"Wow, you're mellow. I have a friend in prison because unsolicited child porn passed through his network. He's not feeling so mellow any more"
Let's assume you told us the whole truth. Then obviously the problem is not child abusers but your own legal system. And once you start having real problems like this with your legal system (thus, with the government) they won't vanish just because you hide your head under your arm. They'll only get worse.
"I'm sure the Bush administration would do a swell job allocating money to promising areas like stem cell research, birth control methods, the morning after pill"
Well, even then it would be a "four year ban" for such researches that you can help to eradicate with your vote next elections.
Currently what you have is a perpetual ban on things like malaria, cholera or AIDS research that *do* kill people in the millions because it doesn't fit on the big pharma portfolios, so go figure.
"Except I'd rather the authors I like not have to write in their spare time and on lunch breaks."
Well, then *you* still can pay for their books; or directly subsidize your favorite authors, or whatever.
Even if you don't pay for new books -heck, even if you restrained yourself from reading anything published past 1900, I don't think you will find scarcity of good literature on your whole life.
This article hides a very strong misconception. Maybe Norway is the first European country "...to legalise sharing of any copyrighted material for non-commercial use", but that's only because in most Europe cultural copyrighted material (everything but software, that is) is *already* -and always has been, free to be copied for non-commercial use.
Certainly the Pirate Party wants to go beyond this (since they want to include *all* copyrighted material, not only cultural, and they want to include mass media reproduction for free too, as long as it's not made for-profit), but remember that Europe is no USA: here the "private copy" has always been legal.
"Copyrights exist exactly for this reason"
Copyrights exist because the king wanting to retain control of intelectual production as he had about real state properties (the copy-right meant just exactly that: the king giving an impressor the right to print copies of a book -and being paid for such copies). So in its very foundations copyright is as anti-democrat as it can be.
" What others see as deliberate attempt at not disclosing the change can just be laziness"
Yes, it *can* be laziness. But in this case, as long as the summary states it, it can't be laziness since the project leader took the effort of not aproving for being published any comment relating to such decision.
"if someone downloaded it within that hour can they treat it as GPL even though now it has a different license but it is the same software?"
Of course. It took *his own copy* under the GPL. He can do with *his own copy* everything the GPL entitles him to do, there's no black magic about it.
"Or what if someone steals my code and slaps a GPL license on it"
Just read the GPL. Since he thief doesn't own copyright of such work, he is not entitled to distribute it under no license at all (of course, that include the GPL too). Once a tribunal states that state of affairs you are not able to gain advantage of the GPL: you don't own a copy of the software under the GPL but a copy of the software that *seemed to be* under the GPL. Of course when someone passes to you something that seems to be "A" but it's "B" instead when the one that passed it to you had reasonable meanings to know about the counterfeit you are perfectly allowed to seek retaliations from him (in other words: both the legit owner of the code and you would go after him on tribunals to take even his underpants).
And I bet they're only on your head. How many of them have you tested? How many of them you can say "I successfully deployed it on Company X, so I know it's a viable solution that does work"?
"Likewise, if marketing thinks their is demand for 20 million, but you can only produce 5 or 10 million, they kind of need to communicate that to the customer"
Or else you can have a marketroid that knows how to multiply (gasp!) and knows that at (more or less) constant market capacity, the more expensive you sell, the more benefits you have and he has discovered that early sells manage to be made at higher prices so they have decided to artificially extend the "early adopters" time frame by means of an artificial offer shortage.
"or you'll have 10 million fans screaming, "OMG, what is wrong with Nintendo!?? When will I be able to buy a Wii!?""
Exactly the kind of fans that will pay *more* for the product than its percived "neutral" market value in order to be the firsts to have the thing.
Just imagine you have studied your market so you know that you will sell 100 units of a given item. 10 of the buyers are rabid enthusiasts 80 "usual & casual" buyers and you will manage to extract 10 sells more by flooding the market with marketing campaigns. Now, you can put 100 units on the market at a time so you can sell 90 of them quite soon and the other ten once the product is well stablished (those ten are the ones that will say to themselves "after all, I do want to own one of those devices everybody is talking about"). All in all you'll get 100*X gross income (being X the price per unit).
Or you can put only 5 units in the market only after an strategic marketing campaign so your 10 enthusiasts will be waiting at wal-mart doors by day one in order to buy the device at 2*X and feeling there's a product shortage and you will only risk your 5-unit production (after all you market study could be wrong). Then you sell another 7 units at a bit slower pace at 2*X and as an added effect you will gain mindshare (what's happening with that thingie?) which can make your market going from 100 to 110 of "late adopters". Once you have squeezed your "fans cow" you sell at X 90 units more. Gross income? 12*2X+100*X=124*X or a 24% more. Of course the numbers are totally made up but the reasoning is quite strong. So the marketing guys managed to augment their benefits reducing their risk and they even didn't lied since there *were* a shortage (only it was an expected one).
"And what do you think would happen to IE's market share if Google Maps and a horder of other interesting web apps ran beautifully on everything except IE?"
Yeah! I really can imagine hordes of enterprise investors wanting to expend their money on a web app known NOT to work on the web browser by default of about 90% of their market target. I think they call that "network effect" (how can that idea be modded up "insightful" is what is beyond my comprehension).
"The analogy still stands. He was in the UK, but committed a US crime that allegedly caused damage in the US. The actual distance between the two places isn't especially relevant."
The model was showing her ankels in the photograph and that magazine managed to get into Iran. Furthermore Satellite News had a report on her which obviously got into Iran space. Should we extradite her to Iran? Or is it the case that she was in the USA under USA laws and society so she can't expect her behaviour to be so far reaching?
The case is that what he did, while punible, is a very minor offense in the UK, specially when compared to the fines it can expect from a trial in the USA (in a civilized country there should be stronger penalties for the public officials that made so badly their jobs -they were Internet connected boxes with standard or no passwords at all! than those for the "offender"). Extradition here just doesn't hold water from justice and common sense point of view, even if it can have legal grounds.
The fact that it is USA the one asking for the extradition with such a bizzarre track record lately regarding "national security", "hackers" and "terrorism" and not, say, France, Germany or other "civilized" country just makes it worse.
"Those who have rejected reason cannot be conquered by it. They only understand violence and brute force, and so must be dealt with in those terms."
That's true. But it is not the criminal the one I'm worried about, it is the rest of the society.
It's not that a criminal (or at least some criminals) is not a beast: he is. It is that by supporting a society were there exists death penalty *I* become the beast.
"Gimme a break. Do you really think that any court in America would give this punk the death penalty?"
I don't think it does matter. The thing is that USA applies death penalty. That should be enough for any civilized country not to maintain an extradition treaty with such a country.
"And even in states that have capital punishment, in the vast majority of murder cases, prosecutors rarely go after the death penalty."
"Fortunately, I think we're all aware that diamond is one of, if not THE hardest metal known to man,"
Of course diamond, being Carbon is not a metal at all.
Even then, while a diamond is the hardest natural material, it's still a crystal, thus terribly hard but still quite fragile: it won't be scratched, but it certainly can be crashed into pieces if you let it drop to floor.
"Having said that - I'm not complaining, just pointing out that this kind of stuff makes many people not want to go with Linux - core services are just too difficult to configure."
It is not. It's all about plain text files. The problem is what you are trying to do *is* difficult, and while others will try to hide its intrinsic difficulty under easy to follow wizards -that surely will bring you to an easy way to shoot your foot, some sane software won't try to hide the difficulty *in concept*.
For instance, configuring Bind is terribly easy... once you know the nitty-gritty nuisances of the DNS protocol; if you don't know'em all an easy interface can do is to make very easy for you to make the wrong assumption. The key question is not how (it's easy: edit some usually clear text file) but why (and on that no wizzard will help you that much).
So let's look at it: *You were finally fired no matter what. *Because your job environment those were three nefarious years. *When you were finally fired you had to go through a long reentry path anyway just the same than if you were fired on day one (and luckly you were helped by youf parents -and it's you the one talking about me perhaps not knowing why daddy goes each morning to work! but anyway, that's disgressing) *Finally you were hired by one of your old coworkers which by then was "a VP of MIS" at a lower wage, and the DBA is working for IBM (albeit on a different state) so there goes your "but I gained a lot of experience": they managed to get even more than you, probably on better environments with less suffering.
So by staying on your old work you not only won nothing (at then end you still needed to live on your savings and on the help of your parents) but you even lost career projection: your other mates were doing those certifications and work hunting on the bad days of the dot-crasg while you were suffering within your old company and when the times were a bit brighter they were the ones being there to take the first places gaining start advantage on climbing the hill while you still needed your certifications and whatnots.
It's of course very easy for me to analize your situation after the fact and not being my money and my family, but the general scenario you portrait is general enough to extract some conclusions: when you are at the low end of the rope is stupid to lick asses; it won't save you and you will end up with very bad mounth taste.
"One day the VP of MIS left abruptly and a manager from accounting was promoted to VP. All was fine for a short time, then several employees from our group were terminated unexpectedly. They were there in the morning but gone after lunch, no notice, no announcement, nothing."
What do you mean? That the "expensive guys" were terminated no matter if they stayed long hours or not?
"basically 7 different systems on disparate platforms would be discontinued. (Sounds interesting, right? I love a challenge!) But a large part of the meeting was spent warning us that we would either "get on board" and spend WHATEVER time was necessary to hit our goal date or "hit the road". This was a new VP and we didn't know much about his style and what to expect (...) Almost immediately more than 8 different H1B workers were hired"
No matter how long the hours were, such a program means months beyong you. The situation is clear: time to move on. What about looking for a new job while staying on your old one whitout making the extra mile? Or even making the extra mile, for that matter. The longer you stay talking the sillier you seem to be. Really, I'm not trying to insult you, but you really should read yourself carefully and extract your own conclusions. From a more or less standard environment you were fastly pushed at one with morons as managers, where obviously the only why to maintain that job is not by being good at it but cheap an low-headed towards the managers -that will probably crash anyway and will use you as a bumpstopper. Just go away even on lower wages (you will be fired anyway sooner or later so another low payed H1 can have your job, so it's a bit more for a while and then the disemployment queue or a little less but each and every month) and make us a favor: if management wants to ruin the company, don't help them at any rate.
"I had given my all to the project and was definitely never compensated"
So who the stupid one? And who the clever one that got the bonuses? And thanks to what stupid one? (hint: answer to questions one and three is *you*).
"But I had 3 children and was working in an area where there were little to no other IT jobs in my salary range"
What you did, then, when you were finally fired that was not possible three years before? There is a phrase from Nobel Prize Gabriel García Márquez: "the only thing I learnt after I was forty is to say 'no' when it is 'no'".
"What would I do in the future? I would call a recruiter immediately and move if I had to."
So after you long rant you have to admit you were stupid (I don't mean you *are* actually stupid -how I could, I don't even know you!, but that you acted like one) and that I was right from minute one.
"The experience I gained from tearing apart middleware (you don't turn on the whole system overnight you know), enterprise software design, large DB's Data Warehousing on Oracle 8i and SQL Server 2000, etc etc helped me more in the long run than the salary."
Don't fool yourself. You grew three year older. While you did get good job experience on your old job at a nefarious price, why do you think you wouldn't be the experienced greyback you are now if that experience would have taken anywhere else without the pain? You talked about a good DBA which was one of the first fired? Do you know per chance where is he now and how he spent those grievous three years of yours?
"Meanwhile, the project manager who set the insane schedule, kept their ass comfortably in their desk chair for 9-5, M-F days, for the most part just asking the technical guy 'how close to done are you', and repeating that data to customer executives and their own management chain. This project manager gets promoted in recognition for their 'stellar work to make it happen'."
And d'you know why? *because* was he the one that made it happen. It was the PHB the one that found a stupid (while technologically savvy) nerd, pushed him beyond all realistical time-goals and made the magic happen at a very low cost.
For the stupid one to it would have been enough not to work for such long hours and ask for apropiate wages, but he didn't, and that's the success of the PHB.
I really know who I hate the more of the PHB and the stupid nerd.
Because _it's_not_your_document_. The owner might want to furtherly work on it... on the format he manages because he uses -gasp, Microsoft Word (someone had to, since the document ended up being Ms Doc format).
"Debian (and almost all other distributions) includes non free firmware in the kernel."
In any case it's free enough to redistribute, or else it wouldn't be in Debian, and since we are talking about a hardware controller there's no real (or usual) need to change it once it's working properly (and it *has* to be working properly: remember we are talking here about certified hardware). It insures it will remain working on future versions of the wrapping software as well. It's good enough for me.
"gNewSense [...] does NOT includes non free firmware in the kernel, and only has free drivers and free software"
That obviously would be even better... if it would happen that anyone knew or was using gNewSense which is not the case, or if at the very least it would have a known, wide and stable community wrapping it (which being an Ubuntu-dependant -which happens to be a Debian dependant, distribution doesn't have).
I think this is quite the "syndrome" Shuttleworth was talking about: I don't only want for the hardware to run good enough with Linux (which I think saying "Debian" would make for a well-ballanced, good-enough choice) but I want it to run on *my* petty distribution which happens to almost nobody else use or know about.
"I don't see the part where I make scads more money than if I did nothing. It doesn't take a "genious" to see that either."
Maybe that's why you see falling your sells by about a 20% in most markets and lost the #1 position in favour of HP.
Linux is a very promising market for your servers and opening to Debian can and will open you quite more sells. And, remember the threat about admins installing whatever they have in their desktops or the other way around? Those people that can have their servers fully compatible with Linux (by making them compatible with Debian) are first rate candidates to buy desktops (not only their own but others within the company too).
"The other good reason is the security backporting"
I'll accept RHEL has the appeal of certifications to corporate guys, but I won't admit security backporting at Red Hat being good. It's not bad and that's it.
"RH is excellent at keeping a stable system going"
*Debian* excels at such task. Red Hat is, well, hum-hum. Of course, when compared against some other systems from Redmond it shines, but I wouldn't say that's the point. I myself have been bitten by Red Hat updates some times, of course not BIG CRASHES (TM) but more like discovering that three days after an update (and, of course, I mean a _minor_security_update, nothing like going from u2 to u3) some seemingly unrelated subsystem fails -in the end you discover that the security update closed a "bug" too that happened to be used as a "feature" by some other package.
"which is one reason they keep a the same kernel the release shipped with and only add security fixes to it, instead of releasing newer kernels"
They don't jump versions, but that's more about marketing than anything else. Red Hat introduces severe changes on their kernels that sorry, no, are not only to patch security vulnerabilities (you just can go to their release logs, fortunately they publish them and they are accurate -not the case with some other Redmond based companies). The most glaring and obvious examples is new hardware support on updates (that's why you find that model XYZ from vendor ABC will only work on RHEL 4 upgrade 2 or higher, but -surprise, will be only certified on exactly RHEL 4 upgrade 2, neither 1 nor 3).
"That kind of 'it will not break' attitude makes a lot of sense to the people who run it."
A lot of sense, yes, but not *most* sense or else they'd be running Debian (I say Debian because I know for a fact they're better about stability on security updates, but if someone can point out another example, the better for us all -no, Suse will not work: I know it too and it's more or less on par to Red Hat on this realm) or somebody else that *truly* puts stability over everything else.
"But they end up running Redhat, Fedora, SuSE, Kubuntu, etc, on their servers instead, because that's what they run on their desktops."
Well, I've been only in the bussiness for little more than a decade but on my experience you will find the desktop->server only on Windows administrators (in fact, that's how Microsoft put his feet on the workgroup server market). In my opinion, unix-like administrators go the other way around: what's on the server is installed on their desktops (and it's my own case too).
Slashdot Mirror
"Wow, you're mellow. I have a friend in prison because unsolicited child porn passed through his network. He's not feeling so mellow any more"
Let's assume you told us the whole truth. Then obviously the problem is not child abusers but your own legal system. And once you start having real problems like this with your legal system (thus, with the government) they won't vanish just because you hide your head under your arm. They'll only get worse.
"I'm sure the Bush administration would do a swell job allocating money to promising areas like stem cell research, birth control methods, the morning after pill"
Well, even then it would be a "four year ban" for such researches that you can help to eradicate with your vote next elections.
Currently what you have is a perpetual ban on things like malaria, cholera or AIDS research that *do* kill people in the millions because it doesn't fit on the big pharma portfolios, so go figure.
"Except I'd rather the authors I like not have to write in their spare time and on lunch breaks."
Well, then *you* still can pay for their books; or directly subsidize your favorite authors, or whatever.
Even if you don't pay for new books -heck, even if you restrained yourself from reading anything published past 1900, I don't think you will find scarcity of good literature on your whole life.
"So how exactly is an author supposed to get paid for writing a book?"
So why exactly has anyone to pay anything for a book nobody asked for?
By the way, nobody seems to care so much about nobody making profit out of selling fresh water in the streets anymore.
This article hides a very strong misconception. Maybe Norway is the first European country "...to legalise sharing of any copyrighted material for non-commercial use", but that's only because in most Europe cultural copyrighted material (everything but software, that is) is *already* -and always has been, free to be copied for non-commercial use.
Certainly the Pirate Party wants to go beyond this (since they want to include *all* copyrighted material, not only cultural, and they want to include mass media reproduction for free too, as long as it's not made for-profit), but remember that Europe is no USA: here the "private copy" has always been legal.
"Copyrights exist exactly for this reason"
Copyrights exist because the king wanting to retain control of intelectual production as he had about real state properties (the copy-right meant just exactly that: the king giving an impressor the right to print copies of a book -and being paid for such copies). So in its very foundations copyright is as anti-democrat as it can be.
" What others see as deliberate attempt at not disclosing the change can just be laziness"
Yes, it *can* be laziness. But in this case, as long as the summary states it, it can't be laziness since the project leader took the effort of not aproving for being published any comment relating to such decision.
"if someone downloaded it within that hour can they treat it as GPL even though now it has a different license but it is the same software?"
Of course. It took *his own copy* under the GPL. He can do with *his own copy* everything the GPL entitles him to do, there's no black magic about it.
"Or what if someone steals my code and slaps a GPL license on it"
Just read the GPL. Since he thief doesn't own copyright of such work, he is not entitled to distribute it under no license at all (of course, that include the GPL too). Once a tribunal states that state of affairs you are not able to gain advantage of the GPL: you don't own a copy of the software under the GPL but a copy of the software that *seemed to be* under the GPL. Of course when someone passes to you something that seems to be "A" but it's "B" instead when the one that passed it to you had reasonable meanings to know about the counterfeit you are perfectly allowed to seek retaliations from him (in other words: both the legit owner of the code and you would go after him on tribunals to take even his underpants).
"And that's just off the top of my head..."
And I bet they're only on your head. How many of them have you tested? How many of them you can say "I successfully deployed it on Company X, so I know it's a viable solution that does work"?
"Not that the console market works like that."
That's why you have a bazillion posts just here explaining how somebody were shopping at 6AM just to find somebody else were even earlier.
"Console prices don't fall at retail until well after production is sufficient to meet demand"
And that's exactly what I already told.
"In your second scenario, you need a production capacity to make the 90 unit supply. "
At a slower pace, that's what I said.
Hummm... Let's see...
"I know"
That makes one.
"a guy"
Two.
"who knows a guy"
Three.
"who says that his sisters"
Four.
"boyfriends"
Five.
roomate"
And six!
I know who's the roomate of the boyfriend of the sister of the guy who knows a guy you know: It's Kevin Bacon!
"Likewise, if marketing thinks their is demand for 20 million, but you can only produce 5 or 10 million, they kind of need to communicate that to the customer"
Or else you can have a marketroid that knows how to multiply (gasp!) and knows that at (more or less) constant market capacity, the more expensive you sell, the more benefits you have and he has discovered that early sells manage to be made at higher prices so they have decided to artificially extend the "early adopters" time frame by means of an artificial offer shortage.
"or you'll have 10 million fans screaming, "OMG, what is wrong with Nintendo!?? When will I be able to buy a Wii!?""
Exactly the kind of fans that will pay *more* for the product than its percived "neutral" market value in order to be the firsts to have the thing.
Just imagine you have studied your market so you know that you will sell 100 units of a given item. 10 of the buyers are rabid enthusiasts 80 "usual & casual" buyers and you will manage to extract 10 sells more by flooding the market with marketing campaigns. Now, you can put 100 units on the market at a time so you can sell 90 of them quite soon and the other ten once the product is well stablished (those ten are the ones that will say to themselves "after all, I do want to own one of those devices everybody is talking about"). All in all you'll get 100*X gross income (being X the price per unit).
Or you can put only 5 units in the market only after an strategic marketing campaign so your 10 enthusiasts will be waiting at wal-mart doors by day one in order to buy the device at 2*X and feeling there's a product shortage and you will only risk your 5-unit production (after all you market study could be wrong). Then you sell another 7 units at a bit slower pace at 2*X and as an added effect you will gain mindshare (what's happening with that thingie?) which can make your market going from 100 to 110 of "late adopters". Once you have squeezed your "fans cow" you sell at X 90 units more. Gross income? 12*2X+100*X=124*X or a 24% more. Of course the numbers are totally made up but the reasoning is quite strong. So the marketing guys managed to augment their benefits reducing their risk and they even didn't lied since there *were* a shortage (only it was an expected one).
"And what do you think would happen to IE's market share if Google Maps and a horder of other interesting web apps ran beautifully on everything except IE?"
Yeah! I really can imagine hordes of enterprise investors wanting to expend their money on a web app known NOT to work on the web browser by default of about 90% of their market target. I think they call that "network effect" (how can that idea be modded up "insightful" is what is beyond my comprehension).
"The analogy still stands. He was in the UK, but committed a US crime that allegedly caused damage in the US. The actual distance between the two places isn't especially relevant."
The model was showing her ankels in the photograph and that magazine managed to get into Iran. Furthermore Satellite News had a report on her which obviously got into Iran space. Should we extradite her to Iran? Or is it the case that she was in the USA under USA laws and society so she can't expect her behaviour to be so far reaching?
The case is that what he did, while punible, is a very minor offense in the UK, specially when compared to the fines it can expect from a trial in the USA (in a civilized country there should be stronger penalties for the public officials that made so badly their jobs -they were Internet connected boxes with standard or no passwords at all! than those for the "offender"). Extradition here just doesn't hold water from justice and common sense point of view, even if it can have legal grounds.
The fact that it is USA the one asking for the extradition with such a bizzarre track record lately regarding "national security", "hackers" and "terrorism" and not, say, France, Germany or other "civilized" country just makes it worse.
"Those who have rejected reason cannot be conquered by it. They only understand violence and brute force, and so must be dealt with in those terms."
That's true. But it is not the criminal the one I'm worried about, it is the rest of the society.
It's not that a criminal (or at least some criminals) is not a beast: he is. It is that by supporting a society were there exists death penalty *I* become the beast.
"Gimme a break. Do you really think that any court in America would give this punk the death penalty?"
I don't think it does matter. The thing is that USA applies death penalty. That should be enough for any civilized country not to maintain an extradition treaty with such a country.
"And even in states that have capital punishment, in the vast majority of murder cases, prosecutors rarely go after the death penalty."
Just 1057 times in 2006 only.
"Fortunately, I think we're all aware that diamond is one of, if not THE hardest metal known to man,"
Of course diamond, being Carbon is not a metal at all.
Even then, while a diamond is the hardest natural material, it's still a crystal, thus terribly hard but still quite fragile: it won't be scratched, but it certainly can be crashed into pieces if you let it drop to floor.
"Having said that - I'm not complaining, just pointing out that this kind of stuff makes many people not want to go with Linux - core services are just too difficult to configure."
It is not. It's all about plain text files. The problem is what you are trying to do *is* difficult, and while others will try to hide its intrinsic difficulty under easy to follow wizards -that surely will bring you to an easy way to shoot your foot, some sane software won't try to hide the difficulty *in concept*.
For instance, configuring Bind is terribly easy... once you know the nitty-gritty nuisances of the DNS protocol; if you don't know'em all an easy interface can do is to make very easy for you to make the wrong assumption. The key question is not how (it's easy: edit some usually clear text file) but why (and on that no wizzard will help you that much).
So let's look at it:
*You were finally fired no matter what.
*Because your job environment those were three nefarious years.
*When you were finally fired you had to go through a long reentry path anyway just the same than if you were fired on day one (and luckly you were helped by youf parents -and it's you the one talking about me perhaps not knowing why daddy goes each morning to work! but anyway, that's disgressing)
*Finally you were hired by one of your old coworkers which by then was "a VP of MIS" at a lower wage, and the DBA is working for IBM (albeit on a different state) so there goes your "but I gained a lot of experience": they managed to get even more than you, probably on better environments with less suffering.
So by staying on your old work you not only won nothing (at then end you still needed to live on your savings and on the help of your parents) but you even lost career projection: your other mates were doing those certifications and work hunting on the bad days of the dot-crasg while you were suffering within your old company and when the times were a bit brighter they were the ones being there to take the first places gaining start advantage on climbing the hill while you still needed your certifications and whatnots.
It's of course very easy for me to analize your situation after the fact and not being my money and my family, but the general scenario you portrait is general enough to extract some conclusions: when you are at the low end of the rope is stupid to lick asses; it won't save you and you will end up with very bad mounth taste.
"One day the VP of MIS left abruptly and a manager from accounting was promoted to VP. All was fine for a short time, then several employees from our group were terminated unexpectedly. They were there in the morning but gone after lunch, no notice, no announcement, nothing."
What do you mean? That the "expensive guys" were terminated no matter if they stayed long hours or not?
"basically 7 different systems on disparate platforms would be discontinued. (Sounds interesting, right? I love a challenge!) But a large part of the meeting was spent warning us that we would either "get on board" and spend WHATEVER time was necessary to hit our goal date or "hit the road". This was a new VP and we didn't know much about his style and what to expect (...) Almost immediately more than 8 different H1B workers were hired"
No matter how long the hours were, such a program means months beyong you. The situation is clear: time to move on. What about looking for a new job while staying on your old one whitout making the extra mile? Or even making the extra mile, for that matter. The longer you stay talking the sillier you seem to be. Really, I'm not trying to insult you, but you really should read yourself carefully and extract your own conclusions. From a more or less standard environment you were fastly pushed at one with morons as managers, where obviously the only why to maintain that job is not by being good at it but cheap an low-headed towards the managers -that will probably crash anyway and will use you as a bumpstopper. Just go away even on lower wages (you will be fired anyway sooner or later so another low payed H1 can have your job, so it's a bit more for a while and then the disemployment queue or a little less but each and every month) and make us a favor: if management wants to ruin the company, don't help them at any rate.
"I had given my all to the project and was definitely never compensated"
So who the stupid one? And who the clever one that got the bonuses? And thanks to what stupid one? (hint: answer to questions one and three is *you*).
"But I had 3 children and was working in an area where there were little to no other IT jobs in my salary range"
What you did, then, when you were finally fired that was not possible three years before?
There is a phrase from Nobel Prize Gabriel García Márquez: "the only thing I learnt after I was forty is to say 'no' when it is 'no'".
"What would I do in the future? I would call a recruiter immediately and move if I had to."
So after you long rant you have to admit you were stupid (I don't mean you *are* actually stupid -how I could, I don't even know you!, but that you acted like one) and that I was right from minute one.
"The experience I gained from tearing apart middleware (you don't turn on the whole system overnight you know), enterprise software design, large DB's Data Warehousing on Oracle 8i and SQL Server 2000, etc etc helped me more in the long run than the salary."
Don't fool yourself. You grew three year older. While you did get good job experience on your old job at a nefarious price, why do you think you wouldn't be the experienced greyback you are now if that experience would have taken anywhere else without the pain? You talked about a good DBA which was one of the first fired? Do you know per chance where is he now and how he spent those grievous three years of yours?
"Meanwhile, the project manager who set the insane schedule, kept their ass comfortably in their desk chair for 9-5, M-F days, for the most part just asking the technical guy 'how close to done are you', and repeating that data to customer executives and their own management chain. This project manager gets promoted in recognition for their 'stellar work to make it happen'."
And d'you know why? *because* was he the one that made it happen. It was the PHB the one that found a stupid (while technologically savvy) nerd, pushed him beyond all realistical time-goals and made the magic happen at a very low cost.
For the stupid one to it would have been enough not to work for such long hours and ask for apropiate wages, but he didn't, and that's the success of the PHB.
I really know who I hate the more of the PHB and the stupid nerd.
Because _it's_not_your_document_. The owner might want to furtherly work on it... on the format he manages because he uses -gasp, Microsoft Word (someone had to, since the document ended up being Ms Doc format).
"Debian (and almost all other distributions) includes non free firmware in the kernel."
In any case it's free enough to redistribute, or else it wouldn't be in Debian, and since we are talking about a hardware controller there's no real (or usual) need to change it once it's working properly (and it *has* to be working properly: remember we are talking here about certified hardware). It insures it will remain working on future versions of the wrapping software as well. It's good enough for me.
"gNewSense [...] does NOT includes non free firmware in the kernel, and only has free drivers and free software"
That obviously would be even better... if it would happen that anyone knew or was using gNewSense which is not the case, or if at the very least it would have a known, wide and stable community wrapping it (which being an Ubuntu-dependant -which happens to be a Debian dependant, distribution doesn't have).
I think this is quite the "syndrome" Shuttleworth was talking about: I don't only want for the hardware to run good enough with Linux (which I think saying "Debian" would make for a well-ballanced, good-enough choice) but I want it to run on *my* petty distribution which happens to almost nobody else use or know about.
"I don't see the part where I make scads more money than if I did nothing. It doesn't take a "genious" to see that either."
Maybe that's why you see falling your sells by about a 20% in most markets and lost the #1 position in favour of HP.
Linux is a very promising market for your servers and opening to Debian can and will open you quite more sells. And, remember the threat about admins installing whatever they have in their desktops or the other way around? Those people that can have their servers fully compatible with Linux (by making them compatible with Debian) are first rate candidates to buy desktops (not only their own but others within the company too).
"If you're not using Office, why would you care that you are capable of writing a file that can be read by it?"
Because, oh! brave new world, you might need to *modify* it.
"The other good reason is the security backporting"
I'll accept RHEL has the appeal of certifications to corporate guys, but I won't admit security backporting at Red Hat being good. It's not bad and that's it.
"RH is excellent at keeping a stable system going"
*Debian* excels at such task. Red Hat is, well, hum-hum. Of course, when compared against some other systems from Redmond it shines, but I wouldn't say that's the point. I myself have been bitten by Red Hat updates some times, of course not BIG CRASHES (TM) but more like discovering that three days after an update (and, of course, I mean a _minor_security_update, nothing like going from u2 to u3) some seemingly unrelated subsystem fails -in the end you discover that the security update closed a "bug" too that happened to be used as a "feature" by some other package.
"which is one reason they keep a the same kernel the release shipped with and only add security fixes to it, instead of releasing newer kernels"
They don't jump versions, but that's more about marketing than anything else. Red Hat introduces severe changes on their kernels that sorry, no, are not only to patch security vulnerabilities (you just can go to their release logs, fortunately they publish them and they are accurate -not the case with some other Redmond based companies). The most glaring and obvious examples is new hardware support on updates (that's why you find that model XYZ from vendor ABC will only work on RHEL 4 upgrade 2 or higher, but -surprise, will be only certified on exactly RHEL 4 upgrade 2, neither 1 nor 3).
"That kind of 'it will not break' attitude makes a lot of sense to the people who run it."
A lot of sense, yes, but not *most* sense or else they'd be running Debian (I say Debian because I know for a fact they're better about stability on security updates, but if someone can point out another example, the better for us all -no, Suse will not work: I know it too and it's more or less on par to Red Hat on this realm) or somebody else that *truly* puts stability over everything else.
"But they end up running Redhat, Fedora, SuSE, Kubuntu, etc, on their servers instead, because that's what they run on their desktops."
Well, I've been only in the bussiness for little more than a decade but on my experience you will find the desktop->server only on Windows administrators (in fact, that's how Microsoft put his feet on the workgroup server market). In my opinion, unix-like administrators go the other way around: what's on the server is installed on their desktops (and it's my own case too).