The insane price points for his projects really kill his credibility, though. Judging from past experience, I highly doubt that the XO 3 will cost less than $200, let alone $75.
True, but I wouldn't be surprised if 1 business in 10 orders a bunch desktops from Dell with Windows Vista pre-installed, and then re-images them with a custom Linux based system image for development or embedded system purposes. That's what my company does, anyway.
Sadly, you can still get better deals from Dell with a copy of Windows pre-installed than you can with no OS installed at all.
The reason I didn't use Wave is simply because nobody I knew actually used the tool and I didn't have enough Wave invitations to try adopting it as an official communication platform where I worked.
Sorry Google, but for a tool like this to work you can't make it exclusive to the elite technocrati like you did with the early GMail and Google Voice betas.
If you're using RAID-0 for ANYTHING, I hope that you have good backups of whatever you're storing! You just doubled the chances that you're going to lose all of your data due to a hard drive failure.
Oh well... at least you're not recommending the use of refurbished hard drives to save a few more dollars. People who do that are just asking for trouble.
Re:Plagiarism? or Ghost writing? Outsourcing?
on
Plagiarism Inc.
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· Score: 1
Yeah... when you think about it, the student is just outsourcing their work to someone else. Most larger business do this now, so I can't blame today's students for not thinking that it's a big moral issue.
Hell... if this was an MBA course and I caught one my students doing this, I'd be half tempted to give him bonus points for proper application of modern business principles:)
As an iPhone customer with visual voicemail, I was never prompted to set up a voicemail password when I set up my phone. I doubt that anyone else was, either.
Worse yet, the option to set a voicemail password is buried in the phone settings. The option doesn't even seem to work, either, as the password change option failed with an error message saying that "voicemail was unavailable" when I tried to set a password.
Sorry, but it's hard to blame the customer on this mess. Both Apple and AT&T screwed up when it came to securing this feature properly.
I was the sole system administrator for a finance software development department in a big company, and reported directly to the manager of the finance team. She wasn't a technical person, and had an home office 1,500 miles away. Amusingly, I NEVER saw her in person for the 18 months that I worked for her.
The good thing about working for her is that she didn't understand what I did, and didn't particularly care to learn. She didn't bother asking questions as to what I was up to, just assumed that I was doing a good job, and gave me great reviews every year. The flip side of that is that she didn't understand why we needed things like new equipment, new software, or training... which left me running the entire development department on 6 year old refurbished equipment that I could "borrow" from other departments.
That said, it was a good time. I thought myself a lot of useful skills during my downtime, which made me a better sysadmin later on. I wish that I had more managers like that now:)
Dream on. If manufacturing in China starts costing too much, the big multinational manufacturers will just move on countries with even cheaper uneducated labor pools like Vietnam or Bangladesh to meet consumer demand. How do you think big box stores like Walmart keep prices low... by just accepting higher manufacturer prices and taking a cut in their profit margins? Hell no.
I'm surprised that some manufacturers haven't started producing goods in places like Liberia or Somalia yet... you can get REALLY cheap labor rates there, even when you factor in the costs of guards to keep pirates and thieves from stealing your goods.
This is an educational institution, though, so they should try to be using the latest version of software if possible.
It doesn't make sense to teach high school kids on Windows XP now, considering that most companies will be using Windows 7 (or something even newer) by the time they graduate college.
I have an ATI AllInWonder 9800 Pro TV tuner card for my PC, and a Hauppauge USB TV Tuner stick for my laptop. Both are common as dirt, and neither of them are still supported by MythTV. Bummer.
That said, most of that 90% of users who wouldn't bother changing the default options in Chrome probably wouldn't have Chrome to begin with. Most of those users would be using whatever browser came pre-installed on the PC that they ordered from Dell or picked up at Sam's Club, and many of them probably haven't even heard of Chrome yet.
My point is that Chrome already has a pretty advanced user base (advanced enough to know how to download and install a web browser, anyway), and they would know how to edit privacy options if they wanted to do so.
Unless they plan on sending you a new Live CD every time a new Firefox or Linux kernel security bug is patched, many users would be vulnerable to attacks within a few months of this CD being released. A smart phisher will eventually construct an effective "man in the middle" style style attack using whatever security holes are discovered, and the bank would probably take at least a week to develop, test, and ship new CD's that have the issue patched.
Capitalism? Wow, that brings back memories... I was hooked on the original, beta tested the Plus version, and even got my picture in the game as one of the characters!
Honestly, I would be happy if I could use my Windows system for five days without getting a notice to update something. Between Flash, Firefox, Windows Update, and my AntiVirus software, I must see an update notification every 2 days or so!
Not that Linux or Mac users should be gloating... The software update systems in Fedora and Mac OS X are almost as obnoxious.
I'm trying to figure out how in the hell Novell has 900 million dollars in available cash! They must be selling a ton of SuSE support contracts and Platespin licenses in order to bring in that kind of money!
Another thing to keep in mind is that some people still aren't willing to try Linux even if they're frustrated with Windows, simply because they're not willing to learn a new operating system. It's not worth the effort to try to "force" stubborn people like that onto Linux, because they'll eventually end up going back to Windows at some point.
Personally, I like to recommend Mac OS X as a simpler alternative to Windows, but even a Mac can take awhile for some people to get used to after using Windows for over a decade.
It's sad that these folks needed to learn this the hard way, but it's important to know that you need to get the hell out of a business that can't meet payroll. Start looking for a new job right away, and make sure to file a claim to the labor relations organization for that jurisdiction if you don't get your back pay in a timely manner. Paying your employees is a top priority and a legal obligation for any business, whether or not they are for-profit or non-profit. (Sad, but I have a friend who got stiffed by a church of all places)
If a company don't have the funds available to pay it's people, they're already screwed. It's only a matter of time before they either close up shop or their creditors shut the place down at that point.
I just watched the piracy episode from 1985, and it's amazing how much of it still relates to today. My favorite was the Activision representative who had the gall to say that making backup copies of your floppies was "stealing"... even back then, that brand name had assholes working for it:)
You can't "permanently" fix much of anything by installing Fedora, considering that it's only supported for a year before they stop producing patches for that particular release. That that point, you can't get security updates and bug fixes unless you upgrade to a newer version. If you thought that patching Windows XP was dangerous, try updating a few hundred core OS packages to get up the latest release of Fedora!
Fedora is a fun OS to play with, but I'd want something with more long-term support on a home PC like CentOS or the upcoming "LTS" release of Ubuntu.
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The insane price points for his projects really kill his credibility, though. Judging from past experience, I highly doubt that the XO 3 will cost less than $200, let alone $75.
Who knows, we might actually have half of the space technologies in that movie available in 2098 if NASA keeps up it's stellar pace of innovation.
True, but I wouldn't be surprised if 1 business in 10 orders a bunch desktops from Dell with Windows Vista pre-installed, and then re-images them with a custom Linux based system image for development or embedded system purposes. That's what my company does, anyway.
Sadly, you can still get better deals from Dell with a copy of Windows pre-installed than you can with no OS installed at all.
The reason I didn't use Wave is simply because nobody I knew actually used the tool and I didn't have enough Wave invitations to try adopting it as an official communication platform where I worked.
Sorry Google, but for a tool like this to work you can't make it exclusive to the elite technocrati like you did with the early GMail and Google Voice betas.
If you're using RAID-0 for ANYTHING, I hope that you have good backups of whatever you're storing! You just doubled the chances that you're going to lose all of your data due to a hard drive failure.
Oh well... at least you're not recommending the use of refurbished hard drives to save a few more dollars. People who do that are just asking for trouble.
Yeah... when you think about it, the student is just outsourcing their work to someone else. Most larger business do this now, so I can't blame today's students for not thinking that it's a big moral issue.
Hell... if this was an MBA course and I caught one my students doing this, I'd be half tempted to give him bonus points for proper application of modern business principles :)
As an iPhone customer with visual voicemail, I was never prompted to set up a voicemail password when I set up my phone. I doubt that anyone else was, either.
Worse yet, the option to set a voicemail password is buried in the phone settings. The option doesn't even seem to work, either, as the password change option failed with an error message saying that "voicemail was unavailable" when I tried to set a password.
Sorry, but it's hard to blame the customer on this mess. Both Apple and AT&T screwed up when it came to securing this feature properly.
IBM Eventually got the Power line of processors up to 6 GHz in their test labs. Apple just wasn't patient enough to wait for it, though.
I was the sole system administrator for a finance software development department in a big company, and reported directly to the manager of the finance team. She wasn't a technical person, and had an home office 1,500 miles away. Amusingly, I NEVER saw her in person for the 18 months that I worked for her.
The good thing about working for her is that she didn't understand what I did, and didn't particularly care to learn. She didn't bother asking questions as to what I was up to, just assumed that I was doing a good job, and gave me great reviews every year. The flip side of that is that she didn't understand why we needed things like new equipment, new software, or training... which left me running the entire development department on 6 year old refurbished equipment that I could "borrow" from other departments.
That said, it was a good time. I thought myself a lot of useful skills during my downtime, which made me a better sysadmin later on. I wish that I had more managers like that now :)
Dream on. If manufacturing in China starts costing too much, the big multinational manufacturers will just move on countries with even cheaper uneducated labor pools like Vietnam or Bangladesh to meet consumer demand. How do you think big box stores like Walmart keep prices low... by just accepting higher manufacturer prices and taking a cut in their profit margins? Hell no.
I'm surprised that some manufacturers haven't started producing goods in places like Liberia or Somalia yet... you can get REALLY cheap labor rates there, even when you factor in the costs of guards to keep pirates and thieves from stealing your goods.
This is an educational institution, though, so they should try to be using the latest version of software if possible.
It doesn't make sense to teach high school kids on Windows XP now, considering that most companies will be using Windows 7 (or something even newer) by the time they graduate college.
I'll bet that HyperCard app would look cool on an Android phone if the developer decided to port it over... hint, hint.
I have an ATI AllInWonder 9800 Pro TV tuner card for my PC, and a Hauppauge USB TV Tuner stick for my laptop. Both are common as dirt, and neither of them are still supported by MythTV. Bummer.
That said, most of that 90% of users who wouldn't bother changing the default options in Chrome probably wouldn't have Chrome to begin with. Most of those users would be using whatever browser came pre-installed on the PC that they ordered from Dell or picked up at Sam's Club, and many of them probably haven't even heard of Chrome yet.
My point is that Chrome already has a pretty advanced user base (advanced enough to know how to download and install a web browser, anyway), and they would know how to edit privacy options if they wanted to do so.
Unless they plan on sending you a new Live CD every time a new Firefox or Linux kernel security bug is patched, many users would be vulnerable to attacks within a few months of this CD being released. A smart phisher will eventually construct an effective "man in the middle" style style attack using whatever security holes are discovered, and the bank would probably take at least a week to develop, test, and ship new CD's that have the issue patched.
Capitalism? Wow, that brings back memories... I was hooked on the original, beta tested the Plus version, and even got my picture in the game as one of the characters!
Not that most people care, but Real does make a version of RealPlayer that installs via an .RPM file on their web site.
Honestly, I would be happy if I could use my Windows system for five days without getting a notice to update something. Between Flash, Firefox, Windows Update, and my AntiVirus software, I must see an update notification every 2 days or so!
Not that Linux or Mac users should be gloating... The software update systems in Fedora and Mac OS X are almost as obnoxious.
They're hoping for a bidding war with another software company to drive up the price of the shares further.
I'm curious who would want to buy them, though.
I'm trying to figure out how in the hell Novell has 900 million dollars in available cash! They must be selling a ton of SuSE support contracts and Platespin licenses in order to bring in that kind of money!
Another thing to keep in mind is that some people still aren't willing to try Linux even if they're frustrated with Windows, simply because they're not willing to learn a new operating system. It's not worth the effort to try to "force" stubborn people like that onto Linux, because they'll eventually end up going back to Windows at some point.
Personally, I like to recommend Mac OS X as a simpler alternative to Windows, but even a Mac can take awhile for some people to get used to after using Windows for over a decade.
It's sad that these folks needed to learn this the hard way, but it's important to know that you need to get the hell out of a business that can't meet payroll. Start looking for a new job right away, and make sure to file a claim to the labor relations organization for that jurisdiction if you don't get your back pay in a timely manner. Paying your employees is a top priority and a legal obligation for any business, whether or not they are for-profit or non-profit. (Sad, but I have a friend who got stiffed by a church of all places)
If a company don't have the funds available to pay it's people, they're already screwed. It's only a matter of time before they either close up shop or their creditors shut the place down at that point.
I just watched the piracy episode from 1985, and it's amazing how much of it still relates to today. My favorite was the Activision representative who had the gall to say that making backup copies of your floppies was "stealing"... even back then, that brand name had assholes working for it :)
You can't "permanently" fix much of anything by installing Fedora, considering that it's only supported for a year before they stop producing patches for that particular release. That that point, you can't get security updates and bug fixes unless you upgrade to a newer version. If you thought that patching Windows XP was dangerous, try updating a few hundred core OS packages to get up the latest release of Fedora!
Fedora is a fun OS to play with, but I'd want something with more long-term support on a home PC like CentOS or the upcoming "LTS" release of Ubuntu.
It costs more than a Nomad, too. Lame ;)