newspapers that are controlled by a wealthy megacorp oligarchy
Not all newspapers are so. I live in Omaha, where the World-Herald Company (operating the eponymous newspaper and some regional small papers) is employee-owned. Despite the recent hardships, the World-Herald still has the most market penetration of any newspaper in the US.
They haven't figured out a good online strategy yet, it seems, but I'd be far more willing to pay up-front for its coverage than I would be to pay for a Murdock-owned publication. There are still good papers out there; don't give up on them all.
I was helping to manage wireless mics for a local musical production. A member of the ensemble dropped $800 of pack and mic into the toilet. We took the battery out, left it to sit, and on the second day I tested it, it lit right up again. We didn't even drop it in a bag of rice, but that probably would have sped up the evaporation process.
Speaking as someone who does sell those extended warranties, it's not a black-and-white bad deal, because of the customers themselves.
Scenario 1: We don't sell a warranty on an electronic product. It breaks. The customer will invariably want to return it to our store, after the 14-day electronics return policy clearly printed on the receipt (a policy I explicitly mention at the register) -- hell, often months later. When I remind them of the return policy, and tell them they now have to take up defects with the manufacturer, 9/10 of them won't get why this is the case and feel disappointed and cheated, and at least 1/3 will tell me they're never shopping at my store again. Some of them do this more "nicely" than others.
If I do sell a warranty, the user is covered against accidental damage, damage not covered under the manufacturer's warranty, and just not wanting the product after all. Compared to a 15-days-plus regular return, management doesn't bitch as much about a store warranty return performed in the store, even though we're supposed to direct customers to our 800 number/website to process returns. (From personally having one of the warranties on a camera I eventually dropped, yes, it really is a no-questions-asked, quick, friendly process. I don't think I even mentioned I'm an employee.) Since we can do this, the customer is happy, and my job is much more pleasant.
The important point of this story is that the customer doesn't understand the return process, and the customer doesn't want to understand the return process. He doesn't know why his product broke, or even if it's really broken. He doesn't want to look for solutions online, doesn't want to go to the trouble of phoning the Indian call center of the now-distrusted company, doesn't want to box the product up and ship it back. He goes to the "source" of the problem, my store, and just wants his money back within about 60 seconds and the signing of a single receipt.
Theoretically, by selling these no-worries warranties, I'm contributing to the downfall of mankind by telling people that, with a warranty, they don't have to be self-reliant, knowledgeable, or in any way responsible. But it's not like I could instill these qualities in random strangers, anyway. So by selling a warranty, I gain an extra dollar or two in my paycheck (employees' motivation to sell these is primarily managerial, not financial). The customer is placated. I don't have to call other employees or managers to the register, to say exactly what I just said, and take the exact same abuse from the customer.
TL;DR: Customers don't want the truth; that's why it's unacceptable. Until their attitudes change, or my company decides to engage in charity by paying its employees to help soccer moms grow up, instead of paying us to sell product, I'm more than willing to deliver a 30-second spiel about an extended warranty in the hopes of just keeping all parties happy.
That depends on the media and device, as with any format. I bet that Nakamichi was great, and I also bet your friend had very expensive speakers and tape to go along with it.
Quality control varied widely in 8-track duplication -- in fairness, the same can be said for cassettes -- and the incentive for recording and cartridge quality fell somewhat as companies shifted emphasis toward cassettes. Cassettes also gained many improvements that didn't filter down to the "old" format, including superior tape formulations. Most cassettes and 8-tracks sound comparable to my ear, they all have a 1/32" track width, but cassettes play at half the speed 8-tracks do (3.75in/s). Oh, and there were late-model 8-tracks and players with Dolby B support, but those are rather rare.
Anecdotally, I do have a Three Dog Night 8-track that sounds almost CD-quality after probably 30 years, played on a solid home deck and speakers; and about 500 tapes total, going from partially-demagnetized and muffled to plenty crisp and well-maintained. It's pretty easy to tell which spent their time at home, and which baking in the car. And it would make sense that the average quality of tape players and speakers (both car and home) increased from the early 70s to the 80s; better technology does drop down to the consumer price range, given time. I've heard that the best of the best back in the day were Wollensak or Akai decks, and Scotch or BASF tape.
8-tracks can definitely be rewarding to your ears; you just have to take into account that, at any time in recording history, the consumer has the choice between downright crappy, good, and truly excellent stereo systems; and manufacturers will similarly do what they will. Besides, these days, the price is right for what you get. 50 cents an album is a great way to legally drown yourself in classic rock and pop.
P.S. Here's the kicker, I'm 18. I've been collecting these things for years.:)
There are too many sites today that work just fine in IE, and work just fine in Firefox (and so, one would assume, they're perfectly standards-compliant)...and then they break in Opera, which is my personal browser of choice.
For example, Amazon's "search inside this book" feature explicitly posts a message saying my browser isn't supported. I have to open up IE or Firefox to peek at books I'm considering. What's up with that?
All browsers should support the same standards; all sites should follow those same standards; and the idea should not be "Firefox: The IE Alternative," but "Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Konqueror, Epiphany, Lynx, and Internet Explorer: Your Choice."
Funnily enough, I just noticed that the favicons for the Guardian and Google look quite similar. Perhaps it's a conspiracy and "Googlian" is fighting with itself to drive up pageviews!
Aww, that reminds me I had a Wang clone, too. I used it for some time, until I broke the spacebar once removing it. (Snapped one of the little plastic bits grabbing onto the [-shaped metal frame that held the whole bar level when you pressed it, and wasn't able to properly fix it.) Luckily, one of my birthday presents this year was a ridiculously heavy Model M from the mid-90s.:)
Just remember, all the debris kicked up into the atmosphere could actually cause global cooling. Reference the drop in average world temperature caused by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo awhile back.
I'm not able to open the PDF right now to see the pretty graphs, but it says "The figure shows that failures do not increase when the average temperature increases. In fact, there is a clear trend showing that lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates. Only at very high temperatures is there a slight reversal
of this trend." However, it also notes that "What stands out are the 3 and 4-year old drives, where the trend for higher failures with higher temperature is much more constant and also more
pronounced."
Hey, it's an amazing display of fairness for Slashdot to post a review acknowledging that IE actually has some good bits to it, let alone "is back on top.":P
Unfortunately, while I loved them at first, add-ons were the killer in my decision to switch away from Firefox to Opera. I found that even using one or two extensions (including using only Adblock, perhaps the most popular Firefox extension), my browser was bloated, slow, and prone to frequent crashing. Switching to FF3, I enjoyed none of the acclaimed new improvements in memory management once I added any extensions to the mix, and in fact, Firefox would crash constantly (every half-hour or so) under any conditions.
I'd already installed Opera so I could bring it up when I was playing memory- and CPU-hungry games and not lag them any while I had a browser idling in the background, so I just switched fulltime. Aside from noticing a few more ads (easily ignored or remedied with Opera's built-in content blocker), my browsing experience has been much improved; Opera responds far better than Firefox, and has many of the functions that Firefox only has from third-party extensions. The others, I find I don't actually miss at all.
Telnet? Real men would use SSH instead of telnet, but they wouldn't really be real men, because real men disassemble Ubuntu on a friend's computer, read it, then type the commands in all over again on their own from memory.
Yes. This is why I don't get why people don't appreciate the value (at least in redundancy) of having a land line around. I'm gonna miss that when I go off to a residence hall this fall; it's very new and has all the latest amenities, Ethernet to every room, but alas, good old landlines are too old to be useful and worth supplying (or worth demanding), right?
Hooray for me, I live in one of those countries!:/
Very few people in the Midwest, including my family, are ready to listen to the idea that corn ethanol is unfeasible and bad in the long term. When corn prices go up, the farmers are happy, and there are a lot of farmers out here, so the politicians try to keep them happy by keeping corn prices up.
Unfortunately, lots of people are ignorant in that way. When they hear the term "anarchist," they think "a person who wants to blow shit up for fun" or "a threat to democracy."
Well, 8-tracks did have a theoretical advantage. They share the same track width as cassettes (1/32" per track), but the tape travelled at twice the speed (3.75"/sec vs. 1.875"/sec). All other factors being equal, this would have given 8-tracks superior audio quality hands down; however, the industry clearly focused on bringing the latest technical achievements in magnetic tape to the cassette medium, passing 8-tracks over. (For example, I've never heard of CrO2 tape manufactured for 8-track use, and both 8-track tapes and players using the Dolby process are few and far in between.)
Mechanically speaking, cassettes have the reliability advantage because they don't have the quirky infinite-loop travel path (which caused a plethora of problems, each of which I've personally repaired or abandoned a tape for), and they can rewind, but 8-tracks did have some significant unrealized potential, in both the speed advantage and the brief but mindblowing experiment with quad-channel audio that CreepyCrawler mentioned. (In fairness, there were also various quad vinyl standards, but almost all of these were matrixed, versus having discrete channels.)
I know that few straight people flaunt their orientation in social situations, but it's pretty easy to guess the sexuality of the people who call other gamers "fags" on the in-game chat.
Although I suppose they could just be suffering internalized homophobia...:P
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, that's the reason I use Opera. Including on Linux.
Not all newspapers are so. I live in Omaha, where the World-Herald Company (operating the eponymous newspaper and some regional small papers) is employee-owned. Despite the recent hardships, the World-Herald still has the most market penetration of any newspaper in the US.
They haven't figured out a good online strategy yet, it seems, but I'd be far more willing to pay up-front for its coverage than I would be to pay for a Murdock-owned publication. There are still good papers out there; don't give up on them all.
Pagan, or penguin? Huh? Huh? Thanks, folks, I'll be here all night...
I was helping to manage wireless mics for a local musical production. A member of the ensemble dropped $800 of pack and mic into the toilet. We took the battery out, left it to sit, and on the second day I tested it, it lit right up again. We didn't even drop it in a bag of rice, but that probably would have sped up the evaporation process.
Speaking as someone who does sell those extended warranties, it's not a black-and-white bad deal, because of the customers themselves.
Scenario 1: We don't sell a warranty on an electronic product. It breaks. The customer will invariably want to return it to our store, after the 14-day electronics return policy clearly printed on the receipt (a policy I explicitly mention at the register) -- hell, often months later. When I remind them of the return policy, and tell them they now have to take up defects with the manufacturer, 9/10 of them won't get why this is the case and feel disappointed and cheated, and at least 1/3 will tell me they're never shopping at my store again. Some of them do this more "nicely" than others.
If I do sell a warranty, the user is covered against accidental damage, damage not covered under the manufacturer's warranty, and just not wanting the product after all. Compared to a 15-days-plus regular return, management doesn't bitch as much about a store warranty return performed in the store, even though we're supposed to direct customers to our 800 number/website to process returns. (From personally having one of the warranties on a camera I eventually dropped, yes, it really is a no-questions-asked, quick, friendly process. I don't think I even mentioned I'm an employee.) Since we can do this, the customer is happy, and my job is much more pleasant.
The important point of this story is that the customer doesn't understand the return process, and the customer doesn't want to understand the return process. He doesn't know why his product broke, or even if it's really broken. He doesn't want to look for solutions online, doesn't want to go to the trouble of phoning the Indian call center of the now-distrusted company, doesn't want to box the product up and ship it back. He goes to the "source" of the problem, my store, and just wants his money back within about 60 seconds and the signing of a single receipt.
Theoretically, by selling these no-worries warranties, I'm contributing to the downfall of mankind by telling people that, with a warranty, they don't have to be self-reliant, knowledgeable, or in any way responsible. But it's not like I could instill these qualities in random strangers, anyway. So by selling a warranty, I gain an extra dollar or two in my paycheck (employees' motivation to sell these is primarily managerial, not financial). The customer is placated. I don't have to call other employees or managers to the register, to say exactly what I just said, and take the exact same abuse from the customer.
TL;DR: Customers don't want the truth; that's why it's unacceptable. Until their attitudes change, or my company decides to engage in charity by paying its employees to help soccer moms grow up, instead of paying us to sell product, I'm more than willing to deliver a 30-second spiel about an extended warranty in the hopes of just keeping all parties happy.
That depends on the media and device, as with any format. I bet that Nakamichi was great, and I also bet your friend had very expensive speakers and tape to go along with it.
Quality control varied widely in 8-track duplication -- in fairness, the same can be said for cassettes -- and the incentive for recording and cartridge quality fell somewhat as companies shifted emphasis toward cassettes. Cassettes also gained many improvements that didn't filter down to the "old" format, including superior tape formulations. Most cassettes and 8-tracks sound comparable to my ear, they all have a 1/32" track width, but cassettes play at half the speed 8-tracks do (3.75in/s). Oh, and there were late-model 8-tracks and players with Dolby B support, but those are rather rare.
Anecdotally, I do have a Three Dog Night 8-track that sounds almost CD-quality after probably 30 years, played on a solid home deck and speakers; and about 500 tapes total, going from partially-demagnetized and muffled to plenty crisp and well-maintained. It's pretty easy to tell which spent their time at home, and which baking in the car. And it would make sense that the average quality of tape players and speakers (both car and home) increased from the early 70s to the 80s; better technology does drop down to the consumer price range, given time. I've heard that the best of the best back in the day were Wollensak or Akai decks, and Scotch or BASF tape.
8-tracks can definitely be rewarding to your ears; you just have to take into account that, at any time in recording history, the consumer has the choice between downright crappy, good, and truly excellent stereo systems; and manufacturers will similarly do what they will. Besides, these days, the price is right for what you get. 50 cents an album is a great way to legally drown yourself in classic rock and pop.
P.S. Here's the kicker, I'm 18. I've been collecting these things for years. :)
There are too many sites today that work just fine in IE, and work just fine in Firefox (and so, one would assume, they're perfectly standards-compliant)...and then they break in Opera, which is my personal browser of choice.
For example, Amazon's "search inside this book" feature explicitly posts a message saying my browser isn't supported. I have to open up IE or Firefox to peek at books I'm considering. What's up with that?
All browsers should support the same standards; all sites should follow those same standards; and the idea should not be "Firefox: The IE Alternative," but "Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Konqueror, Epiphany, Lynx, and Internet Explorer: Your Choice."
And how redundant, too. That's what old computers are for!
But that's only 0.00025 of a Library of Congress!
man book
Funnily enough, I just noticed that the favicons for the Guardian and Google look quite similar. Perhaps it's a conspiracy and "Googlian" is fighting with itself to drive up pageviews!
Aww, that reminds me I had a Wang clone, too. I used it for some time, until I broke the spacebar once removing it. (Snapped one of the little plastic bits grabbing onto the [-shaped metal frame that held the whole bar level when you pressed it, and wasn't able to properly fix it.) Luckily, one of my birthday presents this year was a ridiculously heavy Model M from the mid-90s. :)
Just remember, all the debris kicked up into the atmosphere could actually cause global cooling. Reference the drop in average world temperature caused by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo awhile back.
Here's the whitepaper (HTML-converted).
I'm not able to open the PDF right now to see the pretty graphs, but it says "The figure shows that failures do not increase when the average temperature increases. In fact, there is a clear trend showing that lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates. Only at very high temperatures is there a slight reversal of this trend." However, it also notes that "What stands out are the 3 and 4-year old drives, where the trend for higher failures with higher temperature is much more constant and also more pronounced."
Hey, it's an amazing display of fairness for Slashdot to post a review acknowledging that IE actually has some good bits to it, let alone "is back on top." :P
Unfortunately, while I loved them at first, add-ons were the killer in my decision to switch away from Firefox to Opera. I found that even using one or two extensions (including using only Adblock, perhaps the most popular Firefox extension), my browser was bloated, slow, and prone to frequent crashing. Switching to FF3, I enjoyed none of the acclaimed new improvements in memory management once I added any extensions to the mix, and in fact, Firefox would crash constantly (every half-hour or so) under any conditions.
I'd already installed Opera so I could bring it up when I was playing memory- and CPU-hungry games and not lag them any while I had a browser idling in the background, so I just switched fulltime. Aside from noticing a few more ads (easily ignored or remedied with Opera's built-in content blocker), my browsing experience has been much improved; Opera responds far better than Firefox, and has many of the functions that Firefox only has from third-party extensions. The others, I find I don't actually miss at all.
Who knew simplicity could be so simple?
Telnet? Real men would use SSH instead of telnet, but they wouldn't really be real men, because real men disassemble Ubuntu on a friend's computer, read it, then type the commands in all over again on their own from memory.
Yes. This is why I don't get why people don't appreciate the value (at least in redundancy) of having a land line around. I'm gonna miss that when I go off to a residence hall this fall; it's very new and has all the latest amenities, Ethernet to every room, but alas, good old landlines are too old to be useful and worth supplying (or worth demanding), right?
Hooray for me, I live in one of those countries! :/
Very few people in the Midwest, including my family, are ready to listen to the idea that corn ethanol is unfeasible and bad in the long term. When corn prices go up, the farmers are happy, and there are a lot of farmers out here, so the politicians try to keep them happy by keeping corn prices up.
Unfortunately, lots of people are ignorant in that way. When they hear the term "anarchist," they think "a person who wants to blow shit up for fun" or "a threat to democracy."
Well, 8-tracks did have a theoretical advantage. They share the same track width as cassettes (1/32" per track), but the tape travelled at twice the speed (3.75"/sec vs. 1.875"/sec). All other factors being equal, this would have given 8-tracks superior audio quality hands down; however, the industry clearly focused on bringing the latest technical achievements in magnetic tape to the cassette medium, passing 8-tracks over. (For example, I've never heard of CrO2 tape manufactured for 8-track use, and both 8-track tapes and players using the Dolby process are few and far in between.) Mechanically speaking, cassettes have the reliability advantage because they don't have the quirky infinite-loop travel path (which caused a plethora of problems, each of which I've personally repaired or abandoned a tape for), and they can rewind, but 8-tracks did have some significant unrealized potential, in both the speed advantage and the brief but mindblowing experiment with quad-channel audio that CreepyCrawler mentioned. (In fairness, there were also various quad vinyl standards, but almost all of these were matrixed, versus having discrete channels.)
What they think is better for baby, anyway.
The first two sound like nice ideas, but then it occurs to me, what about the brilliant but depressed artists? Vincent Van Gogh comes to mind.
I understand that British English often uses this convention for multi-personed organizations.
I know that few straight people flaunt their orientation in social situations, but it's pretty easy to guess the sexuality of the people who call other gamers "fags" on the in-game chat.
Although I suppose they could just be suffering internalized homophobia... :P