It runs fine on any dedicated video card from what I've seen. The problem with Aero is trying to run it with standard, built in graphics on the board. If you have a 3d accelerated card, even an old one like yours, Aero will run fine. The key being 3d accelerated.
When you work for a non-profit it's hard to come up with money for things like LCD screens when the CRTs are working just fine. I guess it's all pretty irrelevant now that the staff has been reduced by 50%...
This brings up a good point. A couple of years ago there was an employee where I work who was having ergonomic issues with their workstation. The complaints were valid and one of the solutions turned out to be a flat panel, LCD monitor. The lesson that the rest of the staff learned was that if they complained about ergonomic issues, they would also get LCD monitors. Soon enough a team had to be formed to deal with all of the ergonomic complaints coming from the staff.
In the context of security exploits, zero day means that the patch is unavailable from the vendor. The original term zero day was stolen from the warez scene where "Zero Day is a state of freshness" (tm). In order for a warez release to be zero day it had to hit the site before it hit the store shelves. Usually that would mean that it came from Europe, or was released by someone who worked at the company putting the game out.
The dickhead move is yelling at some guy on the internet who disagrees with you. I hope whatever is bottled up inside of you simmers down sometime soon. Life is too short to be so hostile.
Good job on dodging the fact that snitching is a dickheaded move and burning the place down on the way out the door is something that only an asshole would do. You can try to pigeon hole my position into a pre-defined logical construct but it doesn't negate the truth of of it. A person with integrity will disengage from the situation. A vindictive prick will try to harm the organization.
I don't think the OP is a vindictive prick. He's just new to the business world and facing his first situation where reality doesn't mesh with his morals. Calling the BSA is a harsh step to take. He can find another job and leave. On his way out the door he can let them know their liabilities and what a BSA audit will cost them. He can tell them that he won't be the one to call the BSA, but given the $10,000 or whatever reward... it is only a matter of time before someone else does.
There are a lot of mature ways to handle the situation that don't involve inflicting financial hardship on the organization. Like I said in another post, I used to consult for the SMB market and about 90% of the customers we dealt with weren't in compliance with their software licenses when we took them on as clients. When I left the company, all of the clients that I was responsible for were.
I think that the OP does need to leave in order to make the point that what is going on is wrong. There isn't any doubt about that.
You bring up a good point and I completely agree. Business is cut throat and there are always trade offs. I personally would walk away from the situation ASAP but I wouldn't call the BSA. Although my beef would be with the CEO or whoever it is that decided they didn't want to comply with licensing requirements, we all know that in the end the rest of the employees will get hurt by the audit. There will be less money for development, growth, salaries, etc.
Yet like you mentioned, if the OP doesn't call the BSA then the rest of the companies in the same market are at a disadvantage if they are paying the full cost of the licenses. It has been my experience that very few companies in the SMB market are in compliance with software licensing. So although your argument does have some merit, I don't think it is very applicable to the real world.
In my experience as a consultant, I'd say that 90% of new clients that we took on weren't in compliance. We worked with them to bring them into compliance. Most often it came during upgrades. If they were already paying tens of thousands of dollars for new servers and workstations, paying a little bit more for software licenses wasn't that big of a deal. Often times Microsoft was so happy that they were actually paying for the software that they would cut them big discounts on volume licenses.
If I'm an idiot, what are you besides angry? Being an agent who has a hand in the downfall of others is a bad thing. The Buddha is attributed with having said something along the lines of, "Don't take another's ills as your own. Do not become upset by the bad behaviors of others."
The world is full of people who do bad things of varying degrees. One must be responsible for their own actions. Here's a hypothetical situation. The OP calls the BSA on his company. They fail their BSA audit and need to cough up fines and license fees. Those costs lead them to cut a position. They decide to let the new lady in accounting go because in all reality, she was a help to the company but her co-workers can pick up the slack. Now sure, the company was in the wrong for pirating software. But what gives the OP the justification for possibly costing someone else their job?
You seem to be a strong proponent of calling the BSA. What good do you see coming from it?
I'm from the greater good school of thought. I also believe that people get what they deserve. If the company is keeping people employed then good for them. If he doesn't like it then he can leave. He doesn't have to burn the bridge on the way out.
I have no problem getting the authorities involved when it is warranted. When my neighbor stabbed her girlfriend, I called the cops and I showed up in court to testify. I could have ignored it but I didn't.
Calling the BSA is a dickhead move. I think the OP should offer up some suggestions about how to run the business and avoid licensing costs with FOSS. He should offer up an analysis of what it would cost the business to become compliant with the licensing for the software that they are currently using. It is one thing to see a problem and take steps to mitigate it. It is one thing to realize a problem is bigger than you are, and that you can't affect change and therefore make the decision to disengage from the situation. It's another thing entirely to take it upon yourself to bring trouble to others. Calling the BSA is bringing trouble to others. You can try to justify it through whatever morals and ethics you have, but at the end of the day you're a dick. You're causing problems for someone else. If you find yourself working for an employer and you don't like the working conditions, leave. Only an asshole trashes the place on the way out.
Personally, I think you are a prime example of why society sucks sometimes. You'll wish ill upon others for no benefit to yourself. You wish ill on me? You don't even know me. You wish ill on some company that is providing jobs based on what some guy wrote about their attitude toward software licensing on the internet? Buddy, you've got some karma coming to you.
For all we know the owner of the company could be driving to work in an old Volvo and doing his best to pay the interest on his small business loan just so that he can keep the doors open. Is that the kind of person you want to stick with a BSA audit? On the other hand if the owner is driving a Benz and taking the sales staff out for drinks and dinner on a weekly basis then maybe he needs a dose of reality. In that case the company probably could afford to become compliant with licenses.
In the real world, businesses juggle expenses all the time. Where I work we have about twenty servers and about a quarter of them aren't under warranty anymore. I brought that up to my boss. There isn't any money in the budget for warranties so he decided not to renew them. He made the bet that we won't have any serious problems with the servers. Well earlier this week there was a power fluctuation. One of our servers (that was thankfully still under warranty) took a hit. Even though it was plugged into a UPS, the UPS didn't condition the power properly and the main board fried. The next day my boss decided he wanted to find money to renew the warranties on the other servers.
To draw a parallel between the two situations... by recommending the guy call the BSA to prove a point would be like telling me that it's okay to wreck a file server to illustrate to my boss the importance of warranties. In my situation I got lucky and an act of God proved my point for me. In the case of the OP, his employer will see the light sooner or later. If they really are bad people, they will get the karma that is coming to them. But it isn't the OP's duty in life to cause problems for others.
The difference is that there are over a million/. uids. While one subset is all for pirating music and movies, there is another subset that is against software piracy.
Most small businesses have a hard time dealing with software licensing. Any money that they have to spend on software is less money for them to spend on other things like employee salaries, power bills to keep the lights on, toner for the printers, etc. It sounds to me like the OP has already shot himself in the foot by bringing it up to management.
If pirated software really bothers you then find another job (good luck with that in this market). However ratting your employer out to the BSA is a dickhead move. Whether you like it or not, they are currently paying your salary, and the salary of at least 20 other people. The odds of them getting audited for license compliance are just about zero, unless someone rats them out.
I'd take a long hard look at the situation. There isn't an easy answer. Either you rat out your employer and impose significant costs and lost productivity on a company in a struggling economy, or you live with being a thief for a while until you can find another job. If I were in that situation, I'd just suck it up and start looking for another job. I wouldn't cry myself to sleep if Microsoft loses out on the licensing revenue for 19 copies of Office. And I certainly wouldn't torpedo a company that is providing employment to my community just so that the BSA and Microsoft can earn a couple thousand dollars.
I play Mobsters which is a Mafia Wars like game. All of those games seem to have been developed around the same marketing/business model. There are bonus points that you can use to buy power up items that make your character better. Some people are obviously competitive and need to have the best character out there. The game doesn't provide those people with enough favor points through regular game play. Instead there are options to earn extra favor points. Installing a toolbar is one of those. Most of them seem to be things like signing up for Netflix, signing up for credit cards (Discover) and various other promotions along those lines.
The rewards for installing toolbars are rather insignificant (~5 points) compared to some of the other ones, like signing up for a Discover card (~200 points). For the real junkies out there, there are even options to spend real money on points (I think it's about 20 points for every $5).
You don't have to install the toolbar to play the games. The point mechanism seems to be decently smart in what it presents to the user. I don't have the option to install toolbars if I play the game on OSX. Oddly enough it seems to be able to recognize virtual machines. I thought that I would game the system and just run VirtualBox and then install the toolbars in there. It didn't present me with the option to install the toolbars in a virtualized copy of XP.
I'm sorry but your water based analogy has confused me. Will you please rephrase what you are trying to say in the form of a car analogy? Or if you insist on sticking with water, please some how integrate the use of a metaphor that involves tubes. Thank you.
I don't know about Linux but my Sonicwall will do it. The firmware handles both ingress and egress bandwidth throttling. You simply put in your maximum available bandwidth and then define rules for various protocols that define a minimum and maximum percentage of the whole that they are allowed to use. Here at work our communications department sends out large amounts of opt-in email. I setup a rule specifically for their box and limited port 25 to no more than 50% of the available bandwidth.
It would be great if the rules could be flexible or have some sort of logic built into them so that they only activate after a certain period of sustained use.
I think that what Comcast is doing is pretty weak because they impact legitimate users, but it isn't the end of the world. I used to swap warez at 14400 baud, over a phone line, where only one person could be connected at a time. That was slow. I don't use bitTorrent, but if my torrents were throttled to 50% of my 6 megabit connection, I could live with that. 3 megabits is still a lot of bandwidth and if you're just leaving the torrents running the background, who cares if you aren't getting the full throughput all the time?
I downloaded an.iso image from Microsoft licensing last night and it took me about twenty two minutes to get the file. If I was on Comcast they'd throttle my connection for that?!
They need to adjust their filtering policies to allow legitimate traffic.
I think the point is that just being smart or talented or educated does not bring success. Unless a person is willing to work diligently toward their goal, they aren't going to get anywhere.
Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "Press On" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
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Looks like the iPhone fanboys are out in force with mod points today. Any post that says Android > iPhone receives an OffTopic mod.
It runs fine on any dedicated video card from what I've seen. The problem with Aero is trying to run it with standard, built in graphics on the board. If you have a 3d accelerated card, even an old one like yours, Aero will run fine. The key being 3d accelerated.
I probably am not the target of these cards though, maybe Grandma just likes her screen saver fish to swim smooth.....
Or her Vista SP^H^H^H^H^H Win7 Aero desktop effects.
When you work for a non-profit it's hard to come up with money for things like LCD screens when the CRTs are working just fine. I guess it's all pretty irrelevant now that the staff has been reduced by 50%...
This brings up a good point. A couple of years ago there was an employee where I work who was having ergonomic issues with their workstation. The complaints were valid and one of the solutions turned out to be a flat panel, LCD monitor. The lesson that the rest of the staff learned was that if they complained about ergonomic issues, they would also get LCD monitors. Soon enough a team had to be formed to deal with all of the ergonomic complaints coming from the staff.
In the context of security exploits, zero day means that the patch is unavailable from the vendor. The original term zero day was stolen from the warez scene where "Zero Day is a state of freshness" (tm). In order for a warez release to be zero day it had to hit the site before it hit the store shelves. Usually that would mean that it came from Europe, or was released by someone who worked at the company putting the game out.
The dickhead move is yelling at some guy on the internet who disagrees with you. I hope whatever is bottled up inside of you simmers down sometime soon. Life is too short to be so hostile.
Good job on dodging the fact that snitching is a dickheaded move and burning the place down on the way out the door is something that only an asshole would do. You can try to pigeon hole my position into a pre-defined logical construct but it doesn't negate the truth of of it. A person with integrity will disengage from the situation. A vindictive prick will try to harm the organization.
I don't think the OP is a vindictive prick. He's just new to the business world and facing his first situation where reality doesn't mesh with his morals. Calling the BSA is a harsh step to take. He can find another job and leave. On his way out the door he can let them know their liabilities and what a BSA audit will cost them. He can tell them that he won't be the one to call the BSA, but given the $10,000 or whatever reward... it is only a matter of time before someone else does.
There are a lot of mature ways to handle the situation that don't involve inflicting financial hardship on the organization. Like I said in another post, I used to consult for the SMB market and about 90% of the customers we dealt with weren't in compliance with their software licenses when we took them on as clients. When I left the company, all of the clients that I was responsible for were.
I think that the OP does need to leave in order to make the point that what is going on is wrong. There isn't any doubt about that.
Well following that logic, for every company that decides to adopt OSS instead of paying the Microsoft tax causes engineers to be laid off.
You bring up a good point and I completely agree. Business is cut throat and there are always trade offs. I personally would walk away from the situation ASAP but I wouldn't call the BSA. Although my beef would be with the CEO or whoever it is that decided they didn't want to comply with licensing requirements, we all know that in the end the rest of the employees will get hurt by the audit. There will be less money for development, growth, salaries, etc.
Yet like you mentioned, if the OP doesn't call the BSA then the rest of the companies in the same market are at a disadvantage if they are paying the full cost of the licenses. It has been my experience that very few companies in the SMB market are in compliance with software licensing. So although your argument does have some merit, I don't think it is very applicable to the real world.
In my experience as a consultant, I'd say that 90% of new clients that we took on weren't in compliance. We worked with them to bring them into compliance. Most often it came during upgrades. If they were already paying tens of thousands of dollars for new servers and workstations, paying a little bit more for software licenses wasn't that big of a deal. Often times Microsoft was so happy that they were actually paying for the software that they would cut them big discounts on volume licenses.
If I'm an idiot, what are you besides angry? Being an agent who has a hand in the downfall of others is a bad thing. The Buddha is attributed with having said something along the lines of, "Don't take another's ills as your own. Do not become upset by the bad behaviors of others."
The world is full of people who do bad things of varying degrees. One must be responsible for their own actions. Here's a hypothetical situation. The OP calls the BSA on his company. They fail their BSA audit and need to cough up fines and license fees. Those costs lead them to cut a position. They decide to let the new lady in accounting go because in all reality, she was a help to the company but her co-workers can pick up the slack. Now sure, the company was in the wrong for pirating software. But what gives the OP the justification for possibly costing someone else their job?
You seem to be a strong proponent of calling the BSA. What good do you see coming from it?
I'm from the greater good school of thought. I also believe that people get what they deserve. If the company is keeping people employed then good for them. If he doesn't like it then he can leave. He doesn't have to burn the bridge on the way out.
I have no problem getting the authorities involved when it is warranted. When my neighbor stabbed her girlfriend, I called the cops and I showed up in court to testify. I could have ignored it but I didn't.
Calling the BSA is a dickhead move. I think the OP should offer up some suggestions about how to run the business and avoid licensing costs with FOSS. He should offer up an analysis of what it would cost the business to become compliant with the licensing for the software that they are currently using. It is one thing to see a problem and take steps to mitigate it. It is one thing to realize a problem is bigger than you are, and that you can't affect change and therefore make the decision to disengage from the situation. It's another thing entirely to take it upon yourself to bring trouble to others. Calling the BSA is bringing trouble to others. You can try to justify it through whatever morals and ethics you have, but at the end of the day you're a dick. You're causing problems for someone else. If you find yourself working for an employer and you don't like the working conditions, leave. Only an asshole trashes the place on the way out.
Personally, I think you are a prime example of why society sucks sometimes. You'll wish ill upon others for no benefit to yourself. You wish ill on me? You don't even know me. You wish ill on some company that is providing jobs based on what some guy wrote about their attitude toward software licensing on the internet? Buddy, you've got some karma coming to you.
For all we know the owner of the company could be driving to work in an old Volvo and doing his best to pay the interest on his small business loan just so that he can keep the doors open. Is that the kind of person you want to stick with a BSA audit? On the other hand if the owner is driving a Benz and taking the sales staff out for drinks and dinner on a weekly basis then maybe he needs a dose of reality. In that case the company probably could afford to become compliant with licenses.
In the real world, businesses juggle expenses all the time. Where I work we have about twenty servers and about a quarter of them aren't under warranty anymore. I brought that up to my boss. There isn't any money in the budget for warranties so he decided not to renew them. He made the bet that we won't have any serious problems with the servers. Well earlier this week there was a power fluctuation. One of our servers (that was thankfully still under warranty) took a hit. Even though it was plugged into a UPS, the UPS didn't condition the power properly and the main board fried. The next day my boss decided he wanted to find money to renew the warranties on the other servers.
To draw a parallel between the two situations... by recommending the guy call the BSA to prove a point would be like telling me that it's okay to wreck a file server to illustrate to my boss the importance of warranties. In my situation I got lucky and an act of God proved my point for me. In the case of the OP, his employer will see the light sooner or later. If they really are bad people, they will get the karma that is coming to them. But it isn't the OP's duty in life to cause problems for others.
The difference is that there are over a million /. uids. While one subset is all for pirating music and movies, there is another subset that is against software piracy.
Most small businesses have a hard time dealing with software licensing. Any money that they have to spend on software is less money for them to spend on other things like employee salaries, power bills to keep the lights on, toner for the printers, etc. It sounds to me like the OP has already shot himself in the foot by bringing it up to management.
If pirated software really bothers you then find another job (good luck with that in this market). However ratting your employer out to the BSA is a dickhead move. Whether you like it or not, they are currently paying your salary, and the salary of at least 20 other people. The odds of them getting audited for license compliance are just about zero, unless someone rats them out.
I'd take a long hard look at the situation. There isn't an easy answer. Either you rat out your employer and impose significant costs and lost productivity on a company in a struggling economy, or you live with being a thief for a while until you can find another job. If I were in that situation, I'd just suck it up and start looking for another job. I wouldn't cry myself to sleep if Microsoft loses out on the licensing revenue for 19 copies of Office. And I certainly wouldn't torpedo a company that is providing employment to my community just so that the BSA and Microsoft can earn a couple thousand dollars.
Yes, you have it right. I made it about half way through the article before my eyes glazed over. I wonder what category the author puts himself in.
I play Mobsters which is a Mafia Wars like game. All of those games seem to have been developed around the same marketing/business model. There are bonus points that you can use to buy power up items that make your character better. Some people are obviously competitive and need to have the best character out there. The game doesn't provide those people with enough favor points through regular game play. Instead there are options to earn extra favor points. Installing a toolbar is one of those. Most of them seem to be things like signing up for Netflix, signing up for credit cards (Discover) and various other promotions along those lines.
The rewards for installing toolbars are rather insignificant (~5 points) compared to some of the other ones, like signing up for a Discover card (~200 points). For the real junkies out there, there are even options to spend real money on points (I think it's about 20 points for every $5).
You don't have to install the toolbar to play the games. The point mechanism seems to be decently smart in what it presents to the user. I don't have the option to install toolbars if I play the game on OSX. Oddly enough it seems to be able to recognize virtual machines. I thought that I would game the system and just run VirtualBox and then install the toolbars in there. It didn't present me with the option to install the toolbars in a virtualized copy of XP.
I'm sorry but your water based analogy has confused me. Will you please rephrase what you are trying to say in the form of a car analogy? Or if you insist on sticking with water, please some how integrate the use of a metaphor that involves tubes. Thank you.
As an occasional WoW player, I wish that I was getting my full download speed on patch day.
I don't know about Linux but my Sonicwall will do it. The firmware handles both ingress and egress bandwidth throttling. You simply put in your maximum available bandwidth and then define rules for various protocols that define a minimum and maximum percentage of the whole that they are allowed to use. Here at work our communications department sends out large amounts of opt-in email. I setup a rule specifically for their box and limited port 25 to no more than 50% of the available bandwidth.
It would be great if the rules could be flexible or have some sort of logic built into them so that they only activate after a certain period of sustained use.
I think that what Comcast is doing is pretty weak because they impact legitimate users, but it isn't the end of the world. I used to swap warez at 14400 baud, over a phone line, where only one person could be connected at a time. That was slow. I don't use bitTorrent, but if my torrents were throttled to 50% of my 6 megabit connection, I could live with that. 3 megabits is still a lot of bandwidth and if you're just leaving the torrents running the background, who cares if you aren't getting the full throughput all the time?
I downloaded an .iso image from Microsoft licensing last night and it took me about twenty two minutes to get the file. If I was on Comcast they'd throttle my connection for that?!
They need to adjust their filtering policies to allow legitimate traffic.
I think the point is that just being smart or talented or educated does not bring success. Unless a person is willing to work diligently toward their goal, they aren't going to get anywhere.
Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not;
nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not;
unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is
full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are
omnipotent. The slogan "Press On" has solved and always will solve the
problems of the human race.
-Calvin Coolidge
Businesses with volume license subscriptions had access to Win7 before it was publicly launched.