Nah... I simply think these people haven't learned from history yet. The "dot com" boom era was chock-full of business plans revolving around money that would supposedly come from advertisers. (Remember all those free dial-up services and free email services? Remember the services that promised to pay you to surf, as long as you kept some little advertising bar running at the bottom of your screen?) Yeah... pretty much all gone now.
There is only so much advertising that has any effectiveness on the Internet. We're close to a saturation point now. (Probably only tolerable because people run pop-up ad blockers as standard practice.)
The entire Internet will never become "advertising supported". It simply can't, because advertisers won't keep paying for ads that don't bring in enough new sales to cost-justify them. Broadcasters streaming a new TV show or movie online can certainly insert a few ads, just like the TV airing counterpart has. But that doesn't signify a huge shift towards advertising "taking over" web sites everywhere.
I'd only agree to an extent... I got my CompTIA A+ cert. years ago, figuring it couldn't hurt to have it, since it was obviously all stuff I knew anyway. (Easier to show a cert. on a resume than to prove, indirectly, you know the same material to some guy you never met before in your life, and you only have 1 hour or less to speak with in an interview.)
CompTIA certs. are entry-level. They only show you have *some* basic knowledge of the topic, vs. some random guy off the street.
I think part of the problem with them is that some employers assume they mean too much. An A+ means you know the equivalent of somebody who had NO former computer experience at all, but spent about 6 months working on PCs with someone giving him some hands-on training. That's not much - but might be all a retail store really wants, considering their unwillingness to pay more for better people.
We're just mincing words here, but I'd say it's valid to argue he was at least "pushed" towards becoming a music pirate. He obviously wasn't originally someone who had any desire to take a free copy of an album over a purchased one. In fact, his very last purchase was supposedly made despite finding the very same songs he was seeking on the net as a free download!
It sounds like he's simply saying he was always willing to spend his money on music, as long as he got 3 things out of the transaction. First, he expected to receive a good quality recording (better than what he'd get from some 2nd. generation copy). Second, he expected that some of his money would find its way back to the artist, to ensure they were fairly compensated for their work. And lastly, he expected the music to be playable on any device that advertised itself as capable of performing a music playback operation on that type of media. (EG. A tape player should play back ANY audio cassette he purchased. A record player should play back ANY vinyl record he purchased. And an iPod should play back ANY digital music purchases of his.)
The current state of the industry means those requirements are no longer being universally met - so yes, that effectively "pushes" him towards looking at piracy as a more viable alternative.
I have to disagree. The real issue is not the level of neatness you see, but the way an individual handles the organizational process. For example, my office at home is rather messy (at least by a neat person's standards). But it doesn't get in my way unless one of two things happen. A.) Another person starts working with my things, putting things in different places than I had them originally. Or B.) I'm not paying attention when I put things down.
As others posted here, neatness and organization starts making sense when multiple people have to share the resources. It's just not realistic to expect 2 different people to have identical ideas about where on a desk or on the floor is best to toss something, or which drawer the staples or a pen should best be placed in. You have to start labeling things and agreeing on rules for locations of items.
Otherwise, rather "messy" or "neat", whatever naturally works best for you is the most sensible thing to do. If I'm wasting "twice as much time as I should be" searching for a tool buried under some papers - that's not automatic proof that I need to file all those papers away neatly in folders, and keep all tools hung up on pegs or in specific drawers. It just means I have to break a bad habit of absent-mindedly sitting the tool down while on the phone or reading something, so I don't wonder what I did with it afterwards.
Where I work, we finally phased out our tape backup drives last year in our server room. A product called the "CRU Dataport" is a very nice removable, hot-swap hard drive frame and carrier assembly. You just install their frame in an external 5.25" drive bay, and buy a set of carriers for it. Install suitable SATA drive drives in each carrier, and switch them out nightly just like backup tapes. Backup software like "Backup Exec" can still be used, but it will treat each cartridge just like it did the backup tapes.
Tape still has a few advantages though. For one thing, they're less fragile than a hard drive. They're also less valuable to the average employee than a SATA hard drive, so there's less worry of one disappearing if you give it to someone to take off-site regularly.
But all in all, we like the switch. Backups complete in less time, and it's faster restoring selected files. (No rewinding or tape re tensioning needed, etc.)
When it comes to piracy of entertainment content, yes - I do believe practically "everybody is doing it" these days. I also believe it makes much less difference in the overall economics than the industries would have you believe.
For every "freeloader" out there collecting thousands of computer games and movies without paying, there's another individual who is inspired to make a new purchase based on a pirated download.
The bottom line has always been; if you release QUALITY content, it will have monetary value. All those pirated copies of high-end CAD software, photo editing packages, and so on mean their users have NO support after the sale. Copy-protection cracks may even mean some portions of the software don't really work 100% properly anymore, and the pirate just didn't delve deep enough into the program to notice that. If you use a product as part of making your living, you're *probably* going to just purchase the thing, no matter how many teenagers pirate it just so they can say they have a copy.
By contrast, when most new video games (entertainment, mind you - NOT a product that can earn you money by using it) are released, they really only hold their value for a short time. The reason someone would pay $50-60 for a single game? Basically, to have it first and show off to their friends. After a game is out for a while, no matter how good it is, the initial luster is gone. If they don't price it cheap enough to make you say "Hey, may as well buy this instead of trouble myself with downloading and burning it." - they're not going to sell a lot of it.
Piracy is no more the "enemy" of developers as it is their "friend" (by creating free advertising and good word-of-mouth as pirates recommend that others buy the product). If anything, developers need to learn that it's not enough to release a great entertainment title once a year and sit around, expecting it to pay all the bills. Instead, they need to continuously release fresh content - ensuring that a given game isn't already owned by "everyone on the block". That said, it's probably unwise to create titles with massive up-front production costs. That's the wrong direction to go. Witness Nintendo's strategy with the Wii. Be creative but keep it simple. All the heavy-duty graphics and sound raise the price of the game titles. You're better off using your imagination instead of dazzling them with CPU power and special f/x.
I know this is "the oldest troll in the book"... telling people to "get a Mac!" when they complain about Windows.
But I was going to say a couple things about that.
1. SPSS is available for OS X on the Mac, not just Windows.
2. Now is really a pretty good time for developers to take the Mac seriously for gaming, and write some quality stuff in OpenGL. Microsoft has Direct-X 10 out as the "latest and greatest thing", but it requires Vista to work, not to mention an expensive new video card. (You can get a new nVidia GeForce 8800 series starting at about $300 that supports it, but no games use it yet.) There haven't been many really "big hits" released in the PC gaming market lately either. So an amazing new game title, available only, or even first on Mac could really convert some more folks to using a Mac. (Some developers are even saying pretty negative things about Direct-X 10 right now... a stark contrast to the level of interest previous updates seemed to generate.)
3. As Blizzard has, no doubt, learned -- writing for OpenGL means sales to users of both PC and Mac platforms is relatively painless. With Mac sales doing as well as they have the last few years, I can't see why you'd pick "Let's write for the new Direct-X and only be able to sell to Vista users." vs. "Let's write in OpenGL and sell to PC users running any of a number of versions of Windows, PLUS OS X Mac users!"?
I can't believe so little has been in the press/media about the horrible job Microsoft did on fixing the DST issue for Exchange server!!
Where I work, we luckily only have one server (no clusters or anything fancy), and our employees don't have it tied into mobile devices like Blackberrys.
But nonetheless, I got a nasty surprise when applying the "hotfix" for the DST issue in Exchange. My message store refused to mount when the service came back up! Turns out, MS had to release a hotfix for the hotfix, to address this problem! Then, most of our users were only able to receive internet email, not send it out! Turns out MS rolled out a series of hotfixes as part of the DST hotfix (supposedly to ensure there weren't a bunch of Exchange servers out there running at different patch levels), and one of those undocumented changes they rolled in altered the security model! (Users now have to be granted "Send As" privileges, even if they already had "full control" to their mailbox, or else they can't send email outside the company!)
After all this is done, you *still* have to tackle issues of calendar entries in Outlook being off by an hour if they were entered before the patch was applied. There's *another* tool for that, but you need each user to run it - or jump through hoops to get something set up that can run it on all the mailboxes for them.
For something as critical as the corporate mail and scheduling system, I thought this patch was incredibly poorly implemented!
As I think about this, I realize that effectively, most sports games serve as one giant advertisement for the major league franchises they emulate. When you play the latest EA Sports Hockey game for example, you're playing with simulations of the *actual* lineup of players at the real games. You're playing in recreations of the real sports venues you pay for tickets to see the real games in. The league even gets to make rules about what can and can't be done in the games! (Remember when all the fights were banned from the hockey games because the NHL didn't approve of it being in them?)
Games like Gran Turismo? Same thing. You don't play with made-up cars. You play with officially licensed replicas of real cars sold by real auto-makers, who get to put their name badges proudly up on your screen. Again, they even get to dictate things like "No virtual car damage is allowed when you wreck!" - despite it making the games less fun to play.
Yeah... very true. But I've seen my share of annoying bugs in console titles in the past, with no option to fix them. EG. SSX Tricky on the PS2. When playing that, I regularly managed to snowboard my character off a slope and into an endless loop of "white screen".
I'm personally hoping titles for consoles will continue to be "bug tested" better than their PC counterparts though, simply because they only have to work with a specific set of hardware requirements. (Many PC game bugs have to do with certain video cards needing newer drivers loaded, or flat out incompatibility with various video chipsets. Same thing used to happen a lot with various sound cards and driver revisions. None of that should matter when you know a console only has 1 specific type of video and audio chipset.)
While it's true that Gates is lobbying for these changes, the statement that the net effect would be "a reduction in our standard of living" and "fewer good paying jobs for US citizens" is probably still debatable.
In the short-term, I absolutely agree. But it's the long-term view where I'm less certain. Sometimes, a change for the better involves some short-term pain. Are we *really* offshoring jobs that better our collective "standard of living", or are we just dumping a slew of jobs that are ultimately "dead ends" for our citizens anyway?
When it comes to such jobs as computer "help desk" positions, it doesn't really seem like they've done many of us any favors. Just because you could read off of scripts and speak the "company policy" to incoming callers doesn't mean you've really learned any new and useful skills that apply to an upward career move in the industry.
The main reason to keep help-desk jobs here in the U.S. is so your *customers* feel better talking to someone who has no language barrier. A thick accent, making a call-center worker tough to understand, is the last thing you want to struggle with when you're already irate because your software just crashed and lost all your data, etc. It's up to businesses to decide if that's really "added value" enough to justify paying more to use local talent for it or not.
Software development, like it or not, is a similar situation. If you're really working on something *original* or *creative*, you should still be able to get someone to back your project financially, or at least go freelance with it and reap the rewards after it's completed. The type of programming jobs they're offshoring tend to be related to code maintenance and development of in-house applications that won't ever amount to much in the "grand scheme" of things. (If the app is only used by ONE company, nobody else really cares much about how nice it is, right?)
As a PS3 owner myself, none of this excites me in the least. I'm not denying there is a market out there for it. But honestly, I only bought a console to get some good single-player games up on a big TV screen in the family room. It's nice to have the ability to play "head to head" against a friend who comes over, once in a while too... and if the game is designed well enough for it, even Internet play. But wandering around in a 3D virtual world just so I can chat with people and set up multi-player games with them? No thanks. It's a big load of unnecessary extra GUI junk....
I really *wanted* to find something amazing/interesting about "Second Life", for that matter, and it failed to draw me in. If I feel like having conversations with random strangers, good old IRC seems like one of the most straightforward ways to accomplish it online. If I only want to chat with specific people I know, then you can't beat a video conference with a web cam, or alternately, instant messenger. I don't feel any need to express myself through some made-up "avatar", or spend my *real* money to have virtual 3D items to show off to other players. It's a horrible value for my dollar.
Honestly, the most exciting part of the PS3 to me lies in the ability for software publishers to send out patches and add-ons to their game titles, and to even purchase titles and download them online. In the past, that was a BIG negative for me with console systems. You buy a game on CD or DVD or whatever, and it is what it is. Find bugs in it? Tough... you're stuck with them. I was really happy with my $19.99 download of Tekken 5, and with the updates they're doing for Resistance. THAT is where a PS3 can add real value for customers.
I know your post was modded "funny", but there's some truth behind it if you ask me! I'm 35, and have been into computers and hardware since I got my hands on my first Commodore VIC-20 and Timex Sinclair 1000.
But really, I feel like I've "outgrown" the era of getting all excited about the latest video card that does yet another 10FPS more than the last one, or the next small processor speed bump.
I still do a fair amount of gaming on my computers, but honestly, the new software hasn't justified the expense of better hardware in quite a while. (I can remember when Doom first came out, and it drove everyone I knew to move from a 386 to a 486 class CPU. It was THAT good. A similar thing happened with Quake. People forked over the $'s for a better video card, because it, alone, made it justifiable.)
In the last few years, it seems like things have advanced more incrementally. I've upgraded my video card every 2 years or so, around Xmas-time, and did a couple hard drive upgrades over the years -- but I'm still using an AGP based Athlon 64 motherboard and don't even use SATA hard drives yet. I've had the same 1GB of PC3200 RAM in it for quite a while too. The local computer store tells me I'm "way out of date" and should move to PCI Express, a new case and power supply, SATA, etc. etc. But I can still play Half Life 2 and FarCry just fine... and nothing new is out that feels unplayable on this box yet
I could be wrong, but I *think* this will pretty much reflect the PC marketplace from here on out. It has "matured" now, so people won't feel like last Tuesday's new PC is already "outdated". You really CAN just buy a relatively high-end prebuilt system, and just use it for a few years. When it gets too outdated, sell it and start over. You're not any worse off, money-wise, than the guy who builds his own from scratch. Potentially better warranty coverage too.
Nope.... In fact, the libertarians making those comments are about the only forward-thinking individuals I see around here!
Since when did libertarians collectively state that ALL government is unnecessary? They've always maintained the belief that even a military force wielding the power to absolutely decide "life or death" is needed to protect the national borders!
The guy wasn't challenging our national highway system, or the usefulness of local police forces maintained by taxes. He was asking if government-sponsored wi-fi was really worthwhile -- and I think that's a very valid question.
I've never really had a difficult time finding free wireless Internet access when I'm traveling around. If nothing else, I know of local restaurants that all offer free wi-fi connections, as long as you're willing to go in and buy at least *something* while you sit there. (Panera Bread Company is one example.) Personally, I think I'd rather support and encourage more local establishments to add wi-fi than pay for the whole thing out of taxes. That way, I'm only "paying as I go", getting food and drinks while I'm at it.
No, he's absolutely right! I just experimented with this on my Windows XP Pro box here at work. If I highlight a group of files in the Explorer so they're all lit up in blue, I can then click anyplace within the blue "box" of highlighted items and it lets me drag the whole group if I hold down the left button.
XP doesn't care if I happen to start the drag operation when the mouse pointer is pointed between two filenames, just past the last character of a filename (but still within the blue highlighting), etc. It always retains the whole selection.
Apparently, OS X doesn't work quite this way. If you don't start dragging when the pointer is right on top of some selected text or its corresponding icon to the left of it, you end up "clicking away" from the selection, de-selecting the whole thing.
I used to say this same thing, but I came to realize otherwise over the years. Here in St. Louis, Missouri - we have 3 CompUSA stores open right now. When they first came here, I believe they only had one location (and another similar-sized competitor, Computer City). At that time, we also had a good 50+ "mom and pop" type corner computer stores to choose from. The REAL reason CompUSA grew and the little guys dwindled? The little guys generally didn't have a good understanding of what the customer really wanted and needed!
I worked for several of these small stores (and like you, used to curse the big guys, saying they were stealing our business, etc.). But each and every time, I saw the small shops screw up and hurt THEMSELVES. They *should* have been able to provide better customer service, but usually didn't. (As minimally staffed as they were, people calling in with questions were lucky to get more than 30 seconds of someone's time on the phone, since they were pulling them away from making sales or fixing a PC that had been sitting on the bench for days.) Returns and exchanges were usually another nightmare for customers. The small shops HATED to give a customer his/her money back on anything that had been opened! Customers often felt like it was worth paying more to a "big box" retailer, who would really honor the "30 day return policy" printed on their sales slip without hassles.
On top of that, a lack of inventory was a killer problem. The small stores just didn't secure large enough business loans to stock their stores very well. Every other customer seemed to be told "We can order one of those for you and have it in by next week!" Nobody wants to hear that! They can get online and do that themselves, saving the sales tax too! They shopped locally because they wanted it NOW!
It's true that you generally get a "half assed" repair job at a store like CompUSA. But increasingly, those retailers aren't even trying to do the repair work themselves anymore. They just send it out to the original manufacturer, who usually DOES do a competent repair job. As long as the store can handle putting in a proper repair request and mailing off the computer, they can usually call the customer back in as little as 24-48 hours, saying "It's ready!"
To be perfectly honest, the one area I'd give Mac OS X a bit of a "thumbs down" is in the area of "mouse precision". No matter how fast the machine (and I own a new Mac Pro quad Xeon 2.66Ghz tower with ATI X1900XT video card), I've seen OS X exhibit what I can only describe as "touchiness/quirkiness" with selecting items or groups of items in the "Finder", and with its decision of whether you clicked or double-clicked on a particular icon.
On a fairly regular basis, I find, for example, that I wanted to drag a highlighted groups of files someplace, but OS X thinks I clicked in some manner to deselect the highlighted group as soon as I click and hold the mouse button to start the drag process.
I've also had the frustration of occasionally trying to double-click an icon to launch a program, but OS X decides I actually clicked, paused, and clicked again on it - giving me the blinking cursor on the name of the icon so I can rename it instead.
It would be easy to write this off as a cheap or defective mouse, except I've used many mice and many different OS X based Macs with similar behavior. I've got a Logitech MX Revolution laser mouse on my Mac Pro right now. (Arguably one of the most accurate mice out there), and it hasn't cured this behavior.
Playing around with the mouse settings in the preferences panel never cures it for me either. It almost seems like OS X just doesn't give quite high enough priority to polling the mouse activity, so the OS occasionally misses something you're trying to do with it? In XP, by contrast (even running on the same Mac Pro system!), I don't experience this.
Let me first say that I'm *not* a software developer myself. Therefore, I could be way off-base with my comments.
But having worked in I.T. for about 15 years (mostly on the hardware tech. and support side of things), I've observed that developing apps for the Windows platform is an exercise in frustration, in most cases. Time after time, I watched good, skilled software developers fight with quirks and "inexplicable bugs" in apps they developed using Microsoft technologies, yet they had perfectly working code when they built apps in Java, C++ and other such languages instead.
As just one example, a friend of mine used to work in software Quality Assurance for Reuters. They put out one of their major stock market applications in both a Unix and a Windows version. The Unix team generally had little going on, to the point where they goofed off, threw paper airplanes around the office, and so forth. (Occasionally, they had some "real work" to do, if they were involved in a major upgrade to the package. But support and maintenance-wise, the place was pretty quiet.) By contrast, the Windows support staff was constantly flooded with bugs to handle.
As another example, 2 developers that worked with me at a former job took on the task of constructing a labor log application. The plan was to develop it with MS technologies (the MSDAC objects,for example). They ended up with an app that seemed to work fine for months, and then would suddenly "break" when it got to particular dates of the year. Each time, debugging consisted of "back and forth" with Microsoft support people, eventually escalated to developers of the MSDAC objects themselves, who conceded *each time* that the problems found were actually flaws in their code, not ours. MSDAC objects went through numerous revisions and service packs around that time - which meant our pre-built drive images were constantly having to be rebuilt to accommodate them. Big pain in the butt.
As MS products get increasingly more complex, I can't think this has gotten any better. Rather, developers working for them are probably diving into an unfathomable mess of code spaghetti to unravel. Doesn't sound like a "dream job" to me, or one that it's easy to be "qualified" for!
Yeah.... I remember back in the early 90's, I took a telemarketing job for "Stanley Steemer Carpet Cleaners", and was surprised to find they were in the process of converting a number of their vans to run on natural gas. The biggest issue I recall they had was much less mileage per fill-up, and a gas pressure gauge that wasn't very linear. (Drivers complained that when the natural gas level started getting low, the gauge wouldn't accurately reflect it. It would suddenly drop to near empty and they would sometimes get stranded, needing a tow back to a station they could fill back up at.)
Hopefully those issues were all worked out over the years though....
Well, that is always the "ideal" solution - but monitoring your child's activities at all times proves to be an impossibility in the real world. I do know a number of schools use software that allows mirroring any of a number of desktops that are in use by students. They have sort of a "control center" full of flat-screen monitors that randomly cycle through all the screens that are in use, so people in the office can try to monitor what's going on.
I think, for younger children, the problem is much easier to address than for older kids. When they're younger, there's honestly only so much web content that's really beneficial for them. (My kid is almost 5, and she's been fascinated with computers since she was 3. But so far, her "web surfing" is pretty much limited to nickjr.com, pbskids.com and a few other random sites with good online puzzles, coloring books, etc. to play with.) It's easiest to block *everything* except an "allowed list" of known, good sites. Many little kids like this arrangement better, because they're more frustrated by accidentally clicking away from their page, on some advertising banner or what-not, and getting lost in some totally different site.
I used to have some neighbor kids who were around ages 9-11, and their school encouraged them to get on the Internet at home to research and print out things like topographical maps and statistics on things. (They didn't have a decent computer at their house, so they came over sometimes, asking if they could borrow mine.) What I observed with that age group is, they're very interested in the social networking types of web sites, and easily get distracted from what they started out doing, to "check my mail" on one or more of those places. An ironic thing happens then.... They try to avoid the "porn" web pages, knowing they're "not supposed to be looking at that stuff" (and afraid of getting in trouble for it), but their friends have obscene music videos, music and artwork plastered all over their "home pages", or links to it in their messages and blogs. So somehow, that's a whole different thing for them.
All valid points, but I'd also say it's arguable that credit card companies themselves have helped foster this "lax" security environment we're seeing on the part of many merchants.
Take, for example, the cases of a woman coming in, buying something using a card with a man's name on it, or vice-versa. The fact is, the credit card companies are more concerned about people using their cards as often as possible than in caring WHO uses them. My ex-wife ran up charges on my cards all the time, despite never even being listed as an "authorized user" of them. When I tried to complain that I never authorized those charges, the credit card companies faxed me back the "proof" that they were legitimate, in the form of photocopies of receipts with HER signature on them instead of mine! Their take on thing is basically "If you're married, who cares? Everything's your problem to pay anyway, until/unless some divorce court judge says otherwise."
And with the proliferation of these electronic terminals that have you sign on a touch-screen after swiping your card through, you'd think they'd do some kind of comparison to a stored signature of yours before approving a transaction. But no! They choose not to include a useful security measure like that in the system. You can draw a stick figure, write "Home Depot Sucks!" at Home Depot, or whatever you like.... It's all the same to the terminal.
I totally agree with his belief that a ban on incandescent lighting is a bad idea... although I'd say aesthetics are a much lesser issue.
The REAL issue right now is what to use in place of an incandescent bulb in enclosed fixtures!?
I've tried all sorts of compact fluorescents in my ceiling fan and other light fixtures that place a glass "half dome" over the bulbs - and they only last about a month before they cook their electronic circuit boards to death.
It's totally unrealistic to demand that I trash all of my ceiling fans and other fixtures, in favor of ones that all leave the bulbs exposed!
Truthfully, the *main* reason my MythTV is a superior solution to all of the commercial offerings (Apple included) is because I'm not feature-constrained, artificially, by copyright legislation.
I'm not a programmer/developer, so the fact Myth source is available means about zilch to me. I'm just as "stuck" relying on others to add new features to Myth as I would be if I was waiting for Apple or some other company to add them.
But the ability to rip and store compressed versions of all my movie DVDs, ready for instant play on demand (complete with cover art auto-downloaded as thumbnails to browse, etc.) is awesome. The top-notch commercial filtering/skipping support is great. The integration of multiple game console and coin-op arcade emulators is cool too. These are just some of the things I don't see ANY commercially sold products ever offering, since they'd prefer not to fight the legal battles that would be involved.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah... I simply think these people haven't learned from history yet. The "dot com" boom era was chock-full of business plans revolving around money that would supposedly come from advertisers. (Remember all those free dial-up services and free email services? Remember the services that promised to pay you to surf, as long as you kept some little advertising bar running at the bottom of your screen?) Yeah... pretty much all gone now.
There is only so much advertising that has any effectiveness on the Internet. We're close to a saturation point now. (Probably only tolerable because people run pop-up ad blockers as standard practice.)
The entire Internet will never become "advertising supported". It simply can't, because advertisers won't keep paying for ads that don't bring in enough new sales to cost-justify them. Broadcasters streaming a new TV show or movie online can certainly insert a few ads, just like the TV airing counterpart has. But that doesn't signify a huge shift towards advertising "taking over" web sites everywhere.
Mmm... yes. Just as interesting as the idea of "Slashdotters" all having a common mindset.
I'd only agree to an extent... I got my CompTIA A+ cert. years ago, figuring it couldn't hurt to have it, since it was obviously all stuff I knew anyway. (Easier to show a cert. on a resume than to prove, indirectly, you know the same material to some guy you never met before in your life, and you only have 1 hour or less to speak with in an interview.)
CompTIA certs. are entry-level. They only show you have *some* basic knowledge of the topic, vs. some random guy off the street.
I think part of the problem with them is that some employers assume they mean too much. An A+ means you know the equivalent of somebody who had NO former computer experience at all, but spent about 6 months working on PCs with someone giving him some hands-on training. That's not much - but might be all a retail store really wants, considering their unwillingness to pay more for better people.
We're just mincing words here, but I'd say it's valid to argue he was at least "pushed" towards becoming a music pirate. He obviously wasn't originally someone who had any desire to take a free copy of an album over a purchased one. In fact, his very last purchase was supposedly made despite finding the very same songs he was seeking on the net as a free download!
It sounds like he's simply saying he was always willing to spend his money on music, as long as he got 3 things out of the transaction. First, he expected to receive a good quality recording (better than what he'd get from some 2nd. generation copy). Second, he expected that some of his money would find its way back to the artist, to ensure they were fairly compensated for their work. And lastly, he expected the music to be playable on any device that advertised itself as capable of performing a music playback operation on that type of media. (EG. A tape player should play back ANY audio cassette he purchased. A record player should play back ANY vinyl record he purchased. And an iPod should play back ANY digital music purchases of his.)
The current state of the industry means those requirements are no longer being universally met - so yes, that effectively "pushes" him towards looking at piracy as a more viable alternative.
I have to disagree. The real issue is not the level of neatness you see, but the way an individual handles the organizational process. For example, my office at home is rather messy (at least by a neat person's standards). But it doesn't get in my way unless one of two things happen. A.) Another person starts working with my things, putting things in different places than I had them originally. Or B.) I'm not paying attention when I put things down.
As others posted here, neatness and organization starts making sense when multiple people have to share the resources. It's just not realistic to expect 2 different people to have identical ideas about where on a desk or on the floor is best to toss something, or which drawer the staples or a pen should best be placed in. You have to start labeling things and agreeing on rules for locations of items.
Otherwise, rather "messy" or "neat", whatever naturally works best for you is the most sensible thing to do. If I'm wasting "twice as much time as I should be" searching for a tool buried under some papers - that's not automatic proof that I need to file all those papers away neatly in folders, and keep all tools hung up on pegs or in specific drawers. It just means I have to break a bad habit of absent-mindedly sitting the tool down while on the phone or reading something, so I don't wonder what I did with it afterwards.
Where I work, we finally phased out our tape backup drives last year in our server room. A product called the "CRU Dataport" is a very nice removable, hot-swap hard drive frame and carrier assembly. You just install their frame in an external 5.25" drive bay, and buy a set of carriers for it. Install suitable SATA drive drives in each carrier, and switch them out nightly just like backup tapes. Backup software like "Backup Exec" can still be used, but it will treat each cartridge just like it did the backup tapes.
Tape still has a few advantages though. For one thing, they're less fragile than a hard drive. They're also less valuable to the average employee than a SATA hard drive, so there's less worry of one disappearing if you give it to someone to take off-site regularly.
But all in all, we like the switch. Backups complete in less time, and it's faster restoring selected files. (No rewinding or tape re tensioning needed, etc.)
When it comes to piracy of entertainment content, yes - I do believe practically "everybody is doing it" these days. I also believe it makes much less difference in the overall economics than the industries would have you believe.
For every "freeloader" out there collecting thousands of computer games and movies without paying, there's another individual who is inspired to make a new purchase based on a pirated download.
The bottom line has always been; if you release QUALITY content, it will have monetary value. All those pirated copies of high-end CAD software, photo editing packages, and so on mean their users have NO support after the sale. Copy-protection cracks may even mean some portions of the software don't really work 100% properly anymore, and the pirate just didn't delve deep enough into the program to notice that. If you use a product as part of making your living, you're *probably* going to just purchase the thing, no matter how many teenagers pirate it just so they can say they have a copy.
By contrast, when most new video games (entertainment, mind you - NOT a product that can earn you money by using it) are released, they really only hold their value for a short time. The reason someone would pay $50-60 for a single game? Basically, to have it first and show off to their friends. After a game is out for a while, no matter how good it is, the initial luster is gone. If they don't price it cheap enough to make you say "Hey, may as well buy this instead of trouble myself with downloading and burning it." - they're not going to sell a lot of it.
Piracy is no more the "enemy" of developers as it is their "friend" (by creating free advertising and good word-of-mouth as pirates recommend that others buy the product). If anything, developers need to learn that it's not enough to release a great entertainment title once a year and sit around, expecting it to pay all the bills. Instead, they need to continuously release fresh content - ensuring that a given game isn't already owned by "everyone on the block". That said, it's probably unwise to create titles with massive up-front production costs. That's the wrong direction to go. Witness Nintendo's strategy with the Wii. Be creative but keep it simple. All the heavy-duty graphics and sound raise the price of the game titles. You're better off using your imagination instead of dazzling them with CPU power and special f/x.
I know this is "the oldest troll in the book" ... telling people to "get a Mac!" when they complain about Windows.
But I was going to say a couple things about that.
1. SPSS is available for OS X on the Mac, not just Windows.
2. Now is really a pretty good time for developers to take the Mac seriously for gaming, and write some quality stuff in OpenGL. Microsoft has Direct-X 10 out as the "latest and greatest thing", but it requires Vista to work, not to mention an expensive new video card. (You can get a new nVidia GeForce 8800 series starting at about $300 that supports it, but no games use it yet.) There haven't been many really "big hits" released in the PC gaming market lately either. So an amazing new game title, available only, or even first on Mac could really convert some more folks to using a Mac. (Some developers are even saying pretty negative things about Direct-X 10 right now... a stark contrast to the level of interest previous updates seemed to generate.)
3. As Blizzard has, no doubt, learned -- writing for OpenGL means sales to users of both PC and Mac platforms is relatively painless. With Mac sales doing as well as they have the last few years, I can't see why you'd pick "Let's write for the new Direct-X and only be able to sell to Vista users." vs. "Let's write in OpenGL and sell to PC users running any of a number of versions of Windows, PLUS OS X Mac users!"?
I can't believe so little has been in the press/media about the horrible job Microsoft did on fixing the DST issue for Exchange server!!
Where I work, we luckily only have one server (no clusters or anything fancy), and our employees don't have it tied into mobile devices like Blackberrys.
But nonetheless, I got a nasty surprise when applying the "hotfix" for the DST issue in Exchange. My message store refused to mount when the service came back up! Turns out, MS had to release a hotfix for the hotfix, to address this problem! Then, most of our users were only able to receive internet email, not send it out! Turns out MS rolled out a series of hotfixes as part of the DST hotfix (supposedly to ensure there weren't a bunch of Exchange servers out there running at different patch levels), and one of those undocumented changes they rolled in altered the security model! (Users now have to be granted "Send As" privileges, even if they already had "full control" to their mailbox, or else they can't send email outside the company!)
After all this is done, you *still* have to tackle issues of calendar entries in Outlook being off by an hour if they were entered before the patch was applied. There's *another* tool for that, but you need each user to run it - or jump through hoops to get something set up that can run it on all the mailboxes for them.
For something as critical as the corporate mail and scheduling system, I thought this patch was incredibly poorly implemented!
As I think about this, I realize that effectively, most sports games serve as one giant advertisement for the major league franchises they emulate. When you play the latest EA Sports Hockey game for example, you're playing with simulations of the *actual* lineup of players at the real games. You're playing in recreations of the real sports venues you pay for tickets to see the real games in. The league even gets to make rules about what can and can't be done in the games! (Remember when all the fights were banned from the hockey games because the NHL didn't approve of it being in them?)
Games like Gran Turismo? Same thing. You don't play with made-up cars. You play with officially licensed replicas of real cars sold by real auto-makers, who get to put their name badges proudly up on your screen. Again, they even get to dictate things like "No virtual car damage is allowed when you wreck!" - despite it making the games less fun to play.
Yeah... very true. But I've seen my share of annoying bugs in console titles in the past, with no option to fix them. EG. SSX Tricky on the PS2. When playing that, I regularly managed to snowboard my character off a slope and into an endless loop of "white screen".
I'm personally hoping titles for consoles will continue to be "bug tested" better than their PC counterparts though, simply because they only have to work with a specific set of hardware requirements. (Many PC game bugs have to do with certain video cards needing newer drivers loaded, or flat out incompatibility with various video chipsets. Same thing used to happen a lot with various sound cards and driver revisions. None of that should matter when you know a console only has 1 specific type of video and audio chipset.)
While it's true that Gates is lobbying for these changes, the statement that the net effect would be "a reduction in our standard of living" and "fewer good paying jobs for US citizens" is probably still debatable.
In the short-term, I absolutely agree. But it's the long-term view where I'm less certain. Sometimes, a change for the better involves some short-term pain. Are we *really* offshoring jobs that better our collective "standard of living", or are we just dumping a slew of jobs that are ultimately "dead ends" for our citizens anyway?
When it comes to such jobs as computer "help desk" positions, it doesn't really seem like they've done many of us any favors. Just because you could read off of scripts and speak the "company policy" to incoming callers doesn't mean you've really learned any new and useful skills that apply to an upward career move in the industry.
The main reason to keep help-desk jobs here in the U.S. is so your *customers* feel better talking to someone who has no language barrier. A thick accent, making a call-center worker tough to understand, is the last thing you want to struggle with when you're already irate because your software just crashed and lost all your data, etc. It's up to businesses to decide if that's really "added value" enough to justify paying more to use local talent for it or not.
Software development, like it or not, is a similar situation. If you're really working on something *original* or *creative*, you should still be able to get someone to back your project financially, or at least go freelance with it and reap the rewards after it's completed. The type of programming jobs they're offshoring tend to be related to code maintenance and development of in-house applications that won't ever amount to much in the "grand scheme" of things. (If the app is only used by ONE company, nobody else really cares much about how nice it is, right?)
As a PS3 owner myself, none of this excites me in the least. I'm not denying there is a market out there for it. But honestly, I only bought a console to get some good single-player games up on a big TV screen in the family room. It's nice to have the ability to play "head to head" against a friend who comes over, once in a while too ... and if the game is designed well enough for it, even Internet play. But wandering around in a 3D virtual world just so I can chat with people and set up multi-player games with them? No thanks. It's a big load of unnecessary extra GUI junk....
I really *wanted* to find something amazing/interesting about "Second Life", for that matter, and it failed to draw me in. If I feel like having conversations with random strangers, good old IRC seems like one of the most straightforward ways to accomplish it online. If I only want to chat with specific people I know, then you can't beat a video conference with a web cam, or alternately, instant messenger. I don't feel any need to express myself through some made-up "avatar", or spend my *real* money to have virtual 3D items to show off to other players. It's a horrible value for my dollar.
Honestly, the most exciting part of the PS3 to me lies in the ability for software publishers to send out patches and add-ons to their game titles, and to even purchase titles and download them online. In the past, that was a BIG negative for me with console systems. You buy a game on CD or DVD or whatever, and it is what it is. Find bugs in it? Tough... you're stuck with them. I was really happy with my $19.99 download of Tekken 5, and with the updates they're doing for Resistance. THAT is where a PS3 can add real value for customers.
I know your post was modded "funny", but there's some truth behind it if you ask me! I'm 35, and have been into computers and hardware since I got my hands on my first Commodore VIC-20 and Timex Sinclair 1000.
... and nothing new is out that feels unplayable on this box yet
But really, I feel like I've "outgrown" the era of getting all excited about the latest video card that does yet another 10FPS more than the last one, or the next small processor speed bump.
I still do a fair amount of gaming on my computers, but honestly, the new software hasn't justified the expense of better hardware in quite a while. (I can remember when Doom first came out, and it drove everyone I knew to move from a 386 to a 486 class CPU. It was THAT good. A similar thing happened with Quake. People forked over the $'s for a better video card, because it, alone, made it justifiable.)
In the last few years, it seems like things have advanced more incrementally. I've upgraded my video card every 2 years or so, around Xmas-time, and did a couple hard drive upgrades over the years -- but I'm still using an AGP based Athlon 64 motherboard and don't even use SATA hard drives yet. I've had the same 1GB of PC3200 RAM in it for quite a while too. The local computer store tells me I'm "way out of date" and should move to PCI Express, a new case and power supply, SATA, etc. etc. But I can still play Half Life 2 and FarCry just fine
I could be wrong, but I *think* this will pretty much reflect the PC marketplace from here on out. It has "matured" now, so people won't feel like last Tuesday's new PC is already "outdated". You really CAN just buy a relatively high-end prebuilt system, and just use it for a few years. When it gets too outdated, sell it and start over. You're not any worse off, money-wise, than the guy who builds his own from scratch. Potentially better warranty coverage too.
NASA needs a "You can't win if you don't play!" ad campaign!
Nope.... In fact, the libertarians making those comments are about the only forward-thinking individuals I see around here!
Since when did libertarians collectively state that ALL government is unnecessary? They've always maintained the belief that even a military force wielding the power to absolutely decide "life or death" is needed to protect the national borders!
The guy wasn't challenging our national highway system, or the usefulness of local police forces maintained by taxes. He was asking if government-sponsored wi-fi was really worthwhile -- and I think that's a very valid question.
I've never really had a difficult time finding free wireless Internet access when I'm traveling around. If nothing else, I know of local restaurants that all offer free wi-fi connections, as long as you're willing to go in and buy at least *something* while you sit there. (Panera Bread Company is one example.) Personally, I think I'd rather support and encourage more local establishments to add wi-fi than pay for the whole thing out of taxes. That way, I'm only "paying as I go", getting food and drinks while I'm at it.
No, he's absolutely right! I just experimented with this on my Windows XP Pro box here at work. If I highlight a group of files in the Explorer so they're all lit up in blue, I can then click anyplace within the blue "box" of highlighted items and it lets me drag the whole group if I hold down the left button.
XP doesn't care if I happen to start the drag operation when the mouse pointer is pointed between two filenames, just past the last character of a filename (but still within the blue highlighting), etc. It always retains the whole selection.
Apparently, OS X doesn't work quite this way. If you don't start dragging when the pointer is right on top of some selected text or its corresponding icon to the left of it, you end up "clicking away" from the selection, de-selecting the whole thing.
Stupid!
I used to say this same thing, but I came to realize otherwise over the years. Here in St. Louis, Missouri - we have 3 CompUSA stores open right now. When they first came here, I believe they only had one location (and another similar-sized competitor, Computer City). At that time, we also had a good 50+ "mom and pop" type corner computer stores to choose from. The REAL reason CompUSA grew and the little guys dwindled? The little guys generally didn't have a good understanding of what the customer really wanted and needed!
I worked for several of these small stores (and like you, used to curse the big guys, saying they were stealing our business, etc.). But each and every time, I saw the small shops screw up and hurt THEMSELVES. They *should* have been able to provide better customer service, but usually didn't. (As minimally staffed as they were, people calling in with questions were lucky to get more than 30 seconds of someone's time on the phone, since they were pulling them away from making sales or fixing a PC that had been sitting on the bench for days.) Returns and exchanges were usually another nightmare for customers. The small shops HATED to give a customer his/her money back on anything that had been opened! Customers often felt like it was worth paying more to a "big box" retailer, who would really honor the "30 day return policy" printed on their sales slip without hassles.
On top of that, a lack of inventory was a killer problem. The small stores just didn't secure large enough business loans to stock their stores very well. Every other customer seemed to be told "We can order one of those for you and have it in by next week!" Nobody wants to hear that! They can get online and do that themselves, saving the sales tax too! They shopped locally because they wanted it NOW!
It's true that you generally get a "half assed" repair job at a store like CompUSA. But increasingly, those retailers aren't even trying to do the repair work themselves anymore. They just send it out to the original manufacturer, who usually DOES do a competent repair job. As long as the store can handle putting in a proper repair request and mailing off the computer, they can usually call the customer back in as little as 24-48 hours, saying "It's ready!"
To be perfectly honest, the one area I'd give Mac OS X a bit of a "thumbs down" is in the area of "mouse precision". No matter how fast the machine (and I own a new Mac Pro quad Xeon 2.66Ghz tower with ATI X1900XT video card), I've seen OS X exhibit what I can only describe as "touchiness/quirkiness" with selecting items or groups of items in the "Finder", and with its decision of whether you clicked or double-clicked on a particular icon.
On a fairly regular basis, I find, for example, that I wanted to drag a highlighted groups of files someplace, but OS X thinks I clicked in some manner to deselect the highlighted group as soon as I click and hold the mouse button to start the drag process.
I've also had the frustration of occasionally trying to double-click an icon to launch a program, but OS X decides I actually clicked, paused, and clicked again on it - giving me the blinking cursor on the name of the icon so I can rename it instead.
It would be easy to write this off as a cheap or defective mouse, except I've used many mice and many different OS X based Macs with similar behavior. I've got a Logitech MX Revolution laser mouse on my Mac Pro right now. (Arguably one of the most accurate mice out there), and it hasn't cured this behavior.
Playing around with the mouse settings in the preferences panel never cures it for me either. It almost seems like OS X just doesn't give quite high enough priority to polling the mouse activity, so the OS occasionally misses something you're trying to do with it? In XP, by contrast (even running on the same Mac Pro system!), I don't experience this.
Let me first say that I'm *not* a software developer myself. Therefore, I could be way off-base with my comments.
But having worked in I.T. for about 15 years (mostly on the hardware tech. and support side of things), I've observed that developing apps for the Windows platform is an exercise in frustration, in most cases. Time after time, I watched good, skilled software developers fight with quirks and "inexplicable bugs" in apps they developed using Microsoft technologies, yet they had perfectly working code when they built apps in Java, C++ and other such languages instead.
As just one example, a friend of mine used to work in software Quality Assurance for Reuters. They put out one of their major stock market applications in both a Unix and a Windows version. The Unix team generally had little going on, to the point where they goofed off, threw paper airplanes around the office, and so forth. (Occasionally, they had some "real work" to do, if they were involved in a major upgrade to the package. But support and maintenance-wise, the place was pretty quiet.) By contrast, the Windows support staff was constantly flooded with bugs to handle.
As another example, 2 developers that worked with me at a former job took on the task of constructing a labor log application. The plan was to develop it with MS technologies (the MSDAC objects,for example). They ended up with an app that seemed to work fine for months, and then would suddenly "break" when it got to particular dates of the year. Each time, debugging consisted of "back and forth" with Microsoft support people, eventually escalated to developers of the MSDAC objects themselves, who conceded *each time* that the problems found were actually flaws in their code, not ours. MSDAC objects went through numerous revisions and service packs around that time - which meant our pre-built drive images were constantly having to be rebuilt to accommodate them. Big pain in the butt.
As MS products get increasingly more complex, I can't think this has gotten any better. Rather, developers working for them are probably diving into an unfathomable mess of code spaghetti to unravel. Doesn't sound like a "dream job" to me, or one that it's easy to be "qualified" for!
Yeah.... I remember back in the early 90's, I took a telemarketing job for "Stanley Steemer Carpet Cleaners", and was surprised to find they were in the process of converting a number of their vans to run on natural gas. The biggest issue I recall they had was much less mileage per fill-up, and a gas pressure gauge that wasn't very linear. (Drivers complained that when the natural gas level started getting low, the gauge wouldn't accurately reflect it. It would suddenly drop to near empty and they would sometimes get stranded, needing a tow back to a station they could fill back up at.)
Hopefully those issues were all worked out over the years though....
Well, that is always the "ideal" solution - but monitoring your child's activities at all times proves to be an impossibility in the real world. I do know a number of schools use software that allows mirroring any of a number of desktops that are in use by students. They have sort of a "control center" full of flat-screen monitors that randomly cycle through all the screens that are in use, so people in the office can try to monitor what's going on.
I think, for younger children, the problem is much easier to address than for older kids. When they're younger, there's honestly only so much web content that's really beneficial for them. (My kid is almost 5, and she's been fascinated with computers since she was 3. But so far, her "web surfing" is pretty much limited to nickjr.com, pbskids.com and a few other random sites with good online puzzles, coloring books, etc. to play with.) It's easiest to block *everything* except an "allowed list" of known, good sites. Many little kids like this arrangement better, because they're more frustrated by accidentally clicking away from their page, on some advertising banner or what-not, and getting lost in some totally different site.
I used to have some neighbor kids who were around ages 9-11, and their school encouraged them to get on the Internet at home to research and print out things like topographical maps and statistics on things. (They didn't have a decent computer at their house, so they came over sometimes, asking if they could borrow mine.) What I observed with that age group is, they're very interested in the social networking types of web sites, and easily get distracted from what they started out doing, to "check my mail" on one or more of those places. An ironic thing happens then.... They try to avoid the "porn" web pages, knowing they're "not supposed to be looking at that stuff" (and afraid of getting in trouble for it), but their friends have obscene music videos, music and artwork plastered all over their "home pages", or links to it in their messages and blogs. So somehow, that's a whole different thing for them.
All valid points, but I'd also say it's arguable that credit card companies themselves have helped foster this "lax" security environment we're seeing on the part of many merchants.
Take, for example, the cases of a woman coming in, buying something using a card with a man's name on it, or vice-versa. The fact is, the credit card companies are more concerned about people using their cards as often as possible than in caring WHO uses them. My ex-wife ran up charges on my cards all the time, despite never even being listed as an "authorized user" of them. When I tried to complain that I never authorized those charges, the credit card companies faxed me back the "proof" that they were legitimate, in the form of photocopies of receipts with HER signature on them instead of mine! Their take on thing is basically "If you're married, who cares? Everything's your problem to pay anyway, until/unless some divorce court judge says otherwise."
And with the proliferation of these electronic terminals that have you sign on a touch-screen after swiping your card through, you'd think they'd do some kind of comparison to a stored signature of yours before approving a transaction. But no! They choose not to include a useful security measure like that in the system. You can draw a stick figure, write "Home Depot Sucks!" at Home Depot, or whatever you like.... It's all the same to the terminal.
I totally agree with his belief that a ban on incandescent lighting is a bad idea... although I'd say aesthetics are a much lesser issue.
The REAL issue right now is what to use in place of an incandescent bulb in enclosed fixtures!?
I've tried all sorts of compact fluorescents in my ceiling fan and other light fixtures that place a glass "half dome" over the bulbs - and they only last about a month before they cook their electronic circuit boards to death.
It's totally unrealistic to demand that I trash all of my ceiling fans and other fixtures, in favor of ones that all leave the bulbs exposed!
Truthfully, the *main* reason my MythTV is a superior solution to all of the commercial offerings (Apple included) is because I'm not feature-constrained, artificially, by copyright legislation.
I'm not a programmer/developer, so the fact Myth source is available means about zilch to me. I'm just as "stuck" relying on others to add new features to Myth as I would be if I was waiting for Apple or some other company to add them.
But the ability to rip and store compressed versions of all my movie DVDs, ready for instant play on demand (complete with cover art auto-downloaded as thumbnails to browse, etc.) is awesome. The top-notch commercial filtering/skipping support is great. The integration of multiple game console and coin-op arcade emulators is cool too. These are just some of the things I don't see ANY commercially sold products ever offering, since they'd prefer not to fight the legal battles that would be involved.