Well said.
Interesting statement by the faceless corporation to employees. It will be interesting to see how removing any sense of personal ownership in the office space works out for the companies that try this. Sure, cubes were pathetic, but at least you had a bit of space that was yours.
Next they'll announce a calculus with space available for workers = 0.75 * number of workers. This will help cut down on those non-productive bathroom breaks and trips to the water cooler. Don't leave your space - someone else will snag it. Brilliant.
Means that the plaintiff can't use boilerplate (form letter) verbiage as a complaint. In other words, the complaint is too generic or abstract and fails to state specifics, and is therefore not actionable. At least that's how it sounds to this layperson - IANAL.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure Comcast et al will just sit back and let people grab HD content from other sources. They won't use packet shaping to protect their business model, er, revenue stream, er, no, um... Infrastructure. Yeah, that's it! Infrastructure. They're protecting the infrastructure and customer bandwidth.
The people and companies who actually purchase software are just revenue units.
Their real customers are the stockholders.
That's who they're beholden to. The folks who buy software have been commoditized. We haven't been the customer for some time, and this inevitably leads to crass disregard of the purchaser of the good or service of a company in favor of the stockholder. This is a fundamental economic shift -- commoditization of purchasers and re-identification of "the customer" as the stockholder, and it has predictable consequences in the attitude of a publicly traded company toward the people who spend money for whatever they sell.
It's also one reason why many publicly traded companies, M$ among them, may well be dinosaurs.
With a sufficient population of users, I'll bet Google will provide free email accounts with institutional domains, e.g. yourschool.edu - there's very little downside in this.
It is worthwhile to have an internal domain name in address to distinguish internal email traffic. Otherwise, Gmail has much better sysadmins than most colleges, and the revenue generated by eventual targeted ads will pay for the disk space. Schools don't have to budget for email infrastructure and get all the benefits of localized addressing with none of the headaches. Sounds like a win-win to me...... unless students get Scroogled eventually:
http://www.radaronline.com/from-the-magazine/2007/09/google_fiction_evil_dangerous_surveillance_control_1.php
Agreed. The bill is a pretty common sense measure.
Chicken little, please tell Henny Penny and Turkey Lurkey it was only an acorn, not a piece of the Internet sky falling.
The basic pitch begins like this:
Nice business you got here... it'd be a shame if something happened to it.
Works for other organizations than the BSA.
It's been about two years ago now that I embarked on a similar journey to your own. I wanted to find a good Linux distribution that met several criteria:
1. An installation routine that would allow me to dual-boot with Windows easily. My wife still uses Windows and is not yet ready for the transition, and since I earn my daily bread as a Windows sysadmin, I still need to keep it around for some of the things in my job.
2. A community which would be as newbie-friendly as the distribution itself. In the past I had bad experiences with some Linux experts who thought that Linux was, and should remain, the exclusive province of uber-geeks. In non-newbie-friendly support community forums, one may post a question, no matter how well formulated, and one of these fellows will offer helpful replies such as, "what a n00b- if you can't read the man pages, maybe you should go back to window$ or get a commodore64."
3. A reasonably good set of apps and tools built into the distro do to the things I need to do, and a reasonably good package manager to add new apps.
I loaded Mandrake (just prior to the change to Mandriva), looked at Suse, and Fedora. All of them met criteria 1 and 3, though correspondence to criteria 2 was a bit spotty. At that time I heard about a new distribution that was gaining a lot of popularity that had an African-sounding name: Ubuntu. I downloaded the then-current version, and loaded it with no problems. The forum users were hospitable and winsome, and welcomed me home to the distro, and the community tries to live up to the ethos of the word Ubuntu, which is used in several southern African languages, and means something like compassion for fellow human beings (very loosely paraphrased.) Where my previous experiences had been technically adequate and interesting, Ubuntu felt like coming home.
Since one of the reasons I was loading Linux was to join the free software community, I also decided that I would limit myself to obtaining whatever manuals and documentation I could also find that was free and open, in the same spirit of the Free Software Community, and here are some links that I think you'll find helpful:
The first stop on your documentation journey outside of the forums of your chosen distribution and the help guides and wikis therein should be the Linux Documentation Project at http://www.tldp.org/
Full length guides are here: http://www.tldp.org/guides.html
Especially helpful to me were Machtelt Garrels Introduction to Linux: A Hands-On Guide and his Bash Guide for Beginners, but all the docs here are worthwhile, freely downloadable and printable.
Another good guide is RUTE: Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition
Very well written and thorough. The author writes, "You can find out what book a person needs by asking the question, "Do you want to be a Muggle or a Wizard?"
(1) If they answer "Wizard", then you give them Rute.
(2) If they answer "Muggle", then you give them "Linux for Dummies."
(3) If they answer "What's a Muggle?", then you give them "Harry Potter".
I had just finished reading the first few Harry Potter books to my kids, and so this tickled me. RUTE is a great starter manual:
http://linux.2038bug.com/rute-home.html
Bruce Perens is one of the brighter stars in the firmament of the Free Software movement, and his publisher, Prentiss Hall, has a number of books in the Bruce Perens Series available in PDF format for download here:
http://www.phptr.com/promotions/promotion.asp?prom o=1484&redir=1&rl=1
No list would be complete without including the O'Reilly Open Book page. This page includes books such as the Linux Network Administrator's Guide, but also some books on the history and philosophy of the Free Software movement such as Eric S. Reymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Slashdot Mirror
Well said. Interesting statement by the faceless corporation to employees. It will be interesting to see how removing any sense of personal ownership in the office space works out for the companies that try this. Sure, cubes were pathetic, but at least you had a bit of space that was yours. Next they'll announce a calculus with space available for workers = 0.75 * number of workers. This will help cut down on those non-productive bathroom breaks and trips to the water cooler. Don't leave your space - someone else will snag it. Brilliant.
Means that the plaintiff can't use boilerplate (form letter) verbiage as a complaint. In other words, the complaint is too generic or abstract and fails to state specifics, and is therefore not actionable. At least that's how it sounds to this layperson - IANAL.
Just make sure all her gifts are from this list and you have a decent chance of changing marital status.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure Comcast et al will just sit back and let people grab HD content from other sources. They won't use packet shaping to protect their business model, er, revenue stream, er, no, um... Infrastructure. Yeah, that's it! Infrastructure. They're protecting the infrastructure and customer bandwidth.
The people and companies who actually purchase software are just revenue units. Their real customers are the stockholders. That's who they're beholden to. The folks who buy software have been commoditized. We haven't been the customer for some time, and this inevitably leads to crass disregard of the purchaser of the good or service of a company in favor of the stockholder. This is a fundamental economic shift -- commoditization of purchasers and re-identification of "the customer" as the stockholder, and it has predictable consequences in the attitude of a publicly traded company toward the people who spend money for whatever they sell. It's also one reason why many publicly traded companies, M$ among them, may well be dinosaurs.
An inexplicable attack of clarity from the Recording Industry! Sweet!
With a sufficient population of users, I'll bet Google will provide free email accounts with institutional domains, e.g. yourschool.edu - there's very little downside in this. It is worthwhile to have an internal domain name in address to distinguish internal email traffic. Otherwise, Gmail has much better sysadmins than most colleges, and the revenue generated by eventual targeted ads will pay for the disk space. Schools don't have to budget for email infrastructure and get all the benefits of localized addressing with none of the headaches. Sounds like a win-win to me... ... unless students get Scroogled eventually:
http://www.radaronline.com/from-the-magazine/2007/09/google_fiction_evil_dangerous_surveillance_control_1.php
Agreed. The bill is a pretty common sense measure. Chicken little, please tell Henny Penny and Turkey Lurkey it was only an acorn, not a piece of the Internet sky falling.
The basic pitch begins like this: Nice business you got here... it'd be a shame if something happened to it. Works for other organizations than the BSA.
It's been about two years ago now that I embarked on a similar journey to your own. I wanted to find a good Linux distribution that met several criteria:
1. An installation routine that would allow me to dual-boot with Windows easily. My wife still uses Windows and is not yet ready for the transition, and since I earn my daily bread as a Windows sysadmin, I still need to keep it around for some of the things in my job.
2. A community which would be as newbie-friendly as the distribution itself. In the past I had bad experiences with some Linux experts who thought that Linux was, and should remain, the exclusive province of uber-geeks. In non-newbie-friendly support community forums, one may post a question, no matter how well formulated, and one of these fellows will offer helpful replies such as, "what a n00b- if you can't read the man pages, maybe you should go back to window$ or get a commodore64."
3. A reasonably good set of apps and tools built into the distro do to the things I need to do, and a reasonably good package manager to add new apps.
I loaded Mandrake (just prior to the change to Mandriva), looked at Suse, and Fedora. All of them met criteria 1 and 3, though correspondence to criteria 2 was a bit spotty. At that time I heard about a new distribution that was gaining a lot of popularity that had an African-sounding name: Ubuntu. I downloaded the then-current version, and loaded it with no problems. The forum users were hospitable and winsome, and welcomed me home to the distro, and the community tries to live up to the ethos of the word Ubuntu, which is used in several southern African languages, and means something like compassion for fellow human beings (very loosely paraphrased.) Where my previous experiences had been technically adequate and interesting, Ubuntu felt like coming home.
Since one of the reasons I was loading Linux was to join the free software community, I also decided that I would limit myself to obtaining whatever manuals and documentation I could also find that was free and open, in the same spirit of the Free Software Community, and here are some links that I think you'll find helpful:
The first stop on your documentation journey outside of the forums of your chosen distribution and the help guides and wikis therein should be the Linux Documentation Project at http://www.tldp.org/
Full length guides are here: http://www.tldp.org/guides.html Especially helpful to me were Machtelt Garrels Introduction to Linux: A Hands-On Guide and his Bash Guide for Beginners, but all the docs here are worthwhile, freely downloadable and printable.
Another good guide is RUTE: Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition Very well written and thorough. The author writes, "You can find out what book a person needs by asking the question, "Do you want to be a Muggle or a Wizard?" (1) If they answer "Wizard", then you give them Rute. (2) If they answer "Muggle", then you give them "Linux for Dummies." (3) If they answer "What's a Muggle?", then you give them "Harry Potter". I had just finished reading the first few Harry Potter books to my kids, and so this tickled me. RUTE is a great starter manual: http://linux.2038bug.com/rute-home.html
Bruce Perens is one of the brighter stars in the firmament of the Free Software movement, and his publisher, Prentiss Hall, has a number of books in the Bruce Perens Series available in PDF format for download here: http://www.phptr.com/promotions/promotion.asp?prom o=1484&redir=1&rl=1
No list would be complete without including the O'Reilly Open Book page. This page includes books such as the Linux Network Administrator's Guide, but also some books on the history and philosophy of the Free Software movement such as Eric S. Reymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar