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BusinessWeek Advocates Microsoft Piracy 181

Posted by Zonk from the not-like-they-have-anything-to-lose dept.
xzvf writes "In a lengthy editorial, BusinessWeek advocates allowing users in China and India to pirate Microsoft software so that it can obtain the same level of market share there as it has in the US and Europe. From the piece: 'If Microsoft succeeds in discouraging piracy of Windows in China and India, it is far more likely to drive the user of the pirated software into the Linux camp than it is to steer them into the land of paid-up Windows users. Microsoft's IP management strategy in China and India should instead focus on securing the victory of Windows on the desktops of all PC users. That may require deliberately lax enforcement efforts against pirated copies of Windows for the short and medium term. Only after the Linux threat lessens might Microsoft have the luxury of tightening up piracy protections, as it is now doing in the West. Microsoft can afford to be patient.'"
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - 25 Complaints For Sprint

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Last week, we read about Sprint's new policy to cancel accounts of burdensome customers; about 25 CS calls a month is the threshold. With the iPhone out, I couldn't wish for a better opportunity to weasel out of my early termination fee! I'd like to challenge like-minded Sprint-ing Slashdotters to join in, but we need the community's help: we need to put together a list of 25 or more unique complaints to throw at customer service. Any ideas?
Education

Submission + - Getting involved with writing open source licenses

Submitted by bulio
bulio writes: I'm planning on studying civil law, and would like to gain some experience in the field by helping to write and revise licenses such as the GNU Free Documentation License, and licenses such as Creative Commons (and its derivatives). My question is, how does one help to revise and improve licenses like these? Is there a mailing list or IRC channel that I could visit? On another note, how would one go about writing his own documentation license?
Programming

Submission + - Are IT deadlines too strict? (karastathis.org)

Submitted by
wikinerd
wikinerd writes: "Reading the latest issue of Information Age, a publication of the ACS (Australian Computer Society), an organisation with which I am associated, I became concerned by an article about ethics in ICT. Citing a recent ACS-funded online survey among public and private sector ICT professionals, with over 40% of them being aware of ACS Code of Ethics, the authors show that the leading cause of concern about ICT ethics among respondends is compromising quality to meet deadlines (54.9%), while the second (49.7%) is about unprofessional behaviour. Concerns over deadlines also appear as the 7th and 8th cause of worry among ICT pros: 29.9% say consider compromising user requirements to meet deadlines an ethical issue facing ICT, and 29.6% say the same about compromising functionality to meet deadlines.

What are your own personal observations regarding deadlines of IT and software projects and their correlation with the quality of the delivered projects? Have unrealistic deadline demands from PHBs forced you or your team to deliver something below your own quality standards? If you work solo, have you tried to explain to pushy clients that quality is not subject to cutbacks, especially in critical systems? Would you ever accept to deliver a system knowing that it is highly likely to fail in operation? How many do the right thing, ie attempting to discuss and explain the issue to the client and if unsuccessful turn down a contract before committing to a client asking you to underdeliver in your chosen profession?"
Spam

Submission + - Invasive popups, what can we do?

Submitted by
phyrebyrd
phyrebyrd writes: "Everyone knows those annoying popups that seem to get through the popup blockers... One that seems prolific are those for NetFlix... But what can we do to seriously hurt this advertising model so that it's not so attractive to use? Is there a way we can automate spoofed 'clicks' so that this racks up the bill for the invasive advertiser? Can this be done 'legally'? After all, they're going against our own wishes and forcing ads upon us with the intent of circumventing our own blockers, couldn't we fight back and hurt them where it counts? Does such a technology already exist to combat these things and hit them where it really hurts instead of just blocking the ads? I feel like these advertisers have absolutely no regard for how they get their 'messages' across, so why can't we use the same tactics to get OUR message across? Why should we have to tolerate such practices?"
United States

Submission + - Hacktivism Questions for Presidential Candidates 1

Submitted by
DevanJedi
DevanJedi writes: "I am putting together a questionnaire of issues important to the geek hacktivists for each of the candidates for next years US Presidential Election. Most of the web sites of these candidates do not come close to addressing the issues that are important to us today and will affect society in general tomorrow. Issues of privacy, copyright and fair use, net neutrality, the DMCA, the PATRIOT act will obviously come up, but what are the questions that you would want to put to the people who may have the power to change the rules of the digital game?"
Slashdot.org

Submission + - Slashdot and the tagging fad 2

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Here's a question for the slashdot crowd. Tagging is one of those fads that seems to be everywhere, and slashdot has picked it up too. After watching how people use tagging since it's introduction here, it appears that it's mostly useless though, given that nearly every article gets tagged with either contradictory tags ("yes","no","yesno", all on one post) or ones that are opinions of the tag posters ("slownewsday", "whoopeef*ck", "wewerenotmeanttobe", as a sampling from the current front page). The remaining tags of any value seem to be solely for the purpose of categorizing, and can be achieved without tagging by editors simply putting articles in the right category/subcategory. So my question: why bother with the tagging thing? Can we get that useless garbage off of the front page so we don't have to see "whoopeef*ck* and other childish noise?
Biotech

Submission + - Choosing a primary care physician

Submitted by Harmonious Botch
Harmonious Botch writes: I'm switching medical plans, and need to choose a primary care physician. I figure that slashdotters switch jobs — and thus medical plans — more often than the average person, and I also assume that they understand the science behind the medicine better than the average person. So, I'm asking slashdot how to do it.

First, of course, I checked google for questions to ask the candidate, and got obvious ones like "how long in practice", and an amazingly large number of lame ones like "what hours is your office open" and "do you have parking". WTF?? There seems to be many copies of one industry standard set of questions out there, and that set of questions is nearly worthless — almost as if it were designed to conceal incompetence.

I need questions to ask a physician so I can determine if he really knows his stuff. I'm inclined to start with "do you believe in astrology" to weed out the scientifically illiterate, but even that allows a dishonest one to see through my intentions and lie.

( BTW, if anybody has personal experience with Blue Cross of California in northern LA, any particular pro or con recomendations would be appreciated. )

Thanks to all contributors.
Communications

Submission + - Why do people tolerate false advertising? (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
DA-MAN
DA-MAN writes: "Why is it that we, in the US, tolerate deliberate false advertising? ISP's advertise unlimited use or don't advertise limits, yet they get away with it. Mobile carriers claim to give unlimited mobile to mobile, never stating that they really mean mobile to mobile within the same network. Why is it that we allow companies to redefine "unlimited" and so forth?"
Spam

Submission + - What do you do when a botnet spams you to death? 1

Submitted by
micromuncher
micromuncher writes: "A month ago I was a happy IT geek. I host my own web site and email server (and have been for over 10 years), and I had been running MDaemon (v7) successfully for four years. A low percentage of spam reached my desktop, though admittedly its gone from a few a day a couple years ago to about twenty now, but then something bad happened. I had measures in place to rudely disconnect spammers; fail on no RDNS, fail on no MX records, and use several spam filters to weed out spam. But the trouble came, from what I can tell, when a non-existant email account got into a botnet — and from what I can tell — its huge. Even though my connections were throttled, I received so many requests, and something odd about the requests, it crashed my mail server. So I flipped on tarpitting and the like, and set my timeouts short, and throttle tight... and I still got crushed. All of the originating servers were passing through the spam filters. Most of them were passing through RBLs. I tried to find information on current spam outbreaks; and I didn't find much useful. I contacted my mail server vendor, and they suggested I fork out the money for an upgrade (that I did), that had the feature of a "bait account". But I'm still getting overloaded by spam (though I am not crashing as far as I can tell.) So my questions to the world; how the heck do you monitor spam outbreaks? What are the most effective measures for dealing with botnets (where all the senders seem legit)? And what the heck can you do to stick it to the foul scum who either advertise through this fraud, or facilitate it?"
Businesses

Submission + - Open source friendly employee agreement?

Submitted by bmarklein
bmarklein writes: I'm a startup founder & first-time CEO with an engineering background. I'm working with a law firm and they've given me their standard "Employee Proprietary Information and Inventions Agreement". Anyone who does work for the company will have to sign this. It's absolutely necessary to have an agreement like this to make it clear that the company has legal rights to the work performed by an employee, but the version I have, like every other one I've seen in the past, seems overreaching to me. It defines an "invention" as almost anything one might have created, and then lays claim to all inventions conceived while employed by the company.

I plan on looking for engineers who have made significant open source contributions. I'd like to make clear that they're free to continue working on open source projects. Has anyone seen language in an agreement like this that attempts to do this? I plan on asking my attorney but I suspect they may not have something on hand, so examples would be very helpful.
Software

Submission + - How to break into the software development field? 1

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: A relative recently graduated with a bachelors in comp-sci. After several months of emailing resumes for software development positions at the rate of several per day, he has yet to find a job. Ideally he'd like to be a Java developer, but would accept any position in the software development field. His problem is that he has no experience as a software developer, and it seems everyone wants a senior programmer and no one wants to hire an entry level programmer. He did co-op while in university, but it was a tech support position and employers seem to disregard it, if they're gonna hire you as a software developer they only care about software development experience. They also don't care that he's been using Java (and several other langs) for at least 4 years, they specifically demand industry experience — academic experience doesn't count to them.

If you recently found an entry level job with no experience, how did you do it? If you are a hiring manager or recruiter, what advice would you give to someone in his position? I'm at a loss of what to tell him, as he seems to be doing everything right but still can't find a job. I often hear that there's a shortage of programmers, so what's going on? If it makes any difference, he lives in Ontario, and is willing to move anywhere in the province (even Toronto if he really has to *shudder*).
Programming

Submission + - Programming exercises for learning new languages

Submitted by pinkfloydhomer
pinkfloydhomer writes: When learning a new programming language or library framework, I find that the most effective method is to work on a real project. The project shouldn't be too big or advanced of course, but it shouldn't be a toy project either.

I usually write a small game or something like that. But of course, that doesn't necessarily take me through the entire language or framework. I think several different kinds of projects would be needed for that. Maybe one focusing on graphics, one focusing on networking, one focusing on database access, etc.

So please give your suggestions for small-but-not-too-small projects that will be instructive to do to learn a new language or framework.
Businesses

Submission + - Dealing with recruiters and other opportunities?

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: I'm currently in an unstable situation. My job could disappear within the next 15 days or so due to downsizing. So I started looking for a new job. I got more than I asked for and the market seems to be really good at the moment. I'm currently working with one recruiting firm even though I think recruiters can be jackals sometimes. One of the opportunities I interviewed with from the recruiter looks like they're going to bite. I also have another opportunity that also could come through as well but it's one that I found and it could possibly be better. However I won't find out for another two weeks about that opportunity. The recruiter is insisting that I drop all other opportunities if the company he's representing wants to hire me. I for one would like to keep it to see what kind of deal I would get. If I accept the job from the recruiter, give my two week notification and within that two week period I'm given a better offer from the other job that I found. Will I be forced to keep the recruiters job? When do recruiters get paid their fee? Will I be liable in any legal way for the recruiter losing his payday? How do you deal with recruiters who insist that you drop all other opportunities? How would you deal with a situation where you were offered a better deal for a job that wasn't from the recruiter?

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