I don't really think anyone "deserves to get fired" over expressing their personal beliefs on a topic. I actually know at least 2 people who DO work for defense-related govt. agencies who are decidedly "anti-war" in their personal beliefs. So what? That hardly means they're not capable of doing the mapping or engineering tasks they're paid to do. What's the line of thinking here? People holding a different set of beliefs are too much of a "security risk" because they'll sabatoge things on the inside?? What a crock! Deal with such issues as you come to them. Don't judge your employees in advance like that.
Lawyers are not "hired to protect IP" in an overall sense, anyway. At most, they're hired to protect individual pieces of IP in specific circumstances. Perhaps someone with a good working knowledge of how IP protection schemes are broken is exactly the one you want in your corner in an IP protection suit?
Sorry - but this whole thing hits rather close to home for me. I was just turned down for a job at an area college, after 2 interviews and being verbally told I got the job, just because someone read my personal web site and didn't like a couple things I said. Unfortunately, these things happen in "at will hiring" states like mine and there's little legal recourse. But it doesn't make it any more "right".
Re:Market Opportunity for Macs and Linux
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Buy Vista or Else
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· Score: 2, Informative
Well, first off, the current market penetration of Macs is more like 5-6% right now, not 3-4%. But I realize that's basically splitting hairs. I get your point, and I tend to agree. But with Apple moving to Intel processors on new Macs, it seems like a lot of new possibilities may open up.
Microsoft, for example, currently owns and sells "VirtualPC" - which is pretty much the only way a Mac user can install and run Windows on a Mac. But with new Macs being Intel-based, it seems logical Microsoft might update VirtualPC to be a product that simply allows simultaneous execution of Windows code in a window inside OS X, rather than emulating all the x86 instructions by translating them to PPC native code.
If this happens, there's no reason Windows couldn't run well enough inside OS X on a new Mac to finally allow Windows games to run at near-native speeds. New Macs all have fairly respectable ATI or nVidia graphics cards - capable of the same features as their Windows counterparts for 3D gaming.
The Mac may never really get lots of game developers interesting in writing or even porting Windows games to OS X native titles - but they might succeed in bringing Windows to it instead, while keeping everything under the umbrella of OS X.
My biggest problem is spending money on a game, only to find I'm bored with it rather quickly - and can't even get enough gameplay out of it to justify the price tag.
Civilization 1, 2, and 3 were all excellent games with lots of "staying power" though. Every time I run across the installation discs for one of those titles and decide to load it back on a computer for the heck of it, I end up playing another round or two of them.
I've never completely grown tired of Warcraft III (with the Frozen Throne expansion set - which really seems like a necessity to give the game enough interesting characters and things to do). I'd couldn't get enough of Starcraft either, until people finally mastered every last detail of that game to the point where it's simply not enjoyable to play against online gamers anymore. (I don't get why it's supposed to still be "fun" to play, when all you're doing is methodically clicking on objects according to some optimal system you've worked out, as rapidly as possible - which guarantees you a win unless the other person performs the same series of commands a little more efficiently than you managed to perform them?)
I always seem to have a version of Unreal Tournament installed too, which I play online now and again. There are so many great custom levels and mods for those games, you *always* see something new when you connect to a server and play.
Other than that, I think the original "classics" like Mario Brothers, Centipede, Burgertime, etc. are much more the type of games I can "go back and play again and again" - because they're much more basic. They take seconds to load up, and you can play 5 or 10 minutes, be satisfied, and forget about them until some other time when you get a urge to fire one back up again. Modern games are so much more complex, they demand more commitment from players.
At the risk of getting a little bit off-topic for this particular message topic - I *do* expect businesses to carefully read resumes that are submitted to determine if they "know what they're talking about" or not. That's one reason you see so much inefficiency in business today! Most managers claim they "don't have time" to go through their job applicants - so they've done things like let the H.R. department "pre-screen" everybody for them. Effectively, that amounts to saying "Here - throw away a bunch of these incoming resumes for me, will you? I don't want a stack of 75 to look at. I want 10." H.R. is hardly more effective than trained monkeys at correctly determining who deserves an interview and who doesn't, in areas outside Human Resources itself! What does you average H.R. employee know about I.T. or engineering, or biotech, or accounting, or . So sure, they just look for "keywords" on resumes that match words mentioned in lists of "required skills", and use the "has one/doesn't have one" test for college degrees to decide what goes in the "round file".
Of course you'll get a lot of unqualified people trying to apply for jobs they have no business doing! But IMHO, a manager's *most important task* may be evaluating candidates for hire! It's a crying shame they don't tend to view it this way! Labor is the single largest expense for any business - so start giving it a little more attention!
I know, working in I.T. myself, I was occasionally asked to look over a few resumes submitted for PC support type jobs. When I did so, I was pretty quickly able to make a determination as to a person's basic level of knowledge. I've seen quite a few people claim a 4 year degree on their resume, yet they had spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes in their cover letter and other such things, indicating they probably don't have the strongest writing skills. To me, that's a bigger reason to trash a resume than not having the degree on it. What else did they do? Do they illustrate a willingness to learn outside the workplace? (AKA. Any "personal projects" listed on a resume like, say, setting up a Linux server at home to learn how it interoperates with their Windows PC?) Which technologies do they claim experience with? Just a regurgitation of the most common ones they think employers want to see (MS Office, Project, Visio, etc.), or do they actually list things you wouldn't run across unless you were doing something a little more in-depth/advanced with computing? (EG. HP OpenView/Manage-X, or advanced backup software)
I, too, use Bits on Wheels on my G5 system nowdays. The ability to visualize the traffic packets is not only cool-looking, but a useful way to see, at a glance, what's going on with your connection. If I see lots of outgoing traffic from the center of the "wheel" and very few packets traveling inwards, I know I'm in a situation where I've got more of the file than most of the peers. I can therefore expect it to take a LONG time for the xfer to finish,or decide it's time to "bail out" and try some other method of getting the file I'm trying to download.
Ok, I agree that this study doesn't prove anything one way or the other. Point taken there.
But as for the "impossible scenes" study, I'm lost as to how it means one can "reasonably conclude that the baabies had some innate sense of physics"? Even as young as 6 months to 12 months old, a child is already experiencing all sorts of basic laws of physics. Every time you dress them, for example, they're experiencing certain rules. (EG. They're unable to see their own skin through the material, and they can't just kick around and have their feet or hands pass through the clothing, leaving it behind them someplace.) Certainly, by age 12 months, they've also done such things as batted at items dangling overhead (say on a mobile in their crib?) and watched the results of those actions.
This study would have a profound impact if it was really discovered that humans are born with this basic sense of geometry. But it doesn't show that at all! Rather than implying that we might have an "innate sense of geometry" - it merely shows that we're able to pick up basic concepts of 3D objects by working and interacting with them every day as we go through our lives.
The fact that adults tended to score better on these tests than kids did further illustrates this. The longer you've been around on this planet (formally educated or not), the more time you've had to work with objects and draw conclusions about what makes an object "different" from other similar ones.
Just from reading the replies here, I think it becomes clear that opinions on which browsers and versions one should keep supporting are as varied as the userbase itself is.
EG. If I ask a Windows user this question, I'm far less likely to get an argument from them that support for browsers like Opera is worthwhile than if I ask a Linux user. By the same token, anyone still hanging onto to "legacy" Macs running MacOS 9.2 or earlier is going to be worried about pages rendering properly in IE 5.17 for Mac - a product that's largely misunderstood by anyone *not* using older Macs. (People tend to think it's equivalent to IE 5.x for Windows, or even IE 6 for Windows - and it's just not.)
Personally, I have real issues with companies deciding that "IE 6 support is good enough". *Maybe* that's true for an in-house package that relies heavily on Active-X components - but even then, you have to question the wisdom of marrying the project to a specific product.
A good example of this concept miserably failing is SBC's user registration site for DSL sign-ups. (https://sbcreg.sbcglobal.net/ They designed it to priamrily be auto-displayed by IE 6 when it's launched from inside their setup program on CD. But if that setup fails to complete properly for some reason, or a user has reasons not to sign up that way (like maybe they're a Mac or Linux user?), they get instructed to visit this site by hand in their browser and create their new user account/email that way. Unfortunately, I can't even get the "Next" and "I Agree" type buttons to display properly when I view this site in FireFox/Mozilla, IE 5.23 for Mac OS X, or even Apple's Safari browser! Last time I set up new DSL service for a client using all Macs, I had to bring along a Windows laptop just to get their user account created!
I don't think racism is a real issue, in and of itself. Sure, like anything, exceptions exist. But I think the larger issues are such things as language barriers and a tendency for people of some cultural backgrounds to have less day-to-day computer experience.
EG. I recently talked to a buddy who was privy to some info on a recent round of I.T. hiring, and one Asian candidate with good, solid experience on his resume and several industry certifications was turned down in the final round of hiring because he was very difficult for the interviewers to understand. Maybe from his perspective, that is "racism" - but in reality, he simply needed to work on better English speaking skills and he would probably have gotten the job.
If you work in America, or even for an American company, I think an ability to speak clear, fluent English (and write it well too) can be just as important a job requirement as Windows 2003 Server experience or anything else a company might need.
The argument that "performance has reached adequate levels" rears its head every few years or so in the industry. The fact is though, everything goes in cycles. Sometimes the software development outpaces the currently available/reasonably priced hardware, and then things shift back the other direction for a little while. But the one thing that's certain is; development isn't going to come to a halt on the software side. If you develop faster, cheaper systems - eventually, software developers will figure out ways to make use of everything that's available to them. They have to, because in most cases, that's the only thing that keeps food on their tables. New versions are expected practically yearly for most popular applications, and once you've offered all the basics - what else is there to do for the next upgrade? You have to add "cool new things" that catch people's interest. Whether that means toolbars that automatically fade into the background when they're not used for a little while or voice recognition integrated into the app, built-in video tutorials or adding all new capabilities to perform tasks the app never tried to tackle at all before - you're going to need ever faster CPUs to become "commdity items" to go along with your work.
Apple has a deep hole to keep trying to dig themselves back out of largely because the perceived "value for the dollar" of buying a Mac became VERY poor in the mid to late 90's. Sleek new systems running OS X have started turning things back around - but Apple's move to Intel means they've got to be MORE concerned with performance increases than ever before! They can't lean on an excuse (however accurate or inaccurate is really was) of "You can't compare Mhz to Mhz between Intel or AMD chips and our PPC chips!" Now, the CPUs powering their hardware are the SAME ones powering everyone else's hardware. So if your new Mac offers a 2.1Ghz CPU and a new Dell has a 3.0Ghz of the same product type - it's clear. The Dell is a lot more powerful. And the general public understands that.
Oddly enough, I had this work in my favor once, by accident. A friend of mine had a computer support position with a large financial company in town, and kept trying to get me a job there too. Finally, a time came when his boss said he needed to hire additional staff, so he kept harassing the guy to invite me in for an interview.
The only thing was, my friend didn't quite explain the situation to me accurately. He made it sound like the guy was ready to offer me a job, and I just needed to come in as a formality, and to please H.R., etc.
When the guy did finally set up an interview with me, I came in, answered a few of his questions, gave him a copy of my resume, and basically asked "So, when do I start?" He had a shocked look on his face, stuttered a bit, and finally said "Umm... how about next week?"
(I didn't find out until the next day that the guy hadn't actually told my friend he would hire me. Oops! But we both got a good laugh from it.)
Oddly enough, I still didn't ever end up working there. It all happened so long ago, I can't remember the exact details - but I believe the job I had at the time gave me a raise or something, making it a better deal to stay where I was at. Just as well though, in the long run, because the financial firm ended up in bankruptcy and merged with another company, eliminating many of their employees in the process.
I tend to agree with you. I'm not even much of a "web developer" at all. Rather, I occasionally get paid to put together a basic e-commerce or plain old advertising "shingle" site for a small business customer. And even for my needs, building rather straightforward "cookie-cutter" type sites, I would rather go with an existing PHP and SQL based template. Especially for things like online shopping carts, a big concern is always security. (EG. Has the solution/template been used extensively and tested for flaws that would allow a customer to modify the price of an item during checkout, or to gain access to other customer's information?) The PHP based e-commerce "store" scripts seem to have the best odds of being widely used, tested, and debugged.
I don't agree that it HAS to be this way. It only *tends* to be this way, because convenience often goes along with laziness. People tend to willingly give up a freedom or right if they're made to believe it's a requirement of gaining something useful that makes their life easier.
If the general public got irritated enough with tracking of their spending habits when using credit cards, for example, they could boycott their use and cause a change. But the convenience vs. perceived threat doesn't motivate most people to take action.
Do you know of anyone who actually did any real studies or investigations and found that spammers really are generating sales from the spam they send out?
In my own experience, when I've actually tried to visit a web-site or reply to an email given in a spam ad, it was already disabled/shut off. It seems like the war on spam has escalated to the point where ISPs are getting fairly efficient at shutting down the spammers' mailboxes and web presences within minutes or hours of them sending out a barrage of advertising.
I suspect the *real* problem is, big spammers are getting paid to advertise other people's products in this manner - never caring that it's completely and utterly ineffective marketing.
That's exactly the problem with Dashboard though... it's too tempting to approach it as "let's load it up with all types of crazy widgets!". By doing that, you make it less functional. (Takes longer to switch to them when you've got a whole screen full of them, etc.)
Certain Dashboard widgets *can* change the way you work, but only when you select the right ones, and eliminate the rest!
For example, Ambrosia Software makes a free widget for easily printing addresses on envelopes (http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/easyenvelopes /). That's something I occasionally need to do, and it's something you don't really want to load up a whole word processing package for.
I find the weather widget handy too. It lets me get the forecast on a whim, while not constantly running and eating resources when I don't need it. Sure, you can visit a web site to get the same info - but a widget is faster and always saves your preferences. (Web sites usually rely on cookies that you might clear out of your browser cache.)
What you propose with users "instantly sharing webpage packets, image packets, and even the music/programs they download" by means of a public portion of a "Temporary Internet Files" type folder is interesting, in theory. But realistically, I don't see it happening any time soon.
Among other things, it makes the assumption that users have plenty of upstream bandwidth, so their Internet performance won't be drastically impacted by this process running in the background.
In reality, the ISPs have *no* interest in giving the "average user" very much upstream bandwidth at all, because that's still their cash cow. The people publishing content are the ones in the best position to pay a premium price to make the publication possible. That's why T1 and T3 circuits still cost hundreds or even thousands per month, while you can get DSL or cable broadband for between $19 and $50 a month. Ability to download (or in other words, view or receive content) is cheap. Ability to provide/distribute the content will cost you much more.
On another note, I'm becoming convinced that as things stand right now, your best bet for "safe sharing" of copyrighted content lies in the realm of private servers and sites which require passwords to use them. P2P will never really be the "optimal" method for distributing content covertly or without fear of legal punishment. Ultimately, any software that can mask the sender and/or receiver's IP addresses still has to have a way to know how the data *really* gets from point A to B and back. That means, someone can always "unmask" it again with some sort of clever reverse-engineering.
The nice thing about a strictly private server, message forum, etc. is that by its very nature, it's not sharing content to the public. If enough different "private sites" were put up that each happened to contain a lot of the same content anyway, law enforcement would have a very difficult time dealing with them. (EG. They can't just connect up, grab a file from your IP, and thereby prove you're "guilty of distributing copyrighted content on a massive scale". For all they know, you could have only a select group of friends using your private site who all own legal licenses for the music they're putting up there, etc.)
I'll be the first to agree that most anti-virus software is a ripoff. But I've been steering folks clear of Symantec AV products for years now. Their stuff is bloated, buggy, and inefficient at doing the job - and insistence on going through "product activation" for retail and OEM products just make it that much less appealing.
That said, your statement that AV software is purely "snake oil"? I have to take exception to that one. I think it's arguable that *some* people wouldn't get enough value from AV software to make it worth using, but not usually.
First of all, if you're a Mac user, then no - please don't waste time with AV products like Virex or Symantec! Right now, they only find a few really dumb attempts at "trojan horse" viruses for OS X that are about as threatening as someone writing a DOS batch file containing "FORMAT C:" and emailing it to people, saying "double click this cool new program!" Their *real* reason for existance is SUPPOSED to be cleaning up viruses in email so you don't accidently become guilty of redistributing some virus you received on your Mac and infecting a Windows user on the other end. But the problems and performance hits these products give most Macs make them unacceptable.
Secondly, if you're a Windows user who doesn't have his/her PC connected to the net at all and generally just keep using the same software on it all the time (or only upgrade from purchased CD-ROM/DVD-ROM discs), you probably can skip the anti-virus software. (I mean, are you THAT concerned about people sticking infected floppy disks in your machine and screwing stuff up? If so, get the AV software - but otherwise, how is your machine ever going to become infected in the first place?)
But TYPICALLY, you use Anti-Virus software on a clean PC to try to KEEP it that way. Yeah, if you get spyware in, it's going to install 10-15 other pieces of malware and "helper viruses" that make it difficult to clean'remove. But an up-to-date realtime scanner should prevent a virus from running in the first place, assuming it came in via email or piggybacked onto some file you downloaded and tried to use. Spyware only messes things up if you allow it to install - so at least in theory, you should be able to keep it from being an issue by not installing software of unknown origin. The virus scanner is supposed to prevent the OTHER type of problem; infection by opening what was supposed to be a perfectly legitimate document or piece of software, except it had something bad secretly attached to it.
Of course they all fail, but I've also been in the field long enough to observe trends. The fact is, particular makes and models of drives were notoriously poor in the area of reliability. The confusion and conflicting stories you hear usually stem from people trying to over-simplify it to "Brand X is better than brand Y!" In this industry, you simply can't do that.
For example, back in the early 90's, I ran a very popular BBS. I had multiple computers running 24/7 and constantly being accessed, loading and saving data to their drives. At that time, the Seagate SCSI drives like the Barracuda were the highest performance drives available, so I tried using them. I had one failure after another. Always bearing issues. The fact is, those drives ran *hot* and keeping them sufficiently cooled in anything resembling a standard PC tower case was nearly impossible, so they'd self-destruct. Did this make Seagate a "bad company"? No, but it told me their high-performance, expensive drives weren't appropriate for my needs.
Earlier on, I had many other failures with Seagate drives, but this was way back in the day when the standards were MFM and RLL. The very popular Seagate ST-238R (30MB!) drive was always losing data and going bad on people, for example.
None of this means anything as to reliability of today's IDE Seagate drives, though. And with my recent poor experiences with Maxtor SATA drives (failing immediately outside the 1 year warranty period), I'm currently a fan of Seagate for those.
Truthfully, the only things Microsoft has been offering Mac users are applications that allow the Mac to be more "Windows-like". IMHO, Microsoft would never kill off a profitable project on the Mac side that helps continue to validate the Windows counterpart. I think they realize that the minority of people out there using Macs have spent considerable amounts of money and put up with a "2nd. class status" in many ways, just because they didn't want to "run with the pack" that uses Windows PCs. The most effective thing Microsoft can do with these people is to help make their Macs easy to use along-side of Windows systems by giving them a few key pieces that help keep a "bridge" between the 2 platforms. Otherwise, they've just completely kissed these potential customers goodbye.
I mean, take a look at what Microsoft *does* offer for the Mac:
1. VirtualPC (a way to sell a Mac user a Windows software license - ingenious!) 2. MSN Messenger for OS X (make sure they're able to chat with Windows users) 3. Windows Media Player for OS X (help keep the proprietary Windows media format a "valid option" for the Mac community) 4. Remote Desktop Client for OS X (make sure you can still use that PC remotely from your Mac's desktop!)
Of course, Office falls right in line with the rest of these. (Make sure a Mac user feels comfortable working with all the proprietary Microsoft file formats for Office documents, and can pull mail from an MS Exchange mail server with Entourage)
Continuing to offer IE for the Mac accomplishes none of these goals for MS anymore, so why would they care about it? Just because a Mac has IE as a browser on it doesn't help a Mac user "see things the MS way" at all. If anything, it casts them in a bad light because it's slow and buggy compared to something like Safari or FireFox.
Well, you're entitled to use eBay any way you wish - but for my part, I look at it like a grade-point average. A 93% or better is an "A" in the educational world, last I checked, and any seller with an "A" rating overall seems fine by me.
Again though, the total number of deals completed is a big factor too. The biggest risk of newer eBayers with low overall feedback scores (whether 100% or not) is that they could easily have just set the account up with an intent to scam and run. Often, these people sell 10 or 15 "trinkets" that get them off to a good start, as part of the setup for the scam, where they move to ripping people off for hundreds or thousands of dollars at a time on bogus big-ticket items. But if someone has, say, 150 transactions under their belt, it's a much better chance that they're a long-standing user who intends to keep using eBay legitimately.
I learned long ago that on eBay, your positive feedback rating is *only* worth worrying about in a general, overall sense. The more items you sell, the more "immune" you become to the jerks who leave you negative comments without a valid reason.
One of my former bosses was very concened about keeping 100% positive feedback on eBay, because his eBay seller ID was his business name, and he really wanted his feedback to reflect his business in a good light. Because of that, he got completely screwed over by several people he bought and sold things from. (EG. One guy sold him what he claimed was a 1GB stick of SDRAM memory, but after exhaustively testing it in all the motherboards we had available to us, were never able to get it to be recognized in any machines as more than 512MB. Of course, the seller insisted it was our fault because we simply "didn't have one of the systems that was able to see all of the memory". But no... After a close enough inspection and looking up the part numbers stamped on the individual chips making up the DIMM, it was obvious it really was only a 512MB stick. Upon trying to return it, my boss was threatened with "If I accept this for return, I'm leaving negative feedback for you, but if you keep it and accept that it's your problem - I'll leave you a positive.")
On my own account, I've always just "stood up" to these individuals, and gladly accepted whatever negative feedback they wish to give me. I, in turn, always reply to it with a comment that attempts to counter their arguments. And despite all this, I've always managed to keep at least a 93-97 percent positive rating. The fact is, if you use it fairly regularly, the number of good, honest people still outweighs the bad (assuming you use a little common sense when buying and selling too!), so you'll turn out ok, feedback-wise.
Re:Is Opera Google's doorway to beating Microsoft?
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Google to Buy Opera?
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· Score: 1
Interesting idea, but I think you should at least qualify it as "Googles' attempt to beat Microsoft or render them irrelevant in the Internet-based apps space."
Google is really *not* going to become the "next Microsoft" in most aspects. (Do you forsee Google-branded wireless optical mice next to the Microsoft and Logitech models on the shelves? I don't. Nor do I see a real interest in a Google-OS for Intel x86, or even competition to products like Visual C++.)
What Google is attempting to kill off is strictly Microsoft's attempts at dominance in the Internet-space, including the offering of "pay as you go" applications served over the Internet, email, IM chat and browsers, and "value added services" of interest to large ISPs.
(And frankly, the one piece I don't quite get is Picasa. Not sure how that fits into Google's "plan" really, other than perhaps it serving as a "gateway product" to other things they want to introduce later. Perhaps something akin to Apple's photo printing services built into iPhoto?)
I wasn't even aware that this "iBackups" company existed until now. But it occurs to me that his defense; "This software is sold simply to serve as a backup copy.", is as old as the pirate bulletin board system. That used to be a VERY popular "disclaimer" on the "NPD" (non public-domain) boards.
The thing is, I wonder if it held more water on a free BBS, where you simply couldn't be accused of selling the software?
If "iBackups" was going to try something this shady, they should have at least tried to obscure what was being paid for. (EG. Pay our price of $X.XX for a copy of our guide to software installation and optimization, and take your pick of a free backup copy of one of the following commercial programs in our library.)
What makes you so sure PalmOS is dead on the Treo line from here on out? The fact that there's a new 700 running Windows doesn't necessarily mean they'll never do another PalmOS based phone. In fact, I heard a few comments from their marketing people that made it sound like they wanted to be VERY cautious about people assuming this was definitely the case. At least one article I read emphasized that the 700 was simply an experiment... an attempt to offer something different. They very well might opt to go back to PalmOS for a "Treo 800" or whatever it might be called, especially if sales of the new 700 aren't stellar.
Thanks for the nugget of "wisdom" pal, but when you discover you're married to a woman who suffers from bi-polar disorder, triggered off by post-pardum depression from having a kid, and she proceeds to clean out the whole house while you're at work and sells off 2 of your vehicles, what would you suggest? Kiss and make up?
No, I didn't really plan on raising a kid by myself with practically no help from family or friends - but it's the lot I'm stuck with. I don't feed my daughter fast food all the time. I thought I made that clear in my original post. But there's a good reason you see so many McDonalds restaurants with children's play-places. The fact is, lots of adults would skip eating at places like that, all things being equal - but when you have a kid that gets the enjoyment of playing with other kids in a setting that lets you finish your own meal in peace, that has a certain attraction. (My kid loves playing at the park, but when it's this cold out, that's not a sensible option. An indoor play-place like you see at many Burger Kings, McDonalds, etc. can be a great alternative.)
And truthfully, my biggest concern with my kid's eating habits don't stem from the fast food places I take her but much more from the in-laws, who try to spoil her with far too many sweets and junk food while she's over there. She doesn't even like pizza, and she asks for things like the fruit and walnut salad thing at McD's when we go there.
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I don't really think anyone "deserves to get fired" over expressing their personal beliefs on a topic. I actually know at least 2 people who DO work for defense-related govt. agencies who are decidedly "anti-war" in their personal beliefs. So what? That hardly means they're not capable of doing the mapping or engineering tasks they're paid to do. What's the line of thinking here? People holding a different set of beliefs are too much of a "security risk" because they'll sabatoge things on the inside?? What a crock! Deal with such issues as you come to them. Don't judge your employees in advance like that.
Lawyers are not "hired to protect IP" in an overall sense, anyway. At most, they're hired to protect individual pieces of IP in specific circumstances. Perhaps someone with a good working knowledge of how IP protection schemes are broken is exactly the one you want in your corner in an IP protection suit?
Sorry - but this whole thing hits rather close to home for me. I was just turned down for a job at an area college, after 2 interviews and being verbally told I got the job, just because someone read my personal web site and didn't like a couple things I said. Unfortunately, these things happen in "at will hiring" states like mine and there's little legal recourse. But it doesn't make it any more "right".
Well, first off, the current market penetration of Macs is more like 5-6% right now, not 3-4%. But I realize that's basically splitting hairs. I get your point, and I tend to agree. But with Apple moving to Intel processors on new Macs, it seems like a lot of new possibilities may open up.
Microsoft, for example, currently owns and sells "VirtualPC" - which is pretty much the only way a Mac user can install and run Windows on a Mac. But with new Macs being Intel-based, it seems logical Microsoft might update VirtualPC to be a product that simply allows simultaneous execution of Windows code in a window inside OS X, rather than emulating all the x86 instructions by translating them to PPC native code.
If this happens, there's no reason Windows couldn't run well enough inside OS X on a new Mac to finally allow Windows games to run at near-native speeds. New Macs all have fairly respectable ATI or nVidia graphics cards - capable of the same features as their Windows counterparts for 3D gaming.
The Mac may never really get lots of game developers interesting in writing or even porting Windows games to OS X native titles - but they might succeed in bringing Windows to it instead, while keeping everything under the umbrella of OS X.
My biggest problem is spending money on a game, only to find I'm bored with it rather quickly - and can't even get enough gameplay out of it to justify the price tag.
Civilization 1, 2, and 3 were all excellent games with lots of "staying power" though. Every time I run across the installation discs for one of those titles and decide to load it back on a computer for the heck of it, I end up playing another round or two of them.
I've never completely grown tired of Warcraft III (with the Frozen Throne expansion set - which really seems like a necessity to give the game enough interesting characters and things to do). I'd couldn't get enough of Starcraft either, until people finally mastered every last detail of that game to the point where it's simply not enjoyable to play against online gamers anymore. (I don't get why it's supposed to still be "fun" to play, when all you're doing is methodically clicking on objects according to some optimal system you've worked out, as rapidly as possible - which guarantees you a win unless the other person performs the same series of commands a little more efficiently than you managed to perform them?)
I always seem to have a version of Unreal Tournament installed too, which I play online now and again. There are so many great custom levels and mods for those games, you *always* see something new when you connect to a server and play.
Other than that, I think the original "classics" like Mario Brothers, Centipede, Burgertime, etc. are much more the type of games I can "go back and play again and again" - because they're much more basic. They take seconds to load up, and you can play 5 or 10 minutes, be satisfied, and forget about them until some other time when you get a urge to fire one back up again. Modern games are so much more complex, they demand more commitment from players.
At the risk of getting a little bit off-topic for this particular message topic - I *do* expect businesses to carefully read resumes that are submitted to determine if they "know what they're talking about" or not. That's one reason you see so much inefficiency in business today! Most managers claim they "don't have time" to go through their job applicants - so they've done things like let the H.R. department "pre-screen" everybody for them. Effectively, that amounts to saying "Here - throw away a bunch of these incoming resumes for me, will you? I don't want a stack of 75 to look at. I want 10." H.R. is hardly more effective than trained monkeys at correctly determining who deserves an interview and who doesn't, in areas outside Human Resources itself! What does you average H.R. employee know about I.T. or engineering, or biotech, or accounting, or . So sure, they just look for "keywords" on resumes that match words mentioned in lists of "required skills", and use the "has one/doesn't have one" test for college degrees to decide what goes in the "round file".
Of course you'll get a lot of unqualified people trying to apply for jobs they have no business doing! But IMHO, a manager's *most important task* may be evaluating candidates for hire! It's a crying shame they don't tend to view it this way! Labor is the single largest expense for any business - so start giving it a little more attention!
I know, working in I.T. myself, I was occasionally asked to look over a few resumes submitted for PC support type jobs. When I did so, I was pretty quickly able to make a determination as to a person's basic level of knowledge. I've seen quite a few people claim a 4 year degree on their resume, yet they had spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes in their cover letter and other such things, indicating they probably don't have the strongest writing skills. To me, that's a bigger reason to trash a resume than not having the degree on it. What else did they do? Do they illustrate a willingness to learn outside the workplace? (AKA. Any "personal projects" listed on a resume like, say, setting up a Linux server at home to learn how it interoperates with their Windows PC?) Which technologies do they claim experience with? Just a regurgitation of the most common ones they think employers want to see (MS Office, Project, Visio, etc.), or do they actually list things you wouldn't run across unless you were doing something a little more in-depth/advanced with computing? (EG. HP OpenView/Manage-X, or advanced backup software)
I, too, use Bits on Wheels on my G5 system nowdays. The ability to visualize the traffic packets is not only cool-looking, but a useful way to see, at a glance, what's going on with your connection. If I see lots of outgoing traffic from the center of the "wheel" and very few packets traveling inwards, I know I'm in a situation where I've got more of the file than most of the peers. I can therefore expect it to take a LONG time for the xfer to finish,or decide it's time to "bail out" and try some other method of getting the file I'm trying to download.
Ok, I agree that this study doesn't prove anything one way or the other. Point taken there.
But as for the "impossible scenes" study, I'm lost as to how it means one can "reasonably conclude that the baabies had some innate sense of physics"? Even as young as 6 months to 12 months old, a child is already experiencing all sorts of basic laws of physics. Every time you dress them, for example, they're experiencing certain rules. (EG. They're unable to see their own skin through the material, and they can't just kick around and have their feet or hands pass through the clothing, leaving it behind them someplace.) Certainly, by age 12 months, they've also done such things as batted at items dangling overhead (say on a mobile in their crib?) and watched the results of those actions.
This study would have a profound impact if it was really discovered that humans are born with this basic sense of geometry. But it doesn't show that at all! Rather than implying that we might have an "innate sense of geometry" - it merely shows that we're able to pick up basic concepts of 3D objects by working and interacting with them every day as we go through our lives.
The fact that adults tended to score better on these tests than kids did further illustrates this. The longer you've been around on this planet (formally educated or not), the more time you've had to work with objects and draw conclusions about what makes an object "different" from other similar ones.
Just from reading the replies here, I think it becomes clear that opinions on which browsers and versions one should keep supporting are as varied as the userbase itself is.
EG. If I ask a Windows user this question, I'm far less likely to get an argument from them that support for browsers like Opera is worthwhile than if I ask a Linux user. By the same token, anyone still hanging onto to "legacy" Macs running MacOS 9.2 or earlier is going to be worried about pages rendering properly in IE 5.17 for Mac - a product that's largely misunderstood by anyone *not* using older Macs. (People tend to think it's equivalent to IE 5.x for Windows, or even IE 6 for Windows - and it's just not.)
Personally, I have real issues with companies deciding that "IE 6 support is good enough". *Maybe* that's true for an in-house package that relies heavily on Active-X components - but even then, you have to question the wisdom of marrying the project to a specific product.
A good example of this concept miserably failing is SBC's user registration site for DSL sign-ups. (https://sbcreg.sbcglobal.net/ They designed it to priamrily be auto-displayed by IE 6 when it's launched from inside their setup program on CD. But if that setup fails to complete properly for some reason, or a user has reasons not to sign up that way (like maybe they're a Mac or Linux user?), they get instructed to visit this site by hand in their browser and create their new user account/email that way. Unfortunately, I can't even get the "Next" and "I Agree" type buttons to display properly when I view this site in FireFox/Mozilla, IE 5.23 for Mac OS X, or even Apple's Safari browser! Last time I set up new DSL service for a client using all Macs, I had to bring along a Windows laptop just to get their user account created!
I don't think racism is a real issue, in and of itself. Sure, like anything, exceptions exist. But I think the larger issues are such things as language barriers and a tendency for people of some cultural backgrounds to have less day-to-day computer experience.
EG. I recently talked to a buddy who was privy to some info on a recent round of I.T. hiring, and one Asian candidate with good, solid experience on his resume and several industry certifications was turned down in the final round of hiring because he was very difficult for the interviewers to understand. Maybe from his perspective, that is "racism" - but in reality, he simply needed to work on better English speaking skills and he would probably have gotten the job.
If you work in America, or even for an American company, I think an ability to speak clear, fluent English (and write it well too) can be just as important a job requirement as Windows 2003 Server experience or anything else a company might need.
The argument that "performance has reached adequate levels" rears its head every few years or so in the industry. The fact is though, everything goes in cycles. Sometimes the software development outpaces the currently available/reasonably priced hardware, and then things shift back the other direction for a little while. But the one thing that's certain is; development isn't going to come to a halt on the software side. If you develop faster, cheaper systems - eventually, software developers will figure out ways to make use of everything that's available to them. They have to, because in most cases, that's the only thing that keeps food on their tables. New versions are expected practically yearly for most popular applications, and once you've offered all the basics - what else is there to do for the next upgrade? You have to add "cool new things" that catch people's interest. Whether that means toolbars that automatically fade into the background when they're not used for a little while or voice recognition integrated into the app, built-in video tutorials or adding all new capabilities to perform tasks the app never tried to tackle at all before - you're going to need ever faster CPUs to become "commdity items" to go along with your work.
Apple has a deep hole to keep trying to dig themselves back out of largely because the perceived "value for the dollar" of buying a Mac became VERY poor in the mid to late 90's. Sleek new systems running OS X have started turning things back around - but Apple's move to Intel means they've got to be MORE concerned with performance increases than ever before! They can't lean on an excuse (however accurate or inaccurate is really was) of "You can't compare Mhz to Mhz between Intel or AMD chips and our PPC chips!" Now, the CPUs powering their hardware are the SAME ones powering everyone else's hardware. So if your new Mac offers a 2.1Ghz CPU and a new Dell has a 3.0Ghz of the same product type - it's clear. The Dell is a lot more powerful. And the general public understands that.
Oddly enough, I had this work in my favor once, by accident. A friend of mine had a computer support position with a large financial company in town, and kept trying to get me a job there too. Finally, a time came when his boss said he needed to hire additional staff, so he kept harassing the guy to invite me in for an interview.
The only thing was, my friend didn't quite explain the situation to me accurately. He made it sound like the guy was ready to offer me a job, and I just needed to come in as a formality, and to please H.R., etc.
When the guy did finally set up an interview with me, I came in, answered a few of his questions, gave him a copy of my resume, and basically asked "So, when do I start?" He had a shocked look on his face, stuttered a bit, and finally said "Umm... how about next week?"
(I didn't find out until the next day that the guy hadn't actually told my friend he would hire me. Oops! But we both got a good laugh from it.)
Oddly enough, I still didn't ever end up working there. It all happened so long ago, I can't remember the exact details - but I believe the job I had at the time gave me a raise or something, making it a better deal to stay where I was at. Just as well though, in the long run, because the financial firm ended up in bankruptcy and merged with another company, eliminating many of their employees in the process.
I tend to agree with you. I'm not even much of a "web developer" at all. Rather, I occasionally get paid to put together a basic e-commerce or plain old advertising "shingle" site for a small business customer. And even for my needs, building rather straightforward "cookie-cutter" type sites, I would rather go with an existing PHP and SQL based template. Especially for things like online shopping carts, a big concern is always security. (EG. Has the solution/template been used extensively and tested for flaws that would allow a customer to modify the price of an item during checkout, or to gain access to other customer's information?) The PHP based e-commerce "store" scripts seem to have the best odds of being widely used, tested, and debugged.
I don't agree that it HAS to be this way. It only *tends* to be this way, because convenience often goes along with laziness. People tend to willingly give up a freedom or right if they're made to believe it's a requirement of gaining something useful that makes their life easier.
If the general public got irritated enough with tracking of their spending habits when using credit cards, for example, they could boycott their use and cause a change. But the convenience vs. perceived threat doesn't motivate most people to take action.
Do you know of anyone who actually did any real studies or investigations and found that spammers really are generating sales from the spam they send out?
In my own experience, when I've actually tried to visit a web-site or reply to an email given in a spam ad, it was already disabled/shut off. It seems like the war on spam has escalated to the point where ISPs are getting fairly efficient at shutting down the spammers' mailboxes and web presences within minutes or hours of them sending out a barrage of advertising.
I suspect the *real* problem is, big spammers are getting paid to advertise other people's products in this manner - never caring that it's completely and utterly ineffective marketing.
That's exactly the problem with Dashboard though ... it's too tempting to approach it as "let's load it up with all types of crazy widgets!". By doing that, you make it less functional. (Takes longer to switch to them when you've got a whole screen full of them, etc.)
s /). That's something I occasionally need to do, and it's something you don't really want to load up a whole word processing package for.
Certain Dashboard widgets *can* change the way you work, but only when you select the right ones, and eliminate the rest!
For example, Ambrosia Software makes a free widget for easily printing addresses on envelopes (http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/easyenvelope
I find the weather widget handy too. It lets me get the forecast on a whim, while not constantly running and eating resources when I don't need it. Sure, you can visit a web site to get the same info - but a widget is faster and always saves your preferences. (Web sites usually rely on cookies that you might clear out of your browser cache.)
What you propose with users "instantly sharing webpage packets, image packets, and even the music/programs they download" by means of a public portion of a "Temporary Internet Files" type folder is interesting, in theory. But realistically, I don't see it happening any time soon.
Among other things, it makes the assumption that users have plenty of upstream bandwidth, so their Internet performance won't be drastically impacted by this process running in the background.
In reality, the ISPs have *no* interest in giving the "average user" very much upstream bandwidth at all, because that's still their cash cow. The people publishing content are the ones in the best position to pay a premium price to make the publication possible. That's why T1 and T3 circuits still cost hundreds or even thousands per month, while you can get DSL or cable broadband for between $19 and $50 a month. Ability to download (or in other words, view or receive content) is cheap. Ability to provide/distribute the content will cost you much more.
On another note, I'm becoming convinced that as things stand right now, your best bet for "safe sharing" of copyrighted content lies in the realm of private servers and sites which require passwords to use them. P2P will never really be the "optimal" method for distributing content covertly or without fear of legal punishment. Ultimately, any software that can mask the sender and/or receiver's IP addresses still has to have a way to know how the data *really* gets from point A to B and back. That means, someone can always "unmask" it again with some sort of clever reverse-engineering.
The nice thing about a strictly private server, message forum, etc. is that by its very nature, it's not sharing content to the public. If enough different "private sites" were put up that each happened to contain a lot of the same content anyway, law enforcement would have a very difficult time dealing with them. (EG. They can't just connect up, grab a file from your IP, and thereby prove you're "guilty of distributing copyrighted content on a massive scale". For all they know, you could have only a select group of friends using your private site who all own legal licenses for the music they're putting up there, etc.)
I'll be the first to agree that most anti-virus software is a ripoff. But I've been steering folks clear of Symantec AV products for years now. Their stuff is bloated, buggy, and inefficient at doing the job - and insistence on going through "product activation" for retail and OEM products just make it that much less appealing.
That said, your statement that AV software is purely "snake oil"? I have to take exception to that one. I think it's arguable that *some* people wouldn't get enough value from AV software to make it worth using, but not usually.
First of all, if you're a Mac user, then no - please don't waste time with AV products like Virex or Symantec! Right now, they only find a few really dumb attempts at "trojan horse" viruses for OS X that are about as threatening as someone writing a DOS batch file containing "FORMAT C:" and emailing it to people, saying "double click this cool new program!" Their *real* reason for existance is SUPPOSED to be cleaning up viruses in email so you don't accidently become guilty of redistributing some virus you received on your Mac and infecting a Windows user on the other end. But the problems and performance hits these products give most Macs make them unacceptable.
Secondly, if you're a Windows user who doesn't have his/her PC connected to the net at all and generally just keep using the same software on it all the time (or only upgrade from purchased CD-ROM/DVD-ROM discs), you probably can skip the anti-virus software. (I mean, are you THAT concerned about people sticking infected floppy disks in your machine and screwing stuff up? If so, get the AV software - but otherwise, how is your machine ever going to become infected in the first place?)
But TYPICALLY, you use Anti-Virus software on a clean PC to try to KEEP it that way. Yeah, if you get spyware in, it's going to install 10-15 other pieces of malware and "helper viruses" that make it difficult to clean'remove. But an up-to-date realtime scanner should prevent a virus from running in the first place, assuming it came in via email or piggybacked onto some file you downloaded and tried to use. Spyware only messes things up if you allow it to install - so at least in theory, you should be able to keep it from being an issue by not installing software of unknown origin. The virus scanner is supposed to prevent the OTHER type of problem; infection by opening what was supposed to be a perfectly legitimate document or piece of software, except it had something bad secretly attached to it.
Of course they all fail, but I've also been in the field long enough to observe trends. The fact is, particular makes and models of drives were notoriously poor in the area of reliability. The confusion and conflicting stories you hear usually stem from people trying to over-simplify it to "Brand X is better than brand Y!" In this industry, you simply can't do that.
For example, back in the early 90's, I ran a very popular BBS. I had multiple computers running 24/7 and constantly being accessed, loading and saving data to their drives. At that time, the Seagate SCSI drives like the Barracuda were the highest performance drives available, so I tried using them. I had one failure after another. Always bearing issues. The fact is, those drives ran *hot* and keeping them sufficiently cooled in anything resembling a standard PC tower case was nearly impossible, so they'd self-destruct. Did this make Seagate a "bad company"? No, but it told me their high-performance, expensive drives weren't appropriate for my needs.
Earlier on, I had many other failures with Seagate drives, but this was way back in the day when the standards were MFM and RLL. The very popular Seagate ST-238R (30MB!) drive was always losing data and going bad on people, for example.
None of this means anything as to reliability of today's IDE Seagate drives, though. And with my recent poor experiences with Maxtor SATA drives (failing immediately outside the 1 year warranty period), I'm currently a fan of Seagate for those.
Truthfully, the only things Microsoft has been offering Mac users are applications that allow the Mac to be more "Windows-like". IMHO, Microsoft would never kill off a profitable project on the Mac side that helps continue to validate the Windows counterpart. I think they realize that the minority of people out there using Macs have spent considerable amounts of money and put up with a "2nd. class status" in many ways, just because they didn't want to "run with the pack" that uses Windows PCs. The most effective thing Microsoft can do with these people is to help make their Macs easy to use along-side of Windows systems by giving them a few key pieces that help keep a "bridge" between the 2 platforms. Otherwise, they've just completely kissed these potential customers goodbye.
I mean, take a look at what Microsoft *does* offer for the Mac:
1. VirtualPC (a way to sell a Mac user a Windows software license - ingenious!)
2. MSN Messenger for OS X (make sure they're able to chat with Windows users)
3. Windows Media Player for OS X (help keep the proprietary Windows media format a "valid option" for the Mac community)
4. Remote Desktop Client for OS X (make sure you can still use that PC remotely from your Mac's desktop!)
Of course, Office falls right in line with the rest of these. (Make sure a Mac user feels comfortable working with all the proprietary Microsoft file formats for Office documents, and can pull mail from an MS Exchange mail server with Entourage)
Continuing to offer IE for the Mac accomplishes none of these goals for MS anymore, so why would they care about it? Just because a Mac has IE as a browser on it doesn't help a Mac user "see things the MS way" at all. If anything, it casts them in a bad light because it's slow and buggy compared to something like Safari or FireFox.
Well, you're entitled to use eBay any way you wish - but for my part, I look at it like a grade-point average. A 93% or better is an "A" in the educational world, last I checked, and any seller with an "A" rating overall seems fine by me.
Again though, the total number of deals completed is a big factor too. The biggest risk of newer eBayers with low overall feedback scores (whether 100% or not) is that they could easily have just set the account up with an intent to scam and run. Often, these people sell 10 or 15 "trinkets" that get them off to a good start, as part of the setup for the scam, where they move to ripping people off for hundreds or thousands of dollars at a time on bogus big-ticket items. But if someone has, say, 150 transactions under their belt, it's a much better chance that they're a long-standing user who intends to keep using eBay legitimately.
I learned long ago that on eBay, your positive feedback rating is *only* worth worrying about in a general, overall sense. The more items you sell, the more "immune" you become to the jerks who leave you negative comments without a valid reason.
One of my former bosses was very concened about keeping 100% positive feedback on eBay, because his eBay seller ID was his business name, and he really wanted his feedback to reflect his business in a good light. Because of that, he got completely screwed over by several people he bought and sold things from. (EG. One guy sold him what he claimed was a 1GB stick of SDRAM memory, but after exhaustively testing it in all the motherboards we had available to us, were never able to get it to be recognized in any machines as more than 512MB. Of course, the seller insisted it was our fault because we simply "didn't have one of the systems that was able to see all of the memory". But no... After a close enough inspection and looking up the part numbers stamped on the individual chips making up the DIMM, it was obvious it really was only a 512MB stick. Upon trying to return it, my boss was threatened with "If I accept this for return, I'm leaving negative feedback for you, but if you keep it and accept that it's your problem - I'll leave you a positive.")
On my own account, I've always just "stood up" to these individuals, and gladly accepted whatever negative feedback they wish to give me. I, in turn, always reply to it with a comment that attempts to counter their arguments. And despite all this, I've always managed to keep at least a 93-97 percent positive rating. The fact is, if you use it fairly regularly, the number of good, honest people still outweighs the bad (assuming you use a little common sense when buying and selling too!), so you'll turn out ok, feedback-wise.
Interesting idea, but I think you should at least qualify it as "Googles' attempt to beat Microsoft or render them irrelevant in the Internet-based apps space."
Google is really *not* going to become the "next Microsoft" in most aspects. (Do you forsee Google-branded wireless optical mice next to the Microsoft and Logitech models on the shelves? I don't. Nor do I see a real interest in a Google-OS for Intel x86, or even competition to products like Visual C++.)
What Google is attempting to kill off is strictly Microsoft's attempts at dominance in the Internet-space, including the offering of "pay as you go" applications served over the Internet, email, IM chat and browsers, and "value added services" of interest to large ISPs.
(And frankly, the one piece I don't quite get is Picasa. Not sure how that fits into Google's "plan" really, other than perhaps it serving as a "gateway product" to other things they want to introduce later. Perhaps something akin to Apple's photo printing services built into iPhoto?)
I wasn't even aware that this "iBackups" company existed until now. But it occurs to me that his defense; "This software is sold simply to serve as a backup copy.", is as old as the pirate bulletin board system. That used to be a VERY popular "disclaimer" on the "NPD" (non public-domain) boards.
The thing is, I wonder if it held more water on a free BBS, where you simply couldn't be accused of selling the software?
If "iBackups" was going to try something this shady, they should have at least tried to obscure what was being paid for. (EG. Pay our price of $X.XX for a copy of our guide to software installation and optimization, and take your pick of a free backup copy of one of the following commercial programs in our library.)
What makes you so sure PalmOS is dead on the Treo line from here on out?
The fact that there's a new 700 running Windows doesn't necessarily mean they'll never do another PalmOS based phone. In fact, I heard a few comments from their marketing people that made it sound like they wanted to be VERY cautious about people assuming this was definitely the case. At least one article I read emphasized that the 700 was simply an experiment... an attempt to offer something different. They very well might opt to go back to PalmOS for a "Treo 800" or whatever it might be called, especially if sales of the new 700 aren't stellar.
Thanks for the nugget of "wisdom" pal, but when you discover you're married to a woman who suffers from bi-polar disorder, triggered off by post-pardum depression from having a kid, and she proceeds to clean out the whole house while you're at work and sells off 2 of your vehicles, what would you suggest? Kiss and make up?
No, I didn't really plan on raising a kid by myself with practically no help from family or friends - but it's the lot I'm stuck with. I don't feed my daughter fast food all the time. I thought I made that clear in my original post. But there's a good reason you see so many McDonalds restaurants with children's play-places. The fact is, lots of adults would skip eating at places like that, all things being equal - but when you have a kid that gets the enjoyment of playing with other kids in a setting that lets you finish your own meal in peace, that has a certain attraction. (My kid loves playing at the park, but when it's this cold out, that's not a sensible option. An indoor play-place like you see at many Burger Kings, McDonalds, etc. can be a great alternative.)
And truthfully, my biggest concern with my kid's eating habits don't stem from the fast food places I take her but much more from the in-laws, who try to spoil her with far too many sweets and junk food while she's over there. She doesn't even like pizza, and she asks for things like the fruit and walnut salad thing at McD's when we go there.