Absolutely true, and as soon as more people realize this, the United States can hopefully put an end to the corrupt Federal Reserve system....
Regardless, the "inherent value" of money, I think, ultimately lies in people's faith in it as a symbol of their labor. There are plenty of good reasons why the US probably shouldn't have eliminated the "gold standard" (or at least backed the currency with something stable and of universally recognized value)... but the fact I can't convert my $100 into $100 worth of gold, taken out of storage from some federal facility, on demand, doesn't automatically make my currency seem "worthless" to me.
What DOES make it more and more worthless is the artificial inflation created by the Fed printing more and more of it out of thin air, to cover debts they can't afford to repay otherwise.
That's common with MANY jobs today. They all do credit checks along with the traditional background checks. There seems to be a pervasive belief that if you have bad credit, it indicates you're more likely to rip off your employer too.
I'd counter, however, that the opposite may in fact be the case. Especially in the case of an individual who filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy, he or she is *unable* to file again for a long period of time, and typically is more motivated than most to "fix their bad credit score". Usually, they're appreciative that they've finally got a "clean slate" and they probably want a new job as part of the equation to keep debt paid down.
If you think about it, MANY people are already essentially subscribing to a monthly service so they can download whatever they like from a large, constantly changing selection of commercial software packages. It's called "Easynews" or "Giganews" or whichever "premium" Usenet service a person prefers.
The only problem with this business model is that the original software developers don't get a cut of the profits.... but that says more about their unwillingness to "evolve" and consider new business models than anything else.
Right now, one of the closet things I can think of for computer software digital distribution that's doing well is "Steam". You often seen discount software bundles up there, as well as special deals on new releases - and thanks to the convenience plus lower prices, a lot of people buy their PC games that way.
And the music and movie industries are starting to "get it", offering their works for electronic download from places like iTunes or Amazon. But book publishers are way behind the curve here - generally assuming their industry was "immune" to needing any changes. (The idea there is, the fact they sell you the work in a printed book form adds enough "value" in and of itself that people wouldn't waste their time on a digital copy they had to print out and staple/bind together, or be stuck only reading on a computer screen.) But e-Book readers tilt things in a new direction - meaning they too need to get on-board with digital distribution, and quickly.
You're right, but at the same time, I think the "buzz" keeps changing about which AV product is "best" largely because the commercial AV makers keep dropping the ball. There was once a time when Norton products had the upmost respect (back when people used MS-DOS, basically). But Symantec quickly trashed his reputation after buying the rights to put his face and name on their product boxes and proceeded to write buggy bloatware.
McAfee stepped in with a product that was less likely to screw up your whole Windows installation... so people flocked to it, especially for corporate use. But then, they started discovering it, too, became a resource hog as they kept adding more things for it to detect and clean, and every so often, McAfee would do an update to the "engine" itself that caused instability and problems until they fixed it.
I know my workplace recently switched to Kaspersky, not because we heard it would do a "better job" detecting viruses... but because the licensing cost about $700 less than McAfee, AND the central management tool was a little better and less likely to crash with Windows exception errors during use.
It's really not a surprise they can't detect and clean 100% of the problems out there, when they can't even seem to build their software to run in a stable, non-intrusive, and non resource-intensive fashion!
I'll give you a prime example. About 2-3 years ago, I decided it was time to buy a good, solid color laser printer for use with my side business. (I wanted to print my own business cards and advertising 3-fold fliers, among other things.) I finally chose an HP Color LaserJet 2550N since it got good reviews for print quality, offered OS X as well as Windows support, had built-in ethernet, and so on.
Well, it turns out it has several big problems most of the early reviewers neglected to mention. For starters, it has a really annoying habit of rotating the carousel the toner cartridges drop into, every 4 hours or so. There's *nothing* about this in the owner's manual, but people complaining to HP tech. support were supposedly told it's "normal behavior" and done "to ensure the toner doesn't clump up/settle in the cartridges over time". All fine and good, except the loud racket it makes, with a big "Cha-chunka, ka-chunka, ka-chunka, ka-CHUNK" drives you crazy when it wakes you up in the middle of the night, and you have to wonder how much extra wear and tear it makes on the internals.
But wait, there's more! The second "surprise" HP had in store for owners of this printer is that each time it cycles the toners around like that, it counts it as 1 print cycle. The toner cartridges and the developer drum all have computer chips in them that track page count, and when it reaches HP's predefined "limit", the toner or developer reports it's "empty" to the printer, and stops working - no matter how much longer it could *really* go! So theoretically, if you leave this printer powered on, so it's available to print to on your LAN, but never even print anything - it will eventually tell you all the supplies are used up and need replacements!
After I owned this printer for the first year or so, I noticed it was quickly replaced with a newer model that uses totally different supplies, too. This is typical for HP's products these days - and becomes a real problem when you run out of a toner and want to grab a replacement locally, so you don't suffer a lot of downtime. At least with cheap inkjet printers, you can usually find what you need, even for popular older models, if you check several office supply places. But they don't like stocking > $120 each color toners for a printer that few people purchased before it was discontinued. So basically, I can't get anything locally for my 2550N!
It's a huge waste - but honestly, when my toners run out, my smartest move (money-wise) is to sell the printer for "parts" on eBay for $25 or whatever, and buy a new color laser that comes with the supplies. The supplies are often as costly to swap as it is to buy the whole printer with them!
I don't think Americans have been brainwashed at all! Many of us simply realize that we have a system of government that's unique in the world, and we don't wish to succumb to conversion to the exact same type of government in place in many other countries.
The biggest problem I have with all of the "socialist ideas" some people are promoting for the USA, currently, is that they can't PAY for any of them! Our government has long ago been bankrupted by the banking cartel, and our deficit spending is OUT OF CONTROL! We keep paying the Federal Reserve to print up more money for us (instead of our government making it directly!?) and then they loan it back to the federal government at INTEREST! Where does that money go they've been shaving off the top? Into the pockets of the private bankers who run the Federal Reserve! And we don't even have enough wealth left in the nation to back all the money that's been printed! Say what you will about the "gold standard" we once used, but at the very least, it ensured our paper money had real value. They couldn't just run off more paper any time they thought it was convenient, because it had to be tied to something tangible.
At this point, I don't see a better option than a massive REDUCTION in the size of government, so it doesn't cost so much to operate it and all of the associated programs it has going on. Failure to do so means a collapse of our entire economy, at some point - and then people will have much bigger things to worry about than if they can get the government to pay for all of their medical care! The only other alternative is findings ways to tax the people huge amounts, to try to balance the budget back out... and I think we're so far in the red, that's not even a workable solution anymore, even IF people were ok with paying 60% or 70% of their annual income back to the government. (We don't even collectively produce enough in exportable goods or services to generate enough wealth to offset all the spending on everything from wars to foreign aid programs.....)
In reality, there are PLENTY of health-care choices every U.S. citizen has. As one of my chiropractor buddies is fond of pointing out, nearly every patient he sees is suffering from at least one medical condition/issue that likely wouldn't have happened in the first place (or would have been dramatically lessened) if he/she took more steps to take care of themselves in the first place.
If you choose to eat loads of sweets and junk food all the time, then you should be aware that you're putting yourself at much higher risk of becoming diabetic, for example -- and with that comes all manner of other health problems. But so many people take an attitude of "It won't happen to ME!" until it finally does, and *then* they're all worried about what's covered with their health insurance plan, or if they can afford one that will take them with their "pre-existing condition."
I'm not saying I'm some kind of health nut, or that I even do all the things I probably could/should do for better health. But I realize it's MY body and MY choices to make. Everything involves a level of risk, and I'm trying to avoid a lot of the BIG risks (like smoking), while opting to take my chances on some of the smaller ones.
In the absolute sense, no, the United States never made health-care a "right". If it had, it would be spelled out someplace in our Constitution or Bill of Rights. As the nation has moved away from its roots as a Democratic Republic and towards some sort of Fascist/Socialist hybrid, though, you're seeing lots of legislative changes promising people new "rights" that aren't spelled out anyplace in the documents that SUPPOSEDLY spell out how things work here. Meanwhile, federal government is completely bankrupt and spending more money it doesn't even HAVE to give "the right of free healthcare to all children" and so forth. The "house of cards" is going to fall, sooner or later... and then we won't have ANY of these promised government freebies anymore.
Well, it all depends, really. If you push the images out using IP multicasting, it shouldn't take more bandwidth to image 100 identical boxes than it takes to image 1. (They all listen to the same broadcast of image data simultaneously.)
Obviously, you're typically not going to have ALL of your PCs using the exact same image, but you probably can narrow things down to several images that cover the needs of the whole network.
Plus, in a corporate setting - it's quite possible nobody really uses the network after business hours, so scheduling this to run overnight gets in nobody's way, even IF it hogs up most/all of the network bandwidth for hours....
It seems like educational institutions have some of the biggest problems with system tampering/hacking/infections, since they're exposed to thousands of students each year who have attitudes of "Who cares? Not MY computer anyway!" and who often think it's a challenge and *fun* trying to mess up the system in question. Unlike hackers trying to infect you with malware over the Internet from some other country, these people have full PHYSICAL access to the computers.
So how do they manage? Many schools I know have things configured so their workstations get re-imaged nightly from master images on a server. Any unauthorized changes made to the computer only last until that nightly maintenance runs, at the longest. (An admin might re-image a workstation even more quickly than that if he/she realizes it has an issue.)
I could see large businesses resorting to this, as well - if they're starting to encounter risks as aggressive as bots targeted to their particular businesses.
Many people have tried to eliminate or reduce traditional pull-down menus in apps, over the years. You saw it happening primarily in the apps geared towards "creative professionals" more than anything else. (Likely because they thought that crowd would be more receptive to the changes and experimentation!)
Anyone remember the suite of Kai's PowerTools,for example? They eliminated practically all menus, opting for things like blobs of color in the corner or middle of the screen that split off into more shapes that performed various functions when clicked.
And what about the concept of "drawers" of tools that expand or collapse into a small bar down the corner of the screen? Many photo editing packages used that idea.
The "ribbon bar" isn't too bad in concept. I think where Microsoft doesn't quite get it right, though, is where they try to present only the functions they think a user will want, at a given point in time. If you want to do something that's not within that scope, the ribbon GUI suddenly becomes more hindrance than help. (EG. Say you want to do a mail merge in Word? I think it was easier with the traditional menus than with the ribbon bar.... and honestly, Word *never* really made that the most user-friendly thing in the world to begin with!)
FireFox might be able to make a ribbon bar work a little bit better, actually, because a web browser doesn't really offer a user as many functions as a word processor or spreadsheet. Most of the things that happen do so on and in the CONTENT itself.
Yeah... it sounds like middle management is the crux of the problem there. Personally, I don't think "middle managers" add enough value to justify the negatives they create, until head-count exceeds a certain number of employees. (I don't claim to know what that "magic number" is either! It's just a rough idea of mine.)
It's like the game people used to play as kids where one person whispers a quick story to the next person, and they try to repeat it to the next, and so on. Before long, it's NOTHING like what was said originally.
Middle management's role, ultimately, is to take input and conclusions from the people they manage, consolidate and filter it into neat little "relevant information packages", and present that to upper management or ownership. Then, they collect responses/wishes/demands from the top and try to filter that into orders or requests for the people below them.
Obviously, that means your good arguments to spend money on product X or reasons why NOT to do item Y get "watered down" before they reach the ears of the decision-makers.
When you reach a certain number of employees, this arrangement beats not getting heard at all (because the upper management has no TIME to hear you out). But for a smaller place, it's really counter-productive. They're essentially paying extra people in the middle a big salary to degrade the quality of communications between the owners and the workers!
Palm's premise was *really* weak, considering Apple already provides a public API for interfacing with iTunes, *and* has in at least one previous case (the Motorola Rokr phone) formally worked with and allowed a 3rd. party to sync directly with iTunes before.
It seems pretty clear that if Palm didn't NEED to break the legal agreement they signed, simply to make their device work with iTunes. They just WANTED to do so, because they had no interest in co-operating with Apple, OR in going to the extra effort to write their own software to work with their device. (What would be so bad about doing a good revision of the old "Palm Desktop" software they already created, and letting Pre owners work with it?)
I'm friends with a few former Apple employees, and all have said basically the same thing. Working at retail Apple stores was actually a lot of FUN around the 2001-2004 time-frame or so. OS X was just catching on, and Jobs had recently taken back the company, doing a top to bottom revamping of the entire product line. Generally, salespeople worked there because they really enjoyed and believed in Apple computers and OS X. Sure, they may not have been technical gurus, but they really did use the same stuff at home that they tried to sell you -- and their excitement about the new products was genuine.
Then came the dilution... iPods playing a more pivotal role, AppleTV, iPhones everywhere, and all the "accessories" to sell along with those items. Before long, you were really more "qualified" to handle most Apple sales with a previous job in a music store than with a computer background! Even the techies working the "Genius bar" had to field questions all day long about someone's earbud headphone wires shorting out, or how come someone couldn't get the music back out of their iPod after they accidentally deleted their iTunes library, or sit on hold with AT&T half the day trying to get new iPhone activations completed.
So currently? Most Apple Store sales staff are just younger folks trying really hard to be "hip" and "trendy" - and chances are good they know very little about Apple's computing products. Sure, they might have received some official training about the basics, so they can show grandma or Aunt Sallie what iPhoto is all about... but it's no better than the assistance you'd get at Best Buy, overall.
Microsoft is likely well aware of this, so they don't stand to gain much by hiring away Apple's rank and file sales staff. Management would make more sense, if they think they can borrow some ideas on efficiency, product placement ideas that work, etc. etc.
Yeah, I follow.... I was, in fact, referring to the cost of sending our our armed forces. But I also think you bring up a really valid point. I never saw the "good" in allowing corporations to be treated under law as "people".
It's something that any rational person would look at the first time they heard of it and say "Huh?" It's just a legal construct someone came up with to give companies certain benefits and entitlements.
I would say, however, that we've never been too concerned about protecting "inalienable rights" of corporations. There is no inalienable right to generate maximum profit, for example. We're simply allowing special interests to bankrupt government so certain corporations (and bankers!) can reap the benefits.
The bigger issue is one of morale.... Sure, the admin might not *leave* over this, but he or she is likely to feel a lot less empowered in the company. When you realize your "expert opinions" have little value in a corporation, and that's what you THOUGHT was one of the key things you could provide them to "add value" in the first place - how excited will you be about doing you job well?
I have to say, I'd never call myself a "top flight" sysadmin. I'm probably someplace in the middle. There's more out there I know nothing about than things I'm familiar with. But I still take pride in a job well done. By contrast, I *really* dislike it when users keep coming to me with issues I discover I can't fully resolve because I'm limited by buggy or ineffective software tools.
I think I'm happy working for small businesses for that reason, rather than larger firms where the salary is much better. For example, I'm currently the ONLY sysadmin for the place I currently work for, so I can largely design the network any way I like. I don't have someone telling me I can't, for example, use Linux for a task because "the other sysadmins don't really know Linux that well and it makes them uncomfortable". (I ran into that at a previous job, and it wasn't even a very big company.) I can easily see how corporate "red tape" and old policies would prevent a lot of good, cost-saving and efficient changes from being made.....
This is true, but there's also a thing called "personal responsibility". The United States has gotten itself into a massive debt (weakening its status in the world in the process), in no small part because of our propensity to try to protect those inalienable rights for people who aren't even our own citizens.
I wish the people of Iran the best in this situation, but it's really THEIR fight to fight. If there's a small way people in other countries can assist with technology (hosting Tor servers or proxies or what-not), that's great! But individual rights and freedoms are only as "valid" as one's willingness to fight for and demand them. (Even United States law recognizes that people typically have the opportunity to "sign a right away", if they wish to waive it.)
The fact is, I really like most things Apple builds, but it's never exactly been a secret that they're on the slow side executing a new idea or design.... Long-time Mac users practically all know about the advice to "avoid revision A products". If they promise a release date, chances are, they'll miss it. And look at the mess they made with MobileME at launch. Even iTunes needed a long time to evolve before they could offer their material for sale in many other countries.
The app store is going through similar "growing pains". Apple really underestimated the amount of work they created for themselves, trying to personally review each and every app submission to ensure it met their "standards" (despite not even having THOSE really set in stone). It's, by nature, a very subjective process - and one employee having a bad day could easily cause a rejection or long delay in a program's approval, over essentially nothing. Other times, someone could just make a simple mistake and ALLOW something really questionable, irritating everyone else who ever tried something similar and got rejected.... I think at some point, Apple is going to have to just start allowing EVERYTHING that meets certain automated code review standards, and deal with complaints AFTER the fact.
I did encounter an issue with my 60GB "launch" PS3 a while back, where the HDMI port seemed to die, no longer outputting any video. I did a Google search on it, and found a fair number of other people reporting the same issue. Some of them seemed to have success "reviving" their port by simply following the procedure to hard reset their PS3 (holding down the front power button for 10 seconds or so after turning the system off with the switch in back first, and then switching that back on) - but multiple attempts at that did me no good. I get nothing but a quiet-ish "pop" on my TV speakers when I boot the PS3, and one quick flash of light on my plasma TV's screen, followed by it going totally black.
I switched to the component cables and everything works fine through them (or through composite, which I tried too just for curiosity's sake).
The other people describing the exact behavior I got with mine said they wound up having to send their PS3 back to Sony for repair (actually received a different refurbished system). I've just been living with it since I don't really need it to connect via HDMI anyway.....
Diminishing returns comes to mind here, immediately.
I agree that security is something you want to attack on many fronts, and it's an ongoing process (not something you "get right" one time and you're done). But that said, look how much effort and how many patches are constantly going into Windows products, yet STILL, the perception of the typical consumer is that Windows is "insecure".
If you're a business trying to market a product, perception is every bit as important as reality, because even the theoretical flawless product won't sell well if people BELIEVE it's not that good.
Apple has a long-standing track record of users having FAR fewer problems with spyware and virus attacks than Windows - despite not implementing many of the things Microsoft has done to secure their own platform. So Apple is in a great place, perception-wise, right now. I think you'll see them reacting to new threats more than spending money to be proactive about them - because they're in a situation where that's the "best business model" for them, money-wise. I'm not saying this is right or wrong, and I see good arguments to be made for both sides of the issue. I'm just saying, I think that's what's happening here.
When I was in school, we didn't ever do anything remotely like this. There was no taking of pulses, using fingers or anything else. P.E. simply consisted of playing various sports, and a few sessions of trying to achieve certain "fitness goals" they set out for the class, like running a mile in X number of minutes, or doing X number of sit-ups....
One of my classmates actually died of an undetected circulatory condition... an artery burst in his brain, killing him within minutes. But it wasn't during P.E. class at all... it was while playing in the school band, outdoors, at a function!
I'm not even necessarily opposed to schools trying to go "higher tech" with P.E. by using heart-rate monitors and what-not, but it's certainly something that deserves a little more advance explanation than just a "Please purchase this strap so we can attach this thing!", sent home with daily school papers!
No, I'm not at all "incredulous that someone else might not want to be an Apple customer". I'm simply saying it makes little to no sense to scream "Boycott!" over a product that had sales in the 30 million units range, and very high overall customer satisfaction rates.
Would I be even happier with my iPhone if I could choose my own carrier and it wasn't locked to AT&T? Of course! But like all things, you weigh the pros and cons -- and the iPhone hardware itself is great. AT&T's level of service is not, but despite all the issues, it's still more than usable. (If it degraded to the point where I couldn't get calls out or missed calls regularly, that would be unacceptable, and the stuff of boycotts.)
I realize, too, that phone carriers are basically all greedy and self-serving. Apple, supposedly, wanted to run their OWN carrier to put their phones on, but discovered that wasn't legal (at least in the USA) because there's some regulation barring phone makers from also offering cellular service. Their first move was to partner up with Verizon, except THEY were so greedy, they wouldn't even make any of the changes Apple requested (like ability to activate the phone via iTunes, or Visual Voicemail functionality).
AT&T was probably a choice Apple wound up having to make, rather than one they WANTED to make, because AT&T needed Apple more than the other carriers felt they needed Apple. Among other things, the iPhone would have never taken off if a carrier couldn't be found who was willing to sell a reasonably priced unlimited data plan for it. AT&T does discount that on iPhone plans, vs. what they charge for any other data capable phone....
I'm not sure one should compare team sports to I.T. though? In many smaller businesses, I.T. is successfully handled by a single person. (Try having a football team consisting of only one player!)
I think that's the fundamental flaw, really. H.R. and many people in management really buy into the "team player" idea for all things, when in reality, it doesn't always apply so well. It's fine for an army or sports, but those are cases where the individual is de-valued and turned into more of a "cog in the machine". The "value" is only obtained by getting a sufficient quantity of people to work in unison.
In the "perfect corporation", I'd envision an environment where the "outspoken genius" gets put in charge of something like defining "best practices" and procedures for people to use. (If he/she is constantly annoying co-workers with suggestions and opinions, but those suggestions/opinions happen to be pretty valid and valuable, that just means he/she is in the wrong part of the business to make a positive impact.)
I agree with you, except I don't see how the iPhone is a good example.
When you buy an iPhone, there is nothing on the box or in the advertising anyplace guaranteeing it will run specific 3rd. party applications like Google Voice. All you're told is that you can pick from many thousands of apps available via the "App Store", and indeed, this is the case.
There was never anything saying that tethering was available for my iPhone on AT&T's network either. All that was said is that it was coming eventually, whenever AT&T deemed it ready. Nothing has really changed in those regards. People just seem to be mad because Apple disabled or removed code that made tethering possible from a technical standpoint on AT&T's network, despite it never having been legally "ready" for use in the first place.
So where is this "expected functionality" that was "yanked out from under us"? I just don't see it, unless you define people's assumptions without doing research first as valid expectations the manufacturer needs to meet in all cases?
Your comment was rated +5 Insightful?? Really? It's that *insightful* that you want people to boycott Apple, and you refuse to buy any Apple products because of issues like this lock on tethering??
I'm sorry, but I have to call this one out as a bunch of Apple haters just modding things up to make themselves feel good.
1. I've purchased 2 iPhones so far (original model with 8GB memory, and currently using a 16GB 3G model), and might even consider getting a 3GS in the future. My boss and the V.P. of our company have also purchased iPhone 3G's and are quite pleased with them. My g/f, like me, owned an original iPhone and now uses a 3G. 2 of my best friends own iPhone 3Gs as well. None of us are angered enough with our purchases to demand people boycott Apple. Frankly, I'm not sure why anyone would be? The only thing that upsets most iPhone owners I know is AT&T's relatively poor level of service. You're FAR more likely to get a dropped call on their network, or slow data transfer on their network, than on most others. But that's true of ANY phone you use on the AT&T network, and hardly something Apple can directly address/correct.
2. Tethering on the AT&T network (legally) is a fairly expensive extra-cost option, on any phone they allow it on. I don't really understand why it's worth the money for 99% of the people out there. The people I saw who were all hot to jailbreak their iPhone, so they could tether on it with AT&T were NOT willing/interested in paying a tethering fee to add it to their cellular plan. They were all hoping to fly under AT&T's radar and not get caught. I don't really expect any wireless carrier or manufacturer to cater to that crowd. Honestly, AT&T has made concessions already to appease iPhone owners, including allowing unlimited free use of all wi-fi hotspots they own. (That feature is one I often take advantage of.)
3. The fact is, Apple and AT&T do have a pretty tight agreement in place with the iPhone, which was giving Apple a cut of AT&T's monthly cellular charges on iPhones. Apple was also able to get AT&T to do some things for them to make the iPhone user experience better than what you'd otherwise get (primarily Visual Voicemail functionality, which required some changes to AT&T's network to accommodate it). Given all of this, it's a no-brainer to see why Apple would bend over backwards to please AT&T when they expressed a desire to limit data usage on their over-burdened network. I knew most of this going into my first iPhone purchase though, and definitely knew all about it by my 2nd. purchase. Ultimately, the ROOT cause of all of these problems keeps coming down to AT&T having an inferior network that can't really handle the loads being placed on it by the popularity of the iPhones out there. (I think Apple's last press conference said around 30 million iPhones have been sold to date?)
So in summary, I have a strong dislike for AT&T... but not so sure you wouldn't have seen similar restrictions popping up if Apple did an exclusive contract for iPhones with any of the other carriers, either. With an exclusive deal on a smartphone that encourages this much usage, the total load can't be distributed over all the major carriers like it normally would be.....
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Absolutely true, and as soon as more people realize this, the United States can hopefully put an end to the corrupt Federal Reserve system....
Regardless, the "inherent value" of money, I think, ultimately lies in people's faith in it as a symbol of their labor. There are plenty of good reasons why the US probably shouldn't have eliminated the "gold standard" (or at least backed the currency with something stable and of universally recognized value) ... but the fact I can't convert my $100 into $100 worth of gold, taken out of storage from some federal facility, on demand, doesn't automatically make my currency seem "worthless" to me.
What DOES make it more and more worthless is the artificial inflation created by the Fed printing more and more of it out of thin air, to cover debts they can't afford to repay otherwise.
That's common with MANY jobs today. They all do credit checks along with the traditional background checks. There seems to be a pervasive belief that if you have bad credit, it indicates you're more likely to rip off your employer too.
I'd counter, however, that the opposite may in fact be the case. Especially in the case of an individual who filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy, he or she is *unable* to file again for a long period of time, and typically is more motivated than most to "fix their bad credit score". Usually, they're appreciative that they've finally got a "clean slate" and they probably want a new job as part of the equation to keep debt paid down.
I think that was "Microsoft Bob", and yeah - it didn't take the world by storm ....
If you think about it, MANY people are already essentially subscribing to a monthly service so they can download whatever they like from a large, constantly changing selection of commercial software packages. It's called "Easynews" or "Giganews" or whichever "premium" Usenet service a person prefers.
The only problem with this business model is that the original software developers don't get a cut of the profits.... but that says more about their unwillingness to "evolve" and consider new business models than anything else.
Right now, one of the closet things I can think of for computer software digital distribution that's doing well is "Steam". You often seen discount software bundles up there, as well as special deals on new releases - and thanks to the convenience plus lower prices, a lot of people buy their PC games that way.
And the music and movie industries are starting to "get it", offering their works for electronic download from places like iTunes or Amazon. But book publishers are way behind the curve here - generally assuming their industry was "immune" to needing any changes. (The idea there is, the fact they sell you the work in a printed book form adds enough "value" in and of itself that people wouldn't waste their time on a digital copy they had to print out and staple/bind together, or be stuck only reading on a computer screen.) But e-Book readers tilt things in a new direction - meaning they too need to get on-board with digital distribution, and quickly.
You're right, but at the same time, I think the "buzz" keeps changing about which AV product is "best" largely because the commercial AV makers keep dropping the ball. There was once a time when Norton products had the upmost respect (back when people used MS-DOS, basically). But Symantec quickly trashed his reputation after buying the rights to put his face and name on their product boxes and proceeded to write buggy bloatware.
McAfee stepped in with a product that was less likely to screw up your whole Windows installation ... so people flocked to it, especially for corporate use. But then, they started discovering it, too, became a resource hog as they kept adding more things for it to detect and clean, and every so often, McAfee would do an update to the "engine" itself that caused instability and problems until they fixed it.
I know my workplace recently switched to Kaspersky, not because we heard it would do a "better job" detecting viruses ... but because the licensing cost about $700 less than McAfee, AND the central management tool was a little better and less likely to crash with Windows exception errors during use.
It's really not a surprise they can't detect and clean 100% of the problems out there, when they can't even seem to build their software to run in a stable, non-intrusive, and non resource-intensive fashion!
I'll give you a prime example. About 2-3 years ago, I decided it was time to buy a good, solid color laser printer for use with my side business. (I wanted to print my own business cards and advertising 3-fold fliers, among other things.) I finally chose an HP Color LaserJet 2550N since it got good reviews for print quality, offered OS X as well as Windows support, had built-in ethernet, and so on.
Well, it turns out it has several big problems most of the early reviewers neglected to mention. For starters, it has a really annoying habit of rotating the carousel the toner cartridges drop into, every 4 hours or so. There's *nothing* about this in the owner's manual, but people complaining to HP tech. support were supposedly told it's "normal behavior" and done "to ensure the toner doesn't clump up/settle in the cartridges over time". All fine and good, except the loud racket it makes, with a big "Cha-chunka, ka-chunka, ka-chunka, ka-CHUNK" drives you crazy when it wakes you up in the middle of the night, and you have to wonder how much extra wear and tear it makes on the internals.
But wait, there's more! The second "surprise" HP had in store for owners of this printer is that each time it cycles the toners around like that, it counts it as 1 print cycle. The toner cartridges and the developer drum all have computer chips in them that track page count, and when it reaches HP's predefined "limit", the toner or developer reports it's "empty" to the printer, and stops working - no matter how much longer it could *really* go! So theoretically, if you leave this printer powered on, so it's available to print to on your LAN, but never even print anything - it will eventually tell you all the supplies are used up and need replacements!
After I owned this printer for the first year or so, I noticed it was quickly replaced with a newer model that uses totally different supplies, too. This is typical for HP's products these days - and becomes a real problem when you run out of a toner and want to grab a replacement locally, so you don't suffer a lot of downtime. At least with cheap inkjet printers, you can usually find what you need, even for popular older models, if you check several office supply places. But they don't like stocking > $120 each color toners for a printer that few people purchased before it was discontinued. So basically, I can't get anything locally for my 2550N!
It's a huge waste - but honestly, when my toners run out, my smartest move (money-wise) is to sell the printer for "parts" on eBay for $25 or whatever, and buy a new color laser that comes with the supplies. The supplies are often as costly to swap as it is to buy the whole printer with them!
I don't think Americans have been brainwashed at all! Many of us simply realize that we have a system of government that's unique in the world, and we don't wish to succumb to conversion to the exact same type of government in place in many other countries.
The biggest problem I have with all of the "socialist ideas" some people are promoting for the USA, currently, is that they can't PAY for any of them! Our government has long ago been bankrupted by the banking cartel, and our deficit spending is OUT OF CONTROL! We keep paying the Federal Reserve to print up more money for us (instead of our government making it directly!?) and then they loan it back to the federal government at INTEREST! Where does that money go they've been shaving off the top? Into the pockets of the private bankers who run the Federal Reserve! And we don't even have enough wealth left in the nation to back all the money that's been printed! Say what you will about the "gold standard" we once used, but at the very least, it ensured our paper money had real value. They couldn't just run off more paper any time they thought it was convenient, because it had to be tied to something tangible.
At this point, I don't see a better option than a massive REDUCTION in the size of government, so it doesn't cost so much to operate it and all of the associated programs it has going on. Failure to do so means a collapse of our entire economy, at some point - and then people will have much bigger things to worry about than if they can get the government to pay for all of their medical care! The only other alternative is findings ways to tax the people huge amounts, to try to balance the budget back out ... and I think we're so far in the red, that's not even a workable solution anymore, even IF people were ok with paying 60% or 70% of their annual income back to the government. (We don't even collectively produce enough in exportable goods or services to generate enough wealth to offset all the spending on everything from wars to foreign aid programs.....)
In reality, there are PLENTY of health-care choices every U.S. citizen has. As one of my chiropractor buddies is fond of pointing out, nearly every patient he sees is suffering from at least one medical condition/issue that likely wouldn't have happened in the first place (or would have been dramatically lessened) if he/she took more steps to take care of themselves in the first place.
If you choose to eat loads of sweets and junk food all the time, then you should be aware that you're putting yourself at much higher risk of becoming diabetic, for example -- and with that comes all manner of other health problems. But so many people take an attitude of "It won't happen to ME!" until it finally does, and *then* they're all worried about what's covered with their health insurance plan, or if they can afford one that will take them with their "pre-existing condition."
I'm not saying I'm some kind of health nut, or that I even do all the things I probably could/should do for better health. But I realize it's MY body and MY choices to make. Everything involves a level of risk, and I'm trying to avoid a lot of the BIG risks (like smoking), while opting to take my chances on some of the smaller ones.
In the absolute sense, no, the United States never made health-care a "right". If it had, it would be spelled out someplace in our Constitution or Bill of Rights. As the nation has moved away from its roots as a Democratic Republic and towards some sort of Fascist/Socialist hybrid, though, you're seeing lots of legislative changes promising people new "rights" that aren't spelled out anyplace in the documents that SUPPOSEDLY spell out how things work here. Meanwhile, federal government is completely bankrupt and spending more money it doesn't even HAVE to give "the right of free healthcare to all children" and so forth. The "house of cards" is going to fall, sooner or later ... and then we won't have ANY of these promised government freebies anymore.
Well, it all depends, really. If you push the images out using IP multicasting, it shouldn't take more bandwidth to image 100 identical boxes than it takes to image 1. (They all listen to the same broadcast of image data simultaneously.)
Obviously, you're typically not going to have ALL of your PCs using the exact same image, but you probably can narrow things down to several images that cover the needs of the whole network.
Plus, in a corporate setting - it's quite possible nobody really uses the network after business hours, so scheduling this to run overnight gets in nobody's way, even IF it hogs up most/all of the network bandwidth for hours....
It seems like educational institutions have some of the biggest problems with system tampering/hacking/infections, since they're exposed to thousands of students each year who have attitudes of "Who cares? Not MY computer anyway!" and who often think it's a challenge and *fun* trying to mess up the system in question. Unlike hackers trying to infect you with malware over the Internet from some other country, these people have full PHYSICAL access to the computers.
So how do they manage? Many schools I know have things configured so their workstations get re-imaged nightly from master images on a server. Any unauthorized changes made to the computer only last until that nightly maintenance runs, at the longest. (An admin might re-image a workstation even more quickly than that if he/she realizes it has an issue.)
I could see large businesses resorting to this, as well - if they're starting to encounter risks as aggressive as bots targeted to their particular businesses.
Many people have tried to eliminate or reduce traditional pull-down menus in apps, over the years. You saw it happening primarily in the apps geared towards "creative professionals" more than anything else. (Likely because they thought that crowd would be more receptive to the changes and experimentation!)
Anyone remember the suite of Kai's PowerTools,for example? They eliminated practically all menus, opting for things like blobs of color in the corner or middle of the screen that split off into more shapes that performed various functions when clicked.
And what about the concept of "drawers" of tools that expand or collapse into a small bar down the corner of the screen? Many photo editing packages used that idea.
The "ribbon bar" isn't too bad in concept. I think where Microsoft doesn't quite get it right, though, is where they try to present only the functions they think a user will want, at a given point in time. If you want to do something that's not within that scope, the ribbon GUI suddenly becomes more hindrance than help. (EG. Say you want to do a mail merge in Word? I think it was easier with the traditional menus than with the ribbon bar.... and honestly, Word *never* really made that the most user-friendly thing in the world to begin with!)
FireFox might be able to make a ribbon bar work a little bit better, actually, because a web browser doesn't really offer a user as many functions as a word processor or spreadsheet. Most of the things that happen do so on and in the CONTENT itself.
Yeah... it sounds like middle management is the crux of the problem there. Personally, I don't think "middle managers" add enough value to justify the negatives they create, until head-count exceeds a certain number of employees. (I don't claim to know what that "magic number" is either! It's just a rough idea of mine.)
It's like the game people used to play as kids where one person whispers a quick story to the next person, and they try to repeat it to the next, and so on. Before long, it's NOTHING like what was said originally.
Middle management's role, ultimately, is to take input and conclusions from the people they manage, consolidate and filter it into neat little "relevant information packages", and present that to upper management or ownership. Then, they collect responses/wishes/demands from the top and try to filter that into orders or requests for the people below them.
Obviously, that means your good arguments to spend money on product X or reasons why NOT to do item Y get "watered down" before they reach the ears of the decision-makers.
When you reach a certain number of employees, this arrangement beats not getting heard at all (because the upper management has no TIME to hear you out). But for a smaller place, it's really counter-productive. They're essentially paying extra people in the middle a big salary to degrade the quality of communications between the owners and the workers!
Palm's premise was *really* weak, considering Apple already provides a public API for interfacing with iTunes, *and* has in at least one previous case (the Motorola Rokr phone) formally worked with and allowed a 3rd. party to sync directly with iTunes before.
It seems pretty clear that if Palm didn't NEED to break the legal agreement they signed, simply to make their device work with iTunes. They just WANTED to do so, because they had no interest in co-operating with Apple, OR in going to the extra effort to write their own software to work with their device. (What would be so bad about doing a good revision of the old "Palm Desktop" software they already created, and letting Pre owners work with it?)
I'm friends with a few former Apple employees, and all have said basically the same thing. Working at retail Apple stores was actually a lot of FUN around the 2001-2004 time-frame or so. OS X was just catching on, and Jobs had recently taken back the company, doing a top to bottom revamping of the entire product line. Generally, salespeople worked there because they really enjoyed and believed in Apple computers and OS X. Sure, they may not have been technical gurus, but they really did use the same stuff at home that they tried to sell you -- and their excitement about the new products was genuine.
Then came the dilution ... iPods playing a more pivotal role, AppleTV, iPhones everywhere, and all the "accessories" to sell along with those items. Before long, you were really more "qualified" to handle most Apple sales with a previous job in a music store than with a computer background! Even the techies working the "Genius bar" had to field questions all day long about someone's earbud headphone wires shorting out, or how come someone couldn't get the music back out of their iPod after they accidentally deleted their iTunes library, or sit on hold with AT&T half the day trying to get new iPhone activations completed.
So currently? Most Apple Store sales staff are just younger folks trying really hard to be "hip" and "trendy" - and chances are good they know very little about Apple's computing products. Sure, they might have received some official training about the basics, so they can show grandma or Aunt Sallie what iPhoto is all about... but it's no better than the assistance you'd get at Best Buy, overall.
Microsoft is likely well aware of this, so they don't stand to gain much by hiring away Apple's rank and file sales staff. Management would make more sense, if they think they can borrow some ideas on efficiency, product placement ideas that work, etc. etc.
Yeah, I follow .... I was, in fact, referring to the cost of sending our our armed forces. But I also think you bring up a really valid point. I never saw the "good" in allowing corporations to be treated under law as "people".
It's something that any rational person would look at the first time they heard of it and say "Huh?" It's just a legal construct someone came up with to give companies certain benefits and entitlements.
I would say, however, that we've never been too concerned about protecting "inalienable rights" of corporations. There is no inalienable right to generate maximum profit, for example. We're simply allowing special interests to bankrupt government so certain corporations (and bankers!) can reap the benefits.
The bigger issue is one of morale.... Sure, the admin might not *leave* over this, but he or she is likely to feel a lot less empowered in the company. When you realize your "expert opinions" have little value in a corporation, and that's what you THOUGHT was one of the key things you could provide them to "add value" in the first place - how excited will you be about doing you job well?
I have to say, I'd never call myself a "top flight" sysadmin. I'm probably someplace in the middle. There's more out there I know nothing about than things I'm familiar with. But I still take pride in a job well done. By contrast, I *really* dislike it when users keep coming to me with issues I discover I can't fully resolve because I'm limited by buggy or ineffective software tools.
I think I'm happy working for small businesses for that reason, rather than larger firms where the salary is much better. For example, I'm currently the ONLY sysadmin for the place I currently work for, so I can largely design the network any way I like. I don't have someone telling me I can't, for example, use Linux for a task because "the other sysadmins don't really know Linux that well and it makes them uncomfortable". (I ran into that at a previous job, and it wasn't even a very big company.) I can easily see how corporate "red tape" and old policies would prevent a lot of good, cost-saving and efficient changes from being made.....
This is true, but there's also a thing called "personal responsibility". The United States has gotten itself into a massive debt (weakening its status in the world in the process), in no small part because of our propensity to try to protect those inalienable rights for people who aren't even our own citizens.
I wish the people of Iran the best in this situation, but it's really THEIR fight to fight. If there's a small way people in other countries can assist with technology (hosting Tor servers or proxies or what-not), that's great! But individual rights and freedoms are only as "valid" as one's willingness to fight for and demand them. (Even United States law recognizes that people typically have the opportunity to "sign a right away", if they wish to waive it.)
For just one example of what they're been putting developers through, see this guy's blog/diary: http://www.roomsapp.mobi/Rooms/Blog/Eintrage/2009/9/14_Crazy_App_Update_Diary.html
The fact is, I really like most things Apple builds, but it's never exactly been a secret that they're on the slow side executing a new idea or design.... Long-time Mac users practically all know about the advice to "avoid revision A products". If they promise a release date, chances are, they'll miss it. And look at the mess they made with MobileME at launch. Even iTunes needed a long time to evolve before they could offer their material for sale in many other countries.
The app store is going through similar "growing pains". Apple really underestimated the amount of work they created for themselves, trying to personally review each and every app submission to ensure it met their "standards" (despite not even having THOSE really set in stone). It's, by nature, a very subjective process - and one employee having a bad day could easily cause a rejection or long delay in a program's approval, over essentially nothing. Other times, someone could just make a simple mistake and ALLOW something really questionable, irritating everyone else who ever tried something similar and got rejected.... I think at some point, Apple is going to have to just start allowing EVERYTHING that meets certain automated code review standards, and deal with complaints AFTER the fact.
I did encounter an issue with my 60GB "launch" PS3 a while back, where the HDMI port seemed to die, no longer outputting any video. I did a Google search on it, and found a fair number of other people reporting the same issue. Some of them seemed to have success "reviving" their port by simply following the procedure to hard reset their PS3 (holding down the front power button for 10 seconds or so after turning the system off with the switch in back first, and then switching that back on) - but multiple attempts at that did me no good. I get nothing but a quiet-ish "pop" on my TV speakers when I boot the PS3, and one quick flash of light on my plasma TV's screen, followed by it going totally black.
I switched to the component cables and everything works fine through them (or through composite, which I tried too just for curiosity's sake).
The other people describing the exact behavior I got with mine said they wound up having to send their PS3 back to Sony for repair (actually received a different refurbished system). I've just been living with it since I don't really need it to connect via HDMI anyway.....
Diminishing returns comes to mind here, immediately.
I agree that security is something you want to attack on many fronts, and it's an ongoing process (not something you "get right" one time and you're done). But that said, look how much effort and how many patches are constantly going into Windows products, yet STILL, the perception of the typical consumer is that Windows is "insecure".
If you're a business trying to market a product, perception is every bit as important as reality, because even the theoretical flawless product won't sell well if people BELIEVE it's not that good.
Apple has a long-standing track record of users having FAR fewer problems with spyware and virus attacks than Windows - despite not implementing many of the things Microsoft has done to secure their own platform. So Apple is in a great place, perception-wise, right now. I think you'll see them reacting to new threats more than spending money to be proactive about them - because they're in a situation where that's the "best business model" for them, money-wise. I'm not saying this is right or wrong, and I see good arguments to be made for both sides of the issue. I'm just saying, I think that's what's happening here.
When I was in school, we didn't ever do anything remotely like this. There was no taking of pulses, using fingers or anything else. P.E. simply consisted of playing various sports, and a few sessions of trying to achieve certain "fitness goals" they set out for the class, like running a mile in X number of minutes, or doing X number of sit-ups....
One of my classmates actually died of an undetected circulatory condition... an artery burst in his brain, killing him within minutes. But it wasn't during P.E. class at all... it was while playing in the school band, outdoors, at a function!
I'm not even necessarily opposed to schools trying to go "higher tech" with P.E. by using heart-rate monitors and what-not, but it's certainly something that deserves a little more advance explanation than just a "Please purchase this strap so we can attach this thing!", sent home with daily school papers!
No, I'm not at all "incredulous that someone else might not want to be an Apple customer". I'm simply saying it makes little to no sense to scream "Boycott!" over a product that had sales in the 30 million units range, and very high overall customer satisfaction rates.
Would I be even happier with my iPhone if I could choose my own carrier and it wasn't locked to AT&T? Of course! But like all things, you weigh the pros and cons -- and the iPhone hardware itself is great. AT&T's level of service is not, but despite all the issues, it's still more than usable. (If it degraded to the point where I couldn't get calls out or missed calls regularly, that would be unacceptable, and the stuff of boycotts.)
I realize, too, that phone carriers are basically all greedy and self-serving. Apple, supposedly, wanted to run their OWN carrier to put their phones on, but discovered that wasn't legal (at least in the USA) because there's some regulation barring phone makers from also offering cellular service. Their first move was to partner up with Verizon, except THEY were so greedy, they wouldn't even make any of the changes Apple requested (like ability to activate the phone via iTunes, or Visual Voicemail functionality).
AT&T was probably a choice Apple wound up having to make, rather than one they WANTED to make, because AT&T needed Apple more than the other carriers felt they needed Apple. Among other things, the iPhone would have never taken off if a carrier couldn't be found who was willing to sell a reasonably priced unlimited data plan for it. AT&T does discount that on iPhone plans, vs. what they charge for any other data capable phone....
I'm not sure one should compare team sports to I.T. though? In many smaller businesses, I.T. is successfully handled by a single person. (Try having a football team consisting of only one player!)
I think that's the fundamental flaw, really. H.R. and many people in management really buy into the "team player" idea for all things, when in reality, it doesn't always apply so well. It's fine for an army or sports, but those are cases where the individual is de-valued and turned into more of a "cog in the machine". The "value" is only obtained by getting a sufficient quantity of people to work in unison.
In the "perfect corporation", I'd envision an environment where the "outspoken genius" gets put in charge of something like defining "best practices" and procedures for people to use. (If he/she is constantly annoying co-workers with suggestions and opinions, but those suggestions/opinions happen to be pretty valid and valuable, that just means he/she is in the wrong part of the business to make a positive impact.)
I agree with you, except I don't see how the iPhone is a good example.
When you buy an iPhone, there is nothing on the box or in the advertising anyplace guaranteeing it will run specific 3rd. party applications like Google Voice. All you're told is that you can pick from many thousands of apps available via the "App Store", and indeed, this is the case.
There was never anything saying that tethering was available for my iPhone on AT&T's network either. All that was said is that it was coming eventually, whenever AT&T deemed it ready. Nothing has really changed in those regards. People just seem to be mad because Apple disabled or removed code that made tethering possible from a technical standpoint on AT&T's network, despite it never having been legally "ready" for use in the first place.
So where is this "expected functionality" that was "yanked out from under us"? I just don't see it, unless you define people's assumptions without doing research first as valid expectations the manufacturer needs to meet in all cases?
Your comment was rated +5 Insightful?? Really? It's that *insightful* that you want people to boycott Apple, and you refuse to buy any Apple products because of issues like this lock on tethering??
I'm sorry, but I have to call this one out as a bunch of Apple haters just modding things up to make themselves feel good.
1. I've purchased 2 iPhones so far (original model with 8GB memory, and currently using a 16GB 3G model), and might even consider getting a 3GS in the future. My boss and the V.P. of our company have also purchased iPhone 3G's and are quite pleased with them. My g/f, like me, owned an original iPhone and now uses a 3G. 2 of my best friends own iPhone 3Gs as well. None of us are angered enough with our purchases to demand people boycott Apple. Frankly, I'm not sure why anyone would be? The only thing that upsets most iPhone owners I know is AT&T's relatively poor level of service. You're FAR more likely to get a dropped call on their network, or slow data transfer on their network, than on most others. But that's true of ANY phone you use on the AT&T network, and hardly something Apple can directly address/correct.
2. Tethering on the AT&T network (legally) is a fairly expensive extra-cost option, on any phone they allow it on. I don't really understand why it's worth the money for 99% of the people out there. The people I saw who were all hot to jailbreak their iPhone, so they could tether on it with AT&T were NOT willing/interested in paying a tethering fee to add it to their cellular plan. They were all hoping to fly under AT&T's radar and not get caught. I don't really expect any wireless carrier or manufacturer to cater to that crowd. Honestly, AT&T has made concessions already to appease iPhone owners, including allowing unlimited free use of all wi-fi hotspots they own. (That feature is one I often take advantage of.)
3. The fact is, Apple and AT&T do have a pretty tight agreement in place with the iPhone, which was giving Apple a cut of AT&T's monthly cellular charges on iPhones. Apple was also able to get AT&T to do some things for them to make the iPhone user experience better than what you'd otherwise get (primarily Visual Voicemail functionality, which required some changes to AT&T's network to accommodate it). Given all of this, it's a no-brainer to see why Apple would bend over backwards to please AT&T when they expressed a desire to limit data usage on their over-burdened network. I knew most of this going into my first iPhone purchase though, and definitely knew all about it by my 2nd. purchase. Ultimately, the ROOT cause of all of these problems keeps coming down to AT&T having an inferior network that can't really handle the loads being placed on it by the popularity of the iPhones out there. (I think Apple's last press conference said around 30 million iPhones have been sold to date?)
So in summary, I have a strong dislike for AT&T ... but not so sure you wouldn't have seen similar restrictions popping up if Apple did an exclusive contract for iPhones with any of the other carriers, either. With an exclusive deal on a smartphone that encourages this much usage, the total load can't be distributed over all the major carriers like it normally would be.....