Back in the heydays of the mid-nineties, I started hanging out in chat rooms. The quick conversations in those places did what a year of typing classes failed to do - taught me to type without looking at the keyboard. My fingers may not be on the exact keys, and I get thrown off on non-Microsoft standard keyboards (I had to get rid of an HP laptop that had media keys on the left side), but I can type around 70 WPM with a 95% accuracy rate. All thanks to AOL.
Aye, for our biggest client, we ghosted over Win XP systems for years. We had some issues getting it to work with Windows 7 - the client doesn't have a Windows 7 volume license yet, so we've been having to do them one at a time. Win7 doesn't like being ghosted and freaks out the second it senses that its origin hardware is not the same as its destination hardware. Fortunately, we standardized that client on HP 6000s a few months ago, so all new machines can be ghosted without any problems. But for the older machines, especially the non-6000 Win7 systems, we've got to do it the hard way. All the printers and stuff have to wait until the system is deployed, since they have a ton of funky scanners and printers and we don't know which ones they've got til we get it out there.
My office charges for "face time" - time spent actually interacting with a machine. So a complete restore (which we frequently do since we work almost exclusively on business machines and the user's critical stuff is, in theory, stored on the server) that takes us 4-6 hours from top to bottom will probably only be billed for an hour or two, and most of that is going to be spent reinstalling their apps. The 3 hours that it sat there with the "HP is installing your software - please wait" and I worked on another project isn't charged at all.
Am I qualified to be a PC technician? I have no certs (yet) and I majored in English. But I'm amazingly good at figuring things out, and I've been tinkering with computers for over a decade. I've met people with half a dozen certs behind their names that know a fraction of what I do. If nothing else, I can always do my own PC repairs and avoid any of these scams.
Or it could be like the first FFXI Mog Lottery, in which all "random" numbers selected for PS2 users followed the pattern "even odd even odd even" meaning it was impossible for anyone on PS2 to win anything, since the (truly random) winning numbers all broke that pattern somehow.
We manage almost a thousand desktops and forty servers. I'd be leery of switching any of our users to Chrome because of the loss of top down control. Active Directory for logins, etc.
Wifi was working just great in Tuscaloosa, AL until the tornadoes hit. At that point, they had bigger problems. It's still working fine in NE Georgia where I live, when 100F+ temperatures are the norm in the summer. In fact, whenever our signal degraded, it was because a squirrel had chewed through an outside line, not because it was too hot or humid. I think TFA is missing the elephant in the room here.
I use a $20 Microsoft Comfort Curve. It is less weird for a touch typer than the true ergo keyboards, and is by leaps and bounds the best keyboard I've ever used. I love the huge space bar and tiny caps lock keys, too.
I damaged my right wrist with a shopping cart once (don't ask.) Sice then, I tend to have issues with RSI in that wrist from the permanently damaged ligaments. If I use the mouse for an extended period of time, then it hurts. An NSAID like aleve and a wrist brace for a few days and it's fine. But some days it's so bad I need to switch to the left hand with my mouse.
Prior to the advent of the communication age, the only way to disseminate information was for other people to tell you that information. Now it's people telling you that information through gadgets. I don't think Facebook is significantly different from gossiping at the village well or the office water cooler.
The effects of gravity are at macro scales, not quantum scales. From what I understand, the observer effect doesn't really kick in until you start talking about stuff smaller than atoms. The universe is a bit more well-behaved at scale sizes larger than an atom, where chemistry and classical physics kick in. Our other end of non-understanding doesn't start until you get to the very macro, all the dark matter and dark energy floating around out there that no one really knows anything about.
Most of the depression in workers has less to do with their employment conditions and more to do with dying hopes and dreams. The factory workers probably didn't get a college scholarship. They came from the countryside with great plans to earn enough money to go to college on their own, to have money to send home to their families, and to live a nice modern life in the city. Instead they find themselves in a factory job with incredibly strict standards, making just enough money to survive in the city (which costs more to live in already) with no money for college OR to send home to mom and dad. It is this crushing reality that causes depression, not necessarily the 12 hour days (which many workers in the US also endure.)
They also make HP stuff. As to why Apple gets trumpeted out, it's because the Apple crowd also tends to be more environmentally conscious as a general rule. Corporate America, which runs on the other products, doesn't give a shit about the treatment of workers overseas, as we well know. But Apple's user base is primarily consumer. You can bet many an Apple user diligently recycles, drives a hybrid car, and eats organic vegetables. And yet they allow Apple to make their products in China and STILL charge them a premium for the brand name.
Are doing good work by throwing off the Feds. Not that my fake FB accounts do anything wrong; they're a small vibrant community of people I imagine live in the empty lots in my neighborhood. I call them The Alphabets. At worst, the majority of them are suspiciously Obama fans in the middle of a very red southern county.
That never works in most warranties, let alone product recalls. Back when I did cell phone insurance, the wording only provided that you'd get "a like or comparable model when available." That seems to be the same wording used in the settlement this time. For cell phones, it did not mean that your $300 fancy phone of 3 years ago would get replaced with a $300 smart phone of today. It meant that the insurance would give you a new or used phone of today that had the same features, or similar features, to your 3 year old phone. Chances are, unless you had a Blackberry, that'd be a $50 Samsung feature phone. I agree that the people in the TFA are getting the short end of the stick, but I'm not sure that they're going to win anything better on appeal. This assumes, of course, that the new Compaq laptops have an nVidia chip in them at all - which they just might not. They have onboard Intel graphics chipsets and no discrete graphics. The lawyers can definitely argue that nVidia is NOT replacing it with a like or comparable model, since it might not even contain the thing that was broken in the first place.
The Auto-Airbrush application will take your image and in real time smooth out blemishes, do your makeup or shave your stubble (depending on the gender setting you choose), and fix your hair (or even apply a toupee or wig if you like.) By guaranteeing that the users of Google Talk for Android will look nice on camera, or at the very least, like actual human beings, Google will get a much needed leg-up on Apple's FaceTime, which is underutilized because no one wants to get cleaned up just to talk on the phone.
Our biggest client has a habit of never telling us when or how many people they are hiring, so we've gotten in the habit of having 4 systems for them on hand, ready to go, at any given time. Then of course they decided to hire six people all within the space of two weeks... Two unlucky people will be stuck with 6 year old laptops til their new PCs come in.
- then I'll be impressed. Currently I sit at 3 days with very heavy usage, and 5-6 days with low to moderate usage. If this sort of mult-core stuff breaks the all important one week barrier, then it'll be a welcomed technology.
The way it was done at my uni was that the lab for the class was its own credit hour, and was charged 1 credit hour's worth of tuition (or sometimes two for very lab intensive classes.) So students had to pay more for those classes, but they also got extra credit for them, literally. For example, a calculus class granted you 3 credit hours, and the lab for it was 1 credit hour. The cost of the class was 4 credit hours worth of tuition, but you also got 4 credit hours toward your overall graduation requirement of 120 hours. Some of the agricultural classes had 3 credit hour lecture classes with 2 credit hour labs, as you were expected to be out on the farm for a few hours each week. So again, you paid more up front for that class and you could not skip out on the lab for it since they were tied together, but the university returned the same to you in value. No classes in the English department were ever more than 3 credit hours, as none of them had separate lab requirements.
I had a few choices for my "race and ethnity" core requirement at my university - and actually got a 1-2 combo punch by taking "Bible in the Black Church" and getting my multi-cultural core requirement knocked out at the same time as my religion/philosophy core requirement. That said, it was one of the most difficult classes I ever took in my life, with tons of reading, writing, and memorization. I spent three hours in the library every day for that class alone. Compared to that, some of my STEM core classes were a breeze. Really though, the issue is that everyone can benefit from the core classes, which is why they are required regardless of major. Universities are not technical schools, and they want to produce high quality graduates with a broad underlying level of cultural understanding, not robots that are living calculators or communications majors who think Africa is a country.
But most English classes can be taught outside in a sunny courtyard amidst the trees and singing birds*, and we'll probably actually have a better class in that environment than if we had been stuck inside a dirty, windowless basement room. When it rains, we can hit the campus coffee shop for round table discussions. Frees up a classroom, meaning the only cost to the university is the course slot for the professor or grad assistant and their office space. STEM classes don't have that option - you need a lab, expensive equipment, and a blackboard to explain long functions visually. (*20th Century Brit Lit was taught in exactly this matter at my university, and we loved it.)
Do you need a specialized degree? No. Do you need a specialized skill set? Absolutely. Obtaining a specialized degree - or even a general one that requires a higher level of reading comprehension than average - is one means to achieve that skill set, and if more universities adopt different tuition rates based on degree, it's going to become one of the cheaper ways to obtain that skill set. Unfortunately, I have met some very intelligent people who are technically clueless. Surgeons who can't figure out how to send an email. Office managers who don't know what a USB cable is. And even fellow IT techs that gloss over critical instructions and end up bunking things up.
You'd be amazed what a great background a technical writing degree is for IT. If it's got an instruction manual, I can run it. If it doesn't have an instruction manual and I figure out how to run it, I can write an instruction manual for others to use it. This is a valuable skill and I've become a vital part of my office because it's not something the rest of the techies know how to do, let alone enjoy.
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Back in the heydays of the mid-nineties, I started hanging out in chat rooms. The quick conversations in those places did what a year of typing classes failed to do - taught me to type without looking at the keyboard. My fingers may not be on the exact keys, and I get thrown off on non-Microsoft standard keyboards (I had to get rid of an HP laptop that had media keys on the left side), but I can type around 70 WPM with a 95% accuracy rate. All thanks to AOL.
Aye, for our biggest client, we ghosted over Win XP systems for years. We had some issues getting it to work with Windows 7 - the client doesn't have a Windows 7 volume license yet, so we've been having to do them one at a time. Win7 doesn't like being ghosted and freaks out the second it senses that its origin hardware is not the same as its destination hardware. Fortunately, we standardized that client on HP 6000s a few months ago, so all new machines can be ghosted without any problems. But for the older machines, especially the non-6000 Win7 systems, we've got to do it the hard way. All the printers and stuff have to wait until the system is deployed, since they have a ton of funky scanners and printers and we don't know which ones they've got til we get it out there.
My office charges for "face time" - time spent actually interacting with a machine. So a complete restore (which we frequently do since we work almost exclusively on business machines and the user's critical stuff is, in theory, stored on the server) that takes us 4-6 hours from top to bottom will probably only be billed for an hour or two, and most of that is going to be spent reinstalling their apps. The 3 hours that it sat there with the "HP is installing your software - please wait" and I worked on another project isn't charged at all.
Am I qualified to be a PC technician? I have no certs (yet) and I majored in English. But I'm amazingly good at figuring things out, and I've been tinkering with computers for over a decade. I've met people with half a dozen certs behind their names that know a fraction of what I do. If nothing else, I can always do my own PC repairs and avoid any of these scams.
Or it could be like the first FFXI Mog Lottery, in which all "random" numbers selected for PS2 users followed the pattern "even odd even odd even" meaning it was impossible for anyone on PS2 to win anything, since the (truly random) winning numbers all broke that pattern somehow.
We manage almost a thousand desktops and forty servers. I'd be leery of switching any of our users to Chrome because of the loss of top down control. Active Directory for logins, etc.
He said he does it intentionally to maintain a creative and highly diverse staff.
Wifi was working just great in Tuscaloosa, AL until the tornadoes hit. At that point, they had bigger problems. It's still working fine in NE Georgia where I live, when 100F+ temperatures are the norm in the summer. In fact, whenever our signal degraded, it was because a squirrel had chewed through an outside line, not because it was too hot or humid. I think TFA is missing the elephant in the room here.
I use a $20 Microsoft Comfort Curve. It is less weird for a touch typer than the true ergo keyboards, and is by leaps and bounds the best keyboard I've ever used. I love the huge space bar and tiny caps lock keys, too.
I damaged my right wrist with a shopping cart once (don't ask.) Sice then, I tend to have issues with RSI in that wrist from the permanently damaged ligaments. If I use the mouse for an extended period of time, then it hurts. An NSAID like aleve and a wrist brace for a few days and it's fine. But some days it's so bad I need to switch to the left hand with my mouse.
Yeah, but it keeps tech support in a job.
Prior to the advent of the communication age, the only way to disseminate information was for other people to tell you that information. Now it's people telling you that information through gadgets. I don't think Facebook is significantly different from gossiping at the village well or the office water cooler.
The effects of gravity are at macro scales, not quantum scales. From what I understand, the observer effect doesn't really kick in until you start talking about stuff smaller than atoms. The universe is a bit more well-behaved at scale sizes larger than an atom, where chemistry and classical physics kick in. Our other end of non-understanding doesn't start until you get to the very macro, all the dark matter and dark energy floating around out there that no one really knows anything about.
Most of the depression in workers has less to do with their employment conditions and more to do with dying hopes and dreams. The factory workers probably didn't get a college scholarship. They came from the countryside with great plans to earn enough money to go to college on their own, to have money to send home to their families, and to live a nice modern life in the city. Instead they find themselves in a factory job with incredibly strict standards, making just enough money to survive in the city (which costs more to live in already) with no money for college OR to send home to mom and dad. It is this crushing reality that causes depression, not necessarily the 12 hour days (which many workers in the US also endure.)
They also make HP stuff. As to why Apple gets trumpeted out, it's because the Apple crowd also tends to be more environmentally conscious as a general rule. Corporate America, which runs on the other products, doesn't give a shit about the treatment of workers overseas, as we well know. But Apple's user base is primarily consumer. You can bet many an Apple user diligently recycles, drives a hybrid car, and eats organic vegetables. And yet they allow Apple to make their products in China and STILL charge them a premium for the brand name.
Are doing good work by throwing off the Feds. Not that my fake FB accounts do anything wrong; they're a small vibrant community of people I imagine live in the empty lots in my neighborhood. I call them The Alphabets. At worst, the majority of them are suspiciously Obama fans in the middle of a very red southern county.
That never works in most warranties, let alone product recalls. Back when I did cell phone insurance, the wording only provided that you'd get "a like or comparable model when available." That seems to be the same wording used in the settlement this time. For cell phones, it did not mean that your $300 fancy phone of 3 years ago would get replaced with a $300 smart phone of today. It meant that the insurance would give you a new or used phone of today that had the same features, or similar features, to your 3 year old phone. Chances are, unless you had a Blackberry, that'd be a $50 Samsung feature phone. I agree that the people in the TFA are getting the short end of the stick, but I'm not sure that they're going to win anything better on appeal. This assumes, of course, that the new Compaq laptops have an nVidia chip in them at all - which they just might not. They have onboard Intel graphics chipsets and no discrete graphics. The lawyers can definitely argue that nVidia is NOT replacing it with a like or comparable model, since it might not even contain the thing that was broken in the first place.
Yes, they are still branded as HP's low-end laptops. You can find them in any Office Depot, usually under $400.
The Auto-Airbrush application will take your image and in real time smooth out blemishes, do your makeup or shave your stubble (depending on the gender setting you choose), and fix your hair (or even apply a toupee or wig if you like.) By guaranteeing that the users of Google Talk for Android will look nice on camera, or at the very least, like actual human beings, Google will get a much needed leg-up on Apple's FaceTime, which is underutilized because no one wants to get cleaned up just to talk on the phone.
Our biggest client has a habit of never telling us when or how many people they are hiring, so we've gotten in the habit of having 4 systems for them on hand, ready to go, at any given time. Then of course they decided to hire six people all within the space of two weeks... Two unlucky people will be stuck with 6 year old laptops til their new PCs come in.
- then I'll be impressed. Currently I sit at 3 days with very heavy usage, and 5-6 days with low to moderate usage. If this sort of mult-core stuff breaks the all important one week barrier, then it'll be a welcomed technology.
The way it was done at my uni was that the lab for the class was its own credit hour, and was charged 1 credit hour's worth of tuition (or sometimes two for very lab intensive classes.) So students had to pay more for those classes, but they also got extra credit for them, literally. For example, a calculus class granted you 3 credit hours, and the lab for it was 1 credit hour. The cost of the class was 4 credit hours worth of tuition, but you also got 4 credit hours toward your overall graduation requirement of 120 hours. Some of the agricultural classes had 3 credit hour lecture classes with 2 credit hour labs, as you were expected to be out on the farm for a few hours each week. So again, you paid more up front for that class and you could not skip out on the lab for it since they were tied together, but the university returned the same to you in value. No classes in the English department were ever more than 3 credit hours, as none of them had separate lab requirements.
I had a few choices for my "race and ethnity" core requirement at my university - and actually got a 1-2 combo punch by taking "Bible in the Black Church" and getting my multi-cultural core requirement knocked out at the same time as my religion/philosophy core requirement. That said, it was one of the most difficult classes I ever took in my life, with tons of reading, writing, and memorization. I spent three hours in the library every day for that class alone. Compared to that, some of my STEM core classes were a breeze. Really though, the issue is that everyone can benefit from the core classes, which is why they are required regardless of major. Universities are not technical schools, and they want to produce high quality graduates with a broad underlying level of cultural understanding, not robots that are living calculators or communications majors who think Africa is a country.
But most English classes can be taught outside in a sunny courtyard amidst the trees and singing birds*, and we'll probably actually have a better class in that environment than if we had been stuck inside a dirty, windowless basement room. When it rains, we can hit the campus coffee shop for round table discussions. Frees up a classroom, meaning the only cost to the university is the course slot for the professor or grad assistant and their office space. STEM classes don't have that option - you need a lab, expensive equipment, and a blackboard to explain long functions visually. (*20th Century Brit Lit was taught in exactly this matter at my university, and we loved it.)
Do you need a specialized degree? No. Do you need a specialized skill set? Absolutely. Obtaining a specialized degree - or even a general one that requires a higher level of reading comprehension than average - is one means to achieve that skill set, and if more universities adopt different tuition rates based on degree, it's going to become one of the cheaper ways to obtain that skill set. Unfortunately, I have met some very intelligent people who are technically clueless. Surgeons who can't figure out how to send an email. Office managers who don't know what a USB cable is. And even fellow IT techs that gloss over critical instructions and end up bunking things up.
You'd be amazed what a great background a technical writing degree is for IT. If it's got an instruction manual, I can run it. If it doesn't have an instruction manual and I figure out how to run it, I can write an instruction manual for others to use it. This is a valuable skill and I've become a vital part of my office because it's not something the rest of the techies know how to do, let alone enjoy.