No, $50,000 is a ridiculous starting figure. Somebody fresh out of college with no previous job experience can't expect to make $50,000. I certainly didn't make that much as a software developer. Of course it's all relative to the cost of living. Perhaps in some place like San Francisco $50,000 would be reasonable; not so much here in Dallas where I live.
The problem with recruiting teachers won't be solved by jacking up the salary. It can be solved by better working conditions. For starters, teachers shouldn't be expected to work crazy hours. A regular 40-hour week is reasonable, but most teachers have to work far more than that just to keep up. It's the workload we have to fix, not the salary.
If you want Windows to be user-friendly, one of the absolute must-haves is that the user must NEVER NEVER NEVER, under any circumstances:
Have to edit the registry (at least config files can have comments explaining what they're about), or
Have to worry about installing drivers for hardware that's been around for years (that's what auto-updates are for).
My dad has used Windows XP for several years and hasn't edited the Registry or installed hardware drivers. With Windows 98 you have may have a point: when my dad still used Windows 98, I often helped him by tweaking Registry settings. And installing drivers for simple hardware like Flash drives and a wireless NIC almost fubared the whole machine.
But none of that happens on Windows XP. All the hardware just works. I like Linux as much as the next guy--I haven't used Windows on my home PC in about five years--but it's not productive to criticize Windows for problems with a nine-year-old version that is no longer supported. The biggest problems with Windows 98 were solved in Windows XP.
I'd be more ticked off that the university was handing out your SSN to all the professors of the classes that you've taken.
It's worse than that. I'm currently a UTA grad student. Until this year, UTA student IDs were the same as your SSN, unless you specifically requested a different number. Starting in the summer session of 2006, all new student IDs are now a 10-digit number unrelated to your SSN. So until this year, UTA professors had to have access to SSNs because there was no other way to do it. Don't blame the professor here. I think the blame lies squarely with the university administrators.
"It's actually a really hard thing to do, so I don't criticize Microsoft too much."
No, really, it isnt.
Unrequested drastic UI and focus alterations are _always_ undesired. You dont need to query anything about wether the user should be interrupted; the user should _not_ be interrupted. For anything. At any time.
If everyone wanted the UI to work *exactly* the same way, then the problem would be simple. But not everyone is the same.
For example, if you're watching a DVD you might prefer never to be interrupted for anything, except a low battery warning. That makes sense, right?
But when I'm watching a DVD, I'd like to be notified if my wife sends me an IM. That's more important than watching the DVD. But if I get an IM from someone other than my wife, it can wait. On the other hand, what if I'm taking a timed test online? In that case, even the IM from my wife can wait.
But how does the computer know that my wife's IM can interrupt a DVD but not an online timed test? Sure, it's easy for you to say that the user should never be interrupted, but in practice that's not what users want. Users want to be interrupted or notified (in a non-destructive way) about *important* things. The trick is figuring out which things are important to the user.
I can understand your point about focus-stealing. That's generally bad, and if the computer needs to steal focus in order to notify the user, then it's a crummy operating system. As you said, notification bars or status tickers are better solutions. But there aren't any notification bars or status tickers in full-screen mode, like a PowerPoint presentation or watching a DVD. So in those cases the computer still has to make a judgement call: does it display a notification bar over-top of the full-screen application, or does it wait until the user exists full-screen mode? The answer depends on how badly the user needs or wants that information, and it's difficult for a computer to accurately make that judgement call--particularly since each user has different needs and wants.
I guess I just dont see how Microsoft would know that your in a meeting. Sorry.
Windows should know that you're giving a PowerPoint presentation. All it needs to do is check to see if PowerPoint is running, and if it is, ask PowerPoint if it's giving a presentation.
And it shouldn't be limited to PowerPoint. There needs to be a standardized API so that Windows can query each running program to ask it whether it's busy doing something that shouldn't be interrupted. So whether you're giving a PowerPoint presentation or taking a timed test online or playing a time-sensitive game, Windows should know enough to not interrupt you.
It's actually a really hard thing to do, so I don't criticize Microsoft too much. For one thing, you can't always trust what the application tells you. What if some idiot programmer writes an application that always claims to be busy and uninterruptible? Should Windows blindly believe that program, and *never* show any alerts? Clearly not. So Windows should sometimes show alerts anyway, even if a program claims to be busy. And what about old programs that don't inform Windows when they're busy? What should Windows do about them? Just ignore them? Or maybe inspect their GUI and use some heuristics to guess whether the program is busy? There are a lot of different solutions, most of them wrong. It's a significant challenge.
The whole reason us college students liked facebook in the first place was that was made by and for us, the college students.
Climb down off your high horse. I've been a college student, and I'm also currently working on a Master's degree. Students don't sign up for Facebook because it's a snobby exclusive club just for them. They sign up because 1) it works, 2) it isn't ugly like Myspace, and 3) it offers reasonable privacy protection. Nobody really cares who made it or who runs it.
Whether or not it's owned by Yahoo doesn't change anything. If Yahoo buys it and screws with the privacy settings (e.g., if they let everyone view your profile) then there will be a user revolt. But users won't revolt en masse just because Facebook is bought out by a *gasp* commercial company. As long as Facebook keeps working, ownership just isn't that big of a deal.
If you can't give a reliable estimate, say "I'll get back to you with a time estimate." If they press you, give an estimate on how long it will take you to give an estimate. E.g., "It will take me two days to research the request and give you a reasonable estimate."
The worst thing you can do is to just guess. If you guess too low, you look incompetent when you don't finish on time. If you guess too high, you create the expectation that all your estimates in the future will also be too high.
So my advice is, politely avoid giving estimates until you can research the request. Most people will understand that it takes a little research to come up with a good estimate.
Over the past three years I've received two letters from SBC notifying me that my DSL rates are increasing. Meanwhile I've noticed that the rates for the first year of service have steadily dropped. I used to think that I was just getting hammered because here in Dallas, my options were pretty much limited to SBC and Comcast (with a touch of Earthlink and a couple of more expensive options). Nope.
I'm in Dallas too, and my rates have decreased at least twice in the last two years. The only trick is that you have to call SBC (AT&T now, I guess) and ask for their new rates. They will require you to re-up your 12-month commitment, but you can get their best rate. I first signed up at $39.99 a month. Later I called and got the same service for $34.95. A few months ago I called up and got my bandwidth doubled and my rates reduced to about $20 a month. (Those rates are the prices for DSL when you have local phone service, so if you don't have SBC landline phone service your situation and rates might be slightly different.)
If you're worried about the 12-month commitment, you should remember that if you move, you can move the DSL with you with no penalty if SBC has service in your new area. I did that and it was no trouble. If you move outside of SBC's coverage area I don't know what the rules are.
Does "goodwill equity" give a customer a reason to buy again? Certainly. Does it mean the customer will be willing to accept one grievance or one mistake? Absolutely NOT.
When a company has built up "goodwill equity" with me by giving me a good value, I will be likely to accept one--and only one--mistake. For example, I've had uniformly positive experiences with Panasonic brand electronics. So when my most recent purchase, a Panasonic cordless phone, turned out to be a lemon, I decided to stick with Panasonic. I went ahead and bought a different model phone from Panasonic.
That's where goodwill equity can help a company. But goodwill equity only goes so far: if my new phone stops working too, I probably won't buy Panasonic ever again.
The problem lies with badly designed operating system/windowing system software that allow windows to grab focus. No window should be allowed to programmatically, without user intervention, pop to the foreground and get focus (whether it's a pop-up ad or any sort of dialogue). Unfortunately, this happens all the time.
I agree. Focus-stealing should never happen, but it does happen--on Windows. It can happen in KDE too, but in the KDE control panel there's an option to disallow focus-stealing. Once I set that, KDE didn't let any app ever steal the focus from me. Instead of stealing focus, apps that want attention simply flash their taskbar entry.
OS X does that by default. If an app needs user input, the Dock icon bounces to notify you that it's waiting for attention. But it doesn't steal the focus.
To be fair to Microsoft, Windows XP is far better about handling focus than earlier incarnations of Windows. Focus-stealing happens only occasionally. I still think it could do a better job, but on the whole it's quite usable. (Sometimes, it's the opposite problem: an app is waiting for my input, but it never bothers to inform me that it needs attention. For example, Visual Basic 6 will wait silently for me to enter my SourceSafe password, without doing anything to notify me that it's waiting for input.)
Um, the first month is less than $50 after you pay a $400+ equipment fee and agree to two years of service at $79/month. That ain't a deal or even comparable to what people want in broadband service.
Those are Canadian dollars. It's still a lot of money ($79 Canadian translates to about $65 US) but it's not an unreasonable price for satellite internet access. Still, it's a far cry from the $40 US a month (and no activation or equipment fees) I pay for my DSL.
It's no wonder Hollywood is considering alternatives, they've just experienced their worst box-office slump in 20 years. Ticket sales are down nearly 8% compared with 2004.
A mere 8% downturn in ticket sales doesn't mean the industry is in a slump. Sure it sucks for the companies that operate the cinemas, but for the film industry as a whole, ticket sales are now only a part of the equation. DVD rentals and sales are now a big part of the industry--so much so that we're routinely seeing DVD releases within six months of the theater release date.
The downturn in ticket sales does not indicate that movie studios are suddenly in dire need of new revenue streams. They've already got their new revenue stream: DVDs.
However, you're right about one thing: Hollywood studios aren't going to pass up what might be a lucrative new market in licensed video game. It's not because the studios are "struggling" and in dire need of money to keep from collapsing, though. Hollywood is doing fine. It's just good business sense to investigate any licensing deals that look like easy money.
See that funny little key on the right side of the space bar? The one that looks like a command key?
That's the one I'm talking about. It's too close. The physical size of my fingers means I need it about two inches farther left. But the other advice I just got is to use my thumb instead of my pinky to hit the Command key. That might work. (Why isn't there a manual with these kinds of tips?)
Use your thumb for the Command key instead of your pinky. Makes a big difference.
I'll try that. It sounds like good advice. Perhaps my problem is user error, but in my defense neither my Mac Mini nor my Kensington keyboard came with a guide to typing.
Compatible control keys. Switching between Mac and Windows this drives me nuts. I have to consciously think "command-C or control-C?"... The problem isn't the labeling, it's the location of the keys used. I had to use a Windows PC today and I kept pressing Alt-C to copy. This is why its a problem.
I'm a recent switcher (I bought my Mac Mini the day after Tiger came out) and my biggest gripe is the control key placement. I love my Mac to death, but it's useless for any text editing because I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts. Pressing Ctrl + C on a PC keyboard to copy text is easy; Command + C on my Mac requires me to twist my fingers because the Command key is too close to the alphabetic keys to be a natural reach.
I don't think it's just a matter of getting used to it, and of breaking old habits. No, the placement of the Command key really is detrimental to its use, at least as far as my fingers are concerned. Until today I've been trying to live with it, but now I'm going to find a way to remap the keys so as to move Command farther to the left.
I just recently switched to Apple when they came out with the Mac Mini. I love their hardware, and I would have switched years ago except that I need the ability to run Linux on x86. The Mac Mini is cheap enough that I bought it as a second computer, and now I run a PC with Linux alongside my Mac.
I am looking forward to the day I can dual-boot Linux and OS X on my Mac. (I know I can do that now with Linux compiled for PPC, but I need x86 Linux. All the non-free software for Linux is compiled for x86 only.) So yes, I will stick with Apple. In fact I wish Apple had made this switch years ago. If Apple had used x86 back then, I would have bought a Mac when OS X first came out.
So, if a music video is $1.99 and the song is $0.99...then I don't get it. Does it really cost that much to make a song or does it really cost very little to make a video?
I understand what you're saying. It doesn't make sense that a video that costs $1 million to make would cost only twice as much as a song that cost $10,000 to produce. Shouldn't a product's value be a measure of the amount of labor put into producing it?
That idea is called the labor theory of value, and it's one of the underpinnings of Marxism. But in a free market, the value of a product is not determined by the amount of labor put into producing it, but rather by what the consumer is willing to pay. Buying and selling in a free market is a mutually beneficial arrangement: the buyer willingly pays a price for a product he wants.
If the buyer is willing to pay $.99 to download a song, then a song is "worth" $.99. It doesn't matter how much it cost to produce that song. Similarly, the cost to produce a video has no bearing on its value. Only the willingness of the buyer to pay determines its value.
Thus it is not the amount of labor or money spent on making the song or video that determines its price, but rather the willingness of the buyer to pay that determines the price. The free market of buyers will pay whatever they feel is reasonable and not a penny more. If $1.99 is all that is reasonable for a video in the minds of the buyers, then that is what videos are worth.
It is my belief that the current way general consumers look at processors are simply price driven and to hell with preformance.. be it AMD, Intel, or anyone else for that matter.
I disagree. A few months ago an intelligent but not computer-savvy friend asked for my advice on buying a new PC. His biggest question was "If I buy a non-Intel processor, what sort of compatibility problems will I have? And are those other chips reliable?" I assured him that 1) he would have no compatibility problems, and 2) AMD chips are quite reliable.
So you see, the Intel Inside advertising is still effective. The fact that my friend had to ask if non-Intel were compatible means Intel has already won.
Which would you rather play, a computer game that takes forty hours to complete or one that lasts just a few minutes?
That's the wrong question. The question is, which would you be more willing to pay $50 for? Game companies make games with the hope that people will buy them.
Think about that. Would you pay $50 for Minesweeper? No, but you'd pay that much for the latest Myst adventure. It doesn't matter that you'll only play Myst once and that you'll enjoy Minesweeper several times a week for the rest of your life. You'll never be able to convince people to pay $50 a pop for short games like you will for epic games.
The reality of the game market doesn't make the article wrong, just irrelevant. It doesn't matter which games are technically better, it matters which games sell.
It sounds like your hands have been tied. I urge you to first seek more authority to demand that users install antivirus software. If the powers-that-be refuse to grant you the power to enforce that rule, your only solution is a social one.
Whenever someone's computer brings down the network, publicize his name. Find some way to make his neighbors hold him accountable. Believe me, it will happen. It won't take too many hazings (and rumors of hazings) before people shape up and install antivirus. Most people know about the need for antivirus, they're just too lazy and think "It won't happen to me." So motivate them.
I'm glad to see this positive development from XGI. Releasing open source Linux drivers can't help but give them positive publicity. Back in November of 2003 I said we had "an opportunity to persuade [XGI] that supporting Linux by releasing drivers would gain them positive reviews and have an impact on sales." XGI has released the drivers, now it remains to be seen whether this drives sales.
I don't know who persuaded XGI to make this commitment to open source but I fully intend to consider XGI for my next video card. I'm using an nVidia card today on the basis of their closed-source driver support for Linux, but I'd rather support a company that embraces open source.
A university degree program and a community college/technical institute program do not have the same focus. The community college's goal is to get you a job as soon as humanly possible, so they offer:
Practical courses, e.g. DNS and BIND
Current hottest technologies
Immediate job skills
A university is about a foundation of theoretical knowledge. You don't go to university to be trained for a job, you go to learn the knowledge to understand a field. Universities offer:
Theory-based courses, e.g. Networking
Exposure to good technologies, not necessarily the latest hottest thing
Related knowledge, such as mathematics
No specific job skills
At a university they won't teach you the specific skills you'll need to get a job. That does not mean you won't have job skills by the time you graduate. You're expected to learn the theory in class and learn the practical job-skill aspects on your own. If you aren't comfortable with that responsibility, a university degree is not for you.
Sure, take all the nice Linux applications over to Windows...don't worry about porting the nice Windows apps over to Linux though. Nope, we're fine...We'll just run them at half speed with WINE or something...
Don't complain--be happy. If enough high-quality cross-platform applications are available on Windows, eventually people will wise up. They'll think: "Hey, I'm using Evolution for email, Firefox for web browsing, Gaim for instant messaging, and OpenOffice for all my documents. I could switch from Windows to Linux and never know the difference."
And if that person is a responsible for an IT department that is currently negotiating to buy a site license for the latest version of Windows, well, suddenly Linux will look mighty attractive. A budget goes a lot further when you're not paying for Windows.
Consider your needs. You may not need a fancy backup solution, so don't buy an expensive external USB hard drive if your needs don't demand it. For example, here is how I backup my home computer. My costs? $70 for the DVD burner, then just the costs of blank discs.
1. Every two months I burn my music and movies to DVD+Rs. It takes 5 DVDs to hold everything. This data seldom changes--only when I buy and rip a new CD, or download some episodes of Red vs Blue--so every two months is fine. I keep one set of these backups at work.
2. Each week I tar up and gzip my home directory and burn it to a CD-R. Yes, it fits on one CD--I keep all my music and stuff on a different partition. I used to worry about losing data during the week, then I remembered: I don't have much to lose, except my latest journal entries, browser cache/history, and Gnucash entries. I can afford to lose a week's worth of data, because it's easy to recreate. So backing up more than once a week is overkill.
I have an IMAP email account, otherwise I would need to back up my emails every day.
3. I don't backup my OS. If Mandrake gets borked and won't boot, I just reinstall. It doesn't take long, and with urpmi it's a snap to reinstall my favorite applications. (I have a local copy of PLF so installing my favorite *unsupported* packages is fast too.) Then I just copy over the latest backup of my home directory and I'm back in business.
The last time I had to restore everything it took just a few hours total.
Do you work? I am not trying to be a troll, but I find this difficult to understand. I have to deal with documents from my co-workers all the time. I have to generate documents to my co-workers all the time. By your term "casual user" I am reading "does work that doesn't involve touching a computer", which in the world I know is a definite minority of people.
I do work, yes. I'm a software developer. And I admit that yes, I have used Word on occasion at work. In the last two years, maybe a dozen times. So yes, people working with computers may need Microsoft Office at work.
But a person who uses a computer as part of his job is not a casual computer user. That's my point. Apple's new suite is going after the casual user, who has a home computer and uses it for email and Internet. Users like that don't need Microsoft Office. As evidence I offer my own experience: since I graduated from university I have not had to use a word processor on my home computer. The need has never arisen. Oh, I think I once wrote a letter to my grandma, but I could have just as easily written that in a text editor. In fact, I think I may have done so, and then pasted it into OpenOffice later to get some better formatting. Tell me, why would I need a Microsoft Office work-alike to do that?
That's what I mean by casual computer user. I myself am a power user at work, but a casual user at home. Any piece of junk word processor is enough to meet my needs on my home computer.
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No, $50,000 is a ridiculous starting figure. Somebody fresh out of college with no previous job experience can't expect to make $50,000. I certainly didn't make that much as a software developer. Of course it's all relative to the cost of living. Perhaps in some place like San Francisco $50,000 would be reasonable; not so much here in Dallas where I live.
The problem with recruiting teachers won't be solved by jacking up the salary. It can be solved by better working conditions. For starters, teachers shouldn't be expected to work crazy hours. A regular 40-hour week is reasonable, but most teachers have to work far more than that just to keep up. It's the workload we have to fix, not the salary.
My dad has used Windows XP for several years and hasn't edited the Registry or installed hardware drivers. With Windows 98 you have may have a point: when my dad still used Windows 98, I often helped him by tweaking Registry settings. And installing drivers for simple hardware like Flash drives and a wireless NIC almost fubared the whole machine.
But none of that happens on Windows XP. All the hardware just works. I like Linux as much as the next guy--I haven't used Windows on my home PC in about five years--but it's not productive to criticize Windows for problems with a nine-year-old version that is no longer supported. The biggest problems with Windows 98 were solved in Windows XP.
It's worse than that. I'm currently a UTA grad student. Until this year, UTA student IDs were the same as your SSN, unless you specifically requested a different number. Starting in the summer session of 2006, all new student IDs are now a 10-digit number unrelated to your SSN. So until this year, UTA professors had to have access to SSNs because there was no other way to do it. Don't blame the professor here. I think the blame lies squarely with the university administrators.
If everyone wanted the UI to work *exactly* the same way, then the problem would be simple. But not everyone is the same.
For example, if you're watching a DVD you might prefer never to be interrupted for anything, except a low battery warning. That makes sense, right?
But when I'm watching a DVD, I'd like to be notified if my wife sends me an IM. That's more important than watching the DVD. But if I get an IM from someone other than my wife, it can wait. On the other hand, what if I'm taking a timed test online? In that case, even the IM from my wife can wait.
But how does the computer know that my wife's IM can interrupt a DVD but not an online timed test? Sure, it's easy for you to say that the user should never be interrupted, but in practice that's not what users want. Users want to be interrupted or notified (in a non-destructive way) about *important* things. The trick is figuring out which things are important to the user.
I can understand your point about focus-stealing. That's generally bad, and if the computer needs to steal focus in order to notify the user, then it's a crummy operating system. As you said, notification bars or status tickers are better solutions. But there aren't any notification bars or status tickers in full-screen mode, like a PowerPoint presentation or watching a DVD. So in those cases the computer still has to make a judgement call: does it display a notification bar over-top of the full-screen application, or does it wait until the user exists full-screen mode? The answer depends on how badly the user needs or wants that information, and it's difficult for a computer to accurately make that judgement call--particularly since each user has different needs and wants.
Windows should know that you're giving a PowerPoint presentation. All it needs to do is check to see if PowerPoint is running, and if it is, ask PowerPoint if it's giving a presentation.
And it shouldn't be limited to PowerPoint. There needs to be a standardized API so that Windows can query each running program to ask it whether it's busy doing something that shouldn't be interrupted. So whether you're giving a PowerPoint presentation or taking a timed test online or playing a time-sensitive game, Windows should know enough to not interrupt you.
It's actually a really hard thing to do, so I don't criticize Microsoft too much. For one thing, you can't always trust what the application tells you. What if some idiot programmer writes an application that always claims to be busy and uninterruptible? Should Windows blindly believe that program, and *never* show any alerts? Clearly not. So Windows should sometimes show alerts anyway, even if a program claims to be busy. And what about old programs that don't inform Windows when they're busy? What should Windows do about them? Just ignore them? Or maybe inspect their GUI and use some heuristics to guess whether the program is busy? There are a lot of different solutions, most of them wrong. It's a significant challenge.
Climb down off your high horse. I've been a college student, and I'm also currently working on a Master's degree. Students don't sign up for Facebook because it's a snobby exclusive club just for them. They sign up because 1) it works, 2) it isn't ugly like Myspace, and 3) it offers reasonable privacy protection. Nobody really cares who made it or who runs it.
Whether or not it's owned by Yahoo doesn't change anything. If Yahoo buys it and screws with the privacy settings (e.g., if they let everyone view your profile) then there will be a user revolt. But users won't revolt en masse just because Facebook is bought out by a *gasp* commercial company. As long as Facebook keeps working, ownership just isn't that big of a deal.
If you can't give a reliable estimate, say "I'll get back to you with a time estimate." If they press you, give an estimate on how long it will take you to give an estimate. E.g., "It will take me two days to research the request and give you a reasonable estimate."
The worst thing you can do is to just guess. If you guess too low, you look incompetent when you don't finish on time. If you guess too high, you create the expectation that all your estimates in the future will also be too high.
So my advice is, politely avoid giving estimates until you can research the request. Most people will understand that it takes a little research to come up with a good estimate.
I'm in Dallas too, and my rates have decreased at least twice in the last two years. The only trick is that you have to call SBC (AT&T now, I guess) and ask for their new rates. They will require you to re-up your 12-month commitment, but you can get their best rate. I first signed up at $39.99 a month. Later I called and got the same service for $34.95. A few months ago I called up and got my bandwidth doubled and my rates reduced to about $20 a month. (Those rates are the prices for DSL when you have local phone service, so if you don't have SBC landline phone service your situation and rates might be slightly different.)
If you're worried about the 12-month commitment, you should remember that if you move, you can move the DSL with you with no penalty if SBC has service in your new area. I did that and it was no trouble. If you move outside of SBC's coverage area I don't know what the rules are.
When a company has built up "goodwill equity" with me by giving me a good value, I will be likely to accept one--and only one--mistake. For example, I've had uniformly positive experiences with Panasonic brand electronics. So when my most recent purchase, a Panasonic cordless phone, turned out to be a lemon, I decided to stick with Panasonic. I went ahead and bought a different model phone from Panasonic.
That's where goodwill equity can help a company. But goodwill equity only goes so far: if my new phone stops working too, I probably won't buy Panasonic ever again.
I agree. Focus-stealing should never happen, but it does happen--on Windows. It can happen in KDE too, but in the KDE control panel there's an option to disallow focus-stealing. Once I set that, KDE didn't let any app ever steal the focus from me. Instead of stealing focus, apps that want attention simply flash their taskbar entry.
OS X does that by default. If an app needs user input, the Dock icon bounces to notify you that it's waiting for attention. But it doesn't steal the focus.
To be fair to Microsoft, Windows XP is far better about handling focus than earlier incarnations of Windows. Focus-stealing happens only occasionally. I still think it could do a better job, but on the whole it's quite usable. (Sometimes, it's the opposite problem: an app is waiting for my input, but it never bothers to inform me that it needs attention. For example, Visual Basic 6 will wait silently for me to enter my SourceSafe password, without doing anything to notify me that it's waiting for input.)
Those are Canadian dollars. It's still a lot of money ($79 Canadian translates to about $65 US) but it's not an unreasonable price for satellite internet access. Still, it's a far cry from the $40 US a month (and no activation or equipment fees) I pay for my DSL.
A mere 8% downturn in ticket sales doesn't mean the industry is in a slump. Sure it sucks for the companies that operate the cinemas, but for the film industry as a whole, ticket sales are now only a part of the equation. DVD rentals and sales are now a big part of the industry--so much so that we're routinely seeing DVD releases within six months of the theater release date.
The downturn in ticket sales does not indicate that movie studios are suddenly in dire need of new revenue streams. They've already got their new revenue stream: DVDs.
However, you're right about one thing: Hollywood studios aren't going to pass up what might be a lucrative new market in licensed video game. It's not because the studios are "struggling" and in dire need of money to keep from collapsing, though. Hollywood is doing fine. It's just good business sense to investigate any licensing deals that look like easy money.
That's the one I'm talking about. It's too close. The physical size of my fingers means I need it about two inches farther left. But the other advice I just got is to use my thumb instead of my pinky to hit the Command key. That might work. (Why isn't there a manual with these kinds of tips?)
I'm a recent switcher (I bought my Mac Mini the day after Tiger came out) and my biggest gripe is the control key placement. I love my Mac to death, but it's useless for any text editing because I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts. Pressing Ctrl + C on a PC keyboard to copy text is easy; Command + C on my Mac requires me to twist my fingers because the Command key is too close to the alphabetic keys to be a natural reach.
I don't think it's just a matter of getting used to it, and of breaking old habits. No, the placement of the Command key really is detrimental to its use, at least as far as my fingers are concerned. Until today I've been trying to live with it, but now I'm going to find a way to remap the keys so as to move Command farther to the left.
I just recently switched to Apple when they came out with the Mac Mini. I love their hardware, and I would have switched years ago except that I need the ability to run Linux on x86. The Mac Mini is cheap enough that I bought it as a second computer, and now I run a PC with Linux alongside my Mac.
I am looking forward to the day I can dual-boot Linux and OS X on my Mac. (I know I can do that now with Linux compiled for PPC, but I need x86 Linux. All the non-free software for Linux is compiled for x86 only.) So yes, I will stick with Apple. In fact I wish Apple had made this switch years ago. If Apple had used x86 back then, I would have bought a Mac when OS X first came out.
That idea is called the labor theory of value, and it's one of the underpinnings of Marxism. But in a free market, the value of a product is not determined by the amount of labor put into producing it, but rather by what the consumer is willing to pay. Buying and selling in a free market is a mutually beneficial arrangement: the buyer willingly pays a price for a product he wants.
If the buyer is willing to pay $.99 to download a song, then a song is "worth" $.99. It doesn't matter how much it cost to produce that song. Similarly, the cost to produce a video has no bearing on its value. Only the willingness of the buyer to pay determines its value.
Thus it is not the amount of labor or money spent on making the song or video that determines its price, but rather the willingness of the buyer to pay that determines the price. The free market of buyers will pay whatever they feel is reasonable and not a penny more. If $1.99 is all that is reasonable for a video in the minds of the buyers, then that is what videos are worth.
So you see, the Intel Inside advertising is still effective. The fact that my friend had to ask if non-Intel were compatible means Intel has already won.
Think about that. Would you pay $50 for Minesweeper? No, but you'd pay that much for the latest Myst adventure. It doesn't matter that you'll only play Myst once and that you'll enjoy Minesweeper several times a week for the rest of your life. You'll never be able to convince people to pay $50 a pop for short games like you will for epic games.
The reality of the game market doesn't make the article wrong, just irrelevant. It doesn't matter which games are technically better, it matters which games sell.
It sounds like your hands have been tied. I urge you to first seek more authority to demand that users install antivirus software. If the powers-that-be refuse to grant you the power to enforce that rule, your only solution is a social one.
Whenever someone's computer brings down the network, publicize his name. Find some way to make his neighbors hold him accountable. Believe me, it will happen. It won't take too many hazings (and rumors of hazings) before people shape up and install antivirus. Most people know about the need for antivirus, they're just too lazy and think "It won't happen to me." So motivate them.
I'm glad to see this positive development from XGI. Releasing open source Linux drivers can't help but give them positive publicity. Back in November of 2003 I said we had "an opportunity to persuade [XGI] that supporting Linux by releasing drivers would gain them positive reviews and have an impact on sales." XGI has released the drivers, now it remains to be seen whether this drives sales.
I don't know who persuaded XGI to make this commitment to open source but I fully intend to consider XGI for my next video card. I'm using an nVidia card today on the basis of their closed-source driver support for Linux, but I'd rather support a company that embraces open source.
- Practical courses, e.g. DNS and BIND
- Current hottest technologies
- Immediate job skills
A university is about a foundation of theoretical knowledge. You don't go to university to be trained for a job, you go to learn the knowledge to understand a field. Universities offer:- Theory-based courses, e.g. Networking
- Exposure to good technologies, not necessarily the latest hottest thing
- Related knowledge, such as mathematics
- No specific job skills
At a university they won't teach you the specific skills you'll need to get a job. That does not mean you won't have job skills by the time you graduate. You're expected to learn the theory in class and learn the practical job-skill aspects on your own. If you aren't comfortable with that responsibility, a university degree is not for you.And if that person is a responsible for an IT department that is currently negotiating to buy a site license for the latest version of Windows, well, suddenly Linux will look mighty attractive. A budget goes a lot further when you're not paying for Windows.
Consider your needs. You may not need a fancy backup solution, so don't buy an expensive external USB hard drive if your needs don't demand it. For example, here is how I backup my home computer. My costs? $70 for the DVD burner, then just the costs of blank discs.
1. Every two months I burn my music and movies to DVD+Rs. It takes 5 DVDs to hold everything. This data seldom changes--only when I buy and rip a new CD, or download some episodes of Red vs Blue--so every two months is fine. I keep one set of these backups at work.
2. Each week I tar up and gzip my home directory and burn it to a CD-R. Yes, it fits on one CD--I keep all my music and stuff on a different partition. I used to worry about losing data during the week, then I remembered: I don't have much to lose, except my latest journal entries, browser cache/history, and Gnucash entries. I can afford to lose a week's worth of data, because it's easy to recreate. So backing up more than once a week is overkill.
I have an IMAP email account, otherwise I would need to back up my emails every day.
3. I don't backup my OS. If Mandrake gets borked and won't boot, I just reinstall. It doesn't take long, and with urpmi it's a snap to reinstall my favorite applications. (I have a local copy of PLF so installing my favorite *unsupported* packages is fast too.) Then I just copy over the latest backup of my home directory and I'm back in business.
The last time I had to restore everything it took just a few hours total.
I do work, yes. I'm a software developer. And I admit that yes, I have used Word on occasion at work. In the last two years, maybe a dozen times. So yes, people working with computers may need Microsoft Office at work.
But a person who uses a computer as part of his job is not a casual computer user. That's my point. Apple's new suite is going after the casual user, who has a home computer and uses it for email and Internet. Users like that don't need Microsoft Office. As evidence I offer my own experience: since I graduated from university I have not had to use a word processor on my home computer. The need has never arisen. Oh, I think I once wrote a letter to my grandma, but I could have just as easily written that in a text editor. In fact, I think I may have done so, and then pasted it into OpenOffice later to get some better formatting. Tell me, why would I need a Microsoft Office work-alike to do that?
That's what I mean by casual computer user. I myself am a power user at work, but a casual user at home. Any piece of junk word processor is enough to meet my needs on my home computer.