I have MORE with Netflix now than I had with satellite. However it is not the same content as with cable. I have to delay some shows for a year and give up another favorite show, but in return I've gotten lots of stuff that is completely new to me that I didn't see when it was new (bing watching Breaking Bad or Dollhouse), lots of older programs as well (all of the real Mission Impossible), lots of movies, etc. And that's without their DVD service that I could use if I wanted to. Plus it's all high definition even programs originally filmed in the 60s shows up higher definition than they ever got when broadcast.
So ya, the $8 I pay for Netflix is the best bargain I ever got with TV. My satellite service was reasonable, a lot cheaper than cable providers even with the tivo fee, and I really liked that service, but over time I felt $70 was just too much money with the declining number of shows I watched regularly. My original plan was to also sub to Hulu but that sort of fell through.
It's a trade off. With cable/satellite you get a few shows you like and tons of shows you will never watch and lots of shows you just wait patiently to show up sometime. With netflix you also get a few shows you like with tons of shows you'll never watch and lots of shows you just wait patiently to show up sometime. It's just that the names of the shows in each category change.
I sort of want something in the middle. A sort of Chinese restaurant menu choice. 3 channels from column A, 3 from column B, option to substitute steamed rice for fried rice.
Problem is that services today that give you just one episode of a show you may have missed are too expensive, and the price for a "season" of a show are also too expensive. Especially if the show was originally broadcast over the air. Plus there must be a DVR option of some sort if the shows are going to vanish after a short period of time; the advantage of streaming is that I can watch it when I want so if I can't have that then I need storage.
Ie, say I want Doctor Who, Walking Dead, Big Bang Theory, and Phineus and Ferb, and each of those requires a separate subscription of $10-20, then I end up paying more than what I did when I was a satellite subscriber. But if I got them all for $20-30 and they were all current episodes plus past episodes, or maybe just the last two years, then that's a deal. Bonus if I could DVR them so I can watch even when the internet is flaky or congested.
Ha, and I thought my $70 satellite was getting too expensive... We really do need some type of way to get just the channels we want instead of a bundle that has 1 thing we want and 12 things we'll never touch. Yes there is ala-carte of buying just one episode or one season, but those are overpriced in my view especially for shows that originally broadcast for free.
Except that it has current content, which Netflix does not have. But the content this new service has is only a few channels. Yes they're popular channels, but I don't want any of them myself.
The problem is that $20 is too much for a single channel, so if you have 5 shows you like to watch and they're all part of different bundles then you end up paying more than you would with cable potentially. Netflix has a good price point; cheap enough that you put up with the few things you can't get and the fact that some stuff is a year old (but it's great for catching up with older stuff). I was going to get Hulu for a couple of my must-see shows except that Hulu won't show one of them this year and $8 is too expensive for my tastes for one single show that I can see near the end of the year instead. Similarly, $15 to watch only some Big Bang Theory episodes is vastly overpriced, may as well get Netflix DVD service.
ESPN and Disney are key points though: there are people who subscribe to TV solely for sports, and those with children who exert high pressure to keep those Disney programs.
I think that by the time people are ready to cut the cord to cable or satellite (and Dish isn't that great a satellite service anyway), that a $20 bundle of a handful of channels isn't going to bring many of those people back. It's still too far away from a decent ala-carte channel selection, which was one of the big problems with cable/setellite subscriptions. I'd say $20 is ok if I get to pick the 5 channels that comes with it, and I am allowed to see old episodes as well (or else allow a keep-it-forever DVR system).
Basically the only time I listen to music is in my car, so ya, the radio is critical. Sure I have some podcasts I'm behind on too but that's not streaming.
But it does sound like a replacement for a smartphone for another group of many people. For instance, those who actually want to make voice calls and who don't really care about apps except to check email now and then. If it were for sale now I might consider it, except for the small display not going to work well with my eyes, and it being a byproduct of the dismantling of Nokia which discourages me as an ex-Nokia employee.
The market for cheaper phones is actually one of the things leading to Nokia's decline, as there's a huge market for cheap phones but they were being undercut on their low end products. The first world of hipsters may only think in terms of big smart phones but that's not the whole world.
As someone working on a system with only 16K RAM, I think 8MB RAM can do a whole lot. Size of RAM is irrelevant if the applications do what they're supposed to do. Sure the people who brag about how big their iPhone is won't want one of these, but that's not who these were designed for. Remember that is only RAM and likely this is not where the code runs from.
Except that Christianity as a whole does not make those claims. Only subset of Christianity. In particular the literalist interpretations of the Bible that assume 7 days is equal to the modern 168 hours for example. And yes, the last one has been used as an argument before.
There are groups that trust the King James Bible version over newer translations, but that doesn't mean all of Christianity agrees with them. On the other hand we have Christian founded and run colleges who do a very good job at education and a good job at science.
Politics has always been about Us versus Them. We first have to know what our side believes in before we know what we believe in. Some countries like to put nuances on it though, as in Our Coalition versus Their Coalition. Other countries simplify it to Us versus those in prison because they didn't vote for Us.
Hmm, Slashdot always felt more lower-case libertarian than anything else. Which of course, to the conservatives feels too liberal, and to the liberals feels too conservative.
Presidents for the most part tend to be pushed towards the center as a result of being forced to govern rather than campaign. Even if the opposition claims that they're the most conservative/liberal president that ever existed. Reagan and Dubya were not nearly as hardcore conservative as the popular mythology claims, and certainly far less conservative than the modern Reagan worshippers are. Similarly, Clinton basically reinvented the middle of the road democrat. So if we get another Republican president it's not likely to be from the deranged segment without completely fracturing the party.
My guess is that it will be a Bush v. Clinton election, which is kind of sad since a country this size should be able to find qualified candidates without relying upon pedigrees like we were some old world aristocracy.
Of course if we're going with the myth, everyone in the early American colonies were Puritans and the masses of debtors and criminals shipped here never existed. Of course in Victorian England everyone was upper class as well and totally chaste. And everyone today in Europe is a totally devoted left wing atheist liberal. Nope, class distinctions don't exist or at least can be conveniently ignored.
It's a product of nationalism as well. Remember Lysenkoism in Russia, which partially was due to Stalin's approval, but there was also a very strong component of being a science invented in the USSR and not in the decadent western world. National pride. In India there's a Hindu nationalist party in power and they seem to be pushing their agenda, as in "invented here, not there".
I think there are two causes. First, it's clearly for advertising. No one makes products anymore when they can just make money advertising someone else's products intead. Every two bit blogger feels it's their divine right to make a profit off of their inane ramblings. Second, a lot of sites really don't have developers and instead they just borrow some premade frameworks from a third party, they may not even realize that they're serving up a lot of crap and bogging down the bandwidth.
Javascript is going to be this decade's jobs program, pointless work designed to keep people off the streets.
Not surprising at the time. Email could be very very slow, a lot of people didn't know how to use it, and the messages could be lost. Then again, the inter-departmental memos routinely got lost as well.
In the 80s I once got notified of new mail and a few seconds after that I received a phone call asking if I had received the email. The funny thing was that the email was only a couple lines long and the phone call gave me all the details which made the email itself redundant.
And after all that effort to get people to use the email on the network, today email seems to be considered out of fashion and only for old luddites.
Government regulated does not mean it's the government. Is the fear of the government so pervasive now that any regulation automatically means that the company being regulated is also evil? The actual problem is that the regulators are weak and there is a huge amount of regulatory capture going on. If the utility wants to increase fees they ask the regulators if they can do so, and most of the time the regulators say yes. There's a scandal now with PG&E where there is evidence of the utilities commission being too cozy with them.
A lot of utilities do add extra fees, but most do this as a one time charge. I agree it's stupid. It's like charging more for an automobile because they bought some robotic assemblies, even though the overall cost is reduced. The utilities want to grab some money, and in the absence of real competition they'll do what they can to maximize profits. Many states have a commission to oversee this, but often when a utility requests to add an extra fee the regulators roll over and do what is asked.
And another reason is that utilities are really backwards and are having trouble moving out of the fifties era way of doing business. They've had their guaranteed profits for so long that they haven't modernized. For example, if the analog meter dial has 5 digits then they demand that the smart meters wrap around the readings at 5 digits also so that it doesn't confuse the billing system software. Utilities are also risk averse, it takes a very long time for them to approve changes to software or security.
The big thing I think most utilities need is not necessarily the smart meters but the smart grid, because right now many are flying blind without even knowing how much electricity is on the grid, unable to detect faulty equipment or loss of power efficiency. They could increase profits and increase efficiency at the same time.
The mass media as well as tech companies have redefined the term "operating system". It's been fuzzy this way for awhile. The company I'm at added "OS" as a suffix to a suite of services, including one part that actually uses an third party operating system but also the back office servers and the like. It's a marketing term. Similar to some smart phones, the "OS" is no longer the kernel there but instead refers more to the API or suite of applications. I suspect the average person on the street thinks that Notepad is a part of the Windows operating system too.
One difference is that if you use openssl and someone finds a huge bug then it gets fixed. If you've got the proprietary library and it has bugs you will never be told about them and if there are patches you'll have to wait many months to get them (or worse they'll require you to pay to buy an upgrade, you won't ever be able to backport fixes). So yes you may have a dozen solutions, but only 1 out of 12 probably lets you learn about severe vulnerabilities in a timely manner while also letting you supply your own fix. Maybe 3 out of 12 let your in house expert examine the code. Most won't give you free critical patches and definitely won't provide patches for older versions. We have the variety of solutions already however what we need is a variety of open source solutions.
Slashdot Mirror
I have MORE with Netflix now than I had with satellite. However it is not the same content as with cable. I have to delay some shows for a year and give up another favorite show, but in return I've gotten lots of stuff that is completely new to me that I didn't see when it was new (bing watching Breaking Bad or Dollhouse), lots of older programs as well (all of the real Mission Impossible), lots of movies, etc. And that's without their DVD service that I could use if I wanted to. Plus it's all high definition even programs originally filmed in the 60s shows up higher definition than they ever got when broadcast.
So ya, the $8 I pay for Netflix is the best bargain I ever got with TV. My satellite service was reasonable, a lot cheaper than cable providers even with the tivo fee, and I really liked that service, but over time I felt $70 was just too much money with the declining number of shows I watched regularly. My original plan was to also sub to Hulu but that sort of fell through.
It's a trade off. With cable/satellite you get a few shows you like and tons of shows you will never watch and lots of shows you just wait patiently to show up sometime. With netflix you also get a few shows you like with tons of shows you'll never watch and lots of shows you just wait patiently to show up sometime. It's just that the names of the shows in each category change.
I sort of want something in the middle. A sort of Chinese restaurant menu choice. 3 channels from column A, 3 from column B, option to substitute steamed rice for fried rice.
Problem is that services today that give you just one episode of a show you may have missed are too expensive, and the price for a "season" of a show are also too expensive. Especially if the show was originally broadcast over the air. Plus there must be a DVR option of some sort if the shows are going to vanish after a short period of time; the advantage of streaming is that I can watch it when I want so if I can't have that then I need storage.
Ie, say I want Doctor Who, Walking Dead, Big Bang Theory, and Phineus and Ferb, and each of those requires a separate subscription of $10-20, then I end up paying more than what I did when I was a satellite subscriber. But if I got them all for $20-30 and they were all current episodes plus past episodes, or maybe just the last two years, then that's a deal. Bonus if I could DVR them so I can watch even when the internet is flaky or congested.
Ha, and I thought my $70 satellite was getting too expensive... We really do need some type of way to get just the channels we want instead of a bundle that has 1 thing we want and 12 things we'll never touch. Yes there is ala-carte of buying just one episode or one season, but those are overpriced in my view especially for shows that originally broadcast for free.
Except that it has current content, which Netflix does not have. But the content this new service has is only a few channels. Yes they're popular channels, but I don't want any of them myself.
The problem is that $20 is too much for a single channel, so if you have 5 shows you like to watch and they're all part of different bundles then you end up paying more than you would with cable potentially. Netflix has a good price point; cheap enough that you put up with the few things you can't get and the fact that some stuff is a year old (but it's great for catching up with older stuff). I was going to get Hulu for a couple of my must-see shows except that Hulu won't show one of them this year and $8 is too expensive for my tastes for one single show that I can see near the end of the year instead. Similarly, $15 to watch only some Big Bang Theory episodes is vastly overpriced, may as well get Netflix DVD service.
ESPN and Disney are key points though: there are people who subscribe to TV solely for sports, and those with children who exert high pressure to keep those Disney programs.
I think that by the time people are ready to cut the cord to cable or satellite (and Dish isn't that great a satellite service anyway), that a $20 bundle of a handful of channels isn't going to bring many of those people back. It's still too far away from a decent ala-carte channel selection, which was one of the big problems with cable/setellite subscriptions. I'd say $20 is ok if I get to pick the 5 channels that comes with it, and I am allowed to see old episodes as well (or else allow a keep-it-forever DVR system).
(hell, when is DSL ever practical?)
I'm streaming over VDSL. Not as fast as comcast but the advantage is that is not comcast.
Basically the only time I listen to music is in my car, so ya, the radio is critical. Sure I have some podcasts I'm behind on too but that's not streaming.
You can't take the good stuff without taking the box of floppies also.
Maybe leave a few hidden notes behind for them to find. "Hi Mom, in case I forgot to tell you earlier, thanks."
But it does sound like a replacement for a smartphone for another group of many people. For instance, those who actually want to make voice calls and who don't really care about apps except to check email now and then. If it were for sale now I might consider it, except for the small display not going to work well with my eyes, and it being a byproduct of the dismantling of Nokia which discourages me as an ex-Nokia employee.
The market for cheaper phones is actually one of the things leading to Nokia's decline, as there's a huge market for cheap phones but they were being undercut on their low end products. The first world of hipsters may only think in terms of big smart phones but that's not the whole world.
As someone working on a system with only 16K RAM, I think 8MB RAM can do a whole lot. Size of RAM is irrelevant if the applications do what they're supposed to do. Sure the people who brag about how big their iPhone is won't want one of these, but that's not who these were designed for. Remember that is only RAM and likely this is not where the code runs from.
Except that Christianity as a whole does not make those claims. Only subset of Christianity. In particular the literalist interpretations of the Bible that assume 7 days is equal to the modern 168 hours for example. And yes, the last one has been used as an argument before.
There are groups that trust the King James Bible version over newer translations, but that doesn't mean all of Christianity agrees with them. On the other hand we have Christian founded and run colleges who do a very good job at education and a good job at science.
Politics has always been about Us versus Them. We first have to know what our side believes in before we know what we believe in. Some countries like to put nuances on it though, as in Our Coalition versus Their Coalition. Other countries simplify it to Us versus those in prison because they didn't vote for Us.
Hmm, Slashdot always felt more lower-case libertarian than anything else. Which of course, to the conservatives feels too liberal, and to the liberals feels too conservative.
There are several museums to creationism.
Presidents for the most part tend to be pushed towards the center as a result of being forced to govern rather than campaign. Even if the opposition claims that they're the most conservative/liberal president that ever existed. Reagan and Dubya were not nearly as hardcore conservative as the popular mythology claims, and certainly far less conservative than the modern Reagan worshippers are. Similarly, Clinton basically reinvented the middle of the road democrat. So if we get another Republican president it's not likely to be from the deranged segment without completely fracturing the party.
My guess is that it will be a Bush v. Clinton election, which is kind of sad since a country this size should be able to find qualified candidates without relying upon pedigrees like we were some old world aristocracy.
Of course if we're going with the myth, everyone in the early American colonies were Puritans and the masses of debtors and criminals shipped here never existed. Of course in Victorian England everyone was upper class as well and totally chaste. And everyone today in Europe is a totally devoted left wing atheist liberal. Nope, class distinctions don't exist or at least can be conveniently ignored.
It's a product of nationalism as well. Remember Lysenkoism in Russia, which partially was due to Stalin's approval, but there was also a very strong component of being a science invented in the USSR and not in the decadent western world. National pride. In India there's a Hindu nationalist party in power and they seem to be pushing their agenda, as in "invented here, not there".
I think there are two causes. First, it's clearly for advertising. No one makes products anymore when they can just make money advertising someone else's products intead. Every two bit blogger feels it's their divine right to make a profit off of their inane ramblings. Second, a lot of sites really don't have developers and instead they just borrow some premade frameworks from a third party, they may not even realize that they're serving up a lot of crap and bogging down the bandwidth.
Javascript is going to be this decade's jobs program, pointless work designed to keep people off the streets.
Not surprising at the time. Email could be very very slow, a lot of people didn't know how to use it, and the messages could be lost. Then again, the inter-departmental memos routinely got lost as well.
In the 80s I once got notified of new mail and a few seconds after that I received a phone call asking if I had received the email. The funny thing was that the email was only a couple lines long and the phone call gave me all the details which made the email itself redundant.
And after all that effort to get people to use the email on the network, today email seems to be considered out of fashion and only for old luddites.
Government regulated does not mean it's the government. Is the fear of the government so pervasive now that any regulation automatically means that the company being regulated is also evil? The actual problem is that the regulators are weak and there is a huge amount of regulatory capture going on. If the utility wants to increase fees they ask the regulators if they can do so, and most of the time the regulators say yes. There's a scandal now with PG&E where there is evidence of the utilities commission being too cozy with them.
A lot of utilities do add extra fees, but most do this as a one time charge. I agree it's stupid. It's like charging more for an automobile because they bought some robotic assemblies, even though the overall cost is reduced. The utilities want to grab some money, and in the absence of real competition they'll do what they can to maximize profits. Many states have a commission to oversee this, but often when a utility requests to add an extra fee the regulators roll over and do what is asked.
And another reason is that utilities are really backwards and are having trouble moving out of the fifties era way of doing business. They've had their guaranteed profits for so long that they haven't modernized. For example, if the analog meter dial has 5 digits then they demand that the smart meters wrap around the readings at 5 digits also so that it doesn't confuse the billing system software. Utilities are also risk averse, it takes a very long time for them to approve changes to software or security.
The big thing I think most utilities need is not necessarily the smart meters but the smart grid, because right now many are flying blind without even knowing how much electricity is on the grid, unable to detect faulty equipment or loss of power efficiency. They could increase profits and increase efficiency at the same time.
The mass media as well as tech companies have redefined the term "operating system". It's been fuzzy this way for awhile. The company I'm at added "OS" as a suffix to a suite of services, including one part that actually uses an third party operating system but also the back office servers and the like. It's a marketing term. Similar to some smart phones, the "OS" is no longer the kernel there but instead refers more to the API or suite of applications. I suspect the average person on the street thinks that Notepad is a part of the Windows operating system too.
Smart meters are used by the utilities to save money and improve conservation. The government is not involved at all except to provide stimulus funds.
And no, they don't cause cancer either, or headaches, or higher rates, or mind control.
What about Exciteing?
One difference is that if you use openssl and someone finds a huge bug then it gets fixed. If you've got the proprietary library and it has bugs you will never be told about them and if there are patches you'll have to wait many months to get them (or worse they'll require you to pay to buy an upgrade, you won't ever be able to backport fixes). So yes you may have a dozen solutions, but only 1 out of 12 probably lets you learn about severe vulnerabilities in a timely manner while also letting you supply your own fix. Maybe 3 out of 12 let your in house expert examine the code. Most won't give you free critical patches and definitely won't provide patches for older versions. We have the variety of solutions already however what we need is a variety of open source solutions.
If you're paying $30 for a movie at a theater, you're paying too much and probably buying food at the theater.