A big bulky wristcomputer might actually be worthwhile
The real
"Dick Tracy watch
has a really cool trick -- if you forget to pay your yearly $64.90 MSN-Direct subscription, it turns itself off when Microsoft commands!
the voice recognition just thought they said "being developed."
After a month of intensive training -- every morning, seven days a week -- I can announce that the donut shop owner
understands the subtle linguistic differences of "1-bacon-and-cheese-kolache" vs "1-bacon-egg-and-cheese kolache"
Although my daily consistency could just mean I'd get my usual order even if I now ask her to beg-and-sneeze-a-lot...
Business 2.0 "invited me" last month to receive their magazine. I ignored the offer and they sent it anyway.
It was obviously the result of my (now expired) Fortune magazine subscription information that they bought.
The joke is on advertisers -- I never read either, since Fortune was delivered due to paying once for web content.
But imagine the bloat -- last time I loaded Windows
Media Player (*) using Microsoft's own firewall and
antispyware I suddenly got 15+ connections such as:
207.68.181.118
MICROSOFT
63.241.55.113
NAPSTER
65.17.251.101
DATAPIPE
70.245.59.70
SBC
161.170.254.27
WALMART STORES
72.246.138.151
AKAMAI
216.133.227.210
VITALSTREAM HOLDINGS
66.246.245.56
NET ACCESS CORP
68.142.121.145
LIMELIGHT NETWORKS
209.67.102.104
SAVVIS
204.14.16.178
MOONTAXI MEDIA
216.235.95.144
LIVE365
--
* After disabling live content, initial webpage,
no check for updates, and turning off everything
like "prompt me... content that uses Web pages"
This is all so 1984, all over again. 25 years ago in Michigan, you had more people in formal robotics training programs
than the total number of actual robots projected (correctly) for the entire country to have three years later after 1981.
Because those people with portable notebooks seem to care the most, I have a simple test: Run a "pure" benchmark like Prime95 and see how many iterations you get before it craps out.
It seems some want to eliminate the time component from speed measurements, so you'd only care that one machine got to 110,000 calculations versus another getting to 120,000 calculations.
With desktop machines, just hook up each computer to a 1000VA battery backup UPS and see how FAR each gets... not whether one got to 100,000 calcs in six minutes versus twelve minutes.
Whether it is 60% cheaper or 66% cheaper, the joke's on the new workers in India. Three years from now, there will be someone in some Russian state who is cheaper than India by that same factor.
In 2010 when those India techs complain long and hard about a lack of loyalty on the part of American businesses, they won't be able to honestly say they didn't see that one coming.
I wish someone would have let all of us know there would be a change....
Next time I wish you would let someone in my department know....
You know, you could at least have let ME know about it....
And why was all this changed during the weekend....
The change broke my password during login....
Who's in charge of all this stuff....
Is techsupport available now...
Anyway, the 386 SX was a full 32bit CPU with a 16 bit interface
Oops, bad memory. I best recall that AMD's 386/40 was as good a competitor to Intel's 33MHz
as the later AMD 233MHz was to the Intel 166MHz for the price, other than some games and MMX.
The next AMD chip I remember enthusiasts flocking to over Intel's popular offering was the XP 1700+
But the 386SX claim to fame was not being able to run WIN95... hinted at after Windows 3.1 running
on it in only real mode or standard , but not enhanced (WIN/e or Win/3 from a command prompt)
The AMD 286/20 fanboys were laughing at i386/16 until Windows for Workgroups fast disk mode.
Please correct, as necessary -- except that AMD vs Intel has always hinged on price/performance.
open for plugging in of 3rd party co-processors directly on the processor bus.
AMD won't happen to produce any of these "3rd party co-processors" will they?
I haven't been this excited since Intel started selling 386SX chips that allowed us
to buy Cyrix (or Intel) math coprocessors for twice what a non-crippled DX cost!
I searched and found Sophos and TrendMicro also put out this information. No sign of NAI disseminating this --
I guess that's why they aren't nicknamed McAfree -- or OneCare (though I don't have Microsoft paid support)
"McAfee first delivered security as a service in 1999,
setting the industry standard with seamless, integrated
protection and transforming the way consumers use..."
Always keep in mind, just who first delivered this plague of completely-expiring software upon users who already knew there was no need to buy this-years-model every 12 months.
Few folk with that majored, or minored in Natural Sciences... are intersted
in the low pay and benefits that go with teaching in public high schools in Texas.
You're talking about a state where football/cheerleading/band prevailed against NoPass-NoPlay academic rules.
Around the early 1980s, one very large Texas school district with perennial science-staff shortages took dozens
of displaced HomeEc teachers and moved them into science teacher positions.
That's how you get tough with science -- you eliminate those fluff courses and get back to basics!
When 40% of class time must be spent in lab by state law:
MON - Review last week (by going over last Friday's test)
TUE - Cover this week's new chapter in one day
WED - Lab
THU - Lab
FRI - Test
Assuming that students read the new chapter before Tuesday's class...
the teacher has 50 minutes each week to expand on dry written material
before performing or watching labs with little correlation to the book.
In reality, those 50 minutes a week (ten minutes per day) are presenting
information right from a book to students hearing it for the first time.
An O'Reilley & Associates reprint
properly shows a big reason for the sale of 600,000 copies of the proven-worthless SoftRAM95:
Mark Bunting the self-proclaimed "Computer Guy" of tv and airline magazine fame.
In the end, the only part of this WORST-3 ever products that could be shown to even work, was a reverse-engineered free PC Magazine utility (a dozen lines of code) that purposely fragmented memory below 640K so that no DOS TSR could grab more than about 10K of RAM.
Syncronys Softcorp stole its one functional component line-for-line... including the worthless no-op instructions put in there just to identify the actual author.
Equate business laptops with company-provided vehicles.
People hardly change their own oil in personal cars, so don't expect them to get under the hood of yours.
You're lucky if they take 10 minutes every three months to have Kwik-E-Loob charge it to your Amex card.
No way can you expect them to watch the odometer and change it every 3000 miles.
People hardly rotate their own tires in personal cars, so don't expect them to fix a flat on a fleet vehicle.
It doesn't take 10 minutes, but you're lucky if they don't drive on it thirty miles and damage the wheel.
No way can you expect them to regularly monitor tire pressure and to steer clear of obvious road hazards.
There isn't much point in equipping a tachometer, oil pressure readout, or even a basic temperature gage.
Not when there are people who keep driving with idiot lights on until steam escapes from the radiator.
Just hope they don't have the radio blaring too loud as they drive 70mph with high revs in second gear.
Why care for a disposable $1500 work computer if they don't care about their own $15,000 disposable car?
Twenty years ago it was nearly an artform at some after-work hangouts, for ladies to guess where a guy worked:
navy pinstripe suits indicated a bank, doublebreasted suits meant insurance, charcoal gray suits were brokerages.
Today it is trivial for 21-25 year old women; red shirt is a computer superstore, blue shirt is big box retailer, and
white shirts with a yellow smiley face means WalMartians...
Wal-Mart doesn't sell top line products, for the most part, but they generally do not sell junk.
What about those rebranded Linksys blue-box routers? I don't know if that is for the benefit
of Wal-Mart, or for the benefit of competing retailers... but it isn't for the consumer's benefit.
It reminds me of Radio Shack selling half-size inkjet cartridges for $5 less than regular size;
not-so-savvy consumers really think they are getting a deal compared to Staples and others.
When proposing a move from a big Unix infrastructure to Open Source, be sure to explain to your boss
that new "little keyboards" will become necessary with a cost that sometimes approaches $7 a piece.
It is my understanding that blocking outgoing traffic is mainly useful after your system has been compromised.
Microsoft is being a bad neighbor again. Their bad decisions affect non-MS users.
Many cars have mufflers on them, in part, in consideration of those around you.
And most of us don't want others sneezing and continuously coughing in our face.
Is this really just a test of whether a real IT person would:
1. Click a link from inside an Outlook variant?
2. Navigate to a folder called "scripts" using a Microsoft product?
3. Start an immediate download of a Windows EXEcuteable?
Submitted for your approval -- I am not making this up(TM)
Slashdot Mirror
The real "Dick Tracy watch has a really cool trick -- if you forget to pay your yearly $64.90 MSN-Direct subscription, it turns itself off when Microsoft commands!
After a month of intensive training -- every morning, seven days a week -- I can announce that the donut shop owner
understands the subtle linguistic differences of "1-bacon-and-cheese-kolache" vs "1-bacon-egg-and-cheese kolache"
Although my daily consistency could just mean I'd get my usual order even if I now ask her to beg-and-sneeze-a-lot ...
Business 2.0 "invited me" last month to receive their magazine. I ignored the offer and they sent it anyway.
It was obviously the result of my (now expired) Fortune magazine subscription information that they bought.
The joke is on advertisers -- I never read either, since Fortune was delivered due to paying once for web content.
Media Player (*) using Microsoft's own firewall and
antispyware I suddenly got 15+ connections such as:
207.68.181.118
MICROSOFT
63.241.55.113
NAPSTER
65.17.251.101
DATAPIPE
70.245.59.70
SBC
161.170.254.27
WALMART STORES
72.246.138.151
AKAMAI
216.133.227.210
VITALSTREAM HOLDINGS
66.246.245.56
NET ACCESS CORP
68.142.121.145
LIMELIGHT NETWORKS
209.67.102.104
SAVVIS
204.14.16.178
MOONTAXI MEDIA
216.235.95.144
LIVE365
-- ... content that uses Web pages"
* After disabling live content, initial webpage,
no check for updates, and turning off everything
like "prompt me
This is all so 1984, all over again. 25 years ago in Michigan, you had more people in formal robotics training programs
than the total number of actual robots projected (correctly) for the entire country to have three years later after 1981.
It seems some want to eliminate the time component from speed measurements, so you'd only care that one machine got to 110,000 calculations versus another getting to 120,000 calculations.
With desktop machines, just hook up each computer to a 1000VA battery backup UPS and see how FAR each gets ... not whether one got to 100,000 calcs in six minutes versus twelve minutes.
In 2010 when those India techs complain long and hard about a lack of loyalty on the part of American businesses, they won't be able to honestly say they didn't see that one coming.
Uhhm, aptitude tests in the first place? You want someone with 20 hours a week experience for three or four years while in high school.
What you don't want is someone who reads a 1" column in Money Magazine of the top growth fields by 2011 and just throws a dart.
I've seen where nearly 40% of the incompetent tech staff that I worked around in 2001 jumped right into the field of health sciences.
They shouldn't have been in IT, and the nursing profession (and patients) deserves better -- these folks never "heard their calling."
Next time I wish you would let someone in my department know
You know, you could at least have let ME know about it....
And why was all this changed during the weekend....
The change broke my password during login....
Who's in charge of all this stuff....
Is techsupport available now...
Oops, bad memory. I best recall that AMD's 386/40 was as good a competitor to Intel's 33MHz
as the later AMD 233MHz was to the Intel 166MHz for the price, other than some games and MMX.
The next AMD chip I remember enthusiasts flocking to over Intel's popular offering was the XP 1700+
But the 386SX claim to fame was not being able to run WIN95 ... hinted at after Windows 3.1 running /e or Win /3 from a command prompt)
on it in only real mode or standard , but not enhanced (WIN
The AMD 286/20 fanboys were laughing at i386/16 until Windows for Workgroups fast disk mode.
Please correct, as necessary -- except that AMD vs Intel has always hinged on price/performance.
AMD won't happen to produce any of these "3rd party co-processors" will they?
I haven't been this excited since Intel started selling 386SX chips that allowed us
to buy Cyrix (or Intel) math coprocessors for twice what a non-crippled DX cost!
I guess that's why they aren't nicknamed McAfree -- or OneCare (though I don't have Microsoft paid support)
--
Free information's gonna cost ya, buddy
SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 30
http://www.techweb.com/showPressRelease.jhtml?arti cleID=X482225
"McAfee first delivered security as a service in 1999, ..."
setting the industry standard with seamless, integrated
protection and transforming the way consumers use
Always keep in mind, just who first delivered this plague of completely-expiring software upon users who already knew there was no need to buy this-years-model every 12 months.
Mine needs a tripod like a BBQ grill
and it better have 3 little holes at the top for smoke,
with an ash collector underneath for silicon remnants.
You're talking about a state where football/cheerleading/band prevailed against NoPass-NoPlay academic rules.
Around the early 1980s, one very large Texas school district with perennial science-staff shortages took dozens
of displaced HomeEc teachers and moved them into science teacher positions.
That's how you get tough with science -- you eliminate those fluff courses and get back to basics!
MON - Review last week (by going over last Friday's test)
TUE - Cover this week's new chapter in one day
WED - Lab
THU - Lab
FRI - Test
Assuming that students read the new chapter before Tuesday's class...
the teacher has 50 minutes each week to expand on dry written material
before performing or watching labs with little correlation to the book.
In reality, those 50 minutes a week (ten minutes per day) are presenting
information right from a book to students hearing it for the first time.
In the end, the only part of this WORST-3 ever products that could be shown to even work, was a reverse-engineered free PC Magazine utility (a dozen lines of code) that purposely fragmented memory below 640K so that no DOS TSR could grab more than about 10K of RAM.
Syncronys Softcorp stole its one functional component line-for-line ... including the worthless no-op instructions put in there just to identify the actual author.
Intel's enemy isn't DELL or AMD. It is complacency with their bread'n'butter chip product line
(ie., "rules the market"):
$167 3.0GHz 775 Pent 630 2048KB ZipZoomFly
$177 3.0GHz 478 Prescott 1024KB NewEgg
$213 3.2GHz 775 Pent 640 2048KB ZipZoomFly
$215 3.2GHz 478 Pentium4 512 KB StarMicro
$274 3.4GHz 775 Pent 650 2048KB MonarchComputer
This would be mediocre Price/Performance in May 2005 terms.
But this is current, May 2006 pricing.
[Known vendors; product still in wide availability]
I guess that means that Apple is not a "major PC maker" ?
People hardly change their own oil in personal cars, so don't expect them to get under the hood of yours.
You're lucky if they take 10 minutes every three months to have Kwik-E-Loob charge it to your Amex card.
No way can you expect them to watch the odometer and change it every 3000 miles.
People hardly rotate their own tires in personal cars, so don't expect them to fix a flat on a fleet vehicle.
It doesn't take 10 minutes, but you're lucky if they don't drive on it thirty miles and damage the wheel.
No way can you expect them to regularly monitor tire pressure and to steer clear of obvious road hazards.
There isn't much point in equipping a tachometer, oil pressure readout, or even a basic temperature gage.
Not when there are people who keep driving with idiot lights on until steam escapes from the radiator.
Just hope they don't have the radio blaring too loud as they drive 70mph with high revs in second gear.
Why care for a disposable $1500 work computer if they don't care about their own $15,000 disposable car?
navy pinstripe suits indicated a bank, doublebreasted suits meant insurance, charcoal gray suits were brokerages.
Today it is trivial for 21-25 year old women; red shirt is a computer superstore, blue shirt is big box retailer, and
white shirts with a yellow smiley face means WalMartians...
What about those rebranded Linksys blue-box routers? I don't know if that is for the benefit ... but it isn't for the consumer's benefit.
of Wal-Mart, or for the benefit of competing retailers
It reminds me of Radio Shack selling half-size inkjet cartridges for $5 less than regular size;
not-so-savvy consumers really think they are getting a deal compared to Staples and others.
When proposing a move from a big Unix infrastructure to Open Source, be sure to explain to your boss
that new "little keyboards" will become necessary with a cost that sometimes approaches $7 a piece.
Microsoft is being a bad neighbor again. Their bad decisions affect non-MS users.
Many cars have mufflers on them, in part, in consideration of those around you.
And most of us don't want others sneezing and continuously coughing in our face.
" The following Federal Bureau of Investigation job was just posted at https://jobs1.quickhire.com/scripts/fbi.exe "
Job # HO-2006-0045 (0080 Security Specialist) $108,145.00
Is this really just a test of whether a real IT person would:
1. Click a link from inside an Outlook variant?
2. Navigate to a folder called "scripts" using a Microsoft product?
3. Start an immediate download of a Windows EXEcuteable?
Submitted for your approval -- I am not making this up(TM)