I work full-time in I.T., and juggle it with my consulting business, which I takes calls for on my cellphone and schedule weekend, evening, and sometimes even "during lunch break" appointments.
Initially, I tried to make a full-time business out of this because I was unemployed and the job market was pretty sluggish. But now, it's turned out to be perfect as a "side job".
I can give you a few pieces of advice, based on my findings. But your results may vary.
1. Don't waste money on big phone book ads! I mistakenly believed the Yellow Pages would be critical to my business, but I immediately ran into a couple of problems. First and foremost, my phone company (Southwestern Bell) refused to let me buy a listing in their Yellow Pages unless I owned a business phone number. They wouldn't allow me to publish a cellphone number in their book. I have no need for a land-line for this business, and wouldn't want to pay business rates on one anyway - so that was a no-go. Their competitor in my area, "Yellow Book", offers a clone of the Yellow Pages and *does* let you list cell numbers in it. (Plus, they have cheaper rates for ads.) I took a chance with them, but I'm stuck paying about $160 a month plus several hundred dollars I paid up-front, and I've only gotten 2 customers out of it in 6 or 7 months! If I was going to do it over, I'd just get a 1 line listing and that's it. People do call from the ad, occasionally, but they're usually clueless and asking for things that have nothing to do with my service. (EG. You don't happen to sell new iPods, do you?)
2. Whatever you decide on as your fee structure, make sure it doesn't make people "watch the clock", afraid of getting too big a bill. Many people who use your service will be "on the fence" about it in the first place. They're hoping they have a problem that can be fixed in 30 minutes or less. (Meanwhile, you get there and realize their 4 year old PC is so slow, you can hardly install a single piece of software on it in that length of time - much less remove all the viruses and spyware.) You'll get pressured by these people to do a "rush job" and make things "just good enough" instead of doing it right. You DON'T want that!! (This is a case where they don't know what's best for them. Those device drivers you just "decided to let them find and install later" to save time, or the trojan horse downloader virus you weren't quite able to get time to remove completely are going to make all the work you did pointless!) I like the idea I've seen some handymen use, where they charge $80 or $85 up-front, but that covers the first hour of work, and then additional time is billed at a much lower rate.
3. If you have a little money to invest in this type of business, buy 2 things. First, get an in-car GPS system! It's almost essential for quickly finding houses, or the quickest way to client #2 from client #1 that you're just leaving. Second, look into your options for wireless high-speed Internet access! There are *so* many times I wish I had broadband to my laptop so I could download large files a customer needed who only had a dial-up modem at their location. I've often had to drive back home, burn things on CD, and make a second trip back out there to get their all-in-one printer going, or to get all the needed drivers back on a system after a fresh Windows reinstall.
I've actually worked for places where they seriously considered applicants who were subsequently found to have felony convictions, when a background check came back. In each of these situatiions I can remember, the owner really had to think it over - and was "torn" on whether to take a chance on the person or not. In each case, a corporate lawyer tipped the scales against it happening with advice of "Absolutely not! Too great a legal risk for you!"
I'm sure people trying to find work despite a criminal record often suspect that employers are just discarding their resumes immediately. But I don't think that's really true. It's just that in today's lawsuit-happy climate, no attorney is going to recommend it -- and employers tend not to go against their attorney's advice.
This doesn't necessarily have to be the case. Kids are absolutely *full* of energy, and I know my own daughter would love to play computer games that require a lot of moving and jumping around. The problem is, the gaming industry mostly ignores this idea because the people doing the coding, and the older generation of people picking out the games to purchase don't find it appealing. (How many "quality assurance testers" really look forward to a bunch of physical exertion to find bugs in the code, for that matter?)
There were a few exceptions made, like Dance Dance Revolution:
I just installed a *bunch* of Windows XP patches on my Mac Pro last night. Hey, just 'cuz it's a Mac doesn't mean I want the XP installation on a second hard drive in it to be unpatched!
I'd like to know that too, because I don't bother with MythTV upgrades until it comes out as Knoppmyth on an ISO. Maybe it's just the nature of my particular setup, but it took me *weeks* of tinkering and pouring over message threads to get my Myth box working exactly like I wanted it to. I would have just given up in frustration if the main "core" of the thing wasn't made easier to get going via Knoppmyth.
In the past, it seemed like it took the Knoppmyth developers at least 1-2 months to release a new ISO based on a Myth update though, so this isn't something I'd really expect to see from them in the next few days or anything.
Craigslist represents itself as a digital equivalent of the "classifieds" section of a local newspaper, in many ways. Sensible or not (and I think the more techno-savvy among us would clearly leans towards "not"), the public uses Craigslists under an initial assumption that it's roughly as "reputable" a place as the classifieds from the newspapers.
(After all, it makes a big deal out of the self-policing nature of the system, where anyone can "flag" a post for one of several reasons, and a few "flags" immediately result in the message being pulled. That tends to give people some comfort, despite realizing all messages posted are anonymous.)
Anyone who collects up private information of others and proceeds to repost it someplace is misusing the information he/she was provided with and is breaking the law. That seems pretty clear. The rest of the arguments are irrelevant here.
If you "ask for sex using your work email address", you might be an idiot, but you're no less protected under the same laws that protect you when you do it under any other email address, only to find the person you communicated with was acting under false pretenses and reposted your personal info for the world to see.
It's his work's problem to reprimand him or terminate his employment for his misuse of company email. It's not the job of some guy on Craigslist to assist in making it happen!
I dunno... the idea of vaporizing trash with plasma arcs sounds like something you'd do in a 1st. person shooter... not a recycling plant. But if this works as advertised, it's pretty cool. How much electricity does it take to run though? Seems like this would consume a lot of power!
Really, there will be no "alternatives" to migrating to Vista - other than a complete change in platform (say, Linux, BSD, or a Mac). If you want to keep using your Microsoft Windows compatible applications and games, you're slowly going to be pushed down Microsoft's migration path. The idea of a voluntary "boycott" is only practical in the short-term. (EG. You could actively refuse to upgrade just for the sake of having Vista as soon as it comes out.)
Eventually though, support for XP will be dropped, just as it has been for older versions of Windows in the past - and you won't even be able to use recent versions of Microsoft's "companion products" for Windows (Media Player, for example) without an upgrade. New hardware is going to come pre-loaded with Vista, and only a fool would reformat over it, opting to buy an XP license just to put back on it and "downgrade" to an older OS....
Large businesses will feel the pressure to make a move to Vista as well, simply because it becomes too difficult to provide user support for multiple OS's. As soon as they buy a few Vista machines, I.T. is going to be under the gun to look into what's needed to deploy proper group policy settings for them... and that opens the door for switching everyone else over too. (Hey, we already put in all the effort getting the policies set up for the new boxes. May as well roll out the new stuff and make use of them for more than just 10 sample boxes, right?)
Arguments about price and DRM limitations aside for a moment, it occurs to me that Internet-based movie downloads won't really take off unless there's a piece of hardware accompanying the thing. Tivo, for example, should have partnered up with Amazon or someone else doing this and said "Ok - we'll send down a free firmware upgrade to all of our users, and then our boxes will be able to browse your movie catalog and order up content on-screen, saving it to the hard drive in the unit. Meanwhile, the user will be free to watch existing content while it downloads in the background."
The overall business model works a lot better for music downloads, because A) They're smaller and take a lot less time to download, B) Every single user of a portable digital music player has to learn to sync it with a PC in order to load it up with music, so a PC is a logical "starting point" for receiving that type of content, and C) Many more people are comfortable burning a standards-compliant audio CD from a PC for use in their home or car stereo than are comfortable burning DVD movie content that plays properly on their stand-alone players.
If it was really commonplace for people to use their computer as a media center attached to a TV and surround sound stereo receiver, then this might go over a little bit better. But it's not! Half the people buying new computers with "Windows Media Center edition" preloaded on them don't even use the TV playback and recording capabilities of it. They just went with it because the whole bundle was on sale....
The article said something about the print looking purplish, despite having up to 1200dpi resolution. So if you do print photos on it by mistake, it's going to be immediately obvious.
Yeah.... quite so. But I'm just passing along the general sentiment I heard. The idea that someone of obvious foreign descent running a U.S. computer store is generally seen as a negative by quite a few customers (biggoted though that opinion might be).
The same thing always happened with the Chinese around here. We used to have a computer reseller called Computer-4-U, owned and operated by Chinese. (There was one guy living here in the U.S. who took care of the store as "manager" day-to-day, but his brothers were the primary investors and technically the owners, and they lived in China. They visited once a year to check up on things and tell him if he had been successful enough that year so he could carry this or that name-brand product.) Many computer store owners I knew who purchased products from him held a pretty low opinion of his operation - primarly because of the impression they got that his "language barrier" was at least partially an excuse. (EG. His English got a lot worse if you had questions about an exchange or return than if you wanted to make a new purchase.)
I can tell you for a fact that theft at the Computer City stores we used to have here in St. Louis, MO (USA) was mostly by employees. I used to run a popular computer BBS back in those days, and one of their employees offered to barter hardware for download credits with me one time. I visited his apartment, willing to discuss the idea - and found a large walk-in closet stuffed full of brand new CD-ROM drives, RAM, hard drives, and other goodies. He worked at Computer City and admitted that a group of them were collecting up as much stuff as they could from the store, in order to get a "better salary out of the cheap bastards".
Another time, I was interested in buying an expansion board to do general MIDI with ROM samples on a Soundblaster AWE type csound card. Computer City supposedly had 2 in stock at the store closest to me, but when I got there, they were unable to locate anything except empty boxes. Shortly afterwards, a guy I knew told me that he had "connections" who could get me one of those cards cheap, as long as I didn't mind it was "hot". Funny... one of his buddies worked at Computer City.
That place seemed to generate a lot of ill will with people... One store by me was Arab-owned and operated, for example, and many people felt it should have been run by an American instead. Another just had constantly poor customer service. You could walk around for 30 minutes trying to get help and nobody would seem to be around. I think that's really why they experienced such high loss-rates. Employees were all out to screw the stores over, and many who shopped there didn't feel guilty buying property known to be stolen from the place either.
I'm not an expert on the subject or anything... but I believe the usual procedure here in the U.S. is, anyone can pull money from a checking account if they have the bank's routing number and your account number. If you wish to protest a withdrawl, you can do so by filling out formal paperwork at one of your bank branches, claiming the transaction was fraudulent or the result of a clerical error.
Then the bank will do an investigation, and *may* undo the transaction, depending on their findings.
I'm guessing PayPal doesn't like Netbank anymore, because they tried pulling funds from Netbank checking accounts before to fix negative PayPal balances, and PayPal users filed complaints with Netbank. Then, Netbank deemed PayPal as fraudulently pulling said funds because they're not really an FDIC insured financial institution and couldn't show any proof that the customer gave them written permission to withdraw funds electronically.
In most cases, I guess other banks have allowed these types of withdrawls to go through, rejecting customers' challenges to them.
Quite a few NEC NEAX phone PBX systems still run DOS. I'm quite sure NEC no longer makes any new systems that do, but the old DOS-based ones were incredibly reliable. They're still widely used by the military, as well as in many hotels and offices.
I used to work for a place that used one, and except for actual hardware failures or someone screwing up while trying to reprogram it, I don't think it ever crashed in 6 or 7 years of constant use.
(The place I work for now has a PBX that relies on a Windows NT box for its voice mail and voice prompting. In 6 months, I've had to reboot it twice to fix issues with voice messages no longer showing up in people's mailboxes, etc.)
I'm also told that the firmware in the Canon EOS Digital Rebel cameras is MS-DOS based.
Personally, I think it reduces the credibility and trustworthiness of any service that claims to provide "alternatives to cash", yet places restrictions on who funds can be transferred to or from. Imagine if your phone company took it upon themselves to block incoming or outgoing phone calls to certain phone numbers based on information they obtained about the owners of the lines! Would you still stay with that phone service?
I became aware of yet another evil little thing about PayPal recently. I used to bank with a local bank, along with having a secondary checking account with Netbank. I finally decided it wasn't doing me any good having 2 checking accounts, and consolidated everything with Netbank. (Unlike my local bank, they pay interest on my free checking, and their online billpay seems to get bills paid faster than my local bank ever did through their online equivalent.) After I did this though, PayPal reverted my user status to "unverified". I was told I needed to verify myself by linking PayPal with a valid checking account again (since it used to be linked to the local bank acct. I cancelled).
I tried to enter my Netbank info, but it was rejected! Upon further investigation, I found out that Netbank is one of only a few banks that refuse to allow PayPal to pull out funds on demand without the permission of the bank account owner first. So it seems PayPal's "verification" procedure is just a thinly veiled scheme to ensure they always have a way to get ahold of money from the user, in case they feel a need to do so. (Notice I can't become "verified" by providing any of my credit card information - even though there's no logical reason that would be any less "proof" that I am who I say I am than giving them a valid checking account. This is because PayPal can't just grab funds from one of your charge cards, or else you could just reverse the charges.)
I think for a pre-teen or teenager, concepts like "popularity" reign supreme. So having the ability to talk about oneself in some kind of public forum (EG. friendster or myspace), and then having a "hit counter" recording all the people you're vaguely "connected with" is really attractive to them.
There was a similar "dating/friendship" site somebody referred me to in a URL a while back, and it seemed to take this to even more of an extreme. Basically, people would view your photos or bio and click to indicate they had a "crush" on you. Within 30 seconds of making a new account there, and without even posting any info about myself at all, I had 2 "crushes" sent by people generically posting comments like "Share the love!" along with them. Teens were all over the site, pretty much begging for and competing for who could get the most "crushes" on their accounts. (Silly, really, because the original concept of the site was pretty much ruined that way. The intention was, if 2 people actually happened to send each other a "crush", that indicated enough mutual interest that the site would then let them send each other private emails.)
But eventually, I think people grow out of all that and learn the value of a real friendship, vs. a popularity contest. So it's not really an issue.
Sometimes, this happens simply because ISPs are making use of automated blacklists downloaded nightly (or at least regularly) from the net.
The blacklists are good, but not perfect - and it can be really difficult to get your domain removed from one once it's mistakenly put there.
For example, my workplace started having problems with customers reporting their emails to us were getting bounced back as undeliverable. It turned out it was because the consulting firm that sells us our T1 line and spam filtering for our mail became a target of spammers. Spammers apparently got upset that they were being so efficiently filtered out by these people, so they started filing *their* IP address range as a source of spam with the blacklists. It took them weeks to get it removed again, so they had to route our incoming mail through other hosts in the meantime.
Huh? The responsibility for that illegal operation should rest squarely on the shoulders of the current presidential administration. You can't reasonably expect any company in AT&T's position not to comply with something like that - no matter how evil the request is.
Ultimately, they're put betweewn "a rock and a hard place" because they have no immediate legal recourse for a demand placed on them from the highest level of government. They're already govt. regulated as it is - and failure to comply with such an order could effectively put a freeze on their ability to do business at all.
I think their smartest business move was to just go along with things, but not to interfere when it gets challenged in court either. This is between the govt. and the people, with AT&T getting drug into the middle of things because they owned the technology that needed to be tapped into to make the spying plans work.
I'm glad to see a few people recommending Home Depot's CFL's here. I just bought a few of those to try out, a few weeks ago. For the last couple years, I've really tried to like CFL's and use them around my house. I have a small place built in the 1950's that has a small fuse panel still (no breaker box) and the electrical service is one of the smaller capacities the electric company puts in homes. I used to have a lot of problems of blowing fuses if too many things were turned on at the same time and the microwave or a vacuum cleaner was started up.
Since going to CFL's in the bedrooms and basement, I've not blown a single fuse. So that alone has made them worthwhile for me.
That said though, I wasn't impressed with the CFL's I bought, to date. I think I have a few GE's and some Sylvanias, and like someone else said - the electronics seem to go bad first on them. They're very intolerant of heat build-up, so they died in just 1-2 months when I experimented with putting them in enclosed glass fixtures in my kitchen... and others just started coming on intermittently or suddenly died after just under a year of occasional use. All of them I've used came on instantly when working right - but the light doesn't feel "white" enough until you leave them on for a few minutes.
I haven't really felt like they're saving me anything on my electric bill, but I suppose they do.
As pathetic as this is, I can believe it actually does work. Not that long ago, I did some on-site computer work for a guy, who in turn referred me to a couple of his friends. They were all getting into online stock trading, using some "training CD" of questionable merit.
All of them bought new computer systems, apparently with this stock trading as their primary purpose behind them. (One guy even asked me at length about his options for buying multiple flat panel monitors, thinking it would help him with his trading.)
None of them even knew the basics of how to get their computers properly hooked up to a broadband Internet connection. (That's one of the things they paid me for.)
I figured they probably overestimated the value in what they were doing, but hey - not really my problem. I'm just the computer guy for hire.
Later on, I happened to talk with a couple of them. The guy who I think got the rest of them interested, initially, told me how he was "no longer friends" with the other guys, since they had some kind of "falling out". The other guy I spoke with complained bitterly about the online stock market thing being a big "money pit" and how he lost way too much with it. He had his DSL disconnected and said he never wanted another Internet connection!
I'd argue the opposite, really. It's too bad some of these people who commit very serious, violent crimes only get 6 years or so - and then we turn them loose on society again. Child molestors, rapists, and so forth don't really change their ways very often, just because they had to sit in prison for 5 or 6 years. They only learn a little more about how to become better at not getting caught, as they spend time with other criminal minds.
Percentage-wise, the federal govt. has already handed out financial penalties that compare to what this guy got in cases of computer BBS operators giving away copyrighted programs for free, as a hobby! (If they confiscated $2000-4000 in computer equipment from a teenager who only worked part-time in retail or fast food, that's just as large a part of his total income as forcing this guy to sell off his airplane and cars!)
Well,the *only* reason this gives me any "good vibes" at all is knowing it will help push prices down on cards that are more within the price-range I'd shop in.
But since I've almost completely switched over to Macs these days, it matters even less than before. (With the new Mac Pros using EFI instead of a BIOS, we Mac users are now stuck hoping ATI and nVidia will go to the trouble to release custom Mac versions of some of their cards that work with EFI. And so far, the *only* one shipping today is a crappy GeForce 7300GT.)
As a sysadmin myself, I was put in charge of our Internet security and web site filtering strategy.
Initially, they implemented a Squid proxy that was set up so either you were granted "completely unrestricted" access, or "restricted" - which meant you could *only* visit web sites in an "allowed" list. The "unrestricted" access was, of course, originally only intended to be used for the sysadmin himself, and perhaps the owners of the company.
What ended up happening over the years (before I ever worked for them) was "key" people in many different departments received "unrestricted" access, because they threw huge fits or became too big a drain on the admin's time - asking for access to slews of sites needed for puchasing, getting price quotes, etc.
After looking at a number of options, I ended up using Dansguardian site filtering combined with Squid. The cost of software licensing or subscriptions was zero - making it MUCH easier to get approval for. (And if it didn't work out, nobody was going to "force" me to keep trying to use a broken solution, just because we spent $$$'s on it already.)
Our goal was always to put the brakes on productivity losses (and even to prevent potential lawsuits stemming from someone viewing porn and another employee being offended at seeing said porn, or what-not). As has been proven time and time again, unless you completely deny someone Internet access, he/she can eventually find ways to get to sites you'd rather not have them using while at work. The idea is to implement a solution that stops as many "grave offenses" as possible, while appearing pretty much invisible to regular Inet users.
I've found that a nice "side benefit" of doing this is the fact that you also tend to screen out some of the biggest contributors to loading spyware and other nasties on people's PCs. (Porn sites are a big offender in this area, for example.) But no, we didn't get into the site filtering as primarily a "computer security" issue at all.
I'm a big Mac fan myself these days, but I still got a laugh out of the original post.
Nonetheless, yeah - you make a great point. Windows users seem to think they've made the Mac irrelevant for graphic-artist type work because "all the apps" are available in Windows versions as well as native Mac versions these days.
To an extent, that's true - but it's usually the underlying OS-related issues that keep artists on a Mac. EG. An OS-wide color matching system integrated into MacOS, vs. loading application-specific stuff like "Kodak Colorwatch" software or what-not for Windows apps. Or maybe they're used to the Mac's way of doing font management?
But if your work crosses over into web design, the Mac has Windows beat hands-down in some areas. Look at something like Rapidweaver, for example. Windows simply has nothing that can crank out WYSIWYG pages with decent-looking templates included as starting points, and the ability to add on powerful plug-in modules too. Instead, it has garbage like MS FrontPage.
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I work full-time in I.T., and juggle it with my consulting business, which I takes calls for on my cellphone and schedule weekend, evening, and sometimes even "during lunch break" appointments.
Initially, I tried to make a full-time business out of this because I was unemployed and the job market was pretty sluggish. But now, it's turned out to be perfect as a "side job".
I can give you a few pieces of advice, based on my findings. But your results may vary.
1. Don't waste money on big phone book ads! I mistakenly believed the Yellow Pages would be critical to my business, but I immediately ran into a couple of problems. First and foremost, my phone company (Southwestern Bell) refused to let me buy a listing in their Yellow Pages unless I owned a business phone number. They wouldn't allow me to publish a cellphone number in their book. I have no need for a land-line for this business, and wouldn't want to pay business rates on one anyway - so that was a no-go. Their competitor in my area, "Yellow Book", offers a clone of the Yellow Pages and *does* let you list cell numbers in it. (Plus, they have cheaper rates for ads.) I took a chance with them, but I'm stuck paying about $160 a month plus several hundred dollars I paid up-front, and I've only gotten 2 customers out of it in 6 or 7 months! If I was going to do it over, I'd just get a 1 line listing and that's it. People do call from the ad, occasionally, but they're usually clueless and asking for things that have nothing to do with my service. (EG. You don't happen to sell new iPods, do you?)
2. Whatever you decide on as your fee structure, make sure it doesn't make people "watch the clock", afraid of getting too big a bill. Many people who use your service will be "on the fence" about it in the first place. They're hoping they have a problem that can be fixed in 30 minutes or less. (Meanwhile, you get there and realize their 4 year old PC is so slow, you can hardly install a single piece of software on it in that length of time - much less remove all the viruses and spyware.) You'll get pressured by these people to do a "rush job" and make things "just good enough" instead of doing it right. You DON'T want that!! (This is a case where they don't know what's best for them. Those device drivers you just "decided to let them find and install later" to save time, or the trojan horse downloader virus you weren't quite able to get time to remove completely are going to make all the work you did pointless!) I like the idea I've seen some handymen use, where they charge $80 or $85 up-front, but that covers the first hour of work, and then additional time is billed at a much lower rate.
3. If you have a little money to invest in this type of business, buy 2 things. First, get an in-car GPS system! It's almost essential for quickly finding houses, or the quickest way to client #2 from client #1 that you're just leaving. Second, look into your options for wireless high-speed Internet access! There are *so* many times I wish I had broadband to my laptop so I could download large files a customer needed who only had a dial-up modem at their location. I've often had to drive back home, burn things on CD, and make a second trip back out there to get their all-in-one printer going, or to get all the needed drivers back on a system after a fresh Windows reinstall.
I've actually worked for places where they seriously considered applicants who were subsequently found to have felony convictions, when a background check came back. In each of these situatiions I can remember, the owner really had to think it over - and was "torn" on whether to take a chance on the person or not. In each case, a corporate lawyer tipped the scales against it happening with advice of "Absolutely not! Too great a legal risk for you!"
I'm sure people trying to find work despite a criminal record often suspect that employers are just discarding their resumes immediately. But I don't think that's really true. It's just that in today's lawsuit-happy climate, no attorney is going to recommend it -- and employers tend not to go against their attorney's advice.
This doesn't necessarily have to be the case. Kids are absolutely *full* of energy, and I know my own daughter would love to play computer games that require a lot of moving and jumping around. The problem is, the gaming industry mostly ignores this idea because the people doing the coding, and the older generation of people picking out the games to purchase don't find it appealing. (How many "quality assurance testers" really look forward to a bunch of physical exertion to find bugs in the code, for that matter?)
o n
There were a few exceptions made, like Dance Dance Revolution:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_Dance_Revoluti
I just installed a *bunch* of Windows XP patches on my Mac Pro last night. Hey, just 'cuz it's a Mac doesn't mean I want the XP installation on a second hard drive in it to be unpatched!
But yeah, yeah... I got the joke.
I'd like to know that too, because I don't bother with MythTV upgrades until it comes out as Knoppmyth on an ISO. Maybe it's just the nature of my particular setup, but it took me *weeks* of tinkering and pouring over message threads to get my Myth box working exactly like I wanted it to. I would have just given up in frustration if the main "core" of the thing wasn't made easier to get going via Knoppmyth.
In the past, it seemed like it took the Knoppmyth developers at least 1-2 months to release a new ISO based on a Myth update though, so this isn't something I'd really expect to see from them in the next few days or anything.
Craigslist represents itself as a digital equivalent of the "classifieds" section of a local newspaper, in many ways. Sensible or not (and I think the more techno-savvy among us would clearly leans towards "not"), the public uses Craigslists under an initial assumption that it's roughly as "reputable" a place as the classifieds from the newspapers.
(After all, it makes a big deal out of the self-policing nature of the system, where anyone can "flag" a post for one of several reasons, and a few "flags" immediately result in the message being pulled. That tends to give people some comfort, despite realizing all messages posted are anonymous.)
Anyone who collects up private information of others and proceeds to repost it someplace is misusing the information he/she was provided with and is breaking the law. That seems pretty clear. The rest of the arguments are irrelevant here.
If you "ask for sex using your work email address", you might be an idiot, but you're no less protected under the same laws that protect you when you do it under any other email address, only to find the person you communicated with was acting under false pretenses and reposted your personal info for the world to see.
It's his work's problem to reprimand him or terminate his employment for his misuse of company email. It's not the job of some guy on Craigslist to assist in making it happen!
I dunno... the idea of vaporizing trash with plasma arcs sounds like something you'd do in a 1st. person shooter ... not a recycling plant. But if this works as advertised, it's pretty cool. How much electricity does it take to run though? Seems like this would consume a lot of power!
Really, there will be no "alternatives" to migrating to Vista - other than a complete change in platform (say, Linux, BSD, or a Mac). If you want to keep using your Microsoft Windows compatible applications and games, you're slowly going to be pushed down Microsoft's migration path. The idea of a voluntary "boycott" is only practical in the short-term. (EG. You could actively refuse to upgrade just for the sake of having Vista as soon as it comes out.)
Eventually though, support for XP will be dropped, just as it has been for older versions of Windows in the past - and you won't even be able to use recent versions of Microsoft's "companion products" for Windows (Media Player, for example) without an upgrade. New hardware is going to come pre-loaded with Vista, and only a fool would reformat over it, opting to buy an XP license just to put back on it and "downgrade" to an older OS....
Large businesses will feel the pressure to make a move to Vista as well, simply because it becomes too difficult to provide user support for multiple OS's. As soon as they buy a few Vista machines, I.T. is going to be under the gun to look into what's needed to deploy proper group policy settings for them... and that opens the door for switching everyone else over too. (Hey, we already put in all the effort getting the policies set up for the new boxes. May as well roll out the new stuff and make use of them for more than just 10 sample boxes, right?)
Arguments about price and DRM limitations aside for a moment, it occurs to me that Internet-based movie downloads won't really take off unless there's a piece of hardware accompanying the thing. Tivo, for example, should have partnered up with Amazon or someone else doing this and said "Ok - we'll send down a free firmware upgrade to all of our users, and then our boxes will be able to browse your movie catalog and order up content on-screen, saving it to the hard drive in the unit. Meanwhile, the user will be free to watch existing content while it downloads in the background."
The overall business model works a lot better for music downloads, because A) They're smaller and take a lot less time to download, B) Every single user of a portable digital music player has to learn to sync it with a PC in order to load it up with music, so a PC is a logical "starting point" for receiving that type of content, and C) Many more people are comfortable burning a standards-compliant audio CD from a PC for use in their home or car stereo than are comfortable burning DVD movie content that plays properly on their stand-alone players.
If it was really commonplace for people to use their computer as a media center attached to a TV and surround sound stereo receiver, then this might go over a little bit better. But it's not! Half the people buying new computers with "Windows Media Center edition" preloaded on them don't even use the TV playback and recording capabilities of it. They just went with it because the whole bundle was on sale....
The article said something about the print looking purplish, despite having up to 1200dpi resolution. So if you do print photos on it by mistake, it's going to be immediately obvious.
Yeah.... quite so. But I'm just passing along the general sentiment I heard. The idea that someone of obvious foreign descent running a U.S. computer store is generally seen as a negative by quite a few customers (biggoted though that opinion might be).
The same thing always happened with the Chinese around here. We used to have a computer reseller called Computer-4-U, owned and operated by Chinese. (There was one guy living here in the U.S. who took care of the store as "manager" day-to-day, but his brothers were the primary investors and technically the owners, and they lived in China. They visited once a year to check up on things and tell him if he had been successful enough that year so he could carry this or that name-brand product.) Many computer store owners I knew who purchased products from him held a pretty low opinion of his operation - primarly because of the impression they got that his "language barrier" was at least partially an excuse. (EG. His English got a lot worse if you had questions about an exchange or return than if you wanted to make a new purchase.)
I can tell you for a fact that theft at the Computer City stores we used to have here in St. Louis, MO (USA) was mostly by employees. I used to run a popular computer BBS back in those days, and one of their employees offered to barter hardware for download credits with me one time. I visited his apartment, willing to discuss the idea - and found a large walk-in closet stuffed full of brand new CD-ROM drives, RAM, hard drives, and other goodies. He worked at Computer City and admitted that a group of them were collecting up as much stuff as they could from the store, in order to get a "better salary out of the cheap bastards".
... One store by me was Arab-owned and operated, for example, and many people felt it should have been run by an American instead. Another just had constantly poor customer service. You could walk around for 30 minutes trying to get help and nobody would seem to be around. I think that's really why they experienced such high loss-rates. Employees were all out to screw the stores over, and many who shopped there didn't feel guilty buying property known to be stolen from the place either.
Another time, I was interested in buying an expansion board to do general MIDI with ROM samples on a Soundblaster AWE type csound card. Computer City supposedly had 2 in stock at the store closest to me, but when I got there, they were unable to locate anything except empty boxes. Shortly afterwards, a guy I knew told me that he had "connections" who could get me one of those cards cheap, as long as I didn't mind it was "hot". Funny... one of his buddies worked at Computer City.
That place seemed to generate a lot of ill will with people
I'm not an expert on the subject or anything... but I believe the usual procedure here in the U.S. is, anyone can pull money from a checking account if they have the bank's routing number and your account number. If you wish to protest a withdrawl, you can do so by filling out formal paperwork at one of your bank branches, claiming the transaction was fraudulent or the result of a clerical error.
Then the bank will do an investigation, and *may* undo the transaction, depending on their findings.
I'm guessing PayPal doesn't like Netbank anymore, because they tried pulling funds from Netbank checking accounts before to fix negative PayPal balances, and PayPal users filed complaints with Netbank. Then, Netbank deemed PayPal as fraudulently pulling said funds because they're not really an FDIC insured financial institution and couldn't show any proof that the customer gave them written permission to withdraw funds electronically.
In most cases, I guess other banks have allowed these types of withdrawls to go through, rejecting customers' challenges to them.
Quite a few NEC NEAX phone PBX systems still run DOS. I'm quite sure NEC no longer makes any new systems that do, but the old DOS-based ones were incredibly reliable. They're still widely used by the military, as well as in many hotels and offices.
I used to work for a place that used one, and except for actual hardware failures or someone screwing up while trying to reprogram it, I don't think it ever crashed in 6 or 7 years of constant use.
(The place I work for now has a PBX that relies on a Windows NT box for its voice mail and voice prompting. In 6 months, I've had to reboot it twice to fix issues with voice messages no longer showing up in people's mailboxes, etc.)
I'm also told that the firmware in the Canon EOS Digital Rebel cameras is MS-DOS based.
Personally, I think it reduces the credibility and trustworthiness of any service that claims to provide "alternatives to cash", yet places restrictions on who funds can be transferred to or from. Imagine if your phone company took it upon themselves to block incoming or outgoing phone calls to certain phone numbers based on information they obtained about the owners of the lines! Would you still stay with that phone service?
I became aware of yet another evil little thing about PayPal recently. I used to bank with a local bank, along with having a secondary checking account with Netbank. I finally decided it wasn't doing me any good having 2 checking accounts, and consolidated everything with Netbank. (Unlike my local bank, they pay interest on my free checking, and their online billpay seems to get bills paid faster than my local bank ever did through their online equivalent.) After I did this though, PayPal reverted my user status to "unverified". I was told I needed to verify myself by linking PayPal with a valid checking account again (since it used to be linked to the local bank acct. I cancelled).
I tried to enter my Netbank info, but it was rejected! Upon further investigation, I found out that Netbank is one of only a few banks that refuse to allow PayPal to pull out funds on demand without the permission of the bank account owner first. So it seems PayPal's "verification" procedure is just a thinly veiled scheme to ensure they always have a way to get ahold of money from the user, in case they feel a need to do so. (Notice I can't become "verified" by providing any of my credit card information - even though there's no logical reason that would be any less "proof" that I am who I say I am than giving them a valid checking account. This is because PayPal can't just grab funds from one of your charge cards, or else you could just reverse the charges.)
I think for a pre-teen or teenager, concepts like "popularity" reign supreme. So having the ability to talk about oneself in some kind of public forum (EG. friendster or myspace), and then having a "hit counter" recording all the people you're vaguely "connected with" is really attractive to them.
There was a similar "dating/friendship" site somebody referred me to in a URL a while back, and it seemed to take this to even more of an extreme. Basically, people would view your photos or bio and click to indicate they had a "crush" on you. Within 30 seconds of making a new account there, and without even posting any info about myself at all, I had 2 "crushes" sent by people generically posting comments like "Share the love!" along with them. Teens were all over the site, pretty much begging for and competing for who could get the most "crushes" on their accounts. (Silly, really, because the original concept of the site was pretty much ruined that way. The intention was, if 2 people actually happened to send each other a "crush", that indicated enough mutual interest that the site would then let them send each other private emails.)
But eventually, I think people grow out of all that and learn the value of a real friendship, vs. a popularity contest. So it's not really an issue.
Sometimes, this happens simply because ISPs are making use of automated blacklists downloaded nightly (or at least regularly) from the net.
The blacklists are good, but not perfect - and it can be really difficult to get your domain removed from one once it's mistakenly put there.
For example, my workplace started having problems with customers reporting their emails to us were getting bounced back as undeliverable. It turned out it was because the consulting firm that sells us our T1 line and spam filtering for our mail became a target of spammers. Spammers apparently got upset that they were being so efficiently filtered out by these people, so they started filing *their* IP address range as a source of spam with the blacklists. It took them weeks to get it removed again, so they had to route our incoming mail through other hosts in the meantime.
Huh? The responsibility for that illegal operation should rest squarely on the shoulders of the current presidential administration. You can't reasonably expect any company in AT&T's position not to comply with something like that - no matter how evil the request is.
Ultimately, they're put betweewn "a rock and a hard place" because they have no immediate legal recourse for a demand placed on them from the highest level of government. They're already govt. regulated as it is - and failure to comply with such an order could effectively put a freeze on their ability to do business at all.
I think their smartest business move was to just go along with things, but not to interfere when it gets challenged in court either. This is between the govt. and the people, with AT&T getting drug into the middle of things because they owned the technology that needed to be tapped into to make the spying plans work.
I'm glad to see a few people recommending Home Depot's CFL's here. I just bought a few of those to try out, a few weeks ago. For the last couple years, I've really tried to like CFL's and use them around my house. I have a small place built in the 1950's that has a small fuse panel still (no breaker box) and the electrical service is one of the smaller capacities the electric company puts in homes. I used to have a lot of problems of blowing fuses if too many things were turned on at the same time and the microwave or a vacuum cleaner was started up.
... and others just started coming on intermittently or suddenly died after just under a year of occasional use. All of them I've used came on instantly when working right - but the light doesn't feel "white" enough until you leave them on for a few minutes.
Since going to CFL's in the bedrooms and basement, I've not blown a single fuse. So that alone has made them worthwhile for me.
That said though, I wasn't impressed with the CFL's I bought, to date. I think I have a few GE's and some Sylvanias, and like someone else said - the electronics seem to go bad first on them. They're very intolerant of heat build-up, so they died in just 1-2 months when I experimented with putting them in enclosed glass fixtures in my kitchen
I haven't really felt like they're saving me anything on my electric bill, but I suppose they do.
As pathetic as this is, I can believe it actually does work. Not that long ago, I did some on-site computer work for a guy, who in turn referred me to a couple of his friends. They were all getting into online stock trading, using some "training CD" of questionable merit.
All of them bought new computer systems, apparently with this stock trading as their primary purpose behind them. (One guy even asked me at length about his options for buying multiple flat panel monitors, thinking it would help him with his trading.)
None of them even knew the basics of how to get their computers properly hooked up to a broadband Internet connection. (That's one of the things they paid me for.)
I figured they probably overestimated the value in what they were doing, but hey - not really my problem. I'm just the computer guy for hire.
Later on, I happened to talk with a couple of them. The guy who I think got the rest of them interested, initially, told me how he was "no longer friends" with the other guys, since they had some kind of "falling out". The other guy I spoke with complained bitterly about the online stock market thing being a big "money pit" and how he lost way too much with it. He had his DSL disconnected and said he never wanted another Internet connection!
I'd argue the opposite, really. It's too bad some of these people who commit very serious, violent crimes only get 6 years or so - and then we turn them loose on society again. Child molestors, rapists, and so forth don't really change their ways very often, just because they had to sit in prison for 5 or 6 years. They only learn a little more about how to become better at not getting caught, as they spend time with other criminal minds.
Percentage-wise, the federal govt. has already handed out financial penalties that compare to what this guy got in cases of computer BBS operators giving away copyrighted programs for free, as a hobby! (If they confiscated $2000-4000 in computer equipment from a teenager who only worked part-time in retail or fast food, that's just as large a part of his total income as forcing this guy to sell off his airplane and cars!)
Well,the *only* reason this gives me any "good vibes" at all is knowing it will help push prices down on cards that are more within the price-range I'd shop in.
But since I've almost completely switched over to Macs these days, it matters even less than before. (With the new Mac Pros using EFI instead of a BIOS, we Mac users are now stuck hoping ATI and nVidia will go to the trouble to release custom Mac versions of some of their cards that work with EFI. And so far, the *only* one shipping today is a crappy GeForce 7300GT.)
As a sysadmin myself, I was put in charge of our Internet security and web site filtering strategy.
Initially, they implemented a Squid proxy that was set up so either you were granted "completely unrestricted" access, or "restricted" - which meant you could *only* visit web sites in an "allowed" list. The "unrestricted" access was, of course, originally only intended to be used for the sysadmin himself, and perhaps the owners of the company.
What ended up happening over the years (before I ever worked for them) was "key" people in many different departments received "unrestricted" access, because they threw huge fits or became too big a drain on the admin's time - asking for access to slews of sites needed for puchasing, getting price quotes, etc.
After looking at a number of options, I ended up using Dansguardian site filtering combined with Squid. The cost of software licensing or subscriptions was zero - making it MUCH easier to get approval for. (And if it didn't work out, nobody was going to "force" me to keep trying to use a broken solution, just because we spent $$$'s on it already.)
Our goal was always to put the brakes on productivity losses (and even to prevent potential lawsuits stemming from someone viewing porn and another employee being offended at seeing said porn, or what-not). As has been proven time and time again, unless you completely deny someone Internet access, he/she can eventually find ways to get to sites you'd rather not have them using while at work. The idea is to implement a solution that stops as many "grave offenses" as possible, while appearing pretty much invisible to regular Inet users.
I've found that a nice "side benefit" of doing this is the fact that you also tend to screen out some of the biggest contributors to loading spyware and other nasties on people's PCs. (Porn sites are a big offender in this area, for example.) But no, we didn't get into the site filtering as primarily a "computer security" issue at all.
I'm a big Mac fan myself these days, but I still got a laugh out of the original post.
Nonetheless, yeah - you make a great point. Windows users seem to think they've made the Mac irrelevant for graphic-artist type work because "all the apps" are available in Windows versions as well as native Mac versions these days.
To an extent, that's true - but it's usually the underlying OS-related issues that keep artists on a Mac. EG. An OS-wide color matching system integrated into MacOS, vs. loading application-specific stuff like "Kodak Colorwatch" software or what-not for Windows apps. Or maybe they're used to the Mac's way of doing font management?
But if your work crosses over into web design, the Mac has Windows beat hands-down in some areas. Look at something like Rapidweaver, for example. Windows simply has nothing that can crank out WYSIWYG pages with decent-looking templates included as starting points, and the ability to add on powerful plug-in modules too. Instead, it has garbage like MS FrontPage.
But "Snakes on a Plane" isn't a complete sentence, either.