Whenever I hear people say "security through obscurity is no security at all" like some mantra first I laugh and then I remind them that passwords are an instant counter argument; the passwords, "password" or "12345678" are not obscure and thus suck. The password "g*&Gug®¥øç¥" on the other-hand rocks (Other than being really hard to remember or type)
My 16 digit CC number along with 4 digit expiry and the 3 digit number on the back are quite secure if I keep them safe and obscure but become very insecure if I hand them out willy-nilly.
And lastly good luck breaking into my safe if I don't tell you where it is or what the combo is.
The only flaw is when you completely depend upon the obscurity. If my safe is made from tinfoil then when you find it you will crack it pretty quickly. But obscurity is often a significant part of security. Again let's have a race. You try to crack my safe made from tinfoil that I hid and I'll try to crack your top of the line safe that you deliver to my welding/grinding shop. Obviously the best safe would be both tough and hidden.
Nerds tend to have more logic and less social understanding. So a nerd might be running a company and say "fire the bottom 10%" this is logical and in theory the correct idea; but they forget that it will freak out the other 90% into thinking they are next and probably be worse than just keeping the useless 10% or at least shedding them in a less efficient but more tactful way.
Another good example of this is how so many IT departments make rules that treat the employees like children. It is a fact that most employees, at say an insurance company, would cause many disasters given unlimited access to the various company systems. But they often take this fact way too far; extending it to issuing Blackberries that are horribly crippled (no internet access even through wifi) or not letting managers deploy systems for their department. Again this often backfires and results in their employes referring to IT as the department of NO; so the managers and whatnot end run the IT department and outsource things like a sales management system or a new time management system. I experienced this first hand a while back when I was giving a presentation of a system for a company. Early in the presentation the network connection went very weird. The IT head had a shit eating grin on his face. I then switched over to a cellular connection(very rare at the time) and the presentation went smoothly while the IT guy frantically pounded on his keyboard trying to figure out where my internet connection was coming from. It was clearly his goal to keep the work in house. The people who did hire us showed us all kinds of tricks they had to get around IT. This was a major company and these were top guys. The problem was simple they couldn't out logic the IT people; but they could outsmart them.
The last place that this logic really gets companies in trouble is that IT people become religious about their favorite technology. I have met Windows zelots, linuz zelots, Novell zelots (the worst), Sun zelots, even adabas zelots. Often these people have mastered some technology, been certified up the wazoo, and now have final say in decision making. So some little snot nosed kid comes along and says "Hello you are still using Novell? Time to move on." And poof it is the snot nose who moves on. Can you imagine arguing with someone with 20 years Novell experience under their belt? Even now in 2012 I see companies deploying Novell into new departments.
BTW Novell gives administrators stunning abilities to control the user experience. There are few better systems for treating the users like infants.
I have seen this before. Various things that limit messages, signups, email checks, login attempts. I can't count the number of times that I have been told "You have exceeded the number of XXX, please wait X seconds before trying again."
The story was good but I read it and thought, this is a book written for me. Not nerdface like The Big Bang Theory but stuff complicated enough that it would make most of my family angry to read.
Michael Crichton did this to a limited extent but not to this lovely level.
The description of how he deceives the screen scanning system while imprisoned would throw most people for a loop. I love it!
I have seen business presentation after business presentation where their great idea had a hockey stick. This hockey stick was always just a few years away. The other half of the pattern was that they spent all the investment money around the same time the graph was about to turn up. So for me hockey stick graphs are usually a huge bad smell. If you look at the past you can find all kinds of hockey sticks. But I find that most were not predictable that far in the future. So take the number of European soldiers killed in either World War and you have hockey sticks. But few predicted either war say a decade before they happened. Another hockey stick would be the number of mortgage defaults in the US. Again a few predicted it but the vast majority didn't.
So when someone calls bullshit on anyone waving a hockey stick graph and saying the sky is falling; give me money. I support anyone who calls Bullshit on them.
I have largely left Windows behind but I find that when relatives hand me their Windows box to fix that Windows XP is easier to set right. Just all those little things like the serial number having a much higher chance of working. I find (especially with Windows 7) that I put the correct version DVD in and it rejects the MS serial number that is glued to the box. Then it goes downhill from there.
Then if I have to install any corporate crap like Citrix that it has an inversely proportional ratio of functioning properly to version beyond XP.
Lastly I test my own stuff on Windows by either compiling the program occasionally on windows or running my web apps on IE in a VM. Again the XP VM tends to be speedy and small. Windows 7 tends to be cranky in a VM so even though I am just running it for a few minutes I find it less pleasant. This is not some kind of show stopper just an observation that Windows XP is not glaringly worse than Windows 7 for basic usage.
So I would not ever recommend that someone pull Windows 7 off their machine but that some corporate type with an Office full of XP machines running just fine doubtfully will reap much reward through a huge upgrade. Personally if I were in charge of an office full of XP machines I would organically just replace dead machines with a new machine running whatever newer OS came with it. Someone might complain that supporting multiple OS versions is a cost in and of itself but if supporting multiple OS versions is a cost then your IT structure is either really really big or your IT people really suck.
This is just to lay the legal groundwork for the music and movie industries. This way they can demand this list from the ISP and show that the evildoer just kept going in the face of legal threats.
Pretty dumb for any ISP to help to attack their customers. When will the media companies learn that going to war with your customers is not a sustainable business model?
Plus I torrent Linux quite often how long before they start threatening even legitimate torrent users?
I did some consulting for a company years ago. Some of their top employees worked 4 day weeks as a reward for function points delivered and bugs not delivered. One guy generated enough that he could have worked 2 day weeks (but didn't) and still held the top position on the leaderboard (ranked weekly). The top 3 employees were not gaming the system they were just really good; their total points were a huge multiple of the bottom 20 employees. Then the company brought on a new manager (a lawyer) who said this simply couldn't stand. He eliminated the days off and the top 5 employees all quit right after lunch. I left a few months later when they were getting slower and slower paying my invoices and then poof they were gone. This was after the previous year of 20 million in revenue generating around 6 million in profits. Those top guys had started a new company doing this crazy new thing (iPhone app development) got bought out for about 5 to 7 mil a tiny bit less than a year later.
What I did involved coming in at random times of the day. I can remember was that the worst employees were the ones sweating the long hours. Then after the lawyer came in those same guys were singled out for their dedication and hard work.
Oh the lawyer unsuccessfully tried suing them after their success.
Aren't Kaspersky Labs the bozos who supported Internet passports? That is such a dumb idea that my computer lost 100Mhz just browsing the article. These guys just have verisign envy and want to get between users and hardware in order to charge rent.
With the addition of this feature Ubuntu was crossed off my list. Until now it was Ubuntu for desktops and CentOS for servers. Now it it Mint for desktops and still CentOS for servers. Wow that was hard. Mint is prettier anyway.
Again some MBA was let loose with his spreadsheet. He crunched some numbers and everybody when woooooo. There are all kinds of bad things that look good when put on a spreadsheet. A really nice bold bottom line doesn't make them less bad; it just makes making a bad decision seem better.
Voltaire's Bastards taught me how control of information both up and down the chain is where real power lay. This is why opening up government to complete scrutiny would place power back in the hands of the people. Open government plus democracy has such potential as opposed to our present system of half truths and rarely revealed whole truths swamped by lies and then we are supposed to go to the polling booth and make an informed decision.
Yes elitist like I won't eat food with lead in it or meat that doesn't smell good. It is just that if they won't take my advice and pay less than it would cost for one or two visits to a geek squad and get the right machine then no I won't give my time and years of skill away for free. Going into staples and getting their door crasher special might make them feel good for having save $90 but then they expect me to spend a few hours wiping it of the bloatware and repeated other calls dealing with crap like when the crap WiFi keeps turning itself off.
Then these self same people get an iPhone4s (which regardless of the upfront cost is $700) then they scream about paying more than $400 for a laptop that they need for school/work. So no, you either buy from my list or don't expect me to hand out free support. My list is even flexible. No split left shift, check. No built in trial AV, check. No built in music buying software, check. No built in games software, check. No built in trial of MS Office, check. Machine is from a manufacturer I have heard of, check (Think not SORNY). Machine doesn't sound like a baby rattle when you shake it, check. Machine doesn't smell funny, check. (I find machines that smell funny out of the box have a huge failure rate.) Not a terribly elitist list. Typically you might spend 100-150 more to hit all the points. There are some things that I have even taken off the list as everything has them now like boots from USB.
I did this in the past but I find that just finding the right version of windows to match their product key is a huge pain. Then you have to start installing drivers from HP and often those drivers come with baggage.
So I insist that they get a machine that works out of the box. I have a very short list of machines that I will help with. At first they laughed got crap machines and then when they hit even the smallest hiccup like a printer jam I would just say, "Good luck with Google" Otherwise I just go over and start getting annoyed the first time I go to hit the left shift key. Now they spend a few extra bucks get the right machine and oddly call me a whole lot less.
Call me overly sensitive but if I could repair cars and you bought a Daiwoo I wouldn't fix that either. I would again make a list of cars that are good value and hand that out.
I use a mac and generally recommend those. I set my mother up with a Linux box (locked down so grandkids don't wreck it). One sister is a Lawyer so I told her to go with Windows as it is inevitable that there will be some Windows only app LawMaster2000 or such. So I am very much the right system for the right job. But when it comes to the machine don't buy it from a company that seems to hate their customers. I find HP machines are like companies that pay minimum wage; they are basically saying if it were legal they would pay even less. HP seems to be saying that if they could get away with it they would sell even worse machines.
I don't care if HP computers are made from magic; the bloatware that they come with is intolerable and that stupid cheap "\|" key they put as half of the left shift key is rage inducing.
A while back I gave my family a very short list of computers that I would help them with. HP is not on that list. They buy something off the list and they are on their own. Sign number one that a computer company hates their users is when they put that crap Norton Trialware on the computer.
People keep blah blahing about a Post-PC world coming due to tablets and smart phones. I say it all started to die the day that some MBA came up with the business model of selling a computer really cheap and then trying to screw the customer with all he money / time sucking bloatware.
Another good example of where HP went wrong was with their printer drivers. I print maybe once a month. Thus I don't want the driver running full time in the background. It should be about 3 megs of software that takes my document and prints it. I don't need to manage the print jobs, redirect them, manage supplies, or anything else. These should be optional programs that I could install on say a machine that prints all day long. But no they want me to download 200megs of crap that then installs all kinds of document management crap. This just drives me to make sure that I buy an older used printer that has drivers built into the OS.
I always laugh at those pictures of Jumbotron screens where a Norton AV subscription reminder has come up mid game but that is not so much the fault of the Jumbotron people as it is the greed of companies like HP.
But this crap is now creeping into smartphones. Rogers even put McAfee AV on his Android smartphone.
There need to be serious consequences for claims that turn out to have no merit. The best consequence would not be just a huge fine but after 3rd strike you go to jail. This should be coupled with a lawyers must sign the DMCA notice so that they would not be able to claim ignorance in any way.
After enough strikes the copyright holder should lose their copyright all together and the item should go into the public domain.
Cobol and Fortran. This after programming assembly since I had been 12. Also in my highschool in 1988 Computer programming was considered a "Shop" class categorized with car repair and typing.
You rock! In my city there are about 9 theaters with the largest having 17 screens. All are owned by the same Family who owns most if not all the theaters in my province. Their employees are pimply faced kids from the Simpsons and the places have had all the quality sucked out of them and painted over with a 90's black and glow veneer. They have left one theater in the city alone to be the classy theater where even the employees are cooler.
I helped a guy who got scammed by these guys but it turned out that he was so stubborn that he just wouldn't do what they wanted and just argued with them that they were wrong. So about all that got hurt was the home page on his browser.
Personally I just wasted their time and would thank them for calling and say my computer was acting up and all slow. I would tell them it was booting but to be patient as it would take a few minutes. Then I would say oh something says it installed something and I need to reboot again. I would do this over and over until they hung up. Didn't take my time as they were on speaker phone and I would only talk to them during compiles.
Also the phone conversational radio show Wiretap by CBC seemed to keep them on the line for a long while.
These bozos don't realize that they have lost control of information. Once you put information out it and people want it the information will go everywhere. Before they could release a movie and they controlled the flow of the physical film, then they released the video cassette and again they could mostly control this (some piracy) but now the only control they have is mostly at the film editing level. In the past they abused this control by releasing the films slowly around the world. People in Canada thought it sucked as we got the films after the US but people in Britain really thought it sucked as they got them long after us and much of the world had to wait for video. Places in Africa had theaters that showed video-taped films on big screens.
But now the film companies have put up so many barriers to my seeing their stuff that piracy is logical. I go to the theater for a 9:15 film arriving say 9:05. For those 10 minutes the theater blasts cell phone and car commercials at me. Then at 9:15 they start showing trailers and around 9:30 the film begins but not really it is advertizements for the various levels of production company and more advertisements for the actors and directors so maybe around 9:32 I am seeing a movie that I payed $13 for nearly 30 minutes earlier. Renting a movie is much the same except that I don't know where to rent movies anymore. But if you do get a blue ray most players won't let you skip past the various warnings and even sometimes the trailers.
Now compare that to pirating a movie. Download time 5-10 minutes, cost almost nothing, restrictions: none. So you set the download, get the download and fast forward to the exact moment the real movie starts.
But the one restriction is that it is slightly hard to do. Most people will have difficulty getting a movie onto their computer, finding the file, sending it to a large TV somehow, and then controlling the movie. And this is where the movie industry has a chance. They could make it really easy for most people to use any box (game consoles, apple TV, roku) like netflix and just get the movie for a reasonable price. If the theater charges me $13 don't think you can either charge me more (for my convenience) or anything even close; I know that if you are distributing it directly to me that you have a huge savings so at $2 per movie I will happily watch a zillion movies; at $9.99 a movie I'll find a better use for my money.
This brings me to another point. In this modern age people are finding better uses for their money so don't blame all your dropping revenues on piracy. A blockbuster video game can make billions, that money is coming out of people's entertainment budget which once went to movies and music.
Mindjet Mindmanager rocks. I have shown that tool to at least 20 people and I don't think a single one adopted it; fools. For brainstorming I can't imagine a better tool. You just keep throwing information into the tree and there is always a perfect place for it. My favorite is when a long term project has a new idea for some future feature and I go to put it in and it is already there in the exact place where I wanted to put the "new" idea. Then as the project moves along the tree becomes a source of great ideas that had popped into people's heads long before.
Even for putting together a report or whatnot. You just keep gathering facts and ideas then then export to word; a bit of trimming and editing and you have a report.
But as I said, I have shown that product to at least 20 people with none adopting it. I can't imagine how hard it is for the MindJet people to sell it. Easily one of the first products I install on a new computer, well before an office suite, but after my IDE.
Marshall Mcluhan said "The medium is the message" what do you think the message will be when the new medium comes along and everybody is walking around with a smart phone (and when prices come down) a good data plan?
This is opposed to right now when most people are walking around with a smart phone wishing they had a good data plan.
I have never understood this business. Not much has changed in say basic trig or geometry in 100 years. In that time basic subject textbooks should have been whittled down to two or three that are simply the best. But somehow there is different textbooks in nearly every school system in North America; yet a school system in SoCal should be able to use the same textbook as in Maine. The textbook companies have somehow convinced every schoolboard that they should tailor the books to match their exact curriculum. This gives the schoolboards a warm and fuzzy feeling while they set up approval commities, training sessions, etc for the new books. Yet these books add up to a huge percentage of the budget.
My two daughters have nearly useless textbooks year after year which their teachers just don't use. They will have questions like: "Write down all the ways 10 numbered marbles can be put into 5 lettered bags." Holy crap do these people even have a basic understanding of math.
It is not just ebooks that can replace these dinosaurs but cool online videos.
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever I hear people say "security through obscurity is no security at all" like some mantra first I laugh and then I remind them that passwords are an instant counter argument; the passwords, "password" or "12345678" are not obscure and thus suck. The password "g*&Gug®¥øç¥" on the other-hand rocks (Other than being really hard to remember or type)
My 16 digit CC number along with 4 digit expiry and the 3 digit number on the back are quite secure if I keep them safe and obscure but become very insecure if I hand them out willy-nilly.
And lastly good luck breaking into my safe if I don't tell you where it is or what the combo is.
The only flaw is when you completely depend upon the obscurity. If my safe is made from tinfoil then when you find it you will crack it pretty quickly. But obscurity is often a significant part of security. Again let's have a race. You try to crack my safe made from tinfoil that I hid and I'll try to crack your top of the line safe that you deliver to my welding/grinding shop. Obviously the best safe would be both tough and hidden.
So the line should be security and obscurity.
Nerds tend to have more logic and less social understanding. So a nerd might be running a company and say "fire the bottom 10%" this is logical and in theory the correct idea; but they forget that it will freak out the other 90% into thinking they are next and probably be worse than just keeping the useless 10% or at least shedding them in a less efficient but more tactful way.
Another good example of this is how so many IT departments make rules that treat the employees like children. It is a fact that most employees, at say an insurance company, would cause many disasters given unlimited access to the various company systems. But they often take this fact way too far; extending it to issuing Blackberries that are horribly crippled (no internet access even through wifi) or not letting managers deploy systems for their department. Again this often backfires and results in their employes referring to IT as the department of NO; so the managers and whatnot end run the IT department and outsource things like a sales management system or a new time management system. I experienced this first hand a while back when I was giving a presentation of a system for a company. Early in the presentation the network connection went very weird. The IT head had a shit eating grin on his face. I then switched over to a cellular connection(very rare at the time) and the presentation went smoothly while the IT guy frantically pounded on his keyboard trying to figure out where my internet connection was coming from. It was clearly his goal to keep the work in house. The people who did hire us showed us all kinds of tricks they had to get around IT. This was a major company and these were top guys. The problem was simple they couldn't out logic the IT people; but they could outsmart them.
The last place that this logic really gets companies in trouble is that IT people become religious about their favorite technology. I have met Windows zelots, linuz zelots, Novell zelots (the worst), Sun zelots, even adabas zelots. Often these people have mastered some technology, been certified up the wazoo, and now have final say in decision making. So some little snot nosed kid comes along and says "Hello you are still using Novell? Time to move on." And poof it is the snot nose who moves on. Can you imagine arguing with someone with 20 years Novell experience under their belt? Even now in 2012 I see companies deploying Novell into new departments.
BTW Novell gives administrators stunning abilities to control the user experience. There are few better systems for treating the users like infants.
I have seen this before. Various things that limit messages, signups, email checks, login attempts. I can't count the number of times that I have been told "You have exceeded the number of XXX, please wait X seconds before trying again."
The story was good but I read it and thought, this is a book written for me. Not nerdface like The Big Bang Theory but stuff complicated enough that it would make most of my family angry to read.
Michael Crichton did this to a limited extent but not to this lovely level.
The description of how he deceives the screen scanning system while imprisoned would throw most people for a loop. I love it!
Encore, encore.
I have seen business presentation after business presentation where their great idea had a hockey stick. This hockey stick was always just a few years away. The other half of the pattern was that they spent all the investment money around the same time the graph was about to turn up. So for me hockey stick graphs are usually a huge bad smell. If you look at the past you can find all kinds of hockey sticks. But I find that most were not predictable that far in the future. So take the number of European soldiers killed in either World War and you have hockey sticks. But few predicted either war say a decade before they happened. Another hockey stick would be the number of mortgage defaults in the US. Again a few predicted it but the vast majority didn't.
So when someone calls bullshit on anyone waving a hockey stick graph and saying the sky is falling; give me money. I support anyone who calls Bullshit on them.
I have largely left Windows behind but I find that when relatives hand me their Windows box to fix that Windows XP is easier to set right. Just all those little things like the serial number having a much higher chance of working. I find (especially with Windows 7) that I put the correct version DVD in and it rejects the MS serial number that is glued to the box. Then it goes downhill from there.
Then if I have to install any corporate crap like Citrix that it has an inversely proportional ratio of functioning properly to version beyond XP.
Lastly I test my own stuff on Windows by either compiling the program occasionally on windows or running my web apps on IE in a VM. Again the XP VM tends to be speedy and small. Windows 7 tends to be cranky in a VM so even though I am just running it for a few minutes I find it less pleasant. This is not some kind of show stopper just an observation that Windows XP is not glaringly worse than Windows 7 for basic usage.
So I would not ever recommend that someone pull Windows 7 off their machine but that some corporate type with an Office full of XP machines running just fine doubtfully will reap much reward through a huge upgrade. Personally if I were in charge of an office full of XP machines I would organically just replace dead machines with a new machine running whatever newer OS came with it. Someone might complain that supporting multiple OS versions is a cost in and of itself but if supporting multiple OS versions is a cost then your IT structure is either really really big or your IT people really suck.
This is just to lay the legal groundwork for the music and movie industries. This way they can demand this list from the ISP and show that the evildoer just kept going in the face of legal threats.
Pretty dumb for any ISP to help to attack their customers. When will the media companies learn that going to war with your customers is not a sustainable business model?
Plus I torrent Linux quite often how long before they start threatening even legitimate torrent users?
It may not be perfect but Carbon Dating makes the blurry less blurry and this latest development sharpens it further.
I did some consulting for a company years ago. Some of their top employees worked 4 day weeks as a reward for function points delivered and bugs not delivered. One guy generated enough that he could have worked 2 day weeks (but didn't) and still held the top position on the leaderboard (ranked weekly). The top 3 employees were not gaming the system they were just really good; their total points were a huge multiple of the bottom 20 employees. Then the company brought on a new manager (a lawyer) who said this simply couldn't stand. He eliminated the days off and the top 5 employees all quit right after lunch. I left a few months later when they were getting slower and slower paying my invoices and then poof they were gone. This was after the previous year of 20 million in revenue generating around 6 million in profits. Those top guys had started a new company doing this crazy new thing (iPhone app development) got bought out for about 5 to 7 mil a tiny bit less than a year later.
What I did involved coming in at random times of the day. I can remember was that the worst employees were the ones sweating the long hours. Then after the lawyer came in those same guys were singled out for their dedication and hard work.
Oh the lawyer unsuccessfully tried suing them after their success.
Aren't Kaspersky Labs the bozos who supported Internet passports? That is such a dumb idea that my computer lost 100Mhz just browsing the article. These guys just have verisign envy and want to get between users and hardware in order to charge rent.
With the addition of this feature Ubuntu was crossed off my list. Until now it was Ubuntu for desktops and CentOS for servers. Now it it Mint for desktops and still CentOS for servers. Wow that was hard. Mint is prettier anyway.
Again some MBA was let loose with his spreadsheet. He crunched some numbers and everybody when woooooo. There are all kinds of bad things that look good when put on a spreadsheet. A really nice bold bottom line doesn't make them less bad; it just makes making a bad decision seem better.
Cryptonomicon was awesome. I suspect that people without some programming background would not like it. A book written for people with half a brain.
Voltaire's Bastards taught me how control of information both up and down the chain is where real power lay. This is why opening up government to complete scrutiny would place power back in the hands of the people. Open government plus democracy has such potential as opposed to our present system of half truths and rarely revealed whole truths swamped by lies and then we are supposed to go to the polling booth and make an informed decision.
Yes elitist like I won't eat food with lead in it or meat that doesn't smell good. It is just that if they won't take my advice and pay less than it would cost for one or two visits to a geek squad and get the right machine then no I won't give my time and years of skill away for free. Going into staples and getting their door crasher special might make them feel good for having save $90 but then they expect me to spend a few hours wiping it of the bloatware and repeated other calls dealing with crap like when the crap WiFi keeps turning itself off.
Then these self same people get an iPhone4s (which regardless of the upfront cost is $700) then they scream about paying more than $400 for a laptop that they need for school/work. So no, you either buy from my list or don't expect me to hand out free support. My list is even flexible. No split left shift, check. No built in trial AV, check. No built in music buying software, check. No built in games software, check. No built in trial of MS Office, check. Machine is from a manufacturer I have heard of, check (Think not SORNY). Machine doesn't sound like a baby rattle when you shake it, check. Machine doesn't smell funny, check. (I find machines that smell funny out of the box have a huge failure rate.) Not a terribly elitist list. Typically you might spend 100-150 more to hit all the points. There are some things that I have even taken off the list as everything has them now like boots from USB.
I find that this totally depends on the printer. All-in-ones seem to take over your machine. Boring older models dish out little or no abuse.
I did this in the past but I find that just finding the right version of windows to match their product key is a huge pain. Then you have to start installing drivers from HP and often those drivers come with baggage.
So I insist that they get a machine that works out of the box. I have a very short list of machines that I will help with. At first they laughed got crap machines and then when they hit even the smallest hiccup like a printer jam I would just say, "Good luck with Google" Otherwise I just go over and start getting annoyed the first time I go to hit the left shift key. Now they spend a few extra bucks get the right machine and oddly call me a whole lot less.
Call me overly sensitive but if I could repair cars and you bought a Daiwoo I wouldn't fix that either. I would again make a list of cars that are good value and hand that out.
I use a mac and generally recommend those. I set my mother up with a Linux box (locked down so grandkids don't wreck it). One sister is a Lawyer so I told her to go with Windows as it is inevitable that there will be some Windows only app LawMaster2000 or such. So I am very much the right system for the right job. But when it comes to the machine don't buy it from a company that seems to hate their customers. I find HP machines are like companies that pay minimum wage; they are basically saying if it were legal they would pay even less. HP seems to be saying that if they could get away with it they would sell even worse machines.
I don't care if HP computers are made from magic; the bloatware that they come with is intolerable and that stupid cheap "\|" key they put as half of the left shift key is rage inducing.
A while back I gave my family a very short list of computers that I would help them with. HP is not on that list. They buy something off the list and they are on their own. Sign number one that a computer company hates their users is when they put that crap Norton Trialware on the computer.
People keep blah blahing about a Post-PC world coming due to tablets and smart phones. I say it all started to die the day that some MBA came up with the business model of selling a computer really cheap and then trying to screw the customer with all he money / time sucking bloatware.
Another good example of where HP went wrong was with their printer drivers. I print maybe once a month. Thus I don't want the driver running full time in the background. It should be about 3 megs of software that takes my document and prints it. I don't need to manage the print jobs, redirect them, manage supplies, or anything else. These should be optional programs that I could install on say a machine that prints all day long. But no they want me to download 200megs of crap that then installs all kinds of document management crap. This just drives me to make sure that I buy an older used printer that has drivers built into the OS.
I always laugh at those pictures of Jumbotron screens where a Norton AV subscription reminder has come up mid game but that is not so much the fault of the Jumbotron people as it is the greed of companies like HP.
But this crap is now creeping into smartphones. Rogers even put McAfee AV on his Android smartphone.
There need to be serious consequences for claims that turn out to have no merit. The best consequence would not be just a huge fine but after 3rd strike you go to jail. This should be coupled with a lawyers must sign the DMCA notice so that they would not be able to claim ignorance in any way.
After enough strikes the copyright holder should lose their copyright all together and the item should go into the public domain.
Cobol and Fortran. This after programming assembly since I had been 12. Also in my highschool in 1988 Computer programming was considered a "Shop" class categorized with car repair and typing.
You rock! In my city there are about 9 theaters with the largest having 17 screens. All are owned by the same Family who owns most if not all the theaters in my province. Their employees are pimply faced kids from the Simpsons and the places have had all the quality sucked out of them and painted over with a 90's black and glow veneer. They have left one theater in the city alone to be the classy theater where even the employees are cooler.
I helped a guy who got scammed by these guys but it turned out that he was so stubborn that he just wouldn't do what they wanted and just argued with them that they were wrong. So about all that got hurt was the home page on his browser.
Personally I just wasted their time and would thank them for calling and say my computer was acting up and all slow. I would tell them it was booting but to be patient as it would take a few minutes. Then I would say oh something says it installed something and I need to reboot again. I would do this over and over until they hung up. Didn't take my time as they were on speaker phone and I would only talk to them during compiles.
Also the phone conversational radio show Wiretap by CBC seemed to keep them on the line for a long while.
These bozos don't realize that they have lost control of information. Once you put information out it and people want it the information will go everywhere. Before they could release a movie and they controlled the flow of the physical film, then they released the video cassette and again they could mostly control this (some piracy) but now the only control they have is mostly at the film editing level. In the past they abused this control by releasing the films slowly around the world. People in Canada thought it sucked as we got the films after the US but people in Britain really thought it sucked as they got them long after us and much of the world had to wait for video. Places in Africa had theaters that showed video-taped films on big screens.
But now the film companies have put up so many barriers to my seeing their stuff that piracy is logical. I go to the theater for a 9:15 film arriving say 9:05. For those 10 minutes the theater blasts cell phone and car commercials at me. Then at 9:15 they start showing trailers and around 9:30 the film begins but not really it is advertizements for the various levels of production company and more advertisements for the actors and directors so maybe around 9:32 I am seeing a movie that I payed $13 for nearly 30 minutes earlier. Renting a movie is much the same except that I don't know where to rent movies anymore. But if you do get a blue ray most players won't let you skip past the various warnings and even sometimes the trailers.
Now compare that to pirating a movie. Download time 5-10 minutes, cost almost nothing, restrictions: none. So you set the download, get the download and fast forward to the exact moment the real movie starts.
But the one restriction is that it is slightly hard to do. Most people will have difficulty getting a movie onto their computer, finding the file, sending it to a large TV somehow, and then controlling the movie. And this is where the movie industry has a chance. They could make it really easy for most people to use any box (game consoles, apple TV, roku) like netflix and just get the movie for a reasonable price. If the theater charges me $13 don't think you can either charge me more (for my convenience) or anything even close; I know that if you are distributing it directly to me that you have a huge savings so at $2 per movie I will happily watch a zillion movies; at $9.99 a movie I'll find a better use for my money.
This brings me to another point. In this modern age people are finding better uses for their money so don't blame all your dropping revenues on piracy. A blockbuster video game can make billions, that money is coming out of people's entertainment budget which once went to movies and music.
Mindjet Mindmanager rocks. I have shown that tool to at least 20 people and I don't think a single one adopted it; fools. For brainstorming I can't imagine a better tool. You just keep throwing information into the tree and there is always a perfect place for it. My favorite is when a long term project has a new idea for some future feature and I go to put it in and it is already there in the exact place where I wanted to put the "new" idea. Then as the project moves along the tree becomes a source of great ideas that had popped into people's heads long before.
Even for putting together a report or whatnot. You just keep gathering facts and ideas then then export to word; a bit of trimming and editing and you have a report.
But as I said, I have shown that product to at least 20 people with none adopting it. I can't imagine how hard it is for the MindJet people to sell it. Easily one of the first products I install on a new computer, well before an office suite, but after my IDE.
Marshall Mcluhan said "The medium is the message" what do you think the message will be when the new medium comes along and everybody is walking around with a smart phone (and when prices come down) a good data plan?
This is opposed to right now when most people are walking around with a smart phone wishing they had a good data plan.
I have never understood this business. Not much has changed in say basic trig or geometry in 100 years. In that time basic subject textbooks should have been whittled down to two or three that are simply the best. But somehow there is different textbooks in nearly every school system in North America; yet a school system in SoCal should be able to use the same textbook as in Maine. The textbook companies have somehow convinced every schoolboard that they should tailor the books to match their exact curriculum. This gives the schoolboards a warm and fuzzy feeling while they set up approval commities, training sessions, etc for the new books. Yet these books add up to a huge percentage of the budget.
My two daughters have nearly useless textbooks year after year which their teachers just don't use. They will have questions like: "Write down all the ways 10 numbered marbles can be put into 5 lettered bags." Holy crap do these people even have a basic understanding of math.
It is not just ebooks that can replace these dinosaurs but cool online videos.
Bye bye massively commissioned textbook sales people.