No, it's not infringement. All of the others can be used, but that one can't. If they broadcast it, even claiming it as an example of their error, then it would be.
"Put up or shut up." doesn't stop Viacom from doing it next week to 100 different people.
A class actions of "Show a Jury why you weren't negligent in filing these 100 requests.", tells Viacom and all the others to use a scalpel not a shotgun to do this or we will hurt you.
they are filed with the "on faith and understanding" clause - which mostly means they believe they hold the rights to the material they are requesting to be taken down. In order to get perjury, you would need to be able to prove that they knew they didn't own the rights to the material when they sent in the request. If you can prove that, you can probably prove malice - which will get you into Slander of Title where you can actually make some of the big money because it would involve corperate fraud.
Negligence and damages are more likely avenues to succeed.
Per Groklaw - Slander of Title would apply to this, if you can show some sort of malice. If there were a pattern of the types of videos they 'erroneously' had taken down, it would go a long way towards establishing malice. However, if there is just a bunch of random crap thrown into the legitimate claims, then it's unlikely that you would be able to persue a Slander of Title claim very far.
They have obviously failed to check on the actual status of the Copyrights for the video, which would set them up for a negligence suit. Since it's a tutorial on using a companies software, you might sneak it in under 'Tortuous Interferance' - ie. their actions are causing harm to the company's business and are not related to competition by VIACOM itself. [irony]MS couldn't claim interfierance by Apple just because Apple sells an OS. If Apple were to blackmail/bribe software houses into not developing for MS, then there would be a legitimate suit.[/irony]
Of course if you want to be boring, you could go with
libel - they have accused you in a writen document of engaging in copyright infringement without proof.
damages - lost time/effort/expense to correct their error.
emotional distress - hey, it's an old standby - works better for people than companies.
Depending on how many of the videos they asked to have taken down were not infringing on their copyrights, then this might be a prime target for a CAS against Viacom. That would rattle their chain - and might give the other big distributors a pause before they sent out mass takedown notices as well.
I think he's assuming that all of the 97% of non-iTunes music is non-DRM, but it may be possible that some fraction was bought from other stores. Anyway, it's interesting data, IMHO
iPods only play Fairplay DRM. They don't play plays4sure or any of the others. So yes, if the music plays on the iPod, and it isn't wrapped in Fairplay, then it's DRM free.
How many places besides the iTunes store can you get Fairplay wrapped music? None that I'm aware of. So if iTunes didn't sell it, it's going to be DRM free on the iPod. So his numbers do hold up.
I used to print "Check ID" on the signature space on the back of the card.
A clerk, had me sign the receipt, picked up the card - looked at the card & my signature, and then handed me back my card with a 'thank you'.
You're using the wrong ratio. 11% shrink isn't what they are talking about. They are talking about only 11% of the products on the shelves - in all of the stores - was stolen by camming.
In retail you're talking more along the lines of saying - "OK this year we've had 3% shrinkage, of that 80% was by shoplifting and 20% was credit/check fraud. Looking into the fraud, we can see that only 11% of the products we stock are ever stolen by fraud." This should be followed by the question "WTF is wrong with the rest of our crap that it's not even worth stealing"
It's what gives vomit it's distinctive smell - a drop will clear the floor of a building. A dropped bottle will clear the whole building - and probably the surrounding area while it vents away.
So in your experiance as a tech you never had 1 person who just knew that you could fix the problem with their computer if you wanted to? You know, the one who's modem had smoke coming out of it yesterday but since the computer boots, they can get on if you would just help them. The one's so completely divorced from reality that "Ma'am, it was smoking yesterday, it's a dead modem & we can't help you until you get it fixed." translates to "I can't be bothered to help you." The ones who, once politely gotten off the phone, call back to scream at the supervisor because nobody will help them. And then scream at the manager. And then call back to try to scream at the president? There are people out there that you cannot send away politely. They have decided how life is & until you conform to their belief, they'll be back. You try to help them at the beginning. You try to be polite. But at some point you tell them that the universe does not revolve around them & no amount of screaming on their part is going to make it so.
As for the rest, you might not like the policies companies have, but if you don't - don't deal with them. Yep, Verizon is a bunch of pricks - as Cingular they charged me the disconnect fee 3 months in a row - and refused to acknowledge that until court. I don't deal with Verizon at all now. But I knew going in that when I cancelled the service I would pay the fee and I accepted that when I cancelled service. Same with the portals, they don't hide it in some fine print, it's right on the signup page. You want the free service they offer, you take it on the terms they offer it - you don't whine when you get caught in a part of the TOS you don't like.
As for being a bogus policy, what do you want them to do, hold onto every piece of mail delivered to every account created on their service for the rest of eternity? At some point a company has to decide when to clean up abandoned accounts. Lycos set abandoned at 30 days & cleanup whenever they get around to it. What policy do you want them to have? Remember to include the pro's of your proposal in light of the fact that a large number of portal accounts are spamtraps people create to use when they sign up on other websites. Also, include the business case for having the mail admin spend his time recovering a free account for people that don't value the account at $20.
I learned from my father, a musician, about customer service. There are a couple of rules which keep customers happy, and keep them coming back:
The customer is always right
You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar (or muriatic acid)
Make sure your product doesn't suck
I have a hard time with this kind of reaction from Lycos, and other companies. How can they get away with being assholes?
Hmm, in order -:
The customer is always right - Have you ever done customer service for computer related issues? Would you please explain to me how it is the ISP's fault that the woman who superglued a phonecord jack into her modem & cut off the cord can't get online. (She caught her son surfing porn & this was her solution, until she wanted to get her email). Why would Lycos engage in the expense & effort of restoring this woman's email when it's obviously not even worth $20 to her.
You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar (or muriatic acid) - Butric acid actually catches flies even better - but you would never deliberately put it in the house. This woman started her issue with compaints of extortion, and given the tone of the snippet she posted, she was probably quite a bit more vitrolic in the parts she cut.
Make sure your products don't suck - Lycos is a web portal. It has free email. It has a clear policy that if you go over 30 days without checking your account, they can delete it when they want to. What do you want them to do, hold it active for eternity waiting for you to return? Not going to happen. Shouldn't have to happen. They actually have a policy that gave her an oportunity to recover that email - for a measly $20. If you can find a contractor who will rebuild an account on a mailserver from an archive tape for $20, I'd piss myself in surprise. Their service doesn't suck any more than any of the other free mail services out there - almost all of them have a come back or loose the acct policy. Most of them don't offer any way of getting the mail back.
[snip] get away with being assholes. - which part do you find being assholish? The policy is clear. There was even an oportunity to recover from the problem - according to the snippet she posted, she was given a 48hr window to make a decision on if she wanted the email back or not - given the amount of animosity in the email snippets she posted, there were probably more than she showed. Not being part of the tech team I can't say what was going on but, it's quite possible that when she notified them of the problem they put a hold on recycling the tape - which you can only do for so long before it has to go back into rotation.
I've had to deal with customers who have lost Email before - people who's clients deleted email from the server & it was gone when they reinstalled Windows, cancelled their account then tried to get their email a month later, etc. - they are nasty. If you tried the broadcast 1/10th of the conversation after you tell them it's gone, the FCC would make SWAT look like a bunch of amateurs. Did we have backups - yep, were we going to dig them out for a customer? "Not without a court order" was the actual response to the question. If she got hit in the quarterly purge, it's not surprising at all that they wouldn't touch her account after the grace period.
As for his tone that he's the last person in the chain & nobody is going to help her - there comes a point when being nice doesn't work anymore. At some point you have to say, "this is the way it is, you had your chance now go away."
Requiring you to pay a fee to get your expired emails back is sleazy, but not that unexpected.
How much is your mail administrators time worth? How about the system time to do a recovery from a backup tape? Backup tapes are serial, not random access. Also they can be huge & require decompression.
Overall, $20 to have someone do a restore is cheap. I can't get my mechanic to plug in the EEC code reader for $20. I've dealt with Lycos before -the company I was working with at the time had a branded portal - they're not that bad, but they don't go out of their way to be pricks. I'm betting on the passing of a deadline and a recycling of the freebie acct backups. (face it it's free, they're not going to run daily, weekly, and monthly backups like they would for paying customers)
That was the beginning of the whole argument. She got mad because she felt that this was extortionate, and Lycos' Customer Service Manager basically revoked the offer and said "haha -- now you can't get it back even if you pay!"
I can't read it since it's slashdotted, but if she was offered restoration for the upgrade price, and declined it, then it's entirely possible that the argument went on long enough to cycle her Emails out of the backup rotation. Given that Lycos offers both paid & unpaid services, I don't think it would be a stretch that the unpaid services were on a short backup schedule, with the paying customers having more recovery time.
I can't see the whole argument, but if her contact with Lycos CS was anything like the calls I would get doing tech support, it probably involved a lot of words that the FCC charges companies large amounts of money for using. She may just be posting the final notice after weeks of abusive behaviour. There does come a time when the answer "No, now go away & leave us alone" becomes the right one.
Although there is a lot of talk about TCO and such with Linux versus OS X versus Windows, it's only part of the story. Corporations, especially the large corporations which lie behind Microsoft's market share dominance, have money to burn, so it Windows costs them x more bucks per user per year, it isn't a huge issue. What they need, however, is an office suite which can make read and use the millions of documents they have on hand and the millions they need to produce We all know what office suite that is. This problem isn't unique to Linux.
Don't tell this to IBM & Xerox. If they found out that only MS Office was usable for office documents, why whole divisions dedicated to document storage - in standardized formats - would disapear. Also having gone through it 3 times at a previous job, different versions of MS Word can't read other MS Word formats. OOwriter is better at autodetecting & formatting the various Word formats than MS Word is. OO is slower to load & sometimes slower running, but I don't think I have ever gotten a document I couldn't read. MS Word? that's a weekly occurance.
As for a program that make, read, and use the millions of documents they have on hand & will make, nobody in their right mind should be using a program that changes formatting based on the print driver. Those old spreadsheets & macros? Some of them break with every upgrade to office, so changing to a whole new format isn't much worse. (Yes, I had to install win98 over XP to load an old version of MS office to run a 10 year old Excel spreadsheet.)
The bigger companies are already starting to get bit by format problems for their old documents. Some are transfering them from one format to another, others are just doing the scan & stash routine. Office 2007 isn't going to solve that problem, nor is it going to help in the long run. ODF can help, if it's correctly implimented - including a tag to define which version of ODF the document is writen in. I have no doubt that in 50 years, this version of ODF is going to be so outdated it's not even recognizable.
I can sit down and USE my computer, not fuss with config files or spend hours compiling source code.
I guess I have to ask, WTF do you do on a daily basis with your PC - at home, for home use - that requires fussing with config files or spending hours compiling source code? In the last 2 years, my FC use box has manually compiled exactly 3 things BRLcad, the NVidia Drivers, and a cross compile of an ALSA driver set for an old laptop.(My test box gets a much heavier compile/config load)
I can't comment on the personal finance, I still use my Mac copy of Quickbooks for business - really need to burn those floppies to a CD
Kids - really games & music. IIRC there was an article here a few weeks ago about the crosstalk software being able to successfully run WOW. Most things that will run under DX8 will run under crosstalk once it's set up. I don't know if anyone's bothered to check if iTunes can be run under it or not. But if they want games, then yes, you have to have the platform that the designers put it out on, no difference there between a PC, a Mac, or a PS3.
Photos - last time I checked, they popped up in a directory that the OS auto mounted when I plugged the camera in. I suppose it might take me a few hours to write a program to scan through that directory one at a time, show you the picture & ask where you want to put it - if there isn't already something that specifically does that. I just use gThumb & sort through them. As for scrapbooking software - not sure, since I've never looked into it. The printer - HP & Epson both have versions that work fine in 6color process.
Your time -
Yum update keeps my Linux box up to date - and I don't have to worry about MS dumping it's DRM onto my system as a critical security update.
Between SE-Linux, proper configuration of permisions, and the external firewall - I have neither bothered with anti virus software, nor seen the need to.
AdBlock - check out the ones for Firefox - some wonderful things there - whitelists, development switches, etc - if the one that's built in isn't good enough for you.
Most of your arguments make no sense. The only one that does is that there are specific programs which you cannot run under Linux which you want/have to use. That's fair, and it's always going to be that way. I would love to run my copy of Mech Warrior (mac) on my Linux box. I don't expect it to run, but I would love to do it.
You're right, you need the right tool for the job. Saying Linux isn't the right tool is bunk. Linux is the workshop, clean, neat, and grounded US plugs. It also offers a simple tool to do almost anything - free for the installing. If you want some specific tool, it may or may not be available to with the right plug or adapter, but that's not a reflection on the workshop any more than European tools not working in the US is a reflection on the quality of craftsmanship in Europe.
Linux as an operating system is as, if not more, ready than Windows. It's just waiting for it's apps to catch up.
Collusion => abuse of copyright => inability to enforce copyright.
If the record companies are acting in collusion to illegally support the high cost of music, and artificially manipulate the market - using their copyright of the music - then they are guilty of abuse of copyright (a squirly legal issue about as well defined as fair use). If you are determined to be abusing your copyright, then you can - in theory - loose your right to enforce certain aspects of that copyright.
While most civil suits requesting damages are settle or be sued, most are not extortion. The extortion portion is easier to see when you look at the money involved - pay us $3K now or pay your lawyer $10K to prove you don't owe us $120K. In most civil suits the settlements are still higher than the legal fees - by making the disparity between the settlement & the potential legal fees so great, they can garantee that most people will settle without ever going to court. It's the same thing you see with people & questionable patents, they licence them for $10-20K (and whatever the price it's substantially less than the going rate)- because they know it will cost the company $500K-1M to invalidate their patent w/ 3X damages on top of that if the company they are extorting looses.
As for not going forward if there is no merit, look at IBM v SCO - 4 years in May & 1/2 Billion dollars spent - for claims as pathetic as:
SCO: They included our sacred code that integrates with Intell's Chipset.
IBM: We got it from Intell's documentation - pp. 50-65 in this manual - the same place SCO got it from.
SCO: Oh.
No matter how stupid or petty, a determined advisary can keep punative suits in court until one of you capitulates or goes bankrupt.
Actually, they only actually go to court when the other party is stupid - "Hi, you sued me so I purged by HD before giving it to you", "Hi, I got your supeona & threw it away, please render a default judgement." When people go to court ready to fight, they drop the case. Their 'evidence' is a bunch of screenshots & an IP trace - with no supporting validation that there is no IP spoofing/botnetting going on. If one of these goes to a real trial, I would expect to see the evidence they have crumble like a McD's breakfast biscuit.
must be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the plaintiff is guilty
It's preponderance of evidence in civil suits. Beyond reasonable doubt is for criminal cases only. It's why people are not guilty of criminal negligence but end up paying huge civil settlements for the same negligence claim.
IBM is starting to push out Cell based hardware. That means heavy iron with multiple processors each with multiple types of cores. You know what people are using to learn how to program that? PS3s. You get all the techniques down on a sub $1K chunk of plastic then you migrate those techniques up to $1M+ big iron.
I think if you look at the people contributing to the Cell frameworks & libraries, you're going to find IBM investing heavily in time & lines.
But in general, this "statistic" means absolutely squat. No one is going to give a shit if 100 million people downloaded something -- Microsoft is what managers hear the most about and that's what they are generally inclined to want.
The point is that if you can go to ATI or Netgear and say 'you are going to loose X million sales if you don't develop a Linux driver', then ATI & Netgear will pay more attention than if you go to them & say 'we want drivers for Linux'. It's about numbers. When Marketdroids see multiple million potential sales walking away, they start paying attention - fringe nutters are optional.
Place I worked at did a bad Citrix install - they ended up trying to run ~300 PC's on 1 Citrix server with a bad network. It was ugly until they upgraded the network & put in the 2nd server.
USB ports on terminals is a given. It will be up to access policies at the operating system level whether to allow removable storage devices to be mounted on these ports, and the CTO will be hearing a lot of compelling arguments as to why it should be allowed. Once one user has a storage device mounted, it could be all over.
The rule of thumb is you can't help stupid. It is actually quite simple to allow the keyboards & mice to connect without allowing data storage devices to attach/mount. As for the CTO hearing about why they should be allowed, I doubt it. The only people who would get to compain to the CTO aren't going to be effected by the issue to begin with. DTs & TCs go to the drones out in the workspace - the secretaries, the phone drones, and the pencil pushers - where everyone in the department gets exactly the same software and they share periferials. Anyone with 3 letters in their titles is going to get the biggest [smallest if it's a laptop], newest, shinyest system just like they always have.
The few 3 letter people I know who know how to use a thumbdrive, guard them more closely than they do their laptop. They aren't going to just hand it to their secretary and say 'print off 3 coppies of report.doc'. So what exactly is it that people are going to need to add to their DT/TC? Printers? most are already network printers shared between entire departments/workgroups. Scanners? the few that are needed are usually printer/scanners & still network shared.
Overall, you'll see these systems in bullpen type installations where everyone is a replaceable cog in the system - because that's what they are designed for.
About the same - $300-400 for a low end PC or a thin client w/ monitor, keyboard, & mouse. The slight savings in the TC will be eaten by the heavier server needed
Installation cost
A custom install of corperate software can take over an hour - 40 minutes even if you are installing a Ghosted Image and with registration it's not unusual to have them require you to re-validate your OS.
Connect power/network cable/keyboard/mouse - turn on - DHCP can handle most of the remaining configuration.
Software Cost
Per seat licenses usually cost slightly less than individual software packages.
This is offset by the added cost of the actual server software.
Maintenance Cost
No HD failure, no virus cleanup, virtually no per seat maintenance at all.
Software upgrades go on the server once - everyone get's the same upgrade at the same time - no need to take a seat out of production to upgrade it.
Operating Cost
The low end processors/MBs eat a lot less electricity - depending on load averages, you can be talking 75+W/machine - in a 100 seat call center that's $13+K a year savings
Lifespan
A typical business PC is on a 3-5 year upgrade cycle (not coincidentally the span of the average extended warrenty) This is where fans & HDs start to go at a higher than acceptable rate.
A typical thin client is on a 5-7 year upgrade cycle
So, if you examine the TCO, thin clients are highly desireable. Examining the initial outlay, they come in at slightly more costly due to the increased costs of the server & server software
For office machines I am going to assume that you mean running Office Suite type software - if not ignore the following:
Citrix offers Word pocessing & spreadsheet capabilities for dumb terminals.
50+% of the cycles on the average desktop machine are wasted - even when the person is 'busy' - heck, unless I am compiling something my system is idling at less than 30% usage most of the time - and I have 20+ windows open & active.
The number of companies using internal web apps for custom software is growing.
Given those 3 things, I would say that it is very likely that you will see more and more companies dropping back to thin-client/dumb terminals for the majority of their employees. The upfront costs are slightly higher - you need a more robust server, and the server/client software has a cost independent of the actual programs- but maintenance time is reduced, repair costs are minimized, in house version incompatility is eliminated, and the thin client can drop you from a 85W idle PC to a 8W loaded client. @ $.20/KwH, (slightly up from the US average in 2003) that can save a 100 seat call center $13K a year in electricity alone:
Slashdot Mirror
"Put up or shut up." doesn't stop Viacom from doing it next week to 100 different people.
A class actions of "Show a Jury why you weren't negligent in filing these 100 requests.", tells Viacom and all the others to use a scalpel not a shotgun to do this or we will hurt you.
Negligence and damages are more likely avenues to succeed.
Per Groklaw - Slander of Title would apply to this, if you can show some sort of malice. If there were a pattern of the types of videos they 'erroneously' had taken down, it would go a long way towards establishing malice. However, if there is just a bunch of random crap thrown into the legitimate claims, then it's unlikely that you would be able to persue a Slander of Title claim very far.
They have obviously failed to check on the actual status of the Copyrights for the video, which would set them up for a negligence suit. Since it's a tutorial on using a companies software, you might sneak it in under 'Tortuous Interferance' - ie. their actions are causing harm to the company's business and are not related to competition by VIACOM itself. [irony]MS couldn't claim interfierance by Apple just because Apple sells an OS. If Apple were to blackmail/bribe software houses into not developing for MS, then there would be a legitimate suit.[/irony]
Of course if you want to be boring, you could go with
Depending on how many of the videos they asked to have taken down were not infringing on their copyrights, then this might be a prime target for a CAS against Viacom. That would rattle their chain - and might give the other big distributors a pause before they sent out mass takedown notices as well.
How many places besides the iTunes store can you get Fairplay wrapped music? None that I'm aware of. So if iTunes didn't sell it, it's going to be DRM free on the iPod. So his numbers do hold up.
technically, cancelling autorun for your CD drive is bypassing the DRM no matter what OS you're using.
I used to print "Check ID" on the signature space on the back of the card.
A clerk, had me sign the receipt, picked up the card - looked at the card & my signature, and then handed me back my card with a 'thank you'.
You're using the wrong ratio. 11% shrink isn't what they are talking about. They are talking about only 11% of the products on the shelves - in all of the stores - was stolen by camming.
In retail you're talking more along the lines of saying - "OK this year we've had 3% shrinkage, of that 80% was by shoplifting and 20% was credit/check fraud. Looking into the fraud, we can see that only 11% of the products we stock are ever stolen by fraud." This should be followed by the question "WTF is wrong with the rest of our crap that it's not even worth stealing"
He already has one, he's helping craft legislation here in MA.
Doesn't that just thrill you to know?
It's what gives vomit it's distinctive smell - a drop will clear the floor of a building. A dropped bottle will clear the whole building - and probably the surrounding area while it vents away.
So in your experiance as a tech you never had 1 person who just knew that you could fix the problem with their computer if you wanted to? You know, the one who's modem had smoke coming out of it yesterday but since the computer boots, they can get on if you would just help them. The one's so completely divorced from reality that "Ma'am, it was smoking yesterday, it's a dead modem & we can't help you until you get it fixed." translates to "I can't be bothered to help you." The ones who, once politely gotten off the phone, call back to scream at the supervisor because nobody will help them. And then scream at the manager. And then call back to try to scream at the president? There are people out there that you cannot send away politely. They have decided how life is & until you conform to their belief, they'll be back. You try to help them at the beginning. You try to be polite. But at some point you tell them that the universe does not revolve around them & no amount of screaming on their part is going to make it so.
As for the rest, you might not like the policies companies have, but if you don't - don't deal with them. Yep, Verizon is a bunch of pricks - as Cingular they charged me the disconnect fee 3 months in a row - and refused to acknowledge that until court. I don't deal with Verizon at all now. But I knew going in that when I cancelled the service I would pay the fee and I accepted that when I cancelled service. Same with the portals, they don't hide it in some fine print, it's right on the signup page. You want the free service they offer, you take it on the terms they offer it - you don't whine when you get caught in a part of the TOS you don't like.
As for being a bogus policy, what do you want them to do, hold onto every piece of mail delivered to every account created on their service for the rest of eternity? At some point a company has to decide when to clean up abandoned accounts. Lycos set abandoned at 30 days & cleanup whenever they get around to it. What policy do you want them to have? Remember to include the pro's of your proposal in light of the fact that a large number of portal accounts are spamtraps people create to use when they sign up on other websites. Also, include the business case for having the mail admin spend his time recovering a free account for people that don't value the account at $20.
The customer is always right - Have you ever done customer service for computer related issues? Would you please explain to me how it is the ISP's fault that the woman who superglued a phonecord jack into her modem & cut off the cord can't get online. (She caught her son surfing porn & this was her solution, until she wanted to get her email). Why would Lycos engage in the expense & effort of restoring this woman's email when it's obviously not even worth $20 to her.
You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar (or muriatic acid) - Butric acid actually catches flies even better - but you would never deliberately put it in the house. This woman started her issue with compaints of extortion, and given the tone of the snippet she posted, she was probably quite a bit more vitrolic in the parts she cut.
Make sure your products don't suck - Lycos is a web portal. It has free email. It has a clear policy that if you go over 30 days without checking your account, they can delete it when they want to. What do you want them to do, hold it active for eternity waiting for you to return? Not going to happen. Shouldn't have to happen. They actually have a policy that gave her an oportunity to recover that email - for a measly $20. If you can find a contractor who will rebuild an account on a mailserver from an archive tape for $20, I'd piss myself in surprise. Their service doesn't suck any more than any of the other free mail services out there - almost all of them have a come back or loose the acct policy. Most of them don't offer any way of getting the mail back.
[snip] get away with being assholes. - which part do you find being assholish? The policy is clear. There was even an oportunity to recover from the problem - according to the snippet she posted, she was given a 48hr window to make a decision on if she wanted the email back or not - given the amount of animosity in the email snippets she posted, there were probably more than she showed. Not being part of the tech team I can't say what was going on but, it's quite possible that when she notified them of the problem they put a hold on recycling the tape - which you can only do for so long before it has to go back into rotation.
I've had to deal with customers who have lost Email before - people who's clients deleted email from the server & it was gone when they reinstalled Windows, cancelled their account then tried to get their email a month later, etc. - they are nasty. If you tried the broadcast 1/10th of the conversation after you tell them it's gone, the FCC would make SWAT look like a bunch of amateurs. Did we have backups - yep, were we going to dig them out for a customer? "Not without a court order" was the actual response to the question. If she got hit in the quarterly purge, it's not surprising at all that they wouldn't touch her account after the grace period.
As for his tone that he's the last person in the chain & nobody is going to help her - there comes a point when being nice doesn't work anymore. At some point you have to say, "this is the way it is, you had your chance now go away."
Overall, $20 to have someone do a restore is cheap. I can't get my mechanic to plug in the EEC code reader for $20. I've dealt with Lycos before -the company I was working with at the time had a branded portal - they're not that bad, but they don't go out of their way to be pricks. I'm betting on the passing of a deadline and a recycling of the freebie acct backups. (face it it's free, they're not going to run daily, weekly, and monthly backups like they would for paying customers)
I can't read it since it's slashdotted, but if she was offered restoration for the upgrade price, and declined it, then it's entirely possible that the argument went on long enough to cycle her Emails out of the backup rotation. Given that Lycos offers both paid & unpaid services, I don't think it would be a stretch that the unpaid services were on a short backup schedule, with the paying customers having more recovery time.
I can't see the whole argument, but if her contact with Lycos CS was anything like the calls I would get doing tech support, it probably involved a lot of words that the FCC charges companies large amounts of money for using. She may just be posting the final notice after weeks of abusive behaviour. There does come a time when the answer "No, now go away & leave us alone" becomes the right one.
Don't tell this to IBM & Xerox. If they found out that only MS Office was usable for office documents, why whole divisions dedicated to document storage - in standardized formats - would disapear. Also having gone through it 3 times at a previous job, different versions of MS Word can't read other MS Word formats. OOwriter is better at autodetecting & formatting the various Word formats than MS Word is. OO is slower to load & sometimes slower running, but I don't think I have ever gotten a document I couldn't read. MS Word? that's a weekly occurance.
As for a program that make, read, and use the millions of documents they have on hand & will make, nobody in their right mind should be using a program that changes formatting based on the print driver. Those old spreadsheets & macros? Some of them break with every upgrade to office, so changing to a whole new format isn't much worse. (Yes, I had to install win98 over XP to load an old version of MS office to run a 10 year old Excel spreadsheet.)
The bigger companies are already starting to get bit by format problems for their old documents. Some are transfering them from one format to another, others are just doing the scan & stash routine. Office 2007 isn't going to solve that problem, nor is it going to help in the long run. ODF can help, if it's correctly implimented - including a tag to define which version of ODF the document is writen in. I have no doubt that in 50 years, this version of ODF is going to be so outdated it's not even recognizable.
I guess I have to ask, WTF do you do on a daily basis with your PC - at home, for home use - that requires fussing with config files or spending hours compiling source code? In the last 2 years, my FC use box has manually compiled exactly 3 things BRLcad, the NVidia Drivers, and a cross compile of an ALSA driver set for an old laptop.(My test box gets a much heavier compile/config load)
I can't comment on the personal finance, I still use my Mac copy of Quickbooks for business - really need to burn those floppies to a CD
Kids - really games & music. IIRC there was an article here a few weeks ago about the crosstalk software being able to successfully run WOW. Most things that will run under DX8 will run under crosstalk once it's set up. I don't know if anyone's bothered to check if iTunes can be run under it or not. But if they want games, then yes, you have to have the platform that the designers put it out on, no difference there between a PC, a Mac, or a PS3.
Photos - last time I checked, they popped up in a directory that the OS auto mounted when I plugged the camera in. I suppose it might take me a few hours to write a program to scan through that directory one at a time, show you the picture & ask where you want to put it - if there isn't already something that specifically does that. I just use gThumb & sort through them. As for scrapbooking software - not sure, since I've never looked into it. The printer - HP & Epson both have versions that work fine in 6color process.
Your time -
Most of your arguments make no sense. The only one that does is that there are specific programs which you cannot run under Linux which you want/have to use. That's fair, and it's always going to be that way. I would love to run my copy of Mech Warrior (mac) on my Linux box. I don't expect it to run, but I would love to do it.
You're right, you need the right tool for the job. Saying Linux isn't the right tool is bunk. Linux is the workshop, clean, neat, and grounded US plugs. It also offers a simple tool to do almost anything - free for the installing. If you want some specific tool, it may or may not be available to with the right plug or adapter, but that's not a reflection on the workshop any more than European tools not working in the US is a reflection on the quality of craftsmanship in Europe.
Linux as an operating system is as, if not more, ready than Windows. It's just waiting for it's apps to catch up.
[blink][blink]You don't think the stripsearch is half the reason for all the piercings?
You're either naieve or I'm jaded, not sure which.
Collusion => abuse of copyright => inability to enforce copyright.
If the record companies are acting in collusion to illegally support the high cost of music, and artificially manipulate the market - using their copyright of the music - then they are guilty of abuse of copyright (a squirly legal issue about as well defined as fair use). If you are determined to be abusing your copyright, then you can - in theory - loose your right to enforce certain aspects of that copyright.
While most civil suits requesting damages are settle or be sued, most are not extortion. The extortion portion is easier to see when you look at the money involved - pay us $3K now or pay your lawyer $10K to prove you don't owe us $120K. In most civil suits the settlements are still higher than the legal fees - by making the disparity between the settlement & the potential legal fees so great, they can garantee that most people will settle without ever going to court. It's the same thing you see with people & questionable patents, they licence them for $10-20K (and whatever the price it's substantially less than the going rate)- because they know it will cost the company $500K-1M to invalidate their patent w/ 3X damages on top of that if the company they are extorting looses.
As for not going forward if there is no merit, look at IBM v SCO - 4 years in May & 1/2 Billion dollars spent - for claims as pathetic as:
SCO: They included our sacred code that integrates with Intell's Chipset.
IBM: We got it from Intell's documentation - pp. 50-65 in this manual - the same place SCO got it from.
SCO: Oh.
No matter how stupid or petty, a determined advisary can keep punative suits in court until one of you capitulates or goes bankrupt.
Actually, they only actually go to court when the other party is stupid - "Hi, you sued me so I purged by HD before giving it to you", "Hi, I got your supeona & threw it away, please render a default judgement." When people go to court ready to fight, they drop the case. Their 'evidence' is a bunch of screenshots & an IP trace - with no supporting validation that there is no IP spoofing/botnetting going on. If one of these goes to a real trial, I would expect to see the evidence they have crumble like a McD's breakfast biscuit.
IBM is starting to push out Cell based hardware. That means heavy iron with multiple processors each with multiple types of cores. You know what people are using to learn how to program that? PS3s. You get all the techniques down on a sub $1K chunk of plastic then you migrate those techniques up to $1M+ big iron.
I think if you look at the people contributing to the Cell frameworks & libraries, you're going to find IBM investing heavily in time & lines.
Place I worked at did a bad Citrix install - they ended up trying to run ~300 PC's on 1 Citrix server with a bad network. It was ugly until they upgraded the network & put in the 2nd server.
The rule of thumb is you can't help stupid. It is actually quite simple to allow the keyboards & mice to connect without allowing data storage devices to attach/mount. As for the CTO hearing about why they should be allowed, I doubt it. The only people who would get to compain to the CTO aren't going to be effected by the issue to begin with. DTs & TCs go to the drones out in the workspace - the secretaries, the phone drones, and the pencil pushers - where everyone in the department gets exactly the same software and they share periferials. Anyone with 3 letters in their titles is going to get the biggest [smallest if it's a laptop], newest, shinyest system just like they always have.
The few 3 letter people I know who know how to use a thumbdrive, guard them more closely than they do their laptop. They aren't going to just hand it to their secretary and say 'print off 3 coppies of report.doc'. So what exactly is it that people are going to need to add to their DT/TC? Printers? most are already network printers shared between entire departments/workgroups. Scanners? the few that are needed are usually printer/scanners & still network shared.
Overall, you'll see these systems in bullpen type installations where everyone is a replaceable cog in the system - because that's what they are designed for.
- Initial price
- Installation cost
- Software Cost
- Maintenance Cost
- Operating Cost
- Lifespan
So, if you examine the TCO, thin clients are highly desireable. Examining the initial outlay, they come in at slightly more costly due to the increased costs of the server & server softwareAbout the same - $300-400 for a low end PC or a thin client w/ monitor, keyboard, & mouse. The slight savings in the TC will be eaten by the heavier server needed
A custom install of corperate software can take over an hour - 40 minutes even if you are installing a Ghosted Image and with registration it's not unusual to have them require you to re-validate your OS.
Connect power/network cable/keyboard/mouse - turn on - DHCP can handle most of the remaining configuration.
Per seat licenses usually cost slightly less than individual software packages.
This is offset by the added cost of the actual server software.
No HD failure, no virus cleanup, virtually no per seat maintenance at all.
Software upgrades go on the server once - everyone get's the same upgrade at the same time - no need to take a seat out of production to upgrade it.
The low end processors/MBs eat a lot less electricity - depending on load averages, you can be talking 75+W/machine - in a 100 seat call center that's $13+K a year savings
A typical business PC is on a 3-5 year upgrade cycle (not coincidentally the span of the average extended warrenty) This is where fans & HDs start to go at a higher than acceptable rate.
A typical thin client is on a 5-7 year upgrade cycle
- Citrix offers Word pocessing & spreadsheet capabilities for dumb terminals.
- 50+% of the cycles on the average desktop machine are wasted - even when the person is 'busy' - heck, unless I am compiling something my system is idling at less than 30% usage most of the time - and I have 20+ windows open & active.
- The number of companies using internal web apps for custom software is growing.
Given those 3 things, I would say that it is very likely that you will see more and more companies dropping back to thin-client/dumb terminals for the majority of their employees. The upfront costs are slightly higher - you need a more robust server, and the server/client software has a cost independent of the actual programs- but maintenance time is reduced, repair costs are minimized, in house version incompatility is eliminated, and the thin client can drop you from a 85W idle PC to a 8W loaded client. @ $.20/KwH, (slightly up from the US average in 2003) that can save a 100 seat call center $13K a year in electricity alone: