I've had a fair number of times when a credit/debit card transaction went through, and it turned out it was for 1 or 2 cents more than what I had on my original receipt.
Typically, this seems to happen with purchases made at restaurants, where you write in a tip on the receipt before leaving it with a server.
Is this really done on purpose, or perhaps just someone transposing numbers or being sloppy when keying in the amount to be billed? Wouldn't doubt some of each happens, but in any case - who is going to really put up a big fight over a penny in a case like this? Only reason I ever notice it is because I track all my finances in Quicken, and manually enter every paper receipt I bring home.
Actually, I'd say that we're already well into a situation where the "best quality" entertainment is no longer generally produced by the people with the fattest wallets!
Hollywood cranked out mostly unoriginal, dull movies for the last year or two. (Many of their "biggest hits" have been adaptations of comic books and cartoons. Not that I have anything against comics, but let's face reality here. That material was aimed primarily at KIDS, and isn't exactly "high-brow literature". If that's the BEST Hollywood can work with, it speaks volumes about their ability to wrap their heads around stories and turn them into engaging movies.)
Meanwhile, some of the most enjoyable and original material I've seen recently was independent film, a la "Thank You for Smoking".
The video-game industry is starting to outsell the movie industry, for that matter. People are getting more out of interactive gaming on a home TV or monitor than paying to view big-budget movie content.
The cheezy, "Ow, my balls!" quality of humor often found on YouTube is a predictable starting point, really. People are learning how to use their camcorders and publish content to the Internet for the first time. Much of their material is unscripted nonsense, meant to really only be viewed by their circle of friends - but available for mass consumption anyway.
But just like the huge price drop in digital recording gear allowed the "Indie music scene" to rise up from people's basements, cheap HD camcorders and video editing suites, plus sites like YouTube, will do the same for the amateur movie producers and directors out there.
This is the counter-argument people make to justify our H1B program, and potential increases to it. It's not a bad argument either, EXCEPT I don't think the current situation in the U.S. compares to the post WWII era.
Post WWII, what we basically had were scientists and engineers with a proven track record of excellence or knowledge, who came here because, well... we were on the winning end of a major world war, and it was a good place to be. (EG. If you built rockets for the Germans in Germany, they probably weren't looking like a nation ready to invest heavily in that area right after losing WWII.)
Today, we've got a flood of computer programmers and "computer support" people coming over on H1Bs, and they're largely occupying the "entry level" job positions our recent college grads need as "stepping stones" on their I.T. career path.
I'm not denying many may go on to become U.S. citizens, and productive ones at that. It's just that right now, I think quite a few of them do so at the expense of giving our own citizens "first dibs" at being productive citizens following the same career choices.
Companies like Microsoft *love* to complain loudly that they NEED the foreign workers because qualified U.S. citizens just don't exist in the numbers required. Yet, I look around and I see lots of our own college students avoiding I.T. because it's just too hard to find and keep a job in the field that offers a decent salary. H1Bs, therefore, give companies a way to fill positions without resorting to the NORMAL tactic of offering a better salary to attact talent.
A vote for Hillary means we're putting a Clinton back in office again.
Our country has been 4 years of Bush, 8 years of Clinton, and 8 years of Bush already. That means anyone younger than 21 can't even remember a time when one of those two families wasn't in power in our nation!
Given that realization, I'd have to give the nod to Obama over Clinton - just for the sake of "breaking the cycle", if nothing else! (Of course, a vote for McCain would accomplish that too... but I'm also deeply concerned that he'd just opt for "stay the course" politics that continued in Bush's footsteps, only under a new name.)
I have to agree with some of the other comments. The Mac Mini is a great little machine, but it's most appropriate for someone wanting a small, "entry level priced" computer that runs Apple's OS X.
It's *not* really an attractive solution when the primary goal is low-price.
The cost of OS X Leopard is factored into the price of each and every new Mac Mini, and that's around $200 itself. By loading a Linux distro on an Asus, they avoid all of that, right off the bat - and Linux is just as "immune to browser exploits and remote attacks" as OS X is, really.
The *real* problem I see? When you take up a career of being a truck driver today, you're essentially signing up for a job of playing "robot".
The next logical step for trucking companies is to automate the big rigs so they can drive themselves on auto-pilot to their pre-programmed destinations.
The railroads have done a lot of this already. We have a big railroad yard not far from my workplace, and signs are all over the railroad crossings around here, warning people that the trains may be unmanned.
As technology progresses, new jobs are created and old ones become obsolete. Truck driving is well on its way out, as we learn enough details to monitor and understand the "ideal" set of circumstances we expect all trucks to operate under while in transit, etc.
I realize there are still technical hurdles to pass before an un-manned semi on our highways would be feasible, but work is being done on all of this as we speak. Perhaps they'll even dedicate a special lane just for this purpose on all the major roads/highways, and put up a tall concrete barrier preventing any cars from crossing over and using it? That would seem to solve a lot of issues right there, of concerns over a computer being able to safely deal with unexpected human driver behavior.
First of all, yeah, I agree that legislation like this is NOT about "free speech". (That's, unfortunately, a mistake people OFTEN make about laws restricting various actions or behaviors. They jump to a flawed "It violates free speech!" argument, instead of looking at it all logically. Maybe that's just because in the U.S., the right to "Freedom of Speech" is the one people are generally most aware of and can most easily comprehend the importance of?)
I don't agree that laws like this also "keep you from taking GIMP, making a few changes, and reselling it as closed source" at retail outlets.
What I saw, quite clearly as a bulletin board system operator in the 1980's through mid 90's (when my BBS was forced to shut down due to an FBI raid and seizure of all my equipment), was the VAST difference between violating copyright *for profit* and NOT for financial gain.
One of the WORST things the DMCA legislation did was to effectively cancel out any such distinction. All of a sudden, an issue which was really only a CIVIL matter between a software developer and another individual became CRIMINAL in nature.
Ever since the year 2000, the U.S. has decided it will waste taxpayer dollars criminalizing random citizens, using this bastardized version of legal statutes originally designed to stop COMMERCIAL COUNTERFEITING.
I agree with much of what you're saying. But I'd also point out that email *filtering* and *archiving* are two vastly different things.
It seems to me that practically all of the issues you're bringing up could be handled successfully by retaining good email backups, going back for a reasonable length of time?
Our company doesn't do anything special in the way of attempting to read employee's emails or filter their content. But we DO have backup systems that dump copies of all the mailboxes onto nightly backups, and we keep a couple alternating "month end" tapes, plus a "year end" tape that's archived away.
This way, if something actually comes up, there's a decent amount of supporting email evidence that can be retrieved for that specific situation.
Otherwise, employees have a general expectation that nobody's monitoring their daily email correspondence in a "big brother" fashion.
I agree... Like SO often happens, people dislike a decision someone else makes, so they scream "There oughta be a law!!"
On the other hand, people ALSO need to get a firm grasp of the idea that things don't HAVE to be "law" to be good decisions, or the "best" way to handle situations.
I wouldn't want to see legal regulation preventing me from operating cameras in my own home, for example. Yet, on principle, I never have installed a monitoring system at home to keep an eye on sitters or cleaning people.
Instead, I prefer to trust the combination of my own instincts and feedback from my kid, to determine if a sitter is doing a "good job" or not. By the same token, I'm picky about who I'd ever pay to clean my house. I've always used people I considered personal friends, so our relationship is at stake if they decided to steal something from me or otherwise cheat me. That's a better motivator to "do the job properly" than risk of being caught on some hidden camera.
I work in a smaller business (one of those shops where I'm the only only doing both the email administration and pretty much all the other computer-related stuff). What I tend to see is employees *receiving* non work-related material, not so much SENDING it.
Some employees don't even have a home computer with Internet access, so all their friends start sending their "funny photos", jokes, and so forth to the only contact address they can find for the person - the work email.
You *could* "blacklist" those people from sending you things, but come on! These are the employee's friends or relatives. They really don't want to block everything they might send them, because sometimes it's relevant or useful.
Do I ever agree! I read this article and thought it was some kind of joke, at first -- or maybe just an attempt to slam the big-name Inet companies.
Just in my own city, I could find 10 "tech" type jobs that are all FAR worse gigs than anything they listed in this article.
Like one guy said, have a Best Buy in your town? How about Geeksquad being on the list? There's a job where you'll never see anything remotely LIKE a $50K a year salary, yet your customers will all place demands and expectations on you like that's what you make (since that's the kind of money they pay Best Buy to get you out there in the first place!).
Or try a call center for any of the telcos? I've had friends doing that job for Verizon and AT&T. You're looking at being packed in a building like sardines, with no windows and poor climate control. The whole place literally stinks of sweat and mildew, and their idea of "variety" is shuffling you around to different cubicles every few weeks. (Really, it just ensures you don't get too friendly with co-workers sitting nearby and actually make new friends!) The pay? $11/hr. if you're lucky.
I know cost of living is different in different parts of the country, but geez! I'm past my mid 30's and I've been working in I.T. since I was 19 or 20. I've STILL never received a salary as high as $50K, much less the $70-80K some of these "worst 10" were offering! I have to work two jobs to get into the lower part of that range at all!
Well, I'm not a metallurgist either, but I did spend a number of years working in metal fabrication shops. So yes, they *can* add color to metals. The problem becomes cost. Metal is much more expensive than plastic to colorize and mold. (Among other things, it doesn't take nearly as much heat to get plastic into a liquefied form suitable for pouring into a mold.)
Also, from what I remember as a kid, most of the metal toys I had (such as toy cap guns, etc.) were made out of very low-grade "pot metal", which did break pretty easily. I have a feeling that's about the same grade we'd wind up with in something like a game controller (in the interest of meeting an expected price point), so you'd have them getting stress fractures and breaking in half when someone dropped them a few times, or threw one across the room. No big advantage over plastic, in other words.
You sound JUST like my dad, who used to constantly rant about plastic and pine for the "good old days" when everything from car dashboards to children's toys were made from wood and metal.
I'm not totally opposed to that mentality, but I also get where plastic has some real advantages.
From a purely aesthetic viewpoint, I think metal is great when you're talking about box-shaped items that will just be hidden from view or mounted on a wall. I love, for example, how Netgear uses the blue painted metal enclosures for many of their switches and routers. That's a place where we could do without the plastic, and nobody would have a big issue with it. Same with M-Audio and most of their external MIDI and audio breakout boxes. Using metal for them was a really good choice.
Other times, I really prefer plastic for the level of fine detail that can be molded into it, and the fact that color can be mixed into the material, instead of just painted onto the surface.
Wood, while "renewable", has some disadvantages. It slowly rots or gets mold and mildew on it if it gets wet for too long. Scratches on it tend to look ugly, if it was stained, painted or otherwise "finished". It's not as lightweight as plastic, and requires more effort to carve complex curves and designs into it.
I think you give them FAR too much credit with that statement! IMHO, they DON'T "mean well" by any stretch of the imagination! They're on a rampage with a skewed agenda - and it's important for people to see them for what they are, a group of radical environmental extremists.
If you REALLY want to encourage positive changes in our "environmental footprint" - you need to do it with education and promoting scientific advances. Research in creating lower power-consumption devices, improved battery technology, an HONEST and REASONABLE approach to the subject of "recycling"... these are all good moves. Harassing businesses and publishing negative reports about their products just makes you lose your credibility.
I would have modded your comment up, if I could. This is exactly right. The *real* problem America faces, if you ask me, is the lack of solid replacements for the industrial jobs we're rapidly giving up to other countries.
It's a natural progression of things for a nation to start outsourcing the jobs that require hard labor and a low level of intelligence or skills. The U.S. generally has managed to educate our people and give our people a high enough standard of living to where the vast majority DOES expect to do better than getting a few bucks an hour for mopping up cow blood or digging ditches.
Where we seem to be failing is at competing in the world marketplace in the things requiring the higher levels of skill. We have a few notable exceptions, like Intel and their processors. But overall, I'm not sure what our future really holds? Everyone talks about the "service economy" we've gone to - but services tend to be more of "luxury" expenses. You can't, for example, really justify paying someone to wash your clothes for you or to take care of your fish aquarium or swimming pool, if you don't already earn enough disposable income to pay for those conveniences. Or say your services are along the lines of advertising and web site building. Ok, great... but you still need to have clients earning a solid income doing something that justifies the expense of that advertising or web site.
Ultimately, it seems like people producing the tangible goods are the ones most able to bring in money from outside the nation. Those offering services generally rely on the disposable income of those located geographically close to them. So our trade imbalance may be what kills us, ultimately.
Truthfully, what I've found (and even experienced myself) is, many I.T. workers in the U.S. aren't properly utilized, so they wind up appearing to be "lazy" and "doing just the bare minimum" to get by.
In most cases, these people were hired and sometimes even promoted because they were intelligent, fairly knowledgeable folks who started out adding a lot of value to the business.
But after the first year or two, they tend to get burnt-out, because after they successfully rip through all of the piled-up, outstanding projects and issues the company had before they brought them in, the company starts leaving them to manage themselves. The mentality tends to be one of, "Well, he already proved he's capable of solving our problems efficiently and effectively - so no need to waste time managing him anymore! If we're not getting complaints from anyone, that means he's out there doing his job!"
The thing is though, most I.T. people like a regular flow of challenges. The "putting out fires" stuff is more of a necessary evil than a reason the job is "motivating". The things that provide good puzzles to solve are the projects where new hardware or software is brought in, 99% of the time. And since those involve significant monetary investments - they're the ones that, #1. don't happen that often, and #2. suddenly involve more "managing" than usual, because people have a vested interest in figuring out if they're getting a return on the investment.
So after a while, you have your systems administrator who automated everything he could to minimize his day-to-day support calls, and just sits around web-surfing and IMiing until a good project comes his way.
Understood, but what you're forgetting is govt's ability to get away with things that would clearly be lacking the support of the general public if done in a low-tech manner, by obfuscating it in high-tech.
We pretty much all understand that cutting people's tongues off to silence them is barbaric and unacceptable. But all of a sudden, start putting a positive spin on the concept of using super high-tech tools to "painlessly and only temporarily stun part of the brain" to paralyze the speech centers of those involved in "terrorist actions" - and lots of folks would be all for it.
If there's one thing I've always found maddening about Applecare, it's that damned policy of theirs of wanting a credit card first, and then giving you that "disclaimer" line about having to charge you if it's determined you called about something not covered.
Apple's a bit of an "odd" one to deal with, though, in the sense that they almost seem to demand you work with them on "faith". Their stated policies seem to provide them a lot of "wiggle room" to deny you coverage for things and screw you over. Yet if you "play along" and "trust" them to do the right thing, you TYPICALLY find that they do.
EG. When most vendors were outlining detailed policies on how many bad pixels an LCD monitor had to have before they'd agree to exchange it, Apple stood fast with an answer of "it's at our discretion", refusing to quote a number. From reading people's anecdotes posted on forums over time though, it became evident that this was working out in people's FAVOR more often than not. Monitors with even 1 or 2 bad pixels that no other company would replace were getting swapped by Apple, if you complained it was interfering with your work (as a graphics artist, photographer, or what have you).
Issues of not getting back the parts you shipped a system with are usually because they opted to ship you a refurbished equivalent machine, and someone screwed up on comparing all the specs and components. Again, this isn't good (although it ALSO means some people get back free upgrades!), but it's not something Apple is known for doing excessively.....
I totally agree with you, but the marketplace is what it is. That's why I always resell any used laptops I come across, but I try to price them all between $50 and $99, so nobody feels too "ripped off" after the sale, when they try to hunt down that replacement battery and see what it really costs to "refurbish" one.
One of the best deals going, currently, for a cheap notebook is the Lenovo Thinkpad R61e. Buy.com was recently blowing these out the door for $399.99 with free shipping. I've found, since then, that most of the major resellers like PC Connection, CDW and Insight have hundreds of these in stock - and will match that $399.99 price if you ask a sales rep about it. (Might not get the free shipping, but still.....)
Maybe the market is different where the original poster comes from, but I can assure you that here in the St. Louis area - a working PIII class laptop (even with a non-functional battery) is easily worth a good $50-75, and can be sold in a matter of hours if you post it on Craigslist.
I just made a quick $90 selling an old Thinkpad PIII 900Mhz (with worn out battery and crashed hard drive) and a working Dell PIII 500Mhz Inspiron 7500 (but it's a big, heavy and slow brick of a computer!). Neither of these even had wi-fi built in.
I find that when you start talking notebook computer and "under $100" in the same sentence, people come out of the woodwork, interested in at least knowing more about it. You don't want to waste money on shipping, so that's why you sell these things locally. But just about EVERY time I ever had contractors over to do any kind of work on my house, at least one of them asks me if I ever sell any cheap, used laptops (after they see all my computer stuff lying around).
I don't think the issue is whether or not an American citizen might be "banished from the country" upon making a return trip. I'd say, no, they're NOT able to do that.
The problem is, they could confiscate your expensive computer gear, and there's no guarantee you'd ever get it back. (There seems to be no real statute of limitations on the time these people are allowed to take to "examine" your property, if they claim a potential "security risk".)
I've been a Myth user for years now (running knoppmyth). Unless Mythubuntu is incredibly more advanced than the Knoppmyth distros though - I'd hardly be able to claim MythTV is "dead simple" for anyone to install!
Sure, you might be able to get the basic system up and running easily enough -- but the devil is in the details.
Just off the top of my head, I can think of numerous things they need to do to make an install easier and more "friendly" for the typical computer user:
1. The TV guide subscription process needs to be automated, so it's done entirely from the installation screens for the Myth distro. As it is now, the uninformed user has to read through documentation to figure out which web site to go to to sign up and create a new paid account, so they can then go back into Myth and configure that same account info in it. (Compare this to the "1 click and it's ready" ease of the TV guide provided in Windows MCE.)
2. Good luck getting the "mythgame" stuff working 100%. Sure, it promises you can use the MAME emulation, SNES emulation, and many others - but it's far from "ready to copy over your game titles and go", out of the box. You're in for hours of editing config files and tinkering to get your joystick set up properly, to get your game titles to all run "full screen" on your particular TV, and to give you a way to exit out of them back to the Myth menu when you're done without having to have a keyboard attached (so you can bang on ESC).
3. Configuration of the "IR Blaster" could be far easier. EG. I have AT&T U-Verse service, and I had to manually copy/paste a config file from a web page just to get the serial IR Blaster to work with the U-Verse boxes. I had to do a lot of manual editing a while back when I had Charter cable, too, to make Myth talk to their box over a direct serial cable connection.
4. Adding more hard disk space to a Myth box after it's already set up involves a lot of command line incantations, if you're trying to merge the drives to act as one big disk. Newer knoppmyth distros seem to be good about merging multiple drives into a big virtual disk at the time of initial setup -- but not so much after the fact.
1. "Faster and cheaper" wins every time, only when it's also reliable! (EG. Apple moved to Intel because despite every effort, they couldn't get either Motorola or IBM to consistently improve on their product offerings in a timely manner. It was already proven that Intel CPUs are reliable, so that PLUS faster and cheaper made it a good move.) It does a person no good to have something that's "cheaper" and supposedly "faster", but is breaking down constantly.
2. My experience with AppleCare has been FAR superior to anything I ever received from Dell, HP, Gateway, or other PC vendors I've had the displeasure of dealing with. Yes, Apple systems are "proprietary", in the same sense that a Playstation game console is proprietary to Sony, or the XBox 360 is proprietary to Microsoft, or a Sun workstation was proprietary to Sun. That business model has its pros and cons, but it's the de-facto ways computers were ALWAYS sold, up until a bunch of different people decided to build "PC clones" running the same default operating system. I know my hold times calling Apple have averaged around 5-10 minutes, as opposed to 45 mins. to 1 hour with everyone else. I know I've always reached a person who speaks my native language clearly and effectively with Apple. I know that when I have sent in a Mac for warranty work, they've gone over and above what was promised or "covered in writing", replacing any dented or scratched casings, loose hinges, etc. etc. What makes you think Dell or anyone else will give you great support for old, out-of-warranty systems of theirs, anyway? Like Apple, they'd rather just have you buy a new model, too.
3. I'm not going to get into the big, raging "Windows vs. OS X" debate, other than to say one thing. Currently, you can poll Mac users and then poll Windows users on how often spyware has crippled their machines. You tell me who suffered the biggest productivity losses.
It's pretty obvious you've got a strong dislike for Apple -- and I have to think it goes beyond a simple, logical comparison of system specs for the money.
I've used quite a few HP laptops, and frankly, I'd never be caught using another one, if I could help it. I'd gladly pay a premium for the Apple-branded notebook, vs. dealing with what comes with an HP purchase.
1. Unless things are different in other countries, Apple tech. support is WORLDS better than HP in the USA. When I contact HP, I typically have to wait about 48 hours for an email response from some 1st. level technician who just quotes obvious nonsense from a checklist. Why email, and not phone? Because calling HP results in over an hour wait time on hold, as a rule, only to wind up with another clueless response.
2. Apple is far more conscious of "design" than HP. Apple notebooks have a bare minimum of plastic doors, sliding trays, and the like which tend to break/snap off. Even the CD or DVD drives on them are slot-loading, so you don't have a big drive tray sliding out the side of your notebook, requiring extra free space around it and potentially breaking. The 17" Macbook Pro and Powerbook before it were thinner and lighter-weight than anything 17" HP had to offer, too. And don't forget Apple's "mag-safe" AC adapter. That's one more great idea, especially when I see how many HP and other laptops are out of service due to loose/broken AC power jacks!
3. OS X, in my opinion, is a FAR less trouble-prone environment to use, day-to-day, than anything else offered for PCs. I can't run a legal and officially-supported OS X environment on non-Apple hardware right now. So essentially, even if Apple hardware costs me a premium, I understand that paying it helps support and subsidize further OS X development and improvement -- and to me, that's a good place for my money to go.
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I've had a fair number of times when a credit/debit card transaction went through, and it turned out it was for 1 or 2 cents more than what I had on my original receipt.
Typically, this seems to happen with purchases made at restaurants, where you write in a tip on the receipt before leaving it with a server.
Is this really done on purpose, or perhaps just someone transposing numbers or being sloppy when keying in the amount to be billed? Wouldn't doubt some of each happens, but in any case - who is going to really put up a big fight over a penny in a case like this? Only reason I ever notice it is because I track all my finances in Quicken, and manually enter every paper receipt I bring home.
Actually, I'd say that we're already well into a situation where the "best quality" entertainment is no longer generally produced by the people with the fattest wallets!
Hollywood cranked out mostly unoriginal, dull movies for the last year or two. (Many of their "biggest hits" have been adaptations of comic books and cartoons. Not that I have anything against comics, but let's face reality here. That material was aimed primarily at KIDS, and isn't exactly "high-brow literature". If that's the BEST Hollywood can work with, it speaks volumes about their ability to wrap their heads around stories and turn them into engaging movies.)
Meanwhile, some of the most enjoyable and original material I've seen recently was independent film, a la "Thank You for Smoking".
The video-game industry is starting to outsell the movie industry, for that matter. People are getting more out of interactive gaming on a home TV or monitor than paying to view big-budget movie content.
The cheezy, "Ow, my balls!" quality of humor often found on YouTube is a predictable starting point, really. People are learning how to use their camcorders and publish content to the Internet for the first time. Much of their material is unscripted nonsense, meant to really only be viewed by their circle of friends - but available for mass consumption anyway.
But just like the huge price drop in digital recording gear allowed the "Indie music scene" to rise up from people's basements, cheap HD camcorders and video editing suites, plus sites like YouTube, will do the same for the amateur movie producers and directors out there.
This is the counter-argument people make to justify our H1B program, and potential increases to it. It's not a bad argument either, EXCEPT I don't think the current situation in the U.S. compares to the post WWII era.
Post WWII, what we basically had were scientists and engineers with a proven track record of excellence or knowledge, who came here because, well... we were on the winning end of a major world war, and it was a good place to be. (EG. If you built rockets for the Germans in Germany, they probably weren't looking like a nation ready to invest heavily in that area right after losing WWII.)
Today, we've got a flood of computer programmers and "computer support" people coming over on H1Bs, and they're largely occupying the "entry level" job positions our recent college grads need as "stepping stones" on their I.T. career path.
I'm not denying many may go on to become U.S. citizens, and productive ones at that. It's just that right now, I think quite a few of them do so at the expense of giving our own citizens "first dibs" at being productive citizens following the same career choices.
Companies like Microsoft *love* to complain loudly that they NEED the foreign workers because qualified U.S. citizens just don't exist in the numbers required. Yet, I look around and I see lots of our own college students avoiding I.T. because it's just too hard to find and keep a job in the field that offers a decent salary. H1Bs, therefore, give companies a way to fill positions without resorting to the NORMAL tactic of offering a better salary to attact talent.
A vote for Hillary means we're putting a Clinton back in office again.
... but I'm also deeply concerned that he'd just opt for "stay the course" politics that continued in Bush's footsteps, only under a new name.)
Our country has been 4 years of Bush, 8 years of Clinton, and 8 years of Bush already. That means anyone younger than 21 can't even remember a time when one of those two families wasn't in power in our nation!
Given that realization, I'd have to give the nod to Obama over Clinton - just for the sake of "breaking the cycle", if nothing else! (Of course, a vote for McCain would accomplish that too
I have to agree with some of the other comments. The Mac Mini is a great little machine, but it's most appropriate for someone wanting a small, "entry level priced" computer that runs Apple's OS X.
It's *not* really an attractive solution when the primary goal is low-price.
The cost of OS X Leopard is factored into the price of each and every new Mac Mini, and that's around $200 itself. By loading a Linux distro on an Asus, they avoid all of that, right off the bat - and Linux is just as "immune to browser exploits and remote attacks" as OS X is, really.
The *real* problem I see? When you take up a career of being a truck driver today, you're essentially signing up for a job of playing "robot".
The next logical step for trucking companies is to automate the big rigs so they can drive themselves on auto-pilot to their pre-programmed destinations.
The railroads have done a lot of this already. We have a big railroad yard not far from my workplace, and signs are all over the railroad crossings around here, warning people that the trains may be unmanned.
As technology progresses, new jobs are created and old ones become obsolete. Truck driving is well on its way out, as we learn enough details to monitor and understand the "ideal" set of circumstances we expect all trucks to operate under while in transit, etc.
I realize there are still technical hurdles to pass before an un-manned semi on our highways would be feasible, but work is being done on all of this as we speak. Perhaps they'll even dedicate a special lane just for this purpose on all the major roads/highways, and put up a tall concrete barrier preventing any cars from crossing over and using it? That would seem to solve a lot of issues right there, of concerns over a computer being able to safely deal with unexpected human driver behavior.
First of all, yeah, I agree that legislation like this is NOT about "free speech". (That's, unfortunately, a mistake people OFTEN make about laws restricting various actions or behaviors. They jump to a flawed "It violates free speech!" argument, instead of looking at it all logically. Maybe that's just because in the U.S., the right to "Freedom of Speech" is the one people are generally most aware of and can most easily comprehend the importance of?)
I don't agree that laws like this also "keep you from taking GIMP, making a few changes, and reselling it as closed source" at retail outlets.
What I saw, quite clearly as a bulletin board system operator in the 1980's through mid 90's (when my BBS was forced to shut down due to an FBI raid and seizure of all my equipment), was the VAST difference between violating copyright *for profit* and NOT for financial gain.
One of the WORST things the DMCA legislation did was to effectively cancel out any such distinction. All of a sudden, an issue which was really only a CIVIL matter between a software developer and another individual became CRIMINAL in nature.
Ever since the year 2000, the U.S. has decided it will waste taxpayer dollars criminalizing random citizens, using this bastardized version of legal statutes originally designed to stop COMMERCIAL COUNTERFEITING.
I agree with much of what you're saying. But I'd also point out that email *filtering* and *archiving* are two vastly different things.
It seems to me that practically all of the issues you're bringing up could be handled successfully by retaining good email backups, going back for a reasonable length of time?
Our company doesn't do anything special in the way of attempting to read employee's emails or filter their content. But we DO have backup systems that dump copies of all the mailboxes onto nightly backups, and we keep a couple alternating "month end" tapes, plus a "year end" tape that's archived away.
This way, if something actually comes up, there's a decent amount of supporting email evidence that can be retrieved for that specific situation.
Otherwise, employees have a general expectation that nobody's monitoring their daily email correspondence in a "big brother" fashion.
I agree... Like SO often happens, people dislike a decision someone else makes, so they scream "There oughta be a law!!"
On the other hand, people ALSO need to get a firm grasp of the idea that things don't HAVE to be "law" to be good decisions, or the "best" way to handle situations.
I wouldn't want to see legal regulation preventing me from operating cameras in my own home, for example. Yet, on principle, I never have installed a monitoring system at home to keep an eye on sitters or cleaning people.
Instead, I prefer to trust the combination of my own instincts and feedback from my kid, to determine if a sitter is doing a "good job" or not. By the same token, I'm picky about who I'd ever pay to clean my house. I've always used people I considered personal friends, so our relationship is at stake if they decided to steal something from me or otherwise cheat me. That's a better motivator to "do the job properly" than risk of being caught on some hidden camera.
I work in a smaller business (one of those shops where I'm the only only doing both the email administration and pretty much all the other computer-related stuff). What I tend to see is employees *receiving* non work-related material, not so much SENDING it.
Some employees don't even have a home computer with Internet access, so all their friends start sending their "funny photos", jokes, and so forth to the only contact address they can find for the person - the work email.
You *could* "blacklist" those people from sending you things, but come on! These are the employee's friends or relatives. They really don't want to block everything they might send them, because sometimes it's relevant or useful.
Do I ever agree! I read this article and thought it was some kind of joke, at first -- or maybe just an attempt to slam the big-name Inet companies.
Just in my own city, I could find 10 "tech" type jobs that are all FAR worse gigs than anything they listed in this article.
Like one guy said, have a Best Buy in your town? How about Geeksquad being on the list? There's a job where you'll never see anything remotely LIKE a $50K a year salary, yet your customers will all place demands and expectations on you like that's what you make (since that's the kind of money they pay Best Buy to get you out there in the first place!).
Or try a call center for any of the telcos? I've had friends doing that job for Verizon and AT&T. You're looking at being packed in a building like sardines, with no windows and poor climate control. The whole place literally stinks of sweat and mildew, and their idea of "variety" is shuffling you around to different cubicles every few weeks. (Really, it just ensures you don't get too friendly with co-workers sitting nearby and actually make new friends!) The pay? $11/hr. if you're lucky.
I know cost of living is different in different parts of the country, but geez! I'm past my mid 30's and I've been working in I.T. since I was 19 or 20. I've STILL never received a salary as high as $50K, much less the $70-80K some of these "worst 10" were offering! I have to work two jobs to get into the lower part of that range at all!
Well, I'm not a metallurgist either, but I did spend a number of years working in metal fabrication shops. So yes, they *can* add color to metals. The problem becomes cost. Metal is much more expensive than plastic to colorize and mold. (Among other things, it doesn't take nearly as much heat to get plastic into a liquefied form suitable for pouring into a mold.)
Also, from what I remember as a kid, most of the metal toys I had (such as toy cap guns, etc.) were made out of very low-grade "pot metal", which did break pretty easily. I have a feeling that's about the same grade we'd wind up with in something like a game controller (in the interest of meeting an expected price point), so you'd have them getting stress fractures and breaking in half when someone dropped them a few times, or threw one across the room. No big advantage over plastic, in other words.
You sound JUST like my dad, who used to constantly rant about plastic and pine for the "good old days" when everything from car dashboards to children's toys were made from wood and metal.
I'm not totally opposed to that mentality, but I also get where plastic has some real advantages.
From a purely aesthetic viewpoint, I think metal is great when you're talking about box-shaped items that will just be hidden from view or mounted on a wall. I love, for example, how Netgear uses the blue painted metal enclosures for many of their switches and routers. That's a place where we could do without the plastic, and nobody would have a big issue with it. Same with M-Audio and most of their external MIDI and audio breakout boxes. Using metal for them was a really good choice.
Other times, I really prefer plastic for the level of fine detail that can be molded into it, and the fact that color can be mixed into the material, instead of just painted onto the surface.
Wood, while "renewable", has some disadvantages. It slowly rots or gets mold and mildew on it if it gets wet for too long. Scratches on it tend to look ugly, if it was stained, painted or otherwise "finished". It's not as lightweight as plastic, and requires more effort to carve complex curves and designs into it.
I think you give them FAR too much credit with that statement! IMHO, they DON'T "mean well" by any stretch of the imagination! They're on a rampage with a skewed agenda - and it's important for people to see them for what they are, a group of radical environmental extremists.
... these are all good moves. Harassing businesses and publishing negative reports about their products just makes you lose your credibility.
If you REALLY want to encourage positive changes in our "environmental footprint" - you need to do it with education and promoting scientific advances. Research in creating lower power-consumption devices, improved battery technology, an HONEST and REASONABLE approach to the subject of "recycling"
Sure.... depending on who you play in a game of Age of Empires....
I would have modded your comment up, if I could. This is exactly right. The *real* problem America faces, if you ask me, is the lack of solid replacements for the industrial jobs we're rapidly giving up to other countries.
It's a natural progression of things for a nation to start outsourcing the jobs that require hard labor and a low level of intelligence or skills. The U.S. generally has managed to educate our people and give our people a high enough standard of living to where the vast majority DOES expect to do better than getting a few bucks an hour for mopping up cow blood or digging ditches.
Where we seem to be failing is at competing in the world marketplace in the things requiring the higher levels of skill. We have a few notable exceptions, like Intel and their processors. But overall, I'm not sure what our future really holds? Everyone talks about the "service economy" we've gone to - but services tend to be more of "luxury" expenses. You can't, for example, really justify paying someone to wash your clothes for you or to take care of your fish aquarium or swimming pool, if you don't already earn enough disposable income to pay for those conveniences. Or say your services are along the lines of advertising and web site building. Ok, great... but you still need to have clients earning a solid income doing something that justifies the expense of that advertising or web site.
Ultimately, it seems like people producing the tangible goods are the ones most able to bring in money from outside the nation. Those offering services generally rely on the disposable income of those located geographically close to them. So our trade imbalance may be what kills us, ultimately.
Truthfully, what I've found (and even experienced myself) is, many I.T. workers in the U.S. aren't properly utilized, so they wind up appearing to be "lazy" and "doing just the bare minimum" to get by.
In most cases, these people were hired and sometimes even promoted because they were intelligent, fairly knowledgeable folks who started out adding a lot of value to the business.
But after the first year or two, they tend to get burnt-out, because after they successfully rip through all of the piled-up, outstanding projects and issues the company had before they brought them in, the company starts leaving them to manage themselves. The mentality tends to be one of, "Well, he already proved he's capable of solving our problems efficiently and effectively - so no need to waste time managing him anymore! If we're not getting complaints from anyone, that means he's out there doing his job!"
The thing is though, most I.T. people like a regular flow of challenges. The "putting out fires" stuff is more of a necessary evil than a reason the job is "motivating". The things that provide good puzzles to solve are the projects where new hardware or software is brought in, 99% of the time. And since those involve significant monetary investments - they're the ones that, #1. don't happen that often, and #2. suddenly involve more "managing" than usual, because people have a vested interest in figuring out if they're getting a return on the investment.
So after a while, you have your systems administrator who automated everything he could to minimize his day-to-day support calls, and just sits around web-surfing and IMiing until a good project comes his way.
Understood, but what you're forgetting is govt's ability to get away with things that would clearly be lacking the support of the general public if done in a low-tech manner, by obfuscating it in high-tech.
We pretty much all understand that cutting people's tongues off to silence them is barbaric and unacceptable. But all of a sudden, start putting a positive spin on the concept of using super high-tech tools to "painlessly and only temporarily stun part of the brain" to paralyze the speech centers of those involved in "terrorist actions" - and lots of folks would be all for it.
Unfortunately, yep - that's the same Applecare.
If there's one thing I've always found maddening about Applecare, it's that damned policy of theirs of wanting a credit card first, and then giving you that "disclaimer" line about having to charge you if it's determined you called about something not covered.
Apple's a bit of an "odd" one to deal with, though, in the sense that they almost seem to demand you work with them on "faith". Their stated policies seem to provide them a lot of "wiggle room" to deny you coverage for things and screw you over. Yet if you "play along" and "trust" them to do the right thing, you TYPICALLY find that they do.
EG. When most vendors were outlining detailed policies on how many bad pixels an LCD monitor had to have before they'd agree to exchange it, Apple stood fast with an answer of "it's at our discretion", refusing to quote a number. From reading people's anecdotes posted on forums over time though, it became evident that this was working out in people's FAVOR more often than not. Monitors with even 1 or 2 bad pixels that no other company would replace were getting swapped by Apple, if you complained it was interfering with your work (as a graphics artist, photographer, or what have you).
Issues of not getting back the parts you shipped a system with are usually because they opted to ship you a refurbished equivalent machine, and someone screwed up on comparing all the specs and components. Again, this isn't good (although it ALSO means some people get back free upgrades!), but it's not something Apple is known for doing excessively.....
I totally agree with you, but the marketplace is what it is. That's why I always resell any used laptops I come across, but I try to price them all between $50 and $99, so nobody feels too "ripped off" after the sale, when they try to hunt down that replacement battery and see what it really costs to "refurbish" one.
One of the best deals going, currently, for a cheap notebook is the Lenovo Thinkpad R61e. Buy.com was recently blowing these out the door for $399.99 with free shipping. I've found, since then, that most of the major resellers like PC Connection, CDW and Insight have hundreds of these in stock - and will match that $399.99 price if you ask a sales rep about it. (Might not get the free shipping, but still.....)
Maybe the market is different where the original poster comes from, but I can assure you that here in the St. Louis area - a working PIII class laptop (even with a non-functional battery) is easily worth a good $50-75, and can be sold in a matter of hours if you post it on Craigslist.
I just made a quick $90 selling an old Thinkpad PIII 900Mhz (with worn out battery and crashed hard drive) and a working Dell PIII 500Mhz Inspiron 7500 (but it's a big, heavy and slow brick of a computer!). Neither of these even had wi-fi built in.
I find that when you start talking notebook computer and "under $100" in the same sentence, people come out of the woodwork, interested in at least knowing more about it. You don't want to waste money on shipping, so that's why you sell these things locally. But just about EVERY time I ever had contractors over to do any kind of work on my house, at least one of them asks me if I ever sell any cheap, used laptops (after they see all my computer stuff lying around).
I don't think the issue is whether or not an American citizen might be "banished from the country" upon making a return trip. I'd say, no, they're NOT able to do that.
The problem is, they could confiscate your expensive computer gear, and there's no guarantee you'd ever get it back. (There seems to be no real statute of limitations on the time these people are allowed to take to "examine" your property, if they claim a potential "security risk".)
I've been a Myth user for years now (running knoppmyth). Unless Mythubuntu is incredibly more advanced than the Knoppmyth distros though - I'd hardly be able to claim MythTV is "dead simple" for anyone to install!
Sure, you might be able to get the basic system up and running easily enough -- but the devil is in the details.
Just off the top of my head, I can think of numerous things they need to do to make an install easier and more "friendly" for the typical computer user:
1. The TV guide subscription process needs to be automated, so it's done entirely from the installation screens for the Myth distro. As it is now, the uninformed user has to read through documentation to figure out which web site to go to to sign up and create a new paid account, so they can then go back into Myth and configure that same account info in it. (Compare this to the "1 click and it's ready" ease of the TV guide provided in Windows MCE.)
2. Good luck getting the "mythgame" stuff working 100%. Sure, it promises you can use the MAME emulation, SNES emulation, and many others - but it's far from "ready to copy over your game titles and go", out of the box. You're in for hours of editing config files and tinkering to get your joystick set up properly, to get your game titles to all run "full screen" on your particular TV, and to give you a way to exit out of them back to the Myth menu when you're done without having to have a keyboard attached (so you can bang on ESC).
3. Configuration of the "IR Blaster" could be far easier. EG. I have AT&T U-Verse service, and I had to manually copy/paste a config file from a web page just to get the serial IR Blaster to work with the U-Verse boxes. I had to do a lot of manual editing a while back when I had Charter cable, too, to make Myth talk to their box over a direct serial cable connection.
4. Adding more hard disk space to a Myth box after it's already set up involves a lot of command line incantations, if you're trying to merge the drives to act as one big disk. Newer knoppmyth distros seem to be good about merging multiple drives into a big virtual disk at the time of initial setup -- but not so much after the fact.
A few things:
1. "Faster and cheaper" wins every time, only when it's also reliable! (EG. Apple moved to Intel because despite every effort, they couldn't get either Motorola or IBM to consistently improve on their product offerings in a timely manner. It was already proven that Intel CPUs are reliable, so that PLUS faster and cheaper made it a good move.) It does a person no good to have something that's "cheaper" and supposedly "faster", but is breaking down constantly.
2. My experience with AppleCare has been FAR superior to anything I ever received from Dell, HP, Gateway, or other PC vendors I've had the displeasure of dealing with. Yes, Apple systems are "proprietary", in the same sense that a Playstation game console is proprietary to Sony, or the XBox 360 is proprietary to Microsoft, or a Sun workstation was proprietary to Sun. That business model has its pros and cons, but it's the de-facto ways computers were ALWAYS sold, up until a bunch of different people decided to build "PC clones" running the same default operating system. I know my hold times calling Apple have averaged around 5-10 minutes, as opposed to 45 mins. to 1 hour with everyone else. I know I've always reached a person who speaks my native language clearly and effectively with Apple. I know that when I have sent in a Mac for warranty work, they've gone over and above what was promised or "covered in writing", replacing any dented or scratched casings, loose hinges, etc. etc. What makes you think Dell or anyone else will give you great support for old, out-of-warranty systems of theirs, anyway? Like Apple, they'd rather just have you buy a new model, too.
3. I'm not going to get into the big, raging "Windows vs. OS X" debate, other than to say one thing. Currently, you can poll Mac users and then poll Windows users on how often spyware has crippled their machines. You tell me who suffered the biggest productivity losses.
It's pretty obvious you've got a strong dislike for Apple -- and I have to think it goes beyond a simple, logical comparison of system specs for the money.
I've used quite a few HP laptops, and frankly, I'd never be caught using another one, if I could help it. I'd gladly pay a premium for the Apple-branded notebook, vs. dealing with what comes with an HP purchase.
1. Unless things are different in other countries, Apple tech. support is WORLDS better than HP in the USA. When I contact HP, I typically have to wait about 48 hours for an email response from some 1st. level technician who just quotes obvious nonsense from a checklist. Why email, and not phone? Because calling HP results in over an hour wait time on hold, as a rule, only to wind up with another clueless response.
2. Apple is far more conscious of "design" than HP. Apple notebooks have a bare minimum of plastic doors, sliding trays, and the like which tend to break/snap off. Even the CD or DVD drives on them are slot-loading, so you don't have a big drive tray sliding out the side of your notebook, requiring extra free space around it and potentially breaking. The 17" Macbook Pro and Powerbook before it were thinner and lighter-weight than anything 17" HP had to offer, too. And don't forget Apple's "mag-safe" AC adapter. That's one more great idea, especially when I see how many HP and other laptops are out of service due to loose/broken AC power jacks!
3. OS X, in my opinion, is a FAR less trouble-prone environment to use, day-to-day, than anything else offered for PCs. I can't run a legal and officially-supported OS X environment on non-Apple hardware right now. So essentially, even if Apple hardware costs me a premium, I understand that paying it helps support and subsidize further OS X development and improvement -- and to me, that's a good place for my money to go.