Lifetime supply of beer for a laptop

Free beer!A New-Zealand brewer just promised that he would provide free beer for life to the individual who would help him get a stolen laptop back. The system, which apparently contains crucial enterprise information, has disappeared early this week when one of the brewery owners forgot to set the alarm before going at the end of the day.

Owners Paul Croucher and Nigel Gregory are desperate to get it back, so much so they are offering free beer to whoever dobs in the person responsible for the burglary.

It happened some time between 8pm on Monday, when Mr Croucher left the Depot St building, and 9am on Tuesday when he arrived back.

I know some of our readers are from New-Zealand, so you guys might want to keep your eyes open for this stolen laptop. Hmmm, free beer for life, that’s certainly a good deal! (but probably not for your health :))

Lifetime supply of beer for a laptop (The Daily Post)

HOW TO: make a GREAT first impression

Let’s face it, when going to an interview for a new job, first impressions are what count for the most in the hiring process. This is why you want to look your best at that first meeting, because we all know that you won’t get a second chance if you mess up. Here’s a short video tutorial that will teach you how to make the right choices in order to be liked by your potential employer.



Why are we happy? Why aren’t we happy?

In the following video, social psychologist Dan Gilbert challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our “psychological immune system” lets us feel real, enduring happiness, he says, even when things don’t go as planned. He calls this kind of happiness “synthetic happiness,” and he says it’s “every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for.”

Steve Ballmer and Linux: A love and hate story

It seems that Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, will never stop hitting the top of the open-source community’s head. Ballmer, during a press conference in London last week, renewed attacks that started a year ago against the world of the “open”.

According to Ballmer, Linux and open-source software users currently violate 235 patents that he claims Microsoft owns. We’re mainly talking about Linux’s kernel, its GUI, its messaging client, and OpenOffice.org.

The strangest part of all of this is that Novell isn’t targeted by these allegations anymore, most likely because of the deal they signed with Microsoft just months ago. This accord changed the nature of these attacks, and now, it seems that Microsoft has only one target: Red Hat.

“People who use Red Hat, at least in respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to eventually compensate us,” Ballmer said at a company event last week in London.
 
“We’ve spent a lot of money licensing patents,” he said. “When people come to us and say, ‘Hey, this commercial piece of software violates our patent, our intellectual property, we’ll either get a court judgment or we’ll pay a big check.”

Microsoft’s attitude in reponse to this whole mess is suprisingly ambiguous. Most of the source code for all Linux distributions is similar, so why would Red hat violate Microsoft’s patents when Novell’s Suse does not? If we follow this line of thought, we can say there is “good” and “bad” open-source applications. If Microsoft endorses the software, then it’s good; if not, it’s evil.

When looking at Microsoft’s position in regard to the Linux world, we can clearly see that Ballmer’s attacks are not targeted toward the community, but more against its individual members. What does this mean? That if you want to run legal “open source”, you have to kneel down and grovel in front of the software giant.

For those of you interested in listening to Ballmer’s speech, you can do so by following this link.

A Vision of Students Today

Cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch and 200 students at Kansas State University created this video summarizing the most important characteristics of students today: How they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and how the world will change during their lifetime. It’s enlightening and interesting information for all of us who have been out of school for years. Things certainly have changed since I got my diploma twelve years ago.