OK, seriously Taco, my first post on your grammar skills in this article was poking fun, but what is that?!? Are you trying to say the editorials are in various stages of completion or competition? Spelling DOES matter, and that's why you guys run Slashdot (a quirky phenomenon of our generation to be sure) INSTEAD of writing for the NYT or Washington Post. I'm not a complete grammar/spelling Nazi, but the many mistakes made on Slashdot by the "editorial staff" make your work less than professional.
On a positive note, you and other editors do occasionally interact with your user base and have the thick skin to put up with our constant whining. I'm simply suggesting that you be more careful with your use of the English language to appeal to a broader demographic of people. Not everyone here speaks in C++ and Perl code on a daily basis, and appreciates decent grammatical correctness.
Another key component in Slashdot article formatting is to strip off the extra text in a submission. I have a mental image of how long a Slashdot story is. Many submissions are to long or to short. So I get out the scissors and start looking for sentences to cut.
Apparently adding those two extra o's to the "to long or to short" portion of the text above would have resulted in a complete slashdotting of this article due to article length!
Learn the fancy new business usage of mathematics: Six Sigma. Ultimately it's just applying logical, methodical thinking to business processes to understand (mostly with statistics) how best to improve sales, reduce operations costs, and improve processes. With your background in Math, getting the "Black Belt" certification shouldn't be too hard for you if you can find a company willing to use your skills in pursuit of you getting that Black belt certification. After that, there are more and more businesses with Six Sigma Black Belt consultants that you could work for. Maybe that's not exactly what you're looking for, but hopefully that helps point your thoughts in the right direction.
I'm no programmer, and I'm no pure sales guy, but my background in computer engineering and my ability to pick up quickly on math concepts has certainly helped me in my job and in attaining one step down from that black belt six sigma cert.
Wow! a few packet or two must have been dropped with that comment, because it hardly makes sense!
Anyway, what I was trying to say is that the opportunity cost is not necessarily worth it here. I know Daytona955i replied to my original post with math stating the guy is MAKING money sitting in the seminar, but that's not exactly true. He's LOSING money, via opportunity cost, by sitting in that seminar is what I was trying to get at. Maybe it's worth it if you have a family and you drag your wife and kids to that seminar too because they make no money, hence no opportunity cost to them, but for you, the job is paying you to go relax. A 4hr seminar about crappy timeshares I never intend to purchase is not my idea of relaxation, so that's opportunity cost to me, not salary.
Just because you're salaried doesn't mean you're losing money by wasting time outside of work on "vacation time" - it merely means the money they pay you for the hours you are at work is distributed more evenly throughout the paychecks you get during the year than it is for the hourly employee with 0 "vacation time." (or the commission-based employee who sees the most direct pay benefit from the work they do - sell one widget, get X dollars, sell lots of widgets, get lots of X dollars) Just because it appears that you're "saving money" on something doesn't mean that it's truly worth it in a purely dollars cost/benefit analysis.
But I'm not trying to play coy here; obviously there are varieties of Christianity which do insist on their interpretation of the Bible as absolute truth, and I don't think it's a coincidence that people who believe this way tend to be profoundly anti-scientific.
Well then at least add one person that maintains that the Bible does contain absolute truth, and who is also certainly not in any way unscientific. In fact, I find that science often only serves to validate that which I believe. And if you have a problem with what you may view as a serious contradiction between my faith and my viewpoints on science (that science is quite capable of modeling fundamental laws of nature), then by all means that's your problem not mine. To me, scientific reasoning and facts are simply a side-product of the absolute truths that I find in the Bible. They serve to validate what God has said to be true in the Bible. And yes, certain things, like Jesus being both man and God, will never be able to be scientifically proven, and I'm A-OK with that.
CmdrTaco:
"Now the real problem with this is what it does to the discussion. Last night a nice story was posted. It came from one of our "Problem" users. And dozens of comments were posted about this user. The conspiracy theories. The hostility. Now a lot of this is normal Slashdot Forum Faire. Thats fine. But the problem is that often when this occurs, it swamps out the real discussion. The messenger becomes the story."
I admit that my discussion with other/.ers at times wavers from the topic at hand. The point of threading and nesting on the comments section is quite simply to allow that kind of banter to occur about a nitpicky point from the main topic, or even to allow entire side discussions to occur. This happens in society all the time as well. When we read the morning paper, my wife and I will begin discussing one topic which leads us down a path of discussion that may have very little or nothing to do with the original topic... but it gets us talking to one another and discussing.
As much as I despise how retarded and offtopic things can get around here at times, there are still those gems of information, little known facts, and useful banter sessions that you can pick up JUST FROM READING THE COMMENTS. All those little bits of goodness is why I keep reading, why I can't stop reading, and why I keep commenting. I'm involved in the discussion, I'm a part of making a concensus on a variety of topics (even if it only lasts for a few days while the discussion rages on), and I get direct feedback on my thoughts from others with varying opinions and points of view. This type of activity engages me far more than just reading my morning paper ever will do. It's talking with others about the topics that makes it worthwhile to read "the news" - IMHO, and I'm sure others will disagree - GREAT!!
Take for example what I copied from your article. When a story submission from Beatles_Beatles or Roland Piquepaille (sp?) is swamped by us users making up conspiracy stories, theories, and conjectures and drowning out whatever BB or RP submitted a story about, obviously we're more interested in these infamous celebrities in our little geek world, just like the majority of the US is more interested in what crazy thing Pat Roberts will proclaim next (and the conspiracy theories around why he does it) than the actual content he presents. He's infamous to the entire US population, just as BB and RP are to our little nerd/geek population on Slashdot. If you really us to only discuss the topic posted, have fun deleting comments left and right every time you post something from these two characters (or the next one that comes along). But obviously you know that won't work because you already instituted a moderation system to allow us to deal directly with that issue - and obviously we LIKE smacking you guys around for posting so much from these two users who apparently have even less important work to do than all the rest of us; given the rate at which they submit stories.
Besides, you just admitted that you edit story submissions, and yet we have dupes and crappy grammar and spelling, and a dozen other problems with how well you guys perform the job of "Editor." So hire some real journalism majors to do a better job, or let us use the comment section to whine and bitch about your lacking facilities (an appropriate grasp of the English language) to our heart's content. Just don't go changing things. K5 and its policies is a wasteland of philosophy turds, IMO.
"Disney is nice, but it's not worth the $55+ per person per day, but it was worth 4 hours of my time which included a nice lunch buffet."
You're time must not be worth that much to you then. Even at a decent salary of ~$40k/yr, that's $76.92 of earning potential / relaxing potential you just threw down the drain attending that 4minar on timeshares I never intend on purchasing meets exactly none of those three requirements for how I wish to spend my time. Just making a counterpoint to your argument, that's all.
And to be more modest about my vehement beginning to this rant, I realize that at $40k/yr you would not necessarily have a lot of extra funds for "fun" activities, so going to this sort of detail to get a deal may indeed be worth it to you and your family. And no, not everything should revolve strictly around money. I'm just trying to point out that from a pure numbers standpoint, these sorts of things don't make financial sense for many people. (Just imagine if you were a lawyer billing out $250/hr. Wasting 4hrs of time in a useless seminar is $1000 removed from your bottom line!)
It's not "Canton City", it's just Canton. And, after having visited there recently, I can tell you it's a midwest town - NOT a city - where life moves just a bit slower than the rest of the country. You can tell by Mr. Fanchione's comments on the article that the police are "trying to teach this youngin' a lesson!" and think they're just so smart for arresting this kid. I agree with your sentiments about how important this really is in the face of actually dangerous stuff. There were all kinds of buildings in that town that probably need to be condemned because they're a fire and health hazard, but no, the 'authorities' are busy arresting kids smarter than they are.
Every packet arriving at "B" comes from a valid, routable IP address. This is REQUIRED as it has to acknowledge the data it's receiving. This is how TCP works. There's basically no way around it.
Yes, I know this, but if you track back the packet arriving at point A to point C, then where do you go? So what if point C got the packet, because you can't unencrypt (easily) which computer sent that packet to C in the first place. (As long as you have many packets coming and going through each node, which goes back to me saying you need lots of users to make it a viable p2p scheme for this sort of privacy to really work.) MUTE decrypts the incoming packet (with a valid TCP/IP address, I know how that works), and then re-encrypts the packet using client C's random seed for encryption, and sends it on to the next destination. Each node keeps doing this repeatedly, and ultimately you "could" track a packets origin if you could monitor EVERY connection to other nodes that a particular computer has, but if you have a lot of users on the network that can be quite a difficult task to accomplish. If you actually RTFA on MUTE's site you would realize this.
And don't think the RIAA/MPAA won't file a suit against thousands of Doe's.
I know they would against thousands, hence the need for LOTS of users as I originally stated. Millions of users is definitely different than a few thousand lawsuits. Judges wouldn't like sudden influxes of thousands of cases on their dockets all at the same time, which is what would have to happen. Sue EVERY network user, or none at all. You can't pin just several thousand "worst offenders" down in MUTE.
There's no network equivalent of floppy disks materializing out of thin air on your desk when no one is looking. Every packet is coming from somewhere; and that somewhere is tracable. You don't have to know an item is stolen to be arrested for possesing/selling it... encrypting the traffic being shuffled around will not protect you.
Again, if you had RTFA about how often MUTE re-seeds the random encryption on each client machine, you would understand that being able to efficiently, or even accurately track back which packet came from where is nearly impossible.
Look, I'm just trying to point out that you're putting too much reliance in a flippant comment from Bram Cohen. Woop-tee-doo, so yes everyone is not truly anonymous online. And no one is truly safe in their homes behind their security systems, however elaborate it may be. But using a full motion-sensored, video camera, ADT-style with rabid pit bulls off the leash prowling along the fence perimeter security system is certainly better than a couple of deadbolt locks on flimsy wooden doors, right? Same thing goes for a system like MUTE compared to a Kazaa.
No, you're not fully understanding how MUTE works.
A sends to B via C, fine. B is unaware of A, true. Watching the traffic at B will not incriminate A, also true. But it CANNOT incriminate C either, not by this train of thought. Basically MUTE is a network with encrypted, virtual addresses and encrypted searches that are seeded with their random values for the encryption algorithms at client runtime. Therefore, not only does B not know who A is, but A doesn't know who B is either. C, being simply an intermediary, could jump on or off of the network at any time, thereby causing re-routing through other nodes to get the content from point A to point B. So let's say C is simply downloading live performances - a well documented fair-use act. C happens to push some copyrighted content from A to B or vice versa while doing its own thing. 1) C cannot see the content going from A to B without decrypting the content, and C doesn't have the keys to do that since the transaction is A to B only. 2) no "spying" by a 3rd party would be able to incriminate any party because it doesn't have encryption keys to the content, and cannot determine exactly which addresses the content is going to or from without actively monitoring every single connection to any node from A, B, or C. (The virtual address for A, B, or C is dynamicly determined every time a connection is established I believe.) See MUTE's description on this topic here.
Now I will grant you that this type of network would only work well if used by a lot of users at once, to maximize node connections and re-routing over the network to make it nearly impossible for any outside entity to isolate any one node long enough to decrypt the virtual addresses and/or encrypted packets being sent over the network. OR an outside entity would somehow have to prove that a multitude of people are all engaging in illegal activity and go after the entire network all at once... again, a very nearly impossible feat with lots and lots of users.
MUTE is just not as simple as you made it out to be.
Such a thing already exists, but it's very much like Freenet, and therefore basically in a non-existent state since very few people use it.
From MUTE's homepage: MUTE protects your privacy by avoiding direct connections with your sharing partners in the network. Most other file sharing programs use direct connections to download or upload, making your identity available to spies from the RIAA and other unscrupulous organizations.
Because I didn't login to Amazon, so no, I'm not lying. Just because it has that portion in the link doesn't mean I make money off of it. Besides, go there yourself and search for the book. I gave the title. Sheesh!
I know you asked us to take your comment with a big grain of salt, so here's my salt:
Why is it that so many people assume kids are just little dumb animals running around all the time? (Granted, some of them with dumb animal-acting parents also tend to run around ACTING like a dumb animal... but that's a different topic.)
Children, even the very very young ones of 2.5yrs old and just barely speaking coherent sentences are just extremely inexperienced humans. Sometimes they will AMAZE you with their grasp of what you consider to be very tough social construct topics... like racism, addiction, anger, war, etc. Why is that? Because they are JUST INEXPERIENCED PEOPLE. Sometimes their comments about such things are cute or funny because they misinterpret what an adult said and used that as the basis for the incorrect reasoning of their comment, but sometimes they have just enough information to logically conclude some really profound stuff. Yes, ones environment can certainly shape experiences in ones life, but it doesn't dictate who we are as people entirely.
My point is that little boys like to play with toy tractors, and Lego's, and play sports, and blow stuff up because they just find that fun. Little girls like to dress up their Barbies, and play house, and cook with their moms because they just find THAT stuff to be fun. I have seen two children, one a boy, and one a girl from the same family and similar in age that will behave VERY differently about certain things. The girl will get upset about a grass stain on her dress and want her mom to wash it ASAP, while the boy is too busy running around kicking and throwing balls and getting muddy to even obey his mom when she wants him to come back to her to get some of the dirt brushed off of him. The girl is interested in talking and being "made over" about how pretty she looks in her new outfit, while the boy is interested in having you play "catch" with him. This all comes from observing children UNDER THE AGE OF 5! (and from multiple families with young kids)
Girls and boys are different! OMG, what a revelation! And each of us is unique, so sometimes guys will want to be in fashion design, and sometimes girls will want to be demolition engineers. Who cares?! We should be more happy when we're more unique than most people in our "profession" or "position in life" and don't want to follow the herd, but instead we think there should just always be 50/50 equality in everything. (But guess what? That doesn't even happen physically in nature since the mix of men to women is 49/51 or something like that.)
Just trying to provide some perspective on environment dictating who we become.
Process change is a tough thing to do in any company, because people like the status quo - it's comfortable and "known" to them. But you can accomplish change if your superiors see the bottom line needs for it.
The key things to focus on to get management to see your plight is to determine a way to measure your current state (how long does it take to perform workstation maintenance per day, per week, per month? How much time is spent doing any kind of security auditing? How many security incidents have you had this year? etc.), and then present suggestions for improvement on your current state as your expected future state that will SAVE THEM MONEY. This is always what business cares about: making or saving money! So if by being able to hire a clerk or tech to offload some of your current responsibilities it will save you company twice as much as the tech's salary per year, you've just proven the obvious and glaring need to do just that.
Also, provide them with a documented measurement startegy for the future to ensure that their investment in another employee is benefitting the bottom line.
If management still says no, and you've clearly made the case that another body is necessary to help you out in your current position, keep yourself open to the possibility that another company can use your help more than your current employer. Healthy companies are open to change when its needed. Unhealthy companies bury their head in the sand and cannot look past maintaining the status quo.
To actually answer this question seriously, they become professors or teachers, or they DO all go into management level positions.
It is my experience that if the programmer really loves the programming and scientific aspects of computers, they tend towards some sort of position in which they are training someone much more 'junior' to them in terms of skill in understanding and programming as a science. If they are someone who likes being a "people person" then they will tend towards a management position, and not necessarily just as a "programmer manager." I've seen a bunch of intelligent programmer types who work in the operations organization of a company. I think workflow processes and programming tend to go hand-in-hand since they both require rigorous analysis of a problem from many different angles, and a rather disciplined approach to solving problems. This lends itself to a career in managing the operations of an organization.
On the other hand, I think it's jobs like sales and marketing that the proto-typical programmer tends to naturally shy away from since there isn't much structure in such jobs. They require more raw, unstructured creativity and people-pleasing skills that the programmer type just doesn't ever tend to be so good at. Us programmer types prefer a bit more structured approach to problem solving (from our math/science background and expertise) to some free-wheeling, off-the-cuff non-structure that salespeople and marketoids are so good at handling on a daily basis.
It may also depend a lot on the company you work for. In my last job... tons of "young" programmers because the company wasn't that old, and was entirely reliant on the Internet to make its money. At my new job... tons of "old" programmers because the company is old and is not completely reliant on computers to make its money.
Well, I think you're right, but not necessarily due to virii causing havoc in the system, but due to user level programs, processes, and threads causing havoc. (As a "usual" type problem, as opposed to the completely show-stopping virii which absolutely WILL happen as you describe, and WILL be given the highest priority attention due to their completely destructive potential to ruin a whole slew of stuff with a couple of incorrectly placed bits.) Will Windows Vista be a pre-imptive kernel AND allow for pre-emptive user level processing? If not, which is probably likely in order to keep the programming, error-checking, and runtime speed levels DOWN, then Vista isn't going to be very successful at placing the video drivers in user space. There's so much opportunity for user space threads and processes deadlocking each other that no longer will it be BSoD's, but NSoD's (No-Screen of Death due to the video driver crapping out when some other user space program deadlocks it).
However, if the whole system will have pre-emption with appropriate deadlock-free operation (oh yeah, like Microsoft can actually pull that off with how gargantuan Vista already is), then putting the video driver in user space IS a good thing, even if it does require power hardware just to run at any acceptable level of responsiveness. Microsoft could just keep betting the farm that people will keep upgrading their computer to the next latest, greatest system, but I think that's a bad bet. CPU speeds have already peaked right around 3.5GHz, and aren't likely to increase for the next year or two at least, IMHO.
My guess is that Vista will contain some kind of hybrid version of a pre-emptive/non-preemptive kernel and user space like I described, and it will take both serious hardware to run it, and not be a completely error-free mode of operation for the casual user. (For the power users it will probably be quite a POS early on.) So all the soccer moms and Joe Sixpacks will stick with WinXP even longer than they hung on to Win98/Win2k and Microsoft won't see the gigantic influx of cash like they're used to. Meanwhile, Google will keep making some really cool things for Joe Sixpack on his Intar-nets and Microsoft will try to chase after all those bright, shiny things that Google has. Microsoft won't die, but I'm just not digging this Vista too much. So it's going to make searching for files really, really cool! Ooh, who cares?! I put my files where I can find them... I SEARCH for stuff online. Microsoft is losing touch with its best customers.
Funny that you mentioned Funcoland, because I once worked there from about Oct - Jan back around '98 I believe. I'll reply to each of your very good points on my thoughts on how that store ran vs. what this Ask Slashdot wants to know. I was just a regular employee, but one of the ones with the most responsibility after only a month because I wasn't a functional retard. The two managers that ran the store (both women, and uh... well... they had a thing for each other, let's just say that...) were sorta trashy types of people although generally nice and decent business owners. I think that their sometimes lack of customer focus and more running the business focus hurt sales at times since you'd get that occasional asshole customer and they didn't always deal well with such types of people, thereby causing a scene which EVERY SINGLE CUSTOMER THERE would witness. Anyways, on with my thoughts:
They dealt with used as well as new games. Sounds like you're doing that so you're already on good ground there. One of the reasons I liked shopping there was that it was easy to say "Well, I've only got $10, I wonder what Funcoland has today."
This did seem to be quite a draw for many local soccer moms with kids in tow. I was in college at the time, so I usually worked Saturdays and during the late afternoon/early evening hours. Moms with kids were the most often customers to come in, and I can't tell you how many moms looked overworked and tired and bored to even be there. I'm sure their kids felt the same way for the previous hour that mom was looking at shoes at the DSW Shoe Warehouse about five store fronts down from our store.
My point: the kids had $10 to spend on whatever they wanted (of course used games only pricewise) and sometimes they'd take a long time to figure out what they wanted. Give the moms somewhere to relax, read a magazine, or a TV to watch much like the salon. They'll appreciate that a lot I think.
They had a wonderful warranty system. If you bought a cleaning kit for the system, you got a one year warranty regardless of if it was new or used. I honestly would never have cared for that until Sony hit the market. As a plus, the cleaning kit was great to have around. (as opposed to just handing over some cash just for a piece of paper with 'warranty' written on it.)
I wasn't very familiar with how well this worked for the newer video games that are all on the easily scratchable CD/DVD/miniDVD formats because we were still doing a fair amount of SNES, Sega Genesis, and N64 business back in '98, but I do know that I was highly encouraged (with miniscule paycheck bonuses even) to upsell those warranties. I assume they made a good deal of money for the company. Most customers did seem to like them too, just based on the terms of the warranty.
Funcoland also had a club card. I think this is fairly common these days. Buy the card for $10, get 10% off every used game you buy for a year. Plus it came with a subscription to a magazine. It was definitely a good deal for the customers because it didn't take long to make that $10 back. Again, that encouraged me to come.
Again, a bonus to encourage repeat customer business.
Funco also had stations set up so people could try the game before they buy them.
Yes, this was pretty good, although it could have been better. The TV screens were tiny (14-19" if I remember correctly), and it was a pain to hustle out the interlopers and snotty little brats whose parents couldn't control them whenever somone else wanted a turn. Dealing with bad parenting skills was sufficiently annoying to me, and I was barely an adult myself at that time.
I don't know if you can pull this off, but I'll mention it anyway: Funco had a number of stores, so it was usually possible to get what you want. They'd make calls for you to find and hold what you're looking for so you can go pick it up. This seems unlikely for you for now, so I have an alternative suggestion: Are there other ma an
Email and Calendaring and calendar sharing and meeting, scheduling, and other Lotus Notes db type stuff IS important to many companies. Why force every person in your 20-person meeting have to individually update their own calendars when a simple email to notify them of a change would do the trick with almost no further user intervention?
Yes, I really like Thunderbird and use it at home, but I simply have too much to keep organized to just do away with Lotus Notes (or Outlook w/ Exchange) at work. And yes, both those applications can suck at times, but they really do make life a lot easier despite the sometimes annoying interface or bugs that they still contain.
"All of our studies are written as if they will be released publicly BUT it is up to the sponsor if the study is publicly released. The vendor knows that they're taking a risk. They pay for the research either way but only have control over whether it is published, not over content. So if their intent is to use it as an outward facing piece, they may end up with something they don't like. Either way, I think it's of high value to them. If there are aspects of the results that favor the sponsor's product, in my experience, it goes to the marketing department and gets released publicly; if it favors the competitors product it goes off to the engineering folks as a tool to understand their product, their competitor's product, and the problem more clearly. Either way, we maintain complete editorial control over the study and there is no financial incentive for us if it becomes a public study or is used as an internal market analysis piece. The methodology has to be as objective as possible to be of any real value in either case."
But isn't this part of the problem with vendor-funded studies? (Maybe it's THE problem)
This WOULD be fine if it were just science for the advance of knowledge, but in the case of studies of *products* somebody somewhere is looking to use the information to make a product purchasing decision, or to promote a new product. In other words, someone is looking to either save money or make money using the results of the study. But those two goals conflict. For the purchaser, they would like to know both the pros and the cons of all studies involving that product. For the seller, they want to know both the pros and cons of their product, but only want their consumers to know the pros, and minimize the cons as much as possible. Both of these positions make complete sense... except for the group conducting the study. You have two different types of customers that you are trying to satisfy with these studies, but only one group is paying you to do the study - the seller. Hence, the results ARE skewed in favor of the organization purchasing the study, because they maintain control over whether the study gets released to the purchasers of that seller's products or not.
In this case, Microsoft has a win-win proposition, whereas for the rest of us, the purchasers, it's a win-lose proposition. Only if the study is positive for Microsoft will we be given more information necessary to help us save money. But if it's a study that puts Microsoft in a bad light, we lose because we don't get to see such information to make a purchasing decision, and may therefore make an incorrect decision.
I'm still skeptical that these "industry supported" studies are fully worthwhile to us, the purchasers.
My wife's computer crashes repeatedly (WinXP Pro on a 6-month old Compaq laptop), and I still can't figure out what's causing it. Maybe it's all that software she's installed, re-installed, deleted-reinstalled-deleted-reinstalled, and just plain deleted so that she can actually run her solo-practice law firm, but I don't know which one it is, what errors or files in Windows are causing the problem, or anything. I've turned on error reporting, but so far it gives nothing but errors like: "The server stopped responding. Error code 0x0023AB023" and crap like that. What the hell does that mean?!?! I DO NOT have the tools or the knowledge to have any clue what 'error code 0x0023AB023' means - that's for the Windows developers.
Another/.er suggested that the reason Linux is "hard to install for the average person" is because the average person never installs an entire operating system. I think that is a completely true statement. Linux, Windows, MacOSX and any other OS installation is hard for the average computer user to install because the install program asks the user questions that must be answered! OMG, am I in EST, CST, or GMT time zone!!! OMG, where is my Windows?!? All I see is this funky computer screen asking me to "format a partition"... wtf does that mean?! Those are the types of responses any average computer luser is going to give when installing an OS from scratch.
Microsoft has done one thing, and only one thing right: partnering (or strong-arming those who don't want to be their "partners") with vendors of PCs to provide their operating system "free of charge" and preinstalled on each computer that the vendor sells to its customers. BillyG must have figured out pretty quickly that no matter how great and wonderful he wrote his software, the average idiot user would never totally "get it", and took to getting it installed on the PC before the customer ever even saw that step.
This is why so many people think computers are "Microsoft Windows" and vice versa. They see the interface, not the underlying mechanics. A "Ford" has a certain style to it and certain standard features, which makes it a "Ford." They don't care where all the engine parts, frame, tires, etc. come from that turn it into a "Ford," they just know it looks like a "Ford." The same exact problem exists with personal computers, hence the ever-present/. quip of tech support calls involving phrases similar to "my Windows is broken" (meaning: my computer is broken), or "I can't get on my internets" (meanin: my modem is broken and I can't connect to your company's servers). The average computer user just doesn't know any better - and usually doesn't care to know any better either.
I'm using the "normal" setting because the 3x and 4x brighness just blurs the hell out of any text on the screen.
Totally agree... 3x and 4x are basically unusable for programming, web browsing, or text editing tasks, etc. For gaming and graphics 3x is very nice though since it does bring out the colors and white levels of digital images and graphics in my experience. Personally I find that the 3x setting gives better color gradients than an LCD monitor, and an LCD also limits the resolution you can view an image by to it's default setting (typically 1024x768 for a 17" LCD or 1280x1024 for a 19" LCD) which can be somewhat limiting to the graphical artist.
Yes, the CRT has a lighter black hue, but I haven't found that to be a problem for graphics or images. But for programming, again, I can see why you would prefer the LCD screen. (blacker letters that stand out better) Personal preference matters most, so whatever works for you is fine by me!
Slashdot Mirror
OK, seriously Taco, my first post on your grammar skills in this article was poking fun, but what is that?!? Are you trying to say the editorials are in various stages of completion or competition? Spelling DOES matter, and that's why you guys run Slashdot (a quirky phenomenon of our generation to be sure) INSTEAD of writing for the NYT or Washington Post. I'm not a complete grammar/spelling Nazi, but the many mistakes made on Slashdot by the "editorial staff" make your work less than professional.
On a positive note, you and other editors do occasionally interact with your user base and have the thick skin to put up with our constant whining. I'm simply suggesting that you be more careful with your use of the English language to appeal to a broader demographic of people. Not everyone here speaks in C++ and Perl code on a daily basis, and appreciates decent grammatical correctness.
Apparently adding those two extra o's to the "to long or to short" portion of the text above would have resulted in a complete slashdotting of this article due to article length!
I'm no programmer, and I'm no pure sales guy, but my background in computer engineering and my ability to pick up quickly on math concepts has certainly helped me in my job and in attaining one step down from that black belt six sigma cert.
Wow! a few packet or two must have been dropped with that comment, because it hardly makes sense!
Anyway, what I was trying to say is that the opportunity cost is not necessarily worth it here. I know Daytona955i replied to my original post with math stating the guy is MAKING money sitting in the seminar, but that's not exactly true. He's LOSING money, via opportunity cost, by sitting in that seminar is what I was trying to get at. Maybe it's worth it if you have a family and you drag your wife and kids to that seminar too because they make no money, hence no opportunity cost to them, but for you, the job is paying you to go relax. A 4hr seminar about crappy timeshares I never intend to purchase is not my idea of relaxation, so that's opportunity cost to me, not salary.
Just because you're salaried doesn't mean you're losing money by wasting time outside of work on "vacation time" - it merely means the money they pay you for the hours you are at work is distributed more evenly throughout the paychecks you get during the year than it is for the hourly employee with 0 "vacation time." (or the commission-based employee who sees the most direct pay benefit from the work they do - sell one widget, get X dollars, sell lots of widgets, get lots of X dollars) Just because it appears that you're "saving money" on something doesn't mean that it's truly worth it in a purely dollars cost/benefit analysis.
Well then at least add one person that maintains that the Bible does contain absolute truth, and who is also certainly not in any way unscientific. In fact, I find that science often only serves to validate that which I believe. And if you have a problem with what you may view as a serious contradiction between my faith and my viewpoints on science (that science is quite capable of modeling fundamental laws of nature), then by all means that's your problem not mine. To me, scientific reasoning and facts are simply a side-product of the absolute truths that I find in the Bible. They serve to validate what God has said to be true in the Bible. And yes, certain things, like Jesus being both man and God, will never be able to be scientifically proven, and I'm A-OK with that.
I admit that my discussion with other /.ers at times wavers from the topic at hand. The point of threading and nesting on the comments section is quite simply to allow that kind of banter to occur about a nitpicky point from the main topic, or even to allow entire side discussions to occur. This happens in society all the time as well. When we read the morning paper, my wife and I will begin discussing one topic which leads us down a path of discussion that may have very little or nothing to do with the original topic... but it gets us talking to one another and discussing.
As much as I despise how retarded and offtopic things can get around here at times, there are still those gems of information, little known facts, and useful banter sessions that you can pick up JUST FROM READING THE COMMENTS. All those little bits of goodness is why I keep reading, why I can't stop reading, and why I keep commenting. I'm involved in the discussion, I'm a part of making a concensus on a variety of topics (even if it only lasts for a few days while the discussion rages on), and I get direct feedback on my thoughts from others with varying opinions and points of view. This type of activity engages me far more than just reading my morning paper ever will do. It's talking with others about the topics that makes it worthwhile to read "the news" - IMHO, and I'm sure others will disagree - GREAT!!
Take for example what I copied from your article. When a story submission from Beatles_Beatles or Roland Piquepaille (sp?) is swamped by us users making up conspiracy stories, theories, and conjectures and drowning out whatever BB or RP submitted a story about, obviously we're more interested in these infamous celebrities in our little geek world, just like the majority of the US is more interested in what crazy thing Pat Roberts will proclaim next (and the conspiracy theories around why he does it) than the actual content he presents. He's infamous to the entire US population, just as BB and RP are to our little nerd/geek population on Slashdot. If you really us to only discuss the topic posted, have fun deleting comments left and right every time you post something from these two characters (or the next one that comes along). But obviously you know that won't work because you already instituted a moderation system to allow us to deal directly with that issue - and obviously we LIKE smacking you guys around for posting so much from these two users who apparently have even less important work to do than all the rest of us; given the rate at which they submit stories.
Besides, you just admitted that you edit story submissions, and yet we have dupes and crappy grammar and spelling, and a dozen other problems with how well you guys perform the job of "Editor." So hire some real journalism majors to do a better job, or let us use the comment section to whine and bitch about your lacking facilities (an appropriate grasp of the English language) to our heart's content. Just don't go changing things. K5 and its policies is a wasteland of philosophy turds, IMO.
You're time must not be worth that much to you then. Even at a decent salary of ~$40k/yr, that's $76.92 of earning potential / relaxing potential you just threw down the drain attending that 4minar on timeshares I never intend on purchasing meets exactly none of those three requirements for how I wish to spend my time. Just making a counterpoint to your argument, that's all.
And to be more modest about my vehement beginning to this rant, I realize that at $40k/yr you would not necessarily have a lot of extra funds for "fun" activities, so going to this sort of detail to get a deal may indeed be worth it to you and your family. And no, not everything should revolve strictly around money. I'm just trying to point out that from a pure numbers standpoint, these sorts of things don't make financial sense for many people. (Just imagine if you were a lawyer billing out $250/hr. Wasting 4hrs of time in a useless seminar is $1000 removed from your bottom line!)
It's not "Canton City", it's just Canton. And, after having visited there recently, I can tell you it's a midwest town - NOT a city - where life moves just a bit slower than the rest of the country. You can tell by Mr. Fanchione's comments on the article that the police are "trying to teach this youngin' a lesson!" and think they're just so smart for arresting this kid. I agree with your sentiments about how important this really is in the face of actually dangerous stuff. There were all kinds of buildings in that town that probably need to be condemned because they're a fire and health hazard, but no, the 'authorities' are busy arresting kids smarter than they are.
Personally, I don't think I care much about Yahoo!'s newfangled service. Looks like just more "content pushing" technology which failed back in '99.
Heh, and you think you're only joking... if only it were that easy. LOL
Every packet arriving at "B" comes from a valid, routable IP address. This is REQUIRED as it has to acknowledge the data it's receiving. This is how TCP works. There's basically no way around it.
Yes, I know this, but if you track back the packet arriving at point A to point C, then where do you go? So what if point C got the packet, because you can't unencrypt (easily) which computer sent that packet to C in the first place. (As long as you have many packets coming and going through each node, which goes back to me saying you need lots of users to make it a viable p2p scheme for this sort of privacy to really work.) MUTE decrypts the incoming packet (with a valid TCP/IP address, I know how that works), and then re-encrypts the packet using client C's random seed for encryption, and sends it on to the next destination. Each node keeps doing this repeatedly, and ultimately you "could" track a packets origin if you could monitor EVERY connection to other nodes that a particular computer has, but if you have a lot of users on the network that can be quite a difficult task to accomplish. If you actually RTFA on MUTE's site you would realize this.
And don't think the RIAA/MPAA won't file a suit against thousands of Doe's.
I know they would against thousands, hence the need for LOTS of users as I originally stated. Millions of users is definitely different than a few thousand lawsuits. Judges wouldn't like sudden influxes of thousands of cases on their dockets all at the same time, which is what would have to happen. Sue EVERY network user, or none at all. You can't pin just several thousand "worst offenders" down in MUTE.
There's no network equivalent of floppy disks materializing out of thin air on your desk when no one is looking. Every packet is coming from somewhere; and that somewhere is tracable. You don't have to know an item is stolen to be arrested for possesing/selling it... encrypting the traffic being shuffled around will not protect you.
Again, if you had RTFA about how often MUTE re-seeds the random encryption on each client machine, you would understand that being able to efficiently, or even accurately track back which packet came from where is nearly impossible.
Look, I'm just trying to point out that you're putting too much reliance in a flippant comment from Bram Cohen. Woop-tee-doo, so yes everyone is not truly anonymous online. And no one is truly safe in their homes behind their security systems, however elaborate it may be. But using a full motion-sensored, video camera, ADT-style with rabid pit bulls off the leash prowling along the fence perimeter security system is certainly better than a couple of deadbolt locks on flimsy wooden doors, right? Same thing goes for a system like MUTE compared to a Kazaa.
A sends to B via C, fine. B is unaware of A, true. Watching the traffic at B will not incriminate A, also true. But it CANNOT incriminate C either, not by this train of thought. Basically MUTE is a network with encrypted, virtual addresses and encrypted searches that are seeded with their random values for the encryption algorithms at client runtime. Therefore, not only does B not know who A is, but A doesn't know who B is either. C, being simply an intermediary, could jump on or off of the network at any time, thereby causing re-routing through other nodes to get the content from point A to point B. So let's say C is simply downloading live performances - a well documented fair-use act. C happens to push some copyrighted content from A to B or vice versa while doing its own thing. 1) C cannot see the content going from A to B without decrypting the content, and C doesn't have the keys to do that since the transaction is A to B only. 2) no "spying" by a 3rd party would be able to incriminate any party because it doesn't have encryption keys to the content, and cannot determine exactly which addresses the content is going to or from without actively monitoring every single connection to any node from A, B, or C. (The virtual address for A, B, or C is dynamicly determined every time a connection is established I believe.) See MUTE's description on this topic here.
Now I will grant you that this type of network would only work well if used by a lot of users at once, to maximize node connections and re-routing over the network to make it nearly impossible for any outside entity to isolate any one node long enough to decrypt the virtual addresses and/or encrypted packets being sent over the network. OR an outside entity would somehow have to prove that a multitude of people are all engaging in illegal activity and go after the entire network all at once... again, a very nearly impossible feat with lots and lots of users.
MUTE is just not as simple as you made it out to be.
From MUTE's homepage:
MUTE protects your privacy by avoiding direct connections with your sharing partners in the network. Most other file sharing programs use direct connections to download or upload, making your identity available to spies from the RIAA and other unscrupulous organizations.
Because I didn't login to Amazon, so no, I'm not lying. Just because it has that portion in the link doesn't mean I make money off of it. Besides, go there yourself and search for the book. I gave the title. Sheesh!
I know you asked us to take your comment with a big grain of salt, so here's my salt:
Why is it that so many people assume kids are just little dumb animals running around all the time? (Granted, some of them with dumb animal-acting parents also tend to run around ACTING like a dumb animal... but that's a different topic.)
Children, even the very very young ones of 2.5yrs old and just barely speaking coherent sentences are just extremely inexperienced humans. Sometimes they will AMAZE you with their grasp of what you consider to be very tough social construct topics... like racism, addiction, anger, war, etc. Why is that? Because they are JUST INEXPERIENCED PEOPLE. Sometimes their comments about such things are cute or funny because they misinterpret what an adult said and used that as the basis for the incorrect reasoning of their comment, but sometimes they have just enough information to logically conclude some really profound stuff. Yes, ones environment can certainly shape experiences in ones life, but it doesn't dictate who we are as people entirely.
My point is that little boys like to play with toy tractors, and Lego's, and play sports, and blow stuff up because they just find that fun. Little girls like to dress up their Barbies, and play house, and cook with their moms because they just find THAT stuff to be fun. I have seen two children, one a boy, and one a girl from the same family and similar in age that will behave VERY differently about certain things. The girl will get upset about a grass stain on her dress and want her mom to wash it ASAP, while the boy is too busy running around kicking and throwing balls and getting muddy to even obey his mom when she wants him to come back to her to get some of the dirt brushed off of him. The girl is interested in talking and being "made over" about how pretty she looks in her new outfit, while the boy is interested in having you play "catch" with him. This all comes from observing children UNDER THE AGE OF 5! (and from multiple families with young kids)
Girls and boys are different! OMG, what a revelation! And each of us is unique, so sometimes guys will want to be in fashion design, and sometimes girls will want to be demolition engineers. Who cares?! We should be more happy when we're more unique than most people in our "profession" or "position in life" and don't want to follow the herd, but instead we think there should just always be 50/50 equality in everything. (But guess what? That doesn't even happen physically in nature since the mix of men to women is 49/51 or something like that.)
Just trying to provide some perspective on environment dictating who we become.
My suggestion is get a simple book on change, perferably something on Six Sigma practices. Something like this book from Amazon (or elsewhere, it's not a referrer link) would be appropriate for you I think: Lean Six Sigma for Service : How to Use Lean Speed and Six Sigma Quality to Improve Services and Transactions.
The key things to focus on to get management to see your plight is to determine a way to measure your current state (how long does it take to perform workstation maintenance per day, per week, per month? How much time is spent doing any kind of security auditing? How many security incidents have you had this year? etc.), and then present suggestions for improvement on your current state as your expected future state that will SAVE THEM MONEY. This is always what business cares about: making or saving money! So if by being able to hire a clerk or tech to offload some of your current responsibilities it will save you company twice as much as the tech's salary per year, you've just proven the obvious and glaring need to do just that.
Also, provide them with a documented measurement startegy for the future to ensure that their investment in another employee is benefitting the bottom line.
If management still says no, and you've clearly made the case that another body is necessary to help you out in your current position, keep yourself open to the possibility that another company can use your help more than your current employer. Healthy companies are open to change when its needed. Unhealthy companies bury their head in the sand and cannot look past maintaining the status quo.
To actually answer this question seriously, they become professors or teachers, or they DO all go into management level positions.
It is my experience that if the programmer really loves the programming and scientific aspects of computers, they tend towards some sort of position in which they are training someone much more 'junior' to them in terms of skill in understanding and programming as a science. If they are someone who likes being a "people person" then they will tend towards a management position, and not necessarily just as a "programmer manager." I've seen a bunch of intelligent programmer types who work in the operations organization of a company. I think workflow processes and programming tend to go hand-in-hand since they both require rigorous analysis of a problem from many different angles, and a rather disciplined approach to solving problems. This lends itself to a career in managing the operations of an organization.
On the other hand, I think it's jobs like sales and marketing that the proto-typical programmer tends to naturally shy away from since there isn't much structure in such jobs. They require more raw, unstructured creativity and people-pleasing skills that the programmer type just doesn't ever tend to be so good at. Us programmer types prefer a bit more structured approach to problem solving (from our math/science background and expertise) to some free-wheeling, off-the-cuff non-structure that salespeople and marketoids are so good at handling on a daily basis.
It may also depend a lot on the company you work for. In my last job... tons of "young" programmers because the company wasn't that old, and was entirely reliant on the Internet to make its money. At my new job... tons of "old" programmers because the company is old and is not completely reliant on computers to make its money.
Well, I think you're right, but not necessarily due to virii causing havoc in the system, but due to user level programs, processes, and threads causing havoc. (As a "usual" type problem, as opposed to the completely show-stopping virii which absolutely WILL happen as you describe, and WILL be given the highest priority attention due to their completely destructive potential to ruin a whole slew of stuff with a couple of incorrectly placed bits.) Will Windows Vista be a pre-imptive kernel AND allow for pre-emptive user level processing? If not, which is probably likely in order to keep the programming, error-checking, and runtime speed levels DOWN, then Vista isn't going to be very successful at placing the video drivers in user space. There's so much opportunity for user space threads and processes deadlocking each other that no longer will it be BSoD's, but NSoD's (No-Screen of Death due to the video driver crapping out when some other user space program deadlocks it).
However, if the whole system will have pre-emption with appropriate deadlock-free operation (oh yeah, like Microsoft can actually pull that off with how gargantuan Vista already is), then putting the video driver in user space IS a good thing, even if it does require power hardware just to run at any acceptable level of responsiveness. Microsoft could just keep betting the farm that people will keep upgrading their computer to the next latest, greatest system, but I think that's a bad bet. CPU speeds have already peaked right around 3.5GHz, and aren't likely to increase for the next year or two at least, IMHO.
My guess is that Vista will contain some kind of hybrid version of a pre-emptive/non-preemptive kernel and user space like I described, and it will take both serious hardware to run it, and not be a completely error-free mode of operation for the casual user. (For the power users it will probably be quite a POS early on.) So all the soccer moms and Joe Sixpacks will stick with WinXP even longer than they hung on to Win98/Win2k and Microsoft won't see the gigantic influx of cash like they're used to. Meanwhile, Google will keep making some really cool things for Joe Sixpack on his Intar-nets and Microsoft will try to chase after all those bright, shiny things that Google has. Microsoft won't die, but I'm just not digging this Vista too much. So it's going to make searching for files really, really cool! Ooh, who cares?! I put my files where I can find them... I SEARCH for stuff online. Microsoft is losing touch with its best customers.
Pretty good, although you need to add a "thinking" graphic so that I don't keep clicking the 'recommend' button hoping to get something back.
OK, Tommy Boy...
"There's two kinds of smarts, book smarts, which waved "bye-bye!" to you long ago, and street smarts, the ability to read people."
You really shouldn't be learning your life lessons from a comedy movie starring Chris Farley and David Spade.
Funny that you mentioned Funcoland, because I once worked there from about Oct - Jan back around '98 I believe. I'll reply to each of your very good points on my thoughts on how that store ran vs. what this Ask Slashdot wants to know. I was just a regular employee, but one of the ones with the most responsibility after only a month because I wasn't a functional retard. The two managers that ran the store (both women, and uh... well... they had a thing for each other, let's just say that...) were sorta trashy types of people although generally nice and decent business owners. I think that their sometimes lack of customer focus and more running the business focus hurt sales at times since you'd get that occasional asshole customer and they didn't always deal well with such types of people, thereby causing a scene which EVERY SINGLE CUSTOMER THERE would witness. Anyways, on with my thoughts:
This did seem to be quite a draw for many local soccer moms with kids in tow. I was in college at the time, so I usually worked Saturdays and during the late afternoon/early evening hours. Moms with kids were the most often customers to come in, and I can't tell you how many moms looked overworked and tired and bored to even be there. I'm sure their kids felt the same way for the previous hour that mom was looking at shoes at the DSW Shoe Warehouse about five store fronts down from our store.
My point: the kids had $10 to spend on whatever they wanted (of course used games only pricewise) and sometimes they'd take a long time to figure out what they wanted. Give the moms somewhere to relax, read a magazine, or a TV to watch much like the salon. They'll appreciate that a lot I think.
I wasn't very familiar with how well this worked for the newer video games that are all on the easily scratchable CD/DVD/miniDVD formats because we were still doing a fair amount of SNES, Sega Genesis, and N64 business back in '98, but I do know that I was highly encouraged (with miniscule paycheck bonuses even) to upsell those warranties. I assume they made a good deal of money for the company. Most customers did seem to like them too, just based on the terms of the warranty.
Again, a bonus to encourage repeat customer business.
Yes, this was pretty good, although it could have been better. The TV screens were tiny (14-19" if I remember correctly), and it was a pain to hustle out the interlopers and snotty little brats whose parents couldn't control them whenever somone else wanted a turn. Dealing with bad parenting skills was sufficiently annoying to me, and I was barely an adult myself at that time.
Email and Calendaring and calendar sharing and meeting, scheduling, and other Lotus Notes db type stuff IS important to many companies. Why force every person in your 20-person meeting have to individually update their own calendars when a simple email to notify them of a change would do the trick with almost no further user intervention?
Yes, I really like Thunderbird and use it at home, but I simply have too much to keep organized to just do away with Lotus Notes (or Outlook w/ Exchange) at work. And yes, both those applications can suck at times, but they really do make life a lot easier despite the sometimes annoying interface or bugs that they still contain.
"All of our studies are written as if they will be released publicly BUT it is up to the sponsor if the study is publicly released. The vendor knows that they're taking a risk. They pay for the research either way but only have control over whether it is published, not over content. So if their intent is to use it as an outward facing piece, they may end up with something they don't like. Either way, I think it's of high value to them. If there are aspects of the results that favor the sponsor's product, in my experience, it goes to the marketing department and gets released publicly; if it favors the competitors product it goes off to the engineering folks as a tool to understand their product, their competitor's product, and the problem more clearly. Either way, we maintain complete editorial control over the study and there is no financial incentive for us if it becomes a public study or is used as an internal market analysis piece. The methodology has to be as objective as possible to be of any real value in either case."
But isn't this part of the problem with vendor-funded studies? (Maybe it's THE problem)
This WOULD be fine if it were just science for the advance of knowledge, but in the case of studies of *products* somebody somewhere is looking to use the information to make a product purchasing decision, or to promote a new product. In other words, someone is looking to either save money or make money using the results of the study. But those two goals conflict. For the purchaser, they would like to know both the pros and the cons of all studies involving that product. For the seller, they want to know both the pros and cons of their product, but only want their consumers to know the pros, and minimize the cons as much as possible. Both of these positions make complete sense... except for the group conducting the study. You have two different types of customers that you are trying to satisfy with these studies, but only one group is paying you to do the study - the seller. Hence, the results ARE skewed in favor of the organization purchasing the study, because they maintain control over whether the study gets released to the purchasers of that seller's products or not.
In this case, Microsoft has a win-win proposition, whereas for the rest of us, the purchasers, it's a win-lose proposition. Only if the study is positive for Microsoft will we be given more information necessary to help us save money. But if it's a study that puts Microsoft in a bad light, we lose because we don't get to see such information to make a purchasing decision, and may therefore make an incorrect decision.
I'm still skeptical that these "industry supported" studies are fully worthwhile to us, the purchasers.
My wife's computer crashes repeatedly (WinXP Pro on a 6-month old Compaq laptop), and I still can't figure out what's causing it. Maybe it's all that software she's installed, re-installed, deleted-reinstalled-deleted-reinstalled, and just plain deleted so that she can actually run her solo-practice law firm, but I don't know which one it is, what errors or files in Windows are causing the problem, or anything. I've turned on error reporting, but so far it gives nothing but errors like: "The server stopped responding. Error code 0x0023AB023" and crap like that. What the hell does that mean?!?! I DO NOT have the tools or the knowledge to have any clue what 'error code 0x0023AB023' means - that's for the Windows developers.
/.er suggested that the reason Linux is "hard to install for the average person" is because the average person never installs an entire operating system. I think that is a completely true statement. Linux, Windows, MacOSX and any other OS installation is hard for the average computer user to install because the install program asks the user questions that must be answered! OMG, am I in EST, CST, or GMT time zone!!! OMG, where is my Windows?!? All I see is this funky computer screen asking me to "format a partition"... wtf does that mean?! Those are the types of responses any average computer luser is going to give when installing an OS from scratch.
/. quip of tech support calls involving phrases similar to "my Windows is broken" (meaning: my computer is broken), or "I can't get on my internets" (meanin: my modem is broken and I can't connect to your company's servers). The average computer user just doesn't know any better - and usually doesn't care to know any better either.
Another
Microsoft has done one thing, and only one thing right: partnering (or strong-arming those who don't want to be their "partners") with vendors of PCs to provide their operating system "free of charge" and preinstalled on each computer that the vendor sells to its customers. BillyG must have figured out pretty quickly that no matter how great and wonderful he wrote his software, the average idiot user would never totally "get it", and took to getting it installed on the PC before the customer ever even saw that step.
This is why so many people think computers are "Microsoft Windows" and vice versa. They see the interface, not the underlying mechanics. A "Ford" has a certain style to it and certain standard features, which makes it a "Ford." They don't care where all the engine parts, frame, tires, etc. come from that turn it into a "Ford," they just know it looks like a "Ford." The same exact problem exists with personal computers, hence the ever-present
I'm using the "normal" setting because the 3x and 4x brighness just blurs the hell out of any text on the screen.
Totally agree... 3x and 4x are basically unusable for programming, web browsing, or text editing tasks, etc. For gaming and graphics 3x is very nice though since it does bring out the colors and white levels of digital images and graphics in my experience. Personally I find that the 3x setting gives better color gradients than an LCD monitor, and an LCD also limits the resolution you can view an image by to it's default setting (typically 1024x768 for a 17" LCD or 1280x1024 for a 19" LCD) which can be somewhat limiting to the graphical artist.
Yes, the CRT has a lighter black hue, but I haven't found that to be a problem for graphics or images. But for programming, again, I can see why you would prefer the LCD screen. (blacker letters that stand out better) Personal preference matters most, so whatever works for you is fine by me!