Wal-Mart has been the purveyor of crap for many years now. They push companies close to bankruptcy by insisting that the suppliers' margins be pennies per unit - or they push companies to produce cheaper, crappy Wal-Mart versions of their product with a decent profit margin, but agreeing to do it Wal-Mart's way can ruin your company by tarnishing your reputation. When Joe Sixpack buys your Wal-Mart model TV, your Wal-Mart model computer, or your Wal-Mart lawn mower and the thing turns out to be a piece of crap. Your company's name will be tarnished, and you will get the blame, not Wal-Mart. You might make millions in the short term but over the long term, think about shutting down your company and starting a new one,
Check out the Snapper story (the man who said no to walmart)
I shop at Wal-Mart for some things. I don't buy most appliances there though. I buy underwear, DVDs, and personal care items. Electronics, appliances I want to last for more than six months, and other bigger-ticket items I will buy elsewhere.
and how long to recoup the energy used to manufacture, ship. and install the panels, given the inefficiency of the air car, not to mention energy going into manufacturing of the car itself?
Air may be free, but putting it into compressed form isn't. I'd think hydrogen fuel cells would be a better route than air power.
The best "air power" source would be sails. Why not put a sail on a go cart?
I've been depressed for a while now - I won't take meds at all for it, and I never took meds for depression before. Sometimes life hands you shit and you just need to deal with it. Why take something like prozac which turns you into an emotional zombie? Sorry, I'd rather put what little free time I have available into being with friends, or engaging in hobbies, watching poorly-scripted action and sci fi movies that are so badly made they're fun to watch MST3K style, or reading books.
You hit it spot on here. I am amazed every time I see a new brain med advert on television. Apparently 'shyness' is now a mental disorder which requires drugs for treatment. It seems that putting mind over matter and going out with friends isn't an acceptable fix any more. What is the next mental mdisorder requiring patented drugs going to be? Oh I know, "political anxiety disorder" - when you disagree with Obamacare (or $CurrentAdministration) you obviously have a disorder which requires treatment?
No, but if consumers want them and manufacturers want to produce them, there is obviously a market for it and the government should have absolutely no say in the matter.
Also, I can't help it that your monitor sucks so much energy. I don't know what to tell you other than what I tested with the kill-a-watt meter. I'm curious about the Viewsonic P815s on my desk though - I'll have to bring the meter to the office to check.
Why is People's Republik of Kalifornia banning these things?
It will NOT save the state of California millions every year. Utilities are taxed. By decreasing electricity consumption, they are actually DECREASING tax revenue - something People's Republik of Kalifornia cannot afford at this time.
If Joe Sixpack wants to spend money on a plasma television, they ought to let them. The consumers pay for the electricity they use. Hell if they wanted to save power, they would ban LCDs as well - my Sony 36" CRT uses less electricity (76 watts at full brightness/full volume) than my Samsung 32" television (calibrated screen, "average" volume - I was curious and compared the CRT worst-case to LCD normal use, according to my kill-a-watt meter. I don't remember what the power factor measured at but it was similar for each - close enough to not be a significant variable. Incidentally, I might be replacing the CRT with a surplus 65" plasma screen, but the plasma screen is so heavy I'm not sure I'm going to take it.
I'm tired of Apple putting its own design philosophy and profit motives over my preferences as a consumer.
It's not so much that, well, it is only directly. It is Jobs' intent to control the asthetics and "feel" of the environment by making it very hard to customize. There is also the side benefit of locking down the user so much the system is hard to break, which reduces support costs. I'd rather deal with potentially breaking a system than to not be able to use it to its fullest potential.
With such a long card, there are going to be some definite fitting issues on smaller cases.
With such a long card, there are going to be some definite fitting issues even on many larger cases. Is it time for me to bring my SC-750A cases back into use?
I'd rather they look at ways to integrate compiz-fusion and the emerald decorator. The KDE versions of those features are something I really dislike. The cube is half-assed, there is still no emerald-like features (including no "glass"), compiz and emerald are endlessly configurable (making kwin's effects resemble gnome's non-configurable nature in comparison) and performance is quite a bit slower than compiz-fusion. As far as degrading gracefully is concerned, I don't mind how compiz-fusion works when managed by the fusion-icon applet; starting a different window manager or changing rendering modes is just a context menu away.
I know, most politicians won't go with it, but here it is: How about cutting spending, not only making the additional revenue unnecessary, but enabling the cutting or even elimination of many taxes and "user fees?"
Someone please explain to me why China is getting treated with kid gloves? Their idea of human rights is atrocious and a billion+ people are living under oppression, with limited to no freedom of speech and no freedom of worship. They look the other way where child labor is concerned, and they have most favored trading partner status with several countries (meaning they pay little to no tariffs while not gtranting those trading partners the same privilege). Why we're in a race with China to the bottom is beyond me.
Okay, well, I do understand that is a few politicians in the industrialized nations with clout who envy the power the elite in China have and desire the middle class to be expunged from existence so that everyone is dependent upon big brother, but how do the politicians in those nations justify their actions when questioned? They certainly won't admit the truth, I'm sure.
There are a lot of them. Callaway, Lingenfelter, Hennesey, Ruf, and heck, even car rental companies like Hertz have dabbled in the "modified GM|Ford|Mopar" game. They are not all "licensed." They can sell whatever the damn well please per right of first sale.
Okay, most of us on this site are involved somehow in IT, consulting, or software development.
If everyone "pirated"[sic] your product, how would you eat, make your car payments, your mortgage, and take your girlfriend out on a date? I know, I'm stretching when I assume you're not living free in your mother's basement (this is/. after all) but bear with me. If no one is buying your employer will go out of business. It's not like we're recording artists and can make up for giving product out for free by touring, and most people don't need support most of the time for commodity apps.
Admit it: even though you may not be stealing, strictly speaking, if you're copying software and installing it on 20 workstations at work without paying for it, you are potentially depriving people of earning a living. I don't see much of a problem with downloading an app to learn it (increasing mindshare of an app) but putting it into production is something else entirely.
Being a professional in IT and software I either buy the software (sometimes I'll have friends who are faculty or staff purchase academic software for me for personal use but it is legal - right of first sale allows them to transfer ownership) and every 2-3 years I buy an MSDN subscription so I usually have access to the latest Microsoft software to keep my skills up to date. All the same though, my platform of choice is Linux+KDE for daily use, and most of my software is F/OSS - totally unencumbered. Software I have to use on Windows has been purchased legally (or came "free"[sic] with appliances or peripherals).
You may not be stealing in the legal sense, but in a very practical sense you are stealing because you are depriving someone of a living, either by reducing sales which reduces bonuses and even salaries, or prevents the creation of new jobs.
In summary: I agree in the legal sense that you are not stealing. In a moral sense, you are.
I would add: Document everything. Save any emails about software installations, make a spreadsheet contains: Name of Software, Key used, Installed on, Requested by.
I never hesitate to violate an EULA since an EULA is worthless. Ever since I read the suggestion on here I have always amended such contracts with a post-it on the monitor to read "Right of first sale applies" and then click agree. I have the right to amend any contract prior to signing it. However, I don't and won't infringe on the copyright. Making backups and storing the original away or installing it twice on one PC for a dual boot is one thing, but installing it on 20 machines is entirely different.
That said, it's not your job to make policy, nor is it your responsibility to protect the financial interests of the publishers of the software in question.
It may not be his job to protect financial interests of would-be vendors, but it is his ethical obligation to ensure that his employer is not violating the law, and it is in his own personal best interest to refuse to install "pirated"[sic] software, since he would be sharing in the liability if/when BSA members find out.
What does one do when a good portion of the application software at your workplace is pirated?
Make him read articles which show how much inadvertant copyright infringement has cost companies, and mention that he's doing it willfully so the BSA members would show absolutely no mercy in his case.
Nevertheless I have been called on to install dubious software on multiple occasions.
Are you an engineer? If so you had to have taken ethics at some point. The answer is obvious: refuse to contribute to their felonious actions. Need office, but don't want to pay for it? Show him OpenOffice.org and KOffice. If you want "free" software, choose free software. Don't "steal"[sic] encumbered software.
A CD-R is not proof of purchase -- obviously. Hell, during BSA raids they don't even consider a CoA to be proof of purchase.
As for shareware, what strategies do you use to convince management to allow the purchase of commonly used utilities?
osalt.
Need Winzip? Check out 7zip.
If an installation of WinZip reports thousands of uses, I think the software developer deserves a bit o' coin for it.
Yeah, or the owner of the business needs to pay a fine or go to jail.
When I told management that WinZip has a timeout counter that counts off one second per file previously opened, they tried to implement a policy of wait for it, do something else, and come back later, rather than spend the money.
. . . which is more costly than paying for the software.
Also, some software is free for home and educational use only, like AVG Free. What do you when management ignores this?
You document it, inform your manager they have no choice but to correct the issue, and blow the whistle to the BSA and to the copyright holders. When they fire you in retaliation, bring all the documentation to a good attorney and collect a minimum of several years' salary. Not paying a few thousand for software will cost your boss hundreds of thousands in statutory fines PLUS several years of your salary when he retailiates by firing you.
Copyright holders get their due. You get paid time off, and the unethical businessman is put out on the street and his business will probably be siezed and/or closed down. Everybody wins!
Why "steal"[sic] software when there are free alternatives that do the job perfectly well?
interesting: Apple is a great company at Slashdot until it is convenient for it not to be a great company at Slashdot:)
On the contrary: some of us think Apple is a fairly crappy company which happens to offer a few decent products (OS X, iPhone, iPod, etc.) , and it is unfortunate that Apple sometimes takes steps to cripple some products after the point of purchase (tethering/iPhone).
If you want to get actual work done, OpenSUSE is pretty much ready to go out of the box. Its achilles' heel has historically been poor wifi support (requiring a lot of tinkering, whereas Ubuntu has worked consistently well with wifi in my experience) but hopefully 11.2 fares a lot better in that regard.
And what a good job Microsoft did, keeping the OS footprint under 10GB!
Meanwhile, a full install of OpenSUSE 11.1, including full development environments, three full desktop environments (not just one like Windows has), three complete office suites, video editors, multiple browsers (not just MSIE like Microsoft has), multiple IM clients, a zillion games, source packages, and so on and so forth, takes under 7GB of space.
Oh, and did I mention OpenSUSE comes with the ability to share out the desktop for support f so desired, using several different means to do so, and that not only do I not have to worry about spyware and viruses, I've actually TRIED to run them under Windows through both WINE and Crossover Office? I feel so left out not having to worry about that crap.
I'd LOVE to switch my family over to Linux. The only problem is they insist on buying Windows-only camera+photo printer packages.:(
Why not pay for a pirate tax and then use that as a defense when they sue you for downloading and sharing content you are not the copyright holder of?
"Yes, your honor, I would like to make a statement. I did download movies from P2P networks. You see, 12% of my income goes to the new mandatory pirate taxes, therefore all of the content I have downloaded has been compensated for. You don't think I'm going to pay that tax and receive nothing in exchange for it, do you, your honor?"
Slashdot Mirror
"There's an app for that"
(just not from Apple)
Wal-Mart has been the purveyor of crap for many years now. They push companies close to bankruptcy by insisting that the suppliers' margins be pennies per unit - or they push companies to produce cheaper, crappy Wal-Mart versions of their product with a decent profit margin, but agreeing to do it Wal-Mart's way can ruin your company by tarnishing your reputation. When Joe Sixpack buys your Wal-Mart model TV, your Wal-Mart model computer, or your Wal-Mart lawn mower and the thing turns out to be a piece of crap. Your company's name will be tarnished, and you will get the blame, not Wal-Mart. You might make millions in the short term but over the long term, think about shutting down your company and starting a new one,
Check out the Snapper story (the man who said no to walmart)
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/102/open_snapper.html
I shop at Wal-Mart for some things. I don't buy most appliances there though. I buy underwear, DVDs, and personal care items. Electronics, appliances I want to last for more than six months, and other bigger-ticket items I will buy elsewhere.
and how long to recoup the energy used to manufacture, ship. and install the panels, given the inefficiency of the air car, not to mention energy going into manufacturing of the car itself?
Air may be free, but putting it into compressed form isn't. I'd think hydrogen fuel cells would be a better route than air power.
The best "air power" source would be sails. Why not put a sail on a go cart?
I've been depressed for a while now - I won't take meds at all for it, and I never took meds for depression before. Sometimes life hands you shit and you just need to deal with it. Why take something like prozac which turns you into an emotional zombie? Sorry, I'd rather put what little free time I have available into being with friends, or engaging in hobbies, watching poorly-scripted action and sci fi movies that are so badly made they're fun to watch MST3K style, or reading books.
You hit it spot on here. I am amazed every time I see a new brain med advert on television. Apparently 'shyness' is now a mental disorder which requires drugs for treatment. It seems that putting mind over matter and going out with friends isn't an acceptable fix any more. What is the next mental mdisorder requiring patented drugs going to be? Oh I know, "political anxiety disorder" - when you disagree with Obamacare (or $CurrentAdministration) you obviously have a disorder which requires treatment?
No, but if consumers want them and manufacturers want to produce them, there is obviously a market for it and the government should have absolutely no say in the matter.
Also, I can't help it that your monitor sucks so much energy. I don't know what to tell you other than what I tested with the kill-a-watt meter. I'm curious about the Viewsonic P815s on my desk though - I'll have to bring the meter to the office to check.
Not free, but cheap enough for me to consider an antiquated plasma screen. Burn in isn't an issue for the purpose I would be using it.
Why is People's Republik of Kalifornia banning these things?
It will NOT save the state of California millions every year. Utilities are taxed. By decreasing electricity consumption, they are actually DECREASING tax revenue - something People's Republik of Kalifornia cannot afford at this time.
If Joe Sixpack wants to spend money on a plasma television, they ought to let them. The consumers pay for the electricity they use.
Hell if they wanted to save power, they would ban LCDs as well - my Sony 36" CRT uses less electricity (76 watts at full brightness/full volume) than my Samsung 32" television (calibrated screen, "average" volume - I was curious and compared the CRT worst-case to LCD normal use, according to my kill-a-watt meter. I don't remember what the power factor measured at but it was similar for each - close enough to not be a significant variable. Incidentally, I might be replacing the CRT with a surplus 65" plasma screen, but the plasma screen is so heavy I'm not sure I'm going to take it.
It's not so much that, well, it is only directly. It is Jobs' intent to control the asthetics and "feel" of the environment by making it very hard to customize. There is also the side benefit of locking down the user so much the system is hard to break, which reduces support costs. I'd rather deal with potentially breaking a system than to not be able to use it to its fullest potential.
"at which point it sparked a mailing list thread that is, as of this writing, over 100 posts long."
Pfft. 100 posts is nothing. Consider your audience; this is slashdot!
No, AOL was to blame for that.
With such a long card, there are going to be some definite fitting issues even on many larger cases. Is it time for me to bring my SC-750A cases back into use?
I'd rather they look at ways to integrate compiz-fusion and the emerald decorator. The KDE versions of those features are something I really dislike. The cube is half-assed, there is still no emerald-like features (including no "glass"), compiz and emerald are endlessly configurable (making kwin's effects resemble gnome's non-configurable nature in comparison) and performance is quite a bit slower than compiz-fusion. As far as degrading gracefully is concerned, I don't mind how compiz-fusion works when managed by the fusion-icon applet; starting a different window manager or changing rendering modes is just a context menu away.
I'd like to propose an alternate solution
I know, most politicians won't go with it, but here it is: How about cutting spending, not only making the additional revenue unnecessary, but enabling the cutting or even elimination of many taxes and "user fees?"
Oh, really ? If it's secure enough for these guys, it's secure enough for you and me.
Someone please explain to me why China is getting treated with kid gloves? Their idea of human rights is atrocious and a billion+ people are living under oppression, with limited to no freedom of speech and no freedom of worship. They look the other way where child labor is concerned, and they have most favored trading partner status with several countries (meaning they pay little to no tariffs while not gtranting those trading partners the same privilege). Why we're in a race with China to the bottom is beyond me.
Okay, well, I do understand that is a few politicians in the industrialized nations with clout who envy the power the elite in China have and desire the middle class to be expunged from existence so that everyone is dependent upon big brother, but how do the politicians in those nations justify their actions when questioned? They certainly won't admit the truth, I'm sure.
There are a lot of them. Callaway, Lingenfelter, Hennesey, Ruf, and heck, even car rental companies like Hertz have dabbled in the "modified GM|Ford|Mopar" game. They are not all "licensed." They can sell whatever the damn well please per right of first sale.
Okay, most of us on this site are involved somehow in IT, consulting, or software development.
If everyone "pirated"[sic] your product, how would you eat, make your car payments, your mortgage, and take your girlfriend out on a date? I know, I'm stretching when I assume you're not living free in your mother's basement (this is /. after all) but bear with me. If no one is buying your employer will go out of business. It's not like we're recording artists and can make up for giving product out for free by touring, and most people don't need support most of the time for commodity apps.
Admit it: even though you may not be stealing, strictly speaking, if you're copying software and installing it on 20 workstations at work without paying for it, you are potentially depriving people of earning a living. I don't see much of a problem with downloading an app to learn it (increasing mindshare of an app) but putting it into production is something else entirely.
Being a professional in IT and software I either buy the software (sometimes I'll have friends who are faculty or staff purchase academic software for me for personal use but it is legal - right of first sale allows them to transfer ownership) and every 2-3 years I buy an MSDN subscription so I usually have access to the latest Microsoft software to keep my skills up to date. All the same though, my platform of choice is Linux+KDE for daily use, and most of my software is F/OSS - totally unencumbered. Software I have to use on Windows has been purchased legally (or came "free"[sic] with appliances or peripherals).
You may not be stealing in the legal sense, but in a very practical sense you are stealing because you are depriving someone of a living, either by reducing sales which reduces bonuses and even salaries, or prevents the creation of new jobs.
In summary: I agree in the legal sense that you are not stealing. In a moral sense, you are.
Check out Belarc Advisor for Windows machines. :)
I never hesitate to violate an EULA since an EULA is worthless. Ever since I read the suggestion on here I have always amended such contracts with a post-it on the monitor to read "Right of first sale applies" and then click agree. I have the right to amend any contract prior to signing it. However, I don't and won't infringe on the copyright. Making backups and storing the original away or installing it twice on one PC for a dual boot is one thing, but installing it on 20 machines is entirely different.
It may not be his job to protect financial interests of would-be vendors, but it is his ethical obligation to ensure that his employer is not violating the law, and it is in his own personal best interest to refuse to install "pirated"[sic] software, since he would be sharing in the liability if/when BSA members find out.
Make him read articles which show how much inadvertant copyright infringement has cost companies, and mention that he's doing it willfully so the BSA members would show absolutely no mercy in his case.
Are you an engineer? If so you had to have taken ethics at some point. The answer is obvious: refuse to contribute to their felonious actions.
Need office, but don't want to pay for it? Show him OpenOffice.org and KOffice. If you want "free" software, choose free software. Don't "steal"[sic] encumbered software.
A CD-R is not proof of purchase -- obviously. Hell, during BSA raids they don't even consider a CoA to be proof of purchase.
osalt.
Need Winzip? Check out 7zip.
Yeah, or the owner of the business needs to pay a fine or go to jail.
. . . which is more costly than paying for the software.
You document it, inform your manager they have no choice but to correct the issue, and blow the whistle to the BSA and to the copyright holders. When they fire you in retaliation, bring all the documentation to a good attorney and collect a minimum of several years' salary. Not paying a few thousand for software will cost your boss hundreds of thousands in statutory fines PLUS several years of your salary when he retailiates by firing you.
Copyright holders get their due. You get paid time off, and the unethical businessman is put out on the street and his business will probably be siezed and/or closed down. Everybody wins!
Why "steal"[sic] software when there are free alternatives that do the job perfectly well?
To quote Roger Waters: "Are there any paranoids in the audience tonight? Is there anybody who worries about things? Pathetic. "
Seriously. Not "most of us" hate cookies. A paranoid few do.
If it weren't for cookies, this site wouldn't remember my login. Google apps wouldn't work well. The browser would not retain my per-site preferences.
I rarely ever clear cookies.
On the contrary: some of us think Apple is a fairly crappy company which happens to offer a few decent products (OS X, iPhone, iPod, etc.) , and it is unfortunate that Apple sometimes takes steps to cripple some products after the point of purchase (tethering/iPhone).
If you want to get actual work done, OpenSUSE is pretty much ready to go out of the box. Its achilles' heel has historically been poor wifi support (requiring a lot of tinkering, whereas Ubuntu has worked consistently well with wifi in my experience) but hopefully 11.2 fares a lot better in that regard.
And what a good job Microsoft did, keeping the OS footprint under 10GB!
Meanwhile, a full install of OpenSUSE 11.1, including full development environments, three full desktop environments (not just one like Windows has), three complete office suites, video editors, multiple browsers (not just MSIE like Microsoft has), multiple IM clients, a zillion games, source packages, and so on and so forth, takes under 7GB of space.
Oh, and did I mention OpenSUSE comes with the ability to share out the desktop for support f so desired, using several different means to do so, and that not only do I not have to worry about spyware and viruses, I've actually TRIED to run them under Windows through both WINE and Crossover Office? I feel so left out not having to worry about that crap.
I'd LOVE to switch my family over to Linux. The only problem is they insist on buying Windows-only camera+photo printer packages. :(
Why not pay for a pirate tax and then use that as a defense when they sue you for downloading and sharing content you are not the copyright holder of?
"Yes, your honor, I would like to make a statement. I did download movies from P2P networks. You see, 12% of my income goes to the new mandatory pirate taxes, therefore all of the content I have downloaded has been compensated for. You don't think I'm going to pay that tax and receive nothing in exchange for it, do you, your honor?"