I think the most important thing you can do for your small company is to research and implement an off-site backup solution. Find one strikes the right balance of cost versus privacy/security for the business sector that you're in. So if you're using the Mac as a central place to back up the employees individual computers, or if you've made it the place where everyone saves all their files, that's a great first step. But it needs to be augmented with off-site backup.
I have seen too many examples of small businesses losing all of their data to theft or fire. I don't mean I'm reading about them on the web, I mean I hear these stories in person. I'm honestly amazed at how many times this happens, and having central backup or central storage alone isn't enough to mitigate the dangers.
We all say "vote with your wallet" all the time. Apparently, a lot of us did.
Yep, I paid $20 just now, so that I could hopefully raise the average price if only just a tiny little amount, and also wanted to count my vote in the stats under "Mac"!! I probably won't play any of the games myself, but I'm sure my kids would love to get into World of Goo.
Too bad he doesn't want to show an online demo of this, I was kind of getting used to being able to try out these kinds of exploits in my own browser. Call me masochistic.
Actually, I've had almost the opposite experience. Most (not all, but most) of the Canadian sellers that I've purchased from on eBay have stated right in their auctions that GST will be charged. And they do. And I'm fine with paying it.
Perhaps it's because I usually buy from established sellers, but since these are the sellers that the CRA is targeting, I think many of them will do fine on their audits.
Aren't those the special Tim Hortons (Canadian version of crack in a cup) coins Oh, that's what kept me coming back for more coffee? I thought it was the opium-laced poppy coins they were giving me....
OK, so perhaps I'm really not mis-remembering, thanks.
In reality, the secret of SVI and its kind is that operating costs, with labor in particular, are its biggest component, and to reduce that component, the easiest thing to do is to conduct lay-offs, ostensibly for reasons of say, higher health care costs, higher rents, interest rates, etc. So the shareholders and board have partnered (love that word!) to set up a short-sighted strategy to maximize short-term gain. What does one do to combat this in large organizations? I don't know the answer to that, but I think I know the answer when it comes to smaller scales: get involved. I've started my plan for working my way onto the board of directors in two places locally. One has already succeeded, and I'm a board member. The other will take a few years. I don't know where I am on the socialism scale either, but I do believe that when a company treats its employees fairly and with respect, then they will work harder and with more loyalty for that company. That sounds more like the capitalist in me actually shutting up and listening for once.:)
If I were an employee at IBM, an internal restructuring process named "LEAN" would scare the hell out of me.
I agree with Cringely on this:
The point of this has nothing to do with the work itself and everything to do with the price of IBM shares. Remove at least 100,000 heads, eliminate the long-term drag of a defined-benefit pension plan, and the price of IBM shares will soar.
Is it just me...? I feel that there have been a lot more stories in the last few years about corporations caring less and less about their employees and more about their share price. But I could just be remembering the past with rose-colored glasses.
And this sounds bad:
All this is supposed to happen by the end of 2007, by the way, at which point IBM will also freeze its U.S. pension plan.
We're just going through another round of union / management contract negotiation talks where I work, and really the long-term benefits can't be discounted. It's why your top-rate people will stick around for decades, instead of learning a new skill set and then looking for work elsewhere. This doesn't sound like it would be a smart move for a company interested in its workforce as more than just "human resources"... but if it's all just about share price, then I get it. Still too bad.
Re:And this is indeed a serious problem with EBay.
on
How to Win on Ebay: Snipe
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
If there's an item that you're willing to pay up to $10 for, you would probably still take it for $10.05.
Then $10.00 wasn't really a maximum value was it? The fault would be yours for not bidding $10.05 in the first place. If you bid your absolute maximum amount on every auction, then when you get outbid you won't feel bad for losing the auction.
Works for me - I see something I like, then I bid my max and forget about it. If I get an email later saying that I won the auction, I go back and pay. I turn off those uselsss "you have been outbid" emails.
Apple probably intends iTunes to eventually usurp terrestrial and satellite TV.
Personally, I'll continue to use satellite, thank you.
One of our local internet providers broadcasts television content over high-speed (ADSL). We tried it out for a while, but switched back to satellite due to lack of good movie selection. However, I am also happy of the switch back for another reason: the constant flow of bits (actually megabits!) over our connection noticably degraded our internet experience.
I've been watching all of the talk lately about two-tiered internet and the rise of more and more content of ever-increasing size being sent across the net, and it makes me wonder when it will plateau. (I know, I know... it won't) If content providers keep pushing for internet video-on-demand and if more consumers switch to getting their movies and also regular TV programming from the internet, we are going to fill up those big bandwidth pipes. (Yes, again I know: the ISPs will just do traffic shaping and/or charge us more for premium service)
Yes, I was thinking this exactly myself last week. Our office subscribes to a few national newspapers as well as one local one. I was reading the sports section of our local one, then jumped to one of the national ones. Almost exactly the same story - just a few words seemed to be added to the national one (or omitted from the local one, not sure).
Seems to me that we as a society are quite used to this syndication of content. It shouldn't surprise us that now with the Internet providing the tools to everyone (I personally never had a printing press in my basement in the 80's) that many are jumping on board and trying to emulate the behaviour that has worked so well for newspapers for hundreds of years. Why would we expect otherwise?
The stories that really interest me these days are those that are not told with an air of authority, but those that are coming from the writer honestly. I'm much more occupied these days with blogs - there is a lot of crap out there, but you know, there are a lot of gems to be found. This is the kind of content that these copy-edit-paste authors aren't interested in either, so both they and I are happy.
Symantec rebates make the annual upgrade cost of these products almost (if not exactly) $0.
Really? Then you had better inform most of the non-techie users that I have met, because they seem to keep paying $49/yr for the latest version of Norton Antivirus or $79/yr for Norton Internet Security (something like that, anyway). Each of them have had at least one virus in the past, before they had Norton, so they are now all happy to pay their "virus tax" each year.
Yes, I have seen some rebate offers for Symantec products in the past, but each of the rebates that I've seen only applies to users who are migrating from a different vendor's package (from McAfee to Norton, for example). And the one rebate that I did help one of them send in got rejected for some trivial reason and the re-submission was rejected because it came in past the deadline (of course it did - they took too long to let my friend know that his first submission wasn't perfect). I know it's not related to AV in particular, but this whole rebate thing by the manufacturers is a sore point for me - I think it's a scam really, and many people do not get their rebate money.
So considering Norton Internet Security at $79 per year versus Microsoft at $49 per year I think that $49 per year WILL be paid by many users, only because the price is actually cheaper compared to Norton Internet Security, and also because you won't have to send in any stupid rebates.
Yes, when I read "frozen liquid", I laughed a bit. How they have any idea that the matter on the surface of this very distant planet *used* to be liquid isn't explained at all. What if it was always solid rock, and now it's rock but very cold?
Anyhow, the part that really got me was this:
"The new planet has five times the Earth's mass and can be found about 25,000 light-years away"
I think that's stretching things a bit much. If that planet is really that far away, then we're looking at the light rays that are just reaching earth now - which first bounced off that planet 25,000 freaking years ago. So the planet may be long gone by now , and "can be found" is better written "might have been found" (or something equally vague about the planet's current state).
I don't think that many would disagree with you in the fact that scanning irises and then recognizing that image later is "cool" and may even "work as designed". However, you're ignoring the real questions here: should we be doing this at all? What are the wider social implications to going down this brave new world?
You blithely state that this system is a great step towards safer schools. Do you really think so? Do you even have kids? I do, I have two. It doesn't make me an authority to represent all parents, but I do know this: I would fight this damn system until I was blue in the face if anyone here ever tried to bring it in. It wouldn't make me feel any safer about my kids at all, and the money can surely be used for countless more worthy projects in the school.
Here's another interesting anecdote for you: there are two of those "mega play center" places near where I live. One of them had wrist bands for every adult and kid that enters the place (with the adult one being tied to the kids) and it also has security cameras. The other one has no security at all - just walk out with your kids any time you would like. Guess which one gives parents a false sense of security, and which one actually forces them to be aware of where their kids are at all times? And finally, guess which one had actual cases of kids being sexually molested right within the ball pit? (the pedophiles had learned where the camera's blind spots were).
Go wave your "this is cool technology" flag somewhere else.
Every once in a while I misread the Slashdot article titles - albeit because they're worded in such as way as to be easily misconstrued. Do the editors do this on purpose just to mess with my head? Is that part of the fun of being an editor?:)
At the university where I work, we just started looking into NotifyLink.
Sorry I can't give you any anecdotes from usage yet, as we're just getting the server up for this. However, it looks promising: it does wireless sync for a wide range of wireless handhelds available, to either of our back end SunOne or Exchange servers.
Wow, that's a great link, thanks! Yes, I did read TFA, and they say that the public comments on Deborah's blog were "vitriolic". No, they aren't! (go read the article, and then read the user comments at that link) They're simply challenging Deborah, asking her to back up her journalism. That's quite the spin they put on this.
I read through the article, and I had a deja-vu experience, where Brave New World and Minority Report both came into my thoughts at the same time. Strange.
Anyway, I was thinking that if a system like this was ever successfully used as evidence in court, that would be the tipping point; after that, it would be an all-out hackfest. Lots of people, for a whole host of different reasons, would want to have the ability to "plant" false data in this system, to later be used as evidence against other people that they wanted to frame.
Remind me to take a taxi or bus wherever I go, if this system ever comes to Canada.
Who exactly is Otto Z. Stern? What is his background, credentials, past software development involvement, and so on?
Actually, I'm always open to reading opinions and ideas from people that I have never heard of. Sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised that these "unknown" people can have truly inspiring or insightful commentary.
No so with Mr. Stern.
I checked out "My prostate's as hard as an opal" and was similarily disappointed with his fetish around his own ass and related body parts. "Big Google is much worse than Big Oil" manages to mention herpes in the first line, and never does get around to making a solid case against Google apologists.
So, it's good that I read through some of his drivel, now I'll know to avoid anything written by him in the future.
I'm fairly certain that SETS' tankless water heaters do in fact use a conventional electric element to provide heated water on demand.
My Dad works at a place that sells these in Canada, and has been selling them for a while (not sure how long exactly, but well over a year). Not the microwave variety like the story talks about, but the electric variety like SETS. He says they work quite well, but it does take people some time to "accept" them.
There are a decent amount of this variety out now, it appears. And if they're being sold at Home Depot to your average Joe, then I'd say that at least the electric version of this technology is mature enough.
I would buy one if my water heater wasn't working so darn well right now (I hope I didn't just sentence my water heater to a premature death).
I think they chose the name DEFENDER so that they can hide a really cool easter egg in this new software. Of course, who wouldn't welcome the chance to download bloated software just to be able to play one of the best arcade games of the 80's!
Don't think they won't do it... I had fun playing the flight sim easter egg that was hidden in Excel 97!
Yes - sorry, I forgot to mention that I didn't want to pay the hundreds of dollars for MS Office. Neither do I wish to pay Intuit for Quicken on the Mac. I don't want to send any more of my money toward either of those companies.
I know, I shouldn't subject my wife to my own political bent, but hey she makes me do some strange things (like shop certain places and not others), so I feel a little justified.
This is great news for me - it should make my wife happy!
I switched over to OS X for our home computer when Apple came out with the Mac Mini (I love iMovie, it makes great movies of the kids). It's been mostly painless, except for one thing: MS Word Documents. My wife needs to open and edit.doc files that she gets sent via email.
I tried installing OpenOffice 1.4, but it was slow and felt unpolished. More importantly: she didn't like it. We tried NeoOffice/J but the Java startup time is a pain, too. The AbiWord OS X port doesn't look done. And I did't think that Word 2000 running inside an emulator was going to cut it for her. Up to now, I have had to keep our old WinXP box around just to keep her from strangling me.
I welcome the opportunity to finally donate my WinXP box to the local kids computer recycling program!
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, I'm in too! I don't know what to make with the kit yet, but I hope it's going to feel like tinkering with an electronics kit from the 1980's :)
I think the most important thing you can do for your small company is to research and implement an off-site backup solution. Find one strikes the right balance of cost versus privacy/security for the business sector that you're in. So if you're using the Mac as a central place to back up the employees individual computers, or if you've made it the place where everyone saves all their files, that's a great first step. But it needs to be augmented with off-site backup.
I have seen too many examples of small businesses losing all of their data to theft or fire. I don't mean I'm reading about them on the web, I mean I hear these stories in person. I'm honestly amazed at how many times this happens, and having central backup or central storage alone isn't enough to mitigate the dangers.
Good luck, and happy Googling!
We all say "vote with your wallet" all the time. Apparently, a lot of us did.
Yep, I paid $20 just now, so that I could hopefully raise the average price if only just a tiny little amount, and also wanted to count my vote in the stats under "Mac"!! I probably won't play any of the games myself, but I'm sure my kids would love to get into World of Goo.
Too bad he doesn't want to show an online demo of this, I was kind of getting used to being able to try out these kinds of exploits in my own browser. Call me masochistic.
Actually, I've had almost the opposite experience. Most (not all, but most) of the Canadian sellers that I've purchased from on eBay have stated right in their auctions that GST will be charged. And they do. And I'm fine with paying it. Perhaps it's because I usually buy from established sellers, but since these are the sellers that the CRA is targeting, I think many of them will do fine on their audits.
If I were an employee at IBM, an internal restructuring process named "LEAN" would scare the hell out of me.
I agree with Cringely on this:
Is it just me...? I feel that there have been a lot more stories in the last few years about corporations caring less and less about their employees and more about their share price. But I could just be remembering the past with rose-colored glasses.
And this sounds bad:
We're just going through another round of union / management contract negotiation talks where I work, and really the long-term benefits can't be discounted. It's why your top-rate people will stick around for decades, instead of learning a new skill set and then looking for work elsewhere. This doesn't sound like it would be a smart move for a company interested in its workforce as more than just "human resources"... but if it's all just about share price, then I get it. Still too bad.
Then $10.00 wasn't really a maximum value was it? The fault would be yours for not bidding $10.05 in the first place. If you bid your absolute maximum amount on every auction, then when you get outbid you won't feel bad for losing the auction.
Works for me - I see something I like, then I bid my max and forget about it. If I get an email later saying that I won the auction, I go back and pay. I turn off those uselsss "you have been outbid" emails.
One of our local internet providers broadcasts television content over high-speed (ADSL). We tried it out for a while, but switched back to satellite due to lack of good movie selection. However, I am also happy of the switch back for another reason: the constant flow of bits (actually megabits!) over our connection noticably degraded our internet experience.
I've been watching all of the talk lately about two-tiered internet and the rise of more and more content of ever-increasing size being sent across the net, and it makes me wonder when it will plateau. (I know, I know... it won't) If content providers keep pushing for internet video-on-demand and if more consumers switch to getting their movies and also regular TV programming from the internet, we are going to fill up those big bandwidth pipes. (Yes, again I know: the ISPs will just do traffic shaping and/or charge us more for premium service)
Yes, I was thinking this exactly myself last week. Our office subscribes to a few national newspapers as well as one local one. I was reading the sports section of our local one, then jumped to one of the national ones. Almost exactly the same story - just a few words seemed to be added to the national one (or omitted from the local one, not sure).
Seems to me that we as a society are quite used to this syndication of content. It shouldn't surprise us that now with the Internet providing the tools to everyone (I personally never had a printing press in my basement in the 80's) that many are jumping on board and trying to emulate the behaviour that has worked so well for newspapers for hundreds of years. Why would we expect otherwise?
The stories that really interest me these days are those that are not told with an air of authority, but those that are coming from the writer honestly. I'm much more occupied these days with blogs - there is a lot of crap out there, but you know, there are a lot of gems to be found. This is the kind of content that these copy-edit-paste authors aren't interested in either, so both they and I are happy.
Yes, I have seen some rebate offers for Symantec products in the past, but each of the rebates that I've seen only applies to users who are migrating from a different vendor's package (from McAfee to Norton, for example). And the one rebate that I did help one of them send in got rejected for some trivial reason and the re-submission was rejected because it came in past the deadline (of course it did - they took too long to let my friend know that his first submission wasn't perfect). I know it's not related to AV in particular, but this whole rebate thing by the manufacturers is a sore point for me - I think it's a scam really, and many people do not get their rebate money.
So considering Norton Internet Security at $79 per year versus Microsoft at $49 per year I think that $49 per year WILL be paid by many users, only because the price is actually cheaper compared to Norton Internet Security, and also because you won't have to send in any stupid rebates.
Yes, when I read "frozen liquid", I laughed a bit. How they have any idea that the matter on the surface of this very distant planet *used* to be liquid isn't explained at all. What if it was always solid rock, and now it's rock but very cold?
Anyhow, the part that really got me was this:
"The new planet has five times the Earth's mass and can be found about 25,000 light-years away"
I think that's stretching things a bit much. If that planet is really that far away, then we're looking at the light rays that are just reaching earth now - which first bounced off that planet 25,000 freaking years ago. So the planet may be long gone by now , and "can be found" is better written "might have been found" (or something equally vague about the planet's current state).
I don't think that many would disagree with you in the fact that scanning irises and then recognizing that image later is "cool" and may even "work as designed". However, you're ignoring the real questions here: should we be doing this at all? What are the wider social implications to going down this brave new world?
You blithely state that this system is a great step towards safer schools. Do you really think so? Do you even have kids? I do, I have two. It doesn't make me an authority to represent all parents, but I do know this: I would fight this damn system until I was blue in the face if anyone here ever tried to bring it in. It wouldn't make me feel any safer about my kids at all, and the money can surely be used for countless more worthy projects in the school.
Here's another interesting anecdote for you: there are two of those "mega play center" places near where I live. One of them had wrist bands for every adult and kid that enters the place (with the adult one being tied to the kids) and it also has security cameras. The other one has no security at all - just walk out with your kids any time you would like. Guess which one gives parents a false sense of security, and which one actually forces them to be aware of where their kids are at all times? And finally, guess which one had actual cases of kids being sexually molested right within the ball pit? (the pedophiles had learned where the camera's blind spots were).
Go wave your "this is cool technology" flag somewhere else.
Every once in a while I misread the Slashdot article titles - albeit because they're worded in such as way as to be easily misconstrued. Do the editors do this on purpose just to mess with my head? Is that part of the fun of being an editor? :)
I'll stick with Usenet.
You may just have to, since I doubt that DVD Jon will be doing any DRM-hacking now that he's gainfully employed and located in the USA.
I read through the article, and I had a deja-vu experience, where Brave New World and Minority Report both came into my thoughts at the same time. Strange.
Anyway, I was thinking that if a system like this was ever successfully used as evidence in court, that would be the tipping point; after that, it would be an all-out hackfest. Lots of people, for a whole host of different reasons, would want to have the ability to "plant" false data in this system, to later be used as evidence against other people that they wanted to frame.
Remind me to take a taxi or bus wherever I go, if this system ever comes to Canada.
Actually, I'm always open to reading opinions and ideas from people that I have never heard of. Sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised that these "unknown" people can have truly inspiring or insightful commentary.
No so with Mr. Stern.
I checked out "My prostate's as hard as an opal" and was similarily disappointed with his fetish around his own ass and related body parts. "Big Google is much worse than Big Oil" manages to mention herpes in the first line, and never does get around to making a solid case against Google apologists.
So, it's good that I read through some of his drivel, now I'll know to avoid anything written by him in the future.
My Dad works at a place that sells these in Canada, and has been selling them for a while (not sure how long exactly, but well over a year). Not the microwave variety like the story talks about, but the electric variety like SETS. He says they work quite well, but it does take people some time to "accept" them.
There are a decent amount of this variety out now, it appears. And if they're being sold at Home Depot to your average Joe, then I'd say that at least the electric version of this technology is mature enough.
I would buy one if my water heater wasn't working so darn well right now (I hope I didn't just sentence my water heater to a premature death).
Todd
Don't think they won't do it... I had fun playing the flight sim easter egg that was hidden in Excel 97!
Yes - sorry, I forgot to mention that I didn't want to pay the hundreds of dollars for MS Office. Neither do I wish to pay Intuit for Quicken on the Mac. I don't want to send any more of my money toward either of those companies.
I know, I shouldn't subject my wife to my own political bent, but hey she makes me do some strange things (like shop certain places and not others), so I feel a little justified.
This is great news for me - it should make my wife happy!
.doc files that she gets sent via email.
I switched over to OS X for our home computer when Apple came out with the Mac Mini (I love iMovie, it makes great movies of the kids). It's been mostly painless, except for one thing: MS Word Documents. My wife needs to open and edit
I tried installing OpenOffice 1.4, but it was slow and felt unpolished. More importantly: she didn't like it. We tried NeoOffice/J but the Java startup time is a pain, too. The AbiWord OS X port doesn't look done. And I did't think that Word 2000 running inside an emulator was going to cut it for her. Up to now, I have had to keep our old WinXP box around just to keep her from strangling me.
I welcome the opportunity to finally donate my WinXP box to the local kids computer recycling program!