Actually, this leads into something I have been thinking about lately. The company I work for is small and thus does not have a Volume License or Enterprise agreement for Windows XP. We buy machines with OEM XP licenses, image the machines (based off an OEM install), and use the product key that is affixed the the outside of the computer. Imaging the machines is a lot easier than removing all the crapware and loading up all of the standard company stuff.
As of late we have been buying products from reputable vendors (CDW, PCMALL) that come "Preloaded" with Windows XP. Only problem? The only product key tag included with the unit is a Windows Vista key. I talked to my sales rep and he said we have a license for Windows XP but not a product key......
So when I go to dump a standard company image on said computers.... I actually have no way to register the copy of Windows XP. I probably shouldn't admit this freely but what the hell....the company supposedly has a legit license to use that operating System. I've been grabbing the numbers off the Product ID tags of other machines in the building and doubling up on them. I've only done this with four machines thus far, but technically what I am doing is illegal. I don't like to run an IT Department that way but what other options do I have?
What it comes down to, is that I am doing exactly as you said...I'm "Pirating" Windows XP. Anyone know what to do in this scenario?
That is an interesting thought, as temperatures on the moon range from somewhere around 130 degrees C to -100 Degrees C (I could be wrong on that). The question is...how rapidly in terms of distance does the temperature shift? With no atmosphere you probably get a reasonably sharp drop off, but even say....20 miles is a pretty major construction project.
Not that a nuclear reactor isn't a major project....
I second the cash-only thing for local transactions. I myself found that swiping a card through a machine to pay for goods seemed much less "real" and made me tend to spend more money. Seeing the bills in my wallet dwindle has a much more potent psychological effect on me than checking my account balance online.
Oh, and T-Bone down the street doesn't take credit cards or checks so it is just more handy for me to have cash on me for those late night cravings.
For what its worth, Benzocaine's structure is far different from that of Cocaine, where Novocaine (Procaine) is a derivative of Cocaine. I'm way past my Biochemistry days but I would think that it would be fairly easy to tell the difference between Benzocaine and Cocaine. As far as Novocaine...while almost anyone who has visited a dentist has probably had Novocaine injections, I'm thinking that far fewer people have ever touched solid Novocaine compared to people who have touched solid Cocaine. At least in the states, you cannot purchase Novocaine through normal means and there is hardly a hot black market for it.
Speaking of Japan, I have a little personal anecdote to tell....
I work at a company that is a subsidiary of a Japanese company. For that reason, we always have a handful of Japanese Workers that rotate through the office. Earlier this year I was outside during break. Two of the men from Japan were standing out there too. They are both very intelligent individuals and are pretty savvy when it comes to American culture. One of them looked down and found a $10 Bill rolled up into a perfect snorting straw. The guy that picked up the money said to the other one something like "Wow, why would someone keep their money like this instead of folded? It seems like it would be easy to lose." The other Japanese man was talking about ways that the bill could have accidently ended up like that...
The other American workers standing around were pretty darn quite about the bill, knowing full well why it was rolled up as such. As the Japanese men have quite a bit of power, nobody really talked about it until they were out of earshot. Now, in my experience some of the workers from Japan are incredibly clever and it is possible that they were trying to bait someone somehow or just try to play dumb for other reasons....but I know these guys fairly well and their mannerisms and tone seemed to indicate that they were truly puzzled.
I guess my point is that perhaps snorting coke from rolled up money is not as common in Japan as it is here. Perhaps they don't have as many people that use cocaine, perhaps the people that do use cocaine tend to use straws/other similar device, shoot their cocaine, or smoke their cocaine.
While I do agree there is a gambling aspect to the stock market, there is a big difference. Those 50 shares of Company X you purchased at $20 a share may have plummeted to $5...meaning you "Lost" $750...but you do still have those stocks. They could rally back to $20...maybe next month, maybe next year. The $1000 you put down on "Red Bucket" to win the Horse Race is positively gone for good if Red Bucket doesn't win right there, right now.
There is real investing going on, too. Every single person in the Country with a 401k through their company is playing the stock market game....just not in the Day Trader sort of way. I'm really not big on looking over all sorts of historic trends but I'm guessing that anyone that lets their money sit in a 401k fund (without panicking and taking it out at a horrible time or something) is going to make money above normal interest over an extended period of time.
I used to play Texas Hold 'Em Online a few years back on sites like PokerRoom.com and PartyPoker.com. I'm not talking large amounts...I'm not that good of a player but enjoy the game. Once in awhile I would buy $20 worth of credits and play a few $5 Tables and I would play the "Free Roll" (A free tournament where you can win a few hundred dollars). I actually won a decent sized tournament once and they sent me a check for $500. It was really no hassle.
Anyway, the point is, one day I received an EMAIL from both of the sites saying that United States residents could no longer play for real money after . When that date came, I was curious to see how things would be handled. The Sites said that they would not mail checks to anyone in the states. I tried to buy Credits....Visa and Mastercard (I figured I'd buy a hat with the money if the transaction went through) wouldn't allow it.
The point is, I don't even know if the individual states need to get on board. Get the credit card companies to not allow transactions to these places, get the larger gaming sites to comply and it is done. Can you still gamble online? Probably...if you are willing to pay Western Union to wire money to a smaller and probably less trusthworthy organization and hope that if you DO win they will actually send you the winnings. It is like gambling twice.
Actually, I used to "Roll My Own" smokes. Actually it wasn't so much "rolling" because I purchased loose tobacco and tubes with filters attached and had a machine to stuff them. When I started doing that (I'd say about 7 years ago) I was paying about $12 for a Carton (200 Cigarettes). I stopped doing it out of laziness about two years ago but recently was going to get back into it. They had increased bags of tobacco enough that I was looking at $40 per carton to do it myself. The savings was not worth my time (see below for my purchasing habits)
So now I bounce between buying them online (yes, I have a good overseas source that does not report to the IRS. No, I will not talk about who they are) and buying whatever brand is on sale. While everyone else pays $6.50 for a pack I pay $2.40 from the online sources, and usually $2.50-$4.00 for on sale brands (it is not unusually for something like Camel #9 to be buy one get one free. The cheapest cigarettes I get around here are the Marlboro 72's when they are buy 1 get 1 free. They go normally for about $4.75 a pack so they are somewhere around $2.50 when they are B1G1.
But yes, there are plenty of smokers that freak out if they cannot get their usual brand of smokes. That is odd to me as I dislike smoking the same thing all the time. All cigarettes (From roll your own, to American Spirit, To Marlboro Lights, to Parliments, to Camel really all have very subtle nuances when it comes to flavor, filter texture, smell, and overall smoking experience.
I'll fully admit to being pretty addicted to Nicotine. At this point in time in my life...I have no problem with that fact. I never think "I wish I had never started smoking" or "I wish I could quit" or "I don't even enjoy it" which are comments you year from a lot of smokers. I really like smoking cigarettes. I enjoy nearly every cigarette I smoke (sometimes I get a few crappy smokes in a pack or something). I have not even considered quitting. Future lifestyle changes may change my mind (I intend to have children in the next few years and I don't think I want to smoke with an infant/toddler in the house) but until then....I'll be enjoying my smokes.
If you state your comment in a funny enough manor then all sins are forgiven.
None of the manors I have ever been in weren't very funny at all. They were mostly impressive. I'll assume it is a matter of taste and next time I visit a manor I will state my comment hoping it is funny enough.
Let's face it, even if you have the guy on site you aren't going to be standing behind him making sure he doesn't steal the entire time he is there. If the person who does your work is unscrupulous and your IP is interesting enough that they want to steal it, I would say they are going to steal it if they work remotely or on site.
I probably would try to insist upon meeting any techs that will work on your stuff face to face on a few occasions. Not that you'll definitly be able to spot a thief but you will get to see if the individual is someone that you feel comfortable with.
Keep in mind that just as you are saving money, the place you are outsourcing too is doing the same. There are so many benefits to them to not have to send someone out. They save money in gas. They don't lose an hour or so per incident to travel time. The tech that would have come out might be able to work on something else while he is patching your servers. The tech who comes on site benefits from being able to bounce ideas off others sitting in his vicinity rather than trying to call someone if he gets in trouble. There are a myriad of reasons why they may want to work remotely that are not remotely connected to ripping you off.
Another thing to consider...let us say that you hired me to come on site and be your Admin. I see a potential gold mind in ripping off your information and selling it so I go ahead and do it. You end up catching me. You sue me and are awarded all of the $8,000 in my bank account. I go to jail. That hardly makes up for the damages I caused you. A consulting firm is going to be able to compensate you more fully if one of their employees turned out to be a schmuck.
If you still would rather have them on site, see if you could work out a deal for slightly higher hourly wages to offset the "Hard" and "Soft" costs associated with sending someone on-site. If you can make it worth their while I would think they would be willing to accomidate you.
No doubt about it, an actual "Fair" way of doing this experiment that isn't completely destructive to the participants seems difficult and I didn't present a possible way to go about it because I have NO idea.
The test that you outlined would be interesting from an intelligence development level as well as a sociological point of view. Even today it seems that a good percentage of the population from a young age like to surround themselves with people that are similar to themselves (Geeks hanging with Geeks, Jocks hanging with Jocks, Caucasians hanging with Caucasians, African Americans hanging with African Americans.....etc). I refuse to believe that SOME of that (At least on the ethnic end of things....common interests will always bring people together.)
I am not so sure if we'll ever be completely rid of prejudice because I don't think we'll ever be completely rid of ignorance. In some circles it seems obvious that prejudice is absolutely foolish but a quick trip to a few bars located in a predominantly White, Blue Collar suburb can be proof enough that it still exists in both the older and newer generations.
I really hate to help support a troll's point of view, but the fact is that I have seen numerous sources (If I need to I will dig them up but I'm pretty sure it isn't hard to find) that indicate that on average the African American Population has a lower IQ than the rest of the Population of the United States.
This of course, does feed into your post as I think the next question is "Are our IQ tests really indicative of intelligence or do they lean too heavily on prior knowledge/education?" No doubt I believe Educational difference is the case but if we want to even pretend to address this using anything close to the Scientific Method we can't rule out the possibility that certain populations have genes floating around their gene pool that make them more or less able to perform well on that sort of test for whatever reason....even if we are not altogether comfortable with that outcome. At this point in time that possibility seems to have been abandoned because of the enormous social problems that would result if that were so.
On the other hand, a truly well done study that is controlled for Education level that proves that African Americans have the same average IQ as all other ethnic groups would blow up one of the fundamental beliefs of racists...the belief that for some reason African Americans are intelluctually inferior. That would be a positive thing.
As far as a Science and Technology type Museum trip, you don't want to make Milwaukee you primary destination, but if you are hitting some of the Michigan sites that have been mentioned and of course, the Chicago Museums it may be worth your time to take a little jaunt up to Milwaukee. The Milwaukee Public Museum has been hurting for cash (I believe they basically laid off all the curators) but there have a decent "Earth" exhibit that includes some dinosaur stuff, plate tectonic stuff, and geology stuff. They also have a somewhat interesting rain forest exhibit and participate in a traveling exhibit (not sure what they have right now). I heard they also have some kind of planetarium thing going on right now but I do not know what that is about.
Not to mention the Milwaukee County Zoo is really spectacular. I know I'm pushing the bounds of what you asked about but if that type of thing interests you also it really is a nice zoo to visit. I don't know if it really gets the credit nationally that it deserves.
Mind you I don't want to oversell these attractions in Milwaukee. If you made a special trip for them you probably would want to find me and kick me in the face....but being two hours from Chicago might make it easy enough to be worth your while, should you choose to go in that direction.
Let me throw another one out there: Everybody hates the office martyr. You know the one. She seems to be there every night until long after everybody leaves, but she never seems to get anything done. Whenever more work lands on her plate, she complains, "OMG, can I possibly get any more work? I never have time to get anything done as it is!" You suggest that maybe she's burning out and should take some vacation time. "I caiiinnn't! Have you seen how much work they pile on me? This place would fall apart if I took three days off." Eventually everybody else starts picking up work from this employee's plate "as a favor," because she never gets anything done, and still she won't take vacation, and still she keeps complaining. Encountered one of those before?
These people are quite annoying. They usually "Work" long hours but those hours consist of getting coffee/socializing/surfing the internet until morning break and stopping with any actual productive work by 2 or 3 PM.
Where I am at I get the real early morning/late night calls and do all the at home, off hours work. It is a pain when it happens, but it doesn't happen all that often. Aside from that I come into the office, sit down, and am working within five minutes. While at work I actually work. My managers can see that I am doing actual work by the fact that I actually get stuff done. Because of those two things (Working hard the entire time I am there, doing all the crazy hours crap) I come in when I want and only actually stay in the office 24-30 hours a week (usually over 4 days). I've been doing this for three years now. Nobody complains about my hours at all. They wouldn't want to deal with some of the crazy times I have to do work at. I don't complain, as it fits pretty well with my lifestyle. I don't want to deal with being actually at work for 50+ hours a week. It works out wonderfully for everyone. My pay isn't mind blowingly awesome but I could be doing much worse for myself.
I know it isn't an option for most people these days when we are all mostly lucky to have a job, but I got the position I wanted by moving around a few times and not just taking new positions because they offered a slightly higher wage. "How flexible are you with working hours? Not very? Ok, I like your company, but I am probably not the ideal candidate for the job and you aren't the ideal employer for this candidate." If you are employed, take the time to look for a job that you think will come closest to treating you as you expect to be treated.
I had a Merchant Account of some sort (I honestly don't remember the details) a few years back. I could accept Visa and Mastercard but the fees for other cards (Discover, American Express) were pretty insane. I'm not going to guarantee that my statement is factual but I think Discover cards were between 4-6%. That is a pretty significant percentage.
Heck, even 1-2% can be significant for small business owners. There is a local liquor/basic grocery store across from my house. I've helped them install security cameras and some POS software in exchange for some free merchandise so they talk pretty freely with me about their margins. About a month ago we were talking and the owner was telling me that One of the highest volume things they sell are individual packs of cigarettes. They charge $6.41 for a pack of Marlboro's. They make $0.21 off the transaction, or ~3.3%. Not exactly a really high mark up. Make the prices any higher and the customers may start traveling two extra blocks to a chain gas station. I'm real close to a college campus and they get tons of college kids that come in and swipe the credit/debit card every other day for $6.41...of which 1.5% goes to credit card processing fee. It literally cuts their profit in half but they have to accept it or business will go elsewhere.
This isn't about the USAA or this particular method but it is similar.....
The company I work for has a bank account with Chase Bank where they deposit all of their checks. They announced a "New and Easy way" to get those checks deposited. They sent a special check scanner and we had to register it on their web site and download a Java plugin to make it work. No problems there. It seemed very nice. A few days into it the woman who is responsible for processing the checks had me come over to unjam a check from the scanner. Five minutes later another, and then another....
We contacted the bank and described the problem. They said it must be a bad scanner and sent a new one (At which point we had to go through this un-registration/registration process.) Not ten checks into the new scanner, it jammed again. I tried doing the check feeding in case the woman doing the scanning was somehow screwing something up. Same result. I called and talked to them to see if we could get a different model scanner. No way. That is the scanner they use. Weeks and an additional two scanners later, the company gave up and started doing whatever it is they did before.
Taking a picture of the check would probably work ok, but using a standard scanner would really be preferred as they process a lot of checks. I could see the IPHONE picture method running into problems with poor lighting/excess lighting causing people to constantly have to resubmit checks due to legibility issues. A scanner is going to be more consistent in the quality of the image....I would think.
While I do like the idea of Fine Arts trying to be innovative instead of just replaying past performances that have been successful this is a little ridiculous. I'm guessing this is a publicity stunt of sorts...."There are a lot of people talking about Twitter these days but not so many people talking about the Opera. Let's make an Opera based on Twitter. People will talk about it then!" instead of a being a genuinely interesting idea. It seems too much like the Opera conceding that people would rather sit around and write/read really short and inane posts than attend a lengthy artistic story.
As a side note, the heavy exposure that Twitter is getting makes me want to punch myself in the face repeatedly. I explored the world of Twitter for a couple of hours a while back to see what the buzz was about and I just...don't....get it. I think you would have to be a special kind of person to be reasonably funny/interesting/entertaining on a consistent basis using 140 characters or less. The Twitter posts I did read (And I fully admit that I did not read a huge amount of them) were not in any way worthwhile to me. Obviously a pretty large number of people disagree with me though.
It is likely that back when your primary machine was a 386sx laptop you either A. Didn't do exactly the same kind of things with the laptop you do now (Which is likely, as whatever you were programming back then probably had far different expectation than now) or B. You only ran one app at a time back then because that was about all you could do anyway but would have ran several windows all over the screen if you could have.
It is nice to have say....a Web Development tool open, a web page opened to test the site you are developing, and two reference sources open right in front of you. It would have been nice back in the day, too. You just didn't have the chance to do that back in the day.
To be fair, if they had rented a year or two, there might not have been a big difference. If they were in "Buy a House" mode I'm thinking if they chose to rent it wouldn't have been a cheap Studio apartment. They may have sat paying $800 monthly for two years which is nearly $20,000 plus paying moving expenses twice instead of once.;)
Off topic you say! No, I'm getting to a point here. A lot of times people say they just want a cheap laptop. Often in the last two years people have shown me ads of $400-$450 laptops and asked me if they were ok. It seemed to suit their needs so I told them it is fine. A year and a half later? Broken laptop. Buy a new one. Now they've purchased 2 $400-$450 laptops and payed to have it set up/software installed/files transferred twice instead of buying a higher quality $800-$900 laptop the first time around and having it last for awhile. The Cheap option has a "Rent a laptop" feel to it for me.
Maybe I just know people who have bad luck or are rough on their stuff but when I see really cheap, new 15.6" Toshiba units I think "Run Away"....and that isn't a knock on Toshiba. Their Tecra line, albeit pretty expensive, is about as quality of a laptop as I've owned. It survived 7 years of hard use. The company I worked for at the time had bought it for me so the price didn't sting as much as it would had I purchased it myself though.
Admittedly I don't know have much first hand experience with Netbooks so I can't speak in terms of longevity or durability but they are priced as throwaway units so I would expect them to not survive as long as a quality laptop. If someone told me they expected to have the unit for say....four years of college I think I would steer them away from a netbook.
I'm not so sure if many of Microsoft tools would survive the death of Windows. There are some things (Internet Explorer, for Example) that survive (I think) simply by default. Obviously if Windows tanked IE would be gone. Their next big product, Office and the programs that are big time associated with it like Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint Server would have to undergo a really really major overhaul to make them work as they are supposed to outside of a Windows/Active Directory environment. Yeah, you can set up Exchange to POP Mail or use Web Access but I don't see the use of buying Exchange to use in this fashion.
ASP.NET, Visual Studio, and SQL Server. Hmmm. It is really hard to say if these things would survive. On one hand Visual Studio and.Net is probably the easiest thing to use to begin programming and getting something that looks cool. I personally also think it is the easiest platform/IDE for a beginning/low end programmer to quickly cobbling together some internal, database applications for a business. Again though...I'm not sure how well.Net Web applications would work without IIS Web Servers. No Windows, No IIS, and their development platform might fold up rather quickly, too.
At this point, if these things all folded or ended up with a heavily diminished market share Microsoft would be in trouble. They have tons of other little pieces of software and some hardware (Mice or whatever) but not enough to really be considered a major player. Since the things I mentioned for the most rely heavily on Windows, I'd say that if Windows failed Microsoft would fail.
You know, this is about as good of a description of what it takes to be a good Syadmin that I've ever read. Unfortunately, a lot of people approach it as "I am here to mess with computers, not hold your hand in explaining what I do to you worthless neophytes" or "I am here because I heard that attending PCproschools would land me a job making $75k a year. I did my schooling now don't bother me with learning new stuff. Just give me my damn money."
Acceptable levels of social skills + patience + love for the technology + accepting that 90% of the time yours is a thankless task = Very happy Sysadmin that is usually quite valuable to the company.
Quite a few pieces of malicious software I have seen lately hijacked the userinit.exe file. Not that this excuses a false positive on an uninfected userinit.exe but I think it makes it more understandable. It isn't just randomly detecting things as a virus/malware.
To be fair, Windows handles WebDav (Http or Https) and FTP shares right through Windows Explorer in just about the same way (Select "Add Network Location" instead of "Places).
Although it is pretty lame that a fresh install of Windows Vista or 7 has zero support for SSH or sFTP. Previous version had Hyperterminal which (I believe) could connect with SSH. I can't remember though, I've used PuTTY for such things for a while now.
I'll admit that this is true. I was handed a piece of paper at freshman orientation that gave "average starting salaries" for various degrees with regional and national columns. I'd imagine that some people use that sort of thing to decide their degree path. I had already made up my mind so it didn't sway me. I wanted to be a Biochemist...although that $70,000 starting average in the state of Wisconsin did look pretty sweet.
I worked at an off campus lab for a year and a half before I graduated for typical college student wages ($8 an hour or something) and was actually performing research for half that time. They brought me on full time when I got my degree at....$27,000 per year. A mere $43,000 less than the average salary according to the inflated sheet I had been given as a freshman. For reasons not relating to money I did quit about 9 months later and entered the IT field, where I started off even lower on the pay scale. It took a few years and hard work to get myself up to a decent salary but I don't regret any of it.
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Actually, this leads into something I have been thinking about lately. The company I work for is small and thus does not have a Volume License or Enterprise agreement for Windows XP. We buy machines with OEM XP licenses, image the machines (based off an OEM install), and use the product key that is affixed the the outside of the computer. Imaging the machines is a lot easier than removing all the crapware and loading up all of the standard company stuff.
As of late we have been buying products from reputable vendors (CDW, PCMALL) that come "Preloaded" with Windows XP. Only problem? The only product key tag included with the unit is a Windows Vista key. I talked to my sales rep and he said we have a license for Windows XP but not a product key......
So when I go to dump a standard company image on said computers.... I actually have no way to register the copy of Windows XP. I probably shouldn't admit this freely but what the hell....the company supposedly has a legit license to use that operating System. I've been grabbing the numbers off the Product ID tags of other machines in the building and doubling up on them. I've only done this with four machines thus far, but technically what I am doing is illegal. I don't like to run an IT Department that way but what other options do I have?
What it comes down to, is that I am doing exactly as you said...I'm "Pirating" Windows XP. Anyone know what to do in this scenario?
That is an interesting thought, as temperatures on the moon range from somewhere around 130 degrees C to -100 Degrees C (I could be wrong on that). The question is...how rapidly in terms of distance does the temperature shift? With no atmosphere you probably get a reasonably sharp drop off, but even say....20 miles is a pretty major construction project.
Not that a nuclear reactor isn't a major project....
I second the cash-only thing for local transactions. I myself found that swiping a card through a machine to pay for goods seemed much less "real" and made me tend to spend more money. Seeing the bills in my wallet dwindle has a much more potent psychological effect on me than checking my account balance online.
Oh, and T-Bone down the street doesn't take credit cards or checks so it is just more handy for me to have cash on me for those late night cravings.
For what its worth, Benzocaine's structure is far different from that of Cocaine, where Novocaine (Procaine) is a derivative of Cocaine. I'm way past my Biochemistry days but I would think that it would be fairly easy to tell the difference between Benzocaine and Cocaine. As far as Novocaine...while almost anyone who has visited a dentist has probably had Novocaine injections, I'm thinking that far fewer people have ever touched solid Novocaine compared to people who have touched solid Cocaine. At least in the states, you cannot purchase Novocaine through normal means and there is hardly a hot black market for it.
Speaking of Japan, I have a little personal anecdote to tell....
I work at a company that is a subsidiary of a Japanese company. For that reason, we always have a handful of Japanese Workers that rotate through the office. Earlier this year I was outside during break. Two of the men from Japan were standing out there too. They are both very intelligent individuals and are pretty savvy when it comes to American culture. One of them looked down and found a $10 Bill rolled up into a perfect snorting straw. The guy that picked up the money said to the other one something like "Wow, why would someone keep their money like this instead of folded? It seems like it would be easy to lose." The other Japanese man was talking about ways that the bill could have accidently ended up like that...
The other American workers standing around were pretty darn quite about the bill, knowing full well why it was rolled up as such. As the Japanese men have quite a bit of power, nobody really talked about it until they were out of earshot. Now, in my experience some of the workers from Japan are incredibly clever and it is possible that they were trying to bait someone somehow or just try to play dumb for other reasons....but I know these guys fairly well and their mannerisms and tone seemed to indicate that they were truly puzzled.
I guess my point is that perhaps snorting coke from rolled up money is not as common in Japan as it is here. Perhaps they don't have as many people that use cocaine, perhaps the people that do use cocaine tend to use straws/other similar device, shoot their cocaine, or smoke their cocaine.
While I do agree there is a gambling aspect to the stock market, there is a big difference. Those 50 shares of Company X you purchased at $20 a share may have plummeted to $5...meaning you "Lost" $750...but you do still have those stocks. They could rally back to $20...maybe next month, maybe next year. The $1000 you put down on "Red Bucket" to win the Horse Race is positively gone for good if Red Bucket doesn't win right there, right now.
There is real investing going on, too. Every single person in the Country with a 401k through their company is playing the stock market game....just not in the Day Trader sort of way. I'm really not big on looking over all sorts of historic trends but I'm guessing that anyone that lets their money sit in a 401k fund (without panicking and taking it out at a horrible time or something) is going to make money above normal interest over an extended period of time.
I used to play Texas Hold 'Em Online a few years back on sites like PokerRoom.com and PartyPoker.com. I'm not talking large amounts...I'm not that good of a player but enjoy the game. Once in awhile I would buy $20 worth of credits and play a few $5 Tables and I would play the "Free Roll" (A free tournament where you can win a few hundred dollars). I actually won a decent sized tournament once and they sent me a check for $500. It was really no hassle.
Anyway, the point is, one day I received an EMAIL from both of the sites saying that United States residents could no longer play for real money after . When that date came, I was curious to see how things would be handled. The Sites said that they would not mail checks to anyone in the states. I tried to buy Credits....Visa and Mastercard (I figured I'd buy a hat with the money if the transaction went through) wouldn't allow it.
The point is, I don't even know if the individual states need to get on board. Get the credit card companies to not allow transactions to these places, get the larger gaming sites to comply and it is done. Can you still gamble online? Probably...if you are willing to pay Western Union to wire money to a smaller and probably less trusthworthy organization and hope that if you DO win they will actually send you the winnings. It is like gambling twice.
Actually, I used to "Roll My Own" smokes. Actually it wasn't so much "rolling" because I purchased loose tobacco and tubes with filters attached and had a machine to stuff them. When I started doing that (I'd say about 7 years ago) I was paying about $12 for a Carton (200 Cigarettes). I stopped doing it out of laziness about two years ago but recently was going to get back into it. They had increased bags of tobacco enough that I was looking at $40 per carton to do it myself. The savings was not worth my time (see below for my purchasing habits)
So now I bounce between buying them online (yes, I have a good overseas source that does not report to the IRS. No, I will not talk about who they are) and buying whatever brand is on sale. While everyone else pays $6.50 for a pack I pay $2.40 from the online sources, and usually $2.50-$4.00 for on sale brands (it is not unusually for something like Camel #9 to be buy one get one free. The cheapest cigarettes I get around here are the Marlboro 72's when they are buy 1 get 1 free. They go normally for about $4.75 a pack so they are somewhere around $2.50 when they are B1G1.
But yes, there are plenty of smokers that freak out if they cannot get their usual brand of smokes. That is odd to me as I dislike smoking the same thing all the time. All cigarettes (From roll your own, to American Spirit, To Marlboro Lights, to Parliments, to Camel really all have very subtle nuances when it comes to flavor, filter texture, smell, and overall smoking experience.
I'll fully admit to being pretty addicted to Nicotine. At this point in time in my life...I have no problem with that fact. I never think "I wish I had never started smoking" or "I wish I could quit" or "I don't even enjoy it" which are comments you year from a lot of smokers. I really like smoking cigarettes. I enjoy nearly every cigarette I smoke (sometimes I get a few crappy smokes in a pack or something). I have not even considered quitting. Future lifestyle changes may change my mind (I intend to have children in the next few years and I don't think I want to smoke with an infant/toddler in the house) but until then....I'll be enjoying my smokes.
Careful! I think I posted that same thing 6 years ago or so. She never left and I ended up marrying her!
If you state your comment in a funny enough manor then all sins are forgiven.
None of the manors I have ever been in weren't very funny at all. They were mostly impressive. I'll assume it is a matter of taste and next time I visit a manor I will state my comment hoping it is funny enough.
Let's face it, even if you have the guy on site you aren't going to be standing behind him making sure he doesn't steal the entire time he is there. If the person who does your work is unscrupulous and your IP is interesting enough that they want to steal it, I would say they are going to steal it if they work remotely or on site.
I probably would try to insist upon meeting any techs that will work on your stuff face to face on a few occasions. Not that you'll definitly be able to spot a thief but you will get to see if the individual is someone that you feel comfortable with.
Keep in mind that just as you are saving money, the place you are outsourcing too is doing the same. There are so many benefits to them to not have to send someone out. They save money in gas. They don't lose an hour or so per incident to travel time. The tech that would have come out might be able to work on something else while he is patching your servers. The tech who comes on site benefits from being able to bounce ideas off others sitting in his vicinity rather than trying to call someone if he gets in trouble. There are a myriad of reasons why they may want to work remotely that are not remotely connected to ripping you off.
Another thing to consider...let us say that you hired me to come on site and be your Admin. I see a potential gold mind in ripping off your information and selling it so I go ahead and do it. You end up catching me. You sue me and are awarded all of the $8,000 in my bank account. I go to jail. That hardly makes up for the damages I caused you. A consulting firm is going to be able to compensate you more fully if one of their employees turned out to be a schmuck.
If you still would rather have them on site, see if you could work out a deal for slightly higher hourly wages to offset the "Hard" and "Soft" costs associated with sending someone on-site. If you can make it worth their while I would think they would be willing to accomidate you.
No doubt about it, an actual "Fair" way of doing this experiment that isn't completely destructive to the participants seems difficult and I didn't present a possible way to go about it because I have NO idea.
The test that you outlined would be interesting from an intelligence development level as well as a sociological point of view. Even today it seems that a good percentage of the population from a young age like to surround themselves with people that are similar to themselves (Geeks hanging with Geeks, Jocks hanging with Jocks, Caucasians hanging with Caucasians, African Americans hanging with African Americans.....etc). I refuse to believe that SOME of that (At least on the ethnic end of things....common interests will always bring people together.)
I am not so sure if we'll ever be completely rid of prejudice because I don't think we'll ever be completely rid of ignorance. In some circles it seems obvious that prejudice is absolutely foolish but a quick trip to a few bars located in a predominantly White, Blue Collar suburb can be proof enough that it still exists in both the older and newer generations.
Sorry for swerving way off topic...
I really hate to help support a troll's point of view, but the fact is that I have seen numerous sources (If I need to I will dig them up but I'm pretty sure it isn't hard to find) that indicate that on average the African American Population has a lower IQ than the rest of the Population of the United States.
This of course, does feed into your post as I think the next question is "Are our IQ tests really indicative of intelligence or do they lean too heavily on prior knowledge/education?" No doubt I believe Educational difference is the case but if we want to even pretend to address this using anything close to the Scientific Method we can't rule out the possibility that certain populations have genes floating around their gene pool that make them more or less able to perform well on that sort of test for whatever reason....even if we are not altogether comfortable with that outcome. At this point in time that possibility seems to have been abandoned because of the enormous social problems that would result if that were so.
On the other hand, a truly well done study that is controlled for Education level that proves that African Americans have the same average IQ as all other ethnic groups would blow up one of the fundamental beliefs of racists...the belief that for some reason African Americans are intelluctually inferior. That would be a positive thing.
As far as a Science and Technology type Museum trip, you don't want to make Milwaukee you primary destination, but if you are hitting some of the Michigan sites that have been mentioned and of course, the Chicago Museums it may be worth your time to take a little jaunt up to Milwaukee. The Milwaukee Public Museum has been hurting for cash (I believe they basically laid off all the curators) but there have a decent "Earth" exhibit that includes some dinosaur stuff, plate tectonic stuff, and geology stuff. They also have a somewhat interesting rain forest exhibit and participate in a traveling exhibit (not sure what they have right now). I heard they also have some kind of planetarium thing going on right now but I do not know what that is about.
Not to mention the Milwaukee County Zoo is really spectacular. I know I'm pushing the bounds of what you asked about but if that type of thing interests you also it really is a nice zoo to visit. I don't know if it really gets the credit nationally that it deserves.
Mind you I don't want to oversell these attractions in Milwaukee. If you made a special trip for them you probably would want to find me and kick me in the face....but being two hours from Chicago might make it easy enough to be worth your while, should you choose to go in that direction.
Let me throw another one out there: Everybody hates the office martyr. You know the one. She seems to be there every night until long after everybody leaves, but she never seems to get anything done. Whenever more work lands on her plate, she complains, "OMG, can I possibly get any more work? I never have time to get anything done as it is!" You suggest that maybe she's burning out and should take some vacation time. "I caiiinnn't! Have you seen how much work they pile on me? This place would fall apart if I took three days off." Eventually everybody else starts picking up work from this employee's plate "as a favor," because she never gets anything done, and still she won't take vacation, and still she keeps complaining. Encountered one of those before?
These people are quite annoying. They usually "Work" long hours but those hours consist of getting coffee/socializing/surfing the internet until morning break and stopping with any actual productive work by 2 or 3 PM.
Where I am at I get the real early morning/late night calls and do all the at home, off hours work. It is a pain when it happens, but it doesn't happen all that often. Aside from that I come into the office, sit down, and am working within five minutes. While at work I actually work. My managers can see that I am doing actual work by the fact that I actually get stuff done. Because of those two things (Working hard the entire time I am there, doing all the crazy hours crap) I come in when I want and only actually stay in the office 24-30 hours a week (usually over 4 days). I've been doing this for three years now. Nobody complains about my hours at all. They wouldn't want to deal with some of the crazy times I have to do work at. I don't complain, as it fits pretty well with my lifestyle. I don't want to deal with being actually at work for 50+ hours a week. It works out wonderfully for everyone. My pay isn't mind blowingly awesome but I could be doing much worse for myself.
I know it isn't an option for most people these days when we are all mostly lucky to have a job, but I got the position I wanted by moving around a few times and not just taking new positions because they offered a slightly higher wage. "How flexible are you with working hours? Not very? Ok, I like your company, but I am probably not the ideal candidate for the job and you aren't the ideal employer for this candidate." If you are employed, take the time to look for a job that you think will come closest to treating you as you expect to be treated.
I had a Merchant Account of some sort (I honestly don't remember the details) a few years back. I could accept Visa and Mastercard but the fees for other cards (Discover, American Express) were pretty insane. I'm not going to guarantee that my statement is factual but I think Discover cards were between 4-6%. That is a pretty significant percentage.
Heck, even 1-2% can be significant for small business owners. There is a local liquor/basic grocery store across from my house. I've helped them install security cameras and some POS software in exchange for some free merchandise so they talk pretty freely with me about their margins. About a month ago we were talking and the owner was telling me that One of the highest volume things they sell are individual packs of cigarettes. They charge $6.41 for a pack of Marlboro's. They make $0.21 off the transaction, or ~3.3%. Not exactly a really high mark up. Make the prices any higher and the customers may start traveling two extra blocks to a chain gas station. I'm real close to a college campus and they get tons of college kids that come in and swipe the credit/debit card every other day for $6.41...of which 1.5% goes to credit card processing fee. It literally cuts their profit in half but they have to accept it or business will go elsewhere.
This isn't about the USAA or this particular method but it is similar.....
The company I work for has a bank account with Chase Bank where they deposit all of their checks. They announced a "New and Easy way" to get those checks deposited. They sent a special check scanner and we had to register it on their web site and download a Java plugin to make it work. No problems there. It seemed very nice. A few days into it the woman who is responsible for processing the checks had me come over to unjam a check from the scanner. Five minutes later another, and then another....
We contacted the bank and described the problem. They said it must be a bad scanner and sent a new one (At which point we had to go through this un-registration/registration process.) Not ten checks into the new scanner, it jammed again. I tried doing the check feeding in case the woman doing the scanning was somehow screwing something up. Same result. I called and talked to them to see if we could get a different model scanner. No way. That is the scanner they use. Weeks and an additional two scanners later, the company gave up and started doing whatever it is they did before.
Taking a picture of the check would probably work ok, but using a standard scanner would really be preferred as they process a lot of checks. I could see the IPHONE picture method running into problems with poor lighting/excess lighting causing people to constantly have to resubmit checks due to legibility issues. A scanner is going to be more consistent in the quality of the image....I would think.
While I do like the idea of Fine Arts trying to be innovative instead of just replaying past performances that have been successful this is a little ridiculous. I'm guessing this is a publicity stunt of sorts...."There are a lot of people talking about Twitter these days but not so many people talking about the Opera. Let's make an Opera based on Twitter. People will talk about it then!" instead of a being a genuinely interesting idea. It seems too much like the Opera conceding that people would rather sit around and write/read really short and inane posts than attend a lengthy artistic story.
As a side note, the heavy exposure that Twitter is getting makes me want to punch myself in the face repeatedly. I explored the world of Twitter for a couple of hours a while back to see what the buzz was about and I just...don't....get it. I think you would have to be a special kind of person to be reasonably funny/interesting/entertaining on a consistent basis using 140 characters or less. The Twitter posts I did read (And I fully admit that I did not read a huge amount of them) were not in any way worthwhile to me. Obviously a pretty large number of people disagree with me though.
It is likely that back when your primary machine was a 386sx laptop you either A. Didn't do exactly the same kind of things with the laptop you do now (Which is likely, as whatever you were programming back then probably had far different expectation than now) or B. You only ran one app at a time back then because that was about all you could do anyway but would have ran several windows all over the screen if you could have.
It is nice to have say....a Web Development tool open, a web page opened to test the site you are developing, and two reference sources open right in front of you. It would have been nice back in the day, too. You just didn't have the chance to do that back in the day.
To be fair, if they had rented a year or two, there might not have been a big difference. If they were in "Buy a House" mode I'm thinking if they chose to rent it wouldn't have been a cheap Studio apartment. They may have sat paying $800 monthly for two years which is nearly $20,000 plus paying moving expenses twice instead of once. ;)
Off topic you say! No, I'm getting to a point here. A lot of times people say they just want a cheap laptop. Often in the last two years people have shown me ads of $400-$450 laptops and asked me if they were ok. It seemed to suit their needs so I told them it is fine. A year and a half later? Broken laptop. Buy a new one. Now they've purchased 2 $400-$450 laptops and payed to have it set up/software installed/files transferred twice instead of buying a higher quality $800-$900 laptop the first time around and having it last for awhile. The Cheap option has a "Rent a laptop" feel to it for me.
Maybe I just know people who have bad luck or are rough on their stuff but when I see really cheap, new 15.6" Toshiba units I think "Run Away"....and that isn't a knock on Toshiba. Their Tecra line, albeit pretty expensive, is about as quality of a laptop as I've owned. It survived 7 years of hard use. The company I worked for at the time had bought it for me so the price didn't sting as much as it would had I purchased it myself though.
Admittedly I don't know have much first hand experience with Netbooks so I can't speak in terms of longevity or durability but they are priced as throwaway units so I would expect them to not survive as long as a quality laptop. If someone told me they expected to have the unit for say....four years of college I think I would steer them away from a netbook.
I'm not so sure if many of Microsoft tools would survive the death of Windows. There are some things (Internet Explorer, for Example) that survive (I think) simply by default. Obviously if Windows tanked IE would be gone. Their next big product, Office and the programs that are big time associated with it like Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint Server would have to undergo a really really major overhaul to make them work as they are supposed to outside of a Windows/Active Directory environment. Yeah, you can set up Exchange to POP Mail or use Web Access but I don't see the use of buying Exchange to use in this fashion.
ASP.NET, Visual Studio, and SQL Server. Hmmm. It is really hard to say if these things would survive. On one hand Visual Studio and .Net is probably the easiest thing to use to begin programming and getting something that looks cool. I personally also think it is the easiest platform/IDE for a beginning/low end programmer to quickly cobbling together some internal, database applications for a business. Again though...I'm not sure how well .Net Web applications would work without IIS Web Servers. No Windows, No IIS, and their development platform might fold up rather quickly, too.
At this point, if these things all folded or ended up with a heavily diminished market share Microsoft would be in trouble. They have tons of other little pieces of software and some hardware (Mice or whatever) but not enough to really be considered a major player. Since the things I mentioned for the most rely heavily on Windows, I'd say that if Windows failed Microsoft would fail.
You know, this is about as good of a description of what it takes to be a good Syadmin that I've ever read. Unfortunately, a lot of people approach it as "I am here to mess with computers, not hold your hand in explaining what I do to you worthless neophytes" or "I am here because I heard that attending PCproschools would land me a job making $75k a year. I did my schooling now don't bother me with learning new stuff. Just give me my damn money."
Acceptable levels of social skills + patience + love for the technology + accepting that 90% of the time yours is a thankless task = Very happy Sysadmin that is usually quite valuable to the company.
Quite a few pieces of malicious software I have seen lately hijacked the userinit.exe file. Not that this excuses a false positive on an uninfected userinit.exe but I think it makes it more understandable. It isn't just randomly detecting things as a virus/malware.
To be fair, Windows handles WebDav (Http or Https) and FTP shares right through Windows Explorer in just about the same way (Select "Add Network Location" instead of "Places).
Although it is pretty lame that a fresh install of Windows Vista or 7 has zero support for SSH or sFTP. Previous version had Hyperterminal which (I believe) could connect with SSH. I can't remember though, I've used PuTTY for such things for a while now.
I'll admit that this is true. I was handed a piece of paper at freshman orientation that gave "average starting salaries" for various degrees with regional and national columns. I'd imagine that some people use that sort of thing to decide their degree path. I had already made up my mind so it didn't sway me. I wanted to be a Biochemist...although that $70,000 starting average in the state of Wisconsin did look pretty sweet.
I worked at an off campus lab for a year and a half before I graduated for typical college student wages ($8 an hour or something) and was actually performing research for half that time. They brought me on full time when I got my degree at....$27,000 per year. A mere $43,000 less than the average salary according to the inflated sheet I had been given as a freshman. For reasons not relating to money I did quit about 9 months later and entered the IT field, where I started off even lower on the pay scale. It took a few years and hard work to get myself up to a decent salary but I don't regret any of it.