That depends on the industry does it not? I consult for several lawyers and they ALL have it on every computer. Best Buy must sell enough of it to make a buck else why waste the shelf space?
Now I admit that many of them could get by with PDFcreator but you don't tell a lawyer that he just blew $200 per PC. Not an keep a client....
Perhaps. I'm not a graphics guy. I'd say that if Photoshop is popular in the warez crowd then it is more popular then you give it credit for and only the huge price tag is what scares people off from buying it. OTOH people will pirate anything and everything and many will pirate things just to pirate them.
Also adobe makes more then just Photoshop. Every lawyer I've ever worked with has copies of Acrobat.
And yes I know most everything you can do with either Adobe product can be done open source. But you still have to explain that to the PHB's that don't grasp what an OS is let alone what a comparitable application is.
Oh because people actually use it?
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm not a graphics guy so I can't really say if GIMP is that good or bad. But most people have never used it. Those that do graphic work have used Adobe. Adobe is needed on the Linux desktop for the same reason Quickbooks is. If they provide software for Linux then end users can justify the change. Other wise it is a case of abandon everything known about your computer, all you past software, all your data and make the switch. One reason Apple doesn't sell as much as they can is because of some of those issues. Software, data, and training are big investments. To most end users the computer was a bitch to learn the first time and they don't want to go through that again.
Not Best Buy...Dell, HP and Gateway.
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
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· Score: 4, Interesting
PHB have no clue about it because it isn't offered as standard by the major PC makers. If when you were buying a PC and you forgot to tell them to ship Windows XP they by default shipped SuSE or Mandrake then maybe they might know what it is.
Now at the Best Buy it's not that Linux is missing from the shelves. It's that applications that Run on Linux are missing on the shelves. Give me Quickbooks, OfficeXP, or Adobe with little "for Linux" stickers on them and we might get noticed.
Most PHBs don't even know what an OS is. I've had plenty of well educated people, when I ask them, "What OS do you run?" tell me Word. They know on some level that they run Windows but they are clueless about what it really is. They just hear the name and they parrot that. Word, Windows, whatever...
In a TV ad, a visual medium, how does one refer to Sept. 11 without using the images of that day? Especially if one trying to say that they did a good job of responding to that crisis.
I'm not saying that Bush IS doing a good job. Personally I don't but I think that criticism over using images is a worthless cheap attack. Just like many people get labeled a traitor for being critical of the administration during a war is ALSO a cheap attack.
Bush claiming that he is doing a good job is a perfectly legitimate political topic. Just as criticism of him is also legitimate.
The moveon.org ads were submitted by amateurs and were not approved by any candidate or moveon.org, and were removed from the site.
So moveon.org has no control over then own contests and website? They couldn't have made a judgment call and said that the Nazi ad was over the line and not published it at all? Bullshit. They used it deliberately and only after the backlash did they pull it and then used the excuse of "We didn't create it..." to cover up a bad move.
I don't like Bush. But not being allowed to mention Sept.11th is stupid. It happened on his watch. He has a right to mention what he has done about it just as the dems have a right to be critical of his handling of it. Sept 11th HAS to be in the fore front of any advertising or it would be impossible to discusses Bush's record be it for or against. Bush's use of 9-11 images was a lot more tasteful and respectful then calling him a Nazi as some of moveon.org submitted ads did. I know many Jews that were very offended by that.
I don't think that i could really compare tech support with 7-eleven guy, motel clerk, etc. reason being, that there's pretty much a fixed number of things that the customer can ask for...and you're ready for it. can i get a slurpee and gas? the customer knows what's needed, so they're not hostile.
You've never put yourself through college at a 7-Eleven have you.
I had a guy enter and ask to buy plane tickets on southwest airlines and scream at me when I told him I was not a travel agent.
I had a little old lady that I had to call the cops to remove because I wouldn't sell her a car wash. The fact that the 7-Eleven I was working in didn't HAVE a car wash was a big factor in that. No amount of explaining to this senile woman would explain that. After she began to chuck can goods at me I called the cops. Alzheimer I'd guess...
People all the time would throw down the wrong credit card and bitch because I wouldn't take it.
Mod this guy up. He has very valid point. IT guys in this culture are the wipping boys for a large group of people that are afraid of new technolgy and vent their fear and anger on us techs.
They fear computers because they know that they will be replaced by them.
How can the computer play, ON THE BRIDGE, the words "Picard to..." when he hasn't even uttered the words yet?
Sure the computer is wrapped up in an FTL field. That just means that, from the POV of the computer, it is having to wait an enormously long time while it waits on Picard to utter Bridge, Sickbay, Barbershop, or whatever he might be wanting to call. Unless shipwide there is this utterance of "Picard to..." that is snuffed out when the finally says the destination.
Back during my days before the internet was in wide use I was on GEnie. A lot of the staff on trek hung out there. Mike Okuda who did the graphic art of the show and helped write the tech manuals and technical writing guides told me in an oline clat that the computer was constantly ease dropping on everyone in order to tell if you were about to request a comm link.
Thus you had Picard saying to the ceiling "Picard to Bridge" and get an instant comm link with out having to touch anything. The only issue I had was there was never a pause. He would instantly say that and Riker or Data would instantly answer. Obviously in real life the computer would have had to record that request and play that on the bridge for whoever to hear an answer. A delay of a second or two should have always happened while the computer repeated the request and got an answer back.
Picard: "Picard to Bridge" Computer on bridge: "Picard to Bridge" Riker: "Riker here, sir." Computer in Picard's quarters: "Riker here, sir." Only at that point would the two way link be established.
Obviously from a TV point of view that realistic a use of comm links would have slowed down the show.
No drives were killed, their firmware was merely overwritten becuase the drive was non-compliant... Yeah whatever. It is still dead meat and some poor Windows jockey/Liunx nOOb has to fix it. I'd heard that gentoo had the same problem. I had not heard that SuSE wrote the code. (That's funny.)
screwed up menus
Guess who didn't install updates for 9.2... My menus always screwed up AFTER the updates. Again you can fix it and again a newbie wouldn't know how.
10.0 Community has been out for a week. And, that's the whole point of the community release, to iron out all the really minor issues that end-users really care about, but some of us couldn't care less about.
Well I don't mind some instability but that many patches and changes? How is that any better then cooker? 10.X had both betas and RCs out before the community edition yet it feels and acts like it's still a RC. Perhaps I've misunderstood the purpose of the community edition but IMHO if you're going to stop calling it a beta or even an RC then you should have some level of stability to it that the beta/RCs don't have. Aren't they selling this as a packaged product? They expect me to PAY for a RC?
You should really wait for 10.0 Official to give out to newbies... Yes that is the intent but that also has yet to happen. Offical might be stable or just as prone to needed updates as community is. Time will tell if this plan of Mandrake works or not.
I use Mandrake as my main distro and it is very stable. The only issue with drake is the bugs. Little things like killing CD-ROM drives, screwed up menus, non bootable boot CDs...
Mandrake is very pretty to look at and can be user friendly but only when it works right. The 9.X and 10.X distros I've been afraid to show to newbies. 10.X been out a week or so and already 400MB of patches!
Now I just show a newbie the retail copy of SuSE. It is better, works with lots of hardware, and is very stable.
Mandrake is often more cutting edge. 2.6 Kernel and so forth but Cutting Edge often means you bleed.
I use to work for a company that did service work for equant, warantech, banctec, etc. We did the warranty repairs on a lot of e-machines. When they first came out the were junk. Best Buy finally dropped the line because of a 20% return rate. They are back in Best Buy now and they are doing much better. Worth a second look if your looking at a cheap computer.
Ok if the bad guys can get certs from slime certificate houses then I can delete said certificates or mark them untrustworthy. Will I then get warning about the certificate being invalid and that should prompt me to take a closer look.
If so anybody have a list of SSL providers I should be giving a second look at when the site pops up?
Re:And most consumers wouldn't know about them.
on
Is Windows Worth $45?
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· Score: 1
I'm in the PC repair business too. In the states, Texas. I don't see much XP piracy here. I'm sure it happends but I see alot more 98 then XP. Don't see too many small shops pulling the piracy bit here. Too many competitors will fink you out in this neck of the woods. A Microsoft loves to raid computer shops.
Most of them don't know about the choices or don't know enough to make good choices. The only thing a Windows user knows about a Mac is that it "will not run my software" and it is expensive compared to a PC. The arguement that your paying to much for Windows falls short if all you see is the price tag for a Mac.
Linux is unknown to Joe User. 99% have never heard of it.
Piracy - tried to do it but that damn WPA caught me. I see pirated copies of 98 all the time XP is much more rare. Only geeks pirate that.
It is being done. Microsoft just wants the PR and their hands in the door. http://spf.pobox.com
We need to tell the OS world that we want this. Sendmail or Postfix has yet to jump on this from what I've seen. We need to let them know that we want there support for it.
Sendmail is one of the vendors working on Sender Permited From or Sender Policy Framwork is it not? spf.pobox.com I have no clue, nor did the article, on what Microsoft might be doing.
SPF is basicly a reverse DNS lookup on SMTP servers if I understand it correctly. Basicly under the plan to send mail you have to have a registered SMTP server in DNS so that your mail can be traced back to the sending SMTP server. No SPF records then your mail is most likely spam and can be discarded at the client or even at the POP server. Heck I suppose even SMTP servers could refuse to forward such mail. Will not eliminate all spam but it would halt the span-in-can email virus like SoBig that makes every Winblows box into instant spam machine. It would also stop spoofed email that causes so much headache.
You all know what I mean. Your idiot(friend, parent, coworker, or spouse) that can't help but send you mail you don't want but you are socially not in a position to refuse will get through because they also send you legit mail you DO want/need to read. POPfile sorts this out for me very well. Some how I doubt this system would do as well.
Note this is a double post. In a moment of stupidity I posted it AC. Someone please mod it down redundant.
The two advantages of e-Voting that I can see are: votes can be counted more quickly and
e-voting systems don't involve humans at the counting stage(Emphasis added) so in a perfect system errors can't be introduced deliberately or accidentally.
That is the great misconception that the pro voting machine crowd would like the public to think. But who programmed and designed them, GOD? Humans are in the process still. It is just that there efforts are more closely hidden then ever before. Any kind of mechanical counting is BY DESIGN an effort to hide vote counting from the public. It is a deliberate effort to rig the vote(or at least put the mechanism in place to easily rig it.) Even now in most states votes are not counted in public view but at the court house and anybody can tamper with the ballot box(or even outright replace it) before it reaches the court house to be counted.
Most people would be unable to check the accuracy of the programming and thus could be fooled into thinking the vote is safe. I'm not a programmer so I would have to rely on others to check on the vote and there are only so many programmers. Also would they allow me to spot check on demand? How do I know that the machine I'm using is running the same program as what was certified. If sheriff deputies can play musical ballot boxes on election day what is stopping them from playing musical hard drives or ROM chips?
Sorry give me human counters that count paper ballots AT THE POLL. Otherwise why bother to vote?
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That depends on the industry does it not? I consult for several lawyers and they ALL have it on every computer. Best Buy must sell enough of it to make a buck else why waste the shelf space?
Now I admit that many of them could get by with PDFcreator but you don't tell a lawyer that he just blew $200 per PC. Not an keep a client....
Of the viewers but I don't think they have copy of the full Acrobat and it certainly anit on the shelves at Best Buy.
Perhaps. I'm not a graphics guy. I'd say that if Photoshop is popular in the warez crowd then it is more popular then you give it credit for and only the huge price tag is what scares people off from buying it. OTOH people will pirate anything and everything and many will pirate things just to pirate them.
Also adobe makes more then just Photoshop. Every lawyer I've ever worked with has copies of Acrobat.
And yes I know most everything you can do with either Adobe product can be done open source. But you still have to explain that to the PHB's that don't grasp what an OS is let alone what a comparitable application is.
I'm not a graphics guy so I can't really say if GIMP is that good or bad. But most people have never used it. Those that do graphic work have used Adobe. Adobe is needed on the Linux desktop for the same reason Quickbooks is. If they provide software for Linux then end users can justify the change. Other wise it is a case of abandon everything known about your computer, all you past software, all your data and make the switch. One reason Apple doesn't sell as much as they can is because of some of those issues. Software, data, and training are big investments. To most end users the computer was a bitch to learn the first time and they don't want to go through that again.
PHB have no clue about it because it isn't offered as standard by the major PC makers. If when you were buying a PC and you forgot to tell them to ship Windows XP they by default shipped SuSE or Mandrake then maybe they might know what it is.
Now at the Best Buy it's not that Linux is missing from the shelves. It's that applications that Run on Linux are missing on the shelves. Give me Quickbooks, OfficeXP, or Adobe with little "for Linux" stickers on them and we might get noticed.
Most PHBs don't even know what an OS is. I've had plenty of well educated people, when I ask them, "What OS do you run?" tell me Word. They know on some level that they run Windows but they are clueless about what it really is. They just hear the name and they parrot that. Word, Windows, whatever...
Must be a windows user.
*ducks*
So if I follow you correctly she is probably loosing one day of her life for every trip through the zone?
In a TV ad, a visual medium, how does one refer to Sept. 11 without using the images of that day? Especially if one trying to say that they did a good job of responding to that crisis.
I'm not saying that Bush IS doing a good job. Personally I don't but I think that criticism over using images is a worthless cheap attack. Just like many people get labeled a traitor for being critical of the administration during a war is ALSO a cheap attack.
Bush claiming that he is doing a good job is a perfectly legitimate political topic. Just as criticism of him is also legitimate.
The moveon.org ads were submitted by amateurs and were not approved by any candidate or moveon.org, and were removed from the site.
So moveon.org has no control over then own contests and website? They couldn't have made a judgment call and said that the Nazi ad was over the line and not published it at all? Bullshit. They used it deliberately and only after the backlash did they pull it and then used the excuse of "We didn't create it..." to cover up a bad move.
I don't like Bush. But not being allowed to mention Sept.11th is stupid. It happened on his watch. He has a right to mention what he has done about it just as the dems have a right to be critical of his handling of it. Sept 11th HAS to be in the fore front of any advertising or it would be impossible to discusses Bush's record be it for or against. Bush's use of 9-11 images was a lot more tasteful and respectful then calling him a Nazi as some of moveon.org submitted ads did. I know many Jews that were very offended by that.
I don't think that i could really compare tech support with 7-eleven guy, motel clerk, etc. reason being, that there's pretty much a fixed number of things that the customer can ask for...and you're ready for it. can i get a slurpee and gas? the customer knows what's needed, so they're not hostile.
You've never put yourself through college at a 7-Eleven have you.
I had a guy enter and ask to buy plane tickets on southwest airlines and scream at me when I told him I was not a travel agent.
I had a little old lady that I had to call the cops to remove because I wouldn't sell her a car wash. The fact that the 7-Eleven I was working in didn't HAVE a car wash was a big factor in that. No amount of explaining to this senile woman would explain that. After she began to chuck can goods at me I called the cops. Alzheimer I'd guess...
People all the time would throw down the wrong credit card and bitch because I wouldn't take it.
People will ask for anything.
Mod this guy up. He has very valid point. IT guys in this culture are the wipping boys for a large group of people that are afraid of new technolgy and vent their fear and anger on us techs.
They fear computers because they know that they will be replaced by them.
By mind reading?
..." that is snuffed out when the finally says the destination.
How can the computer play, ON THE BRIDGE, the words "Picard to..." when he hasn't even uttered the words yet?
Sure the computer is wrapped up in an FTL field. That just means that, from the POV of the computer, it is having to wait an enormously long time while it waits on Picard to utter Bridge, Sickbay, Barbershop, or whatever he might be wanting to call. Unless shipwide there is this utterance of "Picard to
Back during my days before the internet was in wide use I was on GEnie. A lot of the staff on trek hung out there. Mike Okuda who did the graphic art of the show and helped write the tech manuals and technical writing guides told me in an oline clat that the computer was constantly ease dropping on everyone in order to tell if you were about to request a comm link.
Thus you had Picard saying to the ceiling "Picard to Bridge" and get an instant comm link with out having to touch anything. The only issue I had was there was never a pause. He would instantly say that and Riker or Data would instantly answer. Obviously in real life the computer would have had to record that request and play that on the bridge for whoever to hear an answer. A delay of a second or two should have always happened while the computer repeated the request and got an answer back.
Picard: "Picard to Bridge"
Computer on bridge: "Picard to Bridge"
Riker: "Riker here, sir."
Computer in Picard's quarters: "Riker here, sir."
Only at that point would the two way link be established.
Obviously from a TV point of view that realistic a use of comm links would have slowed down the show.
Dude you are just making my point.
...
...
No drives were killed, their firmware was merely overwritten becuase the drive was non-compliant...
Yeah whatever. It is still dead meat and some poor Windows jockey/Liunx nOOb has to fix it. I'd heard that gentoo had the same problem. I had not heard that SuSE wrote the code. (That's funny.)
screwed up menus
Guess who didn't install updates for 9.2
My menus always screwed up AFTER the updates. Again you can fix it and again a newbie wouldn't know how.
10.0 Community has been out for a week. And, that's the whole point of the community release, to iron out all the really minor issues that end-users really care about, but some of us couldn't care less about.
Well I don't mind some instability but that many patches and changes? How is that any better then cooker? 10.X had both betas and RCs out before the community edition yet it feels and acts like it's still a RC. Perhaps I've misunderstood the purpose of the community edition but IMHO if you're going to stop calling it a beta or even an RC then you should have some level of stability to it that the beta/RCs don't have. Aren't they selling this as a packaged product? They expect me to PAY for a RC?
You should really wait for 10.0 Official to give out to newbies
Yes that is the intent but that also has yet to happen. Offical might be stable or just as prone to needed updates as community is. Time will tell if this plan of Mandrake works or not.
I use Mandrake as my main distro and it is very stable. The only issue with drake is the bugs. Little things like killing CD-ROM drives, screwed up menus, non bootable boot CDs...
Mandrake is very pretty to look at and can be user friendly but only when it works right. The 9.X and 10.X distros I've been afraid to show to newbies. 10.X been out a week or so and already 400MB of patches!
Now I just show a newbie the retail copy of SuSE. It is better, works with lots of hardware, and is very stable.
Mandrake is often more cutting edge. 2.6 Kernel and so forth but Cutting Edge often means you bleed.
I use to work for a company that did service work for equant, warantech, banctec, etc. We did the warranty repairs on a lot of e-machines. When they first came out the were junk. Best Buy finally dropped the line because of a 20% return rate. They are back in Best Buy now and they are doing much better. Worth a second look if your looking at a cheap computer.
Bad Chick-fil-a joke.
Ok if the bad guys can get certs from slime certificate houses then I can delete said certificates or mark them untrustworthy. Will I then get warning about the certificate being invalid and that should prompt me to take a closer look.
If so anybody have a list of SSL providers I should be giving a second look at when the site pops up?
I'm in the PC repair business too. In the states, Texas. I don't see much XP piracy here. I'm sure it happends but I see alot more 98 then XP. Don't see too many small shops pulling the piracy bit here. Too many competitors will fink you out in this neck of the woods. A Microsoft loves to raid computer shops.
Most of them don't know about the choices or don't know enough to make good choices. The only thing a Windows user knows about a Mac is that it "will not run my software" and it is expensive compared to a PC. The arguement that your paying to much for Windows falls short if all you see is the price tag for a Mac.
Linux is unknown to Joe User. 99% have never heard of it.
Piracy - tried to do it but that damn WPA caught me. I see pirated copies of 98 all the time XP is much more rare. Only geeks pirate that.
It is being done. Microsoft just wants the PR and their hands in the door. http://spf.pobox.com
We need to tell the OS world that we want this. Sendmail or Postfix has yet to jump on this from what I've seen. We need to let them know that we want there support for it.
Sendmail is one of the vendors working on Sender Permited From or Sender Policy Framwork is it not? spf.pobox.com I have no clue, nor did the article, on what Microsoft might be doing.
SPF is basicly a reverse DNS lookup on SMTP servers if I understand it correctly. Basicly under the plan to send mail you have to have a registered SMTP server in DNS so that your mail can be traced back to the sending SMTP server. No SPF records then your mail is most likely spam and can be discarded at the client or even at the POP server. Heck I suppose even SMTP servers could refuse to forward such mail. Will not eliminate all spam but it would halt the span-in-can email virus like SoBig that makes every Winblows box into instant spam machine. It would also stop spoofed email that causes so much headache.
Very needed plan IMHO.
Like geeks don't have enough baggage stuck on our image. I can just see the pocket protectors with cooling fans and neon lights on them....*shudder*
You all know what I mean. Your idiot(friend, parent, coworker, or spouse) that can't help but send you mail you don't want but you are socially not in a position to refuse will get through because they also send you legit mail you DO want/need to read. POPfile sorts this out for me very well. Some how I doubt this system would do as well.
Note this is a double post. In a moment of stupidity I posted it AC. Someone please mod it down redundant.
That is the great misconception that the pro voting machine crowd would like the public to think. But who programmed and designed them, GOD? Humans are in the process still. It is just that there efforts are more closely hidden then ever before. Any kind of mechanical counting is BY DESIGN an effort to hide vote counting from the public. It is a deliberate effort to rig the vote(or at least put the mechanism in place to easily rig it.) Even now in most states votes are not counted in public view but at the court house and anybody can tamper with the ballot box(or even outright replace it) before it reaches the court house to be counted.
Most people would be unable to check the accuracy of the programming and thus could be fooled into thinking the vote is safe. I'm not a programmer so I would have to rely on others to check on the vote and there are only so many programmers. Also would they allow me to spot check on demand? How do I know that the machine I'm using is running the same program as what was certified. If sheriff deputies can play musical ballot boxes on election day what is stopping them from playing musical hard drives or ROM chips?
Sorry give me human counters that count paper ballots AT THE POLL. Otherwise why bother to vote?