It is also possible to use UAC from a non-administrator account. In this mode you must type a password every time a UAC prompt comes up, instead of just clicking "continue". Few people do this because it is not the default setup and it's even more annoying than regular UAC.
I think that was what the GP was trying to say. I run as a normal user and never touch the admin account unless I need to install software. I also configure other windows systems in this manner so that the user doesn't just click away. The only software that has issues are some old apps that do stupid things like write to their programs directory during normal use. Some older games would do this but you can prevent the UAC prompts by changing the game's directory to have write permissions for regular users.
No, never. If you keep signing 2 year contracts we'll never have competitive rates because you keep giving up your biggest bargaining chip. When you are monthly, you can cancel at any point for bad service and they lose market share while their competitor gains market share. You can use this to negotiate down your monthly rate on a monthly basis rather than every 2 years.
Where are the ads (with or without Jerry Seinfeld) and the glossy brochures at Best Buy?
Marketing isn't just advertising and promotion. It is also the act of determining what kind of product a particular target market desires. The reason why linux isn't on the desktop is because it doesn't get something right that other OSes and platforms for that particular target market. If the target market is "desktop users" then I say desktop users don't care about what is running under the hood, they only care that their apps and their devices work.
In my opinion, the correct marketing strategy for a desktop linux distro would be:
MS Office must work, Adobe Photoshop must work
Work on 3rd party electronic device compatibility: cameras off the shelf from best buy must work, printers and scanners must work, ipods must work.
And no, the correct answer is not "use gimp" or "use openoffice" or "don't buy ipods". If you want to sell linux, you need to offer them something that meets the customer's needs. All I hear when open source devs say "use openoffice" is the same as forcing openoffice down their throat. Instead, the first question any good salesman asks of any customer is "what do you need?" If they then answer "I need to use itunes for my iphone" then you better get linux to work with itunes and their iphone otherwise your product is not for that customer!
Notice that I never specified how one would get devices like iphones and MS Office and such to work. One could strike an agreement with the manufacturers to release drivers, apps, and such or maybe outline a standard that manufacturers can build and work with. But guess what, that means a new marketing strategy for a new customer. In this case you're going to have to make it easier for the companies (the new target market) to make more money either by sharing the workload or offering them something that benefits them.
Unfortunately, things like the GPL and even the nature of linux limit the choices in marketing strategies (as well as the one-sidedness many FOSS advocates have). But remember, the customer is king; if you can't give them what they want, they will never be your customer.
On a side note: I've always felt that FreeBSD had a better chance for being a good base for a desktop OS simply because of licensing. Example: the FreeBSD camp has always had madwifi available with no licensing issues while the linux camp has only recently gotten some fully supported madwifi drivers without tainting the kernel. But of course in a desktop environment, I have no problem with companies providing proprietary drivers. If their product doesn't work, it goes back to the store. In a corporate environment, I do have everything against proprietary software but that is because the needs of a company (different target market) are different from the needs of a home user. If that hint wasn't big enough, I was pointing out that while linux might not be for the home desktop user, it might be better suited for the corporate office user. Get MS Office working and you've probably met most cubicle worker needs.
See really the other players like the Nomad were light years ahead but failed to due to marketing. Never mind that its interface was cumbersome. Never mind that it was larger than a portable CD player. Never mind that the Nomad could not be used as portable HD. Never mind it took many steps and hours for it to sync up. Never mind that it had a 45 min battery life. The iPod beat it on pure marketing.
Marketing does not mean what you think it means. Marketing in a nutshell boils down to target market and the marketing strategy. The marketing strategy commonly consists of the "four Ps": Product, Price, Promotion, and Place. The misconception many slashdotters have is that marketing activities only include the latter three (price, promotion, and place) and more specifically advertising. But marketing is more than that. The P that is often missed is product which defines the product to be distributed and sold. What you just described are problems with the product that the Nomad got wrong and Apple got right. In an ideal marketing situation, you wouldn't have to worry much about price and promotion because the product would sell itself. Why else do you think Apple gets away with just spinning their products on a 10 second commercial? But even with a good product you would still have to have place marketing strategies to get your product in the stores and in front of consumers. Apple accomplishes this as well through the Apple store and retail shelf space.
Before you start whining about "such and such open source software is an AWESOME product yet it doesn't 'sell'" I encourage you to compare what companies like Apple have done with all 4Ps of marketing versus what open source has done. In Apple you'll find they attack all four strategies. They build a product that people actually want to buy. They advertise the product and get the product into retail outlets so people are aware that the product exists and can be bought. They negotiate with other players in the market, for example ATT, to make sure the product works. They purposely price their products on the high end to make a statement that their product is different from the competition. And all of these strategies are rolled up to target specific markets or customers. There is a lot of complaining that Apple product are expensive, and my answer to those people is Apple is not targeting you. Such an act would be the equivalent of Nordstrom trying to open a store targeting the customers of Walmart.
The problem engineer types have is that we are too focused on product that we forget that there are many other factors that make a huge difference. In fact many young engineers don't even understand that they are building a product for customer's problem and they fail to understand the the interpretation of the requirements is the most crucial piece of that puzzle. And once the engineer type finally gets the product right, he has no clue how to get it into the hands of his customers. He doesn't understand retail and distribution. He doesn't understand working with other businesses to negotiate shelf space, cooperative advertising campaigns, or even what advertising is effective. He only thinks that the lower price means better for the customer when that is not always true. Customers sometimes do not want to pay low prices for various reasons. (Not all customers think logically.)
I don't know how the grandparent got modded flamebait because what he said is true. The problem is of course that slashdotters like to armchair everything even when it is out of their specialization or knowledge.
And don't get me wrong, there are bad marketers just as there are bad engineers. Both camps have the same "stereotype" mentality against the opposing group. But the businesses that will succeed are those that are able to get these teams to cooperate and understand the real problem at hand rather than having an invisible wall between the two. And for your disclosure, my profession is a Software Engineer but I've taken enough business and marketing classes to understand their side of the world. Allow the stereotypes to mess with your head and you will fail consistently regardless of your specialization.
On the short weeks you can get away with only charging 36 hours of vacation if you want to take the week off.
The off friday is convenient for getting errands done (dry cleaning) or appointments (dentist) that normally can't be done outside of business hours.
You save some money and time commuting 9 days instead of 10
For certain holidays you end up with really short weeks or really long weekends
If you find that you're consistently working more than 8 hours, you will actually work less since M-Th is usually 9 hours so you're not always getting screwed by being at the office late as much as you would with only 8 hour days.
Every other thursday feels like friday.
The off friday is a good excuse to not show up because you can always say "well no one is going to be at the office so I can't get work done."
Cons:
The off friday is a good excuse to have you come in and do things that normally can't be done when everyone else is in the office (might be a pro in some cases since you wouldn't have to come in on the weekend.)
Though you have friday off, most other people are at work so you can't just "hang out" during the day.
The extra hour for M-Th takes some getting used to; you may find you have zero time left over to do anything on 9 hour days.
If you have regular schedules synced with schools (pick up kids and such), the off friday can be awkward.
The long weeks feel really long.
If you need a random day off, you'll end up charging 9 hours instead of 8.
9/80 is best when paired with a flex time schedule so that you can move around hours when you need to. The off friday gives you an option to tell your boss "i'll work more these days or just come in friday" if you want to take a different day off instead of the off friday. Coming in on the off friday usually means the office is dead. That can be good and bad. Some people like not having anyone around because they normally get interrupted too much when people are at the office. Other people hate it because there's nobody else to kick the bucket with.
If you find you are normally working more than 8 hours everyday, 9/80 is actually a good option because you will have a decent excuse for not coming in on the off fridays and you will have to work 9 hours most days anyway. If you find you are working even on the weekends, 9/80 will have no impact on your hours.
As a single guy, I prefer 9/80. But I do know some family types that prefer the 5/40 since they really need the consistent 8 hour days to keep their family schedules synced. At first you will loath the 9 hour days because that extra hour is bigger than it looks. After a while though 9 hours will seem like nothing and the working fridays will seem really short.
Onboard sound really sucks. Get really good head phones and you'll hear hiss, noise, or interference whenever your system does something. I have Sennheiser HD 280 pro headphones with passive noise canceling and I tell you, there is a huge difference. Now if you have crappy head phones that let in all the sound from your whining computer fans, then sure, you'll never notice the noise and hiss the onboard sound produces.
I'm no system engineer, but wouldn't it make a lot more sense to put all the brains in the box connected to the television (and the power outlet), and just use a cheap remote control (with much better battery life) to control it?
But then if I have a nifty USB thumb drive or SD card with pictures, I have to walk up to the TV, plug it in, and walk by to my keyboard. Sure, the "remote" could have usb and a card reader but now it isn't much of a cheap remote?
if you've got a built-in wireless HDMI for streaming video to a largescreen TV... what the fsck do you need a crappy 5" LCD screen for???
It probably doubles as a trackpad and/or troubleshooting display should your hdmi connection have problems. If they can keep the price down I'm all for lcd displays on keyboards. A killer feature I've always dreamed of is an lcd display above the "F" keys which would allow you to remap or give special programming to these keys. Sounds like the optimus keyboard but a much cheaper version.
I'd say the killer app for this is a desktop that shares some of the benefits of a notebook. Current notebooks are a pain to hookup to other devices, this device is supposedly going to make it easy to hook up to monitors, tvs, and such. That means rather than buy a pc for the living room and the home office, you buy this keyboard and just drag it to the room where you need to work. The difference would be you don't need a dock like a laptop and you'd want to use a better display device like a monitor or hdtv.
The killer app will probably be just youtube and email in the living room and/or bedroom. Sure the Wii and other consoles can do youtube, but you're not about to drag your Wii, Xbox, or PS3 with you to every room with a TV.
People also tend to like devices that seem to "just work" even if it only fits a single purpose. For example most people do think HTPCs are cool but most people don't feel comfortable setting up a PC to work with their TV. At minimum, you'd have to have a PC and wireless keyboard/mouse and hook everything up correctly (hdmi, sound cables, wireless kb/mouse connection). With this device you'd probably just plug in the wireless HDMI adapter to the tv and you're done. Sure, the implementation from an engineering standpoint doesn't make sense, but the user doesn't care. They only care that it fits the use case they envision.
I setup my family member's vista machine to have them running as a normal user. I put a password on the administrator account. Whenever they see UAC, it requires a password for them to go forward and they don't know the password. So anytime they have software that requires this they usually call me. For the software they use (office, browser, tax programs, occasional picture viewing) they never get UAC prompts unless something fishy is happening.
I had this problem and realized that the amount of time I spent sorting socks was ridiculous. The solution? Flatten your socks down to 1 or 2 types (white and black) and now the sorting problem goes away. Anytime your socks start developing holes or you feel you need to replace them, throw out the entire batch and buy all identical ones. By now you don't even have to pair up the socks when sorting the laundry. Just throw them in the drawer/basket and you're done.
You're a rich bastard if you can toss your $2800 laptop and buy a new one every few years. I still have my dell laptop I paid $800 for 3.5 years ago and still have no plans on tossing it.
There's still opportunity for entertainment. That's probably why sex, gambling, and drugs goes up. The cheapest form of entertainment these days is either TV, movies, or video games. I'd say the entertainment industry will stay strong as people will have nothing better to do while looking for new jobs or waiting for interviews.
I had the same problem. My parent's computer with Windows XP got viruses so I had to have them run on ubuntu livecd till they moved into their new house (we were moving at the time and didn't have all our things). The problem is my dad likes to buy turbotax from the store when he needs to file his tax returns. And of course that software only runs on Windows or Mac.
So eventually I just bought them a refurb Dell for under $300 that came with Vista Business. Surprisingly, the machine didn't have much crap on it except Dell's support tool. So I set them up as a non-admin user within Vista and never told them the administrator password. This causes UAC prompts to ask for the admin password before they can do anything. Whenever they manage to get it (which is rare for them), they usually call me. This is good because now I have a windows compatible machine with some sense of security before they do something potentially malicious to their computer.
Sure I could have used a VM and trained my dad about how windows is running inside of their linux, but that wouldn't stop the other problems like getting their printer to work, let them buy any piece of crap from the store and have it work (digital cameras, scanners, software, etc). I actually get very few "support" requests from them now and the last time I thought I'd follow up on the IE exploit (though my dad uses firefox, I felt I should install the patch just to keep them safe), when I got there the computer had already updated itself with the patch.
So linux is a great solution only if the user has a limited scope of needs surrounding browsing the net, email, and maybe writing a document or two. The second you add 3rd party products, linux compatibility (I'm not just talking about computer specific hardware, but consumer electronics that interface with computers like digital cameras) is a problem. And no, Googling is not a solution. The user should be able to buy what they want and reasonably have it work. Windows makes this happen (not perfectly, but usually) and is one of the main reasons why it continues to live.
I may have no problem looking up linux compatible hardware, but you can sure bet normal people aren't. They just see the commercials "ipods" or "blackberries" and instantly say "I want that." If it doesn't work, they don't google about how to fix it. They simply return the product and ask for their money back.
Take a look at fairsoftware.net. It was designed for exactly that purpose: geeks starting a side business together.
It was also designed to take 9.9% of each sale you make. Not necessarily saying that's a bad deal, but rather if you don't understand what that means for the business, you ought to educate yourself first.
They're almost here. $70 for 30GB SSD is currently out of stock but I'm sure they'll get a new shipment within the week. With each new drive that hits the market profit margins are getting squeezed out. MLC NAND flash chips spot prices are about $1 a gigabyte so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a healthy 100% margin still built into these product prices.
The problem with most introductory programming courses is that they drop you in the deep end and expect the student to eventually figure out how to stay alive based on all the tools they start throwing at you. And I'll be honest, I don't have an answer as to what programming language you should use or if it even matters. Let me explain.
I first started learning programming at the age of 14 (first year in high school). So I might have been one of these kids. Prior to that I knew how to write html and make webpages. That part was easy because there is no programming there. But when I got to my introductory programming course taught in C/C++ at the time, I didn't feel equipped as a student to tackle the problems presented. For example one of the tougher problems in the course was printing a diamond (ascii art) of stars based on a given number as input. So if they provided you with an input of 5, that meant at the widest point, the diamond would be 5 consecutive * characters with the previous and next lines being 3 consecutive * characters followed padded by one space on each end, and finally the top and bottom lines having one * with 2 spaces padding the left and right sides. Keep in mind that by this point, as a student, the most I had learned was basic algebra and perhaps a bit of geometry. The real heavy math/science courses were to be taught later in high school involving trigonometry, calculus, and physics.
Continuing on with the story, most students in the introductory programming class failed at this simple task of printing a diamond to the screen. It wasn't because of their lack of knowledge regarding programming, but their lack of knowledge regarding problem solving skills and the application of math. Had the teacher reviewed the problem at hand, by examining the necessary parts (calculations involved) on a black or whiteboard, I think all students could have implemented a solution. But the place where students were struggling was finding A solution. They would start writing 'for' loops knowing that this was a test of how well you understood 'for' loops without having a clue of why they needed the loops or what the loops were going to do.
So if you want your students to succeed, the language of choice will be the least of your problems since you are not bothering to teach high level programming paradigms (OO, functional, logic etc). The bigger problem will be how to teach the students to apply what they already know in a fashion they've never seen.
What about office apps? Design tools (like engineering design software)? Compilers, linkers, and interpreters? Package management (since this is linux)? File searches with the "find" command? Recursive directory copies?
The benchmark suite chosen is not representative of the "real world" usage. In the real world there are a variety apps that work on a variety of data. Not just cpu bound applications.
First: Lawyers are expensive. Very expensive. Most working people can't afford them very well, much less research assistants or students.
There is an alternative. Most people say "talk to a lawyer" as if you're expecting the lawyer to actually become your agent and act on your behalf. That doesn't have to be true. Why not learn how the law works in a class taught by a practicing law professional. That's the cheap way out of anything really. Don't want to pay for a mechanic? Learn how to do it yourself. Don't want to hire a plumber? Learn how to do it yourself. Don't want to be forced to ask every stupid question about the law to a licensed professional? Learn the law yourself. Sure, you won't come out with a degree or a license to practice law, but you'll be able to answer most stupid questions yourself. A single 2 or 4 unit law class can go a long way to helping anyone out.
It is not justice to allow a murderer to go free. Technicalities are not justice.
It is also not justice to have one innocent person convicted of a crime he did not commit and sent to jail. The law is not perfect, I agree with that. But just because your definition of justice is not met does not mean that the society's view of "justice" is not working as intended.
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It is also possible to use UAC from a non-administrator account. In this mode you must type a password every time a UAC prompt comes up, instead of just clicking "continue". Few people do this because it is not the default setup and it's even more annoying than regular UAC.
I think that was what the GP was trying to say. I run as a normal user and never touch the admin account unless I need to install software. I also configure other windows systems in this manner so that the user doesn't just click away. The only software that has issues are some old apps that do stupid things like write to their programs directory during normal use. Some older games would do this but you can prevent the UAC prompts by changing the game's directory to have write permissions for regular users.
No, never. If you keep signing 2 year contracts we'll never have competitive rates because you keep giving up your biggest bargaining chip. When you are monthly, you can cancel at any point for bad service and they lose market share while their competitor gains market share. You can use this to negotiate down your monthly rate on a monthly basis rather than every 2 years.
Where are the ads (with or without Jerry Seinfeld) and the glossy brochures at Best Buy?
Marketing isn't just advertising and promotion. It is also the act of determining what kind of product a particular target market desires. The reason why linux isn't on the desktop is because it doesn't get something right that other OSes and platforms for that particular target market. If the target market is "desktop users" then I say desktop users don't care about what is running under the hood, they only care that their apps and their devices work.
In my opinion, the correct marketing strategy for a desktop linux distro would be:
And no, the correct answer is not "use gimp" or "use openoffice" or "don't buy ipods". If you want to sell linux, you need to offer them something that meets the customer's needs. All I hear when open source devs say "use openoffice" is the same as forcing openoffice down their throat. Instead, the first question any good salesman asks of any customer is "what do you need?" If they then answer "I need to use itunes for my iphone" then you better get linux to work with itunes and their iphone otherwise your product is not for that customer!
Notice that I never specified how one would get devices like iphones and MS Office and such to work. One could strike an agreement with the manufacturers to release drivers, apps, and such or maybe outline a standard that manufacturers can build and work with. But guess what, that means a new marketing strategy for a new customer. In this case you're going to have to make it easier for the companies (the new target market) to make more money either by sharing the workload or offering them something that benefits them.
Unfortunately, things like the GPL and even the nature of linux limit the choices in marketing strategies (as well as the one-sidedness many FOSS advocates have). But remember, the customer is king; if you can't give them what they want, they will never be your customer.
On a side note: I've always felt that FreeBSD had a better chance for being a good base for a desktop OS simply because of licensing. Example: the FreeBSD camp has always had madwifi available with no licensing issues while the linux camp has only recently gotten some fully supported madwifi drivers without tainting the kernel. But of course in a desktop environment, I have no problem with companies providing proprietary drivers. If their product doesn't work, it goes back to the store. In a corporate environment, I do have everything against proprietary software but that is because the needs of a company (different target market) are different from the needs of a home user. If that hint wasn't big enough, I was pointing out that while linux might not be for the home desktop user, it might be better suited for the corporate office user. Get MS Office working and you've probably met most cubicle worker needs.
See really the other players like the Nomad were light years ahead but failed to due to marketing. Never mind that its interface was cumbersome. Never mind that it was larger than a portable CD player. Never mind that the Nomad could not be used as portable HD. Never mind it took many steps and hours for it to sync up. Never mind that it had a 45 min battery life. The iPod beat it on pure marketing.
Marketing does not mean what you think it means. Marketing in a nutshell boils down to target market and the marketing strategy. The marketing strategy commonly consists of the "four Ps": Product, Price, Promotion, and Place. The misconception many slashdotters have is that marketing activities only include the latter three (price, promotion, and place) and more specifically advertising. But marketing is more than that. The P that is often missed is product which defines the product to be distributed and sold. What you just described are problems with the product that the Nomad got wrong and Apple got right. In an ideal marketing situation, you wouldn't have to worry much about price and promotion because the product would sell itself. Why else do you think Apple gets away with just spinning their products on a 10 second commercial? But even with a good product you would still have to have place marketing strategies to get your product in the stores and in front of consumers. Apple accomplishes this as well through the Apple store and retail shelf space.
Before you start whining about "such and such open source software is an AWESOME product yet it doesn't 'sell'" I encourage you to compare what companies like Apple have done with all 4Ps of marketing versus what open source has done. In Apple you'll find they attack all four strategies. They build a product that people actually want to buy. They advertise the product and get the product into retail outlets so people are aware that the product exists and can be bought. They negotiate with other players in the market, for example ATT, to make sure the product works. They purposely price their products on the high end to make a statement that their product is different from the competition. And all of these strategies are rolled up to target specific markets or customers. There is a lot of complaining that Apple product are expensive, and my answer to those people is Apple is not targeting you. Such an act would be the equivalent of Nordstrom trying to open a store targeting the customers of Walmart.
The problem engineer types have is that we are too focused on product that we forget that there are many other factors that make a huge difference. In fact many young engineers don't even understand that they are building a product for customer's problem and they fail to understand the the interpretation of the requirements is the most crucial piece of that puzzle. And once the engineer type finally gets the product right, he has no clue how to get it into the hands of his customers. He doesn't understand retail and distribution. He doesn't understand working with other businesses to negotiate shelf space, cooperative advertising campaigns, or even what advertising is effective. He only thinks that the lower price means better for the customer when that is not always true. Customers sometimes do not want to pay low prices for various reasons. (Not all customers think logically.)
I don't know how the grandparent got modded flamebait because what he said is true. The problem is of course that slashdotters like to armchair everything even when it is out of their specialization or knowledge.
And don't get me wrong, there are bad marketers just as there are bad engineers. Both camps have the same "stereotype" mentality against the opposing group. But the businesses that will succeed are those that are able to get these teams to cooperate and understand the real problem at hand rather than having an invisible wall between the two. And for your disclosure, my profession is a Software Engineer but I've taken enough business and marketing classes to understand their side of the world. Allow the stereotypes to mess with your head and you will fail consistently regardless of your specialization.
Pros:
Cons:
9/80 is best when paired with a flex time schedule so that you can move around hours when you need to. The off friday gives you an option to tell your boss "i'll work more these days or just come in friday" if you want to take a different day off instead of the off friday. Coming in on the off friday usually means the office is dead. That can be good and bad. Some people like not having anyone around because they normally get interrupted too much when people are at the office. Other people hate it because there's nobody else to kick the bucket with.
If you find you are normally working more than 8 hours everyday, 9/80 is actually a good option because you will have a decent excuse for not coming in on the off fridays and you will have to work 9 hours most days anyway. If you find you are working even on the weekends, 9/80 will have no impact on your hours.
As a single guy, I prefer 9/80. But I do know some family types that prefer the 5/40 since they really need the consistent 8 hour days to keep their family schedules synced. At first you will loath the 9 hour days because that extra hour is bigger than it looks. After a while though 9 hours will seem like nothing and the working fridays will seem really short.
Onboard sound really sucks. Get really good head phones and you'll hear hiss, noise, or interference whenever your system does something. I have Sennheiser HD 280 pro headphones with passive noise canceling and I tell you, there is a huge difference. Now if you have crappy head phones that let in all the sound from your whining computer fans, then sure, you'll never notice the noise and hiss the onboard sound produces.
Google does image and video ads, not just text ads.
I'm no system engineer, but wouldn't it make a lot more sense to put all the brains in the box connected to the television (and the power outlet), and just use a cheap remote control (with much better battery life) to control it?
But then if I have a nifty USB thumb drive or SD card with pictures, I have to walk up to the TV, plug it in, and walk by to my keyboard. Sure, the "remote" could have usb and a card reader but now it isn't much of a cheap remote?
if you've got a built-in wireless HDMI for streaming video to a largescreen TV... what the fsck do you need a crappy 5" LCD screen for???
It probably doubles as a trackpad and/or troubleshooting display should your hdmi connection have problems. If they can keep the price down I'm all for lcd displays on keyboards. A killer feature I've always dreamed of is an lcd display above the "F" keys which would allow you to remap or give special programming to these keys. Sounds like the optimus keyboard but a much cheaper version.
I'd say the killer app for this is a desktop that shares some of the benefits of a notebook. Current notebooks are a pain to hookup to other devices, this device is supposedly going to make it easy to hook up to monitors, tvs, and such. That means rather than buy a pc for the living room and the home office, you buy this keyboard and just drag it to the room where you need to work. The difference would be you don't need a dock like a laptop and you'd want to use a better display device like a monitor or hdtv.
The killer app will probably be just youtube and email in the living room and/or bedroom. Sure the Wii and other consoles can do youtube, but you're not about to drag your Wii, Xbox, or PS3 with you to every room with a TV.
People also tend to like devices that seem to "just work" even if it only fits a single purpose. For example most people do think HTPCs are cool but most people don't feel comfortable setting up a PC to work with their TV. At minimum, you'd have to have a PC and wireless keyboard/mouse and hook everything up correctly (hdmi, sound cables, wireless kb/mouse connection). With this device you'd probably just plug in the wireless HDMI adapter to the tv and you're done. Sure, the implementation from an engineering standpoint doesn't make sense, but the user doesn't care. They only care that it fits the use case they envision.
I setup my family member's vista machine to have them running as a normal user. I put a password on the administrator account. Whenever they see UAC, it requires a password for them to go forward and they don't know the password. So anytime they have software that requires this they usually call me. For the software they use (office, browser, tax programs, occasional picture viewing) they never get UAC prompts unless something fishy is happening.
I had this problem and realized that the amount of time I spent sorting socks was ridiculous. The solution? Flatten your socks down to 1 or 2 types (white and black) and now the sorting problem goes away. Anytime your socks start developing holes or you feel you need to replace them, throw out the entire batch and buy all identical ones. By now you don't even have to pair up the socks when sorting the laundry. Just throw them in the drawer/basket and you're done.
Skip the wear leveling fs and just buy a 2.5" SSD. The cf card + adapter will yield slower performance and capacity compared to a cheap 2.5" SSD.
You're a rich bastard if you can toss your $2800 laptop and buy a new one every few years. I still have my dell laptop I paid $800 for 3.5 years ago and still have no plans on tossing it.
I'm waiting for bootable USB flash drive images I can just dd. This would enable me to drop all the cd/dvd drives from my systems.
There's still opportunity for entertainment. That's probably why sex, gambling, and drugs goes up. The cheapest form of entertainment these days is either TV, movies, or video games. I'd say the entertainment industry will stay strong as people will have nothing better to do while looking for new jobs or waiting for interviews.
I had the same problem. My parent's computer with Windows XP got viruses so I had to have them run on ubuntu livecd till they moved into their new house (we were moving at the time and didn't have all our things). The problem is my dad likes to buy turbotax from the store when he needs to file his tax returns. And of course that software only runs on Windows or Mac.
So eventually I just bought them a refurb Dell for under $300 that came with Vista Business. Surprisingly, the machine didn't have much crap on it except Dell's support tool. So I set them up as a non-admin user within Vista and never told them the administrator password. This causes UAC prompts to ask for the admin password before they can do anything. Whenever they manage to get it (which is rare for them), they usually call me. This is good because now I have a windows compatible machine with some sense of security before they do something potentially malicious to their computer.
Sure I could have used a VM and trained my dad about how windows is running inside of their linux, but that wouldn't stop the other problems like getting their printer to work, let them buy any piece of crap from the store and have it work (digital cameras, scanners, software, etc). I actually get very few "support" requests from them now and the last time I thought I'd follow up on the IE exploit (though my dad uses firefox, I felt I should install the patch just to keep them safe), when I got there the computer had already updated itself with the patch.
So linux is a great solution only if the user has a limited scope of needs surrounding browsing the net, email, and maybe writing a document or two. The second you add 3rd party products, linux compatibility (I'm not just talking about computer specific hardware, but consumer electronics that interface with computers like digital cameras) is a problem. And no, Googling is not a solution. The user should be able to buy what they want and reasonably have it work. Windows makes this happen (not perfectly, but usually) and is one of the main reasons why it continues to live.
I may have no problem looking up linux compatible hardware, but you can sure bet normal people aren't. They just see the commercials "ipods" or "blackberries" and instantly say "I want that." If it doesn't work, they don't google about how to fix it. They simply return the product and ask for their money back.
Going by his account name it appears that he's likely the CEO. On the Company page you can see the details. My guess is he will certainly have a bias.
I would go here. Many of the links go to the irs website but there should be an SBA office near you where you can get more information.
Take a look at fairsoftware.net. It was designed for exactly that purpose: geeks starting a side business together.
It was also designed to take 9.9% of each sale you make. Not necessarily saying that's a bad deal, but rather if you don't understand what that means for the business, you ought to educate yourself first.
They're almost here. $70 for 30GB SSD is currently out of stock but I'm sure they'll get a new shipment within the week. With each new drive that hits the market profit margins are getting squeezed out. MLC NAND flash chips spot prices are about $1 a gigabyte so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a healthy 100% margin still built into these product prices.
Unless I missed something a 250GB SSD is going on newegg for $700.
The problem with most introductory programming courses is that they drop you in the deep end and expect the student to eventually figure out how to stay alive based on all the tools they start throwing at you. And I'll be honest, I don't have an answer as to what programming language you should use or if it even matters. Let me explain.
I first started learning programming at the age of 14 (first year in high school). So I might have been one of these kids. Prior to that I knew how to write html and make webpages. That part was easy because there is no programming there. But when I got to my introductory programming course taught in C/C++ at the time, I didn't feel equipped as a student to tackle the problems presented. For example one of the tougher problems in the course was printing a diamond (ascii art) of stars based on a given number as input. So if they provided you with an input of 5, that meant at the widest point, the diamond would be 5 consecutive * characters with the previous and next lines being 3 consecutive * characters followed padded by one space on each end, and finally the top and bottom lines having one * with 2 spaces padding the left and right sides. Keep in mind that by this point, as a student, the most I had learned was basic algebra and perhaps a bit of geometry. The real heavy math/science courses were to be taught later in high school involving trigonometry, calculus, and physics.
Continuing on with the story, most students in the introductory programming class failed at this simple task of printing a diamond to the screen. It wasn't because of their lack of knowledge regarding programming, but their lack of knowledge regarding problem solving skills and the application of math. Had the teacher reviewed the problem at hand, by examining the necessary parts (calculations involved) on a black or whiteboard, I think all students could have implemented a solution. But the place where students were struggling was finding A solution. They would start writing 'for' loops knowing that this was a test of how well you understood 'for' loops without having a clue of why they needed the loops or what the loops were going to do.
So if you want your students to succeed, the language of choice will be the least of your problems since you are not bothering to teach high level programming paradigms (OO, functional, logic etc). The bigger problem will be how to teach the students to apply what they already know in a fashion they've never seen.
What about office apps? Design tools (like engineering design software)? Compilers, linkers, and interpreters? Package management (since this is linux)? File searches with the "find" command? Recursive directory copies?
The benchmark suite chosen is not representative of the "real world" usage. In the real world there are a variety apps that work on a variety of data. Not just cpu bound applications.
First: Lawyers are expensive. Very expensive. Most working people can't afford them very well, much less research assistants or students.
There is an alternative. Most people say "talk to a lawyer" as if you're expecting the lawyer to actually become your agent and act on your behalf. That doesn't have to be true. Why not learn how the law works in a class taught by a practicing law professional. That's the cheap way out of anything really. Don't want to pay for a mechanic? Learn how to do it yourself. Don't want to hire a plumber? Learn how to do it yourself. Don't want to be forced to ask every stupid question about the law to a licensed professional? Learn the law yourself. Sure, you won't come out with a degree or a license to practice law, but you'll be able to answer most stupid questions yourself. A single 2 or 4 unit law class can go a long way to helping anyone out.
I was thinking about frying it in oil to make a new type of Calamari.
It is not justice to allow a murderer to go free. Technicalities are not justice.
It is also not justice to have one innocent person convicted of a crime he did not commit and sent to jail. The law is not perfect, I agree with that. But just because your definition of justice is not met does not mean that the society's view of "justice" is not working as intended.