Chill out, dickwad. :-)

Philosophically I agree with you. Pragmatically, in most companies, this is a losing strategy. I've seen many managers whose fundamental strategy is to outsource everything, and despite their often utter incompetence, I have to admit that they maintain a very high pay/skill ratio for themselves. And Microsoft, for example, makes quite a meal catering to these types.

I agree that that's probably the primary explanation. The boss might reasonably also be asking himself, though, whether

• the employee can really make cables as well as a typical vendor
• this is really cost effective when you consider all of the costs/risks involved
• (including the risk that said employee will quit or get run over by a bus)
• he can shift this expense onto his capital budget (which may not be tightly constrained), leaving more labor available (which might be more restricted).

For be it from me to take up for PHBs, but still, it's not obvious from the post that the boss is wrong here.

One final question: Has the OP asked himself whether this is really what he'd like to be spending his time doing, given the available alternatives? I've been through episodes like this myself, and learned to realize that there's no reason putting yourself though hell to save a few bucks or make things better for people that (at best) won't care anyway. Cast not your pearls before swine, etc.

Maybe you should read it. That was an essay, not an RFC. Furthermore, even RFC "MUST"s apply only within the context of the RFC (e.g., "If you wish to be considered an Internet troll, you MUST do X, Y, and Z.")

However, according to Zawinski's Law, it also needs to read mail...

I meant a drug that would make the taker of the drug more attractive, though dumb as a post. In other words, given the chance, how many of us would choose to look like Brad or Angelina, even if it came with the mental limitations of the average actor?

Imagine what we'd do with a drug that made people a whole bunch more attractive, albeit incredibly stupid...

Isn't there an expensive series of pills with occasional lethal side effects I can take instead?

I installed it on an old (even for then) POS 16MHz 386 PC we had sitting in a corner at work. Mostly I remember running 'find /' over and over again, marveling at how outrageously fast it was compared to the Sun Sparcstations (1+'s or 2's?) that we used for real work. Not an entirely fair comparison, since the Sun's used bitmapped graphics for everything, whereas Linux in console mode gets to use character-mode video hardware. Still, it was a revelation.

A few years later, I was developing an early web site, and damned if that thing didn't run faster on underpowered Compaq Aero 486SX than it did on the Sun boxes we had there. At that point, Sun had just switched to "Slowlaris", and I really can't think of any Sun box since that I've seen match Linux for speed. They did/do still support larger, more enterprisey hardware, of course.

In my day, I spent hundreds of hours playing Quake (and I don't think I've seen anything that matched it), but I no longer have the time, energy, patience, or remaining carpal tunnel capacity to put up with learning some game's 17 inverse lower Egyptian Ninja super power spin moves. Plus, I have little kids and a wife, so unfortunately the spurting gore- and slut-fests are out.

When I get home from a long day at work, I want to blow up easy-to-hit baddies for a while, or walk around in an interesting and well-written environment. I don't want to see "game over" or even be sent back to the "beginning of the level". Better yet, the game should come with a "god mode" accessible from the very beginning--I bought the damn thing, I'll decide how much I'd like to "cheat".

I'm having trouble finding good games like this, but I have plenty of money burning a hole in my pocket if someone can point them out to me. Zelda Wind Waker was not too bad, though really too difficult to be really entertaining. At this point, Lego Star Wars is about as good as I've found.

That's what "casual" is to me. I have a Wii. Game suggestions welcome.

Okay, but unhappy customers are going to leave anyway. Is this really any worse than having them flee to your commercial competitor?

Also, with this "downside", there is a balancing upside, which is that having your source code be Open Source is a substantial benefit for your customers. When I'm choosing vendors, if there's a serious competitor offering an Open Source product, that all but rules out the closed alternatives.

Good grief. If you're trying to find out something that you can't just go look up at the library, and you're forming and testing hypotheses to do so, that could reasonably be called "research". Don't be so pedantic. :-)

(Anyway, it may well turn out that Nature is just stuff that someone already knows all the answers perfectly to and just doesn't want to tell you.)

Wasn't this the plot of some Dilbert strip?

Actually, I do fairly well watching episodes of TV shows that I've already watched into the ground (e.g., MASH). Because I know exactly what's going to happen, I can tune in and out at any time without missing anything. It's kind of meditative.

I also agree about the headphones. Perhaps these two are related.

The GPL only exists to ameliorate the ill effects of copyright. I think (and I believe he has said) that RMS would much prefer that copyright go away, at least with respect to software.