Eh, could be worse. At least they knew that Ballmer as theoretical head of the operations of the company now should be the ultimate, "buck stops here," person, as opposed to still spamming Bill while he's off in Africa fighting mosquitoes.
A friend of mine registered "spam@[university]" and "abuse@[university]" while we were at school, they allowed students to have up to seven of them for some odd reason, and he got some funny e-mail. Nothing so bad as to justify forwarding it along to actual school IT administration, but amusing nonetheless.
I have found that the cost of one month of cable can pay for one or two seasons of a show a month. We went through M*A*S*H, Star Treks TOS and TNG, a bunch of Doctor Who and Torchwood, Inspector Morse and Lewis, and we're halfway through Farscape, with La Femme Nikita and Babylon 5 to follow.
That's what we did. Between MeTV, "This", RTV, Bounce, Tuff TV, Create (rebadged as Life here), PBS World, and a bunch of other subcarrier channels there's often actually something that I want to watch, which is more than I found with extended analog cable.
There have been ads on TV for companies to install antennas on houses. This makes me laugh, given the fade that industry saw for many years.
We had cable until COX took Turner Classic Movies off of analog cable and put it on digital cable, at which point we had enough. Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel, The History Channel, and Sci-Fi/SyFy were already on the way down but hadn't hit rock bottom yet.
We don't miss it. Between XBMC, free content or ad-supported streaming content via our network-connected Blu-ray player, and free content via web browser, there's no reason to pay for content that still comes with ads anymore.
The current iSeries machine we have dates to about two years ago. Before that mini we had an older iSeries mini, and before that we had another AS/400 mini. Before that we had a Honeywell, and at some point they had a Wang. These computers have handled employment records, payroll, enrollment records, equipment records, and all government reporting requirements with minimal downtime during operating hours. Come to think of it, the last time that we had long-term unscheduled downtime was when the roof collapsed in a rainstorm and the eight inches of water the computer was sitting in demanded that it be shut down.
Pretty much. Everything where I work, weekly timecards, missed timeclock punches, equipment asset transfer sheets, loan-of-equipment forms, and certainly dozens of other records are all done on paper and more importantly, all require signatures, even though every single one of these items is recorded in the AS/400. Worse, some are ridiculously redundant, like the timecards and the missed timeclock punches, the latter of which get recorded on the former. I feel sorry for my boss, he has to sign at least six forms a week for just me alone, and there are about 20 people working under him, and that's just the timecard stuff. Add in all of the equipment transfer forms and everything else he has to sign- and he's not allowed to use a stamp- and his hand must be either worn out or possessing the strongest muscles in his body...
It would be so easy to add fields to all of the various records that would let employees handle these tasks electronically, either through a web interface on the AS/400 that could be reached from any workstation on the network and logged into with credentials, or else simple, internally-developed smartphone apps that would do the same thing and submit via network to the server. If there still was a requirement for a paper timecard, just print them out like we do now and sign the one copy, that's it...
And better, the damn inventory would be right as the property management people wouldn't miss paperwork and data entry.
We built an XBMC box for out TV, and we found that our Blu-ray player can also connect to a bunch of services like slacker radio, crackle, youtube, NPR, and the like.
Honestly, Wordpad is good enough for so many users' individual needs that it's almost foolish for the vast majority of users to purchase extra word processing software in Microsoft environments. Hell, even the netbook I'm using to type this with Windows 7 Starter Edition has Wordpad built in.
Throw in free word processors that are more feature-rich than Wordpad or are meant for other platforms and the actual number of users that needs Microsoft Office is very, very small. It's dumb for school districts to buy Office for most of their computers. It's dumb for home users to buy it. I would argue that it's even possibly dumb for many professionals to buy it. They simply do not need it unless there's some true need to protect proprietary content.
That's part why I like buying physical media. I get looked at as quaint, but my CD collection can't really have its license revoked and I don't lose everything if a hard disk crashes. Same reason I have a lot of DVDs, though the more active nature of Blu-ray does have me concerned. All of these issues with subscription services just reinforce the need for my own media.
Humans really aren't all that violent individually.
Only because of the balance of negative consequences to positive successes through other choices. Look at places where the rule of law has faltered or where unemployment is so high that it's exceedingly difficult to make an honest living, people often turn savage. A "bad neighborhood" is an example of this on the lower end of the spectrum, and places like northern Mexico are the other end.
No, the state is enabling the controls by default, and forcing you to tell the state that you want the controls turned off. The term Google uses for such is "chilling effects". There are a lot of people that won't opt-out because they are concerned about the perception or longer term ramifications if they do opt-out.
Opt-in would be that the state would make it generally known that the controls exist, and would encourage those with children who do not know how to monitor their own connections to subscribe to the block. Making that option known would be as simple as a statement in the initial signup contract for the Internet service or a line added to each monthly bill offering it.
Okay, then we need a definition of artistic merit. Leaving out sexuality entirely for the example, my wife was rather unimpressed when she visited the Tate Modern Museum in London several years back, so we didn't go see it when we visited a couple years ago. She did not feel that the works in the Tate Modern held artistic merit. After the fact, I saw something on the Internet that was at the Tate Modern that I probably wouldn't have minded seeing, but she still did not care for.
My point is that it's difficult to define pornography because it always comes down to one's own perspective. Someone might find some fetish work to be art because of some characteristic of the fetish that requires skill to wear or display or carry out, while others will simply see it as pornography without any consideration for the craftsmanship. Even basic nude photography without any hypersexualized intent can fall into this, where some see an image of a naked person as pornography, while others look at the composition of the photograph for focus, lighting, lens selection, background content or props, the work put into the model in hair and makeup, posing, even the particular selection of the model as being able to have artistic merit. It's also possible for those same characteristics to apply to an image or a work that is of something sexual.
Do I believe that parents should have both the right and the responsibility to control their children's exposure to content? Absolutely. Do I believe that it's the State's job to do that? No, I don't.
Generally credit cards generally are not issued to minors, while debit cards come with the checking account. That would explain why a debit card was unacceptable as a method to verify age.
Bearing in mind that there are particularly lurid and erotic oil paintings hanging in Britain's museums, voluptuous topless women in many British mass-distribution daily newspapers, and fine art photography of nudes, not to mention album cover art, statues, anatomy and medical journals, encyclopedias, etc...
That would probably depend, in part, on how the photographed party was visible through the window, where the photographer had to be in order to see the photographed party, and if the photographed party had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the location they were in.
...it's fairly clever to target partitions that aren't the OS partition. I didn't read the article, but if it's targeting all entries mapped on D:-I: then that could be network shares, flash memory, external hard disks, internal extra hard disks, and possibly even files awaiting burn to disc, and with the OS left untouched would not raise suspicion as quickly.
Sure. Let's joke about posting personal pictures of a non-consenting party.
I don't have a problem with the jokes. And honestly while I don't agree with the illegal methods of obtaining the data that the hacker used, I also do not consider his data breach any worse than any other random data breach. Fact is, those who take naked pictures of themselves or allow naked pictures to be taken of them must accept that it's possible that others will see them. That held true for the girl who sent cheesecake-style pinup photos of herself to her soldier-boyfriend who would probably show the picture to his buddies, held true for the Polaroid revolution, held true for the 8mm camera era, held true for the videotape era, and holds true for the digital camera era.
Simply, if one doesn't want naked pictures of one's self to be seen, one should not take or allow taken, naked pictures of one's self. Literally that's it. Don't do it if you don't want them seen. The only reason for a picture to exist is for it to be seen, and the large number of prurient people in this world will be happy to look. If one never takes or allows these kinds of pictures to be taken then there will never be a chance of them being shared, leaked, or stolen.
This comment wouldn't even come up if it was a man whose pictures were taken.
You've never been around women gossiping that don't know that a man can hear them, have you?
I once managed to get Windows NT Small Business Server to function as a backup domain controller, so I'd bet that there are ways of making RT do things that have been disabled in it... *grin*
Their business support doesn't suck though. If you're an enterprise-level customer and have your IT staff certified through Dell's online coursework then you can do all of your warranty work in-house and they generally next-day parts to you, and they really don't make a big deal of misdiagnosed machines where you end up replacing perfectly good parts. We use mostly Optiplexes and Latitudes and keeping up with about 30,000 PCs has been possible with a paltry staff.
Personally I'm typing this on a several-year-old Lenovo Ideapad S10-2, my wife uses a Thinkpad X301, and Dad bought an Ideapad G550 based on our recommendations, so I like old-IBM/Lenovo fairly well, but I don't think that Dell is quite as bad overall as you've dealt with. I'm using an old Latitude D520 at work in the field without problems, and my Optiplex 780 workstation has handled its duties without problems.
Last time I checked, gambling behavior as a primary hobby or profession wasn't considered respectable or responsible, it was considered borderline sociopathic.
If I were a stockholder I'd be worried. Technology these days seems to be about a combination of giving people what they want and convincing people of what they want. Android, to an extent, is giving people what they want, as Android is popular with users as well as with OEMs. Windows 8, by and large, does not appear to be popular, either in portable devices or on the desktop.
So, Dell is now moving to a system of neither giving people what they want, nor convincing people of what they want.
I don't think that Dell is in any danger of going Chapter 7. Where I work buys Dell just about exclusively, in a 30,000 desktop environment. The paltry sales Apple or other OEMs get is almost not worth mentioning. But, their extra markets, like phones, tablets, and other consumer devices will probably die.
I had actually wanted a Dell phone back in the day, but they weren't compatible with my cell provider. Otherwise they had the features I wanted. Pity that...
Disclaimer, I have no Facebook account, didn't really use myspace, and found twitter essentially useless. I had a web log on a domain I own, but haven't had the domain hosted in the better part of a decade.
If social networking allowed one to define either the character of the post with some predefined categories as key words, or if there were well-written software that could define the content of the post. One could choose what to see from one's "friends" instead of seeing everything.
Slashdot is broken up into predefined topics though, and the topics are what dictate the discussion. We don't generally completely go off into other topics without some kind of relevant segue, and if we try then we run the risk of being moderated down. Additionally, factual incorrectness, baiting, or other inappropriateness in the discussion can result in downward moderation.
I like Slashdot's method of interaction for the most part. It's not perfect, but it's the best that I've seen so far.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh, could be worse. At least they knew that Ballmer as theoretical head of the operations of the company now should be the ultimate, "buck stops here," person, as opposed to still spamming Bill while he's off in Africa fighting mosquitoes.
A friend of mine registered "spam@[university]" and "abuse@[university]" while we were at school, they allowed students to have up to seven of them for some odd reason, and he got some funny e-mail. Nothing so bad as to justify forwarding it along to actual school IT administration, but amusing nonetheless.
Woosh!
I have found that the cost of one month of cable can pay for one or two seasons of a show a month. We went through M*A*S*H, Star Treks TOS and TNG, a bunch of Doctor Who and Torchwood, Inspector Morse and Lewis, and we're halfway through Farscape, with La Femme Nikita and Babylon 5 to follow.
That's what we did. Between MeTV, "This", RTV, Bounce, Tuff TV, Create (rebadged as Life here), PBS World, and a bunch of other subcarrier channels there's often actually something that I want to watch, which is more than I found with extended analog cable.
There have been ads on TV for companies to install antennas on houses. This makes me laugh, given the fade that industry saw for many years.
We had cable until COX took Turner Classic Movies off of analog cable and put it on digital cable, at which point we had enough. Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel, The History Channel, and Sci-Fi/SyFy were already on the way down but hadn't hit rock bottom yet.
We don't miss it. Between XBMC, free content or ad-supported streaming content via our network-connected Blu-ray player, and free content via web browser, there's no reason to pay for content that still comes with ads anymore.
Cut the cord permanently.
A computer architecture from the eighties is still newer than a computer architecture developed in the sixties and seventies by a telephone company, which the bulk of the planet runs on derivations of.
The current iSeries machine we have dates to about two years ago. Before that mini we had an older iSeries mini, and before that we had another AS/400 mini. Before that we had a Honeywell, and at some point they had a Wang. These computers have handled employment records, payroll, enrollment records, equipment records, and all government reporting requirements with minimal downtime during operating hours. Come to think of it, the last time that we had long-term unscheduled downtime was when the roof collapsed in a rainstorm and the eight inches of water the computer was sitting in demanded that it be shut down.
Pretty much. Everything where I work, weekly timecards, missed timeclock punches, equipment asset transfer sheets, loan-of-equipment forms, and certainly dozens of other records are all done on paper and more importantly, all require signatures, even though every single one of these items is recorded in the AS/400. Worse, some are ridiculously redundant, like the timecards and the missed timeclock punches, the latter of which get recorded on the former. I feel sorry for my boss, he has to sign at least six forms a week for just me alone, and there are about 20 people working under him, and that's just the timecard stuff. Add in all of the equipment transfer forms and everything else he has to sign- and he's not allowed to use a stamp- and his hand must be either worn out or possessing the strongest muscles in his body...
It would be so easy to add fields to all of the various records that would let employees handle these tasks electronically, either through a web interface on the AS/400 that could be reached from any workstation on the network and logged into with credentials, or else simple, internally-developed smartphone apps that would do the same thing and submit via network to the server. If there still was a requirement for a paper timecard, just print them out like we do now and sign the one copy, that's it...
And better, the damn inventory would be right as the property management people wouldn't miss paperwork and data entry.
We built an XBMC box for out TV, and we found that our Blu-ray player can also connect to a bunch of services like slacker radio, crackle, youtube, NPR, and the like.
It works fairly well actually.
Honestly, Wordpad is good enough for so many users' individual needs that it's almost foolish for the vast majority of users to purchase extra word processing software in Microsoft environments. Hell, even the netbook I'm using to type this with Windows 7 Starter Edition has Wordpad built in.
Throw in free word processors that are more feature-rich than Wordpad or are meant for other platforms and the actual number of users that needs Microsoft Office is very, very small. It's dumb for school districts to buy Office for most of their computers. It's dumb for home users to buy it. I would argue that it's even possibly dumb for many professionals to buy it. They simply do not need it unless there's some true need to protect proprietary content.
That's part why I like buying physical media. I get looked at as quaint, but my CD collection can't really have its license revoked and I don't lose everything if a hard disk crashes. Same reason I have a lot of DVDs, though the more active nature of Blu-ray does have me concerned. All of these issues with subscription services just reinforce the need for my own media.
Only because of the balance of negative consequences to positive successes through other choices. Look at places where the rule of law has faltered or where unemployment is so high that it's exceedingly difficult to make an honest living, people often turn savage. A "bad neighborhood" is an example of this on the lower end of the spectrum, and places like northern Mexico are the other end.
Oh yeah? I bet he wouldn't say that to my face!
No, the state is enabling the controls by default, and forcing you to tell the state that you want the controls turned off. The term Google uses for such is "chilling effects". There are a lot of people that won't opt-out because they are concerned about the perception or longer term ramifications if they do opt-out.
Opt-in would be that the state would make it generally known that the controls exist, and would encourage those with children who do not know how to monitor their own connections to subscribe to the block. Making that option known would be as simple as a statement in the initial signup contract for the Internet service or a line added to each monthly bill offering it.
Okay, then we need a definition of artistic merit. Leaving out sexuality entirely for the example, my wife was rather unimpressed when she visited the Tate Modern Museum in London several years back, so we didn't go see it when we visited a couple years ago. She did not feel that the works in the Tate Modern held artistic merit. After the fact, I saw something on the Internet that was at the Tate Modern that I probably wouldn't have minded seeing, but she still did not care for.
My point is that it's difficult to define pornography because it always comes down to one's own perspective. Someone might find some fetish work to be art because of some characteristic of the fetish that requires skill to wear or display or carry out, while others will simply see it as pornography without any consideration for the craftsmanship. Even basic nude photography without any hypersexualized intent can fall into this, where some see an image of a naked person as pornography, while others look at the composition of the photograph for focus, lighting, lens selection, background content or props, the work put into the model in hair and makeup, posing, even the particular selection of the model as being able to have artistic merit. It's also possible for those same characteristics to apply to an image or a work that is of something sexual.
Do I believe that parents should have both the right and the responsibility to control their children's exposure to content? Absolutely. Do I believe that it's the State's job to do that? No, I don't.
Generally credit cards generally are not issued to minors, while debit cards come with the checking account. That would explain why a debit card was unacceptable as a method to verify age.
Okay, define pornography then.
Bearing in mind that there are particularly lurid and erotic oil paintings hanging in Britain's museums, voluptuous topless women in many British mass-distribution daily newspapers, and fine art photography of nudes, not to mention album cover art, statues, anatomy and medical journals, encyclopedias, etc...
That would probably depend, in part, on how the photographed party was visible through the window, where the photographer had to be in order to see the photographed party, and if the photographed party had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the location they were in.
...it's fairly clever to target partitions that aren't the OS partition. I didn't read the article, but if it's targeting all entries mapped on D:-I: then that could be network shares, flash memory, external hard disks, internal extra hard disks, and possibly even files awaiting burn to disc, and with the OS left untouched would not raise suspicion as quickly.
I don't have a problem with the jokes. And honestly while I don't agree with the illegal methods of obtaining the data that the hacker used, I also do not consider his data breach any worse than any other random data breach. Fact is, those who take naked pictures of themselves or allow naked pictures to be taken of them must accept that it's possible that others will see them. That held true for the girl who sent cheesecake-style pinup photos of herself to her soldier-boyfriend who would probably show the picture to his buddies, held true for the Polaroid revolution, held true for the 8mm camera era, held true for the videotape era, and holds true for the digital camera era.
Simply, if one doesn't want naked pictures of one's self to be seen, one should not take or allow taken, naked pictures of one's self. Literally that's it. Don't do it if you don't want them seen. The only reason for a picture to exist is for it to be seen, and the large number of prurient people in this world will be happy to look. If one never takes or allows these kinds of pictures to be taken then there will never be a chance of them being shared, leaked, or stolen.
You've never been around women gossiping that don't know that a man can hear them, have you?
I donno, I might pay good money for a dog that can retrieve beer for me on command...
I once managed to get Windows NT Small Business Server to function as a backup domain controller, so I'd bet that there are ways of making RT do things that have been disabled in it... *grin*
Their business support doesn't suck though. If you're an enterprise-level customer and have your IT staff certified through Dell's online coursework then you can do all of your warranty work in-house and they generally next-day parts to you, and they really don't make a big deal of misdiagnosed machines where you end up replacing perfectly good parts. We use mostly Optiplexes and Latitudes and keeping up with about 30,000 PCs has been possible with a paltry staff.
Personally I'm typing this on a several-year-old Lenovo Ideapad S10-2, my wife uses a Thinkpad X301, and Dad bought an Ideapad G550 based on our recommendations, so I like old-IBM/Lenovo fairly well, but I don't think that Dell is quite as bad overall as you've dealt with. I'm using an old Latitude D520 at work in the field without problems, and my Optiplex 780 workstation has handled its duties without problems.
Last time I checked, gambling behavior as a primary hobby or profession wasn't considered respectable or responsible, it was considered borderline sociopathic.
If I were a stockholder I'd be worried. Technology these days seems to be about a combination of giving people what they want and convincing people of what they want. Android, to an extent, is giving people what they want, as Android is popular with users as well as with OEMs. Windows 8, by and large, does not appear to be popular, either in portable devices or on the desktop.
So, Dell is now moving to a system of neither giving people what they want, nor convincing people of what they want.
I don't think that Dell is in any danger of going Chapter 7. Where I work buys Dell just about exclusively, in a 30,000 desktop environment. The paltry sales Apple or other OEMs get is almost not worth mentioning. But, their extra markets, like phones, tablets, and other consumer devices will probably die.
I had actually wanted a Dell phone back in the day, but they weren't compatible with my cell provider. Otherwise they had the features I wanted. Pity that...
Disclaimer, I have no Facebook account, didn't really use myspace, and found twitter essentially useless. I had a web log on a domain I own, but haven't had the domain hosted in the better part of a decade.
If social networking allowed one to define either the character of the post with some predefined categories as key words, or if there were well-written software that could define the content of the post. One could choose what to see from one's "friends" instead of seeing everything.
Slashdot is broken up into predefined topics though, and the topics are what dictate the discussion. We don't generally completely go off into other topics without some kind of relevant segue, and if we try then we run the risk of being moderated down. Additionally, factual incorrectness, baiting, or other inappropriateness in the discussion can result in downward moderation.
I like Slashdot's method of interaction for the most part. It's not perfect, but it's the best that I've seen so far.