I couldn't agree more. I don't have a degree. I don't even have a qualification in IT. I have a diploma in multimedia. I'm self learned in computers and programming.
I work for one of the largest data storage device manufacturers as a server technician. Although the requirements for the job stated a degree, I still got the job because computers aren't just something I studied in college in order to make loads of money. It's something I love working with and have an aptitude for. The recruiters and interviewers saw that and that's why I got the job.
Not only is it because it is installed by default, but also because Symantec offer stores such low wholesale prices the profit margin for the store is huge.
While I was in college I worked as a tech part time with PC World who are one of the biggest offline PC retailers in Europe. The sales staff got extra commission if they sold Norton but standard commission for other AV products. Guess which one they pushed on customers. I actually felt guilty about even working there when I knew customers were getting ripped off so badly. Customers would come back a few months later complaining that they got viruses even though they had Norton. Although I was supposed to point to the 99.9% effectiveness label, and say they are within the 0.1%, and I would have to charge them 80 euro to remove the virus manually, my concience used to get the better of me. I'd tell them to uninstall Norton and get Avira or AVG for free and it would do a better job.
That was fine, until one day a customer complained to a manager that he had been sold bad software and that I had confirmed it. I didn't care, I was leaving soon afterwards anyway.
Back on topic... Symantec/Norton is one of the worst AV out there. They should spend less money on marketing and more on improving their product.
A few months ago my father was looking to buy a new laptop. He had been an apple user for years but was balking at the price of the macbook (1100 euro). I convinced him to buy a Dell.
People think that Dell's do not match Apple in quality but that is a myth. It's spin by the masters of spin, Apple. Why did he have to replace his three year old iBook while my four year old Inspiron was still running fine (and I use mine a hell of a lot more than he uses his)?
The supposedly super strong Polycarbonate chassis was creaking and felt like it was about to fall apart. The battery was loose and if the laptop was moved without being plugged in the power would die. The charger or power slot was faulty because you would have to keep plugging/unplugging and fiddling with the plug for it to start charging. That laptop never left the comfort of the front room in his house. My Dell has been travelling everywhere with me and taken a hell of a lot more knocks.
Then we get back to the price... I reminded my father that that was his third Apple laptop in 10 years. He had a Powerbook 3400c (which was second hand and still works, just incredibly slow), a Wallstreet PowerBook G3 (had more problems than his last iBook) and then there's the previously mentioned iBook. I then reminded him about my laptop, how old it is, what it's been through, and how it's still fine.
He decided to go with Dell then so I bought him an Inspiron. He got a 2.2Ghz C2D, 2GB RAM, 250GB HDD, 15 inch screen, HDMI out (he's got a 1080p telly so that was essential). It cost 600 euro inc shipping and taxes. That's 500 euro less than the comparable macbook at the time, which didn't have HDMI.
The funny thing is that he had Macs because I used to be a Mac user. That is until Mr. Jobs took over at apple and made them fashion accessories rather than computers. I now build my own desktops and media PC, and use my Inspiron and eeePC. All run Linux.
I've had a 'dock' in XP for years now... On my desktop my Start menu is at the top of the screen and I have a toolbar at the bottom (and I can just as easily move it to the side), it's set to auto-hide. I have shortcuts to my most frequently used applications there. If I want to run a program I just move my mouse to the bottom of the screen, the toolbar pops up just like Apple's dock and I click an icon. Hey presto, my app opens. AFAIK that capability has been available since Windows 98.
Actually you are wrong.
In Ireland the Mc prefix is also very common. Here in the city I live in there was a fast food place called McBia's who sold the McBurger. And the nearest McDonalds was less than a mile away.
Actually COD4 has very, very annoying DRM. If I want to play COD4 I have to disable any image mounting software and then reboot. It's a good game but I can't be bothered going to the effort needed just to play it. For that reason I will never buy an Activision game again.
I had a similar problem about two weeks ago with my copy of Half-Life Generations that is many years old and had never been used by me through Steam. The steam rep told me to scan/photograph my booklet with the serial numbers on it, write my steam account name along with the incident number on a post-it on the the booklet and email the image back. I did and it was all sorted within 10 mins.
That's the solution contained in the steam knowledgebase also. I'd suggest searching the knowledgebase for it and then email the link back to the rep you were in contact with.
And, selling drives at enterprise level is quite different to selling them a consumer level. When you buy something as a consumer, the product is shipped to you as-is. When you buy enterprise storage, everything is thoroughly analysed, tested, qualified. Everything has redundancy. The software that is developed monitors the whole system to try and detect failures before it happens. You then have an engineer on site to correct the problem before you even realise you have a problem. If you have never been in an EMC plant and seen the process each little component goes through to ensure that there are no failures/potential failures shipped to clients, then don't complain about the prices. As I said, enterprise storage is completely different to consumer storage.
Would you pay tens if not hundreds of thousands for a storage system for your mp3's and photos? I think not. What would you pay? A few hundred euro at most maybe? For that price, you get the product as-is. That isn't good enough for a bank for instance. If their storage system fails, their business if GONE. They are willing to pay the huge amounts of money for the service and not just the product that EMC and other enterprise storage companies provide.
I read the LoTR and the Hobbit and loved them both. They are some of the greatest stories ever told in my opinion. After reading them I was addicted and wanted more. I rushed out and bought the Silmarillion. I was so excited before I started reading. As I read, I kept thinking "ok, the real story will start soon..." About a half of the way through the book I just gave up. Terribly dissapointed at having wasted as much time as I did reading the crap. It was like reading the bible, and just as badly written.
As stated in an article here, Irish music sales has seen a steep decline of just over €40m in 7 years. They attribute this to filesharing, but I think that's bollocks. First, that is a drop of roughly 33%. Broadband penetration in Ireland is still one of the lowest in the EU. AFAIK, something like 40% of households now have broadband. It is now 2008, the decline has been happening since 2001, and trust me, in 2001 if you were one of the extremely privledged few who could even get broadband in Ireland you would be paying about €100 per month (roughly 80 punts) for a 512k connection, so much so that if you needed faster than dial-up, ISDN was a cheaper option. This decline in sales has been happening since before people in Ireland had even knew what an mp3 was.
I can give you some reasons why I think there has been a drop in sales in Ireland. In the last few years there has been a huge jump in interest in home-grown bands. Many of these bands play gigs around the country and sell their own music themselves. They skip the corporate labels and use word of mouth and reputation to gain popularity. Then they sell their cd's at gigs and keep the money themselves rather than give it to some suit. Also, do they take into account online sales through amazon, cdwow, play.com, etc? My father buys a lot of movies and music, and buys exclusively online. Is he the only one? I think not... Or downloads from iTunes, etc, are they accounted for? I'd be sure that filesharing has caused some of the dip, but the point I'm trying to make is that the big fall in sales is not directly attributed to it.
Also, eircom have a monopoly over DSL in Ireland. There are other providers but eircom own all the exchanges and telephone lines. Even most of the other DSL providers such as BT, Digiweb, Perlico, Magnet's ADSL (not their ADSL2+), etc, all rent bandwidth from eircom and resell it to customers. This means that the filtering, if imposed, would not just affect eircom's customers, but all ADSL customers in the country. Many people in rural areas cannot get cable from Chorus/NTL or wireless from Digiweb, etc. Most people in Ireland are stuck with eircom or one of their bandwidth resellers. If this filtering did come in to play, it would effectively destroy filesharing in Ireland, but would it actually stop the decline in sales? I think that it would end up causing a monetary loss for the labels (assuming that they have to pay for the system).
Well then why don't people sue Microsoft for leaving holes in their OS and then charging extra (Windows Live OneCare) to have the malware removed?
I seriously doubt this is about iPhone security.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destructionWhile various leftover weapons components from the 1980s and 1990s have been found, most weapons inspectors now believe that Iraq's chemical weapons program did indeed cease production after 1991.
I have a two and a half year old Nokia N70 which is one of the oldest 3G phones on the market. I still get over 3 days between recharges. I use my phone quite a lot for web, games, talk and text and as I said, I get 3 days. I don't believe this 'battery life' explanation for 3G on the iPhone, I agree with the poster who said it's for marketing reasons. I mean, look at the iPod photo... It's capable of playing video if you install iPod Linux, yet Apple said it wasn't powerful enough and that's why they didn't include an option for it. Yet, one year later they release the iPod Video. It's BS.
If you actually lived in Ireland, you'd notice that there is actually quite an amount of resentment towards the EU. I'm not arguing that the EU have been bad for Ireland, it has been extremely beneficial. But, not all success of the Irish economy is due to the EU. A low corporation tax coupled with skilled workers is what attracted large corporations such as Microsoft, Intel, EMC, Apple, Dell, Pfizer, GSK, etc.
Back to the resentment of the EU though... Many Irish people are extremely nationalistic and proud of our heritage, culture, etc. Many Irish feel that the EU is turning into some sort of United States of Europe. With Ireland being such a small country that would not have as much pull as the larger states, Irish people feel that we would be ruled by a collection of foreign states that don't have the best interests of the Irish people at heart. Ireland is a neutral country, but the EU is on the way to a single army which would nullify our neutrality (although many would argue we have lost that anyway by letting US war planes refuel here and letting CIA extraordinary-rendition pass through). We want to be able to make our own laws, not be told what we can and can't do from Brussels. The EU is changing from what it was originally, into a single country and many Irish people (and people from other EU countries) don't want that. That is why the Nice Treaty was voted against, and why so many countries opposed the EU constitution. Maybe your government told you that Irish people thought they made a mistake voting no the first time around for the Nice Treaty, but what actually happened was our government reworded it told us that it would be ok and we were to vote again (for the same thing) and it narrowly passed. We had already said No, the government should have just accepted that.
Anyway, gone way off-topic here, but in reference to the original post: If Microsoft products were banned it would do a hell of a lot more damage to the EU than good. I can't speak for other countries but in Ireland, Microsoft would obviously close, as would Dell and EMC for example (which would mean that I am out of a job), as they use Microsoft OS's in their products. It would also cost companies billions upon billions overall throughout the EU to transition from Windows to Linux. It is not feasible.
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I couldn't agree more. I don't have a degree. I don't even have a qualification in IT. I have a diploma in multimedia. I'm self learned in computers and programming.
I work for one of the largest data storage device manufacturers as a server technician. Although the requirements for the job stated a degree, I still got the job because computers aren't just something I studied in college in order to make loads of money. It's something I love working with and have an aptitude for. The recruiters and interviewers saw that and that's why I got the job.
Not only is it because it is installed by default, but also because Symantec offer stores such low wholesale prices the profit margin for the store is huge.
While I was in college I worked as a tech part time with PC World who are one of the biggest offline PC retailers in Europe. The sales staff got extra commission if they sold Norton but standard commission for other AV products. Guess which one they pushed on customers. I actually felt guilty about even working there when I knew customers were getting ripped off so badly. Customers would come back a few months later complaining that they got viruses even though they had Norton. Although I was supposed to point to the 99.9% effectiveness label, and say they are within the 0.1%, and I would have to charge them 80 euro to remove the virus manually, my concience used to get the better of me. I'd tell them to uninstall Norton and get Avira or AVG for free and it would do a better job.
That was fine, until one day a customer complained to a manager that he had been sold bad software and that I had confirmed it. I didn't care, I was leaving soon afterwards anyway.
Back on topic... Symantec/Norton is one of the worst AV out there. They should spend less money on marketing and more on improving their product.
I agree.
A few months ago my father was looking to buy a new laptop. He had been an apple user for years but was balking at the price of the macbook (1100 euro). I convinced him to buy a Dell.
People think that Dell's do not match Apple in quality but that is a myth. It's spin by the masters of spin, Apple. Why did he have to replace his three year old iBook while my four year old Inspiron was still running fine (and I use mine a hell of a lot more than he uses his)?
The supposedly super strong Polycarbonate chassis was creaking and felt like it was about to fall apart. The battery was loose and if the laptop was moved without being plugged in the power would die. The charger or power slot was faulty because you would have to keep plugging/unplugging and fiddling with the plug for it to start charging. That laptop never left the comfort of the front room in his house. My Dell has been travelling everywhere with me and taken a hell of a lot more knocks.
Then we get back to the price... I reminded my father that that was his third Apple laptop in 10 years. He had a Powerbook 3400c (which was second hand and still works, just incredibly slow), a Wallstreet PowerBook G3 (had more problems than his last iBook) and then there's the previously mentioned iBook. I then reminded him about my laptop, how old it is, what it's been through, and how it's still fine.
He decided to go with Dell then so I bought him an Inspiron. He got a 2.2Ghz C2D, 2GB RAM, 250GB HDD, 15 inch screen, HDMI out (he's got a 1080p telly so that was essential). It cost 600 euro inc shipping and taxes. That's 500 euro less than the comparable macbook at the time, which didn't have HDMI.
The funny thing is that he had Macs because I used to be a Mac user. That is until Mr. Jobs took over at apple and made them fashion accessories rather than computers. I now build my own desktops and media PC, and use my Inspiron and eeePC. All run Linux.
This is how it officially breaks down...
Windows 1
Windows 2 (+2.1)
Windows 3 (+3.1)
Windows 4 (95, 98, 98SE, ME)
Windows 5 (2000, XP)
Windows 6 (Vista)
Windows 7...
Did that have floating toolbars that could dock to screen edges? That's why I said 'AFAIK', I wasn't sure if it was there before Win '98.
I've had a 'dock' in XP for years now... On my desktop my Start menu is at the top of the screen and I have a toolbar at the bottom (and I can just as easily move it to the side), it's set to auto-hide. I have shortcuts to my most frequently used applications there. If I want to run a program I just move my mouse to the bottom of the screen, the toolbar pops up just like Apple's dock and I click an icon. Hey presto, my app opens. AFAIK that capability has been available since Windows 98.
Actually you are wrong. In Ireland the Mc prefix is also very common. Here in the city I live in there was a fast food place called McBia's who sold the McBurger. And the nearest McDonalds was less than a mile away.
I need to get more diazepam for my next clan battle in counterstrike.
Actually COD4 has very, very annoying DRM. If I want to play COD4 I have to disable any image mounting software and then reboot. It's a good game but I can't be bothered going to the effort needed just to play it. For that reason I will never buy an Activision game again.
I had a similar problem about two weeks ago with my copy of Half-Life Generations that is many years old and had never been used by me through Steam. The steam rep told me to scan/photograph my booklet with the serial numbers on it, write my steam account name along with the incident number on a post-it on the the booklet and email the image back. I did and it was all sorted within 10 mins. That's the solution contained in the steam knowledgebase also. I'd suggest searching the knowledgebase for it and then email the link back to the rep you were in contact with.
How the hell is this insightful?
Duh... First under 'Earth', then under 'Quake'...
I'm not defending the scumbags, just stating that they are left-wing rather than right-wing.
The IRA are the military wing of Sinn Fein. Sinn Fein is a marxist party. The opposite of right-wing.
EMC actually use STEC drives.
And, selling drives at enterprise level is quite different to selling them a consumer level. When you buy something as a consumer, the product is shipped to you as-is. When you buy enterprise storage, everything is thoroughly analysed, tested, qualified. Everything has redundancy. The software that is developed monitors the whole system to try and detect failures before it happens. You then have an engineer on site to correct the problem before you even realise you have a problem. If you have never been in an EMC plant and seen the process each little component goes through to ensure that there are no failures/potential failures shipped to clients, then don't complain about the prices. As I said, enterprise storage is completely different to consumer storage.
Would you pay tens if not hundreds of thousands for a storage system for your mp3's and photos? I think not. What would you pay? A few hundred euro at most maybe? For that price, you get the product as-is. That isn't good enough for a bank for instance. If their storage system fails, their business if GONE. They are willing to pay the huge amounts of money for the service and not just the product that EMC and other enterprise storage companies provide.
I read the LoTR and the Hobbit and loved them both. They are some of the greatest stories ever told in my opinion. After reading them I was addicted and wanted more. I rushed out and bought the Silmarillion. I was so excited before I started reading. As I read, I kept thinking "ok, the real story will start soon..." About a half of the way through the book I just gave up. Terribly dissapointed at having wasted as much time as I did reading the crap. It was like reading the bible, and just as badly written.
You're right, you shouldn't be modded Offtopic... You should be modded Flamebait.
As stated in an article here, Irish music sales has seen a steep decline of just over €40m in 7 years. They attribute this to filesharing, but I think that's bollocks. First, that is a drop of roughly 33%. Broadband penetration in Ireland is still one of the lowest in the EU. AFAIK, something like 40% of households now have broadband. It is now 2008, the decline has been happening since 2001, and trust me, in 2001 if you were one of the extremely privledged few who could even get broadband in Ireland you would be paying about €100 per month (roughly 80 punts) for a 512k connection, so much so that if you needed faster than dial-up, ISDN was a cheaper option. This decline in sales has been happening since before people in Ireland had even knew what an mp3 was.
I can give you some reasons why I think there has been a drop in sales in Ireland. In the last few years there has been a huge jump in interest in home-grown bands. Many of these bands play gigs around the country and sell their own music themselves. They skip the corporate labels and use word of mouth and reputation to gain popularity. Then they sell their cd's at gigs and keep the money themselves rather than give it to some suit. Also, do they take into account online sales through amazon, cdwow, play.com, etc? My father buys a lot of movies and music, and buys exclusively online. Is he the only one? I think not... Or downloads from iTunes, etc, are they accounted for? I'd be sure that filesharing has caused some of the dip, but the point I'm trying to make is that the big fall in sales is not directly attributed to it.
Also, eircom have a monopoly over DSL in Ireland. There are other providers but eircom own all the exchanges and telephone lines. Even most of the other DSL providers such as BT, Digiweb, Perlico, Magnet's ADSL (not their ADSL2+), etc, all rent bandwidth from eircom and resell it to customers. This means that the filtering, if imposed, would not just affect eircom's customers, but all ADSL customers in the country. Many people in rural areas cannot get cable from Chorus/NTL or wireless from Digiweb, etc. Most people in Ireland are stuck with eircom or one of their bandwidth resellers. If this filtering did come in to play, it would effectively destroy filesharing in Ireland, but would it actually stop the decline in sales? I think that it would end up causing a monetary loss for the labels (assuming that they have to pay for the system).
Well then why don't people sue Microsoft for leaving holes in their OS and then charging extra (Windows Live OneCare) to have the malware removed? I seriously doubt this is about iPhone security.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction While various leftover weapons components from the 1980s and 1990s have been found, most weapons inspectors now believe that Iraq's chemical weapons program did indeed cease production after 1991.
It happens to real cars every day. In fact, it'll even happen to me when I finish work today. I'm not theorised or modelled in a computer.
Don't believe everything you hear...
I have a two and a half year old Nokia N70 which is one of the oldest 3G phones on the market. I still get over 3 days between recharges. I use my phone quite a lot for web, games, talk and text and as I said, I get 3 days. I don't believe this 'battery life' explanation for 3G on the iPhone, I agree with the poster who said it's for marketing reasons. I mean, look at the iPod photo... It's capable of playing video if you install iPod Linux, yet Apple said it wasn't powerful enough and that's why they didn't include an option for it. Yet, one year later they release the iPod Video. It's BS.
If you actually lived in Ireland, you'd notice that there is actually quite an amount of resentment towards the EU. I'm not arguing that the EU have been bad for Ireland, it has been extremely beneficial. But, not all success of the Irish economy is due to the EU. A low corporation tax coupled with skilled workers is what attracted large corporations such as Microsoft, Intel, EMC, Apple, Dell, Pfizer, GSK, etc.
Back to the resentment of the EU though... Many Irish people are extremely nationalistic and proud of our heritage, culture, etc. Many Irish feel that the EU is turning into some sort of United States of Europe. With Ireland being such a small country that would not have as much pull as the larger states, Irish people feel that we would be ruled by a collection of foreign states that don't have the best interests of the Irish people at heart. Ireland is a neutral country, but the EU is on the way to a single army which would nullify our neutrality (although many would argue we have lost that anyway by letting US war planes refuel here and letting CIA extraordinary-rendition pass through). We want to be able to make our own laws, not be told what we can and can't do from Brussels. The EU is changing from what it was originally, into a single country and many Irish people (and people from other EU countries) don't want that. That is why the Nice Treaty was voted against, and why so many countries opposed the EU constitution. Maybe your government told you that Irish people thought they made a mistake voting no the first time around for the Nice Treaty, but what actually happened was our government reworded it told us that it would be ok and we were to vote again (for the same thing) and it narrowly passed. We had already said No, the government should have just accepted that.
Anyway, gone way off-topic here, but in reference to the original post: If Microsoft products were banned it would do a hell of a lot more damage to the EU than good. I can't speak for other countries but in Ireland, Microsoft would obviously close, as would Dell and EMC for example (which would mean that I am out of a job), as they use Microsoft OS's in their products. It would also cost companies billions upon billions overall throughout the EU to transition from Windows to Linux. It is not feasible.
Really? I thought it would be a method of creating your own CPU's...