Yes, I have an iPhone, and yes I run pandora on it. It works great, and I enjoy it at home and in the car.
But that wasn't why I dropped Sirius.
I had two radios, and the high-quality internet subscription. After the merger, some of my favorite stations either went away, or the playlists got cut down to 20 songs.
I called and complained, but I was greeted with "sorry about that, how would you like two months free service?" Why would I want two more months of a service that sucks?
The last straw was the sound quality problems. Octane 20 sounded like it was underwater. I guess Sirius cut back on the bandwidth reserved for some channels to make room for some of the XM offerings.
In the end, it was bad music content, and terrible sound quality that killed it for me.
I do miss Howard, but I hope that he'll go online once Sirius XM goes tits up.
Again, the majority of my attorney friends all say that prosecutors will only bring cases they are sure of winning. This is especially true if the prosecutor in question has political ambitions beyond his/her current job. Why bring marginal cases you might lose? It only makes your conviction rate look weak.
If you make it to trial you've, most likely, already lost.
Two of my criminal law friends have not gone to a complete jury trial in over TWO years.
Prosecutors pick their battles, just like everyone else.
Falsehoods portrayed as truth happens every day on the Fox news channel. Why is this news?
I am not a lawyer, but my lawyer is.
on
You Are Not a Lawyer
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
OK, i'll bite.
I'm not a lawyer, I'm a computer scientist, but you can be damn sure that I'm going to give MY lawyer all the ammunition I can to defend me.
I'm going to have logs that "prove" I didn't do the crime.
I'm going to have "forensics" that "prove" my computers did not have the offending data in question.
I'm going to have hidden encrypted volumes 12-ways to Sunday - good luck getting to those without the NSA's help, or after my attorney tells me not to incriminate myself.
What most of my friends, who are attorneys, tell me is that law-enforcement is generally incompetent when it comes to investigating a case. Collecting evidence in a LEGAL manner is a complex and difficult process. These guys that barely made it out of the academy aren't lawyers and they will fuck it up. A good attorney will find a way to make the prosecution's evidence inadmissible.
Unfortunately, law is a complex thing. Gone are the days when the common man could defend himself. Today it's fight fire with fire.
Maybe someone with a law degree could enlighten me on the 5th amendment? Does it apply here?
"nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself"
If I am asked or forced to give up my DNA, could that not be considered witnessing against myself? If the 5th amendment applies here, why are police allowed to collect and store fingerprints?
I functionally name my servers (DC1 is Domain Controller #1...etc) I know, it's not terribly creative.
We have a front-end, back-end topology for our exchange servers. A while ago, some users wanted to directly connect to the server containing the mail database and asked me what the name of the server was.
After I responded "backend" I had a bunch of adults in a room giggling like teenagers.
Apple is releasing the next version of OS X soon called "Snow Leopard". The update centers around tweaks and performance improvements on the existing "Leopard" operating system.
Windows 7 appears to be a similar improvement to the existing Vista product, therefore, I propose that Microsoft should name the product "Vista Cruiser". Oldsmobile is no longer, so Microsoft could get the name for a song. They might even consider putting some fake wood grain on the sides of the box to enhance its marketing potential.
Hopefully Microsoft's next OS will be better than the car...
Microsoft has spent so much time bending over backwards for governments and lobby groups that they have lost touch with what their customers are actually doing with their products.
In most retail customer's minds there are only two versions of windows:
1. The one installed on the computer I bought 2. The one not installed on the computer I bought
That's it. How many people do you know of that made a stink about what version of Vista to buy? I don't know of a single person that bought a boxed copy of Vista. Every Vista user I know bought a computer that came with Vista.
Business users have similar simple requirements. Most volume license customers buy the version they can get cheapest. I don't know of a single volume license customer that bought Vista Ultimate. Why you ask? No volume license pricing exists for Vista Ultimate. Vista Business or Enterprise is what volume license customers buy.
Microsoft can't find their butts with both hands these days.
Fairness and honesty can hardly be called tenets of communism. Laws that enforce fairness and honesty in business practices foster faith in our capitalist system and provide a level playing field for all those that conduct business within the system.
Without laws protecting consumers, the playing field is very much tilted in favor of those with deep legal pockets. Consumer protection laws also force businesses to compete honestly so that the best product at the best price will succeed in the market.
I highly doubt you will find a majority of any population that actually wants businesses to operate dishonestly. Regulations enforcing fairness and honesty ARE consensus.
I find that most people that protest laws protecting consumers usually are the ones trying to game the system to their advantage at the expense of those who could least defend themselves in court.
Don't you think chips like this will enable set top converters for less than $40?
Technology history is full of examples of expensive stuff becoming really cheap, really fast. Why would DTV set top boxes be any different? You'd be a fool to believe otherwise.
Do you honestly believe that prices will go lower than $40 if the government is giving away that amount of money for each box? No businessman with a brain in his skull is going to charge less than $40 until the money dries up.
My post was meant to illustrate that this commoditization process can now occur naturally since the artificial prop holding up pricing has now been removed.
A short while ago, converter box prices bottomed out at $50, and that was before the Yuan/Dollar exchange rate turned to crap. Now just a few no-name boxes are just barely able to squeeze in at that $40 price point. It is absolutely amazing that any companies are able to make an HDTV converter for $40. Just decoding the MPEG-2 video at 19Mbit/sec takes more horsepower than a 2GHz Intel/AMD CPU can manage. And good luck finding a video card with hardware decoding (eg. XvMC) for under $40.
Who mentioned anything about HDTV? The converter boxes I am talking about do not support HDTV. As a matter of fact, decoding and outputing an HDTV signal made your box ineligible for the coupon redemption program.
What I am talking about are dirt cheap digital TV converters for standard definition televisions. Your CPU example is poor. A general purpose CPU will always have more overhead than a dedicated ASIC. There are a TON of companies that make MPEG-2 decoders that are dirt cheap (infact, they are found in $20 DVD players).
These boxes have already started dropping in price:
You can now buy 22 inch LCD TVs with ATSC/QAM/NTSC tuners built in for $299. It's not hard to think that stand alone ATSC tuners will go for less than $40 now that the subsidy is gone.
With a $40 government subsidy, the cost of converter boxes was guaranteed NOT to drop below $40. If you make the boxes, why leave that sweet government money on the table?
Now that the program money has dried up, maybe we'll actually see $10 or $20 boxes.
We may actually see converter boxes with more features as well. To qualify for the coupon, the boxes had to fall within a minimum/maximum spec set by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. If you made a box with too many features, then your box was not eligible for the coupon.
Microsoft is the General Motors of software. I've been saying this for years, and slowly Microsoft is proving me right.
Here are the similarities:
1. Low-quality products. Quarter after quarter, year after year, cranking out low-quality products that have persistent design issues.
2. Lots of overhead for a few products that do produce profits.
3. Ignoring the customer. How many times have calls for better/more secure products gone unheeded?
4. Incompetent management that has no vision.
Microsoft's long term health will end up like GMs - they have a mountain of cash, so it will take a while, but unless the above changes, Microsoft's fate will be the same as GM's.
You call TTAC's analysis obvious now with the benefit of hindsight, but I can assure you - two years ago, MANY people in the industry and on wall street were using terms like "too big to fail" and "GM will be around forever".
TTAC detailed problems with the Detroit 3's relationships with suppliers, stuffing their dealer channels to make quarterly numbers, as well as the asset sales and complex debt financing LONG before most of the newspapers realized that the ship was going down - fast.
TTAC is only one example. There are tons of other examples - you just need to find them. Once you do, newspapers are pretty much unnecessary.
I recently started a subscription to the Financial Times since I got it for free - I thought it would be interesting to get a European perspective on events occurring in the US. Still, by the time the FT lands in my driveway, it's old news.
-ted
People interested in news aren't stupid
on
Are Newspapers Doomed?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Investigative newspaper reporting died over a decade ago. Newspapers today are nothing more than a collection of press releases.
The investigative reporters are now almost exclusively online. You no longer need a distribution network, and printing facilities. A good investigative reporter can setup a web site fairly easily, and if he/she is any good, the ad dollars will follow.
Take thetruthaboutcars.com - those guys called the demise of the American autos years ago - way before mainstream media. They were able to perform the in-depth financial analysis that the journalists at major newspapers simply ignored until recently.
Investors know this as well. Not many investors I know read newspapers any more for news. By the time the newspapers report it; the information is almost useless.
Goodbye newspapers. A generation of kids is growing up seeing the newspaper as obsolete as the typewriter.
Yes, in a small shop with a "basic" configuration, I can see how Mac OS X server would be the closest thing to a server "appliance" that you can get. Mac OS X server seems way easier to setup and maintain than Microsoft's Small Business Server.
Still, when you are a small/medium sized shop with an existing Microsoft Active Directory infrastructure, integrating Mac OS X server isn't easy - and Apple's support in these types of environments is lacking at best.
Leopard server had a bunch of issues when it was released, every issue I reported was greeted with "yup, it's broken - we'll fix it in the next service release". Unfortunately those releases are months apart. It took 6 months for Apple to give me Leopard servers that actually worked.
I have hope though - my contacts at Apple say they are evaluating the (support) needs of enterprise users.
Could it be that the RIAA realizes that these lawsuits might attract the attention of the new administration and decided that the political climate (recession, financial turmoil, new administration etc) does not support their efforts?
I think lawmakers are a lot less receptive to complaints from the RIAA when the economy is in the toilet and major US industries are in a death-spiral. I believe that the suspension of these lawsuits is only temporary.
I'm the IT director for a small private school. We are well on our way to having one laptop per student, and here's how we do it:
The computer is a tool to perform school tasks. Using the principal of least access, we only allow activities/applications that are related to classroom instruction.
We use MacBooks. No student has an administrative account. They are using the system, not modifying it.
We've enabled parental controls to keep track of the use of the laptop, and to prevent access to bad things on the internet. We also use a combination of OpenDNS, Cisco/Trend Micro filtering, Postini email filtering, and Sophos AV.
Teachers require the students to check in the machines each day. This allows us to keep track of the hardware.
We re-image machines if we have a problem. Students are required to keep their data on a flash disk, or on the servers at the school. If the data is not in either of those locations - too bad.
The bottom line is that if students don't like these restrictions, they are welcome to purchase their own computer, and do what ever they please, at home, under the supervision of their parents.
I can't believe that I'm seeing people here blame end users for this problem.
Consumers are now acting more like battered wives than ever before. Blame yourself - you are the problem...it can't possibly be the manufacturer's fault.
My car has a DVD player that CONSTANTLY moves around while it is playing - rough roads, fast corners, hard braking - the works.....and guess what - it has never scratched a disc - EVER.
Why can't one of the richest technology companies in the world figure out what cut-rate Chinese electronics manufacturers figured out years ago?
Both companies offer internet access without requiring voice or TV service to be purchased.
If you decide to buy two of the three services in their "triple play" packages, you may as well buy the third service since it typically only adds about $5.00/month.
Microsoft bundles office the same way. If you buy word and excel, you may as well buy the suite since it doesn't cost very much more.
Companies do this to get you hooked on all three services, and statistically triple play customers "ISP hop" much less than a la carte customers.
I'm the director of IT for a small private school, and I've seen, first-hand, how some teachers respond when they are asked to learn, or teach, something new.
We were a Windows shop for many years, and still are in some respects. We use a bit of Linux here and there, but we are transitioning to Mac OS on the desktop - for reasons that I won't get into here.
The initial pushback was bad, lots of teachers did not want to learn anything new. Eventually, the doubters saw how attracted students were to the new platforms - the smart teachers used that to their advantage - holding out use of the computers as a reward for doing other non-computer related tasks.
We finally have most of the school moved over to Mac OS. I'm sure Linux would have received a similar welcome. It's not Windows VS Linux VS Mac OS - in the minds of many teachers it's "something I already know" VS "something new that I have to spend time on".
I work in a school with a mix of Macs and Windows machines. We've run Sophos AV on all of these machines for a couple of years now and I found that by protecting the Macs, we've also enhanced the protection of our Windows machines.
One of our teachers attached one of those cheap digital photo frames to one of our Macs, and Sophos found and removed a Windows virus. We may have prevented the infection of her home computer by detecting the virus on a Mac.
While the Mac was not vulnerable to the Windows virus, having anti virus software on the Macs may have prevented a Windows infection at her house. No matter your platform preference, we can all agree that one less spam spewing bot on the internet is a good thing.
The entire computing ecosystem benefits from everyone running AV software.
I'm grateful that I have a computer science degree, it has enabled me to have a deeper understanding of all the things I administer on a day to day basis. It is nice to know how spanning-tree actually works on my switches, and how databases actually use data structures to store and retrieve data.
I'm not designing and building these systems, I'm installing, using, and maintaining these systems. Do I need a CS degree to do this? Hardly.
If you like installing and maintaining computer systems, but hate math and theory - don't go for a CS degree. You will be better served by doing your own research/training, getting some certs (RH, MS, Oracle, Cisco...etc) and if you are so inclined, maybe a 2/4 year IT Management degree.
If you want to build the products that people install and use (software more complicated than a web page or login script, hardware, firmware for embedded systems...etc) you will need to endure the math and theory that a CS degree requires (and possibly an Electrical Engineering/Computer Engineering minor as well).
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I have an iPhone, and yes I run pandora on it. It works great, and I enjoy it at home and in the car.
But that wasn't why I dropped Sirius.
I had two radios, and the high-quality internet subscription. After the merger, some of my favorite stations either went away, or the playlists got cut down to 20 songs.
I called and complained, but I was greeted with "sorry about that, how would you like two months free service?" Why would I want two more months of a service that sucks?
The last straw was the sound quality problems. Octane 20 sounded like it was underwater. I guess Sirius cut back on the bandwidth reserved for some channels to make room for some of the XM offerings.
In the end, it was bad music content, and terrible sound quality that killed it for me.
I do miss Howard, but I hope that he'll go online once Sirius XM goes tits up.
-ted
I've got all three, and I watch the HD feeds off of the antenna whenever possible. The picture quality beats both other systems by a long shot.
-ted
Again, the majority of my attorney friends all say that prosecutors will only bring cases they are sure of winning. This is especially true if the prosecutor in question has political ambitions beyond his/her current job. Why bring marginal cases you might lose? It only makes your conviction rate look weak.
If you make it to trial you've, most likely, already lost.
Two of my criminal law friends have not gone to a complete jury trial in over TWO years.
Prosecutors pick their battles, just like everyone else.
-ted
Falsehoods portrayed as truth happens every day on the Fox news channel. Why is this news?
OK, i'll bite.
I'm not a lawyer, I'm a computer scientist, but you can be damn sure that I'm going to give MY lawyer all the ammunition I can to defend me.
I'm going to have logs that "prove" I didn't do the crime.
I'm going to have "forensics" that "prove" my computers did not have the offending data in question.
I'm going to have hidden encrypted volumes 12-ways to Sunday - good luck getting to those without the NSA's help, or after my attorney tells me not to incriminate myself.
What most of my friends, who are attorneys, tell me is that law-enforcement is generally incompetent when it comes to investigating a case. Collecting evidence in a LEGAL manner is a complex and difficult process. These guys that barely made it out of the academy aren't lawyers and they will fuck it up. A good attorney will find a way to make the prosecution's evidence inadmissible.
Unfortunately, law is a complex thing. Gone are the days when the common man could defend himself. Today it's fight fire with fire.
-ted
Maybe someone with a law degree could enlighten me on the 5th amendment? Does it apply here?
"nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself"
If I am asked or forced to give up my DNA, could that not be considered witnessing against myself? If the 5th amendment applies here, why are police allowed to collect and store fingerprints?
-ted
I functionally name my servers (DC1 is Domain Controller #1...etc) I know, it's not terribly creative.
We have a front-end, back-end topology for our exchange servers. A while ago, some users wanted to directly connect to the server containing the mail database and asked me what the name of the server was.
After I responded "backend" I had a bunch of adults in a room giggling like teenagers.
-ted
Apple is releasing the next version of OS X soon called "Snow Leopard". The update centers around tweaks and performance improvements on the existing "Leopard" operating system.
Windows 7 appears to be a similar improvement to the existing Vista product, therefore, I propose that Microsoft should name the product "Vista Cruiser". Oldsmobile is no longer, so Microsoft could get the name for a song. They might even consider putting some fake wood grain on the sides of the box to enhance its marketing potential.
Hopefully Microsoft's next OS will be better than the car...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldsmobile_Vista_Cruiser
-ted
Microsoft has spent so much time bending over backwards for governments and lobby groups that they have lost touch with what their customers are actually doing with their products.
In most retail customer's minds there are only two versions of windows:
1. The one installed on the computer I bought
2. The one not installed on the computer I bought
That's it. How many people do you know of that made a stink about what version of Vista to buy? I don't know of a single person that bought a boxed copy of Vista. Every Vista user I know bought a computer that came with Vista.
Business users have similar simple requirements. Most volume license customers buy the version they can get cheapest. I don't know of a single volume license customer that bought Vista Ultimate. Why you ask? No volume license pricing exists for Vista Ultimate. Vista Business or Enterprise is what volume license customers buy.
Microsoft can't find their butts with both hands these days.
-ted
Fairness and honesty can hardly be called tenets of communism. Laws that enforce fairness and honesty in business practices foster faith in our capitalist system and provide a level playing field for all those that conduct business within the system.
Without laws protecting consumers, the playing field is very much tilted in favor of those with deep legal pockets. Consumer protection laws also force businesses to compete honestly so that the best product at the best price will succeed in the market.
I highly doubt you will find a majority of any population that actually wants businesses to operate dishonestly. Regulations enforcing fairness and honesty ARE consensus.
I find that most people that protest laws protecting consumers usually are the ones trying to game the system to their advantage at the expense of those who could least defend themselves in court.
It's not communism to keep people honest.
Sure, the boxes decode an "HD" signal. Yes they scale the HD signal down to 480i. You are right about this.
You are wrong about future pricing of these boxes - history is on my side here.
Here is a press release for a Microtune MT2131 chip that integrates analog NTSC, DTV, and digital cable reception capability onto a single chip:
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6311888.html
The chip's cost: $2.40 per chip (and this is from 2006 - they are probably cheaper now). No "magic pixie dust" needed.
Here is an HDTV decoder chip from 2004 that cost $18 back then:
http://www.st.com/stonline/press/news/year2004/p1494p.htm
This article details entire system on a chip designs that fell to $15 at the end of 2007.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_/ai_n25455222
Don't you think chips like this will enable set top converters for less than $40?
Technology history is full of examples of expensive stuff becoming really cheap, really fast. Why would DTV set top boxes be any different? You'd be a fool to believe otherwise.
Do you honestly believe that prices will go lower than $40 if the government is giving away that amount of money for each box? No businessman with a brain in his skull is going to charge less than $40 until the money dries up.
My post was meant to illustrate that this commoditization process can now occur naturally since the artificial prop holding up pricing has now been removed.
-ted
A short while ago, converter box prices bottomed out at $50, and that was before the Yuan/Dollar exchange rate turned to crap. Now just a few no-name boxes are just barely able to squeeze in at that $40 price point. It is absolutely amazing that any companies are able to make an HDTV converter for $40. Just decoding the MPEG-2 video at 19Mbit/sec takes more horsepower than a 2GHz Intel/AMD CPU can manage. And good luck finding a video card with hardware decoding (eg. XvMC) for under $40.
Who mentioned anything about HDTV? The converter boxes I am talking about do not support HDTV. As a matter of fact, decoding and outputing an HDTV signal made your box ineligible for the coupon redemption program.
What I am talking about are dirt cheap digital TV converters for standard definition televisions. Your CPU example is poor. A general purpose CPU will always have more overhead than a dedicated ASIC. There are a TON of companies that make MPEG-2 decoders that are dirt cheap (infact, they are found in $20 DVD players).
These boxes have already started dropping in price:
Here is a zenith for $29.00
http://www.consumerdepot.com/products.asp?id=DTT901R&referer=google
You can now buy 22 inch LCD TVs with ATSC/QAM/NTSC tuners built in for $299. It's not hard to think that stand alone ATSC tuners will go for less than $40 now that the subsidy is gone.
-ted
With a $40 government subsidy, the cost of converter boxes was guaranteed NOT to drop below $40. If you make the boxes, why leave that sweet government money on the table?
Now that the program money has dried up, maybe we'll actually see $10 or $20 boxes.
We may actually see converter boxes with more features as well. To qualify for the coupon, the boxes had to fall within a minimum/maximum spec set by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. If you made a box with too many features, then your box was not eligible for the coupon.
-ted
Microsoft is the General Motors of software. I've been saying this for years, and slowly Microsoft is proving me right.
Here are the similarities:
1. Low-quality products. Quarter after quarter, year after year, cranking out low-quality products that have persistent design issues.
2. Lots of overhead for a few products that do produce profits.
3. Ignoring the customer. How many times have calls for better/more secure products gone unheeded?
4. Incompetent management that has no vision.
Microsoft's long term health will end up like GMs - they have a mountain of cash, so it will take a while, but unless the above changes, Microsoft's fate will be the same as GM's.
-ted
You call TTAC's analysis obvious now with the benefit of hindsight, but I can assure you - two years ago, MANY people in the industry and on wall street were using terms like "too big to fail" and "GM will be around forever".
TTAC detailed problems with the Detroit 3's relationships with suppliers, stuffing their dealer channels to make quarterly numbers, as well as the asset sales and complex debt financing LONG before most of the newspapers realized that the ship was going down - fast.
TTAC is only one example. There are tons of other examples - you just need to find them. Once you do, newspapers are pretty much unnecessary.
I recently started a subscription to the Financial Times since I got it for free - I thought it would be interesting to get a European perspective on events occurring in the US. Still, by the time the FT lands in my driveway, it's old news.
-ted
Investigative newspaper reporting died over a decade ago. Newspapers today are nothing more than a collection of press releases.
The investigative reporters are now almost exclusively online. You no longer need a distribution network, and printing facilities. A good investigative reporter can setup a web site fairly easily, and if he/she is any good, the ad dollars will follow.
Take thetruthaboutcars.com - those guys called the demise of the American autos years ago - way before mainstream media. They were able to perform the in-depth financial analysis that the journalists at major newspapers simply ignored until recently.
Investors know this as well. Not many investors I know read newspapers any more for news. By the time the newspapers report it; the information is almost useless.
Goodbye newspapers. A generation of kids is growing up seeing the newspaper as obsolete as the typewriter.
-ted
Yes, in a small shop with a "basic" configuration, I can see how Mac OS X server would be the closest thing to a server "appliance" that you can get. Mac OS X server seems way easier to setup and maintain than Microsoft's Small Business Server.
Still, when you are a small/medium sized shop with an existing Microsoft Active Directory infrastructure, integrating Mac OS X server isn't easy - and Apple's support in these types of environments is lacking at best.
Leopard server had a bunch of issues when it was released, every issue I reported was greeted with "yup, it's broken - we'll fix it in the next service release". Unfortunately those releases are months apart. It took 6 months for Apple to give me Leopard servers that actually worked.
I have hope though - my contacts at Apple say they are evaluating the (support) needs of enterprise users.
-ted
Could it be that the RIAA realizes that these lawsuits might attract the attention of the new administration and decided that the political climate (recession, financial turmoil, new administration etc) does not support their efforts?
I think lawmakers are a lot less receptive to complaints from the RIAA when the economy is in the toilet and major US industries are in a death-spiral. I believe that the suspension of these lawsuits is only temporary.
-ted
I'm the IT director for a small private school. We are well on our way to having one laptop per student, and here's how we do it:
The computer is a tool to perform school tasks. Using the principal of least access, we only allow activities/applications that are related to classroom instruction.
We use MacBooks. No student has an administrative account. They are using the system, not modifying it.
We've enabled parental controls to keep track of the use of the laptop, and to prevent access to bad things on the internet. We also use a combination of OpenDNS, Cisco/Trend Micro filtering, Postini email filtering, and Sophos AV.
Teachers require the students to check in the machines each day. This allows us to keep track of the hardware.
We re-image machines if we have a problem. Students are required to keep their data on a flash disk, or on the servers at the school. If the data is not in either of those locations - too bad.
The bottom line is that if students don't like these restrictions, they are welcome to purchase their own computer, and do what ever they please, at home, under the supervision of their parents.
-ted
Is exactly the same as yours.
I'm the IT director for a small private school, and my "enterprise issues" are identical to yours.
My favorite question by Apple support, when calling about our xserves, is : "Is your xserve in a basic or advanced configuration?"
What does it matter? You sold me the product, support it no matter what the configuration.
Apple really needs to get their head around the enterprise. Why bother selling Xserves, and Xsans if you aren't going to support them properly?
-ted
I can't believe that I'm seeing people here blame end users for this problem.
Consumers are now acting more like battered wives than ever before. Blame yourself - you are the problem...it can't possibly be the manufacturer's fault.
My car has a DVD player that CONSTANTLY moves around while it is playing - rough roads, fast corners, hard braking - the works.....and guess what - it has never scratched a disc - EVER.
Why can't one of the richest technology companies in the world figure out what cut-rate Chinese electronics manufacturers figured out years ago?
-ted
Both companies offer internet access without requiring voice or TV service to be purchased.
If you decide to buy two of the three services in their "triple play" packages, you may as well buy the third service since it typically only adds about $5.00/month.
Microsoft bundles office the same way. If you buy word and excel, you may as well buy the suite since it doesn't cost very much more.
Companies do this to get you hooked on all three services, and statistically triple play customers "ISP hop" much less than a la carte customers.
-ted
I'm the director of IT for a small private school, and I've seen, first-hand, how some teachers respond when they are asked to learn, or teach, something new.
We were a Windows shop for many years, and still are in some respects. We use a bit of Linux here and there, but we are transitioning to Mac OS on the desktop - for reasons that I won't get into here.
The initial pushback was bad, lots of teachers did not want to learn anything new. Eventually, the doubters saw how attracted students were to the new platforms - the smart teachers used that to their advantage - holding out use of the computers as a reward for doing other non-computer related tasks.
We finally have most of the school moved over to Mac OS. I'm sure Linux would have received a similar welcome. It's not Windows VS Linux VS Mac OS - in the minds of many teachers it's "something I already know" VS "something new that I have to spend time on".
-ted
I work in a school with a mix of Macs and Windows machines. We've run Sophos AV on all of these machines for a couple of years now and I found that by protecting the Macs, we've also enhanced the protection of our Windows machines.
One of our teachers attached one of those cheap digital photo frames to one of our Macs, and Sophos found and removed a Windows virus. We may have prevented the infection of her home computer by detecting the virus on a Mac.
While the Mac was not vulnerable to the Windows virus, having anti virus software on the Macs may have prevented a Windows infection at her house. No matter your platform preference, we can all agree that one less spam spewing bot on the internet is a good thing.
The entire computing ecosystem benefits from everyone running AV software.
-ted
I'm grateful that I have a computer science degree, it has enabled me to have a deeper understanding of all the things I administer on a day to day basis. It is nice to know how spanning-tree actually works on my switches, and how databases actually use data structures to store and retrieve data.
I'm not designing and building these systems, I'm installing, using, and maintaining these systems. Do I need a CS degree to do this? Hardly.
If you like installing and maintaining computer systems, but hate math and theory - don't go for a CS degree. You will be better served by doing your own research/training, getting some certs (RH, MS, Oracle, Cisco...etc) and if you are so inclined, maybe a 2/4 year IT Management degree.
If you want to build the products that people install and use (software more complicated than a web page or login script, hardware, firmware for embedded systems...etc) you will need to endure the math and theory that a CS degree requires (and possibly an Electrical Engineering/Computer Engineering minor as well).
-ted