Actually, I already own the majority of the music I want to listen to. Oh sure, something new comes out that I like every now and then -- but over 90% of what I want to hear, I already bought on cassette tape or CD in the past.
When I download MP3s from the net, I often grab the same songs I already bought once, on tape, because my cassettes are old and wearing out.
Other times, I grab individual songs I happen to like, from newer artists that haven't put out anything else that I was impressed with. No way I'm going to buy a whole CD just to get one good song unless I absolutely have to. That's not about me ripping off an artist; that's about the artist ripping me off!
Hmm... perhaps we'll just have to agree to disagree on this point. I really do think virus writers target Windows because it's what's popular.
Granted, you're right that this didn't become an issue in the days of Novell, but that has a lot to do with the fact that Internet connectivity was slim to none in those days, too. When most people ran Novell Netware, they did so on a closed network. Email didn't typically travel beyond the walls of the company.
I'll also agree that most MS products are "half-baked" and are prone to easy attack. Like I said in my original post, I'm far from being a Microsoft advocate. I'd like nothing more than to see our company move away from their overpriced and bloated products.
Still, I'd like to call the shots like they are. I think it's just unrealistic to say the virus threat wouldn't exist if people used a different platform. Quite a few virii are developed by an ex-employee who wants revenge on their employer. Obviously, they have to target the employer's OS of choice, which is Microsoft, 95% of the time. (Ok, I'm pulling this percentage out of thin air - but I don't think I'm *that* far off. How many businesses do you see that run something other than MS stuff on the desktops, for example?)
It seems to me, people sleep different lengths of time on different nights, depending on the circumstances.
For example, I caught a cold on Friday night. I slept for several hours more than usual on both Sat. and Sun. night. I probably could have gotten up sooner, but I chose to go back to sleep when I woke up once or twice, knowing that the extra rest would help me get over the cold more quickly.
The rest of last week though, I know I got less sleep than usual. I woke up tired each morning, and could barely get out of bed.
Well, if you take the *average* of all of this, I bet it shows that I slept approximately 7 to 7.5 hours per night. Therefore, I'd be doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing, according to this study. In reality, I probably got too little sleep all week long, causing me to get sick - and then tried to make up for it over the weekend. Not exactly a recommended sleep cycle!
Re: At least you have the monitoring idea right
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Peek-a-Boo(ty)
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· Score: 2
The biggest problem I see is management content to drop the whole Internet surfing problem in the lap of the I.T. department. What most I.T. workers are saying is "Hey, I want to spend my time taking care of the computer systems and network -- not becoming the Internet police."
It's the job of a manager to oversee his/her employees and make sure they're using their time efficiently. As I've always said, employees who want to waste time will find a million ways to do it. If you restrict them from surfing the net, they'll just talk to friends on the phone, or bring in a newspaper to read, or walk the halls with a cup of coffee and try to look busy.
I have no problem with putting the basics of an automated system in place to block known porn sites and other blatantly illegal sites. Just by doing that, you're showing you took measures to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace. I think most companies would like to be in a position to say they did that, if it ever came up in court.
Beyond that, I think it's wrong for managers of other departments to request/expect I.T. to "fill them in on what so-and-so is doing on the web", or to complain that something's not "locked down tight enough". If you know you have employees surfing where you don't want them surfing, take care of it yourself!
RE: Someday, I see this splitting up the net
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Peek-a-Boo(ty)
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· Score: 2
Already, we have the "Internet 2" project for researchers, so they can have their own Internet, free of commercial traffic and home users clogging things up with streaming video/audio and file downloads.
I see more of this coming. In the future, I predict businesses will get together and pay in to some sort of entity that builds (or promises to build) an independent Internet type network just for business purposes. If you're a porn provider or warez site, you simply won't qualify to be a part of this private network. The only question remaining is how many ties to the rest of the Internet will it have? It seems it has to have at least a few, because employees working from home will want to tunnel in via VPN to the workplace.
Not only are addresses harvested quickly, but it's amazing how often they'll use a brute-force attack. This is how some email spam ends up in new employee mailboxes.
I've seen it while administering our own Exchange server. They'll try all sorts of common name combinations (such as rsmith@, tsmith@, jsmith@, etc.) in the hopes that some of them exist.
They know your domain is valid - so they never lay off trying to stuff garbage in any valid boxes on the site they can hit.
I'm certainly not what anyone would describe as a "Windows supporter", other than the fact that I'm stuck supporting an MS environment for a living.
Still, I grow really tired of the assertions that "Windows users have to re-install the operating system at least 2-5 times per year", and "it wastes so much time finding device drivers", not to mention the "downtime due to worms and virii".
1. Unless you're still running a Microsoft OS that's at least 3 generations old, you should be long past the days of needing to wipe your drive and re-install the whole OS several times per year. We still run Windows NT 4.0 on over 200 PCs, and in the last year, I bet I only had to re-install the OS on 2 computers. (Both were cases where a developer had a whole mess of specialized apps installed, and did so many un-install/re-installs of programs on the box that they finally needed to start over fresh.)
We have easily over 100 PCs that are used every day with NT 4.0 which haven't needed to be touched in 3 years (except to upgrade software on them).
2. Apple plays their card games with a loaded deck. Of course you don't need to spend time locating device drivers for lots of devices on a Mac. You just do without the ability to use the peripheral on your Mac at all, until/unless Apple says it's "approved". If it takes me a couple hours to find a driver to make a specialized piece of hardware work on a PC, so what? It's a great investment of my time, if I just saved the company from buying yet another product to replace it.
3. Code red never affected us. Neither have any of the latest, nuch-hyped, email virii. Why? Because we put proper precautions in place a long time ago. We run a virus scanner on all incoming and outgoing email, and have a well-configured firewall in place. All workstations run a virus scanner as well, as do all file servers. If Apple was the predominant system used in business today, you'd see just as many virii and worms out there that were Mac specific. Apple doesn't have some sort of magic ability to thwart virus code!
Huh? Last I checked, any newer firmware revisions for the Apex 600a also removed the secret menu, and all of the cool functionality (like region changing and macrovision removal) which made it valuable to begin with.
The fact that you can get "surround out" does me no good. What I need is component audio outputs on the back. (6 independent RCA jacks; 2 for front speakers, 2 for rear speakers, 1 for center channel, and one for subwoofer)
The Samsung DVD-812 I bought as a replacement has this, and feels like a better quality player to boot. Best of all, it costs me less (new in opened box on eBay) than what I sold the 600a for.
Granted, I miss MP3 playing capabilities a little bit, but I'd rather just play them from my PC anyway (or burn the best songs to audio CDRs).
Great use for FreeDOS: Citrix ICA client!
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FreeDOS
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· Score: 2
I was recently searching for alternatives to purchasing new thin clients at work, when I ran across the FreeDOS project.
Right now, we run Citrix Metaframe on a "farm" of 6 servers, and employees do 90% of their work from within a Citrix ICA session. Most of their computers are 3+ year old Dell PCs, still running Windows NT 4.0, that have the Citrix "Program Neighborhood" software loaded on them.
Although some people will still need a full-blown PC running Windows because they use AutoCAD or other specialized software packages, the majority of our users just need basic applications that are available to them in Citrix.
We bought 20 Wyse thin clients, in a pilot project to replace older/unneeded PCs with them - but they haven't been too reliable. (I think 6 of the 20 have been back for repair after the first year - and Wyse takes over a month to ship repaired units back to us!) On top of that, they're not really that cost-effective, with the price of regular PCs dropping so low these days.
I realized I could "recycle" a bunch of our oldest PCs (even Pentium 100's!) by loading FreeDOS on them and using the DOS Citrix ICA client. Now, these old machines boot up in 10 seconds or so, right into a Windows 2000 desktop - served by Citrix, and they cost us nothing (besides a Windows terminal server connection license).
Now, the only issue I'm still left with is re-imaging. I tried using Symantec Ghost to make drive images of my FreeDOS/Citrix ICA installation - but when I Ghost it back to a system with a different size hard drive, sometimes it won't boot up. As far as I can tell, FreeDOS must save some type of information about the hard drive geometry in a file when you run a "SYS" command to make the drive bootable. Ghost must preserve this drive geometry data in the Ghost image, causing my problems. (If I boot from a bootable FreeDOS floppy and do a "SYS C:" on a freshly Ghosted drive that isn't booting, it works fine after that.)
Ultimately, you *have* to trust someone in order to complete an online transaction. I'm not really sure that it's so clear-cut that one person (say, a given escrow service) is more trustworthy than another (such as PayPal)?
In the past, I've heard of at least one instance where the escrow service suddenly closed up shop, keeping all of the customer goods and money that was held in escrow at that time, and disappeared.
Even more likely, what about the escrow service making a clerical error, causing you to lose your money and not receive your item?
I've always said it's best to keep the "middle-men" out of transactions, whenever possible - because it just adds more places for mistakes to be made.
I've used PayPal extensively, and I did have a problem once with them freezing my account, but it was rectified within a matter of 2 days after I emailed their customer service dept. Other than that, it's worked flawlessly for me - and so many people use it, it's currently the best way for me to receive quick payments for online sales.
Granted, I won't keep large amounts of money in PayPal, since they aren't FDIC insured. If you use them as a payment transfer service though, they're as good as anything else.
Bleah.... I sold my 600a recently, because it's inferior in a number of ways. Sure, the secret menu in the BIOS was way cool, but it can't output Dolby Surround component audio, which I need for my "Surround ready" receiver that doesn't do internal decoding of the signal.
The Apex also choked on a number of commercial DVD titles, due to bugs in their firmware. The MP3 player freaked out on some of my MP3 songs I burned to CDR that used a variable bit-rate. (They'd start playing at the wrong speed, and sounded like the Chipmunks.)
It's not so much a change in attitude favoring "cheapness over quality".
Instead, it's more of a societal interest in having whatever is the latest and greatest. High-tech electronics go from "cutting edge" to "old tech" in just a few years. Why bother engineering a DVD player to last 30 years when 99.9% of the customers will be using something completely different in half that time?
By contrast, the phonograph record was in use for over 70 years before anything really began to render it obsolete. (Sure, you had "open reel" tape, 8-track tape, and then cassette tape - but people were still buying and using records throughout all of these technologies.)
No, the problem here is the vagueness of your idea. A good idea must be specific.
"World peace" sounds great too, but ideas that are usable/marketable have to be much more specific.
If you have a well thought-out idea of how to accomplish the goal of building a 100% compatible Windows clone without infringing on existing copyrights - then you have something!
Well, as a matter of fact, it seems to be law in the U.S. that you're not even *allowed* to home-school your own kids unless at least one of you doing so has a bachelors degree. Therefore, unless you're married to someone who does - or you're getting outside assistance someplace, you're not legally allowed to home-school your children anyway.
Personally, I find this rather insulting. Government, once again, proposes to know better than the parents know what's best for the kids.
Hmm..... and you don't find it worrying that most people are content to send their kid off each day to an institution that caters to the lowest common denominator of each class, and has no vested interest in your own children's success?
We have our first kid on the way (8 more weeks or so), and we intend to do home-schooling too.
The educational system in the U.S. has become a pathetic joke (minus the occasional quality teacher, fighting to stay afloat in the murk).
The strongest point I've heard made against home-schooling is a social one - and I think any social issues can be better solved by enrolling your kid in extracurricular activities. Perhaps we'll interest our kid in scouts, among other things.
IMHO, this "problem" could be largely rectified by adding rules to the project.
Simply require that all Powerpoint presentations use original graphics, and teach the kids how to create new GIF, BMP, JPG (whatever) files using a freeware or shareware drawing package.
This little lesson applies to most modern software tools anyway. (For example, look at FrontPage for web design. Everyone who is serious about building a quality web site with FrontPage skips all of the default templates and starts with a blank page. Otherwise, you just get a cookie-cutter site that looks like thousands of others out there.)
If your primary objection to letting kids use a computer to build presentations is that it distracts them from the real focus of their work (a science course) - then I think the concern is unwarranted. It might initially do so, but after they learn that they're being graded on the material they present, and not on the "flash" and "glitter" of the presentation, they'll quickly learn to spend less effort on the unimportant parts.
Sure, your idea is great - but have you ever tried calling these non-profits or schools and asking if they want your old PC hardware?
I tried it once, when our work got rid of 50 or so older computers (Pentium 100 and 133 class machines). Everyone started giving me lists of requirements "must have this operating system loaded on it, and we need a word processor and spreadsheet on it too", or said "Sure, we'll take them off your hands, if you bring them over here and set them up for us. We don't have anyone who can come get them from you."
Gee... wonder why I ended up throwing them away instead....
I agree with your main point, but you say you've *never* been in a job interview that you thought was "torturous"? All I can say is count yourself very lucky!
I can remember several that were painful. One was at Mastercard, some years ago. I was being interviewed for a support position, but the portion of the interview related to my PC knowledge and troubleshooting skills was a 2 minute long thing where they sat me down in front of a Windows '95 PC and asked me how to "select a file" and "shut down the computer properly".
Then, I got escorted into a training room where I was given over an hour's worth of psychological exams, including this ridiculous "personality profile" where I was asked to circle adjectives that I thought described my behavior, and cross out ones that didn't describe me. (I was supposed to mark words in some other way if I didn't know what they meant, or thought they were made-up words.)
What the hell was that crap supposed to prove? Anyone with a little common sense could circle the words (like "motivated", for example) that management would like to see - and it would really have no bearing of whether or not the interviewee possessed those attributes!
Hmm... yeah, I tend to agree with you. As someone who currently has a patentable idea that we (my wife and I) would like to bring to market as a product in the next year or so, the whole issue interests me considerably.
From the research we did already to see if previous patents existed for our product idea, I could tell that most people filing patents are "fishing for lawsuits", as opposed to having a real interest in selling a product.
We didn't find anything that was exactly like our idea, but we found close to 10 patents for various methods of accomplishing pieces of what we needed to do in our product. Most made a vague mention of having a possible application in the general area of what we're trying to do. All of these patents were apparently thrown out there by tinkerers who made a single, crude attempt at performing a function with parts taken from the basement or garage - and then nothing more was ever done with them. Considering the cost of filing patents on them, I can only assume that they're hoping someone comes along and builds a successful product using a basic concept similar enough to theirs, so they can come out of the woodwork screaming "I have a lawyer! You owe me!"
It's depressing, really....
This is really just a piece of a larger issue.....
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Read the Fine Print
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Personally, I think this article was written just for the sake of sensationalism and to nit-pick at some details of a EULA. As it has been repeatedly pointed out, MS still asks you in Windows XP how you'd like to handle auto-updates. You can A) disable them completely, B) just have it alert you that a new update is available, and let you decide if you want to download it, or C) let MS auto-download them all to you. Some people (normally *home* users) would like to choose option C, so MS wanted to have a clause in their EULA allowing them to offer this option to you without legal issues coming up.
What's really going on here is a larger issue which has been around with *all* of the Microsoft products since day 1. Everything is still designed around what makes the individual home user happy. Corporate environments are much different. Security is tighter, and they're usually run in a more authoritarian manner. "We, the sysadmins, will tell you what you can and can't run on your PC."
Despite MS trying to develop two flavors of Windows XP (home and corporate), even the corporate edition is chock-full of potential security issues that are only there because they made concessions to what the home consumer would think was "cool" or "worth upgrading for". If their "Professional" edition was truly aimed at corporate America, they'd remove all of the Internet media playing crap, never even consider letting the product auto-update itself, remove the default installation of the MSN messenger, ditch most of the cutsie wizards, and stick with a more clear-cut security model. (Try sharing the root of your C: or D: drive out under Windows XP. All you get is a warning that it's risky, security-wise, followed by it asking if you still wish to do it. If you do, you're not even sure what sort of permissions it placed on that share - or whether or not it is allowing it only for the local LAN, or for the whole Internet.) At least Windows 2000 gave everything to you straight. You just clicked the security tab and saw which options were on and off. Makes much more sense than trying to "user-friendly up" the security with simplistic prompts and questions.
You know, I do play Galactic Battlegrounds, and it's fun - but it's also a blatant ripoff of Age of Empires II. Almost everything in the game is just an AOE2 unit converted to Star Wars graphics and sounds.
If I had to list all of the memorable RTS games in an article I wrote, I'd probably leave this one out on purpose - just because it's such a copycat of a true classic.
Re:Best RTS ever in my not so humble opinion...
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HIstory of RTS Games
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· Score: 2
Total Annihilation never worked very well for me.
When I used to go to LAN parties, we'd try to set up a game of T.A., and most of the time, it would blow up with errors right in the middle of the action, 15 or 20 minutes into playing.
It always seemed to work fine as a 2-player or stand-alone game, but it seemed to have major problems with handling higher levels of network traffic.
I was always disappointed it didn't work better though, because I agree -- it looked like one of the better real-time strategy games available at that time.
Right! That's the whole thing... The data is typically worth far more than the drive itself. The people doing these mods are generally gamers, who can simply re-install their OS and games if a drive fails on them. Considering the value some people get out of just working on a project of this sort, plus the "cool factor" of showing it off to their friends - a new drive that fails after 9 months or a year, due to contamination, is probably not a real issue.
Anyone who relies on an opened/modded hard drive to store files of importance, however, is being a fool.
Huh? I think you just contradicted yourself.
If you automatically have copyright to anything merely by writing it down, then I'm sure the author of the beta software can easily prove he holds the rights to his product.
This is very true, except what makes you think this might not be a topic worthy of some discussion amongst a computer and technology-savvy crowd?
I'm sure this guy is going to get a lawyer, if the issue can't be resolved through discussion with the other party. It's not a matter of people printing out Slashdot commentary and dragging it into the courtroom, as though it's legally binding.
He, quite simply, just wants to tell us about his problem and invite some discussion. Maybe gain some insight into what other people's results were if they had a similar sitation happen and already spent money on lawyers....
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I already own the majority of the music I want to listen to. Oh sure, something new comes out that I like every now and then -- but over 90% of what I want to hear, I already bought on cassette tape or CD in the past.
When I download MP3s from the net, I often grab the same songs I already bought once, on tape, because my cassettes are old and wearing out.
Other times, I grab individual songs I happen to like, from newer artists that haven't put out anything else that I was impressed with. No way I'm going to buy a whole CD just to get one good song unless I absolutely have to. That's not about me ripping off an artist; that's about the artist ripping me off!
Hmm... perhaps we'll just have to agree to disagree on this point. I really do think virus writers target Windows because it's what's popular.
Granted, you're right that this didn't become an issue in the days of Novell, but that has a lot to do with the fact that Internet connectivity was slim to none in those days, too. When most people ran Novell Netware, they did so on a closed network. Email didn't typically travel beyond the walls of the company.
I'll also agree that most MS products are "half-baked" and are prone to easy attack. Like I said in my original post, I'm far from being a Microsoft advocate. I'd like nothing more than to see our company move away from their overpriced and bloated products.
Still, I'd like to call the shots like they are. I think it's just unrealistic to say the virus threat wouldn't exist if people used a different platform. Quite a few virii are developed by an ex-employee who wants revenge on their employer. Obviously, they have to target the employer's OS of choice, which is Microsoft, 95% of the time. (Ok, I'm pulling this percentage out of thin air - but I don't think I'm *that* far off. How many businesses do you see that run something other than MS stuff on the desktops, for example?)
It seems to me, people sleep different lengths of time on different nights, depending on the circumstances.
For example, I caught a cold on Friday night. I slept for several hours more than usual on both Sat. and Sun. night. I probably could have gotten up sooner, but I chose to go back to sleep when I woke up once or twice, knowing that the extra rest would help me get over the cold more quickly.
The rest of last week though, I know I got less sleep than usual. I woke up tired each morning, and could barely get out of bed.
Well, if you take the *average* of all of this, I bet it shows that I slept approximately 7 to 7.5 hours per night. Therefore, I'd be doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing, according to this study. In reality, I probably got too little sleep all week long, causing me to get sick - and then tried to make up for it over the weekend. Not exactly a recommended sleep cycle!
The biggest problem I see is management content to drop the whole Internet surfing problem in the lap of the I.T. department. What most I.T. workers are saying is "Hey, I want to spend my time taking care of the computer systems and network -- not becoming the Internet police."
It's the job of a manager to oversee his/her employees and make sure they're using their time efficiently. As I've always said, employees who want to waste time will find a million ways to do it. If you restrict them from surfing the net, they'll just talk to friends on the phone, or bring in a newspaper to read, or walk the halls with a cup of coffee and try to look busy.
I have no problem with putting the basics of an automated system in place to block known porn sites and other blatantly illegal sites. Just by doing that, you're showing you took measures to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace. I think most companies would like to be in a position to say they did that, if it ever came up in court.
Beyond that, I think it's wrong for managers of other departments to request/expect I.T. to "fill them in on what so-and-so is doing on the web", or to complain that something's not "locked down tight enough". If you know you have employees surfing where you don't want them surfing, take care of it yourself!
Already, we have the "Internet 2" project for researchers, so they can have their own Internet, free of commercial traffic and home users clogging things up with streaming video/audio and file downloads.
I see more of this coming. In the future, I predict businesses will get together and pay in to some sort of entity that builds (or promises to build) an independent Internet type network just for business purposes. If you're a porn provider or warez site, you simply won't qualify to be a part of this private network. The only question remaining is how many ties to the rest of the Internet will it have? It seems it has to have at least a few, because employees working from home will want to tunnel in via VPN to the workplace.
Not only are addresses harvested quickly, but it's amazing how often they'll use a brute-force attack. This is how some email spam ends up in new employee mailboxes.
I've seen it while administering our own Exchange server. They'll try all sorts of common name combinations (such as rsmith@, tsmith@, jsmith@, etc.) in the hopes that some of them exist.
They know your domain is valid - so they never lay off trying to stuff garbage in any valid boxes on the site they can hit.
I'm certainly not what anyone would describe as a "Windows supporter", other than the fact that I'm stuck supporting an MS environment for a living.
Still, I grow really tired of the assertions that "Windows users have to re-install the operating system at least 2-5 times per year", and "it wastes so much time finding device drivers", not to mention the "downtime due to worms and virii".
1. Unless you're still running a Microsoft OS that's at least 3 generations old, you should be long past the days of needing to wipe your drive and re-install the whole OS several times per year. We still run Windows NT 4.0 on over 200 PCs, and in the last year, I bet I only had to re-install the OS on 2 computers. (Both were cases where a developer had a whole mess of specialized apps installed, and did so many un-install/re-installs of programs on the box that they finally needed to start over fresh.)
We have easily over 100 PCs that are used every day with NT 4.0 which haven't needed to be touched in 3 years (except to upgrade software on them).
2. Apple plays their card games with a loaded deck. Of course you don't need to spend time locating device drivers for lots of devices on a Mac. You just do without the ability to use the peripheral on your Mac at all, until/unless Apple says it's "approved". If it takes me a couple hours to find a driver to make a specialized piece of hardware work on a PC, so what? It's a great investment of my time, if I just saved the company from buying yet another product to replace it.
3. Code red never affected us. Neither have any of the latest, nuch-hyped, email virii. Why? Because we put proper precautions in place a long time ago. We run a virus scanner on all incoming and outgoing email, and have a well-configured firewall in place. All workstations run a virus scanner as well, as do all file servers. If Apple was the predominant system used in business today, you'd see just as many virii and worms out there that were Mac specific. Apple doesn't have some sort of magic ability to thwart virus code!
Huh? Last I checked, any newer firmware revisions for the Apex 600a also removed the secret menu, and all of the cool functionality (like region changing and macrovision removal) which made it valuable to begin with.
The fact that you can get "surround out" does me no good. What I need is component audio outputs on the back. (6 independent RCA jacks; 2 for front speakers, 2 for rear speakers, 1 for center channel, and one for subwoofer)
The Samsung DVD-812 I bought as a replacement has this, and feels like a better quality player to boot. Best of all, it costs me less (new in opened box on eBay) than what I sold the 600a for.
Granted, I miss MP3 playing capabilities a little bit, but I'd rather just play them from my PC anyway (or burn the best songs to audio CDRs).
I was recently searching for alternatives to purchasing new thin clients at work, when I ran across the FreeDOS project.
Right now, we run Citrix Metaframe on a "farm" of 6 servers, and employees do 90% of their work from within a Citrix ICA session. Most of their computers are 3+ year old Dell PCs, still running Windows NT 4.0, that have the Citrix "Program Neighborhood" software loaded on them.
Although some people will still need a full-blown PC running Windows because they use AutoCAD or other specialized software packages, the majority of our users just need basic applications that are available to them in Citrix.
We bought 20 Wyse thin clients, in a pilot project to replace older/unneeded PCs with them - but they haven't been too reliable. (I think 6 of the 20 have been back for repair after the first year - and Wyse takes over a month to ship repaired units back to us!) On top of that, they're not really that cost-effective, with the price of regular PCs dropping so low these days.
I realized I could "recycle" a bunch of our oldest PCs (even Pentium 100's!) by loading FreeDOS on them and using the DOS Citrix ICA client. Now, these old machines boot up in 10 seconds or so, right into a Windows 2000 desktop - served by Citrix, and they cost us nothing (besides a Windows terminal server connection license).
Now, the only issue I'm still left with is re-imaging. I tried using Symantec Ghost to make drive images of my FreeDOS/Citrix ICA installation - but when I Ghost it back to a system with a different size hard drive, sometimes it won't boot up. As far as I can tell, FreeDOS must save some type of information about the hard drive geometry in a file when you run a "SYS" command to make the drive bootable. Ghost must preserve this drive geometry data in the Ghost image, causing my problems. (If I boot from a bootable FreeDOS floppy and do a "SYS C:" on a freshly Ghosted drive that isn't booting, it works fine after that.)
Ultimately, you *have* to trust someone in order to complete an online transaction. I'm not really sure that it's so clear-cut that one person (say, a given escrow service) is more trustworthy than another (such as PayPal)?
In the past, I've heard of at least one instance where the escrow service suddenly closed up shop, keeping all of the customer goods and money that was held in escrow at that time, and disappeared.
Even more likely, what about the escrow service making a clerical error, causing you to lose your money and not receive your item?
I've always said it's best to keep the "middle-men" out of transactions, whenever possible - because it just adds more places for mistakes to be made.
I've used PayPal extensively, and I did have a problem once with them freezing my account, but it was rectified within a matter of 2 days after I emailed their customer service dept. Other than that, it's worked flawlessly for me - and so many people use it, it's currently the best way for me to receive quick payments for online sales.
Granted, I won't keep large amounts of money in PayPal, since they aren't FDIC insured. If you use them as a payment transfer service though, they're as good as anything else.
Bleah.... I sold my 600a recently, because it's inferior in a number of ways. Sure, the secret menu in the BIOS was way cool, but it can't output Dolby Surround component audio, which I need for my "Surround ready" receiver that doesn't do internal decoding of the signal.
The Apex also choked on a number of commercial DVD titles, due to bugs in their firmware. The MP3 player freaked out on some of my MP3 songs I burned to CDR that used a variable bit-rate. (They'd start playing at the wrong speed, and sounded like the Chipmunks.)
It's not so much a change in attitude favoring "cheapness over quality".
Instead, it's more of a societal interest in having whatever is the latest and greatest. High-tech electronics go from "cutting edge" to "old tech" in just a few years. Why bother engineering a DVD player to last 30 years when 99.9% of the customers will be using something completely different in half that time?
By contrast, the phonograph record was in use for over 70 years before anything really began to render it obsolete. (Sure, you had "open reel" tape, 8-track tape, and then cassette tape - but people were still buying and using records throughout all of these technologies.)
No, the problem here is the vagueness of your idea. A good idea must be specific.
"World peace" sounds great too, but ideas that are usable/marketable have to be much more specific.
If you have a well thought-out idea of how to accomplish the goal of building a 100% compatible Windows clone without infringing on existing copyrights - then you have something!
Well, as a matter of fact, it seems to be law in the U.S. that you're not even *allowed* to home-school your own kids unless at least one of you doing so has a bachelors degree. Therefore, unless you're married to someone who does - or you're getting outside assistance someplace, you're not legally allowed to home-school your children anyway.
Personally, I find this rather insulting. Government, once again, proposes to know better than the parents know what's best for the kids.
Alas, it's the law...
Hmm..... and you don't find it worrying that most people are content to send their kid off each day to an institution that caters to the lowest common denominator of each class, and has no vested interest in your own children's success?
We have our first kid on the way (8 more weeks or so), and we intend to do home-schooling too.
The educational system in the U.S. has become a pathetic joke (minus the occasional quality teacher, fighting to stay afloat in the murk).
The strongest point I've heard made against home-schooling is a social one - and I think any social issues can be better solved by enrolling your kid in extracurricular activities. Perhaps we'll interest our kid in scouts, among other things.
IMHO, this "problem" could be largely rectified by adding rules to the project.
Simply require that all Powerpoint presentations use original graphics, and teach the kids how to create new GIF, BMP, JPG (whatever) files using a freeware or shareware drawing package.
This little lesson applies to most modern software tools anyway. (For example, look at FrontPage for web design. Everyone who is serious about building a quality web site with FrontPage skips all of the default templates and starts with a blank page. Otherwise, you just get a cookie-cutter site that looks like thousands of others out there.)
If your primary objection to letting kids use a computer to build presentations is that it distracts them from the real focus of their work (a science course) - then I think the concern is unwarranted. It might initially do so, but after they learn that they're being graded on the material they present, and not on the "flash" and "glitter" of the presentation, they'll quickly learn to spend less effort on the unimportant parts.
Sure, your idea is great - but have you ever tried calling these non-profits or schools and asking if they want your old PC hardware?
I tried it once, when our work got rid of 50 or so older computers (Pentium 100 and 133 class machines). Everyone started giving me lists of requirements "must have this operating system loaded on it, and we need a word processor and spreadsheet on it too", or said "Sure, we'll take them off your hands, if you bring them over here and set them up for us. We don't have anyone who can come get them from you."
Gee... wonder why I ended up throwing them away instead....
I agree with your main point, but you say you've *never* been in a job interview that you thought was "torturous"? All I can say is count yourself very lucky!
I can remember several that were painful. One was at Mastercard, some years ago. I was being interviewed for a support position, but the portion of the interview related to my PC knowledge and troubleshooting skills was a 2 minute long thing where they sat me down in front of a Windows '95 PC and asked me how to "select a file" and "shut down the computer properly".
Then, I got escorted into a training room where I was given over an hour's worth of psychological exams, including this ridiculous "personality profile" where I was asked to circle adjectives that I thought described my behavior, and cross out ones that didn't describe me. (I was supposed to mark words in some other way if I didn't know what they meant, or thought they were made-up words.)
What the hell was that crap supposed to prove? Anyone with a little common sense could circle the words (like "motivated", for example) that management would like to see - and it would really have no bearing of whether or not the interviewee possessed those attributes!
Hmm... yeah, I tend to agree with you. As someone who currently has a patentable idea that we (my wife and I) would like to bring to market as a product in the next year or so, the whole issue interests me considerably.
From the research we did already to see if previous patents existed for our product idea, I could tell that most people filing patents are "fishing for lawsuits", as opposed to having a real interest in selling a product.
We didn't find anything that was exactly like our idea, but we found close to 10 patents for various methods of accomplishing pieces of what we needed to do in our product. Most made a vague mention of having a possible application in the general area of what we're trying to do. All of these patents were apparently thrown out there by tinkerers who made a single, crude attempt at performing a function with parts taken from the basement or garage - and then nothing more was ever done with them. Considering the cost of filing patents on them, I can only assume that they're hoping someone comes along and builds a successful product using a basic concept similar enough to theirs, so they can come out of the woodwork screaming "I have a lawyer! You owe me!"
It's depressing, really....
Personally, I think this article was written just for the sake of sensationalism and to nit-pick at some details of a EULA. As it has been repeatedly pointed out, MS still asks you in Windows XP how you'd like to handle auto-updates. You can A) disable them completely, B) just have it alert you that a new update is available, and let you decide if you want to download it, or C) let MS auto-download them all to you. Some people (normally *home* users) would like to choose option C, so MS wanted to have a clause in their EULA allowing them to offer this option to you without legal issues coming up.
What's really going on here is a larger issue which has been around with *all* of the Microsoft products since day 1. Everything is still designed around what makes the individual home user happy. Corporate environments are much different. Security is tighter, and they're usually run in a more authoritarian manner. "We, the sysadmins, will tell you what you can and can't run on your PC."
Despite MS trying to develop two flavors of Windows XP (home and corporate), even the corporate edition is chock-full of potential security issues that are only there because they made concessions to what the home consumer would think was "cool" or "worth upgrading for". If their "Professional" edition was truly aimed at corporate America, they'd remove all of the Internet media playing crap, never even consider letting the product auto-update itself, remove the default installation of the MSN messenger, ditch most of the cutsie wizards, and stick with a more clear-cut security model. (Try sharing the root of your C: or D: drive out under Windows XP. All you get is a warning that it's risky, security-wise, followed by it asking if you still wish to do it. If you do, you're not even sure what sort of permissions it placed on that share - or whether or not it is allowing it only for the local LAN, or for the whole Internet.) At least Windows 2000 gave everything to you straight. You just clicked the security tab and saw which options were on and off. Makes much more sense than trying to "user-friendly up" the security with simplistic prompts and questions.
You know, I do play Galactic Battlegrounds, and it's fun - but it's also a blatant ripoff of Age of Empires II. Almost everything in the game is just an AOE2 unit converted to Star Wars graphics and sounds.
If I had to list all of the memorable RTS games in an article I wrote, I'd probably leave this one out on purpose - just because it's such a copycat of a true classic.
Total Annihilation never worked very well for me.
When I used to go to LAN parties, we'd try to set up a game of T.A., and most of the time, it would blow up with errors right in the middle of the action, 15 or 20 minutes into playing.
It always seemed to work fine as a 2-player or stand-alone game, but it seemed to have major problems with handling higher levels of network traffic.
I was always disappointed it didn't work better though, because I agree -- it looked like one of the better real-time strategy games available at that time.
Right! That's the whole thing... The data is typically worth far more than the drive itself. The people doing these mods are generally gamers, who can simply re-install their OS and games if a drive fails on them. Considering the value some people get out of just working on a project of this sort, plus the "cool factor" of showing it off to their friends - a new drive that fails after 9 months or a year, due to contamination, is probably not a real issue.
Anyone who relies on an opened/modded hard drive to store files of importance, however, is being a fool.
Huh? I think you just contradicted yourself.
If you automatically have copyright to anything merely by writing it down, then I'm sure the author of the beta software can easily prove he holds the rights to his product.
This is very true, except what makes you think this might not be a topic worthy of some discussion amongst a computer and technology-savvy crowd?
I'm sure this guy is going to get a lawyer, if the issue can't be resolved through discussion with the other party. It's not a matter of people printing out Slashdot commentary and dragging it into the courtroom, as though it's legally binding.
He, quite simply, just wants to tell us about his problem and invite some discussion. Maybe gain some insight into what other people's results were if they had a similar sitation happen and already spent money on lawyers....