Noble? I have to say that you are very kind to talk this way. I do have several reasons for going in this career. First my fiancé is in education, which facilitates vacations (right?). Then I love to explain, I always did... have been that way for over 10 years. *but* I have to say one thing: I will earn about 1000€ more per month as a teacher than I did being a programmer. So either I was really badly paid or they still value education in this country.
So, you are kind to call me noble but I'm there for the money, the vacation and also for giving what I got: a good education.
In general, they just want their computers to boot up and let them download all of the free music that they can find.
It's funny you mention this. My brother (30 years old) is mostly like this. While he knows how to download, execute and install programs his only and sole reason seems to be to download mods for GTA3 and Vice City. The family computer has 40Gig disk, and he uses over half of it for this shit....
I think you started a good topic. I'm 28... My girlfriend is 23, and her brother is 12. I only say this because I started at 12 myseld. In the days where you tweaked bootdisks to play games, the days you tried to take all of the machine as much as you could.
However the 12 years old of today... They want to do what we wanted: program games. However for us the threshold was PacMac or Space Invader.... for them the threshold is Need For Speed Underground 2. Hey, I showed him the orginal Prince or Persia... The one he knows from his Gamecube. Worlds of difference. They know they can't do it... Heck he was absolutely high on the fact he could have colour on his GameBoy advance... Then I showed him my Sega Game Gear, which is about 10 years older that the GBA. I don't think he understood the meaning of it yet.
It was the DOS days. Daddy bought a brand new IBM PS/2. I wanted to know how to calculate things on it and he showed me good old GW-BASIC (That is indeed Gates-William-BASIC, I started off as a Microsoftie).
He showed me statements. I figured out how to write a scientific calculator in BASIC. It never became my thing until daddy gave me a Pascal book and Turbo Pascal 4 (?). It was a dream! I reinvented bubble-sort, and stuff like that. I was sold. I knew I was going to go into computers.
That's why I enrolled after highschool in the computer science classes in a not too remote University. I learned about Linux and BSD, became a OpenBSD fan... I managed to get through my eductaion and get a job as a programmer. I launched Java in the company that took me (and it was a big commercial success), and now... after 6 years... I quit that company. I left to become a teacher... I'll be teaching computers to high schoolers... and so the circle ends.
Two sessions? Block account if that happens? Have you *ever* worked in a bank? In ebanking? Man, let's just say one thing: in my days at working at banks there was exactly *one* bank that did this. With most of the others, we had the arguments in the style of "what if wife and husband are on different computers and want to check balance?".
You, as a techie can rant all you want about security, but the business guy will not listen. Trust me on that one.
Oh, come one, I once had a discussion with a business guy and told him it would be sensible to authenticate every transaction with the users password (as my bank does). He thought that was too cumbersome and would stop "spontaneous" transactions like buying shares and the like. Guess how it is implemented? I'll tell you: not the most secure way.:-(
No that is not the centerpoint of my agumentation: the centerpoint is that OS X is mostly secure out of the box and Windows is not. Well, the whole point is that regular users don't want to learn how to keep their computer secure. I agree with most you say (except I think it is vital to run an AV - on Windows - Better be safe than sorry). As you know I have been keeping my machines (Win, Mac and others) clean for ages, but it is something that interests me. I keep my computer knowledge up to date, it is a complete part of my life.
Grandma Sixpack isn't going to care. The eMac is for her...
VMWare is for pro users: you're not going to run a Windows in order to run another Windows in emulation so that Grandma can surf safely. Besides, you do realise that you need a valid license for the host operating system, a valid license for VMWare and a valid license for each guest OS you install. That's a lot of money if you don't want to fall in illegality.
What you describe would be more like a "Ghost" scenario... but, MY opinion is that it is better to prevent than to fix. You fix when things go bad, I prevent that things go bad. It's the difference between a car with airbags and safe driving: the airbag is there to save your life if you crash your car, with safe driving you just don't crash your car.
I wasn't bashing Law students in any way, in case you thought that. He's a nice guy, so I can't blame him for anything that happened with his computer. I found a few IRC servers on his machine too... You know, trojans that open on port 6667.
Well, appartently Acer didn't ship with SP2 about three months ago. SP2 is out how long? August this year, right? Now seriously.... That laptop should have shipped with SP2.
Okay, this is Acers fault... I hope they fixed that now. Also don't forget that all those people having only a SP1 (or even SP0) restore disks that will eventually be used because the machine needs to be reinstalled. That's gonna hurt. SP2 helps a lot, but it isn't a magic bullet.
My bad for not being precise. I knew that: I found that out when I set up a dial-up connection on a machine about a year ago. From the end-user point of view it doesn't matter though: a default-inactive firewall is as good as no firewall if you don't know about its existence.
I've been out of school for too long to think "educational price". You're probably right..
Say, do you happen to know if educational prices are also applicable to teachers? I'm changing jobs, this is my last day as an IT Consultant and on the 3rd January 2005 I'll be a high-school teacher....
And to say, I paid 2200Euro for my iBook G3 600Mhz, 384Meg RAM, 20Gig Harddisk... That was 3 years ago.... It's still going strong though... I'll probably hold out until they bring out G5 laptops.
I don't think it is an unbreakable fort, just as I know that OpenBSD, Linux, Solaris, whatever isn't unbreakable. OS X does have automatic updates, and they work very fine.
However, I can surf with Safari without getting drive-by-downloads, or whatnot. It is pretty much secure out of the box. Besides, there is not a single service active on a newly installed OS X. Windows XP SP2 has a firewall to protect its services now, but currently all OEMS ship with XP SP1.
Tell your friend not to install all that stuff that gives him malware.
Well, there was spyware, but no program that traditionally includes spyware (Like Kazaa). I could enumerate the software that was installed on his machine, and apart from Yahoo Messenger everything seems to have been preinstalled. All problems that he had were caused by using IE.
I think you are being a bit obtuse with your view on Macs. My whole point is that a computer neophyte can buy a Mac and keep it running without being exposed to too much problems, and you can't with a OEM PC. Up until last weekend I didn't know that he had a PC! How could I have educated him? So, the computer neophyte must be educated before he buys a computer... Hey, that would make him a non-neophyte. Funny how it works, eh?
Okay, let me restate that: a machine running XP is not reliable unless you know what you do. Hey, I know how to run any NT4 based Windows reliably (I have been running WinNT4, Win2k, WinXP Home and Pro) without any big problems whatsoever. The problem is: I know what I do.)
Windows can be reliable, it just isn't reliable without taking action yourself.
Even if the Dell was $1 and the iBook was $50000 according to you the iBook would still be a better choice because I want a reliable computer and a Dell just is not reliable.
No, because at a 1$ price, you could buy a new Dell every 3 months. Buying an iBook in that scenario would be idiot. I'd like to know where I didn't stick to the facts. Please point out where. I challenge you to give a XP machine (bought straight from an OEM), give it to a non-geek student *and* keep it running reliably without making any changes to the basic configuration of the machine. If you can do that, I must tip my hat for you, and I'd be glad to take some sysadmin courses from you.
All the software for light-users, who are the target of low-end PC's and/or low-end Macs exists. Web-surfing: Check! Email: Check! Chat: Check! Word processing: Check! Photo manipulation: Check!
What exactly more do you want for a low-usage-user?
Yes.... Stupid from a monetary reason. You are absolutely right, but from a value reason: No. The eMac is a perfect investment for people who have light computing needs and need a reliable platform. Windows XP on a Dell (or any OEM) is just not reliable.
Why? Very simple: Spyware, viruses and other annoyances. I just spent the weekend of cleaning the 3 month (!!!) old Acer PC from one of my cousins. This cousin is not your local geek, he's a law student and uses his laptop for surfing, chat and writing papers. Hey, he's a student, he doesn't have tons of money, so he bought the cheapest laptop he could find: A Celeron with 256Meg RAM and 30Gig HD, Shared Graphics and whatnot. It ran Win-XP Home SP1, don't ask me why a OEM doesn't ship SP2 by default now... I suspect it cost him around 800Euro.
Now an entry level iBook is around 1200Euro, so it can't match in price. I'll grant you that. But what would have happened to my cousin if he didn't have a nice geek in the family willing to rip his hear out while cleaning up this barfed-up XP machine? He would have spent a lot of money by letting it be cleaned up by a company. If he would have opted for an iBook, it would have chugged along. His Acer was essentially a paperweight after 3 months of usage.
So, please, if you compare on price, also compare on value. I know I just compared a low-priced iBook with a low-priced laptop... The same hold for people not wanting portability: low-end Dell versus eMac.
I know that you and I wouldn't bother with such machines (though I own an iBook, because I am a "switcher"), but we are not low-usage-users.
I'm with you on this one. I have a nice Sony Wega 32" and I'm very happy with it. Heck, it's borderline too large for my living room. You don't put a 50" screen in a 20square meter living room.
Those extra levies on casettes/minidiscs/CD-R and apparently also MP3 players, do they really reach the artists? How do they redistrubute, and on what criteria?
I always thought that this money will never be seen by the artists, and was essentially just a scam.
Who uses Kazaa for pr0n anyways? For your daily fresh dose of pr0n, just go to thehun.com. For some things, a regularly updated list is more than enough...
In the US it is clearly allowed, or didn't you see those Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi ads? In Europe you may now compare to other products, but you have to be truthful and fair, and that is why it is rarely done. Just too risky.
Seven years? Do these people know what kind of storage one would need for that? I don't think so... Plus, it has to be easily searchable to have any kind of value.
I have worked for banks: they are required to store all important paper from the last X years (could be 7 or so). I've seen these storages, not very practical. Many banks are now digitizing this stuff, but thats a lot of work. Here we're not talking about paper, but about Audio...
We got my mom a new Gameboy Advance SP for Christmas. My mom loved her gameboy classic and the only game she plays is Tetris. Problem is her Gameboy classic died and, well, she needed a new one.
It will be the only game ever played on that Gameboy Advance... You can tell me what you want, but Tetris hasn't been beaten in playability ever since it appeared on the Gameboy classic. A Gameboy DS would be useless for my mom.
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No, because I started smoking at 19.... I went to study, and missed the smoke at home.... Sad, eh?
So, you are kind to call me noble but I'm there for the money, the vacation and also for giving what I got: a good education.
It's funny you mention this. My brother (30 years old) is mostly like this. While he knows how to download, execute and install programs his only and sole reason seems to be to download mods for GTA3 and Vice City. The family computer has 40Gig disk, and he uses over half of it for this shit....
Oh, well, I'll buy him a new disk soon.
However the 12 years old of today... They want to do what we wanted: program games. However for us the threshold was PacMac or Space Invader.... for them the threshold is Need For Speed Underground 2. Hey, I showed him the orginal Prince or Persia... The one he knows from his Gamecube. Worlds of difference. They know they can't do it... Heck he was absolutely high on the fact he could have colour on his GameBoy advance... Then I showed him my Sega Game Gear, which is about 10 years older that the GBA. I don't think he understood the meaning of it yet.
Our worlds are so different.
He showed me statements. I figured out how to write a scientific calculator in BASIC. It never became my thing until daddy gave me a Pascal book and Turbo Pascal 4 (?). It was a dream! I reinvented bubble-sort, and stuff like that. I was sold. I knew I was going to go into computers.
That's why I enrolled after highschool in the computer science classes in a not too remote University. I learned about Linux and BSD, became a OpenBSD fan... I managed to get through my eductaion and get a job as a programmer. I launched Java in the company that took me (and it was a big commercial success), and now... after 6 years... I quit that company. I left to become a teacher... I'll be teaching computers to high schoolers... and so the circle ends.
Which part of "TightVNC" don't you understand?
You, as a techie can rant all you want about security, but the business guy will not listen. Trust me on that one.
Oh, come one, I once had a discussion with a business guy and told him it would be sensible to authenticate every transaction with the users password (as my bank does). He thought that was too cumbersome and would stop "spontaneous" transactions like buying shares and the like. Guess how it is implemented? I'll tell you: not the most secure way. :-(
What a beautiful present...
Grandma Sixpack isn't going to care. The eMac is for her...
VMWare is for pro users: you're not going to run a Windows in order to run another Windows in emulation so that Grandma can surf safely. Besides, you do realise that you need a valid license for the host operating system, a valid license for VMWare and a valid license for each guest OS you install. That's a lot of money if you don't want to fall in illegality.
What you describe would be more like a "Ghost" scenario... but, MY opinion is that it is better to prevent than to fix. You fix when things go bad, I prevent that things go bad. It's the difference between a car with airbags and safe driving: the airbag is there to save your life if you crash your car, with safe driving you just don't crash your car.
Wow... Good to know. While it doesn't matter for me anymore: what did you have to do to qualify as "developer"? I know I paid my iBook full-price.
I wasn't bashing Law students in any way, in case you thought that. He's a nice guy, so I can't blame him for anything that happened with his computer. I found a few IRC servers on his machine too... You know, trojans that open on port 6667.
Okay, this is Acers fault... I hope they fixed that now. Also don't forget that all those people having only a SP1 (or even SP0) restore disks that will eventually be used because the machine needs to be reinstalled. That's gonna hurt. SP2 helps a lot, but it isn't a magic bullet.
Which is, alas, the case for most users.
Say, do you happen to know if educational prices are also applicable to teachers? I'm changing jobs, this is my last day as an IT Consultant and on the 3rd January 2005 I'll be a high-school teacher....
And to say, I paid 2200Euro for my iBook G3 600Mhz, 384Meg RAM, 20Gig Harddisk... That was 3 years ago.... It's still going strong though... I'll probably hold out until they bring out G5 laptops.
However, I can surf with Safari without getting drive-by-downloads, or whatnot. It is pretty much secure out of the box. Besides, there is not a single service active on a newly installed OS X. Windows XP SP2 has a firewall to protect its services now, but currently all OEMS ship with XP SP1.
Tell your friend not to install all that stuff that gives him malware.
Well, there was spyware, but no program that traditionally includes spyware (Like Kazaa). I could enumerate the software that was installed on his machine, and apart from Yahoo Messenger everything seems to have been preinstalled. All problems that he had were caused by using IE.
I think you are being a bit obtuse with your view on Macs. My whole point is that a computer neophyte can buy a Mac and keep it running without being exposed to too much problems, and you can't with a OEM PC.
Up until last weekend I didn't know that he had a PC! How could I have educated him? So, the computer neophyte must be educated before he buys a computer... Hey, that would make him a non-neophyte. Funny how it works, eh?
Windows can be reliable, it just isn't reliable without taking action yourself.
Even if the Dell was $1 and the iBook was $50000 according to you the iBook would still be a better choice because I want a reliable computer and a Dell just is not reliable.
No, because at a 1$ price, you could buy a new Dell every 3 months. Buying an iBook in that scenario would be idiot.
I'd like to know where I didn't stick to the facts. Please point out where. I challenge you to give a XP machine (bought straight from an OEM), give it to a non-geek student *and* keep it running reliably without making any changes to the basic configuration of the machine. If you can do that, I must tip my hat for you, and I'd be glad to take some sysadmin courses from you.
What exactly more do you want for a low-usage-user?
Why? Very simple: Spyware, viruses and other annoyances. I just spent the weekend of cleaning the 3 month (!!!) old Acer PC from one of my cousins. This cousin is not your local geek, he's a law student and uses his laptop for surfing, chat and writing papers. Hey, he's a student, he doesn't have tons of money, so he bought the cheapest laptop he could find: A Celeron with 256Meg RAM and 30Gig HD, Shared Graphics and whatnot. It ran Win-XP Home SP1, don't ask me why a OEM doesn't ship SP2 by default now... I suspect it cost him around 800Euro.
Now an entry level iBook is around 1200Euro, so it can't match in price. I'll grant you that. But what would have happened to my cousin if he didn't have a nice geek in the family willing to rip his hear out while cleaning up this barfed-up XP machine? He would have spent a lot of money by letting it be cleaned up by a company. If he would have opted for an iBook, it would have chugged along. His Acer was essentially a paperweight after 3 months of usage.
So, please, if you compare on price, also compare on value. I know I just compared a low-priced iBook with a low-priced laptop... The same hold for people not wanting portability: low-end Dell versus eMac.
I know that you and I wouldn't bother with such machines (though I own an iBook, because I am a "switcher"), but we are not low-usage-users.
I think that must be Debian. As the string he printed is exactly the same as what my Debian System (Sarge) says.
I'm with you on this one. I have a nice Sony Wega 32" and I'm very happy with it. Heck, it's borderline too large for my living room. You don't put a 50" screen in a 20square meter living room.
I always thought that this money will never be seen by the artists, and was essentially just a scam.
Who uses Kazaa for pr0n anyways? For your daily fresh dose of pr0n, just go to thehun.com. For some things, a regularly updated list is more than enough...
In the US it is clearly allowed, or didn't you see those Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi ads? In Europe you may now compare to other products, but you have to be truthful and fair, and that is why it is rarely done. Just too risky.
I have worked for banks: they are required to store all important paper from the last X years (could be 7 or so). I've seen these storages, not very practical. Many banks are now digitizing this stuff, but thats a lot of work. Here we're not talking about paper, but about Audio...
It will be the only game ever played on that Gameboy Advance... You can tell me what you want, but Tetris hasn't been beaten in playability ever since it appeared on the Gameboy classic. A Gameboy DS would be useless for my mom.