When I sold digital cameras back in the bad old days (mostly pre-y2k) I observed that most people fall into one of two categories of photographers:
People who want to take pictures of other people they know
People who want to take pictures of everything else
And these people need significantly different kinds of cameras.
People from the first group want fast shooting, small cameras with minimal fuss. 99% of these people buy point-and-shoot cameras. They might or might not be technical people. They will probably get their pictures developed at the drug store or just post them to their favorite web site. Red-eye reduction is more important to them than long zoom or the ability to manually do much of anything.
The second group want a zoom lens longer than the longest you have on hand. They want to take a picture of the nose hairs on Mount Rushmore and they want to count the feathers on baby bald eagles. They have plenty of time to get their pictures "just right" and they will pay more for professional grade media. 99% of these people buy DSLRs (or the closest things we had to them back then). You can sell a tripod to these people but they don't really care about facial recognition or red eye reduction because they aren't looking to take pictures of their best friends since they already know what they look like. These people are not necessarily anti-social they just see photography as being about remembering things more so than events.
So my advice is first figure out which group you fall into. Then you can quickly rule out a good chunk of the cameras on the market. And don't let someone tell you there is one camera that does both well, because that is a lie. There are small cameras with good zoom but they are nowhere near being equals to DSLRs, and no DSLR is ever going to fit into your pocket.
Carlos Slim is an interesting possibility, but his record in the US is not great. The first corporate purchase he made here that I can think of was CompUSA, which he promptly watched get driven into the ground. Granted, that was a company that excelled at promoting wholly incompetent people to upper management and corporate purchasing decisions, but nonetheless he watched a moderately profitable company slide right past mediocrity and into bankruptcy. I don't see why we could expect him to improve T-Mobile in any way, shape or form; rather if he (or his investment group) bought it I would expect it to deteriorate even more rapidly.
I expect T-Mobile will still be sold, just not to another major mobile phone provider.
I disagree. I think T-Mobile has reached a state of corporate radioactivity. Their coverage is mediocre, their pricing is nothing extraordinary. and they have the worst phones of any major US carrier.
T-Mobile is the only major carrier in the US who does not carry the iPhone (as just one example). T-Mobile hasn't had a new BlackBerry phone in a very, very, long time (as another example). If they can't get phone manufacturers to believe in them, how will they get a potential investor to? They have one foot in the grave already and there is nobody looking to throw them a line.
There's too many customers and too much spectrum for them to just be shut down.
Too many customers is not a valid reason for a company to stick around. T-Mobile customers will just become prey for the remaining carriers. They'll be in liquidation before 3Q 2012 and AT&T will be buying up their towers in cities where they want to increase their coverage. The rest of their towers will become roosts for birds.
They're even still showing growth
Any idiot can grow a cell phone company right now. Teenagers are viewing phones as a right-of-passage in this country today, and kids younger than them are getting them at an alarming rate as well. That is new customers coming in off the street without having to do anything at all, and as long as text messages stay expensive the providers have a gold mine by way of all those kids.
T-Mobile is now officially my #1 entry. Deutsche Telekom was looking to get rid of them, and I don't see them being likely to hold in there very long without them.
they sure make a mess of things. Maybe we can find them a nice island somewhere.
Unfortunately an MBA took over this island we call "America". Indeed, he did make a mess of things. I'm not inclined to give an island, or anything that exists in the physical world, to an MBA. How about we pair each MBA up with one of our surplus lawyers (we have tons of 'em where I live and I suspect that is the case in other places, too) and encourage them to sue each other? That should keep them busy for a while...
Some scientific sites are either no longer existent, or not much to look at. Sure, there are paleontological sites and museums you can visit, but some places either aren't around or don't take visitors. For example, I visited the University of Chicago many years ago for something unrelated to its history and found that you cannot visit the site where they split the first atom because the site has been demolished long ago.
A little more information could get a really good list going. And some insight into exactly what parts of the country you are willing or planning to visit would help, too.
I heard that T-Mobile wants to rid themselves of their US division. If it isn't making enough revenue to be kept on the books, it probably isn't doing well enough to stand on its own either. Which likely means it will just fold up completely.
Hence either T-Mobile is bought out by AT&T and we have one fewer carrier, or T-Mobile goes under and we have one fewer carrier. It seems like we might at least preserve a few jobs with option number one that would otherwise be lost with option number two. The other main carriers don't want to buy a GSM provider, it doesn't make technological sense. They just want a shot at picking off some T-Mobile customers that they might not otherwise get if AT&T buys them out.
Certainly that the pedestrian was listening to music has no bearing on assignment of fault.
Correct. However if the pedestrian wanders into the road at a point other than where they are entitled to cross, or at a time counter to when they are entitled to cross at a controlled intersection, they are at fault for the accident they cause.
And if they happen to get clobbered by a vehicle in a different situation because they couldn't hear it, the fault does not belong to the vehicle itself. It may be the vehicle operator's fault, but if the pedestrian was too stupid to pay attention to their environment while walking down the street, then they got what they had coming.
There are laws for pedestrians too, but these are not designed to remove fault from the driver.
Correct. They are designed to ensure that everyone who is entitled to use of the road can do so safely. That is why we have crosswalks in areas with sufficient mixed traffic to necessitate them (amongst other things). That is also why jaywalking is a ticketable offense.
I hear of more car-pedestrian accidents involving people who are willingly unable to hear than involving people who are actually blind, dear, or hard of hearing.
It's telling that you leave out a third, major, category - accidents in which the pedestrians are not at fault at all.
That is because it wasn't relevant to the point I was making.
Indeed there are pedestrian-motor vehicle accidents that occur where the fault is not at all the pedestrian. Happy?
Seriously, can we stop with the highly moderated "blame the victim" posts?
I didn't say there are no bad drivers - indeed my part of the country is sadly tremendously overpopulated with them. However when pedestrians are walking around without the ability to hear what is going on, they can easily get themselves into stupid situations. I hear of more car-pedestrian accidents involving people who are willingly unable to hear than involving people who are actually blind, dear, or hard of hearing.
So to be clear, I am not universally in favor of "blame the victim". Rather I am saying that pedestrians who are too stupid to actually pay attention to their surroundings will at times get what they have coming.
A lot of pedestrians are walking around listening to their music at full-blast and have no chance of hearing the car coming anyways. The fault does not belong to the car in that situation.
That Honda that you love so much? If you actually read the news you would know that for model year 2009 Ford matched Honda and Toyota in initial quality and owner satisfaction surveys. And if it wasn't for the touchscreens they installed in 2010 vehicles, they would have matched them for that year as well.
So before you go bashing three completely different corporations under one blind moniker, do your research.
Hell, the 2010 Motor Trend Car of the Year was the Ford Fusion. Being as that was also a model year for an all-new (and therefore CotY eligible) Toyota Camry, that is a huge coup for Ford. Anybody who reads Motor Trend knows that very few awards from them have gone to Ford, GM, or Chrysler in the past couple decades.
But you didn't seem to want to bother with facts in your post. So I won't expect you to follow up on this.
I don't think you can find anyone over the age of 6 who speaks English and hasn't heard at least that one Ford acronym, and frankly most 6-year-olds have heard a few more as well. If ever a post deserved to be called "redundant", it was that one.
I've heard that argument many times, although I don't think that Gimp is any more difficult to learn that photoshop, it's just different. I would wager that if you had a user who had no experience with either, you could train them equally well with Gimp in the same amount of time as you could in photoshop.
After all, both applications are primarily used for technical adjustments to existing files (when used by home users) - crop, rotate, contrast, copy/paste, etc. Very few home users ever start with a blank canvas in either application.
Every person I know who has tried to learn to use GIMP has given up in 10 minutes because they couldn't draw a circle
I would say they're doing it wrong. Why would you want to draw a circle in Gimp? That is more of a proper task for a vector drawing application (like Inkscape).
That said, there are also plenty of good tutorials online that can help you use Gimp. And with a little bit of careful finagling you can use most photoshop techniques in Gimp as well.
or persevered only because Photoshop costs cash
Of course for the dead-set-on-photoshop crowd you could always try Gimpshop instead. Same free underpinnings, with special display settings to make it look more like Adobe. I've had good luck getting people to use that when they were previously Gimp-averse.
To make this an actual gift rather than an evangelising exercise I'd tailor the drives to each relative.
That is a solid idea. I don't have any specific suggestions for kids, or really for anyone who doesn't need image editing software since that is the first thing that comes to mind for me. I am a big fan of openoffice/libreoffice but I know that bringing that up can trigger a shitstorm here on slashdot and it seems like 60% of windows users already have pirated (either intentionally or through their employer) copies of MS Office anyways so it is rarely a useful thing to discuss. On a similar idea gaming is a minefield since it is enormously difficult to predict what games will be fun or meaningful for someone you don't know.
Those were the first things that came to mind for me. I use Gimp at least once a week in my job, and Inkscape probably once a month. They are great tools for those who don't need the fanciest of plug-ins. I would bet that they are mature enough now that 90% of home users who think "I need photoshop and/or illustrator" could actually get by just fine with these tools instead.
And being as most home users know what they can do with the Adobe programs, but not specifically how to do it, they could be just as well off to learn these instead.
So indeed, save your relatives a few hundred dollars by giving them a flash drive with Inkscape and Gimp. Of course, they probably won't install them, but at least you tried.
If giving a cheap flash drive full of crap is your idea of a nice Christmas gift, then the best gift you can give to your family and friends is dying.
He did say stocking stuffer. I don't know about your family but when I was growing up sometimes our stocking stuffers weren't worth nearly the cost of a flash drive. They'd often be filled with candy or small yo-yo-like toys. I think a flash drive is perfectly in line with that.
On the other hand, if you are of the habit of sending out $100 bills as stocking stuffers, I'll happily send you my mailing address and you can send some of your extra money to me.
Why is it that such an expensive piece of hardware is given to a kid any ways? When I was a kid I built my own computer and had a whopping 1mb of system ram when I first booted it and installed DOS. Granted I wasn't compiling anything at the time, but where does this sense of entitlement come from? You shouldn't need anywhere near that kind of expensive hardware to write code for a handheld device.
Don't the warlords have access to fire? I'm pretty sure that brings about a thoroughly unrecoverable destruction of the documents...
Impractical: I am pretty sure that most offices where this would actually be used have rules against lighting fires indoors. Shredding provides a way to dispose of any document in any circumstance.
If we're talking about warlords and other such types, who don't see a problem with using rape as a tool for war, I don't think they would be that worried about lighting a fire in a place where others might think it to be less-than-kosher. Hell if a warlord is trying to run away from something, they may well just set the entire building alight in hopes that the documents and everything else inside will go up in smoke.
We see what our new POTUS, with his new administration, does as head of state. Not that this comes as any surprise considering every thing he's done so far. Naturally, our federal government will continue to make decisions that favor their corporate sponsors, everyone else be damned.
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And these people need significantly different kinds of cameras.
People from the first group want fast shooting, small cameras with minimal fuss. 99% of these people buy point-and-shoot cameras. They might or might not be technical people. They will probably get their pictures developed at the drug store or just post them to their favorite web site. Red-eye reduction is more important to them than long zoom or the ability to manually do much of anything.
The second group want a zoom lens longer than the longest you have on hand. They want to take a picture of the nose hairs on Mount Rushmore and they want to count the feathers on baby bald eagles. They have plenty of time to get their pictures "just right" and they will pay more for professional grade media. 99% of these people buy DSLRs (or the closest things we had to them back then). You can sell a tripod to these people but they don't really care about facial recognition or red eye reduction because they aren't looking to take pictures of their best friends since they already know what they look like. These people are not necessarily anti-social they just see photography as being about remembering things more so than events.
So my advice is first figure out which group you fall into. Then you can quickly rule out a good chunk of the cameras on the market. And don't let someone tell you there is one camera that does both well, because that is a lie. There are small cameras with good zoom but they are nowhere near being equals to DSLRs, and no DSLR is ever going to fit into your pocket.
Carlos Slim is an interesting possibility, but his record in the US is not great. The first corporate purchase he made here that I can think of was CompUSA, which he promptly watched get driven into the ground. Granted, that was a company that excelled at promoting wholly incompetent people to upper management and corporate purchasing decisions, but nonetheless he watched a moderately profitable company slide right past mediocrity and into bankruptcy. I don't see why we could expect him to improve T-Mobile in any way, shape or form; rather if he (or his investment group) bought it I would expect it to deteriorate even more rapidly.
I expect T-Mobile will still be sold, just not to another major mobile phone provider.
I disagree. I think T-Mobile has reached a state of corporate radioactivity. Their coverage is mediocre, their pricing is nothing extraordinary. and they have the worst phones of any major US carrier.
T-Mobile is the only major carrier in the US who does not carry the iPhone (as just one example). T-Mobile hasn't had a new BlackBerry phone in a very, very, long time (as another example). If they can't get phone manufacturers to believe in them, how will they get a potential investor to? They have one foot in the grave already and there is nobody looking to throw them a line.
There's too many customers and too much spectrum for them to just be shut down.
Too many customers is not a valid reason for a company to stick around. T-Mobile customers will just become prey for the remaining carriers. They'll be in liquidation before 3Q 2012 and AT&T will be buying up their towers in cities where they want to increase their coverage. The rest of their towers will become roosts for birds.
They're even still showing growth
Any idiot can grow a cell phone company right now. Teenagers are viewing phones as a right-of-passage in this country today, and kids younger than them are getting them at an alarming rate as well. That is new customers coming in off the street without having to do anything at all, and as long as text messages stay expensive the providers have a gold mine by way of all those kids.
That means the T-Mobile commercials with that hot girl in pink will continue!
I'm pretty sure AT&T would have bought her as well. She's way hotter than anyone who ever sold Verizon...
T-Mobile is now officially my #1 entry. Deutsche Telekom was looking to get rid of them, and I don't see them being likely to hold in there very long without them.
It looks to me like the display on the left was just blurred; even the monitor bezel and stand look blurry.
they sure make a mess of things. Maybe we can find them a nice island somewhere.
Unfortunately an MBA took over this island we call "America". Indeed, he did make a mess of things. I'm not inclined to give an island, or anything that exists in the physical world, to an MBA. How about we pair each MBA up with one of our surplus lawyers (we have tons of 'em where I live and I suspect that is the case in other places, too) and encourage them to sue each other? That should keep them busy for a while...
"In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
Some scientific sites are either no longer existent, or not much to look at. Sure, there are paleontological sites and museums you can visit, but some places either aren't around or don't take visitors. For example, I visited the University of Chicago many years ago for something unrelated to its history and found that you cannot visit the site where they split the first atom because the site has been demolished long ago.
A little more information could get a really good list going. And some insight into exactly what parts of the country you are willing or planning to visit would help, too.
... because I have been told many times that I am the only person in the world who is not on facebook. Therefore you must be on facebook.
Once the business friendly Republicans win more elections
Are you trying to claim that business-friendly Republicans aren't already running the entire show? You're hilarious, tell me another of your jokes!
I heard that T-Mobile wants to rid themselves of their US division. If it isn't making enough revenue to be kept on the books, it probably isn't doing well enough to stand on its own either. Which likely means it will just fold up completely.
Hence either T-Mobile is bought out by AT&T and we have one fewer carrier, or T-Mobile goes under and we have one fewer carrier. It seems like we might at least preserve a few jobs with option number one that would otherwise be lost with option number two. The other main carriers don't want to buy a GSM provider, it doesn't make technological sense. They just want a shot at picking off some T-Mobile customers that they might not otherwise get if AT&T buys them out.
Certainly that the pedestrian was listening to music has no bearing on assignment of fault.
Correct. However if the pedestrian wanders into the road at a point other than where they are entitled to cross, or at a time counter to when they are entitled to cross at a controlled intersection, they are at fault for the accident they cause.
And if they happen to get clobbered by a vehicle in a different situation because they couldn't hear it, the fault does not belong to the vehicle itself. It may be the vehicle operator's fault, but if the pedestrian was too stupid to pay attention to their environment while walking down the street, then they got what they had coming.
There are laws for pedestrians too, but these are not designed to remove fault from the driver.
Correct. They are designed to ensure that everyone who is entitled to use of the road can do so safely. That is why we have crosswalks in areas with sufficient mixed traffic to necessitate them (amongst other things). That is also why jaywalking is a ticketable offense.
I hear of more car-pedestrian accidents involving people who are willingly unable to hear than involving people who are actually blind, dear, or hard of hearing.
It's telling that you leave out a third, major, category - accidents in which the pedestrians are not at fault at all.
That is because it wasn't relevant to the point I was making.
Indeed there are pedestrian-motor vehicle accidents that occur where the fault is not at all the pedestrian. Happy?
Seriously, can we stop with the highly moderated "blame the victim" posts?
I didn't say there are no bad drivers - indeed my part of the country is sadly tremendously overpopulated with them. However when pedestrians are walking around without the ability to hear what is going on, they can easily get themselves into stupid situations. I hear of more car-pedestrian accidents involving people who are willingly unable to hear than involving people who are actually blind, dear, or hard of hearing.
So to be clear, I am not universally in favor of "blame the victim". Rather I am saying that pedestrians who are too stupid to actually pay attention to their surroundings will at times get what they have coming.
A lot of pedestrians are walking around listening to their music at full-blast and have no chance of hearing the car coming anyways. The fault does not belong to the car in that situation.
That Honda that you love so much? If you actually read the news you would know that for model year 2009 Ford matched Honda and Toyota in initial quality and owner satisfaction surveys. And if it wasn't for the touchscreens they installed in 2010 vehicles, they would have matched them for that year as well.
So before you go bashing three completely different corporations under one blind moniker, do your research.
Hell, the 2010 Motor Trend Car of the Year was the Ford Fusion. Being as that was also a model year for an all-new (and therefore CotY eligible) Toyota Camry, that is a huge coup for Ford. Anybody who reads Motor Trend knows that very few awards from them have gone to Ford, GM, or Chrysler in the past couple decades.
But you didn't seem to want to bother with facts in your post. So I won't expect you to follow up on this.
I don't think you can find anyone over the age of 6 who speaks English and hasn't heard at least that one Ford acronym, and frankly most 6-year-olds have heard a few more as well. If ever a post deserved to be called "redundant", it was that one.
The learning curve is horrid
I've heard that argument many times, although I don't think that Gimp is any more difficult to learn that photoshop, it's just different. I would wager that if you had a user who had no experience with either, you could train them equally well with Gimp in the same amount of time as you could in photoshop.
After all, both applications are primarily used for technical adjustments to existing files (when used by home users) - crop, rotate, contrast, copy/paste, etc. Very few home users ever start with a blank canvas in either application.
Every person I know who has tried to learn to use GIMP has given up in 10 minutes because they couldn't draw a circle
I would say they're doing it wrong. Why would you want to draw a circle in Gimp? That is more of a proper task for a vector drawing application (like Inkscape).
That said, there are also plenty of good tutorials online that can help you use Gimp. And with a little bit of careful finagling you can use most photoshop techniques in Gimp as well.
or persevered only because Photoshop costs cash
Of course for the dead-set-on-photoshop crowd you could always try Gimpshop instead. Same free underpinnings, with special display settings to make it look more like Adobe. I've had good luck getting people to use that when they were previously Gimp-averse.
To make this an actual gift rather than an evangelising exercise I'd tailor the drives to each relative.
That is a solid idea. I don't have any specific suggestions for kids, or really for anyone who doesn't need image editing software since that is the first thing that comes to mind for me. I am a big fan of openoffice/libreoffice but I know that bringing that up can trigger a shitstorm here on slashdot and it seems like 60% of windows users already have pirated (either intentionally or through their employer) copies of MS Office anyways so it is rarely a useful thing to discuss. On a similar idea gaming is a minefield since it is enormously difficult to predict what games will be fun or meaningful for someone you don't know.
Inkscape
GIMP
Those were the first things that came to mind for me. I use Gimp at least once a week in my job, and Inkscape probably once a month. They are great tools for those who don't need the fanciest of plug-ins. I would bet that they are mature enough now that 90% of home users who think "I need photoshop and/or illustrator" could actually get by just fine with these tools instead.
And being as most home users know what they can do with the Adobe programs, but not specifically how to do it, they could be just as well off to learn these instead.
So indeed, save your relatives a few hundred dollars by giving them a flash drive with Inkscape and Gimp. Of course, they probably won't install them, but at least you tried.
If giving a cheap flash drive full of crap is your idea of a nice Christmas gift, then the best gift you can give to your family and friends is dying.
He did say stocking stuffer. I don't know about your family but when I was growing up sometimes our stocking stuffers weren't worth nearly the cost of a flash drive. They'd often be filled with candy or small yo-yo-like toys. I think a flash drive is perfectly in line with that.
On the other hand, if you are of the habit of sending out $100 bills as stocking stuffers, I'll happily send you my mailing address and you can send some of your extra money to me.
Why is it that such an expensive piece of hardware is given to a kid any ways? When I was a kid I built my own computer and had a whopping 1mb of system ram when I first booted it and installed DOS. Granted I wasn't compiling anything at the time, but where does this sense of entitlement come from? You shouldn't need anywhere near that kind of expensive hardware to write code for a handheld device.
Don't the warlords have access to fire? I'm pretty sure that brings about a thoroughly unrecoverable destruction of the documents...
Impractical: I am pretty sure that most offices where this would actually be used have rules against lighting fires indoors. Shredding provides a way to dispose of any document in any circumstance.
If we're talking about warlords and other such types, who don't see a problem with using rape as a tool for war, I don't think they would be that worried about lighting a fire in a place where others might think it to be less-than-kosher. Hell if a warlord is trying to run away from something, they may well just set the entire building alight in hopes that the documents and everything else inside will go up in smoke.
Don't the warlords have access to fire? I'm pretty sure that brings about a thoroughly unrecoverable destruction of the documents...
We see what our new POTUS, with his new administration, does as head of state. Not that this comes as any surprise considering every thing he's done so far. Naturally, our federal government will continue to make decisions that favor their corporate sponsors, everyone else be damned.