Even though Walmart.com sells Lindows and Lycoris machines, Walmart stores do not. So the odds of them carrying Lindows or Lycoris notebooks is slimmer still.
I miss Fastlane, which lasted all of a season on FOX, and I was really disappointed when I found out it had been cancelled. It had cool special effects, good music, and decent plots. It was total escapist TV, but it was GOOD escapist TV. Like Futurama, Family Guy, Greg the Bunny, and a ton of other FOX shows, they moved it around and took it off and on until everyone forgot about it.
The main players in VOIP right now offer free nationwide long distance for a flat rate - $20 a month for Packet8, $35 for Vonage. They also offer huge discounts on international calls. If you have, say, family in another state, or are in a long-distance relationship, or for some reason make a lot of long distance calls, it can be a good deal.
I just signed up for Packet8, haven't gotten the equiptment yet. Previously, I've just used a cell with nationwide long distance, but I get awful reception in my new apartment, so $20 a month seems like a good deal for long distance.
I think there is a big difference between doing hardware/OS type tech support and doing development. Obviously, if you are developing software, you should have some idea of the industry the software is being developed for. But if you are providing hardware-type support, it seems much less important. Replacing a hard drive is replacing a hard drive, and it doesn't matter if the computer is used to keep track of trees or stocks.
You can format a MAC iPod to windows, as well as format a windows iPod to Mac. This article says so, and also has a link on how to do both
The point isn't that you can't MAKE an iPod one or the other, it's just that Windows will not recognize a Mac iPod while a Mac will recognize a PC iPod.
I have a generation 2 10 gig Windows format iPod. I sync it at home with my WinXP box, but at work I plug it into an older G4 that I have, and it recognizes it, and I can play songs off of it in iTunes. However, I have to make sure that I click "no" when it flashes it's little "there is an update available for your iPod" button, or it will go Mac.
I spent two summers in college temping in the mailroom of a small insurance company. I worked for them one summer, and they actually had the temp agency call me back while I was still at school the next year and ask if they could hire me back. As people had mentioned, the turnover rate was crazy. One of the times, they had me train my replacement. In a week, we went through three people. The first one never showed up after the first day, and the second one worked half a day and then decided she didn't like the job.
So I can see why they would want someone who isn't going to leave after a couple days. Plus, at least where I was, the job did involve making sure important documents got to the right people -stuff like subpoenas, titles, ect.
was a tech support job for the forest service. The duties were typical hardware/software support, and it had the usual list of of skills - Windows, Novell, Office, virus removal, hardware troubleshooting and repair, ect. Until you got to the last one, which was something like "knowledge and experience with tree husbandry"
Yes, I know it was the forest service, but the duties didn't mention anything tree-related, and one would imagine you could fix the computer of someone in the forest service without forestry skills. I kind of wondered if they had someone in mind they wanted to promote who had worked there, and that was their way of eliminating outsiders.
What's so bad about having a window modded hard drive fail?
Well, there is that whole loss of data thing.
Yes, I know that one should have 15 backups of all their data, stored in seperate climate controlled locations, along with multiple hard drive images. But why do something that is going to have minimal positive effect (who cares what your hard drive looks like?) and is going to cost you time, money, and posibly data?
When your main webpage consists of, on the left, a gif of your product that looks like someone drew in photoshop, and on the right a list of press releases, and on the top your sticker symbol, I have to wonder if you really have a product to sell. Or if you are just running a pump and dump.
The CSI clip is kind of funny too... it's a bad sign when you are so desperate for publicity that you see your product being used to commit a crime in a TV show as good publicity.
I have a RePlay 5060. One of the things it does is that when it goes into screensaver mode, it will sometimes show ads from RePlay... I've seen it show ones for sales on RePlays at their website, and it's currently showing one advertising the new "quickskip" feature that they pushed out in their last firmware update.
not a huge deal, especially since if I've left it long enough to go into screensaver, I'm obviously not watching it, but I fear the day it starts pushing out ads for something other than RePlay.
Checks are not percieved to be worth anything if there isn't money behind them. People know that and take steps to make sure that they are legit (requiring ID, not sending an item until the check has cleared, using check verification services). With money, people generally assume it's valid... and our entire economic system would collapse if too much counterfitting existed.
There are still a lot of Novell users out there, especially among certain groups (education, government, healthcare, law offices). I recently attended a CNA class, and all of the attendees fell into one of those catagories.
Novell actually has some pretty cool products out there, such as iFolder (syncs data between computers and a server), NetStorage (lets you access network drives from any computer with a web browser), and iPrint (lets users install their own printers via a web browser). They might not have a lot of new users, but they have a lot of old users who have no plans on changing - and they are coming out with some products that are actually pretty good.
Plus it's nice that our GroupWise email system resists most of those fun Outlook-based viruses.
Try to reduce the possibility of students infecting systems via removable media (I'd outlaw floppy disks, but students still use these!).
I work at a college, too, and I can't tell you how many times students have walked in with a floppy disk (sometimes physically damaged, ie cracked in half) with the only copy of their paper that's due in an hour.
We've had pretty good luck using BadCopy (from JufSoft) to recover the disks, but sometimes they are too far gone, and students can't understand how it could get damaged since "it worked an hour ago"
We're trying to encourage flash drive use, which brings up more issues, IE how do you let users install hardware on a locked-down machine - especially tricky since every brand of drive seems to act differently, and sometimes tries to grap network drive assignments
The other thing we've started doing is creating Novell Netstorage accounts (shared drives accessible through the internet from anywhere). Good when it works, but most students don't know it exists, plus they have to learn fun novell logins (.username.context)
One thing I've noticed is that shows that frequently appeal to what many would consider the "geek" demographic - the same people who would be most into games - seem to to die quickly, get cancelled, get shuffled around a bunch until nobody knows they are on, ect.
Fox's firefly comes to mind. I never watched it, but I know it got some press on slashdot when it came out, and some of my fellow dorky coworkers sweared by it, and it was cancelled quickly. Futurama is another show with a huge geek following that was shuffled around, then cancelled, despite loyal fans. While I'm busting on FOX, I'm pissed they killed Fastlane. Hot chicks, stuff blowing up... maybe a bit thin on plot, but the kind of show that's fun to watch after a long day, and that appeals to many of the same kind of people who game. UPN's The Sentinal (now on SciFi) used to have a pretty loyal geek following.
There are probably a ton more examples. If TV wants to appeal to young, computer savy guys, they should stop cancelling shows that are liked by young, computer savy guys. I know lots of people like myself who liked the above shows, and very few people under 40 who watch Survivor et al.
Are we cheating them? NO! Because FAIR USE allows you to run this software on as many machines as you want, just not at the same time.
Right. I'm sure a lot of people who run NAV on two machines with one license will do exactly that... disable it on one machine while it runs in the background of the other.
Do I think activation is a bad idea? Yes. But one can understand why they do it - because few people bother reading/following the EULA they said yes to.
MS may make nice hardware (their mice, keyboards, and joysticks are all great), but why should I care?
Well, you shouldn't because they aren't making the hardware, just the software for the PC and the kernal for the hardware. They are licensing it to 3rd-party companies, just like they do for Windows.
Despite the traditional concerns about privacy, I do kind of like the idea of target marketing. If companies are going to advertise to me, I would rather it be products I might actually buy than stuff I wouldn't. But all the opportunities seem to aimed at products I don't want. Amazon knows I buy mostly electronics from them, but I get a gold box full of kids toys and $100 pots. Credit card companies supposedly know my credit history, but all I get is secured cards aimed at people with no credit, or Amex Gold cards for buisness owners. Send me an application for a rewards card with no annual fee, and I might go for it.
Same with this talking cart. If it really usues the info for telling me about products I might like, or that are a good deal, I might like it. If it just tells me that products I would never buy are on sale, then forget it.
Office Depot was running a promo for a while.. bring in an empty ink cartridge for "recycling", get a free ream of paper. I've seen collection bins at staples and other places. Obviously, they resell these to places that make remanufactured ink cartridges, and the printer makers don't seem to care.
From the Post article "Consumers buying TV sets will know that the receivers they buy will continue to receive all broadcast signals, even as broadcasting changes to digital," Fritts said.
Yup, the government requiring consumers to do something that they don't want to do (because if they did, they would be selling more TV's with the equiptment now) is real pro consumer.
Another quote The FCC has said the increase was more likely to fall between $50 and $75, an estimate the appeals court found reasonable.
That doesn't seem reasonable when we are talking about 13" TV's. That DOUBLES the price of a cheap TV. Heck, I got a 20" Apex for $100 a few months ago. And since I only use it for video games, I don't care what signals it can recieve and don't want to pay for it... and would be shocked if it still works 7 years from now when there are digital signals for it to recieve.
Ummm.. Because it allows Mac OS users to run Windows applications? What other application does that (reliably)?
Fine point of distinction - the link in the article points to Virtual PC for Windows... which will run OS's written for X86 chips - it's for OS/2, Netware, Windows, ect on a windows machine. For running Windows on a Mac, you would need Virtual PC for the Mac. Which conviniently comes with a Windows license.
They didn't get find for sending spam per se, they got fined for sending spam with specific characteristics - specifically spam with forged headers, no opt-out, and routed through a bunch of hacked computers.
Maybe this really doesn't make a difference, since most spam has those characteristics. While legitmate email addresses and not routing it through a ton of open relays would be nice, the opt-out part is useless, since almost everyone knows not to respond to op-out on spam, since it usually just results in more spam because they know it's an active address.
I've had at least one class where the professor who was teaching the class also wrote the textbook, and I know other people who have had professors teach out of textbooks they wrote. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it's one way to ensure that your book will have at least some sales.
Although in the class where I had this happen, the professor hadn't updated the book in around 10 years, so all the copies were used. I don't even think it was still in print.
The "preferred shopper" cards that most supermarkets currently issue don't really care *who* you are, as much as *what* you are.
True. My local grocery chain recently installed new POS equiptment that prints Thank you "insert name of customer." Only then did I realize that the name on it was not mine, but rather the Dutch foreign exchange student who had been one of my roomates 3 years ago. Must have accidently switched cards somehow, and it never really mattered. Though it is impressive that he's saved nearly $300 in bonuscard savings despite being on the other side of the globe for the last 2 years.
I usually avoid the self checkouts. I feel kind of stupid, since I'm young and work in IT, I'm supposed to love cool technology. But I also use coupons, and it never fails that at least one of my coupons won't scan, prompting me to have to summon someone over to fix it. Usually winds up killing any extra time I would have saved over waiting in line. I would rather just deal with a person in the first place.
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Even though Walmart.com sells Lindows and Lycoris machines, Walmart stores do not. So the odds of them carrying Lindows or Lycoris notebooks is slimmer still.
I miss Fastlane, which lasted all of a season on FOX, and I was really disappointed when I found out it had been cancelled. It had cool special effects, good music, and decent plots. It was total escapist TV, but it was GOOD escapist TV. Like Futurama, Family Guy, Greg the Bunny, and a ton of other FOX shows, they moved it around and took it off and on until everyone forgot about it.
The main players in VOIP right now offer free nationwide long distance for a flat rate - $20 a month for Packet8, $35 for Vonage. They also offer huge discounts on international calls. If you have, say, family in another state, or are in a long-distance relationship, or for some reason make a lot of long distance calls, it can be a good deal.
I just signed up for Packet8, haven't gotten the equiptment yet. Previously, I've just used a cell with nationwide long distance, but I get awful reception in my new apartment, so $20 a month seems like a good deal for long distance.
I think there is a big difference between doing hardware/OS type tech support and doing development. Obviously, if you are developing software, you should have some idea of the industry the software is being developed for. But if you are providing hardware-type support, it seems much less important. Replacing a hard drive is replacing a hard drive, and it doesn't matter if the computer is used to keep track of trees or stocks.
You can format a MAC iPod to windows, as well as format a windows iPod to Mac. This article says so, and also has a link on how to do both
The point isn't that you can't MAKE an iPod one or the other, it's just that Windows will not recognize a Mac iPod while a Mac will recognize a PC iPod.
I have a generation 2 10 gig Windows format iPod. I sync it at home with my WinXP box, but at work I plug it into an older G4 that I have, and it recognizes it, and I can play songs off of it in iTunes. However, I have to make sure that I click "no" when it flashes it's little "there is an update available for your iPod" button, or it will go Mac.
I spent two summers in college temping in the mailroom of a small insurance company. I worked for them one summer, and they actually had the temp agency call me back while I was still at school the next year and ask if they could hire me back. As people had mentioned, the turnover rate was crazy. One of the times, they had me train my replacement. In a week, we went through three people. The first one never showed up after the first day, and the second one worked half a day and then decided she didn't like the job.
So I can see why they would want someone who isn't going to leave after a couple days. Plus, at least where I was, the job did involve making sure important documents got to the right people -stuff like subpoenas, titles, ect.
was a tech support job for the forest service. The duties were typical hardware/software support, and it had the usual list of of skills - Windows, Novell, Office, virus removal, hardware troubleshooting and repair, ect. Until you got to the last one, which was something like "knowledge and experience with tree husbandry"
Yes, I know it was the forest service, but the duties didn't mention anything tree-related, and one would imagine you could fix the computer of someone in the forest service without forestry skills. I kind of wondered if they had someone in mind they wanted to promote who had worked there, and that was their way of eliminating outsiders.
What's so bad about having a window modded hard drive fail?
Well, there is that whole loss of data thing.
Yes, I know that one should have 15 backups of all their data, stored in seperate climate controlled locations, along with multiple hard drive images. But why do something that is going to have minimal positive effect (who cares what your hard drive looks like?) and is going to cost you time, money, and posibly data?
When your main webpage consists of, on the left, a gif of your product that looks like someone drew in photoshop, and on the right a list of press releases, and on the top your sticker symbol, I have to wonder if you really have a product to sell. Or if you are just running a pump and dump.
The CSI clip is kind of funny too... it's a bad sign when you are so desperate for publicity that you see your product being used to commit a crime in a TV show as good publicity.
I have a RePlay 5060. One of the things it does is that when it goes into screensaver mode, it will sometimes show ads from RePlay... I've seen it show ones for sales on RePlays at their website, and it's currently showing one advertising the new "quickskip" feature that they pushed out in their last firmware update.
not a huge deal, especially since if I've left it long enough to go into screensaver, I'm obviously not watching it, but I fear the day it starts pushing out ads for something other than RePlay.
here.
Basically, you get the check, you think it's cleared, release car and money, find out too late that the check was fake.
Checks are not percieved to be worth anything if there isn't money behind them. People know that and take steps to make sure that they are legit (requiring ID, not sending an item until the check has cleared, using check verification services). With money, people generally assume it's valid... and our entire economic system would collapse if too much counterfitting existed.
There are still a lot of Novell users out there, especially among certain groups (education, government, healthcare, law offices). I recently attended a CNA class, and all of the attendees fell into one of those catagories.
Novell actually has some pretty cool products out there, such as iFolder (syncs data between computers and a server), NetStorage (lets you access network drives from any computer with a web browser), and iPrint (lets users install their own printers via a web browser). They might not have a lot of new users, but they have a lot of old users who have no plans on changing - and they are coming out with some products that are actually pretty good.
Plus it's nice that our GroupWise email system resists most of those fun Outlook-based viruses.
Try to reduce the possibility of students infecting systems via removable media (I'd outlaw floppy disks, but students still use these!).
I work at a college, too, and I can't tell you how many times students have walked in with a floppy disk (sometimes physically damaged, ie cracked in half) with the only copy of their paper that's due in an hour.
We've had pretty good luck using BadCopy (from JufSoft) to recover the disks, but sometimes they are too far gone, and students can't understand how it could get damaged since "it worked an hour ago"
We're trying to encourage flash drive use, which brings up more issues, IE how do you let users install hardware on a locked-down machine - especially tricky since every brand of drive seems to act differently, and sometimes tries to grap network drive assignments
The other thing we've started doing is creating Novell Netstorage accounts (shared drives accessible through the internet from anywhere). Good when it works, but most students don't know it exists, plus they have to learn fun novell logins (.username.context)
One thing I've noticed is that shows that frequently appeal to what many would consider the "geek" demographic - the same people who would be most into games - seem to to die quickly, get cancelled, get shuffled around a bunch until nobody knows they are on, ect.
Fox's firefly comes to mind. I never watched it, but I know it got some press on slashdot when it came out, and some of my fellow dorky coworkers sweared by it, and it was cancelled quickly. Futurama is another show with a huge geek following that was shuffled around, then cancelled, despite loyal fans. While I'm busting on FOX, I'm pissed they killed Fastlane. Hot chicks, stuff blowing up... maybe a bit thin on plot, but the kind of show that's fun to watch after a long day, and that appeals to many of the same kind of people who game. UPN's The Sentinal (now on SciFi) used to have a pretty loyal geek following.
There are probably a ton more examples. If TV wants to appeal to young, computer savy guys, they should stop cancelling shows that are liked by young, computer savy guys. I know lots of people like myself who liked the above shows, and very few people under 40 who watch Survivor et al.
Are we cheating them? NO! Because FAIR USE allows you to run this software on as many machines as you want, just not at the same time.
Right. I'm sure a lot of people who run NAV on two machines with one license will do exactly that... disable it on one machine while it runs in the background of the other.
Do I think activation is a bad idea? Yes. But one can understand why they do it - because few people bother reading/following the EULA they said yes to.
MS may make nice hardware (their mice, keyboards, and joysticks are all great), but why should I care?
Well, you shouldn't because they aren't making the hardware, just the software for the PC and the kernal for the hardware. They are licensing it to 3rd-party companies, just like they do for Windows.
Despite the traditional concerns about privacy, I do kind of like the idea of target marketing. If companies are going to advertise to me, I would rather it be products I might actually buy than stuff I wouldn't. But all the opportunities seem to aimed at products I don't want. Amazon knows I buy mostly electronics from them, but I get a gold box full of kids toys and $100 pots. Credit card companies supposedly know my credit history, but all I get is secured cards aimed at people with no credit, or Amex Gold cards for buisness owners. Send me an application for a rewards card with no annual fee, and I might go for it.
Same with this talking cart. If it really usues the info for telling me about products I might like, or that are a good deal, I might like it. If it just tells me that products I would never buy are on sale, then forget it.
Office Depot was running a promo for a while.. bring in an empty ink cartridge for "recycling", get a free ream of paper. I've seen collection bins at staples and other places. Obviously, they resell these to places that make remanufactured ink cartridges, and the printer makers don't seem to care.
From the Post article "Consumers buying TV sets will know that the receivers they buy will continue to receive all broadcast signals, even as broadcasting changes to digital," Fritts said.
Yup, the government requiring consumers to do something that they don't want to do (because if they did, they would be selling more TV's with the equiptment now) is real pro consumer.
Another quote The FCC has said the increase was more likely to fall between $50 and $75, an estimate the appeals court found reasonable.
That doesn't seem reasonable when we are talking about 13" TV's. That DOUBLES the price of a cheap TV. Heck, I got a 20" Apex for $100 a few months ago. And since I only use it for video games, I don't care what signals it can recieve and don't want to pay for it... and would be shocked if it still works 7 years from now when there are digital signals for it to recieve.
Ummm.. Because it allows Mac OS users to run Windows applications? What other application does that (reliably)?
Fine point of distinction - the link in the article points to Virtual PC for Windows... which will run OS's written for X86 chips - it's for OS/2, Netware, Windows, ect on a windows machine. For running Windows on a Mac, you would need Virtual PC for the Mac. Which conviniently comes with a Windows license.
They didn't get find for sending spam per se, they got fined for sending spam with specific characteristics - specifically spam with forged headers, no opt-out, and routed through a bunch of hacked computers.
Maybe this really doesn't make a difference, since most spam has those characteristics. While legitmate email addresses and not routing it through a ton of open relays would be nice, the opt-out part is useless, since almost everyone knows not to respond to op-out on spam, since it usually just results in more spam because they know it's an active address.
I've had at least one class where the professor who was teaching the class also wrote the textbook, and I know other people who have had professors teach out of textbooks they wrote. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it's one way to ensure that your book will have at least some sales.
Although in the class where I had this happen, the professor hadn't updated the book in around 10 years, so all the copies were used. I don't even think it was still in print.
The "preferred shopper" cards that most supermarkets currently issue don't really care *who* you are, as much as *what* you are.
True. My local grocery chain recently installed new POS equiptment that prints Thank you "insert name of customer." Only then did I realize that the name on it was not mine, but rather the Dutch foreign exchange student who had been one of my roomates 3 years ago. Must have accidently switched cards somehow, and it never really mattered. Though it is impressive that he's saved nearly $300 in bonuscard savings despite being on the other side of the globe for the last 2 years.
I usually avoid the self checkouts. I feel kind of stupid, since I'm young and work in IT, I'm supposed to love cool technology. But I also use coupons, and it never fails that at least one of my coupons won't scan, prompting me to have to summon someone over to fix it. Usually winds up killing any extra time I would have saved over waiting in line. I would rather just deal with a person in the first place.