I don't know much about XP and think that you'd be nuts to head to the store on October 25th and install this thing on your PC (as with any other MS OS in the past).
I finally installed Windows 2000 on my work PC and was - for the first time in the history of Windows - actually impressed with its performance and stability. For the first time ever, I wasn't rebooting my PC five times a day (which is a frustrating contrast to some of my Linux boxes that are approaching 1 year of uptime). I was so impressed with 2000's stability, that I installed it on my home PC and my girlfriend's laptop, which was experiencing the good old Win98 10-a-day reboot exercise.
So this article got me wondering if there was anything that XP would offer me in the future that just might coerce me to upgrade in the next year or so. So I found a link on MS's site that let me
"Check my upgrade options" . I was shocked to see that the only upgrade path from Win 2000 is to the XP Professional Edition, which costs $100 more than the Home Edition.
Why is this the case? Isn't XP Professional is nothing more than the XP Home Edition with a few more add-ons? Anyone have any insight as to why MS restricts you from upgrading 2000 to XP Home Edition?
My money is on the fact that they figure only business and power users are using Windows 2000, so they just want to rape people for the extra $100. Upgrading my three Windows 2000 PCs to XP would cost me $600.
It'll be a cold day in hell before I shell out another $600 to MS.
I work in the credit card industry, specifically focusing in the area of risk and fraud. The recent wave of chip cards (credit cards with an embedded microchip) is perhaps one of the most interesting marketing "ploys" in the recent history of the payment card industry.
The use of chip cards has tremendous potential in both the face-to-face (traditional, i.e. at the grocery store) and card-not-present (CNP, i.e. Internet) purchase mediums. For example, one day there may be a client-side and server-side standard that enables card authentication over the Internet, giving e-commerce retailers greater confidence that the person on the other end is the legitimate cardholder and not someone typing in stolen cardholder information. There are also a number of other proposals to use the chip for CRM purposes, such as electronic couponing and loyalty schemes. The potential is certainly there to greatly improve the way credit cards are used for payments today.
Despite this potential, even the card companies don't know what to do with the chips on these cards. There is a total lack of standards among the card associations (Visa, MC, Amex, Discover and other foreign schemes). To date, none of them have proposed any type of beneficial use for these embedded chips. The card associations love to use catch slogans like "The card with a brain", but mysteriously offer no explanation as to how this brain can help you.
The use of embedded-chip payment cards is not new to the world. Several card markets have experimented with chip cards in the past. Perhaps the most notable market is France, who has employed chip card technology for the last several years. If you've ever been to France, you may have noticed that there is a PIN input pad at every point-of-sale terminal. If you are at a restaurant, the waiter will bring a handheld card reader to your table. Each card issued by a French bank contains a chip, which enables this reader unit to verify if a correct secret PIN has been entered by the cardholder - without contacting a bank or any other banking network. These units also contain a traditional magnetic stripe reader used to authorize non-French issued cards.
This chip-bases system was implemented in France for two reasons: offline cardholder verification and enhanced security. Since the units are able to independently verify correct cardholder PINs, this allows merchants to authorize credit card transactions offline, without requiring a dedicted phone line. This is a nice feature for countries with telcos that take 12 months to install a phone line, which often have overly expensive telecom costs. One important thing to note: Offline PIN-based validations do not have the ability to check for basic validations like checking to see if there is open credit on the account or checking to see if the account is even valid. The offline validation also does not work on non-French issued cards. Subsequently, most retailers authorize transactions using a traditional online method, even if the card has a chip.
Despite the widespread use in France, chip-based authorization is still years away here in the US. France is a very small card market with only a handful of banks issuing credit cards. Various reports have estimated a cost between $10 and $20 billion dollars to convert the current US card authorizations systems to include chip-based authentication/authorization - a cost that card issuers, acquirers (the banks that merchants interface with) and merchants are not ready to eat. In addition, extending chip card authorization to the online world will require client-side hardware (i.e. card readers) and server-side software....more hassle than the card issuers are ready to deal with right now. AMEX tried it and failed miserably (did you actually know anyone that used the AMEX Blue smart card reader? Do you know any online merchants that support it?)
In a nutshell, your credit card may have a brain, but it is yet to have a place to use all that intelligence.
Use a number of different approaches...
on
Dorm Storm?
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· Score: 1
I went to Rutgers, which has the largest on-campus community in the world. Lots of beds, lots of dorm rooms and suites.
We used an approach that combines some of the suggestions I've seen posted:
1. Give students very clear information for configurfing thier own machines on their own. Make the info clear and concise - don't give them so much information that they get confused. Use a type of "quick setup guide" and keep more detailed information available online (accessable through the computer labs for printing and bringing back to the dorm room).
2. Schedules "rollouts" over the first 4 weeks of school - only provide installation support to students who live in a dorm that is being rolled out that week. This will help you focus on solving problems in a pariticular area (dorm, geographic region, etc.). This also helps weed out issues related to specific locations (such as a flakey switch, bad wiring, etc.)
3. Use students who KNOW what they are doing. We had a student dorm networking rep in every dorm. It worked VERY well.
Classic cases in copyright law - you can't copyright the contents of the phonebook. The phonebook is just a collection of publicly available names and numbers. There is nothing that prevents other companies from publishing alternative phonebooks in markets where Ma' Bell already publishes (and we see this quite often, esp. in big cities).
Same theory here: Gracenote is selling a *Service* - you pay them and they manage a list of publicly available information for you. If you'd prefer, you can spend your own time and money putting together your own version of CDDB and no one can stop you. Gracenote does not actually own the Album and track titles that it dishes out. It only owns the service that it provides to companies who pay for it.
In this particular case, someone else has entered the market and has decided to do the work of gathering the same info that Gracenote gathers. Much in the same way that (here in NYC) Yellowbook gathers telephone info to publish their own phonebook, even though Verizon publishes one that looks very, very similar. Much in the way Oxford gathers their information to publish a dictionary that looks very similar to Webster's.
Yes, employees may spend several hours a day writing, reading and managing email, but what are the alternatives??? - pick up the phone every time you need to talk to someone? get out of your desk and hunt people down in person? write paper "memos" and distribute them by hand? write snail mail letters?
Email provides us with a way to communicate with other *when we want to*. I can send 100 people in my organization an email message in just a couple of minutes. The person doesn't have to be sitting at their desk to receive the message...they can pick it up whenever they sit back down.
So while we may be spending hours a day on email, you really can't call this "lost time" as there are clear (but often immeasurable) increases in productivity when email is used as an effective communications medium.
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I finally installed Windows 2000 on my work PC and was - for the first time in the history of Windows - actually impressed with its performance and stability. For the first time ever, I wasn't rebooting my PC five times a day (which is a frustrating contrast to some of my Linux boxes that are approaching 1 year of uptime). I was so impressed with 2000's stability, that I installed it on my home PC and my girlfriend's laptop, which was experiencing the good old Win98 10-a-day reboot exercise.
So this article got me wondering if there was anything that XP would offer me in the future that just might coerce me to upgrade in the next year or so. So I found a link on MS's site that let me "Check my upgrade options" . I was shocked to see that the only upgrade path from Win 2000 is to the XP Professional Edition, which costs $100 more than the Home Edition.
Why is this the case? Isn't XP Professional is nothing more than the XP Home Edition with a few more add-ons? Anyone have any insight as to why MS restricts you from upgrading 2000 to XP Home Edition?
My money is on the fact that they figure only business and power users are using Windows 2000, so they just want to rape people for the extra $100. Upgrading my three Windows 2000 PCs to XP would cost me $600.
It'll be a cold day in hell before I shell out another $600 to MS.
I can't belive it's not a PDA!
The use of chip cards has tremendous potential in both the face-to-face (traditional, i.e. at the grocery store) and card-not-present (CNP, i.e. Internet) purchase mediums. For example, one day there may be a client-side and server-side standard that enables card authentication over the Internet, giving e-commerce retailers greater confidence that the person on the other end is the legitimate cardholder and not someone typing in stolen cardholder information. There are also a number of other proposals to use the chip for CRM purposes, such as electronic couponing and loyalty schemes. The potential is certainly there to greatly improve the way credit cards are used for payments today.
Despite this potential, even the card companies don't know what to do with the chips on these cards. There is a total lack of standards among the card associations (Visa, MC, Amex, Discover and other foreign schemes). To date, none of them have proposed any type of beneficial use for these embedded chips. The card associations love to use catch slogans like "The card with a brain", but mysteriously offer no explanation as to how this brain can help you.
The use of embedded-chip payment cards is not new to the world. Several card markets have experimented with chip cards in the past. Perhaps the most notable market is France, who has employed chip card technology for the last several years. If you've ever been to France, you may have noticed that there is a PIN input pad at every point-of-sale terminal. If you are at a restaurant, the waiter will bring a handheld card reader to your table. Each card issued by a French bank contains a chip, which enables this reader unit to verify if a correct secret PIN has been entered by the cardholder - without contacting a bank or any other banking network. These units also contain a traditional magnetic stripe reader used to authorize non-French issued cards.
This chip-bases system was implemented in France for two reasons: offline cardholder verification and enhanced security. Since the units are able to independently verify correct cardholder PINs, this allows merchants to authorize credit card transactions offline, without requiring a dedicted phone line. This is a nice feature for countries with telcos that take 12 months to install a phone line, which often have overly expensive telecom costs. One important thing to note: Offline PIN-based validations do not have the ability to check for basic validations like checking to see if there is open credit on the account or checking to see if the account is even valid. The offline validation also does not work on non-French issued cards. Subsequently, most retailers authorize transactions using a traditional online method, even if the card has a chip.
Despite the widespread use in France, chip-based authorization is still years away here in the US. France is a very small card market with only a handful of banks issuing credit cards. Various reports have estimated a cost between $10 and $20 billion dollars to convert the current US card authorizations systems to include chip-based authentication/authorization - a cost that card issuers, acquirers (the banks that merchants interface with) and merchants are not ready to eat. In addition, extending chip card authorization to the online world will require client-side hardware (i.e. card readers) and server-side software....more hassle than the card issuers are ready to deal with right now. AMEX tried it and failed miserably (did you actually know anyone that used the AMEX Blue smart card reader? Do you know any online merchants that support it?)
In a nutshell, your credit card may have a brain, but it is yet to have a place to use all that intelligence.
We used an approach that combines some of the suggestions I've seen posted:
1. Give students very clear information for configurfing thier own machines on their own. Make the info clear and concise - don't give them so much information that they get confused. Use a type of "quick setup guide" and keep more detailed information available online (accessable through the computer labs for printing and bringing back to the dorm room).
2. Schedules "rollouts" over the first 4 weeks of school - only provide installation support to students who live in a dorm that is being rolled out that week. This will help you focus on solving problems in a pariticular area (dorm, geographic region, etc.). This also helps weed out issues related to specific locations (such as a flakey switch, bad wiring, etc.)
3. Use students who KNOW what they are doing. We had a student dorm networking rep in every dorm. It worked VERY well.
Good luck!
Same theory here: Gracenote is selling a *Service* - you pay them and they manage a list of publicly available information for you. If you'd prefer, you can spend your own time and money putting together your own version of CDDB and no one can stop you. Gracenote does not actually own the Album and track titles that it dishes out. It only owns the service that it provides to companies who pay for it.
In this particular case, someone else has entered the market and has decided to do the work of gathering the same info that Gracenote gathers. Much in the same way that (here in NYC) Yellowbook gathers telephone info to publish their own phonebook, even though Verizon publishes one that looks very, very similar. Much in the way Oxford gathers their information to publish a dictionary that looks very similar to Webster's.
Sorry Gracenote. You're just bitter.
Yes, employees may spend several hours a day writing, reading and managing email, but what are the alternatives??? - pick up the phone every time you need to talk to someone? get out of your desk and hunt people down in person? write paper "memos" and distribute them by hand? write snail mail letters? Email provides us with a way to communicate with other *when we want to*. I can send 100 people in my organization an email message in just a couple of minutes. The person doesn't have to be sitting at their desk to receive the message...they can pick it up whenever they sit back down. So while we may be spending hours a day on email, you really can't call this "lost time" as there are clear (but often immeasurable) increases in productivity when email is used as an effective communications medium.