What's your price? Audiophile companies usually start at about $15-20 each to burn in audio cables before use.
Try these guys "The Cable Burner Company is a San Diego based company which offers the high-end audio/video enthusiast a quicker and more effective alternative to the normal cable break-in process of putting hours and hours of use on their systems."
"Your cables won't perform at their best until they are 'burnt-in'. We are happy to do this for you at a cost of £15 per item if you purchase this option when ordering the cables."
All that I can say is avoid software from Dynix. Our local Hamilton Public Library, usually a superb outfit, just moved all of their catalogues to Dynix systems and it has been a total disaster.
The terminals in the library are very, very slow to respond, and for the first month the search funtion only worked about 10% of the time.
Talk to them before buying Dynix to find out what went so wrong.
Well to start with it appears that there no way to move several years of Pegasus data into Thunderbird. In terms of features, it seems to have less than Pegasus, as well as lacking some things that I would really like - such as an integrated hot-syncable calendar and easy filter setup. (which I admit Eudora does pretty well).
My guess is that Thunderbird will eventually approach the feature set that is available elsewhere, and I may move over to a Firefox/Thunderbird combo, but it'll be a while yet.
Aside from looking for deals on E-bay, you'll find that the features you want are not availble at a consumer level.
High end mindisc recorders allow digital dubbing, but not consumer models. An excellent source of information is here.
By the way, minidisc does not use DRM, it just doesn't have a digital line out jack.
In broadcast circles a lot of people are moving to various flash media units, and seem quite happy with them. These tend to be "pro" units, with XLR mic jacks and digital in and out.
You can also check out transom.org for advice on recorders.
...how is it that a software title that is guaranteed to sell by the millions, meaning that the cost of manufacturing each copy is very low, meaning that shops will buy hundreds of copies in at a discounted rate, is still given a standard price of $54.99 ?
Gee maybe they're affilated with textbook companies, who somehow can't sell millions of first year text books for less than $75!
Surely no-one on the planet is screwed more than university students at book buying time!
Your quandry is this: you found programming to be fun. Got an education, and found a job programming.
Whoops - once programming became your job, it also became work, not fun.
Really you have only two choices: don't program for a living, or don't program for a hobby.
The best advice is to find some other interests and leave the programming for work. It will make you a happier person, a more balanced individual, and will expand your circle of friends to a group larger than just programmers. All of those will help you to enjoy your work more which just might make programming fun again.
The customs problem is a big one, or more acurately, the god awful UPS brokerage charges, which usually far exceed the actual duties.
What's funny is that there are lots of companies who manage to ship to Canada, or even to drop ship large groups of items and then ship from within the country.
It is possible to handle Canadian orders successfully and without surprises, and some retailers even have sites that will calculate brokerage and duties before you commit to the order.
Ultimately it really comes down to one thing - some companies really don't want an extra 30 million customers.
NAFTA never did much for individuals or everyday consumers. Mostly it just allows large corporations to move money (and some people) around with less overhead.
Yes, be professional. That doesn't mean you can't have fun, but strike a balance.
At this point it should be 9-5, an hour for lunch off site, and no after hours phone calls. Got banked flex time? Use it up now.
Beyond that you really should look at what you can do to eliminate any suggestion that you didn't do your core job. Yes, that means updating essential documentation of those things that you were hired to do. Stuff that you did as a favor can be ignored.
In fact, write it up, add a table of contents, and hand over the cerlox bound (aka, not machine readable)copy on your way out the door.
Clear your workstation of any programs or files that aren't 100% company issue, nuke all non-company e-mail and files, and then sanitize the hard drive so that you don't have to worry about someone finding the stuff later. Tell your co-workers to do the same. Do this a week or two before your last day.
If there is the slightest chance of a lawsuit - and hey, spend a couple hundred bucks on an employment lawyer to see what is and isn't negotiable - you should be copying records of work done and hours worked and taking them offsite. Not internal confidential information, but the paperwork that will support any claim that you might make.
Again, tell your co-workers to do the same.
Finally, do not assume that your employer knows or is telling you the truth about what your rights might be under the law. Depending on your jurisdiction you may be eligible for more severance pay than they offer. Ask your lawyer.
Ask your employer for letter of reference as early on as possible. Even better, write it for them and offer to let them just copy it to letterhead and sign it. Having that letter pretty much assures that they'll say good things about you if they are called. It also will prove valuable if the rest of the company disappears and there is no-one who can actually be contacted.
Although some employers would not approve, it is a good idea to send your personal e-mail to as many contacts as possible before the company shuts down your account. A lot of people who know you as joe@hort.com will have great trouble finding you once that address is gone.
And remember - on the last day it doesn't matter how late you are, how early you leave, or how you dress. And you don't have to shake the hand of the people who are firing you.
What does Mom do when she is not on the computer? What interests does she have? Who does she e-mail?
My mother in law had only slight interest in computers until she found out that there was a gigantic network of grandmothers who exchanged computer embroidery designs via e-mail.
Or, more accurately, designs featuring characters that are well protected by the Sonny Bono Copyright act. From a company whose name starts with "D"....
Several hundred floppy discs later we bought her a CD burner so she could better manage her booty.
Eventually the Alberta cop who was one of the central figures in this operation was shut down and charged.
Who gets to win in the marketplace? The Innovators who invest in R&D like crazy or those that just take cost out of standard products.
The innovation was in creating products that filled a formerly unidentified need. Those lovely early HP calculators are an example. The first reliable laser printers are an example. The personal computer is an example.
When each of these was being developed, the technology industry - heck the whole personal computer industry - was in its infancy, and just about anything with a semi-conductor as "innovative".
Those are now mature products, which is where companies like Dell appear. Their role is not to address needs that other companies haven't seen, but to build a business that exploits mature technology with identified market.
Innovation will come from left field, and will involved products or processes that few of us will see coming.
Lord folks - why was this even posted? After three machines it's pretty obvious that the install media had a problem. What possible use is a "review" that basically says "Well, I couldn't get it to install, and now I'm going to whine about it."
The support system doesn't sound like it's much better or worse than what most companies offer these days, although there is a legitimate discussion to be had about support desks that don't speak english (or your language) adequately.
Next time let's wait until someone get's a reasonable install and can talk about what JDS actually does and how it performs. "It didn't work for me" is pretty much useless.
"As a brief aside, if I were Google..., who are rumored to be working on client side technologies for managing information, I'd put a lot of energy into Mozilla, and release a Google branded browser..."
Mozilla, and Open Source in general has an amazing window of opportunity right now. A product tie in like the one described in the article is exactly what is needed.
IE looks as if it will remain stagnant for at least another couple of years. If there is a Mozilla marketing arm, they should be jumping in with both feet.
Similarly, now is the time for Open Office to get the MS Word compatibility bugs sorted out and to mount a big attack on the corporate sector.
If the Open Source community waits another year or two MS will steamroller them with the latest and greatest MS OS and Office packages. If they jump now and can find backers to finance PR and advertising, groups like Mozilla could make major gains.
To our surprise, our first beta site complained: 'Most of our residents use Apples.'
You can't take a comment like that at face value. A lot of Mac users assume that everyone else also uses a Mac, primarily because they, personally, have never used anything else.
It's possible that you have managed to find a place where Macs are predominant. Your really need to survey the population that you hope to serve before you can assume that is the case.
If your product only works with Windows right now, then plan your beta test accordingly. Talk to the site ahead of time, ask for a tally of what systems and OS versions they use, and then decide whether to roll out the product.
That ensures that you look successful and professional.
The only thing that matters is results. Is the answer that I need in the first three or four results? If you can do that, you win. If you can't, don't bother.
I'm skeptical about how realistic it is to develop an open source search engine. Wikipedia, although cool, has large gaps in content, and only a few months ago was begging for donations to survive. I'm betting that a Google sized operation would be even more resource intensive.
Seriously, it is not hard to tell the scam artists from the honest retailers on e-bay. I suspect that most gripes come from people trying to get a deal that is "too good to be true".
It is pointless to compare shopping on e-bay with going to a bricks and mortar retailer like Best Buy.
E-bay is the wild west. The onus is on the buyer to look at feedback ratings, look at what elese the guys sells, and make an educated guess about the risk factor involved.
If you decide to pay $250 for new super pentium4 notebook with lots of free software from a guy with no history called "ebaydood675", then you pretty much assume that it will never arrive.
Sure there are scam artists on e-bay. There are also guys who go door to door selling aluminum siding, but I don't insist that the city should roll up the sidewalks to keep them away from my house.
Instead of blaming e-bay or Pay-Pal (who, sure, don't really do anything if you do get ripped off) take some responsibility for your own decisions.
Just as Mozilla is the odds on replacemnt for Internet Explorer, and generally is embraced by any IE user who tries it, it would be wonderful to have a replacemnt for the godawful Palm software.
I for one would love to have a calendar/contact list that had all of the features that Palm Desktop lacks. If Sunbird could sync with Palms, and even better, between my laptop and desktop, it could build a nice sized user group.
Comparison shopping on-line is time consuming and generally irritating. Is the $5 you save on some item really worth the hour that you spend going from site to site, checking prices, checking shipping costs, adding and subtracting taxes, and then double checking that the company at hand actually is trustworthy enough to deal with?
Plus the added challenge of trying to find out if what you want is actually in stock.
With few exceptions you're just as well off just paying retail at a big outfit like Amazon.com and not worrying about it.
Of course, if you have no life, then spending five days shopping for deals on a $300 system is probably as good as anything.
For those who point out that Word's market share is so large that no other word processor could hope to overtake it, I would point out that there was a time when Wordperfect was seen as the product that ruled the market and was seen as unstoppable.
And perhaps WordStar before it.
There is a reason why Word used to (still does?) include special help for people moving over from WordPerfect.
I had been an avid fan of Wordperfect back to the days of the much beloved 5.1 for DOS.
If you wanted or needed to have complete control of your document it beat Word hands down. Over the years Reveal Codes alone has saved me many hours of work trying figure out why formatting didn't work.
The real masters of Wordperfect though were always the secretarial folks in any large company. They could make it sing and dance. They didn't need Wizards and Clippy because they knew that program inside out, and knew how to make it do exactly what they needed.
Word simply cannot be controlled in the same manner as WordPerfect. The automagic features in Word are still a phenomenal pain in the ass. It is still possible to find your formatting totally screwed up with no way to find out what's wrong.
So am I still using Wordperfect?
Only for two things: envelope printing, for which it has the best widget I've seen, and outlining, which it does much, much better than Word because it doesn't try to out-think you or take over the whole process.
Other than those, I have moved almost entirely over to Open Office which avoids most of the really irritating things about MS Word, and does so at a price that WP can't beat.
Do they actually provide any measurable service to the users who use their product?... They sell advertising.
Like radio, they are selling consumers to advertisers. Their product is the number of eyeballs that they can deliver. The software or whatever service it offers is not their product. It is just a means to get you to see an advertisement.
This company and others like it, do not own your pc, they are not your ISP, and they are (probably?) not providing some form of service to you.
And the radio station does not own your radio, yet they freely send advertising to it for you to hear. All of that music and talk on your radio is not what they sell, and you are not the customer. You, in fact, is what the radio station is selling. You, assuming you fit the right demographic, are the product which is being offered to their customers.
The software being referred to is a delivery medium which allows them to sell your eyeballs to their customers.
Am I alone in thinking of hotmail or yahoo or google as the kind of e-mail you use when you have no better alternative? I can't imagine why anyone who can afford the price of an Internet account wouldn't prefer Pegasus, Eudora, or even Outlook.
Beyond that, I want my e-mail archives on my computer, not on some random server that I don't control. I want to know that I'm the only person who is accessing my files, and I don't want to wake up some morning and find out that the message that I desperately need to review is lost because of a server failure or DDOS attack.
Relying on a webmail system for your primary communications just seems foolish.
Slashdot Mirror
What's your price? Audiophile companies usually start at about $15-20 each to burn in audio cables before use.
Try these guys "The Cable Burner Company is a San Diego based company which offers the high-end audio/video enthusiast a quicker and more effective alternative to the normal cable break-in process of putting hours and hours of use on their systems."
Or These Guys
"Your cables won't perform at their best until they are 'burnt-in'. We are happy to do this for you at a cost of £15 per item if you purchase this option when ordering the cables."
All that I can say is avoid software from Dynix. Our local Hamilton Public Library, usually a superb outfit, just moved all of their catalogues to Dynix systems and it has been a total disaster.
The terminals in the library are very, very slow to respond, and for the first month the search funtion only worked about 10% of the time.
Talk to them before buying Dynix to find out what went so wrong.
Well to start with it appears that there no way to move several years of Pegasus data into Thunderbird. In terms of features, it seems to have less than Pegasus, as well as lacking some things that I would really like - such as an integrated hot-syncable calendar and easy filter setup. (which I admit Eudora does pretty well).
My guess is that Thunderbird will eventually approach the feature set that is available elsewhere, and I may move over to a Firefox/Thunderbird combo, but it'll be a while yet.
Aside from looking for deals on E-bay, you'll find that the features you want are not availble at a consumer level.
High end mindisc recorders allow digital dubbing, but not consumer models. An excellent source of information is here.
By the way, minidisc does not use DRM, it just doesn't have a digital line out jack.
In broadcast circles a lot of people are moving to various flash media units, and seem quite happy with them. These tend to be "pro" units, with XLR mic jacks and digital in and out.
You can also check out transom.org for advice on recorders.
Gee maybe they're affilated with textbook companies, who somehow can't sell millions of first year text books for less than $75!
Surely no-one on the planet is screwed more than university students at book buying time!
They simply cannot be beat, especially the special Christmas version with bouncing Santa hats....
Lemmings
3D lemmings
DHTML Lemmings
Your quandry is this: you found programming to be fun. Got an education, and found a job programming.
Whoops - once programming became your job, it also became work, not fun.
Really you have only two choices: don't program for a living, or don't program for a hobby.
The best advice is to find some other interests and leave the programming for work. It will make you a happier person, a more balanced individual, and will expand your circle of friends to a group larger than just programmers. All of those will help you to enjoy your work more which just might make programming fun again.
The customs problem is a big one, or more acurately, the god awful UPS brokerage charges, which usually far exceed the actual duties.
What's funny is that there are lots of companies who manage to ship to Canada, or even to drop ship large groups of items and then ship from within the country.
It is possible to handle Canadian orders successfully and without surprises, and some retailers even have sites that will calculate brokerage and duties before you commit to the order.
Ultimately it really comes down to one thing - some companies really don't want an extra 30 million customers.
NAFTA never did much for individuals or everyday consumers. Mostly it just allows large corporations to move money (and some people) around with less overhead.
Yes, be professional. That doesn't mean you can't have fun, but strike a balance.
At this point it should be 9-5, an hour for lunch off site, and no after hours phone calls. Got banked flex time? Use it up now.
Beyond that you really should look at what you can do to eliminate any suggestion that you didn't do your core job. Yes, that means updating essential documentation of those things that you were hired to do. Stuff that you did as a favor can be ignored.
In fact, write it up, add a table of contents, and hand over the cerlox bound (aka, not machine readable)copy on your way out the door.
Clear your workstation of any programs or files that aren't 100% company issue, nuke all non-company e-mail and files, and then sanitize the hard drive so that you don't have to worry about someone finding the stuff later. Tell your co-workers to do the same. Do this a week or two before your last day.
If there is the slightest chance of a lawsuit - and hey, spend a couple hundred bucks on an employment lawyer to see what is and isn't negotiable - you should be copying records of work done and hours worked and taking them offsite. Not internal confidential information, but the paperwork that will support any claim that you might make.
Again, tell your co-workers to do the same.
Finally, do not assume that your employer knows or is telling you the truth about what your rights might be under the law. Depending on your jurisdiction you may be eligible for more severance pay than they offer. Ask your lawyer.
Ask your employer for letter of reference as early on as possible. Even better, write it for them and offer to let them just copy it to letterhead and sign it. Having that letter pretty much assures that they'll say good things about you if they are called. It also will prove valuable if the rest of the company disappears and there is no-one who can actually be contacted.
Although some employers would not approve, it is a good idea to send your personal e-mail to as many contacts as possible before the company shuts down your account. A lot of people who know you as joe@hort.com will have great trouble finding you once that address is gone.
And remember - on the last day it doesn't matter how late you are, how early you leave, or how you dress. And you don't have to shake the hand of the people who are firing you.
What does Mom do when she is not on the computer? What interests does she have? Who does she e-mail?
My mother in law had only slight interest in computers until she found out that there was a gigantic network of grandmothers who exchanged computer embroidery designs via e-mail.
Or, more accurately, designs featuring characters that are well protected by the Sonny Bono Copyright act. From a company whose name starts with "D"....
Several hundred floppy discs later we bought her a CD burner so she could better manage her booty.
Eventually the Alberta cop who was one of the central figures in this operation was shut down and charged.
Who gets to win in the marketplace? The Innovators who invest in R&D like crazy or those that just take cost out of standard products.
The innovation was in creating products that filled a formerly unidentified need. Those lovely early HP calculators are an example. The first reliable laser printers are an example. The personal computer is an example.
When each of these was being developed, the technology industry - heck the whole personal computer industry - was in its infancy, and just about anything with a semi-conductor as "innovative".
Those are now mature products, which is where companies like Dell appear. Their role is not to address needs that other companies haven't seen, but to build a business that exploits mature technology with identified market.
Innovation will come from left field, and will involved products or processes that few of us will see coming.
Lord folks - why was this even posted? After three machines it's pretty obvious that the install media had a problem. What possible use is a "review" that basically says "Well, I couldn't get it to install, and now I'm going to whine about it."
The support system doesn't sound like it's much better or worse than what most companies offer these days, although there is a legitimate discussion to be had about support desks that don't speak english (or your language) adequately.
Next time let's wait until someone get's a reasonable install and can talk about what JDS actually does and how it performs. "It didn't work for me" is pretty much useless.
"As a brief aside, if I were Google ..., who are rumored to be working on client side technologies for managing information, I'd put a lot of energy into Mozilla, and release a Google branded browser..."
Mozilla, and Open Source in general has an amazing window of opportunity right now. A product tie in like the one described in the article is exactly what is needed.
IE looks as if it will remain stagnant for at least another couple of years. If there is a Mozilla marketing arm, they should be jumping in with both feet.
Similarly, now is the time for Open Office to get the MS Word compatibility bugs sorted out and to mount a big attack on the corporate sector.
If the Open Source community waits another year or two MS will steamroller them with the latest and greatest MS OS and Office packages. If they jump now and can find backers to finance PR and advertising, groups like Mozilla could make major gains.
To our surprise, our first beta site complained: 'Most of our residents use Apples.'
You can't take a comment like that at face value. A lot of Mac users assume that everyone else also uses a Mac, primarily because they, personally, have never used anything else.
It's possible that you have managed to find a place where Macs are predominant. Your really need to survey the population that you hope to serve before you can assume that is the case.
If your product only works with Windows right now, then plan your beta test accordingly. Talk to the site ahead of time, ask for a tally of what systems and OS versions they use, and then decide whether to roll out the product.
That ensures that you look successful and professional.
Yes, and what's more, it's a dancing Bear!
Ah - such an amazing Bear, even though it dances slowly and poorly, it does indeed dance.
Let me know when it can ride a bicycle.
Another Dancing Bear story.
What would you look for out of this project?
The only thing that matters is results. Is the answer that I need in the first three or four results? If you can do that, you win. If you can't, don't bother.
I'm skeptical about how realistic it is to develop an open source search engine. Wikipedia, although cool, has large gaps in content, and only a few months ago was begging for donations to survive. I'm betting that a Google sized operation would be even more resource intensive.
Seriously, it is not hard to tell the scam artists from the honest retailers on e-bay. I suspect that most gripes come from people trying to get a deal that is "too good to be true".
It is pointless to compare shopping on e-bay with going to a bricks and mortar retailer like Best Buy.
E-bay is the wild west. The onus is on the buyer to look at feedback ratings, look at what elese the guys sells, and make an educated guess about the risk factor involved.
If you decide to pay $250 for new super pentium4 notebook with lots of free software from a guy with no history called "ebaydood675", then you pretty much assume that it will never arrive.
Sure there are scam artists on e-bay. There are also guys who go door to door selling aluminum siding, but I don't insist that the city should roll up the sidewalks to keep them away from my house.
Instead of blaming e-bay or Pay-Pal (who, sure, don't really do anything if you do get ripped off) take some responsibility for your own decisions.
Just as Mozilla is the odds on replacemnt for Internet Explorer, and generally is embraced by any IE user who tries it, it would be wonderful to have a replacemnt for the godawful Palm software.
I for one would love to have a calendar/contact list that had all of the features that Palm Desktop lacks. If Sunbird could sync with Palms, and even better, between my laptop and desktop, it could build a nice sized user group.
Comparison shopping on-line is time consuming and generally irritating. Is the $5 you save on some item really worth the hour that you spend going from site to site, checking prices, checking shipping costs, adding and subtracting taxes, and then double checking that the company at hand actually is trustworthy enough to deal with?
Plus the added challenge of trying to find out if what you want is actually in stock.
With few exceptions you're just as well off just paying retail at a big outfit like Amazon.com and not worrying about it.
Of course, if you have no life, then spending five days shopping for deals on a $300 system is probably as good as anything.
For those who point out that Word's market share is so large that no other word processor could hope to overtake it, I would point out that there was a time when Wordperfect was seen as the product that ruled the market and was seen as unstoppable.
And perhaps WordStar before it.
There is a reason why Word used to (still does?) include special help for people moving over from WordPerfect.
I had been an avid fan of Wordperfect back to the days of the much beloved 5.1 for DOS.
If you wanted or needed to have complete control of your document it beat Word hands down. Over the years Reveal Codes alone has saved me many hours of work trying figure out why formatting didn't work.
The real masters of Wordperfect though were always the secretarial folks in any large company. They could make it sing and dance. They didn't need Wizards and Clippy because they knew that program inside out, and knew how to make it do exactly what they needed.
Word simply cannot be controlled in the same manner as WordPerfect. The automagic features in Word are still a phenomenal pain in the ass. It is still possible to find your formatting totally screwed up with no way to find out what's wrong.
So am I still using Wordperfect?
Only for two things: envelope printing, for which it has the best widget I've seen, and outlining, which it does much, much better than Word because it doesn't try to out-think you or take over the whole process.
Other than those, I have moved almost entirely over to Open Office which avoids most of the really irritating things about MS Word, and does so at a price that WP can't beat.
Pants? You wear pants? ...Oops, did I say that out loud?
Sadly our computers seem less inclined to share that love...
"Open the pod bay door HAL...."
Do they actually provide any measurable service to the users who use their product?... They sell advertising.
Like radio, they are selling consumers to advertisers. Their product is the number of eyeballs that they can deliver. The software or whatever service it offers is not their product. It is just a means to get you to see an advertisement.
This company and others like it, do not own your pc, they are not your ISP, and they are (probably?) not providing some form of service to you.
And the radio station does not own your radio, yet they freely send advertising to it for you to hear. All of that music and talk on your radio is not what they sell, and you are not the customer. You, in fact, is what the radio station is selling. You, assuming you fit the right demographic, are the product which is being offered to their customers.
The software being referred to is a delivery medium which allows them to sell your eyeballs to their customers.
Am I alone in thinking of hotmail or yahoo or google as the kind of e-mail you use when you have no better alternative? I can't imagine why anyone who can afford the price of an Internet account wouldn't prefer Pegasus, Eudora, or even Outlook.
Beyond that, I want my e-mail archives on my computer, not on some random server that I don't control. I want to know that I'm the only person who is accessing my files, and I don't want to wake up some morning and find out that the message that I desperately need to review is lost because of a server failure or DDOS attack.
Relying on a webmail system for your primary communications just seems foolish.