Bear in mind also the expectations that most IT people work in. You are expected to put in ridiculous amounts of hours, sometimes be on call 24/7, all for pay that's in many cases only somewhat better than that of a janitor.
No... women are leaving IT in droves because they're taking one look at what kind of career path they can look forward to and saying, "Screw this".
You can't put the blame solely on Windows for this. There's *plenty* that can be done even with a Windows box to protect it. The single easiest step being to plug a cheap $20 router between the computer and the internet. Hell, I'm even starting to see modems with built in routers now.
One problem is education. A bigger problem is that users don't see this as being "their problem". The ISP should be protecting them. The banks should be protecting them. The gov't should be protecting them. They don't feel they need to bear any of the responsibility of what is going on. I remember one old neighbour who's computer was riddled with viruses, and their ISP cut them off. They proceeded to blast the ISP for cutting the service and not not protecting them in the first place.
Until people becoming willing to take responsibility, the education won't happen. Until the education happens, these problems cannot be prevented.
As stated, "spontaneous life from nothing" is completely inaccurate and useless. So yes, it IS unfalsifiable because we are unable to go back in time and determine if monkeys indeed magically fly out of god's primordial buttocks.
Now, if you give a REAL statement such as, "Did the conditions of early earth allow for amino acids to spontaneously form?" Or "Is it possible for amino acids to bump into each other and form proteins", etc, etc. Then you have statements that can be analyzed and experimented against.
Creationists love to think evolution is all about life popping into existence out of thin air. Or how specific organs automagically just popped out of an easy-bake oven and fell into place. I'm sorry, but that is NOT how evolution works, and that is not how science works. That is how a supernatural non-scientific deity works.
People who treat science as if it were just another religion have absolutely no idea of what science is really about. And I would opine that, they prefer it that way, otherwise they would themselves be doing their own research to improve their understanding.
Perfect example is a phone I had. Samsung a650. This thing could do marvelous things. You could even synchronize your outlook contacts with it!
At least, you COULD, if you looked at the raw capabilities from Samsung's site. After Telus was done with the phone, you could do NONE of that. They reduced it to a basic phone with no expandability other than what you could download from telus itself. They hacked it up so heavily, that even samsung's own manufacturers tools couldn't read the file system on the phone.
I was more than a little pissed at this, because I wanted to play around with BREW and J2ME development. But if I can't even upload my own programs to my own damn phone, why bother?
They're just upset because they put a lot of research and development into stripping the features out of phones that they find inconvenient, and having multiple systems means they need to spend that much more in tech so that they can hamper the new devices similarly.
I mean, they CAN'T just let the phones be, can they? If they did, then the phones would have the out-of-the-box capability to transfer ringtones and wallpapers 'n whatnot directly from people's PCs, or from web sites OTHER than the carriers!
New OSes have *nothing* to do with the fact that adoption is being hampered. It's the greed of the telcos that are hampering things, because they demand that phones be completely locked down so users are ONLY allowed to do what the telcos want, like paying 4 bucks for crappy renditions of Madonna songs.
On the one hand you have a company trying to protect it's assets and cash flow.
On the other hand this same company's assets cause massive security breaches, inconvenience millions of people who are forced to use it, and inconveniences millions of people who DON'T use it, because of the collateral damage said assets cause. And just to put icing on the cake, they have destroyed competition with predatory contracts on the sly, allowing them to get to the position they are in now.
IMO, If Microsoft put out quality software, then yes, they have every legitimate right to protect their assets. But they don't. They put out crap software that single-handedly caused 80% of the email you receive to be spam, an amazing amount of viruses that destroy data and leave you prone to identity theft. Their prices have risen dramatically with each successive release, well beyond what one would expect from inflation, for neglegable value.
What they are doing may be legal, but morally they are completely out to lunch, and THAT is what people are up in arms about. People, for some strange reason, deeply resent being accused of being a pot by someone in a kettle costume. Go figure.
Ironically, the last reviews I looked at (which are admittedly from yesteryear), showed that they were either close, or AVG was dramatically poorer in quality. I would personally vouch for these, as they reflect my own personal experience. Avast has caught all kinda of interesting things before they even got a chance to get hold on my machine, while I know several friends who have used AVG, only to find out they were infected after briefly switching to Avast.
Admittedly, I haven't tried switching to AVG to see if the converse is also true... maybe I should... but then again I haven't had any problems at all on my machine.
As someone who is diagnosed with clinical depression, I completely concur with you. I would also like to extend your statement a bit. It doesn't take much at all to really throw me down into the dumps, and takes me a while to get back up to a really functioning level again.
When I am at my worst, besides the constant bad thoughts kicking in, even when I am trying to focus on an actual task, it's like there's this fog clouding over my thinking. It's like my IQ has dropped a few dozen points or something. I simply can't wrap my head around anything remotely complex, unless it is something I am already familiar with (ie: the kind of thing you could recite off the top of your head when woken up at 2am). When I am in this kind of state, I resort to things as "doing the dishes" and "taking out the garbage" as major accomplishments, and I have to work at not beating myself up over not doing more. This is more a motivation thing than a brainpower thing, but the two end up swirling around each other. When it's that much more difficult to do something, you're that much less motivated to do it.
It's a terrible state that most people just can't appreciate. It sounds like your depression was primarily situational, and that eventually it lifted. I'm glad for you. I can have everything in my life going my way and still be morosely depressed. It's bloody annoying.:\
I also recommend Avast. AVG is also a free one, although I've heard from people who have used it that AVG let some stuff slip through that Avast ended up catching.
And thank you for the heads up on Comodo! I've been using ZoneAlarm where needed and I do find the interface (and the nagging to buy the pro version) mildly annoying. I'll have to try this new one out.
I should have been more clear... the screens need to be LARGE so you can fit an actual page worth of text on each one. The nintendo DS is totally unusable as a text reader cause the screens are too tiny. If it had screens comparable to the size of a paperback book, then that would be outstanding.
Ebooks won't catch on until there is a decent physical device for reading them that doesn't cost a ridiculous amount of money. Why the hell would anybody spend several hundred dollars on a half-baked device that is barely the size of a paperback if you're lucky?
I think a proper ebook reader needs a folded design with two displays, so that it looks and behaves as if it were a real book. Flip to the next page by either hitting a jog dial or even briefly closing and opening the unit again. And it HAS to be $100.
Of course, this is still ignoring the problem of book availability. The likelyhood of finding what you want in a compatable format is pretty low unless the document was already circulating in the public domain. And don't get me started on DRM encumbered books...
I can see why you got marked as flamebait.
1. It doesn't matter if you're on the gov't dole or not. Results are results. The problem here is that politicians have been actively squelching overwhelming evidence just cause it doesn't satisfy their personal agenda. Scientific research is not the place for POLITICIANS to vent their personal opinions and unrelated suppositions.
2. I call bull unless you can put up some reasonable evidence.
3. And whose fault is that? If the gov't hadn't put so much effort into hiding the truth, we wouldn't have the chicken little-ing we have now. There might even be a plan in place.
I recommend going back to your flat earth society meetings and leave this to people who are willing to face the fact that our world view changes as we learn more.
Geez, that's a terrible idea! Last time anyone did that, a bumbling race grab a hold of one and reprogrammed it to replicate as its top priority over everything else! The result was that the probes were finding other races and then breaking them down into their component compounds with their lightning thingies!
Wow... where to begin? I think at the beginning is probably the best. When CDs were first created long long ago, the format itself was considered a DRM measure, because computers at the time were hopelessly incapable of copying them. They didn't have enough capacity, there was no "internet" to speak of... Hell, most computers at the time didn't even have CDROM drives, let alone CD Burners. No one could forsee the world we have now. CDs have been around for a LONG time now.
So your assertion that the labels wouldn't sell CDs if they weren't concerned about theft is ridiculous. To add insult to injury, despite the fact that CDs were astoundingly cheaper to produce, CDs were significantly more expensive than casette tapes. I talked to someone once who worked in the industry, and they said it was because CDs had "longevity" and thus priced it accordingly. Riiiiight.
Your "opinion" is that its the tech companies who are pushing DRM (and by implication, the major labels are just victims of the advertising). Well, until you can give some figures to back that up, I would say that that statement is downright idiotic and naive. As the GP mentioned, there are countless articles spanning years about the major labels talking about how desperate DRM is needed in order to curtail the rampant piracy and other nonsense. There are also a good number of articles pointing out how completely false these statements are, and how laughable the supposed supporting evidence is.
Major labels, and major content providers in general (ie: movies) have ALWAYS had a fondness for ANYTHING they can use to control what people do with content, with the only limiting factor being the law. VHS tapes have special encodings to prevent them from being copied, for example. Content control is not a new thing. It is not some thing that tech companies suddenly dreamed up. Tech companies now are doing nothing more than similar companies did in the past. They saw that the media industry wanted to control the product they sell to customers, and created products accordingly to suit the media industries whims.
The fact that it's biting the media industry in the ass is PURELY the media industry's fault, as a result of the media industries own greed. No amount of spinning you try to do will change that simple, widely acknowledged fact.
I just wanted to make a quick observation. You can't compare something like ambient air temperature to pouring a liquid of even the same temperature onto yourself.
The areas you describe are deserts, and so, have next to no humidity. This gives your body all the opportunity it needs to protect itself from the heat and maintain homeostasis. For eg: sweating like mad. Additionally, your body would have time to adjust to this temperature over time, for no other reason than the steady increase in temperature during travel. As long as you had plenty of water to keep hydrated and you had shade, you could survive well enough in such conditions, although it would be pretty uncomfortable.
Dropping a hot liquid on your skin is a concentrated blast of heat on a small area, with no chance for your body to adjust and purge the heat.
Not that I'm discounting the main point of your argument, which I fully agree with. I just felt like being anal retentive.
That is entirely true. The question is, if you go onto iTunes (I don't use it myself so I don't know), do you get a discount if you buy 10 or more songs at once? If you don't, then your entire argument is moot because the music industry *isn't* following this pattern with respect to online music.
Also, consideration must be given to the differences between physical and online distribution. The per track cost of buying music online is $0.99. Fine. But it is also lower quality compared to a CD. AND it's infested with DRM restricting what you can do with your music and most CDs do not.
With all the cons that the music industry imposes for the price, the value of online music is dramatically less that physical IMO, even when taking into account the "mass purchase discount" effect.
Given the amount of truely idiotic and genuinely hostile things Sony has done to consumers, they deserve nothing more than utter failure.
Sadly, way too many people have short memories and don't care that computers were scrambled by willfully malicious sony music CDs.
Or the fact that they love to sue music cust^H^H^H^Hpirates into submission. "Don't even have a computer? Give us money anyway cause we KNOW you've been pirating!"
Hell, the last sony laptop I got my hands on, had so much advertising crap on it that it actually *slowed down* the machine significantly, until I uninstalled all of it.
I'm sure I'm forgetting plenty of examples of Sony's heinous, arrogant behaviour.
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Bear in mind also the expectations that most IT people work in. You are expected to put in ridiculous amounts of hours, sometimes be on call 24/7, all for pay that's in many cases only somewhat better than that of a janitor.
No... women are leaving IT in droves because they're taking one look at what kind of career path they can look forward to and saying, "Screw this".
You can't put the blame solely on Windows for this. There's *plenty* that can be done even with a Windows box to protect it. The single easiest step being to plug a cheap $20 router between the computer and the internet. Hell, I'm even starting to see modems with built in routers now.
One problem is education. A bigger problem is that users don't see this as being "their problem". The ISP should be protecting them. The banks should be protecting them. The gov't should be protecting them. They don't feel they need to bear any of the responsibility of what is going on. I remember one old neighbour who's computer was riddled with viruses, and their ISP cut them off. They proceeded to blast the ISP for cutting the service and not not protecting them in the first place.
Until people becoming willing to take responsibility, the education won't happen. Until the education happens, these problems cannot be prevented.
Okay, maybe I'm naive here... but why did you go out of your way to support a company that is bent on vilifying you?
I just don't understand that. You're pissed off at how you're treated by a company, yet you continue to buy its products?
Sony has pissed me off to high heaven for numerous reasons. I will never buy ANY Sony product. EVER.
As stated, "spontaneous life from nothing" is completely inaccurate and useless. So yes, it IS unfalsifiable because we are unable to go back in time and determine if monkeys indeed magically fly out of god's primordial buttocks.
Now, if you give a REAL statement such as, "Did the conditions of early earth allow for amino acids to spontaneously form?" Or "Is it possible for amino acids to bump into each other and form proteins", etc, etc. Then you have statements that can be analyzed and experimented against.
Creationists love to think evolution is all about life popping into existence out of thin air. Or how specific organs automagically just popped out of an easy-bake oven and fell into place. I'm sorry, but that is NOT how evolution works, and that is not how science works. That is how a supernatural non-scientific deity works.
People who treat science as if it were just another religion have absolutely no idea of what science is really about. And I would opine that, they prefer it that way, otherwise they would themselves be doing their own research to improve their understanding.
Oops! that reminds me... I rebuilt my system and forgot to reinstall the addons.
*goes to the article to find out what add-ons to download*.
Pong had gibs? Wow, what version did YOU play? I'm missing out here!
Hmm... interesting idea....
:)
*goes off to write the patent proposal*
Perfect example is a phone I had. Samsung a650. This thing could do marvelous things. You could even synchronize your outlook contacts with it!
At least, you COULD, if you looked at the raw capabilities from Samsung's site. After Telus was done with the phone, you could do NONE of that. They reduced it to a basic phone with no expandability other than what you could download from telus itself. They hacked it up so heavily, that even samsung's own manufacturers tools couldn't read the file system on the phone.
I was more than a little pissed at this, because I wanted to play around with BREW and J2ME development. But if I can't even upload my own programs to my own damn phone, why bother?
Oh poor carriers! Boo hoo hoo!
They're just upset because they put a lot of research and development into stripping the features out of phones that they find inconvenient, and having multiple systems means they need to spend that much more in tech so that they can hamper the new devices similarly.
I mean, they CAN'T just let the phones be, can they? If they did, then the phones would have the out-of-the-box capability to transfer ringtones and wallpapers 'n whatnot directly from people's PCs, or from web sites OTHER than the carriers!
New OSes have *nothing* to do with the fact that adoption is being hampered. It's the greed of the telcos that are hampering things, because they demand that phones be completely locked down so users are ONLY allowed to do what the telcos want, like paying 4 bucks for crappy renditions of Madonna songs.
Because it turns into a comparison of morals.
On the one hand you have a company trying to protect it's assets and cash flow.
On the other hand this same company's assets cause massive security breaches, inconvenience millions of people who are forced to use it, and inconveniences millions of people who DON'T use it, because of the collateral damage said assets cause. And just to put icing on the cake, they have destroyed competition with predatory contracts on the sly, allowing them to get to the position they are in now.
IMO, If Microsoft put out quality software, then yes, they have every legitimate right to protect their assets. But they don't. They put out crap software that single-handedly caused 80% of the email you receive to be spam, an amazing amount of viruses that destroy data and leave you prone to identity theft. Their prices have risen dramatically with each successive release, well beyond what one would expect from inflation, for neglegable value.
What they are doing may be legal, but morally they are completely out to lunch, and THAT is what people are up in arms about. People, for some strange reason, deeply resent being accused of being a pot by someone in a kettle costume. Go figure.
Ironically, the last reviews I looked at (which are admittedly from yesteryear), showed that they were either close, or AVG was dramatically poorer in quality. I would personally vouch for these, as they reflect my own personal experience. Avast has caught all kinda of interesting things before they even got a chance to get hold on my machine, while I know several friends who have used AVG, only to find out they were infected after briefly switching to Avast.
Admittedly, I haven't tried switching to AVG to see if the converse is also true... maybe I should... but then again I haven't had any problems at all on my machine.
As someone who is diagnosed with clinical depression, I completely concur with you. I would also like to extend your statement a bit. It doesn't take much at all to really throw me down into the dumps, and takes me a while to get back up to a really functioning level again.
:\
When I am at my worst, besides the constant bad thoughts kicking in, even when I am trying to focus on an actual task, it's like there's this fog clouding over my thinking. It's like my IQ has dropped a few dozen points or something. I simply can't wrap my head around anything remotely complex, unless it is something I am already familiar with (ie: the kind of thing you could recite off the top of your head when woken up at 2am). When I am in this kind of state, I resort to things as "doing the dishes" and "taking out the garbage" as major accomplishments, and I have to work at not beating myself up over not doing more. This is more a motivation thing than a brainpower thing, but the two end up swirling around each other. When it's that much more difficult to do something, you're that much less motivated to do it.
It's a terrible state that most people just can't appreciate. It sounds like your depression was primarily situational, and that eventually it lifted. I'm glad for you. I can have everything in my life going my way and still be morosely depressed. It's bloody annoying.
I also recommend Avast. AVG is also a free one, although I've heard from people who have used it that AVG let some stuff slip through that Avast ended up catching.
And thank you for the heads up on Comodo! I've been using ZoneAlarm where needed and I do find the interface (and the nagging to buy the pro version) mildly annoying. I'll have to try this new one out.
I should have been more clear... the screens need to be LARGE so you can fit an actual page worth of text on each one. The nintendo DS is totally unusable as a text reader cause the screens are too tiny. If it had screens comparable to the size of a paperback book, then that would be outstanding.
Ebooks won't catch on until there is a decent physical device for reading them that doesn't cost a ridiculous amount of money. Why the hell would anybody spend several hundred dollars on a half-baked device that is barely the size of a paperback if you're lucky?
I think a proper ebook reader needs a folded design with two displays, so that it looks and behaves as if it were a real book. Flip to the next page by either hitting a jog dial or even briefly closing and opening the unit again. And it HAS to be $100.
Of course, this is still ignoring the problem of book availability. The likelyhood of finding what you want in a compatable format is pretty low unless the document was already circulating in the public domain. And don't get me started on DRM encumbered books...
I can see why you got marked as flamebait. 1. It doesn't matter if you're on the gov't dole or not. Results are results. The problem here is that politicians have been actively squelching overwhelming evidence just cause it doesn't satisfy their personal agenda. Scientific research is not the place for POLITICIANS to vent their personal opinions and unrelated suppositions. 2. I call bull unless you can put up some reasonable evidence. 3. And whose fault is that? If the gov't hadn't put so much effort into hiding the truth, we wouldn't have the chicken little-ing we have now. There might even be a plan in place. I recommend going back to your flat earth society meetings and leave this to people who are willing to face the fact that our world view changes as we learn more.
Buy this comment for $20 a year!
Geez, that's a terrible idea! Last time anyone did that, a bumbling race grab a hold of one and reprogrammed it to replicate as its top priority over everything else! The result was that the probes were finding other races and then breaking them down into their component compounds with their lightning thingies!
Wow... where to begin? I think at the beginning is probably the best. When CDs were first created long long ago, the format itself was considered a DRM measure, because computers at the time were hopelessly incapable of copying them. They didn't have enough capacity, there was no "internet" to speak of... Hell, most computers at the time didn't even have CDROM drives, let alone CD Burners. No one could forsee the world we have now. CDs have been around for a LONG time now. So your assertion that the labels wouldn't sell CDs if they weren't concerned about theft is ridiculous. To add insult to injury, despite the fact that CDs were astoundingly cheaper to produce, CDs were significantly more expensive than casette tapes. I talked to someone once who worked in the industry, and they said it was because CDs had "longevity" and thus priced it accordingly. Riiiiight. Your "opinion" is that its the tech companies who are pushing DRM (and by implication, the major labels are just victims of the advertising). Well, until you can give some figures to back that up, I would say that that statement is downright idiotic and naive. As the GP mentioned, there are countless articles spanning years about the major labels talking about how desperate DRM is needed in order to curtail the rampant piracy and other nonsense. There are also a good number of articles pointing out how completely false these statements are, and how laughable the supposed supporting evidence is. Major labels, and major content providers in general (ie: movies) have ALWAYS had a fondness for ANYTHING they can use to control what people do with content, with the only limiting factor being the law. VHS tapes have special encodings to prevent them from being copied, for example. Content control is not a new thing. It is not some thing that tech companies suddenly dreamed up. Tech companies now are doing nothing more than similar companies did in the past. They saw that the media industry wanted to control the product they sell to customers, and created products accordingly to suit the media industries whims. The fact that it's biting the media industry in the ass is PURELY the media industry's fault, as a result of the media industries own greed. No amount of spinning you try to do will change that simple, widely acknowledged fact.
I wish slashdot had a special moderation adjustment for comments like this. It's worth far more than just the max 5 points.
I just wanted to make a quick observation. You can't compare something like ambient air temperature to pouring a liquid of even the same temperature onto yourself. The areas you describe are deserts, and so, have next to no humidity. This gives your body all the opportunity it needs to protect itself from the heat and maintain homeostasis. For eg: sweating like mad. Additionally, your body would have time to adjust to this temperature over time, for no other reason than the steady increase in temperature during travel. As long as you had plenty of water to keep hydrated and you had shade, you could survive well enough in such conditions, although it would be pretty uncomfortable. Dropping a hot liquid on your skin is a concentrated blast of heat on a small area, with no chance for your body to adjust and purge the heat. Not that I'm discounting the main point of your argument, which I fully agree with. I just felt like being anal retentive.
Hell yeah I would! Of course, I'm aiming to get sex reassignment surgery one day, so perhaps I'm biased...
Time Machine only works if you can maintain a thoroughput rate of 88Mbps.
That is entirely true. The question is, if you go onto iTunes (I don't use it myself so I don't know), do you get a discount if you buy 10 or more songs at once? If you don't, then your entire argument is moot because the music industry *isn't* following this pattern with respect to online music.
Also, consideration must be given to the differences between physical and online distribution. The per track cost of buying music online is $0.99. Fine. But it is also lower quality compared to a CD. AND it's infested with DRM restricting what you can do with your music and most CDs do not.
With all the cons that the music industry imposes for the price, the value of online music is dramatically less that physical IMO, even when taking into account the "mass purchase discount" effect.
Given the amount of truely idiotic and genuinely hostile things Sony has done to consumers, they deserve nothing more than utter failure.
Sadly, way too many people have short memories and don't care that computers were scrambled by willfully malicious sony music CDs.
Or the fact that they love to sue music cust^H^H^H^Hpirates into submission. "Don't even have a computer? Give us money anyway cause we KNOW you've been pirating!"
Hell, the last sony laptop I got my hands on, had so much advertising crap on it that it actually *slowed down* the machine significantly, until I uninstalled all of it.
I'm sure I'm forgetting plenty of examples of Sony's heinous, arrogant behaviour.