Before the negative posts start arriving please understand that this is my comment to the editorial story on IDG which I’ve linked here for you entitled:
To clarify, I call any PC which a user sits at, that has the traditional keyboard, mouse and display a desktop PC.
I cannot fault the author of that article because it is simply true. You can convert users, but over time without good constant support from a real person they are likely to move back to Windows.
It tells us that if we participate in the “focus group” that we will get paid $100 for this. Well I’ve participated in many surveys and ‘focus groups’ and enjoy doing so, but many are not all they seem, and some are downright invasive about ‘knowing your personal lifestyle’ or worse, resellers of your information. So I decided to check it out and reply to the email listed in the ad as Haley.Axel@gmail.com. My first suspicion about this was when I received a reply almost immediately. Very rarely do ad responses get immediate replies, and instead of asking for a time to meet, it simply directed me to a ‘screener’ survey via Survey Monkeys. Well Survey Monkeys is a free online service anyone can use to generate surveys and submit them. So I’m thinking they wanted to stick me into doing a survey for free. Well the questions were in my mind serving nothing other than providing a clear redirect to the real company Lightspeed Reasearch, based in New Jersey, to ‘become a member’. Well membership is free so I’m thinking so far so good right?
I usually advise clients that the vast bulk of these tools are simply nothing more than snake-oil products. However many self-proclaimed experts on many support forums tend to get annoyed with me making such statements. I feel their annoyance may simply reflect the fact that many of these products may well support these same sites, which would be a conflict of interest. Regardless, I’ve never seen any substantial GOOD come from these tools.
After reading this article on MaximumPC, I felt that I would quote the relevent sections to indicate that they are simply products to make you part with your money and nothing more. Few if any offer any serious advantage to the average person, and even fewer advantages to the average machine. Frankly I’ve seen a fair amount of work from people who use these tools and break their systems, so I guess I can be happy for the work. I’m positive I don’t know anyone who has anything ‘positive’ to say about these tools. Registry bloat is a non-issue and no one needs to delete dead old entries UNLESS they are relevent to a malware infection. In which case ‘some’ of these tools can be handy in a malware cleaners toolbox, but only if they know what they are doing.
If you had an opportunity to view your local newspapers job classifieds this weekend you may well find an ad like this one.
It looks like a highly sincere advertisement seeking folks who would like an opportunity like this. They obviously are seeking to appeal to anyone interested in a highly flexible and possibly rewarding (getting paid to shop) opportunity. The site seems to indicate a 4-12 hour work week on average and you are considered part time. This is all cool. However, what isn’t so cool is the lack of ANY security features for the sites ‘job application’ forms.
In my eyes this is very troublesome that anyone would submit this much personal information without any measures at encrypting the data to the site. And it wants a LOT of data from you.
Debian OS
Our preferred server OS. Great improvements on package maintenance as well as greater emphasis on security of network packages has made this one of the choice OS”s for servers
FreeNAS
A great Network Accessible Storage (NAS) solution for any environment. Boots from a small image. One of the best projects, based on FreeBSD 5.x/6.x
Ubuntu OS
Our desktop OS of choice, completely free to download, and free to use. Has one of the largest support offerings as well as a very large user-community
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