Ehm, no. In your logic a baker, butcher of supermarket should ask more for a loaf of bread when the person who buys it has a higher salary. Food is needed to have energy and that energy is used for higher income/profit.
We obviously don't do this for groceries, well, not directly. Grocers tend to offer standard prices for their goods based on the regions they serve, though often neighborhoods where the people can't afford cars tend to enjoy higher prices as they can't comparison shop as much. But you're talking about things bought as an individual vs commercial buying.
Things like movie tickets do offer pricing based on age and one's student status.
For software, there also are student prices. There are also licenses based on whether a product is for commercial use or "home" use. This obviously is done whether you feel it's unfair they don't charge for bread based on income.
IIRC it was round and abouts of WindowsME that Microsoft got it in their heads to actually restrict some of the network features. Talking about it to a Microsoft employee, their basic "explanation" was that NT and 2k were for businesses and 98 and ME were for the home. I don't have issue with Microsoft having different pricing for businesses, if you're making a profit off their product it makes perfect sense to ask for more.
I don't remember the issue, perhaps it was logging onto a domain. Perhaps they also made it a pain to display all the workgroups on a given network. I don't know. During the win9x/me age, it was more problematic since were programs and hardware that just wouldn't work with NT/2k
So now we have Vista. I have no direct experience with it but from my understanding some features I find "useful" are missing in the home/pro editions. That seems to be the biggest insult and certainly a good reason to avoid the vista 4 flavor insanity. For example I use fax from time to time. Not often, but when dealing with medical shit they use fax. It seems I need business or ultimate vista to do "fax", well either that or get 3rd party support for it.
But like with most people I'm sticking with XP until such time as there is actually a reason to upgrade. I said the same thing about win2k, and unfortunately there was some adobe program that "required" xp.
However does anyone else feel this may be payback for employees checking personal e-mail, playing games in their browser, ordering personal items online... Basically wasting time on the company dime.
Can you go home? No? You get paid IMHO. Obviously it's not good to waste money on company time, but the fact of the matter is there often are times of major latency where you need to do "something" to maintain your sanity. Obviously non productive workers should get the sack, that goes without saying, and one should use their breaks and lunch hour to do personal crap.
Actually, the service industry is a bad example. I worked at a convenience store for a summer and my wife worked at a coffee shop for a while. Both of us stopped getting paid when the doors were locked despite the fact that there was still cleanup to be done. The theory was that we were supposed to be cleaning as the shift was winding down, but time and customers rarely allowed for that. Crappy summer jobs aren't necessarily comparable to career jobs, however (unless you're unfortunate enough to have a crappy service job as your career) because both of us had the option to leave and take better jobs where we were paid fairly.
Just because it happens in practice doesn't make it legal. IANAL but a good rule of thumb is when you arrive at work, and are ready to work, you get paid. Over a decade ago I did the summer job thing, dishwasher, food service, even some light industrial. All tried to play the game of stiffing pay. Light industrial for example it's common to not pay people for the first hour, just have them wait around until other people show up. Food service, if it's sluggish they would prefer you hang out and drink coffee before getting paid. You got out of bed, you got there ontime, you're working. It doesn't matter if they have nothing for you to do, if you can't go home, you're at work. It often takes a few phone calls to the department of labor to verify this.
How exactly do they own the copyright to images of their product? I thought that kind of logic applied only to pictures of persons.
The ONLY thing I can think of is they own the trademark, but this wouldn't be a copyright issue AFAIK. It goes something like this
You photograph something with our logo on it. We charge you for use of "our logo"
Now, the obvious solution is to photoshop out the factory logos. The thing is, I'm sure that wouldn't make them happy either since those logos are there for a reason, so people know what kind of car it is on the off chance that they will say "hey, I want that car".
If this is held up in court this would be a bad precedent. Anyone could register a trademark, slap it on everything, and charge you money to photograph.
All of those can be reasonably included in browsing habits, yet changing just one of them, one of adblocker, script-blocker, browser, browser-platform, would have likely made you immune. Change all four of them, still keeping in mind they all fit reasonably within the definition of browsing habits, and the chances of being infected by an ad that's blocked, requiring scripting that's turned off, targeting a browser you aren't running, on an OS that if you run at all, you don't consider secure enough to browse the web with, are practically nil!
I'm sure what is meant is "if you're going to search for vvarzz you're going to get infected". I could change my platform, I could run an ad blocker.
Browser, well, I got infected using firefox v2.0.0.18. I "should" update.
I recently got infected with Antivirus 2008. Googling for a solution, mainly which windows exploit was used to get it on the system I found the following type of comments.
"You are infected with a malware that you picked up because of your browsing habits"
Yeah right, I got infected because of Google Ads, which can be found on many a mainstream site. I actually had just updated my virus definitions (avast), and updated my firewall. My windows updates are not as up to date as they could be, which is rather why I ask which one takes care of this exploit?
The behavior was a forced reboot with no option to run cmd to abort it. After windows said something about not connecting to "all" network drives, which is odd as I don't have any network drives setup. Then the process "brastk.exe" appeared.
Pager coverage is actually pretty damn good. Come to think about it, I had less issues with pager coverage than cell coverage even though it was obvious they broadcast pages cross a given region, a few states or cross the nation wide network. Service was pretty damned reasonable, about $8/month or so IIRC, about the same as unlimited texts on t-mobile.
Why did I ditch it? Well the pager networks got bought out by other people, changed hands, and they no longer offered some of the handy dandy services they once did, which would include web->page and or e-mail->page without adding a ton of formating data. As in, one could attach a pager to a page reader via TTL serial and issue commands remotely. Mucking with the system resulted in too many garbage characters, and I could either revamp the system or go with something internet based.
But pagers still have their use. Coverage is still pretty damn good.
1) Move suspicious files to the chest 2) log the changes 3) reboot with a little script that if no successful login in x minuets, restore from last change.
I'm a little confused and the whole free market concept, since market anarchists when asked respond with "we don't need to prove a negative".
But you propose a a city design where essential services (gas, water, power, communications) are offered by both the city and private industry, well they automatically assume that's a market, and by extension justifies their idea of a free market.
Problem is, in order to provide multiple services, you do have to spend more on your infrastructure. You need stronger poles, larger underground conduit, or perhaps separate conduit, and more in the way of system analysis since you have to make sure competing services don't interfere with each other. The monopoly model for essential services does make a fair amount of sense provided the monopoly plays nice. They tend not to play nice, and as a result competition tends to encourage respective companies improve them selves, whether it means prices or quality of service.
People discontinue products to force people to buy new stuff and, thus, make more money. Next question.
Well, in the automotive world, they make parts for older vehicles. To be honest, I don't know how long they made the parts for the older vehicles. I can get gaskets for 1980s Volvos without a problem, though they do have to be ordered often times from the UK.
But we are not talking a car, we are talking about computers which are often a part of a larger information system. It's sometimes prohibitive to adopt the newest software solution if you are locked into some old obscure hardware.
As far as Microsoft goes, that difference does it really make to them if you buy a copy of xp, Vista, or a copy of 3.1 windows. How about 3.1 windows and a legacy version of word? It's pretty good for for the hardware manufacturers though, I have to admit that.
It seems to me that it's somewhat silly to actually "discontinue" a software product. After all, it's software. It's not a physical product. It's something you can download, and it seems somewhat nutty to not accept coin for it if asked.
There are exceptions when you don't want a prior product like XP to compete with a current product, say vista, but win3.1 is some of those cases where there is really no threat of it competing with a current generation product.
I'm not saying that microsoft shouldn't abandon support for win3.1. Far from it, only it seems to make little sense since win3.1 was used on a number of systems, and if you lose your drive and for some reason simply have to have that legacy system operational, there is some wisdom is keeping the product available for purchase. Otherwise you run into some questionable situations where you "need" win3.1 but can't buy it.
IBM for example at one point offered PC DOS 5.0 as a free download. It was a commercial product but by 1998-1999 it had NO commercial value. According to wiki you can get PC-DOS 2000 (Chinese Edition) for free. They seem to understand the value of this being a vital port of legacy systems, and make it available. Microsoft offers a ton of files from their dos distribution available.
That's my only bitch, if you need it, the only solution is hunting around for it, or pirating it.
I was at Sears auto center today. I could almost swear that their repair/billing system looks like something written for 3.x running on win95/98.
Can't confirm it one way or another though.
Let me try that again.
Sears AFAIK is still mainframe based with 3270/5250 clients hooking up to a terminal server, over a t-1 to the mainframe.
It became popular in the late 90s to offer PCs with terminal emulation software as terminals were relativly costly, and PCs dropped below $1000 each with monitors.
The last company I know of other than IBM to make 3270/5250 terminal adapters was Attachmate, and those were $500 to $1000 a pop.
If they were on a 486slc PS/2, it would cost too damned much to upgrade from win3.1, and why bother if all you need is a glorified terminal. You "could" upgrade PCs and get something with win98/2k/xp/vista, but unless you already have a PCI terminal adapter, to swap in a new PC would cost $500-$1000 above and beyond the cost of the PC for a glorified terminal.
I was at Sears auto center today. I could almost swear that their repair/billing system looks like something written for 3.x running on win95/98.
Can't confirm it one way or another though.
The last time I was at sears auto center, well, it was 2000. I think it was 2000/2001. Anyhow their setup was a 486slc PS/2 with a 3270 or 5250 terminal adapter. Win3.1 would have been the default, and those things were limited to 16 megs of ram even though they were geared to accept more, pesky 486slc limitations.
It wouldn't shock me if they were still on ye'old main frame and they only thing they needed for their billing is terminal emulation software. The last company I knew of who made them was Attachmate According to Wikipedia they own Reflection which was a product by Walker Richard and Quinn. The PCI Attachmate Irma 3270 adapter in it's heyday cost well $500-$1000 for the hardware and software. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_1996_Sept_9/ai_18655802
You really have to wonder about the wisdom of keeping such a network in service. Odds are pretty decent they are on twisted pair where all the adapters go to centralized terminal server which typically was an IBM product booting from a 5.25 inch 2.44meg disc. It seems rather trivial to upgrade that to something that supports Ethernet rather than a relativly primitive dedicated terminal lines. This is one of those cases where you say "this looks like a job for linux" and you'd be correct. Cisco I'm sure has some offerings for 3270 servers that would do the job. Not that you can't get an ethernet card for ye'old mainframe back east.
But I'm getting side tracked. Sears near as I'm aware uses 3270/5250 terminal emulation on a PC. Win 3.1 @ 16 color is more than adquate for the task.
Was in the age of Dial-Up. I remember that there were a few ISPs back in the mid '90s that charged $20/month for a limited amount of time online...somewhere between 30 to 50 hours per month. But when other ISPs offered unlimited time online for the same price (or $25 to $30 per month), it was a no-brainer.
My first ISP was well, like $7.50/month unlimited. They went tits up. My second ISP didn't, it was either $15 or $20. They didn't meter but they had a policy of 2hrs on 2hrs off, or was it 4hrs on 4hrs off. A little e-mail reminded you if you exceeded their recommendation. It worked out pretty well actually since they had little objection to being excessive at night, which was in the spirit of their agreement. While I stuck with them, the "other guys" were either offering unlimited, or more for the same service, or metering. I was hooked up to a service that used a credit system, like 25c/hour or some such with a birthday credit that piled up.
Such a system I don't see working these days when a good percent of the population is online. It's just too much to manage. It wasn't so bad when I could download 300+megs after hours and get the file by morning, but these days it's pretty much a non issue as I can get gigs in hours rather than a couple or three days in the dialup age.
What might be handy to actually limited bandwidth use is a proxy like @home had.
I lived in a rental last year where the owners were in England and the rental company was freaking clueless. The security system was cryptic and difficult to figure out, and no one bothered to tell me the arming code. Well there was a power outage and the system got reset, so the sucker kept on making noise at the wrong times.
This is one of those things that is the owner's responsibility without a doubt but the rental company was just clueless. I tried to take it upon my self to actually hire someone to fix the stupid thing but I couldn't find a company willing to address it since well, I wasn't the owner.
I ended up just removing all the magnets from the doors and windows, so there was in effect a fully armed security system but nothing triggered it. Alternatively I could have just put a magnet near the sensors and that would have had the same effect.
I have some ideas for home security that would employ both LED and magnetic door and window sensors, as it seems magnetic sensors alone can be defeated too easily.
The most frustrating thing was, I'm sure I could have waited until midnight and cut the breakers to reset the system, but there clearly was a battery backup somewhere, and the system got mucked up when the power was out in excess of a week.
If anybody found a piece of anything on the ground Monday morning, I would hope they wouldn't get too close to it
Yes, I hope they don't, but in reality if someone encounters a piece of space trash, and see it for space trash, they will pick it up thinking it might be worth something.
It's not as easy as you think: "I can't cum unless you pretend to be dead... wait, where are you going? Damnit, that's the third one this week! What am I supposed to do with THIS?..."
And then it's back to match.com to find another one.
Could be worse. "I can't cum unless you pretend to be a dead furry."
It's this point where you consider giving up dating all together, or at least match.com.
Opening the company website and typing in a short product code is pretty damn easy. And as an added bonus, it works on every computer out there... You don't need to carry around a big, bulky, barcode scanner, attach it to the computer you're using, install the software from CD, just to scan a bar code, and then remove it later.
Well, I'm actually rather a fan of bar codes. Even if we geeks order OEM, odds are there's going to be a house barcode.
I need a list of supplies. You can submit it either with the description, or product code. If it's a product code, barcodes reduce the need for manual entry and are less prone to error. It was a little different when the cuecats were out since 300dpi laserprinters were still the norm, and they are somewhat marginal when it comes to barcodes, but with now 1200dpi lasers are out, and inkjets at the very least do 600dpi for text, well, it's not too far fetched to implant barcodes in your purchase order.
I'll agree it's somewhat moot since prior orders are often stored, and reordering is just a few clicks away.
FYI, most barcode readers for PCs are just keyboard wedges. No special software or drivers needed. From time to time I pull out my old USB cuecat for projects.
But I have to agree that the concept of barcode to url was actually rather spiffy. How often do you have to give someone a long cryptic url in hardcopy form, and have to transcribe 20 some odd characters. Tinyurl is handy, and by extension the cuecat url concept is also handy. Alternatively speaking, you can encode any text in, I believe it's called 3 of 9 barcode font. It doesn't offer checksums but it does offer encoding of text and symbols.
Digital Convergence didn't have a bad idea, but as seen with the various database software, they might have enjoyed better luck focusing on the a nitch first.
Take their model.
Q: What do I use this thing for A: To scan your soup cans Q: Why the fuck would I want to do that? A: To visit the website and so we can collect demographic information Q: Why don't you fuck off?
Good idea as barcodes are everywhere, certainly handy, but for your average consumer, they didn't do this in the first place. They want to know more about their soup, they can type in the company name in google, no big deal.
But you start talking to people about indexing their book, CD, or video collection, well, there you go! Consumer gets their DB, DC gets their marketing information. Then perhaps as a side one could index barcodes with company names.
They also had a semi-decent idea promoting urls within broadcasts. The states doesn't use teletext, and that would be rather handy. But this was like the late 1990s. You sort of needed to have a TV with audio out, or a tuner/vcr with a free audio out. And who would want to make run from their VCR to their PC just to collect URLs?
But as far as I can tell, Digital Convergence was just a company out to get venture capital and go bankrupt ASAP.
I have to really wonder about this. The DMCA only applies within US borders. Piracy is alive and well. There is thepirate bay, somewhat lame video sites tudou.com and youku.com, and I can still find a ton of infringing material on Youtube. I can't for example upload a 20 second clip that Sony owns an interest in without it getting pulled based on keywords. I've had to deal with offline storage sites that to be fair take a takedown notice as license to terminate an account period without resolve.
Without the DMCA I have to wonder if the web would still be the wild wild west of 2000, and if so would it actually be better. Piracy is pretty damn good advertising.
Slashdot Mirror
Ehm, no. In your logic a baker, butcher of supermarket should ask more for a loaf of bread when the person who buys it has a higher salary. Food is needed to have energy and that energy is used for higher income/profit.
We obviously don't do this for groceries, well, not directly. Grocers tend to offer standard prices for their goods based on the regions they serve, though often neighborhoods where the people can't afford cars tend to enjoy higher prices as they can't comparison shop as much. But you're talking about things bought as an individual vs commercial buying.
Things like movie tickets do offer pricing based on age and one's student status.
For software, there also are student prices. There are also licenses based on whether a product is for commercial use or "home" use. This obviously is done whether you feel it's unfair they don't charge for bread based on income.
IIRC it was round and abouts of WindowsME that Microsoft got it in their heads to actually restrict some of the network features. Talking about it to a Microsoft employee, their basic "explanation" was that NT and 2k were for businesses and 98 and ME were for the home. I don't have issue with Microsoft having different pricing for businesses, if you're making a profit off their product it makes perfect sense to ask for more.
I don't remember the issue, perhaps it was logging onto a domain. Perhaps they also made it a pain to display all the workgroups on a given network. I don't know. During the win9x/me age, it was more problematic since were programs and hardware that just wouldn't work with NT/2k
So now we have Vista. I have no direct experience with it but from my understanding some features I find "useful" are missing in the home/pro editions. That seems to be the biggest insult and certainly a good reason to avoid the vista 4 flavor insanity. For example I use fax from time to time. Not often, but when dealing with medical shit they use fax. It seems I need business or ultimate vista to do "fax", well either that or get 3rd party support for it.
But like with most people I'm sticking with XP until such time as there is actually a reason to upgrade. I said the same thing about win2k, and unfortunately there was some adobe program that "required" xp.
However does anyone else feel this may be payback for employees checking personal e-mail, playing games in their browser, ordering personal items online... Basically wasting time on the company dime.
Can you go home? No? You get paid IMHO. Obviously it's not good to waste money on company time, but the fact of the matter is there often are times of major latency where you need to do "something" to maintain your sanity. Obviously non productive workers should get the sack, that goes without saying, and one should use their breaks and lunch hour to do personal crap.
Actually, the service industry is a bad example. I worked at a convenience store for a summer and my wife worked at a coffee shop for a while. Both of us stopped getting paid when the doors were locked despite the fact that there was still cleanup to be done. The theory was that we were supposed to be cleaning as the shift was winding down, but time and customers rarely allowed for that. Crappy summer jobs aren't necessarily comparable to career jobs, however (unless you're unfortunate enough to have a crappy service job as your career) because both of us had the option to leave and take better jobs where we were paid fairly.
Just because it happens in practice doesn't make it legal. IANAL but a good rule of thumb is when you arrive at work, and are ready to work, you get paid. Over a decade ago I did the summer job thing, dishwasher, food service, even some light industrial. All tried to play the game of stiffing pay. Light industrial for example it's common to not pay people for the first hour, just have them wait around until other people show up. Food service, if it's sluggish they would prefer you hang out and drink coffee before getting paid. You got out of bed, you got there ontime, you're working. It doesn't matter if they have nothing for you to do, if you can't go home, you're at work. It often takes a few phone calls to the department of labor to verify this.
How exactly do they own the copyright to images of their product? I thought that kind of logic applied only to pictures of persons.
The ONLY thing I can think of is they own the trademark, but this wouldn't be a copyright issue AFAIK. It goes something like this
You photograph something with our logo on it.
We charge you for use of "our logo"
Now, the obvious solution is to photoshop out the factory logos. The thing is, I'm sure that wouldn't make them happy either since those logos are there for a reason, so people know what kind of car it is on the off chance that they will say "hey, I want that car".
If this is held up in court this would be a bad precedent. Anyone could register a trademark, slap it on everything, and charge you money to photograph.
All of those can be reasonably included in browsing habits, yet changing just one of them, one of adblocker, script-blocker, browser, browser-platform, would have likely made you immune. Change all four of them, still keeping in mind they all fit reasonably within the definition of browsing habits, and the chances of being infected by an ad that's blocked, requiring scripting that's turned off, targeting a browser you aren't running, on an OS that if you run at all, you don't consider secure enough to browse the web with, are practically nil!
I'm sure what is meant is "if you're going to search for vvarzz you're going to get infected". I could change my platform, I could run an ad blocker.
Browser, well, I got infected using firefox v2.0.0.18. I "should" update.
I recently got infected with Antivirus 2008. Googling for a solution, mainly which windows exploit was used to get it on the system I found the following type of comments.
"You are infected with a malware that you picked up because of your browsing habits"
Yeah right, I got infected because of Google Ads, which can be found on many a mainstream site. I actually had just updated my virus definitions (avast), and updated my firewall. My windows updates are not as up to date as they could be, which is rather why I ask which one takes care of this exploit?
The behavior was a forced reboot with no option to run cmd to abort it. After windows said something about not connecting to "all" network drives, which is odd as I don't have any network drives setup. Then the process "brastk.exe" appeared.
Pager coverage is actually pretty damn good. Come to think about it, I had less issues with pager coverage than cell coverage even though it was obvious they broadcast pages cross a given region, a few states or cross the nation wide network. Service was pretty damned reasonable, about $8/month or so IIRC, about the same as unlimited texts on t-mobile.
Why did I ditch it? Well the pager networks got bought out by other people, changed hands, and they no longer offered some of the handy dandy services they once did, which would include web->page and or e-mail->page without adding a ton of formating data. As in, one could attach a pager to a page reader via TTL serial and issue commands remotely. Mucking with the system resulted in too many garbage characters, and I could either revamp the system or go with something internet based.
But pagers still have their use. Coverage is still pretty damn good.
How hard is it for a virus scanner to
1) Move suspicious files to the chest
2) log the changes
3) reboot with a little script that if no successful login in x minuets, restore from last change.
Something like this would be farking useful.
how this is 'competition' and 'free market'.
I'm a little confused and the whole free market concept, since market anarchists when asked respond with "we don't need to prove a negative".
But you propose a a city design where essential services (gas, water, power, communications) are offered by both the city and private industry, well they automatically assume that's a market, and by extension justifies their idea of a free market.
Problem is, in order to provide multiple services, you do have to spend more on your infrastructure. You need stronger poles, larger underground conduit, or perhaps separate conduit, and more in the way of system analysis since you have to make sure competing services don't interfere with each other. The monopoly model for essential services does make a fair amount of sense provided the monopoly plays nice. They tend not to play nice, and as a result competition tends to encourage respective companies improve them selves, whether it means prices or quality of service.
They are on public property. Am I free to take them? Can I cover them with my own promotional stickers?
Or better yet, can you charge the company for cleanup?
Seriously I understand the need for yard sale signs. That's well and good. There usually are laws on how long you can keep them up.
People discontinue products to force people to buy new stuff and, thus, make more money. Next question.
Well, in the automotive world, they make parts for older vehicles. To be honest, I don't know how long they made the parts for the older vehicles. I can get gaskets for 1980s Volvos without a problem, though they do have to be ordered often times from the UK.
But we are not talking a car, we are talking about computers which are often a part of a larger information system. It's sometimes prohibitive to adopt the newest software solution if you are locked into some old obscure hardware.
As far as Microsoft goes, that difference does it really make to them if you buy a copy of xp, Vista, or a copy of 3.1 windows. How about 3.1 windows and a legacy version of word? It's pretty good for for the hardware manufacturers though, I have to admit that.
It seems to me that it's somewhat silly to actually "discontinue" a software product. After all, it's software. It's not a physical product. It's something you can download, and it seems somewhat nutty to not accept coin for it if asked.
There are exceptions when you don't want a prior product like XP to compete with a current product, say vista, but win3.1 is some of those cases where there is really no threat of it competing with a current generation product.
I'm not saying that microsoft shouldn't abandon support for win3.1. Far from it, only it seems to make little sense since win3.1 was used on a number of systems, and if you lose your drive and for some reason simply have to have that legacy system operational, there is some wisdom is keeping the product available for purchase. Otherwise you run into some questionable situations where you "need" win3.1 but can't buy it.
IBM for example at one point offered PC DOS 5.0 as a free download. It was a commercial product but by 1998-1999 it had NO commercial value. According to wiki you can get PC-DOS 2000 (Chinese Edition) for free. They seem to understand the value of this being a vital port of legacy systems, and make it available. Microsoft offers a ton of files from their dos distribution available.
That's my only bitch, if you need it, the only solution is hunting around for it, or pirating it.
ftp://ftp.boulder.ibm.com/software/dos/
I was at Sears auto center today. I could almost swear that their repair/billing system looks like something written for 3.x running on win95/98.
Can't confirm it one way or another though.
Let me try that again.
Sears AFAIK is still mainframe based with 3270/5250 clients hooking up to a terminal server, over a t-1 to the mainframe.
It became popular in the late 90s to offer PCs with terminal emulation software as terminals were relativly costly, and PCs dropped below $1000 each with monitors.
The last company I know of other than IBM to make 3270/5250 terminal adapters was Attachmate, and those were $500 to $1000 a pop.
If they were on a 486slc PS/2, it would cost too damned much to upgrade from win3.1, and why bother if all you need is a glorified terminal. You "could" upgrade PCs and get something with win98/2k/xp/vista, but unless you already have a PCI terminal adapter, to swap in a new PC would cost $500-$1000 above and beyond the cost of the PC for a glorified terminal.
I was at Sears auto center today. I could almost swear that their repair/billing system looks like something written for 3.x running on win95/98.
Can't confirm it one way or another though.
The last time I was at sears auto center, well, it was 2000. I think it was 2000/2001. Anyhow their setup was a 486slc PS/2 with a 3270 or 5250 terminal adapter. Win3.1 would have been the default, and those things were limited to 16 megs of ram even though they were geared to accept more, pesky 486slc limitations.
It wouldn't shock me if they were still on ye'old main frame and they only thing they needed for their billing is terminal emulation software. The last company I knew of who made them was Attachmate According to Wikipedia they own Reflection which was a product by Walker Richard and Quinn. The PCI Attachmate Irma 3270 adapter in it's heyday cost well $500-$1000 for the hardware and software.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_1996_Sept_9/ai_18655802
You really have to wonder about the wisdom of keeping such a network in service. Odds are pretty decent they are on twisted pair where all the adapters go to centralized terminal server which typically was an IBM product booting from a 5.25 inch 2.44meg disc. It seems rather trivial to upgrade that to something that supports Ethernet rather than a relativly primitive dedicated terminal lines. This is one of those cases where you say "this looks like a job for linux" and you'd be correct. Cisco I'm sure has some offerings for 3270 servers that would do the job. Not that you can't get an ethernet card for ye'old mainframe back east.
But I'm getting side tracked. Sears near as I'm aware uses 3270/5250 terminal emulation on a PC. Win 3.1 @ 16 color is more than adquate for the task.
Was in the age of Dial-Up. I remember that there were a few ISPs back in the mid '90s that charged $20/month for a limited amount of time online...somewhere between 30 to 50 hours per month. But when other ISPs offered unlimited time online for the same price (or $25 to $30 per month), it was a no-brainer.
My first ISP was well, like $7.50/month unlimited. They went tits up. My second ISP didn't, it was either $15 or $20. They didn't meter but they had a policy of 2hrs on 2hrs off, or was it 4hrs on 4hrs off. A little e-mail reminded you if you exceeded their recommendation. It worked out pretty well actually since they had little objection to being excessive at night, which was in the spirit of their agreement. While I stuck with them, the "other guys" were either offering unlimited, or more for the same service, or metering. I was hooked up to a service that used a credit system, like 25c/hour or some such with a birthday credit that piled up.
Such a system I don't see working these days when a good percent of the population is online. It's just too much to manage. It wasn't so bad when I could download 300+megs after hours and get the file by morning, but these days it's pretty much a non issue as I can get gigs in hours rather than a couple or three days in the dialup age.
What might be handy to actually limited bandwidth use is a proxy like @home had.
I lived in a rental last year where the owners were in England and the rental company was freaking clueless. The security system was cryptic and difficult to figure out, and no one bothered to tell me the arming code. Well there was a power outage and the system got reset, so the sucker kept on making noise at the wrong times.
This is one of those things that is the owner's responsibility without a doubt but the rental company was just clueless. I tried to take it upon my self to actually hire someone to fix the stupid thing but I couldn't find a company willing to address it since well, I wasn't the owner.
I ended up just removing all the magnets from the doors and windows, so there was in effect a fully armed security system but nothing triggered it. Alternatively I could have just put a magnet near the sensors and that would have had the same effect.
I have some ideas for home security that would employ both LED and magnetic door and window sensors, as it seems magnetic sensors alone can be defeated too easily.
The most frustrating thing was, I'm sure I could have waited until midnight and cut the breakers to reset the system, but there clearly was a battery backup somewhere, and the system got mucked up when the power was out in excess of a week.
And there is no good reason that they shouldn't. It won't be dangerous and it will be worth something.
That's hardly the point, the point is if they think there is any possibility of risk it's silly to "hope" no one picks it up.
If anybody found a piece of anything on the ground Monday morning, I would hope they wouldn't get too close to it
Yes, I hope they don't, but in reality if someone encounters a piece of space trash, and see it for space trash, they will pick it up thinking it might be worth something.
It's not as easy as you think: "I can't cum unless you pretend to be dead... wait, where are you going? Damnit, that's the third one this week! What am I supposed to do with THIS?..."
And then it's back to match.com to find another one.
Could be worse. "I can't cum unless you pretend to be a dead furry."
It's this point where you consider giving up dating all together, or at least match.com.
Opening the company website and typing in a short product code is pretty damn easy. And as an added bonus, it works on every computer out there... You don't need to carry around a big, bulky, barcode scanner, attach it to the computer you're using, install the software from CD, just to scan a bar code, and then remove it later.
Well, I'm actually rather a fan of bar codes. Even if we geeks order OEM, odds are there's going to be a house barcode.
I need a list of supplies. You can submit it either with the description, or product code. If it's a product code, barcodes reduce the need for manual entry and are less prone to error. It was a little different when the cuecats were out since 300dpi laserprinters were still the norm, and they are somewhat marginal when it comes to barcodes, but with now 1200dpi lasers are out, and inkjets at the very least do 600dpi for text, well, it's not too far fetched to implant barcodes in your purchase order.
I'll agree it's somewhat moot since prior orders are often stored, and reordering is just a few clicks away.
FYI, most barcode readers for PCs are just keyboard wedges. No special software or drivers needed. From time to time I pull out my old USB cuecat for projects.
But I have to agree that the concept of barcode to url was actually rather spiffy. How often do you have to give someone a long cryptic url in hardcopy form, and have to transcribe 20 some odd characters. Tinyurl is handy, and by extension the cuecat url concept is also handy. Alternatively speaking, you can encode any text in, I believe it's called 3 of 9 barcode font. It doesn't offer checksums but it does offer encoding of text and symbols.
The human body is beautiful
In a vacuum perhaps, but in practice there are some damn ugly humans.
Digital Convergence didn't have a bad idea, but as seen with the various database software, they might have enjoyed better luck focusing on the a nitch first.
Take their model.
Q: What do I use this thing for
A: To scan your soup cans
Q: Why the fuck would I want to do that?
A: To visit the website and so we can collect demographic information
Q: Why don't you fuck off?
Good idea as barcodes are everywhere, certainly handy, but for your average consumer, they didn't do this in the first place. They want to know more about their soup, they can type in the company name in google, no big deal.
But you start talking to people about indexing their book, CD, or video collection, well, there you go! Consumer gets their DB, DC gets their marketing information. Then perhaps as a side one could index barcodes with company names.
They also had a semi-decent idea promoting urls within broadcasts. The states doesn't use teletext, and that would be rather handy. But this was like the late 1990s. You sort of needed to have a TV with audio out, or a tuner/vcr with a free audio out. And who would want to make run from their VCR to their PC just to collect URLs?
But as far as I can tell, Digital Convergence was just a company out to get venture capital and go bankrupt ASAP.
The plastic bag that my copy of Wired came in had a big hole in it when it got to my house. The CueCat was either stolen or it fell out.
Software wants to be free.
I have to really wonder about this. The DMCA only applies within US borders. Piracy is alive and well. There is thepirate bay, somewhat lame video sites tudou.com and youku.com, and I can still find a ton of infringing material on Youtube. I can't for example upload a 20 second clip that Sony owns an interest in without it getting pulled based on keywords. I've had to deal with offline storage sites that to be fair take a takedown notice as license to terminate an account period without resolve.
Without the DMCA I have to wonder if the web would still be the wild wild west of 2000, and if so would it actually be better. Piracy is pretty damn good advertising.