A) IE is very recognized. I don't think there is anyone that uses the internet that doesn't know what it is.
Laura Ingraham recently changed her website. The day she changed it, she had people calling in telling her whether they were being directed to her old site or her new site, and was asking what browser and ISP they were using. You would be amazed (or maybe you wouldn't) at how many people just responded with something like 'my internet' or 'AOL' for their browser. Her little sidekick dude kept telling people, "If there's a blue E, it's Internet Explorer." Even after he had said that probably half a dozen times on the air, there were still people calling in who had no idea what browser they were using - they were just using the one that came with the computer.
(OK, let the jokes begin about the kind of people who listen to conservative talk radio)
Someone mentioned in one of the earlier Firefox discussions to approach switching someone by saying something to the effect of "Have you upgraded your browser yet?" (Which, by the way, still hasn't made a difference to my parents or my in-laws)
That's very useful to know, I wouldn't have thought of telling them to replace their surge protectors after every lightning strike (like they would anyway, hah!). Thanks for the info!
We built an XP box maybe a year ago and forgot to turn on the firewall before we started downloading patches. The machine was infected with Sasser in well under five minutes.
Fortunately the machine didn't have anything important on it since it was freshly built...
They're actually very smart, my mother has almost finished her masters in gerontology and occupational therapy, besides running a rehab unit at a hospital she also teaches yoga and occupational therapy courses, plus she's a practitioner at her church. She recently went to Honduras to help build and set up a hospital. She's just terrified (and possibly resentful) of computers, probably related to the fact that my father (her ex-husband) is a computer geek too.
She probably has some choice words to say about me and the way I treat my body - I get some form of tendinitis, bursitis, or a sprain every few months, and I am not good at following up on my physical therapy. Not everyone's smarts are with computers.
I wouldn't even have bothered with giving them computers except that my mom's partner is mildly technically savvy and does some web design for their church, and she likes to email and shop online. Plus, I don't spend money on mailing pictures out - if we take them ourselves, we put them on a server and send out a link, if we get them taken someplace that they can view and buy pictures online. It saves us at least $500 a year.
Then I'd hear no end of "I bought this software to work on my Mac at home, why can't I install it on my PC at work? Why did you buy me something that doesn't fit with anything else?" No thanks...Plus, then I couldn't holler at them for not calling one of my tech support buddies there, because none of my friends there are Mac people (they were all smart and moved out of Oklahoma)
They can't get broadband, they live out in the boonies. The dirt road to their house is so bad that part of my car FELL OFF on this last trip from the potholes in the road. (They haven't been able to grade the roads in almost a month because of rain).
They are currently living in a trailer while they build their house. I will suggest whole-house protection to them - is this something that gets built in or what? I have never heard of it before. If it needs to be built in, I need to tell them soon because they are starting the wiring in the spring.
Welll...would you expect your brother to charge you if you kept throwing, say, Depends down your toilet and expected him to keep fixing it for free, despite the fact that he has repeatedly told you not to throw your goddamn incontinent diapers down the toilet? Especially since after you flushed the Depends down the toilet, you decided to flush a box of tampons and a couple of rolls of toilet paper too to see if that would clear it up?
That's what fixing my families' computers feels like anymore - they don't update their virus protection, they open anything that they get in their email, they don't plug their computers into surge protectors, and then they wonder why we dread their phone calls. Every time we make the drive to their house (nine hours away if the weather is good and my toddler is very cooperative, thirteen if the above conditions are not met), we end up working on their computers. We have friends down there that they could call that would gladly come work on their computers at the first sign of trouble for the price of a home-cooked meal, but they try to fix it themselves, hose it up even more (like doing a parallel install of an older version of Windows 98 just because someone gave them the disk, then not understanding why all their apps cease to work) and then wait until we travel home for a visit to tell us their computer isn't working, but fail to mention things like the parallel install or the lightning striking their house after they decided to put the surge protector on their washing machine instead of leaving it on the computer. They also fail to mention that it's not working before we start the drive down so that we can pack parts from the graveyard, so it ends up either costing us money to buy them parts or they complain about the cost of computer parts when we make them buy the replacements.
My attitude toward the whole thing would probably be helped if my mother didn't keep telling me how much she hates the computer I gave her for Christmas last year. All the hardware was failing on her old computer, so I gave her and her partner both refurbished computers for Christmas. All I hear is how much she hates the damned thing.
If I treated my plumber like that, he would never come to my house again, no matter how much I paid him.
OK, I can end my rant now. I would probably be calmer about it except that we just got back from a trip there - we were working on their computers until a half hour before we left to drive back.
My husband made a stray mark on his ballot and it was kicked out by the machine to be hand-counted - I told him I was shipping him off to live in Florida if he couldn't learn to fill out a ballot properly.
We should all pool our money and buy every Senator a TiVo, then send someone to their house to show them how to program the 30-second skip. This bill would be killed after about a week of them getting addicted.
Have you looked at your check statement to see what part is health insurance and what part is taxes? We got a boost due to tax cuts, then in July when my husband's insurance contract was renewed, we took a $300 a month hit.I'm not saying this is necessarily the case in your situation, but this is what happened to us.
Um, just so you know, IT education budgets have been and will be going up because of No Child Left Behind. The school system my husband works for has been adding a senior programming position a year - and the candidates applying for the jobs have been 95% pathetic, padding their resumes with skills they don't really have. They're also trying to hire a junior programmer right now, but haven't been able to find one. They actually had to close the position once because no one applied.
These aren't jobs that are demanding 10 years of WinXP experience and 15 years of Java programming either - the job requirements are quite reasonable.
I'm not blaming Edwards because Bush said so - I blame Edwards and the other ambulance chasers because in my experience (and the experience of my family and friends - several attorneys there) frivolous lawsuits account for a large majority of the rising cost of health insurance.
Temporarily, the economy is going to be a little out of whack - if you look at what the dot-bomb era did to the economy, plus the September 11 attacks, it's not surprising that the economy looks bad now. The way to get the economy back on track is to give more disposable income to people to keep money circulating.
My skill set IS specialized. It's not like I was testing your usual desktop apps - I tested medical software and wrote documentation to get FDA clearance to use our hardware and software for drug studies. Not to mention, if I started working full-time on our side business, it could make up for my job income - we rarely advertise or approach people to do work for them, and we still have had to turn work away. That's work that people that NEED jobs wouldn't be getting.
It's not that I want a handout, I want the opportunity to use *our* income to maintain *our* household. Between the rising costs of health insurance (thank you John Edwards and all the other ambulance chasers) and taxes, it comes close sometimes. And before you start on the 'Republicans have this everything for themselves attitude', you should take a look at the volume of our charitable donations, both to organizations and to people we know that just don't have enough.
If I end up having to get a job because of rising taxes, so be it - I won't be happy about it but I will do what I can for my household. Just keep in mind when you vote to raise taxes that it could be your next job that I'm taking.
I'm a stay-at-home mom. I used to be in software testing and documentation, until the tax cuts of the past few years made it possible for me to stay home with my son. (My husband and I also do some web design on the side, which pays for little extras)
If taxes were to go up (which I am guessing they would have under Kerry), I would have to go find a job since we do not depend on our little outside jobs to pay bills. Since I am very qualified in my field - and not to mention that I do an excellent job - I would probably get a job fairly quickly. That is a job that some poor schmuck who REALLY needs it wouldn't have available to him. The good of new job creation is minimized if people who currently are able to stay out of the workforce by choice are forced back in.
By the way, I consider us as 'ahead' because I am able to stay home with my son and raise him instead of outsourcing his care. I know that's not a popular idea among the liberals and feminists, but it's better for our family.
On three different computers, using the stored credit card function on their website using Firefox has failed. It simply routes the user back to the payment page.
If it had been one or even two, I could believe it. But it was three. I contacted Verizon and was told to clear my cookies, which still didn't fix it.
That's going to make for so much fun when they're calling their ISP or their bank or what have you because there is a problem, and they INSIST that they are using IE. Believe it or not, there are still sites that WILL not work with Firefox - i.e. Verizon Wireless's bill pay.
You're making your users look even more stupid than they are, and you're taking away their choice. Isn't having the right to choose which software you are using a big part of the reason people choose Firefox and other free software?
I have to wonder how often the auto-update would fire - having it check every few minutes or even every few hours would have the same effect as ping-flooding their servers...
I don't understand why this is considered a 'news site'. Really all/. is is a giant communal blog. Keep this in mind when you read/. and the bent of the stories will make much more sense.
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A) IE is very recognized. I don't think there is anyone that uses the internet that doesn't know what it is.
Laura Ingraham recently changed her website. The day she changed it, she had people calling in telling her whether they were being directed to her old site or her new site, and was asking what browser and ISP they were using. You would be amazed (or maybe you wouldn't) at how many people just responded with something like 'my internet' or 'AOL' for their browser. Her little sidekick dude kept telling people, "If there's a blue E, it's Internet Explorer." Even after he had said that probably half a dozen times on the air, there were still people calling in who had no idea what browser they were using - they were just using the one that came with the computer.
(OK, let the jokes begin about the kind of people who listen to conservative talk radio)
Someone mentioned in one of the earlier Firefox discussions to approach switching someone by saying something to the effect of "Have you upgraded your browser yet?" (Which, by the way, still hasn't made a difference to my parents or my in-laws)
That's very useful to know, I wouldn't have thought of telling them to replace their surge protectors after every lightning strike (like they would anyway, hah!). Thanks for the info!
Or about the bugmenot plugin keeping them from requiring a DNA sample from people who want to read the articles.
"The light pole near the flash has been inspected and does not show any damage, although the light inside was not working."
"If you made it to college, you were not left behind, and further attempts at monitoring citizens should be."
If this is true, then why is there affirmative action to get into college and for hiring, even when job candidates have degrees?
Oh, wait, you were referring to the grammar...
We built an XP box maybe a year ago and forgot to turn on the firewall before we started downloading patches. The machine was infected with Sasser in well under five minutes.
Fortunately the machine didn't have anything important on it since it was freshly built...
They're actually very smart, my mother has almost finished her masters in gerontology and occupational therapy, besides running a rehab unit at a hospital she also teaches yoga and occupational therapy courses, plus she's a practitioner at her church. She recently went to Honduras to help build and set up a hospital. She's just terrified (and possibly resentful) of computers, probably related to the fact that my father (her ex-husband) is a computer geek too.
She probably has some choice words to say about me and the way I treat my body - I get some form of tendinitis, bursitis, or a sprain every few months, and I am not good at following up on my physical therapy. Not everyone's smarts are with computers.
I wouldn't even have bothered with giving them computers except that my mom's partner is mildly technically savvy and does some web design for their church, and she likes to email and shop online. Plus, I don't spend money on mailing pictures out - if we take them ourselves, we put them on a server and send out a link, if we get them taken someplace that they can view and buy pictures online. It saves us at least $500 a year.
Then I'd hear no end of "I bought this software to work on my Mac at home, why can't I install it on my PC at work? Why did you buy me something that doesn't fit with anything else?" No thanks...Plus, then I couldn't holler at them for not calling one of my tech support buddies there, because none of my friends there are Mac people (they were all smart and moved out of Oklahoma)
They can't get broadband, they live out in the boonies. The dirt road to their house is so bad that part of my car FELL OFF on this last trip from the potholes in the road. (They haven't been able to grade the roads in almost a month because of rain).
They are currently living in a trailer while they build their house. I will suggest whole-house protection to them - is this something that gets built in or what? I have never heard of it before. If it needs to be built in, I need to tell them soon because they are starting the wiring in the spring.
Welll...would you expect your brother to charge you if you kept throwing, say, Depends down your toilet and expected him to keep fixing it for free, despite the fact that he has repeatedly told you not to throw your goddamn incontinent diapers down the toilet? Especially since after you flushed the Depends down the toilet, you decided to flush a box of tampons and a couple of rolls of toilet paper too to see if that would clear it up?
That's what fixing my families' computers feels like anymore - they don't update their virus protection, they open anything that they get in their email, they don't plug their computers into surge protectors, and then they wonder why we dread their phone calls. Every time we make the drive to their house (nine hours away if the weather is good and my toddler is very cooperative, thirteen if the above conditions are not met), we end up working on their computers. We have friends down there that they could call that would gladly come work on their computers at the first sign of trouble for the price of a home-cooked meal, but they try to fix it themselves, hose it up even more (like doing a parallel install of an older version of Windows 98 just because someone gave them the disk, then not understanding why all their apps cease to work) and then wait until we travel home for a visit to tell us their computer isn't working, but fail to mention things like the parallel install or the lightning striking their house after they decided to put the surge protector on their washing machine instead of leaving it on the computer. They also fail to mention that it's not working before we start the drive down so that we can pack parts from the graveyard, so it ends up either costing us money to buy them parts or they complain about the cost of computer parts when we make them buy the replacements.
My attitude toward the whole thing would probably be helped if my mother didn't keep telling me how much she hates the computer I gave her for Christmas last year. All the hardware was failing on her old computer, so I gave her and her partner both refurbished computers for Christmas. All I hear is how much she hates the damned thing.
If I treated my plumber like that, he would never come to my house again, no matter how much I paid him.
OK, I can end my rant now. I would probably be calmer about it except that we just got back from a trip there - we were working on their computers until a half hour before we left to drive back.
We have this in Thornton, Colorado too.
My husband made a stray mark on his ballot and it was kicked out by the machine to be hand-counted - I told him I was shipping him off to live in Florida if he couldn't learn to fill out a ballot properly.
You obviously don't have a TiVo...
(variation on the 'You're new here, aren't you' theme)
We should all pool our money and buy every Senator a TiVo, then send someone to their house to show them how to program the 30-second skip. This bill would be killed after about a week of them getting addicted.
I was wondering if you were referring to kids or degrees until I read the second line in your post...I thought degrees were much more likely.
Have you looked at your check statement to see what part is health insurance and what part is taxes? We got a boost due to tax cuts, then in July when my husband's insurance contract was renewed, we took a $300 a month hit.I'm not saying this is necessarily the case in your situation, but this is what happened to us.
Um, just so you know, IT education budgets have been and will be going up because of No Child Left Behind. The school system my husband works for has been adding a senior programming position a year - and the candidates applying for the jobs have been 95% pathetic, padding their resumes with skills they don't really have. They're also trying to hire a junior programmer right now, but haven't been able to find one. They actually had to close the position once because no one applied.
These aren't jobs that are demanding 10 years of WinXP experience and 15 years of Java programming either - the job requirements are quite reasonable.
I'm not blaming Edwards because Bush said so - I blame Edwards and the other ambulance chasers because in my experience (and the experience of my family and friends - several attorneys there) frivolous lawsuits account for a large majority of the rising cost of health insurance.
Temporarily, the economy is going to be a little out of whack - if you look at what the dot-bomb era did to the economy, plus the September 11 attacks, it's not surprising that the economy looks bad now. The way to get the economy back on track is to give more disposable income to people to keep money circulating.
My skill set IS specialized. It's not like I was testing your usual desktop apps - I tested medical software and wrote documentation to get FDA clearance to use our hardware and software for drug studies. Not to mention, if I started working full-time on our side business, it could make up for my job income - we rarely advertise or approach people to do work for them, and we still have had to turn work away. That's work that people that NEED jobs wouldn't be getting.
It's not that I want a handout, I want the opportunity to use *our* income to maintain *our* household. Between the rising costs of health insurance (thank you John Edwards and all the other ambulance chasers) and taxes, it comes close sometimes. And before you start on the 'Republicans have this everything for themselves attitude', you should take a look at the volume of our charitable donations, both to organizations and to people we know that just don't have enough.
If I end up having to get a job because of rising taxes, so be it - I won't be happy about it but I will do what I can for my household. Just keep in mind when you vote to raise taxes that it could be your next job that I'm taking.
I'm a stay-at-home mom. I used to be in software testing and documentation, until the tax cuts of the past few years made it possible for me to stay home with my son. (My husband and I also do some web design on the side, which pays for little extras)
If taxes were to go up (which I am guessing they would have under Kerry), I would have to go find a job since we do not depend on our little outside jobs to pay bills. Since I am very qualified in my field - and not to mention that I do an excellent job - I would probably get a job fairly quickly. That is a job that some poor schmuck who REALLY needs it wouldn't have available to him. The good of new job creation is minimized if people who currently are able to stay out of the workforce by choice are forced back in.
By the way, I consider us as 'ahead' because I am able to stay home with my son and raise him instead of outsourcing his care. I know that's not a popular idea among the liberals and feminists, but it's better for our family.
Either you copied and pasted this from somewhere else, or the Republicans succeeded in fooling you into thinking that Election Day wasn't here yet...
Oh yeah, and they told me that I should be using IE 6.0 or above. That tell you anything?
On three different computers, using the stored credit card function on their website using Firefox has failed. It simply routes the user back to the payment page.
If it had been one or even two, I could believe it. But it was three. I contacted Verizon and was told to clear my cookies, which still didn't fix it.
That's going to make for so much fun when they're calling their ISP or their bank or what have you because there is a problem, and they INSIST that they are using IE. Believe it or not, there are still sites that WILL not work with Firefox - i.e. Verizon Wireless's bill pay.
You're making your users look even more stupid than they are, and you're taking away their choice. Isn't having the right to choose which software you are using a big part of the reason people choose Firefox and other free software?
I have to wonder how often the auto-update would fire - having it check every few minutes or even every few hours would have the same effect as ping-flooding their servers...
I don't understand why this is considered a 'news site'. Really all /. is is a giant communal blog. Keep this in mind when you read /. and the bent of the stories will make much more sense.