You're right. Despite claims to the contrary, home users REALLY hate paying for computer repair and only do it when they're desperate - which is why their machines are in such a mess when we get to them.
In fact, corporate users don't like it either. For some reason, there's some myth that all these boxes with moving parts in the drives and high heat output are supposed to be "un-breakable" for the five years or more people keep them.
I got one client still running a ten-to-fifteen year old Windows 95 box, for God's sakes! He absolutely will not upgrade that box because it runs a specific software he needs and he doesn't want to learn anything newer. It's already burned out at least one power supply and he lucked out that it didn't fry his motherboard.
And it's not just scammers charging low rates. I charge low rates and don't scam anyone. There's just a ton of people doing PC repair work and the competition is fierce. Add that customers don't like paying a lot per hour and it's hard to justify higher rates, especially for poorer home users. It's a bad business model but poor people need PC support, too, and just can't afford Geek Squad rates.
"Personally I don't get the drive to be dishonest for these places."
It's simple. There are two main reasons: 1) competition, or 2) the guy is just dishonest by nature.
In the case of competition, there are two reasons: 1) a lot of out of work techies go into computer support - I did - and they charge less than someone running a store with overhead; and 2) the economy sucks and as I've mentioned elsewhere people hate paying for computer repair so it's not that easy to make a decent living fixing PCs unless a) you're very good, and/or b) you have good marketing skills and thus a lot of corporate clients as opposed to home users.
Marketing skills and PC repair skills tend not to go together in the same person - it sure doesn't in me.
In the case of 2), dishonesty is common in every profession. By definition, most of the people in any profession are doing less well than the people at the top of the profession. This tends to bring out dishonesty. The lower down the totem pole you go, the more dishonesty you find. Since basic PC repair (as opposed to more high end computer consulting) is basically a blue collar, low education, no respect type of job, it's no surprise people who end up in it tend to be dishonest.
The only surprise I have is that they're using cold calling for this instead of just dumping a fake AV on her machine. Cold calling is a really labor intensive way to make some money. I suppose they did this because they're too dumb to use a phishing email or other remote means.
The fake AV business is booming. Most of the spyware cleaning I get these days is because of some fake AV. I've read reports that some of these guys are probably making several million a year from this scam.
Most of the clients who call me pretty much figure out that it's a scam, and maybe they know to try one of the spyware utilities, but frequently that doesn't work because the fake AV disables the AV or they pick the wrong one. So they call me and I come in with UBCD4Win and a few other removal utilities and clean it out. Then I get them off IE and on Firefox if they aren't already and put the free version of Malwarebytes Antimalware and ThreatFire 3 on their system and usually switch their AV to Avast (because their Norton or McAfee was slowing their machine down to a crawl.) And also make sure they're fully patched. My maximum home user charge is $100, but I usually eat a couple hours getting them straightened out after the actual cleaning so they don't have to do it again in a month.
I think the point is precisely that it does take longer to do that, so the store owner gets to charge his hourly rate for four hours of make work, and THEN does NOT have to pay for the $30-40 or whatever per RAM stick he didn't put in the machine while still charging the client for it.
I'd say the store owner has to be careful, though, as the client might actually know enough to look at Properties on Computer and see how much RAM he's got. But there are plenty of people who don't know how to do that.
Also, the store owner probably has to run some BS in order to charge for the extra hours if the client thought all he needed was some more RAM. But if the client is naive enough, that would probably work.
But the store owner would get nailed if the client knew all he needed was more RAM and knew that all it took was slapping a stick in the box in five minutes. But there are tons of clients who don't know this.
2) Most of these stories are from ten years ago based on the hardware described, but we can assume the same tactics are used today.
3) I service PCs for corporate and home customers - and I don't do any of that crap. I'm not the most hardware-oriented technical support person you'll ever see and I'm not the sort of techie who knows Windows internals forwards and backwards, but I usually fix the problem regardless and I do it in a way that doesn't cause problems down the road.
I also charge a reasonable rate - which means I'm barely paying my rent. So obviously I'm an idiot.
I charge 25 bucks per hour for home users with a maximum charge of $100 - and usually that means I work a couple hours for free on a spyware cleaning and repair - and 50 bucks per hour for business users. Obviously I could charge a lot more. But there's a lot of competition out there from out of work tech people who also charge low. And despite claims from some people that customers will pay tons of money for computer service, the reality is most people REALLY hate paying anything more than what they paid for the computer in the first place and only get support because they're desperate when the machine is unusable (which is why they can be suckered by the unscrupulous).
Another scam that is very common these days is the "remote maintenance" company, who charges you a tiny amount of money per month and who promises to fix your machine remotely from their systems if you have a problem. I've never figured out how they expect to do that when the machine won't even boot because the hard drive has died or the home router doesn't work or the customer doesn't even have Internet. Sure, this can work with a spyware cleaning - IF the spyware will allow you to remote in or the machine isn't running bone slow because of the spyware. And if you've ever done any remote support over the phone, you know what a painful process that is, especially with a naive user.
There's no substitute for a guy standing in front of the machine who can assess what the customer has done wrong and can help the customer do things right from now on, as well as actually physically seeing what is going on with the machine. I've had several clients call me after the "remote maintenance" company either couldn't fix their problem or screwed things up even worse.
It seems to me things would eventually get better if every grammar school and high school in the country had a basic computer course teaching everyone how to buy a machine, something about the innards, and how to use a machine, including proper computer security, and how to fix the most common problems. I don't know if school systems do that these days, but they should - computer savvy is a basic survival trait these days.
And by all reviews I've ever seen, massively unstable - even compared to Adobe crap. And still doesn't support anywhere near the features of Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro.
Actually, right now, Final Cut is behind Adobe Premiere in turns of features and speed - even on Apple hardware.
I came to the conclusion that Final Cut was behind Adobe Premiere. That situation may change when the new version of Final Cut is released, as it will finally be a 64-bit application. But right now, it seems a number of professional video editors have jumped ship to Adobe running on high-end PC hardware with NVidia graphics running Adobe's Mercury Playback Engine on their CUDA cores which speeds up effects processing and rendering by a factor of ten.
I recently researched the situation in order to spec upgraded machines for one of my clients who does digital conversions of video, film and stills. They are operating on a combination of ancient single-core Pentium 4 PCs using Adobe Premiere 1.5 and some dual-core iMacs and one quad-core Mac Server using Final Cut Pro. I decided on a six-core Intel i7 970 (or quad-core 950, they haven't decided yet) with 24GB of RAM and an NVidia GeForce card supporting CUDA running Adobe Premiere CS5. According to reports, this level system can render HD video at or near real-time - and my client mostly deals with SD video so far (but they need productivity to handle the order flow).
Cost-wise (the system comes in at around $3200), this system is superior to iMacs running Final Cut Pro and approaches the capability of a Mac Server running Final Cut Pro. I expect the productivity improvement to be massive for my client over the crap they're running now.
Sorry, but there are no Linux video editing suites that don't suck compared to Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro. The ones that have the most features - and most don't even have enough for real consumer home video editing, let alone professional video editing - are ridiculously unstable - even compared to Adobe products which are notorious crap.
There is only ONE former commercial product which has been recently open sourced which seems adequate - LightWorks: http://www.lightworksbeta.com/
Check out these features:
Editing
Resolution, format and codec independent timeline
Edit at 23.976, true 24, 25, 29.97, 30, 50, or 60 fps
Advanced Multicam editing with unlimited sources
Source/Record three-point editing
Insert and Overwrite editing
Replace, t to ll, backfill
Drag-and-drop replace editing
Extend and Split edits
A/V Sync indicators on timeline
Single-click re-sync of whole timeline
Multi-colored markers for edits and clips
Matchframe for clips and subclips
Trimming
Ripple
Roll
Slip and Slide
Remove and Delete
Asymmetric, multitrack trimming
Dynamic trimming during playback
JKL trimming
Trim window
Timeline trimming
Keyboard and numeric moving and trimming
Close Gap
Effects
Third Party Plugin Support
Alpha Channel Matte Transitions
Global Transitions adds effects between In and Out points
Real-time effects in SD, HD and 2K
Speed Tool for varispeed changes
Keyframe graphs
Transitions, effects, and filters included
Unlimited effects user templates
Copy and paste effect attributes to multiple clips
Effects layers with node-based compositing tool
Bezier curves with movable motion paths
Numeric control and keyframe capabilities
Tools
Real-time, hardware accurate video vectorscopes and waveform monitors
Multitrack Audio Mixer with full bus routing and multiple mixes
Keyboard and user interface customization tool with templates for Avid and FCP keyboard mappings
On-screen console controls
Voice Over tool for adding narration directly to timeline
Multi-split screen Viewer for original shot comparison
Shot Sync - sync two sources for playback comparison
Customisable BITC timecode and film footage overlays in Viewer
Colour Correction
Real time Primary color correctors
Real time Secondary color correctors
Image control filters
Audio
Subframe audio keyframing
Real-time audio adjustments during playback
OMF audio export with pan and volume levels
Real
LONG before we get the chance to colonize some other interstellar planet, the human species will be replaced by entities that don't procreate using current biological methods.
Another example of idiot scientists inventing problems that will be made utterly obsolete by other developments long before they will occur.
I CAN testify to the fact that tempers get hot when the DM is an butt-hole, or other players are too stupid to handle even simple situations. The problem is especially acute with DMs. DMs in my understanding can be cool or not cool. Given the nature of criminals, DM criminals tend to not be cool. However, during my experiences with D&D in a Federal joint, at least one DM that I knew wasn't that bad. But most of the rest easily tended to be either brutal on their players (within the game that is) or just bizarre.
I know back in the '90's several Federal prisons banned D&D because of the incidence of shankings that occurred. So the potential for violence in a violent place is definitely real. Several inmates I played D&D with said they didn't mind playing at a FCI (a Federal Correctional Institute, a medium security facility) but wouldn't consider playing at a Penitentiary (a high security facility) due to the risk of playing with more violent offenders.
But "stimulating gang activity"? That's just ridiculous. You're either in a gang or you're not in the joint. The decision is made by your background on the street, not by some game. By far most prison D&D players in my experience were white urban criminals, many of whom probably weren't gang members on the street, although some undoubtedly were. Whether they would participate in gang activities in the joint would be totally determined by their previous gang membership or their wish to join a prison gang for support reasons. D&D is purely a recreational activity the same as weight lifting or basketball or card playing in the joint. Who you do it with is determined by your social connections in the joint, not the reverse.
I just read today they're also removing the Profile Manager from Firefox 4.0. You will need a third party tool to manage your profiles now.
Programmers have become hair dressers who only know how to REMOVE things like hair and features rather than STYLE them. Every new piece of software is now gutted of features rather than improved.
I upgraded my openSUSE 11.0 to 11.3, switching from KDE 3.5 to 4.4 in the process. End result: Gwenview, my preferred image viewer, no longer shows the image sizes in the thumbnails. KRename, my preferred file renamer, no longer allows inserting number increments greater than 2 digits. I had to switch to Picasa and Metamorphose2 to recover this functionality. (And don't get me started on the weird Picasa user interface.)
I tried using Dolphin, the new file manager. Next to useless. I switched back to Konqueror, discovered moving files between the two pane view was absurdly slow Then I discovered if I just used straight cut and paste into the folder the speed came back. Obviously it spends more time trying to figure out how to update the display than it does moving the files. Worse, it DOESN'T update the display. The Kongueror in KDE 3.5 had no problem updating the display when files were added or renamed (most of the time anyway.) The current KDE is so bloated it can't keep up.
It no longer matters - commercial or open source - it's all utter crap now. Untested, insecure, unreliable, buggy, poor user interfaces, useless error messages.
The real "overhead" for many, many Web sites now is the linking to fifty ad servers on every page - and THOSE servers are either down or slow, so they don't finish responding to the browser request in less than ten minutes.
Which is why your browser "busy" indicator stays that way even though the page appears to have been fully loaded - or worse, the page never loads.
This makes a difference when you try to save a page on your hard drive - that last little bit won't save and the browser will tell you the save "failed" - in reality you got most of it except for one lousy little ad.
All of this is just the effect of the Internet industry running on too little server horsepower and too little bandwidth - and WAY too little brains.
And yet people think they can run a business "in the cloud" - not with these morons running the cloud.
The reality is that the Internet is now as fast as an old monochrome green screen dumb terminal hooked up to a mainframe circa 1975 - except it's in color. You still spend a minute waiting for a Web page to load, no different than waiting for an overloaded mainframe to respond to a dumb terminal. And this despite the fact that the servers running a Web site are a thousand times more powerful than that 1970's mainframe.
And there may be an entire server FARM running that Web site - it's STILL slow. Because somebody else's server ISN'T.
As Woody Allen summed up the human situation, "Nothing works and nobody cares."
Just out of curiosity, why is her age surprising? Did you think she was younger or older?
She's only been acting for eight years. She seems younger than 29 because she's so quiet and shy and a bit socially awkward because of her history of shyness. When she first came to Los Angeles, she had to take assertiveness courses. I find her amazing for being able to do what she does despite being so shy, as well as for her amazing physical abilities.
One interesting thing about her is her facial expressions. If you watch a series of screencaps from some TV show, such as Dollhouse, you'll notice that she almost never has the same facial expression twice. She has an amazingly fluid, expressive and constantly changing face. It's almost creepy. It's one of the things that makes her an impressive actress. The other main thing is her ability to physically express a role. She has said that she approaches most roles first in a physical way and only then via her voice, as a result of her ballet training.
A lot of people have argued that is true but I don't agree. A cyborg is an organism which has had an organic part completely or partially replaced by a mechanism. So the first items you suggest (watches, eyeglasses, etc.) wouldn't qualify, but, yes, a guy with a prosthetic arm is a cyborg. A guy with a pin in his ankle is a gray area - I'd say not so much because the modification is so minor and not so much a replacement of existing organics. If he had a fully prosthetic ankle, you could say he was a cyborg.
In SF games, usually you have distinctions like "partial cyborg" (robot arms, robot legs, implanted body armor) vs "full cyborg" (wherein almost everything is mechanical except the significant parts of the brain).
Deathlok in Marvel Comics is a cyborg. He was a human who had most of his organic parts replaced by robotic parts except for his brain. The brain was hooked to a computer which did most of the controlling of the body.
The key is what did the entity start out as: an organism or a machine. If it started as an organism, it's a cyborg. If it started as a machine, it's a robot.
Another distinction is how well does it function if you remove the organic or machine component. If you remove the skin of a Terminator, it functions perfectly well, as demonstrated by Chromartie in T:SCC. That indicates the skin is only important for its function as an infiltrator, not for its ability to function at all. In fact, most of the Terminators in the movies shown in the future don't even have ANY organic parts - they're pure robots as shown in the battle scenes. How one can call them "cyborgs" is incomprehensible. Just adding a layer of tissue doesn't seem sufficient to make them a "cyborg" any more than covering them with clothes or whatever would do so. The tissue is superfluous to their primary functioning.
Now one COULD I suppose make the argument that if you took Cameron the Terminator in T:SCC and replaced all or most of her critical robotic parts with human tissue and human systems except the CPU chip, that she would be a "cyborg". But I think this is stretching it. The key to a human cyborg is the presence of most of the original functioning organic brain. Cameron never had a human brain.
The same applies to Star Trek's Data. He was never an organism in the biological sense.
Although that does raise the question: once robotics becomes PERFECT at imitating BIOLOGICAL PROCESSES, will the distinction become moot? If you have nanotech devices perfectly mimicking organic cells, does that make the nanotech "organic"? Note: I'm not talking here about "nanoorganic", i.e., controlling organic components through some sort of cybernetics or mechanics, I'm talking non-organic components mimicking organic processes.
I think again the issue is origin. Biology and organisms arose from evolution. A nanotech device not composed of the same chemical components as a biological cell and not structured identically to an organic cell simply isn't "biological" - it's an IMITATION of biology. From a functional standpoint, it may be a perfect imitation - but it's still an imitation.
Distinctions matter (except of course where they don't depending on specific perspective.)
A Terminator is NOT a cyborg. A cyborg is an ORGANISM which has been ENHANCED or even REPLACED by cybernetic machinery. The key is that the original entity was a living biologically based organism.
A Terminator is merely a ROBOT covered by an organic covering. The covering is no more significant than if the robot were just wearing clothes. It's just covering. The machine underneath is not a living organism and never was.
Just because James Cameron doesn't know his technology, the word cyborg has been debased beyond all recognition. It's probably a waste of time to try to correct it any more, but I like wasting my time.
Back when Vista was being developed, they shared the code with the NSA in order to detect vulnerabilities.
So obviously what did NSA do? They found X vulnerabilities - and told Microsoft about X minus Y vulnerabilities.
Now Microsoft wants Mossad, an organization known for conducting massive espionage - both political, military and economic - against the US to have the same capability.
This client does video and film conversion to digital storage. They archive the customer stuff for months in case the customer needs a redo or something. So they eat a fair amount of storage.
For archival purposes, they couldn't spend tens of thousands on a SAN or anything like that, so I pitched a Burley (also known as MacGurus) enclosure a la this: MGBurly8PM - Burly 8 Bay w/Port Multiplier http://www.burlystorage.com/ccp0-prodshow/MGBurly8PM.html with 8 750GB hard drives (the biggest around a couple years ago). This is an expensive enclosure but well designed. With today's hard drives, you can cram 8TB of storage in it for another $800. It's worked very well except for one hard drive which had to be replaced with a 1TB drive, and another component which we had to replace when it failed.
Piece of advice: do not try to mix and match port multipliers, enclosures and hard drives. This is a recipe for failure. There are issues with the multipliers firmware, the drive firmware and other bugs. Buy the lot from one source and make sure they test it before they ship it to you. Burley knows what they are doing and we've gotten great support from them.
We also wanted to serve up some 8TB of space to some Macs for video editing using iSCSI. First we bought some Micronet external enclosures, two enclosures with four drives each. The Mac drivers didn't work at all with the Macs, and Micronet had ZERO support for that issue. We tried using the boxes on the Windows XP video editing machines - Adobe Premiere 1.5 (ancient, I know, but the client can't afford to upgrade yet because they're using older Matrox video cards) does NOT like that kind of thing at all. So I took one of the older XP machines and put OpenFiler on it to serve up the space as iSCSI for the Macs. This has worked very well. Final Cut Pro uses the iSCSI storage without any problems at all. OpenFiler was installed, configured and has not been updated for the last year or so and it has faithfully served up iSCSI storage to four Macs without a single hiccup (except when a staff member plugged in an air conditioner to an overloaded circuit and dropped every machine in the room - restarting the OpenFiler box, it went right back to work.)
To archive and serve up a bunch of videos, just get a big enclosure (or several smaller ones), load them up with big drives, hook them up to any reasonably cheap box with a couple GB of RAM and just serve up that storage any way you want. OpenFiler can do it.
One caveat: Do not use Seagate drives. Their quality control these days absolutely sucks. We just installed a HD video machine recently with four 1TB Seagate drives in a RAID 0 array, and one of the drives started giving read errors within the first few days. Reviews of the Seagate drives over 1TB on most of the retail sites like Newegg show either DOA or clicking within six months. They're selling Seagate 1.5TB drives for $125, which is a good price - except the customer reviews are dismal. I wouldn't touch a 2TB drive yet with a ten-foot pole, by any manufacturer, until I see good reviews on the retail sites - and I mean a hundred or more reviews with 75% or more being 4 or 5 stars.
Contrary to one person's viewpoint above, Hitachi tends to get good reviews. I'm going to be using a new one this weekend to back up my stuff on my home machine.
Until people wake up and realize that ALL IP laws are BS, human civilization will continue to grind down into the mud until only the lawyers remain, scrabbling like nude female mud wrestlers (without the sexual attractiveness, if any - I've never like nude mud wrestling.)
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You mean you don't actually install a fake AV, pull half their RAM and leave child porn on the machine as well?
So how evil are you? Eh, not so much.
You're right. Despite claims to the contrary, home users REALLY hate paying for computer repair and only do it when they're desperate - which is why their machines are in such a mess when we get to them.
In fact, corporate users don't like it either. For some reason, there's some myth that all these boxes with moving parts in the drives and high heat output are supposed to be "un-breakable" for the five years or more people keep them.
I got one client still running a ten-to-fifteen year old Windows 95 box, for God's sakes! He absolutely will not upgrade that box because it runs a specific software he needs and he doesn't want to learn anything newer. It's already burned out at least one power supply and he lucked out that it didn't fry his motherboard.
And it's not just scammers charging low rates. I charge low rates and don't scam anyone. There's just a ton of people doing PC repair work and the competition is fierce. Add that customers don't like paying a lot per hour and it's hard to justify higher rates, especially for poorer home users. It's a bad business model but poor people need PC support, too, and just can't afford Geek Squad rates.
"Personally I don't get the drive to be dishonest for these places."
It's simple. There are two main reasons: 1) competition, or 2) the guy is just dishonest by nature.
In the case of competition, there are two reasons: 1) a lot of out of work techies go into computer support - I did - and they charge less than someone running a store with overhead; and 2) the economy sucks and as I've mentioned elsewhere people hate paying for computer repair so it's not that easy to make a decent living fixing PCs unless a) you're very good, and/or b) you have good marketing skills and thus a lot of corporate clients as opposed to home users.
Marketing skills and PC repair skills tend not to go together in the same person - it sure doesn't in me.
In the case of 2), dishonesty is common in every profession. By definition, most of the people in any profession are doing less well than the people at the top of the profession. This tends to bring out dishonesty. The lower down the totem pole you go, the more dishonesty you find. Since basic PC repair (as opposed to more high end computer consulting) is basically a blue collar, low education, no respect type of job, it's no surprise people who end up in it tend to be dishonest.
On Windows, it's called CCleaner.
But it doesn't help if you have ten gig worth of porn in your Documents folder.
Switch his wife to your Web site, obviously. And make sure you note the Web sites and phone numbers of those hookers.
What kind of nerd are you? :-)
The only surprise I have is that they're using cold calling for this instead of just dumping a fake AV on her machine. Cold calling is a really labor intensive way to make some money. I suppose they did this because they're too dumb to use a phishing email or other remote means.
The fake AV business is booming. Most of the spyware cleaning I get these days is because of some fake AV. I've read reports that some of these guys are probably making several million a year from this scam.
Most of the clients who call me pretty much figure out that it's a scam, and maybe they know to try one of the spyware utilities, but frequently that doesn't work because the fake AV disables the AV or they pick the wrong one. So they call me and I come in with UBCD4Win and a few other removal utilities and clean it out. Then I get them off IE and on Firefox if they aren't already and put the free version of Malwarebytes Antimalware and ThreatFire 3 on their system and usually switch their AV to Avast (because their Norton or McAfee was slowing their machine down to a crawl.) And also make sure they're fully patched. My maximum home user charge is $100, but I usually eat a couple hours getting them straightened out after the actual cleaning so they don't have to do it again in a month.
I think the point is precisely that it does take longer to do that, so the store owner gets to charge his hourly rate for four hours of make work, and THEN does NOT have to pay for the $30-40 or whatever per RAM stick he didn't put in the machine while still charging the client for it.
I'd say the store owner has to be careful, though, as the client might actually know enough to look at Properties on Computer and see how much RAM he's got. But there are plenty of people who don't know how to do that.
Also, the store owner probably has to run some BS in order to charge for the extra hours if the client thought all he needed was some more RAM. But if the client is naive enough, that would probably work.
But the store owner would get nailed if the client knew all he needed was more RAM and knew that all it took was slapping a stick in the box in five minutes. But there are tons of clients who don't know this.
1) Yes, there are idiots who do this stuff.
2) Most of these stories are from ten years ago based on the hardware described, but we can assume the same tactics are used today.
3) I service PCs for corporate and home customers - and I don't do any of that crap. I'm not the most hardware-oriented technical support person you'll ever see and I'm not the sort of techie who knows Windows internals forwards and backwards, but I usually fix the problem regardless and I do it in a way that doesn't cause problems down the road.
I also charge a reasonable rate - which means I'm barely paying my rent. So obviously I'm an idiot.
I charge 25 bucks per hour for home users with a maximum charge of $100 - and usually that means I work a couple hours for free on a spyware cleaning and repair - and 50 bucks per hour for business users. Obviously I could charge a lot more. But there's a lot of competition out there from out of work tech people who also charge low. And despite claims from some people that customers will pay tons of money for computer service, the reality is most people REALLY hate paying anything more than what they paid for the computer in the first place and only get support because they're desperate when the machine is unusable (which is why they can be suckered by the unscrupulous).
Another scam that is very common these days is the "remote maintenance" company, who charges you a tiny amount of money per month and who promises to fix your machine remotely from their systems if you have a problem. I've never figured out how they expect to do that when the machine won't even boot because the hard drive has died or the home router doesn't work or the customer doesn't even have Internet. Sure, this can work with a spyware cleaning - IF the spyware will allow you to remote in or the machine isn't running bone slow because of the spyware. And if you've ever done any remote support over the phone, you know what a painful process that is, especially with a naive user.
There's no substitute for a guy standing in front of the machine who can assess what the customer has done wrong and can help the customer do things right from now on, as well as actually physically seeing what is going on with the machine. I've had several clients call me after the "remote maintenance" company either couldn't fix their problem or screwed things up even worse.
It seems to me things would eventually get better if every grammar school and high school in the country had a basic computer course teaching everyone how to buy a machine, something about the innards, and how to use a machine, including proper computer security, and how to fix the most common problems. I don't know if school systems do that these days, but they should - computer savvy is a basic survival trait these days.
And by all reviews I've ever seen, massively unstable - even compared to Adobe crap. And still doesn't support anywhere near the features of Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro.
Actually, right now, Final Cut is behind Adobe Premiere in turns of features and speed - even on Apple hardware.
I came to the conclusion that Final Cut was behind Adobe Premiere. That situation may change when the new version of Final Cut is released, as it will finally be a 64-bit application. But right now, it seems a number of professional video editors have jumped ship to Adobe running on high-end PC hardware with NVidia graphics running Adobe's Mercury Playback Engine on their CUDA cores which speeds up effects processing and rendering by a factor of ten.
I recently researched the situation in order to spec upgraded machines for one of my clients who does digital conversions of video, film and stills. They are operating on a combination of ancient single-core Pentium 4 PCs using Adobe Premiere 1.5 and some dual-core iMacs and one quad-core Mac Server using Final Cut Pro. I decided on a six-core Intel i7 970 (or quad-core 950, they haven't decided yet) with 24GB of RAM and an NVidia GeForce card supporting CUDA running Adobe Premiere CS5. According to reports, this level system can render HD video at or near real-time - and my client mostly deals with SD video so far (but they need productivity to handle the order flow).
Cost-wise (the system comes in at around $3200), this system is superior to iMacs running Final Cut Pro and approaches the capability of a Mac Server running Final Cut Pro. I expect the productivity improvement to be massive for my client over the crap they're running now.
Sorry, but there are no Linux video editing suites that don't suck compared to Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro. The ones that have the most features - and most don't even have enough for real consumer home video editing, let alone professional video editing - are ridiculously unstable - even compared to Adobe products which are notorious crap.
There is only ONE former commercial product which has been recently open sourced which seems adequate - LightWorks:
http://www.lightworksbeta.com/
Check out these features:
Editing
Resolution, format and codec independent timeline
Edit at 23.976, true 24, 25, 29.97, 30, 50, or 60 fps
Advanced Multicam editing with unlimited sources
Source/Record three-point editing
Insert and Overwrite editing
Replace, t to ll, backfill
Drag-and-drop replace editing
Extend and Split edits
A/V Sync indicators on timeline
Single-click re-sync of whole timeline
Multi-colored markers for edits and clips
Matchframe for clips and subclips
Trimming
Ripple
Roll
Slip and Slide
Remove and Delete
Asymmetric, multitrack trimming
Dynamic trimming during playback
JKL trimming
Trim window
Timeline trimming
Keyboard and numeric moving and trimming
Close Gap
Effects
Third Party Plugin Support
Alpha Channel Matte Transitions
Global Transitions adds effects between In and Out points
Real-time effects in SD, HD and 2K
Speed Tool for varispeed changes
Keyframe graphs
Transitions, effects, and filters included
Unlimited effects user templates
Copy and paste effect attributes to multiple clips
Effects layers with node-based compositing tool
Bezier curves with movable motion paths
Numeric control and keyframe capabilities
Tools
Real-time, hardware accurate video vectorscopes and waveform monitors
Multitrack Audio Mixer with full bus routing and multiple mixes
Keyboard and user interface customization tool with templates for Avid and FCP keyboard mappings
On-screen console controls
Voice Over tool for adding narration directly to timeline
Multi-split screen Viewer for original shot comparison
Shot Sync - sync two sources for playback comparison
Customisable BITC timecode and film footage overlays in Viewer
Colour Correction
Real time Primary color correctors
Real time Secondary color correctors
Image control filters
Audio
Subframe audio keyframing
Real-time audio adjustments during playback
OMF audio export with pan and volume levels
Real
Completely idiotic problem.
LONG before we get the chance to colonize some other interstellar planet, the human species will be replaced by entities that don't procreate using current biological methods.
Another example of idiot scientists inventing problems that will be made utterly obsolete by other developments long before they will occur.
Must be a slow day at the lab.
I CAN testify to the fact that tempers get hot when the DM is an butt-hole, or other players are too stupid to handle even simple situations. The problem is especially acute with DMs. DMs in my understanding can be cool or not cool. Given the nature of criminals, DM criminals tend to not be cool. However, during my experiences with D&D in a Federal joint, at least one DM that I knew wasn't that bad. But most of the rest easily tended to be either brutal on their players (within the game that is) or just bizarre.
I know back in the '90's several Federal prisons banned D&D because of the incidence of shankings that occurred. So the potential for violence in a violent place is definitely real. Several inmates I played D&D with said they didn't mind playing at a FCI (a Federal Correctional Institute, a medium security facility) but wouldn't consider playing at a Penitentiary (a high security facility) due to the risk of playing with more violent offenders.
But "stimulating gang activity"? That's just ridiculous. You're either in a gang or you're not in the joint. The decision is made by your background on the street, not by some game. By far most prison D&D players in my experience were white urban criminals, many of whom probably weren't gang members on the street, although some undoubtedly were. Whether they would participate in gang activities in the joint would be totally determined by their previous gang membership or their wish to join a prison gang for support reasons. D&D is purely a recreational activity the same as weight lifting or basketball or card playing in the joint. Who you do it with is determined by your social connections in the joint, not the reverse.
"Release crap. Often"
I just read today they're also removing the Profile Manager from Firefox 4.0. You will need a third party tool to manage your profiles now.
Programmers have become hair dressers who only know how to REMOVE things like hair and features rather than STYLE them. Every new piece of software is now gutted of features rather than improved.
I upgraded my openSUSE 11.0 to 11.3, switching from KDE 3.5 to 4.4 in the process. End result: Gwenview, my preferred image viewer, no longer shows the image sizes in the thumbnails. KRename, my preferred file renamer, no longer allows inserting number increments greater than 2 digits. I had to switch to Picasa and Metamorphose2 to recover this functionality. (And don't get me started on the weird Picasa user interface.)
I tried using Dolphin, the new file manager. Next to useless. I switched back to Konqueror, discovered moving files between the two pane view was absurdly slow Then I discovered if I just used straight cut and paste into the folder the speed came back. Obviously it spends more time trying to figure out how to update the display than it does moving the files. Worse, it DOESN'T update the display. The Kongueror in KDE 3.5 had no problem updating the display when files were added or renamed (most of the time anyway.) The current KDE is so bloated it can't keep up.
It no longer matters - commercial or open source - it's all utter crap now. Untested, insecure, unreliable, buggy, poor user interfaces, useless error messages.
The software industry produces total shit.
The real "overhead" for many, many Web sites now is the linking to fifty ad servers on every page - and THOSE servers are either down or slow, so they don't finish responding to the browser request in less than ten minutes.
Which is why your browser "busy" indicator stays that way even though the page appears to have been fully loaded - or worse, the page never loads.
This makes a difference when you try to save a page on your hard drive - that last little bit won't save and the browser will tell you the save "failed" - in reality you got most of it except for one lousy little ad.
All of this is just the effect of the Internet industry running on too little server horsepower and too little bandwidth - and WAY too little brains.
And yet people think they can run a business "in the cloud" - not with these morons running the cloud.
The reality is that the Internet is now as fast as an old monochrome green screen dumb terminal hooked up to a mainframe circa 1975 - except it's in color. You still spend a minute waiting for a Web page to load, no different than waiting for an overloaded mainframe to respond to a dumb terminal. And this despite the fact that the servers running a Web site are a thousand times more powerful than that 1970's mainframe.
And there may be an entire server FARM running that Web site - it's STILL slow. Because somebody else's server ISN'T.
As Woody Allen summed up the human situation, "Nothing works and nobody cares."
Just out of curiosity, why is her age surprising? Did you think she was younger or older?
She's only been acting for eight years. She seems younger than 29 because she's so quiet and shy and a bit socially awkward because of her history of shyness. When she first came to Los Angeles, she had to take assertiveness courses. I find her amazing for being able to do what she does despite being so shy, as well as for her amazing physical abilities.
One interesting thing about her is her facial expressions. If you watch a series of screencaps from some TV show, such as Dollhouse, you'll notice that she almost never has the same facial expression twice. She has an amazingly fluid, expressive and constantly changing face. It's almost creepy. It's one of the things that makes her an impressive actress. The other main thing is her ability to physically express a role. She has said that she approaches most roles first in a physical way and only then via her voice, as a result of her ballet training.
Add Josh Friedman since he screwed up the show and got it canceled.
A lot of people have argued that is true but I don't agree. A cyborg is an organism which has had an organic part completely or partially replaced by a mechanism. So the first items you suggest (watches, eyeglasses, etc.) wouldn't qualify, but, yes, a guy with a prosthetic arm is a cyborg. A guy with a pin in his ankle is a gray area - I'd say not so much because the modification is so minor and not so much a replacement of existing organics. If he had a fully prosthetic ankle, you could say he was a cyborg.
In SF games, usually you have distinctions like "partial cyborg" (robot arms, robot legs, implanted body armor) vs "full cyborg" (wherein almost everything is mechanical except the significant parts of the brain).
Deathlok in Marvel Comics is a cyborg. He was a human who had most of his organic parts replaced by robotic parts except for his brain. The brain was hooked to a computer which did most of the controlling of the body.
The key is what did the entity start out as: an organism or a machine. If it started as an organism, it's a cyborg. If it started as a machine, it's a robot.
Another distinction is how well does it function if you remove the organic or machine component. If you remove the skin of a Terminator, it functions perfectly well, as demonstrated by Chromartie in T:SCC. That indicates the skin is only important for its function as an infiltrator, not for its ability to function at all. In fact, most of the Terminators in the movies shown in the future don't even have ANY organic parts - they're pure robots as shown in the battle scenes. How one can call them "cyborgs" is incomprehensible. Just adding a layer of tissue doesn't seem sufficient to make them a "cyborg" any more than covering them with clothes or whatever would do so. The tissue is superfluous to their primary functioning.
Now one COULD I suppose make the argument that if you took Cameron the Terminator in T:SCC and replaced all or most of her critical robotic parts with human tissue and human systems except the CPU chip, that she would be a "cyborg". But I think this is stretching it. The key to a human cyborg is the presence of most of the original functioning organic brain. Cameron never had a human brain.
The same applies to Star Trek's Data. He was never an organism in the biological sense.
Although that does raise the question: once robotics becomes PERFECT at imitating BIOLOGICAL PROCESSES, will the distinction become moot? If you have nanotech devices perfectly mimicking organic cells, does that make the nanotech "organic"? Note: I'm not talking here about "nanoorganic", i.e., controlling organic components through some sort of cybernetics or mechanics, I'm talking non-organic components mimicking organic processes.
I think again the issue is origin. Biology and organisms arose from evolution. A nanotech device not composed of the same chemical components as a biological cell and not structured identically to an organic cell simply isn't "biological" - it's an IMITATION of biology. From a functional standpoint, it may be a perfect imitation - but it's still an imitation.
Distinctions matter (except of course where they don't depending on specific perspective.)
(sigh) Terminators were never organisms to begin with. Sam Worthington is not your classical Terminator.
Well, I screwed those goddamn links up!
Let's try again:
http://img264.imageshack.us/img264/3936/summerglau232tw3.jpg
http://img509.imageshack.us/img509/9497/summerglau1514gg2.jpg
http://img205.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=54834_summer-fire_230B78_122_111lo.jpg
http://img45.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=39069_Summer-G001_122_72lo.jpg
When they start looking like this, email me.
http://blog.hdscreencaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/summer_glau_0002.jpg/
http://usemycomputer.com/indeximages/2009/May/SummerGlauTerminatorSecondSeasonMay2009114.jpg/
http://www.wallpaperweb.org/wallpaper/babes/1920x1200/summer_glau_20090725_0161.jpg/
http://www.wallpaperweb.org/wallpaper/babes/1280x800/summer_glau_20091211_2158_1280x800.jpg/
No, no, no.
A Terminator is NOT a cyborg. A cyborg is an ORGANISM which has been ENHANCED or even REPLACED by cybernetic machinery. The key is that the original entity was a living biologically based organism.
A Terminator is merely a ROBOT covered by an organic covering. The covering is no more significant than if the robot were just wearing clothes. It's just covering. The machine underneath is not a living organism and never was.
Just because James Cameron doesn't know his technology, the word cyborg has been debased beyond all recognition. It's probably a waste of time to try to correct it any more, but I like wasting my time.
Back when Vista was being developed, they shared the code with the NSA in order to detect vulnerabilities.
So obviously what did NSA do? They found X vulnerabilities - and told Microsoft about X minus Y vulnerabilities.
Now Microsoft wants Mossad, an organization known for conducting massive espionage - both political, military and economic - against the US to have the same capability.
Dumbest mofo's in industry.
This client does video and film conversion to digital storage. They archive the customer stuff for months in case the customer needs a redo or something. So they eat a fair amount of storage.
For archival purposes, they couldn't spend tens of thousands on a SAN or anything like that, so I pitched a Burley (also known as MacGurus) enclosure a la this: MGBurly8PM - Burly 8 Bay w/Port Multiplier http://www.burlystorage.com/ccp0-prodshow/MGBurly8PM.html with 8 750GB hard drives (the biggest around a couple years ago). This is an expensive enclosure but well designed. With today's hard drives, you can cram 8TB of storage in it for another $800. It's worked very well except for one hard drive which had to be replaced with a 1TB drive, and another component which we had to replace when it failed.
Piece of advice: do not try to mix and match port multipliers, enclosures and hard drives. This is a recipe for failure. There are issues with the multipliers firmware, the drive firmware and other bugs. Buy the lot from one source and make sure they test it before they ship it to you. Burley knows what they are doing and we've gotten great support from them.
We also wanted to serve up some 8TB of space to some Macs for video editing using iSCSI. First we bought some Micronet external enclosures, two enclosures with four drives each. The Mac drivers didn't work at all with the Macs, and Micronet had ZERO support for that issue. We tried using the boxes on the Windows XP video editing machines - Adobe Premiere 1.5 (ancient, I know, but the client can't afford to upgrade yet because they're using older Matrox video cards) does NOT like that kind of thing at all. So I took one of the older XP machines and put OpenFiler on it to serve up the space as iSCSI for the Macs. This has worked very well. Final Cut Pro uses the iSCSI storage without any problems at all. OpenFiler was installed, configured and has not been updated for the last year or so and it has faithfully served up iSCSI storage to four Macs without a single hiccup (except when a staff member plugged in an air conditioner to an overloaded circuit and dropped every machine in the room - restarting the OpenFiler box, it went right back to work.)
To archive and serve up a bunch of videos, just get a big enclosure (or several smaller ones), load them up with big drives, hook them up to any reasonably cheap box with a couple GB of RAM and just serve up that storage any way you want. OpenFiler can do it.
One caveat: Do not use Seagate drives. Their quality control these days absolutely sucks. We just installed a HD video machine recently with four 1TB Seagate drives in a RAID 0 array, and one of the drives started giving read errors within the first few days. Reviews of the Seagate drives over 1TB on most of the retail sites like Newegg show either DOA or clicking within six months. They're selling Seagate 1.5TB drives for $125, which is a good price - except the customer reviews are dismal. I wouldn't touch a 2TB drive yet with a ten-foot pole, by any manufacturer, until I see good reviews on the retail sites - and I mean a hundred or more reviews with 75% or more being 4 or 5 stars.
Contrary to one person's viewpoint above, Hitachi tends to get good reviews. I'm going to be using a new one this weekend to back up my stuff on my home machine.
My two cents.
only slightly less than Microsoft...
Until people wake up and realize that ALL IP laws are BS, human civilization will continue to grind down into the mud until only the lawyers remain, scrabbling like nude female mud wrestlers (without the sexual attractiveness, if any - I've never like nude mud wrestling.)