Well, I guess some people missed the point of what this thread was trying to say. It was mentioned that "[Evanescence]'s not amazingly innovative or anything, but it's more than just another over-produced pop album..." . But that seemed to get lost in the thought. Granted that what they do is nothing new at all, but they did have a different way of packaging it that made it appeal and open doors for people to the other stuff mentioned. And I actually own just about all of the albums of the artists mentioned in the parent and the responses.
But the point is the diversity in this (and any genre) is enough to see that innovation in the music industry is not dead. Innovation is the improvement of existing technology. (Something many forget and constantly confuse with invention.) Just because other artist have made similar music in the past does not negate the effort and work that a later artist have put into there music.
I agree with the CDBaby suggestion though. I've bought a ton of music that will probably never be heard through mainstream radio.
Re:It sounds like it would be permanent
on
Metal Velcro
·
· Score: 1
I can think of an application that as far as joining metal to metal together that it may be useful for.
That is as in typical strucutral steel applications where you have two structural members held together by a bolted plate. (Think of two beams bolted together as is used in most buildings.) If the surface of the plate and the member had this applied to it then conceivably if the bolts were to be sheared or they failed the members would still stay together.
Or used in any application where welding is not an option. Basically any thing has to be bolted the members can have this coating on them. Good luck getting them apart though if the need ever arises.
To me it seems that you want basic a VGA splitting and sharing device independent of the the computer that uses just the VGA signal it selfs and send it from a single source to multiple destinations.
It's surprising to me that it seems most are talking about client/server apps, streaming, VNC, etc.
Anyway this reminded me of a setup we had in my high school CAD class. The teacher would use something similar for presentations, examples, and to just blank the screens so no one would be playing on the computers while he was lecturing. I can't remember the name of the one used but it was fully addressable allowing any node on the system to become the source and have it sent to any combination of other nodes.
Agreed, the soundtrack to is just plain awesome. Great if you haven't seen the movie and even better if you have. The Remixed soundtrack is good too. Especially the Delerium version of the theme.
This was a good movie with great action/fight sequences. Though I still don't understand why they didn't release it all over and why it was pulled from theatres so soon. I was in Atlanta and Chicago shortly after it was and couldn't find it playing anywhere or anywhere within 50 miles of either city. Though it was supposed to be playing in both cities. Ended up having to see Drumline instead.
Both were great movies which didn't get as much attention deserved to them.
Darren Aronofsky did an excellent job with the direction Requiem and PI. Good roles by the actor on fleshing out believable characters. Malon Wayans role in Requiem was the best I'd ever see him do. He took me completely by surprised when I saw he was in a drama and that he could actually do drama well.
Cube was good writing and excellent use of using a single room set, and one of the best low budget film examples.
That's an interesting point. It does seem that open source software tends to be a few years behind proprietary software but in this case it may not be such a bad thing. Perhaps there's a way to get an implementation of Wine and a distro that focused only on full Win 9x compatibility while still being a full Linux system. Also having a theme that looked liked Win 9x so businesses that need to upgrade can upgrade and still use there legacy apps and slowly transition software. It would be even better if it could run on older systems requiring minimum hardwar changes too.
After all many large orginaztions that I know of are still on Win 9x platforms because of older legacy apps and are just now starting the full upgrade process.
There is a market for giving a business the ability to upgrade incrementally. That is to upgrade software and hardware a little at a time. Remove there PC one day. Replace it the next just a little beefed up with additional Icons. They can still continue to work and start using any newer software as well. Companies ask me for this type of solution all the time.
Except in this case time does have a monetary value. In a work environment every moment that people are "on the clock" is costing money and has to be accounted for somehow.
In a case like this, they have to see if paying little or no cost for software is worth the time it will take to have the employees retrained in will cost the business money. Money spent in sending them to class during non-work hours or to have them trained during working hours which will cost them in paying wages and training costs.
Good points in seperating essential from non-essential.
Also to consider, from the article: "An operating system, as we use the term, means a collection of programs that are sufficient to use the computer to do a wide variety of jobs. A general purpose operating system, to be complete, ought to handle all the jobs that many users may want to do.
The kernel is one of the programs in an operating system--the program that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that are running. The kernel also takes care of starting and stopping other programs."
The FSF and anyone who use the same logic in describing their systems should be very careful here. They are starting to claim that the bundling of different programs together is what makes the operating system.
One of the big arguments with MS was that they bundled unnecessary, and essential programs together and called it an OS. Many people complained that they didn't need to alot of the programs that make up MS definition of the Windows OS (Internet Explorer, Media Player, etc...) so they shouldn't be considered as part of the OS. But based on the FSF's definition that for "a general purpose operating system, to be complete, [it] ought to handle all the jobs that many users may want to do." That's a pretty broad explanation of an OS.
"We developed programs such as GCC, GNU Emacs, GAS, GLIBC, BASH, etc., because we needed them for the GNU operating system. GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection is the compiler that we wrote for the GNU operating system. We developed Ghostscript, GNUCash, GNU Chess and GNOME for the GNU system too." The inclusion of programs here is claiming to make up the OS. By the FSF's definition of an OS the arguements against MS and it's 'bundling'need to be re-evaluated. The only difference is that in most Open Source/Free Software, the bundled components can be replaced. A clear definition of an OS needs to be established for the entire software industry to use. Otherwise people may need to think again when complaining about MS purely based on what programs are associated with what's part of the OS or not.
So maybe it should be that the distros be considered the actual OS and credits being stated by the distributer of the components that make up there OS.
While it may take only a short while to get the initial design of something in place, it takes much much more time to get it finalized, working, and approved by the customer. And even more time to be added for debugging, and other problems. When a bid is 1/3 the price of the next lowest bid, then it appears that something has been overlooked. Then usually one of three things happen.
1. The persons bid is thrown out. I've known companies in which if they recieved more than say 5 bids for a job, the lowest and the highest bids a immediately rejected. Or only the bids within a certain percentage of each other are considered.
2. The bidder is audited or question to verify they can actually do the work and won't just skip out or do half a job which is the a huge concern with low bidders.
3. If the client is just plain cheap and greedy they run with it and take the bidder for everything they can.
I've seen these tactics applied in just about every field that has work to be bid on. There are industry standard expected price values to pay for different types of work and bids outside of this raises more flags and questions that costs companies more than to just pay the higher bids.
You have to ask yourself, Do you want to gamble getting it done, just want it to get done, or want it done right.
The actual equipment, may be cheap but the time, data invested is not. Software cost, be it monetary or percieved value for what it does. The other thing is an $800 machine may just be a CPU, monitor, crappy keyboard and mouse, and maybe some cheap speakers. There's hosts more peripherals that may be cheap individually but adds up in cost collectively.
That one has a K because it happens to be one of the very first stations to get designations. I'm not entirely sure when the W started in eastern stations.
This goes to show just how much the RIAA needs to change it's sales models. They're still depending on air play to hype up people to purchasing a album. But no one wants to wait the weeks or months for them to release them. So those pirating are making out like bandits on the people who want it now.
Just having the assumption that they can eliminate piracy and continue using the same sales tactics isn't going to show the improvement of CD sales they're looking for. They should be releasing the albums for sale at the same time tracks are released for airplay. Then impulse buyers can run out and get the CDs immediately. If buyers have to wait for the overly far away release dates they will look to other means of getting what they want.
I think the same really applies to most media nowadays. Movies should be released for purchase sooner, TV shows should be released when their seasons finish, and so on. The public are tired of having to wait for what they want. Once it's been released and aired you should be able to purchase it then. You'll then have the choice of a possibly inferior in someway pirated copy or the real thing.
I wonder if the promotional versions of that radio stations and others recieve were somewhat different, say fewer tracks, for the public releases what will these pre-released bootleg versions be? Promotional releases are controlled so they should monitor that.
However now they'll just focus on the piracy issue and the public will suffer from it.
Though, MS Office helps that's not the only reason for MS presence on the desktop market. If it was only for MS Office than a lot more people would be using Macs. Especially since the new iMac line came out and with the presence of MS Office for OS X. MS Office on Macs have been better than the Windows Counterparts for a while now.
I'll just take the small-medium sized business arena. Here there's a huge amount of niche market applications that only run Windows platforms. For instance AutoCAD is the defacto standard for 2d/3d drafting/design software here. When a company needs a more powerful alternative they switch to a few Unix machines as that's the platform that most of the heavy 3d analysis and structural modeling software run on.
Then there's all the specific software that is used to actually manage and support a company with. Most of the software here runs on Windows as well. This software is generally expensive enough and if there does happen to alternatives then it's either Windows based to or Unix based and a lot more costly.
For this Linux developers need to focus on providing software that can be used by these niche markets. There also needs to be a way to present developers currently in these markets a feasible way develop Linux versions of software and have a business model that will keep them in business.
I agree with IE doing the best at rendering pages the way the was meant to look.
I design pages and test view them in IE for til I get the layout the way it should look. Then I do check to make sure W3C compliant. Then I test view it in Netscape, IE4, and Opera on Windows. Then I test it in Mozilla and Konqueror on Linux.
Until Netscape 6.2 I've always had to make a lot changes or sacrifices in to display properly in Netscape. I've given up on trying it to display with the exact same layout in everything else. I just make sure it's still readable and understandable. In the end I do a final W3C check to make sure it's compliant.
What I'd like to see more than anymore features being added is full CSS, Javascript, and HTML support to the W3C standards. For instance, overflow, clipping, and height settings working correctly in more than just IE.
I'd like to see a review that really covers standards support between browsers.
Re:Spidey is why I learned to read
on
Review: Spiderman
·
· Score: 1
Hey, someone else on Slashdot read that too. It was a great laugh.
"Embedded experts claim the embedded space is practically impossible to play in these days if all you have is an operating system, especially when the OS is basically immaterial to the embedded designer."
Have they ever heard of QNX. As far as I can see they are pretty much just an OS company with a very good product that is doing well. They have partnerships with other companies to provide the necessary hardware for specialized systems. Also it can run on a x86 architecure.
How can experts claim this when there are companies out there that are successful and don't seem to be doing anything that's impossible? And how's the OS "immaterial" when it's the interface to the hardware being used?
Reboots aren't alway necessary on Windows even if an installer tells you it needs to. But I think one reason it does is that with the willy nilly way it loads dlls into memory is that you never know as a developer what app a person may have running that may need to have a reboot to reload the new dll. So a reboot will is better than having a million support questions as to why it just didn't work.
I do a lot of support for people on Windows and Mac machines but mostly Windows. And the biggest thing they all want to do with installing any hardware is plug it up and at the most answer a few questions. On Dos, Win 3.1, 3.11, 95, and occasionally 98 I would have them open up a file and pray that they can edit it properly and have things go ok. And they always asked the same question, "Do I have to do all this and is it really necessary?" In the end I usually had to go to there machines and do it myself.
That's what has gotten good with most drivers from major companies that these people buy from is that they can insert a disk or download a file from a site and just double click and blindly click yes to everything that doesn't involve registration and have the driver installed.
Is it the cleanest install? No. But it does the job. Which is all they want. (It's generally not good to accept the mediocre but computers is not a huge part of their lives so it is mediocre to them.) I've explanied things to a few people but most has said right from the start they don't want to know all the detail they just want it to work.
I have several systems at home set up from Windows 2000, XP, to Red Hat 7.1 as a PDS, and FreeBSD to implement some new programs I'm developing. When asked what to recommend to people if it involves more than just email, web browsing, digital cameras, and the occasional letter I recommend a Windows or Mac machine. If they want more non application specific things I will recommend Linux or FreeBSD.
Recently one person asked me to explain to him Open Source software and it's advantages. He didn't care about price in his decisions so as long as it worked for him and his family. He chose to go with Windows mostly because if needed to install something and I wasn't available he could just point and click to get it installed.
The biggest deterent to Windows and Mac alternatives is the amount of knowledge of the OS that it takes to get something like a display driver working. Modifying something like a display card is a nightmare to an household user on a Linux system configured to use something else. I'm very grateful that Windows will almost always boot in to a basic mode that is not hardware dependent on systems for the past 3 years so configuration of a point and click nature can be done.
Yea, this movie was basically a summer flick. But I have to admit after seeing Blade I I was really looking forward to it. If for no other than to just sit back and enjoy 2 hours of meaningless action. I loved the movie for what it was. It really never tried to play itself as something different. Just nothing but fighting and gore with vampires and vampire enemies alike.
What is the definition of a power user these days. Yea, the chips and systems have steadily increased in power but they've outpaced the software and OS's available.
What does one have to be doing then to be a power user?
I have a 600mh Duron computer that I primarily use and I usually have no less then 4-5 programs running at a time.
I thought a power user was someone who used a computer extensively and to it's fullest. Since when is it measured by the power of there processor?
Used to be that way. I've always heard for instance that when the refridgerator was invented there was a patent granted to it, then someone added a lightbulb and got a patent another patent. Supposedly if you changed one part of the method you could get a new patent. Not anymore though. But for most good patents nowadays you have to get a patent lawyer to write it. They usually can get the patent cover the concept and the mechanical method to do it.
It depends on whether or not they have the concept or the method patented. I don't think concepts should be able to be patented though.
Nope, Sorry. I live in the Eastern TN and was laid off from a job where I was the sysadm, webmaster, Technical Manager, Drafting Manager and so on.
Basically if there was any type of IT equipment or situation involving the use of the equipment (from typewriters and caculators to the servers) I handle it and oversaw it. This was for a medium sized steel fabricator.
When the economy started to turn down they as most of the fabrication shops and everything else in the area had troubles too. In supposed to be temporary restructuring I was laid off because it was determine by the investors, banks, and upper managment that IT wasn't directly involved in getting a product out the door and considered an extra expense. Eventhough a lot of my day to day duties involved solving problems not related to computer maintainence but to application of the system to the company.
The problem is that most places that are not tech oriented in production feel this way about IT. So those that can get a job are often overworked but can't get any help because it's looked as too expensive to hire additional people.
Now do contract work for the same company for what was my position. But I also do the same for 3 additional companies. The problem is that all of them are very picky about how long you're there and do not give up a lot of work so I'm still making less than I was before. (Which wasn't an over inflated rate but decent for the area.)
The entire economy has a completey different view of what the IT sector now and it's reflecting in the amount of jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I guess some people missed the point of what this thread was trying to say. It was mentioned that "[Evanescence]'s not amazingly innovative or anything, but it's more than just another over-produced pop album..." . But that seemed to get lost in the thought. Granted that what they do is nothing new at all, but they did have a different way of packaging it that made it appeal and open doors for people to the other stuff mentioned. And I actually own just about all of the albums of the artists mentioned in the parent and the responses.
But the point is the diversity in this (and any genre) is enough to see that innovation in the music industry is not dead. Innovation is the improvement of existing technology. (Something many forget and constantly confuse with invention.) Just because other artist have made similar music in the past does not negate the effort and work that a later artist have put into there music.
I agree with the CDBaby suggestion though. I've bought a ton of music that will probably never be heard through mainstream radio.
Listen to Trippin' In The Dark for some new different stuff.
I can think of an application that as far as joining metal to metal together that it may be useful for.
That is as in typical strucutral steel applications where you have two structural members held together by a bolted plate. (Think of two beams bolted together as is used in most buildings.) If the surface of the plate and the member had this applied to it then conceivably if the bolts were to be sheared or they failed the members would still stay together.
Or used in any application where welding is not an option. Basically any thing has to be bolted the members can have this coating on them. Good luck getting them apart though if the need ever arises.
To me it seems that you want basic a VGA splitting and sharing device independent of the the computer that uses just the VGA signal it selfs and send it from a single source to multiple destinations.
Try these links then.
NTI
QVS
Google, VGA Video Splitter
It's surprising to me that it seems most are talking about client/server apps, streaming, VNC, etc.
Anyway this reminded me of a setup we had in my high school CAD class. The teacher would use something similar for presentations, examples, and to just blank the screens so no one would be playing on the computers while he was lecturing. I can't remember the name of the one used but it was fully addressable allowing any node on the system to become the source and have it sent to any combination of other nodes.
Also the fees are a minimum of $2000 a year.
Agreed, the soundtrack to is just plain awesome. Great if you haven't seen the movie and even better if you have. The Remixed soundtrack is good too. Especially the Delerium version of the theme.
Ellen Burstyn is her name. And the movie had one of the most powerful and gripping endings that I've seen on any movie yet.
Everyone that I've shown it had some type of emotional affect on. Funny to that the affects were all across the spectrum.
This was a good movie with great action/fight sequences. Though I still don't understand why they didn't release it all over and why it was pulled from theatres so soon. I was in Atlanta and Chicago shortly after it was and couldn't find it playing anywhere or anywhere within 50 miles of either city. Though it was supposed to be playing in both cities. Ended up having to see Drumline instead.
Both were great movies which didn't get as much attention deserved to them.
Darren Aronofsky did an excellent job with the direction Requiem and PI. Good roles by the actor on fleshing out believable characters. Malon Wayans role in Requiem was the best I'd ever see him do. He took me completely by surprised when I saw he was in a drama and that he could actually do drama well.
Cube was good writing and excellent use of using a single room set, and one of the best low budget film examples.
That's an interesting point. It does seem that open source software tends to be a few years behind proprietary software but in this case it may not be such a bad thing. Perhaps there's a way to get an implementation of Wine and a distro that focused only on full Win 9x compatibility while still being a full Linux system. Also having a theme that looked liked Win 9x so businesses that need to upgrade can upgrade and still use there legacy apps and slowly transition software. It would be even better if it could run on older systems requiring minimum hardwar changes too.
After all many large orginaztions that I know of are still on Win 9x platforms because of older legacy apps and are just now starting the full upgrade process.
There is a market for giving a business the ability to upgrade incrementally. That is to upgrade software and hardware a little at a time. Remove there PC one day. Replace it the next just a little beefed up with additional Icons. They can still continue to work and start using any newer software as well. Companies ask me for this type of solution all the time.
Except in this case time does have a monetary value. In a work environment every moment that people are "on the clock" is costing money and has to be accounted for somehow.
In a case like this, they have to see if paying little or no cost for software is worth the time it will take to have the employees retrained in will cost the business money. Money spent in sending them to class during non-work hours or to have them trained during working hours which will cost them in paying wages and training costs.
Good points in seperating essential from non-essential.
Also to consider, from the article: "An operating system, as we use the term, means a collection of programs that are sufficient to use the computer to do a wide variety of jobs. A general purpose operating system, to be complete, ought to handle all the jobs that many users may want to do.
The kernel is one of the programs in an operating system--the program that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that are running. The kernel also takes care of starting and stopping other programs."
The FSF and anyone who use the same logic in describing their systems should be very careful here. They are starting to claim that the bundling of different programs together is what makes the operating system.
One of the big arguments with MS was that they bundled unnecessary, and essential programs together and called it an OS. Many people complained that they didn't need to alot of the programs that make up MS definition of the Windows OS (Internet Explorer, Media Player, etc...) so they shouldn't be considered as part of the OS. But based on the FSF's definition that for "a general purpose operating system, to be complete, [it] ought to handle all the jobs that many users may want to do." That's a pretty broad explanation of an OS.
"We developed programs such as GCC, GNU Emacs, GAS, GLIBC, BASH, etc., because we needed them for the GNU operating system. GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection is the compiler that we wrote for the GNU operating system. We developed Ghostscript, GNUCash, GNU Chess and GNOME for the GNU system too." The inclusion of programs here is claiming to make up the OS. By the FSF's definition of an OS the arguements against MS and it's 'bundling'need to be re-evaluated. The only difference is that in most Open Source/Free Software, the bundled components can be replaced. A clear definition of an OS needs to be established for the entire software industry to use. Otherwise people may need to think again when complaining about MS purely based on what programs are associated with what's part of the OS or not.
So maybe it should be that the distros be considered the actual OS and credits being stated by the distributer of the components that make up there OS.
Nicely, said.
While it may take only a short while to get the initial design of something in place, it takes much much more time to get it finalized, working, and approved by the customer. And even more time to be added for debugging, and other problems. When a bid is 1/3 the price of the next lowest bid, then it appears that something has been overlooked. Then usually one of three things happen.
1. The persons bid is thrown out. I've known companies in which if they recieved more than say 5 bids for a job, the lowest and the highest bids a immediately rejected. Or only the bids within a certain percentage of each other are considered.
2. The bidder is audited or question to verify they can actually do the work and won't just skip out or do half a job which is the a huge concern with low bidders.
3. If the client is just plain cheap and greedy they run with it and take the bidder for everything they can.
I've seen these tactics applied in just about every field that has work to be bid on. There are industry standard expected price values to pay for different types of work and bids outside of this raises more flags and questions that costs companies more than to just pay the higher bids.
You have to ask yourself, Do you want to gamble getting it done, just want it to get done, or want it done right.
The actual equipment, may be cheap but the time, data invested is not. Software cost, be it monetary or percieved value for what it does. The other thing is an $800 machine may just be a CPU, monitor, crappy keyboard and mouse, and maybe some cheap speakers. There's hosts more peripherals that may be cheap individually but adds up in cost collectively.
That one has a K because it happens to be one of the very first stations to get designations. I'm not entirely sure when the W started in eastern stations.
This goes to show just how much the RIAA needs to change it's sales models. They're still depending on air play to hype up people to purchasing a album. But no one wants to wait the weeks or months for them to release them. So those pirating are making out like bandits on the people who want it now.
Just having the assumption that they can eliminate piracy and continue using the same sales tactics isn't going to show the improvement of CD sales they're looking for. They should be releasing the albums for sale at the same time tracks are released for airplay. Then impulse buyers can run out and get the CDs immediately. If buyers have to wait for the overly far away release dates they will look to other means of getting what they want.
I think the same really applies to most media nowadays. Movies should be released for purchase sooner, TV shows should be released when their seasons finish, and so on. The public are tired of having to wait for what they want. Once it's been released and aired you should be able to purchase it then. You'll then have the choice of a possibly inferior in someway pirated copy or the real thing.
I wonder if the promotional versions of that radio stations and others recieve were somewhat different, say fewer tracks, for the public releases what will these pre-released bootleg versions be? Promotional releases are controlled so they should monitor that.
However now they'll just focus on the piracy issue and the public will suffer from it.
Though, MS Office helps that's not the only reason for MS presence on the desktop market. If it was only for MS Office than a lot more people would be using Macs. Especially since the new iMac line came out and with the presence of MS Office for OS X. MS Office on Macs have been better than the Windows Counterparts for a while now.
I'll just take the small-medium sized business arena. Here there's a huge amount of niche market applications that only run Windows platforms. For instance AutoCAD is the defacto standard for 2d/3d drafting/design software here. When a company needs a more powerful alternative they switch to a few Unix machines as that's the platform that most of the heavy 3d analysis and structural modeling software run on.
Then there's all the specific software that is used to actually manage and support a company with. Most of the software here runs on Windows as well. This software is generally expensive enough and if there does happen to alternatives then it's either Windows based to or Unix based and a lot more costly.
For this Linux developers need to focus on providing software that can be used by these niche markets. There also needs to be a way to present developers currently in these markets a feasible way develop Linux versions of software and have a business model that will keep them in business.
I agree with IE doing the best at rendering pages the way the was meant to look.
I design pages and test view them in IE for til I get the layout the way it should look. Then I do check to make sure W3C compliant. Then I test view it in Netscape, IE4, and Opera on Windows. Then I test it in Mozilla and Konqueror on Linux.
Until Netscape 6.2 I've always had to make a lot changes or sacrifices in to display properly in Netscape. I've given up on trying it to display with the exact same layout in everything else. I just make sure it's still readable and understandable. In the end I do a final W3C check to make sure it's compliant.
What I'd like to see more than anymore features being added is full CSS, Javascript, and HTML support to the W3C standards. For instance, overflow, clipping, and height settings working correctly in more than just IE.
I'd like to see a review that really covers standards support between browsers.
Hey, someone else on Slashdot read that too. It was a great laugh.
"Embedded experts claim the embedded space is practically impossible to play in these days if all you have is an operating system, especially when the OS is basically immaterial to the embedded designer."
Have they ever heard of QNX. As far as I can see they are pretty much just an OS company with a very good product that is doing well. They have partnerships with other companies to provide the necessary hardware for specialized systems. Also it can run on a x86 architecure.
How can experts claim this when there are companies out there that are successful and don't seem to be doing anything that's impossible? And how's the OS "immaterial" when it's the interface to the hardware being used?
Reboots aren't alway necessary on Windows even if an installer tells you it needs to. But I think one reason it does is that with the willy nilly way it loads dlls into memory is that you never know as a developer what app a person may have running that may need to have a reboot to reload the new dll. So a reboot will is better than having a million support questions as to why it just didn't work.
Thank you for the post.
I do a lot of support for people on Windows and Mac machines but mostly Windows. And the biggest thing they all want to do with installing any hardware is plug it up and at the most answer a few questions. On Dos, Win 3.1, 3.11, 95, and occasionally 98 I would have them open up a file and pray that they can edit it properly and have things go ok. And they always asked the same question, "Do I have to do all this and is it really necessary?" In the end I usually had to go to there machines and do it myself.
That's what has gotten good with most drivers from major companies that these people buy from is that they can insert a disk or download a file from a site and just double click and blindly click yes to everything that doesn't involve registration and have the driver installed.
Is it the cleanest install? No. But it does the job. Which is all they want. (It's generally not good to accept the mediocre but computers is not a huge part of their lives so it is mediocre to them.) I've explanied things to a few people but most has said right from the start they don't want to know all the detail they just want it to work.
I have several systems at home set up from Windows 2000, XP, to Red Hat 7.1 as a PDS, and FreeBSD to implement some new programs I'm developing. When asked what to recommend to people if it involves more than just email, web browsing, digital cameras, and the occasional letter I recommend a Windows or Mac machine. If they want more non application specific things I will recommend Linux or FreeBSD.
Recently one person asked me to explain to him Open Source software and it's advantages. He didn't care about price in his decisions so as long as it worked for him and his family. He chose to go with Windows mostly because if needed to install something and I wasn't available he could just point and click to get it installed.
The biggest deterent to Windows and Mac alternatives is the amount of knowledge of the OS that it takes to get something like a display driver working. Modifying something like a display card is a nightmare to an household user on a Linux system configured to use something else. I'm very grateful that Windows will almost always boot in to a basic mode that is not hardware dependent on systems for the past 3 years so configuration of a point and click nature can be done.
Yea, this movie was basically a summer flick. But I have to admit after seeing Blade I I was really looking forward to it. If for no other than to just sit back and enjoy 2 hours of meaningless action. I loved the movie for what it was. It really never tried to play itself as something different. Just nothing but fighting and gore with vampires and vampire enemies alike.
What is the definition of a power user these days. Yea, the chips and systems have steadily increased in power but they've outpaced the software and OS's available.
What does one have to be doing then to be a power user?
I have a 600mh Duron computer that I primarily use and I usually have no less then 4-5 programs running at a time.
I thought a power user was someone who used a computer extensively and to it's fullest. Since when is it measured by the power of there processor?
Used to be that way. I've always heard for instance that when the refridgerator was invented there was a patent granted to it, then someone added a lightbulb and got a patent another patent. Supposedly if you changed one part of the method you could get a new patent. Not anymore though. But for most good patents nowadays you have to get a patent lawyer to write it. They usually can get the patent cover the concept and the mechanical method to do it.
It depends on whether or not they have the concept or the method patented. I don't think concepts should be able to be patented though.
Nope, Sorry. I live in the Eastern TN and was laid off from a job where I was the sysadm, webmaster, Technical Manager, Drafting Manager and so on.
Basically if there was any type of IT equipment or situation involving the use of the equipment (from typewriters and caculators to the servers) I handle it and oversaw it. This was for a medium sized steel fabricator.
When the economy started to turn down they as most of the fabrication shops and everything else in the area had troubles too. In supposed to be temporary restructuring I was laid off because it was determine by the investors, banks, and upper managment that IT wasn't directly involved in getting a product out the door and considered an extra expense. Eventhough a lot of my day to day duties involved solving problems not related to computer maintainence but to application of the system to the company.
The problem is that most places that are not tech oriented in production feel this way about IT. So those that can get a job are often overworked but can't get any help because it's looked as too expensive to hire additional people.
Now do contract work for the same company for what was my position. But I also do the same for 3 additional companies. The problem is that all of them are very picky about how long you're there and do not give up a lot of work so I'm still making less than I was before. (Which wasn't an over inflated rate but decent for the area.)
The entire economy has a completey different view of what the IT sector now and it's reflecting in the amount of jobs.