Honestly I think malware is the consumer's fault. Seriously, if people didn't try to circumvent advertising with their pop-up blocker software and their Tivos, we wouldn't be in this spot. It's only natural that companies are going to have to find new venues for advertising. And honestly I don't find this stuff all that intrusive.
Wait hang on. Phone call. It's my mortgage company. Never mind, telemarketer. Okay as I was saying, I really don't think that advertising is as intrusive as people make it out to be. I mean is it that disruptive to take out a second of your day to... oooh e-mail. Hold on, something about my penis. This must be important... Hmm, guess not. Usually things about my penis are fairly important.
Okay where were we? Grr, hold on. Yes honey I checked the mail. No, just something from Citibank. It's not a bank statement. We don't even use Citibank, honey. Yeah you also got something about a free cell phone. Did we order a new cell phone? Well it says it's ready to be shipped. Why would I order a new cell phone and then ask you if you did? All I'm saying is that someone is sending us a cell phone. I'm not going to fight about this.
I'm back. Oh what now? What's this? A fax? I'm not familiar with this vacation company. No, throw it away. I don't care if it's only $99 to go to Disney, we're not going to Disney. All right, back to the topic on hand. I was watching this commercial on TV the other day and... ah forget it. Windows needs to be optimized. I better click on this. I mean it just popped up so it's gotta be important...
I'm not sure if it's coincidence or not but ever since signing up for the DNC list I've gotten more pre-recorded messages than ever before. The actual real live human being* telemarketers are near extinct on my land-land however so that's a blessing. We were up to around 15-20 calls a day. But it's still odd that we never got the prerecorded stuff before the list. Now my days are filled with "call this number to subscribe to our newspaper, satellite internet is now available in your area, we can help you with your mortgage..."
* Though soulless, telemarketers are technically human.
"What do you mean no prior business relationship? You said hello. Hello is a greeting and greetings are an integral part of relationships. Now about that home mortgage..."
What they don't realize is that iSync is not a HotSync replacement. I've posted on several Mac-related boards yesterday about Palm dropping Mac support and no one seems to care. They have iSync.
Heck as far as I know this news is not even on any of the Mac news sites (save SpyMac and Macrumors) since everyone assumes this means only the death of Palm Desktop (which virtually no one on the Mac side uses anyway).
So, you're smart enough to have noticed those same exact bogus comments on other teacher's profiles but you're assuming that the students are too dumb to notice that to.
I wasn't belittling the intelligence of the students, I'm just simply making a statement that these types of sites can be dangerous to someone's career. That's all.
I mean it's an open forum to criticize someone at their job by people who may or may not have even ever met the person they're criticizing. And while I respect that some students would realize this (students were the ones who brought it to my attention, I had never even visited the site on my own prior to this) it's certainly plausible that other students won't notice. And even if that were to impact just one student's opinion of a teacher, that's a bad thing.
I'm a teacher and a lot of the students at our school use a site similar to TeacherReviews.com to help find out general information about the teachers prior to taking a class.
When the site was first promoted across the college via a horde of seemingly omnipresent leaflets, it was actually a useful tool and students (as well as teachers) put a lot of stock into it.
Of course like anything where people are allowed to anonymously post their opinions it's only a matter of time before that system is abused. In our case it took about 3 semesters before bizarre, oddball (sometimes obscene) comments started to show up in teacher's reviews. I myself fell victim to this and went from a near perfect score to a slightly battered rating through a span of strange, bogus comments from unregistered users. Had I not seen these same exact comments on other teacher's profiles I might have been worried.
What concerns me however isn't necessarily the bad ratings (which cannot be removed), it's that students STILL refer to this site regardless of the validity of the reviews and there's not much we as teachers can do about it. Never mind the fact that upper management is sure to start trolling the site to get the "real, inside scoop" on their employees. Shudder.
In my opinion if you're going to operate a site that can negatively impact a person's career perhaps you should make sure the information posted on the site is remotely legitimate before it gets posted.
But I really doubt that Linux will ever conquer the desktop until it decides to pick an interface and stick with it. Admittedly I've used Linux only a select few times. However I have established boxes running RedHat, YellowDog, Lycoris and Mandrake just to see how far this OS had come along. Outside of my particular issues with each subsequent install and overlooking the technical glitches (Mandrake would not recognize my particular keyboard and mouse until I configured it to do so - a feat quite difficult without the benefit of a keyboard or mouse), it was still clear that Linux was maturing quite nicely.
What I, as a novice Linux user, was most put off about was the overabundance of different user interfaces across the board. Nothing was consistent; settings/programs/utilities were oddly named (K-this, K-that) haphazardly organized (sometimes even within the same flavor) and the entire experience was largely confusing for a Linux newbie like myself. And I hate to say it, but outside of the disorder I was really under-whelmed by the look of the desktops across the board. Each interface felt foreign, dated and clunky, outside of Lycros which felt familiar, dated and clunky (being essentially stolen from Windows XP). Then again I've been a Mac user for the last ten years so perhaps I'm just afraid of change.
Regardless, in my opinion for Linux to make any real inroads with average users like myself they've got to standardize on a single interface. Too many different looks confuse those of us who actually use the GUI and stand as a huge roadblock to adoption for those who can barely transition from one version of Windows to the next in six year increments.
"The problem is a lack of highly educated workers willing to work for the minimum wage or lower in the U.S."
Carly also added, "If it were up to me, corporations would just be allowed to drive around freely and gather up workers at our discretion and keep them in little camps where they could earn their way to freedom. I mean when you think about it they already pay so much for a college education and then only have work it off at minimum wage anyway, so the difference is negligible at best."
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Honestly I think malware is the consumer's fault. Seriously, if people didn't try to circumvent advertising with their pop-up blocker software and their Tivos, we wouldn't be in this spot. It's only natural that companies are going to have to find new venues for advertising. And honestly I don't find this stuff all that intrusive.
Wait hang on. Phone call. It's my mortgage company. Never mind, telemarketer. Okay as I was saying, I really don't think that advertising is as intrusive as people make it out to be. I mean is it that disruptive to take out a second of your day to... oooh e-mail. Hold on, something about my penis. This must be important... Hmm, guess not. Usually things about my penis are fairly important.
Okay where were we? Grr, hold on. Yes honey I checked the mail. No, just something from Citibank. It's not a bank statement. We don't even use Citibank, honey. Yeah you also got something about a free cell phone. Did we order a new cell phone? Well it says it's ready to be shipped. Why would I order a new cell phone and then ask you if you did? All I'm saying is that someone is sending us a cell phone. I'm not going to fight about this.
I'm back. Oh what now? What's this? A fax? I'm not familiar with this vacation company. No, throw it away. I don't care if it's only $99 to go to Disney, we're not going to Disney. All right, back to the topic on hand. I was watching this commercial on TV the other day and... ah forget it. Windows needs to be optimized. I better click on this. I mean it just popped up so it's gotta be important...
I'm not sure if it's coincidence or not but ever since signing up for the DNC list I've gotten more pre-recorded messages than ever before. The actual real live human being* telemarketers are near extinct on my land-land however so that's a blessing. We were up to around 15-20 calls a day. But it's still odd that we never got the prerecorded stuff before the list. Now my days are filled with "call this number to subscribe to our newspaper, satellite internet is now available in your area, we can help you with your mortgage..." * Though soulless, telemarketers are technically human.
"What do you mean no prior business relationship? You said hello. Hello is a greeting and greetings are an integral part of relationships. Now about that home mortgage..."
What Lies Ahead For Linux!
This punctuation brought to you by your friends at Microsoft.
What they don't realize is that iSync is not a HotSync replacement. I've posted on several Mac-related boards yesterday about Palm dropping Mac support and no one seems to care. They have iSync.
Heck as far as I know this news is not even on any of the Mac news sites (save SpyMac and Macrumors) since everyone assumes this means only the death of Palm Desktop (which virtually no one on the Mac side uses anyway).
So, you're smart enough to have noticed those same exact bogus comments on other teacher's profiles but you're assuming that the students are too dumb to notice that to.
I wasn't belittling the intelligence of the students, I'm just simply making a statement that these types of sites can be dangerous to someone's career. That's all.
I mean it's an open forum to criticize someone at their job by people who may or may not have even ever met the person they're criticizing. And while I respect that some students would realize this (students were the ones who brought it to my attention, I had never even visited the site on my own prior to this) it's certainly plausible that other students won't notice. And even if that were to impact just one student's opinion of a teacher, that's a bad thing.
I'm a teacher and a lot of the students at our school use a site similar to TeacherReviews.com to help find out general information about the teachers prior to taking a class. When the site was first promoted across the college via a horde of seemingly omnipresent leaflets, it was actually a useful tool and students (as well as teachers) put a lot of stock into it. Of course like anything where people are allowed to anonymously post their opinions it's only a matter of time before that system is abused. In our case it took about 3 semesters before bizarre, oddball (sometimes obscene) comments started to show up in teacher's reviews. I myself fell victim to this and went from a near perfect score to a slightly battered rating through a span of strange, bogus comments from unregistered users. Had I not seen these same exact comments on other teacher's profiles I might have been worried. What concerns me however isn't necessarily the bad ratings (which cannot be removed), it's that students STILL refer to this site regardless of the validity of the reviews and there's not much we as teachers can do about it. Never mind the fact that upper management is sure to start trolling the site to get the "real, inside scoop" on their employees. Shudder. In my opinion if you're going to operate a site that can negatively impact a person's career perhaps you should make sure the information posted on the site is remotely legitimate before it gets posted.
But I really doubt that Linux will ever conquer the desktop until it decides to pick an interface and stick with it. Admittedly I've used Linux only a select few times. However I have established boxes running RedHat, YellowDog, Lycoris and Mandrake just to see how far this OS had come along. Outside of my particular issues with each subsequent install and overlooking the technical glitches (Mandrake would not recognize my particular keyboard and mouse until I configured it to do so - a feat quite difficult without the benefit of a keyboard or mouse), it was still clear that Linux was maturing quite nicely.
What I, as a novice Linux user, was most put off about was the overabundance of different user interfaces across the board. Nothing was consistent; settings/programs/utilities were oddly named (K-this, K-that) haphazardly organized (sometimes even within the same flavor) and the entire experience was largely confusing for a Linux newbie like myself. And I hate to say it, but outside of the disorder I was really under-whelmed by the look of the desktops across the board. Each interface felt foreign, dated and clunky, outside of Lycros which felt familiar, dated and clunky (being essentially stolen from Windows XP). Then again I've been a Mac user for the last ten years so perhaps I'm just afraid of change.
Regardless, in my opinion for Linux to make any real inroads with average users like myself they've got to standardize on a single interface. Too many different looks confuse those of us who actually use the GUI and stand as a huge roadblock to adoption for those who can barely transition from one version of Windows to the next in six year increments.
"The problem is a lack of highly educated workers willing to work for the minimum wage or lower in the U.S."
Carly also added, "If it were up to me, corporations would just be allowed to drive around freely and gather up workers at our discretion and keep them in little camps where they could earn their way to freedom. I mean when you think about it they already pay so much for a college education and then only have work it off at minimum wage anyway, so the difference is negligible at best."