I can agree with that. I graduated with a degree in Biochemistry and worked in a lab for my senior year as an intern and was hired on when I graduated. We were working on finding polymer based gene therapy solutions. My typical week was...
Monday - Theorize about which molecules would create polymers best suited to what we were trying to do. I picked about 50 per week. This was the interesting day.
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday - Repeat the same procedure with all 50 molecule combinations that I had thought up. Essentially, measure, spin, do Chromotography, distill, do Chromotography AGAIN, distill, do Chromotgraphy AGAIN, distill, submit a sample of each to the DNA handlers/Rat Testers, run a Gel of each sample. Pretty much 8-12 hours a day standing up.
Friday - Obtain the results and write a page entry in my journal for each of the 50 polymers. Whomever invented the phrase "Thank God it's Friday" never spent the entire day writing out results that too often were demoralizing.
So out of the work week 2 days were sitting down researching or writing, and 3 days were spent pretty much doing "Grunt Work" that anyone in the world could have done after a weeks training.
In the end, I realized how quick I would jump when there was something that needed to be done with the computers, the network, or any of the high tech machines in the lab (Protein Synthasizer) and decided that is what I really wanted to be doing. I do miss the rush that came when I achieved any level of modest success in the lab.
I think that the driving issue is a huge deal in the possible legalization of marijuana. If you drink and consume alcohol, it is quite easy to prove that you were legally intoxicated. Either you'll be drunk enough that you are staggering and swaying or you'll blow into the breathalizer at the roadside and the cops will know if you are "Legally Intoxicated.
Marijuana? While some may argue that they know that the drive better stoned;) I don't want those around me getting stoned and driving any more than I want them drinking and driving. How to tell if they are stoned? A Marijuana high lasts a heck of a lot shorter than a good drunk and stays in your system way longer. If they find Marijuana in your system, are you going to be considered as having been driving under the unfluence?
A few comments based on my own personal habits. Mind you I did not look at your web site, the book on Amazon.com, nor did I pirate your material so I know nothing about how you are distributing it, the quality of it, the level of content matter...anything.
I have pirated hundreds of Technical books in the past and will do so in the future. Why? At $50+ per book I want to know I am getting exactly what I want. I want to see how chapters are laid out and how the author presents the information. If it is too remedial (or too advanced), written poorly, is a 100 page book cleverly spaced to fill up 600 pages, or if there are any other major problems that would make the book worthless or less worthwhile than other books of the same genre.
In the end, after pirating as many of 20 books on the same topic, I decide which one is the best and go order a physical copy of it...sometimes full price and sometimes on the secondary market. I rarely (if ever) look again at any of the other pirated ebooks I have. I usually keep the pirated copy of the book I purchased to have on hand in case I have my laptop with me when I am not near the book and have to reference it.
In terms of your "old model" I am going to the book store and thumbing through the books to see which one I like the best....only I don't have to drive to the bookstore and I am not limited to only the books that are in stock. Perhaps a good thing to do is make sure that a good amount of your book is available online to browse through. If I can see large chunks of the inside of the book legally, that might keep me from pirating any books. I am talking about sections with information that is needed...don't give me samples that are a lead up to showing me a block of code and then cut out the block of code so people won't be able to glean useful information for free. I want to see that block of code and make sure it isn't absolutely terrible.
Also, the best way to ensure people buy your book isn't to go online and start making fun of vectors they use to get information. There may be a lot of videos of cats riding Roombas but I have found some very informative stuff on Youtube as well. There are many places with free information that I have found to be useful. Maybe you don't like getting information this way but your potential customers might. If the posts you make in public forums make you sound like a dick it may be also be assumed that they are considering shelling out $50 to read more of you sounding like a dick. That really isn't what people are looking for.
A Mechanical Engineer that I work with purchased a copy of Windows XP Pro on EBAY. He received a copy of the disc and COA and installed it. Eventually, his copy stopped working because it could not pass genuine validation. He brought the discs to me and I could barely tell that the disc had a thin holographic label pressed on and the COA had a few very minor flaws....all of which made it obvious that he had been duped.
This guy isnt the most intelligent person I know but one thing he is, is very honest to the point of being naive. He was really really upset when he found out he had counterfeit software and called Microsoft several times to make sure he wouldn't get in trouble. They accused him of knowingly pirating it and told him he would not get in trouble if he purchased a copy of Windows XP Pro. He did.
Nope, they didn't offer to give him a discount or help him in any way. Treated him like a criminal from the onset. I seriously don't do this very often, but I offered to go grab a pirate copy off the internet. I felt bad that he was going to have to pay twice for the software. He "Didn't want to risk it".
Cephalon is a Pharmaceutical company whose flagship products are probably Treanda and Provigil. In February of 2006, they applied for a patent for a new drug similar to Provigil called "Nuvigil" or "Armodafinil". If you have narcolepsy or ADHD you should go talk to your doctor and try to get a prescription for Nuvigil.
He won't give you one. Why? Nuvigil has not actually hit the market yet. They are finishing up the last phase of clinical studies. The official company website says that Nuvigil is coming soon. We'll say that 3 more months is sufficient to get the product into the hands of the pharmacies.
Under the "All patents are for 5 years" idea, Cephalon will have only 18 months to reap the benefits of being the sole producer of this product. It would become "public domain" and prices would drop sharply as other pharma companies would likely start producing generics. That should be just about the time when potential for lawsuits starts to fade. The company that spent years and tons of money to develop the medication, perform trials on the medication, and be prepared to deal with any lawsuits that come from patients taking the medication would lose boatloads of money. Nobody would develop new pharma products. The field of medicine would stagnate and the "Public" would lose out on live saving/quality of life increasing medications that would have been produced.
How would you feel if your boss decided to do the same with your paycheck? Or are you trying to tell us that your work deserves compensation while the work of others does not?
Actually, that's exactly the way it works for me. I don't get "residuals" on the work I do. The second I stop working, I stop getting paid too, I don't continue receiving money for my work for the rest of my life, despite the fact that it will still be benefitting my employer.
Here is the thing though. You employer is paying you a salary to produce things that will benefit them. It is a contract both your employer and yourself enter into willingly.
They are assuming the financial risk assuming that you will create something worthwhile for them. Maybe you are brought in to write a program that theoretically should help their business system immensely. After two years of receiving a salary it turns out that this program is not going to come together. You still have been provided with income for a place to live, food to eat, toys, and entertainment. They get no benefit except perhaps for the knowledge that a certain way of doing something will not work.
If you are so sure that your work would be such an outstanding benefit to companies you could quit your job and write this type of program on your own and market it to many firms. If after the same two year period (where you have been living off your savings, a spouses salary, your parents, or living in your car...whatever) you come to the conclusion that your program will not be helpful to businesses, you have nothing....not even compensation for time spent working on the project. If it is however a smashing success, you will reap financial compensation well in excess of what your salary would have been at a single company.
Quite simply, you cannot have it both ways. You take the safe route and get paid even though the project has a chance of failure, or you gamble that your program is that good that you are willing to sacrifice a salary to produce it in hopes for other gains later.
I agree with the pricing. Tigerdirect is supposed to be an awesome place for deals but quite often I see a refurbished item at the same price (Sometimes more??) than I could get the same thing new elsewhere.
Anytime I need to buy individual pieces of hardware, I check out at a site called gearxs.com. Sometimes they aren't that impressive but on occasion they will have some crazy deals. Some items I have got from there - 20 Logitech (Wired) Optical Mice for $.28 each (For a company), An LG External Lightscribe Dual Layer DVD Writer for $14.99, and 25 or so Sandisk Cruzer 2GB flash drives for $3.99 (Again, for a company).
The place seems a little shady but I have ordered from there at least 20 times and they have always come through.
If we strictly consider the office work environment, we pretty much had everything we needed with win2k and office2k. There's been no new killer app introduced since then. Probably the only argument to be made is that there's more in excel 2007 than in 2k but those extra goodies came at the price of a lot of crap.
For what its worth, I consider RPCoHTTPS that first appeared for computers running Windows XP/Office 2k3 and connecting to Exchange 2003 servers to be somewhat of a killer app. For some reason it seems most "Outside"/"Traveling" Sales and Service types hate Web Mail, are not satisfied with POP/IMAP, and find VPN software to be a hassle. Give them the ability to open Outlook on the desktop and get fully functional calenders/address lists/whatever and they stop whining real quick.
I don't know if computers necessarily live longer. I have a 386 computer that did nothing but sit for years and years. I booted it up late last year to show a younger relative "Crazy Ancient" technology after just blowing the dust off the motherboard and out of the power supply. Everything still worked with the exception of the floppy drive.
A few 486 (Sx? Dx?) 25 machines that run equipment in the shop where I work have been in use nearly every day for...well....a long time. I had to take images of both hard drives and replace them. Other than that...still going. I know a lot of people who have 486 or older machines running old linux distros and used only as routers/print servers/other odd functions.
I would argue that older machines CAN run for just as long or longer than desktop machines made today. In most cases, they simply didn't. There were huge jumps in what you could do from 8088 - 286 - 386 - 486/Pentium - Pentium II. Machine became actually obsolete quicker and were replaced sooner.
Actually, I found this thread enlightening but a bit late. I work for a smaller company with around 100 site workstations (plus another 30-40 cable runs for manufacturing equipment on the network, printers, and misc stuff).
We recently did a major reconfiguration of one of the office areas. We had to make a decision between trying to reroute existing cable that was laid about 8 years ago and resided above a drop ceiling where temperatures get really cold in winter, really hot in summer. Ultimately I felt it was best that we ran new cable. A lot of the cable that was replaced had cracks in the casing in some places. I figured if we are already going in and tearing up the area we might as well replace the cable instead of starting to have to replace a cable at a time over the next few years as more cracks formed and degradation became apparent.
I have to agree with the not where but WHEN being important. For whatever reason, my synapses fire the best between 10PM and 2AM. On the other side, the 8AM to 11AM block has to be the worst. I'll take shortcuts, use non-descriptive variables (Uhhh, i think I used a and b already. I'll go with d), and avoid commenting anything.
Of course it could be that if I am working in the morning I am at work and if I am working at night I am at home. At work I face countless interruptions and a rather uncomfortable desk setup. At home I have my "Office" where I have a comfortable chair, an old wooden chair if I need to switch to something solid, and "Papasan" chair if I get really desperate. I have a air purifier for some ambient noise or some music quietly in the background. If I am in here with the door closed the wife knows not to come in unless someone we know is dead/dying or if she means business. A break to get frisky can really put me in focused mindset.
I don't know about Symantec Endpoint Security in particular, but most closed source solutions have a very large amount of user support forums...they may not be on the vendor's site but somewhere else that a quick google search will reveal.
Microsoft solutions in particular have insane amounts of "User Forum Support" locations and blogs. The issue here may be the quality of advice as there are plenty of people on forums for Microsoft products that have no business posting advice to anyone..but not everyone that uses Microsoft products is an idiot. If you be sure to check multiple sources you will almost always find the help you need for Microsoft Products, if only due to sheer volume of users.
Why announce it to begin with?... gays/lesbians are looking to start fights... a lot of minorities play that game.
As others have pointed out, it has nothing to do with starting fights and everything to do with expressing what is an integral part of your personal identity and choosing what kinds of online relationships you want to pursue.
In a similar vein, I'm curious what "game" it is that you feel minorities are playing? The "game" where they don't try to hide their identity and culture? The "game" where they expect to be treated fairly and equally with others in their workplace and community?
I have to wonder if there aren't women on Xbox Live that say they are Lesbians to try to stave off the "OMG b00Biez! Letz Talk!" type of person. It may backfire in some cases though, drawing more interest
That rhetoric may be an attempt to pretend that they are tolerant but at other times it is right on the head.
I have one homosexual friend (and by extension usually another homosexual acquaintance in the form of his partner) and one homosexual acquaintance (And often by extension, another homosexual acquaintance in the form of his partner). We'll call my friend "John" and my acquaintance "Jason" for simplicity.
The difference between how John and Jason present themselves in public is night and day. John may hold hands, hug, kiss lightly his partner. Jason makes it a point (from what I observe, especially when in the company of people he does not know well) to be absolutely all over his partner. Open mouth kissing, groping, grinding...in public. He rarely does this type of thing amongst a small group of people he knows relatively well.
I would not condone that type of behavior from my heterosexual friends, and I don't condone it from my homosexual friends. I very quietly brought the issue to Jason's attention at one point and he became very cross with me, accusing me of either being a homophobe or a closet homosexual that is jealous. That was maybe two years ago, his activities continue, and things are a little tense between us. He now seems to make it a point to very openly show affection at any time when I am around.
IANAL either but I have a small tale about overpayment of employees.
Understand this happened a few years back when I was working a summer job during college and was still quite naive in the ways of the world. My interpretation of what happened may be skewed.
An employee was with the company I was interning at for five years. He agreed about a salary (I believe it was around $1000 per week). Every week that he received a paycheck he actually was paid $2000 (or double his agreed upon salary). I worked in the same general area as him. The police came in one day, escorted him to HR, where HR confronted him as to why he didn't report it (Of course he claimed he didn't know), and laid out terms of his repayment. From there the police escorted him outside of the building.
My impression of this is that not recognizing obvious overpayment of what your contract/terms of employment read is a case of corporate theft and fraud.
As much as I feel for the Microsoft workers who are now out of a job, if they signed off on a contract that stated a specific percentage or flat amount they have no right to a penny more than that. It is theft plain and simple if they don't return the money. It is so clean cut that Court costs would likely be very very low.
I'm not following the actual trial very intently but I'd assume that legal reasoning behind torrents is that they are used to distribute legal software. The most common legal downloads that I have seen mentioned on here are Linux Distributions.
With some of the Public perception being "OMG LINUX IS WHAT HACKERS USE" one could possibly end up following the logic trail of... Pirate Bay Distributes Linux, Hackers use Linux, Pirate Bay taken to Court, Prosecuting companies are getting Hacked, Supposed Legitimate use of the Pirate Bay is supporting evil criminal hackers.
In a little way it reminds me of a time about a decade ago when Wisconsin was about to pass a law to lower the drinking age to 19. A bunch of underage drinkers at The University of Wisconsin Oshkosh went out a few nights before the final vote to prove that they could handle their booze just like 21+ year olds could. They ended up breaking street lamps, turning over cars, throwing bricks threw shop windows, etc..... Needless to say the drinking age in Wisconsin is still 21
The thing is...you should do your homework when buying a PC. Let's compare HP desktops at PCMALL.
This One.This One.
They are both the same model, a dx2450. They both have an Athlon X2 5000B CPU, 1 GB of of DDR2, an 80 GB Sata Drive, a CD/DVD Drive, and a Geforce 6150SE Video card.
The first one comes with Windows XP Pro with the option to upgrade to Windows Vista Business. Cost? $418.99. The second one comes with Windows Vista Business. Cost? $429.99.
I didn't feel like looking for notebooks but the point is that it is your duty as a consumer to look around for the product you want at the price point that you want. This "XP Tax" is not the same across the board. Some units will be the same price or cheaper with XP, some units will be cheaper with Vista. Perhaps Lenova has some models that are like this, perhaps not.
I would imagine the manufacturer has some input on this. Between Driver compatibility, BIOS compatibility, Bloatware compatibility, and support calls the manufacturer might say "Hey, we are going to charge extra for one of the operating systems to cover our costs." That is reasonable and it is not really the fault of Microsoft.
Some Manufacturers (Toshiba for one) does not even have support for XP Drivers on some of it's lower end notebook and did not sell it with Windows XP ever. One model I know of is the A215-S4697 because I failed to do my homework, had someone purchase it, and tried to install their retail copy of Windows XP on it. Ooops. Time to dig for drivers that don't exist.
I worked in a desktop support capacity for a company some years back that had a pretty good number of lefties that had the mouse on the left side of the keyboard with the buttons switched around. I think it is one of those things that if one lefty in a corporate environment figures it out, other southpaws take note and ask how it is done.
The fact that companies are going to be running on economized IT budgets is a good argument for why Windows will stay. You can pay fairly competent Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/Vista desktop support people $12 an hour. Finding fairly competent Linux desktop support staff is likely to be more difficult AND more expensive.
I myself have worked at mostly smaller businesses in my 10 year IT career. I'd say that during that time I worked with about 150 different IT employees ranging from first level help desk to network engineers. I can think of about 30 who ever even used Linux and about 15 that would be able to do anything with it (Of course some of my earlier acquaintainces that I have not seen in a decade may have picked up Linux later on). The 15 that would be able to deal with Linux in a legitimate capacity were mostly higher up on the food chain or were very ambitious and headed that way.
As far as hardware goes, I think people are putting a little too much stock in the idea of crazy expensive hardware being needed to run Windows Vista. A lot of companies that I know of have a 4 year or less replacement cycle on desktops and an enterprise license agreement with Microsoft. Vista would now be covered under said agreement. They could go out and buy HP business desktops like this one From CDW It has an Athlon 64x2 5000b. It only has 1 GB of RAM so maybe they will need to plop down another $40 to upgrade it to 3GB. The built in video is sufficient for Aero. The Price? $379 without corporate discounts. Tell me again about how companies will not upgrade to Vista because they don't want to buy this extreme hardware....
Well, you may like to keep your screen as clean as possible but others like things as inane as a cat that walks on the bottom of the start menu and can be picked up and dropped with the mouse pointer.
It serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever but back when I was doing desktop support there were quite a few users that would become extremely agitated when I tried to take away their stupid cat.
If people will deal with stuff like that on their desktop, I'm sure gadgets that actually serve some purpose may also be popular.
Don't forget the low end stuff too! Sometimes there is a lot of money a company can save. Example: At the company I work for the PC's in the shop can go through 4 mice/keyboards in the lifetime of a desktop because of poor treatment. I get a mailer (Once Monthly at the most) from a company called gearxs.com At one point we purchased 20 Logitech mice from them for $1.29 each. We have been upgrading everyone to 22" flatscreens and a year ago, when they were still always $230+ we got a handful for $140 each. Their normal prices are not that great but when they send out their sales flier you can pick up some of the every day tech that every company needs are real nice prices.
I also used ServerSupply.com to get spare parts for HP DL380 Servers to keep them running. Once I ordered 4 147 GB Hot swap SCSI drives and realized I read the part number wrong and ended up with 68 Pin instead of 80. They took the parts back with no restocking fee to us (Even though I had opened two of the boxes)...we just had to pay the shipping. It is not common for a company to eat YOUR mistake.
Just two places that I found gave me some good deals and fast service. Ordered many times from both places and felt like I was walking away with a deal every time.
I personally am a big fan of "Start" (ctrl-esc), "Run". Instead of actually looking around for an application in the start menu/desktop/quick launch bar I'll type excel, winword, calc, notepad, firefox, cmd, \\fileserver or 15-20 applications i use reasonably often. I did not really like the new Vista Start Menu so I switched it to XP themed. My most common applications in the run menu require a key or two and autocomplete can take over.
Should be easy enough, right? Wrong. On my Vista laptop there is an infuriating 40-60 second delay after selecting run every single time. That is infuriating. Start, run is NOT a complex function.
Sure, maybe there are easier ways to launch programs....but ive been launching them this way for years. I like doing it that way.
The laptop has 3 GB of RAM and is a Dual Core 2(.4?) ghz AMD Turion. It should have plenty of power to bring up the run menu in a matter of a second.
And no, I'm not a Linux Zealot bashing Vista. I play around with Linux, but how things fell out in my career I found myself doing server support/development purely in all Microsoft Environments. I still play with Linux, but frankly it's just better for me all around to mainly use Windows. I've been adjusting to Vista for 9 months or so and I have to say I see nothing that makes it better than XP and things that make it less appealing than XP.
Call me ignorant, but I don't understand why the browser market is one that is so furiously fought over? Surely it can't make that much difference to Microsoft if users use the browser built into their Operating System? What does Google really have to gain by entering the Browser market?
Could it really do harm for Microsoft to let Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Whatever become the dominant browser with Internet Explorer just built into the operating system for those who don't want to go download a new one?
Further, people who go online in social contact areas have prior knowledge that all kinds of nonsense may occur. They are free never to enter or to surf to another type of site at any time.
I would like to add that Megan Meier and Lori Drew's daughter had....on many occasions....violated the terms of service.
1. The terms of service state you need to be 14 to sign up for an account. I believe the two girls were as young as 12.
2. The girls created accounts under false names and presented themselves as attractive older girls so they could talk to boys.
Megan's mother banned Megan from using the Site for a period of time because she KNEW they were misrepresenting themselves. When this boy started acting erratically, they should have thought the situation over logically.....Megan's mother in particular as she was the adult...knowing what kind of stuff goes down on those type of sites.
This could create a dangerous standard. I've signed up on a lot of odd web sites that I did not feel terribly comfortable divulging too much of my true identity. Heck, my Boss is a 54 year old guy who is about as "Good" of a person as I've met. When he created his first Yahoo account a decade ago he did so under a false name and gender because he didn't want to give out personal information. It kind of became his "Thing" so every account he has for that type of service is under his alter ego.
Slashdot Mirror
I can agree with that. I graduated with a degree in Biochemistry and worked in a lab for my senior year as an intern and was hired on when I graduated. We were working on finding polymer based gene therapy solutions. My typical week was...
Monday - Theorize about which molecules would create polymers best suited to what we were trying to do. I picked about 50 per week. This was the interesting day.
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday - Repeat the same procedure with all 50 molecule combinations that I had thought up. Essentially, measure, spin, do Chromotography, distill, do Chromotography AGAIN, distill, do Chromotgraphy AGAIN, distill, submit a sample of each to the DNA handlers/Rat Testers, run a Gel of each sample. Pretty much 8-12 hours a day standing up.
Friday - Obtain the results and write a page entry in my journal for each of the 50 polymers. Whomever invented the phrase "Thank God it's Friday" never spent the entire day writing out results that too often were demoralizing.
So out of the work week 2 days were sitting down researching or writing, and 3 days were spent pretty much doing "Grunt Work" that anyone in the world could have done after a weeks training.
In the end, I realized how quick I would jump when there was something that needed to be done with the computers, the network, or any of the high tech machines in the lab (Protein Synthasizer) and decided that is what I really wanted to be doing. I do miss the rush that came when I achieved any level of modest success in the lab.
I think that the driving issue is a huge deal in the possible legalization of marijuana. If you drink and consume alcohol, it is quite easy to prove that you were legally intoxicated. Either you'll be drunk enough that you are staggering and swaying or you'll blow into the breathalizer at the roadside and the cops will know if you are "Legally Intoxicated.
Marijuana? While some may argue that they know that the drive better stoned ;) I don't want those around me getting stoned and driving any more than I want them drinking and driving. How to tell if they are stoned? A Marijuana high lasts a heck of a lot shorter than a good drunk and stays in your system way longer. If they find Marijuana in your system, are you going to be considered as having been driving under the unfluence?
A few comments based on my own personal habits. Mind you I did not look at your web site, the book on Amazon.com, nor did I pirate your material so I know nothing about how you are distributing it, the quality of it, the level of content matter...anything.
I have pirated hundreds of Technical books in the past and will do so in the future. Why? At $50+ per book I want to know I am getting exactly what I want. I want to see how chapters are laid out and how the author presents the information. If it is too remedial (or too advanced), written poorly, is a 100 page book cleverly spaced to fill up 600 pages, or if there are any other major problems that would make the book worthless or less worthwhile than other books of the same genre.
In the end, after pirating as many of 20 books on the same topic, I decide which one is the best and go order a physical copy of it...sometimes full price and sometimes on the secondary market. I rarely (if ever) look again at any of the other pirated ebooks I have. I usually keep the pirated copy of the book I purchased to have on hand in case I have my laptop with me when I am not near the book and have to reference it.
In terms of your "old model" I am going to the book store and thumbing through the books to see which one I like the best....only I don't have to drive to the bookstore and I am not limited to only the books that are in stock. Perhaps a good thing to do is make sure that a good amount of your book is available online to browse through. If I can see large chunks of the inside of the book legally, that might keep me from pirating any books. I am talking about sections with information that is needed...don't give me samples that are a lead up to showing me a block of code and then cut out the block of code so people won't be able to glean useful information for free. I want to see that block of code and make sure it isn't absolutely terrible.
Also, the best way to ensure people buy your book isn't to go online and start making fun of vectors they use to get information. There may be a lot of videos of cats riding Roombas but I have found some very informative stuff on Youtube as well. There are many places with free information that I have found to be useful. Maybe you don't like getting information this way but your potential customers might. If the posts you make in public forums make you sound like a dick it may be also be assumed that they are considering shelling out $50 to read more of you sounding like a dick. That really isn't what people are looking for.
A Mechanical Engineer that I work with purchased a copy of Windows XP Pro on EBAY. He received a copy of the disc and COA and installed it. Eventually, his copy stopped working because it could not pass genuine validation. He brought the discs to me and I could barely tell that the disc had a thin holographic label pressed on and the COA had a few very minor flaws....all of which made it obvious that he had been duped.
This guy isnt the most intelligent person I know but one thing he is, is very honest to the point of being naive. He was really really upset when he found out he had counterfeit software and called Microsoft several times to make sure he wouldn't get in trouble. They accused him of knowingly pirating it and told him he would not get in trouble if he purchased a copy of Windows XP Pro. He did.
Nope, they didn't offer to give him a discount or help him in any way. Treated him like a criminal from the onset. I seriously don't do this very often, but I offered to go grab a pirate copy off the internet. I felt bad that he was going to have to pay twice for the software. He "Didn't want to risk it".
Max 5 years for everything? Medications included?
Cephalon is a Pharmaceutical company whose flagship products are probably Treanda and Provigil. In February of 2006, they applied for a patent for a new drug similar to Provigil called "Nuvigil" or "Armodafinil". If you have narcolepsy or ADHD you should go talk to your doctor and try to get a prescription for Nuvigil.
He won't give you one. Why? Nuvigil has not actually hit the market yet. They are finishing up the last phase of clinical studies. The official company website says that Nuvigil is coming soon. We'll say that 3 more months is sufficient to get the product into the hands of the pharmacies.
Under the "All patents are for 5 years" idea, Cephalon will have only 18 months to reap the benefits of being the sole producer of this product. It would become "public domain" and prices would drop sharply as other pharma companies would likely start producing generics. That should be just about the time when potential for lawsuits starts to fade. The company that spent years and tons of money to develop the medication, perform trials on the medication, and be prepared to deal with any lawsuits that come from patients taking the medication would lose boatloads of money. Nobody would develop new pharma products. The field of medicine would stagnate and the "Public" would lose out on live saving/quality of life increasing medications that would have been produced.
Actually, that's exactly the way it works for me. I don't get "residuals" on the work I do. The second I stop working, I stop getting paid too, I don't continue receiving money for my work for the rest of my life, despite the fact that it will still be benefitting my employer.
Here is the thing though. You employer is paying you a salary to produce things that will benefit them. It is a contract both your employer and yourself enter into willingly.
They are assuming the financial risk assuming that you will create something worthwhile for them. Maybe you are brought in to write a program that theoretically should help their business system immensely. After two years of receiving a salary it turns out that this program is not going to come together. You still have been provided with income for a place to live, food to eat, toys, and entertainment. They get no benefit except perhaps for the knowledge that a certain way of doing something will not work.
If you are so sure that your work would be such an outstanding benefit to companies you could quit your job and write this type of program on your own and market it to many firms. If after the same two year period (where you have been living off your savings, a spouses salary, your parents, or living in your car...whatever) you come to the conclusion that your program will not be helpful to businesses, you have nothing....not even compensation for time spent working on the project. If it is however a smashing success, you will reap financial compensation well in excess of what your salary would have been at a single company.
Quite simply, you cannot have it both ways. You take the safe route and get paid even though the project has a chance of failure, or you gamble that your program is that good that you are willing to sacrifice a salary to produce it in hopes for other gains later.
I agree with the pricing. Tigerdirect is supposed to be an awesome place for deals but quite often I see a refurbished item at the same price (Sometimes more??) than I could get the same thing new elsewhere.
Anytime I need to buy individual pieces of hardware, I check out at a site called gearxs.com. Sometimes they aren't that impressive but on occasion they will have some crazy deals. Some items I have got from there - 20 Logitech (Wired) Optical Mice for $.28 each (For a company), An LG External Lightscribe Dual Layer DVD Writer for $14.99, and 25 or so Sandisk Cruzer 2GB flash drives for $3.99 (Again, for a company).
The place seems a little shady but I have ordered from there at least 20 times and they have always come through.
If we strictly consider the office work environment, we pretty much had everything we needed with win2k and office2k. There's been no new killer app introduced since then. Probably the only argument to be made is that there's more in excel 2007 than in 2k but those extra goodies came at the price of a lot of crap.
For what its worth, I consider RPCoHTTPS that first appeared for computers running Windows XP/Office 2k3 and connecting to Exchange 2003 servers to be somewhat of a killer app. For some reason it seems most "Outside"/"Traveling" Sales and Service types hate Web Mail, are not satisfied with POP/IMAP, and find VPN software to be a hassle. Give them the ability to open Outlook on the desktop and get fully functional calenders/address lists/whatever and they stop whining real quick.
I don't know if computers necessarily live longer. I have a 386 computer that did nothing but sit for years and years. I booted it up late last year to show a younger relative "Crazy Ancient" technology after just blowing the dust off the motherboard and out of the power supply. Everything still worked with the exception of the floppy drive.
A few 486 (Sx? Dx?) 25 machines that run equipment in the shop where I work have been in use nearly every day for...well....a long time. I had to take images of both hard drives and replace them. Other than that...still going. I know a lot of people who have 486 or older machines running old linux distros and used only as routers/print servers/other odd functions.
I would argue that older machines CAN run for just as long or longer than desktop machines made today. In most cases, they simply didn't. There were huge jumps in what you could do from 8088 - 286 - 386 - 486/Pentium - Pentium II. Machine became actually obsolete quicker and were replaced sooner.
Actually, I found this thread enlightening but a bit late. I work for a smaller company with around 100 site workstations (plus another 30-40 cable runs for manufacturing equipment on the network, printers, and misc stuff).
We recently did a major reconfiguration of one of the office areas. We had to make a decision between trying to reroute existing cable that was laid about 8 years ago and resided above a drop ceiling where temperatures get really cold in winter, really hot in summer. Ultimately I felt it was best that we ran new cable. A lot of the cable that was replaced had cracks in the casing in some places. I figured if we are already going in and tearing up the area we might as well replace the cable instead of starting to have to replace a cable at a time over the next few years as more cracks formed and degradation became apparent.
I have to agree with the not where but WHEN being important. For whatever reason, my synapses fire the best between 10PM and 2AM. On the other side, the 8AM to 11AM block has to be the worst. I'll take shortcuts, use non-descriptive variables (Uhhh, i think I used a and b already. I'll go with d), and avoid commenting anything.
Of course it could be that if I am working in the morning I am at work and if I am working at night I am at home. At work I face countless interruptions and a rather uncomfortable desk setup. At home I have my "Office" where I have a comfortable chair, an old wooden chair if I need to switch to something solid, and "Papasan" chair if I get really desperate. I have a air purifier for some ambient noise or some music quietly in the background. If I am in here with the door closed the wife knows not to come in unless someone we know is dead/dying or if she means business. A break to get frisky can really put me in focused mindset.
I don't know about Symantec Endpoint Security in particular, but most closed source solutions have a very large amount of user support forums...they may not be on the vendor's site but somewhere else that a quick google search will reveal.
Microsoft solutions in particular have insane amounts of "User Forum Support" locations and blogs. The issue here may be the quality of advice as there are plenty of people on forums for Microsoft products that have no business posting advice to anyone..but not everyone that uses Microsoft products is an idiot. If you be sure to check multiple sources you will almost always find the help you need for Microsoft Products, if only due to sheer volume of users.
What if they decided that a non-violent game needed to be taxed? Would it be considered a SynTax Error?
Why announce it to begin with? ... gays/lesbians are looking to start fights ... a lot of minorities play that game.
As others have pointed out, it has nothing to do with starting fights and everything to do with expressing what is an integral part of your personal identity and choosing what kinds of online relationships you want to pursue.
In a similar vein, I'm curious what "game" it is that you feel minorities are playing? The "game" where they don't try to hide their identity and culture? The "game" where they expect to be treated fairly and equally with others in their workplace and community?
I have to wonder if there aren't women on Xbox Live that say they are Lesbians to try to stave off the "OMG b00Biez! Letz Talk!" type of person. It may backfire in some cases though, drawing more interest
That rhetoric may be an attempt to pretend that they are tolerant but at other times it is right on the head.
I have one homosexual friend (and by extension usually another homosexual acquaintance in the form of his partner) and one homosexual acquaintance (And often by extension, another homosexual acquaintance in the form of his partner). We'll call my friend "John" and my acquaintance "Jason" for simplicity.
The difference between how John and Jason present themselves in public is night and day. John may hold hands, hug, kiss lightly his partner. Jason makes it a point (from what I observe, especially when in the company of people he does not know well) to be absolutely all over his partner. Open mouth kissing, groping, grinding...in public. He rarely does this type of thing amongst a small group of people he knows relatively well.
I would not condone that type of behavior from my heterosexual friends, and I don't condone it from my homosexual friends. I very quietly brought the issue to Jason's attention at one point and he became very cross with me, accusing me of either being a homophobe or a closet homosexual that is jealous. That was maybe two years ago, his activities continue, and things are a little tense between us. He now seems to make it a point to very openly show affection at any time when I am around.
I really don't think that I am the problem here.
IANAL either but I have a small tale about overpayment of employees. Understand this happened a few years back when I was working a summer job during college and was still quite naive in the ways of the world. My interpretation of what happened may be skewed. An employee was with the company I was interning at for five years. He agreed about a salary (I believe it was around $1000 per week). Every week that he received a paycheck he actually was paid $2000 (or double his agreed upon salary). I worked in the same general area as him. The police came in one day, escorted him to HR, where HR confronted him as to why he didn't report it (Of course he claimed he didn't know), and laid out terms of his repayment. From there the police escorted him outside of the building. My impression of this is that not recognizing obvious overpayment of what your contract/terms of employment read is a case of corporate theft and fraud. As much as I feel for the Microsoft workers who are now out of a job, if they signed off on a contract that stated a specific percentage or flat amount they have no right to a penny more than that. It is theft plain and simple if they don't return the money. It is so clean cut that Court costs would likely be very very low.
I'm not following the actual trial very intently but I'd assume that legal reasoning behind torrents is that they are used to distribute legal software. The most common legal downloads that I have seen mentioned on here are Linux Distributions.
With some of the Public perception being "OMG LINUX IS WHAT HACKERS USE" one could possibly end up following the logic trail of... Pirate Bay Distributes Linux, Hackers use Linux, Pirate Bay taken to Court, Prosecuting companies are getting Hacked, Supposed Legitimate use of the Pirate Bay is supporting evil criminal hackers.
In a little way it reminds me of a time about a decade ago when Wisconsin was about to pass a law to lower the drinking age to 19. A bunch of underage drinkers at The University of Wisconsin Oshkosh went out a few nights before the final vote to prove that they could handle their booze just like 21+ year olds could. They ended up breaking street lamps, turning over cars, throwing bricks threw shop windows, etc..... Needless to say the drinking age in Wisconsin is still 21
The thing is...you should do your homework when buying a PC. Let's compare HP desktops at PCMALL. This One. This One. They are both the same model, a dx2450. They both have an Athlon X2 5000B CPU, 1 GB of of DDR2, an 80 GB Sata Drive, a CD/DVD Drive, and a Geforce 6150SE Video card. The first one comes with Windows XP Pro with the option to upgrade to Windows Vista Business. Cost? $418.99. The second one comes with Windows Vista Business. Cost? $429.99. I didn't feel like looking for notebooks but the point is that it is your duty as a consumer to look around for the product you want at the price point that you want. This "XP Tax" is not the same across the board. Some units will be the same price or cheaper with XP, some units will be cheaper with Vista. Perhaps Lenova has some models that are like this, perhaps not. I would imagine the manufacturer has some input on this. Between Driver compatibility, BIOS compatibility, Bloatware compatibility, and support calls the manufacturer might say "Hey, we are going to charge extra for one of the operating systems to cover our costs." That is reasonable and it is not really the fault of Microsoft. Some Manufacturers (Toshiba for one) does not even have support for XP Drivers on some of it's lower end notebook and did not sell it with Windows XP ever. One model I know of is the A215-S4697 because I failed to do my homework, had someone purchase it, and tried to install their retail copy of Windows XP on it. Ooops. Time to dig for drivers that don't exist.
I worked in a desktop support capacity for a company some years back that had a pretty good number of lefties that had the mouse on the left side of the keyboard with the buttons switched around. I think it is one of those things that if one lefty in a corporate environment figures it out, other southpaws take note and ask how it is done.
The fact that companies are going to be running on economized IT budgets is a good argument for why Windows will stay. You can pay fairly competent Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/Vista desktop support people $12 an hour. Finding fairly competent Linux desktop support staff is likely to be more difficult AND more expensive.
I myself have worked at mostly smaller businesses in my 10 year IT career. I'd say that during that time I worked with about 150 different IT employees ranging from first level help desk to network engineers. I can think of about 30 who ever even used Linux and about 15 that would be able to do anything with it (Of course some of my earlier acquaintainces that I have not seen in a decade may have picked up Linux later on). The 15 that would be able to deal with Linux in a legitimate capacity were mostly higher up on the food chain or were very ambitious and headed that way.
As far as hardware goes, I think people are putting a little too much stock in the idea of crazy expensive hardware being needed to run Windows Vista. A lot of companies that I know of have a 4 year or less replacement cycle on desktops and an enterprise license agreement with Microsoft. Vista would now be covered under said agreement. They could go out and buy HP business desktops like this one From CDW It has an Athlon 64x2 5000b. It only has 1 GB of RAM so maybe they will need to plop down another $40 to upgrade it to 3GB. The built in video is sufficient for Aero. The Price? $379 without corporate discounts. Tell me again about how companies will not upgrade to Vista because they don't want to buy this extreme hardware....
Well, you may like to keep your screen as clean as possible but others like things as inane as a cat that walks on the bottom of the start menu and can be picked up and dropped with the mouse pointer.
It serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever but back when I was doing desktop support there were quite a few users that would become extremely agitated when I tried to take away their stupid cat.
If people will deal with stuff like that on their desktop, I'm sure gadgets that actually serve some purpose may also be popular.
Don't forget the low end stuff too! Sometimes there is a lot of money a company can save. Example: At the company I work for the PC's in the shop can go through 4 mice/keyboards in the lifetime of a desktop because of poor treatment. I get a mailer (Once Monthly at the most) from a company called gearxs.com At one point we purchased 20 Logitech mice from them for $1.29 each. We have been upgrading everyone to 22" flatscreens and a year ago, when they were still always $230+ we got a handful for $140 each. Their normal prices are not that great but when they send out their sales flier you can pick up some of the every day tech that every company needs are real nice prices.
I also used ServerSupply.com to get spare parts for HP DL380 Servers to keep them running. Once I ordered 4 147 GB Hot swap SCSI drives and realized I read the part number wrong and ended up with 68 Pin instead of 80. They took the parts back with no restocking fee to us (Even though I had opened two of the boxes)...we just had to pay the shipping. It is not common for a company to eat YOUR mistake.
Just two places that I found gave me some good deals and fast service. Ordered many times from both places and felt like I was walking away with a deal every time.
I personally am a big fan of "Start" (ctrl-esc), "Run". Instead of actually looking around for an application in the start menu/desktop/quick launch bar I'll type excel, winword, calc, notepad, firefox, cmd, \\fileserver or 15-20 applications i use reasonably often. I did not really like the new Vista Start Menu so I switched it to XP themed. My most common applications in the run menu require a key or two and autocomplete can take over.
Should be easy enough, right? Wrong. On my Vista laptop there is an infuriating 40-60 second delay after selecting run every single time. That is infuriating. Start, run is NOT a complex function.
Sure, maybe there are easier ways to launch programs....but ive been launching them this way for years. I like doing it that way.
The laptop has 3 GB of RAM and is a Dual Core 2(.4?) ghz AMD Turion. It should have plenty of power to bring up the run menu in a matter of a second.
And no, I'm not a Linux Zealot bashing Vista. I play around with Linux, but how things fell out in my career I found myself doing server support/development purely in all Microsoft Environments. I still play with Linux, but frankly it's just better for me all around to mainly use Windows. I've been adjusting to Vista for 9 months or so and I have to say I see nothing that makes it better than XP and things that make it less appealing than XP.
Call me ignorant, but I don't understand why the browser market is one that is so furiously fought over? Surely it can't make that much difference to Microsoft if users use the browser built into their Operating System? What does Google really have to gain by entering the Browser market?
Could it really do harm for Microsoft to let Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Whatever become the dominant browser with Internet Explorer just built into the operating system for those who don't want to go download a new one?
Call me clueless but I simply don't get it.
Further, people who go online in social contact areas have prior knowledge that all kinds of nonsense may occur. They are free never to enter or to surf to another type of site at any time.
I would like to add that Megan Meier and Lori Drew's daughter had....on many occasions....violated the terms of service.
1. The terms of service state you need to be 14 to sign up for an account. I believe the two girls were as young as 12.
2. The girls created accounts under false names and presented themselves as attractive older girls so they could talk to boys.
Megan's mother banned Megan from using the Site for a period of time because she KNEW they were misrepresenting themselves. When this boy started acting erratically, they should have thought the situation over logically.....Megan's mother in particular as she was the adult...knowing what kind of stuff goes down on those type of sites.
This could create a dangerous standard. I've signed up on a lot of odd web sites that I did not feel terribly comfortable divulging too much of my true identity. Heck, my Boss is a 54 year old guy who is about as "Good" of a person as I've met. When he created his first Yahoo account a decade ago he did so under a false name and gender because he didn't want to give out personal information. It kind of became his "Thing" so every account he has for that type of service is under his alter ego.