Almost every employer I've worked for has had a nearly-identical clause for college coursework.
They'll pay for any classes (or, more properly, any classes I pass with a good grade) that are related to my profession, or in support of a degree program relevant to my profession. However, each individual course has a one-year payback clause. If I leave the company for any reason within a year of any check being cut to reimburse me for a class, I have to pay it back. All coursework is completed on my own time, and if I fail a course I get no reimbursement. Reimbursement is also reduced for a passing-but-low grade (example from one company, A=100%, B=90%, C=75%, D=50%).
I was laid off at one company, though, and they forgave the 3 classes I had taken within the one-year time limit. Technically they could have asked for it, but they wrote it off, which was nice of them.
why would someone suddenly want to leave just because they completed one training course?
Because another firm is looking for skills in the area they just got trained in, and is offering big bucks for someone already trained in it?
Here's the tricky part - if I need a skill I can either hire someone who has the skill already, or I can train someone who does not have the skill. Assuming that skill is in some demand, once that training is complete my employee is worth more money, meaning that in order to retain them I have to give them a raise or risk having them jump ship to someone else who will pay them more.
Most employers do not think in terms of the complete skillset. Let's say Inintech has an employee called "Frank" who has been with them for years. He's a solid performer being paid a competitive salary for his current skills. They think "If I train Frank, I'm paying craploads of money to make it so Frank can demand more money from me. If I hire someone who already has the skill, I'm not paying for that training and getting the same skill." They get a resume from Bob, who is already trained in the skill and is asking the same money as Frank would after Frank is done with his training.
The problem is, they don't both have the same skill. Frank, who has been with the company for years, is already familiar with the company, and is probably already familiar with a lot of the company's systems. If you add to his skillset, then all of his added knowledge will be added in context of what your company already does. Joe, on the other hand, has to go through orientation and familiarization with your systems, you way of doing things, your standards, etc.
If you are looking to add a skill and all of your internal people are already at capacity and happy in their positions, then it makes sense to hire a new person with the skills you need already in place, then orient them to your company. If, however, you are looking at eliminating a current employee and replacing them, then (assuming the employee is otherwise performing well and is capable of the skill) it may make a lot more sense to retrain that existing employee. It costs more, but you get someone who knows the skill AND is familiar with your company.
It can also boost overall loyalty and morale if you demonstrate that you want to keep your employees.
But it's always a risk. Frank might get the skill, then find another job who is really desperate for the skill and offers him more money than you can afford (especially since you just shelled out a lot of money on him and the coffers are a bit low). It makes sense to depreciate the cost of training over some short-but-reasonable timeframe, and put the employee on the hook for reimbursement of the training if they leave very soon after being trained.
I've seen employers who have offered the training in terms of an interest-free loan. You get the training, and the company pays for it up front. At the end of the training, you get a raise commensurate with your new skills. However, the amount of the raise goes into repaying the loan until it is paid off, so your actual paycheck doesn't change for a while. Once the loan is paid off, you're free and clear and the raise reaches your paycheck. If you leave the company you owe them the remainder of the loan.
It seems a very reasonable way to handle it - you're paying the employee a competitive paycheck while encouraging them to expand their skills, but ensuring that the training you pay for them isn't just a tool to allow them to leapfrog over you and into a better-paying job as soon as the ink dries on the certificate.
It also leads to some interesting creativity on the part of employees, who want the training and the bigger future paycheck it unlocks, but might settle for a cheaper hotel or whatever, because it's their own money they are spending.
True, though the only communications medium open to them (throwing exceptions to syslog) is obviously ignored by many ClamAV users. Those who were paying attention went to the URL and did the upgrade.
Those who did not were about to get a nonfunctional copy of Clam (no more updates, and AV is worse than useless without recent updates - it gives you a false sense of security which is far more dangerous than a real sense of fear). So you might as well kill it off with some fanfare so people who don't monitor their syslogs notice something is wrong.
The only reason anyone found out about this case was because the school dragged the kid's parents in for a parent-teacher conference and showed the pictures to the parents.
After it was all explained that the kid liked "Mike and Ike" candy (which is pill-shaped) the school then explained how they got the pictures. I don't know if the parents asked, or what, but the school showed image captured by the kids laptop in his own bedroom to the kid's parents.
1. A broken security tool that is obviously broken, or
2. A half-broken security tool that looks like it's working OK?
Umm, I'll take #1 for priceless security, Alex.
As soon as ClamAV stops sending out freshclam for a version, that version should fail. As spectacularly and noisily as possible. It should scream of its obsolescence from the rooftops, and prevent any service depending on it from doing jack schitt until it gets fixed.
The least intrusive means would have been to call the student's parents and ask if he had the laptop with him. Yes? OK, please pay the insurance fee before he takes it home again, thanks. Issue resolved.
OK, let's go with that for a second. The school apparently did have some reason to believe that the laptop was stolen, since the student's parents didn't pay an insurance fee that was supposed to authorize the kid to take the laptop home.
However, the laptop was issued to that student. So the correct answer would have been to call the student's parents at home and ask if the laptop is there, and request that payment be rendered for the insurance fee if the kid wants to take it home again, please and thanks.
Someone at the school instead decided to turn on the camera. Fortunately for them, all they saw was the student fully dressed sitting in front of the computer eating something. They could have ended up getting a picture of an underage girl naked, possession of which is sufficient proof for child porn in the US and long frequent love sessions with Bubba, because Bubba likes child molesters and he gets lonely.
OK, so they've gotten damned lucky so far. Laptop is obviously not stolen, and they didn't end up accidentally acquiring kiddie porn images. Best to delete all the images and sigh with relief, right?
But, wait, what is that he's popping? Damn, that looks a lot like a bunch of pills. Let's call the parents in and accuse the kid of maybe taking illegal drugs, just in case the parents need to intervene. I mean, we're only trying to protect him, right? Yeah, let's call the parents in and show them the images, then explain how we go them.
Oh, "Mike and Ike", you say? Oops, our bad. Please ignore our blatantly illegal violation of the privacy of your home, THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
Yeah, behavior like that makes me think that someone was probably "thinking of the children", or at least their cute little bodies and hoping to "accidentally" get a juicy picture of one.
I'm sure the person who did this did so with the best of intentions, but IT WAS STUPID. Actually, it started stupid and got worse, to the point of being criminally stupid, then just criminal.
The problem here is that once support services end, they stop writing new signatures for the old version of ClamAV. If an administrator has been ignoring (or has been unaware of) the impending end-of-life of ClamAV for the past 6 months, they are going to remain unaware of the problem basically forever.
There are four ways to handle this:
1. Contact all of your users. How?? Those who have subscribed to the updates list already know. You don't have to register to have ClamAV, so for most of the rest they won't have an email address.
2. Make the software tell the user it is about to expire. How?? There isn't a communications process written into ClamAV that can send a signal up to the GUI and most people don't monitor every line of their syslogs.
3. Just shut down the update server so you won't offer the users signature updates any more. Users will continue along for long periods of time with increasingly outdated antivirus definitions. This is a really, really bad idea.
4. Give people ample warning over as many channels as you can, then break it so people notice that something is wrong.
#4 is not ideal. But it's the best of the options.
Personally, I have ClamAV on all of my machines, but it's the Ubuntu/Mint supported version out of the repositories, so it gets updated. I think ClamAV would be well-served putting up Debian and RPM repositories and making people install the software using the repos, and not offering it for direct download any more.
No. I pay my credit card company with an ACH transaction. I log on to my credit union's web site and authorize transfer of the funds every month. No paper checks, and the only people who have access to that information are my credit union and my credit card company.
And the only account authorized for ACH and checks is one I keep a limited amount of funds in. So even if my checking account was compromised, they could only take what I had deposited in it to cover the bills outstanding against it at the moment.
Plus, even if I did pay them with a check, that's one transaction per month I am taking a risk with. I pay for nearly everything with my credit cards, so I am using them multiple times PER DAY with various and sundry vendors.
I'd rather have my bank account with my real money exposed for one transaction per month than many. And even that is a "front" account with little funds in it.
In other words, I use the technique most people here espouse to make debit cards more secure - keep only a small amount exposed to the card.. except I use that as a SECOND layer of defense, not a primary one.
Credit cards may not be absolutely secure, but in terms of their ability to drain my actual money from my actual accounts, they are as close as we're gonna get.
If someone uses my credit card for fraud, I may have an uncomfortable time with the one creditor (my credit card company), but my cash in my bank/credit union accounts cannot be compromised by that. That means that any other payments I might make are unaffected by the fraud, my checks clear, and all of the people I am honestly paying will get paid.
To me, debit cards represent the worst of all possible worlds. I am exposing my actual bank account in each transaction, I am not receiving any float on my funds, I am not receiving any cashback or awards for my purchases, and the vendor I am doing business with is still paying a transaction fee.
For someone disciplined enough to pay off a credit card every month, I have yet to hear of any benefit to using a debit card. There are lots of disadvantages, and not a single advantage I've ever heard of.
Yes, your bank account may get cleaned out (or depleted up to the daily spending limit of your debit card), and outstanding checks may bounce, and you may have a freeze on your account until it gets resolved. However, this zero liability guarantee means any transactions found to be fraudulent will be reimbursed by your bank. The bank then goes after the merchant that processed the transaction to recoup their own losses. If you have a good bank, they'll also refund your overdraft fees.
Meaning no offense, but why in the hell would this make me want a debit card?
Maybe the bank would give me back my fees and losses, but I've still bounced checks with God-knows-who and caused them all manner of hassle and had them incur fees and lost trust with them. If my bank account gets cleaned out the day before my IRS check hits, do you seriously think they'll just chuckle and say "oopsie, well, we'll clear it again". No. I'm going to spend hours on the phone with everyone I sent a check or made an automated payment to, trying to dig my way out of the hole that used to be my bank account.
I've had an account cleanout happen (account was cleaned out by lawyers suing my parents, and I stupidly left my mother's name on my bank account). My mortgage and car payment checks were in the outgoing mail the same day I received the "summons to trustee" notice, and all my money was gone. It worked out, but I had to take two days off work (lost vacation time) to make all the necessary phone calls, and I still had a black mark on my credit rating for several years afterward, even though none of the bounced checks were determined to be my fault. I worked for a bank service company at the time, and they routinely pulled credit ratings (since I handled account details on a lot of people). I had to spend a couple of hours explaining the whole situation at work, and it's possible I could have lost my job over it. Fortunately I didn't. Net result was an absolute nightmare, and my bank was actually pretty nice and helpful about the whole thing.
I also had my credit card number compromised once (Hannaford breach, and my card was actually used overseas). Visa called me, said that the card had been suspended but that any automated payments I had set up would work for another week to give me time to transition to the new card number, went through the outstanding charges over the phone to verify that they were all valid, apologized for the inconvenience, and I never even saw any of the fraudulent charges at all. I spent 15 minutes on the phone with them, 10 minutes entering the new card on my automated payments, and another 5 minutes cutting up the old card when the new one came in. Impact to my credit rating: none.
"Yes, the debit card can be almost as secure as the credit card if you use it as a credit card, and if your bank is really nice the resulting damage to your account and credit rating can be built back to almost new after a lot of effort!"
Thanks, I'll use a credit card. If it gets used fraudulently, the onus is on the credit card company to help me out, because my money is not gone. A credit card does not have access to my checking account. That's a very important distinction to me.
They were probably too busy watching Medieval Idol to even realize who Shakespeare or the King was;)
A jest, I know, but it does demonstrate a serious point.
Our history books are based on records maintained by the winners of wars, the leaders, the successful, etc. We know a lot about Shakespeare. We know relatively little about how his audiences actually felt about his work.
We largely speculate as to how life was for the ordinary folk during historical periods based on writings about them, not writings from them. The exception to this is diaries, and now many people maintain those any more. Twitter can help replace some of that perspective.
Admittedly, Twitter is not an ideal way to get a picture of a society, but you get to hear historical events told from a very different perspective. Actually, you get to hear them from LOTS of perspectives. They may not be an accurate portrayal of the events, but they are a snapshot of how a society reacts to and perceives events.
Who will represent the narcissists in society for future generations?
I read in my easy chair and in bed, and to me a tablet is similar in format to a hardcover book. In my easy chair, I kick the footrest up and rest my feet on the top of it, so the book is held at a very natural and comfortable angle for reading and I hold very little weight in my hands.
I also draw while resting in the same position, with a piece of 1/2" plywood as a hard surface.
Having said all that, I have little use for a tablet myself. And I have no use for a larger iPod Touch. I do find the whole concept of a tablet somewhat appealing for reading, but on the other hand, I could get a Kindle and a Netbook for about what the iPad costs.:)
Sure you could. It's just not as comfortable as a tablet format. But it would work.
The tablet format would appeal to people who spend a lot of time surfing the web while sitting in a chair, or sitting up in bed, or things like that.
It's useless to people who want to input a lot of text until we figure out something better than a keyboard, and it's largely useless to those who want one computer to do everything. But as a "sitting around in the La-Z-Boy surfin the web" device it's ideal.
Some will still prefer a laptop or a netbook for those applications, and you can sit with one of those and be comfortable too.
The niche is a small one, but it's there. Netbooks, with their incredibly light weight, help bridge that gap somewhat.
I have little use for a tablet myself, but I can see certain places where they are more convenient (especially for content consumption) than a laptop. Reading a book, sitting/lying in bed watching a show or surfing the web, etc.
The tablet is the same form-factor as a clipboard. You can hold it with one hand while standing and use the other hand to do things on it (similar to writing on a clipboard while standing). You can sit up in bed, fold your legs up to about 45 degrees, and use it that way. You can also sit on the couch and hold it in place. Placing it on a desk and trying to input data into it is going to be a nightmare for most people. They'll enter their data on a real computer and send it to a tablet for final editing or just to present it.
You are thinking of a tablet as a "content production" device (lots of typing and data input). In general, it's not good at that. A tablet is a content consumption device. Surf to YouTube, maybe type in a short search, then click on what you want and sit back and watch. It's for passive consumption, not active participation.
It's more akin to a really cool interactive television set than it is a computer.
The iPad is not a computer. It's a content consumption device. A damned awesome one, don't get me wrong, but its primary purpose is to consume content. There are a few specific things it does very well, and anything it doesn't do very well it will not be allowed to do at all. Other things that it COULD do well it won't be allowed to do either. It's a closed ecosystem, by design. This ensures an awesome user experience as long as you want to do things that Apple agrees are good things to do on it. It's a walled garden, but the flowers are very nice and you can choose what color flowers you want as long as you buy the seeds from Apple. There are a lot of people who like walled gardens. Apple is very smart to build a machine that fits that need quite well.
The reviewed device, such as it is, is an actual computer. Warts and all. It runs an operating system that you have a much greater level of control over, and with the off-the-shelf hardware you could probably run another OS on it if you wanted to. That means you are allowed to do things with it that it doesn't do particularly well. The garden walls are down, and weeds can get in, but you can plant anything you like. Not all the plants will always grow well. It's going to have less battery life and weigh more because it's going to need (and have) more horsepower. It's going to cost more because it's going to have more powerful hardware. It's probably also going to suck monkey balls, because tablets are more of a content-consumption form factor than a real-computer form factor.
Apple is going to do well in the tablet niche, building a device that does exactly what most people want tablets to do, and stripping out all the stuff that people think they want to do with tablets and are in for a bitter disappointment when they discover the form factor isn't good for those things. Have you seen a breakdown of the iPad? There's just not much hardware in there, and none of it is particularly powerful. Why is that? Because you don't need a lot of power to consume content. Other companies want to make tablets into general purpose computers. For the most part, that's going to suck. Badly.
And shipping with OpenOffice is meant to be a good thing?
As opposed to making you pay $30 for iWork?
Shipping with OpenOffice is a good thing, at least for those of us who use OpenOffice and find it perfectly adequate for our needs. And remember, OpenOffice is also free, which is a big argument for including it. You can always purchase and run anything you damned well please, including Microsoft Office if you want to spend a little time twiddling with Wine or Crossover. There are also lots of lighter-weight word processors out there that are free or cost next to nothing.
Don't get me wrong, iWork sounds nice, and the $30 price tag isn't terrible, and you get word processing, spreadsheet, and great-sounding presentation at a pretty reasonable price. But we're back to the "walled garden" argument. What if I think iWork sucks? What if I need something that can save actual recent Microsoft.DOC formatted files and not RTF or older formats? Can I try out other word processing or spreadsheet packages? How many of them are available and how much do they cost?
Or, if you're seriously cash-strapped, you can have Canonical mail you one for free (this option requires a bit of patience - they delay the shipments to prevent massive abuse of their largess). https://shipit.ubuntu.com/
I'm not saying they are totally ubiquitous, or that you can always find one for free, but in most places in the US you can probably find someone within twenty miles of you who would be willing to burn a CD for you at little or no cost. I've given about a half dozen of them to coworkers.
Even if you have to spend $25 to get it, that's still $75 less than the cheapest legal version of Windows Seven available in the US (Home Premium).
Right, I'm not saying that the Asus is the ideal solution for everyone, only that as a fully-equipped and ready-to-go machine it is pretty close in price to the $200 special once you add a keyboard, mouse, and screen (unless you do some inventive dumpster diving or find really good prices on used gear).
And, honestly, if you're that good at dumpster diving you've probably got a free old machine to go with it. Load Xubuntu on it and go to town.
As far as specs, there's no way to compare it short of buying the book, from what I can see. The author is probably recommending a low-end motherboard with a $40 2.5GHz Sempron or therabouts.
The Asus I have runs an Intel N450 (1.66GHz processor) with 1GB RAM. Mint (full desktop edition, not a netbook remix) is responsive and snappy on it.
I don't know if the desktop is a lot faster, but I imagine it would be somewhat faster.
My key point of advantage on the netbook was the portability, which gives you the availability of free Internet connections in a lot of places. If you're looking at $200 for a computer, you'll rapidly find it useless without an Internet connection for the most part.
Slashdot Mirror
But we didn't wirk togehter you isnensitive cold!!
Almost every employer I've worked for has had a nearly-identical clause for college coursework.
They'll pay for any classes (or, more properly, any classes I pass with a good grade) that are related to my profession, or in support of a degree program relevant to my profession. However, each individual course has a one-year payback clause. If I leave the company for any reason within a year of any check being cut to reimburse me for a class, I have to pay it back. All coursework is completed on my own time, and if I fail a course I get no reimbursement. Reimbursement is also reduced for a passing-but-low grade (example from one company, A=100%, B=90%, C=75%, D=50%).
I was laid off at one company, though, and they forgave the 3 classes I had taken within the one-year time limit. Technically they could have asked for it, but they wrote it off, which was nice of them.
why would someone suddenly want to leave just because they completed one training course?
Because another firm is looking for skills in the area they just got trained in, and is offering big bucks for someone already trained in it?
Here's the tricky part - if I need a skill I can either hire someone who has the skill already, or I can train someone who does not have the skill. Assuming that skill is in some demand, once that training is complete my employee is worth more money, meaning that in order to retain them I have to give them a raise or risk having them jump ship to someone else who will pay them more.
Most employers do not think in terms of the complete skillset. Let's say Inintech has an employee called "Frank" who has been with them for years. He's a solid performer being paid a competitive salary for his current skills. They think "If I train Frank, I'm paying craploads of money to make it so Frank can demand more money from me. If I hire someone who already has the skill, I'm not paying for that training and getting the same skill." They get a resume from Bob, who is already trained in the skill and is asking the same money as Frank would after Frank is done with his training.
The problem is, they don't both have the same skill. Frank, who has been with the company for years, is already familiar with the company, and is probably already familiar with a lot of the company's systems. If you add to his skillset, then all of his added knowledge will be added in context of what your company already does. Joe, on the other hand, has to go through orientation and familiarization with your systems, you way of doing things, your standards, etc.
If you are looking to add a skill and all of your internal people are already at capacity and happy in their positions, then it makes sense to hire a new person with the skills you need already in place, then orient them to your company. If, however, you are looking at eliminating a current employee and replacing them, then (assuming the employee is otherwise performing well and is capable of the skill) it may make a lot more sense to retrain that existing employee. It costs more, but you get someone who knows the skill AND is familiar with your company.
It can also boost overall loyalty and morale if you demonstrate that you want to keep your employees.
But it's always a risk. Frank might get the skill, then find another job who is really desperate for the skill and offers him more money than you can afford (especially since you just shelled out a lot of money on him and the coffers are a bit low). It makes sense to depreciate the cost of training over some short-but-reasonable timeframe, and put the employee on the hook for reimbursement of the training if they leave very soon after being trained.
I've seen employers who have offered the training in terms of an interest-free loan. You get the training, and the company pays for it up front. At the end of the training, you get a raise commensurate with your new skills. However, the amount of the raise goes into repaying the loan until it is paid off, so your actual paycheck doesn't change for a while. Once the loan is paid off, you're free and clear and the raise reaches your paycheck. If you leave the company you owe them the remainder of the loan.
It seems a very reasonable way to handle it - you're paying the employee a competitive paycheck while encouraging them to expand their skills, but ensuring that the training you pay for them isn't just a tool to allow them to leapfrog over you and into a better-paying job as soon as the ink dries on the certificate.
It also leads to some interesting creativity on the part of employees, who want the training and the bigger future paycheck it unlocks, but might settle for a cheaper hotel or whatever, because it's their own money they are spending.
True, though the only communications medium open to them (throwing exceptions to syslog) is obviously ignored by many ClamAV users. Those who were paying attention went to the URL and did the upgrade.
Those who did not were about to get a nonfunctional copy of Clam (no more updates, and AV is worse than useless without recent updates - it gives you a false sense of security which is far more dangerous than a real sense of fear). So you might as well kill it off with some fanfare so people who don't monitor their syslogs notice something is wrong.
Did you not read the history of this case?
The only reason anyone found out about this case was because the school dragged the kid's parents in for a parent-teacher conference and showed the pictures to the parents.
After it was all explained that the kid liked "Mike and Ike" candy (which is pill-shaped) the school then explained how they got the pictures. I don't know if the parents asked, or what, but the school showed image captured by the kids laptop in his own bedroom to the kid's parents.
So, yeah, they are that stupid.
I guess it all boils down to "which is worse":
1. A broken security tool that is obviously broken, or
2. A half-broken security tool that looks like it's working OK?
Umm, I'll take #1 for priceless security, Alex.
As soon as ClamAV stops sending out freshclam for a version, that version should fail. As spectacularly and noisily as possible. It should scream of its obsolescence from the rooftops, and prevent any service depending on it from doing jack schitt until it gets fixed.
The least intrusive means would have been to call the student's parents and ask if he had the laptop with him. Yes? OK, please pay the insurance fee before he takes it home again, thanks. Issue resolved.
OK, let's go with that for a second. The school apparently did have some reason to believe that the laptop was stolen, since the student's parents didn't pay an insurance fee that was supposed to authorize the kid to take the laptop home.
However, the laptop was issued to that student. So the correct answer would have been to call the student's parents at home and ask if the laptop is there, and request that payment be rendered for the insurance fee if the kid wants to take it home again, please and thanks.
Someone at the school instead decided to turn on the camera. Fortunately for them, all they saw was the student fully dressed sitting in front of the computer eating something. They could have ended up getting a picture of an underage girl naked, possession of which is sufficient proof for child porn in the US and long frequent love sessions with Bubba, because Bubba likes child molesters and he gets lonely.
OK, so they've gotten damned lucky so far. Laptop is obviously not stolen, and they didn't end up accidentally acquiring kiddie porn images. Best to delete all the images and sigh with relief, right?
But, wait, what is that he's popping? Damn, that looks a lot like a bunch of pills. Let's call the parents in and accuse the kid of maybe taking illegal drugs, just in case the parents need to intervene. I mean, we're only trying to protect him, right? Yeah, let's call the parents in and show them the images, then explain how we go them.
Oh, "Mike and Ike", you say? Oops, our bad. Please ignore our blatantly illegal violation of the privacy of your home, THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
Yeah, behavior like that makes me think that someone was probably "thinking of the children", or at least their cute little bodies and hoping to "accidentally" get a juicy picture of one.
I'm sure the person who did this did so with the best of intentions, but IT WAS STUPID. Actually, it started stupid and got worse, to the point of being criminally stupid, then just criminal.
The problem here is that once support services end, they stop writing new signatures for the old version of ClamAV. If an administrator has been ignoring (or has been unaware of) the impending end-of-life of ClamAV for the past 6 months, they are going to remain unaware of the problem basically forever.
There are four ways to handle this:
1. Contact all of your users. How?? Those who have subscribed to the updates list already know. You don't have to register to have ClamAV, so for most of the rest they won't have an email address.
2. Make the software tell the user it is about to expire. How?? There isn't a communications process written into ClamAV that can send a signal up to the GUI and most people don't monitor every line of their syslogs.
3. Just shut down the update server so you won't offer the users signature updates any more. Users will continue along for long periods of time with increasingly outdated antivirus definitions. This is a really, really bad idea.
4. Give people ample warning over as many channels as you can, then break it so people notice that something is wrong.
#4 is not ideal. But it's the best of the options.
Personally, I have ClamAV on all of my machines, but it's the Ubuntu/Mint supported version out of the repositories, so it gets updated. I think ClamAV would be well-served putting up Debian and RPM repositories and making people install the software using the repos, and not offering it for direct download any more.
No. I pay my credit card company with an ACH transaction. I log on to my credit union's web site and authorize transfer of the funds every month. No paper checks, and the only people who have access to that information are my credit union and my credit card company.
And the only account authorized for ACH and checks is one I keep a limited amount of funds in. So even if my checking account was compromised, they could only take what I had deposited in it to cover the bills outstanding against it at the moment.
Plus, even if I did pay them with a check, that's one transaction per month I am taking a risk with. I pay for nearly everything with my credit cards, so I am using them multiple times PER DAY with various and sundry vendors.
I'd rather have my bank account with my real money exposed for one transaction per month than many. And even that is a "front" account with little funds in it.
In other words, I use the technique most people here espouse to make debit cards more secure - keep only a small amount exposed to the card.. except I use that as a SECOND layer of defense, not a primary one.
Credit cards may not be absolutely secure, but in terms of their ability to drain my actual money from my actual accounts, they are as close as we're gonna get.
If someone uses my credit card for fraud, I may have an uncomfortable time with the one creditor (my credit card company), but my cash in my bank/credit union accounts cannot be compromised by that. That means that any other payments I might make are unaffected by the fraud, my checks clear, and all of the people I am honestly paying will get paid.
To me, debit cards represent the worst of all possible worlds. I am exposing my actual bank account in each transaction, I am not receiving any float on my funds, I am not receiving any cashback or awards for my purchases, and the vendor I am doing business with is still paying a transaction fee.
For someone disciplined enough to pay off a credit card every month, I have yet to hear of any benefit to using a debit card. There are lots of disadvantages, and not a single advantage I've ever heard of.
Glad your credit union was so helpful.
This is the way Credit Cards work by default, however. So I don't have to depend on getting a helpful agent at my credit union to bail me out.
In other words, if you have a really good bank/credit union, the experience is almost as good and almost as painless as having a credit card.
Or you can use a credit card and pay it off every month. That makes it the same as a "charge card".
Yes, your bank account may get cleaned out (or depleted up to the daily spending limit of your debit card), and outstanding checks may bounce, and you may have a freeze on your account until it gets resolved. However, this zero liability guarantee means any transactions found to be fraudulent will be reimbursed by your bank. The bank then goes after the merchant that processed the transaction to recoup their own losses. If you have a good bank, they'll also refund your overdraft fees.
Meaning no offense, but why in the hell would this make me want a debit card?
Maybe the bank would give me back my fees and losses, but I've still bounced checks with God-knows-who and caused them all manner of hassle and had them incur fees and lost trust with them. If my bank account gets cleaned out the day before my IRS check hits, do you seriously think they'll just chuckle and say "oopsie, well, we'll clear it again". No. I'm going to spend hours on the phone with everyone I sent a check or made an automated payment to, trying to dig my way out of the hole that used to be my bank account.
I've had an account cleanout happen (account was cleaned out by lawyers suing my parents, and I stupidly left my mother's name on my bank account). My mortgage and car payment checks were in the outgoing mail the same day I received the "summons to trustee" notice, and all my money was gone. It worked out, but I had to take two days off work (lost vacation time) to make all the necessary phone calls, and I still had a black mark on my credit rating for several years afterward, even though none of the bounced checks were determined to be my fault. I worked for a bank service company at the time, and they routinely pulled credit ratings (since I handled account details on a lot of people). I had to spend a couple of hours explaining the whole situation at work, and it's possible I could have lost my job over it. Fortunately I didn't. Net result was an absolute nightmare, and my bank was actually pretty nice and helpful about the whole thing.
I also had my credit card number compromised once (Hannaford breach, and my card was actually used overseas). Visa called me, said that the card had been suspended but that any automated payments I had set up would work for another week to give me time to transition to the new card number, went through the outstanding charges over the phone to verify that they were all valid, apologized for the inconvenience, and I never even saw any of the fraudulent charges at all. I spent 15 minutes on the phone with them, 10 minutes entering the new card on my automated payments, and another 5 minutes cutting up the old card when the new one came in. Impact to my credit rating: none.
"Yes, the debit card can be almost as secure as the credit card if you use it as a credit card, and if your bank is really nice the resulting damage to your account and credit rating can be built back to almost new after a lot of effort!"
Thanks, I'll use a credit card. If it gets used fraudulently, the onus is on the credit card company to help me out, because my money is not gone. A credit card does not have access to my checking account. That's a very important distinction to me.
They were probably too busy watching Medieval Idol to even realize who Shakespeare or the King was ;)
A jest, I know, but it does demonstrate a serious point.
Our history books are based on records maintained by the winners of wars, the leaders, the successful, etc. We know a lot about Shakespeare. We know relatively little about how his audiences actually felt about his work.
We largely speculate as to how life was for the ordinary folk during historical periods based on writings about them, not writings from them. The exception to this is diaries, and now many people maintain those any more. Twitter can help replace some of that perspective.
Admittedly, Twitter is not an ideal way to get a picture of a society, but you get to hear historical events told from a very different perspective. Actually, you get to hear them from LOTS of perspectives. They may not be an accurate portrayal of the events, but they are a snapshot of how a society reacts to and perceives events.
Who will represent the narcissists in society for future generations?
I read in my easy chair and in bed, and to me a tablet is similar in format to a hardcover book. In my easy chair, I kick the footrest up and rest my feet on the top of it, so the book is held at a very natural and comfortable angle for reading and I hold very little weight in my hands.
I also draw while resting in the same position, with a piece of 1/2" plywood as a hard surface.
Having said all that, I have little use for a tablet myself. And I have no use for a larger iPod Touch. I do find the whole concept of a tablet somewhat appealing for reading, but on the other hand, I could get a Kindle and a Netbook for about what the iPad costs. :)
Sure you could. It's just not as comfortable as a tablet format. But it would work.
The tablet format would appeal to people who spend a lot of time surfing the web while sitting in a chair, or sitting up in bed, or things like that.
It's useless to people who want to input a lot of text until we figure out something better than a keyboard, and it's largely useless to those who want one computer to do everything. But as a "sitting around in the La-Z-Boy surfin the web" device it's ideal.
Some will still prefer a laptop or a netbook for those applications, and you can sit with one of those and be comfortable too.
You could, but it's not as convenient.
The niche is a small one, but it's there. Netbooks, with their incredibly light weight, help bridge that gap somewhat.
I have little use for a tablet myself, but I can see certain places where they are more convenient (especially for content consumption) than a laptop. Reading a book, sitting/lying in bed watching a show or surfing the web, etc.
3d party apps? I would have thought the form factor would limit it to 2d. (snare drum)
The tablet is the same form-factor as a clipboard. You can hold it with one hand while standing and use the other hand to do things on it (similar to writing on a clipboard while standing). You can sit up in bed, fold your legs up to about 45 degrees, and use it that way. You can also sit on the couch and hold it in place. Placing it on a desk and trying to input data into it is going to be a nightmare for most people. They'll enter their data on a real computer and send it to a tablet for final editing or just to present it.
You are thinking of a tablet as a "content production" device (lots of typing and data input). In general, it's not good at that. A tablet is a content consumption device. Surf to YouTube, maybe type in a short search, then click on what you want and sit back and watch. It's for passive consumption, not active participation.
It's more akin to a really cool interactive television set than it is a computer.
I'm gonna go with custom Linux distro. Android is based on Linux, so I'm assuming it can run X11 and has an Android-compatibility layer on top.
Define "better". It's a subjective term.
The iPad is not a computer. It's a content consumption device. A damned awesome one, don't get me wrong, but its primary purpose is to consume content. There are a few specific things it does very well, and anything it doesn't do very well it will not be allowed to do at all. Other things that it COULD do well it won't be allowed to do either. It's a closed ecosystem, by design. This ensures an awesome user experience as long as you want to do things that Apple agrees are good things to do on it. It's a walled garden, but the flowers are very nice and you can choose what color flowers you want as long as you buy the seeds from Apple. There are a lot of people who like walled gardens. Apple is very smart to build a machine that fits that need quite well.
The reviewed device, such as it is, is an actual computer. Warts and all. It runs an operating system that you have a much greater level of control over, and with the off-the-shelf hardware you could probably run another OS on it if you wanted to. That means you are allowed to do things with it that it doesn't do particularly well. The garden walls are down, and weeds can get in, but you can plant anything you like. Not all the plants will always grow well. It's going to have less battery life and weigh more because it's going to need (and have) more horsepower. It's going to cost more because it's going to have more powerful hardware. It's probably also going to suck monkey balls, because tablets are more of a content-consumption form factor than a real-computer form factor.
Apple is going to do well in the tablet niche, building a device that does exactly what most people want tablets to do, and stripping out all the stuff that people think they want to do with tablets and are in for a bitter disappointment when they discover the form factor isn't good for those things. Have you seen a breakdown of the iPad? There's just not much hardware in there, and none of it is particularly powerful. Why is that? Because you don't need a lot of power to consume content. Other companies want to make tablets into general purpose computers. For the most part, that's going to suck. Badly.
And shipping with OpenOffice is meant to be a good thing?
As opposed to making you pay $30 for iWork?
Shipping with OpenOffice is a good thing, at least for those of us who use OpenOffice and find it perfectly adequate for our needs. And remember, OpenOffice is also free, which is a big argument for including it. You can always purchase and run anything you damned well please, including Microsoft Office if you want to spend a little time twiddling with Wine or Crossover. There are also lots of lighter-weight word processors out there that are free or cost next to nothing.
Don't get me wrong, iWork sounds nice, and the $30 price tag isn't terrible, and you get word processing, spreadsheet, and great-sounding presentation at a pretty reasonable price. But we're back to the "walled garden" argument. What if I think iWork sucks? What if I need something that can save actual recent Microsoft .DOC formatted files and not RTF or older formats? Can I try out other word processing or spreadsheet packages? How many of them are available and how much do they cost?
You would need to download Ubuntu, whose bundling availability via the book is not mentioned in the summary or the Amazon page linked.
Or you can get a copy from a friend if you know of someone who has Internet access and a 2 cent CD.
Or your local library can probably download one for you and you buy a 5-pack of blank CDs and give them the other four.
Or you can buy a 5-pack of them from Canonical for 5 pounds plus shipping and split the cost between a few people.
Or Amazon would be happy to sell you one in pretty packaging with a reference card and other materials for $25.
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-video-DVD-Training-Reference-commands/dp/B0018KUB6Y/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1271106869&sr=8-4
Or, if you're seriously cash-strapped, you can have Canonical mail you one for free (this option requires a bit of patience - they delay the shipments to prevent massive abuse of their largess). https://shipit.ubuntu.com/
I'm not saying they are totally ubiquitous, or that you can always find one for free, but in most places in the US you can probably find someone within twenty miles of you who would be willing to burn a CD for you at little or no cost. I've given about a half dozen of them to coworkers.
Even if you have to spend $25 to get it, that's still $75 less than the cheapest legal version of Windows Seven available in the US (Home Premium).
Right, I'm not saying that the Asus is the ideal solution for everyone, only that as a fully-equipped and ready-to-go machine it is pretty close in price to the $200 special once you add a keyboard, mouse, and screen (unless you do some inventive dumpster diving or find really good prices on used gear).
And, honestly, if you're that good at dumpster diving you've probably got a free old machine to go with it. Load Xubuntu on it and go to town.
As far as specs, there's no way to compare it short of buying the book, from what I can see. The author is probably recommending a low-end motherboard with a $40 2.5GHz Sempron or therabouts.
The Asus I have runs an Intel N450 (1.66GHz processor) with 1GB RAM. Mint (full desktop edition, not a netbook remix) is responsive and snappy on it.
I don't know if the desktop is a lot faster, but I imagine it would be somewhat faster.
My key point of advantage on the netbook was the portability, which gives you the availability of free Internet connections in a lot of places. If you're looking at $200 for a computer, you'll rapidly find it useless without an Internet connection for the most part.
Thank you for catching me on that, I got caught up in that despite running free AV tools on Windows for years. Apologies.
grep/hour/aeon :)