Yesterday I had to explain to someone the difference between male and female RJ-45 jacks in the office.
After a few times around of it not being clear which was which...I said 'it's *exactly* how you think it is" and a few people giggled and then everyone understood. I figure HR will call me today.
No no no. You missed the genius that happened behind the scenes at Apple.
A few years ago they managed to get everyone to buy all new cables because Lightning. That petered out and the clone cables are not of sufficient quality and lower price that people don't care.
Apple thought long and hard. Then realized using USB-C on their laptops means people have to buy new power adapters - genius! But that's not enough. They sell way more iPhones.
Instead of giving up on the massive profit center that is Lightning...they struck upon a truly genius idea of "let's change the OTHER end of that magic cable". Yep, instead of replacing the lightning port, we'll replace what's on the other end. So people still have to buy a new cable and it STILL has to be proprietary.
Ok but I wouldn't buy the Dell system if they paid me.
Do you mean... like a rebate? lol
On a serious note, I've got laptops from Dell, HP, Apple, Toshiba, MS floating around my office and home. Cheap crap laptops from any mfg are...cheap crap. I see friends with them in various states if disrepair all the time.
The higher end laptops are another story. Apple has it's quirks, but their hardware is well built. The high end Dell stuff like the XPS13 and 15 are easily equal of anything from Apple... without the insistence on being different by removing ports and keys. HP and Toshiba and MS have good products as well.
I wish someone would pick up magsafe and apply it to USB-C (or just some kind of standard which all the mfgs could use).
Except HIV is actually pretty hard to get. About 1.5% infection rate for an anal bottom that a positive top ejaculates into.
So yes it spreads, but no it's not such a quick growth rate as implied. If each of those 250 people were anal bottoms and had sex with an infected person who ejacuated in them...you'd average close to 4 infections.
And as for the claims that gay men have about the same amount of sex as straight people, I'm calling BS. Using a dating site as your reference ignores the immense amount of sites/apps focused exclusively on gay sex not to mention the events outside of dating. Gay sex parties, while not exactly commonplace, are not especially rare if you're looking for them. Straight sex parties in the same mindset are much, MUCH less common.
They're liable to charge you individually for each on if they're in a mood. The DA may simplify it down, but it's quite common to have many booked charges related to a single 'charge' as people see it. Just ask anyone who's been charged for 14 counts of this and 137 counts of that which happens all the time. Hell, punch someone in the face and you'll probably see 4 or 5 charges as a result.
I'd be more active and less whiny about it. One day when working late I'd pour epoxy all over the keyboard.
If you replaced it, I'd see what facial indentations it could make.
You seriously use a keyboard like that in an open office? Speaking of prima donna... I heard there's someone upset by the type of keyboard they're using now.
Bait aside, this is a perfect exampe of the types of distractions you get in open offices. People often don't realize how insanely annoying they are to others.
It's not so much that the cool tech companies have open offies. It's that they just buy desks and can't afford fancy cubicle furniture.
Is there some benefit to open office seating? Yes. For small groups in their own, partitioned area sure. Small teams workign together can collaborate easily.
Opening the whole office like that? Hell no. There's no real collaboration across 5 rows of desks without shouting and interrupting everyone in between. I've been through the transition from cubes to more open cubes, to very open 'cubes' to full open office, non-partition desks. I work out of my secondary office now because the noise is impossible. I can't even hear what's being said on conference calls half the time because someone is having some loud conversation (or socializing or whatever) 5 feet from me.
Oh, and my company decided anyone who's not an executive gets these new 'wonderful' seats that 'employees love'. Right.
Prior to the last few years, there's been a lot of groundbreaking products with a large portion coming in Apple devices.
Removing the headphone jack is significant, though I don't agree with Apple on its merits.
Overall there's been a much smaller increment between product generations in the last few years from Apple in particular, and most manufacturers in general.
I can think of a few ideas that may be close, but the tech isn't quite there for. Otherwise - what more would we like cell phones to do for us? Realistically, what features are missing that aren't in at least one of the popular dozen devices in the market? Waterproof. Retina scanning. Fingerprint scanning. Dual camera. Higher res displays than your large-screen TV. Storage nearly on par with computers. Cellular speeds competing with WiFi speeds in some areas/markets. Cameras with enough quality that they're on par with P&S cameras from a few years ago. Hell, the Note7 can even be used to cook dinner while off the grid.
Battery life would be nice but that's a very basic change that anyone can make at the expense of a larger/heavier phone...and battery cases do that anyhow.
Robots continue to be more and more prevalent in manufacturing. There's a grey area in which you have to look at the cost of a task-specific robot vs. the product lifecycle though...and calculate X # of man-hours @ $ vs custom robot that costs $millions.
The more universal the robots are, the more they can be used across production lines and the simpler to adapt them when they are.
It doesn't, however, solve the problem of employment for the displaced workers. Yes, yes, I know...all the crying and politics. There's an end-game somewhere down the road though and it's not pretty. Manufacturing used to be what the poorly or moderately educated could do to earn a livable, though certainly not extravagant, wage. Now that's shifted to things like retain sales, call centers, and other marginalized jobs...except the comparative pay and buying power is much, much worse....ok climbing off my soap box now.
No, people aren't going to spend 10% more on a product because 'made in USA'... imports would need to be taxed or something similar to make them price equivalent.
None of them are being shipped by air - that would actually be very much illegal.
I have one of the corporate demo devices and they sent a fire resistant box (fully lined with fire-retardant ceramic matting) with HAZMAT exception paperwork, pre-paid sticker, and 'GROUND ONLY' in big letters.
Oh, and the Note 7 is the only phone made by Samsung.
I two of them, zero problems, and it's a great device. The extremely small chance of a fire really doesn't have me very worried. It amazes me that Samsung recalled eleventeen billion phones over a few dozen confirmed reports of issues.
Red-light cameras are a tool for revenue generation
Irrelevant. If they fight what needs fighting — and do it cheaper than other methods — than we should be using them.
Very relevant. There IS a proven cheaper method. Longer (~+1sec) yellow lights have been demonstrated to greatly reduce red light violations (to the point where one town removed their cameras since they were costing more than they made) without the increase in rear-end collisions. Why isn't this adopted everywhere? Because revenue. Google yourself, this is readily available and has been reported in the media multiple times.
growing body of evidence of their abuse
Citation missing.
If someone makes some odd, esoteric, or strange claim, then a citation is relevant. Asking for one when there's a huge body of evidence? Lame. But sure: http://bfy.tw/81id
Police body cams however are supposed to be an impartial witness.
All cameras are impartial.
Functionally true. As a practical matter, certainly not. A camera is not omnipresent. A camera only see's what it's pointed at. You can shove someone off-camera and then turn and film them (apparently) attacking you out of the blue. While they're a HUGE benefit, camera's are not the only thing needed.
I've bought $0.00 in music and movies from iTunes since the times when people were telling ME to get off THEIR lawn. I refuse to give lock-in services any money for the inconvenience of using them.
Apple: we courageously removed the headphones jack to make the already thin phone [drumroll].001 inches thinner and have 5% more battery life [taDAA]... [crickets]
3rd party vendor: we've put back the headphone jack and made the phone.2 inches thicker and added 60% more battery life... [crowds scrambe to throw money at them]
While the phones look sleep and cool, who really DOESN'T put their phone in a case these days? the.001 inch different in thickness is as pointless as the 5 gram weight reduction. I don't want to carry a brick around, but some basic shock protection and/or decent battery life (and a headphones jack) don't seem all that big of a deal.
I've got a lawn for peopel to get off because I've been saying it for years. More like over a decade: Provide a reasonable cost, easy to use, LEGAL alternative and people will use it.
When Netflix had a reasonably full catalog (instead of focusing so much on their own content) the number of downloads "a friend of mine" did was severely reduced. It was quick, easy, cheap, and had much of what he was looking for. Fast forward a bit and now there's a half dozen major and a few dozen minor streaming services. Each with their own quirks, app, content, cost, and rules. Oh, and I still can't watch them on a plan or subway. I mean he. He can't watch them on a plane.
So when it's time to watch some movie there's a ~15 minute delay while the torrent protocol 'caches' the movie and then it's watches. It's LESS convenient than what COULD (and HAS) been offered but more convenient than figuring out the BS of a dozen different streaming platforms or trying to figure out somewhere to legally buy/download from and them export/import into whatever I want to watch on.
There's some shelf life concerns. Typically drugs break down slowly and lose potency over time. A 5 year old epi pen may have half the potency (wild ass guess) and the breakdown time line is what's supposed to drive the expiration.
In reality, it's a combination of profits and paranoia about being sued. 90% potency and someone, somehow dies because it wasn't enough...where a full 100% dose would have saved them? maybe? Yeah...there's a lawsuit and $xyz settlement.
I agree though, it's largely about profits and convincing people that 'expired' medicine is useless, dangerous, or somehow bad for... something.
The problem is their device is *certified and approved* while the epipencil (and any similar mass-produced device) would not be.
It's ridiculous, but even things that utterly fail the patent test because they're virtually identical and obvious do NOT automatically get certified for medical use. IIRC there's another manufacturer getting their epipen (which they will call something else) certified because... it's worth it to spend the $ and they can still hugely undercut on the price.
IDK if they laws explicitly require this *exact* epi device in schools or requires a "FDA approved epi auto-injector".
I believe they're still legally required to allow this is some odd, awkward situations (aka cablecard).
But it's intentionally cryptic, difficult, and works very poorly for the vast majority of cases.
Cable companies went encrypted digital and quickly locked most of the market out - and made built-in TV tuners essentially useless - as part of a huge (legally approved) scam to force people to rent set top boxes for $cheap per month...which quickly escalated to $rip-off per month.
While you're getting off my lawn, I remember when you could plug any TV in via splitter and get all the standard cable channels. The special ones - like HBO and playboy - still needed a box but you could easily watch the rest. This is a big part of how TVs proliferated so quickly and people bought one for every room.
Using someone else's open WiFi does have an impact on them. Though it's likely minimal, there are situations where you could definitely impact them - using significant bandwidth, downloading things that get them naughty MAFIAA letters, or other issues degrading their network. It's not completely zero impact like watching a TV though an open window, but it's not fully utilizing a resource and taking it away from it's owner.
However, it IS unauthorized access. The various 'digital tresspass' laws (most of which are a crock of... erm stew) make this illegal. The owner may be less than tech savvy and *should* secure their network... but anyone not given permission to use it, definitely don't belong on it.
Open NYC WiFi... I'm going to guess that buried in the terms is (or eventually will be) some clause about not retransmitting, selling, porting, routing, etc. the wifi. Or maybe not, but if they put these near housing too many people will use it and they'll become useless.
USB-C fixes all that and comes with a complimentary bag of chips.
Oh, and you'll also find it on newer laptops/docking stations. I'd be quite pleased with being able to retire my laptop and just dock my phone some time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Yesterday I had to explain to someone the difference between male and female RJ-45 jacks in the office.
After a few times around of it not being clear which was which...I said 'it's *exactly* how you think it is" and a few people giggled and then everyone understood. I figure HR will call me today.
No no no. You missed the genius that happened behind the scenes at Apple.
A few years ago they managed to get everyone to buy all new cables because Lightning. That petered out and the clone cables are not of sufficient quality and lower price that people don't care.
Apple thought long and hard. Then realized using USB-C on their laptops means people have to buy new power adapters - genius! But that's not enough. They sell way more iPhones.
Instead of giving up on the massive profit center that is Lightning...they struck upon a truly genius idea of "let's change the OTHER end of that magic cable". Yep, instead of replacing the lightning port, we'll replace what's on the other end. So people still have to buy a new cable and it STILL has to be proprietary.
Pure genius from an apple profit perspective.
Ok but I wouldn't buy the Dell system if they paid me.
Do you mean ... like a rebate? lol
On a serious note, I've got laptops from Dell, HP, Apple, Toshiba, MS floating around my office and home. Cheap crap laptops from any mfg are...cheap crap. I see friends with them in various states if disrepair all the time.
The higher end laptops are another story. Apple has it's quirks, but their hardware is well built. The high end Dell stuff like the XPS13 and 15 are easily equal of anything from Apple ... without the insistence on being different by removing ports and keys. HP and Toshiba and MS have good products as well.
I wish someone would pick up magsafe and apply it to USB-C (or just some kind of standard which all the mfgs could use).
Except HIV is actually pretty hard to get. About 1.5% infection rate for an anal bottom that a positive top ejaculates into.
So yes it spreads, but no it's not such a quick growth rate as implied. If each of those 250 people were anal bottoms and had sex with an infected person who ejacuated in them...you'd average close to 4 infections.
And as for the claims that gay men have about the same amount of sex as straight people, I'm calling BS. Using a dating site as your reference ignores the immense amount of sites/apps focused exclusively on gay sex not to mention the events outside of dating. Gay sex parties, while not exactly commonplace, are not especially rare if you're looking for them. Straight sex parties in the same mindset are much, MUCH less common.
Actually, that's unlikely to be true.
They're liable to charge you individually for each on if they're in a mood. The DA may simplify it down, but it's quite common to have many booked charges related to a single 'charge' as people see it. Just ask anyone who's been charged for 14 counts of this and 137 counts of that which happens all the time. Hell, punch someone in the face and you'll probably see 4 or 5 charges as a result.
I'd be more active and less whiny about it. One day when working late I'd pour epoxy all over the keyboard.
If you replaced it, I'd see what facial indentations it could make.
You seriously use a keyboard like that in an open office? Speaking of prima donna ... I heard there's someone upset by the type of keyboard they're using now.
Bait aside, this is a perfect exampe of the types of distractions you get in open offices. People often don't realize how insanely annoying they are to others.
Yup.
It's not so much that the cool tech companies have open offies. It's that they just buy desks and can't afford fancy cubicle furniture.
Is there some benefit to open office seating? Yes. For small groups in their own, partitioned area sure. Small teams workign together can collaborate easily.
Opening the whole office like that? Hell no. There's no real collaboration across 5 rows of desks without shouting and interrupting everyone in between. I've been through the transition from cubes to more open cubes, to very open 'cubes' to full open office, non-partition desks. I work out of my secondary office now because the noise is impossible. I can't even hear what's being said on conference calls half the time because someone is having some loud conversation (or socializing or whatever) 5 feet from me.
Oh, and my company decided anyone who's not an executive gets these new 'wonderful' seats that 'employees love'. Right.
Prior to the last few years, there's been a lot of groundbreaking products with a large portion coming in Apple devices.
Removing the headphone jack is significant, though I don't agree with Apple on its merits.
Overall there's been a much smaller increment between product generations in the last few years from Apple in particular, and most manufacturers in general.
I can think of a few ideas that may be close, but the tech isn't quite there for. Otherwise - what more would we like cell phones to do for us? Realistically, what features are missing that aren't in at least one of the popular dozen devices in the market? Waterproof. Retina scanning. Fingerprint scanning. Dual camera. Higher res displays than your large-screen TV. Storage nearly on par with computers. Cellular speeds competing with WiFi speeds in some areas/markets. Cameras with enough quality that they're on par with P&S cameras from a few years ago. Hell, the Note7 can even be used to cook dinner while off the grid.
Battery life would be nice but that's a very basic change that anyone can make at the expense of a larger/heavier phone...and battery cases do that anyhow.
Robots continue to be more and more prevalent in manufacturing. There's a grey area in which you have to look at the cost of a task-specific robot vs. the product lifecycle though...and calculate X # of man-hours @ $ vs custom robot that costs $millions.
The more universal the robots are, the more they can be used across production lines and the simpler to adapt them when they are.
It doesn't, however, solve the problem of employment for the displaced workers. Yes, yes, I know...all the crying and politics. There's an end-game somewhere down the road though and it's not pretty. Manufacturing used to be what the poorly or moderately educated could do to earn a livable, though certainly not extravagant, wage. Now that's shifted to things like retain sales, call centers, and other marginalized jobs...except the comparative pay and buying power is much, much worse. ...ok climbing off my soap box now.
No, people aren't going to spend 10% more on a product because 'made in USA' ... imports would need to be taxed or something similar to make them price equivalent.
Yup. Airport security is definitely stopping to examine every cell phone.
Or not.
In fact not at all. I just took several flights in the last 2 weeks and the only thing they do is make an announcement on the plane.
No one in the airport world of security and service noticed my Note 7 or asked a single question about anyone's phone.
Mars is much, much closer than Jovian moons and cold poses less of a challenge than heat.
I wouldn't say they're being ignored, but they're significantly further outside of our abilities today.
Probably not, but plenty of other people would agree it's a good trade
None of them are being shipped by air - that would actually be very much illegal.
I have one of the corporate demo devices and they sent a fire resistant box (fully lined with fire-retardant ceramic matting) with HAZMAT exception paperwork, pre-paid sticker, and 'GROUND ONLY' in big letters.
Oh, and the Note 7 is the only phone made by Samsung.
I two of them, zero problems, and it's a great device. The extremely small chance of a fire really doesn't have me very worried. It amazes me that Samsung recalled eleventeen billion phones over a few dozen confirmed reports of issues.
Irrelevant. If they fight what needs fighting — and do it cheaper than other methods — than we should be using them.
Very relevant. There IS a proven cheaper method. Longer (~+1sec) yellow lights have been demonstrated to greatly reduce red light violations (to the point where one town removed their cameras since they were costing more than they made) without the increase in rear-end collisions. Why isn't this adopted everywhere? Because revenue. Google yourself, this is readily available and has been reported in the media multiple times.
Citation missing.
If someone makes some odd, esoteric, or strange claim, then a citation is relevant. Asking for one when there's a huge body of evidence? Lame. But sure: http://bfy.tw/81id
All cameras are impartial.
Functionally true. As a practical matter, certainly not. A camera is not omnipresent. A camera only see's what it's pointed at. You can shove someone off-camera and then turn and film them (apparently) attacking you out of the blue. While they're a HUGE benefit, camera's are not the only thing needed.
This.
At the rate we're going, all we need to do to stop illegal immigration is wait.
...buy...music...iTunes...
bwahahahahahahahahahaha
I've bought $0.00 in music and movies from iTunes since the times when people were telling ME to get off THEIR lawn. I refuse to give lock-in services any money for the inconvenience of using them.
Apple: we courageously removed the headphones jack to make the already thin phone [drumroll] .001 inches thinner and have 5% more battery life [taDAA] ... [crickets]
3rd party vendor: we've put back the headphone jack and made the phone .2 inches thicker and added 60% more battery life ... [crowds scrambe to throw money at them]
While the phones look sleep and cool, who really DOESN'T put their phone in a case these days? the .001 inch different in thickness is as pointless as the 5 gram weight reduction. I don't want to carry a brick around, but some basic shock protection and/or decent battery life (and a headphones jack) don't seem all that big of a deal.
Yup, this.
I've got a lawn for peopel to get off because I've been saying it for years. More like over a decade: Provide a reasonable cost, easy to use, LEGAL alternative and people will use it.
When Netflix had a reasonably full catalog (instead of focusing so much on their own content) the number of downloads "a friend of mine" did was severely reduced. It was quick, easy, cheap, and had much of what he was looking for. Fast forward a bit and now there's a half dozen major and a few dozen minor streaming services. Each with their own quirks, app, content, cost, and rules. Oh, and I still can't watch them on a plan or subway. I mean he. He can't watch them on a plane.
So when it's time to watch some movie there's a ~15 minute delay while the torrent protocol 'caches' the movie and then it's watches. It's LESS convenient than what COULD (and HAS) been offered but more convenient than figuring out the BS of a dozen different streaming platforms or trying to figure out somewhere to legally buy/download from and them export/import into whatever I want to watch on.
There's some shelf life concerns. Typically drugs break down slowly and lose potency over time. A 5 year old epi pen may have half the potency (wild ass guess) and the breakdown time line is what's supposed to drive the expiration.
In reality, it's a combination of profits and paranoia about being sued. 90% potency and someone, somehow dies because it wasn't enough...where a full 100% dose would have saved them? maybe? Yeah...there's a lawsuit and $xyz settlement.
I agree though, it's largely about profits and convincing people that 'expired' medicine is useless, dangerous, or somehow bad for ... something.
They won't because they won't need to.
The problem is their device is *certified and approved* while the epipencil (and any similar mass-produced device) would not be.
It's ridiculous, but even things that utterly fail the patent test because they're virtually identical and obvious do NOT automatically get certified for medical use. IIRC there's another manufacturer getting their epipen (which they will call something else) certified because ... it's worth it to spend the $ and they can still hugely undercut on the price.
IDK if they laws explicitly require this *exact* epi device in schools or requires a "FDA approved epi auto-injector".
Oh, sorry. Let me get off your lawn.
I believe they're still legally required to allow this is some odd, awkward situations (aka cablecard).
But it's intentionally cryptic, difficult, and works very poorly for the vast majority of cases.
Cable companies went encrypted digital and quickly locked most of the market out - and made built-in TV tuners essentially useless - as part of a huge (legally approved) scam to force people to rent set top boxes for $cheap per month...which quickly escalated to $rip-off per month.
While you're getting off my lawn, I remember when you could plug any TV in via splitter and get all the standard cable channels. The special ones - like HBO and playboy - still needed a box but you could easily watch the rest. This is a big part of how TVs proliferated so quickly and people bought one for every room.
Imperfect analogies are imperfect.
Using someone else's open WiFi does have an impact on them. Though it's likely minimal, there are situations where you could definitely impact them - using significant bandwidth, downloading things that get them naughty MAFIAA letters, or other issues degrading their network. It's not completely zero impact like watching a TV though an open window, but it's not fully utilizing a resource and taking it away from it's owner.
However, it IS unauthorized access. The various 'digital tresspass' laws (most of which are a crock of ... erm stew) make this illegal. The owner may be less than tech savvy and *should* secure their network ... but anyone not given permission to use it, definitely don't belong on it.
Open NYC WiFi ... I'm going to guess that buried in the terms is (or eventually will be) some clause about not retransmitting, selling, porting, routing, etc. the wifi. Or maybe not, but if they put these near housing too many people will use it and they'll become useless.
USB-C fixes all that and comes with a complimentary bag of chips.
Oh, and you'll also find it on newer laptops/docking stations. I'd be quite pleased with being able to retire my laptop and just dock my phone some time soon.
dare to dream...