The Thailand expat forum for Travel, Lifestyle and Fun.

mobs00

^ Same as the music scam. They made money on that one and now moved on to a bigger and more profitable scam.

Rural Surin

.........only if there's a profit motive behind it.

Butterfly

apparently, from some news link, the raids are carried after investigation and evidence provided internally by current or former employees or competitors or anyone with an agenda to fuck someone over

peterpan

Thai employees will fvck a non Thai employer every chance they get, makes them feel bigger I guess.

BobR

In the USA those "software alliance" lowlifes actually take out advertisements in newspapers and magazines looking for disgruntled employees who want to strike back at their employer. I forget the exact wording but "get even" was part of it.

Gerbil

^ Yep. 'BSA' is behnd it here. They advertise 'up to 250,000 baht reward for snitching on someone'.

Butterfly

With such rewards, no wonder it's a success in Thailand

like shooting fish in a barrel,

slackula

My wife has an interest in a small school and is listed as a director/co-owner of it (I take no interest in it as I was against it from the start and her partner in it is a pain in the arse).

Apparently on Friday she got a call from somebody in the Edu Dept. saying that they were going to check schools and she could "license" her computers for about 1500 Baht each.

Since that is way less than the going price for XP Pro and Office licenses she took it as a bribe request to be taken off the list of places to visit and basically shrugged it off.

After I showed her this thread she decided to kick MS into touch there (plus too many issues with virii and other crap from IE, autorun etc) and I spent my Sunday putting Linux onto the three desktops the school uses.

FWIW I chose Kubuntu over my beloved Slackware for a couple of reasons and the only issue I had was that each computer had a different brand of wireless dongle. Since I couldn't be bothered to muck about with all the wifi config options (there is only so many times I can type sudo before I get pissed off, and the /etc folder of any Debian based distro is alien to me!) for three different dongles I went out and bought a 579 Baht 5 port switch and a few meters of cable and just wired them up.

After a couple of hours of "Where is this?" type questions the users seemed to be going along OK; nowadays Evolution and OOo are close enough to their MS counterparts to be a fairly shallow learning curve and udev or HAL or avahi or whatever the hell *buntu uses seems to work for shoving USB drives in and out.

__________________
bibo ergo sum

FarangRed

Not only, I know of a Thai employer who grassed up for using copy Auto Cad, that was in Bangkok

FarangRed

what about all the intenet cafe's?

the dogcatcher

They pay the police monthly for their software license and the police pass the money onto Bill Gates in person.

Butterfly

good one, slack. Ubuntu for desktop is quite nice, even though it's slower than WinXP. Sadly.

Spitfire

I went into the university I work at today in Korat and everything has changed to Linux/Ubuntu, looks like it's going down in a lot of places.

Spin

Hypocrits, my gf bought home her bosses laptop the other day and besides having loads of images of horses doing rude things to women on the hard drive, also had a pirated copy of widows on it. The owner is the head of the Dept of Labour in XXXXXX province.

Butterfly

^ good one !!! LOL

harrybarracuda

Seriously, I can't understand why anyone with a small business in Thailand would even risk it.

Download any of the*ubuntu variants and they will do the job.

And it's not just the OS, it's ALL of the free applications that you can download just by selecting them from a list.

Our company (3,000 computers) spends a fortune on Micro$oft, and I'm not complaining because it keeps me in a job when it doesn't work, but we could probably ditch $4million a year we give to Microsoft for what most people here do on computers (send emails, surf the net, use web applications).

If you don't know Linux, you can just as easily look up a Linux problem on the net as a Windows one, and to be honest you'll probably find a more help response.

Go to Distrowatch.com, follow the simple instructions to download and burn a copy of Ubuntu and then boot it on your 'puter. Unless you specifically choose to install it, you can have a good old play and see what you think. If you don't like it, take it out, throw the disk away and carry using that pirate XP until the feds walk in to your office wearing a strap on

slackula

Actually I am getting more and more disillusioned with the *buntus; the one box that couldn't see its nic is now running Slackware and now sees the nic fine and the KDE that ships with Slackware 13 seems to be a lot smoother than the Kubuntu one and also doesn't have so much crap in the menus. Fonts seem to render better on the Slackware box too.

I still haven't been able to figure out which Udev rule to change to get the Kubuntu machine to use a scanner with a regular user but the Slackware machine was a lot easier to configure, it pretty much worked on install.

I'll give it a couple more days but if I still can't get the scanners working on the buntus then all the boxes are going to be Slackware-ized.

I don't know if it is because I am old or old-fashioned but I find Slackware to be much, much easier to maintain.

Marmite the Dog

I tried 2 versions of Linux on my laptop (Ubuntu and another one) and neither worked.

Wayne Kerr

Most of the software on the computers in the Bangkok/Asia-Pacific headquarters of one of the world's largest organizations is pirate. Lucky the Thai police aren't allowed in there unless invited.

harrybarracuda

Want to elaborate on "neither worked"?

You couldn't boot them?