Absolutely... I worked in a company with at least 20 systems, plus tape backup units, etc. - all packed into a computer room not much larger than the average-sized bathroom with tub and shower. It was always kept around 60 degrees, but when the AC broke down, it quickly got HOT in there. We had to leave the door propped open with big fans circulating air to keep the systems from crashing until it could be fixed - and it only took minutes to reach that point.
Despite all the talk of watching movies in wide-screen format and the like being a primary factor in the move to widescreen format displays on laptops, I really doubt that's nearly as big a deal as the manufacturers seem to think?
The *big* benefit to a widescreen notebook display (whatever size screen in inches you opt for) is the ability to display 2 applications, side by side, at the same time!
We've always had screen resolutions with more horizontal pixels than vertical - but widescreen brings the ratio closer to something really sensible and usable. How many times have you wanted to keep a web page open and copy/paste something from it into a Word document, or into email? How often are you working in a publishing package and need to move clip-art over from, say, Photoshop after you've just edited it? How often do you want to leave something open and in the foreground because you're in the middle of working with it, yet you get interrupted with a task that requires looking something up in a second app? It's really nice to have both on-screen at the same time in any of these cases, rather than playing "shuffle" with 2 app windows. And in most cases, making a laptop display widescreen doesn't really make the machine itself much bigger anyway. (You already usually want roughly that much width to the bottom half of the system so you have a comfortable keyboard to type on.)
Every time I hear the "in the 90's, people stumbled all over themselves to pay you I.T. guys to do practically nothing" line, it makes me cringe. See, like a lot of people I knew, we stayed here in the midwest during the.com explosion, figuring "Hey, all those modern-era gold-rush people will come back soon enough with their tails between their legs anyway." Instead, we worked hard for our below-average salaries, confident that our commitment to the job and dedication would win out in the long run. Then, many of us got laid off while the scammers and cons came back with millions from stock options, or hundreds of thousands for providing practically useless services to failing businesses. Some thanks we got for "doing the right thing", huh?
Best job I could find after that was a couple years of working in a guy's unheated garage scrapping together used computers for resale cheap to daycare centers and preschools - for less than half of my former, below-average salary. I'm *still* trying to find something that might at least pay close to what I made in '99-2000!
I agree that smart businesses are clued in more to things like "people skills" and "work ethics" nowdays, but from what I've been running into around here - the single most impotant thing you can have is an inside connection. Almost everyone I know in this market who has a good-paying job in I.T. got there because they had a friend in management. They need a decent resume too - but you're just another piece of paper in H.R.'s resume pile unless you have connections who get someone to "pull your resume" and seriously consider it....
Why wouldn't it? Yes, it's fraud - unlike situations where you were *voluntarily* extended credit. If you don't repay a debt, it's ultimately the problem for the person or business that chose to take the *risk* that you'd repay as promised. If you write a check, you're signing a paper promising that the amount of funds written on it will be paid. If those funds really aren't there, you've misrepresented the situation. In a way, it's much more akin to paying with counterfeit money you printed up in advance than to refusing to pay on a loan.
Yep! I've had the same experience. I have a couple of enclosed fixtures in my kitchen with 2 bulbs in each, and thought "Hey - I can really save some $'s going with CFL's in these!" - but they all failed in a matter of 1-2 months of occasional use. A couple of the CFL's I removed even had brown burn marks on their white plastic casings.
I've had another one just in an open socket in my basement that started misbehaving due to what seems like a loose connection inside it. It intermittently goes out and I can bring it back to life by tapping on it.
I like the energy efficiency of them, but considering their much higher iniital cost compared to regular bulbs, they're not really going to save me much if they keep failing. So I'm done with using them in any kind of enclosed fixture. (The "not recommended" warning on their boxes isn't kidding, folks!)
The "usability" is probably the single biggest reason I ended up buying an iPod - despite waiting through 3 generations of them before breaking down and getting one. The other players with similar storage capacity simply weren't as versatile or usable! There are FAR more iPod accessories made than for all the other players out there, combined! Want to use your player as a temporary holding space for a bunch of digital photos? Want to stick a microphone on top of it and use it as a voice recorder? Want it to seamlessly interface with your Alpine car stereo? It's Apple iPod or zilch.
Not to mention, as a Mac user already, it's nice having a player that can double as an external firewire hard drive so I can boot from it in an emergency and run disk repair utilities from it, if I desire.
(At one point in time, there was talk of an addition coming to Mac OS X that would let you log into ANY Mac by docking your iPod with it first, and thereby automatically bringing up a desktop with your personal preferences and settings. Basically, your iPod would hold the key components from your "home" directory and OS X would know how to use it as sort of a "roaming profile". I imagine something like that is still on the way....)
Granted, the smaller capacity flash players aren't going to be doing all of this.... but they're not $400-500 either. But they still get the benefits of the easy to navigate menu system and click-wheel concept, and lack of annoying little eraser-sized buttons and controls all over them.
iPods aren't a huge success just because "Mac fanboys" think they're only buying style and coolness factor with them....
These days, many people who are very involved in technology *don't* build their own machines any more, because they're starting to realize what a waste of time and effort that is. I spent close to 10 years preaching the benefits of "rolling your own" home-built PC, but know what? I highly doubt I'll ever do it again if I need a whole new computer. The only reason I've messed with it at all lately is because I've still got a good quality Antec tower case here with enough good, working parts in it that it's been more economical to do a motherboard swap and a hard drive upgrade to it than to sell off the entire box and start over. But come the next round of upgrades? The whole thing will probably go, because now I'm looking at the need for all new cards (PCI Express) and different RAM for the next motherboard and CPU, plus most likely, a new power supply to handle it too... and by then, my SCSI DVD-ROM slot-loader drive will make sense to replace too.
I run into people who "hate Apple computers and everything about them" all the time too, but when you quiz them on all the "whys" behind their stance, you almost always find that they haven't spent more than 5 minutes in front of OS X and they're still griping about some miserable MacOS 8.x or 9.x experience on a Performa machine from 1996 or 97. Furthermore, some take a purely political stance, claiming that since Steve Jobs is a Democrat, they won't support his company or products. (WTF? Even Rush Limbaugh has gone on the record saying how much he likes Apple computers.)
I'm not a technology writer by trade, but I do computer support for everyone from graphics artists and designers to newspaper columnists and book authors who work from home, and Macs are seen in these scenarios much more often than not.
Myself? I use both PC and Mac - but my last few computer purchases have been Macs. I home built a MythTV box running Linux, and I've used Linux on a Dell server in the past as a web and development server for a project I was doing with some friends. I'm pretty comfortable using whatever platform and OS I choose. But for the computers I use every day for email, web surfing, typing up papers, editing video and photos, and a little game playing on the side too - the Macs have been just as reliable or more reliable than anything I've built from parts on my own. They do have a price premium, but I consider that the cost of the OS and bundled software - and I'm ok with that.
Once Apple finishes the switch to Intel based Macs, it looks like Mac users will be able to dual-boot into Windows and run it at native speeds. (The need for a "VirtualPC" emulator product will be gone.) Therefore, it will start making more sense for Apple to offer their own products that you can run directly inside OS X - while letting the other people do whatever they want. If they think Apple's competition is too much for them, let them write a Windows-only version.... Mac users can still boot to Windows and use it if they want/need to.
In the case of Adobe, practically their entire product line caters to the segment of the market most likely to be using a Mac. They may sell more Windows versions of their software just due to the sheer volume of PCs out there (including colleges and universities wanting to offer courses in products like Photoshop or Illustrator, who may only have a Windows PC computer lab). But the professionals are relatively *often* getting their work done on the Mac. They'd be foolish to "pack up and leave the platform" rather than compete.
Did you ever hear the interview with Bill Gates that PBS did years ago? One of the statements he made way back then was that he envisioned himself as becoming one of the great philanthropists of the modern era. He looked up to people like Carnegie who were "immortalized" with foundations bearing their names, and so forth.
As I recall, the comment came about because the interviewer pretty much directly asked him why he wasn't donating more of his money to charitable causes. Bill explained that he still saw himself as a businessman first and foremost. He felt he was still too young to start in with the philanthrophy, but that was part of his "long term plan".
So yeah, of course the donations serve as tax write-offs for him, as all of them do. But it seems to me Gates is doing pretty much what he said his personal goals were.....
Unless you've got some kind of evidence that the history museum is being influenced to change the nature of their exhibits to lean towards a more Microsoft-centric history - I think you're just being another anti-Gates troll with this comment.
It's pretty clear that Gates is a guy who has a real interest in computing, no matter what else you think of his company's own products or business practices. I think almost *any* of us with a similar interest (both personal and business) in computing technology would throw some donation money towards a museum catering towards preserving computing history - assuming we had loads of cash sitting in a bank account for these purposes already.
If you see Bill Gates donating millions to a "bowling hall of fame" - then you might say "Ok, what's the catch here? Microsoft powered bowling alley scoring systems?" But Bill isn't an avid bowler, last I checked. This is a little bit different....
I'd have to say your list of symptoms allows for a pretty wide spectrum...
I won't address *all* of those points of yours one by one, but I can comment on a number of them selected at random to try to illustrate my point.
1. Thoughts of suicide? Yes, I spent most of my first couple years of high-school thinking about "just ending it all" practically every day. I was extremely unhappy and depressed, yet most people probably never had a clue I really felt THAT bad. Most of them were either too busy just having fun at my expense (Hey guys, let's steal his shoes again and run off with them so he goes bezerk trying to get 'em back!.. and that kind of thing.), or the few people that were close to me just saw the "other side" of me, where I was much happier, being around my friend with similar interests and all. Still, I "solved" this problem on my own, by convincing my folks to pull me out of the private, all-boys' school I was attending, and switching to a public school where I felt like I had a chance to make a "fresh start" in a much more "normal" social environment.
2. Codependent? I suppose, but not *extremely* so. I lived at my parents' house a lot longer than some people I knew, but by the time I was 21, I did move out. Screwed up with my first apartment and roommate due to not finding a decent job to pay my share of the bills, and had to go back to mom and dad for another stint... But I finally did buy a house and move out on my own. I guess this was partially the "fear of the unknown" thing plus a bit of laziness, but I didn't have parents that were pushing for me to leave either. In fact, my folks still cried the day I moved out - and called all the time wanting me to come back to help them with any number of misc. things they'd come up with.
3. Social interaction? I definitely had problems in this area. To this day, keeping eye contact with someone while talking to them is really difficult for me and always feels very uncomfortable. I've learned to force myself to do it in situations where I know it's expected of me (job interviews and such) but I'm very bad about doing it with someone I care about (a lover, a good friend, etc.) because I'm comfortable with them and don't feel the need to force myself to do it anymore around people who have already fully accepted me as a friend. I used to be very shy around people too, and I can't imagine ever just striking up conversations with strangers at a dance club or bar, to this day. But I'm very talkative when I'm in a small group and can chat one-on-one with people about anything of interest.
4. Hyper-focusing. This is one of those areas where my "disorder" was surely an advantage, work or project-wise. I used to be able to absolutely absorb myself into a project - like writing and working on an early BBS system I put together. I made it into one of the most popular ones in town (and greatly expanded my social circle in the process) - but I was walking around in classes with the greenbar paper printouts of my code and editing things with a pencil during school whenever I could get away with it. It was an obsession, simply because it really interested me. Nowdays, I don't even get the opportunity to get myself into that "mode" because all the responsibilities of having a kid to take care of, a house to take care of, bills to pay, my own business to build up, etc. etc. removes that option.
For one thing, I think Asperger's Syndrome is a very real condition, but the jury's still out on whether or not it just describes a variation of normal behavior, or whether it's something worthy of considering as a "mental illness" - implying a need for treatment.
The simple description of "a mild form of autism" leaves it pretty wide open to describe a whole spectrum of behaviors. But the condition interested me, personally, only because I realized that I probably have it myself after reading enough about it. In my case, I think I've partially "overcome" it as I've gotten older and forced myself to break myself of some of my older, more "anti-social" habits. But the side-effect? It seems pretty unlikely I'll ever accomplish any brilliant or great projects anymore, either.
In the case of BT's creator, it seems to me like the guy is following the same path I did - and I'd predict his days of intensely focused, marathon coding sessions are nearly over. (He got married, etc.)
He's the one who created BitTorrent, so he's the best choice to head up any company trying to market the technology. According to the article, he already hired on a guy to communicate his product to the recording industry execs, realizing he wasn't able to do that so well himself. He's smart enough to get the right people for those jobs, as needed.
They often suggest Bill Gates had Asperger's too, and he seemed to manage to make a semi-successful company out of Microsoft over the years as C.E.O.
Is time really "wasted" reading corporate email?
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Meet The Life Hackers
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· Score: 1
It seems like lately, there's a lot of backlash to instant messengers and email in the workplace. Lots of accusations of people spending "upwards of 16 to 20 hours a week" just reading or replying to their messages and the idea that all of this is ruining productivity.
I can see where that's one possibility, but I'd just like to point out the flip side. I've worked for companies with multiple locations around the country, and there's a very large, very real cost for all the long distance phone calls that go on just so people can remain in communications with their co-workers. By shunting as much off that off to email or IM as possible, the phone bills drop significantly. (In fact, one place I worked went so far as to issue everyone with "accounting codes" they had to dial in before making a long distance call, and that way - the accounting dept. could break down the cost of all the calls by department and charge them to the respective "cost centers" of the business. That means your accountants are losing a lot of productivity sorting all those phone calls every month too!)
Especially in cases where you're performing computer help-desk type functions for other employees, making the contact over the phone often means you're sitting on the line for long periods of time either "on hold" or effectively on-hold, while the person puts down the receiver and performs a few tasks and waits for the results, or while they make you wait while they handle some pressing thing that came up in the middle of your troubleshooting session. If you can do the support via a series of emails instead, you let both parties answer at their own pace and avoid running up LD charges for "dead air" over idle phone lines.
Ultimately, the reason most things are printed on paper is because it's still the cheapest method of distributing the content while also remaining zero cost for the end user to read it.
No matter how advanced "eBooks" get, the end user still has to have the hardware in order to read the content, not to mention potential costs for replacement batteries, etc.
Electronic paper solves the requirement of special hardware on the end-user's side, but still can't be produced as cheaply as printing text or pictures on regular paper.
Billboards are a great example of a place where electronic paper would make sense though. You're already spending a considerable amount of money to print up a color advertisement of that size, plus paying for the labor for people to climb up on the billboard and strip off the previous paper ad, replacing it with the new one you paid for. If all of this was as easy to change as someone uploading the latest data to a billboard at a particular IP address on the net, it would speed up delivery times and cut costs for both advertiser and billboard owner.
(If you think about it, billboards would have gone to gigantic LCD panels or something long ago, if it was cost-effective to build displays of the required size. But it never has been... so maybe electronic paper can solve this problem?)
Re:It will be a worry when...
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Space Tourism?
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You mean like the way we can't get anyone to perform test flights to research airplane design changes anymore, because too many regular passengers take up all the seats on commercial aircraft?
Your fears are completely unfounded. If tourists buy up all the "time in space", larger spacecraft will be developed to accomodate the need to take extra passengers, or more craft will be built to run more flights at a time. NASA isn't going to just stop doing research because they've got too many civilians who will pay to go up in a shuttle.... It will just mean they'll end up doing seperate flights for commercial and for research purposes!
I call B.S. on this one. Seriously, ProTools may have the most recognized *name* in the recording industry, but that doesn't mean it's the most widely used product for the job. What tends to happen with ProTools is studios know it "rings a bell" with people when they hear it mentioned, so they always list it as a capability their studio offers. But in reality, the ProTools rig often sits collecting dust. It's not a bad product at all, but flexibility and technology wise, it's been eclipsed by other packages. The mere fact that it uses proprietary "plug ins" turns a lot of people off to it. There are some awesome plug-in f/x made to the.VST standard, or even to Apple's new Audio Units standard, and many people would rather use a product that natively handles those formats.
(Even if you're not a big CuBase or Logic Audio fan, what about DP4 for the Mac? You can use any of these products with whatever audio recording peripherals you like too, rather than just some "ProTools approved" hardware product.)
Well, I happen to *like* doing on-site computer service, and right now, spyware and virus infections are an unfortunate reality of the industry. Many times, I'm not even sure what's wrong with someone's machine until I actually arrive on-site and start looking at it. People just tell you things like "It crashes a lot." or "I can't get my printer to work." and that could be a hundred different problems.
The reason I point out my dislike of spyware removal jobs to customers is because I want them to be aware that all of us working as computer consultants or technicians aren't running around, overjoyed that this stuff is breaking computers and causing people grief. I had one guy, for example, who told me he suspected "computer techs like me actually *wrote* all this stuff so we could create work for ourselves". And you can hardly blame him for coming up with that notion.
The overall problem is, IM clients are weak and lacking in features for *all* non-Windows platforms! While I don't think I ever really felt a need for the ability to "nudge" the window of the person I'm chatting with or to shoot annoying Flash animations over to their screen - I *do* expect such things as basic voice or webcam conferencing ability to work. Just last week, I was on my Mac using OS X and the Adium chat client (which seems to generally be agreed upon as the best multi-protocol IM client available for Mac OS X at this time), and I wasn't able to view another person's webcam they had running via Yahoo chat. I shut down Adium and ran Yahoo Messenger for OS X, and was at least able to see their webcam that way, but the software was prone to crashing and shutting down at random, and it refused to enable my iSight camera for more than a fraction of a second before displaying it as "stopped" again. After some google searching, I discovered a *lot* of OS X users with the same problems, and an overall complaint that Yahoo seemed to be abandonning support for the Mac version of their client. (A number of people called in to tech. support and got the cold shoulder from Yahoo on these issues, as well as some other ones like security settings not really working right when you tell Yahoo IM you only want specific people to be able to view your webcam.)
Doing some more searching, I saw where several of the OS X IM clients (such as "Fire") had FAQ files posted to their web sites, and there were *always* questions like "When do you plan to start supporting video conferencing and webcams?" - and the answers were all about the same. "No support is planned at this time, although we're keeping an eye on several open source projects that are trying to reverse engineer the protocols used for them."
So much of this appears to be caused by the authors of the major Windows IM clients using proprietary protocols for the "extras" and then not caring if anyone else can figure out how to make them work on 3rd. party clients. Since you're not likely to see Yahoo or ICQ or anyone else putting equal effort into developing native Macintosh or Linux or BSD or other such clients, we're always left hanging out to dry, to an extent, for not using Windows.
What a crappy attitude! You're comment makes you look like an embarassment to I.T. I do get paid good money to clean up spyware/malware problems as part of my job. I do on-site PC service and consulting for a living. But like I tell lots of customers, I'd *much* rather being doing something else for my money. Frankly, it's boring, and sometimes even tedious work. Here you are, on the clock, waiting for several scanners to go through every single file and folder on their hard drives - and in some cases, doing a bunch of manual registry editing and searching too. Hours can easily go by, especially when the customer has a slower computer, and you're just praying the machine doesn't decide to freeze up in the middle of one of these scans, or else you've got to start it over from the beginning again! Meanwhile, you're starting to wonder how you're going to justify billing the person for all this time that's going by - when charging your normal hourly rate is starting to mean charging more than their system is even worth!
Just as I have no desire to join the mafia and extort money from people, I don't enjoy billing high rates to customers who were victimized by malware when all they're trying to do is struggle by on their 5 or 6 year old PC, reading their email and typing up papers.
In fact, I've often ended up trying to "do the right thing" and only charging them a more reasonable price, which meant I got seriously short-changed for my time spent. But I guess I just can't stomach the idea of taking some retired lady's entire pension for the month just because some asshat like 180 Solutions tossed their crap-ware on her computer when she thought she was just downloading a pretty waterfall screen saver or something.
I'm in total agreement. Except one little "nit-pick". Joining the EFF is probably the smartest move anyone can make with their campaign contribution dollars. But the ACLU? I hate to say it, but I think that group has a *lot* of people fooled. They're taking in huge amounts of yearly contributions, yet they don't seem to be able to show what they're doing with all the money. The causes they take up vs. the causes they won't pursue seem like they've got certain agendas besides just "ensuring every American citizens' civil liberties are protected". Sure, they do some high-profile things that I'm in complete agreement with - but it's telling which things they overlook too. (EG. If you're a typical middle class white suburban man and you get wronged by your local police because they choose to be lazy and not do their job investigating a crime committed against you, writing to the ACLU will get you nowhere. If, however, you happen to be an inner-city black woman who had the exact same thing happen to her, the ACLU is *much* more likely to lend a sympathetic ear and get after those police.)
I'm using beta 2 of FireFox in OS X right now, and the movie played in high resolution mode for me, including sound. Looked great in fact. (Using a dual 2.0Ghz PowerMac G5)
Well, before you go bashing Microsoft on this one, it's worth noting that "MS Anti-Spyware" is actually just a product purchased from Giant Software, and re-branded with the Microsoft logo. Giant Anti-Spyware was highly rated as being an effective "one stop removal tool" for viruses in corporate settings - and not long after it was release as version 1.0, Microsoft bought it from them.
(There's actually a strange licensing deal going on with the product too, because apparently, Sunbelt Software already licensed a version of Giant Anti-Spyware that can grab update signatures from a central server on a corporate network and allows centralized administration. So right now, Microsoft holds all the rights to the original single-workstation version, while Sunbelt holds the network/corporate LAN version rights. But once Sunbelt's license expires, who knows if they'll be able to do anything further with the product, or if Microsoft will just force them to discontinue selling it? Right now, Sunbelt's product has to download updates from the same server the MS Anti-Spyware uses.....)
But in any case, this product in it's current incarnation has practically no Microsoft developers' code in it.
I've considered this too, not being at all fond of the typical legal fees and lack of real work done for one's money in many cases.
But there is a flip-side to your argument. How would you like to be a judge, having to sort out right from wrong in all of these court cases where both sides came in with no formal training in a "proper" way to present their cases? You'd end up with the type of circus you can wtiness on TV every day on all of the "People's Court" or "Judge Judy" type of shows. That's fine for small arguments like "He broke my washer and I want the $75 he owes me for the repair!"... but for more serious accusations of criminal wrongdoing? When a judge is forced to hear out heated arguments between two bickering people, he or she is ultimately going to start feeling bias against whoever has the personality he/she finds more "inflammatory". Lawyers, at least, serve as disconnected individuals who can present the facts to a judge or jury without all the personal resentment towards the opposing party.
Not really that exciting once you think about it.... It has a way to upload a log of its activity to a web site? All of my Unix servers can blog then too!
Well, before I trash Wired too badly, I have to say that I had a subscription ever since issue #2, until some time around early 2000, when I finally decided it "jumped the shark" and wasn't worth the space it was taking up on my bookshelf, much less the subscription price.
When it got started, I really enjoyed it. If nothing else, it seemed like most issues contained 1 really good interview with someone of importance in the tech. sector. It was the type of in-depth "we describe the person's character and workplace/home life in so much detail, you feel like you're watching this unfold on TV rather than reading" article, that really got them to make some statements that gave you insight into *why* they got where they were at that time, and where they thought their business was heading in the future. Plus, it had none of the editing you'd expect other mainstream rags would have done if they had conducted the same interview. (If the guy said "My main competitor fucked up!" - they printed it.)
They also seemed to be strong in scooping other science and tech. magazines on news about a new invention or interesting implementation of an existing technology (especially in medicine and biotech).
But it seemed like the combination of.com area millionaires, inflated I.T. salaries overall, and a tendency to glorify modern art and flashy/trendy doo-datd and gadgets poisoned Wired. The "fluff" became the "substance". The magazine got really thick in '99 with glossy full-page color ads for multi-thousand dollar designer watches, luxury cars and clothing. Then when it all came crashing down, the magazine went on a diet - losing about half of its thickness overnight. And quality never really came back..... You could comb a good article or two out of one, here or there. But it was best suited as something to download into your PDA for free using AvantGo, or via web links to specific articles of interest.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely... I worked in a company with at least 20 systems, plus tape backup units, etc. - all packed into a computer room not much larger than the average-sized bathroom with tub and shower. It was always kept around 60 degrees, but when the AC broke down, it quickly got HOT in there. We had to leave the door propped open with big fans circulating air to keep the systems from crashing until it could be fixed - and it only took minutes to reach that point.
Despite all the talk of watching movies in wide-screen format and the like being a primary factor in the move to widescreen format displays on laptops, I really doubt that's nearly as big a deal as the manufacturers seem to think?
The *big* benefit to a widescreen notebook display (whatever size screen in inches you opt for) is the ability to display 2 applications, side by side, at the same time!
We've always had screen resolutions with more horizontal pixels than vertical - but widescreen brings the ratio closer to something really sensible and usable. How many times have you wanted to keep a web page open and copy/paste something from it into a Word document, or into email? How often are you working in a publishing package and need to move clip-art over from, say, Photoshop after you've just edited it? How often do you want to leave something open and in the foreground because you're in the middle of working with it, yet you get interrupted with a task that requires looking something up in a second app? It's really nice to have both on-screen at the same time in any of these cases, rather than playing "shuffle" with 2 app windows. And in most cases, making a laptop display widescreen doesn't really make the machine itself much bigger anyway. (You already usually want roughly that much width to the bottom half of the system so you have a comfortable keyboard to type on.)
Every time I hear the "in the 90's, people stumbled all over themselves to pay you I.T. guys to do practically nothing" line, it makes me cringe. See, like a lot of people I knew, we stayed here in the midwest during the .com explosion, figuring "Hey, all those modern-era gold-rush people will come back soon enough with their tails between their legs anyway." Instead, we worked hard for our below-average salaries, confident that our commitment to the job and dedication would win out in the long run. Then, many of us got laid off while the scammers and cons came back with millions from stock options, or hundreds of thousands for providing practically useless services to failing businesses. Some thanks we got for "doing the right thing", huh?
Best job I could find after that was a couple years of working in a guy's unheated garage scrapping together used computers for resale cheap to daycare centers and preschools - for less than half of my former, below-average salary. I'm *still* trying to find something that might at least pay close to what I made in '99-2000!
I agree that smart businesses are clued in more to things like "people skills" and "work ethics" nowdays, but from what I've been running into around here - the single most impotant thing you can have is an inside connection. Almost everyone I know in this market who has a good-paying job in I.T. got there because they had a friend in management. They need a decent resume too - but you're just another piece of paper in H.R.'s resume pile unless you have connections who get someone to "pull your resume" and seriously consider it....
Why wouldn't it? Yes, it's fraud - unlike situations where you were *voluntarily* extended credit. If you don't repay a debt, it's ultimately the problem for the person or business that chose to take the *risk* that you'd repay as promised. If you write a check, you're signing a paper promising that the amount of funds written on it will be paid. If those funds really aren't there, you've misrepresented the situation. In a way, it's much more akin to paying with counterfeit money you printed up in advance than to refusing to pay on a loan.
Yep! I've had the same experience. I have a couple of enclosed fixtures in my kitchen with 2 bulbs in each, and thought "Hey - I can really save some $'s going with CFL's in these!" - but they all failed in a matter of 1-2 months of occasional use. A couple of the CFL's I removed even had brown burn marks on their white plastic casings.
I've had another one just in an open socket in my basement that started misbehaving due to what seems like a loose connection inside it. It intermittently goes out and I can bring it back to life by tapping on it.
I like the energy efficiency of them, but considering their much higher iniital cost compared to regular bulbs, they're not really going to save me much if they keep failing. So I'm done with using them in any kind of enclosed fixture. (The "not recommended" warning on their boxes isn't kidding, folks!)
The "usability" is probably the single biggest reason I ended up buying an iPod - despite waiting through 3 generations of them before breaking down and getting one. The other players with similar storage capacity simply weren't as versatile or usable! There are FAR more iPod accessories made than for all the other players out there, combined! Want to use your player as a temporary holding space for a bunch of digital photos? Want to stick a microphone on top of it and use it as a voice recorder? Want it to seamlessly interface with your Alpine car stereo? It's Apple iPod or zilch.
Not to mention, as a Mac user already, it's nice having a player that can double as an external firewire hard drive so I can boot from it in an emergency and run disk repair utilities from it, if I desire.
(At one point in time, there was talk of an addition coming to Mac OS X that would let you log into ANY Mac by docking your iPod with it first, and thereby automatically bringing up a desktop with your personal preferences and settings. Basically, your iPod would hold the key components from your "home" directory and OS X would know how to use it as sort of a "roaming profile". I imagine something like that is still on the way....)
Granted, the smaller capacity flash players aren't going to be doing all of this.... but they're not $400-500 either. But they still get the benefits of the easy to navigate menu system and click-wheel concept, and lack of annoying little eraser-sized buttons and controls all over them.
iPods aren't a huge success just because "Mac fanboys" think they're only buying style and coolness factor with them....
These days, many people who are very involved in technology *don't* build their own machines any more, because they're starting to realize what a waste of time and effort that is. I spent close to 10 years preaching the benefits of "rolling your own" home-built PC, but know what? I highly doubt I'll ever do it again if I need a whole new computer. The only reason I've messed with it at all lately is because I've still got a good quality Antec tower case here with enough good, working parts in it that it's been more economical to do a motherboard swap and a hard drive upgrade to it than to sell off the entire box and start over. But come the next round of upgrades? The whole thing will probably go, because now I'm looking at the need for all new cards (PCI Express) and different RAM for the next motherboard and CPU, plus most likely, a new power supply to handle it too ... and by then, my SCSI DVD-ROM slot-loader drive will make sense to replace too.
I run into people who "hate Apple computers and everything about them" all the time too, but when you quiz them on all the "whys" behind their stance, you almost always find that they haven't spent more than 5 minutes in front of OS X and they're still griping about some miserable MacOS 8.x or 9.x experience on a Performa machine from 1996 or 97. Furthermore, some take a purely political stance, claiming that since Steve Jobs is a Democrat, they won't support his company or products. (WTF? Even Rush Limbaugh has gone on the record saying how much he likes Apple computers.)
I'm not a technology writer by trade, but I do computer support for everyone from graphics artists and designers to newspaper columnists and book authors who work from home, and Macs are seen in these scenarios much more often than not.
Myself? I use both PC and Mac - but my last few computer purchases have been Macs. I home built a MythTV box running Linux, and I've used Linux on a Dell server in the past as a web and development server for a project I was doing with some friends. I'm pretty comfortable using whatever platform and OS I choose. But for the computers I use every day for email, web surfing, typing up papers, editing video and photos, and a little game playing on the side too - the Macs have been just as reliable or more reliable than anything I've built from parts on my own. They do have a price premium, but I consider that the cost of the OS and bundled software - and I'm ok with that.
Once Apple finishes the switch to Intel based Macs, it looks like Mac users will be able to dual-boot into Windows and run it at native speeds. (The need for a "VirtualPC" emulator product will be gone.) Therefore, it will start making more sense for Apple to offer their own products that you can run directly inside OS X - while letting the other people do whatever they want. If they think Apple's competition is too much for them, let them write a Windows-only version.... Mac users can still boot to Windows and use it if they want/need to.
In the case of Adobe, practically their entire product line caters to the segment of the market most likely to be using a Mac. They may sell more Windows versions of their software just due to the sheer volume of PCs out there (including colleges and universities wanting to offer courses in products like Photoshop or Illustrator, who may only have a Windows PC computer lab). But the professionals are relatively *often* getting their work done on the Mac. They'd be foolish to "pack up and leave the platform" rather than compete.
Did you ever hear the interview with Bill Gates that PBS did years ago? One of the statements he made way back then was that he envisioned himself as becoming one of the great philanthropists of the modern era. He looked up to people like Carnegie who were "immortalized" with foundations bearing their names, and so forth.
As I recall, the comment came about because the interviewer pretty much directly asked him why he wasn't donating more of his money to charitable causes. Bill explained that he still saw himself as a businessman first and foremost. He felt he was still too young to start in with the philanthrophy, but that was part of his "long term plan".
So yeah, of course the donations serve as tax write-offs for him, as all of them do. But it seems to me Gates is doing pretty much what he said his personal goals were.....
Unless you've got some kind of evidence that the history museum is being influenced to change the nature of their exhibits to lean towards a more Microsoft-centric history - I think you're just being another anti-Gates troll with this comment.
It's pretty clear that Gates is a guy who has a real interest in computing, no matter what else you think of his company's own products or business practices. I think almost *any* of us with a similar interest (both personal and business) in computing technology would throw some donation money towards a museum catering towards preserving computing history - assuming we had loads of cash sitting in a bank account for these purposes already.
If you see Bill Gates donating millions to a "bowling hall of fame" - then you might say "Ok, what's the catch here? Microsoft powered bowling alley scoring systems?" But Bill isn't an avid bowler, last I checked. This is a little bit different....
I'd have to say your list of symptoms allows for a pretty wide spectrum...
.. and that kind of thing.), or the few people that were close to me just saw the "other side" of me, where I was much happier, being around my friend with similar interests and all. Still, I "solved" this problem on my own, by convincing my folks to pull me out of the private, all-boys' school I was attending, and switching to a public school where I felt like I had a chance to make a "fresh start" in a much more "normal" social environment.
I won't address *all* of those points of yours one by one, but I can comment on a number of them selected at random to try to illustrate my point.
1. Thoughts of suicide? Yes, I spent most of my first couple years of high-school thinking about "just ending it all" practically every day. I was extremely unhappy and depressed, yet most people probably never had a clue I really felt THAT bad. Most of them were either too busy just having fun at my expense (Hey guys, let's steal his shoes again and run off with them so he goes bezerk trying to get 'em back!
2. Codependent? I suppose, but not *extremely* so. I lived at my parents' house a lot longer than some people I knew, but by the time I was 21, I did move out. Screwed up with my first apartment and roommate due to not finding a decent job to pay my share of the bills, and had to go back to mom and dad for another stint... But I finally did buy a house and move out on my own. I guess this was partially the "fear of the unknown" thing plus a bit of laziness, but I didn't have parents that were pushing for me to leave either. In fact, my folks still cried the day I moved out - and called all the time wanting me to come back to help them with any number of misc. things they'd come up with.
3. Social interaction? I definitely had problems in this area. To this day, keeping eye contact with someone while talking to them is really difficult for me and always feels very uncomfortable. I've learned to force myself to do it in situations where I know it's expected of me (job interviews and such) but I'm very bad about doing it with someone I care about (a lover, a good friend, etc.) because I'm comfortable with them and don't feel the need to force myself to do it anymore around people who have already fully accepted me as a friend. I used to be very shy around people too, and I can't imagine ever just striking up conversations with strangers at a dance club or bar, to this day. But I'm very talkative when I'm in a small group and can chat one-on-one with people about anything of interest.
4. Hyper-focusing. This is one of those areas where my "disorder" was surely an advantage, work or project-wise. I used to be able to absolutely absorb myself into a project - like writing and working on an early BBS system I put together. I made it into one of the most popular ones in town (and greatly expanded my social circle in the process) - but I was walking around in classes with the greenbar paper printouts of my code and editing things with a pencil during school whenever I could get away with it. It was an obsession, simply because it really interested me. Nowdays, I don't even get the opportunity to get myself into that "mode" because all the responsibilities of having a kid to take care of, a house to take care of, bills to pay, my own business to build up, etc. etc. removes that option.
For one thing, I think Asperger's Syndrome is a very real condition, but the jury's still out on whether or not it just describes a variation of normal behavior, or whether it's something worthy of considering as a "mental illness" - implying a need for treatment.
The simple description of "a mild form of autism" leaves it pretty wide open to describe a whole spectrum of behaviors. But the condition interested me, personally, only because I realized that I probably have it myself after reading enough about it. In my case, I think I've partially "overcome" it as I've gotten older and forced myself to break myself of some of my older, more "anti-social" habits. But the side-effect? It seems pretty unlikely I'll ever accomplish any brilliant or great projects anymore, either.
In the case of BT's creator, it seems to me like the guy is following the same path I did - and I'd predict his days of intensely focused, marathon coding sessions are nearly over. (He got married, etc.)
He's the one who created BitTorrent, so he's the best choice to head up any company trying to market the technology. According to the article, he already hired on a guy to communicate his product to the recording industry execs, realizing he wasn't able to do that so well himself. He's smart enough to get the right people for those jobs, as needed.
They often suggest Bill Gates had Asperger's too, and he seemed to manage to make a semi-successful company out of Microsoft over the years as C.E.O.
It seems like lately, there's a lot of backlash to instant messengers and email in the workplace. Lots of accusations of people spending "upwards of 16 to 20 hours a week" just reading or replying to their messages and the idea that all of this is ruining productivity.
I can see where that's one possibility, but I'd just like to point out the flip side. I've worked for companies with multiple locations around the country, and there's a very large, very real cost for all the long distance phone calls that go on just so people can remain in communications with their co-workers. By shunting as much off that off to email or IM as possible, the phone bills drop significantly. (In fact, one place I worked went so far as to issue everyone with "accounting codes" they had to dial in before making a long distance call, and that way - the accounting dept. could break down the cost of all the calls by department and charge them to the respective "cost centers" of the business. That means your accountants are losing a lot of productivity sorting all those phone calls every month too!)
Especially in cases where you're performing computer help-desk type functions for other employees, making the contact over the phone often means you're sitting on the line for long periods of time either "on hold" or effectively on-hold, while the person puts down the receiver and performs a few tasks and waits for the results, or while they make you wait while they handle some pressing thing that came up in the middle of your troubleshooting session. If you can do the support via a series of emails instead, you let both parties answer at their own pace and avoid running up LD charges for "dead air" over idle phone lines.
Ultimately, the reason most things are printed on paper is because it's still the cheapest method of distributing the content while also remaining zero cost for the end user to read it.
... so maybe electronic paper can solve this problem?)
No matter how advanced "eBooks" get, the end user still has to have the hardware in order to read the content, not to mention potential costs for replacement batteries, etc.
Electronic paper solves the requirement of special hardware on the end-user's side, but still can't be produced as cheaply as printing text or pictures on regular paper.
Billboards are a great example of a place where electronic paper would make sense though. You're already spending a considerable amount of money to print up a color advertisement of that size, plus paying for the labor for people to climb up on the billboard and strip off the previous paper ad, replacing it with the new one you paid for. If all of this was as easy to change as someone uploading the latest data to a billboard at a particular IP address on the net, it would speed up delivery times and cut costs for both advertiser and billboard owner.
(If you think about it, billboards would have gone to gigantic LCD panels or something long ago, if it was cost-effective to build displays of the required size. But it never has been
You mean like the way we can't get anyone to perform test flights to research airplane design changes anymore, because too many regular passengers take up all the seats on commercial aircraft?
Your fears are completely unfounded. If tourists buy up all the "time in space", larger spacecraft will be developed to accomodate the need to take extra passengers, or more craft will be built to run more flights at a time. NASA isn't going to just stop doing research because they've got too many civilians who will pay to go up in a shuttle.... It will just mean they'll end up doing seperate flights for commercial and for research purposes!
I call B.S. on this one. Seriously, ProTools may have the most recognized *name* in the recording industry, but that doesn't mean it's the most widely used product for the job. What tends to happen with ProTools is studios know it "rings a bell" with people when they hear it mentioned, so they always list it as a capability their studio offers. But in reality, the ProTools rig often sits collecting dust. It's not a bad product at all, but flexibility and technology wise, it's been eclipsed by other packages. The mere fact that it uses proprietary "plug ins" turns a lot of people off to it. There are some awesome plug-in f/x made to the .VST standard, or even to Apple's new Audio Units standard, and many people would rather use a product that natively handles those formats.
(Even if you're not a big CuBase or Logic Audio fan, what about DP4 for the Mac? You can use any of these products with whatever audio recording peripherals you like too, rather than just some "ProTools approved" hardware product.)
Well, I happen to *like* doing on-site computer service, and right now, spyware and virus infections are an unfortunate reality of the industry. Many times, I'm not even sure what's wrong with someone's machine until I actually arrive on-site and start looking at it. People just tell you things like "It crashes a lot." or "I can't get my printer to work." and that could be a hundred different problems.
The reason I point out my dislike of spyware removal jobs to customers is because I want them to be aware that all of us working as computer consultants or technicians aren't running around, overjoyed that this stuff is breaking computers and causing people grief. I had one guy, for example, who told me he suspected "computer techs like me actually *wrote* all this stuff so we could create work for ourselves". And you can hardly blame him for coming up with that notion.
The overall problem is, IM clients are weak and lacking in features for *all* non-Windows platforms! While I don't think I ever really felt a need for the ability to "nudge" the window of the person I'm chatting with or to shoot annoying Flash animations over to their screen - I *do* expect such things as basic voice or webcam conferencing ability to work. Just last week, I was on my Mac using OS X and the Adium chat client (which seems to generally be agreed upon as the best multi-protocol IM client available for Mac OS X at this time), and I wasn't able to view another person's webcam they had running via Yahoo chat. I shut down Adium and ran Yahoo Messenger for OS X, and was at least able to see their webcam that way, but the software was prone to crashing and shutting down at random, and it refused to enable my iSight camera for more than a fraction of a second before displaying it as "stopped" again. After some google searching, I discovered a *lot* of OS X users with the same problems, and an overall complaint that Yahoo seemed to be abandonning support for the Mac version of their client. (A number of people called in to tech. support and got the cold shoulder from Yahoo on these issues, as well as some other ones like security settings not really working right when you tell Yahoo IM you only want specific people to be able to view your webcam.)
Doing some more searching, I saw where several of the OS X IM clients (such as "Fire") had FAQ files posted to their web sites, and there were *always* questions like "When do you plan to start supporting video conferencing and webcams?" - and the answers were all about the same. "No support is planned at this time, although we're keeping an eye on several open source projects that are trying to reverse engineer the protocols used for them."
So much of this appears to be caused by the authors of the major Windows IM clients using proprietary protocols for the "extras" and then not caring if anyone else can figure out how to make them work on 3rd. party clients. Since you're not likely to see Yahoo or ICQ or anyone else putting equal effort into developing native Macintosh or Linux or BSD or other such clients, we're always left hanging out to dry, to an extent, for not using Windows.
What a crappy attitude! You're comment makes you look like an embarassment to I.T. I do get paid good money to clean up spyware/malware problems as part of my job. I do on-site PC service and consulting for a living. But like I tell lots of customers, I'd *much* rather being doing something else for my money. Frankly, it's boring, and sometimes even tedious work. Here you are, on the clock, waiting for several scanners to go through every single file and folder on their hard drives - and in some cases, doing a bunch of manual registry editing and searching too. Hours can easily go by, especially when the customer has a slower computer, and you're just praying the machine doesn't decide to freeze up in the middle of one of these scans, or else you've got to start it over from the beginning again! Meanwhile, you're starting to wonder how you're going to justify billing the person for all this time that's going by - when charging your normal hourly rate is starting to mean charging more than their system is even worth!
Just as I have no desire to join the mafia and extort money from people, I don't enjoy billing high rates to customers who were victimized by malware when all they're trying to do is struggle by on their 5 or 6 year old PC, reading their email and typing up papers.
In fact, I've often ended up trying to "do the right thing" and only charging them a more reasonable price, which meant I got seriously short-changed for my time spent. But I guess I just can't stomach the idea of taking some retired lady's entire pension for the month just because some asshat like 180 Solutions tossed their crap-ware on her computer when she thought she was just downloading a pretty waterfall screen saver or something.
I'm in total agreement. Except one little "nit-pick". Joining the EFF is probably the smartest move anyone can make with their campaign contribution dollars. But the ACLU? I hate to say it, but I think that group has a *lot* of people fooled. They're taking in huge amounts of yearly contributions, yet they don't seem to be able to show what they're doing with all the money. The causes they take up vs. the causes they won't pursue seem like they've got certain agendas besides just "ensuring every American citizens' civil liberties are protected". Sure, they do some high-profile things that I'm in complete agreement with - but it's telling which things they overlook too. (EG. If you're a typical middle class white suburban man and you get wronged by your local police because they choose to be lazy and not do their job investigating a crime committed against you, writing to the ACLU will get you nowhere. If, however, you happen to be an inner-city black woman who had the exact same thing happen to her, the ACLU is *much* more likely to lend a sympathetic ear and get after those police.)
I'm using beta 2 of FireFox in OS X right now, and the movie played in high resolution mode for me, including sound. Looked great in fact. (Using a dual 2.0Ghz PowerMac G5)
Well, before you go bashing Microsoft on this one, it's worth noting that "MS Anti-Spyware" is actually just a product purchased from Giant Software, and re-branded with the Microsoft logo. Giant Anti-Spyware was highly rated as being an effective "one stop removal tool" for viruses in corporate settings - and not long after it was release as version 1.0, Microsoft bought it from them.
(There's actually a strange licensing deal going on with the product too, because apparently, Sunbelt Software already licensed a version of Giant Anti-Spyware that can grab update signatures from a central server on a corporate network and allows centralized administration. So right now, Microsoft holds all the rights to the original single-workstation version, while Sunbelt holds the network/corporate LAN version rights. But once Sunbelt's license expires, who knows if they'll be able to do anything further with the product, or if Microsoft will just force them to discontinue selling it? Right now, Sunbelt's product has to download updates from the same server the MS Anti-Spyware uses.....)
But in any case, this product in it's current incarnation has practically no Microsoft developers' code in it.
I've considered this too, not being at all fond of the typical legal fees and lack of real work done for one's money in many cases.
... but for more serious accusations of criminal wrongdoing? When a judge is forced to hear out heated arguments between two bickering people, he or she is ultimately going to start feeling bias against whoever has the personality he/she finds more "inflammatory". Lawyers, at least, serve as disconnected individuals who can present the facts to a judge or jury without all the personal resentment towards the opposing party.
But there is a flip-side to your argument. How would you like to be a judge, having to sort out right from wrong in all of these court cases where both sides came in with no formal training in a "proper" way to present their cases? You'd end up with the type of circus you can wtiness on TV every day on all of the "People's Court" or "Judge Judy" type of shows. That's fine for small arguments like "He broke my washer and I want the $75 he owes me for the repair!"
Not really that exciting once you think about it.... It has a way to upload a log of its activity to a web site? All of my Unix servers can blog then too!
Well, before I trash Wired too badly, I have to say that I had a subscription ever since issue #2, until some time around early 2000, when I finally decided it "jumped the shark" and wasn't worth the space it was taking up on my bookshelf, much less the subscription price.
.com area millionaires, inflated I.T. salaries overall, and a tendency to glorify modern art and flashy/trendy doo-datd and gadgets poisoned Wired. The "fluff" became the "substance". The magazine got really thick in '99 with glossy full-page color ads for multi-thousand dollar designer watches, luxury cars and clothing. Then when it all came crashing down, the magazine went on a diet - losing about half of its thickness overnight. And quality never really came back..... You could comb a good article or two out of one, here or there. But it was best suited as something to download into your PDA for free using AvantGo, or via web links to specific articles of interest.
When it got started, I really enjoyed it. If nothing else, it seemed like most issues contained 1 really good interview with someone of importance in the tech. sector. It was the type of in-depth "we describe the person's character and workplace/home life in so much detail, you feel like you're watching this unfold on TV rather than reading" article, that really got them to make some statements that gave you insight into *why* they got where they were at that time, and where they thought their business was heading in the future. Plus, it had none of the editing you'd expect other mainstream rags would have done if they had conducted the same interview. (If the guy said "My main competitor fucked up!" - they printed it.)
They also seemed to be strong in scooping other science and tech. magazines on news about a new invention or interesting implementation of an existing technology (especially in medicine and biotech).
But it seemed like the combination of