Having developed on multiple platforms, even though I was being paid and paid well, I hated working in a Windows shop. Just a personal preference, but that is pretty much my only frame of reference.
That being said, I was laid off before I could find a new job, and 6 months later I was back where I belonged with Solaris and Linux.
But does it really matter what OS/environment you work with? I always thought real programmers could care less... It's not like you're doing it for fun--you ARE getting paid, after all.
When I was 19 or 20 I saw some dude when I was working at a nursery that came by every week or so to empty the portapoties. He was a fat man that didn't seem as though he enjoyed his job and his truck and I assume himself also smelled like human waste. He probably made more than I did at the time, but even today if he makes anything near what I make or even 100x more than I do, I would not trade jobs. I would not even apply for it if it was the only job in the paper.
Granted then or now I don't have dependents (that is not a mistake either), some things are more important to me than money. Personal respect and worth are high on my list.
Food and a place to live is not that hard to obtain. Regaining personal respect after loosing it is very difficult to reobtain.
Man, 1995... I still remember being awed by the way that places like yahoo.com and hotwired.com looked in Netscape (was 2.0 even out yet?
No. 2.0 was officially released in 1996 but in beta in 1995. Remember that 2.0 added the stuff we love to hate in browsers today (at least I do) like frames and javascript. Although both do have their perks from time to time if done correctly. Frames started working in version 3.0 if I remember correctly (if you hit the back button in 2.0 you went all the way back to the 1st page that _did not include a frameset_, it did not go back to the previous frame link). Also, somewhere around this time is when advertisers and people with those cute "Under Construction" pictures started using animated GIFs.
More nostalgia -- Netscape 2.0 came after 1.2. Tables were first introduced in version 1.1. Layouts were pretty much limited to inlined images, ordered and bulleted lists, and text breaks via a paragraph or hr tag.
Before Netscape there was Mosaic. Actually, many of the Netscape people came from the Mosaic project. Mosaic was the first graphical browser. It was slow as molasses, and could not simultaneously download images and text at the same time. What it would do is bring down the text, and then it would bring down the images. If I remember correctly, it would not display the page until all text and graphics were downloaded.
There were only a handful of commercial companies on the web at the time. Most notably, playboy and penthouse, and these wierdo companies like yahoo. Most of the web was "Under construction" or the pages did not exist. It was common for there to be complete backbone outages for many hours if not close to or around a day or two.
For me, gopher was more useful than the web. It was faster because of the lack of graphics, and there was simply more information available. Software came from about 10-20 popular FTP sites to include Linux. At the time, the busiest FTP site was wuarchive.wustl.edu.
In my experience with closed source commercial and OS software, QA pretty much means let the (l)users do QA.
The immediate issues people have had with many OS X updates seem to prove that there were little to no internal QA before releasing them. The same with Windows service packs. Where I work, they just approved XP SP1 or 2 (not a windows guy), but its been many months since the service pack was released, and it took that long for it to be approved for the masses.
The "release early and often" paradigm seems to be pretty ubiquitous.
I dinged MS and Apple, because they are big guys that put out updates fairly regularly, but this is not unique to them.
Re:What is QA Always a Separate Organization?
on
QA != Testing
·
· Score: 1
Every software company I've worked for, the QA department was always separate from Development. Then the classic mistake was always repeated... bring in QA at the tail end of a project and expect them to certify it and find all the bugs.
Madness!!
In my experience, its easier to lay those people off in slow times if they are a separate dept.
Also, QA people are a different breed, and their gene pool should be kept separate from others.
Re:Quality?
on
QA != Testing
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
BOVE'S THEOREM: The remaining work to finish in order to reach your goal increases as the deadline approaches.
PARKINSON'S LAW: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
This is why I don't believe in deadlines (to a degree).
_Everything_ is a work in progress, deadlines are rarely met, or if they are the stress and rush is rarely worth the satisfaction of meeting the deadline.
I would strongly recommend all people to read How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life. The guy is annoyingly into time management. Its his fulltime job! He sets his watch 3 minutes fast so he's "ahead of the world", and always takes advantage of those 5 or so minute waits to make lists of things to do and whatnot. But here is the best thing I got from the book. Keep in mind that this dude is anally retentive -- bigtime.
He lets his employees bring pleasure stuff to work with them, and as soon as they finish what they are tasked to do he lets them read, do puzzles, sew, or whatever they want while at work.
My jaw dropped when I was reading those pages. That did not make any sense to me whatsoever.
Then he said why. He said that if he gave someone a set time to do something, they would stretch it out to finish exactly at that time. By letting people not have a deadline and do something they want to do when finished with their work, he was actually able to get _more_ work out of them. It was also clear to him without taking any of his time to tell when his employees were done with their work and could be tasked with something else. Completely without any communication.
A side benefit, is that the employees actually feel more free, and get their work done in a more timely manor than if he gave them a deadline.
That is, in terms of the number of Unix servers vs. Linux servers vs. Windows servers?
If it takes 15 Linux servers to do the work of 1 Windows server, what does the number of servers tell you?
Man, I don't get the moderators lately. I'm not Windows guy at all, but intentionally put absurd numbers that are opposite of my beliefs to make a point, and I get modded as a troll. Shesh.
I was trying to merely make a counterpoint to the "Insightful" comment that someone wanted data for the number of servers installed.
I wouldn't expect slashdotters to have any first hand familarity with heroin or the drug trade, but let's just think this through in a few steps.
I guess this includes you:)
Actually, heroin is not that expensive, and it is not in that high of a demand. $20 to $40 worth of heroin is good for an evening. That is on par with drinking at a bar.
a) Started out "free" -- reasoning the bank didn't have to pay so many human tellers. b) Moved to a small fee for the operator of the ATM, which is understandable. C) Fee doubled when your bank realized it could charge you in addition to the charges of the ATM operator. D) Mext the fees nearly doubled to an average of $1.50 each side of the transaction (minus the "free" out of network uses you get per month). E) Finally -- we end up with bank plans where you can be charged to talk to a human teller.
If we figure out where we went wrong with banks and ATMs it might help us not repeat the same mistake.
ATMs are a convenience just like a convenience store.
I bitch about the prices of both, but enjoy the convenience of both from time to time.
Of course and your absolutly right, except the part about selling something for pennies that cost dollars to make, noone would do this unless they are trying to liquidate their assets.
Its not used much anymore, but it used to be a common marketing ploy called a loss leader.
However, the fact that iTMS is working means that people aren't buying CDs, which is an indicator that the "music industry" is obsolete. The fact is, you can produce an album on your own and get it on iTMS, use internet/viral marketing for your promotion, and bypass major record labels altogether. We don't need them and there business model anymore, and they know it, but they don't want you to know it.
That is worth being bolded and repeated:
However, the fact that iTMS is working means that people aren't buying CDs, which is an indicator that the "music industry" is obsolete. The fact is, you can produce an album on your own and get it on iTMS, use internet/viral marketing for your promotion, and bypass major record labels altogether. We don't need them and there business model anymore, and they know it, but they don't want you to know it.
Music is thousands of years old. About as old as humans could first figure out how to hit two things together to make a sound. The music industry is less than 100 years old. Their need is gone, yet believe it or not music will survive without them. Just like diamonds are a new facet of love, love predated the need to pay "2 months salary" for a love rock, and love will keep going after the diamond industry.
Music is best experienced live. Even if its "live" via LPs or whatever at a dance club or what have you, that is where the real money and human enjoyment is. All recordings have always been and always will be second to the live experience. Porn and to a lesser extent TV are pretty much the only entertainment means that are enjoyed alone.
Their big hope is to convince everyone that p2p sharing is immoral and online music stores are too expensive-- it would cost more than a CD and you don't even get a lossless copy or the medium or liner notes or anything. As long as they can scare us into sticking with medium-based distribution models, they still have a business.
Morals are so medieval. At least as far as I'm concerned, morals were only relevant when good people kill and torture bad people for the sake of being good like in the witch trials of Europe and early America. To me is immoral to take my hard earned money and give it to some record exec that I don't know. I pay for my music just like I pay for my television. In fact, its on the same bill. I have a cable broadband connection and cable TV. I pay about $45 a month for each TV and music, not including the thousands of dollars (many of it Sony) for electronic equipment to enjoy said entertainment.
I also believe that its immoral to butcher fine music files and convert them to MP3s that have no internal integrity to ensure that the file is complete or not corrupt, but thats just me.
I just hope that governments can stay out of this whole record label demise and let them simply fail like they should. They had their heyday, but we simply don't need these couple of companies out there to put our music on a half filled piece of plastic and an often void of relevant information piece of paper.
During the last few years, certificate mills creating an army of windows admin drones, who can only click a predefined sequence of location on the screen with their mouse and passing as "system administrators"
Not to bash a Windows admins, but merely some observations.
1) On average a *NIX admin can code and script, a windows admin can't.
2) On average a *NIX admin can handle more boxes than a windows admin (probably because of #1)
GUI administration is fine and dandy, and UNIX and Linux releases come out with more of them each year. But the shear fact that knowing where these things are stored on the system and being able to directly manipulate, distribute, and restore these things is godlike. Even things like remote desktops and whatnot make things easier in the GUI land, they still don't scale very well.
When it drops to around $349 then I will jump. I know a few others that want a $299 price point. As it stands now its not truly a $499 machine either as you need a minimum of 512mb of ram to have a good system.
Mmmkay. The Mini comes with about $200 in software which makes the hardware about $300. Even in the PC world, you can get a minimal piece of crap PC for like $200. A copy of XP will run you about $150. So for your target price of $350^H^H49 you will get a bottom of the line PC with no real end user software. If that floats your boat, then a Mac is not targeted for someone like you. Go talk to someone at a computer retailer like CompUSA. Ask them the difference between PC buyers and Macs. PC buyers come in buy their cheap computer, and are forever coming back buying more crap for it. Typically, a Mac buyer comes in, buys their mac, and they never see them again.
Oh, and go look on ebay sometime for used computers. Compare the Macs to PCs, and then tell me if the initial purchase price was worth the extra couple of bucks.
I've changed my pin before on my bank cards, but I never gave the card to anybody to reprogram.
I believe it is looked up upon entry, or at least that would make sense to me. Its too easy to buy a reader and brute force it offline.
Even if there is a number of failed attempts lockout of trying to brute force a PIN at an ATM. Most people would get tired of standing there before getting near the right PIN.
If I've mistakenly put in the wrong PIN on my card, it silently accepts it, and makes me go through the menus to do what I need to do, and then at the very end it says "Wrong PIN" and ejects my card.
Even if it only took 10 seconds to try each PIN, that would mean that in 5 minutes one could only attempt 30 different PINs. It would be easier to break into a house.
How easy would it be to edit the data on the strips?
Its trivial. You can get a magstripe writer for a couple hundred bucks, max.
For example, would it be possible for me to take my magnetic bus ticket and easily add another 10 trips to it?
Depends on how the bus tickets are set up. If they have a unique identifier on them and it looks up your balance against a central database. No luck. If the info is stored on the ticket itself, it should be trivial. Although the paper bus and train tickets are not the same as standard CC style cards.
Interesting trivia on the subject.
Ever wonder why the person swipes your credit card and then enters the last 4 digits that are hologram embossed on the card manually?
Because its trivial to put any account number on the card.
CC numbers have an internal checksum, so you cant simply make up a number that will match the last 4 digits. The odds of reprogramming your card with an active and valid account that matches your last 4 digits printed on your card are pretty low.
But I think what would be needed more is a try to do things like actual stresstesting and comparisions under load.
Yes, that would be interesting, but unless they broke something severe like they did with their TCPIP stack somewhere between version 8 and 9, handling a load is where solaris shines.
I've always said, solaris is never fast, but then again it never slows down either.
Which is exactly why I have mine set to vibrate mode. The reality is, during a meeting, nobody gives a shit what kind of music I like. Cell phone use is intrusive enough without the addition of "look how cool I am" ring tones.
That is why they don't pay college and high school kids to go to meetings.
I know no one over 30 that has a custom ringtone.
I know no one over 2 that even needs a phone on vibrate in a meeting.
I would like to see how much is actually given to the artist per sale. I would suspect that a lot of older music gives less than a cent per sold song to the original artist.
Considering that many of the older music artists are dead, who cares?
That is one thing that kills me about older recorded music. Take for example the Beatle's white album. Amazon is bragging about their deal for that album at $27.99 (20% or 6.99 of of MSRP I guess).
There are 30 tracks on this album that is now about 37 years old. I like the beatles and all, but considering 50% of them are dead and all, I don't see where the remaining two deserve even 1 cent for something they did 37 years ago. Hmm, maybe I should remind all of my former employers that if they use something I set up after I left, that I should get paid for it today. Oh, I signed a contract saying that I could not do that. Damn.
I was hoping to see the end of the album format, with the exception of concept albums or soundtracks or long classical works and such. Artists would just release a new song when they had one worth peddling.
I think they called those singles. Although you can/could buy singles CDs and cassettes, they did not sell too well. Probably because it was annoying to put a CD or tape into your walkman or car stereo and then have to immediately take it out and put something else in. I get pissed that most of my bought albums on CD are only about 45 minutes long vs 60 to 80+ minutes for my burned live CDs.
Singles were fine back when you had no other option to play them except at home. Hell, back in the day, you could make your own "playlist" by stacking these things on top of one of those record player auto player things:) But that is not that common today.
Why can't the record labels get off of their early 1980s business model and provide these products to people at a price?
On a side note, I burned my first MP3 to CD Friday before last, and I question why people are willing to pay for these things. I only got the MP3s because its a new band that I'm going to see in April and they have never toured or recorded together before and the only recordings I could get from them are 4 128bps MP3 tracks off of their website.
If I paid 4 bucks for these MP3s I would be very pissed off. The same goes with an iPod that someone brought over to my house a while back. I plugged it into my stereo, and I guess that bass is something you have to pay extra for.
My point of all this bitching about MP3s is that there apparently is a market for low quality, inexpensive and portable music. No one in their right mind would pay more than 99c for something like this. It would seem to me that the record labels would sell more than one thing to their customers (CDs) when there is a whole market of goods that people want. But I guess if your a rich record exec and have been for the last 20 years, I guess your motivation for change is about zero.
I'd love to have an alternative to the BIOS which is open source, or free software, or both.
Maybe your looking in the wrong direction. Maybe you should ask yourself in 2005 if you should be be thinking about something a little more than a simple BIOS.
In my experience, its only cheap x86 computers that still use a BIOS, everyone else has something much more modern and robust.
High school is not set up by the government for education. Most everyone I know who's parents were genuinely concerned with their children's education sent them to private schools. At least where I'm from, public schools are clearly better for education than the government funded ones.
High school is set up by the government for socialization. Those that want an education and are capable, get an education from somewhere (yes, some get it from public schools).
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Having developed on multiple platforms, even though I was being paid and paid well, I hated working in a Windows shop. Just a personal preference, but that is pretty much my only frame of reference.
That being said, I was laid off before I could find a new job, and 6 months later I was back where I belonged with Solaris and Linux.
But does it really matter what OS/environment you work with? I always thought real programmers could care less... It's not like you're doing it for fun--you ARE getting paid, after all.
When I was 19 or 20 I saw some dude when I was working at a nursery that came by every week or so to empty the portapoties. He was a fat man that didn't seem as though he enjoyed his job and his truck and I assume himself also smelled like human waste. He probably made more than I did at the time, but even today if he makes anything near what I make or even 100x more than I do, I would not trade jobs. I would not even apply for it if it was the only job in the paper.
Granted then or now I don't have dependents (that is not a mistake either), some things are more important to me than money. Personal respect and worth are high on my list.
Food and a place to live is not that hard to obtain. Regaining personal respect after loosing it is very difficult to reobtain.
Man, 1995... I still remember being awed by the way that places like yahoo.com and hotwired.com looked in Netscape (was 2.0 even out yet?
No. 2.0 was officially released in 1996 but in beta in 1995. Remember that 2.0 added the stuff we love to hate in browsers today (at least I do) like frames and javascript. Although both do have their perks from time to time if done correctly. Frames started working in version 3.0 if I remember correctly (if you hit the back button in 2.0 you went all the way back to the 1st page that _did not include a frameset_, it did not go back to the previous frame link). Also, somewhere around this time is when advertisers and people with those cute "Under Construction" pictures started using animated GIFs.
More nostalgia -- Netscape 2.0 came after 1.2. Tables were first introduced in version 1.1. Layouts were pretty much limited to inlined images, ordered and bulleted lists, and text breaks via a paragraph or hr tag.
Before Netscape there was Mosaic. Actually, many of the Netscape people came from the Mosaic project. Mosaic was the first graphical browser. It was slow as molasses, and could not simultaneously download images and text at the same time. What it would do is bring down the text, and then it would bring down the images. If I remember correctly, it would not display the page until all text and graphics were downloaded.
There were only a handful of commercial companies on the web at the time. Most notably, playboy and penthouse, and these wierdo companies like yahoo. Most of the web was "Under construction" or the pages did not exist. It was common for there to be complete backbone outages for many hours if not close to or around a day or two.
For me, gopher was more useful than the web. It was faster because of the lack of graphics, and there was simply more information available. Software came from about 10-20 popular FTP sites to include Linux. At the time, the busiest FTP site was wuarchive.wustl.edu.
Wow, that seems like yesterday.
They all are now in their late 20's and early 30's. They are incarcerated for crimes they committed when they were not yet 18.
Now spending 10+ years in prison awaiting to be executed not being cruel and unusual punishment is an entirely different story.
BTW, corporations are having a hard time adapting their business models to new technology.
You should look at my cable bill.
HDTV service, HD DVR, & broadband.
That corp is getting almost 100% of my music, movie, and internet funds. The only thing they don't get paid for is when I see a concert in person.
In my experience with closed source commercial and OS software, QA pretty much means let the (l)users do QA.
The immediate issues people have had with many OS X updates seem to prove that there were little to no internal QA before releasing them. The same with Windows service packs. Where I work, they just approved XP SP1 or 2 (not a windows guy), but its been many months since the service pack was released, and it took that long for it to be approved for the masses.
The "release early and often" paradigm seems to be pretty ubiquitous.
I dinged MS and Apple, because they are big guys that put out updates fairly regularly, but this is not unique to them.
Every software company I've worked for, the QA department was always separate from Development. Then the classic mistake was always repeated... bring in QA at the tail end of a project and expect them to certify it and find all the bugs.
Madness!!
In my experience, its easier to lay those people off in slow times if they are a separate dept.
Also, QA people are a different breed, and their gene pool should be kept separate from others.
BOVE'S THEOREM: The remaining work to finish in order to reach your goal increases as the deadline approaches.
PARKINSON'S LAW: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
This is why I don't believe in deadlines (to a degree).
_Everything_ is a work in progress, deadlines are rarely met, or if they are the stress and rush is rarely worth the satisfaction of meeting the deadline.
I would strongly recommend all people to read How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life. The guy is annoyingly into time management. Its his fulltime job! He sets his watch 3 minutes fast so he's "ahead of the world", and always takes advantage of those 5 or so minute waits to make lists of things to do and whatnot. But here is the best thing I got from the book. Keep in mind that this dude is anally retentive -- bigtime.
He lets his employees bring pleasure stuff to work with them, and as soon as they finish what they are tasked to do he lets them read, do puzzles, sew, or whatever they want while at work.
My jaw dropped when I was reading those pages. That did not make any sense to me whatsoever.
Then he said why. He said that if he gave someone a set time to do something, they would stretch it out to finish exactly at that time. By letting people not have a deadline and do something they want to do when finished with their work, he was actually able to get _more_ work out of them. It was also clear to him without taking any of his time to tell when his employees were done with their work and could be tasked with something else. Completely without any communication.
A side benefit, is that the employees actually feel more free, and get their work done in a more timely manor than if he gave them a deadline.
Re:What about numbers? (Score:1, Troll)
That is, in terms of the number of Unix servers vs. Linux servers vs. Windows servers?
If it takes 15 Linux servers to do the work of 1 Windows server, what does the number of servers tell you?
Man, I don't get the moderators lately. I'm not Windows guy at all, but intentionally put absurd numbers that are opposite of my beliefs to make a point, and I get modded as a troll. Shesh.
I was trying to merely make a counterpoint to the "Insightful" comment that someone wanted data for the number of servers installed.
I wouldn't expect slashdotters to have any first hand familarity with heroin or the drug trade, but let's just think this through in a few steps.
:)
I guess this includes you
Actually, heroin is not that expensive, and it is not in that high of a demand. $20 to $40 worth of heroin is good for an evening. That is on par with drinking at a bar.
a) Started out "free" -- reasoning the bank didn't have to pay so many human tellers.
b) Moved to a small fee for the operator of the ATM, which is understandable.
C) Fee doubled when your bank realized it could charge you in addition to the charges of the ATM operator.
D) Mext the fees nearly doubled to an average of $1.50 each side of the transaction (minus the "free" out of network uses you get per month).
E) Finally -- we end up with bank plans where you can be charged to talk to a human teller.
If we figure out where we went wrong with banks and ATMs it might help us not repeat the same mistake.
ATMs are a convenience just like a convenience store.
I bitch about the prices of both, but enjoy the convenience of both from time to time.
Of course and your absolutly right, except the part about selling something for pennies that cost dollars to make, noone would do this unless they are trying to liquidate their assets.
Its not used much anymore, but it used to be a common marketing ploy called a loss leader.
However, the fact that iTMS is working means that people aren't buying CDs, which is an indicator that the "music industry" is obsolete. The fact is, you can produce an album on your own and get it on iTMS, use internet/viral marketing for your promotion, and bypass major record labels altogether. We don't need them and there business model anymore, and they know it, but they don't want you to know it.
That is worth being bolded and repeated:
However, the fact that iTMS is working means that people aren't buying CDs, which is an indicator that the "music industry" is obsolete. The fact is, you can produce an album on your own and get it on iTMS, use internet/viral marketing for your promotion, and bypass major record labels altogether. We don't need them and there business model anymore, and they know it, but they don't want you to know it.
Music is thousands of years old. About as old as humans could first figure out how to hit two things together to make a sound. The music industry is less than 100 years old. Their need is gone, yet believe it or not music will survive without them. Just like diamonds are a new facet of love, love predated the need to pay "2 months salary" for a love rock, and love will keep going after the diamond industry.
Music is best experienced live. Even if its "live" via LPs or whatever at a dance club or what have you, that is where the real money and human enjoyment is. All recordings have always been and always will be second to the live experience. Porn and to a lesser extent TV are pretty much the only entertainment means that are enjoyed alone.
Their big hope is to convince everyone that p2p sharing is immoral and online music stores are too expensive-- it would cost more than a CD and you don't even get a lossless copy or the medium or liner notes or anything. As long as they can scare us into sticking with medium-based distribution models, they still have a business.
Morals are so medieval. At least as far as I'm concerned, morals were only relevant when good people kill and torture bad people for the sake of being good like in the witch trials of Europe and early America. To me is immoral to take my hard earned money and give it to some record exec that I don't know. I pay for my music just like I pay for my television. In fact, its on the same bill. I have a cable broadband connection and cable TV. I pay about $45 a month for each TV and music, not including the thousands of dollars (many of it Sony) for electronic equipment to enjoy said entertainment.
I also believe that its immoral to butcher fine music files and convert them to MP3s that have no internal integrity to ensure that the file is complete or not corrupt, but thats just me.
I just hope that governments can stay out of this whole record label demise and let them simply fail like they should. They had their heyday, but we simply don't need these couple of companies out there to put our music on a half filled piece of plastic and an often void of relevant information piece of paper.
During the last few years, certificate mills creating an army of windows admin drones, who can only click a predefined sequence of location on the screen with their mouse and passing as "system administrators"
Not to bash a Windows admins, but merely some observations.
1) On average a *NIX admin can code and script, a windows admin can't.
2) On average a *NIX admin can handle more boxes than a windows admin (probably because of #1)
GUI administration is fine and dandy, and UNIX and Linux releases come out with more of them each year. But the shear fact that knowing where these things are stored on the system and being able to directly manipulate, distribute, and restore these things is godlike. Even things like remote desktops and whatnot make things easier in the GUI land, they still don't scale very well.
I'm not interested in well over 99% of the female population out there.
Yet, I still care.
Oh, and its 96.37% of all stats are made up on the spot.
That is, in terms of the number of Unix servers vs. Linux servers vs. Windows servers?
If it takes 15 Linux servers to do the work of 1 Windows server, what does the number of servers tell you?
When it drops to around $349 then I will jump. I know a few others that want a $299 price point. As it stands now its not truly a $499 machine either as you need a minimum of 512mb of ram to have a good system.
Mmmkay. The Mini comes with about $200 in software which makes the hardware about $300. Even in the PC world, you can get a minimal piece of crap PC for like $200. A copy of XP will run you about $150. So for your target price of $350^H^H49 you will get a bottom of the line PC with no real end user software. If that floats your boat, then a Mac is not targeted for someone like you. Go talk to someone at a computer retailer like CompUSA. Ask them the difference between PC buyers and Macs. PC buyers come in buy their cheap computer, and are forever coming back buying more crap for it. Typically, a Mac buyer comes in, buys their mac, and they never see them again.
Oh, and go look on ebay sometime for used computers. Compare the Macs to PCs, and then tell me if the initial purchase price was worth the extra couple of bucks.
I've changed my pin before on my bank cards, but I never gave the card to anybody to reprogram.
I believe it is looked up upon entry, or at least that would make sense to me. Its too easy to buy a reader and brute force it offline.
Even if there is a number of failed attempts lockout of trying to brute force a PIN at an ATM. Most people would get tired of standing there before getting near the right PIN.
If I've mistakenly put in the wrong PIN on my card, it silently accepts it, and makes me go through the menus to do what I need to do, and then at the very end it says "Wrong PIN" and ejects my card.
Even if it only took 10 seconds to try each PIN, that would mean that in 5 minutes one could only attempt 30 different PINs. It would be easier to break into a house.
How easy would it be to edit the data on the strips?
Its trivial. You can get a magstripe writer for a couple hundred bucks, max.
For example, would it be possible for me to take my magnetic bus ticket and easily add another 10 trips to it?
Depends on how the bus tickets are set up. If they have a unique identifier on them and it looks up your balance against a central database. No luck. If the info is stored on the ticket itself, it should be trivial. Although the paper bus and train tickets are not the same as standard CC style cards.
Interesting trivia on the subject.
Ever wonder why the person swipes your credit card and then enters the last 4 digits that are hologram embossed on the card manually?
Because its trivial to put any account number on the card.
CC numbers have an internal checksum, so you cant simply make up a number that will match the last 4 digits. The odds of reprogramming your card with an active and valid account that matches your last 4 digits printed on your card are pretty low.
But I think what would be needed more is a try to do things like actual stresstesting and comparisions under load.
Yes, that would be interesting, but unless they broke something severe like they did with their TCPIP stack somewhere between version 8 and 9, handling a load is where solaris shines.
I've always said, solaris is never fast, but then again it never slows down either.
Which is exactly why I have mine set to vibrate mode. The reality is, during a meeting, nobody gives a shit what kind of music I like. Cell phone use is intrusive enough without the addition of "look how cool I am" ring tones.
That is why they don't pay college and high school kids to go to meetings.
I know no one over 30 that has a custom ringtone.
I know no one over 2 that even needs a phone on vibrate in a meeting.
I would like to see how much is actually given to the artist per sale. I would suspect that a lot of older music gives less than a cent per sold song to the original artist.
Considering that many of the older music artists are dead, who cares?
That is one thing that kills me about older recorded music. Take for example the Beatle's white album. Amazon is bragging about their deal for that album at $27.99 (20% or 6.99 of of MSRP I guess).
There are 30 tracks on this album that is now about 37 years old. I like the beatles and all, but considering 50% of them are dead and all, I don't see where the remaining two deserve even 1 cent for something they did 37 years ago. Hmm, maybe I should remind all of my former employers that if they use something I set up after I left, that I should get paid for it today. Oh, I signed a contract saying that I could not do that. Damn.
I was hoping to see the end of the album format, with the exception of concept albums or soundtracks or long classical works and such. Artists would just release a new song when they had one worth peddling.
:) But that is not that common today.
I think they called those singles. Although you can/could buy singles CDs and cassettes, they did not sell too well. Probably because it was annoying to put a CD or tape into your walkman or car stereo and then have to immediately take it out and put something else in. I get pissed that most of my bought albums on CD are only about 45 minutes long vs 60 to 80+ minutes for my burned live CDs.
Singles were fine back when you had no other option to play them except at home. Hell, back in the day, you could make your own "playlist" by stacking these things on top of one of those record player auto player things
Why can't the record labels get off of their early 1980s business model and provide these products to people at a price?
On a side note, I burned my first MP3 to CD Friday before last, and I question why people are willing to pay for these things. I only got the MP3s because its a new band that I'm going to see in April and they have never toured or recorded together before and the only recordings I could get from them are 4 128bps MP3 tracks off of their website.
If I paid 4 bucks for these MP3s I would be very pissed off. The same goes with an iPod that someone brought over to my house a while back. I plugged it into my stereo, and I guess that bass is something you have to pay extra for.
My point of all this bitching about MP3s is that there apparently is a market for low quality, inexpensive and portable music. No one in their right mind would pay more than 99c for something like this. It would seem to me that the record labels would sell more than one thing to their customers (CDs) when there is a whole market of goods that people want. But I guess if your a rich record exec and have been for the last 20 years, I guess your motivation for change is about zero.
I'd love to have an alternative to the BIOS which is open source, or free software, or both.
Maybe your looking in the wrong direction. Maybe you should ask yourself in 2005 if you should be be thinking about something a little more than a simple BIOS.
In my experience, its only cheap x86 computers that still use a BIOS, everyone else has something much more modern and robust.
High school is not set up by the government for education. Most everyone I know who's parents were genuinely concerned with their children's education sent them to private schools. At least where I'm from, public schools are clearly better for education than the government funded ones.
High school is set up by the government for socialization. Those that want an education and are capable, get an education from somewhere (yes, some get it from public schools).
I would say the socialization part is working quite well..