Its funny that many of the auction that I have seen on eBay actually close higher then if you had bought it at a retail store.
Its a known and studied phenomenon. What happens is that under "normal" economic transactions, people are trying to optimize bang for buck with little variables like convenience (eg, paying more at a convenience store), supply/demand (eg, movie theater soda prices), paying slightly more for the illusion or reality of support vs buying it second hand, etc.
But, many of these rules go out the window when in an auction environment. What happens, is the price outweighs "winning" the auction, and the desire to win can outweigh logic, reason, convenience, supply/demand, and all that. An example is when someone will pay for something online via eBay and pay more for something vs just going to the store and buying it. But hey, that is the price of winning, right?
You always have to wonder why business professors -- if they know so much about how to read the market -- aren't out there making a fortune instead of making less as a professor.
Those Who Can't Do... Teach!
There is more to it than that, actually a lot more, but there is a BIG difference between knowing and doing.
I'm frequently astounded how many PhDs in computer science or something like human factors engineering teach this stuff for a living and do research in the fields, but they don't or can't do basic stuff in their field in their everyday life.
Regarding business, its completely different to study and have an interest in business but to not have the interest in doing business itself. There are legal issues, ass kissing/soul selling, compromises over beliefs/morals for profits, taxes, and all of these things. There is risk taking, where being a professor is not very risky.
Hmm, I know bunches of stuff, and I've been told that I'm bright enough to do anything successfully, but currently I'm moderately paid and am moderately OK with it because I'm also lazy and don't want the responsibility, risk taking, stress, and headache of taking over the world. Oh, and I used to correct my college professors when they were wrong like professors correct the "real world" when they are wrong:)
BTW, the 10 things there are really good tips in the article.
If users expect bundled software, the computer OEMs can supply it.
Unfortunately, the "PeeCee" market is different than the server market or the Mac market. OEMs cannot get away with bundling too much software because they are in a cutthroat market where price matters more than quality. From what I know, its common for new PC owners to keep going back to the store where they bought the computer from (or a computer store if they bought it online) and buy more crap for their computer. Apple owners don't do this nearly as much because their computer is bundled with much more hardware and software than your average PC. I'll say this until the facts change, but if you look at ROI, longevity of a PC, maintenance, extra software, extra reinstalls, crashes, slowness from viruses and spyware and/or slowness from antivirus software/malware, really owning a PC is more expensive than owning a Mac. Kinda like owning vs renting a place to live or owning vs leasing a car (yes, I know there are exceptions, as well as there are PC owner exceptions I guess too). But many people opt for the more expensive option all the time.
Linux distros are a little different insofar as they generally target a different demographic.
Yes, I know that. I'm a Linux freak (on the server side). But it would be trivial to make a distro for Web, Email, and whatever 90+% of the "normal" population uses computers for, bundle it with the PC (if you can avoid the MS tax/laws/whatever), and sell it as a basic, inexpensive blackbox kind of computer like a public terminal or something like the OS a DVR has, and if the price is right and it works good enough, it should sell. I really think the update, reinstall drivers, reboot, crash, read HOWTOs, and all that crap is way overdue to disappear, and a computing experience is more like driving a car or some other sane, normal activity. Sure, I could get religious about Ford vs Chevy (I prefer neither:), but even if I'm a Ford guy, if my job gives me a working Chevy for free, odds are I'll get over my religious beliefs over a while. I had the displeasure of using a Win2k box last week, and although I only used Putty, Firefox, and Acrobat Reader, I was not too thrilled with the experience. It was OK, and usable, but I would get kinda pissy if I knew this was more than a temporary necessity. Acrobat Reader kinda sucks, but is tolerable. I don't know if its bundled or not, but I simply prefer that Macs come with a working PDF viewer that is simple and nice. Oh, Acrobat nagged me about updates and all that crap, and took a long time to load, and yelled at me about closing it when I used it as a plugin in firefox and as an external reader. Obnoxious. Every time I logged into the machine some kind of anti-virus or whatever crap thrashed the machine until I had to tell it to stop. I believe there was some Office search thing that periodically thrashed the machine too or something else. Sorry, I'm not that much of a fan of Firefox, but its OK, I guess its better than IE. Oh, I had to remove some spyware and/or viruses vs adaware or something from the machine. I was told to just log in as administrator and I could not get my own account or something like that. The look and feel seemed so 90s. Keyboard focus sometimes had to be augmented with clicking on crap with the mouse to tell the programs where the focus should be. Putty is tolerable, but nowhere near as nice as a real terminal and typing ssh. All of this from 3 days of just using a computer. Oh, a few weeks ago I had to convince it to print to a printer, and that was bassackwards.
My statement was a personal one; I've always kept at least one machine with a current version of Windows for gaming and using other software, with the exception of Win ME. In fact, I've always planned on doing so. With the additional bloat, the apparent substandard implementation of new features, the embedding of increasingly draconian DRM, and intrusive Windows licensing enforcement... well, I've changed my
I think it is unfair that you should have to pay extra to have your number unlisted, or to have to pay extra for caller ID.
I don't have caller ID even though I want it. I'm protesting them making me pay for it. My cordless phones have caller ID builtin to the handsets, but I would have to pay more than my overpriced $30/mo to have the ability to tap into information that is already on the wire to begin with. Now, I have had someone here on/. tell me that there is some gizmo whatever in the background so it may actually cost the phone company.30/mo or something for caller ID, but I simply do not understand why a phone costs me $30/mo that only works in my local area. No, I don't want 911. Thanks for offering, but I'm not interested. If I'm dying and by myself and I can't go to a neighbors house, then I will die like I'm supposed to, thanks. No, I don't care about the phone working when my electricity doesn't. In fact, my phone doesn't because all of my phones are cordless and need power to work. I do not understand why broadband from the same company is like $24/mo and I can go anywhere in the world 24/7 but my phone costs more, and does not go over 50 miles or so from my house. I have to pay extra to go beyond that, so I don't pay and ask people to call me if its long distance or use a calling card. I may get VOIP because its cheaper, but then I may have to get new phones and I like my phones.
This should be a feature that you can choose or not choose for free and have the expense paid as part of a tax on telemarketers, politicians, surveyers, and charitable organizations. Actually, only the caller ID is an expense. Not printing your name in a phone book is actually a credit to the phone company's bottom line, or at least it would be if they were not selling your information without your permission.
I would assume somewhere in the fine print you give them permission. They charge you to have the number unlisted because they make money off of selling the information otherwise. I don't know how common this is, but you can buy phone listings that are organized by area and go down the street. Pretty slick, huh?
MS often bundles the software in an attempt to corner the market and stamp out competitors. Actually, if you bother to understand the law at all, this sort of behavior is exactly what must be done in order for a company to be guilty of being an abusive monopoly (for the record being a monopoly isn't illegal, it's abusing the monopoly that is).
See, the thing is that Microsoft can do no right. Users expect bundled software, but its illegal for MS to provide it, and when they do oftentimes it sucks.
However, its now 2006. We have choices today. I'm not Microsoft free because of religious masochism, I'm MS free because I prefer to be free over "dealing with" or "putting up" with MS crap. The minute they create a worthy product, I'm on board. But I'm picky, and I simply want different and better than what they provide. There is no need for even a novice to have to put up with or deal with a Microsoft computer. I've had a number of people from 2 different countries use my Mac with no problems and they have never used one before. The only real thing that they said was that it was different and it was nice. They were able to check email, surf the web, do normal stuff that normal people do on a computer.
With some effort, a Linux distro could be set up to almost be as pleasant.
Basically, I don't believe that an explicit boycott of Vista is necessary. I just say do something different and better instead.
Jailing people is expensive, and it should be reserved for persons who are a danger to the safety of others. Jailing a spammer is a waste of money--those tens of thousands of dollars would be better spent on funding technological anti-spam measures.
This is way offtopic and a complete topic into itself, but yes, jailing/imprisoning people is expensive, but it is the current mantra in the US for dealing with people that counter our society. It fulfills a few basic human desires 1) Its quick and easy. 2) The perception of the problem is now physically "removed". 3) Prisons and the legal system are lucrative industries and a current part of society. 4) The revenge factor is priceless.
Its no accident that the US imprisons more of its population than any other society.
Spam is more easily blocked and can be taken care of on my time. Telemarketers though, I have to choose between getting up during dinner / sleeping to answer the phone or dealing with the damn thing ringing every 5 minutes.
Maybe my area is different than yours, but the number of telemarketers went from too much, to almost zero after I got a new telephone number _AND_ when I got the number, I paid an extra $1.50 or so a month to have the number unlisted.
About once every 3-5 months I get a charitable organization that can sneak through the laws. For a while I did get some calls from India when someone either lied about their phone number or they had the number before I did, but those have gone away too.
Now, I think its silly that I have to pay extra for less "features", but to me its worth it. In the "everybody has 15-20 phone numbers that change all the time and none of them are able to be looked up in the phonebook" era, a phone book entry seems pretty useless. Yes, I do have a land line, but my work pays for a cell phone, and that is the primary number I give to people which they would not find in a phone book anyway.
I wish I could pay for a PO box and eliminate the snail mail spam as well, but even if I did pay for one, I would still get crap in my mailbox in front of my house. Is there a way to disconnect one of those, or can I just pull it out of the ground?
I thought the summary said that TV shows were 1.99/episode and movies 9.99 and up.
Let me guess? I have to pay for an internet connection. Wait for the download to come down, and store the download. Oh, but I don't even own the copy either due to DRM, right?
For about $40-50/month I get tons of TV episodes with DVR service, the transport mechanism and storage media and no DRM.
I'd say about 1/5 to 1/10th or less of the cost, and I might to on a spree.
I know I'm in the slashdot minority here, but I think I'm still in the majority of the population that actually prefers to watch TV from the couch on a TV with a remote.
From the informal polls I've taken by talking with people, I know of two people who routinely watch TV on the computer, and the rest of the hundreds of people I know still use a television.
If all we have left are the "big guys" where is the next revolution going to come from ?
I guess nothing will be new. Startups, and the sucessful ones will be bought out by the big fish, or they will become a big fish themselves.
On your large computer company list IBM brought us the PC architecture, POWER, and Blue Gene. HP brought us HPUX (never used it), Itanium (with intel). Intel brought us ia32, ia64 (Itanium), and mobile processors. AMD the Opteron.
I'm getting conservative in my old age, but I much prefer to get something from these big guys because odds are it will work, and work well for a long time.
Oh, and I heard from a friend who worked at Radioshack that most of the important passwords were something very, very, VERY easy. I'll leave you to figure it out.
blankstare
Set a login attempt limiter, which will discourage trial and error.
Isn't this sufficient? I mean even a basic dictionary word with no case variations would take at least 100 or so attempts to crack. KISS
If passwords are the only thing you can think of for access to a system, then how about letting the user pick any dictionary word as a password and just lock out access after 3-5 failed attempts?
Even if '1xIf%at$3' were a secure password, an infinite number of attempts will definitely crack it.
I believe that if your system doesn't need security beyond a simple username/password, then let the password be user friendly and don't make them change it every week. I've admined systems that have remote access over the internet for years and have NEVER had a breakin due to a "weak" password. Buffer overflows? Yup (not my system though). Sniffed passwords? Yup (not my system though).
People should get over the 80s and 90s obsessions about passwords.
Even the weak password 'joshua' took the guy from wargames what a week or more to crack after a number of failed attempts? I would like to pretend we have come a ways beyond that.
In the end of course, the system administrator is going to catch heat for not having a strong password policy. Even though he/she would've caught hell if there had been one implemented in the first place.
Yeah, if the people were security experts they would know the rules by now.
1) Never share passwords 2) Pick a password that is very obscure and contains numbers, letters, and special characters. 3) Change the password on a regular basis, like every 6 months.
Where I work, we have the exact same draconian rules, yet I've been here almost 10 years and people have come and go and lets look at the other security measures they simply ignore.
1) Never share passwords, but common keys to get into buildings is OK, even after employees leave. 2) Just give a regular key to anybody, and since it says "Do not copy" it won't be copied. 3) Keep the keys the same for at least 10 to 20 years if not indefinitely.
I simply do not understand why in 2006 we are still basing authentication to a computer system based on a known "secret" that is picked by the user, chronically annoy the user to change it AND remember it, but we don't do a damn thing about physical security.
Security is a lip service game, nothing more. The more the illusion of security needs to be illusioned, the more lip service that goes into the game.
Any computer system that is protected with a username and password AND cares about security is full of shit. At a minimum, a computer system needs a physical token and a secret to pass basic measures of security. Anything that does not meet those two conditions is just playing minimal lip service to said security.
The same goes for storing sensitive data on a laptop or a desktop machine vs a securely located networked drive. Just ask the thousands of people who have had their personal info compromised from a stolen laptop or desktop machine./rant
What happens when a newbie votes for A, changes her mind, tries to erase A and vote for B. This is what happened in the Orange county in 2000 where some people found the ballot confusing and had to change their selection.
How are your machines going to deal with such equivalent of a 'hanging chad'? How is this going to be handled during the recount? (Say, the machine called it B, while A's lawers claim the voter intended A).
Your right. Harvard is filled with community college capable people and community college is filled with Harvard capable people because of scantron issues like hanging chads, confusing true/false things, and whatnot.
If an election is that close that its down to a hanging chad or something, I say we settle it like we do all things that are a tie.
Get the candidates to do a 2 out of 3 game of rock paper scissors.
I mean, WTF did hanging chads have to do with anything when the guy was appointed by the Supreme Court and the other guy conceded? Do you really think the smoke and mirrors at a magic show are there because the stuff going on there really is magic?
Still, scantrons are WAY better than the magic-hat shitboxes Diebold currently provides.
Yes. They are. Easily used by people, rereadable, builtin paper trail, familiar by users, fast, inexpensive. I cannot think of a better system.
I'm no MS fanboy, don't get me wrong, but isn't it better with a couple of service packs for big changes instead of the way Apple does it, releasing a slightly upgraded OS at full price (Cheetah, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger and now Leopard, 2001 - present)?
In all fairness, you are only required to pay every other release, and upgrading is not required either. I run both Panther and Tiger, and I don't consider Tiger an "upgrade" over Panther. I actually prefer Panther, and I have only heard of one extention for Safari that requires Tiger and of course widgets if your into those, all other software works fine on Panther and Tiger.
I really wonder why the states can put together lottery systems that is secure, fast, flexiable, and can not make a voting system? The lottery system has terminal all over place. It uses secure paper to print your selections on, and instance feedback that your entry has be received.
I believe the whole thing is disinformation to keep the random public guessing and/or to make the elections rigable.
Of course this is an easy task. You point out lottery. I point out banks. Banks have used Diebold for years with AFAIK no known compromise and billions of dollars moved all over the place. And money deals with floating point precision!
Now if a simple machine cant count between one of two possible choices? Something is amiss.
Have the voters fill out a scantron-type ballot. And then have the voter/user feed that ballot through two different voting machines made by two different manufacturers.
This way there would be a paper record and two, seperate databases to compare to each other.
This would double the effort (or perhaps square it at best) for hacking and would allow manual recounts from random sample districts to test the accuracy of the two machines.
I'm confused how reduculous this is supposed to be.
I've said from day one that these stupid election ballots should be scantron-like becauase its inexpensive and proven technology that everybody is capable of using and is computer and human readable.
The best thing for the machines to do is to sort the sheets by candidate, and add a timestamp or sequence number to each one and a quick visual inspection by any moron would be able to tell if candidate A's votes were in candidates B's pile and if A's pile was bigger than B's pile. There is a written record. Slop and randomness by people to ensure they weren't stuffed. Inexpensive. Every damn thing about them are perfect except Diebold can't make money off of existing standardized equipement now can they?
I do like the Centaur and I can't find them anymore but there was another segway like thing for handicapped people that was like a wheelchair that grew so that the person was at eye level. That looked like it kicked ass for people confined to a wheelchair.
So I clicked on the zcodec.com link above and the first thing I noticed was the use of some copyrighted movie posters on their page. And then I saw the link for the "therms of use." "Professional enough" indeed...
Yeah, I saw the "therms of use page" linky here: http://www.zcodec.com/therms.html -- notice that the web page is therms.html . At least they are consistently wrong:)
I thought it kinda looked OK, but I noticed there was not FAQ, and there was no info on what to do with said codec. Hey, its only a 100k download, right?
I'm not sure if Oracle still does this, but they used to have almost voodoo math to figure out how much you owe oracle. It was something like X/CPU, then that value multiplied by a scale for the type of CPU (at the time RISC vs CISC), and then another multiplier by the amount of RAM on the box.
When I heard that, I always suggested under specing the box and then silently upgrading it after the Oracle guys left. I believe the technical term is sliding scale which means the more you can afford, the more you will pay.
It all just begs the question "why?" was the code that they have to turn off the start up sound now SO BADLY WRITTEN that they decided not to migrate it?
I don't understand why everything nowadays has to have 1) a clock that is always wrong (getting better with auto synchronized clocks) and 2) it has to make noises all the time.
It kills me that most cell phones make noise when you turn them off so they won't make noise. I have all of the sounds turned off on my cell phone, but I usually have it on speaker phone, so to silence the ring I have to turn off the speaker phone which makes a noise. When I'm at a conference or somewhere where people bring Windows laptops, I find it annoying to hear the startup and shutdown sounds.
Apple is just as bad with their startup sound on Macs, but I will say that hooked up to a subwoofer at loud volumes, the Mac sound does sound pretty cool, but its annoying at a conference. Macs used to be much more annoying than they are today. They used to make obnoxious sounds when closing windows. Thank god that has gone away.
If Congress were serious about keeping the US economy "safe and effective", it would reform the "lawyers' job security" laws. Instead it will surely make them even worse, and make the lawyer tax on technology mandatory.
Slashdot Mirror
Same reason alcohol is great: drink to forget (bad times), drink to celebrate (good times).
Simpsons did it!
Alcohol: The cause of and solution to all of life's problems!
Its funny that many of the auction that I have seen on eBay actually close higher then if you had bought it at a retail store.
Its a known and studied phenomenon. What happens is that under "normal" economic transactions, people are trying to optimize bang for buck with little variables like convenience (eg, paying more at a convenience store), supply/demand (eg, movie theater soda prices), paying slightly more for the illusion or reality of support vs buying it second hand, etc.
But, many of these rules go out the window when in an auction environment. What happens, is the price outweighs "winning" the auction, and the desire to win can outweigh logic, reason, convenience, supply/demand, and all that. An example is when someone will pay for something online via eBay and pay more for something vs just going to the store and buying it. But hey, that is the price of winning, right?
You always have to wonder why business professors -- if they know so much about how to read the market -- aren't out there making a fortune instead of making less as a professor.
:)
Those Who Can't Do... Teach!
There is more to it than that, actually a lot more, but there is a BIG difference between knowing and doing.
I'm frequently astounded how many PhDs in computer science or something like human factors engineering teach this stuff for a living and do research in the fields, but they don't or can't do basic stuff in their field in their everyday life.
Regarding business, its completely different to study and have an interest in business but to not have the interest in doing business itself. There are legal issues, ass kissing/soul selling, compromises over beliefs/morals for profits, taxes, and all of these things. There is risk taking, where being a professor is not very risky.
Hmm, I know bunches of stuff, and I've been told that I'm bright enough to do anything successfully, but currently I'm moderately paid and am moderately OK with it because I'm also lazy and don't want the responsibility, risk taking, stress, and headache of taking over the world. Oh, and I used to correct my college professors when they were wrong like professors correct the "real world" when they are wrong
BTW, the 10 things there are really good tips in the article.
If users expect bundled software, the computer OEMs can supply it.
:), but even if I'm a Ford guy, if my job gives me a working Chevy for free, odds are I'll get over my religious beliefs over a while. I had the displeasure of using a Win2k box last week, and although I only used Putty, Firefox, and Acrobat Reader, I was not too thrilled with the experience. It was OK, and usable, but I would get kinda pissy if I knew this was more than a temporary necessity. Acrobat Reader kinda sucks, but is tolerable. I don't know if its bundled or not, but I simply prefer that Macs come with a working PDF viewer that is simple and nice. Oh, Acrobat nagged me about updates and all that crap, and took a long time to load, and yelled at me about closing it when I used it as a plugin in firefox and as an external reader. Obnoxious. Every time I logged into the machine some kind of anti-virus or whatever crap thrashed the machine until I had to tell it to stop. I believe there was some Office search thing that periodically thrashed the machine too or something else. Sorry, I'm not that much of a fan of Firefox, but its OK, I guess its better than IE. Oh, I had to remove some spyware and/or viruses vs adaware or something from the machine. I was told to just log in as administrator and I could not get my own account or something like that. The look and feel seemed so 90s. Keyboard focus sometimes had to be augmented with clicking on crap with the mouse to tell the programs where the focus should be. Putty is tolerable, but nowhere near as nice as a real terminal and typing ssh. All of this from 3 days of just using a computer. Oh, a few weeks ago I had to convince it to print to a printer, and that was bassackwards.
Unfortunately, the "PeeCee" market is different than the server market or the Mac market. OEMs cannot get away with bundling too much software because they are in a cutthroat market where price matters more than quality. From what I know, its common for new PC owners to keep going back to the store where they bought the computer from (or a computer store if they bought it online) and buy more crap for their computer. Apple owners don't do this nearly as much because their computer is bundled with much more hardware and software than your average PC. I'll say this until the facts change, but if you look at ROI, longevity of a PC, maintenance, extra software, extra reinstalls, crashes, slowness from viruses and spyware and/or slowness from antivirus software/malware, really owning a PC is more expensive than owning a Mac. Kinda like owning vs renting a place to live or owning vs leasing a car (yes, I know there are exceptions, as well as there are PC owner exceptions I guess too). But many people opt for the more expensive option all the time.
Linux distros are a little different insofar as they generally target a different demographic.
Yes, I know that. I'm a Linux freak (on the server side). But it would be trivial to make a distro for Web, Email, and whatever 90+% of the "normal" population uses computers for, bundle it with the PC (if you can avoid the MS tax/laws/whatever), and sell it as a basic, inexpensive blackbox kind of computer like a public terminal or something like the OS a DVR has, and if the price is right and it works good enough, it should sell. I really think the update, reinstall drivers, reboot, crash, read HOWTOs, and all that crap is way overdue to disappear, and a computing experience is more like driving a car or some other sane, normal activity. Sure, I could get religious about Ford vs Chevy (I prefer neither
My statement was a personal one; I've always kept at least one machine with a current version of Windows for gaming and using other software, with the exception of Win ME. In fact, I've always planned on doing so. With the additional bloat, the apparent substandard implementation of new features, the embedding of increasingly draconian DRM, and intrusive Windows licensing enforcement... well, I've changed my
I think it is unfair that you should have to pay extra to have your number unlisted, or to have to pay extra for caller ID.
/. tell me that there is some gizmo whatever in the background so it may actually cost the phone company .30/mo or something for caller ID, but I simply do not understand why a phone costs me $30/mo that only works in my local area. No, I don't want 911. Thanks for offering, but I'm not interested. If I'm dying and by myself and I can't go to a neighbors house, then I will die like I'm supposed to, thanks. No, I don't care about the phone working when my electricity doesn't. In fact, my phone doesn't because all of my phones are cordless and need power to work. I do not understand why broadband from the same company is like $24/mo and I can go anywhere in the world 24/7 but my phone costs more, and does not go over 50 miles or so from my house. I have to pay extra to go beyond that, so I don't pay and ask people to call me if its long distance or use a calling card. I may get VOIP because its cheaper, but then I may have to get new phones and I like my phones.
I don't have caller ID even though I want it. I'm protesting them making me pay for it. My cordless phones have caller ID builtin to the handsets, but I would have to pay more than my overpriced $30/mo to have the ability to tap into information that is already on the wire to begin with. Now, I have had someone here on
This should be a feature that you can choose or not choose for free and have the expense paid as part of a tax on telemarketers, politicians, surveyers, and charitable organizations. Actually, only the caller ID is an expense. Not printing your name in a phone book is actually a credit to the phone company's bottom line, or at least it would be if they were not selling your information without your permission.
I would assume somewhere in the fine print you give them permission. They charge you to have the number unlisted because they make money off of selling the information otherwise. I don't know how common this is, but you can buy phone listings that are organized by area and go down the street. Pretty slick, huh?
MS often bundles the software in an attempt to corner the market and stamp out competitors. Actually, if you bother to understand the law at all, this sort of behavior is exactly what must be done in order for a company to be guilty of being an abusive monopoly (for the record being a monopoly isn't illegal, it's abusing the monopoly that is).
See, the thing is that Microsoft can do no right. Users expect bundled software, but its illegal for MS to provide it, and when they do oftentimes it sucks.
However, its now 2006. We have choices today. I'm not Microsoft free because of religious masochism, I'm MS free because I prefer to be free over "dealing with" or "putting up" with MS crap. The minute they create a worthy product, I'm on board. But I'm picky, and I simply want different and better than what they provide. There is no need for even a novice to have to put up with or deal with a Microsoft computer. I've had a number of people from 2 different countries use my Mac with no problems and they have never used one before. The only real thing that they said was that it was different and it was nice. They were able to check email, surf the web, do normal stuff that normal people do on a computer.
With some effort, a Linux distro could be set up to almost be as pleasant.
Basically, I don't believe that an explicit boycott of Vista is necessary. I just say do something different and better instead.
Jailing people is expensive, and it should be reserved for persons who are a danger to the safety of others. Jailing a spammer is a waste of money--those tens of thousands of dollars would be better spent on funding technological anti-spam measures.
This is way offtopic and a complete topic into itself, but yes, jailing/imprisoning people is expensive, but it is the current mantra in the US for dealing with people that counter our society. It fulfills a few basic human desires 1) Its quick and easy. 2) The perception of the problem is now physically "removed". 3) Prisons and the legal system are lucrative industries and a current part of society. 4) The revenge factor is priceless.
Its no accident that the US imprisons more of its population than any other society.
Spam is more easily blocked and can be taken care of on my time. Telemarketers though, I have to choose between getting up during dinner / sleeping to answer the phone or dealing with the damn thing ringing every 5 minutes.
Maybe my area is different than yours, but the number of telemarketers went from too much, to almost zero after I got a new telephone number _AND_ when I got the number, I paid an extra $1.50 or so a month to have the number unlisted.
About once every 3-5 months I get a charitable organization that can sneak through the laws. For a while I did get some calls from India when someone either lied about their phone number or they had the number before I did, but those have gone away too.
Now, I think its silly that I have to pay extra for less "features", but to me its worth it. In the "everybody has 15-20 phone numbers that change all the time and none of them are able to be looked up in the phonebook" era, a phone book entry seems pretty useless. Yes, I do have a land line, but my work pays for a cell phone, and that is the primary number I give to people which they would not find in a phone book anyway.
I wish I could pay for a PO box and eliminate the snail mail spam as well, but even if I did pay for one, I would still get crap in my mailbox in front of my house. Is there a way to disconnect one of those, or can I just pull it out of the ground?
At 1/3 to 1/2 this price I'd go on a spree.
I thought the summary said that TV shows were 1.99/episode and movies 9.99 and up.
Let me guess? I have to pay for an internet connection. Wait for the download to come down, and store the download. Oh, but I don't even own the copy either due to DRM, right?
For about $40-50/month I get tons of TV episodes with DVR service, the transport mechanism and storage media and no DRM.
I'd say about 1/5 to 1/10th or less of the cost, and I might to on a spree.
I know I'm in the slashdot minority here, but I think I'm still in the majority of the population that actually prefers to watch TV from the couch on a TV with a remote.
From the informal polls I've taken by talking with people, I know of two people who routinely watch TV on the computer, and the rest of the hundreds of people I know still use a television.
Didn't your parents ever teach you to "Never buy the *first* of anything".
Being that new stuff gets bought all the time, I guess there are many kids/adults who had parents that did not teach them this vital lesson in life.
If all we have left are the "big guys" where is the next revolution going to come from ?
I guess nothing will be new. Startups, and the sucessful ones will be bought out by the big fish, or they will become a big fish themselves.
On your large computer company list IBM brought us the PC architecture, POWER, and Blue Gene. HP brought us HPUX (never used it), Itanium (with intel). Intel brought us ia32, ia64 (Itanium), and mobile processors. AMD the Opteron.
I'm getting conservative in my old age, but I much prefer to get something from these big guys because odds are it will work, and work well for a long time.
I think they should release IRIX under the GPL and let the community maintain it!
I believe that is called Linux. SGI has already released bunches of IRIX to Linux including ccNUMA code and XFS and I'm sure other goodies as well.
Oh, and I heard from a friend who worked at Radioshack that most of the important passwords were something very, very, VERY easy. I'll leave you to figure it out.
blankstare
Set a login attempt limiter, which will discourage trial and error.
Isn't this sufficient? I mean even a basic dictionary word with no case variations would take at least 100 or so attempts to crack. KISS
If passwords are the only thing you can think of for access to a system, then how about letting the user pick any dictionary word as a password and just lock out access after 3-5 failed attempts?
Even if '1xIf%at$3' were a secure password, an infinite number of attempts will definitely crack it.
I believe that if your system doesn't need security beyond a simple username/password, then let the password be user friendly and don't make them change it every week. I've admined systems that have remote access over the internet for years and have NEVER had a breakin due to a "weak" password. Buffer overflows? Yup (not my system though). Sniffed passwords? Yup (not my system though).
People should get over the 80s and 90s obsessions about passwords.
Even the weak password 'joshua' took the guy from wargames what a week or more to crack after a number of failed attempts? I would like to pretend we have come a ways beyond that.
I'd like to know why you can view user passwords in plaintext anyway....
(In Napoleon Dynamite voice)
Duh, its easier to debug. Having all that stuff encrypted only complicates things. Gosh! What an idiot!
In the end of course, the system administrator is going to catch heat for not having a strong password policy. Even though he/she would've caught hell if there had been one implemented in the first place.
/rant
Yeah, if the people were security experts they would know the rules by now.
1) Never share passwords
2) Pick a password that is very obscure and contains numbers, letters, and special characters.
3) Change the password on a regular basis, like every 6 months.
Where I work, we have the exact same draconian rules, yet I've been here almost 10 years and people have come and go and lets look at the other security measures they simply ignore.
1) Never share passwords, but common keys to get into buildings is OK, even after employees leave.
2) Just give a regular key to anybody, and since it says "Do not copy" it won't be copied.
3) Keep the keys the same for at least 10 to 20 years if not indefinitely.
I simply do not understand why in 2006 we are still basing authentication to a computer system based on a known "secret" that is picked by the user, chronically annoy the user to change it AND remember it, but we don't do a damn thing about physical security.
Security is a lip service game, nothing more. The more the illusion of security needs to be illusioned, the more lip service that goes into the game.
Any computer system that is protected with a username and password AND cares about security is full of shit. At a minimum, a computer system needs a physical token and a secret to pass basic measures of security. Anything that does not meet those two conditions is just playing minimal lip service to said security.
The same goes for storing sensitive data on a laptop or a desktop machine vs a securely located networked drive. Just ask the thousands of people who have had their personal info compromised from a stolen laptop or desktop machine.
What happens when a newbie votes for A, changes her mind, tries to erase A and vote for B. This is what happened in the Orange county in 2000 where some people found the ballot confusing and had to change their selection.
How are your machines going to deal with such equivalent of a 'hanging chad'? How is this going to be handled during the recount? (Say, the machine called it B, while A's lawers claim the voter intended A).
Your right. Harvard is filled with community college capable people and community college is filled with Harvard capable people because of scantron issues like hanging chads, confusing true/false things, and whatnot.
If an election is that close that its down to a hanging chad or something, I say we settle it like we do all things that are a tie.
Get the candidates to do a 2 out of 3 game of rock paper scissors.
I mean, WTF did hanging chads have to do with anything when the guy was appointed by the Supreme Court and the other guy conceded? Do you really think the smoke and mirrors at a magic show are there because the stuff going on there really is magic?
Still, scantrons are WAY better than the magic-hat shitboxes Diebold currently provides.
Yes. They are. Easily used by people, rereadable, builtin paper trail, familiar by users, fast, inexpensive. I cannot think of a better system.
I'm no MS fanboy, don't get me wrong, but isn't it better with a couple of service packs for big changes instead of the way Apple does it, releasing a slightly upgraded OS at full price (Cheetah, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger and now Leopard, 2001 - present)?
In all fairness, you are only required to pay every other release, and upgrading is not required either. I run both Panther and Tiger, and I don't consider Tiger an "upgrade" over Panther. I actually prefer Panther, and I have only heard of one extention for Safari that requires Tiger and of course widgets if your into those, all other software works fine on Panther and Tiger.
I really wonder why the states can put together lottery systems that is secure, fast, flexiable, and can not make a voting system? The lottery system has terminal all over place. It uses secure paper to print your selections on, and instance feedback that your entry has be received.
I believe the whole thing is disinformation to keep the random public guessing and/or to make the elections rigable.
Of course this is an easy task. You point out lottery. I point out banks. Banks have used Diebold for years with AFAIK no known compromise and billions of dollars moved all over the place. And money deals with floating point precision!
Now if a simple machine cant count between one of two possible choices? Something is amiss.
Here's a ridiculous idea.
Have the voters fill out a scantron-type ballot. And then have the voter/user feed that ballot through two different voting machines made by two different manufacturers.
This way there would be a paper record and two, seperate databases to compare to each other.
This would double the effort (or perhaps square it at best) for hacking and would allow manual recounts from random sample districts to test the accuracy of the two machines.
I'm confused how reduculous this is supposed to be.
I've said from day one that these stupid election ballots should be scantron-like becauase its inexpensive and proven technology that everybody is capable of using and is computer and human readable.
The best thing for the machines to do is to sort the sheets by candidate, and add a timestamp or sequence number to each one and a quick visual inspection by any moron would be able to tell if candidate A's votes were in candidates B's pile and if A's pile was bigger than B's pile. There is a written record. Slop and randomness by people to ensure they weren't stuffed. Inexpensive. Every damn thing about them are perfect except Diebold can't make money off of existing standardized equipement now can they?
I've been waiting for a Segway knockoff to appear so I could actually afford a similar device.
You're going to have to wait a long time:
http://www.delphion.com/details?&pn=US05971091__
I do like the Centaur and I can't find them anymore but there was another segway like thing for handicapped people that was like a wheelchair that grew so that the person was at eye level. That looked like it kicked ass for people confined to a wheelchair.
So I clicked on the zcodec.com link above and the first thing I noticed was the use of some copyrighted movie posters on their page. And then I saw the link for the "therms of use." "Professional enough" indeed...
:)
Yeah, I saw the "therms of use page" linky here: http://www.zcodec.com/therms.html -- notice that the web page is therms.html . At least they are consistently wrong
I thought it kinda looked OK, but I noticed there was not FAQ, and there was no info on what to do with said codec. Hey, its only a 100k download, right?
"processor power factor" (think Oracle)
I'm not sure if Oracle still does this, but they used to have almost voodoo math to figure out how much you owe oracle. It was something like X/CPU, then that value multiplied by a scale for the type of CPU (at the time RISC vs CISC), and then another multiplier by the amount of RAM on the box.
When I heard that, I always suggested under specing the box and then silently upgrading it after the Oracle guys left. I believe the technical term is sliding scale which means the more you can afford, the more you will pay.
It all just begs the question "why?" was the code that they have to turn off the start up sound now SO BADLY WRITTEN that they decided not to migrate it?
I don't understand why everything nowadays has to have 1) a clock that is always wrong (getting better with auto synchronized clocks) and 2) it has to make noises all the time.
It kills me that most cell phones make noise when you turn them off so they won't make noise. I have all of the sounds turned off on my cell phone, but I usually have it on speaker phone, so to silence the ring I have to turn off the speaker phone which makes a noise. When I'm at a conference or somewhere where people bring Windows laptops, I find it annoying to hear the startup and shutdown sounds.
Apple is just as bad with their startup sound on Macs, but I will say that hooked up to a subwoofer at loud volumes, the Mac sound does sound pretty cool, but its annoying at a conference. Macs used to be much more annoying than they are today. They used to make obnoxious sounds when closing windows. Thank god that has gone away.
If Congress were serious about keeping the US economy "safe and effective", it would reform the "lawyers' job security" laws. Instead it will surely make them even worse, and make the lawyer tax on technology mandatory.
l e_id=1671
I don't see that happening any time soon -- http://www.yourcongress.com/ViewArticle.asp?artic