So we all dig these laptops for their day to day durability, and their lack of moving vital parts (HDDs), and their portability, and their flexability.
And we all want one for $100, and we'd all gladly pay up to $400 for one. I've got a PowerBook, and I'd still love one. I wouldn't have to worry about it, but it would be really handy.
This may indicate a market for such a device. Not a PDA, not a full-on "outfitted for war" laptop, not a (god damned useless) e-reader, not a handheld gaming rig, but the space between.
This is the space for essentialy a portable, truly open device that will let us surf the web, and run shells, and edit text files or to-do lists, but that won't break us financially if it's snatched from us on the subway.
MIT is showing us the market, and they're refusing to compete! Why have none of us embraced this yet?
My formula would be a Gumstix and an eInk display, maybe? Anyone have any better ideas?
I've seen a lot of people comment that they work at large companies and have admin rights on their Windows boxen. I (pretty much) had the same setup at both of the larger companies I worked at where MS was enforced on the desktop (at both places I wouldn't have been able to interact with the work environment without Windows).
I suspect one of the other big reasons for this is it's cheaper to do a bare-bones re-install when the Windows box goes teets up than to have an admin action every user need that is required on a box where the user is actually treated as a user.
Imagine how many real-life admins you might need to handle the hour to hour needs of a company where access rights in Windows were restricted.
This of course applies to no company that does NOT run Windows. Almost any other company would be able to handle that easily.
You can hardly get good managed services when the dude is beside the boxes, good luck with that remote hooha.
Also, as others have pointed out if the network is truly down down down, they're powerless.
So is it that they want the criminals to hand over their passwords before they commit a crime?
This should go well with the anti bank-robbery legislation requiring all would-be robbers to call in a schedule before they pull off a heist.
I can tell you from experience that there IS nowhere to go. All other posistions are either eternally filled or are constipated with stupid activities that the averge geek just done't care about. This leads to you rather doing the monotonous job, constantly waiting for the gates of heaven to open up and offer you the dream posistion.
I guess I'm an anomoly then, as my experience is very different, and so are my observations about who gets stuck with the calls and who moves on to better things. Within the corporations that I have started on the phones, I have never been "stuck". There's always somewhere to go, if you know where you're going.
If you don't know what you really want (other than "to be anywhere but the phones"), well it seems everyone who is coasting miserably through a support job ends up in a place where "every good position is filled".
Whatever helps you sleep dude.
Honestly, this guy just described EXACTLY what this job is about. Don't be a dick, I hope you get modded down.
I'm not being a dick, I'm being real. And I did get modded down, after being modded up, so I'm assuming that I'm raising a few heckles with the people who don't feel like getting up and doing anything about their excuse to bitch about how unfair life is to them.
Keep modding me down fellas, and try not to think about what I've written here.
Also, I guess you've never worked at a large-ish techsupport department or company?
Survey says... guess wrong! I've worked in three different large call centers. Two of them for major telcos that now don't exist.
If you are a highly skilled guy helping thousands of noob^h^h^h^h customers, management (ie. the guys you would unleash your "people skills" on) are going to do everything they can to keep you in place. That means no career moves. That means that after about a year or two, three it's time to move on. As the article states!
Look at this paragraph you've written. What's your argument here? It seems your argument is that those with the "real skill" won't make career moves. Those that can't "kiss ass" won't progress in a company.
What you're saying is exactly what I'm saying. Those that have technical know-how, but that also have no people skills, and no idea of what they want out of their life, and their career will yes indeed get stepped on. Also you've made my point for me, this guy, and you, can't seem to move past griping about "how bad" tech support is, and "how stuck" the skilled workers are. It's a steaming load. He's out of the job and he still has to post his "memoirs" on how down-trodden he was? He's hardly writing it in the past-tense. Talk about holding on... He's even talking about his current opportunity like it's some lucky break, like he didn't even earn it. He keeps going on about how superior he is, but when he get's acknowledgement for it, he calls it a roll of the dice!
Have you considered that showing drive and initiative, that showing some sort of ambition is in fact NOT kissing ass? There's a huge difference.
Be up in the face of your boss. Be an idea guy. If you're in a company you can participate outside of your department to get where you want to go. Step on toes, shit, why not, what are they going to do, fire you?
Sometimes it's about having a backbone, and being a productive whiner. Talking to the boss is not kissing ass.
This guy is right, he is lucky to have gotten out, because he was making a really half-arsed effort at his time at Apple.
The "better" one. Frack. A dime a dozen in tech supprt. Sorry, dude, but the reason your career didn't advance is because you didn't have the people skills to climb the ladder.
How many of us here have done tech support as a full time gig? I bet the show of hands is impressive. How many realized it was time to move on, not just from the job, but from the "customerz R teh st00pitz" attitude as well?
No? Haven't figured that out yet? Enjoy your time in the middle.
There's always one, or more, of those guys who feel that they have been given the shaft. They're just so good technically but they can't seem to put a career together. Why? It' must be dumb luck and conspiracy. "I don't get promoted because [manager|company|god] is threatened by my skill, or because they are short sighted, or because maybe I didn't take a shower this month".
Those of you who have your eyes upwards, or elsewhere know who I'm talking about. Those who are this guy will not realize it.
That doesn't happen. Any time hubris starts to take a foothold in any one distribution of Linux people tend to switch until it calms down. This doesn't often result in much user pain, if they even notice.
Not to point a finger at RedHat... Hell, why not... Anyway I felt RedHat was moving to a point where I felt it was pulling too many proprietary stunts (the updater, the "enterprise" crap, the fragmenting with Fedora, etc) so I switched to Debian. [Disclaimer: this is not a denouncement of RedHat, this was my personal choice, RedHat is still cool, but my leanings are to Debian right now]
I don't know when or how, but if Debian ever starts to lose the balance I like, I'll just switch to Gentoo, or something. Or my own distro, or whatever.
It's not like we're literally going to wake up one day to find that the Kerel has been made proprietary and all the software we use will suddenly become closed source.
It's more that SMTP is too broken. The model we use to communicate with each other is sadly too open, given the potential of the technology for automation.
The real solution is to extend or replace SMTP completely.
Good point indeed. Nature has already provided some decent design ideas to embrace and extend. My thoughts echo yours and others on this; starting from scratch, we probably couldn't do much better than what our planet has already provided.
The design proposed by PZ Myers would probably highlight why it wasn't done that way if this new human ever manged to appear out of thin air.
I know you're being flippant, but they could flame out faster than you think. This company HAS to grow, it's part of what gives them so much market capitalization in the first place. If they can't do that then the stock starts to drop, and the market capitalization goes away.
I think Ballmer, specifically, leaving MS, would be good for the company, and may give us naysayers reason to look at them again.
This is both true and untrue. Teens are susceptible to groupthink, but they're also capable of complete individuality. If I was Ballmer, I would be asking why all of my kids friends have one... Just marketing? There's much more to it than that.
I've been saying it for years, a company's attitude starts at the top. If he wasn't a moron, he'd be letting his kids use these things, and then he'd be observing them and quizzing them on why they like them.
He has his own marketing team, right there in his house, but he's more content to control than to learn and discover.
Well, -shrug-, that's why MS will be MS until he and Bill are gone. I feel sorry for the micromanaged offspring though.
ANY TIME, I see a question mark at the end of a Slashdot story, I know that the entire premise of the article is at best bogus.
The Question Mark; it's a tell.
A little from column A, a little from column B.
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
·
· Score: 1
OSX will attract more hackers this way (hackers in the traditional, benevolent sense), which will lead to more interesting software, and honestly harder security. It will also attract virus writers, but I doubt it will be anything like what we see via Windows.
It's basically a challenge to crackers when Apple releases software this way, but at the same time it keeps the mainstream public buying Apple hardware because of the exposure. Just like in the world of fashion, all trends start in the back alleys.
So Intel OSX, "free of costly Apple hardware" will attract some of the best and brightest kids, but at the same time the parents of these kids... Mom isn't going to download the 0-day ISO of OSX so that she can run it on her crappy grey Dell, but if she suddenly decides she likes iMacs because they're pretty and because iPhoto is so cool, she'll buy one.
My guess is Apple will keep putting up these barriers, and the kids will keep breaking them down, and in-between the kids that get serious about OSX will buy Apple machines, and the mainstream consumer will continue to as well.
So, from Apple, it's "Oh, uh yeah, uh please don't... woe is us. *snicker*" Sorta like it is with XP and Microsoft now.
note: this post has been certified incoherent, but I'm hitting submit anyway.
Hadrian: Metal fatigue. Old equipment... worn strap fails, drops a million cubit drone to the deck, kills 13 pilots, lands 7 more in sickbay. It's hard to hear this, I know, but we got lucky. If that had been a missile, instead of a com drone... it'd have taken out the side of the ship.
Tyrol: Never had a death o n my hangar deck. Accidents... never a death.
You're absolutely right. Luckily for the world Steve Jobs is a madman;)
Come to think of it telling Steve and Woz to give up on the crazy vision of Personal Computing would probably have been lucid advice at the time as well.
Those labs were the only thing that kept me interested as a child.
That being said, your point is not only well taken, but valid. These laptops could be a leap forward, but they aren't much use if the children they are designed for don't also have food, clothing, and shelter to start.
I play Second Life exclusively online, so I don't run into this sort of thing. There's no leveling, etc, so running a cheat bot is kinda dumb. On the other hand there's a lot of intrigue and politics in the exchange of Linden dollars that kills the atmosphere of SL for me sometimes.
Most if not all cheating for advancement is for monitary gain. It's always funny when real world politics and cash corrupts a purely fantastical plane that doesn't even exist. Does that speak to eternal human nature, or is this just a product of the times we live in?
Slashdot Mirror
And we all want one for $100, and we'd all gladly pay up to $400 for one. I've got a PowerBook, and I'd still love one. I wouldn't have to worry about it, but it would be really handy.
This may indicate a market for such a device. Not a PDA, not a full-on "outfitted for war" laptop, not a (god damned useless) e-reader, not a handheld gaming rig, but the space between.
This is the space for essentialy a portable, truly open device that will let us surf the web, and run shells, and edit text files or to-do lists, but that won't break us financially if it's snatched from us on the subway.
MIT is showing us the market, and they're refusing to compete! Why have none of us embraced this yet?
My formula would be a Gumstix and an eInk display, maybe? Anyone have any better ideas?
I suspect one of the other big reasons for this is it's cheaper to do a bare-bones re-install when the Windows box goes teets up than to have an admin action every user need that is required on a box where the user is actually treated as a user.
Imagine how many real-life admins you might need to handle the hour to hour needs of a company where access rights in Windows were restricted.
This of course applies to no company that does NOT run Windows. Almost any other company would be able to handle that easily.
Talk about hidden costs.
You can hardly get good managed services when the dude is beside the boxes, good luck with that remote hooha. Also, as others have pointed out if the network is truly down down down, they're powerless.
So is it that they want the criminals to hand over their passwords before they commit a crime? This should go well with the anti bank-robbery legislation requiring all would-be robbers to call in a schedule before they pull off a heist.
I guess I'm an anomoly then, as my experience is very different, and so are my observations about who gets stuck with the calls and who moves on to better things. Within the corporations that I have started on the phones, I have never been "stuck". There's always somewhere to go, if you know where you're going.
If you don't know what you really want (other than "to be anywhere but the phones"), well it seems everyone who is coasting miserably through a support job ends up in a place where "every good position is filled".
Whatever helps you sleep dude.
I'm not being a dick, I'm being real. And I did get modded down, after being modded up, so I'm assuming that I'm raising a few heckles with the people who don't feel like getting up and doing anything about their excuse to bitch about how unfair life is to them.
Keep modding me down fellas, and try not to think about what I've written here.
Survey says... guess wrong! I've worked in three different large call centers. Two of them for major telcos that now don't exist.
Look at this paragraph you've written. What's your argument here? It seems your argument is that those with the "real skill" won't make career moves. Those that can't "kiss ass" won't progress in a company.
What you're saying is exactly what I'm saying. Those that have technical know-how, but that also have no people skills, and no idea of what they want out of their life, and their career will yes indeed get stepped on. Also you've made my point for me, this guy, and you, can't seem to move past griping about "how bad" tech support is, and "how stuck" the skilled workers are. It's a steaming load. He's out of the job and he still has to post his "memoirs" on how down-trodden he was? He's hardly writing it in the past-tense. Talk about holding on... He's even talking about his current opportunity like it's some lucky break, like he didn't even earn it. He keeps going on about how superior he is, but when he get's acknowledgement for it, he calls it a roll of the dice!
Have you considered that showing drive and initiative, that showing some sort of ambition is in fact NOT kissing ass? There's a huge difference.
Be up in the face of your boss. Be an idea guy. If you're in a company you can participate outside of your department to get where you want to go. Step on toes, shit, why not, what are they going to do, fire you?
Sometimes it's about having a backbone, and being a productive whiner. Talking to the boss is not kissing ass.
This guy is right, he is lucky to have gotten out, because he was making a really half-arsed effort at his time at Apple.
How many of us here have done tech support as a full time gig? I bet the show of hands is impressive. How many realized it was time to move on, not just from the job, but from the "customerz R teh st00pitz" attitude as well?
No? Haven't figured that out yet? Enjoy your time in the middle.
There's always one, or more, of those guys who feel that they have been given the shaft. They're just so good technically but they can't seem to put a career together. Why? It' must be dumb luck and conspiracy. "I don't get promoted because [manager|company|god] is threatened by my skill, or because they are short sighted, or because maybe I didn't take a shower this month".
Those of you who have your eyes upwards, or elsewhere know who I'm talking about. Those who are this guy will not realize it.
The man has a point! Am I in the right dimension, am I siding with a Microsoft rep?? I may have to get a 360 now with my Wii...
Not to point a finger at RedHat... Hell, why not... Anyway I felt RedHat was moving to a point where I felt it was pulling too many proprietary stunts (the updater, the "enterprise" crap, the fragmenting with Fedora, etc) so I switched to Debian. [Disclaimer: this is not a denouncement of RedHat, this was my personal choice, RedHat is still cool, but my leanings are to Debian right now]
I don't know when or how, but if Debian ever starts to lose the balance I like, I'll just switch to Gentoo, or something. Or my own distro, or whatever.
It's not like we're literally going to wake up one day to find that the Kerel has been made proprietary and all the software we use will suddenly become closed source.
Microsoft of Linux as an analogy does not work.
I am indeed!
It's more that SMTP is too broken. The model we use to communicate with each other is sadly too open, given the potential of the technology for automation. The real solution is to extend or replace SMTP completely.
The design proposed by PZ Myers would probably highlight why it wasn't done that way if this new human ever manged to appear out of thin air.
I think Ballmer, specifically, leaving MS, would be good for the company, and may give us naysayers reason to look at them again.
This is both true and untrue. Teens are susceptible to groupthink, but they're also capable of complete individuality. If I was Ballmer, I would be asking why all of my kids friends have one... Just marketing? There's much more to it than that.
I think this is the "La la la I can't hear you" counter-strategy against Microsoft's competitors. Phase two will involve employing everyone on earth.
I've been saying it for years, a company's attitude starts at the top. If he wasn't a moron, he'd be letting his kids use these things, and then he'd be observing them and quizzing them on why they like them. He has his own marketing team, right there in his house, but he's more content to control than to learn and discover. Well, -shrug-, that's why MS will be MS until he and Bill are gone. I feel sorry for the micromanaged offspring though.
ANY TIME, I see a question mark at the end of a Slashdot story, I know that the entire premise of the article is at best bogus. The Question Mark; it's a tell.
It's basically a challenge to crackers when Apple releases software this way, but at the same time it keeps the mainstream public buying Apple hardware because of the exposure. Just like in the world of fashion, all trends start in the back alleys.
So Intel OSX, "free of costly Apple hardware" will attract some of the best and brightest kids, but at the same time the parents of these kids... Mom isn't going to download the 0-day ISO of OSX so that she can run it on her crappy grey Dell, but if she suddenly decides she likes iMacs because they're pretty and because iPhoto is so cool, she'll buy one.
My guess is Apple will keep putting up these barriers, and the kids will keep breaking them down, and in-between the kids that get serious about OSX will buy Apple machines, and the mainstream consumer will continue to as well.
So, from Apple, it's "Oh, uh yeah, uh please don't... woe is us. *snicker*" Sorta like it is with XP and Microsoft now.
note: this post has been certified incoherent, but I'm hitting submit anyway.
Tyrol: Never had a death o n my hangar deck. Accidents... never a death.
Come to think of it telling Steve and Woz to give up on the crazy vision of Personal Computing would probably have been lucid advice at the time as well.
Apple then vs. Apple now, the difference is night and day.
That being said, your point is not only well taken, but valid. These laptops could be a leap forward, but they aren't much use if the children they are designed for don't also have food, clothing, and shelter to start.
Nice gesture, but it's a long way off.
I play Second Life exclusively online, so I don't run into this sort of thing. There's no leveling, etc, so running a cheat bot is kinda dumb. On the other hand there's a lot of intrigue and politics in the exchange of Linden dollars that kills the atmosphere of SL for me sometimes. Most if not all cheating for advancement is for monitary gain. It's always funny when real world politics and cash corrupts a purely fantastical plane that doesn't even exist. Does that speak to eternal human nature, or is this just a product of the times we live in?
Ou is more a naysayer than a crypto-shill for MS. I watched him beat XML with a crowbar the other day.
Microsoft Corporation is a company that writes software most people just want out of the way so they can get to work.
One name inspires commerce, and the other name inspires thoughts of trips to the dentist's office.