I can only tell you a bit about my own situation.
on
IT and Divorce?
·
· Score: 1
I've been divorced for a couple years now, and I have primary custody of my 4 year old daughter. I've worked in I.T. for roughly 15 years now. (I'm 35.)
While I agree that it's foolish to blame "I.T." itself as "the reason" for a divorce, it's also true that it can be a contributing factor. If you look at the statistics out there, they show that a surprisingly large number of marriages end in divorce primarily over financial stress/issues. I know my own divorce happened right in the middle of the whole "dot com bust" era, when everyone started getting worried about the I.T. job market, and I in fact did lose my job.
Without going into too much detail, my ex-wife wasn't completely mentally stable. Her pregnancy seemed to be the "trigger" for her latent issues (never conclusively diagnosed but suspected by at least one therapist in the past of being bi-polar, and suffered from bouts of depression). That's, ultimately, what made it impossible to live with her anymore... although if I wasn't under the financial stresses of losing a decent-paying job and having no prospects on the horizon of a replacement with anywhere near similar pay, we might have had a better shot of working through it.
I will tell you this much. If you're in I.T. like I am and you're trying to raise a child by yourself, make SURE you work for someone who is understanding and flexible with the hours!! My kid just started preschool during the day, and they won't even allow dropping her off until about 7:50AM each day. I'm supposed to be at work by 8:00, which just doesn't quite work. After a few rounds battling this out with the owners, H.R., etc. - they finally seem to have agreed to let it slide, as long as I make myself very reachable by cellphone and make up the time with shorter lunches, working a little bit late, etc. Since school usually lets out by 3PM, that also poses problems. I'm currently faced with selling my house and moving much closer to my parents, so they can more easily lend a hand.
Well, first off, I never said the other PC was a Dell. I guess you assumed that since I have a Dell 24" monitor on the Mac. But it's just an AMD Athlon 64 clone PC I built before I got the Mac.
Anyway, I may eventually get rid of it as I do have XP on the Mac Pro in Bootcamp. But currently, it's nice having 2 separate machines so my kid can use one while I'm on the other, or so guests can check their email, play games, etc. on it without messing up my primary machine.
Ugh... I just had a bit of a debate on this subject with a female friend who works in a university library in my city.
She maintained that schools teaching kids to "do research on the Internet" does them little good, and it's a farce that it's even called "research". She had an obvious bias towards printed books as superior media.
I maintain that the content is what's important... not so much the form of distribution. Books used to be the least expensive way to distribute the content. Now, that's just not the case. It's far more space-efficient to convert most of it to digital media, and doing so gives huge advantages in search capabilities too.
With digital content, you can always duplicate onto printed media at will. With your original being a book, you have to do labor-intensive photocopying or scanning and printing to produce a duplicate. I'm not against the idea of paper or books, but especially for research purposes - digital is a vastly more flexible format.
I'm actually in a situation at home where I can compare both side-by-side. I have a PC with XP on it running two 20" wide-screen LCD panels, and across the room, I have a new Mac Pro with a Dell 24" LCD display. (Ok, granted, not quite a 30" like they use in this study... but should be close enough for the purpose.)
Despite having 40" of total space on one system, vs. only 24" on the other, I *still* prefer the single 24" display, all things considered.
The fact that you can angle each viewing area separately is more of a nuisance than a benefit, IMHO. I'm always finding one of the displays gets bumped so it's not sitting right up against the other one, and the gap between screens is distracting. I also find that with dual displays, I tend to want to angle them just slightly inward so they have a slight "wrapping around my viewing area" effect, rather than looking straight on at both of them. But again, that always seems to get bumped out of place if someone wants to play with the controls on one of the panels or whatever.
With dual displays, I'd also be happier if games would start making use of them. As it is, I don't think I've ever gotten a piece of software other than MS Flight Simulator to take advantage of dual monitors. (I recall seeing somebody's instructions for making Quake 3 use dual monitors for a wide-aspect game spanning both of them - but it required software rendering, which made it horribly slow.)
It's true that technology allows us to reduce our usage of paper. (And in turn, it follows that the older generation is more set in their ways of using paper where the younger crowd feels more comfortable using one of the alternatives instead.)
BUT - there are good, valid reasons for paper printouts. The "easier on the eyes" argument has merit, simply because you can't easily pick up your monitor and comnfortably read it at different angles and positions. You're generally forced to look at it from a specific distance away from the screen, in a relatively fixed position in your desk. The eyes get tired of focusing on something at only one focal length after a while. With sheets of paper, most people tend to do things like stand up and carry them around, continuing to glance at them as they go into another room, or perhaps turn around in their chair and read the paper sitting on their lap while they're facing away from their desk.
Also, paper is lit up by light reflecting off of it, vs. being backlit. You're not "staring into the light" to read paper, like you do an LCD or CRT display.
It recently struck me that as we strive to move to digital vs. paper, it's interesting that the whole question of "backup" and "longevity" becomes more critical too. We know we can properly store a book and expect it to be perfectly readable in 200 years, but the promise of CDs and DVDs lasting anywhere near that long is questionable at best. Tape backups degrade over time, slowly becoming demagnetized as they sit around. Hard drives are doing good to last 10 years before failing. So far, the best answer for ensuring your document (photo, video, etc.) sticks around is posting it to the Internet. Then your "backup" becomes everything from Usenet archives to Google caches to individuals who found it useful enough to make their own copies at home or at work. If a work becomes "lost", someone can post to message forums begging for a copy and usually, someone out there has one they can repost. But our legal system discourages using the net in this way, citing copyright violation, in many cases.
I think "the market" may be more web-savvy than YOU!
You can't just "make a YouTube out of Slashdot" or what have you, with "only minor code changes"! I'd agree that only small changes are needed to turn a particular type of site into a competing "clone" of the site. This is often seen with online dating service web sites, for example. They all perform the same basic function, so the back-end database code is pretty much the same.
But the hardware, bandwidth AND software demands of a streaming video site are very different than a blog site that deals in practically all text.
The fact that young people switch web sites "on a whim" is meaningless. Young people *always* switch brand loyalty on a whim. The fashion industry is well aware of this, yet they haven't stopped vying for their dollars, have they? The fact is, there's a lot of money to be made in creating and trying to hang onto an image of "oool/trendy" as long as you possibly can.
Actually, the trend I've seen is an awful lot of musicians trying to do self-promotion via YouTube videos. I think that's one of the "new, uncharted territories" for unsigned musicians. Finally, a way to promote oneself via homemade music videos, broadcast for free to the whole world.
MySpace probably sees a lot of "crossover" here though, because people can build a "starting point" web page off MySpace and link to their YouTube videos from there.
First off, it doesn't have to. I've had IM chats where we established a "direct connect" type of chat session, bypassing any central server. It's just like doing the old/DCC CHAT command in IRC.
But even when it does, I still maintain that users should expect a reasonable level of privacy. If nothing else, through simple obscurity - because millions of sessions are flowing through a major IM service's servers each day. What are the chances your particular chat is being read by a 3rd. party? (I would hope that a respectable IM service hosted by a major company like Yahoo or Microsoft would have polices punishing employees who manually sifted through chat sessions and viewed them, too.)
That's an oversimplification... so maybe that's why people find it "hard to understand". If I'm on my *personal* computer and I instant message a friend, I have an understanding that the content is destined to travel directly from point A (my IP address) to point B (the receiver's IP address). Yes, it will travel through other people's routers and networks on the way, but it's generally assumed that such traffic isn't subject to review by humans, in-transit.
Chatting over IM on the net is much more like carrying on a one-on-one conversation with somebody in an empty room, with the door closed. Could someone be eavesdropping with their ear against the door, or even spying with a hidden microphone in the room? Of course... but we regularly make the assumption that they're not. It's just not practical to go to great lengths to assure privacy in most cases. "Good enough" really is good enough in many situations.
Most of the people who already commented here made good points, and I almost feel like I should have just moderated some of them up, rather then add to what's here.
But here's my only thought I didn't see mentioned yet. Steam is a great example of the "right" way to sell software online. It's not a subscription model, yet the user is always alerted of expansions or new game releases they can buy for a reasonable price by simply clicking a button. Nonethless, this advertising doesn't really get in the way of using the games themselves either -- so it's usually looked at as a "good thing" vs. a "nuisance".
MMORPGs like WoW are, in my opinion, not really representative of the type of success a company like Microsoft could expect to see if they started offering software by subscription. For starters, MMORPGs are a highly addictive genre of games, by design. They do everything they can to get players "hooked" so they keep coming back for more. I don't think you can build this same level of "excitement" into typical business apps like Word or Excel. Furthremore, they're far from the "norm", so people can deal with paying a monthly fee for them. If *most* of your apps all started asking for monthly subscriptions, you'd quickly say "Enough!" and look for alternatives.
I generally agree -- but you have to be savvy enough about the technology to make a judgement call, as an I.T. manager, about which upgrades have validity and which don't.
My past experience has been, software developers often know relatively little about hardware issues. (Why should they, since it's not really their area of focus?) If they're using old CRTs and they're asking for a flat-screen, that's a no-brainer. Get it for them! It saves electricity, gives you less eyestrain, and generally gives at least 1" more of usable space for the stated display size. If it's a $20 item that's all about personal preference (like a particular brand/model of keyboard or mouse), get that for them too. Even if you can't discern a single reason it's worthwhile, that's not really the point. You're just throwing the cost of a couple lunches or dinners their way to keep them happy and productive.
If they start demanding all new computers with faster CPUs though, you have to sit down and take a closer look. Is it just because they read about the "latest and greatest" thing in some magazine, so now they want it for the bragging rights? If so, hey - tell them to buy their own and brag about it at home. Buying a machine that has all different components and necessary device drivers than the majority of your systems is going to create expensive support hassles down the road, in addition to the up-front cost. It may only give them speed increases in areas not relevant to what they're doing with the machine, too! (EG. Adding more than 4GB of RAM on a system using a 32-bit OS and apps is going to be a total waste. Nothing's going to make good use of the memory above 4GB because it can't allocate it. Buying a 750GB hard drive is probably a waste too on a corporate machine attached to a network. Files should be getting saved on a server. If a developer asks for a huge drive, it's likely to do non work-related things without getting caught, like collecting up DVD movies and MP3 music on their C: drives.)
And, you might also notice, I *am* the parent poster.... And no, I don't think I'm a "fanboy", nor was my point that Apple is "so cool, they can't do anything evil or wrong".
My point was, looking at the whole situation rationally, it makes plenty of sense why the first company trying to create a digital online music store would have to make concessions with the recording industry, or else be stuck in a "rut" of only having unknown, independent-label bands to offer. Apple happened to be that first company.
Recent studies/surveys are showing that most music people listen to on their iPods does *not* come from iTunes music store -- so Apple is certainly benefiting financially from iPod sales, even among people who don't want to buy their digital music.
Like someone else already posted though, DRM is firmly entrenched with media purchases already. Show me a single commercial DVD you can buy today that isn't CSS protected. Even back in the glory days of VHS tape, they usually put silly Macrovision copy protection on them. And we all know software vendors have been trying to enforce copy-protection schemes on computer and console games for YEARS. In a way, all that's happened is the protection scheme has gotten a lot more intelligent about who the owner is. Instead of trying to trip up everyone possessing the media so they can't make "unauthorized copies", now they track *who* made the purchase and extend a set of specific usage rights to them that they won't interfere with.
If it weren't for the fact that they're limiting *where* the purchased media can be played as well as regulating its duplication, I doubt most people would even care. And I could see that restriction going away or being relaxed quite a bit if most music sales shift to the digital realm. To the recording industry, all of this is still pretty new stuff.
And the writer of that blog seems to be wearing an awful lot of tinfoil, too.
Since it was a *known* fact that developer Macs shipped with the TPM hardware in place when they moved to Intel chips, I'm not sure why anyone is shocked or surprised that it wasn't removed by the time they went to production?
As someone posted a reply comment about on that blog page, *virtualization* is one possible reason to make use of a TPM chip. Maybe Apple is interested in utilizing it to get Windows compatibility seamlessly running inside the next release of OS X?
Ultimately, it *still* comes down to software... Do the programs you use implement the TPM in such a manner as to restrict your usage? If so, why run those programs? OS X currently makes no use of it, so if that changes, just skip the next OS X upgrade or stop using the updated apps that start using it in an offensive way. Until then, you're just complaining about scenarios that don't even exist yet.
Au contraire.... They *do* get it, far better than many others.
First off, the statistics about our trash production aren't as meaningful as some would want you to believe. Remember the basic laws of physics do still apply. Matter is neither created nor destroyed. Our "trash" is simply the same matter that existed before, but happens to have been converted into a form we consider "useless" enough to throw it away. If a landfill can capture the gases generated by the decomposition of materials in it and use that as energy (as at least one landfill in CA does now), it sounds like that "pile of waste" is doing an awful lot of good. Another recent Slashdot article talked about plasma arcs being used to generate power from trash too. This stuff doesn't have to just "pile up and do nothing but take up space".
As for our consumption of electricty, again, that's a relative statement. Much of the world's population isn't technologically developed enough to *need* as much electrcity as we do. It's not like there's a finite amount of electricity doled out to the world from a big kettle, and Americans are guilty of walking off each month with 25% of the pot in big glass jars. If you need more electricity, you develop an infrastructure capable of generating it. There's still much that can be done with nuclear power, a little bit more room for advances in solar power, and there are other alternatives in the future like hydrogen power too. I even read about an experimental attempt to generate power off the coast of some islands by sinking a giant spinning "corkscrew" into the ocean floor. The ocean currents would cause it to rotate, generating electricity.
I'm not all that impressed....
on
The Day Against DRM
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
As much as I dislike DRM, I can't really get too worked up about these protests either. For starters, I get the idea that Apple stores are being "picked on" because they're seen as "high profile" in the mass media. In reality, I don't think Apple was all that "pro DRM" at all. They simply agreed to it in order to successfully get the whole iTunes music store off to a start with major record labels on-board.
Until Apple did this and proved the business model was really viable, the only other real visible options for people were illegal downloads of MP3s (of sometimes dubious encoding quality) from p2p networks like Napster.
It seems obvious to me that somewhere in the development process, Apple did some bargaining for rights of the end-users of the music... since to this day, they *still* offer one of the most flexible set of usage rights on the DRM'd files. (As many as 5 computers can be authorized to use one user's purchased music, and anything purchased can be burnt to audio CD format as many times as you wish - as long as you create new "playlists" of tracks every so many times first, etc.) In fact, although it's not advertised, there are several documented cases of users losing all their music due to drive crashes, and upon emailing Apple support, were granted the ability to re-download everything they lost at no charge. They also allow you to reset your computer authorizations up to once per year, in case you forget to de-authorize systems before wiping the drives on them and selling them to someone else.
Microsoft's "Fairplay" DRM and its upcoming use in devices like the Zune seem like a much more worthy target of attack. Fairplay is used by practically all the music services BUT Apple - and is getting more and more restrictive in every update to Windows Media Player that's released. Unlike Apple, MS seems to think it's ok to keep "turning the screws" to lock it down beyond what early adopters were told the rules were.
I think your observation is flawed. Throwing money at problems almost never efficiently solves them. The fact that MS has been so successful indicates they've made very good use of their money, really. If they were able to spend their "marketing" cash on OS development instead, they'd (in an ideal world) end up with a teriffic OS, but one that most people weren't aware of or convinced to switch to.
I'm not sure I completely agree -- at least not with the idea that being a "self-made man" isn't possible in many places besides the U.S.
In the past, I would have agreed.
But considering the increasing loss of our individual rights and freedoms while other countries experiment more with the idea of a "free market", I'm not sure anymore. The successful entrepreneur type can thrive anywhere, really. Even if the country he/she lives in is dirt poor, technologies like the Internet enable sales and marketing world-wide for minimal cost.
One of my former bosses was a big user of software tools to spy on his teenage daughters' IM chat sessions. (I think he actually got the idea, initially, after having a successful run as a reseller of a commercial web-site filtering/monitor package for Windows.)
In any case, he had the classical "good daughter" (A+ student, liked by everybody, never got in trouble, great at sports, etc. etc.), and the "bad daughter" (ran around with a convict boyfriend, left home and had to come back several times, didn't finish school, lost numerous jobs, etc. etc.).
I remember his shock and confusion when the results of his IM logging revealed to him that his "good daughter" was experimenting with drugs with her friends. He, of course, was expecting to see problems from the other one instead. His biggest "worry" was how to confront her about the problem without letting on that he had, indeed, spied on her conversations.
All of that just reinforced my own belief that if your kid is old enough to use your home computer, unsupervised, then they're old enough to have some expectation of privacy too. Anything else just compromises your ability to react to any issues that do come up.
The conversations they have over IM are generally no different than the ones they have while they're at school, out at a party, etc. Your concern needs to focus on putting up some "guard rails" along the sides of the "road of life" they're traveling -- not trying to control the speed or direction they're traveling in.
Symantec, at least, recently tried to stir up a big scare about OS X being ripe for attack by the same types of spyware/malware that affected Windows PCs, and cautioned Mac users to start thinking about buying anti-virus software for their systems.
About 10 months later, none of it materialized... go figure.
Furthermore, as a Mac user myself, I can tell you that none of the big AV vendors have even figured out how to write a quality anti-virus app for OS X in the first place! Hell, Apple themselves gave away free copies of Virex to people owning a.Mac account last year, and ended up recommending people uninstall it after it caused all sorts of system conflicts and crashes!
Same has always been true for Symantec's anti-virus products for the Mac. Slows the system down noticeably, hogs resources, and prevents other packages from installing or working properly. The "cure" is far worse than the "threat".
I agree with most of what you're saying, but I don't agree that the "lack of national pride" in the U.S. is the "biggest problem" we're facing.
The problem with that line of thought is, people run around trying to drum up support for things made in the U.S.A. with "peer pressure" vs. trying to ask the tough questions. (EG. WHY do people not particularly care if the Made in the U.S.A. tag is on their product or not?)
I saw this clearly with cars and trucks throughout the 80's and into the 90's. You had your union workers proudly driving around their Chevy, Ford or Dodge trucks with big bumper stickers slapped on them telling you to only buy U.S. made vehicles. Yet, most of the general public was reading publications like "Consumer Reports" before making such a big purchase, where they learned that every year, the most-reliable and best made vehicles were coming from Japan instead. So what do you do? Buy U.S.A. anyway and receive an inferior product (and by extension, continue to vote for inferior products with your dollars)?
I think "pride" in U.S. made products will only really come when we've earned it. This isn't going to happen as long as we're only concerned with selling "as cheap as China" either. We need to quit dumping our skilled jobs on other countries to save a buck in the short-term, and then wondering why people don't really like our products better than foreign ones!
Yes, you are the "bad guy", although ultimately, the blame can probably be at least equally placed on the owners of whatever company you work for, as well as any superiors you report to other than the owners.
Of course outsourcing/offshoring is not "new", and of course you can point to as many failures as successes with it. All of this completely dodges the point. As the original article clearly stated, the problem is, for every I.T. position that is sent overseas, we get nothing in return from the nation we awarded the job to. (Where's the "equality"? How is India, for example, going to provide our now unemployed I.T. worker with an equivalent new job to perform?)
The only benefit a "successful" offshoring or outsourcing project gives us is cheaper labor for the company doing it. That doesn't do a thing for the unemployed American worker, who now has to compete for a dwindling number of remaining jobs paying anywhere near the salary range he/she expects to earn.
When industries like "garments/textiles" and steel were outsourced, it caused economic havock in the U.S. - but the damage was considered "acceptable" by many, because those were industries where the workers could arguably learn new skills and "move up" to a *better paying* job. But now, we're dumping those "better paying" jobs requiring more education too.
It seems like lately, every time MS takes "too long" to release a patch, someone rolls out an unofficial one - and then this debate rages on whether or not that's a "good thing".
Rather than wasting all the time and effort on doing this - I think the efforts could be better spent simply doing all the patches for the "unsupported" OS's, and *not* the current ones.
It would still accomplish the same result that most of these security experts seem to want; making MS look bad for their slow response times. (Imagine the embarassment if it turns out you're better and more quickly patched against vulnerabilities by running one of Microsoft's "now unsupported" OS's like Windows '98 or ME than by using their current products!) Plus, it provides needed patches for a marketplace that can't get them anymore any other way. (I think some people might be surprised at how often a business still keeps an old, outdated MS system running for a special task at least someplace in the company. Despite MS's assertions, it's still not realistic to expect everybody to migrate fully to Windows XP/2003 Server. Even the relatively small (under 100 employees) business I work for is still running an NT 4.0 workstation that drives an old voice mail system for our phones.
I think the original poster already pretty much answered the question for you. He thinks a Linux distro like Debian should focus more on being usable/desirable to the majority of users, vs. being less so for the sake of "principles".
Seems like a perfectly fair and valid comment to me. Although, it is one that's biased towards software developers in his case. (Again, that might make some sense, if you come from a viewpoint that Linux is mainly of interest to people who want to hack around with the code they're initially given.)
I think the problem here is, Debian did such a good job with their distro over the years (above average packaging system and so on) that it became popular with a crowd that just wants as complete a set of OS/Apps as possible. If they're allowed to legally download the ISO for free and use what's given to them, they're happy. They probably won't ever care about modifying a line of source, nor will they care if some package actually has a few restrictions on its use. (If it's on there and they can make it run, they're happy. They'll just ignore such nonsense as "This is only for *personal* use, not business use." or what have you.
These types are going to dislike anything that causes a well-known, popular app to get removed, renamed, or moved into some special place where it's not installed by default.
But hey, whatever. I think Debian has made it clear what their goals are, and it's turning out those don't make for the best "out of box" experience for some people.
As far as I can tell, the only real reason fed. govt. has been concerned about off-shore gambling sites is because they have no way of regulating them to ensure they do, in fact, operate the games as stated.
If gambling is done on U.S. soil, it's possible to send in government regulators to verify that the posted odds really are correct, to place daily betting limits, and other such rules. They can't realistically put any such controls on some web site running in a foreign country.
And how fair is it to let some guy in the Ukraine run a poker game site where the cards aren't really shuffled quite right, or a blackjack game where the computerized dealer manages to cause players to "bust" an unusual number of times - when all the real casinos built here and bringing in revenue have to play by different rules?
State-sponsored gambling has nothing to do with discouraging education, hard work or wise investing. The only scam along those lines has been govt. promising they'd use revenues generated by casinos to fund education, and then managing to siphon off the funding for other uses.
Realistically, taxation itself discourages hard work, education and wise investing, if we follow your line of thought. (EG. Why bust my butt to work so hard, when government is going to come along and forcibly take at least 1/3rd. or so of my income as taxes before I even see the money? Why worry about saving as much as possible for my future, when govt. already takes out part of each paycheck for "social security"?)
Slashdot Mirror
/me ducks and runs....
I've been divorced for a couple years now, and I have primary custody of my 4 year old daughter. I've worked in I.T. for roughly 15 years now. (I'm 35.)
... although if I wasn't under the financial stresses of losing a decent-paying job and having no prospects on the horizon of a replacement with anywhere near similar pay, we might have had a better shot of working through it.
While I agree that it's foolish to blame "I.T." itself as "the reason" for a divorce, it's also true that it can be a contributing factor. If you look at the statistics out there, they show that a surprisingly large number of marriages end in divorce primarily over financial stress/issues. I know my own divorce happened right in the middle of the whole "dot com bust" era, when everyone started getting worried about the I.T. job market, and I in fact did lose my job.
Without going into too much detail, my ex-wife wasn't completely mentally stable. Her pregnancy seemed to be the "trigger" for her latent issues (never conclusively diagnosed but suspected by at least one therapist in the past of being bi-polar, and suffered from bouts of depression). That's, ultimately, what made it impossible to live with her anymore
I will tell you this much. If you're in I.T. like I am and you're trying to raise a child by yourself, make SURE you work for someone who is understanding and flexible with the hours!! My kid just started preschool during the day, and they won't even allow dropping her off until about 7:50AM each day. I'm supposed to be at work by 8:00, which just doesn't quite work. After a few rounds battling this out with the owners, H.R., etc. - they finally seem to have agreed to let it slide, as long as I make myself very reachable by cellphone and make up the time with shorter lunches, working a little bit late, etc. Since school usually lets out by 3PM, that also poses problems. I'm currently faced with selling my house and moving much closer to my parents, so they can more easily lend a hand.
Well, first off, I never said the other PC was a Dell. I guess you assumed that since I have a Dell 24" monitor on the Mac. But it's just an AMD Athlon 64 clone PC I built before I got the Mac.
Anyway, I may eventually get rid of it as I do have XP on the Mac Pro in Bootcamp. But currently, it's nice having 2 separate machines so my kid can use one while I'm on the other, or so guests can check their email, play games, etc. on it without messing up my primary machine.
Ugh... I just had a bit of a debate on this subject with a female friend who works in a university library in my city.
... not so much the form of distribution. Books used to be the least expensive way to distribute the content. Now, that's just not the case. It's far more space-efficient to convert most of it to digital media, and doing so gives huge advantages in search capabilities too.
She maintained that schools teaching kids to "do research on the Internet" does them little good, and it's a farce that it's even called "research". She had an obvious bias towards printed books as superior media.
I maintain that the content is what's important
With digital content, you can always duplicate onto printed media at will. With your original being a book, you have to do labor-intensive photocopying or scanning and printing to produce a duplicate. I'm not against the idea of paper or books, but especially for research purposes - digital is a vastly more flexible format.
I'm actually in a situation at home where I can compare both side-by-side. I have a PC with XP on it running two 20" wide-screen LCD panels, and across the room, I have a new Mac Pro with a Dell 24" LCD display. (Ok, granted, not quite a 30" like they use in this study ... but should be close enough for the purpose.)
Despite having 40" of total space on one system, vs. only 24" on the other, I *still* prefer the single 24" display, all things considered.
The fact that you can angle each viewing area separately is more of a nuisance than a benefit, IMHO. I'm always finding one of the displays gets bumped so it's not sitting right up against the other one, and the gap between screens is distracting. I also find that with dual displays, I tend to want to angle them just slightly inward so they have a slight "wrapping around my viewing area" effect, rather than looking straight on at both of them. But again, that always seems to get bumped out of place if someone wants to play with the controls on one of the panels or whatever.
With dual displays, I'd also be happier if games would start making use of them. As it is, I don't think I've ever gotten a piece of software other than MS Flight Simulator to take advantage of dual monitors. (I recall seeing somebody's instructions for making Quake 3 use dual monitors for a wide-aspect game spanning both of them - but it required software rendering, which made it horribly slow.)
It's true that technology allows us to reduce our usage of paper. (And in turn, it follows that the older generation is more set in their ways of using paper where the younger crowd feels more comfortable using one of the alternatives instead.)
BUT - there are good, valid reasons for paper printouts. The "easier on the eyes" argument has merit, simply because you can't easily pick up your monitor and comnfortably read it at different angles and positions. You're generally forced to look at it from a specific distance away from the screen, in a relatively fixed position in your desk. The eyes get tired of focusing on something at only one focal length after a while. With sheets of paper, most people tend to do things like stand up and carry them around, continuing to glance at them as they go into another room, or perhaps turn around in their chair and read the paper sitting on their lap while they're facing away from their desk.
Also, paper is lit up by light reflecting off of it, vs. being backlit. You're not "staring into the light" to read paper, like you do an LCD or CRT display.
It recently struck me that as we strive to move to digital vs. paper, it's interesting that the whole question of "backup" and "longevity" becomes more critical too. We know we can properly store a book and expect it to be perfectly readable in 200 years, but the promise of CDs and DVDs lasting anywhere near that long is questionable at best. Tape backups degrade over time, slowly becoming demagnetized as they sit around. Hard drives are doing good to last 10 years before failing. So far, the best answer for ensuring your document (photo, video, etc.) sticks around is posting it to the Internet. Then your "backup" becomes everything from Usenet archives to Google caches to individuals who found it useful enough to make their own copies at home or at work. If a work becomes "lost", someone can post to message forums begging for a copy and usually, someone out there has one they can repost. But our legal system discourages using the net in this way, citing copyright violation, in many cases.
I think "the market" may be more web-savvy than YOU!
You can't just "make a YouTube out of Slashdot" or what have you, with "only minor code changes"! I'd agree that only small changes are needed to turn a particular type of site into a competing "clone" of the site. This is often seen with online dating service web sites, for example. They all perform the same basic function, so the back-end database code is pretty much the same.
But the hardware, bandwidth AND software demands of a streaming video site are very different than a blog site that deals in practically all text.
The fact that young people switch web sites "on a whim" is meaningless. Young people *always* switch brand loyalty on a whim. The fashion industry is well aware of this, yet they haven't stopped vying for their dollars, have they? The fact is, there's a lot of money to be made in creating and trying to hang onto an image of "oool/trendy" as long as you possibly can.
Actually, the trend I've seen is an awful lot of musicians trying to do self-promotion via YouTube videos. I think that's one of the "new, uncharted territories" for unsigned musicians. Finally, a way to promote oneself via homemade music videos, broadcast for free to the whole world.
MySpace probably sees a lot of "crossover" here though, because people can build a "starting point" web page off MySpace and link to their YouTube videos from there.
First off, it doesn't have to. I've had IM chats where we established a "direct connect" type of chat session, bypassing any central server. It's just like doing the old /DCC CHAT command in IRC.
But even when it does, I still maintain that users should expect a reasonable level of privacy. If nothing else, through simple obscurity - because millions of sessions are flowing through a major IM service's servers each day. What are the chances your particular chat is being read by a 3rd. party? (I would hope that a respectable IM service hosted by a major company like Yahoo or Microsoft would have polices punishing employees who manually sifted through chat sessions and viewed them, too.)
That's an oversimplification... so maybe that's why people find it "hard to understand". If I'm on my *personal* computer and I instant message a friend, I have an understanding that the content is destined to travel directly from point A (my IP address) to point B (the receiver's IP address). Yes, it will travel through other people's routers and networks on the way, but it's generally assumed that such traffic isn't subject to review by humans, in-transit.
Chatting over IM on the net is much more like carrying on a one-on-one conversation with somebody in an empty room, with the door closed. Could someone be eavesdropping with their ear against the door, or even spying with a hidden microphone in the room? Of course... but we regularly make the assumption that they're not. It's just not practical to go to great lengths to assure privacy in most cases. "Good enough" really is good enough in many situations.
Most of the people who already commented here made good points, and I almost feel like I should have just moderated some of them up, rather then add to what's here.
But here's my only thought I didn't see mentioned yet. Steam is a great example of the "right" way to sell software online. It's not a subscription model, yet the user is always alerted of expansions or new game releases they can buy for a reasonable price by simply clicking a button. Nonethless, this advertising doesn't really get in the way of using the games themselves either -- so it's usually looked at as a "good thing" vs. a "nuisance".
MMORPGs like WoW are, in my opinion, not really representative of the type of success a company like Microsoft could expect to see if they started offering software by subscription. For starters, MMORPGs are a highly addictive genre of games, by design. They do everything they can to get players "hooked" so they keep coming back for more. I don't think you can build this same level of "excitement" into typical business apps like Word or Excel. Furthremore, they're far from the "norm", so people can deal with paying a monthly fee for them. If *most* of your apps all started asking for monthly subscriptions, you'd quickly say "Enough!" and look for alternatives.
I generally agree -- but you have to be savvy enough about the technology to make a judgement call, as an I.T. manager, about which upgrades have validity and which don't.
My past experience has been, software developers often know relatively little about hardware issues. (Why should they, since it's not really their area of focus?) If they're using old CRTs and they're asking for a flat-screen, that's a no-brainer. Get it for them! It saves electricity, gives you less eyestrain, and generally gives at least 1" more of usable space for the stated display size. If it's a $20 item that's all about personal preference (like a particular brand/model of keyboard or mouse), get that for them too. Even if you can't discern a single reason it's worthwhile, that's not really the point. You're just throwing the cost of a couple lunches or dinners their way to keep them happy and productive.
If they start demanding all new computers with faster CPUs though, you have to sit down and take a closer look. Is it just because they read about the "latest and greatest" thing in some magazine, so now they want it for the bragging rights? If so, hey - tell them to buy their own and brag about it at home. Buying a machine that has all different components and necessary device drivers than the majority of your systems is going to create expensive support hassles down the road, in addition to the up-front cost. It may only give them speed increases in areas not relevant to what they're doing with the machine, too! (EG. Adding more than 4GB of RAM on a system using a 32-bit OS and apps is going to be a total waste. Nothing's going to make good use of the memory above 4GB because it can't allocate it. Buying a 750GB hard drive is probably a waste too on a corporate machine attached to a network. Files should be getting saved on a server. If a developer asks for a huge drive, it's likely to do non work-related things without getting caught, like collecting up DVD movies and MP3 music on their C: drives.)
And, you might also notice, I *am* the parent poster.... And no, I don't think I'm a "fanboy", nor was my point that Apple is "so cool, they can't do anything evil or wrong".
My point was, looking at the whole situation rationally, it makes plenty of sense why the first company trying to create a digital online music store would have to make concessions with the recording industry, or else be stuck in a "rut" of only having unknown, independent-label bands to offer. Apple happened to be that first company.
Recent studies/surveys are showing that most music people listen to on their iPods does *not* come from iTunes music store -- so Apple is certainly benefiting financially from iPod sales, even among people who don't want to buy their digital music.
Like someone else already posted though, DRM is firmly entrenched with media purchases already. Show me a single commercial DVD you can buy today that isn't CSS protected. Even back in the glory days of VHS tape, they usually put silly Macrovision copy protection on them. And we all know software vendors have been trying to enforce copy-protection schemes on computer and console games for YEARS. In a way, all that's happened is the protection scheme has gotten a lot more intelligent about who the owner is. Instead of trying to trip up everyone possessing the media so they can't make "unauthorized copies", now they track *who* made the purchase and extend a set of specific usage rights to them that they won't interfere with.
If it weren't for the fact that they're limiting *where* the purchased media can be played as well as regulating its duplication, I doubt most people would even care. And I could see that restriction going away or being relaxed quite a bit if most music sales shift to the digital realm. To the recording industry, all of this is still pretty new stuff.
And the writer of that blog seems to be wearing an awful lot of tinfoil, too.
... Do the programs you use implement the TPM in such a manner as to restrict your usage? If so, why run those programs? OS X currently makes no use of it, so if that changes, just skip the next OS X upgrade or stop using the updated apps that start using it in an offensive way. Until then, you're just complaining about scenarios that don't even exist yet.
Since it was a *known* fact that developer Macs shipped with the TPM hardware in place when they moved to Intel chips, I'm not sure why anyone is shocked or surprised that it wasn't removed by the time they went to production?
As someone posted a reply comment about on that blog page, *virtualization* is one possible reason to make use of a TPM chip. Maybe Apple is interested in utilizing it to get Windows compatibility seamlessly running inside the next release of OS X?
Ultimately, it *still* comes down to software
Au contraire.... They *do* get it, far better than many others.
First off, the statistics about our trash production aren't as meaningful as some would want you to believe. Remember the basic laws of physics do still apply. Matter is neither created nor destroyed. Our "trash" is simply the same matter that existed before, but happens to have been converted into a form we consider "useless" enough to throw it away. If a landfill can capture the gases generated by the decomposition of materials in it and use that as energy (as at least one landfill in CA does now), it sounds like that "pile of waste" is doing an awful lot of good. Another recent Slashdot article talked about plasma arcs being used to generate power from trash too. This stuff doesn't have to just "pile up and do nothing but take up space".
As for our consumption of electricty, again, that's a relative statement. Much of the world's population isn't technologically developed enough to *need* as much electrcity as we do. It's not like there's a finite amount of electricity doled out to the world from a big kettle, and Americans are guilty of walking off each month with 25% of the pot in big glass jars. If you need more electricity, you develop an infrastructure capable of generating it. There's still much that can be done with nuclear power, a little bit more room for advances in solar power, and there are other alternatives in the future like hydrogen power too. I even read about an experimental attempt to generate power off the coast of some islands by sinking a giant spinning "corkscrew" into the ocean floor. The ocean currents would cause it to rotate, generating electricity.
As much as I dislike DRM, I can't really get too worked up about these protests either. For starters, I get the idea that Apple stores are being "picked on" because they're seen as "high profile" in the mass media. In reality, I don't think Apple was all that "pro DRM" at all. They simply agreed to it in order to successfully get the whole iTunes music store off to a start with major record labels on-board.
... since to this day, they *still* offer one of the most flexible set of usage rights on the DRM'd files. (As many as 5 computers can be authorized to use one user's purchased music, and anything purchased can be burnt to audio CD format as many times as you wish - as long as you create new "playlists" of tracks every so many times first, etc.) In fact, although it's not advertised, there are several documented cases of users losing all their music due to drive crashes, and upon emailing Apple support, were granted the ability to re-download everything they lost at no charge. They also allow you to reset your computer authorizations up to once per year, in case you forget to de-authorize systems before wiping the drives on them and selling them to someone else.
Until Apple did this and proved the business model was really viable, the only other real visible options for people were illegal downloads of MP3s (of sometimes dubious encoding quality) from p2p networks like Napster.
It seems obvious to me that somewhere in the development process, Apple did some bargaining for rights of the end-users of the music
Microsoft's "Fairplay" DRM and its upcoming use in devices like the Zune seem like a much more worthy target of attack. Fairplay is used by practically all the music services BUT Apple - and is getting more and more restrictive in every update to Windows Media Player that's released. Unlike Apple, MS seems to think it's ok to keep "turning the screws" to lock it down beyond what early adopters were told the rules were.
I think your observation is flawed. Throwing money at problems almost never efficiently solves them. The fact that MS has been so successful indicates they've made very good use of their money, really. If they were able to spend their "marketing" cash on OS development instead, they'd (in an ideal world) end up with a teriffic OS, but one that most people weren't aware of or convinced to switch to.
I'm not sure I completely agree -- at least not with the idea that being a "self-made man" isn't possible in many places besides the U.S.
In the past, I would have agreed.
But considering the increasing loss of our individual rights and freedoms while other countries experiment more with the idea of a "free market", I'm not sure anymore. The successful entrepreneur type can thrive anywhere, really. Even if the country he/she lives in is dirt poor, technologies like the Internet enable sales and marketing world-wide for minimal cost.
One of my former bosses was a big user of software tools to spy on his teenage daughters' IM chat sessions. (I think he actually got the idea, initially, after having a successful run as a reseller of a commercial web-site filtering/monitor package for Windows.)
In any case, he had the classical "good daughter" (A+ student, liked by everybody, never got in trouble, great at sports, etc. etc.), and the "bad daughter" (ran around with a convict boyfriend, left home and had to come back several times, didn't finish school, lost numerous jobs, etc. etc.).
I remember his shock and confusion when the results of his IM logging revealed to him that his "good daughter" was experimenting with drugs with her friends. He, of course, was expecting to see problems from the other one instead. His biggest "worry" was how to confront her about the problem without letting on that he had, indeed, spied on her conversations.
All of that just reinforced my own belief that if your kid is old enough to use your home computer, unsupervised, then they're old enough to have some expectation of privacy too. Anything else just compromises your ability to react to any issues that do come up.
The conversations they have over IM are generally no different than the ones they have while they're at school, out at a party, etc. Your concern needs to focus on putting up some "guard rails" along the sides of the "road of life" they're traveling -- not trying to control the speed or direction they're traveling in.
Symantec, at least, recently tried to stir up a big scare about OS X being ripe for attack by the same types of spyware/malware that affected Windows PCs, and cautioned Mac users to start thinking about buying anti-virus software for their systems.
... go figure.
.Mac account last year, and ended up recommending people uninstall it after it caused all sorts of system conflicts and crashes!
About 10 months later, none of it materialized
Furthermore, as a Mac user myself, I can tell you that none of the big AV vendors have even figured out how to write a quality anti-virus app for OS X in the first place! Hell, Apple themselves gave away free copies of Virex to people owning a
Same has always been true for Symantec's anti-virus products for the Mac. Slows the system down noticeably, hogs resources, and prevents other packages from installing or working properly. The "cure" is far worse than the "threat".
I agree with most of what you're saying, but I don't agree that the "lack of national pride" in the U.S. is the "biggest problem" we're facing.
The problem with that line of thought is, people run around trying to drum up support for things made in the U.S.A. with "peer pressure" vs. trying to ask the tough questions. (EG. WHY do people not particularly care if the Made in the U.S.A. tag is on their product or not?)
I saw this clearly with cars and trucks throughout the 80's and into the 90's. You had your union workers proudly driving around their Chevy, Ford or Dodge trucks with big bumper stickers slapped on them telling you to only buy U.S. made vehicles. Yet, most of the general public was reading publications like "Consumer Reports" before making such a big purchase, where they learned that every year, the most-reliable and best made vehicles were coming from Japan instead. So what do you do? Buy U.S.A. anyway and receive an inferior product (and by extension, continue to vote for inferior products with your dollars)?
I think "pride" in U.S. made products will only really come when we've earned it. This isn't going to happen as long as we're only concerned with selling "as cheap as China" either. We need to quit dumping our skilled jobs on other countries to save a buck in the short-term, and then wondering why people don't really like our products better than foreign ones!
Yes, you are the "bad guy", although ultimately, the blame can probably be at least equally placed on the owners of whatever company you work for, as well as any superiors you report to other than the owners.
Of course outsourcing/offshoring is not "new", and of course you can point to as many failures as successes with it. All of this completely dodges the point. As the original article clearly stated, the problem is, for every I.T. position that is sent overseas, we get nothing in return from the nation we awarded the job to. (Where's the "equality"? How is India, for example, going to provide our now unemployed I.T. worker with an equivalent new job to perform?)
The only benefit a "successful" offshoring or outsourcing project gives us is cheaper labor for the company doing it. That doesn't do a thing for the unemployed American worker, who now has to compete for a dwindling number of remaining jobs paying anywhere near the salary range he/she expects to earn.
When industries like "garments/textiles" and steel were outsourced, it caused economic havock in the U.S. - but the damage was considered "acceptable" by many, because those were industries where the workers could arguably learn new skills and "move up" to a *better paying* job. But now, we're dumping those "better paying" jobs requiring more education too.
It seems like lately, every time MS takes "too long" to release a patch, someone rolls out an unofficial one - and then this debate rages on whether or not that's a "good thing".
Rather than wasting all the time and effort on doing this - I think the efforts could be better spent simply doing all the patches for the "unsupported" OS's, and *not* the current ones.
It would still accomplish the same result that most of these security experts seem to want; making MS look bad for their slow response times. (Imagine the embarassment if it turns out you're better and more quickly patched against vulnerabilities by running one of Microsoft's "now unsupported" OS's like Windows '98 or ME than by using their current products!) Plus, it provides needed patches for a marketplace that can't get them anymore any other way. (I think some people might be surprised at how often a business still keeps an old, outdated MS system running for a special task at least someplace in the company. Despite MS's assertions, it's still not realistic to expect everybody to migrate fully to Windows XP/2003 Server. Even the relatively small (under 100 employees) business I work for is still running an NT 4.0 workstation that drives an old voice mail system for our phones.
I think the original poster already pretty much answered the question for you. He thinks a Linux distro like Debian should focus more on being usable/desirable to the majority of users, vs. being less so for the sake of "principles".
Seems like a perfectly fair and valid comment to me. Although, it is one that's biased towards software developers in his case. (Again, that might make some sense, if you come from a viewpoint that Linux is mainly of interest to people who want to hack around with the code they're initially given.)
I think the problem here is, Debian did such a good job with their distro over the years (above average packaging system and so on) that it became popular with a crowd that just wants as complete a set of OS/Apps as possible. If they're allowed to legally download the ISO for free and use what's given to them, they're happy. They probably won't ever care about modifying a line of source, nor will they care if some package actually has a few restrictions on its use. (If it's on there and they can make it run, they're happy. They'll just ignore such nonsense as "This is only for *personal* use, not business use." or what have you.
These types are going to dislike anything that causes a well-known, popular app to get removed, renamed, or moved into some special place where it's not installed by default.
But hey, whatever. I think Debian has made it clear what their goals are, and it's turning out those don't make for the best "out of box" experience for some people.
As far as I can tell, the only real reason fed. govt. has been concerned about off-shore gambling sites is because they have no way of regulating them to ensure they do, in fact, operate the games as stated.
If gambling is done on U.S. soil, it's possible to send in government regulators to verify that the posted odds really are correct, to place daily betting limits, and other such rules. They can't realistically put any such controls on some web site running in a foreign country.
And how fair is it to let some guy in the Ukraine run a poker game site where the cards aren't really shuffled quite right, or a blackjack game where the computerized dealer manages to cause players to "bust" an unusual number of times - when all the real casinos built here and bringing in revenue have to play by different rules?
State-sponsored gambling has nothing to do with discouraging education, hard work or wise investing. The only scam along those lines has been govt. promising they'd use revenues generated by casinos to fund education, and then managing to siphon off the funding for other uses.
Realistically, taxation itself discourages hard work, education and wise investing, if we follow your line of thought. (EG. Why bust my butt to work so hard, when government is going to come along and forcibly take at least 1/3rd. or so of my income as taxes before I even see the money? Why worry about saving as much as possible for my future, when govt. already takes out part of each paycheck for "social security"?)