I live on the road and that damn paperboy can't find me anymore!

I wish my laptop would run Linux and there was an alternative to Photoshop. I would spend the time to get my machine working on Open Source and would train my 80 yr old mother to use Ubuntu or another desktop variant. Unfortunately my laptop came with Vista ARRRG and an upgrade to Win7 which HP said would work. No lie between MS and HP they totally killed my bluetooth port and my remote TV controllers will never work again. HP stance was go back to Vista if I wanted the remotes delivered with the laptop to ever work again. Long story short. I ran a software and hardware support department, if one of my techs gave that answer without even consulting a product engineer, it would be the last support call they ever took for me. I have a stable machine on Win7, without remotes of course. Where are good open source coders that can get my fingerprint reader and other HP hardware to run on Linux? I would even pay for it just to be free of MS and Apple!

Shame on your management. When you get over a few hundred machines there should be a software audit package doing the grunt work and it should be run on a regular basis. There is no excuse to have that many machines (10K) without clear policy and procedures in place. Remind management how much it would cost to have a body do all the running around every quarter, and how much they are liable for if they fail to maintain compliance, the audit software is cheaper and everyone gets to sleep at night. Don't just tell someone in management, slip it into a report that is widely distributed in the company so they can't ignore you or lay the blame on you. You have to cover your ass too; the next job interview you save could be yours! Forget suing these thugs unless you are advised by your lawyer, they wouldn't be going after you if you could match them in court. God only knows what you agreed to in the EULA but you can bet it was not in your favor and has been amended many times since you got the copy you have in your hand. If you are doing business with some big company, MS, IBM, AT&T or such, and it is a face to face meeting with their sales employees, don’t be afraid to try to tilt the rigged game in your favor. Strike objectionable clauses in the contract and have the rep initial the line item. If it is a big problem they will go up their management chain and you will get a new, more informed rep and a smack down from them. Quite often you will get no pushback from the rep and the time bomb will be in their files to get their legal team to explain in court. I have never had to resolve one of the contracts I did this to but (MY CYA) check with your attorney. And please, I urge everyone to strike the arbitration clause in every contract you sign. Make the bastards fight you in your local court, which you enter in the margin, signed by an authorized agent for the company on the contract before signing the contract or paying a dime for service. Your attorney may thank you later, and the company will save on travel expenses if you do go to court. This will not work for your personal cell phone contract but it will work if you are equipping a company sales force or service staff spread across the country or world. The bottom line is we are forced by management to play with the devil, creative commons licensed software won’t get you through all the rough implementation issues, but it should be the first thing you look at before you go to the boss for a new purchase of Apple or MS software. If it ain’t mission critical you will save all the BS of the bastards and their audit as well as some money for the company. Then PAY the developers of the software that keeps you from having to put up with EULAs. If you’re a poor startup then take up a collection and give the developer a resounding letter of recognition for them to help their marketing efforts and whatever you collected in money. You can skip a latte for one meeting. If it wasn't for the open source community many startups would never get to see the light of day. We can't afford what the big boys get for a seat license much less a site license as startups. IMHO we should fill the pockets of all the lawyers with copies of every stupid software and hardware patent and let them take a long hike on a short plank into a deep and cold abyss. Yes I was forced to work with the bastards but i didn't like it a bit. And if you can't tell I am still pissed at them to this day. Now the only MS in my retired life is the copy of Win7 running on this laptop, Office 2010 and Lightroom-Photoshop CS/5. It's all legal purchased at a discount with the laptop and everything from my website to the tools I use to maintain it is open source. GPL software is not up to the heavy lifting semipro or pro photographers need to do the job, until then MS got me to the dance and Apple is just as bad, better the devil I know than buying into another closed HW/SW platform that gives the owner anything but full rights. CMA-Disclaimer-- The opinions expressed here are mine and not to be used for any legal purposes so don’t have your lawyer book lunch or even call my lawyer. I won’t pay either of them.

This is very sound advice. Some of us didn't go for MS, we inherited it from the previous IT people. Spend the time to do an audit yourself now! IT should have a locked storage with a photocopy of the purchase order, invoice from the vendor clearly stating if it is a physical copy or license only and the s/n and last a photocopy of the key code that ties to the s/n and the machine it is installed on. Put this all in a spreadsheet or db. When you have to touch all the machines for a patch or upgrade, check the spreadsheet! If you don't have a big site, use the next hardware upgrade to get OEM copies of the OS for pennys on the dollar. Also consider locking down the machine so the user can't install software. All this advice is for small shops with less than a hundred or so machines. The big boys have software to do the audits over the wire so most of this is SOP for them. I urge you to take one other step before you get a letter. Have a clear companywide IT policy published, signed by management and have your employees sign it as a part of the new hire package. This may not help you down the road but it doesn't hurt and should give you some legal standing that the policy of the company is no user or unlicensed software is allowed. I bet when management has to sign off on this policy you may get the backing to get legal copies of everything you use. It would be corporate negligence for them to do otherwise. Not a corporation? If you have five or so people see if you can become a partner in MS speak with the vendor. You can get free licenses for all kind of software for test use or to build a mockup for a client. Most importantly. Don’t ever give a lawyer anything more than the court compels you to in any situation in life! I feel for you, good luck. Don't let the bastards wear you down! This was spell checked with Office 2010. Oh No!

We didn't have that many servers so we went with planets. For some reason no one wanted to be assigned our backoffice server Uranus.

AKA Rocky Mountain goat piss.

Just had to add these two to the list of dead OS.

Glad to be free...retired. They can't drag me back into corporate no mo!

I wipe my drives with sandpaper if the motor will still spin the disks. Then I reshape the platters and the case with a few blasts from a 12 Ga shotgun. If the drive won't spin then I go straight to step two.

I have to say that I only fly first class these days. I flew over 500Kmi back in the 80's and 90's. Back then corp made me fly coach. But that was when there was a smoking section in the back. I never saw a plane back into a mountain so that was cool. This crap that passes as security is a joke. Now I fly first class because I refuse to let them have my $15K worth of cameras and I will be one of the first to the crash site.

I will have to see if I forget. The only checks I write are to the @#$^!!& Government and my quarterly tax is due this month. I refuse to make these blood suckers a "payee". I would love to send them a pdf of a check on a micro SD. It would probably take them until the next quarter to "hack the card".

I've been to England...trust me they wouldn't know a good steak if it hit them in the mouth.

I smoke our turkey with hickory. Hard to keep lit but damn good!