I like the Yahoo mail/notepad/address book/to-do list because it's fairly brainless to synch up with my palmtop. Since odds are that if I don't have access to the webmail toys, I will have access to the palmtop, and if my palmtop is down, I'll still be able to get access to the webmail even if it is on someone else's box, I'm happy.
Yahoo mail has the option to block all images from loading by default (not just in the sorted-as-spam bucket), warns the user when images are blocked from loading, and allows loading of images on a message-by-message basis.
However, this option must be hunted down and turned on.
Hotmail does one better, and allows you to block all images from loading by default, and set rules so certain senders' images will always load as well as viewing images in a piece of mail on a case-by-case basis.
I used to hear mostly good things about Dell's tech support. Evidently that was the main advantage Dell had over some of the other companies. If this is the direction their tech support is going in, they may be losing that advantage fast.
It took this guy and me a good ten to fifteen minutes to overcome the communication barrier and finally start talking about the same thing. He kept using the wrong name for the part he was talking about, too.
I'm fairly good at communicating with people, and it took me that long to get on the same page with that guy. I'm wondering what's going to happen when these guys and ordinary users have to overcome not only the language barrier but the techie/non-techie communication barrier.
Figure it takes ten minutes to figure out what you're talking about over a non-native-speaker language barrier. Then figure it's at least ten minutes for J. Random Tech Support to get simple concepts across to L. User. The mind boggles at how much time is going to be spent trying to figure out what's going on. And the longer you're on the phone with tech support, the madder the average user gets...
I called up suspecting a flaky NIC, and wanted to know if he had any help in troubleshooting it. Of course, he could not just take my word on "anything that passes through this NIC has a 25 to 75% packet loss based on pings", noo. (I am, for the record, female.) Once he heard that I was connecting to the internet just fine, he told me that they did not support that.
We had to play several games of run-around before I was able to understand that what he meant was that he had come to the unshakable assumption that my internet connectivity was traveling through the NIC, even though I assured him that it was not.
I finally had to eject the NIC from the laptop, holding the phone so he could hear the "Hey, I unplugged a card" sound, telling him what I was doing at every step (I was furious by this point), and proved that I was indeed online and I had about 6 new spam messages in my webmail before he would even listen to what I was saying.
Next time, I'm calling my buddy there who works 2nd tier and supports this goddamn three-year-old piece of crap.
That's how they spread Orkut as well, IIRC. Hand out a few to a few people, and then have existing users invite new ones. They'll likely do the same thing for whatever the next big thing of theirs is.
Now, they've got "helpful" tools that try to install themselves without asking, and Wired News.
When their obnoxious little programs ended up on my box for the second time (despite countermeasures) I decided that Wired News wasn't worth dealing with the aftermath of visiting.
Please do explain for the rest of us exactly how much degradation of the material occurrs with the.mp3 ->.mp3. At what generation does the loss become audible to the trained ear? At what generation does it become audible to the average listener? What generation are most of the.mp3s being shared?
I've never looked into this, and it does sound interesting.
Are schools suddenly commercial organizations? (Probably not. But they're not individual consumers either.)
It would be very nice if schools could easily get site licenses for software and other media for only slightly more than the price of a few seat licenses. It might lead to immediate decreased revenue for the companies involved, but if your company's software is what schoolchildren are getting trained on, guess what the majority of those schoolchildren are going to buy themselves (or nag their parents to buy, or download and individually pirate for themsleves)?
That principle, the "what children are trained on is what they are likely to use for themselves" principle, is incidentally why M$ paying fines by donating $$$ worth of software to schools makes me grind my teeth. They're not losing money by giving software to schools, they're recruiting a wider userbase for themselves.
Smaller companies may not be able to afford this as easily, but if the schools duplicated the material themselves, and then paid full price for support from the company, they at least wouldn't be losing actual money. In fact, schools might be encouraged to buy more software from companies they otherwise wouldn't have considered, if they can legally get enough to share with everyone.
I'm taking this a little personally, because it's local. I haven't RTFA yet, as TFA's suffering from the/. effect, but I'm presuming that since someone somewhere upthread said Deer Valley, that it's not our kid's school district, and if it had been, then we'd have at least gotten a note home about it...
And I've ridden shotgun with my laptop and a map program many times. (It really sucks when your map program's on crack and things aren't where they actually are.)
I'm an excellent navigator, despite what seems to be a slight case of dysgraphia (I can tell my watch hand from my mouse hand, but can't always put the names "right" and "left" on them, especially under pressure), so when I'm navigating, I need to be sitting somewhere where the driver can see my gestures; a "Turn that way at the intersection!" from me is useless if the driver can't see which way I'm pointing.
It is probably safer to have me up front with my laptop advising the driver, rather than sitting behind the driver and the driver having to divert their attention from the road in order to see which way I'm pointing.
No one was murdered, no. (At least, not that I know of.)
People did die, however. I'm not about to forget the loss of life involved in space exploration just because it's neat. I still think it's worth it; I would probably still think it was worth it even if my own boy grew up to be an astronaut and died because of it.
If one's communicating with these scammers using one's most common e-mail address, and one has a significant web presence and hasn't always been careful about leaving personal information elsewhere, it's conceivable that someone with a grudge and a lot of time on their hands could do something interesting.
For example, if someone were to Google my primary e-mail address, they could very well come up with a page that contains my real first and last name. With some of the information on that page, they could track me all over the web, where I've left my original hometown, the city I live in and the general area in that that I'm in now, and the school I attend. They could also find out who some of my online friends are, and could perhaps social engineer more information out of them. All of this is information that I wouldn't want shady characters getting their paws on.
Even though my e-mail address cannot itself be traced to a specific location, I would definitely recommend using a brand-new address if playing with scammers' heads.
One of my friends has been trying to introduce them to each other.
"I don't think I can help you, Mr. D---, but I think you might be interested in meeting Mrs. L---, recently a widow, who has a business proposition similar to yours..."
I prefer things that pop under to pop over, if things must pop at all.
Pop-unders, I can deal with when I get around to them. I don't have to close each one before I can read the content on the page.
The pop-up ads that get right in my way and open 10,000,000 windows on top of mine, I get peeved with, because then I have to stop reading what I'm reading to get them to leave.
On the other hand, when my reaction time is really fast and the pop-unders are being slow to pop under, and I catch them while they're just headed below the window I'm interested in, occasionally they disappear right while I'm about to whack the close button in the corner, and I wind up closing the wrong thing. You can imagine how annoyed I get.
Overall, I prefer the Google toolbar, which blocks the stupid things so I never have to see them.
For some strange reason, the floppy drive did work after that. I'm impressed. My lab partner was impressed. I think he learned a few new words while I was diving for the power strip's off switch.
Nor while smoking. Nor with the assistance of household pets. Nor without restraining any dangling hair. And touching the wrong metal bits of that floppy drive to the wrong metal bits of the case will cause the magic smoke to leave.
Simple. Schedule your/. time while she's... um... doing something that women do by themselves.
Ah! Taking a long, hot bath in complete privacy!
If you just set up the bathtub properly, and announce that you've done this so that she can get a nice, long, hot relaxing bath in complete privacy (and then ensure the privacy by going and/.ing) you'll look so nice and thoughtful.
(Incidentally, this rant has quite possibly nothing to do with the esteemed poster of parent comment, and everything to do with the [expletive] that I used to be engaged to.)
Confidence is the best thing some of those bad guys have going for them. No one wants to date someone whiny and insecure with no social skills.
(If you have female friends, I recommend asking them if you have social skills, and if you don't, getting tutoring.)
Sometimes it helps when the "good guys" set aside quality time to spend with the girl in question after they've got her, quality time being defined as time spent on mutually interesting pursuits. So if your lady really really DOES like playing Counterstrike, no problem. If she doesn't want for whatever reason to sit around bored while the men play some mind-numbingly repetitive game, you're SOL. "Bad guys" sometimes don't mind spending a couple hours BSing with a girl, flattering her, making her feel special.
Not that some girls don't like gaming. But figure out what she likes and spend at least an equal amount of time doing (or sitting through) something she likes as she winds up doing something you like but she doesn't care much for.
Self-confidence will get you, if not everywhere, at least many interesting places that you might not have gotten without it. (Confidence in your ability to get some, and a willingness to follow through -- and a willingness to back off if you read the signals wrong -- may actually lead to getting some, in other words.)
If a guy runs screaming into the night, a girl's probably not going to think that he was just a little nervous and not used to talking to girls -- she's going to think he thought there was something wrong with her, and get upset, offended, and dismiss him as being a loser for not appreciating her.
Make sure that you are acting like a nice guy, and aren't actually playing the passive-aggressive asshole instead. Hint: if you are living together, complain about how messy it always is, then never pick up after yourself, you're an asshole.
If a "nice guy" has girls hitting on him, and then complains that no one will date him, all the girls who have been trying to get his attention want to REALLY KILL HIM. If you don't think that any girls are interested in you, before complaining about this in the hearing of one of your female friends, ask if she's noticed any girls being interested in you, because you are male and blind and cannot spot these things!!! Girls will generally feel better about you for admitting that you are not good at noticing these things than you attempting to bluff your way through. A simple "Please tell me about any social mistakes I am inadvertently making, as I'm not so good with these things," gets you sensitivity points and maybe pointers on where you screw up.
I also discovered some ways to know when a relationship between a "nice guy" geek and a girl is over.
If the guy doesn't have a working box because his has a fried power supply, and he complains that power supplies are too expensive (and then buys a game every paycheck), and insists on using his girl's sweet laptop...
...he should not be surprised that after he installs a huge game and complains that there's no more room on the hard drive, his girl goes through, uninstalls his game, removes 'install program' from his user privs, and changes the password to her own administrative account.
Why? Because I'm a lazy bum who can't be arsed to install myself a real operating system.
And, more to the point, I'm a broke college student and no one's written a Linux driver yet (as of the last time my girlfriend and I checked) for the DSL modem that came free with signup to the service, and I'm not skilled enough to write one myself.
Until I do swap entirely over to Linux, I'm using what's easiest for me at the moment. And, at this moment, that's IE. It has been Netscape from time to time, usually when IE's been flaky.
The average user is more concerned about performance and convenience than security, sadly. (Again, guilty as charged.) A few minutes locating, downloading, and installing, plus the trouble of migrating bookmarks, is more trouble than dealing with slight IE flakiness. (I'm such a dumbshit.)
(I've also been drinking, or I wouldn't be idiot enough to admit that I use IE on Slashdot.)
Slashdot Mirror
And as far as Yahoo knows, I'm Ms. None Fsckoff.
I got sent a Gmail invitation to a Yahoo account. It showed up in my inbox, not the Bulk folder.
However, this option must be hunted down and turned on.
Hotmail does one better, and allows you to block all images from loading by default, and set rules so certain senders' images will always load as well as viewing images in a piece of mail on a case-by-case basis.
It took this guy and me a good ten to fifteen minutes to overcome the communication barrier and finally start talking about the same thing. He kept using the wrong name for the part he was talking about, too.
I'm fairly good at communicating with people, and it took me that long to get on the same page with that guy. I'm wondering what's going to happen when these guys and ordinary users have to overcome not only the language barrier but the techie/non-techie communication barrier.
Figure it takes ten minutes to figure out what you're talking about over a non-native-speaker language barrier. Then figure it's at least ten minutes for J. Random Tech Support to get simple concepts across to L. User. The mind boggles at how much time is going to be spent trying to figure out what's going on. And the longer you're on the phone with tech support, the madder the average user gets...
Clearly, time to run, screaming.
I called up suspecting a flaky NIC, and wanted to know if he had any help in troubleshooting it. Of course, he could not just take my word on "anything that passes through this NIC has a 25 to 75% packet loss based on pings", noo. (I am, for the record, female.) Once he heard that I was connecting to the internet just fine, he told me that they did not support that.
We had to play several games of run-around before I was able to understand that what he meant was that he had come to the unshakable assumption that my internet connectivity was traveling through the NIC, even though I assured him that it was not.
I finally had to eject the NIC from the laptop, holding the phone so he could hear the "Hey, I unplugged a card" sound, telling him what I was doing at every step (I was furious by this point), and proved that I was indeed online and I had about 6 new spam messages in my webmail before he would even listen to what I was saying.
Next time, I'm calling my buddy there who works 2nd tier and supports this goddamn three-year-old piece of crap.
That's how they spread Orkut as well, IIRC. Hand out a few to a few people, and then have existing users invite new ones. They'll likely do the same thing for whatever the next big thing of theirs is.
Now, they've got "helpful" tools that try to install themselves without asking, and Wired News.
When their obnoxious little programs ended up on my box for the second time (despite countermeasures) I decided that Wired News wasn't worth dealing with the aftermath of visiting.
Please do explain for the rest of us exactly how much degradation of the material occurrs with the .mp3 -> .mp3. At what generation does the loss become audible to the trained ear? At what generation does it become audible to the average listener? What generation are most of the .mp3s being shared?
I've never looked into this, and it does sound interesting.
Are schools suddenly commercial organizations? (Probably not. But they're not individual consumers either.)
/. effect, but I'm presuming that since someone somewhere upthread said Deer Valley, that it's not our kid's school district, and if it had been, then we'd have at least gotten a note home about it...
It would be very nice if schools could easily get site licenses for software and other media for only slightly more than the price of a few seat licenses. It might lead to immediate decreased revenue for the companies involved, but if your company's software is what schoolchildren are getting trained on, guess what the majority of those schoolchildren are going to buy themselves (or nag their parents to buy, or download and individually pirate for themsleves)?
That principle, the "what children are trained on is what they are likely to use for themselves" principle, is incidentally why M$ paying fines by donating $$$ worth of software to schools makes me grind my teeth. They're not losing money by giving software to schools, they're recruiting a wider userbase for themselves.
Smaller companies may not be able to afford this as easily, but if the schools duplicated the material themselves, and then paid full price for support from the company, they at least wouldn't be losing actual money. In fact, schools might be encouraged to buy more software from companies they otherwise wouldn't have considered, if they can legally get enough to share with everyone.
I'm taking this a little personally, because it's local. I haven't RTFA yet, as TFA's suffering from the
You might as well use the AirPhone to call out, but you could receive incoming calls at your own number, which could be an issue for some people.
Or, for that matter, you could show up on the caller ID of others as yourself, rather than whatever it is that the AirPhone makes you show up as.
I'm an excellent navigator, despite what seems to be a slight case of dysgraphia (I can tell my watch hand from my mouse hand, but can't always put the names "right" and "left" on them, especially under pressure), so when I'm navigating, I need to be sitting somewhere where the driver can see my gestures; a "Turn that way at the intersection!" from me is useless if the driver can't see which way I'm pointing.
It is probably safer to have me up front with my laptop advising the driver, rather than sitting behind the driver and the driver having to divert their attention from the road in order to see which way I'm pointing.
See the thread involving DeBeers and artificially created diamond shortages.
The US might do better to auction off a few small pieces to the highest bidders, if they were going to go that route for fundraising.
People did die, however. I'm not about to forget the loss of life involved in space exploration just because it's neat. I still think it's worth it; I would probably still think it was worth it even if my own boy grew up to be an astronaut and died because of it.
My point exactly. You left out my middle name and my current place of study, and got the profession wrong, though.
It's also processed within -1 inch of its life, conveniently packaged, and was featured in a Monty Python sketch.
For example, if someone were to Google my primary e-mail address, they could very well come up with a page that contains my real first and last name. With some of the information on that page, they could track me all over the web, where I've left my original hometown, the city I live in and the general area in that that I'm in now, and the school I attend. They could also find out who some of my online friends are, and could perhaps social engineer more information out of them. All of this is information that I wouldn't want shady characters getting their paws on.
Even though my e-mail address cannot itself be traced to a specific location, I would definitely recommend using a brand-new address if playing with scammers' heads.
"I don't think I can help you, Mr. D---, but I think you might be interested in meeting Mrs. L---, recently a widow, who has a business proposition similar to yours..."
I guess you're glad that your eugenics program isn't selecting for spelling?
Pop-unders, I can deal with when I get around to them. I don't have to close each one before I can read the content on the page.
The pop-up ads that get right in my way and open 10,000,000 windows on top of mine, I get peeved with, because then I have to stop reading what I'm reading to get them to leave.
On the other hand, when my reaction time is really fast and the pop-unders are being slow to pop under, and I catch them while they're just headed below the window I'm interested in, occasionally they disappear right while I'm about to whack the close button in the corner, and I wind up closing the wrong thing. You can imagine how annoyed I get.
Overall, I prefer the Google toolbar, which blocks the stupid things so I never have to see them.
For some strange reason, the floppy drive did work after that. I'm impressed. My lab partner was impressed. I think he learned a few new words while I was diving for the power strip's off switch.
Nor while smoking.
Nor with the assistance of household pets.
Nor without restraining any dangling hair.
And touching the wrong metal bits of that floppy drive to the wrong metal bits of the case will cause the magic smoke to leave.
As the field loses that cliquishness (is that even a word?) some of the in-jokes get lost in the noise.
Ah! Taking a long, hot bath in complete privacy!
If you just set up the bathtub properly, and announce that you've done this so that she can get a nice, long, hot relaxing bath in complete privacy (and then ensure the privacy by going and /.ing) you'll look so nice and thoughtful.
Confidence is the best thing some of those bad guys have going for them. No one wants to date someone whiny and insecure with no social skills.
(If you have female friends, I recommend asking them if you have social skills, and if you don't, getting tutoring.)
Sometimes it helps when the "good guys" set aside quality time to spend with the girl in question after they've got her, quality time being defined as time spent on mutually interesting pursuits. So if your lady really really DOES like playing Counterstrike, no problem. If she doesn't want for whatever reason to sit around bored while the men play some mind-numbingly repetitive game, you're SOL. "Bad guys" sometimes don't mind spending a couple hours BSing with a girl, flattering her, making her feel special.
Not that some girls don't like gaming. But figure out what she likes and spend at least an equal amount of time doing (or sitting through) something she likes as she winds up doing something you like but she doesn't care much for.
Self-confidence will get you, if not everywhere, at least many interesting places that you might not have gotten without it. (Confidence in your ability to get some, and a willingness to follow through -- and a willingness to back off if you read the signals wrong -- may actually lead to getting some, in other words.)
If a guy runs screaming into the night, a girl's probably not going to think that he was just a little nervous and not used to talking to girls -- she's going to think he thought there was something wrong with her, and get upset, offended, and dismiss him as being a loser for not appreciating her.
Make sure that you are acting like a nice guy, and aren't actually playing the passive-aggressive asshole instead. Hint: if you are living together, complain about how messy it always is, then never pick up after yourself, you're an asshole.
If a "nice guy" has girls hitting on him, and then complains that no one will date him, all the girls who have been trying to get his attention want to REALLY KILL HIM. If you don't think that any girls are interested in you, before complaining about this in the hearing of one of your female friends, ask if she's noticed any girls being interested in you, because you are male and blind and cannot spot these things!!! Girls will generally feel better about you for admitting that you are not good at noticing these things than you attempting to bluff your way through. A simple "Please tell me about any social mistakes I am inadvertently making, as I'm not so good with these things," gets you sensitivity points and maybe pointers on where you screw up.
I also discovered some ways to know when a relationship between a "nice guy" geek and a girl is over.
If the guy doesn't have a working box because his has a fried power supply, and he complains that power supplies are too expensive (and then buys a game every paycheck), and insists on using his girl's sweet laptop...
Windows here. Also IE.
Why? Because I'm a lazy bum who can't be arsed to install myself a real operating system.
And, more to the point, I'm a broke college student and no one's written a Linux driver yet (as of the last time my girlfriend and I checked) for the DSL modem that came free with signup to the service, and I'm not skilled enough to write one myself.
Until I do swap entirely over to Linux, I'm using what's easiest for me at the moment. And, at this moment, that's IE. It has been Netscape from time to time, usually when IE's been flaky.
The average user is more concerned about performance and convenience than security, sadly. (Again, guilty as charged.) A few minutes locating, downloading, and installing, plus the trouble of migrating bookmarks, is more trouble than dealing with slight IE flakiness. (I'm such a dumbshit.)
(I've also been drinking, or I wouldn't be idiot enough to admit that I use IE on Slashdot.)