File a small claims case for the value of the CD plus court costs. This can easily hit $100, depending on court fees. Bring the player (stereo, walkman, iMac, etc.) into court. Show the judge the logos. It should be fairly cut and dried.
The point here isn't the $100, the point is forcing some manager to waste a day in small claims court. It might only be ten minutes if you are first on the docket, but it could be 8 hours if you get to sit around. If they try to settle while you are waiting in the court house, make sure you make them sign a form saying "this CD was defective for the purpose it was sold". And if they bring in a lawyer, dummy up and speak to the judge.
First, read "Hi Tech Heretic". If you still have questions, reread it. If you still have questions, there's not much I can do for you.
Turtle graphics. It's simple, and does something kids can appreciate. It is better at subroutines than most BASIC I have seen.
But really, if you knew why you had the computers there in the first place, you would have already answered your own questions. It seems someone wanted computers just to have computers.
That is basically correct. I am not a resident of DC, BTW. Not only do they have no voting representation in the US Congress, they have no ability to form their own budget. Further, only something like 40% of the land is taxable (all gov't buildings are tax exempt).
It's a serious clusterfuck, of gargantuan proportions. The city also tends to be used by various Congressmen for their own pet projects. In addition, the city is not allowed to count votes for certain ballot initiatives, if the suspected results would not be in accordance with the results desired by members of the House committee on the District.
DC has to perform the functions of a state, a penitentiary being the prime example, without having any of the funding freedoms given to every other state and territory. Not sure if this ever got resolved, but DC had to pick up the bill for an unfunded federal pension. As I understand it, DC was given control and responsibility of the pension of the city employees. But the federal government had 'borrowed' money from the fund and never paid it back.
You could almost argue why Puerto Rico, American Samoa, etc. have no voting rights. But to deny representation to the people living in the nation's capitol?
You can vote for the mayor, who figures out how best to spend the money that Congress may or may not have doled out. You can vote for the legislative group (council?) who can pass laws that Congress may or may not allow to be passed. That's all I can think of. Perhaps a resident of the city knows more?
GE Capital wasn't bad to deal with. Can't remember who we use now (Also can't remember why we switched. Or if we did. It's been a few years since picking up a new lease on equipment). A couple of things to recommend:
Make sure vendor doesn't get a good portion of the money until AFTER the contract is fulfilled. We had a big problem with this. Partially our fault, partially the lease company (not GE in this case). Which leads me to number two: make sure the finance company is dealing with only one person: YOU. YOU are the one who has to sign off when various stages of delivery are met. You are the one who has to be happy. They are not to send a dime to the vendor unless you say so.
Talk to your accountant. He can best explain to you what the terms should be from a tax and cash flow basis. Any advice to the contrary should be taken with a grain of salt. CPA's speak the language of the IRS.
Have a good idea now if you will be keeping or returning the stuff at lease end. If returning, budget for saving all those boxes. It will make life much easier. We always buy out at the end of the lease, so we pitch the boxes (saving a couple for shipping in case of bad unit after the lease is final). When making this decision, don't forget the cost in 3 or so years of reinstalling all these machines.
One thing I could never get an answer to: who owns the licenses, you or the lease company? I have a feeling this is something that may become an issue in the future. My reading is that all of the equipment is the property of the lease company. Reading the standard MS licenses, they may not be sold, transferred, leased, etc. Considering you are a random slashbot, I doubt you have a site license. But I could be wrong. Our policy: if M$ comes knocking, block the door. If they show up with subpoena's, torch the building. Actually, we have more licenses than machines running MS OS'es, but they are poorly documented.
See if you can swing a service contract for the length of the lease. It really pisses off CEO's to be paying for machines that are dead and/or costing money to repair. Also, your lease company might require it. BTW, this also depends on the savvy and time availability of in house folks.
To sum up:
1. Hold back some money (25% is a good amount) to make sure the vendor satisfies you. 2. Make sure one person and one person only can release money from the leasing company to the vendor. 3. Talk to CPA. 4. Begin making the decision now whether to buy out lease or return equipment. 5. (optional) Talk to attorney about licenses. 6. (optional) Consider service contract for length of lease.
Yes, it's much better to deny people the right to build a seawall, and then spend billions on beach reclamation projects. Sheeeeerrrrr Genius (said in Wile E. Coyote voice)
A better use would be to take the computer and beat in the skull of the head of the Army Corps of Engineers and the greenie-weenie's he serves.
There's nothing wrong with unions that the unions themselves couldn't fix. Traditionally, unions performed a gatekeeper role. They would say to an employer "this person is qualified to do job X". The company could go to the bank on that qualification. At some point in time (50's-60's ?) the unions by and large ceded that role. My brother-in-law works in a union that still subscribes to this viewpoint. If you don't pass union training, you don't move up. If you suck, you get moved down or moved out of the union.
In one scenario, you maintain business logic, info storage, display, and all sorts of other crap. In the other, you only maintain logic and display. It's easier to force your customers into lockin with some proprietary mish mash, but there are others (like myself) who will turn you down flat.
Internal stuff is similar. Do you want to maintain EVERYTHING, or just half of it?
I'm thinking Windstar if I wind up getting stuck in minivan mode. With any luck, there will be some decent large wagons available by then. How is the performance? Mileage?
No stick shift. I traded mine in and got a Mystique. Better looks, better handling, etc. Also, after the three that were in the family, I'm not interested in another unless they've improved the brake discs. The ones I've seen (a '90, '91, and a '94) all destroyed the front discs instead of having the pads go bad. The rotors were spec'ed a bit too thin.
All that said, when I'm ready to dump the Mystique, the Taurus/Sable are on the short list due to their phenomenal crash ratings (which you should have mentioned) and value.
For the sighted, there are major gains to be realized from GUI apps. But you do trade off functionality.
Even before losing her eyesight, my wife preferred text terminals to GUIs. She almost had a conniption when her Dos 6.2 partition died on her computer. The total upside is that she doesn't need to 'unlearn' the GUI tools.
If the parent poster is still reading, I always liked WordPerfect for DOS. With a multi-line braille terminal, you can have an editing line and a status line. What more do you need? Sounds like a perfect environment for VIM.
Nobody has discussed the privacy factor either. Perhaps my wife (or some random blind person) doesn't want the world to know she is browsing the Barney website (or whatever she browses). Text-to-speech prevents that. Hell, with a Braille TTY, I can't even look over her shoulder and see what she's doing. (Upside is she can't look over my shoulder and see me looking at pr0n).
I think you are on the mark in what you suggest for blind people. I believe links, lynx, w3m, and a few others support the functionality you mention. All you have to do is assign some sound player to handle.wav files and whatnot. It's not unlike choosing helper apps for Mozilla and others. Like I said, I'm a fan of WP5.2. Think we still have a copy around here. Will probably try to run it from one of the command line DOS emulators for Linux.
On the last thing: I'm no zealot. I'm typing this from a Win2k machine. But the command line for Linux is far superior to that in any current version of DOS/Windows.
First, there are no new ideas in teaching. It's the same old crap wrapped up in a new buzzword. The 'new things' my mother and MIL learned when in college were the same things with different names that my wife learned.
Second, you are going to be too busy the first year to muck about with computers for the classroom. If not, you're probably doing a disservice to the kids. (OTOH, if you get it going in the summer so that all you have to do is wheel them in...)
Are you going to support them? On a teacher's salary? How long until junior wants to see if the class goldfish can live in the CD rom drive? If not, do you have any idea how bad the odds are that someone who works IT for your school will have a clue? Again, good luck.
If you really have new, useful ideas, you could probably do more good sharing them with other teachers, not testing them on some unwitting students. If what you are thinking truly is new (and see my first comment: it probably isn't) you could qualify for some grant money. At this point, getting the okay from your principal is very important.
Finally, I strongly urge you to read High Tech Heretic. Even if you disagree with his conclusions, you should at least be able to argue against them intelligently.
The CLI is far more efficient for blind users. Particularly those with hearing loss. Learning the one system (a Braille TTY) allows the blind person to read, and insures it won't have to be learned at a later date if the hearing should go. The first point isn't specious; there are studies showing that text to speech 'solutions' are leading to a lack of reading ability amongst the blind. They more or less prove that listening to a book on tape is not the same as reading it, whether in type or in Braille.
All that said, I wish you luck. And let me add a caveat: good luck getting the project adopted. In my experience, government agencies aren't interested in anything but Windows. Whatever you come up with will have to be able to be set up by the end user or some helpful geek.
Well, since you are here, how much is true of the xenu stories on the net? (I won't comment on the validity of a space alien's dead remains being the cause of most human suffering. I believe that an anthropomorphic deity made all creation from his navel lint. Both require a bit of *ahem* faith.)
If there is a general website that gives the generalities of HIPAA compliance, I think it would help the average worker to understand much better.
Don't count on the government helping a great deal. There is a profit motive for the public to not understand how it works. That's the reason that the IRS doesn't have to give out accurate information on filling out your taxes.
Perhaps you or the parent poster could answer this question:
Why the hell should users have access to any configuration items? These are the company computers. The company is the one to pay for your changes to the system. The company is the one who pays to settle with the EEOC over your 'bikini babes screensaver'. If it weren't for licensing costs, we'd be all over Citrix. As it is, I can swap any two machines in our network (only about 40 terminals) and nobody is the wiser.
We have about 90% employees who made it out of high school. (The other ten percent are physicians and three others, including myself). We switched from a minicomputer with dumb terminals (some bastard vt100 rig) to Windows NT. Guess what? No problems. Users didn't have access to CD's, minesweeper, solitaire, control panels, floppy drive, etc. There is a network share in the off chance they need to save something. We spent one month training. And had almost no problems.
But economics, psychologists and other liberal arts types realize that human beings defy "nature" all the time. People who study economics essentially study the cases where economics don't work! Psychologists study why people are not rational/utility maximizers.
I can't speak to psychologists, because those people are nuts, but most economists I've spoken to are generally concerned with 'cases that don't work' only in that they are trying to improve the models. I would also disagree with placing either discipline in the 'liberal arts' category. They can (and usually are) studied as scientific disciplines. Yes, they are probably best termed 'soft sciences' relative to chemistry, but they certainly have more in common with biology than they do with English Literature.
(I canceled my Comcast modem and television service last week. Originally, I just wanted to get rid of the television service, but they told me that if I did, they were going to jack up my cable modem price by $15. I told them to cancel everything.)
I'll try not to be snide here, but without context, this sounds like biting off your nose to spite your face. Are you dropping the service because they make too much money? How do you determine that? Profit (to be distinguished from 'economic profit') is perfectly acceptable. How are prices set? A common misconception is that it is "(price of goods or services) + x%" where 'x' is an arbitrary amount that someone decides the company 'needs'. This is not true. Price is determined based on (here goes the ugly word) markets. In a transaction, both sides get a deal that is acceptable to themselves. If Comcast says that $100 per month is a good price for them (and how they arrive at that is often based on the above formula) that's fine. As a customer, do you feel you are receiving enough service for that $100 per month? That's all that matters. Why should a consumer care how much Comcast gets? All that really matters is what YOU get.
Slashdot Mirror
Blockbuster might have bandwidth, but the latency is a bitch.
Real Mac lovers don't bleed aqua; they bleed six colors.
You forgot step 3 b:
File a small claims case for the value of the CD plus court costs. This can easily hit $100, depending on court fees. Bring the player (stereo, walkman, iMac, etc.) into court. Show the judge the logos. It should be fairly cut and dried.
The point here isn't the $100, the point is forcing some manager to waste a day in small claims court. It might only be ten minutes if you are first on the docket, but it could be 8 hours if you get to sit around. If they try to settle while you are waiting in the court house, make sure you make them sign a form saying "this CD was defective for the purpose it was sold". And if they bring in a lawyer, dummy up and speak to the judge.
First, read "Hi Tech Heretic". If you still have questions, reread it. If you still have questions, there's not much I can do for you.
Turtle graphics. It's simple, and does something kids can appreciate. It is better at subroutines than most BASIC I have seen.
But really, if you knew why you had the computers there in the first place, you would have already answered your own questions. It seems someone wanted computers just to have computers.
That is basically correct. I am not a resident of DC, BTW. Not only do they have no voting representation in the US Congress, they have no ability to form their own budget. Further, only something like 40% of the land is taxable (all gov't buildings are tax exempt).
It's a serious clusterfuck, of gargantuan proportions. The city also tends to be used by various Congressmen for their own pet projects. In addition, the city is not allowed to count votes for certain ballot initiatives, if the suspected results would not be in accordance with the results desired by members of the House committee on the District.
DC has to perform the functions of a state, a penitentiary being the prime example, without having any of the funding freedoms given to every other state and territory. Not sure if this ever got resolved, but DC had to pick up the bill for an unfunded federal pension. As I understand it, DC was given control and responsibility of the pension of the city employees. But the federal government had 'borrowed' money from the fund and never paid it back.
You could almost argue why Puerto Rico, American Samoa, etc. have no voting rights. But to deny representation to the people living in the nation's capitol?
You can vote for the mayor, who figures out how best to spend the money that Congress may or may not have doled out. You can vote for the legislative group (council?) who can pass laws that Congress may or may not allow to be passed. That's all I can think of. Perhaps a resident of the city knows more?
I will cry tears of joy if it means that Exchange Server gets forced open to the extent that someone can make a 'PnP' replacement for that bastard.
GE Capital wasn't bad to deal with. Can't remember who we use now (Also can't remember why we switched. Or if we did. It's been a few years since picking up a new lease on equipment). A couple of things to recommend:
Make sure vendor doesn't get a good portion of the money until AFTER the contract is fulfilled. We had a big problem with this. Partially our fault, partially the lease company (not GE in this case). Which leads me to number two: make sure the finance company is dealing with only one person: YOU. YOU are the one who has to sign off when various stages of delivery are met. You are the one who has to be happy. They are not to send a dime to the vendor unless you say so.
Talk to your accountant. He can best explain to you what the terms should be from a tax and cash flow basis. Any advice to the contrary should be taken with a grain of salt. CPA's speak the language of the IRS.
Have a good idea now if you will be keeping or returning the stuff at lease end. If returning, budget for saving all those boxes. It will make life much easier. We always buy out at the end of the lease, so we pitch the boxes (saving a couple for shipping in case of bad unit after the lease is final). When making this decision, don't forget the cost in 3 or so years of reinstalling all these machines.
One thing I could never get an answer to: who owns the licenses, you or the lease company? I have a feeling this is something that may become an issue in the future. My reading is that all of the equipment is the property of the lease company. Reading the standard MS licenses, they may not be sold, transferred, leased, etc. Considering you are a random slashbot, I doubt you have a site license. But I could be wrong. Our policy: if M$ comes knocking, block the door. If they show up with subpoena's, torch the building. Actually, we have more licenses than machines running MS OS'es, but they are poorly documented.
See if you can swing a service contract for the length of the lease. It really pisses off CEO's to be paying for machines that are dead and/or costing money to repair. Also, your lease company might require it. BTW, this also depends on the savvy and time availability of in house folks.
To sum up:
1. Hold back some money (25% is a good amount) to make sure the vendor satisfies you.
2. Make sure one person and one person only can release money from the leasing company to the vendor.
3. Talk to CPA.
4. Begin making the decision now whether to buy out lease or return equipment.
5. (optional) Talk to attorney about licenses.
6. (optional) Consider service contract for length of lease.
Yes, it's much better to deny people the right to build a seawall, and then spend billions on beach reclamation projects. Sheeeeerrrrr Genius (said in Wile E. Coyote voice)
A better use would be to take the computer and beat in the skull of the head of the Army Corps of Engineers and the greenie-weenie's he serves.
One problem with Lexan is that it scratches easily. How does acrylic compare?
There's nothing wrong with unions that the unions themselves couldn't fix. Traditionally, unions performed a gatekeeper role. They would say to an employer "this person is qualified to do job X". The company could go to the bank on that qualification. At some point in time (50's-60's ?) the unions by and large ceded that role. My brother-in-law works in a union that still subscribes to this viewpoint. If you don't pass union training, you don't move up. If you suck, you get moved down or moved out of the union.
I believe that the actor who played Boone wanted out. In any event, it was straight into the toilet after he left.
Andromeda. Firefly is decent. Umm... Hmm. Yeah, guess you're right.
In one scenario, you maintain business logic, info storage, display, and all sorts of other crap. In the other, you only maintain logic and display. It's easier to force your customers into lockin with some proprietary mish mash, but there are others (like myself) who will turn you down flat.
Internal stuff is similar. Do you want to maintain EVERYTHING, or just half of it?
I'm thinking Windstar if I wind up getting stuck in minivan mode. With any luck, there will be some decent large wagons available by then. How is the performance? Mileage?
What's your favorite team? Raiders?
No stick shift. I traded mine in and got a Mystique. Better looks, better handling, etc. Also, after the three that were in the family, I'm not interested in another unless they've improved the brake discs. The ones I've seen (a '90, '91, and a '94) all destroyed the front discs instead of having the pads go bad. The rotors were spec'ed a bit too thin.
All that said, when I'm ready to dump the Mystique, the Taurus/Sable are on the short list due to their phenomenal crash ratings (which you should have mentioned) and value.
This is pathetic. 16 comments and slashdotted? Mirrors anyone?
For the sighted, there are major gains to be realized from GUI apps. But you do trade off functionality.
.wav files and whatnot. It's not unlike choosing helper apps for Mozilla and others. Like I said, I'm a fan of WP5.2. Think we still have a copy around here. Will probably try to run it from one of the command line DOS emulators for Linux.
Even before losing her eyesight, my wife preferred text terminals to GUIs. She almost had a conniption when her Dos 6.2 partition died on her computer. The total upside is that she doesn't need to 'unlearn' the GUI tools.
If the parent poster is still reading, I always liked WordPerfect for DOS. With a multi-line braille terminal, you can have an editing line and a status line. What more do you need? Sounds like a perfect environment for VIM.
Nobody has discussed the privacy factor either. Perhaps my wife (or some random blind person) doesn't want the world to know she is browsing the Barney website (or whatever she browses). Text-to-speech prevents that. Hell, with a Braille TTY, I can't even look over her shoulder and see what she's doing. (Upside is she can't look over my shoulder and see me looking at pr0n).
I think you are on the mark in what you suggest for blind people. I believe links, lynx, w3m, and a few others support the functionality you mention. All you have to do is assign some sound player to handle
On the last thing: I'm no zealot. I'm typing this from a Win2k machine. But the command line for Linux is far superior to that in any current version of DOS/Windows.
First, there are no new ideas in teaching. It's the same old crap wrapped up in a new buzzword. The 'new things' my mother and MIL learned when in college were the same things with different names that my wife learned.
Second, you are going to be too busy the first year to muck about with computers for the classroom. If not, you're probably doing a disservice to the kids. (OTOH, if you get it going in the summer so that all you have to do is wheel them in...)
Are you going to support them? On a teacher's salary? How long until junior wants to see if the class goldfish can live in the CD rom drive? If not, do you have any idea how bad the odds are that someone who works IT for your school will have a clue? Again, good luck.
If you really have new, useful ideas, you could probably do more good sharing them with other teachers, not testing them on some unwitting students. If what you are thinking truly is new (and see my first comment: it probably isn't) you could qualify for some grant money. At this point, getting the okay from your principal is very important.
Finally, I strongly urge you to read High Tech Heretic. Even if you disagree with his conclusions, you should at least be able to argue against them intelligently.
The CLI is far more efficient for blind users. Particularly those with hearing loss. Learning the one system (a Braille TTY) allows the blind person to read, and insures it won't have to be learned at a later date if the hearing should go. The first point isn't specious; there are studies showing that text to speech 'solutions' are leading to a lack of reading ability amongst the blind. They more or less prove that listening to a book on tape is not the same as reading it, whether in type or in Braille.
All that said, I wish you luck. And let me add a caveat: good luck getting the project adopted. In my experience, government agencies aren't interested in anything but Windows. Whatever you come up with will have to be able to be set up by the end user or some helpful geek.
NextGen, Alteer, Practice Partner, and Medical Manager our all Windows only apps.
For the first in the list, it's not fucking running at all, since it's taking them over a goddamned week to upgrade things.
Well, since you are here, how much is true of the xenu stories on the net? (I won't comment on the validity of a space alien's dead remains being the cause of most human suffering. I believe that an anthropomorphic deity made all creation from his navel lint. Both require a bit of *ahem* faith.)
If there is a general website that gives the generalities of HIPAA compliance, I think it would help the average worker to understand much better.
Don't count on the government helping a great deal. There is a profit motive for the public to not understand how it works. That's the reason that the IRS doesn't have to give out accurate information on filling out your taxes.
It's for walkup ATMs. It's just cheaper to make one machine for both instead of having a separate machine for drive-ups and walkups.
Perhaps you or the parent poster could answer this question:
Why the hell should users have access to any configuration items? These are the company computers. The company is the one to pay for your changes to the system. The company is the one who pays to settle with the EEOC over your 'bikini babes screensaver'. If it weren't for licensing costs, we'd be all over Citrix. As it is, I can swap any two machines in our network (only about 40 terminals) and nobody is the wiser.
We have about 90% employees who made it out of high school. (The other ten percent are physicians and three others, including myself). We switched from a minicomputer with dumb terminals (some bastard vt100 rig) to Windows NT. Guess what? No problems. Users didn't have access to CD's, minesweeper, solitaire, control panels, floppy drive, etc. There is a network share in the off chance they need to save something. We spent one month training. And had almost no problems.
But economics, psychologists and other liberal arts types realize that human beings defy "nature" all the time. People who study economics essentially study the cases where economics don't work! Psychologists study why people are not rational/utility maximizers.
I can't speak to psychologists, because those people are nuts, but most economists I've spoken to are generally concerned with 'cases that don't work' only in that they are trying to improve the models. I would also disagree with placing either discipline in the 'liberal arts' category. They can (and usually are) studied as scientific disciplines. Yes, they are probably best termed 'soft sciences' relative to chemistry, but they certainly have more in common with biology than they do with English Literature.
(I canceled my Comcast modem and television service last week. Originally, I just wanted to get rid of the television service, but they told me that if I did, they were going to jack up my cable modem price by $15. I told them to cancel everything.)
I'll try not to be snide here, but without context, this sounds like biting off your nose to spite your face. Are you dropping the service because they make too much money? How do you determine that? Profit (to be distinguished from 'economic profit') is perfectly acceptable. How are prices set? A common misconception is that it is "(price of goods or services) + x%" where 'x' is an arbitrary amount that someone decides the company 'needs'. This is not true. Price is determined based on (here goes the ugly word) markets. In a transaction, both sides get a deal that is acceptable to themselves. If Comcast says that $100 per month is a good price for them (and how they arrive at that is often based on the above formula) that's fine. As a customer, do you feel you are receiving enough service for that $100 per month? That's all that matters. Why should a consumer care how much Comcast gets? All that really matters is what YOU get.
Sorry, I lost it somewhere and started rambling.