I recently (~2 weeks ago) bought the vonage wifi phone - a little thingy that looks like a cell phone but is actually a vonage phone that works on a wifi network. I bought it because I decided I was spending too much on my cell phone plan and still having to worry about running out of minutes, so I dropped to a cheaper cell phone plan and for the cost difference I got a vonage plan that is unlimited. No more worries.
I had low expectations for the physical form of the wifi phone. I knew it was a little ugly, and I guessed (without paying attention to measurements) that it would probably be bulky. Actually it's a tiny little thing, about 2/3 the size of my Nokia cell phone. It is still ugly though, but its hard to tell that with either the phone in my pocket or the ugly side pressed to my ear.
I had low expectations for the sound quality of the wifi phone. It not only exceeds my expectations, it actually sounds clearer than almost any other phone I've used, and people I talk to tell me I'm clear as a bell too. The downside is that on very rare occasions (once so far at home, once in the office) a burst of really excessive traffic on my local network can munge my call quality and then I have to restart the phone to get things back to normal. But, I choose to live with that for the price. I recognize that a lot of people would get upset about it in comparison to their POTS phone, but I'm comparing it to my cell phone where these things happen occasionally.
I had read before buying the phone that its UI sucks, which is true. No big deal, it's just a phone. More of a problem is that it came pre-configured to show me UI in English but only allow me to enter text in French. (If I hadn't already known Vonage is in NJ, I'd have guessed Montreal.) Fortunately the manual was helpful about that, but a non-technical user would have had real problems.
There is a slight delay on the line induced by the VOIP process, which is to be expected. It's not nearly as bad as, say, Skype, or an old international call. I only actually noticed it after having the phone for a week and a half or so and talking on it extensively.
I love that Vonage will (since I configured it to on their easy web site) deliver my voice mails to my email. I've always been terrible about checking my voice mail but great about checking my email: now I can check my voice mail with the convenience of email, and I'm much happier. I know they're not the only voice mail service with email delivery, but damn, it's a nice bonus to a service I was going to have anyway.
I was able to adjust the forwarding on my cell phone so that when I turn it off, my calls go to my Vonage phone. Vonage has nothing to do with that, but it does make the whole thing much easier for me. I haven't had to tell anyone my Vonage number, and people don't even realize when they call my cell phone that they may be getting my Vonage phone. It also lets me use only the Vonage voice mail, instead of the hideous voice mail my cell service provides.
Overall I'm very happy with the service. I'm sorry to hear they're a pain in the ass to departing customers, I think that's rude, but fortunately I'm not planning on leaving them any time soon.
There's nothing wrong with dumping a customer, but the correct way to do it is to 1) Be truthful with them, and 2) If possible, refer them to another professional who can help them.
The client can take it much better if what you have to tell them is "I'm very sorry but for personal reasons I'm not able to take care of your needs at this time. I've selected someone who can help you in my place, let me give you their name and number..."
It's also a good opportunity to throw a colleague some work. A friend gave me one of those clients he didn't feel he had time to deal with, at a time when I needed the work. It helped me a lot and I was grateful. Perhaps this incident can lead to some good for someone.
and uses technology that is reasonably available, technologically feasible, and economically reasonable to prevent the making of copies or phonorecords embodying the transmission in whole or in part
There is no such technology. Nothing you can do to the software can prevent me from grabbing the analog audio out of my computer and recording it if I really want to. Even if you build the DRM right into the hardware, ultimately the audio gets decrypted somewhere and goes to a speaker, which has two electrical contacts on it, and I can tap directly onto those contacts and record it. Even if you build the DRM into the speaker, I can take the speaker apart and find those contacts and do it. As long as the physical playback device is in my physical control, nothing anyone can do can forcibly prevent me from recording the output if I wanted to.
Basically, it says you have to use this fantasy technology if it is "reasonably available, technologically feasible" and I say that any competent technician will tell you it's neither. This is like passing a law requiring that it may not rain on wednesdays: it's meaningless.
It's not like this is anything new. I was asked to costume "Star Wars: The Opera" years ago (I declined, too busy) by a friend who sang the part of Obiwan.
Ok, let's compare. Apple is now selling full episodes of 1 hour TV shows at $2 each, at a reduced resolution. That establishes my price point for 1 hour of VCD quality video delivered via download at $2. Therefore, for a two hour movie at that video quality, I wouldn't be willing to pay more than $4.
Increase the resolution to full DVD quality, and I'd be willing to pay about $8, which is twice the current hourly rate of the iTunes store... but is somewhat less than the average price of a DVD (I usually pay $12 to $17 for a DVD, sometimes a couple dollars more or less), because I'm not getting the packaging, physical disc, etc, and they're not paying for the shipping, distribution, etc... and I have to put up with a long download for a large video file, and pay for media to back it up.
Once you hit the price of $10 for a movie download, I wouldn't buy because that's what I pay for a DVD on sale anyway.
And, we haven't discussed the extras I usually get on a DVD... I'm certainly not going to pay as much for a download without the extras as I would for a DVD with them, but if they sold the download for less and offered the extras as separate purchases, I would buy some of them sometimes.
I almost hate to say it but... unlike what he's doing to Star Wars, I think Lucas actually really improved THX-1138 with his recent revision of it. It's a much richer film now. It looks better, it feels more real. It doesn't feel like he broke it, more like he fluffed up what was already there and gave it more reality. I was expecting to hate it, and was very pleasantly surprised.
My mother got a new PC about Feb last year, it had XP installed on it (not by me) and since her Internet access would be coming through my PC through NAT, I asked her to install Mozilla on it to stop her getting malware. She immediately told me she didn't want "any of that Linux crap" on her PC.
My neighbor has been giving me free internet service at home for years. We have a very simple deal. He gives me free service, and I agree not to use Microsoft Windows on his network. If I want to use Windows that's fine, I just have to get my own network service for it.
I think it's about time you tell your mom that if she can either choose to respect basic security procedures (like using Firefox), or get her own internet connection and pay for her own technician to maintain her machine.
Once upon a time there was the floppy, and it was too small to store many of our files. We used to use software that would break the file up and spread it across a set of floppies, and then reassemble it at the destination. Then we'd walk to work with the floppy, uphill both ways through a blinding blizzard...
Anyway, just because a file is too large to fit on a DVD, doesn't mean it can't be transported.
If I really want to worry about absolute utter reliability for my data, I'd set up another RAID array in another location and arrange mirroring, but it's just not that vital to me.
I had a flash based mp3 player from a small name manufacturer. I chose it after trying a variety of small flash based players and deciding they were all pretty much the same to me. I had it for a couple years, and it was working just fine thanks.
Then, this winter, a friend gave me an iPod Shuffle. I thought it was an unnecessarily expensive gift, since I already had an extremely similar player, but I figured that since he'd gone to the trouble of getting me one, I'd use it and give my old player to a young family member.
The first thing I noticed was that the iPod is remarkably easy to use. I hadn't really considered integration with iTunes to be a priority, but damn if that doesn't make it much easier to use! I also found the iPod controls much easier to use, even though the old player had been pretty well designed.
The second thing I noticed is that the sound from the iPod is more "clean" while my old player was a bit more "bright". This is inherent to the player, not to the headphones: I kept my old headphones (Sony noise canceling) and have never tried the Apple white earbuds.
The iPod Shuffle is also very, very light. It weighs essentially nothing. I have had to train myself strictly to exclusively put it in a particular pocket when it's detached from the headphones I use, because otherwise I can lose it in my own pockets. (I once spent 20 minutes searching my apartment for it and it turned out to be in my pocket.)
My old player never elicited any comment. The iPod Shuffle, despite being nearly functionally identical, very frequently gets comments from people around me. Store clerks often notice it as I press pause and remove my headphones while aproaching the register, and often say "Oooooh what's THAT?" with a big grin. People frequently ask me what it is, what model of iPod, how many songs it stores, and where they can get one. So, I guess that visually, it's a hit... but Apple should rethink their advertising if so many interested young people haven't noticed it until I walk in with one.
Overall, I find myself enjoying my iPod Shuffle much more than my old mp3 player, and if I find myself with some extra money on my hands in the next year or so, I might even buy an iPod Shuffle and send it to the kid who got my old mp3 player.
For my photos, whenever I've taken enough to fill a CD, I burn four copies, two each of two different brands of media. I then mail one of each type of media to a family member in another state, I put one of my two remaining copies in a cool dry closet stored in a plastic jewel case, and keep the other at my desk for use. (My family member sends me discs of their photos to store too.) I swap the copies from the desk and the copies from the closet occasionally.
If I find that one copy has gone bad, hopefully one of the other three copies will still be readable. If one brand of media goes bad first, there's a copy on another brand of media. If my house burns down, I ask my family member to please give me their copies of my photos.
Next year I plan to also put a 2 terrabyte RAID 5 server in the house and keep all my media on that. I still want to send backups to my family for offsite storage, but I won't have to back up the whole thing: I can do incrementals mostly, and do a whole system backup only once in a great while.
Yeah. I understod how it works. I just think that's the user's problem.
Error occurred between user's ears. Insert neurons to continue.
To be blunt, this is how Javascript has been for years, and those of us who understood the technology all along are now shaking our heads and asking "yeah, so?"... Calling this a flaw now just seems more like a desperate grab for attention than an actual technical problem to be discussed. If you don't like it, take it up with the standards committee and try to get the behavior redesigned for the next revision of the spec, but don't try to blame the browsers, that's just stupid.
It's not a bug. You can regard it as a design flaw of the Javascript system as a whole I guess, but this represents functioning-as-designed. If the user is dumb enough to type private information into a popup without taking the time to figure out where the popup came from, that's their problem.
Fred Pohl invented the idea of downloading your brain into a computer upon death in his Heechee Saga. I read it about 15 years ago, and I think the book where he started it may be more like 20 or 30 years old.
It's quite common in the computer industry that when an employee gives their notice, the employer just lets them go, because they're considered a security risk once they're known to be planning to depart. It's not a comment on the employee at all, it's really nothing personal.
So, if you don't want to work through your notice because the employer reacts badly, you can always tell the new employer that the old one decided that having anyone around after they gave notice is a risk, and so you're available early. If they're at all professional, the new employer will have no problem with this.
Also, it happens that sometimes when an employee gives notice, the old employer doesn't assign them any new work that they might have to leave in the middle of, so you simply finish everything before your notice is up and have nothing left to do, and so they let you go. That's another perfectly reasonable excuse for not completing your given notice period, as far as the new employer should be concerned.
Or, well, if you have the money in the bank, it's already less than two weeks... you could just take a few days off unpaid.
In regard to cutting your losses and leaving... if you already have the new job lined up and the current job started mistreating you after you gave your notice, just call the new job and say "I know I told you I wanted to give two weeks notice at my old position, but it turns out that won't be necessary. Would you like me sooner?"
If they're pros, they'll understand, really. And if they do say they'd like you to start immediately, just pack your personal belongings at your old office, then inform the old manager that since he's clearly "concerned" about having you around this will be your last day, and does he have any further questions before you depart? He'll be angry. He may tell you so. If he asks, it's okay to tell him honestly that you've felt mistreated since you gave your notice and have no desire to remain further to experience more of it. (After all, he asked.) He may be angry about that too, but that's not your problem.
Then as long as he's reasonably sane, answer any questions he may have about your job (he may want passwords for stuff etc), and spend the rest of the day politely providing final information to aid their transition to your replacement.
And if he yells at all, just say good bye, walk out of his office, go get your box of personal stuff, and leave. You have no further need of him and no obligation to stay if he's going to act hostile and threatening. Make sure to say good-bye to at least three people on your way out, including people who don't have your (now ex-)boss as their boss, so they can verify the time and date of your departure in case it becomes an issue regarding pay.
I believe every state has a law about issuing paychecks within a certain amount of time after the end of the pay period. The employee who receives a threat from the boss that a paycheck will be withheld should immediately contact their state's attorney general's office to find out what their rights are and see if the office can offer any advice about how to handle the threats. (Do they think he should ignore the threat and see what happens? Or tell him on the spot that it's illegal? Or walk out the door immediately?)
In Massachusetts, if I remember correctly the employer may not withhold a paycheck for more than a week after the paycheck for the pay period would normally be issued, and in the case of a termination or layoff, they're required to issue a paycheck, expenses, and pay for accrued vacation all on the day of the termination or layoff. I'm not sure what the penalties are. The attorney general's office can refer you to appropriate legal resources, or may even choose to get directly involved with getting you paid.
I had one incident of an employer trying to not pay me. The AG's office said that yes, they'd take legal action on my behalf if necessary, but first they wanted me to simply demand the money in their name. That got me my money, much to my surprise.
The store was far stupider if they actually told the guy the installation was free, and later called to threaten arrest. If they pulled that stunt on me, I'd get their number and tell them I'd call them back, call the attorney general's office, and report the store for fraud and/or blackmail.
They may get away with that kind of BS a lot of the time, but the store manager only has to run into one pissed off consumer like me to get arrested.
If they police told him they knew he was innocent, and arrested him anyway, they admitted that it was a false arrest... which is actionable... and maybe even a violation of his constitutional rights.
Check your state's consumer protection laws. In Massachusetts, a store is required by law to give the consumer's choice of repair, replacement, or refund if an item is defective upon purchase... and I think bad pixels could reasonably be called "defective".
So, if you bought a PSP in Massachusetts (or a state with similar laws) and it has bad pixels, take it back. They have to deal with it for you.
My father is a veteran systems administrator with 35 years of experience in the industry. His and his girlfriends' home PCs keep getting virii, spyware, and adware.
It's not that dad's an old coot, he actually keeps his skills up to date. It's that Windows is so unbelievably insecure he just can't keep up with it. He uses antivirus software, he tries to keep it up to date, he has multiple spyware scanners/removers which he updates regularly, and he just can't keep the systems clean. Every year or two it gets too unbearable and he just has to wipe the machine and reinstall from scratch, or replace it.
If my father can't do it, then no normal mortal computer owner should be expected to do it.
I think I've got Dad just about convinced to buy a Macintosh. When he hears that I have absolutely no problems with malware and I don't even have to have special software to prevent it, he gets very interested.
Ok, so, let's pretend for a moment that *tomorrow* we magically all have the technology to download enormous video files of DVD quality in a reasonable time.
Where are you going to put it?
Okay, so you've got a nice fat hard disk on your computer. That's just great for storing your first 10 or 20 movies that you buy for delivery via network. But where do you store all this data after that?
I have, at a guess, about 500 DVDs (and increasing rapidly), and really my collection isn't that big compared to a lot of my friends. That's 5 terabytes or more of data right there. Is everyone going to have to have a really big expensive server just to store their movies?
And how are we going to back all that data up? It will have to be backed up if the files are purchased, or when the server crashes the owner will lose their entire (very expensive) video collection. High capacity backup systems are not cheap or easy, and whatever solution is selected has to be simple enough that grammaw can use it after a 2 minute lesson or it won't catch on. Heck, I'm not at all sure that the entire concept of backups isn't too much for a lot of consumers to cope with. I suspect in a few years after recent model macs are finally gettting old enough to experience hard disk failure, there are going to be a lot of irate Itunes Store users who didn't heed the application's advice to back up their music.
No, we need a physical media format to be around for a while longer, until storage space is very very cheap and reliable (cheap enough that we can all have an enormous RAID array on our PVR) and easy to manage.
This isn't going to happen soon because the networks do not own most of the stations that broadcast their shows, and the individual stations would view such downloads as competition. Stations make their money on advertising revenue, and the rates they receive are based on the number of viewers watching that station. (Based on such ratings tools as Nielsen and local population figures.) Every viewer who chooses to buy a downloadable version of the show directly from the network instead of watching it on the local station is one fewer viewer in the station's audience figures for their advertising revenue. Why, therefore, should the station remain on that network when the network is directly competing with them for revenue?
I worked for an advertising agency that was doing a web site for a major product manufacturing company. The company wanted to be able to sell its own products on its web site, but its dealer network threatened firmly that if the manufacturer did this, they'd stop carrying the manufacturer's products.
I'm sure if a network decided to sell downloads of its shows, its stations would threaten to drop them in favor of a competing network.
As you no doubt know, your expenses in a system - be it software or hardware - are not only the initial purchase, but also its upkeep, both in terms of ongoing direct costs (upgrade fees, purchase of parts or media), but in time. Every hour you spend working on something is an hour the employer had to pay for you to be maintaining something existing instead of making something better. Employers like to see progress. They're much more willing to pay when they see you're making progress.
So, this means you need to do two things: 1) Reduce the amount of time you spend on maintenance. 2) Document everything you do.
So, let's look at these a little more closely.
Reducing time spent on maintenance Examine your obvious unnecessary expenses and see how you can eliminate them.
Having problems with viruses and spyware, or spending time on antivirus and anti-spyware software? Replace IE with Firefox and replace Outlook with... well, anything you like, really. That'll prevent a lot of viruses right away, and that's an enormous savings. It cost my organization $45,000 in staff time every single time a new Windows virus hit the net, and that's AFTER installation of antivirus software. The antivirus software never seemed able to keep up. Also, start replacing simple desktop stations with Mac Minis. MacOS X doesn't get viruses or spyware. I'm not saying you should take perfectly good stations out of service to replace them, but as you replace older systems with new ones, start putting macs in instead of new Windows boxes.
Macs also tend to stay current several years longer than Windows boxes. So, you could amortize the purchase cost over an extra year, or perhaps even two, and save money on desktop machines that way.
Wasting time setting up software on desktops, or maintaining the software on desktops that were already rolled out? Get a Ghost server so you can just ghost the machines. If someone's software is malfunctioning, don't go muck with their system in person, just ghost their system remotely and move on to the next task.
Lots of your time sucked up by idiot users on repetitive problems? Spend a little time writing a how-to white paper, and when they call to ask that same old question, get the person doing triage on incoming support calls to just give them the white paper so they don't have to bother a tech. The faster you get that person off the phone or out the door, the less dollar value your employer spent on your time dealing with them.
Spending time administrating servers? Reduce the number of servers. A smaller number of larger (expensive) servers, well backed-up and with substantial redundancy, is much cheaper to maintain than a large number of smaller (cheap) servers, because you only have to do each maintenance task once for one large server instead of umpteen times for umpteen little servers. I've actually seen organizations that literally had more servers than employees, and they couldn't figure out why they were spending so much on IT. Yeesh!
Problems with viruses and security on servers? Servers going down from time to time? Replace your Windows servers with Apple XServes. They're fast and easy to configure, can integrate into your existing LDAP login environment, can support both Windows and Macintosh clients (your users never have to know), and can easily be set up for RAID and redundancy. Apple also has superb offerings for on-site maintenance agreements.
Documenting all work Employers often think they can get away with making you cut a person in IT because they don't understand what IT does, so in their mind IT doesn't actually do anything. You need to show them how much you really do. This means very anal-retentively documenting EVERY action of EVERY staff member, and indexing it to the customer as well.
I mean, if the phone rings, there should be a record in the computer of who called and who they talked to and for how long and about what. Got a stupid user who requires constant hand-holding? S
Sometimes buying software from outside is more expensive than just building it in-house, particularly if the outside software is overpriced (as it usually is), and if you can define a reasonable and limited set of features or the software to be developed in-house (this is where most development efforts fail).
As an IT/IS manager, I have in the past been tasked with buying software packages for major company initiatives... and found that all of the decent packages that came anywhere near meeting requirements cost upwards of $75,000, and at that they wouldn't integrate into any existing systems. (This creates another set of logins to maintain.)
For 2/3 that price, I could hire a competent programmer for a year. So, faced with this dilemma and an expensive package I needed to have, I hired a programmer. And the system was developed in two man months, leaving me able to use that programmer's time on other important projects. Oh, and the package integrated perfectly with existing systems, and was expandable.
Okay, so having a full time programmer is $50,000 a year on the books every year, an ongoing expense, while buying the software is $75,000 and then it's over. (Except for the invisible ongoing administrative costs.) But, I saved $25,000 outright by hiring the programmer, and then if I consider that it actually only took two months of time to do it, I actually saved $66,667 by hiring someone. And then I could save more on the next project that I developed in-house.
Prof. Theremin was back in Russia by 1938, and he had been present for the composition of various music for his instruments while in the US. The First Aerphonic Suite for Theremin and Orchestra was composed by Joseph Schillinger in 1929.
Further proof exists in that Clara Rockmore recorded Anis Fuleihan's Concerto for Theremin in 1945, fully two years before the Barrons got their start, and I think she had performed it in 1939, but I'm not certain of the latter. (It's an absolutely jaw-dropping recording by the way, her virtuosity on the instrument remains unsurpassed.)
Slashdot Mirror
I recently (~2 weeks ago) bought the vonage wifi phone - a little thingy that looks like a cell phone but is actually a vonage phone that works on a wifi network. I bought it because I decided I was spending too much on my cell phone plan and still having to worry about running out of minutes, so I dropped to a cheaper cell phone plan and for the cost difference I got a vonage plan that is unlimited. No more worries.
I had low expectations for the physical form of the wifi phone. I knew it was a little ugly, and I guessed (without paying attention to measurements) that it would probably be bulky. Actually it's a tiny little thing, about 2/3 the size of my Nokia cell phone. It is still ugly though, but its hard to tell that with either the phone in my pocket or the ugly side pressed to my ear.
I had low expectations for the sound quality of the wifi phone. It not only exceeds my expectations, it actually sounds clearer than almost any other phone I've used, and people I talk to tell me I'm clear as a bell too. The downside is that on very rare occasions (once so far at home, once in the office) a burst of really excessive traffic on my local network can munge my call quality and then I have to restart the phone to get things back to normal. But, I choose to live with that for the price. I recognize that a lot of people would get upset about it in comparison to their POTS phone, but I'm comparing it to my cell phone where these things happen occasionally.
I had read before buying the phone that its UI sucks, which is true. No big deal, it's just a phone. More of a problem is that it came pre-configured to show me UI in English but only allow me to enter text in French. (If I hadn't already known Vonage is in NJ, I'd have guessed Montreal.) Fortunately the manual was helpful about that, but a non-technical user would have had real problems.
There is a slight delay on the line induced by the VOIP process, which is to be expected. It's not nearly as bad as, say, Skype, or an old international call. I only actually noticed it after having the phone for a week and a half or so and talking on it extensively.
I love that Vonage will (since I configured it to on their easy web site) deliver my voice mails to my email. I've always been terrible about checking my voice mail but great about checking my email: now I can check my voice mail with the convenience of email, and I'm much happier. I know they're not the only voice mail service with email delivery, but damn, it's a nice bonus to a service I was going to have anyway.
I was able to adjust the forwarding on my cell phone so that when I turn it off, my calls go to my Vonage phone. Vonage has nothing to do with that, but it does make the whole thing much easier for me. I haven't had to tell anyone my Vonage number, and people don't even realize when they call my cell phone that they may be getting my Vonage phone. It also lets me use only the Vonage voice mail, instead of the hideous voice mail my cell service provides.
Overall I'm very happy with the service. I'm sorry to hear they're a pain in the ass to departing customers, I think that's rude, but fortunately I'm not planning on leaving them any time soon.
There's nothing wrong with dumping a customer, but the correct way to do it is to 1) Be truthful with them, and 2) If possible, refer them to another professional who can help them.
The client can take it much better if what you have to tell them is "I'm very sorry but for personal reasons I'm not able to take care of your needs at this time. I've selected someone who can help you in my place, let me give you their name and number..."
It's also a good opportunity to throw a colleague some work. A friend gave me one of those clients he didn't feel he had time to deal with, at a time when I needed the work. It helped me a lot and I was grateful. Perhaps this incident can lead to some good for someone.
Basically, it says you have to use this fantasy technology if it is "reasonably available, technologically feasible" and I say that any competent technician will tell you it's neither. This is like passing a law requiring that it may not rain on wednesdays: it's meaningless.
It's not like this is anything new. I was asked to costume "Star Wars: The Opera" years ago (I declined, too busy) by a friend who sang the part of Obiwan.
Ok, let's compare. Apple is now selling full episodes of 1 hour TV shows at $2 each, at a reduced resolution. That establishes my price point for 1 hour of VCD quality video delivered via download at $2. Therefore, for a two hour movie at that video quality, I wouldn't be willing to pay more than $4.
Increase the resolution to full DVD quality, and I'd be willing to pay about $8, which is twice the current hourly rate of the iTunes store... but is somewhat less than the average price of a DVD (I usually pay $12 to $17 for a DVD, sometimes a couple dollars more or less), because I'm not getting the packaging, physical disc, etc, and they're not paying for the shipping, distribution, etc... and I have to put up with a long download for a large video file, and pay for media to back it up.
Once you hit the price of $10 for a movie download, I wouldn't buy because that's what I pay for a DVD on sale anyway.
And, we haven't discussed the extras I usually get on a DVD... I'm certainly not going to pay as much for a download without the extras as I would for a DVD with them, but if they sold the download for less and offered the extras as separate purchases, I would buy some of them sometimes.
I almost hate to say it but... unlike what he's doing to Star Wars, I think Lucas actually really improved THX-1138 with his recent revision of it. It's a much richer film now. It looks better, it feels more real. It doesn't feel like he broke it, more like he fluffed up what was already there and gave it more reality. I was expecting to hate it, and was very pleasantly surprised.
I think it's about time you tell your mom that if she can either choose to respect basic security procedures (like using Firefox), or get her own internet connection and pay for her own technician to maintain her machine.
Once upon a time there was the floppy, and it was too small to store many of our files. We used to use software that would break the file up and spread it across a set of floppies, and then reassemble it at the destination. Then we'd walk to work with the floppy, uphill both ways through a blinding blizzard...
Anyway, just because a file is too large to fit on a DVD, doesn't mean it can't be transported.
If I really want to worry about absolute utter reliability for my data, I'd set up another RAID array in another location and arrange mirroring, but it's just not that vital to me.
I had a flash based mp3 player from a small name manufacturer. I chose it after trying a variety of small flash based players and deciding they were all pretty much the same to me. I had it for a couple years, and it was working just fine thanks.
Then, this winter, a friend gave me an iPod Shuffle. I thought it was an unnecessarily expensive gift, since I already had an extremely similar player, but I figured that since he'd gone to the trouble of getting me one, I'd use it and give my old player to a young family member.
The first thing I noticed was that the iPod is remarkably easy to use. I hadn't really considered integration with iTunes to be a priority, but damn if that doesn't make it much easier to use! I also found the iPod controls much easier to use, even though the old player had been pretty well designed.
The second thing I noticed is that the sound from the iPod is more "clean" while my old player was a bit more "bright". This is inherent to the player, not to the headphones: I kept my old headphones (Sony noise canceling) and have never tried the Apple white earbuds.
The iPod Shuffle is also very, very light. It weighs essentially nothing. I have had to train myself strictly to exclusively put it in a particular pocket when it's detached from the headphones I use, because otherwise I can lose it in my own pockets. (I once spent 20 minutes searching my apartment for it and it turned out to be in my pocket.)
My old player never elicited any comment. The iPod Shuffle, despite being nearly functionally identical, very frequently gets comments from people around me. Store clerks often notice it as I press pause and remove my headphones while aproaching the register, and often say "Oooooh what's THAT?" with a big grin. People frequently ask me what it is, what model of iPod, how many songs it stores, and where they can get one. So, I guess that visually, it's a hit... but Apple should rethink their advertising if so many interested young people haven't noticed it until I walk in with one.
Overall, I find myself enjoying my iPod Shuffle much more than my old mp3 player, and if I find myself with some extra money on my hands in the next year or so, I might even buy an iPod Shuffle and send it to the kid who got my old mp3 player.
For my photos, whenever I've taken enough to fill a CD, I burn four copies, two each of two different brands of media. I then mail one of each type of media to a family member in another state, I put one of my two remaining copies in a cool dry closet stored in a plastic jewel case, and keep the other at my desk for use. (My family member sends me discs of their photos to store too.) I swap the copies from the desk and the copies from the closet occasionally.
If I find that one copy has gone bad, hopefully one of the other three copies will still be readable. If one brand of media goes bad first, there's a copy on another brand of media. If my house burns down, I ask my family member to please give me their copies of my photos.
Next year I plan to also put a 2 terrabyte RAID 5 server in the house and keep all my media on that. I still want to send backups to my family for offsite storage, but I won't have to back up the whole thing: I can do incrementals mostly, and do a whole system backup only once in a great while.
Yeah. I understod how it works. I just think that's the user's problem.
... Calling this a flaw now just seems more like a desperate grab for attention than an actual technical problem to be discussed. If you don't like it, take it up with the standards committee and try to get the behavior redesigned for the next revision of the spec, but don't try to blame the browsers, that's just stupid.
Error occurred between user's ears. Insert neurons to continue.
To be blunt, this is how Javascript has been for years, and those of us who understood the technology all along are now shaking our heads and asking "yeah, so?"
It's not a bug. You can regard it as a design flaw of the Javascript system as a whole I guess, but this represents functioning-as-designed. If the user is dumb enough to type private information into a popup without taking the time to figure out where the popup came from, that's their problem.
Fred Pohl invented the idea of downloading your brain into a computer upon death in his Heechee Saga. I read it about 15 years ago, and I think the book where he started it may be more like 20 or 30 years old.
It's quite common in the computer industry that when an employee gives their notice, the employer just lets them go, because they're considered a security risk once they're known to be planning to depart. It's not a comment on the employee at all, it's really nothing personal.
So, if you don't want to work through your notice because the employer reacts badly, you can always tell the new employer that the old one decided that having anyone around after they gave notice is a risk, and so you're available early. If they're at all professional, the new employer will have no problem with this.
Also, it happens that sometimes when an employee gives notice, the old employer doesn't assign them any new work that they might have to leave in the middle of, so you simply finish everything before your notice is up and have nothing left to do, and so they let you go. That's another perfectly reasonable excuse for not completing your given notice period, as far as the new employer should be concerned.
Or, well, if you have the money in the bank, it's already less than two weeks... you could just take a few days off unpaid.
In regard to cutting your losses and leaving... if you already have the new job lined up and the current job started mistreating you after you gave your notice, just call the new job and say "I know I told you I wanted to give two weeks notice at my old position, but it turns out that won't be necessary. Would you like me sooner?"
If they're pros, they'll understand, really. And if they do say they'd like you to start immediately, just pack your personal belongings at your old office, then inform the old manager that since he's clearly "concerned" about having you around this will be your last day, and does he have any further questions before you depart? He'll be angry. He may tell you so. If he asks, it's okay to tell him honestly that you've felt mistreated since you gave your notice and have no desire to remain further to experience more of it. (After all, he asked.) He may be angry about that too, but that's not your problem.
Then as long as he's reasonably sane, answer any questions he may have about your job (he may want passwords for stuff etc), and spend the rest of the day politely providing final information to aid their transition to your replacement.
And if he yells at all, just say good bye, walk out of his office, go get your box of personal stuff, and leave. You have no further need of him and no obligation to stay if he's going to act hostile and threatening. Make sure to say good-bye to at least three people on your way out, including people who don't have your (now ex-)boss as their boss, so they can verify the time and date of your departure in case it becomes an issue regarding pay.
I believe every state has a law about issuing paychecks within a certain amount of time after the end of the pay period. The employee who receives a threat from the boss that a paycheck will be withheld should immediately contact their state's attorney general's office to find out what their rights are and see if the office can offer any advice about how to handle the threats. (Do they think he should ignore the threat and see what happens? Or tell him on the spot that it's illegal? Or walk out the door immediately?)
In Massachusetts, if I remember correctly the employer may not withhold a paycheck for more than a week after the paycheck for the pay period would normally be issued, and in the case of a termination or layoff, they're required to issue a paycheck, expenses, and pay for accrued vacation all on the day of the termination or layoff. I'm not sure what the penalties are. The attorney general's office can refer you to appropriate legal resources, or may even choose to get directly involved with getting you paid.
I had one incident of an employer trying to not pay me. The AG's office said that yes, they'd take legal action on my behalf if necessary, but first they wanted me to simply demand the money in their name. That got me my money, much to my surprise.
The store was far stupider if they actually told the guy the installation was free, and later called to threaten arrest. If they pulled that stunt on me, I'd get their number and tell them I'd call them back, call the attorney general's office, and report the store for fraud and/or blackmail.
They may get away with that kind of BS a lot of the time, but the store manager only has to run into one pissed off consumer like me to get arrested.
If they police told him they knew he was innocent, and arrested him anyway, they admitted that it was a false arrest... which is actionable... and maybe even a violation of his constitutional rights.
Check your state's consumer protection laws. In Massachusetts, a store is required by law to give the consumer's choice of repair, replacement, or refund if an item is defective upon purchase... and I think bad pixels could reasonably be called "defective".
So, if you bought a PSP in Massachusetts (or a state with similar laws) and it has bad pixels, take it back. They have to deal with it for you.
My father is a veteran systems administrator with 35 years of experience in the industry. His and his girlfriends' home PCs keep getting virii, spyware, and adware.
It's not that dad's an old coot, he actually keeps his skills up to date. It's that Windows is so unbelievably insecure he just can't keep up with it. He uses antivirus software, he tries to keep it up to date, he has multiple spyware scanners/removers which he updates regularly, and he just can't keep the systems clean. Every year or two it gets too unbearable and he just has to wipe the machine and reinstall from scratch, or replace it.
If my father can't do it, then no normal mortal computer owner should be expected to do it.
I think I've got Dad just about convinced to buy a Macintosh. When he hears that I have absolutely no problems with malware and I don't even have to have special software to prevent it, he gets very interested.
Ok, so, let's pretend for a moment that *tomorrow* we magically all have the technology to download enormous video files of DVD quality in a reasonable time.
Where are you going to put it?
Okay, so you've got a nice fat hard disk on your computer. That's just great for storing your first 10 or 20 movies that you buy for delivery via network. But where do you store all this data after that?
I have, at a guess, about 500 DVDs (and increasing rapidly), and really my collection isn't that big compared to a lot of my friends. That's 5 terabytes or more of data right there. Is everyone going to have to have a really big expensive server just to store their movies?
And how are we going to back all that data up? It will have to be backed up if the files are purchased, or when the server crashes the owner will lose their entire (very expensive) video collection. High capacity backup systems are not cheap or easy, and whatever solution is selected has to be simple enough that grammaw can use it after a 2 minute lesson or it won't catch on. Heck, I'm not at all sure that the entire concept of backups isn't too much for a lot of consumers to cope with. I suspect in a few years after recent model macs are finally gettting old enough to experience hard disk failure, there are going to be a lot of irate Itunes Store users who didn't heed the application's advice to back up their music.
No, we need a physical media format to be around for a while longer, until storage space is very very cheap and reliable (cheap enough that we can all have an enormous RAID array on our PVR) and easy to manage.
This isn't going to happen soon because the networks do not own most of the stations that broadcast their shows, and the individual stations would view such downloads as competition. Stations make their money on advertising revenue, and the rates they receive are based on the number of viewers watching that station. (Based on such ratings tools as Nielsen and local population figures.) Every viewer who chooses to buy a downloadable version of the show directly from the network instead of watching it on the local station is one fewer viewer in the station's audience figures for their advertising revenue. Why, therefore, should the station remain on that network when the network is directly competing with them for revenue?
I worked for an advertising agency that was doing a web site for a major product manufacturing company. The company wanted to be able to sell its own products on its web site, but its dealer network threatened firmly that if the manufacturer did this, they'd stop carrying the manufacturer's products.
I'm sure if a network decided to sell downloads of its shows, its stations would threaten to drop them in favor of a competing network.
As you no doubt know, your expenses in a system - be it software or hardware - are not only the initial purchase, but also its upkeep, both in terms of ongoing direct costs (upgrade fees, purchase of parts or media), but in time. Every hour you spend working on something is an hour the employer had to pay for you to be maintaining something existing instead of making something better. Employers like to see progress. They're much more willing to pay when they see you're making progress.
So, this means you need to do two things:
1) Reduce the amount of time you spend on maintenance.
2) Document everything you do.
So, let's look at these a little more closely.
Reducing time spent on maintenance
Examine your obvious unnecessary expenses and see how you can eliminate them.
Having problems with viruses and spyware, or spending time on antivirus and anti-spyware software? Replace IE with Firefox and replace Outlook with... well, anything you like, really. That'll prevent a lot of viruses right away, and that's an enormous savings. It cost my organization $45,000 in staff time every single time a new Windows virus hit the net, and that's AFTER installation of antivirus software. The antivirus software never seemed able to keep up. Also, start replacing simple desktop stations with Mac Minis. MacOS X doesn't get viruses or spyware. I'm not saying you should take perfectly good stations out of service to replace them, but as you replace older systems with new ones, start putting macs in instead of new Windows boxes.
Macs also tend to stay current several years longer than Windows boxes. So, you could amortize the purchase cost over an extra year, or perhaps even two, and save money on desktop machines that way.
Wasting time setting up software on desktops, or maintaining the software on desktops that were already rolled out? Get a Ghost server so you can just ghost the machines. If someone's software is malfunctioning, don't go muck with their system in person, just ghost their system remotely and move on to the next task.
Lots of your time sucked up by idiot users on repetitive problems? Spend a little time writing a how-to white paper, and when they call to ask that same old question, get the person doing triage on incoming support calls to just give them the white paper so they don't have to bother a tech. The faster you get that person off the phone or out the door, the less dollar value your employer spent on your time dealing with them.
Spending time administrating servers? Reduce the number of servers. A smaller number of larger (expensive) servers, well backed-up and with substantial redundancy, is much cheaper to maintain than a large number of smaller (cheap) servers, because you only have to do each maintenance task once for one large server instead of umpteen times for umpteen little servers. I've actually seen organizations that literally had more servers than employees, and they couldn't figure out why they were spending so much on IT. Yeesh!
Problems with viruses and security on servers? Servers going down from time to time? Replace your Windows servers with Apple XServes. They're fast and easy to configure, can integrate into your existing LDAP login environment, can support both Windows and Macintosh clients (your users never have to know), and can easily be set up for RAID and redundancy. Apple also has superb offerings for on-site maintenance agreements.
Documenting all work
Employers often think they can get away with making you cut a person in IT because they don't understand what IT does, so in their mind IT doesn't actually do anything. You need to show them how much you really do. This means very anal-retentively documenting EVERY action of EVERY staff member, and indexing it to the customer as well.
I mean, if the phone rings, there should be a record in the computer of who called and who they talked to and for how long and about what. Got a stupid user who requires constant hand-holding? S
Sometimes buying software from outside is more expensive than just building it in-house, particularly if the outside software is overpriced (as it usually is), and if you can define a reasonable and limited set of features or the software to be developed in-house (this is where most development efforts fail).
As an IT/IS manager, I have in the past been tasked with buying software packages for major company initiatives... and found that all of the decent packages that came anywhere near meeting requirements cost upwards of $75,000, and at that they wouldn't integrate into any existing systems. (This creates another set of logins to maintain.)
For 2/3 that price, I could hire a competent programmer for a year. So, faced with this dilemma and an expensive package I needed to have, I hired a programmer. And the system was developed in two man months, leaving me able to use that programmer's time on other important projects. Oh, and the package integrated perfectly with existing systems, and was expandable.
Okay, so having a full time programmer is $50,000 a year on the books every year, an ongoing expense, while buying the software is $75,000 and then it's over. (Except for the invisible ongoing administrative costs.) But, I saved $25,000 outright by hiring the programmer, and then if I consider that it actually only took two months of time to do it, I actually saved $66,667 by hiring someone. And then I could save more on the next project that I developed in-house.
Prof. Theremin was back in Russia by 1938, and he had been present for the composition of various music for his instruments while in the US. The First Aerphonic Suite for Theremin and Orchestra was composed by Joseph Schillinger in 1929.
Further proof exists in that Clara Rockmore recorded Anis Fuleihan's Concerto for Theremin in 1945, fully two years before the Barrons got their start, and I think she had performed it in 1939, but I'm not certain of the latter. (It's an absolutely jaw-dropping recording by the way, her virtuosity on the instrument remains unsurpassed.)