Looking through this, I'm seeing tons of replies detailing the pros and cons of this web service vs. that one, keeping an encrypted partition somewhere vs. putting it on a thumb drive, all very elaborate and in many cases complicated just to choose between them when you take into account the apples vs. oranges pros and cons between them. I have a netbook I keep zipped up in the jacket of a dayplanner. It would probably do a great job of fulfilling his requirements, and do it anywhere he can carry a dayplanner! With this relatively lowbrow solution, he can type whatever he wants into a computer at his place of employment (or wherever) and be completely protected from work related spyware, keyloggers, firewall issues, proxies, etc. If he really wanted to he could get a phone card for internet access (completely off the work network) but this is not necessary, just secure the netbook which is after all 100% his personal property.
Interesting comment. Adobe Photoshop for the Mac is close enough to the Win. version that books for CSx are not platform dependent but cover both in the same text. In what way is, say, CS5 PS for the Mac deficient vs. CS5 PS for the PC? I'm not trying to be argumentative here, I'm genuinely curious.
To simulate a right click, tap with two fingers. Much easier, but you may need to turn on the "tap using two fingers for secondary click" option in your trackpad properties..
Apple's still got specs for all their stuff on their site. http://support.apple.com/specs/#g4%20500mhz
Now while this will tell you how much your tower uses, plugging in a kill-a-watt for a week or so will tell you how much your entire setup uses under real life load.
The first thing that went through my mind when I read the summary is that for $100 I can go buy a USB external notebook drive that holds in the area of 350Gigs. With the proper formatting it's universally readable and can easily hold 50 movies + a ton of music + a stupid number of documents. Why would they want to do this? Maybe they're worried about the environmental impact of shipping season long episodes on multiple plastic disks?
I remember seeing a comic in my college newspaper. Little boy has his tongue stuck to a lightpole. Other little boy's running up with an axe held up in the air. Third kid is shouting "Stop! Just because it'll work doesn't mean it's the right thing to do!"
You're not way off base, but I think you're coming at the issue from the wrong direction. Prisoners are sent to prison to be "rehabilitated". This sounds nice but really prison is a place of punishment. If you accept that this is about punishing someone for their crime, then it becomes relatively logical that a given defined crime will come with a given defined period of punishment. Punishment will of course be subject to certain upper and lower parameters which hopefully will be adjusted with the scope / severity of the crime in question.
Unfortunately, we seem to be looking at extending the punishment period for certain crimes indefinately, possibly resulting in a gross imbalance from the previously understood relationship between the severity of a crime and the term of the punishment.
Thank you for making my point. There are socially defined "rules" by which we live. These rules are not set down in law and usually aren't even written anywhere but we all know you don't cut in/hold up a checkout line for groceries, examine your pubes at the gym or take your dog out to "crap in sandboxes" as you so eloquently put it. These are "rules" of behavior we have almost all agreed to and when followed they make living with your fellow man much more pleasant.
In the game it would appear that there is a concurrent set of rules about ingame behavior. Most people have gravitated from PVP to fighting against computer controlled characters. This guy's tactic appears to be an exploit (abuse) of a mechanism put into the game to keep people from being forced to PVP. Not only is he cutting into line and holding people up, he's actually abusive to them afterwords. Twixt is the "in-your-way society ruiner" here. He's chosen to disregard the unwritten rules of the society he has joined in a very abrasive manner, then be astounded that his fellow players consider him in an unflattering light.
What in his actions makes you want to ally yourself with him? For that matter, if most people have chosen to play a certain way, what makes you (by your own admission, a non-player) qualified to dictate how the game is to be played and decry the people who don't see things the way you see them?
So we have a majority of players playing the game one way. Presumably they are doing this because they like to play the game that way (it's fun for them). This is the decision that has been made by most people of their free will. Now we have a very small minority who exploit game mechanics to kill other players (members of the majority) and then publicly heap abuse on them. For some reason the majority doesn't approve of this behavior. Now if the two sides were not supposed to communicate, that option would have been made impossible (ala WOW) but it wasn't. I guess what I'm getting at here is that the people who play the game are the ones who decide how the game is played. Both styles of gameplay have been left open by the designers for the players to decide. They would appear to have decided.
Well, maybe we can bring it a bit more in line. You go to the court with your basketball and see people standing around talking. You force them into playing a game with you using a rule exploit such that they instantly lose and are penalized for losing. You then mock them and publicly insult them to incite their ire (read the articles and associated posts of people who had direct experience, also how the game mechanics work). Repeat... repeat... repeat... Now you can stand amazed that for some reason everyone seems to think you are a jerk!
One thing to keep in mind is that in their eyes you are on par with the plumber. Nobody really wants to call the plumber or have him around, OTOH you really need one when the fecal matter hits the rotary air impeller. When they give you attitude they are probably angry / frustrated at their machine / server / the situation and not necessarily you specifically. If they're being really uptight when you walk in the door remind them that you've had the last 15 seconds to fix it and you're on their side. Depending on the political situation you may be able to interject something into a company meeting explaining what's going on and get people to consider your side. All in all, remember to keep calm and be sure this is really the right thing for you to be doing. Maybe it's time for you to make a change?
Let's think about this for a moment. Why do you work? Maybe you like what you do and maybe it benefits the world but I'm willing to be that for a majority of us we work so we can eat, have a place to live etc. When I went through school kids did schoolwork (worked) because that's what you were supposed to do. Now if you were supposed to work but only got a slap on the wrist (and a paycheck) for not doing so, what would you choose? Providing a real world reward for doing your work and doing it well does not seem that unreasonable to me. Heck, we're teaching that to our 7 year old doing chores right now!
Hrm.... if you're on salary your "hourly pay" is largely a matter of conjecture. When confronted with the tradeoff of a:) having a salaried employee work an extra few hours (employee's free time takes a hit) or b:) buying the product (someones budget takes a hit) I have yet to see the manager who will opt with b. There's no need for a tradeoff here, they'll simply have you do both.
I was trying to illustrate the situation in a manner that was unencumbered by the emotional baggage the whole RIAA/pirate/IP thing has taken and pickles came to mind. I think most people who read the post got that. Maybe you should take another look. Listen for aircraft this time.
Spin any straw men lately? Please don't take my words out of context. The word "forced" was followed by "to purchase". By this I meant if he wants to purchase the product he must do it in this manner. The option to buy just the individual song (the product he wants) is not on the table. A consumer wanting to pay a fair price for only the product they want is in my opinion completely reasonable.
Like it or not, the product is out there. Itâ(TM)s available for (mostly) free if someone wants to get it that way. Itâ(TM)s also available via the B&M style mindset you and most of the record companies seem to be stuck in. Most people who want a product would prefer to acquire it in an honest manner. Claiming that someone should be happy to pay too much for a product they donâ(TM)t want while spurning the alternative of just getting it for free is getting a bit carried away. To claim that we should ignore the situation (reality) as it stands and condemn them for getting what they want is plain silly. If you were a record company shill Iâ(TM)d even go so far as to claim that your condemnation is nothing more than... a cop out.
So you want some pickles. The only vendor of pickles you can find has decreed that you may have them, but you must also purchase a beef patty, lettuce, tomato, a bun, a side of fries and a soft drink. Yeah, maybe you're in the mood for lunch (and maybe you're not)and while technically you can buy your pickles this isn't really what you're being forced to purchase. He wants a single song at a fair price, not a $25 CD containing that song and others he's never heard of.
I did the same thing. Recently, I've replaced my 12" Lenovo with a 10" netbook for my primary device to read off of. At $400 (yeah, Lenovo again) it beats holy hell out of a Kindle / Sony ereader / whatever.
Funny you should mention that. About four months ago I got a Lenovo X61 (2GHx, 3Gigs, 7200 RPM drive) tablet to the tune of about $2k. It came with Vista. Now I'd tried three times to run Vista on my desktop but went back to XP every time but I'd heard that with SP2 it worked much better. I figured I'd give it a shot (read: I was too cheap to buy the XP restore / downgrade disks)and besides they'd dropped the XP option as an OS choice. Half the time I couldn't connect to wireless networks, and googling the error gets responses saying that I should only connect to Vista compatible routers! Wake up times ran about one minute and I was looking at about 6 minutes (yes I timed it) to come back up from a suspend. By comparison, my lowly 1.2 GHz Macbook will wake up and be usable in a couple seconds. This is "user time". When I am called out to a client and I open my laptop then sit there for a minute humming to myself and not fixing their problem, I feel stupid. When I realize it's gone into suspend I open my laptop and have to "gather more information" or hide in the bathroom for a few minutes. Really! There's no excuse for this on a new computer. Restore / reinstall didn't help. Last week I shelled out 50+ dollars to jettison Vista Ultimate for its predecessor. I now couldn't be happier with the performance of this machine. My point is that an OS needs to be superior to its predecessor from an end user perspective. It's not there for the sake of the computer it's there to facilitate the function of the guy sitting in front of it running programs. Looking at the speed and compatibility problems I ran into I just can't justify Vista for use in a business setting. Not on older hardware with 1 gig of ram, not on a brand new machine with 3. For business it needs to work as well or better than XP and THEN look pretty. I think they got that part backwards.
It doesn't make a lot of sense on the surface, but there can be a lot of power in being a "minority". For living, current proof of this check out what it takes to get into the Postal Service as a white male! I think it's really hard for people who have gotten used to the benefits that come with being a minority, even / especially if they're not, to let go. It's not about logic, it's about being able to discriminate or preach hate or demand recompense for something that happened to their great great great grandfather (from someone who didn't do it) or otherwise act in an outrageous manner with impunity. This is deemed acceptable because they're a "minority" or "oppressed". If they can get on that pedestal, nobody can call them on it as doing so would be political and social suicide. Anyone objecting becomes the evil oppressor incarnate. Sorry for the rant, getting off soapbox now.
The "Clone MAC Address" feature is there because some ISP's (Cox comes to mind) will grab the mac addy. of the first device you hook up and refuse to provide service to anything else. So when you plug your laptop straight in to check if they've turned up the line it works. Plug in your router and it's dead.
Tech support swears they don't do this, so you have two choices: call/hold/bitch at tech support till they reset your account (locking you into your current router's MAC so you start over if you get another router) or just clone the MAC and start moving packets.
Slashdot Mirror
If a jet flies waaaay over the head of an AC, does it still make a whooshing sound?
Looking through this, I'm seeing tons of replies detailing the pros and cons of this web service vs. that one, keeping an encrypted partition somewhere vs. putting it on a thumb drive, all very elaborate and in many cases complicated just to choose between them when you take into account the apples vs. oranges pros and cons between them. I have a netbook I keep zipped up in the jacket of a dayplanner. It would probably do a great job of fulfilling his requirements, and do it anywhere he can carry a dayplanner!
With this relatively lowbrow solution, he can type whatever he wants into a computer at his place of employment (or wherever) and be completely protected from work related spyware, keyloggers, firewall issues, proxies, etc. If he really wanted to he could get a phone card for internet access (completely off the work network) but this is not necessary, just secure the netbook which is after all 100% his personal property.
Interesting comment. Adobe Photoshop for the Mac is close enough to the Win. version that books for CSx are not platform dependent but cover both in the same text. In what way is, say, CS5 PS for the Mac deficient vs. CS5 PS for the PC?
I'm not trying to be argumentative here, I'm genuinely curious.
... pay the 700,000 mortgage, it's more expensive then you'd like it to be to pick up ...
FTFY
To simulate a right click, tap with two fingers.
Much easier, but you may need to turn on the "tap using two fingers for secondary click" option in your trackpad properties..
Apple's still got specs for all their stuff on their site.
http://support.apple.com/specs/#g4%20500mhz
Now while this will tell you how much your tower uses, plugging in a kill-a-watt for a week or so will tell you how much your entire setup uses under real life load.
The first thing that went through my mind when I read the summary is that for $100 I can go buy a USB external notebook drive that holds in the area of 350Gigs. With the proper formatting it's universally readable and can easily hold 50 movies + a ton of music + a stupid number of documents. Why would they want to do this? Maybe they're worried about the environmental impact of shipping season long episodes on multiple plastic disks?
Hilarious!
You should consider performing your comedy routine in a live venue.
I remember seeing a comic in my college newspaper. Little boy has his tongue stuck to a lightpole. Other little boy's running up with an axe held up in the air. Third kid is shouting "Stop! Just because it'll work doesn't mean it's the right thing to do!"
You're not way off base, but I think you're coming at the issue from the wrong direction.
Prisoners are sent to prison to be "rehabilitated".
This sounds nice but really prison is a place of punishment. If you accept that this is about punishing someone for their crime, then it becomes relatively logical that a given defined crime will come with a given defined period of punishment. Punishment will of course be subject to certain upper and lower parameters which hopefully will be adjusted with the scope / severity of the crime in question.
Unfortunately, we seem to be looking at extending the punishment period for certain crimes indefinately, possibly resulting in a gross imbalance from the previously understood relationship between the severity of a crime and the term of the punishment.
haha...
http://xkcd.com/327/
If you don't follow XKCD religiously, you should!
Thank you for making my point.
There are socially defined "rules" by which we live. These rules are not set down in law and usually aren't even written anywhere but we all know you don't cut in/hold up a checkout line for groceries, examine your pubes at the gym or take your dog out to "crap in sandboxes" as you so eloquently put it. These are "rules" of behavior we have almost all agreed to and when followed they make living with your fellow man much more pleasant.
In the game it would appear that there is a concurrent set of rules about ingame behavior. Most people have gravitated from PVP to fighting against computer controlled characters.
This guy's tactic appears to be an exploit (abuse) of a mechanism put into the game to keep people from being forced to PVP. Not only is he cutting into line and holding people up, he's actually abusive to them afterwords. Twixt is the "in-your-way society ruiner" here. He's chosen to disregard the unwritten rules of the society he has joined in a very abrasive manner, then be astounded that his fellow players consider him in an unflattering light.
What in his actions makes you want to ally yourself with him? For that matter, if most people have chosen to play a certain way, what makes you (by your own admission, a non-player) qualified to dictate how the game is to be played and decry the people who don't see things the way you see them?
So we have a majority of players playing the game one way. Presumably they are doing this because they like to play the game that way (it's fun for them). This is the decision that has been made by most people of their free will. Now we have a very small minority who exploit game mechanics to kill other players (members of the majority) and then publicly heap abuse on them. For some reason the majority doesn't approve of this behavior.
Now if the two sides were not supposed to communicate, that option would have been made impossible (ala WOW) but it wasn't.
I guess what I'm getting at here is that the people who play the game are the ones who decide how the game is played. Both styles of gameplay have been left open by the designers for the players to decide. They would appear to have decided.
Well, maybe we can bring it a bit more in line. You go to the court with your basketball and see people standing around talking. You force them into playing a game with you using a rule exploit such that they instantly lose and are penalized for losing. You then mock them and publicly insult them to incite their ire (read the articles and associated posts of people who had direct experience, also how the game mechanics work). Repeat... repeat... repeat... Now you can stand amazed that for some reason everyone seems to think you are a jerk!
One thing to keep in mind is that in their eyes you are on par with the plumber. Nobody really wants to call the plumber or have him around, OTOH you really need one when the fecal matter hits the rotary air impeller. When they give you attitude they are probably angry / frustrated at their machine / server / the situation and not necessarily you specifically. If they're being really uptight when you walk in the door remind them that you've had the last 15 seconds to fix it and you're on their side.
Depending on the political situation you may be able to interject something into a company meeting explaining what's going on and get people to consider your side.
All in all, remember to keep calm and be sure this is really the right thing for you to be doing. Maybe it's time for you to make a change?
Let's think about this for a moment. Why do you work?
Maybe you like what you do and maybe it benefits the world but I'm willing to be that for a majority of us we work so we can eat, have a place to live etc. When I went through school kids did schoolwork (worked) because that's what you were supposed to do.
Now if you were supposed to work but only got a slap on the wrist (and a paycheck) for not doing so, what would you choose? Providing a real world reward for doing your work and doing it well does not seem that unreasonable to me.
Heck, we're teaching that to our 7 year old doing chores right now!
Hrm.... if you're on salary your "hourly pay" is largely a matter of conjecture. When confronted with the tradeoff of
a:) having a salaried employee work an extra few hours (employee's free time takes a hit)
or
b:) buying the product (someones budget takes a hit)
I have yet to see the manager who will opt with b. There's no need for a tradeoff here, they'll simply have you do both.
I was trying to illustrate the situation in a manner that was unencumbered by the emotional baggage the whole RIAA/pirate/IP thing has taken and pickles came to mind. I think most people who read the post got that. Maybe you should take another look. Listen for aircraft this time. ... a cop out.
Spin any straw men lately? Please don't take my words out of context. The word "forced" was followed by "to purchase". By this I meant if he wants to purchase the product he must do it in this manner. The option to buy just the individual song (the product he wants) is not on the table. A consumer wanting to pay a fair price for only the product they want is in my opinion completely reasonable.
Like it or not, the product is out there. Itâ(TM)s available for (mostly) free if someone wants to get it that way. Itâ(TM)s also available via the B&M style mindset you and most of the record companies seem to be stuck in. Most people who want a product would prefer to acquire it in an honest manner. Claiming that someone should be happy to pay too much for a product they donâ(TM)t want while spurning the alternative of just getting it for free is getting a bit carried away. To claim that we should ignore the situation (reality) as it stands and condemn them for getting what they want is plain silly. If you were a record company shill Iâ(TM)d even go so far as to claim that your condemnation is nothing more than
So you want some pickles. The only vendor of pickles you can find has decreed that you may have them, but you must also purchase a beef patty, lettuce, tomato, a bun, a side of fries and a soft drink. Yeah, maybe you're in the mood for lunch (and maybe you're not)and while technically you can buy your pickles this isn't really what you're being forced to purchase. He wants a single song at a fair price, not a $25 CD containing that song and others he's never heard of.
I did the same thing. Recently, I've replaced my 12" Lenovo with a 10" netbook for my primary device to read off of. At $400 (yeah, Lenovo again) it beats holy hell out of a Kindle / Sony ereader / whatever.
Funny you should mention that.
About four months ago I got a Lenovo X61 (2GHx, 3Gigs, 7200 RPM drive) tablet to the tune of about $2k. It came with Vista. Now I'd tried three times to run Vista on my desktop but went back to XP every time but I'd heard that with SP2 it worked much better. I figured I'd give it a shot (read: I was too cheap to buy the XP restore / downgrade disks)and besides they'd dropped the XP option as an OS choice.
Half the time I couldn't connect to wireless networks, and googling the error gets responses saying that I should only connect to Vista compatible routers! Wake up times ran about one minute and I was looking at about 6 minutes (yes I timed it) to come back up from a suspend. By comparison, my lowly 1.2 GHz Macbook will wake up and be usable in a couple seconds.
This is "user time". When I am called out to a client and I open my laptop then sit there for a minute humming to myself and not fixing their problem, I feel stupid. When I realize it's gone into suspend I open my laptop and have to "gather more information" or hide in the bathroom for a few minutes. Really! There's no excuse for this on a new computer. Restore / reinstall didn't help. Last week I shelled out 50+ dollars to jettison Vista Ultimate for its predecessor. I now couldn't be happier with the performance of this machine.
My point is that an OS needs to be superior to its predecessor from an end user perspective. It's not there for the sake of the computer it's there to facilitate the function of the guy sitting in front of it running programs. Looking at the speed and compatibility problems I ran into I just can't justify Vista for use in a business setting. Not on older hardware with 1 gig of ram, not on a brand new machine with 3. For business it needs to work as well or better than XP and THEN look pretty. I think they got that part backwards.
It doesn't make a lot of sense on the surface, but there can be a lot of power in being a "minority". For living, current proof of this check out what it takes to get into the Postal Service as a white male! I think it's really hard for people who have gotten used to the benefits that come with being a minority, even / especially if they're not, to let go. It's not about logic, it's about being able to discriminate or preach hate or demand recompense for something that happened to their great great great grandfather (from someone who didn't do it) or otherwise act in an outrageous manner with impunity. This is deemed acceptable because they're a "minority" or "oppressed". If they can get on that pedestal, nobody can call them on it as doing so would be political and social suicide. Anyone objecting becomes the evil oppressor incarnate.
Sorry for the rant, getting off soapbox now.
Isn't there some sort of process where the people you show your idea to Agree to Non-Disclosure of it?
At the risk of killing my karma, this may help illuminate that oblique reference.
The "Clone MAC Address" feature is there because some ISP's (Cox comes to mind) will grab the mac addy. of the first device you hook up and refuse to provide service to anything else. So when you plug your laptop straight in to check if they've turned up the line it works. Plug in your router and it's dead.
Tech support swears they don't do this, so you have two choices: call/hold/bitch at tech support till they reset your account (locking you into your current router's MAC so you start over if you get another router) or just clone the MAC and start moving packets.