Every time I excercise my second amendment rights by purchasing a firearm, I am required to fill out a government form with all sorts of personal information. The seller is then required to get permission from the FBI and Colorado Bureau of Investigation to complete the transaction.
Note that I agree with you, and I'm not certain about what I'm about to say, but.... If you are a convicted felon, don't you automatically give up the right to purchase a firearm, thus making the procedure necessary to make sure you aren't a felon? Granted, we all know they are doing far more than just checking your criminal record. And I'm sure that non-felons have been denied a purchase....
I s'pose you could provide easy ways to enable scripting, etc for those sites that legitimately need them, and leave them off by default.
Sounds like a good option to include in the post-1.0 versions of Mozilla. It would be nice to be able to disable all scripting with the exception of certain sites you include in an approval list. You would only add sites to the approval list if they didn't work without scripting, and you really needed to use them. Any Mozilla developers out there listening? Should I submit this to Bugzilla?
Wow, yet another "I didn't read the article, but I feel fully qualified to comment on it" response...
I guess you didn't read the whole article yourself.:-) Check this quote:
In some cases, people are not even asked whether they want the software. It just installs on the hard drive--a particularly troublesome tactic that some have dubbed "drive-by download."
Granted, anybody who has this happen automatically can only blame themselves for allowing any ActiveX program to download and run without requesting permission, but note that it *is* happening. Some of those poor dialup users are definitely getting nailed.
If you smoke in the same room as me, then you are affecting me
Thus my tail-comment about sidestream effects. I recognized immediately that the example was not ideal -- just the best I could come up with on almost no sleep. And I agree with you on the "smoking in the same" room philosophy, although I'm more likely to just fart next to you. Less blunt, but certainly more fun.
Either way, thats nothing to sue over.. You aren't constitutionally guaranteed a right to post on someone's mailing list.
Agreed, but he's just using that argument to add fuel to the fire. The only legal basis he has is regarding slander. And, as most of us agree, that legal standing is (in the eyes of non-lawyers like myself) very shaky at best.
I too am wondering if that had anything to do with it. Anybody out there already have one of these devices syncing properly with Outlook on Win XP? Which version of Outlook?
We can't save people from themselves, can't make the horse drink, and can't represent our moral-technical views as the views of others because, well, they just don't care.
And I'm not sure that we should try. The important thing is that we make sure it is a requirement that people are adequately informed by the companies that distribute such software. Just because I don't like to use software that contains spyware and other such junk, doesn't mean that my neighbor should feel the same way. As long as (s)he understands what is happening and chooses to accept the risks, that's ok. The hard part is in making sure that users understand.
This whole thing isn't really much different than smoking cigarettes. I don't smoke. I would rather that nobody smoke. But I can't (and won't) force others to feel the same way. Today, cigarette packages (at least in the USA) must be marked with warnings. Smokers are free to ignore those warnings. Willful installation of software that has other "side-effects" is just fine with me, as long as those performing the installation are adequately warned. And also, you don't have to worry about "sidestream" effects of what your neighbor does. Hmmm. Or maybe you do -- cable modem anyone?
but since when has it been illegal and lawsuit worthy to say something negative about a company?
Unfortunately, that's not really what he's suing over. He's claiming that the comments were not only malicious, but false. He's also claiming that attempts to block his responses were intentionally blocked.
Note that I'm not supporting his actions, just stating what technique I believe he used to get the case heard in the first place. And remember, IANAL, nor do I watch them on TV.
To compare them with a newly-released, first-generation Linux-based PDA isn't completely fair.
Although it may not be fair, if you are releasing a competing product into an already established market, it's best to do your homework and provide something that is either superior to or cheaper than your competitors' products. Besides, you also have the advantage of learning from the mistakes of those who came before you. That should help balance out the "fairness" factor a bit. I haven't tried the device firsthand, so I can only comment through the eyes of others....
The screen was touch sensitive and he could drag windows around with his finger and then push it into the background layer. You could get a lot more things on the screen with this device because the added layer gave you something to focus on.
How is this an improvement on simulated translucency with a normal LCD screen? I'm not trying to be negative -- just trying to understand. Maybe I need more caffeine today.
The whole idea behind this is that certain pixels on the low layer get shaded by pixels from the upper layer. Now if you have a high enough resolution, and if the pixels fit exactly, then you get 3D (meaning: your left sees something else then your right eye).
Thanks for your explanation, but I'm still having trouble seeing how this works better than a single screen with good pixel shading. Maybe I just need to see the darn thing for myself, or maybe a diagram showing how this interacts with the eyes would explain it. I know with the old 3d movies (Jaws 3 in 3D), the glasses allowed you to see slightly different images in each eye because of the color filters on them. But I would think that with this technology, both eyes are still seeing the same image -- or is it because the background image through the foreground image is being viewed at a different angle from each eye? If so, how do they adjust the perceived depth so that it doesn't always just like like a half-centimeter difference? I haven't had much sleep (again), so maybe my brain just isn't working right.
I know I'm late on posting to this, but I would suspect that they could have obtained the necessary genes from healthy adult cells. Although I'm certainly no expert in this matter....
FDIC doesn't necessarily insure money transfers, only deposits.
This is true, but at the bottom of the article, it states that PayPal inquired about FDIC protection. They have recently begun depositing the money they receive for transactions into accounts in an FDIC-insured bank. The FDIC responded to their inquiry with an advisory letter indicating that the amounts deposited would indeed be insured up to the standard $100,000 per customer per bank. This would mean that as long as PayPal opens a separate account for each customer, they should be insured. Note that it would probably NOT insure money "lost-in-transit."
god man, that blows. Perhaps yet another reason not to upgrade to PPC2002?
Oh wait, I think I may have made a mistake with what I typed in my first post. I'm NOT running PPC2002. I'm running PPC2000. Oops. So, maybe PPC2002 is better.
Really? Now you're making me paranoid. I reset my iPAQ 3150 a lot, and have never had a problem.
I'm not really trying to make you paranoid. It's fresh in my mind because it happened to me AGAIN last week. This time, I was browsing the web through wireless LAN, when I received a message telling me that I needed to allocate more memory to storage space. Rather than transfer memory from system, I decided to clear my cache on the browser. When I did so, it gave me the cute little spinner. After watching the spinner and getting dizzy for about ten minutes, I finally gave up and presset the reset button. The device happily came up and asked me to start configuring it for first time use. It had lost EVERYTHING. I've had this happen before when I reset while a program was busy. I've also had it crash when installing / removing the PCMCIA jacket, and when inserting or removing cards. And the most frustrating is the crash that occurs by simply turning the device on. All of these hard crashes I've encountered could not be fixed by pressing the reset button. I was required to actually do a hard reset (with the switch) to make the device usable again.
This wouldn't matter nearly as much if it didn't take close to an hour to do a backup or restore over ActiveSync. I probably just need to bite the bullet and get a flash card. But in my mind, if the device is THIS unreliable, it should have been provided WITH a flash card.
If numbers are any indication, Palm OS devices are what the business world wants.
I know that's what the numbers indicate, but I don't think the Palm is what the business world wants either. It just gets closer than the other offerings. What most of the business people that I know want is a device like the Pocket PC that has the battery life, price and reliability of a Palm. They also want better wireless connectivity and more memory. I've never heard anybody complain about the Palm crashing and losing its memory contents. However, my iPaq does that regularly. I know that my peers have had similar problems on other Pocket PC platforms. I always hesitate to press that little reset button because you never know if it will reboot with memory intact or not. Note that I do NOT have Pocket PC 2000 on my device, so maybe that's better.
I firmly believe that when a company releases a very reliable, fast, powerful device with good battery life and a low price, you'll see all of the numbers change.
This article could not possibly be more subjective.
I agree with you 100%. Usually I find at least a couple nuggets of "good stuff" in what Jon writes, but I feel he's way off the mark on this one.
It's hard to recall any industry which has so abused, neglected and exploited its customers and survived.
This problem is hardly attributable to the Tech industry alone. The problem is one common to most companies today. Any kind of customer support is lousy. It's an afterthought. Look at the amount of money companies spend on sales vs what they allocate to keeping the customer happy. It's pretty clear that if companies weren't forced to offer some kind of support in order to sell their products, they wouldn't bother.
Jon also describes TV as the one technology that almost everybody seems to be able to use, and then compares that to people's comfort level with newer technologies. Duh. An overwhelming majority of today's population grew up with TV. I don't have numbers to argue with, but I suspect the trend is that the longer technology is in society, the more understood and accepted it is. And if you grew up with something, you're more likely to be comfortable using it than somebody who didn't grow up with it.
Despite the proliferation of tech toys and work devices in people's lives, the gap between the tech-savvy and the techno-confused keeps growing, a monumental failure of our arrogant and elitist tech industries.
This is just pure hogwash. There are plenty of self-study materials available, not to mention adult education courses. The big problem is that as adults, we don't have time to spend learning these things. We're too busy doing a job that will ultimately be obsolete. The reason that gap keeps widening is because technology keeps advancing. Today's youth is fully immersed in all of the latest technology. They have the time to play with and learn all of the new stuff. For crying out loud, they even study it in school. Older adults, on the other hand, have spent the last thirty-some years of their life raising their children and working to put food on the table. They get about an hour of free time per evening. And guess where they'd rather be spending it? In front of the TV. They haven't had the gobs of time to spend on learning technology. Most likely, they weren't using new technology at work, so it's not likely that the knowledge to use it is just going to pop itself into their heads.
Young adults are also more proficient, says the survey, when it comes to using cell phones, stereos, remote controls, microwaves and computers.
These are all things that young adults have grown up with. Why would their proficiency be so surprising?
Separated, divorced and widowed Americans are more involved with high-tech than other singles and married people. This may be because they have more time, or are perhaps more focused on using tech to connect with other people.
This just goes to prove what I was saying. The time factor. I'd like to see the study narrow down a bit to take into account the "child" factor. My guess is that single people with children fared far worse in the study because they have even less time than a married person to spend with technology, unless they use it at work.
It confirms the idea that tech industries are peopled by smart geeks still too far removed from the ordinary concerns of average Americans.
I'd like to see the survey. Did anybody find a reference to it on the link Jon provided? I really want to see where he pulls this idea from. Sure, technology is developed by the "smart" people. But don't forget that product development, marketing and sales aren't made up of the same breed of people. They are smart in their own ways, but not normally as technology savvy.
It reminds us that Tech Support is a scandal.
I agree with this, but as I said before, this applies to other customer service areas, too. Did you ever have a problem with a vacuum cleaner and try calling their support line? It's every bit as bad as a Tech support line. And they pull the same crap, like charging more to fix a simple problem than it would cost to just buy a new vacuum cleaner.
I'm sorry, but I don't think this survey was very well thought out. Maybe it's just Jon's take on it, but it appears that the survey was written specifically to support a theory. I'm sure there are some interesting things in there. For example, the ethnic differences are interesting. One might wonder, for example, what the family background of different ethnic groups are. For example, how many generations in the US. What their education levels are. What their family is interested in. Whether they have relatives in other countries that they still need to communicate with.
Is it just me, or do these all-in-one gadgets fly in the face of the UNIX idea of compartmentalized utilities that do one specific function, and that's it?
I think the concept is to limit the amount of "stuff" you have to carry. If you can combine a whole bunch of functions that you need or commonly use into a single device, that's a good thing. On the other hand, if product development has missed their mark and included features that just aren't of interest to most people, they may have a hard time getting people to pay the price.
Yes, these toys are neat at times, but it's just more features that can break.
Agreed. This is, of course, the down side to a multi-function device. If the device breaks, you lose everything.
Because AOL users represent the biggest piece of the internet consumers pie (at least, in the USA), all those websites will need to adapt and become "AOL (mozilla) compliant" ( = W3C compliant?? ) or (economically) die.
This is interesting. I just hit the "Submit" button on an opinion that takes it from the other point of view. I indicated that AOL may face a risk of departing customers if too many web pages don't work. This all brings up an interesting question: Is AOL's large install base enough to whip the noncompliant web sites into shape? Do you think they'd start working on this problem in advance of a Mozilla-based delivery? What's the right approach to make sure the web sites change rather than the AOL customer base?
Of course AOL will have to eventually switch to Mozilla - considering how much they hate MS...
I'm sure they eventually will. It would make sense to use technology for which they have the source code. My guess is that the single biggest thing stopping them (besides the work required to switch over) is the fear that the Mozilla flavor of their product will have trouble with web sites that contain either broken or IE-only coding and don't work properly in Mozilla. To much trouble in this area could send some of their customers to MSN. I think switching will be a tad risky.
Windows admins don't script, for the most part. They push the same buttons on each system. This might be a big factor in increasing the Windows TCO.
This is an interesting point. On a parallel, I used to work for a large hospital system where the CIO decided that we should replace all of our aging Novel servers with NT boxes. We ended up with something like four times as many servers to accomplish only about 1.5 times the work. But the really interesting expenses were in automation. Because of the lack of robust scripting ability in NT (at the time) and lack of knowledge among most of the staff, the company chose to purchase an unbelievably expensive automation package and then spent even more money on training people to use the automation package. The funny thing about it was that the automation package was more complex, less capable, more error-prone and more difficult to debug than scripting. One of the more technically aware members of our staff elected to be a renegade and purchased a reasonably inexpensive third party add-on for the servers that provided the same capabilities as Unix shell scripting. (Similar to CYGWIN) He had all of his processes fully automated and running before the rest of the staff had completed training. And his automation solutions could be maintained by the same people responsible for our Unix systems, so nobody could complain about creating something unsupportable. He was a really bright guy -- a clear thinker.
I guess the valid comparison would be that the RIAA is correct in it's harassment campaign to shutdown Napster and similar file-sharing services, as they(Napster, etc) leave the door unlocked to trading copyrighted software.
Almost, but not quite. If RIAA had notified Napster that illegal trading of copyrighted works was happening, and then asked for either 1) their assistance in tracking down the abusers or 2) the lockout of abuser accounts, that would be the end of it. IIRC, they instead sued FIRST and then asked for cooperation later. Also, the RIAA never actually proved any damage from the illegal trading. Their sales records certainly don't show any. The damage from SPAM is pretty clear when you add up storage space, network bandwidth and personal time.
It's NOT illegal to leave an open relay, not as far as I know.
Agreed. If it were, he would have already been arrested. It's also not illegal to block or blacklist the ISP. Somebody carefully pointed this out to me when I was stupid enough to try to argue about it with no sleep for two days.
Portraying his open relay as a "Public Health Hazard" of the Internet is all fine and dandy if there are clear and precise regulations detailing what constitutes a hazard.
I don't think most people are portraying it as a public health hazard, although some certainly are. And I agree that they are going overboard. But the fact of the matter is that it costs people time and money. 95% of my e-mail is from SPAM. I have to spend time dealing with it.
Those restrictions/laws/regulations don't yet exist, people shouldn't be randomly forming organizations to "police" the internet using strongarm and blackmail tactics.
No, the regulations don't exist yet. And I don't think you want them to. Anytime a law is made to counter a problem, it almost certainly has negative impacts elsewhere. It is costly to enforce, and it must be enforced globally to be effective. It can also be warped and used in the future by particularly crafty people with their own agenda. The organizations that have chosen to fight SPAM are doing so because they have a common belief: they don't want somebody using their storage space, their time and their network resources to send out mass mailings to people, most of whom are irritated by it at best. Remember that the people who use a block list OWN their equipment. If they don't want certain people using them for certain purposes, it is within their rights to block that traffic. Without laws and regulations in place, it was inevitable that individuals and companies (even competitors) would get together to fight what they view as a common enemy.
Every time the subject of SPAM comes up, there are arguments that we should target the SPAMMERS and not the owners of the relays they take advantage of. I would agree, except that in cyberspace it is very difficult to track down the source of the SPAM. If you manage to do so, the SPAMMER just moves on to other pastures. It's relatively simple to locate and shut down the resources they use. If closing up open relays actually had a significant impact on the legitimate use of SMTP servers, it would not be acceptable to demand that they be closed. However, as several other threads of this topic have discussed, there is no real harm to the operator in closing up that open relay. If he wants his friends to use the relay, there are several authorization methods that can be employed. Also bear in mind that for SPAMMERS, there is no real cost. It is the rest of us that bear that cost.
Gilmore's server is abused by spammers, so he's a victim, right?
Oh, give me a break. He was a victim when it FIRST happened and he was notified. He stops being a victim when he doesn't implement any of the simple measures already mentioned.
All this blacklisting like saying we should weld car doors shut for people who have thier cars stolen.
No, it's more like saying we should take cars away from people who have them stolen over and over again and yet consistently leave them unlocked, park them in unguarded lots with a posted theft rate of over 50% and leave a big sign on the car that says "Steal me. I'm unlocked." I would wholeheartedly support preventing anybody like this from owning a car, as their negligence is only causing my insurance rates to go up. That's basically what a blacklist is doing for people who refuse to close their open relays.
Hardware stores are not at fault for selling crowbars if criminals use them to break into our houses.
This is hardly a valid comparison. In his case, the thief doesn't even need a crowbar. All they need is his address.
Sorry. No matter how you slice it, he's not an innocent victim. Maybe if you put quotes around it....
Slashdot Mirror
Note that I agree with you, and I'm not certain about what I'm about to say, but.... If you are a convicted felon, don't you automatically give up the right to purchase a firearm, thus making the procedure necessary to make sure you aren't a felon? Granted, we all know they are doing far more than just checking your criminal record. And I'm sure that non-felons have been denied a purchase....
Sounds like a good option to include in the post-1.0 versions of Mozilla. It would be nice to be able to disable all scripting with the exception of certain sites you include in an approval list. You would only add sites to the approval list if they didn't work without scripting, and you really needed to use them. Any Mozilla developers out there listening? Should I submit this to Bugzilla?
I guess you didn't read the whole article yourself. :-) Check this quote:
Granted, anybody who has this happen automatically can only blame themselves for allowing any ActiveX program to download and run without requesting permission, but note that it *is* happening. Some of those poor dialup users are definitely getting nailed.Thus my tail-comment about sidestream effects. I recognized immediately that the example was not ideal -- just the best I could come up with on almost no sleep. And I agree with you on the "smoking in the same" room philosophy, although I'm more likely to just fart next to you. Less blunt, but certainly more fun.
Agreed, but he's just using that argument to add fuel to the fire. The only legal basis he has is regarding slander. And, as most of us agree, that legal standing is (in the eyes of non-lawyers like myself) very shaky at best.
I too am wondering if that had anything to do with it. Anybody out there already have one of these devices syncing properly with Outlook on Win XP? Which version of Outlook?
And I'm not sure that we should try. The important thing is that we make sure it is a requirement that people are adequately informed by the companies that distribute such software. Just because I don't like to use software that contains spyware and other such junk, doesn't mean that my neighbor should feel the same way. As long as (s)he understands what is happening and chooses to accept the risks, that's ok. The hard part is in making sure that users understand.
This whole thing isn't really much different than smoking cigarettes. I don't smoke. I would rather that nobody smoke. But I can't (and won't) force others to feel the same way. Today, cigarette packages (at least in the USA) must be marked with warnings. Smokers are free to ignore those warnings. Willful installation of software that has other "side-effects" is just fine with me, as long as those performing the installation are adequately warned. And also, you don't have to worry about "sidestream" effects of what your neighbor does. Hmmm. Or maybe you do -- cable modem anyone?
Err, that should read "He's also claiming that attempts to respond to criticism were intentionally blocked." I definitely need more caffeine.
Unfortunately, that's not really what he's suing over. He's claiming that the comments were not only malicious, but false. He's also claiming that attempts to block his responses were intentionally blocked.
Note that I'm not supporting his actions, just stating what technique I believe he used to get the case heard in the first place. And remember, IANAL, nor do I watch them on TV.
Although it may not be fair, if you are releasing a competing product into an already established market, it's best to do your homework and provide something that is either superior to or cheaper than your competitors' products. Besides, you also have the advantage of learning from the mistakes of those who came before you. That should help balance out the "fairness" factor a bit. I haven't tried the device firsthand, so I can only comment through the eyes of others....
How is this an improvement on simulated translucency with a normal LCD screen? I'm not trying to be negative -- just trying to understand. Maybe I need more caffeine today.
Thanks for your explanation, but I'm still having trouble seeing how this works better than a single screen with good pixel shading. Maybe I just need to see the darn thing for myself, or maybe a diagram showing how this interacts with the eyes would explain it. I know with the old 3d movies (Jaws 3 in 3D), the glasses allowed you to see slightly different images in each eye because of the color filters on them. But I would think that with this technology, both eyes are still seeing the same image -- or is it because the background image through the foreground image is being viewed at a different angle from each eye? If so, how do they adjust the perceived depth so that it doesn't always just like like a half-centimeter difference? I haven't had much sleep (again), so maybe my brain just isn't working right.
I know I'm late on posting to this, but I would suspect that they could have obtained the necessary genes from healthy adult cells. Although I'm certainly no expert in this matter....
This is true, but at the bottom of the article, it states that PayPal inquired about FDIC protection. They have recently begun depositing the money they receive for transactions into accounts in an FDIC-insured bank. The FDIC responded to their inquiry with an advisory letter indicating that the amounts deposited would indeed be insured up to the standard $100,000 per customer per bank. This would mean that as long as PayPal opens a separate account for each customer, they should be insured. Note that it would probably NOT insure money "lost-in-transit."
Oh wait, I think I may have made a mistake with what I typed in my first post. I'm NOT running PPC2002. I'm running PPC2000. Oops. So, maybe PPC2002 is better.
I'm not really trying to make you paranoid. It's fresh in my mind because it happened to me AGAIN last week. This time, I was browsing the web through wireless LAN, when I received a message telling me that I needed to allocate more memory to storage space. Rather than transfer memory from system, I decided to clear my cache on the browser. When I did so, it gave me the cute little spinner. After watching the spinner and getting dizzy for about ten minutes, I finally gave up and presset the reset button. The device happily came up and asked me to start configuring it for first time use. It had lost EVERYTHING. I've had this happen before when I reset while a program was busy. I've also had it crash when installing / removing the PCMCIA jacket, and when inserting or removing cards. And the most frustrating is the crash that occurs by simply turning the device on. All of these hard crashes I've encountered could not be fixed by pressing the reset button. I was required to actually do a hard reset (with the switch) to make the device usable again.
This wouldn't matter nearly as much if it didn't take close to an hour to do a backup or restore over ActiveSync. I probably just need to bite the bullet and get a flash card. But in my mind, if the device is THIS unreliable, it should have been provided WITH a flash card.
I know that's what the numbers indicate, but I don't think the Palm is what the business world wants either. It just gets closer than the other offerings. What most of the business people that I know want is a device like the Pocket PC that has the battery life, price and reliability of a Palm. They also want better wireless connectivity and more memory. I've never heard anybody complain about the Palm crashing and losing its memory contents. However, my iPaq does that regularly. I know that my peers have had similar problems on other Pocket PC platforms. I always hesitate to press that little reset button because you never know if it will reboot with memory intact or not. Note that I do NOT have Pocket PC 2000 on my device, so maybe that's better.
I firmly believe that when a company releases a very reliable, fast, powerful device with good battery life and a low price, you'll see all of the numbers change.
Yup. Always take advice from the one most reluctant to give an opinion. He or she is most likely the wisest in the room.
I agree with you 100%. Usually I find at least a couple nuggets of "good stuff" in what Jon writes, but I feel he's way off the mark on this one.
It's hard to recall any industry which has so abused, neglected and exploited its customers and survived.
This problem is hardly attributable to the Tech industry alone. The problem is one common to most companies today. Any kind of customer support is lousy. It's an afterthought. Look at the amount of money companies spend on sales vs what they allocate to keeping the customer happy. It's pretty clear that if companies weren't forced to offer some kind of support in order to sell their products, they wouldn't bother.
Jon also describes TV as the one technology that almost everybody seems to be able to use, and then compares that to people's comfort level with newer technologies. Duh. An overwhelming majority of today's population grew up with TV. I don't have numbers to argue with, but I suspect the trend is that the longer technology is in society, the more understood and accepted it is. And if you grew up with something, you're more likely to be comfortable using it than somebody who didn't grow up with it.
Despite the proliferation of tech toys and work devices in people's lives, the gap between the tech-savvy and the techno-confused keeps growing, a monumental failure of our arrogant and elitist tech industries.
This is just pure hogwash. There are plenty of self-study materials available, not to mention adult education courses. The big problem is that as adults, we don't have time to spend learning these things. We're too busy doing a job that will ultimately be obsolete. The reason that gap keeps widening is because technology keeps advancing. Today's youth is fully immersed in all of the latest technology. They have the time to play with and learn all of the new stuff. For crying out loud, they even study it in school. Older adults, on the other hand, have spent the last thirty-some years of their life raising their children and working to put food on the table. They get about an hour of free time per evening. And guess where they'd rather be spending it? In front of the TV. They haven't had the gobs of time to spend on learning technology. Most likely, they weren't using new technology at work, so it's not likely that the knowledge to use it is just going to pop itself into their heads.
Young adults are also more proficient, says the survey, when it comes to using cell phones, stereos, remote controls, microwaves and computers.
These are all things that young adults have grown up with. Why would their proficiency be so surprising?
Separated, divorced and widowed Americans are more involved with high-tech than other singles and married people. This may be because they have more time, or are perhaps more focused on using tech to connect with other people.
This just goes to prove what I was saying. The time factor. I'd like to see the study narrow down a bit to take into account the "child" factor. My guess is that single people with children fared far worse in the study because they have even less time than a married person to spend with technology, unless they use it at work.
It confirms the idea that tech industries are peopled by smart geeks still too far removed from the ordinary concerns of average Americans.
I'd like to see the survey. Did anybody find a reference to it on the link Jon provided? I really want to see where he pulls this idea from. Sure, technology is developed by the "smart" people. But don't forget that product development, marketing and sales aren't made up of the same breed of people. They are smart in their own ways, but not normally as technology savvy.
It reminds us that Tech Support is a scandal.
I agree with this, but as I said before, this applies to other customer service areas, too. Did you ever have a problem with a vacuum cleaner and try calling their support line? It's every bit as bad as a Tech support line. And they pull the same crap, like charging more to fix a simple problem than it would cost to just buy a new vacuum cleaner.
I'm sorry, but I don't think this survey was very well thought out. Maybe it's just Jon's take on it, but it appears that the survey was written specifically to support a theory. I'm sure there are some interesting things in there. For example, the ethnic differences are interesting. One might wonder, for example, what the family background of different ethnic groups are. For example, how many generations in the US. What their education levels are. What their family is interested in. Whether they have relatives in other countries that they still need to communicate with.
I think the concept is to limit the amount of "stuff" you have to carry. If you can combine a whole bunch of functions that you need or commonly use into a single device, that's a good thing. On the other hand, if product development has missed their mark and included features that just aren't of interest to most people, they may have a hard time getting people to pay the price.
Yes, these toys are neat at times, but it's just more features that can break.
Agreed. This is, of course, the down side to a multi-function device. If the device breaks, you lose everything.
This is interesting. I just hit the "Submit" button on an opinion that takes it from the other point of view. I indicated that AOL may face a risk of departing customers if too many web pages don't work. This all brings up an interesting question: Is AOL's large install base enough to whip the noncompliant web sites into shape? Do you think they'd start working on this problem in advance of a Mozilla-based delivery? What's the right approach to make sure the web sites change rather than the AOL customer base?
I'm sure they eventually will. It would make sense to use technology for which they have the source code. My guess is that the single biggest thing stopping them (besides the work required to switch over) is the fear that the Mozilla flavor of their product will have trouble with web sites that contain either broken or IE-only coding and don't work properly in Mozilla. To much trouble in this area could send some of their customers to MSN. I think switching will be a tad risky.
This is an interesting point. On a parallel, I used to work for a large hospital system where the CIO decided that we should replace all of our aging Novel servers with NT boxes. We ended up with something like four times as many servers to accomplish only about 1.5 times the work. But the really interesting expenses were in automation. Because of the lack of robust scripting ability in NT (at the time) and lack of knowledge among most of the staff, the company chose to purchase an unbelievably expensive automation package and then spent even more money on training people to use the automation package. The funny thing about it was that the automation package was more complex, less capable, more error-prone and more difficult to debug than scripting. One of the more technically aware members of our staff elected to be a renegade and purchased a reasonably inexpensive third party add-on for the servers that provided the same capabilities as Unix shell scripting. (Similar to CYGWIN) He had all of his processes fully automated and running before the rest of the staff had completed training. And his automation solutions could be maintained by the same people responsible for our Unix systems, so nobody could complain about creating something unsupportable. He was a really bright guy -- a clear thinker.
It's NOT illegal to leave an open relay, not as far as I know.
Agreed. If it were, he would have already been arrested. It's also not illegal to block or blacklist the ISP. Somebody carefully pointed this out to me when I was stupid enough to try to argue about it with no sleep for two days.
Portraying his open relay as a "Public Health Hazard" of the Internet is all fine and dandy if there are clear and precise regulations detailing what constitutes a hazard.
I don't think most people are portraying it as a public health hazard, although some certainly are. And I agree that they are going overboard. But the fact of the matter is that it costs people time and money. 95% of my e-mail is from SPAM. I have to spend time dealing with it.
Those restrictions/laws/regulations don't yet exist, people shouldn't be randomly forming organizations to "police" the internet using strongarm and blackmail tactics.
No, the regulations don't exist yet. And I don't think you want them to. Anytime a law is made to counter a problem, it almost certainly has negative impacts elsewhere. It is costly to enforce, and it must be enforced globally to be effective. It can also be warped and used in the future by particularly crafty people with their own agenda. The organizations that have chosen to fight SPAM are doing so because they have a common belief: they don't want somebody using their storage space, their time and their network resources to send out mass mailings to people, most of whom are irritated by it at best. Remember that the people who use a block list OWN their equipment. If they don't want certain people using them for certain purposes, it is within their rights to block that traffic. Without laws and regulations in place, it was inevitable that individuals and companies (even competitors) would get together to fight what they view as a common enemy.
Every time the subject of SPAM comes up, there are arguments that we should target the SPAMMERS and not the owners of the relays they take advantage of. I would agree, except that in cyberspace it is very difficult to track down the source of the SPAM. If you manage to do so, the SPAMMER just moves on to other pastures. It's relatively simple to locate and shut down the resources they use. If closing up open relays actually had a significant impact on the legitimate use of SMTP servers, it would not be acceptable to demand that they be closed. However, as several other threads of this topic have discussed, there is no real harm to the operator in closing up that open relay. If he wants his friends to use the relay, there are several authorization methods that can be employed. Also bear in mind that for SPAMMERS, there is no real cost. It is the rest of us that bear that cost.
Oh, give me a break. He was a victim when it FIRST happened and he was notified. He stops being a victim when he doesn't implement any of the simple measures already mentioned.
All this blacklisting like saying we should weld car doors shut for people who have thier cars stolen.
No, it's more like saying we should take cars away from people who have them stolen over and over again and yet consistently leave them unlocked, park them in unguarded lots with a posted theft rate of over 50% and leave a big sign on the car that says "Steal me. I'm unlocked." I would wholeheartedly support preventing anybody like this from owning a car, as their negligence is only causing my insurance rates to go up. That's basically what a blacklist is doing for people who refuse to close their open relays.
Hardware stores are not at fault for selling crowbars if criminals use them to break into our houses.
This is hardly a valid comparison. In his case, the thief doesn't even need a crowbar. All they need is his address.
Sorry. No matter how you slice it, he's not an innocent victim. Maybe if you put quotes around it....