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"this is basic data security 101 - never trust inputs without validation"

That was easy. I wonder if Staples gets a cut...

You are inflating the prices a bit. A full, non-OEM version of XP Pro is $300 retail - XP Home is $170 retail. You can get upgrades for less than $100, if you look around. OEM versions need only be sold with hardware, not complete systems.

-bZj

So they are using the stop button.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/16/15 19208

I like the eazy button.
http://www.staples.com/

At Staples, where I work, we've been selling Skype kits for over a month. I wonder, then, how this Radioshack deal constitutes a U.S. Retail debut.

No, you can't find the phones on the staples.com website, unfortunately. I found this out the hard way when a guy who had been buying quite a few for some out-of-country employees of his came in to buy more than we had in stock, and I had to get them from another store rather than just ship them to him from an online order.

Use PaperDisk! http://www.paperdisk.com/aboutpd6.htm Go to Staples, and get this: http://www.staples.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/S taplesProductDisplay?storeId=10001&catalogId=10051 &langId=-1&productId=119926&cmArea=SEARCH There you go... 2GB for $3.84!

I use my laptop in my living room just like you. My wife bought me this for Xmas and it works great for me. http://www.staples.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/S taplesProductDisplay?storeId=10001&catalogId=10051 &langId=-1&productId=101575&cmArea=SEARCH

For smaller stuff like that, I stack them on in/out box trays like this and run the wiring out the back. For larger stuff like systems, I use wire shelving like this. You can adjust the shelves to fit towers or rack-mount size boxes. Or at least, that's what I used to do. Now I have exactly one desktop with a UPS. The cable modem and WAP/router are hidden in the entertainment center.

http://www.staples.com/products/SpotLights/Marketi ng/copyprint/default.asp

Staples is rolling out that service to a lot of its stores with a variety of acceptable document formats. It has truly been a time-saver for a lot of people in a rush.

Well, sure, the shopping cart will need them. I don't have a problem with that; if I actually decide to do business with an online merchant, I add their site to my whitelist.

But consider, say, Staples, for example. With cookies disabled, one cannot even see if Staples even carries the item one might be interested in buying. That's just silly.

As for turning them off, well, it's certainly a personal preference. I do what I can to keep my online activities private.

If you actually enter a Staples store, you'll see a certain kind of surge suppressor with individual switches on the plugs. Also, they are on the website. Tell me which store you went to so I can pass this along to their management?

On the http://www.staples.com/ website, look under: Technology / Power Protection / Surge Protectors - Monitor

I don't know if this will work, but: http://www.staples.com/Catalog/Browse/class.asp?Pa geType=3&ClassID=141969&bcFlag=True&bcSCatId=3&bcS CatName=Technology&bcCatId=75&bcCatName=Power+Prot ection

I do know that at least one of those is actively stocked in every US location.

If you actually enter a Staples store, you'll see a certain kind of surge suppressor with individual switches on the plugs. Also, they are on the website. Tell me which store you went to so I can pass this along to their management?

On the http://www.staples.com/ website, look under: Technology / Power Protection / Surge Protectors - Monitor

I don't know if this will work, but: http://www.staples.com/Catalog/Browse/class.asp?Pa geType=3&ClassID=141969&bcFlag=True&bcSCatId=3&bcS CatName=Technology&bcCatId=75&bcCatName=Power+Prot ection

I do know that at least one of those is actively stocked in every US location.

Besides, you can get your data out of the other kind of notebook with the proper tool. You can then cut & paste, or import into a three-ring system with another tool.

(How far can we stretch this joke? :) )

Go to Office Depot. et al.

But if you looked hard at all, I would be surprised if you couldn't get one in resonable condition for $50.

Well, theres Apple, of course. And Pixar. And the Virginia Tech supercluster, and the majority of genetic research/biotech labs, like the Whitehead Institute, BioGen and Genentech. Then there's Staples corporate headquarters. Those are the ones I know of off the top of my head.

It is very unlikely that they would (try to) register Ajax as a trademark...
http://www.staples.com/images/products/catalog/pro ducts/CCPM3814.jpg

It is also a very famous Dutch football team. ;-)

All I needed to get started was this and this.

And maybe make one of these with Stinger, Antivir, and Ad-aware to clean trojans and virii.

Of course, service is the key to this. I make house calls and often spend an extra hour of non-billable time explaining things. Since I am in California I charge $75 an hour to wealthy clients and $45 an hour for the non-wealthy.

Acquire an LCD monitor that will accept a 75mm or 100mm wall adapter (like this).

Acquire 1" wide aluminum stock (available at Lowes or other DIY places).

Create brackets that look like a large, squared-off letter J: the horizontal piece is meant to be the width of your mid-tower case; the short vertical piece goes toward the back of the case; and the longer vertical piece goes toward the front:

|
|
|__| (The picture is backwards/inverted 'cause the ASCII art was easier that way. Use your imagination.)

Drill holes in the long vertical part of the brackets to match the holes on the back of the LCD monitor.

Use appropriately-sized machine screws to mount the monitor on the brackets.

Hang the LCD on the side of the mid-tower.

No "profit" - sorry.
Your success will depend in part on the weight of the LCD (so 20" might not work - 15" should be okay).

It's the beam, dude. While a standard cheapo red beam laser pointer does not usually have a beam visible unless there's enough fog to prevent seeing stars, the higher-end pricey green lasers have a beam that can be seen with just the normal trace of dust in the air, since it's about 50 times brighter than the usual red ones. Perfectly good for a pointer for astronomy lessons.

Well, I'm certainly an "educated analyst" going back to the days when "GOTO considered harmful" was the cutting edge and from the question I infer with near-100 percent certainty that you're not one. You may be educated, but you've certainly never had to perform an actual meet people in their offices and ask questions analysis task.

You don't develop preconditions, use CASE tools, or define formal workflows in those sessions; you do that after days or weeks of asking questios, accumulating data, and making vague sketches on whiteboards. Before you can do a brilliant analysis, you've got to know something to be brilliant about.

Now, having disposed of that, I'd say that you may not be running into a computer tools problem as much as you're running into an intellectual tools problem. Personally, I find the linear notes on a page model to be badly bandwidth-limited; for that kind of analysis, I like to use a big drawing pad (like this one, except Office Max sells one with half-inch quadrille I like better, but it's not on their web site for some reason) and many colors of pen and highlighter.

I use them to accumulate a series of "mind maps" (see http://www.google.com/search?complete=1&hl=en&q=mi nd+mapping&btnG=Google+Search for some examples) to build up a picture of the information.

Label each page on a consistent edge with date and time in a consistent format; AFTER the session is done, write some keywords on an orthogonal edge of the paper to remind yourself what the session told you.

All I needed to get started helping home users and small businesses (like my dentist) was:

invoices

and

a CD from Microsoft

I also put together a boot CD to scan and clean virri

I charge $75 an hour to 'fix' windows PCs here in California using these two CDROMs and an invoice book.

If you want to be really nice give people a copy of The Open CD (it has good software for home and office users)

Seriously folks, there is nothing to see here. Move along and don't take the free koolaid. Of the things this guy says that are correct (points 1,2, and 4) are addressed with changing your process, not your tools. Points (3 and 5) are just attempts to sell you a glass hammer (it's like the infamous "golden hammer", but breaks when you try to use it). Better programming models have been promised for over 30 years, and pay-as-you-go is just forcing you to behave the way some vendor wants you to. In this case, "some vendor" is IBM.

*CASE: Celluloid Assisted Software Engineering

Yes, but it wasn't all that long ago when decent software could be had for much cheaper. I bought my first word processing program new for $10, on 5.25" disks, and it does just as good a job at typing letters as the modern multi-hundred dollar Microsoft package (yes, I know Word can be had by itself, but even according to my neighborhood Staples, even that alone is $219 [yes, I know it can be had other places in other packages for cheaper, but I'm illustrating for the average consumer who walks into retail store X looking for Word]).

Except that the purpose of the hardware is to run the software. It's not "We have the hardware, now what are we going to run on it?", it's more like "What do I have to buy to get NNN?".

I believe this is one of many purposes Free/Open Source software serves- to break that archeotype. For most purposes (and when configured properly), a Linux box running OpenOffice provides the same, if not more levels of functionality as a $100 copy of Windows, and an $80 copy of Works Suite for the average person (average person defined as a user who surfs the net, checks email, types letters, does finances, etc). So if the hardware becomes free (minus any hidden software fee ala cell phone service [free fone with purchase of 2 year plan!]), and the software is free, wouldn't people line up in the streets to recieve their free computers while hardware manufacturers go bankrupt due to lack of money?

Mead Palmtop

get one of those crazy warrantees. I picked this up from staples last week. Nothing amazing, just a well built comfortable chair. I chose fabric over the crappy leather any chair $350 comes with. The cool thing is for an extra $20 you can get a 3 year service plan that covers everything except water damage. Personally I havent had a computer chair last over 3 years, mainly because all these cheapo "executive" chairs just arent built to last that long.

http://staples.com/Catalog/Browse/skuset.asp?PageT ype=2&SkuSetID=1003127&bcFlag=True&bcSCatId=1&bcSC atName=Office+Supplies&bcCatId=10&bcCatName=Paper& bcClassId=140783&bcClassName=Laser+Paper

(Yes, I know that's a LONG address)

It's $8 a ream ($32.99/case), not $7. They don't say what the finish is on it, but on your HP laser paper they say it has an "ultra smooth" finish. I can tell at a touch OR glance the difference between this 28/108 stuff and the $2.47 Georgia Pacific 20/84 WalMart special.

I looked at the package to see if it's made for Staples by anyone, but it just says Staples...

Eh, they could have taken advantage of pricing mistakes.

If you want to try a little hands-on experimentation, check out your local Staples, which carries at least some of the line, but calls them "Electronic Organizers" rather than PDAs.

Just did a quick search on the Canadian Staples web site for A4 and after entering my postal code (you can try 'H2Y 1V7' if you are outside of Canada and don't know of one), quickly found a few entries listing A4 related products, including a box of A4 paper. The US Staples web site also list some (I specified 68000 as the zip code).

Looks like the results you get just depend on how you go about your search.

Just did a quick search on the Canadian Staples web site for A4 and after entering my postal code (you can try 'H2Y 1V7' if you are outside of Canada and don't know of one), quickly found a few entries listing A4 related products, including a box of A4 paper. The US Staples web site also list some (I specified 68000 as the zip code).

Looks like the results you get just depend on how you go about your search.

Or, you could have just gone to their website and entered "a4 paper" in the search box. :-)

Tada! You'd get this.

(Note that when clicking that link, you'll probably be asked to enter your zip code before seeing the page.)

• I don't feel comfortable putting all my financial information online in one place
• I like playing with my taxes a lot playing various 'what-if' scenarios which I may not quite want to put out there
• I want to make sure that if I reopen my tax return from the past year(s), they will stay the same, using the same program, etc.

Compare and contrast the pricing of the prior version here and here. Yes, I realize that the second version is an OEM copy, but if you look a bit you can find legal copies Corel office for about $20-$30, they set the retail prices to get the clueless user who will comapre them to MS office and be happy with the savings. The second is for those who know about Open Office and want a cheap suite.

Your typical motion sensor lock runs for $50 list, probably less on the street. Add an entry-level GPS receiver, retailing for around $120. Toss in extra money to support a transceiver that broadcasts the notebook's position (remember, the GPS unit by itself just lets the notebook know where it is; you have to have some way for it to send that location to you), tamper-proofing/camoflage (how good's your GPS receiver if the thief just snaps off your antenna?), monthly charges for monitoring and a call center, and you're probably looking at $400 or more plus subscription. That might be peanuts for a car of $20,000+, but on your $1000 laptop, that's a significant chunk of change.

$49.94 from staples.com

It's the full product; "One year security and maintenance updates via Red Hat Network"

AIUI, anyone could just pick up a bunch of these and each box is good for a year's worth of RHN.

If you mean me as in The Linux Community, then on all our behalf, you're welcome. In case you've forgotten, Red Hat did not write Linux.

I'm aware Red Hat didn't write linux, but even you have to admit they blaze a few trails and lead in my areas. If you don't admit it that's fine too I will not list them.

I gave Red Hat a couple of hundred RHN subscriptions, including all of my personal systems and the rest from among my employer and client base, all for doing what a Gentoo user does every time he installs a system (kludging packages together) and keeping an update server running.

And you can not afford $10 extra per-box this year? RHPW is still $60 per year for updates and only $10 more for the box.

Except for the small matter of Fedora being a screaming train wreck.

Could you explain please? Personally I can see a few things that sucked, A few bugs, etc. The way I see fedora is the first release was kinda slammed together quickly "here it is!" but it really wasn't ready IMO. Documentation, Guidelines, Repositories. Nobody was ready for it so some snags ensued. And FC2 is going to have 2.6 kernel, apt-get and SElinux so I expect more snags here, But FC3? FC4? the biggest things we are likely to see is KDE/GNOME like things. Once the kernel and the Fedora project itself have Ironed out thier flaws I expect Fedora to be an excellent distro for a long time.

A distro with a real package management system makes customization and maintenance a lot less of a problem.

apt-get isn't a good package management system? Debian users would disagree. Take away apt from dpkg and what do you have? the same problem RPM does without yum, or apt-get. This is the part where I wonder if you've even tried Fedora.

Actually, it's more like $90. After the discount. For a system whose concept Red Hat said was untenable a few weeks ago (desktop Linux). What will they say next week? Will it sound like "Guess what, you, your employer, and all your customers are fucked. Have a nice day."

Nah more like $49.94
They said the "desktop was unatainable" wow I never got that memo, do you have a link? It looks like they're hiring desktop people to me http://www.redhat.com/about/careers/boston/
On the Desktop thing, if you honestly think our mothers, and local hardware store owners are just fine on KDE you're flat wrong, the Desktop is great for us, or secretarys people with some technical abilitys. But for your average gamer and solitare player? c'mon man..

Although it won't handle the entire list presented above, this shredder seems to do pretty well, and currently only costs $49.99.

"Media Destroyer"

It's still possible... Dot Matrix Printers At Staples.com. They've got the ribbon, too. Not that I'm preferential towards Staples, but they do supply a lot of businesses. There are businesses out there that still use carbon copy paper (for receipts, invoices, and the like). Inkjets don't do carbon copy ;o). Whenever I get around to setting up my home network, I'd like to have any "critical" machines have a "logger" machine hooked up to the critical machine via a serial cable only. Send the logs through the serial cable, and there's nothing that I know of that the cracker can do to erase that log.

Dunno how many of you are familiar with the Averatec notebooks, personally I think it looks a lot better than the Panasonic reviewed here. It's also considerably cheaper and specs are similar, but spec-wise, it ultimately wins out over the Panasonic.

For starters, the Averatec 3150H comes with the Athlon Mobile 1600+ CPU, can have up to 640MB PC2100 mem (I know it's not THAT much more than 512MB, but it's still more), been using the battery pretty often and it's not hard to get about 4 hours of use out of it... even with most of the power saving features turned off.

As far as anything else goes, the specs aside from what I mentioned above, are almost exactly the same. Paying more than $2000 for any laptop, even if it looks pretty, is just insane... especially if it only has a 12" screen. I got mine for $850 after rebate at Staples. AFAIK, they're still a regular stock item.

Other differences:
A: Has 30GB
P: has 40GB

A: Has 3x USB2
P: Has 2x USB2

A: Has Athlon XPM 1600+ (Approx 1.4Ghz)
P: Has Pentium4 Centrino 900Mhz

A: Doesn't have any mem stick slots
P: has SD/MMC reader slot.

A: Model 3150P has Wifi built in, dunno how much it costs, but it's still cheaper than the panasonic.

A: Touchpad has two scrolling buttons instead of a wheel. Verrryyyy handy.

A: Approx 2lbs heavier. Big deal.

A: Linux installs beautifully. All standard components.
P: Er... well...uhm...

Both notebooks are made out of lightweight magnesium alloy.

Not getting paid, just a VERY satisfied user. I've been looking for a long time and I've always known there were MUCH better smaller notebooks out there for under 1K.

Staples has the Averatec notebooks on spotlight on their site. Look here.

http://www003.staples.com/Products/SpotLights/03 08 10/516090/Default.asp (For the link shy.)

Even better. Get CD binder pages and put them in an ordinary 3-ring binder. This way, you can insert new pages as your collection grows. This is much more convenient than leaving blank pages in the middle or reshuffling them all as you get new stuff.

See them here: at Staples.

I prefer a cheap, "self loading, hexagon shaped 0.5 millimeter mechanical pencil with a rubberized barrel that provides a positive grip." Zebra Posi-Grip fits the bill. Pair that with a big white eraser, and you're all set.

= 9J =

Your Own Printer

crappy compuers, shitty scanners and so-so printers (but losing market share since people already will know the HP's expensive printers don't have quality or features to justify it's tag price)


Uh, no. While I can't say much about their desktop lineup (there have been a few problems) their laptops are great (most on the heavy side, unfortunately). I haven't had much experience with the HP scanners, so I can't comment, but their printers are, top notch. While HP's brand prestige has definitely gone down in recent years, I sure would never buy a printer that wasn't an HP. Even their cheapest photo printer produces some of the nicest prints I've seen.

Just as the mac table holds exactly the equipment a mac user needs/can afford, my table accomodates my monitor, KVM switch, printer, scanner, speakers, network hub, firewall, and fax machine, with room left over for note paper, coffee cups, pens, USB gadgets, CDs and manuals. It has plenty of space below for my 5 PCs and their huge tangle of cables.

As an 31337 mod, I've added a sliding keyboard/mouse tray and a clip-on desk lamp. I've been using this setup for years, and I really can't find anything wrong with it.

Officemax has the HP Laserjet 1200 as an end-of-life product that's selling for $199. If they're out, just go to or order from Staples. They'll price match it for you plus give you 10% of the difference which would make it $179. Just got one myself. Not a bad price at all. It's end-of-life because it's being replaced by the Laserjet 1300. And the cartridges aren't too bad either.

It's got PostScript Level 2 emulation and 45 scalable fonts plus 35 PostScript fonts built-in. Should be fine.

In most places, you can always go to Staples or OfficeMax. So if you don't like Office Depot's policy, spend your money on office supplies somewhere else!

Write to them to complain instead of writing on Shashdot. Are you unhappy about this misuse of an already existing law? Sale prices are facts, not copyrighted material. Courts have already ruled that facts devoid of any creativity (such as telephone books) can be copied.


Wal-Mart

From main web site, click Help (at top). Click Company Information (bottom). Click Contact Stores and Home Office Customer Service (bottom left).

Contact


Target

From main web site, click Help (way bottom). Click either Contact Us About Online Services (left middle), or Contact Us About Target (left further down).

Target

Target


Best Buy

From main web site, click Contact Us (left bar, bottom). Click General Questions about BestBuy.com.

Best Buy


Staples

From main web site, click Help (top right). Click Contact Us. Click Something Else.

Staples


These pages have a SUBMIT button for a reason. (because they want you to submit to them.)

If you don't write, then I'll assume you are perhaps happy about this.

I've seen many comments saying "Don't buy from these companies" or the like. That's fine, but be sure to let them know why you aren't buying from them!

Here are some links to:
Walmart's comment page.

Best Buy's comment page or call them at 1-888-BESTBUY.

Target's comment page or call them at 1-800-440-0680.

Staple's comment page or call 1-800-3STAPLE.

Truthfully you are looking at spending around $350+ dollars if you really want a good solution.

Basically, since it is for my brother, he pretty much just wants it for the novelty of having GPS in his vehicle. He's still in highschool and doesn't really have a lot of money, and he'll be a bit disappointed if I have to tell him he's gonna have to spend even $150 for Staples current GPS offering... Really what I'm trying to find for him is something like the Rand McNally StreetFinder and GPS Staples used to sell, in the neighborhood of about the same price.