Take, for instance, Salk's development of the Polio vaccine at the University of Pittsburgh. He was asked why he didn't patent it, and replied "That would be like patenting the sun".
Of course his research was funded out of the public's pockets. Anyways my point is not that people can't forsake IP protections: Absolutely they can! Indeed I think that is fantastic what he did. However the vast majority of commercial drugs that we have today would not exist without the IP protections that are in place, so when someone yabbers about the evils of IP protection because the FRUITS of those IP protections come in handy, the irony is just too thick.
Oh I read his whole post, and there is a very clear anti-IP slant. The point that _I_ was making is that it's the "fake ethical" perspective: Free drugs for all, but no new drugs in the future. The quick and easy solution that costs the future. The trying-to-be-ethical person would say that in times of economic downturn the government should open it's wallets (or rather the wallets of bond-buyers) and dole out charity left and right, building multi trillion dollar deficits. The REAL ethical person realizes that shortly down the road that means that inevitably the foolish short term solution will lead to incredible long term pain that will hurt far more than the short term solution helped.
Let me put it this way: Another poster mentioned that free AIDS drugs in Africa perhaps merely prolong the life of infected peoples, leading to more infections, and people immediately beat their bleating little liberal hearts (I'm actually a liberal, well, a libertarian, so I'm saying this tongue-in-cheek) about how mean that is, when the net effects of what THEY propose could mean the deaths of astronomically MORE people. Merely meaning well isn't good enough.
Yeah, right. If you have been following the drug companies' financials, a lot of their expenses is not in the actual research but in marketting the drugs plus the hefty profits that they make.
The beauty of a capitalist system is that if you think you can do it better, go nuts. I wish you the best of luck on curing AIDS and making people live longer. Really I do.
Plus, a lot of their so-called medicines comes from the jungles and seas of third-world countries.
Again if it's so easy to isolate and apply a compound from a ant in a jungle in some third world country and cure some disease, then go ahead and do it. Once again it's a capitalist system, and if you want to take a shot at it then go nuts.
Hang on, you'll need to cite a reliable source for the cost of developing drugs. The figures I've seen, which I can't cite a source for either, put the figure at a few dozens of millions of dollars for drug research. Still a substantial sum, but a far cry from 'billions'.
Well I did pluralize, meaning that multiple drugs together cost billions. Anyways one example is Viagra, which cost $500 million to develop. Pfizer, pre-merging with Warner-Lambert, spent $2.7 billion for R&D in a single year. R&D accounts for only 20% of Pfizers total charges, yet the company wouldn't exist without the other 80% (the administrative stuff that's necessary for it to function).
Actually ironically they have to charge so much because of patent expiry: The drug companies have to charge hefty prices during the intial availability of the drug to pay for the R&D over a very short time (consider it a very short amortization period for R&D recovery) because then the patent DOES become public domain and any old company can copy it.
In other words: When there's a new super-long-life drug at the drug store and it costs $50 a pill, blame the government for imposing drug patent expiry, or alternately thank them when it's $3 a pill several years later.
To imply that nothing would get ever done without the incentive of making obscene amounts of money is to be a greedy, cheap, cynical, amoral, capitalist bastard.
Ah a good old fashioned foolish idealist. You're a dying breed. I'll take it you're a recipient of educational welfare (you know that crazy thing that soaks up billions of dollars, leading to thousands of professors that wax poetically about the benefits of socialism while they suck up taxpayers dollars).
Money=work. Whether you're a communist country, a socialist country, whatever: It's all the same bloody thing. Drug companies have billions of dollars worth of equipment, and they have 10s, no 100s of thousands of employees working day in and day out to help people live longer, better lives. Your foolish assertion that it's just a will and "passion" that makes it happens is absolutely hilarious.
There is an alternative: Put the government in charge of all drug development and pretend that your tax dollars paying for it is magically different from paying at the pharmacy (ah the number of naives that think that). Of course government sponsored programs like that without capitalist incentives of competition are pretty much always a spectacular bust, but hey let's pretend right? It's great to pretend idealism when you don't have to cite proof.
But much of the funding for drug development is actually done with public funds in University settings.
I really question this claim and would like to see some metrics that state as such. In the end a standard consumer drug cost from $500 million to over a billion dollars from inception to public availability.
they could take a cut in executive salaries and glitzy marketing TV-blitzathons
Ads generally only run for non-lifesaving life-improvement drugs (hence how many AIDS drug ads have you seen?), and generally those ads solicit more profits from sales than the ad cost (the general metric of when to run an ad), so your claim is counter to the reality: Those ads indirectly provide more income for the drug company that can be used to develop the next "save the world" drug.
In my opinion, placing an artificial scarcity on the music in this manner is immoral. It keeps people from doing what is in their best interest, namely sharing information, enjoying it, and quite possibly learning from it. It may be illegal to share music in this manner, but it is not unethical.
In my opinion the "our way or no way" imposition of the GPL is unfair, and it's immoral for GPL advocates to push such a facist position, therefore I have decided that I will simply ignore GPL "rights" of artificial limitations (how much more artificial could it be than a "license disclaimer"?) in this matter and I'm going to copy/paste GPL code into my closed-source proprietary application because that's righteous and is the ethical, moral thing to do.
It's almost always better to give information away freely than it is to keep it hidden. This is a subjective viewpoint, but one that's very easily defendable. Look at the growing AIDS holocaust in Africa right now. The pharma companies are all doing their damndest to keep from from having their AIDS drugs, or at least the intellectual property rights to those drugs, taken away, nationalized, so that those drugs can be made more freely and be used to treat individuals.
Sure, it will hurt those companies if their patents are violated, but then how many lives would it save?
Classic anti-IP FUD. The reality is that drug companies don't just "give it away freely" because those drugs cost billions of dollars to develop in the first place, and the earnings from sales finances the NEXT round of life saving drugs. In other words it's real convenient to say "Geee, thanks for the drugs...now let's make them free!", changing the rules after they've been developed, but the reality is that that would DEMOLISH the future of drugs that will save countless future lives. Your position is the compassionate position, but the reality is that it's the simplistic position that equals countless deaths/shorter lives because you've undermined the whole foundation of why these drugs exist in the first place.
And someone might be walking into a liquor store with a balaclava and a handgun because he's cold and wants to open his vodka with a bullet. The reality is that the OVERWHELMING (meaning >99.999999999999999%. This is not a scientific number but I'd wager that it's accurate) use of Napster and derivatives is for the trading of copyright infringed music and applications. Just because some guy in somewhere/someplace uses it for a legit purpose doesn't legitimize the overwhleming number of people who don't/
The irony of all of this is the early days of Napster when the lawyers were first starting up their engines: Here on Slashdot and elsewhere "Freedom" advocates were yapping about how Napster gives garage bands the type of exposure that the big names have, and how it equalized the playing field and now the Big Record Co. no longer held all the cards. Viva la revolution! Of course what was ACTUALLY traded on Napster and friends? Britney Spears, Backdoor Boys, etc. The usual pop garbage.
There are some DSL providers that have horrible track records, just as there are cable outfits that have fantastic records. In 3 years of having a cable modem I'd say my total downtime is
There's an old saying about trying to herd cats...
Seriously though, what were they thinking? Apart from the moral and ethical depravity of it, logically it seems like a pretty stupid plan to begin with: Was the cat fed wet food from a picture of the person whom it was supposed to befriend? For anyone who has a cat, you know from the beginning that these morons obviously didn't.
Is Bin Laden dead? The reality is that the suicide bombers are generally the suckers, but the people calling the shots are directing the actions based around their own well being and the general well being of their society. Lots of Japanese were hurled out to die in World War II, but once the Emporor felt personally at risk from nuclear weapons (no longer was he immune) the war suddenly ended. Smallpox would not be contained to North America, so anyone using it would pretty much be wiping out their own societies (in fact they would moreso be wiping out their own societies given poor sanitation, inadequate healthcare, etc.) : Not really an effective measure.
If you're measuring the enemy by the suckers, if you will, who died in the aircraft then you are foolish. They were mere pawns for others (and I'll bet you for a split second before crashing into the building they thought "Hrmmm...what if there isn't an eternal afterlife of bliss and heaven?". It reminds me a hilarious Simpsons were Maude Flanders is rescued and she states "Oooh Neddy : I almost thought I was going to the place of eternal bliss and salvation!" and that right there points out the hilarious paradox of religion)
As scary as smallpox sounds, it's a non-discriminating disease, meaning that anyone looking to use it had better plan for all their own people to die too. Anthrax works for terrorists because there's very little chance of something mailed to Washington D.C. hurting people in Afghanistan or whatever. While it's easy to portray all these terrorists as simply insane, they do have a motivation (an INCREDIBLY racist and zealotous motivation, but nonetheless) that isn't driven purely by insanity.
It reminds me of the "cold war" with the Soviety Union: The military-industrial complex (yup it really exists) wants to sell weapons, and to do that they need everyone to believe that the Soviets were a bunch of land hungry maniacs who were just dying for the chance to press the big red button, yet the reality is that the USSR was family men and woman who wanted to just live their lives just like everyone in the US. Nonetheless the misguided nuclear fear was driven by the propaganda that the godless USSR empire was suicidal.
BTW: For those who care I used the cygnus split GNU utility to split it and that worked great, and on the other end it was a simply copy parta+partb+partc dest (with a binary flag). Cheers.
Also, Winzip does many things the Me shell extension, and I would assume the XP shell extension don't. ie - Breaking apart to multiple files
Funny thing that you mention that! Just last night I had to split a file (coincidentally an ISO of Windows XP! It was a legit volume copy BTW, but I had to move it between offices over a slow connection and I've had too many bad experiences with FTP resumes and last hundred MB downloads) and went into WinZIP to see if it would, to find that the only way it supported splitting the file was if I targetted a removable media, at which point it would split to the size indicated: It would not let me arbitrarily enter a size of each volume. Then again the ZIP file format has always been lame: Remember in the old days if you had a split file you'd have to enter the last disc apparently just so it could get the section information, and then you'd have to put back in the first disc when it'd actually start doing work. That was lame and obviously the result of an oversight.
While it's not as slick as terminal services, the Windows community has had Netmeeting Remote Desktop Sharing for quite a while now and it's a very slick product and already had mostly replaced pcAnywhere. I don't like seeing Microsoft putting companies out of business, but at the same time pcAnywhere was quite the POS : It's kernel level drivers guaranteed you fairly frequent BSODs, and there were brutal flaws in its scripting language that amazingly remained through many revisions of the product. Overall it just seemed like a "the least product we can deliver and make money" kinda deal.
They told me it was my problem for choosing an alternative opperating system, not theirs.
The key is to never, ever mention that you're running anything from whatever is the most common, otherwise they'll immediately blame your system. I recently had an incident where my cable modem couldn't connect to the local node (i.e. the cable/block-sync light was out), and upon calling and telling her that my cable light was out (pretty cut and dry issue) she immediately started walking through reversing the TP cable to my computer from the cable modem, Windows 9x steps to renew my DHCP certificate, checking if I could get to websites, etc. (all the time I'm pretending that I'm doing what she asks, hitting keys on my keyboard, etc. I actually have a FreeBSD firewall talking to the cable modem and doing NAT sharing for several XP/2000 machines, but of course I'm not going to mention that, and in any case the situation was brutally simple: My cable modem couldn't communicate with them. The bloody light doesn't lie. Anyways eventually she tells me to get out my Windows Me install disc (for the phantom Windows Me that I don't have installed) to reinstall some drivers at which point I exclaim "Uh, I really don't think this will help: The cable modem block-sync is out. That's the problem there". She replied "No sir, I'm communicating with your cable modem right now. It has an uptime of 5 days, blah blah". Well the funny thing is that since she kept insisting that she was talking to my cable modem, I had disconnected the cable from it about 90 seconds prior. I exclaimed "Well it must be a magic cable modem then because I unplugged the cable". There was silence on the line, and after a long pause she suddenly says "I'm sorry sir, it's my mistake. I must have entered a wrong number." and she setup a service call.
Anyways I found that pretty funny how some techs have that "list of things to do" and they don't listen to the customer. If I hadn't pretended that I was doing her Windows ME steps she'd have informed me that I was running an uncertified setup or whatever and that would have been that.
I'd normally say "Bah my PC isn't loud" until I had to have a telephone conversation, or anything else that requires a fairly quiet environment. It's at that point that moving to another room is an amazing display of how loud boxes really are, and of course when your boxes are louder everything else gets louder to overcome it: i.e. If I play a game where sound is important (i.e. Operation Flashpoint) I have to turn the volume up so high that it's pretty much sonically assaulting the whole house.
Rather than spending money on quiet fans and such (my problem with them is that often they are quiet via moving slower : I don't want yet another system that might have a bad thermistor screwing up my system because it didn't ramp up the fan speed when the heat rose), I'd rather put my boxes into some sort of sound insulated box. Of course you'd have to worry about heat, but that isn't an insurmountable problem (i.e. have a deep recessed fan with a sound insulated corner). It'd be ideal if I used a digital monitor with a long digital cable so I could cluster all my boxes into one enclosure, but alas.
Hehe, I believe that technically Mexico is a part of North America (i.e. NAFTA includes Mexico. . Many people separate it from the US & Canada not because of geographical reasons, but rather economic reasons: It's easier to say North America and mean the US & Canada.
Tom's site is known to be a "take a stand" site where Tom and crew are looking to piss on whatever company didn't send them a reviewer sample quickly enough (how many times has a bad review started with "We barely have time just because they just sent us the board. All the other sites got theirs last week. Wahhh! Wahhhh! RESPECT MY AUTHORITY: I AM THE TOM!"), or because someone didn't return their phone call, etc. They're like some sad gang of retaliation experts looking for an axe to grind. It's like the National Enquirer of hardware sites.
Wow your company is quick. A couple of months ago you started this new transition, hired a couple of Java programmers who implemented a solution, and you then realized it was flawed and moved it all back again giving up the OO pursuit. That's a pretty fast acting company that you have there.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah that's right: Taking the exact same argument and turning it around is a "troll". Go back to propaganda 101 idiot.
Take, for instance, Salk's development of the Polio vaccine at the University of Pittsburgh. He was asked why he didn't patent it, and replied "That would be like patenting the sun".
Of course his research was funded out of the public's pockets. Anyways my point is not that people can't forsake IP protections: Absolutely they can! Indeed I think that is fantastic what he did. However the vast majority of commercial drugs that we have today would not exist without the IP protections that are in place, so when someone yabbers about the evils of IP protection because the FRUITS of those IP protections come in handy, the irony is just too thick.
Oh I read his whole post, and there is a very clear anti-IP slant. The point that _I_ was making is that it's the "fake ethical" perspective: Free drugs for all, but no new drugs in the future. The quick and easy solution that costs the future. The trying-to-be-ethical person would say that in times of economic downturn the government should open it's wallets (or rather the wallets of bond-buyers) and dole out charity left and right, building multi trillion dollar deficits. The REAL ethical person realizes that shortly down the road that means that inevitably the foolish short term solution will lead to incredible long term pain that will hurt far more than the short term solution helped.
Let me put it this way: Another poster mentioned that free AIDS drugs in Africa perhaps merely prolong the life of infected peoples, leading to more infections, and people immediately beat their bleating little liberal hearts (I'm actually a liberal, well, a libertarian, so I'm saying this tongue-in-cheek) about how mean that is, when the net effects of what THEY propose could mean the deaths of astronomically MORE people. Merely meaning well isn't good enough.
Yeah, right. If you have been following the drug companies' financials, a lot of their expenses is not in the actual research but in marketting the drugs plus the hefty profits that they make.
The beauty of a capitalist system is that if you think you can do it better, go nuts. I wish you the best of luck on curing AIDS and making people live longer. Really I do.
Plus, a lot of their so-called medicines comes from the jungles and seas of third-world countries.
Again if it's so easy to isolate and apply a compound from a ant in a jungle in some third world country and cure some disease, then go ahead and do it. Once again it's a capitalist system, and if you want to take a shot at it then go nuts.
Hang on, you'll need to cite a reliable source for the cost of developing drugs. The figures I've seen, which I can't cite a source for either, put the figure at a few dozens of millions of dollars for drug research. Still a substantial sum, but a far cry from 'billions'.
Well I did pluralize, meaning that multiple drugs together cost billions. Anyways one example is Viagra, which cost $500 million to develop. Pfizer, pre-merging with Warner-Lambert, spent $2.7 billion for R&D in a single year. R&D accounts for only 20% of Pfizers total charges, yet the company wouldn't exist without the other 80% (the administrative stuff that's necessary for it to function).
Actually ironically they have to charge so much because of patent expiry: The drug companies have to charge hefty prices during the intial availability of the drug to pay for the R&D over a very short time (consider it a very short amortization period for R&D recovery) because then the patent DOES become public domain and any old company can copy it.
In other words: When there's a new super-long-life drug at the drug store and it costs $50 a pill, blame the government for imposing drug patent expiry, or alternately thank them when it's $3 a pill several years later.
To imply that nothing would get ever done without the incentive of making obscene amounts of money is to be a greedy, cheap, cynical, amoral, capitalist bastard.
Ah a good old fashioned foolish idealist. You're a dying breed. I'll take it you're a recipient of educational welfare (you know that crazy thing that soaks up billions of dollars, leading to thousands of professors that wax poetically about the benefits of socialism while they suck up taxpayers dollars).
Money=work. Whether you're a communist country, a socialist country, whatever: It's all the same bloody thing. Drug companies have billions of dollars worth of equipment, and they have 10s, no 100s of thousands of employees working day in and day out to help people live longer, better lives. Your foolish assertion that it's just a will and "passion" that makes it happens is absolutely hilarious.
There is an alternative: Put the government in charge of all drug development and pretend that your tax dollars paying for it is magically different from paying at the pharmacy (ah the number of naives that think that). Of course government sponsored programs like that without capitalist incentives of competition are pretty much always a spectacular bust, but hey let's pretend right? It's great to pretend idealism when you don't have to cite proof.
But much of the funding for drug development is actually done with public funds in University settings.
I really question this claim and would like to see some metrics that state as such. In the end a standard consumer drug cost from $500 million to over a billion dollars from inception to public availability.
they could take a cut in executive salaries and glitzy marketing TV-blitzathons
Ads generally only run for non-lifesaving life-improvement drugs (hence how many AIDS drug ads have you seen?), and generally those ads solicit more profits from sales than the ad cost (the general metric of when to run an ad), so your claim is counter to the reality: Those ads indirectly provide more income for the drug company that can be used to develop the next "save the world" drug.
Oh one more thing:
In my opinion, placing an artificial scarcity on the music in this manner is immoral. It keeps people from doing what is in their best interest, namely sharing information, enjoying it, and quite possibly learning from it. It may be illegal to share music in this manner, but it is not unethical.
In my opinion the "our way or no way" imposition of the GPL is unfair, and it's immoral for GPL advocates to push such a facist position, therefore I have decided that I will simply ignore GPL "rights" of artificial limitations (how much more artificial could it be than a "license disclaimer"?) in this matter and I'm going to copy/paste GPL code into my closed-source proprietary application because that's righteous and is the ethical, moral thing to do.
It's almost always better to give information away freely than it is to keep it hidden. This is a subjective viewpoint, but one that's very easily defendable. Look at the growing AIDS holocaust in Africa right now. The pharma companies are all doing their damndest to keep from from having their AIDS drugs, or at least the intellectual property rights to those drugs, taken away, nationalized, so that those drugs can be made more freely and be used to treat individuals.
Sure, it will hurt those companies if their patents are violated, but then how many lives would it save?
Classic anti-IP FUD. The reality is that drug companies don't just "give it away freely" because those drugs cost billions of dollars to develop in the first place, and the earnings from sales finances the NEXT round of life saving drugs. In other words it's real convenient to say "Geee, thanks for the drugs...now let's make them free!", changing the rules after they've been developed, but the reality is that that would DEMOLISH the future of drugs that will save countless future lives. Your position is the compassionate position, but the reality is that it's the simplistic position that equals countless deaths/shorter lives because you've undermined the whole foundation of why these drugs exist in the first place.
And someone might be walking into a liquor store with a balaclava and a handgun because he's cold and wants to open his vodka with a bullet. The reality is that the OVERWHELMING (meaning >99.999999999999999%. This is not a scientific number but I'd wager that it's accurate) use of Napster and derivatives is for the trading of copyright infringed music and applications. Just because some guy in somewhere/someplace uses it for a legit purpose doesn't legitimize the overwhleming number of people who don't/
The irony of all of this is the early days of Napster when the lawyers were first starting up their engines: Here on Slashdot and elsewhere "Freedom" advocates were yapping about how Napster gives garage bands the type of exposure that the big names have, and how it equalized the playing field and now the Big Record Co. no longer held all the cards. Viva la revolution! Of course what was ACTUALLY traded on Napster and friends? Britney Spears, Backdoor Boys, etc. The usual pop garbage.
See hypocrisy.
There are some DSL providers that have horrible track records, just as there are cable outfits that have fantastic records. In 3 years of having a cable modem I'd say my total downtime is
There's an old saying about trying to herd cats...
Seriously though, what were they thinking? Apart from the moral and ethical depravity of it, logically it seems like a pretty stupid plan to begin with: Was the cat fed wet food from a picture of the person whom it was supposed to befriend? For anyone who has a cat, you know from the beginning that these morons obviously didn't.
Is Bin Laden dead? The reality is that the suicide bombers are generally the suckers, but the people calling the shots are directing the actions based around their own well being and the general well being of their society. Lots of Japanese were hurled out to die in World War II, but once the Emporor felt personally at risk from nuclear weapons (no longer was he immune) the war suddenly ended. Smallpox would not be contained to North America, so anyone using it would pretty much be wiping out their own societies (in fact they would moreso be wiping out their own societies given poor sanitation, inadequate healthcare, etc.) : Not really an effective measure.
If you're measuring the enemy by the suckers, if you will, who died in the aircraft then you are foolish. They were mere pawns for others (and I'll bet you for a split second before crashing into the building they thought "Hrmmm...what if there isn't an eternal afterlife of bliss and heaven?". It reminds me a hilarious Simpsons were Maude Flanders is rescued and she states "Oooh Neddy : I almost thought I was going to the place of eternal bliss and salvation!" and that right there points out the hilarious paradox of religion)
As scary as smallpox sounds, it's a non-discriminating disease, meaning that anyone looking to use it had better plan for all their own people to die too. Anthrax works for terrorists because there's very little chance of something mailed to Washington D.C. hurting people in Afghanistan or whatever. While it's easy to portray all these terrorists as simply insane, they do have a motivation (an INCREDIBLY racist and zealotous motivation, but nonetheless) that isn't driven purely by insanity.
It reminds me of the "cold war" with the Soviety Union: The military-industrial complex (yup it really exists) wants to sell weapons, and to do that they need everyone to believe that the Soviets were a bunch of land hungry maniacs who were just dying for the chance to press the big red button, yet the reality is that the USSR was family men and woman who wanted to just live their lives just like everyone in the US. Nonetheless the misguided nuclear fear was driven by the propaganda that the godless USSR empire was suicidal.
BTW: For those who care I used the cygnus split GNU utility to split it and that worked great, and on the other end it was a simply copy parta+partb+partc dest (with a binary flag). Cheers.
Also, Winzip does many things the Me shell extension, and I would assume the XP shell extension don't. ie - Breaking apart to multiple files
Funny thing that you mention that! Just last night I had to split a file (coincidentally an ISO of Windows XP! It was a legit volume copy BTW, but I had to move it between offices over a slow connection and I've had too many bad experiences with FTP resumes and last hundred MB downloads) and went into WinZIP to see if it would, to find that the only way it supported splitting the file was if I targetted a removable media, at which point it would split to the size indicated: It would not let me arbitrarily enter a size of each volume. Then again the ZIP file format has always been lame: Remember in the old days if you had a split file you'd have to enter the last disc apparently just so it could get the section information, and then you'd have to put back in the first disc when it'd actually start doing work. That was lame and obviously the result of an oversight.
While it's not as slick as terminal services, the Windows community has had Netmeeting Remote Desktop Sharing for quite a while now and it's a very slick product and already had mostly replaced pcAnywhere. I don't like seeing Microsoft putting companies out of business, but at the same time pcAnywhere was quite the POS : It's kernel level drivers guaranteed you fairly frequent BSODs, and there were brutal flaws in its scripting language that amazingly remained through many revisions of the product. Overall it just seemed like a "the least product we can deliver and make money" kinda deal.
They told me it was my problem for choosing an alternative opperating system, not theirs.
The key is to never, ever mention that you're running anything from whatever is the most common, otherwise they'll immediately blame your system. I recently had an incident where my cable modem couldn't connect to the local node (i.e. the cable/block-sync light was out), and upon calling and telling her that my cable light was out (pretty cut and dry issue) she immediately started walking through reversing the TP cable to my computer from the cable modem, Windows 9x steps to renew my DHCP certificate, checking if I could get to websites, etc. (all the time I'm pretending that I'm doing what she asks, hitting keys on my keyboard, etc. I actually have a FreeBSD firewall talking to the cable modem and doing NAT sharing for several XP/2000 machines, but of course I'm not going to mention that, and in any case the situation was brutally simple: My cable modem couldn't communicate with them. The bloody light doesn't lie. Anyways eventually she tells me to get out my Windows Me install disc (for the phantom Windows Me that I don't have installed) to reinstall some drivers at which point I exclaim "Uh, I really don't think this will help: The cable modem block-sync is out. That's the problem there". She replied "No sir, I'm communicating with your cable modem right now. It has an uptime of 5 days, blah blah". Well the funny thing is that since she kept insisting that she was talking to my cable modem, I had disconnected the cable from it about 90 seconds prior. I exclaimed "Well it must be a magic cable modem then because I unplugged the cable". There was silence on the line, and after a long pause she suddenly says "I'm sorry sir, it's my mistake. I must have entered a wrong number." and she setup a service call.
Anyways I found that pretty funny how some techs have that "list of things to do" and they don't listen to the customer. If I hadn't pretended that I was doing her Windows ME steps she'd have informed me that I was running an uncertified setup or whatever and that would have been that.
I'd normally say "Bah my PC isn't loud" until I had to have a telephone conversation, or anything else that requires a fairly quiet environment. It's at that point that moving to another room is an amazing display of how loud boxes really are, and of course when your boxes are louder everything else gets louder to overcome it: i.e. If I play a game where sound is important (i.e. Operation Flashpoint) I have to turn the volume up so high that it's pretty much sonically assaulting the whole house.
Rather than spending money on quiet fans and such (my problem with them is that often they are quiet via moving slower : I don't want yet another system that might have a bad thermistor screwing up my system because it didn't ramp up the fan speed when the heat rose), I'd rather put my boxes into some sort of sound insulated box. Of course you'd have to worry about heat, but that isn't an insurmountable problem (i.e. have a deep recessed fan with a sound insulated corner). It'd be ideal if I used a digital monitor with a long digital cable so I could cluster all my boxes into one enclosure, but alas.
Hehe, I believe that technically Mexico is a part of North America (i.e. NAFTA includes Mexico. . Many people separate it from the US & Canada not because of geographical reasons, but rather economic reasons: It's easier to say North America and mean the US & Canada.
Tom's site is known to be a "take a stand" site where Tom and crew are looking to piss on whatever company didn't send them a reviewer sample quickly enough (how many times has a bad review started with "We barely have time just because they just sent us the board. All the other sites got theirs last week. Wahhh! Wahhhh! RESPECT MY AUTHORITY: I AM THE TOM!"), or because someone didn't return their phone call, etc. They're like some sad gang of retaliation experts looking for an axe to grind. It's like the National Enquirer of hardware sites.
The capitalization indicates that it's a product name, not a description. What does http://www.google.com/search?q=%22SQL+Server%22 as a search get you?
Wow your company is quick. A couple of months ago you started this new transition, hired a couple of Java programmers who implemented a solution, and you then realized it was flawed and moved it all back again giving up the OO pursuit. That's a pretty fast acting company that you have there.