I wonder if this is the smoking gun in regards to Oracle/Apple ties. They are offering $10 iTunes Gift Cards to get people hooked into Apple technologies. This is part of an e-mail I was sent today:
Create an Oracle online account today and we’ll give you a Free $10 iTunes Gift Card or Iron Man 2 Poster
Dear Brandon,
A lot of great things will be coming from the combination of Oracle and Sun and you’ll want to stay informed! Keep up to date by creating an Oracle online account today and receive a free iTunes gift card or Iron Man 2 poster if you’re one of the first 12,000 to respond.
Simply follow the link below and tell us a little more about yourself. You can opt-in to receive news and information about products and events from Oracle, and if you’re one of the first 12,000 to reply you’ll receive a free gift card or Iron Man 2 poster.
The only cell phone you can play iTunes music on is an iPhone. Is it just a coincidence that Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison are neighbours? It was speculated that the two companies had ties to get rid of Android, now we have an established business partnership to offer iTunes coupons.
Over the last few years I have dedicated time and effort pushing GNU/Linux. I don’t regret doing this and I will keep doing this. I have learned that it is not good to hyper focus all of my learning activities around Free Software. It is a good thing to have a well rounded grasp of various different types of technologies. If I focus only on the Linux based ones I forfeit my chances to get a good job somewhere just because they might be using Microsoft servers. I recently started attending college, all expenses paid for by the government. My program of choice (and what they would fund) was TriOS College’s Network Support Technician program. I’ve obtained MCTS, MCITP, and MCP certifications* from Microsoft during August 2010. My next certifications are Blackberry Certified Support Specialist, CompTIA A+ and CompTIA Network+. When i’m done i’ll probably pay out of my pocket ($239US) to get CompTIA Linux+ which also grants me LPI Level 1 and Novell Certified Linux Administrator.
I don’t consider myself a traitor at all. In fact I can be considered a trojan horse (get a windows job, and recommend Linux when people trust me). A lot of people out there push Free or Open Source software and have day jobs working on proprietary software or hardware. I shouldn’t limit myself to Linux or GNU friendly jobs, as there aren’t many in the Greater Toronto Area. I want to work at a big company managing their servers. I don’t want to be stuck in a Mom & Pop shop for the rest of my life doing the same thing (removing viruses for idiots). Another reason I hate working for small companies is because they often don’t care about the Employment Standards Act. It’s easier to get rid of you and hire a student who is less likely to demand their rights.
I used to hang out in IRC (#boycottnovell, the techrights channel). I get the impression that some of their hatred is rather silly. I found myself fitting in because I didn’t like Microsoft all that much. However I grew tired of hanging out there due to their anti-google sentiment. The people there will complain about Mono and .NET, but not Java. They don’t want to boycott Java even though it carries the same problems Mono/C# contains. I know they want to take sides against Google on this, most are waiting for the lawsuit to end before they boycott Java (in case Google did something evil).
How far does free software advocacy go? Is simply spreading the word good enough or do you have to live an entire life of proprietary software celibacy? How is it any different than religion?
Please don’t get me wrong; I still love Free Software above and beyond all other types of software. I’m just not going to give up a career for it. If I can get a career working with Free Software that would be amazing but those jobs are too rare to expect anything. Those of you who are more hardcore need people like me to recommend your stuff to business types who don’t get it. I’ll take the jobs you won’t and use the position to make my own recommendations. Nobody will listen to you if you sit out on the sidelines saying everything they use sucks because it’s closed source.
Authors Note: No I haven’t been warped by the devil (I still want to make my own distro for example, based on F14 but with LTO enabled in GCC 4.5 for packages that will benefit).
* Certifications: Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP) Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP)
I was camping near Sauble Beach, Ontario this weekend. I took my Canon camera with me and made a few short videos along with some pictures. Here is one of the funny videos I decided to share with people on Youtube.
The GNOME and LiMo Foundations have today announced their intention to collaborate closely with a key partnership. With immediate effect the LiMO Foundation will become a member of the GNOME Foundation’s Advisory Board and the GNOME Foundation will become an Industry Liaison Partner for the LiMo Foundation. According to the pair, this development represents a natural formalization founded upon the significant use of GNOME Mobile software components within Release 2 and Release 3 of the LiMo Platform.
The freedom haters are back and are behind a proxy organization which follows the same goals. The Limo foundation announced a few days ago it’s new collaborative efforts with the Gnome Foundation. I however know it’s just a big old scam.
ACCESS Corp has MAJOR influence in the Limo Foundation. They created it, and the platform is based heavily upon their own intellectual property. Their partners are just coming along for the ride. It is a foundation dedicated to the exploitation of volunteers in order for the member companies to get cheap labour. It’s a total front operation. These freedom haters are scared of Google Android. If they didn’t consider it a viable market they wouldn’t be writing applications for it.
The Limo Foundation doesn’t care about software freedom. It just cares about using Linux as a kernel so they can exploit it’s massive hardware database, blue tooth stack, various other subsystems and volunteer support. This keeps their payroll budgets smaller. The member companies do not give away any of their own software (such as PalmOS garnet emulation).
You might say:
Brandon, that doesn’t make any sense! If they want free labour why are they paying $20,000 to be on the advisory board? Besides! They are contributing cash!
My answer:
When participating companies donate to non profits they get to write that off on their taxes. They get a nice tax break and free volunteers… How can they possibly lose?
An independent firm has just confirmed what most of us already knew. iPad owners are elitist douche bags.
Consumer research firm MyType conducted the study, in which opinions of 20,000 people were analyzed between March and May. The firm’s conclusion was that iPad owners tend to be wealthy, sophisticated, highly educated and disproportionately interested in business and finance, while they scored terribly in the areas of altruism and kindness. In other words, “selfish elites.”
They are six times more likely to be “wealthy, well-educated, power-hungry, over-achieving, sophisticated, unkind and non-altruistic 30-50 year olds,” MyType’s Tim Koelkebeck told Wired.com.
Bruce Byfield never ceases to amaze me at the kind of people he finds for his interviews. Check out the lolz quotes from this one:
Pearson attributes this balance to the fact that “KDE 3.5 was built to emulate Windows XP, and therefore inherited that balanced interface.”
As if emulating the appearance of another OS inherits it’s characteristics. This is excellent logic; it is quite infallible! KDE is a Windows XP Emulator after all. This is the person maintaining the KDE3 base.
By contrast, Pearson characterizes the KDE 4 series as “closer to Mac OS X. It does not recede into the background willingly, and has lost much of the configurable that KDE 3.5 had.
LOL
In response to the suggestion that Trinity is “static” — that is, has more or less reached the point where it cannot be greatly enhanced without a major rewriting of the code — Pearson’s reply is, “It’s supposed to be that way! Xfce is static by the same criteria, yet a large number of people use it and actually prefer it to KDE4/Gnome.”
LOL
In fact, Pearson argues, many users prefer a desktop that does not change.
Many more users prefer a desktop which gains new features.
Originally Written: May 13, 2008 (In case of obsolete content)
Playing around with computers all day was supposed to be fun. It was a blast during my high school days. Working on computers in a retail environment has been very stressful in comparison. I run into a lot of problems with these consumers. A lot of stuff I have to deal with at my workplace is handling exchanges and returns for stupid customers. Once these people enter the building their IQ drops and their brain stops working. Here is why I think IT is a Nightmare in retail.
1) People can’t read:
Customers at my store always fail to carefully read signs, price tags, rebates forms, etc. They will argue often with a cashier about a price they saw on the shelf which was for a different product. If they had actually bothered to read it they might discover a sale is actually over, or that the product they are looking at is in the wrong spot. These customers also fail to read closed signs or store return policies. They just assume they can get into the store because they see people inside.
Once I had a customer wait outside after we closed for 45 minutes to discuss doing a return with the Manager who just told him to shut his cake hole and go away. We are closed for returns an hour before the store itself closes.
2) Return Policies & Customers who hate them:
Customers seem to think that Futureshop and Best Buy store policies are the law. They fail to realize that just because those stores have massive profit doesn’t mean every other store can afford to give full refunds on opened products. On the small business side of the computer business it’s a hyper price competition. A lot of these computer stores have really small margins and have to charge restocking fees to balance out the discount they will have to give the next customer just to sell the open box product.
When a customer doesn’t like the store policy they usually do the following:
- Threaten to have the store published in the newspaper (usually the Brampton Guardian) as if anyone actually cares.
- Threaten to and actually report the store to the Better Business Bureau for stuff that’s not even a violation.
- Tell us they should have brought a gun and/or leave soon before they get violent. (I am not exaggerating, this happened!)
3) Frugal Behavior:
Customer’s try to get away with anything, even to save fifty fucking cents! I’ve actually received calls from people who call my store and ask if they could return opened packages of DVD recordable media because they saw it cheaper somewhere else. I’ve had people ask for power supplies that they very well know could burn down their homes. No logic at all, they are just chosen because they are cheaper. The stores are also cheap. Insufficient tools, bad store policies, and being understaffed. This leaves the Technicians aruging with customers about restocking fees instead of working on systems. These types of places make technicians do computer building/fixing and doing all of the customer service returns.
4) Brainlessness:
I recently had to give a customer his money back on a hard drive he purchased for his notebook. He tried to tell me the drive was defective, I tried it out on my computer and it worked fine. I suggested that he contact IBM to find out the capacity that was supported by his notebook. He insisted his notebook worked with “every capacity hard drive”. He had an IBM Thinkpad, which stopped being made by IBM a few years ago. A 250gb SATA Notebook drive isn’t going to work with it without at least a BIOS update. I tried to explain this to the customer but he was too slow and didn’t respond well to suggestions.
I’ve also had other stupid customer problems and they are as follows:
- Not realizing that 24-pin power supplies can be adapted to fit older 20 pin motherboards, usually by unclipping plastic.
- Buying a network switch and wondering why it won’t split off their Rogers or Bell internet (Hint: It’s called a ROUTER).
- Installing their motherboard without risers, cauing shorts and usually frying their motherboard and voiding their warranty.
- Customers who think that their motherboards “parts and labour” warranty covers the labour I charge for replacing a motherboard.
- People think that I have nothing to do and beg me to fix/test or install hardware into their computer while they wait.
- Some customers forget to plug in their 12v connector to their motherboard and freak out about their new stuff being defective.
- Customers who buy things automatically assuming they work with Windows fucking Vista.
- They forget to bring the paperwork for computers they have in service. I tell every single person if they lose their paperwork they lose their computer.
5) The Labelers:
These people need a category of their own. The ones who think they are smart about organizing their shit. They write down instructions on paper for doing simply tasks on their computer. I’ve seen these people write on their optical drives so they could remember which drive letter it was in windows. I always laugh when I reinstall XP on these people and those letters change around. I could fix it, but it’s not as funny when I do that. They are almost as bad as the people who put Apple Computer stickers on their PC wishing they had a Mac.
Originally Written: August 28th, 2003 (In case it seems obsolete in some parts)
Computers are too easy to use. I think Bill Gates caused great harm to the computer industry. Some people are saying I’m wrong and that it’s Microsoft that soley made computers what they are today. I fully disagree with this argument. Microsoft may be selling innovating solutions but they are not inventing them. A majority of the time Microsoft does not create products on its own. They usually buy the company that invented the product. Microsoft then makes changes to the products so they are more user friendly, insecure and inferior to competing products. Microsoft’s owes it’s success to IBM for purchasing a peice of software it didn’t even own when Bill Gates made the deal with them. He used their money to buy DOS and licensed it to them. They also used the OS themselves to create MS-DOS.
The computer industry of today was only partially assisted by Microsoft. The biggest impact on the computer industry is PC Gaming. Games push the hardware and games push the software. A computer built in 1997 can still be used very well for word processing, spreadsheets, web development and browsing. My mom has a 166mhz computer with 48mb ram and it works fine. She can do all the daily tasks on it that she normally does without upgrading to Windows XP. Games are the reason that people need the newest CPU’s and Graphics cards. You don’t need a 128mb AGP 8x graphics card to browse the web.
Now, thanks to Microsoft anybody can use a computer and this means all sorts of idiots will be browsing the web. Part of this blame also goes over to the folks who created America Online, perfect name too. Anybody in America can now get online, just give them twice the amount of money that you would give another ISP. Then they can show the world how ignorant they are in every subject.
Back in the old days when DOS ruled the home user world it kicked more ass. When a user made a mistake, the computer threw a big incoherant error at them which made them fear it. Now they get big huge buttons and music. I don’t think DOS did a good enough job so I decided to modify an open source command.com (FreeCom, which is used in FreeDOS) to make it more user unfriendly. Errors are generated with curse words to scare them even more than MS-DOS/PC-DOS did.
The same thing is happening to Linux too. Soon everything will be just like it is on a Mac. If I had it my way, everytime a user made a mistake the operating system would throw a few viruses into the mix. Everytime the user made a configuration error it would format their computer. These are ideas I copied from Maddox but they are good ones that should be repeated. I’m thinking of designing a keyboard that has all sorts of friendly looking shortcuts for users. However, if they press any of those keys it will set their arms on fire.
Now a list of people who have some form of mental illness:
1. People who use AOL (Those who use it on top of High Speed are the worst).
2. People who use website builders provided by the hosting site (Yahoo Pagebuilder is an example).
3. People who own a Mac, and hate PC’s.
4. People who paid money for a Microsoft operating system.
5. People who purchased an X-Box ONLY because Microsoft made it.
6. People who confuse Download with Upload.
7. People who confuse Install with Download.
8. People who bought Microsoft Plus! for XP.
9. People who installed Microsoft Plus! for XP and used it to convert all their MP3s to WMA.
10. People who use Zone Alarm or Norton Anti-virus.
11. People who use IIS, IE and ASP.
12. People who encode WMA music files.
13. People who say Linux sucks.
14. SCO – (Previously known as Caldera).
There are a lot of myths out there about the hiring practices of proprietary software companies vs open source companies or communities. People are sharing anecdotal evidence claiming proprietary software developers are somehow better because they employed more women. While this is extremely far from the truth. I don’t hate women, in fact I love them and I love my girlfriend. Shes the greatest.
However companies like Apple actually have set policies which cause them to hire more women. According to Apple’s Job website:
We are committed to diversity. Apple is an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer.
This actually means that instead of just hiring who comes first, they are filtering their applicants in order to promote an equal workplace. This is not a bad thing but it is something you need to consider when comparing the two entirely different ways of working.
Here is an excercise to get the concept into your head. Say you normally receive 1000 resume’s a week and you need to pick the best. You are likely to pick based on first come first serve, and then check their qualifications and then hire them if they are qualified to do the job.
However if you are a Equal Employment Opportunity employer you cannot do this. You can’t pick based on first come first serve. Your company policy requires an equal workforce so you’ll simply have to put most of the resumes on file. The practice discriminates against hiring men because there are already ‘too many’ if there are more than 50% of them in the company despite the fact that computer science graduates aren’t 50/50 men and women.
Again, I don’t hate women I love them, I’m just pointing out that there is bias in Apple that causes it to have higher numbers of women employed than in companies or communities which don’t enforce an Equal Employment Opportunity. This isn’t bad at all and I hope more women get jobs in IT. This same policy exists in most large corporations, especially ones big enough to get the attention of government agencies.
Meanwhile in open source communities everyone is invited and there are no filters which prevent people from participating based on sex, race or religion. Women are encouraged to join via projects like Debian Women and Ubuntu Women but none of these projects deny or filter men from joining in favour of equality. No open community is going filter out men to increase the numbers of women. There is also nothing preventing women from joining companies or communities like Redhat/Fedora, OpenSuSE/Novell, Canonical/Ubuntu and Mandriva either.
A roundup of complaints about Gates lobbying to change schools, put his foundation in charge of the change, and change coverage about this in the media (by paying those who cover it) […]
Microsoft's business strategy still involves mocking the competition rather than offering something better, let alone a truthful comparison; VMware and Novell still grow closer […]
Consumer Watchdog's president reveals this AstroTurfer's connection to Edelman, which is a hugely unethical 'PR' firm that bribed people for positive reviews of Windows and now hosts a "Slog" against Google […]
Microsoft's value is being hit again, this time by Barclays; many Microsoft executives choose to sell their stakes at Microsoft as its value approaches new lows […]
The libraries which Bill Gates has been giving 'free' Windows can no longer access crucial software that Microsoft has just announced it is killing, which "leaves users in limbo" […]
