Before the business where I work at hired their own tech support staf,f they had blown through a $150,000 budget by calling in a "consultant" - at $50/Hr - to do things like, reboot their machines, install a driver, install the OS, etc. - and those were Macs!! Arguably even simpler to maintain than PC's!
The important distinction to note here is this - a HOME user will want to get away with paying as little as possible beause its THEIR money. A business user won't give a shit if someone charges $50-$75/hr to install 1 memory stick - it's a company expense.
I've given this some thought before, but the reality is, if you are sick of doing tech support now, imagine how nauseaus you'll become doing tech support for every frelled up installation of AOL or "Barbie Beauty Shop". AAARGH!!
There are no ifs ands or buts, tech support for home users SUCKS!!
They got their soundbyte when this poor girl said "This scares me so bad I never want to download anything again."
Yeah, but once you are over being afraid it gradually turns to anger and then to hatred. Think "bullies". Everyone's afraid of a bully, but eventually everyone is angry at the bully and learns to hate the bully. At the next opportunity that said bully is at a disadvantage, guess what's going down?
No stress. This is quite a non-issue for an even moderately competent computer user. In fact, Apple itself recommends that, once you download your songs, you make a backup of them by burning them onto a CD. Even a lower-end Mac comes with a CD burner.
From Apple's Help Menu on iTunes Music Store:
Backing up your music to a CD or DVD
You can create (or "burn") a data CD or DVD with any of the songs and spoken word content in your iTunes library. You might want to do this to make a backup copy (or archive) of all your audio files, or to transfer them to another computer(emphasis mine).
To burn a DVD, your computer should have an internal SuperDrive and Mac OS 10.2.4 or later. Some third-party DVD burners may also work.
You can store about 650 MB of files on a CD, and about 4.7 GB on a DVD.
This does not even include the "analog hole" people keep referring to of outputting your sound out to stereo and recording through tape, VCR, DAT, whatever.
In a article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal article (can't remember the date), Steve Jobs said that Apple's licensing scheme was there to be easy to use and keep honest people honest. More importantly, it was NOT meant to keep a dedicated "pirate" from copying the music. SteveJ basically said that such a software DRM was impossible - someone would always crack it.
Moral of the story, your MP3's and AAC files are imminently corruptible data on a disk. Treat them as such and back them up
Seems like ISP's have been fighting SBC's anti-competitive practices for years. IMHO, the biggest mistake the FCC made was in allowing the Bells to compete as ISP's. They should be barred from being ISP's so that the motivation for them to compete with their own customers (independent ISPs) is removed.
I don't have any firm numbers, but I imagine quite a bit more (er, no pun intended). If the drives can write in the perpendicular, you basically get a storage mechanism in "3D" instead of just "2D" of a normal drive. However, I had always envisioned them doing this with lasers and holograms rather than opaque metal platters.
There is a TREMENDOUS need for increased COMPACT storage with the way bioinformatics is chewing through storage like it was old newspaper.
Sidenote: Baylor College of Medicine's Human Genome Project has over 10 Terabytes of info and add to it at the rate of about 10GB a DAY.
The attitude may be somewhat cold, but I agree with it overall. Some years ago, I read a magazine article that talked about "secret millionaires". It was no other than folks who either worked at their own small business, or kept steady jobs, but most importantly, LIVED MODESTLY. They didn't buy new or ostentatious cars, lived in modest homes just large enough for their families, clipped coupons, kept savings and retirement accounts. Those folks ALL had net worths of over a million dollars.
Secondly, because we live in a country of such obvious wealth, there is a pervasive sense of entitlement in the mindset of the general populace. Many people believe that crap they see on "Friends" as being an achievable lifestyle and strive to emulate that, even when it ruins them financially.
We should be sympathetic to a fellow human being, but living beyond your means for years before it finally catches up to you is *not* a "hardship" deserving of pity.
blue
I thought it quite in keeping with the whole tone of the article - overtly sympathetic to the schools and the students.
My evidence:
1) Article title: "BC, MIT decline to name students in music-use case", as opposed to "music-piracy" or "song-stealing" case.
OR
2) "The recording industry's strategy -- pursuing both high-profile users with hundreds of megabytes of music as well as small-time downloaders -- is intended as a wake-up call to Internet music enthusiasts like Alexa Bedell-Healey - as opposed to "illegal file-swappers" or "song-traders"
Any article can be written to have a slightly positive or negative tone while still remaining "truthful" to the facts of the story. The name of the game to write more "positive" sounding articles like this one that portray the RIAA in a slightly negative light.
There were no subpoenas on file sent to AOL Time Warner Inc., the nation's largest Internet provider and also parent company of Warner Music Group. Earthlink Inc., another of the largest Internet providers, said it has received only three new subpoenas.
Doesn't it strike anyone else as *amazing* that the LARGEST Internet Service Provider in the nation does not have ANY subscribers being sued????? HOW are they deciding which filesharers to sue? Surely there must be several thousand AOL'ers sharing mp3 files. Are they overlooked because they share through IM or what???
My paranoia is telling me the RIAA is being used an an underhanded strongarm technique to consolidate ISP's. Chase away one ISP's customers by suing them, and likely they will change ISP's as well.....
Y'know, you can always just hoard ALL her e-mail and then only forward e-mails that you have approved as non-spam. Nothing like a little "act of sys-admin god" to make a user appreciate how much we DON'T invade their privacy in the workplace.
blue
It's to the advantage of marketers that the public is so ignorant about computers. It makes it easier to sell unrealistic expectations as well as worthless products. It also helps marketers differentiate between otherwise similar products.
I kid you not, a computer store I shop at was selling battery backups for home computers that touted "Internet ready" in a bold red and gold splash on the box. Huh???
I thought it might have meant that the modem line ran through the UPS to catch any surges through the phone line, but it didn't *have* any RJ-11 jacks to accomodate this speculation. I came to the conclusion that it was completely useless marketing spiel designed to play on the "Internet" buzzword.
I strongly believe that computer awareness is the next "literacy" of this millenium - as essential as reading, writing and basic arithmetic. But the only way to accomplish that (on a nationwide level) is to *require* incorporating computer literacy into the curriculum of all schools and make sure all schools have the basic tools to teach it, ie. computers.
video games have always been helpful in the development process. I remember in grade school that all the "smart" kids owned NES or PC games. Theres been a couple studies recently supporting this theory.
This might be true to a certain point, but don't rush out and devote 6 hours a day to your Nintendo just yet. I certainly wouldn't want to emphasize "game learning" much past, say, 6th grade or so.
Why? Because at some point, kids have to learn that not all life is fun and games. Imagine if your $50K year programmer didn't want to work on that personnel management system because it wasn't "fun". Constantly catering to a child's "fun now" instinct does not help build self-control and discipline.
We've all heard of the "smart but unmotivated" kids and adults whose lives don't amount to much. But I've never heard of someone described as "disciplined and hardworking" who didn't encounter at least a modest measure of success in life - no matter how low their IQ.
In the long run, a high IQ will give a child a strong head start, but sooner or later they will have to buckle down and learn to accomplish things even when they don't "feel like it" or it's not "fun".
Just my $.035 (adjusted for inflation).
blue
Re:Hmmmmmm I wonder...
on
Working Hard?
·
· Score: 1
Actually, walmart gives 1 week a year to employees who've been there a year, full time.
After 2 years full time, 2 weeks paid off.
After 4 years, 4 weeks paid off.
After 7 years, 4 weeks off and 5 personal days guaranteed every year after.
Beat that.
Okee. Private Schools.
After 1 year - 3 weeks vacation, 2 weeks Christmas Holidays, 2 days Thanksgiving Holidays, President's day, Labor Day, Martin Luther King Day, Good Friday,.. Geez, I can't remember the rest of them. Oh yah, Spring Break.
Year 2 - Slight pay increase for inflation, repeat for all the same holidays.
would be to have each vendor pick their machine, optimize it to their hearts content software and hardware wise. Then load 3-5 common apps like Photoshop, MS Office, Illustrator, Premier, etc. Working with the same graphics or test files on both platforms, run them through their paces. Just to spice things up, have the persons doing the testing be an "expert" for each platform - a power user that prefers a PC and a power user that prefers a Mac.
Then see how long it takes each to accomplish 1) particular tasks like color rendering a photo, and 2) the total overall time it takes to complete all the tasks.
This is the kind of "benchmarking" that exists in the real world and I want to see a test of that. No whining about "Altivec" or "SSE/SSE2" - it means nothing to me and won't mean anything to me unless the sofware I'm using happens to take advantage of it. To me, this eliminates the "But they left out BLAH optimization and disabled BLAH functionality that REALLY speeds things up!" If the vendor can't figure out how to optimize their own hardware, then that's something you have to consider when deciding your purchase - along with the final cost of all the "mods" and "extras".
THOSE are the results that would impress me more than some vague reference to floating point vs. integer performance.
Gonna play devil's advocate here. I don't believe IE will ever play friendly with web standards when you have this.
"AOL Time Warner, for its part, has just ended its browser-related legal claims against Microsoft as part of a $750 million settlement that included a seven-year free license for IE."
AOL seems just as popular on the Mac side as it is on the PC side. Either AOL bought a license for a discontinued product, or they are planning on integrating IE into their AOL client.
Um, basically, they are going to. This little paragraph here: "On the Windows side, Microsoft has said that it will stop development of standalone versions of Internet Explorer, instead evolving the browser as part of future updates to the Windows OS."
Of course, evolving the browser into the WinOS may or may not have significant impact on all those pages that are IE specific. All I can say for sure is that, of the 3 browsers that I use on OS X, (Safari, Netscape,Explorer) Explorer is by far the slowest and buggiest of the lot.
Ever watched any behavioral studies on chimpanzees? It might frighten you how much of their behavior they have in common with us. Chimpanzees have been observed - participating in sex for pleasure (oral and otherwise), - organizing hunts for food (they happily kill and eat other monkeys or smaller animals), - teaching their young how to use tools (slowly and conscientiously - not haphazardly expecting the kid to just "pick it up") - physically assaulting (and sometimes killing) a fellow group member for no discernible reason.
Sound familiar? It should. Just check out your regular TV news shows to have a keen understanding of the human savagery mirrored in chimp society.
Yeah, I think they are worthy of being included in our genus.
Hrrrm. It's actually a bit more difficult than that. Spammers actively look for ways around non-relaying servers, especially in this day of web-based mail forms. We had an incident where a spammer discovered that a poorly coded cgi-form would allow different e-mail addresses to be sent using our web-based mail submittal form. Even though the server was secured against relaying, it wasn't secured against receiving thousands of submittals through its web form. We only noticed it when someone complained to our ISP, who forwarded the notice on to us. We patched it up and sent an apology to our ISP and the original complainer.
Moral of the story - don't give up complaing to an ISP about spam. You may actually get them to do something about it.
I wonder about this. The article clearly stated that a man who was "colorblind" was, nonetheless, able to see a color triggered by his synesthesia. This would imply that as long as *some* input gets to your brain, your brain makes the adjustment and association. Hmmmm....
Has anyone read this article? There doesn't really seem to be any NEW information regarding SBC and their "frames" patent. It just sorta went on about "who's a patent dickhead now". On the plus side, I was gratified to read that British telecom was told to go stuff it when they attempted to sue Prodigy over "linking". Let's hope ALL these "patent" holders are so told.
One last final point: Open source was doomed from the beginning. Yes, it's a blanket statement that sounds ridiculous. Keep reading. Open source is based on the very principles of communism: everyone works on it, everyone owns it. The very thing that led to the collapse of Communism leads to the inability of open source to become popular: workers then tend to migrate quickly, and not work hard, since they can't gain anything from working on one thing hard.
Actually, I disagree that communism failed because people got tired of contributing. In my opinion, there really hasn't been a "ideological" communist state to exist yet. Russia and Cuba are both just glorified dictatorships, not communist states - no matter how much they claim otherwise. Their governments ended up hoarding all the resources and not really giving back to the people they governed. Getting back to open source software, however, a key difference is that you can LEAVE an open source project whenever you feel like. Do some people have the attention span of mayflies? Sure. But sometimes they just need a break to be able to get back into the project. Since this is their personal interest, it's less likely to be subjected to permanent disinterest. Somewhere, somebody loves everykind of project.
Does it really take people that long to understand that someone may want to create something just for the sheer joy of creating something useful or helpful? How the hell do you explain drawing, music, painting, etc.? Jesus, corporate-boneheads must think everybody is a greedy, sonuvabitch driven only by monetary compensation.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they're going for that "+5 Funny" mod on /.
Before the business where I work at hired their own tech support staf,f they had blown through a $150,000 budget by calling in a "consultant" - at $50/Hr - to do things like, reboot their machines, install a driver, install the OS, etc. - and those were Macs!! Arguably even simpler to maintain than PC's!
The important distinction to note here is this - a HOME user will want to get away with paying as little as possible beause its THEIR money. A business user won't give a shit if someone charges $50-$75/hr to install 1 memory stick - it's a company expense.
I've given this some thought before, but the reality is, if you are sick of doing tech support now, imagine how nauseaus you'll become doing tech support for every frelled up installation of AOL or "Barbie Beauty Shop". AAARGH!!
There are no ifs ands or buts, tech support for home users SUCKS!!
Yeah, but once you are over being afraid it gradually turns to anger and then to hatred. Think "bullies". Everyone's afraid of a bully, but eventually everyone is angry at the bully and learns to hate the bully. At the next opportunity that said bully is at a disadvantage, guess what's going down?
From Apple's Help Menu on iTunes Music Store: This does not even include the "analog hole" people keep referring to of outputting your sound out to stereo and recording through tape, VCR, DAT, whatever.
In a article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal article (can't remember the date), Steve Jobs said that Apple's licensing scheme was there to be easy to use and keep honest people honest. More importantly, it was NOT meant to keep a dedicated "pirate" from copying the music. SteveJ basically said that such a software DRM was impossible - someone would always crack it.
Moral of the story, your MP3's and AAC files are imminently corruptible data on a disk. Treat them as such and back them up
Endless summer of DSL discounts July 7, 2003
FCC loosens broadband rules February 20, 2003
SBC unfair on high-speed Net, ISPs charge July 26, 2001
ISPs fight for more than DSL scraps June 26, 2001
ISPs allege Bell abuse in high-speed services October 27, 1999
Seems like ISP's have been fighting SBC's anti-competitive practices for years. IMHO, the biggest mistake the FCC made was in allowing the Bells to compete as ISP's. They should be barred from being ISP's so that the motivation for them to compete with their own customers (independent ISPs) is removed.
blue
There is a TREMENDOUS need for increased COMPACT storage with the way bioinformatics is chewing through storage like it was old newspaper.
Sidenote: Baylor College of Medicine's Human Genome Project has over 10 Terabytes of info and add to it at the rate of about 10GB a DAY.
blue
The attitude may be somewhat cold, but I agree with it overall. Some years ago, I read a magazine article that talked about "secret millionaires". It was no other than folks who either worked at their own small business, or kept steady jobs, but most importantly, LIVED MODESTLY. They didn't buy new or ostentatious cars, lived in modest homes just large enough for their families, clipped coupons, kept savings and retirement accounts. Those folks ALL had net worths of over a million dollars.
Secondly, because we live in a country of such obvious wealth, there is a pervasive sense of entitlement in the mindset of the general populace. Many people believe that crap they see on "Friends" as being an achievable lifestyle and strive to emulate that, even when it ruins them financially.
We should be sympathetic to a fellow human being, but living beyond your means for years before it finally catches up to you is *not* a "hardship" deserving of pity. blue
My evidence:
1) Article title: "BC, MIT decline to name students in music-use case", as opposed to "music-piracy" or "song-stealing" case. OR
2) "The recording industry's strategy -- pursuing both high-profile users with hundreds of megabytes of music as well as small-time downloaders -- is intended as a wake-up call to Internet music enthusiasts like Alexa Bedell-Healey - as opposed to "illegal file-swappers" or "song-traders"
Any article can be written to have a slightly positive or negative tone while still remaining "truthful" to the facts of the story. The name of the game to write more "positive" sounding articles like this one that portray the RIAA in a slightly negative light.
blue
There were no subpoenas on file sent to AOL Time Warner Inc., the nation's largest Internet provider and also parent company of Warner Music Group. Earthlink Inc., another of the largest Internet providers, said it has received only three new subpoenas.
Doesn't it strike anyone else as *amazing* that the LARGEST Internet Service Provider in the nation does not have ANY subscribers being sued?????
HOW are they deciding which filesharers to sue? Surely there must be several thousand AOL'ers sharing mp3 files. Are they overlooked because they share through IM or what???
My paranoia is telling me the RIAA is being used an an underhanded strongarm technique to consolidate ISP's. Chase away one ISP's customers by suing them, and likely they will change ISP's as well.....
*mumbles* gotta stop watching too much TV....
blue
Y'know, you can always just hoard ALL her e-mail and then only forward e-mails that you have approved as non-spam. Nothing like a little "act of sys-admin god" to make a user appreciate how much we DON'T invade their privacy in the workplace. blue
It's to the advantage of marketers that the public is so ignorant about computers. It makes it easier to sell unrealistic expectations as well as worthless products. It also helps marketers differentiate between otherwise similar products.
I kid you not, a computer store I shop at was selling battery backups for home computers that touted "Internet ready" in a bold red and gold splash on the box. Huh???
I thought it might have meant that the modem line ran through the UPS to catch any surges through the phone line, but it didn't *have* any RJ-11 jacks to accomodate this speculation. I came to the conclusion that it was completely useless marketing spiel designed to play on the "Internet" buzzword.
I strongly believe that computer awareness is the next "literacy" of this millenium - as essential as reading, writing and basic arithmetic. But the only way to accomplish that (on a nationwide level) is to *require* incorporating computer literacy into the curriculum of all schools and make sure all schools have the basic tools to teach it, ie. computers.
(steps of soapbox)
blue
This might be true to a certain point, but don't rush out and devote 6 hours a day to your Nintendo just yet. I certainly wouldn't want to emphasize "game learning" much past, say, 6th grade or so.
Why? Because at some point, kids have to learn that not all life is fun and games. Imagine if your $50K year programmer didn't want to work on that personnel management system because it wasn't "fun". Constantly catering to a child's "fun now" instinct does not help build self-control and discipline.
We've all heard of the "smart but unmotivated" kids and adults whose lives don't amount to much. But I've never heard of someone described as "disciplined and hardworking" who didn't encounter at least a modest measure of success in life - no matter how low their IQ.
In the long run, a high IQ will give a child a strong head start, but sooner or later they will have to buckle down and learn to accomplish things even when they don't "feel like it" or it's not "fun".
Just my $.035 (adjusted for inflation).
blue
Actually, walmart gives 1 week a year to employees who've been there a year, full time.
After 2 years full time, 2 weeks paid off.
After 4 years, 4 weeks paid off.
After 7 years, 4 weeks off and 5 personal days guaranteed every year after.
Beat that.
Okee. Private Schools.
After 1 year - 3 weeks vacation, 2 weeks Christmas Holidays, 2 days Thanksgiving Holidays, President's day, Labor Day, Martin Luther King Day, Good Friday,.. Geez, I can't remember the rest of them. Oh yah, Spring Break.
Year 2 - Slight pay increase for inflation, repeat for all the same holidays.
Year 3 - Repeat ad nauseum.
I'm more concerned with the fact that they have a PDF RMA request form - right beneath two tech support options.
Hmmm, are they expecting a high volume of "This is crap! Give me my money back!" responses which would necessitate an easily downloadable RMA???
blue
"Remember, you get what you pay for."
would be to have each vendor pick their machine, optimize it to their hearts content software and hardware wise. Then load 3-5 common apps like Photoshop, MS Office, Illustrator, Premier, etc. Working with the same graphics or test files on both platforms, run them through their paces. Just to spice things up, have the persons doing the testing be an "expert" for each platform - a power user that prefers a PC and a power user that prefers a Mac.
Then see how long it takes each to accomplish 1) particular tasks like color rendering a photo, and 2) the total overall time it takes to complete all the tasks.
This is the kind of "benchmarking" that exists in the real world and I want to see a test of that. No whining about "Altivec" or "SSE/SSE2" - it means nothing to me and won't mean anything to me unless the sofware I'm using happens to take advantage of it.
To me, this eliminates the "But they left out BLAH optimization and disabled BLAH functionality that REALLY speeds things up!" If the vendor can't figure out how to optimize their own hardware, then that's something you have to consider when deciding your purchase - along with the final cost of all the "mods" and "extras".
THOSE are the results that would impress me more than some vague reference to floating point vs. integer performance.
blue
Gonna play devil's advocate here.
I don't believe IE will ever play friendly with web standards when you have this.
"AOL Time Warner, for its part, has just ended its browser-related legal claims against Microsoft as part of a $750 million settlement that included a seven-year free license for IE."
AOL seems just as popular on the Mac side as it is on the PC side. Either AOL bought a license for a discontinued product, or they are planning on integrating IE into their AOL client.
Just my $.02
blue
Um, basically, they are going to. This little paragraph here:
"On the Windows side, Microsoft has said that it will stop development of standalone versions of Internet Explorer, instead evolving the browser as part of future updates to the Windows OS."
That link embedded in the quote leads to Microsoft abandons standalone IE.
Of course, evolving the browser into the WinOS may or may not have significant impact on all those pages that are IE specific. All I can say for sure is that, of the 3 browsers that I use on OS X, (Safari, Netscape,Explorer) Explorer is by far the slowest and buggiest of the lot.
blue
Ever watched any behavioral studies on chimpanzees?
It might frighten you how much of their behavior they have in common with us.
Chimpanzees have been observed
- participating in sex for pleasure (oral and otherwise),
- organizing hunts for food (they happily kill and eat other monkeys or smaller animals),
- teaching their young how to use tools (slowly and conscientiously - not haphazardly expecting the kid to just "pick it up")
- physically assaulting (and sometimes killing) a fellow group member for no discernible reason.
Sound familiar? It should. Just check out your regular TV news shows to have a keen understanding of the human savagery mirrored in chimp society.
Yeah, I think they are worthy of being included in our genus.
blue
Hrrrm. It's actually a bit more difficult than that. Spammers actively look for ways around non-relaying servers, especially in this day of web-based mail forms. We had an incident where a spammer discovered that a poorly coded cgi-form would allow different e-mail addresses to be sent using our web-based mail submittal form. Even though the server was secured against relaying, it wasn't secured against receiving thousands of submittals through its web form. We only noticed it when someone complained to our ISP, who forwarded the notice on to us. We patched it up and sent an apology to our ISP and the original complainer.
Moral of the story - don't give up complaing to an ISP about spam. You may actually get them to do something about it.
Moral of the story: don't piss people off.
How about Moral of the story: get rid of companies and spammers who mass mail un/solicited junk.
It's not like they can claim "targeted mailings" when every piece of junk mail you get is addressed to you or "Current Resident".
Fscking spam....
blue
I wonder about this. The article clearly stated that a man who was "colorblind" was, nonetheless, able to see a color triggered by his synesthesia. This would imply that as long as *some* input gets to your brain, your brain makes the adjustment and association. Hmmmm....
blue
Has anyone read this article? There doesn't really seem to be any NEW information regarding SBC and their "frames" patent. It just sorta went on about "who's a patent dickhead now".
On the plus side, I was gratified to read that British telecom was told to go stuff it when they attempted to sue Prodigy over "linking". Let's hope ALL these "patent" holders are so told.
blue
Woot!
But will Canada have enough room to accomodate all those professional, middle-class, middle-aged American potsmokers?
And here I was about to get my U.S. citizenship...
Maybe I need to get my ex-patriot butt back home, eh?
blue
One last final point: Open source was doomed from the beginning. Yes, it's a blanket statement that sounds ridiculous. Keep reading. Open source is based on the very principles of communism: everyone works on it, everyone owns it. The very thing that led to the collapse of Communism leads to the inability of open source to become popular: workers then tend to migrate quickly, and not work hard, since they can't gain anything from working on one thing hard.
Actually, I disagree that communism failed because people got tired of contributing. In my opinion, there really hasn't been a "ideological" communist state to exist yet. Russia and Cuba are both just glorified dictatorships, not communist states - no matter how much they claim otherwise. Their governments ended up hoarding all the resources and not really giving back to the people they governed.
Getting back to open source software, however, a key difference is that you can LEAVE an open source project whenever you feel like. Do some people have the attention span of mayflies? Sure. But sometimes they just need a break to be able to get back into the project. Since this is their personal interest, it's less likely to be subjected to permanent disinterest. Somewhere, somebody loves everykind of project.
blue
This one of those "well DUH!" kinda articles.
Does it really take people that long to understand that someone may want to create something just for the sheer joy of creating something useful or helpful? How the hell do you explain drawing, music, painting, etc.? Jesus, corporate-boneheads must think everybody is a greedy, sonuvabitch driven only by monetary compensation.
blue