It'd be like someone stealing a car from GM - fine, they stole it. But imagine if they later came to GM with their stolen car and asked for the $1000 engine recall upgrade. Nope - that's for legitimate carowners only. The $25,000 GM prices the car takes into account the small chance that they may have to set a recall.
Grrr... You mean you created a machine that duplicated a GM car atom by atom perfectly based of blueprints and then when to the GM server and decided to copy a few additional addons like a CD player. Besides the bandwidth charges, you never costed GM anything other than "theoretical loss" except for the time you called GM's 800 number and when they asked for registry number you replied "Gotta go!".
You have not commited theft. You have commited IP, copyright, and patent infringment that should be persued at a civil court! The only real world laws you have broken are the laws of physics.
If GM decides not to assist you in this matter then it is their right to do so (and also their right to sue you!), but do not ever compare IP, copyright, and patent infringments to theft!
BTW if you ever do come up with a machine that can copy a car perfectly down to the atom, then please, choose something else other than a GM car... Maybe like a Volkswagen Bug or a nice Toureg.
Because the DeWalt knockoff drill was a DeWalt drill exactly atom by atom and therefore indistinguashible other than the serial code which the only proof that it wasn't really a DeWalt drill was because DeWalt said so. DeWalt wouldn't pratice bad business ethics would they?
Unfortunatly, these drills without security fixes become flesh eating creatures of doom if infected with a drill virus and also attack people at random leaving you responsible if DeWalt doesn't provide a fix.
Of course if anologies to the real world could be applied to technology it would seem that DeWalt is good in that respect and still supplying security fixes for free for the saftey of all.
So I'm a bit bitter about this: if we can't get enough people to talk with their wallets, we will soon truly have two internets: one for the masses, all EFI'd and bright-shiny-new, and one for the geeks who run ten year old hardware, because that's the last pieces which rolled off without EFI.
Wait a minute... Isn't it us geeks who buy the "bright-shiny-new" hardware before everyone else does? Or maybe are people being duped into buying 256mb $500 video cards to do word processing (hell from my understanding perhaps they are).
So if no one is taking the "first buy" leap then what will happen? Will someone come along and fill in the gap?
You know.... This might make the internet just like the TV was in the 90's and we'll have to come up with another BBS type of system.
The Chinese will infringe on MIPS patents if they try to export their chip to countries where the MIPS patens are valid.
Only then if they either fail to buy the MIPS Technology company, a really good lawyer team, or a lobier of a US Congressman. Hell... With their current economy, they probaly could afford to do all of the above.
if you work for a commercial organisation you obviously do not know anything about computers. Usability is stupid. Whats wrong with the command line? If you cant use the command line then you shouldnt be using a computer.
You sir. Have made my day.
Well, I sort of meant Christians who believe the Bible is fallible or least partly untrue (which are rare moreso these days than they were in the middle ages), but yes there are plenty of non-Christians who believe the bible is fallible.;)
Because there is more mass towards the center of the solar system, the slower light (things with waves and particles) and matter (items with mass) move about.
As you move further away from all the mass, time distorts and you actually speed up as observed from earth. If you were on the spacecraft, you would observe everything else in the solor system slowing down. (I think?)
In theory, one might be able to traverse to other solar systems faster than we originally thought, but still takes more time than we have as humans with current technology.
For a creationist, "believe" means "I have faith that this is so, not because of any empirical evidence, but because it's what I've been told by 'good people' who assure me they're telling the Truth."
There is also quite a difference between articles of faith. I for one believe "Faith in God" litterly means God has spoken to you and has specifically said "do this". Weather you saw a demon with hell fire wings while smoking the pipe light night circa 5,000 BC has yet to be seen.
Faith in God does not even mean faith in say the Bible since it's possible to believe the Bible to be fallible (although we don't have many of those people these days because they were all put to death... Remember the Cathars in France?)
Peerhaps life is natures was of balancing chaos with order.
To put that to an extreme, information is the opposite of entrophy and only information can reverse the effects of chaos. Or rather, when things are able to process information they can reverse the affects of chaos and create order*
*Order being uniformity of matter and chaos being the diversity of matter.
Life can process matter and energy via information store via dna and take matter and put them into almost uniform conditions (like carbon, H20, oxygen, and various other matter)
Humans on the other hand can take this to an extreme and say make a perfect cube of Uranium if they so desired. I seriously doubt you'd find a perfect cube of Uranium spontaneous existing without intelligent life being involved.
From a ground level point of view everyone I know personally that was affected by the bubble burst lost their job after 9/11. This was about 8 different people working with various tech companies from North Carolina, Georgia, TN, and California. I was going back to school myself, but the company I left said they wouldn't be able to hire me back because they laid off the person that replaced me.
But yeah... Most companies were in the red before then after 2000 and 9/11 just pushed most of these companies off the brink. Still, I don't think either president was responsible for what happened.
I worked for a help desk for an outsource center and we assist end corporate customers of a good 100 different companies (maybe more, they don't tell us these things you know).
Oddly enough there are many companies that don't bother to lock down desktops. Most of the time we can tell because they are calling about the fact that there are casino or porn adds popping up when they visit the company portal.
Secondly, there are many companies that have a "DYI attitude" where if someone request something installed they send them a link or the cd and say "have fun!".
Often times companies won't even install printers or the email software required for the person to even connect or office suite on brand new computers.
But that's why they hired us to assist the customer over the phone...
Now there are some hardcore IT desks out there that make you use terminal server and won't even let you right click or close any require programs or even have access to search for files or folders or even have a start button.
So really, it depends on the IT department. Both models are valid depending on the saviness of the end user and the amount of IT staff they are willing to pay for.
As long as the high level people in many games shoot down the beginners, this problem will never go away.
No. You just have to make all players equal and do away with leveling and items that make players inequal.
How would you do this without making the MMORPG into an MMOFPS? I don't relly know. One has to figure out a way to have time sinks without progression or inabalance between players so that a beginer with enough tactical knowledge has a fair fight against a vetern player.
That said, veterns of all games will have an unfair edge because they know the in and outs and have the interface down pat. Still, this is something that is less problematic than the fact a 90th level character can kill things in one hit that a 10th level charcter would die in just by walking in the room of the mob.
If a new player can do as much as a vetern player then you have resolved the problem. You will have to figure out time sinks instead of being able to do something but rather going somewhere to do something. Again, I'm not sure how this would work, but you couldn't have a "Kill/Heal/Kill/Ding-Ding!" level up and gold farming methology like all previous games.
Actually I didn't say that, it wasn't the Macs fault, but it was a problem in just thaving a mac on an NT network. The windows machines work fine you see on the same share and even though it wasn't actually anything to do with OS X it was something that would not have happened if OS X was not brought into the picture.
So no, it wasn't a problem with OS X, but you still have to deal with issues related to it.
Do you work help desk or have you ever worked help desk?
There are three types of support calls and only three types of support calls:
1. They don't know what to do in order to get the computer to do what they want it to do.
"How do I write an Excel formula? How do I get a picture into Word from a webpage?"
2. The computer is broke because of something the end user did.
They went on a happy file delete spree or opened that attachment or downloaded weatherbug or pulled the the fan off the cpu chip because it was making too much noise.
3. The computer is broke because of something beyond the users reasonable amount control because of faulty design of the software or hardware.
Blue screen of death, freeze and hangs because of a bad ram chip, video driver, or Office 2003 registry just ate itself or they plugged a brand new computer to the internet and in 10 minutes it was infected with a virus. Sometimes you can combine this with with scenario 2 call when you combine bad design with lack of knowledge.
You can expand each of those three questions to other things like networking or data mining, but it basically comes down to the main reason they are calling you is because either they don't know how to do it, they did something to prevent themselves from doing it, or something beyond their control is preventing they doing it.
If you can reduce this down to 1 out of 3 then, I'll say you've accomplished a great deal. With OS X, you can sort of take a chunk out of friendly user interface, but people still need to know how to do things even if the program and computer is in working order.
There are two major companies that I help support with that use macs and maybe have hundreds of macs, but then there are companies without a Mac even in the art room.
Exactly. 90%+ of the cost of running my business is employees. Hardware and software, while not cheap are significantly less expensive over time.
Amen.
The one thing that annoys me is the fact that most companies are not willing to spend money for more than 50mb of email space. In my job I work with many companies and it differs with some giving 100mb per account down to 30mb for an Exchange mailbox.
The thing that gets me if that Google can just give about 1 GB of mail for free (and yahoo and hotmail at 250MB) then why can't these employees get as much since if they spend most of their time trying to fix pst files and calling support to get their mailbox fixed (which just usually involves support just deleting items for them).
The fewer problems a company faces on the computer side, the less they have to spend on people side.
When people ask me what I would recommend (that isn't my job since I'm not a consultant but more or less a front line desktop support person), I tell them to get a Mac. Yes Macs do have problems (and I had a nightmare with an SMB to NT server today with OS 10.4), but as a desktop machine they are rock solid and generally people don't waste as much time trying to get things to work.
However OS X doesn't of yet have a decent (or even killer) office management and email app like GroupWise, Outlook, or anything else that handles meeting and emails and various other things all into an integrated package.
I take that back. Notes 6.5 actually works great on OS X. However, I don't really think notes is the best package on the PC market and it would be nice to have a decently working Exchange program.
I'm sure many people would debate this with me and I personally think if you don't really have the money and time to run an exchange server and have some Notes Development knowledge then go for it.
Outlook and Groupwise do exist for the Mac, but both versions are seriously crippled and are an afterthought in features. Groupwise for the mac doesn't even have functional rules and Outlook 2001 only works in classic OS 9 mode.
There is always Entourage, but it's Exchange support is horrid and you can't even delegate people like you can in outlook and the rules don't interface to the server side.
Perhaps the best solution would be to either run Notes 6.5 or have everyone use Terminal server on a Mac to use Outlook 2k3.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in my day we paid $2000 for 10MB and we liked it!
Actually, I'm not that old... (This was the Hyperdrive in 1984) for the Mac, but back in day people paid a lot more for a great deal less.
Sorry to demonstrate a solid command of the obvious, but nothing is "genuinely free".
Actually, there is and it's called "compulsory labor". However, the labor would disagree on your use of the words "genuinely free".
It'd be like someone stealing a car from GM - fine, they stole it. But imagine if they later came to GM with their stolen car and asked for the $1000 engine recall upgrade. Nope - that's for legitimate carowners only. The $25,000 GM prices the car takes into account the small chance that they may have to set a recall.
Grrr... You mean you created a machine that duplicated a GM car atom by atom perfectly based of blueprints and then when to the GM server and decided to copy a few additional addons like a CD player. Besides the bandwidth charges, you never costed GM anything other than "theoretical loss" except for the time you called GM's 800 number and when they asked for registry number you replied "Gotta go!".
You have not commited theft. You have commited IP, copyright, and patent infringment that should be persued at a civil court! The only real world laws you have broken are the laws of physics.
If GM decides not to assist you in this matter then it is their right to do so (and also their right to sue you!), but do not ever compare IP, copyright, and patent infringments to theft!
BTW if you ever do come up with a machine that can copy a car perfectly down to the atom, then please, choose something else other than a GM car... Maybe like a Volkswagen Bug or a nice Toureg.
Because the DeWalt knockoff drill was a DeWalt drill exactly atom by atom and therefore indistinguashible other than the serial code which the only proof that it wasn't really a DeWalt drill was because DeWalt said so. DeWalt wouldn't pratice bad business ethics would they?
Unfortunatly, these drills without security fixes become flesh eating creatures of doom if infected with a drill virus and also attack people at random leaving you responsible if DeWalt doesn't provide a fix.
Of course if anologies to the real world could be applied to technology it would seem that DeWalt is good in that respect and still supplying security fixes for free for the saftey of all.
So I'm a bit bitter about this: if we can't get enough people to talk with their wallets, we will soon truly have two internets: one for the masses, all EFI'd and bright-shiny-new, and one for the geeks who run ten year old hardware, because that's the last pieces which rolled off without EFI.
Wait a minute... Isn't it us geeks who buy the "bright-shiny-new" hardware before everyone else does? Or maybe are people being duped into buying 256mb $500 video cards to do word processing (hell from my understanding perhaps they are).
So if no one is taking the "first buy" leap then what will happen? Will someone come along and fill in the gap?
You know.... This might make the internet just like the TV was in the 90's and we'll have to come up with another BBS type of system.
The Chinese will infringe on MIPS patents if they try to export their chip to countries where the MIPS patens are valid.
Only then if they either fail to buy the MIPS Technology company, a really good lawyer team, or a lobier of a US Congressman. Hell... With their current economy, they probaly could afford to do all of the above.
if you work for a commercial organisation you obviously do not know anything about computers. Usability is stupid. Whats wrong with the command line? If you cant use the command line then you shouldnt be using a computer. You sir. Have made my day.
There is always DARPA, and they were the original rocket scientists before NASA took over ;)
Well, I sort of meant Christians who believe the Bible is fallible or least partly untrue (which are rare moreso these days than they were in the middle ages), but yes there are plenty of non-Christians who believe the bible is fallible. ;)
Because there is more mass towards the center of the solar system, the slower light (things with waves and particles) and matter (items with mass) move about.
As you move further away from all the mass, time distorts and you actually speed up as observed from earth. If you were on the spacecraft, you would observe everything else in the solor system slowing down. (I think?)
In theory, one might be able to traverse to other solar systems faster than we originally thought, but still takes more time than we have as humans with current technology.
And furthermore, shouldn't I be able to have a game that's free of advertisements, seeing as I allready paid $49.95 for the game?
After you buy the game, you still can always download the warez version with the CD and Ad removal crack patch.
For a creationist, "believe" means "I have faith that this is so, not because of any empirical evidence, but because it's what I've been told by 'good people' who assure me they're telling the Truth."
There is also quite a difference between articles of faith. I for one believe "Faith in God" litterly means God has spoken to you and has specifically said "do this". Weather you saw a demon with hell fire wings while smoking the pipe light night circa 5,000 BC has yet to be seen.
Faith in God does not even mean faith in say the Bible since it's possible to believe the Bible to be fallible (although we don't have many of those people these days because they were all put to death... Remember the Cathars in France?)
Peerhaps life is natures was of balancing chaos with order.
To put that to an extreme, information is the opposite of entrophy and only information can reverse the effects of chaos. Or rather, when things are able to process information they can reverse the affects of chaos and create order*
*Order being uniformity of matter and chaos being the diversity of matter.
Life can process matter and energy via information store via dna and take matter and put them into almost uniform conditions (like carbon, H20, oxygen, and various other matter)
Humans on the other hand can take this to an extreme and say make a perfect cube of Uranium if they so desired. I seriously doubt you'd find a perfect cube of Uranium spontaneous existing without intelligent life being involved.
From a ground level point of view everyone I know personally that was affected by the bubble burst lost their job after 9/11. This was about 8 different people working with various tech companies from North Carolina, Georgia, TN, and California. I was going back to school myself, but the company I left said they wouldn't be able to hire me back because they laid off the person that replaced me.
But yeah... Most companies were in the red before then after 2000 and 9/11 just pushed most of these companies off the brink. Still, I don't think either president was responsible for what happened.
I worked for a help desk for an outsource center and we assist end corporate customers of a good 100 different companies (maybe more, they don't tell us these things you know).
Oddly enough there are many companies that don't bother to lock down desktops. Most of the time we can tell because they are calling about the fact that there are casino or porn adds popping up when they visit the company portal.
Secondly, there are many companies that have a "DYI attitude" where if someone request something installed they send them a link or the cd and say "have fun!".
Often times companies won't even install printers or the email software required for the person to even connect or office suite on brand new computers.
But that's why they hired us to assist the customer over the phone...
Now there are some hardcore IT desks out there that make you use terminal server and won't even let you right click or close any require programs or even have access to search for files or folders or even have a start button.
So really, it depends on the IT department. Both models are valid depending on the saviness of the end user and the amount of IT staff they are willing to pay for.
I believe there was a Republican in the White House during the entire time the Internet Bubble burst.
As long as the high level people in many games shoot down the beginners, this problem will never go away.
No. You just have to make all players equal and do away with leveling and items that make players inequal.
How would you do this without making the MMORPG into an MMOFPS? I don't relly know. One has to figure out a way to have time sinks without progression or inabalance between players so that a beginer with enough tactical knowledge has a fair fight against a vetern player.
That said, veterns of all games will have an unfair edge because they know the in and outs and have the interface down pat. Still, this is something that is less problematic than the fact a 90th level character can kill things in one hit that a 10th level charcter would die in just by walking in the room of the mob.
If a new player can do as much as a vetern player then you have resolved the problem. You will have to figure out time sinks instead of being able to do something but rather going somewhere to do something. Again, I'm not sure how this would work, but you couldn't have a "Kill/Heal/Kill/Ding-Ding!" level up and gold farming methology like all previous games.
...I'm actually following these days (next to the Space Shuttle).
;)
So is there any place I can place my bets on which team is going to win?
I'd bet on Team Red over the OS X but only because they have two entries
Actually I didn't say that, it wasn't the Macs fault, but it was a problem in just thaving a mac on an NT network. The windows machines work fine you see on the same share and even though it wasn't actually anything to do with OS X it was something that would not have happened if OS X was not brought into the picture. So no, it wasn't a problem with OS X, but you still have to deal with issues related to it.
Do you work help desk or have you ever worked help desk?
There are three types of support calls and only three types of support calls:
1. They don't know what to do in order to get the computer to do what they want it to do.
"How do I write an Excel formula? How do I get a picture into Word from a webpage?"
2. The computer is broke because of something the end user did.
They went on a happy file delete spree or opened that attachment or downloaded weatherbug or pulled the the fan off the cpu chip because it was making too much noise.
3. The computer is broke because of something beyond the users reasonable amount control because of faulty design of the software or hardware.
Blue screen of death, freeze and hangs because of a bad ram chip, video driver, or Office 2003 registry just ate itself or they plugged a brand new computer to the internet and in 10 minutes it was infected with a virus. Sometimes you can combine this with with scenario 2 call when you combine bad design with lack of knowledge.
You can expand each of those three questions to other things like networking or data mining, but it basically comes down to the main reason they are calling you is because either they don't know how to do it, they did something to prevent themselves from doing it, or something beyond their control is preventing they doing it.
If you can reduce this down to 1 out of 3 then, I'll say you've accomplished a great deal. With OS X, you can sort of take a chunk out of friendly user interface, but people still need to know how to do things even if the program and computer is in working order.
Depends on which company you work for.
There are two major companies that I help support with that use macs and maybe have hundreds of macs, but then there are companies without a Mac even in the art room.
Exactly. 90%+ of the cost of running my business is employees. Hardware and software, while not cheap are significantly less expensive over time.
Amen.
The one thing that annoys me is the fact that most companies are not willing to spend money for more than 50mb of email space. In my job I work with many companies and it differs with some giving 100mb per account down to 30mb for an Exchange mailbox.
The thing that gets me if that Google can just give about 1 GB of mail for free (and yahoo and hotmail at 250MB) then why can't these employees get as much since if they spend most of their time trying to fix pst files and calling support to get their mailbox fixed (which just usually involves support just deleting items for them).
The fewer problems a company faces on the computer side, the less they have to spend on people side.
When people ask me what I would recommend (that isn't my job since I'm not a consultant but more or less a front line desktop support person), I tell them to get a Mac. Yes Macs do have problems (and I had a nightmare with an SMB to NT server today with OS 10.4), but as a desktop machine they are rock solid and generally people don't waste as much time trying to get things to work.
However OS X doesn't of yet have a decent (or even killer) office management and email app like GroupWise, Outlook, or anything else that handles meeting and emails and various other things all into an integrated package.
I take that back. Notes 6.5 actually works great on OS X. However, I don't really think notes is the best package on the PC market and it would be nice to have a decently working Exchange program.
I'm sure many people would debate this with me and I personally think if you don't really have the money and time to run an exchange server and have some Notes Development knowledge then go for it.
Outlook and Groupwise do exist for the Mac, but both versions are seriously crippled and are an afterthought in features. Groupwise for the mac doesn't even have functional rules and Outlook 2001 only works in classic OS 9 mode.
There is always Entourage, but it's Exchange support is horrid and you can't even delegate people like you can in outlook and the rules don't interface to the server side.
Perhaps the best solution would be to either run Notes 6.5 or have everyone use Terminal server on a Mac to use Outlook 2k3.
my land line works 100% of the time.
You've never had Bell South for a phone company have you?
When the internet goes down your VOIP phone may go with it.
;)
I'm sure someone, somewhere on an ISP help desk is laughing about this ingenious plan
But as soon as you enter a public arena that you don't control you have to learn to play well with others.
Unless you play on the NBA. Then it's called "yelling the ref" until he gives you a good call.