I'll be thinking about this post when I'm at Earth Day next week.
I won't buy component CD or DVD systems anymore. They fail too much. I'm building a MythTV system so I can swap out the drives when they fail. Sadly, I wish it wasn't like this..
Then again, I haven't really bought a lot of CDs in the last two years though, streaming music has kept me pretty happy.
Insult for insult: if you're so damned smart, why are you still working a helpdesk?
Yeah, I've had that same exchange. People came in to take a class (aren't we to commend them?) and didn't know what "double-click the left mouse button" really meant. Some of it was performance anxiety, and some of it was geek-induced anxiety.
Most of my students learned and got pretty comfortable. A few never could do it and dropped out.. despite extra effort on my part.
My implicit point was that when you still have a lot of people struggling with computers, many of whom become functional because they know how to repeat certain steps only because they've been rewarded with success in the past, the "concepts" of computer security may very well be difficult for them to understand. Ultimately, if they can email and check their bank balance, then they get to a point where something daunting occurs on their screen, it really isn't all that unreasonable to see why so many people would just go for Start > Shutdown and go play with their cat.
As for helpdesk: my entire technical staff (myself included) was required to rotate out on the email helpdesk.. just a few questions for the senior folk, but it kept us close to the issues, problems, and confusions of our customers. This was particularly important in the earlier days of e-commerce, when standard operating procedures weren't as ubiquitious. We learned out how sympathize with the customers and adjust the website's language and workflow to better accommodate the less than ideal customer. It worked better for everyone.
Oh, and yeah, I gave up on Windows, because even to someone like me, there were too many annoyances involved. Each time I have to sit at a Windows machine (at a client site or something) it drives me nuts. Add the annoyance factor on top of everything else, and short circuits will prevail.
I think a lot of people posting here are missing the point. I've taught a computer literacy class in a community college setting to people who could barely use a mouse. The amount of information they had to absorb and that I had to learn how to convey in lay terms was truly daunting.
I've beent he CTO of a number of sizable companies, and I moved out to the middle of nowhere for a while. It was while I was there that I did some of this teaching -- mostly to get myself off the ranch.
Anyway, if you get a "check oil" light, you can usually engage in conversation wiht almost any of your friends about it, but a lot of computer problems are too *daunting* to understand and describe for people who don't have the vocabulary and the extensive experience that we do. We know the difference in iterations of behaviors and the subtlety of variations. Most people see things to us are obvious and they don't see it at all.
..I run a mail-order business and the variability of shipments between two static addresses is huge. I'm seeing a lot of complaints about Netflix "holding" movies, and though I've been a mostly happy member for 2 years, I don't think they're doing this.
More importantly, I think they need to increase manageability and sorting features on their website. The fact that you can't more easily manage new releases, sort by release date, etc., frustrates me.
If I were to choose software protecting my company, I would use commercial software. Why? Because if something does go wrong, it is the vendors fault and not yours. With free software, it is your fault.
How does this work in the real world, exactly?
IME, it's always your fault, as it should be, mostly.
..to emulate multi-core CPU functionality using discrete boxes? Could it happen that these extra boxes we have laying around could eventually just act as extra-cores?
..built today will be serviceable in 20 years? I wonder sometimes. Not that it's representative, but the new BMW 7-series has over 100 motors operating various things (seats, suspension, etc). Will you really be able to keep today's car "vintage" a few decades from now?
Will there someday be money in ripping out all computers in cars and replacing them with simple mechanics?
This is no joke: most of the independent investment bankers and VC types I've been dealing with lately favor hotmail. No, they're not Sand Hill Road level ones, but they're out there funding companies and quite happy with Hotmail. I think there's probably a market for this anyway.
I have to say, Postalia's website is one of the funniest things I've seen in a while. From the "any excuse to use a cute girl" on the homepage, to some of the english language translations within. Wow. You just really made my day.
I think you're talking about corporate and intranet applications. I haven't used Windows or IE in years, and I can't think of one useful site I am unable to use because I surf exclusively in Mozilla/Firefox.
Marketshare would assume a commercial site; even my bank lets me use Firefox... Ah: I can think of one site that won't let me shop with Firefox -- Pitney Bowes (see sig). But I can complete my payments over the phone or through the mail, so it hasn't stopped me from using their service.
Bah, I think he's wrong. I want a player without moving parts, and I don't want to spend that much money on an iPod not knowing how long it's going to last. $400-800 items shouldn't seem disposable, and the iPod seems like that to me. I buy a flash player for $150 and I care less if it dies on me. I just don't trust modern commoditized hardware at this level, and that includes all manner of iPod.
I've long argued that Apple should release a sub-$1000 machine just for the annual upgrade fees that would come with it. Everyone can argue that Apple is a hardware company, but $120 once or twice a year from a bigger customer base would probably help them in their machine anyway.
Got the latest Firefox on FC3 and as of a week ago, or so, the left hand nav column shows up in the middle of the page, with a huge whitespace to the left.
I've never had layout issues with Yahoo, but this makes it pretty useless for me. Anyone else have this issue?
See my response to the other poster to my first note about freedom: I think Apple has gotten a little MS-like in requirement things to work in "their" format. For instance, you can use iPhoto to manage photos into albums, but that doesn't create a matching folder hierarchy that can be used generally.
Another thing: iMail is crap. If you have two accounts configured and you've created folders locally for mail storage (and yes, I know where those are stored and did a backup of../Mail before killing the account), it's a bear to figure out which folders are associated with which account. Should you want to delete one of the accounts, you lose your folders. What's up with that?
Font rendering in OS X is crap. Fonts in terminal look ugly. Appleworks renders fonts correctly only at pre-defined zoom levels. Linux fonts are much, much more pleasant.
Mandrakelinux, which is what I've been using, has been pretty "install and go". I admit I'm a tinkerer -- I mess with my system all the time. I don't think much of destroying my install and redoing it. But, lately, I've been working on a big project and I've de-tinkered myself. I installed, added some apps, and have been just "using" the system. It works. It's very, very close.
I think Linux is just 1-2 years from completing it's usability overhaul of configuration utilities, and if there ends up being just a little tighter integration of hardware to a distribution, it can easily compete, at a desktop experience level, with something like Apple. No, it may not have spiffy CoreVideo effects, and Apple may still rule for things like media authoring, but a lot of people don't do that, even the ones buying Apple's.
Oh, and Apple really needs to ship a low-level photo editor. Appleworks can't do it, and the shareware options are poor. Photoshop costs too much, but iPhoto isn't complete enough.
Frankly, I think Apple is probably really sweet if, after shelling out big bucks for the machine, you also pay good money for Office, Photoshop, and probably BBedit. Fink + X11 are sufficient though -- again, fonts render ugly. Linux + OpenOffice.org + GIMP + Bluefish/Gedit/Screem/etc is nicer and prettier than OS X without the commercial apps. What does that say?
I like iPhoto for looking at photos, but i think it needs to be integrated into the Finder. As far as I can tell, you can't combine the management of photos, albums and folders. This seems to be a maddening requirement if you have a lot of photos.
The person for whom I was configuring the iMac, for instance, has photos of her family and artwork. Now, she can try and separate the two so that she's looking at "family" photos or "work" photos, but it's a lot of work. Furthermore, there's no way to look for photos that HAVEN'T been put in an album -- floaters.
I realize that's not what Apple had in mind for iPhoto, but I don't think you have to get too far up the chain of feature requirements before this kind of thing gets better.
Personally, I use gThumb and i prefer it. Yes, iPhoto has refinements that are sweet, but iPhoto looks to me more like a front-end to purchasing (and Kodak's pricers aren't competitive, sorry -- see Ophoto) or uploading or putting into a book. It's not really a photo management app as such. gThumb lets you switch from catalog view to folder view. When Apple adds that (and integrates it into the import utility, which is handy), I'll stop complaining.
..Linux user, I just spent a week with an OS X machine. I've lusted after them for a long time.
I don't think I'll buy one. Linux is really that close, relies less on "metadata" in the apps (iPhoto is horrible), and offers more freedom. Apple still has font rendering issues (have you looked at Appleworks? and fink GUI apps look like crap)..
Linux is extremely close today, preferable for people like me, and will absolutely be the indefensible as a choice within 1-2 years.
..of a major online DVD retailer. I never really understood those clients of ours (a huge percentage) who liked to be $100-200 in DVDs per week.
I much prefer the theater, and with services like Netflix and Blockbuster's new no-late policy, it's easy to get these movies and watch them on your own terms.
What I really noticed of those customers of ours who bought a lot of DVDs per week was that they were all really mainstream releases. Foreign, eclectic, cult or otherwise wouldn't have puzzled me so much, but these titles just sucked.
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I'll be thinking about this post when I'm at Earth Day next week.
I won't buy component CD or DVD systems anymore. They fail too much. I'm building a MythTV system so I can swap out the drives when they fail. Sadly, I wish it wasn't like this..
Then again, I haven't really bought a lot of CDs in the last two years though, streaming music has kept me pretty happy.
Insult for insult: if you're so damned smart, why are you still working a helpdesk?
Yeah, I've had that same exchange. People came in to take a class (aren't we to commend them?) and didn't know what "double-click the left mouse button" really meant. Some of it was performance anxiety, and some of it was geek-induced anxiety.
Most of my students learned and got pretty comfortable. A few never could do it and dropped out.. despite extra effort on my part.
My implicit point was that when you still have a lot of people struggling with computers, many of whom become functional because they know how to repeat certain steps only because they've been rewarded with success in the past, the "concepts" of computer security may very well be difficult for them to understand. Ultimately, if they can email and check their bank balance, then they get to a point where something daunting occurs on their screen, it really isn't all that unreasonable to see why so many people would just go for Start > Shutdown and go play with their cat.
As for helpdesk: my entire technical staff (myself included) was required to rotate out on the email helpdesk.. just a few questions for the senior folk, but it kept us close to the issues, problems, and confusions of our customers. This was particularly important in the earlier days of e-commerce, when standard operating procedures weren't as ubiquitious. We learned out how sympathize with the customers and adjust the website's language and workflow to better accommodate the less than ideal customer. It worked better for everyone.
Oh, and yeah, I gave up on Windows, because even to someone like me, there were too many annoyances involved. Each time I have to sit at a Windows machine (at a client site or something) it drives me nuts. Add the annoyance factor on top of everything else, and short circuits will prevail.
I think a lot of people posting here are missing the point. I've taught a computer literacy class in a community college setting to people who could barely use a mouse. The amount of information they had to absorb and that I had to learn how to convey in lay terms was truly daunting.
I've beent he CTO of a number of sizable companies, and I moved out to the middle of nowhere for a while. It was while I was there that I did some of this teaching -- mostly to get myself off the ranch.
Anyway, if you get a "check oil" light, you can usually engage in conversation wiht almost any of your friends about it, but a lot of computer problems are too *daunting* to understand and describe for people who don't have the vocabulary and the extensive experience that we do. We know the difference in iterations of behaviors and the subtlety of variations. Most people see things to us are obvious and they don't see it at all.
..I run a mail-order business and the variability of shipments between two static addresses is huge. I'm seeing a lot of complaints about Netflix "holding" movies, and though I've been a mostly happy member for 2 years, I don't think they're doing this.
More importantly, I think they need to increase manageability and sorting features on their website. The fact that you can't more easily manage new releases, sort by release date, etc., frustrates me.
If I were to choose software protecting my company, I would use commercial software. Why? Because if something does go wrong, it is the vendors fault and not yours. With free software, it is your fault.
How does this work in the real world, exactly?
IME, it's always your fault, as it should be, mostly.
..to emulate multi-core CPU functionality using discrete boxes? Could it happen that these extra boxes we have laying around could eventually just act as extra-cores?
..built today will be serviceable in 20 years? I wonder sometimes. Not that it's representative, but the new BMW 7-series has over 100 motors operating various things (seats, suspension, etc). Will you really be able to keep today's car "vintage" a few decades from now?
Will there someday be money in ripping out all computers in cars and replacing them with simple mechanics?
Ack.
This is no joke: most of the independent investment bankers and VC types I've been dealing with lately favor hotmail. No, they're not Sand Hill Road level ones, but they're out there funding companies and quite happy with Hotmail. I think there's probably a market for this anyway.
I have to say, Postalia's website is one of the funniest things I've seen in a while. From the "any excuse to use a cute girl" on the homepage, to some of the english language translations within. Wow. You just really made my day.
I think you're talking about corporate and intranet applications. I haven't used Windows or IE in years, and I can't think of one useful site I am unable to use because I surf exclusively in Mozilla/Firefox.
.. Ah: I can think of one site that won't let me shop with Firefox -- Pitney Bowes (see sig). But I can complete my payments over the phone or through the mail, so it hasn't stopped me from using their service.
Marketshare would assume a commercial site; even my bank lets me use Firefox.
Bah, I think he's wrong. I want a player without moving parts, and I don't want to spend that much money on an iPod not knowing how long it's going to last. $400-800 items shouldn't seem disposable, and the iPod seems like that to me. I buy a flash player for $150 and I care less if it dies on me. I just don't trust modern commoditized hardware at this level, and that includes all manner of iPod.
uh, not machine, "mission".
I've long argued that Apple should release a sub-$1000 machine just for the annual upgrade fees that would come with it. Everyone can argue that Apple is a hardware company, but $120 once or twice a year from a bigger customer base would probably help them in their machine anyway.
If the SLIMP3 used TVOUT to display controls on the TV it'd be perfect.
Yeah, I guess it's time to build a MythTV box. Not that I even care about video. Pics and music for me.
../let's you get 2TB of data transfer for less than $150/mo. Get two of those servers for two months and you're talking less than $1G.
Yeah, I'd checked that. It's not cookies or javascript. It's putting the rest of the left nav to the right of the three buttons up there.
Aggravating.
I did that.
Got the latest Firefox on FC3 and as of a week ago, or so, the left hand nav column shows up in the middle of the page, with a huge whitespace to the left.
I've never had layout issues with Yahoo, but this makes it pretty useless for me. Anyone else have this issue?
This is with a stock Firefox, no extensions.
See my response to the other poster to my first note about freedom: I think Apple has gotten a little MS-like in requirement things to work in "their" format. For instance, you can use iPhoto to manage photos into albums, but that doesn't create a matching folder hierarchy that can be used generally.
../Mail before killing the account), it's a bear to figure out which folders are associated with which account. Should you want to delete one of the accounts, you lose your folders. What's up with that?
Another thing: iMail is crap. If you have two accounts configured and you've created folders locally for mail storage (and yes, I know where those are stored and did a backup of
Font rendering in OS X is crap. Fonts in terminal look ugly. Appleworks renders fonts correctly only at pre-defined zoom levels. Linux fonts are much, much more pleasant.
Mandrakelinux, which is what I've been using, has been pretty "install and go". I admit I'm a tinkerer -- I mess with my system all the time. I don't think much of destroying my install and redoing it. But, lately, I've been working on a big project and I've de-tinkered myself. I installed, added some apps, and have been just "using" the system. It works. It's very, very close.
I think Linux is just 1-2 years from completing it's usability overhaul of configuration utilities, and if there ends up being just a little tighter integration of hardware to a distribution, it can easily compete, at a desktop experience level, with something like Apple. No, it may not have spiffy CoreVideo effects, and Apple may still rule for things like media authoring, but a lot of people don't do that, even the ones buying Apple's.
Oh, and Apple really needs to ship a low-level photo editor. Appleworks can't do it, and the shareware options are poor. Photoshop costs too much, but iPhoto isn't complete enough.
Frankly, I think Apple is probably really sweet if, after shelling out big bucks for the machine, you also pay good money for Office, Photoshop, and probably BBedit. Fink + X11 are sufficient though -- again, fonts render ugly. Linux + OpenOffice.org + GIMP + Bluefish/Gedit/Screem/etc is nicer and prettier than OS X without the commercial apps. What does that say?
I like iPhoto for looking at photos, but i think it needs to be integrated into the Finder. As far as I can tell, you can't combine the management of photos, albums and folders. This seems to be a maddening requirement if you have a lot of photos.
The person for whom I was configuring the iMac, for instance, has photos of her family and artwork. Now, she can try and separate the two so that she's looking at "family" photos or "work" photos, but it's a lot of work. Furthermore, there's no way to look for photos that HAVEN'T been put in an album -- floaters.
I realize that's not what Apple had in mind for iPhoto, but I don't think you have to get too far up the chain of feature requirements before this kind of thing gets better.
Personally, I use gThumb and i prefer it. Yes, iPhoto has refinements that are sweet, but iPhoto looks to me more like a front-end to purchasing (and Kodak's pricers aren't competitive, sorry -- see Ophoto) or uploading or putting into a book. It's not really a photo management app as such. gThumb lets you switch from catalog view to folder view. When Apple adds that (and integrates it into the import utility, which is handy), I'll stop complaining.
..Linux user, I just spent a week with an OS X machine. I've lusted after them for a long time.
I don't think I'll buy one. Linux is really that close, relies less on "metadata" in the apps (iPhoto is horrible), and offers more freedom. Apple still has font rendering issues (have you looked at Appleworks? and fink GUI apps look like crap)..
Linux is extremely close today, preferable for people like me, and will absolutely be the indefensible as a choice within 1-2 years.
No doubt.
adopt an e-commerce app to do it for you (OS Commerce is a pretty good choice, see my URL for it)
use a Windows solution instead
[sarcasm on]
Cool, eh?
[sarcasm off]
..of a major online DVD retailer. I never really understood those clients of ours (a huge percentage) who liked to be $100-200 in DVDs per week.
I much prefer the theater, and with services like Netflix and Blockbuster's new no-late policy, it's easy to get these movies and watch them on your own terms.
What I really noticed of those customers of ours who bought a lot of DVDs per week was that they were all really mainstream releases. Foreign, eclectic, cult or otherwise wouldn't have puzzled me so much, but these titles just sucked.
These people:
..charge $0.50/gb. Pretty great.
http://www.tranxactglobal.com/