I can see a lot of truth in many of the comments posted here.
I know one of the problem I continually face is in trying to let my kid "go out in the real world and BE a kid". Personally, I'm a big proponent of what Penn & Teller were trying to say in one of their episodes of "Bullshit".... that the world is NOT more dangerous for kids today than it was in previous generations. In fact, statistically, it's more probable that your kid will randomly be struck by lightning than become a victim of a predator, while playing outside. But my own beliefs and opinions don't dictate what the rest of the community believes either.
As one example, my girlfriend's 3 year old wanted to play outside, a few weeks ago. We live on a dead-end street, where there are at least 4 other families around with young kids. In fact, the people next-door to us have a 3 year old who loves playing with her 3 year old. So she let her go play, since my daughter and her 6 year old son were already playing outside anyway. Seems reasonable enough, right?
Well, not more than 10 minutes later, I get a frantic knocking on my front door. One of the neighbors a few houses down was basically demanding I run out and get her kid, because she was standing outside, on the sidewalk, in front of his house, with no other kids around! When I went to get her, she looked a bit puzzled, and didn't even want to come back in. She was simply standing around because she WANTED to, and was in no danger I could see. (Apparently, the 6 and 7 year olds decided to play in a neighbor's back yard, and didn't want her to go with them since she was "too young" to play whatever they were playing.)
This isn't the first time I've dealt with this sort of thing, either. On several previous occasions, my kid was outside playing, only to be taken by the hand, by an angry parent, and led up to my doorstep. Basically, they tried to tell me I was being irresponsible, because I let my kid play outside and their kid(s) had to go in for dinner, or because they were leaving to go someplace, or what-not. It never occurred to them it might actually be OK for my daughter to walk up and down our street and find her own way back home, when she wanted to come home!
This is in a low-crime, middle-class suburb, mind you.... I do find it interesting that when I used to live in a rougher, lower-income part of town, I *never* saw these issues. Whether it was because parents were too busy to be bothered with hovering over their kids constantly, or because they just had more common sense and less fear of the "real world", I don't know? But kids of all ages played outside, both during the day and even after dark, on a street that WASN'T dead-end and had no sidewalks -- and everyone got along just fine.
Heh... maybe not much, if you consider the old *analog* TV format was uncompressed and used a lot more of the frequency spectrum than digital TV does.... If you wanted to actually try to measure the "bandwidth consumed" of watching analog over-the-air television broadcasts, I bet the number would be up there.
I beg to differ with the +4 Insightful rating people gave your comment!
First of all, almost nobody in I.T. is "irreplaceable". They just get enough of an ego built up over time to THINK they are. You can spend a decade creating unique, one-off solutions to a company's problems, but if and when they decide it's time for you to go -- they'll assign the next guy with the task of revamping all that "custom, hacked-together stuff". In fact, your replacement will very likely despise and curse the undocumented, undecipherable mess of code you created, and it will serve as *motivation* for him to come up with different solutions. He may well even get promotions when they hold technical meetings and he explains how he "upgraded" things with well documented and easier to support alternatives.
I agree that *many* organizations put all the money into "management" and the tree branches that way. That doesn't mean ALL businesses do. In fact, that's one of the things I liked about working for the right small business. They tend not to even have available positions to "promote" people into, if you're doing a good job for them at what you were hired for. For example, you may well be the ONLY full-time I.T. salaried employee they've got. So they're happy to keep giving you raises without a requirement a new management title goes with it first. Or their I.T. department may be small, but full of people with good experience. Eventually, you might become the leader of that group and be handed a title with the word "Manager" in it -- but you're still part of that group, working with the same co-workers as before.
Yep! This is really, and has always been, the bottom line. They found that throwing words around like "unlimited!" nets them a lot of subscribers. And as long as they keep signing up people who don't use their Internet connections too often, it works out well for them.
The problem is, the "average user" is starting to discover more bandwidth-intensive things he/she wants to do with a given Internet connection. A few years ago, only a few "hard core" enthusiasts would have really considered trying to download all their TV shows to watch offline, vs. obtaining them some other way. Now? It's becoming "expected" to be able to catch your favorite shows as live streams via Hulu or other such services, and MANY people are well aware of how to torrent for shows.
The "law of averages" that used to dictate that "for every REAL user of our broadband connection, we've got at least 5 who only use it to check email and view a few web pages" is changing. Their "average user" is using up a lot more bandwidth, and their "big users" are reaching the point of having their connections saturated 24 hours/7 days as they leave servers up all the time to share files.
Even people who are only occasional users of their PC on the net are buying devices like iPhones, that also use their wi-fi connection at home... so it gives them more opportunities to use that same connection.
And yeah, I think they're going to try to start selling connections with monthly gigabyte xfer limits attached to them... but the public won't accept that without a fight. Like you say, Google might see a chance to step in at that point and shake things up... or users might even start using wireless repeaters to bypass the ISP completely and build their own ad-hoc networks. I could see it working sort of like the old BBS days, where people had networks like Fidonet and WWIVnet set up to get messages delivered all over the world by hopping them from point to point, until they reached their destination... except this would happen at 802.11g or n speeds and involve peer to peer file sharing among all the participants, in a private network.....
I remember RedHat kind of slipping from their "glory days" as the highest profile Linux distributor out there. Many people were woo'ed away by the "latest and greatest" or "more user-friendly" features in distros like Mandrake or Ubuntu, and certainly, there was a philosophical difference where some people simply supported the Debian package manager format and were anti-RPM, too.
But that doesn't change the fact that RedHat kept plugging right along, employing deserving software developers and turning out a solid, respectable product.
You don't have to amaze people with "incredible new ideas!" all the time to be a "good company". You just need to treat your employees fairly, offer products that do what they advertise, price your products reasonably, and keep up a tradition of supporting them well.
I think some of the other people posting here hit on the most likely scenario.... If VoIP ever becomes the "standard" for voice telephony, it's highly improbable they'd just run it over your ISP of choice, as you do with VoIP today.
Part of the "secret" to achieving rock solid reliability is to control the entire infrastructure the technology runs on. AT&T does that now with POTS, and they won't want to give a big part of that up if things transition over to VoIP.
So what would probably happen is, they'd provide you with VoIP that only happens on the "back end", in their central offices. You'd use the same phones and it would give the appearance of being the plain old telephone service you've had all along. They wouldn't expect you to maintain a "terminal adapter" that has to be properly configured and piggybacked off of your router or cable/DSL/satellite modem or what-not.
With this arrangement, they'd take care of having redundant Internet connections to/from their central offices, and ensure that your calls still go through, regardless of what happens to your own personal Internet broadband connection at home.
This is exactly the quote I keyed in on, that I think explains it all.
I ran into the same type of fiasco at my workplace, last year, when we looked into replacing our paper time cards with a computerized system. Initially, the argument for doing it was "it'll save money on all the paper cards, storage of them in boxes for years, and stops cheating the system when employees punch their buddy's cards for them". Great! So I researched the options and found many workable solutions, including an ethernet-connected fingerprint reader and a card swiping type of reader that fed data back to software on a back-end PC.
But before a purchase was approved, management latched onto the whole project and decided, "Hey, if we're going to track people's clocking in and out on the computer, we should tie this into our whole accounting system and make something that lets us track exactly how long they spend on specific jobs we ask them to do! Let them punch in codes to define the cost center of whatever project they're currently doing, and then we can make GREAT reports that show us how efficient we are at various tasks!" Next thing you know, it turned into a nightmare. User-friendliness of the system suddenly plummeted. (What union shop worker do you know who would be happy to look up or memorize dozens of cost center codes and keep running back to a keypad, swiping his/her card and keying in the correct codes for each little job he/she does? And who is going to cross-check all those entries to be sure they're even entering correct data?) The cost of implementing it skyrocketed too, because all of a sudden, you're looking at having card readers/keypads placed near all the places people might be working. You can't have them hike half way across the shop floor just to swipe a card and enter a code because they're done sawing pipes, and want to move on to drilling holes in beams, right? That meant running cat5 cabling all through the shop for the readers, etc.
In the end, the whole project was scrapped due to "high cost of implementation" and "inadequate software for handling our reporting needs". Just as well, really....
My mom is a retired R.N. and she's friends with quite a few older doctors out there. One of the big complaints she's heard repeatedly from them is, hospitals are starting to demand they get on-board with using their computer systems. If they refuse, and want to keep track of things on pen and paper, or using their own favorite methods, the hospital simply bars them from working there anymore.
So the computer illiterate doctors are often voluntarily retiring, rather than deal with the learning curve this late into their careers. A few just run their private practice and stay out of the hospitals, so they can do things the "old fashioned way" for a few more years until they're ready to retire.
Sure... it's ridiculous to think that offering the opportunity to be "on call" 24 hours/7days has "no value", but it's just as ridiculous to think you're supposed to get paid for all the downtime when you're NOT doing any support, simply because you carried the phone around or sat it by your nightstand while you slept.
The way this has always been handled in the I.T. world, based on every experience I've ever encountered -- the employee is simply paid a higher wage/salary because being "on call" is bundled into his/her list of responsibilities. If you're a contractor getting paid hourly? Then you boost the hourly pay for the 40 hours or whatever you're asking them to put in, with the understanding that the "on call" duties are being thrown in as part of what they expect to receive for the better regular pay.
Truthfully though, I don't see why a company would go the contractor route, vs. salaried employee, for someone carrying a phone and asked to be "on call" outside regular business hours? It's far easier to get an actual employee, with some vested interest in the company's long-term success, to be willing to take those calls at odd hours. Contractors are always watching the clock, and ultimately, they don't care if a particular company really succeeds or fails because they can always get re-assigned elsewhere.
Well, I've maintained for decades now that "piracy" is actually a "normal" condition, and expected behavior, given the circumstances. There is so much intellectual property out there (with more being creating CONSTANTLY), it's simply a case where the creator of any one work just can't expect or demand ALL people who make use of their content to go through legal channels and purchase it at the asking price.
It seems to me that the desire to "maximize profits" (greed, essentially) is the only reason they keep trying to strike at anyone deemed to be a "key player" in redistributing copyrighted works illegally. But even if they succeeded in taking down ALL of the torrent sites that offered any copyrighted material and all of the web sites offering direct downloads of same, and even every ftp site they could locate.... it wouldn't change the individual's belief that it's "ok" to make a free copy of a piece of intellectual property here or there, as he/she wants one and has ready access to copy it.
I'm not so sure there's that much "educating" that still needs to be done here? Sure, SOME people probably don't really understand the issues at all.. but they're probably not the ones at the heart of the problem either, right?
It seems to me that most people have a pretty good (if only basic) understanding of what's going on. We all "get" that authors of works wish to be compensated fairly for them. The thing is though? We generally believe they already ARE getting fair compensation, DESPITE all the "rampant piracy" going on. Everyone I know who one could accuse of "pirating a lot of material" is also BUYING a lot of material. The people interested enough in music to download albums off Usenet or P2P sharing networks and build up a library ALSO tend to own hundreds of purchased CDs and go to concerts. The big "software pirates" often spend FAR more than the typical consumer on computer-related goods and often even have jobs in the industry where they make key decisions of purchasing of corporate software licenses. And I think as time goes on, you're going to find the same thing with the e-books.... People managing to pirate book content for their Kindles or other readers tend to be avid book readers who own a huge collection of dead-tree publications.
Personally? I tend to think the answer lies not in trying to leverage the legal system to "strong arm" more people into paying, but by offering quality content at a good price - and ACCEPTING the fact that it's "ok and normal" for there to be "one illegal copy in use for each one someone buys from you". Most of us have to put in 8 hours of work each and every day to keep bringing in a paycheck. Content creators have it better than most of us, because once they put in X amount of time on a work and complete it, it keeps generating money for them for a period of time far longer than the time-frame they actually spent creating it.
And if you ask me? As much as anything, this illustrates why the nation's broadband infrastructure is sadly inadequate....
What are you supposed to do in many of these locations as an alternate to a DSL circuit? Dial backup with 56K modem, I suppose? Oh yeah, THAT will run great with today's bandwidth-saturating apps.
Oh, perhaps they should spend the money for satellite Internet at each location then? Big up-front equipment and setup expense for something with high latency and relatively high monthly costs that has plenty of service interruption issues of its own (bad weather, etc.).
Seriously, *many* businesses today (like the one I work for now) are getting royally screwed, paying upwards of $700 a month for a lousy 1.5 to 3mbit T1 circuit, simply because no other options really exist. By comparison, if we only happened to be located a few miles closer to an existing cable installation, we could get Charter cable's broadband in here with download speeds of up to 100mbit (and far better upload speeds than our T1 gives us!) for about $150 per month.
Agreed.... The fact that you can point to even worse situations or living conditions somewhere doesn't mean the fictional world being described in a book like 1984 or Brave New World is any less disturbing or "bad".
In fact, one can often infer that even in those fictional worlds, there are probably still places where people have things worse off than in the cities they're describing.
Huh? The payphone IS dying off, and is practically on its death bed. The fact is, they cost more to produce and maintain than they're worth, once a critical number of people opt to quit pumping coins into them. So many people DO have cellphones these days, the ones left who still want to use a payphone don't put enough cash into one to justify its existence.
Additionally, in many big cities, the payphones that remain tend to get used primarily for drug deals and other illegal activities. (People like the anonymous nature of them.) That means, stores and other establishments don't WANT payphones on their premises - because it draws the wrong type of people.
Really, if you don't want or can't afford a cellphone (even one of those throw-away cells with a pre-paid plan), it's getting to where you can go into most businesses and simply ask if you can borrow the phone, and they're happy to let you use it for free, to make a quick call. In the past, there was always a fear that you'd call some expensive long-distance number if they let you use it... but that's another issue that's quickly becoming a non-issue. Most VoIP plans give you unlimited long distance to several countries, and a number of monthly minutes of free calls anyplace else in the world. Those not on VoIP still often have dirt cheap LD plans these days, compared to what they used to charge. (I think my work's plan, for example, is about 2 1/2 cents per minute.)
Dystopian science fiction is some of my favorite to read or watch in movie form. Everything from 1984 and Brave New World (soon to be made into a movie, last I heard, with Leonardo DeCapprio signed on to play a role) to Minority Report.... None of these really paint a rosy picture of the future, or pretend that we've found some gigantic new energy source.
The plausible future might suck, but good writers can make entertaining stories about that, just as well as they can write "happy, feel-good" stories about our great success.
Well, true, *except*, there's the factor of how well you engineer your prototype before you turn it over to the Chinese factory for production, and how much of a stickler for detail you're going to be as your product is produced.
As I understand it, working with Chinese factories requires taking micro-management to new levels, if you want a quality product as the end result. If you don't spec out every last little detail, they'll pick through it and find places to do substitutions to increase their profit margins. "Oh, he uses a 10 microfarad capacitor here? Well, he didn't specify a certain brand. Lets use this cheap one our sister factory makes and save half a cent on each one!" Next thing you know, your product is having more failures than you anticipated and it turns out to be that one lousy capacitor at fault....
That's just a made-up example, but you get the general idea. There are probably all sorts of little details about how long a circuit board should sit in the solder bath, or how long something should cool before it gets painted or has another process applied to it... all kinds of things that can affect the long-term quality of a product. Traditionally in a U.S. based factory, a lot of that might have gone without saying. You figure "they do this process all the time, and know how to do the job for me". But you can't make such assumptions of the Chinese factories.
Not sure what type of I.T. support you do, but could your experiences be a bit limited because you work in corporate I.T. where only certain brands and models were purchased in any quantity?
I've done quite a bit of on-site service for people, and my experiences line up fairly accurately with some of this. I definitely see a *lot* of HP notebook failures out there. Dell always seemed to me like they build "hit and miss" products. It's a crap-shoot with them, essentially. They've produced some of the most durable and reliable laptops out there, and turned around and produced some total duds that practically ALL had failures in a 2 year time-frame. You can't really make blanket statements about Dell because depending on when you analyze the data, they're going to look really good, somewhere right in the middle, or really bad.
I used to like Toshiba products, but I've come to realize that they have a pretty high long-term failure rate. Satellites, especially, seem to suffer from a large number of motherboard issues. (Ever run across one that lets you power it on but powers right back off after 2 seconds or so? Usually a bad motherboard, and I run into it pretty often.) A buddy of mine had a Toshiba Qosmio (high-end media centric model) that died like that just out of the factory warranty period. Luckily, Toshiba had a "silent recall" on that one, which we found out about online. He was able to call in, demand they repair it under said recall, and get it fixed free -- but only after getting past a 1st. level tech. on the phone who wanted to charge him for the repair and denied knowledge of any recall.....
I haven't had real good experiences with Sony laptops either, all in all. It seems like they build really attractive and sleek machines, but they break fairly easily.
I was a bit surprised that Lenovo didn't rate better. I know their quality has gone downhill from back when IBM owned the Thinkpad line (and they weren't assembled in China). but they still seem to take a lot of design cues from the IBM days, and as a result, seem fairly well-built. They tend to have fewer "bells and whistles" than some models too, so less stuff to go wrong.
And Apple? I have a lot of experience with their notebooks. They do need warranty service occasionally. The idea that "they practically never break!" is kind of a myth. I mean, they do use the same hard drives and displays as everyone else.... But I've had better than average results getting an Apple notebook serviced by Apple while under warranty, and I think more people buy the AppleCare warranties on them up-front. If you have an issue and Apple overnights you a return mailer box to put it in, fixes it in 1 day, and overnights it back, how annoyed are you going to be about the problem vs. the guy with some other laptop that has to wait WEEKS for a repair? That's what helps Apple keep in the lead with "customer satisfaction", even if they don't have the absolutely least likely to break systems.
Glad you like your Blackberry.... but come on! The Blackberry isn't some "mecca" of freedom either. I'm constantly reminded of how frustrating they can be, because I have several clients who need new ones set up for Enterprise messaging, for new hires, and it's *never* easy.
Unlike the iPhone, where I could link it to an existing Exchange server just by entering the appropriate connection info -- on the Blackberry, I have to first make sure the cellular provider provisions the phone correctly. (Otherwise, the "Enterprise Messaging" option doesn't even SHOW UP on the Blackberry's menus!) And 9 times out of 10? When they buy one of these phones and get it activated at a local store, Verizon screws up and doesn't provision it properly.... go figure.
THEN, I have to contact their email hosting service and wait for their people to send me a message containing an activation password, so I can get the phone to start doing the actual Enterprise messaging with their Exchange box.
So in other words, I can't make the phone even work with the guy's email without the assistance and permission of not ONE, but TWO unrelated 3rd. parties!
While I confess I've never even visited Germany before, I had a teacher who did a while ago. I remember him telling us the Germans had a culture of denial, when it came to the WWII Nazi era. History textbooks would completely gloss over that part of history with only the vaguest mention of Hitler and his ambitions. At first, he tried to discuss and question it with people there, but he said it was almost like running into a brick wall. People would practically tell him to quiet down, because "we don't talk about that here anymore".
If that's accurate, then it goes a LONG way towards understanding why they'd ban a game like Wolfenstein, and why they're so adamant about banning sales of Nazi era items on eBay, etc. etc.
Not completely. Sure, Apple is a *business* and as such, they're very interested in turning a good profit.
But to say they don't really care about the "user experience" as long as they rake in a lot of money? There are FAR too many facts that refute it to genuinely make that claim.
I'll give you just one story from last week. A woman I know convinced her best female friend to purchase an Apple Macbook, when she was in the market for a new laptop last year. (She already owned an iMac she was really pleased with, and wanted her friend to switch to Mac too so they'd be running the same type of computer, not have all the potential virus or spyware issues, etc.)
Well, unfortunately, her friend isn't very computer literate in the first place, and on top of that, it seems her Macbook's chicklet keyboard had an issue with one of the letter keys sticking occasionally. She managed to screw all sorts of things up that were simply user-error (locked herself out of visiting any web sites while trying to play with the parental controls feature, for example), and kept getting frustrated. The Apple store was a good 1 1/2 hour drive away from her house, making matters worse. When she did vist, the Genius Bar people helped straighten out her software issues... but she was still upset about the sticking keyboard key. They had her mail it back to Apple for service at that point, but for some reason, Apple shipped it back without her issue being addressed.
So at THIS point, despite it all being relatively minor stuff - she was PISSED at Apple and their products and service. She stormed back to the Apple store to complain about the repair not being done properly, and you know what? They "bent some rules" for her, and swapped her for a BRAND NEW Macbook Pro which had more RAM, a better graphics card, faster processor and more drive space than her low-end Macbook that was just out of the 1 year warranty!
Now she's finally "seen the light" on Apple customer service, and is buying an iMac as her next desktop machine at Xmas time.
There's a reason Apple consistently gets top ratings in magazines like Consumer Reports for customer service. They screw things up like ALL companies do, but they're known for resolving issues to people's satisfaction, eventually... not just saying "Sucks to be you!" or wasting hours of your time on hold with someone who can't speak your language very well, reading off a card to you.
Actually, I doubt that.... The computer industry has a LONG reputation of building OS's that only run with specific hardware configurations sold by the OS vendor. Until the idea of a "PC clone" came along, this was pretty much how ALL personal computers were sold. (You weren't going to get your Commodore 64 to run anything written for the Atari 800, and your TI99/4A didn't work with any of those, OR a computer from Radio Shack....) SPARC machines ran their own operating systems too. (I think Intergraph had to sell a special port of Windows NT for them, to get them to run that.)
Certainly, the minicomputers and mainframes out there all ran their own proprietary OS's too.
I've researched this one for my boss, as well as for personal use. I agree that for Mac users, 1password isn't too bad a program.
If you want a *hardware* based solution, I've looked at Mandylion Labs' Password Manager before too.
Personally, I thought the Mandylion Labs solution was overkill for anything less than corporate use, though. Its "strong points" are largely centered around an I.T. staff centrally administering password policies for the keyfob and so on.
Another basic, but potentially effective and useful solution is simply keeping track of your login info in a text document, but maintaining that document someplace like Google Docs. Then, wherever there's Internet access, there's the ability to get to the document and it's platform-neutral. No worries about a computer drive crash causing you to lose all your passwords either.
I ran knoppmyth for well over a year myself, and honestly, wouldn't have switched from it except for 2 things.
1. My Myth box started having some hardware problems. (It was an Antec Minuet case, similar to their Sonata. Piano black and looked kind of like a stereo component. The blue circular light around the chrome power button started going out - so it would just randomly flicker. Real annoying, and couldn't ever find a replacement part for just that button assembly.) Not only that, but I was still using an old GeForce 4Ti4600 board with it, and it started getting really picky about being seated properly in the slot. I'd constantly find a black screen/no video, and have to power it down, push down hard in the right place to get the card firmly in the slot, and then it'd work again on a reboot (at least for several weeks or so).
2. I got AT&T U-Verse. Knoppmyth had no native support for remote control of their proprietary boxes. Supposedly "good" lirc configs were posted for it, but at best, I had mixed results. I had it changing channels ok on the box, but had issues with the U-Verse box going to a "screen saver" after so many hours of inactivity. Once they went into that state, knoppmyth wasn't properly waking them back up when it needed one to go to a certain channel to start a recording.
Slashdot Mirror
I can see a lot of truth in many of the comments posted here.
I know one of the problem I continually face is in trying to let my kid "go out in the real world and BE a kid". Personally, I'm a big proponent of what Penn & Teller were trying to say in one of their episodes of "Bullshit" .... that the world is NOT more dangerous for kids today than it was in previous generations. In fact, statistically, it's more probable that your kid will randomly be struck by lightning than become a victim of a predator, while playing outside. But my own beliefs and opinions don't dictate what the rest of the community believes either.
As one example, my girlfriend's 3 year old wanted to play outside, a few weeks ago. We live on a dead-end street, where there are at least 4 other families around with young kids. In fact, the people next-door to us have a 3 year old who loves playing with her 3 year old. So she let her go play, since my daughter and her 6 year old son were already playing outside anyway. Seems reasonable enough, right?
Well, not more than 10 minutes later, I get a frantic knocking on my front door. One of the neighbors a few houses down was basically demanding I run out and get her kid, because she was standing outside, on the sidewalk, in front of his house, with no other kids around! When I went to get her, she looked a bit puzzled, and didn't even want to come back in. She was simply standing around because she WANTED to, and was in no danger I could see. (Apparently, the 6 and 7 year olds decided to play in a neighbor's back yard, and didn't want her to go with them since she was "too young" to play whatever they were playing.)
This isn't the first time I've dealt with this sort of thing, either. On several previous occasions, my kid was outside playing, only to be taken by the hand, by an angry parent, and led up to my doorstep. Basically, they tried to tell me I was being irresponsible, because I let my kid play outside and their kid(s) had to go in for dinner, or because they were leaving to go someplace, or what-not. It never occurred to them it might actually be OK for my daughter to walk up and down our street and find her own way back home, when she wanted to come home!
This is in a low-crime, middle-class suburb, mind you .... I do find it interesting that when I used to live in a rougher, lower-income part of town, I *never* saw these issues. Whether it was because parents were too busy to be bothered with hovering over their kids constantly, or because they just had more common sense and less fear of the "real world", I don't know? But kids of all ages played outside, both during the day and even after dark, on a street that WASN'T dead-end and had no sidewalks -- and everyone got along just fine.
Heh... maybe not much, if you consider the old *analog* TV format was uncompressed and used a lot more of the frequency spectrum than digital TV does....
If you wanted to actually try to measure the "bandwidth consumed" of watching analog over-the-air television broadcasts, I bet the number would be up there.
I beg to differ with the +4 Insightful rating people gave your comment!
First of all, almost nobody in I.T. is "irreplaceable". They just get enough of an ego built up over time to THINK they are. You can spend a decade creating unique, one-off solutions to a company's problems, but if and when they decide it's time for you to go -- they'll assign the next guy with the task of revamping all that "custom, hacked-together stuff". In fact, your replacement will very likely despise and curse the undocumented, undecipherable mess of code you created, and it will serve as *motivation* for him to come up with different solutions. He may well even get promotions when they hold technical meetings and he explains how he "upgraded" things with well documented and easier to support alternatives.
I agree that *many* organizations put all the money into "management" and the tree branches that way. That doesn't mean ALL businesses do. In fact, that's one of the things I liked about working for the right small business. They tend not to even have available positions to "promote" people into, if you're doing a good job for them at what you were hired for. For example, you may well be the ONLY full-time I.T. salaried employee they've got. So they're happy to keep giving you raises without a requirement a new management title goes with it first. Or their I.T. department may be small, but full of people with good experience. Eventually, you might become the leader of that group and be handed a title with the word "Manager" in it -- but you're still part of that group, working with the same co-workers as before.
Yep! This is really, and has always been, the bottom line. They found that throwing words around like "unlimited!" nets them a lot of subscribers. And as long as they keep signing up people who don't use their Internet connections too often, it works out well for them.
The problem is, the "average user" is starting to discover more bandwidth-intensive things he/she wants to do with a given Internet connection. A few years ago, only a few "hard core" enthusiasts would have really considered trying to download all their TV shows to watch offline, vs. obtaining them some other way. Now? It's becoming "expected" to be able to catch your favorite shows as live streams via Hulu or other such services, and MANY people are well aware of how to torrent for shows.
The "law of averages" that used to dictate that "for every REAL user of our broadband connection, we've got at least 5 who only use it to check email and view a few web pages" is changing. Their "average user" is using up a lot more bandwidth, and their "big users" are reaching the point of having their connections saturated 24 hours/7 days as they leave servers up all the time to share files.
Even people who are only occasional users of their PC on the net are buying devices like iPhones, that also use their wi-fi connection at home ... so it gives them more opportunities to use that same connection.
And yeah, I think they're going to try to start selling connections with monthly gigabyte xfer limits attached to them ... but the public won't accept that without a fight. Like you say, Google might see a chance to step in at that point and shake things up ... or users might even start using wireless repeaters to bypass the ISP completely and build their own ad-hoc networks. I could see it working sort of like the old BBS days, where people had networks like Fidonet and WWIVnet set up to get messages delivered all over the world by hopping them from point to point, until they reached their destination ... except this would happen at 802.11g or n speeds and involve peer to peer file sharing among all the participants, in a private network.....
I remember RedHat kind of slipping from their "glory days" as the highest profile Linux distributor out there. Many people were woo'ed away by the "latest and greatest" or "more user-friendly" features in distros like Mandrake or Ubuntu, and certainly, there was a philosophical difference where some people simply supported the Debian package manager format and were anti-RPM, too.
But that doesn't change the fact that RedHat kept plugging right along, employing deserving software developers and turning out a solid, respectable product.
You don't have to amaze people with "incredible new ideas!" all the time to be a "good company". You just need to treat your employees fairly, offer products that do what they advertise, price your products reasonably, and keep up a tradition of supporting them well.
I think some of the other people posting here hit on the most likely scenario .... If VoIP ever becomes the "standard" for voice telephony, it's highly improbable they'd just run it over your ISP of choice, as you do with VoIP today.
Part of the "secret" to achieving rock solid reliability is to control the entire infrastructure the technology runs on. AT&T does that now with POTS, and they won't want to give a big part of that up if things transition over to VoIP.
So what would probably happen is, they'd provide you with VoIP that only happens on the "back end", in their central offices. You'd use the same phones and it would give the appearance of being the plain old telephone service you've had all along. They wouldn't expect you to maintain a "terminal adapter" that has to be properly configured and piggybacked off of your router or cable/DSL/satellite modem or what-not.
With this arrangement, they'd take care of having redundant Internet connections to/from their central offices, and ensure that your calls still go through, regardless of what happens to your own personal Internet broadband connection at home.
The "uptime" on this collider is worse than an application server running on Windows 3.0!
This is exactly the quote I keyed in on, that I think explains it all.
I ran into the same type of fiasco at my workplace, last year, when we looked into replacing our paper time cards with a computerized system. Initially, the argument for doing it was "it'll save money on all the paper cards, storage of them in boxes for years, and stops cheating the system when employees punch their buddy's cards for them". Great! So I researched the options and found many workable solutions, including an ethernet-connected fingerprint reader and a card swiping type of reader that fed data back to software on a back-end PC.
But before a purchase was approved, management latched onto the whole project and decided, "Hey, if we're going to track people's clocking in and out on the computer, we should tie this into our whole accounting system and make something that lets us track exactly how long they spend on specific jobs we ask them to do! Let them punch in codes to define the cost center of whatever project they're currently doing, and then we can make GREAT reports that show us how efficient we are at various tasks!" Next thing you know, it turned into a nightmare. User-friendliness of the system suddenly plummeted. (What union shop worker do you know who would be happy to look up or memorize dozens of cost center codes and keep running back to a keypad, swiping his/her card and keying in the correct codes for each little job he/she does? And who is going to cross-check all those entries to be sure they're even entering correct data?) The cost of implementing it skyrocketed too, because all of a sudden, you're looking at having card readers/keypads placed near all the places people might be working. You can't have them hike half way across the shop floor just to swipe a card and enter a code because they're done sawing pipes, and want to move on to drilling holes in beams, right? That meant running cat5 cabling all through the shop for the readers, etc.
In the end, the whole project was scrapped due to "high cost of implementation" and "inadequate software for handling our reporting needs". Just as well, really ....
My mom is a retired R.N. and she's friends with quite a few older doctors out there. One of the big complaints she's heard repeatedly from them is, hospitals are starting to demand they get on-board with using their computer systems. If they refuse, and want to keep track of things on pen and paper, or using their own favorite methods, the hospital simply bars them from working there anymore.
So the computer illiterate doctors are often voluntarily retiring, rather than deal with the learning curve this late into their careers. A few just run their private practice and stay out of the hospitals, so they can do things the "old fashioned way" for a few more years until they're ready to retire.
Sure... it's ridiculous to think that offering the opportunity to be "on call" 24 hours/7days has "no value", but it's just as ridiculous to think you're supposed to get paid for all the downtime when you're NOT doing any support, simply because you carried the phone around or sat it by your nightstand while you slept.
The way this has always been handled in the I.T. world, based on every experience I've ever encountered -- the employee is simply paid a higher wage/salary because being "on call" is bundled into his/her list of responsibilities. If you're a contractor getting paid hourly? Then you boost the hourly pay for the 40 hours or whatever you're asking them to put in, with the understanding that the "on call" duties are being thrown in as part of what they expect to receive for the better regular pay.
Truthfully though, I don't see why a company would go the contractor route, vs. salaried employee, for someone carrying a phone and asked to be "on call" outside regular business hours? It's far easier to get an actual employee, with some vested interest in the company's long-term success, to be willing to take those calls at odd hours. Contractors are always watching the clock, and ultimately, they don't care if a particular company really succeeds or fails because they can always get re-assigned elsewhere.
Well, I've maintained for decades now that "piracy" is actually a "normal" condition, and expected behavior, given the circumstances. There is so much intellectual property out there (with more being creating CONSTANTLY), it's simply a case where the creator of any one work just can't expect or demand ALL people who make use of their content to go through legal channels and purchase it at the asking price.
It seems to me that the desire to "maximize profits" (greed, essentially) is the only reason they keep trying to strike at anyone deemed to be a "key player" in redistributing copyrighted works illegally. But even if they succeeded in taking down ALL of the torrent sites that offered any copyrighted material and all of the web sites offering direct downloads of same, and even every ftp site they could locate .... it wouldn't change the individual's belief that it's "ok" to make a free copy of a piece of intellectual property here or there, as he/she wants one and has ready access to copy it.
I'm not so sure there's that much "educating" that still needs to be done here? Sure, SOME people probably don't really understand the issues at all .. but they're probably not the ones at the heart of the problem either, right?
It seems to me that most people have a pretty good (if only basic) understanding of what's going on. We all "get" that authors of works wish to be compensated fairly for them. The thing is though? We generally believe they already ARE getting fair compensation, DESPITE all the "rampant piracy" going on. Everyone I know who one could accuse of "pirating a lot of material" is also BUYING a lot of material. The people interested enough in music to download albums off Usenet or P2P sharing networks and build up a library ALSO tend to own hundreds of purchased CDs and go to concerts. The big "software pirates" often spend FAR more than the typical consumer on computer-related goods and often even have jobs in the industry where they make key decisions of purchasing of corporate software licenses. And I think as time goes on, you're going to find the same thing with the e-books.... People managing to pirate book content for their Kindles or other readers tend to be avid book readers who own a huge collection of dead-tree publications.
Personally? I tend to think the answer lies not in trying to leverage the legal system to "strong arm" more people into paying, but by offering quality content at a good price - and ACCEPTING the fact that it's "ok and normal" for there to be "one illegal copy in use for each one someone buys from you". Most of us have to put in 8 hours of work each and every day to keep bringing in a paycheck. Content creators have it better than most of us, because once they put in X amount of time on a work and complete it, it keeps generating money for them for a period of time far longer than the time-frame they actually spent creating it.
http://www.break.com/index/burger_king_911.html
And if you ask me? As much as anything, this illustrates why the nation's broadband infrastructure is sadly inadequate....
What are you supposed to do in many of these locations as an alternate to a DSL circuit? Dial backup with 56K modem, I suppose? Oh yeah, THAT will run great with today's bandwidth-saturating apps.
Oh, perhaps they should spend the money for satellite Internet at each location then? Big up-front equipment and setup expense for something with high latency and relatively high monthly costs that has plenty of service interruption issues of its own (bad weather, etc.).
Seriously, *many* businesses today (like the one I work for now) are getting royally screwed, paying upwards of $700 a month for a lousy 1.5 to 3mbit T1 circuit, simply because no other options really exist. By comparison, if we only happened to be located a few miles closer to an existing cable installation, we could get Charter cable's broadband in here with download speeds of up to 100mbit (and far better upload speeds than our T1 gives us!) for about $150 per month.
Agreed.... The fact that you can point to even worse situations or living conditions somewhere doesn't mean the fictional world being described in a book like 1984 or Brave New World is any less disturbing or "bad".
In fact, one can often infer that even in those fictional worlds, there are probably still places where people have things worse off than in the cities they're describing.
Huh? The payphone IS dying off, and is practically on its death bed. The fact is, they cost more to produce and maintain than they're worth, once a critical number of people opt to quit pumping coins into them. So many people DO have cellphones these days, the ones left who still want to use a payphone don't put enough cash into one to justify its existence.
Additionally, in many big cities, the payphones that remain tend to get used primarily for drug deals and other illegal activities. (People like the anonymous nature of them.) That means, stores and other establishments don't WANT payphones on their premises - because it draws the wrong type of people.
Really, if you don't want or can't afford a cellphone (even one of those throw-away cells with a pre-paid plan), it's getting to where you can go into most businesses and simply ask if you can borrow the phone, and they're happy to let you use it for free, to make a quick call. In the past, there was always a fear that you'd call some expensive long-distance number if they let you use it ... but that's another issue that's quickly becoming a non-issue. Most VoIP plans give you unlimited long distance to several countries, and a number of monthly minutes of free calls anyplace else in the world. Those not on VoIP still often have dirt cheap LD plans these days, compared to what they used to charge. (I think my work's plan, for example, is about 2 1/2 cents per minute.)
I don't think I agree with you.....
Dystopian science fiction is some of my favorite to read or watch in movie form. Everything from 1984 and Brave New World (soon to be made into a movie, last I heard, with Leonardo DeCapprio signed on to play a role) to Minority Report.... None of these really paint a rosy picture of the future, or pretend that we've found some gigantic new energy source.
The plausible future might suck, but good writers can make entertaining stories about that, just as well as they can write "happy, feel-good" stories about our great success.
And slugs the world over, rejoice!
Well, true, *except*, there's the factor of how well you engineer your prototype before you turn it over to the Chinese factory for production, and how much of a stickler for detail you're going to be as your product is produced.
As I understand it, working with Chinese factories requires taking micro-management to new levels, if you want a quality product as the end result. If you don't spec out every last little detail, they'll pick through it and find places to do substitutions to increase their profit margins. "Oh, he uses a 10 microfarad capacitor here? Well, he didn't specify a certain brand. Lets use this cheap one our sister factory makes and save half a cent on each one!" Next thing you know, your product is having more failures than you anticipated and it turns out to be that one lousy capacitor at fault....
That's just a made-up example, but you get the general idea. There are probably all sorts of little details about how long a circuit board should sit in the solder bath, or how long something should cool before it gets painted or has another process applied to it ... all kinds of things that can affect the long-term quality of a product. Traditionally in a U.S. based factory, a lot of that might have gone without saying. You figure "they do this process all the time, and know how to do the job for me". But you can't make such assumptions of the Chinese factories.
Not sure what type of I.T. support you do, but could your experiences be a bit limited because you work in corporate I.T. where only certain brands and models were purchased in any quantity?
I've done quite a bit of on-site service for people, and my experiences line up fairly accurately with some of this. I definitely see a *lot* of HP notebook failures out there. Dell always seemed to me like they build "hit and miss" products. It's a crap-shoot with them, essentially. They've produced some of the most durable and reliable laptops out there, and turned around and produced some total duds that practically ALL had failures in a 2 year time-frame. You can't really make blanket statements about Dell because depending on when you analyze the data, they're going to look really good, somewhere right in the middle, or really bad.
I used to like Toshiba products, but I've come to realize that they have a pretty high long-term failure rate. Satellites, especially, seem to suffer from a large number of motherboard issues. (Ever run across one that lets you power it on but powers right back off after 2 seconds or so? Usually a bad motherboard, and I run into it pretty often.) A buddy of mine had a Toshiba Qosmio (high-end media centric model) that died like that just out of the factory warranty period. Luckily, Toshiba had a "silent recall" on that one, which we found out about online. He was able to call in, demand they repair it under said recall, and get it fixed free -- but only after getting past a 1st. level tech. on the phone who wanted to charge him for the repair and denied knowledge of any recall.....
I haven't had real good experiences with Sony laptops either, all in all. It seems like they build really attractive and sleek machines, but they break fairly easily.
I was a bit surprised that Lenovo didn't rate better. I know their quality has gone downhill from back when IBM owned the Thinkpad line (and they weren't assembled in China). but they still seem to take a lot of design cues from the IBM days, and as a result, seem fairly well-built. They tend to have fewer "bells and whistles" than some models too, so less stuff to go wrong.
And Apple? I have a lot of experience with their notebooks. They do need warranty service occasionally. The idea that "they practically never break!" is kind of a myth. I mean, they do use the same hard drives and displays as everyone else .... But I've had better than average results getting an Apple notebook serviced by Apple while under warranty, and I think more people buy the AppleCare warranties on them up-front. If you have an issue and Apple overnights you a return mailer box to put it in, fixes it in 1 day, and overnights it back, how annoyed are you going to be about the problem vs. the guy with some other laptop that has to wait WEEKS for a repair? That's what helps Apple keep in the lead with "customer satisfaction", even if they don't have the absolutely least likely to break systems.
Glad you like your Blackberry .... but come on! The Blackberry isn't some "mecca" of freedom either. I'm constantly reminded of how frustrating they can be, because I have several clients who need new ones set up for Enterprise messaging, for new hires, and it's *never* easy.
Unlike the iPhone, where I could link it to an existing Exchange server just by entering the appropriate connection info -- on the Blackberry, I have to first make sure the cellular provider provisions the phone correctly. (Otherwise, the "Enterprise Messaging" option doesn't even SHOW UP on the Blackberry's menus!) And 9 times out of 10? When they buy one of these phones and get it activated at a local store, Verizon screws up and doesn't provision it properly.... go figure.
THEN, I have to contact their email hosting service and wait for their people to send me a message containing an activation password, so I can get the phone to start doing the actual Enterprise messaging with their Exchange box.
So in other words, I can't make the phone even work with the guy's email without the assistance and permission of not ONE, but TWO unrelated 3rd. parties!
While I confess I've never even visited Germany before, I had a teacher who did a while ago. I remember him telling us the Germans had a culture of denial, when it came to the WWII Nazi era. History textbooks would completely gloss over that part of history with only the vaguest mention of Hitler and his ambitions. At first, he tried to discuss and question it with people there, but he said it was almost like running into a brick wall. People would practically tell him to quiet down, because "we don't talk about that here anymore".
If that's accurate, then it goes a LONG way towards understanding why they'd ban a game like Wolfenstein, and why they're so adamant about banning sales of Nazi era items on eBay, etc. etc.
Not completely. Sure, Apple is a *business* and as such, they're very interested in turning a good profit.
But to say they don't really care about the "user experience" as long as they rake in a lot of money? There are FAR too many facts that refute it to genuinely make that claim.
I'll give you just one story from last week. A woman I know convinced her best female friend to purchase an Apple Macbook, when she was in the market for a new laptop last year. (She already owned an iMac she was really pleased with, and wanted her friend to switch to Mac too so they'd be running the same type of computer, not have all the potential virus or spyware issues, etc.)
Well, unfortunately, her friend isn't very computer literate in the first place, and on top of that, it seems her Macbook's chicklet keyboard had an issue with one of the letter keys sticking occasionally. She managed to screw all sorts of things up that were simply user-error (locked herself out of visiting any web sites while trying to play with the parental controls feature, for example), and kept getting frustrated. The Apple store was a good 1 1/2 hour drive away from her house, making matters worse. When she did vist, the Genius Bar people helped straighten out her software issues ... but she was still upset about the sticking keyboard key. They had her mail it back to Apple for service at that point, but for some reason, Apple shipped it back without her issue being addressed.
So at THIS point, despite it all being relatively minor stuff - she was PISSED at Apple and their products and service. She stormed back to the Apple store to complain about the repair not being done properly, and you know what? They "bent some rules" for her, and swapped her for a BRAND NEW Macbook Pro which had more RAM, a better graphics card, faster processor and more drive space than her low-end Macbook that was just out of the 1 year warranty!
Now she's finally "seen the light" on Apple customer service, and is buying an iMac as her next desktop machine at Xmas time.
There's a reason Apple consistently gets top ratings in magazines like Consumer Reports for customer service. They screw things up like ALL companies do, but they're known for resolving issues to people's satisfaction, eventually ... not just saying "Sucks to be you!" or wasting hours of your time on hold with someone who can't speak your language very well, reading off a card to you.
Actually, I doubt that.... The computer industry has a LONG reputation of building OS's that only run with specific hardware configurations sold by the OS vendor. Until the idea of a "PC clone" came along, this was pretty much how ALL personal computers were sold. (You weren't going to get your Commodore 64 to run anything written for the Atari 800, and your TI99/4A didn't work with any of those, OR a computer from Radio Shack....) SPARC machines ran their own operating systems too. (I think Intergraph had to sell a special port of Windows NT for them, to get them to run that.)
Certainly, the minicomputers and mainframes out there all ran their own proprietary OS's too.
I've researched this one for my boss, as well as for personal use. I agree that for Mac users, 1password isn't too bad a program.
If you want a *hardware* based solution, I've looked at Mandylion Labs' Password Manager before too.
Personally, I thought the Mandylion Labs solution was overkill for anything less than corporate use, though. Its "strong points" are largely centered around an I.T. staff centrally administering password policies for the keyfob and so on.
Another basic, but potentially effective and useful solution is simply keeping track of your login info in a text document, but maintaining that document someplace like Google Docs. Then, wherever there's Internet access, there's the ability to get to the document and it's platform-neutral. No worries about a computer drive crash causing you to lose all your passwords either.
I ran knoppmyth for well over a year myself, and honestly, wouldn't have switched from it except for 2 things.
1. My Myth box started having some hardware problems. (It was an Antec Minuet case, similar to their Sonata. Piano black and looked kind of like a stereo component. The blue circular light around the chrome power button started going out - so it would just randomly flicker. Real annoying, and couldn't ever find a replacement part for just that button assembly.) Not only that, but I was still using an old GeForce 4Ti4600 board with it, and it started getting really picky about being seated properly in the slot. I'd constantly find a black screen/no video, and have to power it down, push down hard in the right place to get the card firmly in the slot, and then it'd work again on a reboot (at least for several weeks or so).
2. I got AT&T U-Verse. Knoppmyth had no native support for remote control of their proprietary boxes. Supposedly "good" lirc configs were posted for it, but at best, I had mixed results. I had it changing channels ok on the box, but had issues with the U-Verse box going to a "screen saver" after so many hours of inactivity. Once they went into that state, knoppmyth wasn't properly waking them back up when it needed one to go to a certain channel to start a recording.