How many competent users, who are tech- and computer-savvy, have had to call a support line simply because the documentation either sucked or was non-existent?
I've had a wireless setup for less than two months, and have had to call tech support (which I'm convinced is routed overseas to India) twice simply because the documentation has no help for troubleshooting. Both times, the steps were simple and straight-forward enough, and given time, I'd have probably stumbled across them by experiment, but the documentation doesn't tell you what some default settings should look like, where the hardware-reset is, etc. Nor did I see anything in their online docs that would have helped me.
I'm sure I can't be the only one who's had to call just because the manual blew chunks.
There are a lot of people (I won't say a majority, the proportion is a point not worth arguing) using P2P simply because they want free music. For those people, I have a suggestion - one that's legal and significantly socially healthier than hiding indoors and playing Russian roulette with the RIAA's lawyers.
Find your local music scene.
Find out which clubs or bars in your town (or a nearby metro area) host live music - many do on the weekends, some do several times a week. Check the local papers for lists of such places, or activities like festivals, open-air concerts, park celebrations, etc. Ask around, check with your friends, neighbors, people at the local watering hole. Hell, take a walk through a noisy section of town sometime on a Friday night and listen to hear which places sound like they've got a band going.
For a small cover (or free, depending) at most of these places, you can get in, hang out with friends, have a few beers, talk to members of your-preferred-gender, and listen to the artists up close and personal. You might be listening to some neo-punk band of sixteen-year-olds. You might catch a really great jazz set. You might hear some grizzled-looking blue-collar fellas playing some mighty fine blues. You might dance to some eighties cover band.
And - here's the part for those interested in free music - a lot of these bands sell their CDs very cheap, and many give them away for free! Sometimes, musicians that aren't even performing will show up just to hand out some CDs of their stuff, to try and get some exposure.
Expand your horizons, get out of your house, have a social experience, spend time with friends, and get free/cheap music, all for little investment - plus, you get to support homegrown talent, instead of manufactured "talent". How can you go wrong?
Re:Disposable Tech & Laziness + Big Macs
on
Japan's War On E-Waste
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I would have to say a lot of products these days are packaged in a way that's best to reduce theft.
Actually, when it comes to food and packaged consumer goods, the vast bulk of the packaging's purpose has been determined by the marketers behind the product. Go to the grocery store and look at the aisle with health and beauty aids - for an example, look at the section with toothpaste. See all those castons with shiny metallic-looking surfaces? That metallic surface is usually a polyethylene or polypropylene (film with vacuum-deposited aluminum on its backside. That film, along with the adhesive to laminate it to the paper stock and the inks required to print onto such a film, make the package cost a very large portion (in some cases the majority) of the raw cost of the total packaged good. Manufacturers spend heaps of money creating fancy, intricate packages designed to do one thing - make their product more attractive to the customer. Most packaging "innovations" have nothing to do with safety, efficiency, or technological advantage - it's just something to make the customer say "ooooh, shiny."
And why would we care? Because all this marketing effort creates plenty of extra (needless) waste materials. It gets even worse when (as other posters have pointed out) you're dealing with single-use or single-serving products.
I shave sometimes with a razor, sometimes with an electric shaver. The Mach3 blades cost something on the order of about 15 USD for five.
All this for something that you're using to cut off a part of yourself that grows back in a short time.:P
Before even taking into account physiological differences due to genetics, no matter how much you spend on the blades, you're going to have to shave again tomorrow (some men even sooner). Which is why I gave up the price battle and just use an electric razor for most times, and a pack of the cheap safety razors around for use other times. If my body is going to force me to spend money, I'll certainly make it as little as possible.
Suppliers like in "Science Made Stupid"?
on
United Nuclear
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I can't help but be reminded of some of the "supply stores" mentioned in "Science Made Stupid" as the places to get various dangerous things. U-235 rods from "Bud's Scientific Supply," anyone?
Footnote on page 25 (might not be in the web version linked above): "A fuller discussion of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle may be found in the Appendix. Then again, it may not."
The media coverage of Harry Potter started *because* of its popularity, it didn't cause it. I will grant that the popularity of the fifth book has probably been helped along by the media coverage, but remember, the popularity of the series was already quite entrenched when the fourth book was being anticipated.
Bear in mind, however, that Scholastic (publisher of "Harry Potter") over $3 million to market the fifth book. The hype may have started with fans, but like anything else, it's been well-capitalized upon.
What if some kid needs to find out medical information about STDs or how to get help if he might've gotten his girlfriend pregnant?
You'll find that a lot of the people who would push for this kind of restriction-of-information tend to live under a delusion that a teen who doesn't know anything about sex is a teen who would therefore never have sex.
Assuming the AC ever checks back, which I'm not sure is all that likely - no, I have no source to cite, only my memory of an anecdotal reference of someone telling me that they'd seen the Wachowskis interviewed during one of the many "sneak-peek-making-of" shows, or some news-infotainment show or other. In that interview, apparently, they said that they had intended to take the parallel-processing angle but it had been ditched during the creative process, and why.
Hence why I said only "it was my understanding" in the original post. Take it for what it's worth, which ain't much.:P
2) resurrect just a small portion of humans to efficiently convert the goo into bioelectricity and heat
It was my understanding that the Wachowski bros. had originally conceived of humans being used as a massive parallel-processing system, but that the notion was lost on the studio execs and/or the execs thought that people wouldn't be able to understand that concept. This, of course, would fit in with the need for the Matrix to exist for brain activity - if people were only needed for the power-producing capabilities (which has already been beaten to death as impractical/impossible, lossy system, etc.), then it would make more sense to have them cerebrally brain-dead. A bit of twisting and stupidity later, and the parallel-processing was ditched for the power-plant, with the Wachowskis, I'm sure, hoping no one would notice/care.
For me, it's less about having the latest-and-greatest, and more about paying what I think it's worth. For me, it's a rare game that's worth the brand-new retail price of $40-50 (or more), but there are plenty of games that I think are worth the $10-20 I end up paying when I get them. The downfall? Stores are keeping fewer older titles around (other than best-sellers like Half-Life et al), so it might be out of print, sending me to eBay or just doing without.
Although eBay still hasn't been much help in finding the PC version of "Divide: Enemies Within" these last few years.
Unfortunately, this means not listening to some of my favorite bands anymore...
There's always the option of buying used CDs, where the label (and unfortunately the artist, but there are other ways of compensating them, such as merchandise and concerts and fairness).
Just a thought, for those who really enjoy artists who happen to be slaves to the big labels...
Course, we'd have to assume that politicians are socially-conscious and intelligent persons capable of actually caring that the world is a better place for everyone.
Assume that politicians are socially-conscious and intelligent? Hell, people aren't socially conscious or intelligent. The vast bulk of people are unmitigatedly self-absorbed, self-centered, and stupid. The world sucks because people, at large, suck.
Politicians, by and large, aren't a different or special class of people. They come from the pool available - stick your hand in raw sewage, and of course all you're likely to find is excrement.
Lucky for me we have a store called cd warehouse nearby that buys the crap I don't listen to anymore, and sells me used CD's for $5-$9.
See, that's what I don't get about the labels. $15 is an iffy purchase price for a CD, as far as I'm concerned, but won't likely stop me. If it's above that price, there's a good chance I won't touch it except on sale, at places that sell below normal (like Best Buy), or used.
If a CD is $10, then my waffling ends and I'll almost certainly buy it.
If CDs were $5 a pop, I'd go f#@$in' broke buying CDs.
Certainly I can't be the only one like this - there's got to be enough people like me that the volume of sales would go up high enough to justify the reduced margins. Food for thought, although the RIAA et al don't seem to be hungry.
One thing I had hoped to find, based subsequent interest from reading the various whitepapers on Bayesian filtering for spam, is an ability to study the spam I get and the rules implemented and learned. Even just an overview of the statistics would be nice (or a plainly-obvious way to access the data to do my own analysis); this became particularly relevant to me after "training" my filters on 1.3 on several hundred spam I'd saved, only to find several false positives in the first few weeks (most related to my job-hunting efforts, one from a friend letting me know briefly that her email had changed, and one from an old college buddy asking how I was doing after so long).
I hear "usability improvements" in regards to the junk mail filtering, and wonder if this kind of thing might be involved, or on the horizon. (Yeah, I know I could download the alpha, but I'm a wuss who likes stable releases.) I see "context menu items" in the release notes, but that doesn't mean much to me. Anyone care to enlighten me?
One could even argue that high-profile abuses of the patent office serve to emphasize it's shortcomings, and set the stage for eventually fixing patent law. Call it a backwards form of civil disobedience, maybe?
I think that's granting it a level of validity and altruism that doesn't remotely exist. This is exploitation of a broken system for a single reason - to make (more) money.
Amen to that. I just recently picked up an X-Box (long-time Panzer Dragoon fan), and other than plugging it in and firing it up to make sure it worked, I've barely touched it lately. What's been sucking up my time lately? I got pulled into re-playing Spyro the Dragon games on my old Playstation. I didn't care if the PS1 graphics weren't up to par with the taste I got while first testing out the X-Box - I was having fun. I've played plenty of pretty games (PC and console) that sucked rocks - give me a good, fun game that shows its age, and I'll go for hours. Hell, I still fire up SNES games for their fun-to-play value (Super Metroid, Secret of Mana, Starfox, etc.).
Complete FUD. American workers work longer than anyone in the industrialized world. Of course this presents a problem, as corporations want to have an excuse to go elsewhere for cheaper labor, so this idiotic rumor has risen. It has completely no basis in reality.
Source for statistics? I'm not voicing disbelief, just curiousity and interest in the numbers.
Curiousity, killed cats, all that - what's your sig mean? It struck me as odd enough that I wondered if it were a palindrome, which it's obviously not. Read backwards, it's almost legit, since it would read:
Satan oscillate my... metanoser?
I thought then it might be a plain ol' anagram, but I don't have the presence of mind to sit down and start rearranging things, since ostensibly I'm at work:P
My gawd, I thought I was the only one who read Skal's Antibodies! I found it floating around on a shelf of various pulp fiction in the backroom at my dad's old house, years ago - and read it, and thought it was just odd. Surprising to see it mentioned here.
Slashdot Mirror
How many competent users, who are tech- and computer-savvy, have had to call a support line simply because the documentation either sucked or was non-existent?
I've had a wireless setup for less than two months, and have had to call tech support (which I'm convinced is routed overseas to India) twice simply because the documentation has no help for troubleshooting. Both times, the steps were simple and straight-forward enough, and given time, I'd have probably stumbled across them by experiment, but the documentation doesn't tell you what some default settings should look like, where the hardware-reset is, etc. Nor did I see anything in their online docs that would have helped me.
I'm sure I can't be the only one who's had to call just because the manual blew chunks.
If you find out, let me know - I'm curious.
Ahhh, that was unexpected - seeing a link with [rose-hulman.edu] in brackets. Always nice to hear the alma mater get its name here and there.
:)
There are a lot of people (I won't say a majority, the proportion is a point not worth arguing) using P2P simply because they want free music. For those people, I have a suggestion - one that's legal and significantly socially healthier than hiding indoors and playing Russian roulette with the RIAA's lawyers.
Find your local music scene.
Find out which clubs or bars in your town (or a nearby metro area) host live music - many do on the weekends, some do several times a week. Check the local papers for lists of such places, or activities like festivals, open-air concerts, park celebrations, etc. Ask around, check with your friends, neighbors, people at the local watering hole. Hell, take a walk through a noisy section of town sometime on a Friday night and listen to hear which places sound like they've got a band going.
For a small cover (or free, depending) at most of these places, you can get in, hang out with friends, have a few beers, talk to members of your-preferred-gender, and listen to the artists up close and personal. You might be listening to some neo-punk band of sixteen-year-olds. You might catch a really great jazz set. You might hear some grizzled-looking blue-collar fellas playing some mighty fine blues. You might dance to some eighties cover band.
And - here's the part for those interested in free music - a lot of these bands sell their CDs very cheap, and many give them away for free! Sometimes, musicians that aren't even performing will show up just to hand out some CDs of their stuff, to try and get some exposure.
Expand your horizons, get out of your house, have a social experience, spend time with friends, and get free/cheap music, all for little investment - plus, you get to support homegrown talent, instead of manufactured "talent". How can you go wrong?
Actually, when it comes to food and packaged consumer goods, the vast bulk of the packaging's purpose has been determined by the marketers behind the product. Go to the grocery store and look at the aisle with health and beauty aids - for an example, look at the section with toothpaste. See all those castons with shiny metallic-looking surfaces? That metallic surface is usually a polyethylene or polypropylene (film with vacuum-deposited aluminum on its backside. That film, along with the adhesive to laminate it to the paper stock and the inks required to print onto such a film, make the package cost a very large portion (in some cases the majority) of the raw cost of the total packaged good. Manufacturers spend heaps of money creating fancy, intricate packages designed to do one thing - make their product more attractive to the customer. Most packaging "innovations" have nothing to do with safety, efficiency, or technological advantage - it's just something to make the customer say "ooooh, shiny."
And why would we care? Because all this marketing effort creates plenty of extra (needless) waste materials. It gets even worse when (as other posters have pointed out) you're dealing with single-use or single-serving products.
Funniest thing I've read today. :P
Hmmm... Be pedantic, or find your post funny? I think I'll go for the latter.
:P
All this for something that you're using to cut off a part of yourself that grows back in a short time.:P
Before even taking into account physiological differences due to genetics, no matter how much you spend on the blades, you're going to have to shave again tomorrow (some men even sooner). Which is why I gave up the price battle and just use an electric razor for most times, and a pack of the cheap safety razors around for use other times. If my body is going to force me to spend money, I'll certainly make it as little as possible.
I can't help but be reminded of some of the "supply stores" mentioned in "Science Made Stupid" as the places to get various dangerous things. U-235 rods from "Bud's Scientific Supply," anyone?
Footnote on page 25 (might not be in the web version linked above): "A fuller discussion of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle may be found in the Appendix. Then again, it may not."
The media coverage of Harry Potter started *because* of its popularity, it didn't cause it. I will grant that the popularity of the fifth book has probably been helped along by the media coverage, but remember, the popularity of the series was already quite entrenched when the fourth book was being anticipated.
Bear in mind, however, that Scholastic (publisher of "Harry Potter") over $3 million to market the fifth book. The hype may have started with fans, but like anything else, it's been well-capitalized upon.
What if some kid needs to find out medical information about STDs or how to get help if he might've gotten his girlfriend pregnant?
You'll find that a lot of the people who would push for this kind of restriction-of-information tend to live under a delusion that a teen who doesn't know anything about sex is a teen who would therefore never have sex.
"If we can't see it, it doesn't exist..."
That reminds me: I've got no U2 mp3s on my puter, better go get some off Kazaa.
How old are you that you don't remember that Mary Bono is the widow of Sonny Bono (of "Sonny and Cher" fame), and not the Bono you've just mentioned?
:P
Do you have a cite for that?
Assuming the AC ever checks back, which I'm not sure is all that likely - no, I have no source to cite, only my memory of an anecdotal reference of someone telling me that they'd seen the Wachowskis interviewed during one of the many "sneak-peek-making-of" shows, or some news-infotainment show or other. In that interview, apparently, they said that they had intended to take the parallel-processing angle but it had been ditched during the creative process, and why.
Hence why I said only "it was my understanding" in the original post. Take it for what it's worth, which ain't much.:P
2) resurrect just a small portion of humans to efficiently convert the goo into bioelectricity and heat
It was my understanding that the Wachowski bros. had originally conceived of humans being used as a massive parallel-processing system, but that the notion was lost on the studio execs and/or the execs thought that people wouldn't be able to understand that concept. This, of course, would fit in with the need for the Matrix to exist for brain activity - if people were only needed for the power-producing capabilities (which has already been beaten to death as impractical/impossible, lossy system, etc.), then it would make more sense to have them cerebrally brain-dead. A bit of twisting and stupidity later, and the parallel-processing was ditched for the power-plant, with the Wachowskis, I'm sure, hoping no one would notice/care.
For me, it's less about having the latest-and-greatest, and more about paying what I think it's worth. For me, it's a rare game that's worth the brand-new retail price of $40-50 (or more), but there are plenty of games that I think are worth the $10-20 I end up paying when I get them. The downfall? Stores are keeping fewer older titles around (other than best-sellers like Half-Life et al), so it might be out of print, sending me to eBay or just doing without.
:P
Although eBay still hasn't been much help in finding the PC version of "Divide: Enemies Within" these last few years.
Unfortunately, this means not listening to some of my favorite bands anymore...
There's always the option of buying used CDs, where the label (and unfortunately the artist, but there are other ways of compensating them, such as merchandise and concerts and fairness).
Just a thought, for those who really enjoy artists who happen to be slaves to the big labels...
Forget call blocking and caller i.d. Do what I did: disconnect your phone and go with a cell service.
I see two problems with that, or I'd do it myself, in a heartbeat:
1.) Ordering a pizza delivery.
2.) Needing to use my fax machine.
Assume that politicians are socially-conscious and intelligent? Hell, people aren't socially conscious or intelligent. The vast bulk of people are unmitigatedly self-absorbed, self-centered, and stupid. The world sucks because people, at large, suck.
Politicians, by and large, aren't a different or special class of people. They come from the pool available - stick your hand in raw sewage, and of course all you're likely to find is excrement.
</cynical bastard>
Lucky for me we have a store called cd warehouse nearby that buys the crap I don't listen to anymore, and sells me used CD's for $5-$9.
See, that's what I don't get about the labels. $15 is an iffy purchase price for a CD, as far as I'm concerned, but won't likely stop me. If it's above that price, there's a good chance I won't touch it except on sale, at places that sell below normal (like Best Buy), or used.
If a CD is $10, then my waffling ends and I'll almost certainly buy it.
If CDs were $5 a pop, I'd go f#@$in' broke buying CDs.
Certainly I can't be the only one like this - there's got to be enough people like me that the volume of sales would go up high enough to justify the reduced margins. Food for thought, although the RIAA et al don't seem to be hungry.
I hear "usability improvements" in regards to the junk mail filtering, and wonder if this kind of thing might be involved, or on the horizon. (Yeah, I know I could download the alpha, but I'm a wuss who likes stable releases.) I see "context menu items" in the release notes, but that doesn't mean much to me. Anyone care to enlighten me?
One could even argue that high-profile abuses of the patent office serve to emphasize it's shortcomings, and set the stage for eventually fixing patent law. Call it a backwards form of civil disobedience, maybe?
I think that's granting it a level of validity and altruism that doesn't remotely exist. This is exploitation of a broken system for a single reason - to make (more) money.
Amen to that. I just recently picked up an X-Box (long-time Panzer Dragoon fan), and other than plugging it in and firing it up to make sure it worked, I've barely touched it lately. What's been sucking up my time lately? I got pulled into re-playing Spyro the Dragon games on my old Playstation. I didn't care if the PS1 graphics weren't up to par with the taste I got while first testing out the X-Box - I was having fun. I've played plenty of pretty games (PC and console) that sucked rocks - give me a good, fun game that shows its age, and I'll go for hours. Hell, I still fire up SNES games for their fun-to-play value (Super Metroid, Secret of Mana, Starfox, etc.).
Complete FUD. American workers work longer than anyone in the industrialized world. Of course this presents a problem, as corporations want to have an excuse to go elsewhere for cheaper labor, so this idiotic rumor has risen. It has completely no basis in reality.
Source for statistics? I'm not voicing disbelief, just curiousity and interest in the numbers.
Curiousity, killed cats, all that - what's your sig mean? It struck me as odd enough that I wondered if it were a palindrome, which it's obviously not. Read backwards, it's almost legit, since it would read:
Satan oscillate my... metanoser?
I thought then it might be a plain ol' anagram, but I don't have the presence of mind to sit down and start rearranging things, since ostensibly I'm at work :P
My gawd, I thought I was the only one who read Skal's Antibodies! I found it floating around on a shelf of various pulp fiction in the backroom at my dad's old house, years ago - and read it, and thought it was just odd. Surprising to see it mentioned here.