So shoot enough of these in an angry crowd, and now you have a crowd that's (A) angrier, since you just shot at them, (B) manic enough to do dumber things than normally, and (C) a lot less sensitive to pain. Just so, you know, they won't be as deterred by further rubber bullets or tear gas or a police batton. It sounds to me like just what you need to turn some unruly demonstrators into an outright riot. Or an outright riot into hell broken loose.Seems like this could actually be pretty usseful...
Imagine surreptitiously replacing the normal nonlethal deterrent bullets with these things...and then using them on a crowd of protesters that you disagree with. Your more-or-less rational group of protesters quickly degenerates into an unruly mob - perfect for discrediting their message on the evening news.
Re:This is my single biggest push to free software
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Vista is Watching You
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· Score: 5, Interesting
This "phone home" crap is the single biggest thing that is driving me to consider open-source alternative operating systems and software.
I got sent out on a call last week... Their complaint was that the PC was running fairly slow and that it kept asking to connect to the Internet (yes, the poor souls were still on dial-up). I honestly expected to find an assortment of spyware/malware on the machine. Instead, I found a pile of legitimate software was trying to phone home.
Just about any HP camera/printer/scanner will install an update utility. Java has a updater that runs in the background. Real Player, Adobe Reader, Flash Player, Quicktime, and assorted Sonic software all have their own background updaters.
Many applications are limited by the speed of the user, not the computer. You can only type or click so fast.
While this is certainly true, think of all the things you can do while you're waiting for the user to click or type. Realtime spellchecking is a fairly useful feature that is only possible because modern computers are fast enough to look up the words as you type them.
And look at the amount of multi-tasking your average user does these days... Usually an email program open, a web browser, a word processor, maybe an mp3 player... I remember when simply running an mp3 player alone slowed my PC down. The reason we can multi-task today is because the hardware has grown enough to allow it.
Hardware would have to catch up to drive this beast. This would max out all known memory and storage systems. Not to mention your internet connection.
True, but hardware is constantly improving anyway. Broadband is, more or less, widely available. Gb networking is almost commonplace. Folks are stringing up fiber left and right. SATA and SAS are replacing their parallel predecessors. We've done DDR, and now DDR2. ISA, to PCI, to PCI Express. Hardware is always changing, improving, growing. Sure, there'll be bottlenecks somewhere...but that's nothing new.
As has been mentioned time and again, until developers actually embrace multi-threading this will be relatively useless. Tests from various hardware sites have shown that going from the Core 2 Duo to the Core 2 Quad offers very little benefit except for a very small subset of users... who should probably be running workstations anyway (Video editing, 3D rendering, etc.)
I'd say this really depends on how the cores are implemented and used. Sure, a word processor isn't going to speed up much from 2 cores to 4 or 8 or 16... But what if you're running a word processor, an mp3 player, some antivirus, VOIP softphone, IM client, and email. What if your OS is automatically defragmenting your files in the background, maybe compressing them too, or encrypting them. Single applications and tasks may not benefit much from tons of cores...but what if you break up your workload so that each application or task has, more or less, a core to itself?
I can't say that having a big pile o' cores is actually going to make anything better. But claiming that lots of cores is useless based on current workloads is just silly...you need to match the workloads to the technology. Look at how different our workloads are today compared to 10 years ago. In another 10 years it may make perfect sense to have 100+ cores in a single PC.
Am I the only one baffled by this obsession with local search? I send most of 5 days a week using desktop computers and a lot of the weekends, and I have to say that I very rarely need to search for anything locally. I put stuff where I can find it later using simple directory structures. Is that so difficult?
I installed Google Desktop on my Windows machine not too long ago... And uninstalled it shortly thereafter. I just didn't use it. Sure, it was nice to be notified when I got a new message through GMail...but that's honestly about the most I did with it.
Like you, my files are generally in order. Most everything, at home and at work, goes onto the server in a logical directory structure. Shares are named in a way that makes it obvious what is inside, subdirectories provide additional structure, and file names are descriptive. I don't usually have to search for anything...just click through the appropriate directories to find the file exactly where it belongs.
I do make use of Gmail's search feature fairly heavily though... It is sometimes difficult to locate a specific email message from a specific person, especially when that person doesn't like to use descriptive subject fields.
Perhaps it would be more helpful in locating some obscure configuration file or dll... But I was under the impression that one of the key features of Google Desktop, as opposed to slocate or Window's native search, was the ability to search within the contents of a file - something that probably isn't going to help much if you're just trying to locate squid.conf or dmime.dll
Now I work for a place I have no real feeling of accomplishment, nor is it a place I yearned to work for. But I get in at 10am, I am out the door at the latest by 6pm. I don't work from home. I don't get on email after I leave work. Emergencies come up and then I take care of them, but I am able to separate my work life from my personal life with great distinction. My co-workers are in their 30s and 40s and 50s, all of them have families and leave on time to make sure that they are home to pick up their kids, play with them, and be at their soccer games. They encourage me to leave work and go out on a date, watch a movie, read a book, and do something constructive. They know that working isn't the point of life, but merely a part of it.
Agreed.
Sure, it's important to work someplace you like... You'll be stuck there, on average, 8 hours a day... But it's essential to be able to leave work behind when you're done for the day and go live your life.
I occasionally have to put in a long day, or work a weekend...sometimes on short notice...but it's the exception rather than the rule. Generally speaking I'm done at 5:00 and can leave it all behind me until the next day. Weekends are mine with no distractions. Holidays are free from intrusions.
Having time to actually spend relaxing, taking care of my house, spending time with the wife and kids... That's all worth a lot more than free lunches or an impressive job title.
$500 for the cheapest iphone, $60/month for the cheapest plan... I'm going to have to get a second job.
Yeah, it's well out of my price range as well. No way in hell I'll be getting one. But $60/month doesn't sound all that bad when you consider it has unlimited data. Data can get very expensive, very quickly.
you wouldn't notice the difference on an Ipod, but on a nice home system you do
For me, there is no nice home system on which to notice the difference. I can, of course, only speak from my own experience...but I suspect this may also be true of other ~30's out there.
I don't have the time or inclination to sit around at home and simply listen to music. I know that some people think that's a great way to spend some time, but I'm just not one of them. Music, for me, generally accompanies something else. It'll be playing while I drive somewhere, while I do yardwork, in the background at a bar or party, or while I do something on my PC. For me, there's no point in spending the money on a nice home stereo because it just wouldn't get used.
The closest I have to a home system is my PC - which has very crappy speakers. More often than not I'm listening to music on some sort of mp3 player. CD's don't really hold that much music, at least not in their native uncompressed format... They're fairly large and awkward to carry around... And a CD player is generally larger and more awkward to carry around than an mp3 player... For me, a CD is nothing more than a package I can use to carry music home from the store with - as soon as I get it home the CD is ripped and tossed into a closet, likely never to be seen again. And now that we've got legal sources of downloadable music I don't even use CD's to bring music home from the store anymore.
Whether you like or hate this administration, there can be little argument that it's caused a great deal of harm to our nations foreign relations.
I dislike the current administration, and agree that it has done harm to our foreign relations... But what has that got to do with this story? France's concerns are very valid - of course we're going to spy on them, we'd be crazy not to. Our government should be spying on pretty much every other nation out there. They'd be incredibly negligent if they weren't keeping tabs on France. And I would assume that France is spying on us as well. Every nation has to watch out for their own best interests, which generally means keeping an eye on everyone else - even your friends.
Now...I guess it seems a little weird that they're worried about BlackBerries specifically... RIM is a Canadian company. Do the French really think that their data is that much less secure because it is being handled by a Canadian company? Do they really think the US government has that much sway over Canada? I think I might be insulted if I was Canadian... And I really don't think their data will be any more secure traveling over any other network or through any other companies...unless maybe they build their own system with very strong end-to-end encryption... I can't help but wonder if there is some ulterior (non-security) motive here... A competing French product that could be used instead.
AJAX actually allows you to, if you want, transfer less data. Gmail, for example, does not need to transmit an entire new page every time I open up a new email message...it just displays the contents of that message. Sure, caches and proxies and all that good stuff can reduce the actual amount of traffic generated by a full-page refresh...but it's still a full-page refresh, you're still requesting a redraw of every single picture and every bit of text - rather than just asking to redraw a small portion.
The reason AJAX is indirectly responsible for an increase in HTTP traffic is because the web is becoming more useful. Gmail and other AJAXy webmail systems are just about as responsive and feature-rich as their traditional desktop counterparts. Message boards and chat systems are becoming more useful and responsive, replacing Usenet and IM clients in places. We've got web-based word processors, spreadsheets, and paint programs. All sorts of stuff is going online now, just because we can. It isn't that AJAX is wasteful, it's that AJAX let's us do so much useful/fun stuff.
I didn't read the article (I'm lazy and at work) but I really have to wonder what they consider P2P traffic... What protocols/clients are they looking at? Is it just BitTorrent, or are they looking at things like Kazaa and LimeWire as well? What about private BitTorrent clients like the one Blizzard uses to update World of Warcraft? I guess I'm not surprised that the various P2P systems are transferring more data than HTTP does... HTTP is generally just text and small pictures, maybe the occasional streaming video. While the assorted P2P clients are transferring huge piles of video, music, and data.
Agreed. Are people really that lazy? Is it really that hard to type out an entire word? Sure, when I'm playing some on-line game my punctuation and capitalization will likely suffer in the name of expediency... But I can generally spell out entire words. And if it's email, a message board, or some sort of IM - where time really isn't critical - then I can most certainly manage to spell out entire words, generally punctuate things mostly correct, even spell-check things occasionally. I can't stand reading posts/messages/IMs from folks who seem to have lost half the keys on their keyboard.
Agreed. I've never heard of "folksonomy" or "blook"... and "netiquette" predates the Internet by quite a bit. I really have to wonder what options were on this poll, who picked them out, and who was voting on them.
After using Vista for about 4-5 months now I actively hate it.
I couldn't even make it through the 4-5 months that you did... Not because I hated it, but because I was trying to get work done.
My company rolled out Vista on several of our technician laptops to get us familiar with the OS. The problem is that those technician laptops are constantly going out on-site to diagnose/repair assorted network issues. And Vista, even the business version, just doesn't work well with Cisco equipment.
There's no telnet utility. Not a big deal, since I install PuTTY anyway... Except that PuTTY didn't seem to like Vista and crashed constantly. Hyperterm is also gone, which again wouldn't be a big deal with PuTTY - but PuTTY kept crashing. I was completely unable to get the P/S/ASDM to work reliably through IE7 (thankfully it worked fine through FireFox). And then there were the constant prompts for elevation - ipconfig, network properties, NetStumbler.
In the end we had to reformat all the technician laptops and re-install Windows XP just so we could get our work done.
Can someone explain to me the reasoning behind the bans on cuba. There are much nastier places that people are allowed to deal with.
I was always under the impression it had something to do with proximity.
It's one thing to have China be communist way over there... It's something else entirely to have a communist Cuba right next door. We have Cuban refugees actually washing ashore in Florida. Cuba is close enough that, without an embargo, it'd make a great vacation destination. This added visibility makes it much harder to ignore than far worse nations over there.
If you plan it right and execute it right it should go without any hiccups.
My company does 3rd party technical support for many businesses in the area... And I'll tell you right now, once you start outsourcing things there's no such thing as planning it right. We're constantly running into unexpected snags around here...the trick isn't to plan it right, it's to deal with surprises quickly and effectively.
There's always something the software vendor forgets to mention... Or mentions to the end-user, but it doesn't get relayed to us... Or it gets relayed to the wrong person here and the message isn't passed on... Or something gets delayed in shipping... Or there isn't power/network where you need it...
If the RIAA moved their website from one outsourced webhost to another outsourced webhost, there's plenty of room for things to go wrong. You're not talking about one person taking a snapshot of a server physically in their possession and moving that image to another server physically in their possession... You're talking about three separate groups trying to coordinate this move.
The problem though, is that even if they do check the signature it's still no garontee that you're the right person. Maybe you're in a hurry, or having a bad day, or your arm is in a cast...so the signature doesn't look right...do they refuse to take the card? What if someone spends a couple hours studying the signature on the back of the card and comes up with a passable forgery...now it matches...what good does checking the signature do you then?
There were (still are?) credit cards with your photograph on them... Sounds like a good idea, but I doubt if it actually added any security. I doubt if your average overworked retail sales clerk really takes the time to check the photo.
What we really need is a credit card system that requires you to enter some kind of a PIN. Similar to what the debit cards use. Don't leave it up to the clerk to visually compare anything...make the customer punch in the PIN and have the computers verify it. Certainly wouldn't be foolproof...but it'd be better than the signatures we have now.
Exactly. Without a whole bunch of super-modern technology, I'd be dead by now anyway, and I bet a lot of us can say the same. The ship has sailed -- may as well enjoy the trip!
Look at what this guy went without - a cell phone, mp3 player, computer, and television - none of these are essential. We're not talking about modern medicine here, we're talking about luxuries.
I would guess that I could probably live without such luxuries pretty much as long as I had to. And many people do. I didn't have a cell phone until very recently, when my boss made me carry one for work. The only mp3 player I have is an ancient one I picked up at a garage sale, and I only use it as a distraction while I'm out doing yardwork. My computer and television are great fun...but I certainly wouldn't call either of them essential.
Wow, i am in my mid-30s and I never saw this guy and only heard of him via TV show jokes etc. I thought he was dead. Go figure... sounds like a lot of you really loved him.
I'm 29 and I've got fond, if vaguely frustrating, memories of Mr. Wizard.
We didn't have cable for most of my childhood. Initially it wasn't available where we lived, and then it was too expensive. We used to visit my grandparents in Louisville, KY and I hate to say that one of the high points of the trip was their cable television. I used to watch Nickelodeon and Mr. Wizard as much as I could. Horrible, isn't it? Go on vacation to see your grandparents and spend your time stuck in front of a TV... My parents didn't approve, and I was constantly being dragged away from some interesting science demonstration to go outside and play with some cousin I didn't know.
We finally got cable television installed in our house shortly before we sold the place and moved. For those few months I would watch Mr. Wizard whenever it was on. I even woke up early in the morning to catch his show. It was the best thing on TV.
Then we sold the house and moved completely out of town... No cable television at all. By that time my parents were hooked on their ESPN and we got one of those ginormous satellite dishes...but the plan with Nickelodeon and Mr. Wizard was too expensive...
OK... but no one really expected to run third-party apps on the iPod in the first place.
I won't argue that there's no place for 3rd party software on a phone... It exists, it's out there, people buy it, it must be in demand... But personally I don't want all that much on my phone. It needs an address book, it needs to be able to make calls...the ability to surf the web looks nifty, but not all that essential...what has me intrigued about the iPhone is the unique voicemail system. I'd love to be able to see my voicemail in some kind of graphical menu structure, instead of listening to several seconds of robotic voice prompts. There are plenty of phones out there (granted, they don't cost $500) that have very limited capabilities... You don't need to be able to run 3rd party software on a phone for it to sell.
I'm not happy with Verizon, and was thrilled when we could move to Vonage for our voice service. The only problem is our craptastic ISP. I may not hate Charter's business practices as much as Verizon's, but their technical support is just as bad...
The worst part is that we've got a local telecom company that's really giving Verizon some competition. Verizon is still purely copper out here, but the local competition is stringing fiber all over the place. They have a nice bundle that unlimited VOIP and 5mbps bandwidth...but we're about 2 miles too far out of town to get it.
A maximum of 11 years is just that, a maximum. It's up to the legal system to decide just how severely to punish him.
Much as I hate to roll out the "think of the children" line... Some spam (I am not at all familiar with this case so I have no idea what they were mailing out) is downright pornographic in nature. If they're just blasting it out to random addresses what are the odds that it reached minors? What are the normal charges for exposing a minor to pornography?
Then you have to wonder how many important emails got lost beneath the mountains of spam that these people produced... How many people missed an important announcement, a change of plans, or a business deal?
What kind of resources have been put into dealing with spam worldwide? More bandwidth for transmitting the messages...more storage for queueing and whatnot...bigger servers, bigger pipes, more IT staff...software to filter it out... How much time does your average IT monkey spend dealing with spam in one way or another over the course of a year? How much are they getting paid? How much of that spam came from these folks?
I'm not suggesting that these guys should get anywhere near 11 years... But I can see where, under some circumstances, 11 years makes sense.
Why doesn't dell just put a bootable diagnostic utility in a small partition on the disk? Seems like a no brainer:)
They do. Every dell I've seen in the last year or two has just such a partition. Not only that, but the bootable diagnostic partition appears to be running some sort of Linux.
Last time I had a problem with my Uninspiron the Dell techie instructed me to open up the front remove a few parts and reseat the screen conection. When I expressed surprise he said this was Dells standard troubleshhooting procedure.
We occasionally get sub-contracted to do Dell service calls, and I'm always surprised at this. Dell routinely has people completely dismantle their computers. They pull sticks of RAM, unplug drives, remove expansion cards, wiggle plugs... I have seen Dell computers that were actually damaged by this diagnostic process. Dell instructs the owner to remove something, and the owner winds up breaking the component in the process. It happens entirely too often.
Is there some diagnostic software that Dell uses that doesn't run on Ubuntu? If the magic blue smoke gets out of the CPU, that's easy to diagnose, but perhaps they're concerned about supporting more subtle hardware issues without diagnostic tools?
Every dell I've dealt with in the last couple of years has had an assortment of diagnostic software that does not run within Windows. They may very well have a Windows-based diagnostic program with a pretty GUI that I'm not familiar with...but all the machines I've worked on had a bootable diagnostic partition that appears to be running some sort of Linux.
Dell servers ship with an Open Manage CD that can help you configure the hardware before installing your OS, and can also perform hardware diagnostics. Again, the Open Manage discs appear to be running some sort of Linux.
There's no reason why a lack of Windows should prevent dell from diagnosing defective hardware.
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So shoot enough of these in an angry crowd, and now you have a crowd that's (A) angrier, since you just shot at them, (B) manic enough to do dumber things than normally, and (C) a lot less sensitive to pain. Just so, you know, they won't be as deterred by further rubber bullets or tear gas or a police batton. It sounds to me like just what you need to turn some unruly demonstrators into an outright riot. Or an outright riot into hell broken loose.Seems like this could actually be pretty usseful...
Imagine surreptitiously replacing the normal nonlethal deterrent bullets with these things...and then using them on a crowd of protesters that you disagree with. Your more-or-less rational group of protesters quickly degenerates into an unruly mob - perfect for discrediting their message on the evening news.
Just about any HP camera/printer/scanner will install an update utility. Java has a updater that runs in the background. Real Player, Adobe Reader, Flash Player, Quicktime, and assorted Sonic software all have their own background updaters.
And look at the amount of multi-tasking your average user does these days... Usually an email program open, a web browser, a word processor, maybe an mp3 player... I remember when simply running an mp3 player alone slowed my PC down. The reason we can multi-task today is because the hardware has grown enough to allow it.True, but hardware is constantly improving anyway. Broadband is, more or less, widely available. Gb networking is almost commonplace. Folks are stringing up fiber left and right. SATA and SAS are replacing their parallel predecessors. We've done DDR, and now DDR2. ISA, to PCI, to PCI Express. Hardware is always changing, improving, growing. Sure, there'll be bottlenecks somewhere...but that's nothing new.I'd say this really depends on how the cores are implemented and used. Sure, a word processor isn't going to speed up much from 2 cores to 4 or 8 or 16... But what if you're running a word processor, an mp3 player, some antivirus, VOIP softphone, IM client, and email. What if your OS is automatically defragmenting your files in the background, maybe compressing them too, or encrypting them. Single applications and tasks may not benefit much from tons of cores...but what if you break up your workload so that each application or task has, more or less, a core to itself?
I can't say that having a big pile o' cores is actually going to make anything better. But claiming that lots of cores is useless based on current workloads is just silly...you need to match the workloads to the technology. Look at how different our workloads are today compared to 10 years ago. In another 10 years it may make perfect sense to have 100+ cores in a single PC.
I installed Google Desktop on my Windows machine not too long ago... And uninstalled it shortly thereafter. I just didn't use it. Sure, it was nice to be notified when I got a new message through GMail...but that's honestly about the most I did with it.
Like you, my files are generally in order. Most everything, at home and at work, goes onto the server in a logical directory structure. Shares are named in a way that makes it obvious what is inside, subdirectories provide additional structure, and file names are descriptive. I don't usually have to search for anything...just click through the appropriate directories to find the file exactly where it belongs.
I do make use of Gmail's search feature fairly heavily though... It is sometimes difficult to locate a specific email message from a specific person, especially when that person doesn't like to use descriptive subject fields.
Perhaps it would be more helpful in locating some obscure configuration file or dll... But I was under the impression that one of the key features of Google Desktop, as opposed to slocate or Window's native search, was the ability to search within the contents of a file - something that probably isn't going to help much if you're just trying to locate squid.conf or dmime.dll
Agreed.
Sure, it's important to work someplace you like... You'll be stuck there, on average, 8 hours a day... But it's essential to be able to leave work behind when you're done for the day and go live your life.
I occasionally have to put in a long day, or work a weekend...sometimes on short notice...but it's the exception rather than the rule. Generally speaking I'm done at 5:00 and can leave it all behind me until the next day. Weekends are mine with no distractions. Holidays are free from intrusions.
Having time to actually spend relaxing, taking care of my house, spending time with the wife and kids... That's all worth a lot more than free lunches or an impressive job title.
Yeah, it's well out of my price range as well. No way in hell I'll be getting one. But $60/month doesn't sound all that bad when you consider it has unlimited data. Data can get very expensive, very quickly.
For me, there is no nice home system on which to notice the difference. I can, of course, only speak from my own experience...but I suspect this may also be true of other ~30's out there.
I don't have the time or inclination to sit around at home and simply listen to music. I know that some people think that's a great way to spend some time, but I'm just not one of them. Music, for me, generally accompanies something else. It'll be playing while I drive somewhere, while I do yardwork, in the background at a bar or party, or while I do something on my PC. For me, there's no point in spending the money on a nice home stereo because it just wouldn't get used.
The closest I have to a home system is my PC - which has very crappy speakers. More often than not I'm listening to music on some sort of mp3 player. CD's don't really hold that much music, at least not in their native uncompressed format... They're fairly large and awkward to carry around... And a CD player is generally larger and more awkward to carry around than an mp3 player... For me, a CD is nothing more than a package I can use to carry music home from the store with - as soon as I get it home the CD is ripped and tossed into a closet, likely never to be seen again. And now that we've got legal sources of downloadable music I don't even use CD's to bring music home from the store anymore.
I dislike the current administration, and agree that it has done harm to our foreign relations... But what has that got to do with this story? France's concerns are very valid - of course we're going to spy on them, we'd be crazy not to. Our government should be spying on pretty much every other nation out there. They'd be incredibly negligent if they weren't keeping tabs on France. And I would assume that France is spying on us as well. Every nation has to watch out for their own best interests, which generally means keeping an eye on everyone else - even your friends.
Now...I guess it seems a little weird that they're worried about BlackBerries specifically... RIM is a Canadian company. Do the French really think that their data is that much less secure because it is being handled by a Canadian company? Do they really think the US government has that much sway over Canada? I think I might be insulted if I was Canadian... And I really don't think their data will be any more secure traveling over any other network or through any other companies...unless maybe they build their own system with very strong end-to-end encryption... I can't help but wonder if there is some ulterior (non-security) motive here... A competing French product that could be used instead.
AJAX actually allows you to, if you want, transfer less data. Gmail, for example, does not need to transmit an entire new page every time I open up a new email message...it just displays the contents of that message. Sure, caches and proxies and all that good stuff can reduce the actual amount of traffic generated by a full-page refresh...but it's still a full-page refresh, you're still requesting a redraw of every single picture and every bit of text - rather than just asking to redraw a small portion.
The reason AJAX is indirectly responsible for an increase in HTTP traffic is because the web is becoming more useful. Gmail and other AJAXy webmail systems are just about as responsive and feature-rich as their traditional desktop counterparts. Message boards and chat systems are becoming more useful and responsive, replacing Usenet and IM clients in places. We've got web-based word processors, spreadsheets, and paint programs. All sorts of stuff is going online now, just because we can. It isn't that AJAX is wasteful, it's that AJAX let's us do so much useful/fun stuff.
I didn't read the article (I'm lazy and at work) but I really have to wonder what they consider P2P traffic... What protocols/clients are they looking at? Is it just BitTorrent, or are they looking at things like Kazaa and LimeWire as well? What about private BitTorrent clients like the one Blizzard uses to update World of Warcraft? I guess I'm not surprised that the various P2P systems are transferring more data than HTTP does... HTTP is generally just text and small pictures, maybe the occasional streaming video. While the assorted P2P clients are transferring huge piles of video, music, and data.
Agreed. Are people really that lazy? Is it really that hard to type out an entire word? Sure, when I'm playing some on-line game my punctuation and capitalization will likely suffer in the name of expediency... But I can generally spell out entire words. And if it's email, a message board, or some sort of IM - where time really isn't critical - then I can most certainly manage to spell out entire words, generally punctuate things mostly correct, even spell-check things occasionally. I can't stand reading posts/messages/IMs from folks who seem to have lost half the keys on their keyboard.
Agreed. I've never heard of "folksonomy" or "blook" ... and "netiquette" predates the Internet by quite a bit. I really have to wonder what options were on this poll, who picked them out, and who was voting on them.
I couldn't even make it through the 4-5 months that you did... Not because I hated it, but because I was trying to get work done.
My company rolled out Vista on several of our technician laptops to get us familiar with the OS. The problem is that those technician laptops are constantly going out on-site to diagnose/repair assorted network issues. And Vista, even the business version, just doesn't work well with Cisco equipment.
There's no telnet utility. Not a big deal, since I install PuTTY anyway... Except that PuTTY didn't seem to like Vista and crashed constantly. Hyperterm is also gone, which again wouldn't be a big deal with PuTTY - but PuTTY kept crashing. I was completely unable to get the P/S/ASDM to work reliably through IE7 (thankfully it worked fine through FireFox). And then there were the constant prompts for elevation - ipconfig, network properties, NetStumbler.
In the end we had to reformat all the technician laptops and re-install Windows XP just so we could get our work done.
I was always under the impression it had something to do with proximity.
It's one thing to have China be communist way over there... It's something else entirely to have a communist Cuba right next door. We have Cuban refugees actually washing ashore in Florida. Cuba is close enough that, without an embargo, it'd make a great vacation destination. This added visibility makes it much harder to ignore than far worse nations over there.
My company does 3rd party technical support for many businesses in the area... And I'll tell you right now, once you start outsourcing things there's no such thing as planning it right. We're constantly running into unexpected snags around here...the trick isn't to plan it right, it's to deal with surprises quickly and effectively.
There's always something the software vendor forgets to mention... Or mentions to the end-user, but it doesn't get relayed to us... Or it gets relayed to the wrong person here and the message isn't passed on... Or something gets delayed in shipping... Or there isn't power/network where you need it...
If the RIAA moved their website from one outsourced webhost to another outsourced webhost, there's plenty of room for things to go wrong. You're not talking about one person taking a snapshot of a server physically in their possession and moving that image to another server physically in their possession... You're talking about three separate groups trying to coordinate this move.
The problem though, is that even if they do check the signature it's still no garontee that you're the right person. Maybe you're in a hurry, or having a bad day, or your arm is in a cast...so the signature doesn't look right...do they refuse to take the card? What if someone spends a couple hours studying the signature on the back of the card and comes up with a passable forgery...now it matches...what good does checking the signature do you then?
There were (still are?) credit cards with your photograph on them... Sounds like a good idea, but I doubt if it actually added any security. I doubt if your average overworked retail sales clerk really takes the time to check the photo.
What we really need is a credit card system that requires you to enter some kind of a PIN. Similar to what the debit cards use. Don't leave it up to the clerk to visually compare anything...make the customer punch in the PIN and have the computers verify it. Certainly wouldn't be foolproof...but it'd be better than the signatures we have now.
Look at what this guy went without - a cell phone, mp3 player, computer, and television - none of these are essential. We're not talking about modern medicine here, we're talking about luxuries.
I would guess that I could probably live without such luxuries pretty much as long as I had to. And many people do. I didn't have a cell phone until very recently, when my boss made me carry one for work. The only mp3 player I have is an ancient one I picked up at a garage sale, and I only use it as a distraction while I'm out doing yardwork. My computer and television are great fun...but I certainly wouldn't call either of them essential.
I'm 29 and I've got fond, if vaguely frustrating, memories of Mr. Wizard.
We didn't have cable for most of my childhood. Initially it wasn't available where we lived, and then it was too expensive. We used to visit my grandparents in Louisville, KY and I hate to say that one of the high points of the trip was their cable television. I used to watch Nickelodeon and Mr. Wizard as much as I could. Horrible, isn't it? Go on vacation to see your grandparents and spend your time stuck in front of a TV... My parents didn't approve, and I was constantly being dragged away from some interesting science demonstration to go outside and play with some cousin I didn't know.
We finally got cable television installed in our house shortly before we sold the place and moved. For those few months I would watch Mr. Wizard whenever it was on. I even woke up early in the morning to catch his show. It was the best thing on TV.
Then we sold the house and moved completely out of town... No cable television at all. By that time my parents were hooked on their ESPN and we got one of those ginormous satellite dishes...but the plan with Nickelodeon and Mr. Wizard was too expensive...
As I already said, what truly intrigues me about the iPhone is the voicemail system.
I won't be purchasing one though... My phone is provided by my employer, and I doubt if they'll be spending $500 on anyone's phone anytime soon.
However, once the iPhone voicemail system is out there for people to use, I am hopeful that it'll find its way into other (cheaper) offerings.
I won't argue that there's no place for 3rd party software on a phone... It exists, it's out there, people buy it, it must be in demand... But personally I don't want all that much on my phone. It needs an address book, it needs to be able to make calls...the ability to surf the web looks nifty, but not all that essential...what has me intrigued about the iPhone is the unique voicemail system. I'd love to be able to see my voicemail in some kind of graphical menu structure, instead of listening to several seconds of robotic voice prompts. There are plenty of phones out there (granted, they don't cost $500) that have very limited capabilities... You don't need to be able to run 3rd party software on a phone for it to sell.
I'm not happy with Verizon, and was thrilled when we could move to Vonage for our voice service. The only problem is our craptastic ISP. I may not hate Charter's business practices as much as Verizon's, but their technical support is just as bad...
The worst part is that we've got a local telecom company that's really giving Verizon some competition. Verizon is still purely copper out here, but the local competition is stringing fiber all over the place. They have a nice bundle that unlimited VOIP and 5mbps bandwidth...but we're about 2 miles too far out of town to get it.
A maximum of 11 years is just that, a maximum. It's up to the legal system to decide just how severely to punish him.
Much as I hate to roll out the "think of the children" line... Some spam (I am not at all familiar with this case so I have no idea what they were mailing out) is downright pornographic in nature. If they're just blasting it out to random addresses what are the odds that it reached minors? What are the normal charges for exposing a minor to pornography?
Then you have to wonder how many important emails got lost beneath the mountains of spam that these people produced... How many people missed an important announcement, a change of plans, or a business deal?
What kind of resources have been put into dealing with spam worldwide? More bandwidth for transmitting the messages...more storage for queueing and whatnot...bigger servers, bigger pipes, more IT staff...software to filter it out... How much time does your average IT monkey spend dealing with spam in one way or another over the course of a year? How much are they getting paid? How much of that spam came from these folks?
I'm not suggesting that these guys should get anywhere near 11 years... But I can see where, under some circumstances, 11 years makes sense.
They do. Every dell I've seen in the last year or two has just such a partition. Not only that, but the bootable diagnostic partition appears to be running some sort of Linux.
We occasionally get sub-contracted to do Dell service calls, and I'm always surprised at this. Dell routinely has people completely dismantle their computers. They pull sticks of RAM, unplug drives, remove expansion cards, wiggle plugs... I have seen Dell computers that were actually damaged by this diagnostic process. Dell instructs the owner to remove something, and the owner winds up breaking the component in the process. It happens entirely too often.
Every dell I've dealt with in the last couple of years has had an assortment of diagnostic software that does not run within Windows. They may very well have a Windows-based diagnostic program with a pretty GUI that I'm not familiar with...but all the machines I've worked on had a bootable diagnostic partition that appears to be running some sort of Linux.
Dell servers ship with an Open Manage CD that can help you configure the hardware before installing your OS, and can also perform hardware diagnostics. Again, the Open Manage discs appear to be running some sort of Linux.
There's no reason why a lack of Windows should prevent dell from diagnosing defective hardware.