Straw man. This has nothing at all to do with the federal government overstepping its bounds. It has everything to do with whether the telcos made a good decision to pull the plug on all wiretaps over an unpaid bill. The telcos do not oversee the morality of the federal government. The bottom line here is money.
And if a parent's responsibility to protect his child means that we need not enforce child abuse laws, well, that logic is the path to anarchy.
There is always a less fortunate person. "Who gives a shit about poor dead Iraqi children when there are poor living children right here at home?" "Why should I fix my flat tire when my neighbor has two flat tires?" Bullshit argument.
Anyhow, I only brought up child porn to counter your generalization that the FBI is bad because of the drug war. I did a search for "FBI arrests" and picked the first link.
You may not like anti-drug laws, and neither do I, but to assume that's all the FBI does is just plain wrong.
With all of *our* tax money that the telcos have sucked up over the years and their long history of unethical business practices, from monopoly to the impossible-to-read bill you receive every month, they can all suck it.
The key works here are "up to." A wide range of punishment is intended to accommodate both meatheads who "accidentally" shine lasers at police helicopters, and those who willfully shine lasers at aircraft with the intent to do harm or out of incredible ignorance/negligence.
Somehow I doubt that these people are going to get 20 years in prison. If they did, we'd have something to complain about. For the time being, it's just the press reporting maximum sentences because it's shocking (and perhaps there's no other measurement to report).
Don't bother. I held off on rolling it out here, but did install it on my primary machine just to get some experience with it. While it's not "terrible", it's really not any better. The features just aren't there. While it may be technically superior under the hood, it hardly matters if I'm not really noticing it. It is most certainly slower than XP in heavy weight applications, which is disappointing.
The glitches are all small but very annoying. Sometimes it forgets about my secondary monitor and I have to reconfigure my display settings on start up. Sometimes the sidebar gadgets get confused about where they should be and all pile up on one another. Sometimes plugging in my USB scanner causes my PS/2 keyboard to stop working until restart. Some drivers just aren't here and require workarounds. A few software applications aren't working for me (notably the corporate antivirus, which needs updating anyhow).
I honestly can't think of one thing about Vista that I'm actually benefiting from at this point. I had to disable UAC to get one of our business applications to run properly. Aero is nice I guess, and the control panel etc is a little better... but for the most part it's all just a wrapper over the old dialogs from XP. I'm considering going back to XP but don't really want the pain of reinstallation.
At its price point and lack of substantial features that the user can appreciate, I am not surprised that people are calling Vista the biggest disappointment of the year.
Personally I'd say that the best thing I've ever done for my Windows experience was to install Rocket Dock, which is free.
"Wait for one hour after uninstalling software! Why?"
To calm down, that's why. Attempting to perform too many consecutive installations of Microsoft software, without proper breaks, has been linked to the recent upsurge in general anxiety disorder.
If I bought a toothbrush with a non-replaceable battery, I would not be surprised. It's very common.
If I bought a cell phone with a non-replaceable battery, I would be surprised. Most people who use cell phones have had to deal with batteries, either because they've needed to replace them or carry extras for emergency. I don't believe that I've ever seen a cell phone without a replaceable battery...I'm not saying they don't exist, but they must be rare. Being able to read about the lack of a replaceable battery on a website after I'd purchased the device without one wouldn't help me much.
I don't think that this guy has a case if he had a chance to return the iPhone for an iRefund, but iWouldn't be surprised if he couldn't.
There are lots of applications out there, but perhaps too many. So many applications have everything but that one critical feature that an organization has come to rely on. "But it's open source and you can implement it yourself!" True, but that costs real money too. Quite a bit actually.
And then there are the vertical applications that we can't move away from because we've got years and years worth of data stuck in the swamp. Yes, we could migrate but at what cost? Business doesn't care about operating systems or information philosophy, it cares about getting the job done to make money. It would take a considerable cost advantage to move an organization of medium size or larger from a Windows environment to a Linux environment.
I spent years on and off trying to figure out how to move my company to Linux both on the desktop and the server. It's just too much, even still. Our business is manufacturing Widgets, and we get along just fine in our Windows world. If we were starting over from scratch today with the 5 or so employees we had when I first started a decade ago, I would make different choices. I despise 3/4 of Microsoft server products, and I hate the cost of MS Office.
"I dunno. I manage to write C++ and never overflow a buffer, always release all resources when I'm done with them, and never throw away an error. Why can't the other 95% of the programmers out there do the same thing?"
Actually, having just enough staff to keep things running sounds very efficient to me.
Redundant testing of MS patches for the extremely unlikely event of having a patch cause real damage is wasteful. I have had MS patches screw up systems plenty, but the cost of fixing the problem after the fact has actually been considerably less than all the work that would be required putting tests through vague tests of my own design. Consider the bug in the topic post. I wouldn't have caught it, even if I did have time to verify every single patch. What would the procedure be?
4.3.4.594393 (c) Verify that programs still have uninstall button in Add/Remove programs.
Now what I've argued here doesn't apply universally. For desktops in what I consider a typical MS environment, however, the amount of time spent fixing problems caused by patches is so low that I could never, ever justify the cost of in-house testing. I read the patch synopsis and caveats, maybe hold off on scarier ones, do a minor amount of verification, and have very few problems.
Morality is the basis of legality, and thus they are not equal concepts. Using the law to force a moral position can be a very dangerous thing, and his use of religious analogy is spot on.
Yeah it's kind of hard to admit it, but I prefer WMP over everything I've tried on Windows, and I've tried a lot of software.
The primary reason that I use WMP is that doing so avoids the power struggle that invariably occurs when installing multiple audio software packages on a Windows machine. I don't think that I've ever not had a problem with files opening in the wrong application, especially when web browsers get involved. It's just simpler to use WMP. It catalogs and tags and does MP3 and rips and burns and when I push the play button I hear music. It's pretty quick too if you disable the online store crap.
So, I use an evil Microsoft application when I use an evil Microsoft operating system, but in so doing I end up with a better overall experience. My only real gripes are trying to play unsupported codecs and that it doesn't show song titles when playing shoutcast/icecast streams.
"Show me one Microsoft app that puts even ONE icon in your tray."
Let me take a peek at my tray.
- Microsoft Outlook - Microsoft Firewall Client - Microsoft Windows Defender - Microsoft Live Messenger - Microsoft Sidebar
I'm not arguing with your overall message, but many MS applications put icons in the tray, and always have. Some MS applications like MS Office and MS Desktop Search take over a piece of the task bar between applications and the tray, which is worse than using the tray itself IMO.
I don't have a particular problem with applications that use the tray, although too many applications use it which causes a great deal of clutter at times.
What if it was video? What if a hypothetical hidden video camera was placed on the public street outside of your house and it sent a live feed to Google. Then I could simply enter your address into the search engine and pull up a video feed of your house from anywhere in the world, at any time. It would be the same as if I was actually there looking at your house, except that you wouldn't see me out there pointing a video camera at you, because I'm a thousand miles away.
The problem with this Google service, while not a huge one, is that the photographs they publish are searchable documentation of specific locations. I'm sure that there are photographs of my house in existence (besides the ones I've taken). Perhaps there are even photographs of my house online right now that I have no idea about...in the background of my neighbor's blog or something. The difference between this and Google's service is that I can't *search* for pictures of my house, and neither can anyone else. If somebody wants to see what my house looks like, and possibly take a peek at me, and maybe snap a picture or two, then they have to get their lazy ass over to my street in person, and risk being seen by me. This makes the interaction *personal*, which greatly modifies behavior.
People act differently when they know they are being watched, and differently again when they know or think that they might be seen by particular people. We clean up the house for dinner guests, but not just in case the neighbor comes for a cup of sugar. What if the Google van drove by right as you ran out of your house in your pink polka-dotted underwear to get the paper? Sure you knew that your neighbors might spot you for a brief second, and you knew that there was a 1 in 1,000,000 chance that somebody might be taking a picture of your house at that moment, but you certainly didn't expect Google to drive by and then throw your picture up on the net for all your friends and family members to see. What if the Google van drove by on a day when your lawn was totally trashed for whatever reason? How long is that picture going to be up? It certainly doesn't represent the typical condition of your abode, but that's what your cousin AJ is going to find when he starts plugging addresses into Google, and then he's going to print it out and show it to your Grandma because he's mean like that. This is why they do need a take down procedure.
How about this: you put your address on your resume and send it in for a very important job opening. You're a little bit down and out after having been laid off by IBM, and you're staying a few months with your cousin Gary, who lives in a run down shack with gutted out cars on the front lawn and a big confederate flag painted on the wall facing the street. This is the picture that your would-have-been-future-boss pulls up from Google when he enters your address. Could he have driven to your address and looked for himself? Sure, of course. But if he did something like this, he would actually considered a bit of a paranoid weirdo. Simply plugging an address into Google doesn't feel the same way, and many people might not even think it's weird to do so.
The ability to easily, quickly, and invisibly gather information about a person is something that is brand new. Even if the information could have been gathered in the past through traditional measures, it does not mean that modern measures are the equivalent and thus subject to the same set of rules.
This Google service doesn't really do much in terms of exposing an individual; it's not a good mechanism for spying on an actual person. However, it does expose the condition of a person's home to the world without giving that person any sort of warning. If you were going to take your own photograph of your home to post online, you'd probably take the photo when the place was at least looking nice. When you're representing yourself to the world, you should have some control over the process.
I want to stress that a person's mug or house or car or cat happening to be published online is not the real issue here. The real issue is that the images taken by Google are referenced to very exact locations.
It can be very difficult to tell if an LCD monitor has a 6 or 8 bit panel, and there are several variations of each. Often times 6 bit panels are labeled as "16.2" million colors, so that's one indication. Otherwise they often use some kind of fishy wording, like "16.7 million color support" which simply means that you can set your display settings to 16.7, even though you're not seeing 8 bit color. Another sign of a 6 bit panel is a super fast response time, like 2ms. Finally, the most important thing to look at is price. On the low side an 8 bit panel is going to start at around $250-300 (19 - 20.1"). A good LCD monitor for graphics work is still going to set a person back a fair amount.
I went through the nightmare of trying to find a low cost 8 bit panel recently. I'm very familiar with the Viewsonic documents you posted, and I remember being quite frustrated with their literature. I'm not sure that they're trying to pull a fast one though. I've never seen so much contradictory literature, from a variety of companies!
For instance, I ended up getting a pair of Samsung SyncMaster 204BW monitors. Check this out:
- According to the *manual* that came with the monitor, it is a 16.7 M Colors (8bit + RGB) a-si TFT active matrix panel. It specifically says "8bit + RGB" in the manual.
- According to most online stores currently selling it, it is a 6 bit panel supporting 16.2M colorand is thus a 6 bit panel. (this has actually changed since I bought it. the store I bought it from at the time listed it as 16.7, and has since changed the spec to 16.2)
- According to some guy in a forum who claims to have called Samsung about this monitor, it is 8 bit.
- According to Samsung online, it is an 6 bit panel.
- According to Samsung online in canada, it is an 8 bit panel.
I think it's very possible that manufacturers choose different components for their models over time, even critical components like the panel in an LCD monitor. Perhaps the 204BW monitors I'm running are 8 bit, and the ones for sale now are 6 bit. I honestly don't know for sure.
The good news is that even if these are 6 bit panels, I think that they look great. I use them for quite a bit of work in Photoshop and Illustrator. No complaints whatsoever. They outperform my old CRTs in terms of color accuracy and contrast, which surprised me (although viewing angle is important with an LCD...which can either be a hindrance or be used as an advantage).
As far as TFA goes, I on one hand don't think these guys have a chance. Cheap LCD panels are nothing new, and they've gotten so good that the average user is none the wiser about them being 6 bit. If the eye is fooled then the eye is fooled. Macintosh certainly didn't invent 6 bit panels, nor do I believe that they intentionally use them to dupe customers. The reason that LCDs have gotten so cheap is not because manufacturing high quality panels has become that much cheaper, it's because the new cheap LCDs use cheaper 6 bit panels! Plus it cracks me up that guys who spend $2500 for Macbooks actually think they're getting the highest quality hardware. (is there a notebook offered today with an 8 bit panel?)
On the other hand, it would be nice if this thing could lead to manufacturers being more consistent in their labeling.
Have you ever noticed that you can buy Windows at Target and Walmart? Plenty of normal users install Windows on their own. Some have trouble and call you, others don't. In my experience with colleagues and friends, quite a number of people attempt to reinstall or upgrade Windows all by their lonesome.
You're sort of setting an arbitrary line between "normal" and "power" users, based on your own criteria, and then making your argument based upon this assumption. A computer user who can boot from a Windows CD, follow a few instructions, and install Windows is not a terribly special case. Lots of boneheads can do it. I know, they're my friends and family.
Really, the only difficult question that the Windows installer asks is about partitioning and formating. If a user can get past that one, they're in most cases home free.
Agreed. Don't use Dreamweaver-specific features like templates, and never use the WYSIWYG editor. As an overall environment without all this extra crap, it's top-notch. A pretty decent editor with correct hints for HTML, CSS, and PHP, and proper project management that actually expects you to work on files locally, test on a testing server, and then publish to a production server. It's odd how many other packages can't get this right when it's such a painfully simple concept.
I found a bug recently in an administrative template that shipped with the initial release of Office 2007. I spent a lot of my own time determining that there was a bug, and exactly what it was. I *fixed* the bug.
I went to Microsoft to report the bug and offer the fix. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the front door. There was one little door off to the side, but the bouncer wanted almost $200 to get through it. I found a large group of people congregating in the parking lot around a few guys with "MVP" badges. Figuring that the MVPs must be representing the company somehow, I told one of them about the problem. He repeated everything I said back to him, and then read something out of a manual. I explained to him that I wasn't having trouble understanding how the software was supposed to work, but I was there to report that the software was not working as documented. He repeated everything I had just said, then everything he had previously said, then everything I originally said, and then asked me about my network settings. I said, "no no, you don't understand. Here's the problem, and here is the fix." I handed him a copy of the exact instructions to fix the problem, and awaited his response. Perhaps a big smooch on the cheek and a check for $50!? No, he just stared off blankly for a while and then started asking some other guy for his network settings. "Click start. Click run. Enter cmd and press enter. Type ipconfig/all..."
I was a little disappointed that I didn't even get a hug or anything for solving a problem for the company who I had just given 24,000 dollars to earlier in the year, but I went away certain that the trustworthy MVP personally delivered my complaint to the proper executives once he had ascertained his daily quota of network settings. I mean, the MVPs can get past the bouncer, right? Of course, of course.
You know, sometimes bitching on the web 2.0 is all we got.
Junk faxes here really slowed down after coverage of the enforcement of junk fax legislation started to hit the mainstream media. I guess that was in the late 90s sometime. We still get a few from time to time. Although now that I think of it, this decrease also probably coincided with an increase in spam, which probably has more to do with it (cheaper, easier, wider base of victims).
Here's a wikipedia page with information about what can be done legally against junk fax senders in the US, if it's bad enough that you want to take the time to go after them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_fax
The solution, although not so much a solution as a better system, is to use fax server software or an online fax service. I run a local fax server here. Faxes come in and are routed via email to the secretary who was at one time responsible for pulling paper faxes off the old fax machine. This person then routes the fax to the appropriate person, and acts as a junk fax filter:) There are four major benefits to software faxing: 1) You'll save money because there are no consumables to buy, and because of this the cost of receiving a junk fax is the same as receiving a junk email as long as you don't pay per minute on your phone line. 2) Routing faxes through email is much more effective than tossing paper into a physical inbox, especially if you have to make copies of faxes for multiple people. 3) Many fax servers will enable your employees to send a fax by simply printing to a special fax printer on their computer, saving time, money, etc. 4) The quality of received faxes, and especially outgoing faxes, is considerably improved.
I do sympathize with you. Especially if you're working with a lot of international companies (assuming you're in the US, if not sorry), sometimes you simply have to be able to accept faxed documents to keep customers happy. You might encourage them to start using email, perhaps by pointing out the financial benefits. Also, a lot of people might not know about simple tools like pdfcreator with which they can print and send a purchase order via email right from their existing accounting software.
I do object to your comment implying that junk email doesn't cost anything. Perhaps if you're working for a small outfit with hosted email it doesn't appear to cost anything. My mail server here processes a hundred thousand spam messages per month, and we're a pretty small outfit. This definitely costs real money in terms of hardware and software support, and most importantly employee time (I guarantee that people spend more time going through their junk email or flagging email as junk than they do looking at junk faxes).
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Straw man. This has nothing at all to do with the federal government overstepping its bounds. It has everything to do with whether the telcos made a good decision to pull the plug on all wiretaps over an unpaid bill. The telcos do not oversee the morality of the federal government. The bottom line here is money.
And if a parent's responsibility to protect his child means that we need not enforce child abuse laws, well, that logic is the path to anarchy.
There is always a less fortunate person. "Who gives a shit about poor dead Iraqi children when there are poor living children right here at home?" "Why should I fix my flat tire when my neighbor has two flat tires?" Bullshit argument.
Anyhow, I only brought up child porn to counter your generalization that the FBI is bad because of the drug war. I did a search for "FBI arrests" and picked the first link.
How about child porn rings? http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2002/03/18/net-porn.htm
You may not like anti-drug laws, and neither do I, but to assume that's all the FBI does is just plain wrong.
With all of *our* tax money that the telcos have sucked up over the years and their long history of unethical business practices, from monopoly to the impossible-to-read bill you receive every month, they can all suck it.
The key works here are "up to." A wide range of punishment is intended to accommodate both meatheads who "accidentally" shine lasers at police helicopters, and those who willfully shine lasers at aircraft with the intent to do harm or out of incredible ignorance/negligence.
Somehow I doubt that these people are going to get 20 years in prison. If they did, we'd have something to complain about. For the time being, it's just the press reporting maximum sentences because it's shocking (and perhaps there's no other measurement to report).
Don't bother. I held off on rolling it out here, but did install it on my primary machine just to get some experience with it. While it's not "terrible", it's really not any better. The features just aren't there. While it may be technically superior under the hood, it hardly matters if I'm not really noticing it. It is most certainly slower than XP in heavy weight applications, which is disappointing.
The glitches are all small but very annoying. Sometimes it forgets about my secondary monitor and I have to reconfigure my display settings on start up. Sometimes the sidebar gadgets get confused about where they should be and all pile up on one another. Sometimes plugging in my USB scanner causes my PS/2 keyboard to stop working until restart. Some drivers just aren't here and require workarounds. A few software applications aren't working for me (notably the corporate antivirus, which needs updating anyhow).
I honestly can't think of one thing about Vista that I'm actually benefiting from at this point. I had to disable UAC to get one of our business applications to run properly. Aero is nice I guess, and the control panel etc is a little better... but for the most part it's all just a wrapper over the old dialogs from XP. I'm considering going back to XP but don't really want the pain of reinstallation.
At its price point and lack of substantial features that the user can appreciate, I am not surprised that people are calling Vista the biggest disappointment of the year.
Personally I'd say that the best thing I've ever done for my Windows experience was to install Rocket Dock, which is free.
Ok ok, one more...I can't help it.
"Wait for one hour after uninstalling software! Why?"
Because it requires a reboot!!
"Wait for one hour after uninstalling software! Why?"
To calm down, that's why. Attempting to perform too many consecutive installations of Microsoft software, without proper breaks, has been linked to the recent upsurge in general anxiety disorder.
Agreed. It's the absolute worst program for use as a simple crop tool, seeing as how it has no crop feature whatsoever.
Right. And then artists can make money the FOSS way, with technical support.
If I bought a toothbrush with a non-replaceable battery, I would not be surprised. It's very common.
If I bought a cell phone with a non-replaceable battery, I would be surprised. Most people who use cell phones have had to deal with batteries, either because they've needed to replace them or carry extras for emergency. I don't believe that I've ever seen a cell phone without a replaceable battery...I'm not saying they don't exist, but they must be rare. Being able to read about the lack of a replaceable battery on a website after I'd purchased the device without one wouldn't help me much.
I don't think that this guy has a case if he had a chance to return the iPhone for an iRefund, but iWouldn't be surprised if he couldn't.
Agreed.
There are lots of applications out there, but perhaps too many. So many applications have everything but that one critical feature that an organization has come to rely on. "But it's open source and you can implement it yourself!" True, but that costs real money too. Quite a bit actually.
And then there are the vertical applications that we can't move away from because we've got years and years worth of data stuck in the swamp. Yes, we could migrate but at what cost? Business doesn't care about operating systems or information philosophy, it cares about getting the job done to make money. It would take a considerable cost advantage to move an organization of medium size or larger from a Windows environment to a Linux environment.
I spent years on and off trying to figure out how to move my company to Linux both on the desktop and the server. It's just too much, even still. Our business is manufacturing Widgets, and we get along just fine in our Windows world. If we were starting over from scratch today with the 5 or so employees we had when I first started a decade ago, I would make different choices. I despise 3/4 of Microsoft server products, and I hate the cost of MS Office.
"I dunno. I manage to write C++ and never overflow a buffer, always release all resources when I'm done with them, and never throw away an error. Why can't the other 95% of the programmers out there do the same thing?"
Because we're employed.
Actually, having just enough staff to keep things running sounds very efficient to me.
Redundant testing of MS patches for the extremely unlikely event of having a patch cause real damage is wasteful. I have had MS patches screw up systems plenty, but the cost of fixing the problem after the fact has actually been considerably less than all the work that would be required putting tests through vague tests of my own design. Consider the bug in the topic post. I wouldn't have caught it, even if I did have time to verify every single patch. What would the procedure be?
4.3.4.594393 (c) Verify that programs still have uninstall button in Add/Remove programs.
Now what I've argued here doesn't apply universally. For desktops in what I consider a typical MS environment, however, the amount of time spent fixing problems caused by patches is so low that I could never, ever justify the cost of in-house testing. I read the patch synopsis and caveats, maybe hold off on scarier ones, do a minor amount of verification, and have very few problems.
The key word in his comment is "equate."
Morality is the basis of legality, and thus they are not equal concepts. Using the law to force a moral position can be a very dangerous thing, and his use of religious analogy is spot on.
Only because you don't smoke forty joints a day, every day, for forty years.
Yeah it's kind of hard to admit it, but I prefer WMP over everything I've tried on Windows, and I've tried a lot of software.
The primary reason that I use WMP is that doing so avoids the power struggle that invariably occurs when installing multiple audio software packages on a Windows machine. I don't think that I've ever not had a problem with files opening in the wrong application, especially when web browsers get involved. It's just simpler to use WMP. It catalogs and tags and does MP3 and rips and burns and when I push the play button I hear music. It's pretty quick too if you disable the online store crap.
So, I use an evil Microsoft application when I use an evil Microsoft operating system, but in so doing I end up with a better overall experience. My only real gripes are trying to play unsupported codecs and that it doesn't show song titles when playing shoutcast/icecast streams.
This is a political statement. A sort of motivated joke.
"Show me one Microsoft app that puts even ONE icon in your tray."
Let me take a peek at my tray.
- Microsoft Outlook
- Microsoft Firewall Client
- Microsoft Windows Defender
- Microsoft Live Messenger
- Microsoft Sidebar
I'm not arguing with your overall message, but many MS applications put icons in the tray, and always have. Some MS applications like MS Office and MS Desktop Search take over a piece of the task bar between applications and the tray, which is worse than using the tray itself IMO.
I don't have a particular problem with applications that use the tray, although too many applications use it which causes a great deal of clutter at times.
Some companies like MSI now offer a "build it yourself" barebones laptop kit.
What if it was video? What if a hypothetical hidden video camera was placed on the public street outside of your house and it sent a live feed to Google. Then I could simply enter your address into the search engine and pull up a video feed of your house from anywhere in the world, at any time. It would be the same as if I was actually there looking at your house, except that you wouldn't see me out there pointing a video camera at you, because I'm a thousand miles away.
The problem with this Google service, while not a huge one, is that the photographs they publish are searchable documentation of specific locations. I'm sure that there are photographs of my house in existence (besides the ones I've taken). Perhaps there are even photographs of my house online right now that I have no idea about...in the background of my neighbor's blog or something. The difference between this and Google's service is that I can't *search* for pictures of my house, and neither can anyone else. If somebody wants to see what my house looks like, and possibly take a peek at me, and maybe snap a picture or two, then they have to get their lazy ass over to my street in person, and risk being seen by me. This makes the interaction *personal*, which greatly modifies behavior.
People act differently when they know they are being watched, and differently again when they know or think that they might be seen by particular people. We clean up the house for dinner guests, but not just in case the neighbor comes for a cup of sugar. What if the Google van drove by right as you ran out of your house in your pink polka-dotted underwear to get the paper? Sure you knew that your neighbors might spot you for a brief second, and you knew that there was a 1 in 1,000,000 chance that somebody might be taking a picture of your house at that moment, but you certainly didn't expect Google to drive by and then throw your picture up on the net for all your friends and family members to see. What if the Google van drove by on a day when your lawn was totally trashed for whatever reason? How long is that picture going to be up? It certainly doesn't represent the typical condition of your abode, but that's what your cousin AJ is going to find when he starts plugging addresses into Google, and then he's going to print it out and show it to your Grandma because he's mean like that. This is why they do need a take down procedure.
How about this: you put your address on your resume and send it in for a very important job opening. You're a little bit down and out after having been laid off by IBM, and you're staying a few months with your cousin Gary, who lives in a run down shack with gutted out cars on the front lawn and a big confederate flag painted on the wall facing the street. This is the picture that your would-have-been-future-boss pulls up from Google when he enters your address. Could he have driven to your address and looked for himself? Sure, of course. But if he did something like this, he would actually considered a bit of a paranoid weirdo. Simply plugging an address into Google doesn't feel the same way, and many people might not even think it's weird to do so.
The ability to easily, quickly, and invisibly gather information about a person is something that is brand new. Even if the information could have been gathered in the past through traditional measures, it does not mean that modern measures are the equivalent and thus subject to the same set of rules.
This Google service doesn't really do much in terms of exposing an individual; it's not a good mechanism for spying on an actual person. However, it does expose the condition of a person's home to the world without giving that person any sort of warning. If you were going to take your own photograph of your home to post online, you'd probably take the photo when the place was at least looking nice. When you're representing yourself to the world, you should have some control over the process.
I want to stress that a person's mug or house or car or cat happening to be published online is not the real issue here. The real issue is that the images taken by Google are referenced to very exact locations.
Interesting. Do you have the manual CD for your 205BW?
The manual disc that came with my 204BW has specs for both the 204BW and the 205BW. I looked at the 205BW specs just now and they read:
Type: a-si TFT active matrix
Display Color: 16.7 M Colors (8bit + RGB)
No viewing angle mentioned. Online they claim 16.7 million color support, and a viewing angle of 160/160.
It can be very difficult to tell if an LCD monitor has a 6 or 8 bit panel, and there are several variations of each. Often times 6 bit panels are labeled as "16.2" million colors, so that's one indication. Otherwise they often use some kind of fishy wording, like "16.7 million color support" which simply means that you can set your display settings to 16.7, even though you're not seeing 8 bit color. Another sign of a 6 bit panel is a super fast response time, like 2ms. Finally, the most important thing to look at is price. On the low side an 8 bit panel is going to start at around $250-300 (19 - 20.1"). A good LCD monitor for graphics work is still going to set a person back a fair amount.
I went through the nightmare of trying to find a low cost 8 bit panel recently. I'm very familiar with the Viewsonic documents you posted, and I remember being quite frustrated with their literature. I'm not sure that they're trying to pull a fast one though. I've never seen so much contradictory literature, from a variety of companies!
For instance, I ended up getting a pair of Samsung SyncMaster 204BW monitors. Check this out:
- According to the *manual* that came with the monitor, it is a 16.7 M Colors (8bit + RGB) a-si TFT active matrix panel. It specifically says "8bit + RGB" in the manual.
- According to most online stores currently selling it, it is a 6 bit panel supporting 16.2M colorand is thus a 6 bit panel. (this has actually changed since I bought it. the store I bought it from at the time listed it as 16.7, and has since changed the spec to 16.2)
- According to some guy in a forum who claims to have called Samsung about this monitor, it is 8 bit.
- According to Samsung online, it is an 6 bit panel.
- According to Samsung online in canada, it is an 8 bit panel.
I think it's very possible that manufacturers choose different components for their models over time, even critical components like the panel in an LCD monitor. Perhaps the 204BW monitors I'm running are 8 bit, and the ones for sale now are 6 bit. I honestly don't know for sure.
The good news is that even if these are 6 bit panels, I think that they look great. I use them for quite a bit of work in Photoshop and Illustrator. No complaints whatsoever. They outperform my old CRTs in terms of color accuracy and contrast, which surprised me (although viewing angle is important with an LCD...which can either be a hindrance or be used as an advantage).
As far as TFA goes, I on one hand don't think these guys have a chance. Cheap LCD panels are nothing new, and they've gotten so good that the average user is none the wiser about them being 6 bit. If the eye is fooled then the eye is fooled. Macintosh certainly didn't invent 6 bit panels, nor do I believe that they intentionally use them to dupe customers. The reason that LCDs have gotten so cheap is not because manufacturing high quality panels has become that much cheaper, it's because the new cheap LCDs use cheaper 6 bit panels! Plus it cracks me up that guys who spend $2500 for Macbooks actually think they're getting the highest quality hardware. (is there a notebook offered today with an 8 bit panel?)
On the other hand, it would be nice if this thing could lead to manufacturers being more consistent in their labeling.
Have you ever noticed that you can buy Windows at Target and Walmart? Plenty of normal users install Windows on their own. Some have trouble and call you, others don't. In my experience with colleagues and friends, quite a number of people attempt to reinstall or upgrade Windows all by their lonesome.
You're sort of setting an arbitrary line between "normal" and "power" users, based on your own criteria, and then making your argument based upon this assumption. A computer user who can boot from a Windows CD, follow a few instructions, and install Windows is not a terribly special case. Lots of boneheads can do it. I know, they're my friends and family.
Really, the only difficult question that the Windows installer asks is about partitioning and formating. If a user can get past that one, they're in most cases home free.
Agreed. Don't use Dreamweaver-specific features like templates, and never use the WYSIWYG editor. As an overall environment without all this extra crap, it's top-notch. A pretty decent editor with correct hints for HTML, CSS, and PHP, and proper project management that actually expects you to work on files locally, test on a testing server, and then publish to a production server. It's odd how many other packages can't get this right when it's such a painfully simple concept.
I found a bug recently in an administrative template that shipped with the initial release of Office 2007. I spent a lot of my own time determining that there was a bug, and exactly what it was. I *fixed* the bug.
/all..."
I went to Microsoft to report the bug and offer the fix. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the front door. There was one little door off to the side, but the bouncer wanted almost $200 to get through it. I found a large group of people congregating in the parking lot around a few guys with "MVP" badges. Figuring that the MVPs must be representing the company somehow, I told one of them about the problem. He repeated everything I said back to him, and then read something out of a manual. I explained to him that I wasn't having trouble understanding how the software was supposed to work, but I was there to report that the software was not working as documented. He repeated everything I had just said, then everything he had previously said, then everything I originally said, and then asked me about my network settings. I said, "no no, you don't understand. Here's the problem, and here is the fix." I handed him a copy of the exact instructions to fix the problem, and awaited his response. Perhaps a big smooch on the cheek and a check for $50!? No, he just stared off blankly for a while and then started asking some other guy for his network settings. "Click start. Click run. Enter cmd and press enter. Type ipconfig
I was a little disappointed that I didn't even get a hug or anything for solving a problem for the company who I had just given 24,000 dollars to earlier in the year, but I went away certain that the trustworthy MVP personally delivered my complaint to the proper executives once he had ascertained his daily quota of network settings. I mean, the MVPs can get past the bouncer, right? Of course, of course.
You know, sometimes bitching on the web 2.0 is all we got.
Junk faxes here really slowed down after coverage of the enforcement of junk fax legislation started to hit the mainstream media. I guess that was in the late 90s sometime. We still get a few from time to time. Although now that I think of it, this decrease also probably coincided with an increase in spam, which probably has more to do with it (cheaper, easier, wider base of victims).
:) There are four major benefits to software faxing: 1) You'll save money because there are no consumables to buy, and because of this the cost of receiving a junk fax is the same as receiving a junk email as long as you don't pay per minute on your phone line. 2) Routing faxes through email is much more effective than tossing paper into a physical inbox, especially if you have to make copies of faxes for multiple people. 3) Many fax servers will enable your employees to send a fax by simply printing to a special fax printer on their computer, saving time, money, etc. 4) The quality of received faxes, and especially outgoing faxes, is considerably improved.
Here's a wikipedia page with information about what can be done legally against junk fax senders in the US, if it's bad enough that you want to take the time to go after them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_fax
The solution, although not so much a solution as a better system, is to use fax server software or an online fax service. I run a local fax server here. Faxes come in and are routed via email to the secretary who was at one time responsible for pulling paper faxes off the old fax machine. This person then routes the fax to the appropriate person, and acts as a junk fax filter
I do sympathize with you. Especially if you're working with a lot of international companies (assuming you're in the US, if not sorry), sometimes you simply have to be able to accept faxed documents to keep customers happy. You might encourage them to start using email, perhaps by pointing out the financial benefits. Also, a lot of people might not know about simple tools like pdfcreator with which they can print and send a purchase order via email right from their existing accounting software.
I do object to your comment implying that junk email doesn't cost anything. Perhaps if you're working for a small outfit with hosted email it doesn't appear to cost anything. My mail server here processes a hundred thousand spam messages per month, and we're a pretty small outfit. This definitely costs real money in terms of hardware and software support, and most importantly employee time (I guarantee that people spend more time going through their junk email or flagging email as junk than they do looking at junk faxes).