If I had a dollar for every time my *&%&^$ Palm Pilot froze on me during a hotsync, I could buy a damn Pocket PC.
Even in the default configuration, a simple sync operation can crash the OS and crash it hard. I gave up on the notion of keeping the think updated. I just jot the changes down on a piece of paper so I can enter them on my computer at home. I've lost WAY too many phone numbers and address updates to a hotsync that went to bad I had to do a hard reset to recover from it.
Palm's slogan should be "How do you want your data mangled today?"
I've been advising my family and friends against Palm for ages, eve since I had chronic problems with my damn T2, and Palm tech support was useless. They dragged the tech issue on for weeks until my warranty had expired, and only THEN did they say I should send it in for service. Great, I'm going to spend over half the purchase price to get it serviced. Sure.
One of these days I need to get around replacing it with something more stable, like WinCE or pen and paper.
We could be looking at an ancient burial ground, where generations of "cursed" were buried. Then again, those with the defect cold have been religious figures, "Blessed by the gods" in some way, and thus buried in holy ground.
A few generations of an otherwise normal population choosing to bury their smaller dead in a specific locations is a likely explanation and expected given human religious tendencies.
It's all about appearance. Columbine and similar incidents have the be BLAMED om something, since most Americans can't take responsibility. The kids didn't become evil murderers on their own, the thinking goes, but something must have corrupted their sweet, innocent minds.
Video games are a technology the older generation can have trouble with, so it's easy to demonize.
Remember, Evil Presley was once considered a corrupting influence, and the hip waggle he used when dancing was censored.
The new is always feared. Just look at all the grief the automobile got when it first came out.
Hell, when I'm in my late 60's I'm sure there'll be something new on the horizon that's considered perfectly normal by the kids, but "Evil" and "corrupting" by my peers. I'll also wager that a similar outcry and burst of legal posturing will result.
Making a law as simple as "No M rated games may be sold to minors" would make it clear that there was already a rating system in place. If that were done, the lawmakers wouldn't look like marshals trying to reign in the rustlers in the old west, they'd just look like bureaucrats making an incremental change to a decent system that's already in place.
It's all about appearance, and the fact that there's already an ratings system in place is a political problem for them. They have to ignore it in order to look like they're doing something worth giving them another term.
We MUST water down all entertainment to protect the children!!
Won't anything think of the Children???
Personally, I'd favor a law that enforced the existing video game ratings, instead of the vague "You could make a bland football game illegal with this" law California passed.
On the other hand, if they made it illegal to sell a video game to a 15 year old that's been rated as "Mature" then I'd consider that far more reasonable. The ratings tend to be a good way of estimating a game's age appropriateness, but they need some enforcement.
Hell, even Hawking has never shaken up the ideas of science and physics to anything near the degree Einstein has.
How long has he been dead? And he's STILL stirring up trouble!
Personally, I think his statue in Washington DC needs to be bigger. He's done far more for this country and the world at large than most of the people with bigger statues. It's just not fair!
Given the fact that having burglary tools in your home is illegal, even if you've never even been suspected of a crime, it's probably safe to assume any RFID Killers would get a similar classification.
You wouldn't need to be carrying them around, transporting them or taking them into a store. Just having them in the back of your closet could land you in jail.
"No honest person would want such devices, only criminals with something to hide would want an RFID Killer. Even the NAME is threatening and criminal."
A backhoe took out Verizon's main cable into a few towns in Massachusetts. The reason this was an issue for us is it included the town that housed the hosting facility that had our servers. Our sites were down for most of a day.
One guy called up, demanding to know why out site was done, and he kept telling me to "Reboot the file sever" and "I don't care about your server. You don't need a server to have a web site. I have a web site and I don;t have a server."
Mind you, this jackass was a middle manager trying to take online courses, not an employee.
I went through the spiel that I'd been giving all the people who called up. The typical reply was along the lines of "SO it should be up tomorrow" or "Bad luck." A few people said "Don't you have another data center?"
This jackass said, "The Internet can't go DOWN," in the tone of voice normally used by high school students trying to humiliate someone with supposedly superior knowledge.
"Sir, I never said the whole Intern-"
I then heard him yelling to other people in his office, "The a**holes say the whole Internet's down. I can't believe they expect me to believe this kind of-"
Someone else took the phone and said to me, "The INTERNET isn't down, just your piss poor site."
"Sir, I never said the Internet was do-"
This new person yelled t the rest of his office, "They're changing their story."
Now I was pissed.
"Listen, I am NOT changing my story. The building that has our servers lost it's Internet connection. A cable was cut by a jackass laying cable. When they fix the cable, we will be back online. I never said the Internet was down."
"That's not what Bob said you said."
"In which case I question his listening skills and comprehension of technology." What the Hell, I was already job hunting.
Dead silence at the other end.
"Give me your manager."
"I AM the manger," I replied. The only person above me is the company's owner.
"Give me the owner."
"He left for the day when he found out our hosting center had lost it's Internet connection. I can send you to his voice mail if you like."
"Give me someone in sal-"
"They left too."
"Give me the owner' voice mail."
I did.
In the end, the owner had so many angry voice mail messages about the outage that he went through and deleted them.
He was very happy when I reminded him and the sales staff that we were still at 99.9% up time.
We are looking into this potential resolution to the current copyright piracy plague sweeping the globe.
At first glance, it does appear secure, but some of our internal managers are saying that it would be useless without some laws requiring people attend these establishments. Another faction recommends we instead push for a flat "Media Tax" on all citizens, and issue coupons for musical selections. This idea is gaining momentum.
A few managers have said the whole chain of thought is a bad idea. We've fired those managers.
Actually, they DO want to encrypt Radio Transmissions, or at least force hardware manufacturers to respect a "Broadcast Only" flag.
I'm just too lazy to hunt up the links, but it's been covered on slashdot.
I'm sure they'd push for digitally signed headphones if someone showed them a demo unit, and held up the "Headphone Splitter" they sell for the iPod (Y-Cable in white plastic) as a scary hacker "Copyright circumvention device."
So I guess this would make Microsoft SQL Server the Wal-Mart of Databases.
It's the one a lot of people go to because they can't be bothered to shop around.
(Please note, the above is intended as humor. I earn my living working with SQL Server, and happen to think it's a fine product, but there are a lot of products that use it because it's Microsoft and for no other reason.)
Of course, all this begs the question, is Oracle the Target or the Sears of Databases?
The Sears hardware and appliance lines make me suspect Oracle is the Sears, but Target is bigger than Sears, which would reflect Oracle's install base better.
We've been hearing about the approaching power of the web app since Java and Netscape first cozied up to each other.
It hasn't happened.
Let's be blunt, web apps are slow loading and clunky compared to the average locally installed application, and it's likely to remain that way. Even broadband won't resolve the issue. Actual bandwidth will have to get to 100 MegaBit before most users will consider a web app fast enough to use.
And even then we hit the old "Switch to OpenOffice" hurdle. Specifically, most users are not going to switch unless there's a good reason to do so. Unless the web apps are clearly better than whatever Microsoft is offering, they'll languish.
And the we need to face facts. Linux is on the server, and we need to compete in that market. I like my Linux desktop, and will be thrilled if iTunes is ever ported to Linux. Aside from that, even if Linux is ready for the desktop, inertia will keep it out of the market in any meaningful way.
Most users still see their computers like a stereo, not like a car requiring maintenance, and installing alternate operating systems is a niche activity, no matter how common it seems in this forum.
Microsoft must LOVE all the time and energy we're wasting on the Desktop, because they know Linux is not a serious threat there. Where are all the Linux companies making their money? SERVER installs.
The server market is where MS fears Linux, and where it has some advantages. Wasting time on the desktop when Linux needs to go after the enterprise, fortune 100 server is playing right into Microsoft's hands.
At my last job, I was the lone OSS user in a sea of technophobics. Kind of odd for an Internet based distance learning company, but we won't go there now.
The owner had a hard line that Microsoft was on top because they were the best, and anyone who said different was just plain stupid. "If it was worth anything, it would cost money" was a phrase I heard on the few occasions when I brought up OSS.
OSS started to cheap in when several members of the sales staff found their IE installs no longer functioned. They'd all installed the same bit of spyware, not knowing what it was, and the Network admin claimed the only way to get things running again was a complete reformat.
While their computers waited in the queue, I installed Firefox on all of them. The sales staff was very happy, especially when I showed them how tabbed browsing worked. One of the sales guys even switched to Firefox for good. I liked this, because it meant the web developer had to remove the javascript he'd put on the intranet that blocked non IE browsers. He was genuinely pissed to learn the site worked fine in Firefox.
I also found that downloading the IE installer files from Microsoft and running them locally would get IE running again, but that's not relevant.
Next came the corrupt Excel documents.
The sales staff somehow managed to corrupt Excel files to the point where they no longer opened in Excel. The entire computer would blue screen when they tried. As these spreadsheets tended to contain data for students that had to be added to the system, the files were critical, and it would look VERY bad if we had to go back to the client and ask for another copy. (i know, backups. The sales staff did their best to avoid them.)
So I had them e-mail me the corrupt documents. They opened fine in OpenOffice, so I would just save them back to Excel and mail them back.
A forward looking salesman found out I was going on vacation, and wanted to make sure someone else would be able to "fix the broken files" for them. Mind you, I'd been telling him what I was doing all along, but he'd steadfastly believed there was some kind of black magic involved.
I installed OpenOffice on his secretary's computer, and had him watch while I talked her through the steps necessary.
File -.> Open
File -> Save As
He was very happy, and they the sales staff spent the next hour installing Open Office on all their machines. They didn't USE if very often, but it worked perfectly when they did need it.
And then I left for another job, just before the new corporate owner fired everyone in the company. My timing was damn near perfect.
Slashdot Mirror
What is Palm's strategy with regards to operating systems?
Slap together whatever can, put it in a cheap, fragile shell, add some new graphics so it looks new and snazzy, and send it to production.
If I had a dollar for every time my *&%&^$ Palm Pilot froze on me during a hotsync, I could buy a damn Pocket PC.
Even in the default configuration, a simple sync operation can crash the OS and crash it hard. I gave up on the notion of keeping the think updated. I just jot the changes down on a piece of paper so I can enter them on my computer at home. I've lost WAY too many phone numbers and address updates to a hotsync that went to bad I had to do a hard reset to recover from it.
Palm's slogan should be "How do you want your data mangled today?"
I've been advising my family and friends against Palm for ages, eve since I had chronic problems with my damn T2, and Palm tech support was useless. They dragged the tech issue on for weeks until my warranty had expired, and only THEN did they say I should send it in for service. Great, I'm going to spend over half the purchase price to get it serviced. Sure.
One of these days I need to get around replacing it with something more stable, like WinCE or pen and paper.
We could be looking at an ancient burial ground, where generations of "cursed" were buried. Then again, those with the defect cold have been religious figures, "Blessed by the gods" in some way, and thus buried in holy ground.
A few generations of an otherwise normal population choosing to bury their smaller dead in a specific locations is a likely explanation and expected given human religious tendencies.
There are no such stats.
It's all about appearance. Columbine and similar incidents have the be BLAMED om something, since most Americans can't take responsibility. The kids didn't become evil murderers on their own, the thinking goes, but something must have corrupted their sweet, innocent minds.
Video games are a technology the older generation can have trouble with, so it's easy to demonize.
Remember, Evil Presley was once considered a corrupting influence, and the hip waggle he used when dancing was censored.
The new is always feared. Just look at all the grief the automobile got when it first came out.
Hell, when I'm in my late 60's I'm sure there'll be something new on the horizon that's considered perfectly normal by the kids, but "Evil" and "corrupting" by my peers. I'll also wager that a similar outcry and burst of legal posturing will result.
I just figured it out.
Making a law as simple as "No M rated games may be sold to minors" would make it clear that there was already a rating system in place. If that were done, the lawmakers wouldn't look like marshals trying to reign in the rustlers in the old west, they'd just look like bureaucrats making an incremental change to a decent system that's already in place.
It's all about appearance, and the fact that there's already an ratings system in place is a political problem for them. They have to ignore it in order to look like they're doing something worth giving them another term.
We MUST water down all entertainment to protect the children!!
Won't anything think of the Children???
Personally, I'd favor a law that enforced the existing video game ratings, instead of the vague "You could make a bland football game illegal with this" law California passed.
On the other hand, if they made it illegal to sell a video game to a 15 year old that's been rated as "Mature" then I'd consider that far more reasonable. The ratings tend to be a good way of estimating a game's age appropriateness, but they need some enforcement.
The "How long has he been dead" comment referred to Einstein, not Hawking.
How many of us have done as much?
Hell, even Hawking has never shaken up the ideas of science and physics to anything near the degree Einstein has.
How long has he been dead? And he's STILL stirring up trouble!
Personally, I think his statue in Washington DC needs to be bigger. He's done far more for this country and the world at large than most of the people with bigger statues. It's just not fair!
Given the fact that having burglary tools in your home is illegal, even if you've never even been suspected of a crime, it's probably safe to assume any RFID Killers would get a similar classification.
You wouldn't need to be carrying them around, transporting them or taking them into a store. Just having them in the back of your closet could land you in jail.
"No honest person would want such devices, only criminals with something to hide would want an RFID Killer. Even the NAME is threatening and criminal."
Since RFID tags are so useful to corporations, I see any "RFID Killer" being classified as illegal as soon as it hiss the market.
After all, it could be used to steal items from a store, or interfere with the RFID chips that people DON'T want deactivated!!!
It'll be classified as a burglary tool or something worse in short order, if there aren't aspects of such a devise that aren't already illegal.
Damn, and me wihtout mod points.
:)
You need some "+x Funny" for that one.
I guess Google knows something about Harvard that I don't.
A backhoe took out Verizon's main cable into a few towns in Massachusetts. The reason this was an issue for us is it included the town that housed the hosting facility that had our servers. Our sites were down for most of a day.
One guy called up, demanding to know why out site was done, and he kept telling me to "Reboot the file sever" and "I don't care about your server. You don't need a server to have a web site. I have a web site and I don;t have a server."
Mind you, this jackass was a middle manager trying to take online courses, not an employee.
I went through the spiel that I'd been giving all the people who called up. The typical reply was along the lines of "SO it should be up tomorrow" or "Bad luck." A few people said "Don't you have another data center?"
This jackass said, "The Internet can't go DOWN," in the tone of voice normally used by high school students trying to humiliate someone with supposedly superior knowledge.
"Sir, I never said the whole Intern-"
I then heard him yelling to other people in his office, "The a**holes say the whole Internet's down. I can't believe they expect me to believe this kind of-"
Someone else took the phone and said to me, "The INTERNET isn't down, just your piss poor site."
"Sir, I never said the Internet was do-"
This new person yelled t the rest of his office, "They're changing their story."
Now I was pissed.
"Listen, I am NOT changing my story. The building that has our servers lost it's Internet connection. A cable was cut by a jackass laying cable. When they fix the cable, we will be back online. I never said the Internet was down."
"That's not what Bob said you said."
"In which case I question his listening skills and comprehension of technology." What the Hell, I was already job hunting.
Dead silence at the other end.
"Give me your manager."
"I AM the manger," I replied. The only person above me is the company's owner.
"Give me the owner."
"He left for the day when he found out our hosting center had lost it's Internet connection. I can send you to his voice mail if you like."
"Give me someone in sal-"
"They left too."
"Give me the owner' voice mail."
I did.
In the end, the owner had so many angry voice mail messages about the outage that he went through and deleted them.
He was very happy when I reminded him and the sales staff that we were still at 99.9% up time.
Damn, I wish this feature had been around when I was single.
Searches like this would have been SO much easier.
Planning a night out with the sales staff would have been a snap.
Now all they need is a button to plot a course from your home, to the chain of clubs for the night on the town.
Of course if this one were to actually work, dating in my "Sowing my Wild Oats" days would have been just as easy.
Again, the ability to map a course would be useful.
Google, all you need to be a 21st century digital player.
I work for the RIAA
Thank you for your recommendation.
We are looking into this potential resolution to the current copyright piracy plague sweeping the globe.
At first glance, it does appear secure, but some of our internal managers are saying that it would be useless without some laws requiring people attend these establishments. Another faction recommends we instead push for a flat "Media Tax" on all citizens, and issue coupons for musical selections. This idea is gaining momentum.
A few managers have said the whole chain of thought is a bad idea. We've fired those managers.
Actually, they DO want to encrypt Radio Transmissions, or at least force hardware manufacturers to respect a "Broadcast Only" flag.
I'm just too lazy to hunt up the links, but it's been covered on slashdot.
I'm sure they'd push for digitally signed headphones if someone showed them a demo unit, and held up the "Headphone Splitter" they sell for the iPod (Y-Cable in white plastic) as a scary hacker "Copyright circumvention device."
So I guess this would make Microsoft SQL Server the Wal-Mart of Databases.
It's the one a lot of people go to because they can't be bothered to shop around.
(Please note, the above is intended as humor. I earn my living working with SQL Server, and happen to think it's a fine product, but there are a lot of products that use it because it's Microsoft and for no other reason.)
Of course, all this begs the question, is Oracle the Target or the Sears of Databases?
The Sears hardware and appliance lines make me suspect Oracle is the Sears, but Target is bigger than Sears, which would reflect Oracle's install base better.
I was going for a +1 funny...
Not +2 or anything. The joke wasn't very good.
Great, just what the world needs. MORE web sites for people looking to cheat on their significant others.
Apple lawsuit over the leaked information in 5... 4... 3...
Not for long...
I used to listen to music through iRate quite a bit...
We've been hearing about the approaching power of the web app since Java and Netscape first cozied up to each other.
It hasn't happened.
Let's be blunt, web apps are slow loading and clunky compared to the average locally installed application, and it's likely to remain that way. Even broadband won't resolve the issue. Actual bandwidth will have to get to 100 MegaBit before most users will consider a web app fast enough to use.
And even then we hit the old "Switch to OpenOffice" hurdle. Specifically, most users are not going to switch unless there's a good reason to do so. Unless the web apps are clearly better than whatever Microsoft is offering, they'll languish.
And the we need to face facts. Linux is on the server, and we need to compete in that market. I like my Linux desktop, and will be thrilled if iTunes is ever ported to Linux. Aside from that, even if Linux is ready for the desktop, inertia will keep it out of the market in any meaningful way.
Most users still see their computers like a stereo, not like a car requiring maintenance, and installing alternate operating systems is a niche activity, no matter how common it seems in this forum.
Microsoft must LOVE all the time and energy we're wasting on the Desktop, because they know Linux is not a serious threat there. Where are all the Linux companies making their money? SERVER installs.
The server market is where MS fears Linux, and where it has some advantages. Wasting time on the desktop when Linux needs to go after the enterprise, fortune 100 server is playing right into Microsoft's hands.
She probalby got confused by the fact that it wasn't under the "View" menu.
At my last job, I was the lone OSS user in a sea of technophobics. Kind of odd for an Internet based distance learning company, but we won't go there now.
The owner had a hard line that Microsoft was on top because they were the best, and anyone who said different was just plain stupid. "If it was worth anything, it would cost money" was a phrase I heard on the few occasions when I brought up OSS.
OSS started to cheap in when several members of the sales staff found their IE installs no longer functioned. They'd all installed the same bit of spyware, not knowing what it was, and the Network admin claimed the only way to get things running again was a complete reformat.
While their computers waited in the queue, I installed Firefox on all of them. The sales staff was very happy, especially when I showed them how tabbed browsing worked. One of the sales guys even switched to Firefox for good. I liked this, because it meant the web developer had to remove the javascript he'd put on the intranet that blocked non IE browsers. He was genuinely pissed to learn the site worked fine in Firefox.
I also found that downloading the IE installer files from Microsoft and running them locally would get IE running again, but that's not relevant.
Next came the corrupt Excel documents.
The sales staff somehow managed to corrupt Excel files to the point where they no longer opened in Excel. The entire computer would blue screen when they tried. As these spreadsheets tended to contain data for students that had to be added to the system, the files were critical, and it would look VERY bad if we had to go back to the client and ask for another copy. (i know, backups. The sales staff did their best to avoid them.)
So I had them e-mail me the corrupt documents. They opened fine in OpenOffice, so I would just save them back to Excel and mail them back.
A forward looking salesman found out I was going on vacation, and wanted to make sure someone else would be able to "fix the broken files" for them. Mind you, I'd been telling him what I was doing all along, but he'd steadfastly believed there was some kind of black magic involved.
I installed OpenOffice on his secretary's computer, and had him watch while I talked her through the steps necessary.
File -.> Open
File -> Save As
He was very happy, and they the sales staff spent the next hour installing Open Office on all their machines. They didn't USE if very often, but it worked perfectly when they did need it.
And then I left for another job, just before the new corporate owner fired everyone in the company. My timing was damn near perfect.