I have a Volt, and yes that was my preferred choice. I was quite excited about it actually. I wanted one for years, even before they went into production. I was still very much interested in what Tesla was doing, but more so because I'm interested in the technology in general.
The Volt is a great first electric car when switching from a gas-only car because you don't have to worry about getting to a charging station before the battery runs out - the gas engine will take over when it needs to without the driver having to do anything. No, I did not consider buying from Tesla. Partly because of the price, and partly because I live in an area where there is no infrastructure for public charging stations which is a definite must if you plan on making a trip farther than your battery range.
So you can't really compare the Volt and the Tesla models. Yes Tesla needs to make a cheaper model that the average Joe can afford but all-electric cars won't catch on if people are worrying about how far they can go before they have to find a charging station. Eventually the batteries will have more range and more charging stations will be built and more average joes will buy electric cars.
For the installation of a DVD drive I think it would be quite arguable that they should NOT have looked at the guy's files. But, suppose he brought in his computer to fix a virus instead? I don't know what steps those particular techs take for virus removal, but if step #1 is "see if it's fixable" then poking around in the files might be necessary. I end up with lots of friends/family/co-worker's computers that are running slow or have some other general symptoms. If they don't want to format or re-image then what choice is there except look at the files? If most chain-stores that do pc repair (or anyone, really) has the client sign a form when they drop it off, really they should just add a paragraph stating that their files might be examined and they waive their right to privacy, or the other way around - that whatever the tech sees is confidential. Problem solved!
I haven't given Vista a try yet (and have no plans to) but I'm going to give my opinion anyway, since everyone else is. It seems a common Vista complaint is performance - XP runs faster on the same hardware. So, what I think MS should do, instead of offering multiple versions of Vista Home, and multiple versions of Vista Pro (or whatever it's called) they should just offer 1 version of Vista Home, which would include all those "helpful" dialog boxes and tooltips and whatnot, and 2 versions of Vista Pro - one version for those "look at my pretty taskbar, and my colourful wallpaper" people, and the other version for the rest of us - no fancy GUI, nothing we don't need during our workday, tuned for performance. It sounds to me MS is trying to sell us a "Corvette" with a 4-cylinder engine under the hood. Useless!
For my home computers, I would NEVER buy one of the big brand names. I have too many stories of trying to fix friend's/family's PC's that have non-standard parts, or parts made by vendors that don't exist anymore, or even if they do exist the part costs 3x as much to replace after your warranty is up. At the shop where I work, we currently have high-end IBM's for cad work and mid-range IBM's for the office. Over half of them have had hard drives die suddenly. Support was no problem, they seemed to speak english well and always send out parts fast. On site service is pretty fast too (at least here in Canada). So they get low marks for hardware quality but ok marks for their support. Previous to the IBM's we had SGI's in our design department - near the end of their lease one needed a replacement graphics card. Sure they had it, and it was covered under warranty but they refused to send it to me so I could swap it myself. The repair person's time was not covered, so we paid $175 to replace a part that probably cost half that. DO make sure that the warranty and support extend for the entire length of the lease, if that's the way you are going. We have a Cisco PIX under 3-year lease but somehow the service was only 2 years. Now with only a few months left on the lease they refuse to help me with even a simple problem & I can't even access the Cisco downloads for software updates. Sure, I would happily build all 25 or so computers we have here in the shop, but management for some reason seems to think that workstations from the big brand names are better in some way (or possibly more impressive to the customers when they tour through the shop). In my opinion, the parts are cheap and in some cases just plain junk. When it comes to replacing a part I can get it in the same amount of time whether I complain to the IBM people or RMA directly to the manufacturer. Which way you go just depends on how much of the hands-on support work you want to do yourself.
I'm from Canada, so maybe our school system is a little different (and it's been 12 years since I've been in school) but back then if you wanted to go to University you had to start deciding in Grade 11 and pretty much have your choice written in stone by Grade 12. My high school didn't even get their first set of workstations for student use until I was in Grade 11. The beginning programming course was at Grade 12 level, too late to influence my post-secondary educational choices. How was I supposed to know then that a few years later I would take an interest in how they worked? How does anyone at that age know that they want to go into CS? I wasted $7000 and one year of my life in B.Comm only to realize that I was way more interested in computers. I asked the head of CS to switch, his only response was "take a year off and if you're still interested ask me again". So I dropped out for a year, and what a bad idea that was - I never went back. For me, and probably most people in the middle-income bracket, schooling that expensive is a one-shot deal. How about some MONETARY incentives for women to go into CS? If I could go to school and still pay the bills then I wouldn't hesitate to sign up (yes I am a woman btw). I would say that CS does suffer from some negative perceptions, though I disagree that geek factor is the one that puts off women the most. I did see it as a career that would require a higher degree of intelligence than some careers, but I never thought that it was "too hard". If anything, women would probably think that a CS graduate's job is pretty boring. Maybe as computers become more commonplace in the classroom (or more people get over the "don't touch the computer, you'll break it" mentality) then maybe more girls will say "Hey, I wonder how this works?" and become interested enough to find out.
The CAD department where I work has an Octane sitting forgotten in a corner (because we "upgraded" to XP machines). It's been here longer than I have, I would say it's around 8 years old. Probably cost a good penny in it's time... I'd like to find a use for it. It's about the right size for a footrest, that's all I've come up with so far! Anyone want to build an Octane array?? LOL
There's only 15 or so people using the Exchange server I set up, but it still gets around 150 spams a day. I installed GFI Mail Essentails, it works ok but lately the amount of spams getting through is increasing - I would say at least 2 or 3 per user per day. I get especially angry at all the Cialis/Viagra e-mails... they could at least throw in some female targeted spams once in a while! Do they assume if you use e-mail that you're a man?? Or that women are already perfect?? LOL
46% of women *had* to do their own troubleshooting because they couldn't find a man to do it (he was probably busy driving around lost somewhere and refusing to ask for directions).
Seriously though, where I live I would say men and women have an equal amount of gadgets (excluding vacuum cleaners and the like). However, when having a problem men seem more likely to try and fix it themselves than women. The women call me for help as soon as they have a problem, men tinker and then call me when they've screwed it up more.
I asked my bf to get me a GTX video card for my birthday but all I got were diamond earrings LOL
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I have a Volt, and yes that was my preferred choice. I was quite excited about it actually. I wanted one for years, even before they went into production. I was still very much interested in what Tesla was doing, but more so because I'm interested in the technology in general. The Volt is a great first electric car when switching from a gas-only car because you don't have to worry about getting to a charging station before the battery runs out - the gas engine will take over when it needs to without the driver having to do anything. No, I did not consider buying from Tesla. Partly because of the price, and partly because I live in an area where there is no infrastructure for public charging stations which is a definite must if you plan on making a trip farther than your battery range. So you can't really compare the Volt and the Tesla models. Yes Tesla needs to make a cheaper model that the average Joe can afford but all-electric cars won't catch on if people are worrying about how far they can go before they have to find a charging station. Eventually the batteries will have more range and more charging stations will be built and more average joes will buy electric cars.
For the installation of a DVD drive I think it would be quite arguable that they should NOT have looked at the guy's files. But, suppose he brought in his computer to fix a virus instead? I don't know what steps those particular techs take for virus removal, but if step #1 is "see if it's fixable" then poking around in the files might be necessary. I end up with lots of friends/family/co-worker's computers that are running slow or have some other general symptoms. If they don't want to format or re-image then what choice is there except look at the files? If most chain-stores that do pc repair (or anyone, really) has the client sign a form when they drop it off, really they should just add a paragraph stating that their files might be examined and they waive their right to privacy, or the other way around - that whatever the tech sees is confidential. Problem solved!
Mishandling sensitive data of over 100,000 people resulting in it being stolen = lose 1 weeks vacation pay
Downloading some MP3's off P2P = lose $222,000 to RIAA
I haven't given Vista a try yet (and have no plans to) but I'm going to give my opinion anyway, since everyone else is. It seems a common Vista complaint is performance - XP runs faster on the same hardware. So, what I think MS should do, instead of offering multiple versions of Vista Home, and multiple versions of Vista Pro (or whatever it's called) they should just offer 1 version of Vista Home, which would include all those "helpful" dialog boxes and tooltips and whatnot, and 2 versions of Vista Pro - one version for those "look at my pretty taskbar, and my colourful wallpaper" people, and the other version for the rest of us - no fancy GUI, nothing we don't need during our workday, tuned for performance. It sounds to me MS is trying to sell us a "Corvette" with a 4-cylinder engine under the hood. Useless!
For my home computers, I would NEVER buy one of the big brand names. I have too many stories of trying to fix friend's/family's PC's that have non-standard parts, or parts made by vendors that don't exist anymore, or even if they do exist the part costs 3x as much to replace after your warranty is up. At the shop where I work, we currently have high-end IBM's for cad work and mid-range IBM's for the office. Over half of them have had hard drives die suddenly. Support was no problem, they seemed to speak english well and always send out parts fast. On site service is pretty fast too (at least here in Canada). So they get low marks for hardware quality but ok marks for their support. Previous to the IBM's we had SGI's in our design department - near the end of their lease one needed a replacement graphics card. Sure they had it, and it was covered under warranty but they refused to send it to me so I could swap it myself. The repair person's time was not covered, so we paid $175 to replace a part that probably cost half that. DO make sure that the warranty and support extend for the entire length of the lease, if that's the way you are going. We have a Cisco PIX under 3-year lease but somehow the service was only 2 years. Now with only a few months left on the lease they refuse to help me with even a simple problem & I can't even access the Cisco downloads for software updates. Sure, I would happily build all 25 or so computers we have here in the shop, but management for some reason seems to think that workstations from the big brand names are better in some way (or possibly more impressive to the customers when they tour through the shop). In my opinion, the parts are cheap and in some cases just plain junk. When it comes to replacing a part I can get it in the same amount of time whether I complain to the IBM people or RMA directly to the manufacturer. Which way you go just depends on how much of the hands-on support work you want to do yourself.
I'm from Canada, so maybe our school system is a little different (and it's been 12 years since I've been in school) but back then if you wanted to go to University you had to start deciding in Grade 11 and pretty much have your choice written in stone by Grade 12. My high school didn't even get their first set of workstations for student use until I was in Grade 11. The beginning programming course was at Grade 12 level, too late to influence my post-secondary educational choices. How was I supposed to know then that a few years later I would take an interest in how they worked? How does anyone at that age know that they want to go into CS? I wasted $7000 and one year of my life in B.Comm only to realize that I was way more interested in computers. I asked the head of CS to switch, his only response was "take a year off and if you're still interested ask me again". So I dropped out for a year, and what a bad idea that was - I never went back. For me, and probably most people in the middle-income bracket, schooling that expensive is a one-shot deal. How about some MONETARY incentives for women to go into CS? If I could go to school and still pay the bills then I wouldn't hesitate to sign up (yes I am a woman btw). I would say that CS does suffer from some negative perceptions, though I disagree that geek factor is the one that puts off women the most. I did see it as a career that would require a higher degree of intelligence than some careers, but I never thought that it was "too hard". If anything, women would probably think that a CS graduate's job is pretty boring. Maybe as computers become more commonplace in the classroom (or more people get over the "don't touch the computer, you'll break it" mentality) then maybe more girls will say "Hey, I wonder how this works?" and become interested enough to find out.
The CAD department where I work has an Octane sitting forgotten in a corner (because we "upgraded" to XP machines). It's been here longer than I have, I would say it's around 8 years old. Probably cost a good penny in it's time... I'd like to find a use for it. It's about the right size for a footrest, that's all I've come up with so far! Anyone want to build an Octane array?? LOL
There's only 15 or so people using the Exchange server I set up, but it still gets around 150 spams a day. I installed GFI Mail Essentails, it works ok but lately the amount of spams getting through is increasing - I would say at least 2 or 3 per user per day. I get especially angry at all the Cialis/Viagra e-mails... they could at least throw in some female targeted spams once in a while! Do they assume if you use e-mail that you're a man?? Or that women are already perfect?? LOL
46% of women *had* to do their own troubleshooting because they couldn't find a man to do it (he was probably busy driving around lost somewhere and refusing to ask for directions). Seriously though, where I live I would say men and women have an equal amount of gadgets (excluding vacuum cleaners and the like). However, when having a problem men seem more likely to try and fix it themselves than women. The women call me for help as soon as they have a problem, men tinker and then call me when they've screwed it up more. I asked my bf to get me a GTX video card for my birthday but all I got were diamond earrings LOL
I haven't purchased any new games since signing up for WoW. I promised myself I wouldn't spend any more on games until Diablo III comes out LOL