Virtualization is one of the best things since sliced bread and I believe it's here to stay. First of all, it spells an end to multi-booting. I have erased my secondary OSs and I run them in VMs under my main system. A performance hit does definitely occur by I am willing to pay such price for the greater ease of use. Secondly, just think of the possibility to move server images from a physical server to another one, literally freezing it here and awakening it over there - InstaScaleOut(tm) must be a server admin's wet dream. Of course, as with all abstraction layers, it introduces complexity and takes a toll in the form of performance - but we all know absraction layers have been increasing all the time since the beginning of time.
Mostly I agree with that but there are a few pitfalls. What tends to happen is that people go wild setting up VMs and whenever an old machine needs to be retired whatever is running on that OS doesn't get migrated to a new machine with a new OS any more. Why bother when you can just turn the half a dozen old web/mail/file servers you need to get rid of into VM's complete with their OS and move them all to a single new computer and thus save loads of rackspace? Well yes, VM'ing is nice I love using it for development test setups, rescue migrations for OS instances running on faulty hardware and it has lots of other uses but it isn't more than a temporary substitute for migrating and merging the web/mail/file servers or whatever other servers you are using when this is appropriate. Even though migrations can be a quite problematic to implement there are situations when you will be better off merging and migrating, for example, a few old webservers onto a single new webserver on a new OS instance rather than just VM'ing all the old web servers. Convincing PHB's of this can be difficult. Some of them don't always seems to immediatley understand that if you just collect VM'ed OS instances and reduce only rackspace the growing number of OS instances will eventually become a burden. PHB's also tend to have strange notions on how many VMs you can run concurrently on a single computer and how heavily you can load those VMs.
The iPod is a) simple, b) reliable, c) user-friendly, d) cool, e) well designed and f) ties in well with iTunes. That's what sells it, not bigger screens or WiFi. Nobody who owns an iPod wants to fiddle around for 5 minutes to get the WiFi to work.
I agree, knowing Microsoft it acutally will take 5 minutes to configure Wifi plus with a Wifi card, a high res display and all the other bells and whistles they'll cram into it this music player will probably cost as much as a good Smartphone and Smartphones already have all this thing will feature: Wifi, a high res display, can play MP3 music, download it from a PC or straight of the internet (or they could with some sort of iTunes like music store software for GSM smart phones) and they also obviusly double as a phones and a PDAs. Why doesn't Microsoft just add music store software to Windows Mobile GSM phones and top it off with lots and lots of storage?
You mean like OpenOffice for 0$? What features are needed in n school (or even university) paper that aren't more than admirably handled by OpenOffice?
Note the past tense. Open office didn't exist back in 1996 and Star Office support for MS formats was kind of crappy in the early days.
You needed autocad to lay out reports? Riiiiiiight....
I personally didn't but then again I was speaking in generalities. Several friends of mine are mechanical engineers and they most definetly did need Autocad. Personally I could get by with Autocad Light but even that version sans the 3D features of the full featured Autocad still wasn't cheap back then.
For what its worth, yeah, at this stage I'd highly recommend someone purchase an entry level laptop, e.g. an ibook (used is fine) or a used PC but that is ALL they need to succeed at university in any field. You could even make do without, if you had to, but the convenience of not having to plan and schedule around lab access or be on campus to get all your work & research done is well worth the money.
But anyone who tells you that you need a dual core PC and Autocad to get a decent mark is just outright lieing. It would only be true if they were so disorganized and idiotic that they left an entire semesters worth of lab work to the last 5 days and then expect to have a unit waiting for them without any competition for it. And yeah, plenty of those people exist, but the proper solution is better time management not a fancy PC and $10,000 worth of stolen software.
Like I tried to point out (and you ignored it), for some university educations you don't need a very powerful machine. For others, like engineering you do. In theory schools here in Europe are supposed to provide enough computers for everybody to use in their labs but in reality with governments being tight fisted that targed is rarely realized. While I suppose you could get away with not owning a computer if all you do is word processing, any technology centric enducation pretty much requires you to buy a computer these days just as was the case when I was studying a little over a decade ago. Most engineering and computer science students I know today actually own two or more computers, one (usually a laptop) to do day-to-day work and the other to install Linux, perhaps dual booted with Windows 2003 Server running heavy duty server software like Oracle Appplication server, jBoss, Oracle database etc. to play around with. If you don't believe me take a look at the resources required to run some of the Oracle Server products in particular. The engineering/computer science teaching tends to be more theoretical and general and not product specific. It helps alot to have gained experience with the software big companies use by the time you graduate and possibly even to have spent a part of your summer vacations collecting a few certificates since having gained at least limited experience with enterprise grade software helps you alot when looking for a job.
Cheap for a uni student? I certainly didn't have that sort of money laying about when I was at university.
/got my computer for 50 bucks //i didn't ask where it came from...
It seems like a rather good deal to me, that offer is actually cheaper than the computer I bought when I went to university. I spent almost every cent I had on that thing including the money meant for buying books. The school books I checked out of the library or borrowed off my friends then I photocopied them for a fraction of what they would have cost to buy and had the resultant stack of A4 paper bound in a spiral binding. The Software was uhummm... well borrowed.... I could never have afforded to buy it back then, even with student discounts, and yet it was more or less a requirement to have expensive word processing software and even massively expensive software like Autocad since the teachers didn't just place importance on content and academic achievement but also the way the reports and assignments were finished and laid-out and they lowered the grade automatically for what they judged to be clumsy and unprofiessionally laid-out reports or assignments. The school claimed that they had enough computers in their labs to cover all the student's needs but that was of course complete crap. At the end of the term the labs were packed and having your own computer could make the difference between finishing your big end-of-term assignments/reports or flunking out. What sort of machine you have to buy depends very much on what you are studying. I suppose you could get away with buying some older-than-your-granny Pentium II laptop at scrap value if you are a philosophy major and only need to run Office 95 or Windows ME but If you are an engineering student something of the caliber of this machine is pretty much an entry level requirement these days.
The DOJ for example? Judging by how they handled Microsoft the political weasels in the DOJ seem to be to busy being corrupt to do anything about monopolies and abusive business practices.
How about the EU? Seems to be growing a spine but I'm skeptical, after all, these are the EU political weasels we are talking about here. I'll make up my mind when they are done with Microsoft.
Social exploits like phishing and pay-forward scams still attack the gullible on any platform. Cross-site scripting exploits can still put web services such as PayPal and Amazon at risk. This has little to do with the platform, and I think many MacOSX fans are falsely smug over the whole thing.
...social exploits and cross site exploits don't depend on a your desktop OS being badly designed but I bet there still is a fair number of Windows users who envy the Mac zealots for not having to waste their time pruning Norton/Panda/Macaffee/etc... anti-malware suites with monotonous regularity never mind the endless nag screens these anti-malware suites throw at you. The very fact that Macs will remain an OS/Hardware package deal with a limited userbase for the forseeable future will limit the OS.X malware problem. Even so I'd still bet on a OS.X or Linux desktop OS'es as having fewer problems (not to be misread as 'no problems') with malware even if the same effort went into producing malware for those two OS'es as goes into the manufacture of Windows malware. This may of course change with Windows Vista but that remains to be seen.
... at the E61 or the E70 while you are browsing the Nokia site I think they have a newer Symbian version than the one you linked to. Design wise I especially like the E70. It folds open into a QWERTY keyboard and has a 352 x 416 pixels display which is better than my old iPaq had but it's quite small for the kind of features it offers. Personally I like Ericsson and Nokia phones better than the Windows Mobile powered ones like the Xda Atom Exec. Windows mobile phones are nice and well integrated but only if you are runnig Microsoft products wall-to-wall. If you want to connect to non Microsoft solutions, unless the phone manufacturer bundles solutions for things like Cisco VPN, Lotus Notes and Blackberry connectivity, you usually end up paying a tidy sum to acquire these capabilities.
What I was pointing out is that there is no "free" way to make money.
I agree completely it's a bit like this whole daytrading fad, it's the couchpotatoe's dream, making money whilst sitting on your arse and despite the fact that you have only basic education and no specialist knowledge of economics. There are certainly day traders, professional bank or investment firms employees and some savvy amateur traders, that know what they are doing but one gets the feeling that for alot of the amateur day traders who have a limted knowledge of what they are doing day trading is really just a substitute for gambling and what keeps them going are the 'fish stories' about some garage mechanic who walked in off the street into a Daytraders Café and made 1.000.000 dollars in 60 seconds. Ebay on the other hand can be described as being: A few Intelligent people (Ebay's owners) making a ton of money off of ordinary traders of various goods (who are either supplementing their income or just making a living). The traders in turn make money firstly off of the ordinary customers who come there for bargains and tend to bid rather conservatively and secondly the people with alot more money than sense (ie. the fools/addicts bidding $500 for a PDA they can get for $300 elsewhere).
A better question than "can you get rich on ebay?" is "is getting rich on ebay worth the time, boredom, and effort?". I think the answer is no, at least for me, as there are more interesting things I would rather be doing (see sig.).
It depends on what your goal is. I don't think you can get as rich as Bill Gates is by dealing on Ebay but you I know a few people who earn a living selling merchandize on sites like Ebay. If you happen to have a small corner shop that sells, say sports goods, photographers supples, new or used books etc.. you can supplement the income from your store, especially if you specialize in a niche market and cater to hobbyists or people who practice sports that are not quite as massively popular as foot ball or basketball and for which you cannot get supplies in your neighborhood sports outlet. Another new fad is used car dealers who make use of favorable exchange rates to buy used cars via Ebay but that is something you have to be very careful with since it is easy to get burned. Dealing on via an intermediary like Ebay or Amazon helps because they get a lot of traffic and because there is greater trust than if you are selling your merchandize through a badly designed homecooked website. Even so, Ebay wouldn't always be my first choice if I had to make my living selling stuff online.
OS X is the opposite. It is high margin, high sytle, and slick. It is perfect for the brand-concious, reasonably wealthy, consumer who wants everything to work together easily.
I agree with you that Linux and OS.X are in many ways opposited but who says OS.X is just for brand consious yuppies? I develop for Linux alot and yet I use OS.X on my workstation because my nerdy need for problem solving is fully satisfied by the development problems I encounter with the software I develop on various Unix/Linux and even, occasionally, Windows 2003 server systems. I simply don't need the added trouble of getting Linux to work properly on my laptop with the degree of smoothness that I demand from a workstation. I despise Windows for workstation use due in no small part to the abundance of malware and the work it takes to keep it off the system but also because the Windows UI simply annoys the hell out of me for many different reasons. I use OS.X for my day to day work mainly because it is the only *NIX that truly works and does so nearly completely flawlessly as a desktop system, straight out of the box. If there was a Linux variant that worked as smoothly as OS.X does on hardware as compact and well designed as that made by Apple and that had a full featured and properly integrated graphical desktop environment that didn't look like a poor imitation of Windows I'd certainly conisder it. So far I haven't found anything that can hold a candle to OS.X in every way, there is always something that doesn't quite work. One thing is for sure, whether you use Linux or OS.X for your workstation OS it is always amusing to see the look of utter despair that appears on the face of a Microsoft trained corporate support monkey when confronted with an OS that hasn't got Microsoft's product logos plasterd all over it. They are so relieved when they find out (after regurgitating the ususal speech about how they only support Windows) that all you want them to do is assign an IP number, set up E-mail access and a VPN account.
Do you get your dental work done at a bombed-out basement in Beirut?
Beirut?!?! No, the last time my dentist sawed into my gums was when I had a tooth capped and the guy had to drill down below the level of the flesh surrounding the tooth. Apparently it is quite hard to keep the drill from slipping during such a procedure the same goes for removal of the rearmost molars which I also had to have done since they had insufficient room to grow out of the jaw bone and the pressure was about to cause the teeth in front of them to fracture. As for the cold water my theory is that the people who manufacture dental gear must live in Southern California or some other place where the temperature never drops below 20 degrees Celsius so this isn't an issue for them. Where I live temperatures of -10 Degrees Celsius are not uncommon. Dental gear designers probably haven't ever been to a dentist either which is not surprising, like all manufacturers of torture instruments tend to be very law obiding people, they know what awaits them in the chair.
The only thing that bothers me about dentists drills is when they slip up while sawing some thooth in half and the drill-bit digs into my gums. That said the vibrations of the dentists drill don't bother me half as much as what happenes when he/she is finished drilling. With only millimeters of tooth seperating the nerve from the open air the dentist then proceeds to thoroughly wash the hole that he/she just drilled with ICE COLD water. I understand the dentist has to wash the dust out of the teeth, but seriously, how much trouble would it be to install a heater in those dentist's chairs/torture-benches that warms the water up to body temperature? Doctors are seriously blind to patient comfort. In my experience it is usually simple things like this that would make visits to the dentist or some other physician much less of an ordeal.
because the mac fanboys always claim apple has the best hardware out there, but from here it looks like apple is just as bad, if not worse than the average PC maker.
What do you mean? Do you mean the quality of the hardware components chip for chip, USB plug for USB plug etc.... it would surprise me if Apple hardware turned up better in such a comparison since Apple sources these components from the same manufacturers as everybody else. Mac fanboys, such as myself, claim Apple makes better computers for other reasons. One example is that when you compare a PowerBook or a MacBook to the average PC laptop the PC looks like a concrete sidewalk paving-slab. Another reason why many Mac fanboys claim Macs are superior computers is because alot of Macs tend to include newer more capable hardware when they ship such as for example WIFI cards that can handle advanced up-to-date encryption standards years after the Mac in question hits the market by which time many PC users have been forced to upgrade their Wifi. The superiority of Apple hardware resides mostly in superior design, the fact that Apple usually loads their machines with the very latest hardware, excellent support and they also keep their value very well. I just sold a three year old G4 PowerBook for about three times what I would have gotten for a WinDell laptop of similar vintage. I have had numerous issues with hardware component falilure in Apple computers but I have also never had the slightest difficutly with getting these defects straightened out under warranty. You only get that with a hand full of PC manufacturers, IBM used to be one of them but now that they have sold their PC division off to Lenovo it remains to be seen whether they will keep up the standards that IBM had set, particularly in terms of design and support, or if they will be greedy and start churning out average junkware. If you buy a bulk quality Wintel box from a random crapware manufacturer and have any issues with it geting it repaired, even under warranty, can be a daunting task and you will soon find that it ages faster than the high end gear due to it being loaded with hardware that is already obsolescent.
Those people who have legitimate access to that data leaking the information? Was there a huge wave of hacker activity stealing and disseminating classified material lately? Because I must have missed it.
Mostly I remember people INSIDE government agencies leaking this information to the press on purpose, to disclose high shenanigans and malfeasence in the Bush administration.
This doesn't do much to stop this kind of leak, but makes it much easier to track down those who do leak information. I don't think this has as much to do with security, as it does fear and punishment.
I am no Neocon and I usually don't agree with Mr Bush and his crowd on anything at all but this time I fail to see what the fuss is about. They are planning to:
Encrypt all sensetive data on laptops and PDAs.
Drastically harden authentication methods and make damn sure idle connections are severed.
Make damn sure sensetive information is not left lying around on hard drives all over the place thus decreasing the likelyhood of it ending up in the hands of people it wasn't intended for by accident. In short they plan to drastically improve the management of sensetive data.
In my humble opinion these are all pretty resonable and sensetive measures for any government to take. My only question is: Why wasn't this done many years ago? These are measures major corporations have considered standard for years in order to thwart industrial espionage. I am quite frankly flabbergasted at the what the article seems to imply, which is that US officials, military bigwigs and intelligence people have been traveling all over the USA and the rest of the world for that matter carrying unencrypted sensetive data on their WinDell laptops.
If you want to "Pay less money than at a store", then go to Ebay, and DON'T TRY TO WIN THE AUCTION.
In my experience Ebay is not the best place to go for low prices. One of the things I buy alot of on the Internet are rare, out of print books and going to Ebay is pretty much something I only do if I have no success elsewehere and am forced to bid there. I have much better results going to specialist book selling webs starting with Amazon which has a service for used book sellers, various other similar internet based services or small mon-and-pop type used bookshops flogging their inventory over the internet via simple HTML based Frontpage web. I have yet to be cheated out of my money by one of these sellers and the prices I get from these sources are often lower than even the reserves in an Ebay auction and finding these sellers is usually as simple as a bit of imaginative 'Googling', it also helps to search more languages than just English. Some of the auctions I have witnessed on Ebay have made me question the sanity of the bidders. I get the feeling that alot of people who buy on Ebay (and by no means all of them or even most of them) are addicts who spend rediculous amounts of money on objects that I know for a fact are available elsewhere for a fraction of the price.
The F-18 Hornet is a short range fighter, and has to keep itself pointed in the general direction of the bogeys until the missles hit.
Most if not all F-18 fighters will have the AIM 120 missile which AFAIK has a two phased guidance procedure. The missile get's the target's location and a rough course uploaded to it by the launching aircraft moments prior to launch. After that, during the first guidance phase, the missile only recieves updates which it uses to adjust the initial uploaded course from the launching aircraft. During the second, terminal phase the missiles own radar locks onto the target and the pilot can move on leaving the missile to guide it self. Theoretically the Aim-120 is a fire and forget weapon even at long range but in practice, if the launching aircraft keeps illuminating the target with his radar through out the first phase, the hit probability will increase considerably especially against fast and highly maneuverable targets like Mig-29s, Su-27/30s, J-10s... never mind something like a Trance 3 Eurofighter with thrustvectoring engines. The launch aircraft does not have to illuminate the target until impact. Interestingly enough the F-14 is slated to be replaced by A/F-18 Super Hornet fighters packing the shorter range AIM-120 missile later this year. Even so the F-18/AIM-120 combination is not really a competitor for the F-14 which, combined with it's Phoenix missles, is still a pretty potent weapons that has few if any peers at the moment since the Russians have apparently stopped developing the MiG-31 at the pace that would have been needed to keep it competitive due to the enormous costs and the Eurofighter and F-22 are still being deployed.
Wearing a tin foil hat in a lightning storm is a win/win situation. If it works you are protected from lightning, if it dosen't work the lightning will melt the tinfoil and fuse it with your skull creating a permanent mindsheild to protect you from those cosmic mind rays plus the lightning will probably also fry all those alien implants.
They certainly have a right to OFFER customers something not to cancel, but they don't have a right to either guilt you into not cancelling or to otherwise harangue you about it. It's the customer's money, and it's the customer's credit card. In the absence of a contractual agreement, they have the right and expectation to be able to call and cancel at any time without getting any guff about it.
Even that can go to far. I once had a few beers to many with a bunch of other nerds one of whom used to be a minor cheiftain in an AOL service center. According to this guy they were actually chewed out by management for responding to cancellation requests from customers by actually doing what the customer wanted quicky and efficiently. The standard procedure when a user requested a cancellation of his AOL account was to make him/her jump through flaming hoops and duel ravenous beasts in order to accomplish this. AOL would respond to all cancellation requests with a brochure containing some sort of 'special offer' and continue to do so using every excuse including the ever useful "Your cancellation request did not fulfill all legal requirements" until people started threatening to get lawyers involved. Most of the time the customer would eventually either give up or if he/she persevered and AOL was eventually forced to cancel the account they still managed to milk the customer for a quite a bit more money by dragging their feet like this.
There is nothing wrong with fossils coming out of China, in fact some of the fossil data coming out of China via legitimate digs by reputable scientists is very interesting. The problems start when foreign museums go buying fossils on the black market that have no history and that have been taken totally out of context by the looters who dug them up which in turn reduced their scientific value considerably and makes them valuable mostly to amateur collectors who buy them for bragging rights. Using black market fossils for scientific work can be a dangerous business and many scientists consequently shun fossils obtained on the black market. If you want to buy fossils off of dodgy characters expect to get burned even if you are an expert. The most famous recent example of the perils of doing this is probably the National Geographic 'Archaeoraptor' debacle which fooled some leading experts and was incidentally partly exposed by a Chinese scientist who found the counterslab of one of the fossils used to make up the faked composit. The ironic thing is that in the end the scientific significance of the two halves of the National Geographic composit fake turned out to be almost as great as that of the composit would have been had it been genuine. Furthermore, had the specimens that were carved up to produce this fake been sold, complete and undamaged along with some sort of contextual data they would probably have been more valuable than the fake turned out to be.
Yes but we expect companies to be greedy and to try to get away with as much as they can. On the other hand the government is supposed to represent the people and respect our rights. A company is created by a few people for their benefit, but the government is created by all the people, and it should be run to the benefit of everyone, not just the power-hungry and the wealthy.
<rant> Theoretically, in a democracy, the government is elected by the people. Unfortunately the selection of candidates available to be elected is usually controlled by a smal clique of wealthy people since it has become so expensive to run for office that no normal person can afford it without sellign his/her soul to these special interest groups. So in effect it is they who are create the government, not the people. Sometimes I get the feeling that the only thing that keeps democracy from being a totally unworkable system of government is the fact that the pack of weasels that make up the government are usually to busy the stabbing each other in the back to concentrate fully on their great design which seems to be to bring about the total collapse of human civilization as we know it. That and the fact that once in a while.... uhmmm.... make that once in a loooooooong while the people grow a spine, get off their ass and remind their 'elected representitives' that governments should never forget to fear their electorate. </rant>
Train them wrong so they will break everything they touch. Revenge is a dish best served cold.
That is a pretty dumb thing to do and to add insult to injury it is also a pretty poor troll. If you intentionally sabotage your employers offshoring efforts you could acutally expose your self to a lawsuit. Basically your options depend on:
Your local labor laws.
What your empoyment contract states.
How much backbone your union/labor association that is to say if people in your line of work even have one these days.
If your local labor laws state that you have an obligation to train replacements during wholesale offshorings you are basically screwed. If you were dumb enough to sign a contract (believe it or not, you can actually object to clauses in an employment contract before signing it) obligating you to train replacements in the event of a wholesale offshoring you are also screwed since figthing it in court will probably bankrupt you even if the laws favor you. If you have a good union or some type of employee association to fight for you, you might stand a chance. Believe it or not there is strength in numbers. Unions can help in cases like this by bankrolling a single test case into court and thus set a precedent. They can also give employees leverage when dealing with employers in situations like this. I know that worker unity is unpopular these days, even with the workers them selves which I find pretty strange since I have seen plenty of examples of people getting bowled over by employers simply because they didn't stick together. In one particular case the employer acutally wanted to insert clauses into contracts that turned out to be legally indefensible when a few of us got together and hired a lawyer to assess the new and improved contracts the PHBs wanted us to sign. I suppose they either hadn't run them by their own lawyers or more likely they wanted those clauses in the contract for their intimidation value. Either way the PHBs backed down in this particular case. If you really want to do something organize your fellow workers and fight back. I'm not arguing for a return to the old trade union model but worker unity still has not lost it's value.
TFA says "your computer", but aren't all Windows installs "my computer" on the desktop? Shouldn't it say "your my computer"? Or is it "my your computer"?
I got a totally different result myself. When I ran Windows Update on my parents laptop about an hour ago Windows Update renamed 'My Computer' to 'All your computer are belong to Microsoft' and changed the system name to 'Skynet subnode 3964270017356334576934-X371N02'. Has anybody else experienced this?
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Virtualization is one of the best things since sliced bread and I believe it's here to stay. First of all, it spells an end to multi-booting. I have erased my secondary OSs and I run them in VMs under my main system. A performance hit does definitely occur by I am willing to pay such price for the greater ease of use. Secondly, just think of the possibility to move server images from a physical server to another one, literally freezing it here and awakening it over there - InstaScaleOut(tm) must be a server admin's wet dream.
Of course, as with all abstraction layers, it introduces complexity and takes a toll in the form of performance - but we all know absraction layers have been increasing all the time since the beginning of time.
Mostly I agree with that but there are a few pitfalls. What tends to happen is that people go wild setting up VMs and whenever an old machine needs to be retired whatever is running on that OS doesn't get migrated to a new machine with a new OS any more. Why bother when you can just turn the half a dozen old web/mail/file servers you need to get rid of into VM's complete with their OS and move them all to a single new computer and thus save loads of rackspace? Well yes, VM'ing is nice I love using it for development test setups, rescue migrations for OS instances running on faulty hardware and it has lots of other uses but it isn't more than a temporary substitute for migrating and merging the web/mail/file servers or whatever other servers you are using when this is appropriate. Even though migrations can be a quite problematic to implement there are situations when you will be better off merging and migrating, for example, a few old webservers onto a single new webserver on a new OS instance rather than just VM'ing all the old web servers. Convincing PHB's of this can be difficult. Some of them don't always seems to immediatley understand that if you just collect VM'ed OS instances and reduce only rackspace the growing number of OS instances will eventually become a burden. PHB's also tend to have strange notions on how many VMs you can run concurrently on a single computer and how heavily you can load those VMs.
Oh come on now. It's not like this exact story and many of the comments were just posted earlier this week or anything.
Begun the flamewars have! I hope you remembered to charge your lightsaber... here comes the Microsoft droid army and they are pissed!!
The iPod is a) simple, b) reliable, c) user-friendly, d) cool, e) well designed and f) ties in well with iTunes. That's what sells it, not bigger screens or WiFi. Nobody who owns an iPod wants to fiddle around for 5 minutes to get the WiFi to work.
I agree, knowing Microsoft it acutally will take 5 minutes to configure Wifi plus with a Wifi card, a high res display and all the other bells and whistles they'll cram into it this music player will probably cost as much as a good Smartphone and Smartphones already have all this thing will feature: Wifi, a high res display, can play MP3 music, download it from a PC or straight of the internet (or they could with some sort of iTunes like music store software for GSM smart phones) and they also obviusly double as a phones and a PDAs. Why doesn't Microsoft just add music store software to Windows Mobile GSM phones and top it off with lots and lots of storage?
You mean like OpenOffice for 0$? What features are needed in n school (or even university) paper that aren't more than admirably handled by OpenOffice?
Note the past tense. Open office didn't exist back in 1996 and Star Office support for MS formats was kind of crappy in the early days.
You needed autocad to lay out reports? Riiiiiiight....
I personally didn't but then again I was speaking in generalities. Several friends of mine are mechanical engineers and they most definetly did need Autocad. Personally I could get by with Autocad Light but even that version sans the 3D features of the full featured Autocad still wasn't cheap back then.
For what its worth, yeah, at this stage I'd highly recommend someone purchase an entry level laptop, e.g. an ibook (used is fine) or a used PC but that is ALL they need to succeed at university in any field. You could even make do without, if you had to, but the convenience of not having to plan and schedule around lab access or be on campus to get all your work & research done is well worth the money.
But anyone who tells you that you need a dual core PC and Autocad to get a decent mark is just outright lieing. It would only be true if they were so disorganized and idiotic that they left an entire semesters worth of lab work to the last 5 days and then expect to have a unit waiting for them without any competition for it. And yeah, plenty of those people exist, but the proper solution is better time management not a fancy PC and $10,000 worth of stolen software.
Like I tried to point out (and you ignored it), for some university educations you don't need a very powerful machine. For others, like engineering you do. In theory schools here in Europe are supposed to provide enough computers for everybody to use in their labs but in reality with governments being tight fisted that targed is rarely realized. While I suppose you could get away with not owning a computer if all you do is word processing, any technology centric enducation pretty much requires you to buy a computer these days just as was the case when I was studying a little over a decade ago. Most engineering and computer science students I know today actually own two or more computers, one (usually a laptop) to do day-to-day work and the other to install Linux, perhaps dual booted with Windows 2003 Server running heavy duty server software like Oracle Appplication server, jBoss, Oracle database etc. to play around with. If you don't believe me take a look at the resources required to run some of the Oracle Server products in particular. The engineering/computer science teaching tends to be more theoretical and general and not product specific. It helps alot to have gained experience with the software big companies use by the time you graduate and possibly even to have spent a part of your summer vacations collecting a few certificates since having gained at least limited experience with enterprise grade software helps you alot when looking for a job.
Cheap for a uni student? I certainly didn't have that sort of money laying about when I was at university.
/got my computer for 50 bucks
//i didn't ask where it came from...
It seems like a rather good deal to me, that offer is actually cheaper than the computer I bought when I went to university. I spent almost every cent I had on that thing including the money meant for buying books. The school books I checked out of the library or borrowed off my friends then I photocopied them for a fraction of what they would have cost to buy and had the resultant stack of A4 paper bound in a spiral binding. The Software was uhummm... well borrowed.... I could never have afforded to buy it back then, even with student discounts, and yet it was more or less a requirement to have expensive word processing software and even massively expensive software like Autocad since the teachers didn't just place importance on content and academic achievement but also the way the reports and assignments were finished and laid-out and they lowered the grade automatically for what they judged to be clumsy and unprofiessionally laid-out reports or assignments. The school claimed that they had enough computers in their labs to cover all the student's needs but that was of course complete crap. At the end of the term the labs were packed and having your own computer could make the difference between finishing your big end-of-term assignments/reports or flunking out. What sort of machine you have to buy depends very much on what you are studying. I suppose you could get away with buying some older-than-your-granny Pentium II laptop at scrap value if you are a philosophy major and only need to run Office 95 or Windows ME but If you are an engineering student something of the caliber of this machine is pretty much an entry level requirement these days.
The DOJ for example?
Judging by how they handled Microsoft the political weasels in the DOJ seem to be to busy being corrupt to do anything about monopolies and abusive business practices.
How about the EU?
Seems to be growing a spine but I'm skeptical, after all, these are the EU political weasels we are talking about here. I'll make up my mind when they are done with Microsoft.
Social exploits like phishing and pay-forward scams still attack the gullible on any platform. Cross-site scripting exploits can still put web services such as PayPal and Amazon at risk. This has little to do with the platform, and I think many MacOSX fans are falsely smug over the whole thing.
...social exploits and cross site exploits don't depend on a your desktop OS being badly designed but I bet there still is a fair number of Windows users who envy the Mac zealots for not having to waste their time pruning Norton/Panda/Macaffee/etc... anti-malware suites with monotonous regularity never mind the endless nag screens these anti-malware suites throw at you. The very fact that Macs will remain an OS/Hardware package deal with a limited userbase for the forseeable future will limit the OS.X malware problem. Even so I'd still bet on a OS.X or Linux desktop OS'es as having fewer problems (not to be misread as 'no problems') with malware even if the same effort went into producing malware for those two OS'es as goes into the manufacture of Windows malware. This may of course change with Windows Vista but that remains to be seen.
... at the E61 or the E70 while you are browsing the Nokia site I think they have a newer Symbian version than the one you linked to. Design wise I especially like the E70. It folds open into a QWERTY keyboard and has a 352 x 416 pixels display which is better than my old iPaq had but it's quite small for the kind of features it offers. Personally I like Ericsson and Nokia phones better than the Windows Mobile powered ones like the Xda Atom Exec. Windows mobile phones are nice and well integrated but only if you are runnig Microsoft products wall-to-wall. If you want to connect to non Microsoft solutions, unless the phone manufacturer bundles solutions for things like Cisco VPN, Lotus Notes and Blackberry connectivity, you usually end up paying a tidy sum to acquire these capabilities.
What I was pointing out is that there is no "free" way to make money.
I agree completely it's a bit like this whole daytrading fad, it's the couchpotatoe's dream, making money whilst sitting on your arse and despite the fact that you have only basic education and no specialist knowledge of economics. There are certainly day traders, professional bank or investment firms employees and some savvy amateur traders, that know what they are doing but one gets the feeling that for alot of the amateur day traders who have a limted knowledge of what they are doing day trading is really just a substitute for gambling and what keeps them going are the 'fish stories' about some garage mechanic who walked in off the street into a Daytraders Café and made 1.000.000 dollars in 60 seconds. Ebay on the other hand can be described as being: A few Intelligent people (Ebay's owners) making a ton of money off of ordinary traders of various goods (who are either supplementing their income or just making a living). The traders in turn make money firstly off of the ordinary customers who come there for bargains and tend to bid rather conservatively and secondly the people with alot more money than sense (ie. the fools/addicts bidding $500 for a PDA they can get for $300 elsewhere).
A better question than "can you get rich on ebay?" is "is getting rich on ebay worth the time, boredom, and effort?". I think the answer is no, at least for me, as there are more interesting things I would rather be doing (see sig.).
It depends on what your goal is. I don't think you can get as rich as Bill Gates is by dealing on Ebay but you I know a few people who earn a living selling merchandize on sites like Ebay. If you happen to have a small corner shop that sells, say sports goods, photographers supples, new or used books etc.. you can supplement the income from your store, especially if you specialize in a niche market and cater to hobbyists or people who practice sports that are not quite as massively popular as foot ball or basketball and for which you cannot get supplies in your neighborhood sports outlet. Another new fad is used car dealers who make use of favorable exchange rates to buy used cars via Ebay but that is something you have to be very careful with since it is easy to get burned. Dealing on via an intermediary like Ebay or Amazon helps because they get a lot of traffic and because there is greater trust than if you are selling your merchandize through a badly designed homecooked website. Even so, Ebay wouldn't always be my first choice if I had to make my living selling stuff online.
OS X is the opposite. It is high margin, high sytle, and slick. It is perfect for the brand-concious, reasonably wealthy, consumer who wants everything to work together easily.
I agree with you that Linux and OS.X are in many ways opposited but who says OS.X is just for brand consious yuppies? I develop for Linux alot and yet I use OS.X on my workstation because my nerdy need for problem solving is fully satisfied by the development problems I encounter with the software I develop on various Unix/Linux and even, occasionally, Windows 2003 server systems. I simply don't need the added trouble of getting Linux to work properly on my laptop with the degree of smoothness that I demand from a workstation. I despise Windows for workstation use due in no small part to the abundance of malware and the work it takes to keep it off the system but also because the Windows UI simply annoys the hell out of me for many different reasons. I use OS.X for my day to day work mainly because it is the only *NIX that truly works and does so nearly completely flawlessly as a desktop system, straight out of the box. If there was a Linux variant that worked as smoothly as OS.X does on hardware as compact and well designed as that made by Apple and that had a full featured and properly integrated graphical desktop environment that didn't look like a poor imitation of Windows I'd certainly conisder it. So far I haven't found anything that can hold a candle to OS.X in every way, there is always something that doesn't quite work. One thing is for sure, whether you use Linux or OS.X for your workstation OS it is always amusing to see the look of utter despair that appears on the face of a Microsoft trained corporate support monkey when confronted with an OS that hasn't got Microsoft's product logos plasterd all over it. They are so relieved when they find out (after regurgitating the ususal speech about how they only support Windows) that all you want them to do is assign an IP number, set up E-mail access and a VPN account.
Do you get your dental work done at a bombed-out basement in Beirut?
Beirut?!?! No, the last time my dentist sawed into my gums was when I had a tooth capped and the guy had to drill down below the level of the flesh surrounding the tooth. Apparently it is quite hard to keep the drill from slipping during such a procedure the same goes for removal of the rearmost molars which I also had to have done since they had insufficient room to grow out of the jaw bone and the pressure was about to cause the teeth in front of them to fracture. As for the cold water my theory is that the people who manufacture dental gear must live in Southern California or some other place where the temperature never drops below 20 degrees Celsius so this isn't an issue for them. Where I live temperatures of -10 Degrees Celsius are not uncommon. Dental gear designers probably haven't ever been to a dentist either which is not surprising, like all manufacturers of torture instruments tend to be very law obiding people, they know what awaits them in the chair.
The only thing that bothers me about dentists drills is when they slip up while sawing some thooth in half and the drill-bit digs into my gums. That said the vibrations of the dentists drill don't bother me half as much as what happenes when he/she is finished drilling. With only millimeters of tooth seperating the nerve from the open air the dentist then proceeds to thoroughly wash the hole that he/she just drilled with ICE COLD water. I understand the dentist has to wash the dust out of the teeth, but seriously, how much trouble would it be to install a heater in those dentist's chairs/torture-benches that warms the water up to body temperature? Doctors are seriously blind to patient comfort. In my experience it is usually simple things like this that would make visits to the dentist or some other physician much less of an ordeal.
because the mac fanboys always claim apple has the best hardware out there, but from here it looks like apple is just as bad, if not worse than the average PC maker.
What do you mean? Do you mean the quality of the hardware components chip for chip, USB plug for USB plug etc.... it would surprise me if Apple hardware turned up better in such a comparison since Apple sources these components from the same manufacturers as everybody else. Mac fanboys, such as myself, claim Apple makes better computers for other reasons. One example is that when you compare a PowerBook or a MacBook to the average PC laptop the PC looks like a concrete sidewalk paving-slab. Another reason why many Mac fanboys claim Macs are superior computers is because alot of Macs tend to include newer more capable hardware when they ship such as for example WIFI cards that can handle advanced up-to-date encryption standards years after the Mac in question hits the market by which time many PC users have been forced to upgrade their Wifi. The superiority of Apple hardware resides mostly in superior design, the fact that Apple usually loads their machines with the very latest hardware, excellent support and they also keep their value very well. I just sold a three year old G4 PowerBook for about three times what I would have gotten for a WinDell laptop of similar vintage. I have had numerous issues with hardware component falilure in Apple computers but I have also never had the slightest difficutly with getting these defects straightened out under warranty. You only get that with a hand full of PC manufacturers, IBM used to be one of them but now that they have sold their PC division off to Lenovo it remains to be seen whether they will keep up the standards that IBM had set, particularly in terms of design and support, or if they will be greedy and start churning out average junkware. If you buy a bulk quality Wintel box from a random crapware manufacturer and have any issues with it geting it repaired, even under warranty, can be a daunting task and you will soon find that it ages faster than the high end gear due to it being loaded with hardware that is already obsolescent.
I am no Neocon and I usually don't agree with Mr Bush and his crowd on anything at all but this time I fail to see what the fuss is about. They are planning to:
- Encrypt all sensetive data on laptops and PDAs.
- Drastically harden authentication methods and make damn sure idle connections are severed.
- Make damn sure sensetive information is not left lying around on hard drives all over the place thus decreasing the likelyhood of it ending up in the hands of people it wasn't intended for by accident. In short they plan to drastically improve the management of sensetive data.
In my humble opinion these are all pretty resonable and sensetive measures for any government to take. My only question is: Why wasn't this done many years ago? These are measures major corporations have considered standard for years in order to thwart industrial espionage. I am quite frankly flabbergasted at the what the article seems to imply, which is that US officials, military bigwigs and intelligence people have been traveling all over the USA and the rest of the world for that matter carrying unencrypted sensetive data on their WinDell laptops.Would this be Slashdot if we didn't?
This place would still be Slashdot, it just wouldn't be any fun at all without the conspiracy theories.
In my experience Ebay is not the best place to go for low prices. One of the things I buy alot of on the Internet are rare, out of print books and going to Ebay is pretty much something I only do if I have no success elsewehere and am forced to bid there. I have much better results going to specialist book selling webs starting with Amazon which has a service for used book sellers, various other similar internet based services or small mon-and-pop type used bookshops flogging their inventory over the internet via simple HTML based Frontpage web. I have yet to be cheated out of my money by one of these sellers and the prices I get from these sources are often lower than even the reserves in an Ebay auction and finding these sellers is usually as simple as a bit of imaginative 'Googling', it also helps to search more languages than just English. Some of the auctions I have witnessed on Ebay have made me question the sanity of the bidders. I get the feeling that alot of people who buy on Ebay (and by no means all of them or even most of them) are addicts who spend rediculous amounts of money on objects that I know for a fact are available elsewhere for a fraction of the price.
Most if not all F-18 fighters will have the AIM 120 missile which AFAIK has a two phased guidance procedure. The missile get's the target's location and a rough course uploaded to it by the launching aircraft moments prior to launch. After that, during the first guidance phase, the missile only recieves updates which it uses to adjust the initial uploaded course from the launching aircraft. During the second, terminal phase the missiles own radar locks onto the target and the pilot can move on leaving the missile to guide it self. Theoretically the Aim-120 is a fire and forget weapon even at long range but in practice, if the launching aircraft keeps illuminating the target with his radar through out the first phase, the hit probability will increase considerably especially against fast and highly maneuverable targets like Mig-29s, Su-27/30s, J-10s... never mind something like a Trance 3 Eurofighter with thrustvectoring engines. The launch aircraft does not have to illuminate the target until impact. Interestingly enough the F-14 is slated to be replaced by A/F-18 Super Hornet fighters packing the shorter range AIM-120 missile later this year. Even so the F-18/AIM-120 combination is not really a competitor for the F-14 which, combined with it's Phoenix missles, is still a pretty potent weapons that has few if any peers at the moment since the Russians have apparently stopped developing the MiG-31 at the pace that would have been needed to keep it competitive due to the enormous costs and the Eurofighter and F-22 are still being deployed.
...and tin foil hats maybe OK.
Wearing a tin foil hat in a lightning storm is a win/win situation. If it works you are protected from lightning, if it dosen't work the lightning will melt the tinfoil and fuse it with your skull creating a permanent mindsheild to protect you from those cosmic mind rays plus the lightning will probably also fry all those alien implants.
Even that can go to far. I once had a few beers to many with a bunch of other nerds one of whom used to be a minor cheiftain in an AOL service center. According to this guy they were actually chewed out by management for responding to cancellation requests from customers by actually doing what the customer wanted quicky and efficiently. The standard procedure when a user requested a cancellation of his AOL account was to make him/her jump through flaming hoops and duel ravenous beasts in order to accomplish this. AOL would respond to all cancellation requests with a brochure containing some sort of 'special offer' and continue to do so using every excuse including the ever useful "Your cancellation request did not fulfill all legal requirements" until people started threatening to get lawyers involved. Most of the time the customer would eventually either give up or if he/she persevered and AOL was eventually forced to cancel the account they still managed to milk the customer for a quite a bit more money by dragging their feet like this.
There is nothing wrong with fossils coming out of China, in fact some of the fossil data coming out of China via legitimate digs by reputable scientists is very interesting. The problems start when foreign museums go buying fossils on the black market that have no history and that have been taken totally out of context by the looters who dug them up which in turn reduced their scientific value considerably and makes them valuable mostly to amateur collectors who buy them for bragging rights. Using black market fossils for scientific work can be a dangerous business and many scientists consequently shun fossils obtained on the black market. If you want to buy fossils off of dodgy characters expect to get burned even if you are an expert. The most famous recent example of the perils of doing this is probably the National Geographic 'Archaeoraptor' debacle which fooled some leading experts and was incidentally partly exposed by a Chinese scientist who found the counterslab of one of the fossils used to make up the faked composit. The ironic thing is that in the end the scientific significance of the two halves of the National Geographic composit fake turned out to be almost as great as that of the composit would have been had it been genuine. Furthermore, had the specimens that were carved up to produce this fake been sold, complete and undamaged along with some sort of contextual data they would probably have been more valuable than the fake turned out to be.
Yes but we expect companies to be greedy and to try to get away with as much as they can. On the other hand the government is supposed to represent the people and respect our rights. A company is created by a few people for their benefit, but the government is created by all the people, and it should be run to the benefit of everyone, not just the power-hungry and the wealthy.
<rant>
Theoretically, in a democracy, the government is elected by the people. Unfortunately the selection of candidates available to be elected is usually controlled by a smal clique of wealthy people since it has become so expensive to run for office that no normal person can afford it without sellign his/her soul to these special interest groups. So in effect it is they who are create the government, not the people. Sometimes I get the feeling that the only thing that keeps democracy from being a totally unworkable system of government is the fact that the pack of weasels that make up the government are usually to busy the stabbing each other in the back to concentrate fully on their great design which seems to be to bring about the total collapse of human civilization as we know it. That and the fact that once in a while.... uhmmm.... make that once in a loooooooong while the people grow a spine, get off their ass and remind their 'elected representitives' that governments should never forget to fear their electorate.
</rant>
That is a pretty dumb thing to do and to add insult to injury it is also a pretty poor troll. If you intentionally sabotage your employers offshoring efforts you could acutally expose your self to a lawsuit. Basically your options depend on:
If your local labor laws state that you have an obligation to train replacements during wholesale offshorings you are basically screwed. If you were dumb enough to sign a contract (believe it or not, you can actually object to clauses in an employment contract before signing it) obligating you to train replacements in the event of a wholesale offshoring you are also screwed since figthing it in court will probably bankrupt you even if the laws favor you. If you have a good union or some type of employee association to fight for you, you might stand a chance. Believe it or not there is strength in numbers. Unions can help in cases like this by bankrolling a single test case into court and thus set a precedent. They can also give employees leverage when dealing with employers in situations like this. I know that worker unity is unpopular these days, even with the workers them selves which I find pretty strange since I have seen plenty of examples of people getting bowled over by employers simply because they didn't stick together. In one particular case the employer acutally wanted to insert clauses into contracts that turned out to be legally indefensible when a few of us got together and hired a lawyer to assess the new and improved contracts the PHBs wanted us to sign. I suppose they either hadn't run them by their own lawyers or more likely they wanted those clauses in the contract for their intimidation value. Either way the PHBs backed down in this particular case. If you really want to do something organize your fellow workers and fight back. I'm not arguing for a return to the old trade union model but worker unity still has not lost it's value.
Was it as big as the one that (supposedly) fell at Tunguska? Although I'm still pretty sure that was caused by dark matter or a UFO or something.
I beg to differ! Tunguska was quite clearly caused by a colossal supernatural fart.
TFA says "your computer", but aren't all Windows installs "my computer" on the desktop? Shouldn't it say "your my computer"? Or is it "my your computer"?
I got a totally different result myself. When I ran Windows Update on my parents laptop about an hour ago Windows Update renamed 'My Computer' to 'All your computer are belong to Microsoft' and changed the system name to 'Skynet subnode 3964270017356334576934-X371N02'. Has anybody else experienced this?