you that their MP is too incompetent to represent their constituents is telling you their MP needs to be replaced.
Yes, but the fact is its nearly impossible to do that in the US. The two parties republican and democrats are two sides of the same coin. Both aim for A) Increasing governmental power B) Decreasing consumer choice C) Having taxes that don't benefit you and D) Preserving their own power. If you believe in a much smaller government, either a more controlled or more free market, tax reform or any number of various issues contrary to republicans and democrats you have -no- representation at all. Not even a single member.
I wasn't aware that the book publishing industry was swimming in as much cash as Hollywood or Microsoft...
Have you not looked at the price of college textbooks? They take about the same materiel as their first edition 20, 30 years ago, "update" it, rearrange some chapters and sell it for $100+. On top of that many books don't even try to be unbiased or even care for the facts. All they need is three guys who have spent enough money on college degrees and they then have a book.
So why aren't you voting for one?
Who says he wasn't? The fact is the US has a very very very broken voting system. It basically narrows every single race down to two parties at most. Even if 5% of the US population believes in something chances are slim that they will even have one vote in congress. We need congressional elections similar to the EU parliament elections where parties get membership based on the % of votes or a smaller federal government. I don't see the second happening anytime soon at least not when Obama controls the white house. So please tell me how you are supposed to get a 3rd party into congress?
I see little reason to "upgrade" during this generation too. For one, everything is very expensive for small gains, in order to really "enjoy" Blu-Ray you have to buy an -expensive- player, for me I'd have to buy an expensive HD TV, and the disks themselves are expensive. Yeah, if you are buying a new TV and everything it makes little sense not to upgrade, but if you are like just about everyone else who has everything working why pay $$$ and upgrade? Sure, HD has a better picture quality, but not $1000+ worth of it, plus, I can rent DVD movies for $1 a night, I can't rent Blu-Ray that cheaply. I didn't get any current gen game consoles save for the Wii until recently because at the start they all sucked and the Wii was the only one that started with a decent price. The 360 was too unreliable in the first few motherboard revisions (RRoD) and the PS3 until about a month or two ago was -far- too expensive. Vista was inferior to XP and cost extra so I didn't upgrade my XP box to Vista. And to be perfectly honest, I don't need a lot of data backed up, my music is redundantly backed up on various MP3 players over the years and audio CDs, I don't have a huge picture collection so most pictures are still on my 4 gig SD card, and anything else needed to be backed up fits nicely on a standard DVD. I don't need to spend $2 on Blu-Ray disks and more for a drive when I only need a few gigs of things backed up.
One of the main advantages to open source is the ease of portability. Some open source application can work fine on Windows, OS X, Linux, a hacked Wii, a smartphone, an obscure Linux powered device, and so on. If people keep using non-free applications you get vendor lock-in. Just look at IE and ActiveX, if ActiveX was used even more than it was back before Firefox became popular, we might still be forced to run IE in an emulator layer just to use the web. If you can get open source out on every single platform for free, especially the newer ones where people don't have to "un-learn" something to use them, it helps spread open standards and in the end a better computing world.
The problem with Android is it needs geeks to survive and Google seems to not welcome them. First off is the fact that your device must be "rooted" in order to have full control, really, all Google needed to do is provide some obscure command to root your device so the geeks can use the device how they wanted and the masses could be protected. Android isn't as shiny or as polished as WebOS or iPhone OS, it -needs- geeks to survive, but how does Google expect that to happen when they send takedown notices to Android modders?
The typical person buys a console for the games. The PS3 lacks a lot of fun party multiplayer games that the Wii has. There is no equivalent for Super Smash Bros. Brawl on the PS3, nor Wii Sports, etc. Yeah, the PS3 wins in online multiplayer, more features, etc. but the Wii has some pretty fun games you can't get on any other console.
Not necessarily. Unless the game is -really- good and not released in the west, I'm not going to get a Japanese game because I don't know Japanese. Japanese is primarily spoken in Japan which is only one country. English speaking nations have in general, pretty wealthy. Etc. Let a language problem rather than a tech problem solve it.
I think the problem is we try to have too much "accountability" that leads to crap education. I can't believe the number of teachers who have either glossed over important things or emphasized unimportant things simply because they would "be on the standardized test". Yeah, the test might be a good guideline, but if its important teach it regardless. This particularly applied to math where various concepts were ignored by previous teachers due to the lack of them being on a standardized test.
However, I think AP classes and other high-level classes should be available so any kid can take them. The problem results when the students/parents expect every kid to get an A regardless of ability. I was a student that even though in general I was mediocre on the things that they forced me to do, but I really tried and enjoyed things whenever I had the freedom to. So in general I excelled in AP and "advanced" classes but during "normal level" classes I really didn't try because they quite frankly bored me. I can much better write about any topic of my choice than "write a persuasive essay on why smoking should be discouraged".
...And what do the armed force recruiters tell you? Sign up and possibly get shot but get money to go to college. They present college as the final destination. Society as a whole presents college as the final destination, either you get to college and have a "successful" life, go to trade school and "just get by", get on the job training with a high school degree and "be a failure" or get a GED and "be the bum living on the street". While in reality this isn't true. I know -many- unemployed people with lots of college education, know many people who went to trade school and practically make more money than they know what to do with and have a job they love, and some people who have no further education than a GED that while they aren't making a million, they sure can pay rent, bills and have enough money left over for a few luxuries which is more than can be said for many college-educated people who are unemployed.
Of course people always make the mistake that they would have been working anyways. In many cases that isn't the truth. I know when I code, there are days where I simply can't code well, and other days I can code like crazy and make great code. So if they wouldn't be doing any real work to begin with, there is no real loss. Plus, how is it any different than things like coffee, doughnuts, etc.
Macs though in general are a lot more uniform. If you know how to use X app, you can use Y app easily. Yeah, OS X has some oddities that if you come from Windows or from GUI Linux (if you use the shell on OS X or Linux its pretty similar) but once you get over those, they are very constant. With Windows you learn each program by themselves. Yeah, you can figure out some things, but the interfaces are totally different between even MS programs shipped on the same version of Windows.
the update actually puts him and millions of other iPhone owners/Windows PC users at increased risk by installing
Millions? Lets see here, the update was only recommended for a few hours and was quickly pulled. How many people do you think update constantly? If Windows updates are any indication (and most just install in the background with almost no user interaction) chances are very few. We aren't talking about "millions" but a few thousand in the worst case.
I think its more Microsoft attempting to be similar to Apple. But the problem is they are failing because PCs are just too common. Its not a "choice" to use MS software, its just there by default. And its a pain for the average user. Either they spend a lot of $$$ getting an easy to use Mac or save money and get a PC with problems. Thats just how the average person sees things.
He swore that it was the hardware becoming obsolete and it wasn't the software. Because we all know that you need state-of-the-art hardware to check e-mail!
For some people, Best Buy -is- the only electronics store for miles around. Yeah, you can buy online, but you pay $20 for the product, $10 for shipping, wait forever for it to come, and hope that your order isn't messed up.
The Level 10 will be available in mid-October for $700.
$700 for a case? I can buy a quad-core desktop with more RAM than I know what to do with for that much.
Re:What's the Difference Between a Computer Salesm
on
Bad PC Sales Staff Exposed
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Exactly. I knew this guy who owned a car dealership (this was before all the American car companies started failing and demanding taxpayer funds) who had about 10 Sony Vaio laptops (between him and his family of 5) over about 3 years. And several high-end HP desktops. The guy didn't need them, he replaced them because they "broke" by broke they just started going "slow" and he in all of his wisdom thought that that was simply going obsolete and making them slow. Of course the guy didn't bother getting a decent enough virus protection or bother scanning his machines... Because the 30 day free trial of Norton is enough protection for anyone, right? Of course this was also when getting Linux to work on a Vaio required black magic, so basically the guy kept spending money every 6 months for computers he didn't need. The guy's computer needs were simply A) Browsing the web B) Checking stocks C) E-mail. A basic, cheap, low-end laptop could have worked just fine and the guy would have had $10,000 or more still in his pocket.
AT&T employees are morons though. Ask them about a phone other than an iPhone, BlackBerry or their "special" and they don't have a clue. I asked them the features of phone X was and the most they could tell me was just their spec sheet. And the phone itself was just a dummy phone so you couldn't turn it on and see. They only have 30 phones at most, and the average employee can only tell you anything about 5 of them.
The only right way to do a "virus removal" is check for tell-tale signs of spyware and the likes- then boot GNU/Linux, backup critical data, wipe (partitions included) and reload.
That works fine, but most people don't have a clue what is critical. The times that I have done that I either get "I don't have anything on that computer", "Just keep -these- 3 files" or some other form of that and when the data is wiped I get a call 3 days later in a panic because they didn't tell me that they needed X even though I told them multiple times to look for -all- their data, or better yet their "backup" that they told me they had is... wait for it... on the same HDD.
In most cases wiping it is too much trouble than what its worth.
high percentage of people just need more ram though...
Depends, a lot of people just need a new computer. By the time you buy expensive RAM (yeah, DDR2 is dirt cheap but DDR and earlier start to get expensive), a new HDD (eventually the old 15 gig HDD is too large for their music collection), etc. It comes pretty close to $300 when you figure in all the components, labor and the general pain of the computer.
A lot of the time you will see ancient computers with many viruses and other pieces of malware.
Re:What's the Difference Between a Computer Salesm
on
Bad PC Sales Staff Exposed
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Depends by "questionable", I've had many bottom-line computers keep chugging right along while I've had high-end systems fail quicker. In fact, I prefer buying the cheaper hardware because there is usually less proprietary crap and components are usually a lot easier to swap out.
Slashdot Mirror
you that their MP is too incompetent to represent their constituents is telling you their MP needs to be replaced.
Yes, but the fact is its nearly impossible to do that in the US. The two parties republican and democrats are two sides of the same coin. Both aim for A) Increasing governmental power B) Decreasing consumer choice C) Having taxes that don't benefit you and D) Preserving their own power. If you believe in a much smaller government, either a more controlled or more free market, tax reform or any number of various issues contrary to republicans and democrats you have -no- representation at all. Not even a single member.
I wasn't aware that the book publishing industry was swimming in as much cash as Hollywood or Microsoft...
Have you not looked at the price of college textbooks? They take about the same materiel as their first edition 20, 30 years ago, "update" it, rearrange some chapters and sell it for $100+. On top of that many books don't even try to be unbiased or even care for the facts. All they need is three guys who have spent enough money on college degrees and they then have a book.
So why aren't you voting for one?
Who says he wasn't? The fact is the US has a very very very broken voting system. It basically narrows every single race down to two parties at most. Even if 5% of the US population believes in something chances are slim that they will even have one vote in congress. We need congressional elections similar to the EU parliament elections where parties get membership based on the % of votes or a smaller federal government. I don't see the second happening anytime soon at least not when Obama controls the white house. So please tell me how you are supposed to get a 3rd party into congress?
You mean like C-SPAN where you can watch congress debate but its so annoyingly boring that no one watches it?
I see little reason to "upgrade" during this generation too. For one, everything is very expensive for small gains, in order to really "enjoy" Blu-Ray you have to buy an -expensive- player, for me I'd have to buy an expensive HD TV, and the disks themselves are expensive. Yeah, if you are buying a new TV and everything it makes little sense not to upgrade, but if you are like just about everyone else who has everything working why pay $$$ and upgrade? Sure, HD has a better picture quality, but not $1000+ worth of it, plus, I can rent DVD movies for $1 a night, I can't rent Blu-Ray that cheaply. I didn't get any current gen game consoles save for the Wii until recently because at the start they all sucked and the Wii was the only one that started with a decent price. The 360 was too unreliable in the first few motherboard revisions (RRoD) and the PS3 until about a month or two ago was -far- too expensive. Vista was inferior to XP and cost extra so I didn't upgrade my XP box to Vista. And to be perfectly honest, I don't need a lot of data backed up, my music is redundantly backed up on various MP3 players over the years and audio CDs, I don't have a huge picture collection so most pictures are still on my 4 gig SD card, and anything else needed to be backed up fits nicely on a standard DVD. I don't need to spend $2 on Blu-Ray disks and more for a drive when I only need a few gigs of things backed up.
Note to clueless mods, Antivirus 2009 is one of these fake antiviruses, mod them funny, not interesting....
Sure, but the community doesn't see it that way. They see Google as control freaks.
One of the main advantages to open source is the ease of portability. Some open source application can work fine on Windows, OS X, Linux, a hacked Wii, a smartphone, an obscure Linux powered device, and so on. If people keep using non-free applications you get vendor lock-in. Just look at IE and ActiveX, if ActiveX was used even more than it was back before Firefox became popular, we might still be forced to run IE in an emulator layer just to use the web. If you can get open source out on every single platform for free, especially the newer ones where people don't have to "un-learn" something to use them, it helps spread open standards and in the end a better computing world.
The problem with Android is it needs geeks to survive and Google seems to not welcome them. First off is the fact that your device must be "rooted" in order to have full control, really, all Google needed to do is provide some obscure command to root your device so the geeks can use the device how they wanted and the masses could be protected. Android isn't as shiny or as polished as WebOS or iPhone OS, it -needs- geeks to survive, but how does Google expect that to happen when they send takedown notices to Android modders?
The typical person buys a console for the games. The PS3 lacks a lot of fun party multiplayer games that the Wii has. There is no equivalent for Super Smash Bros. Brawl on the PS3, nor Wii Sports, etc. Yeah, the PS3 wins in online multiplayer, more features, etc. but the Wii has some pretty fun games you can't get on any other console.
Not necessarily. Unless the game is -really- good and not released in the west, I'm not going to get a Japanese game because I don't know Japanese. Japanese is primarily spoken in Japan which is only one country. English speaking nations have in general, pretty wealthy. Etc. Let a language problem rather than a tech problem solve it.
"Micello is quite literally Google maps for the insides of buildings," said Ankit Agarwal, founder and CEO of Micello
From TFA. And how the heck would that be illegal?
I think the problem is we try to have too much "accountability" that leads to crap education. I can't believe the number of teachers who have either glossed over important things or emphasized unimportant things simply because they would "be on the standardized test". Yeah, the test might be a good guideline, but if its important teach it regardless. This particularly applied to math where various concepts were ignored by previous teachers due to the lack of them being on a standardized test.
However, I think AP classes and other high-level classes should be available so any kid can take them. The problem results when the students/parents expect every kid to get an A regardless of ability. I was a student that even though in general I was mediocre on the things that they forced me to do, but I really tried and enjoyed things whenever I had the freedom to. So in general I excelled in AP and "advanced" classes but during "normal level" classes I really didn't try because they quite frankly bored me. I can much better write about any topic of my choice than "write a persuasive essay on why smoking should be discouraged".
...And what do the armed force recruiters tell you? Sign up and possibly get shot but get money to go to college. They present college as the final destination. Society as a whole presents college as the final destination, either you get to college and have a "successful" life, go to trade school and "just get by", get on the job training with a high school degree and "be a failure" or get a GED and "be the bum living on the street". While in reality this isn't true. I know -many- unemployed people with lots of college education, know many people who went to trade school and practically make more money than they know what to do with and have a job they love, and some people who have no further education than a GED that while they aren't making a million, they sure can pay rent, bills and have enough money left over for a few luxuries which is more than can be said for many college-educated people who are unemployed.
The cost to taxpayers: up to $58,000
Of course people always make the mistake that they would have been working anyways. In many cases that isn't the truth. I know when I code, there are days where I simply can't code well, and other days I can code like crazy and make great code. So if they wouldn't be doing any real work to begin with, there is no real loss. Plus, how is it any different than things like coffee, doughnuts, etc.
Macs though in general are a lot more uniform. If you know how to use X app, you can use Y app easily. Yeah, OS X has some oddities that if you come from Windows or from GUI Linux (if you use the shell on OS X or Linux its pretty similar) but once you get over those, they are very constant. With Windows you learn each program by themselves. Yeah, you can figure out some things, but the interfaces are totally different between even MS programs shipped on the same version of Windows.
the update actually puts him and millions of other iPhone owners/Windows PC users at increased risk by installing
Millions? Lets see here, the update was only recommended for a few hours and was quickly pulled. How many people do you think update constantly? If Windows updates are any indication (and most just install in the background with almost no user interaction) chances are very few. We aren't talking about "millions" but a few thousand in the worst case.
I think its more Microsoft attempting to be similar to Apple. But the problem is they are failing because PCs are just too common. Its not a "choice" to use MS software, its just there by default. And its a pain for the average user. Either they spend a lot of $$$ getting an easy to use Mac or save money and get a PC with problems. Thats just how the average person sees things.
He swore that it was the hardware becoming obsolete and it wasn't the software. Because we all know that you need state-of-the-art hardware to check e-mail!
For some people, Best Buy -is- the only electronics store for miles around. Yeah, you can buy online, but you pay $20 for the product, $10 for shipping, wait forever for it to come, and hope that your order isn't messed up.
The Level 10 will be available in mid-October for $700.
$700 for a case? I can buy a quad-core desktop with more RAM than I know what to do with for that much.
Exactly. I knew this guy who owned a car dealership (this was before all the American car companies started failing and demanding taxpayer funds) who had about 10 Sony Vaio laptops (between him and his family of 5) over about 3 years. And several high-end HP desktops. The guy didn't need them, he replaced them because they "broke" by broke they just started going "slow" and he in all of his wisdom thought that that was simply going obsolete and making them slow. Of course the guy didn't bother getting a decent enough virus protection or bother scanning his machines... Because the 30 day free trial of Norton is enough protection for anyone, right? Of course this was also when getting Linux to work on a Vaio required black magic, so basically the guy kept spending money every 6 months for computers he didn't need. The guy's computer needs were simply A) Browsing the web B) Checking stocks C) E-mail. A basic, cheap, low-end laptop could have worked just fine and the guy would have had $10,000 or more still in his pocket.
AT&T employees are morons though. Ask them about a phone other than an iPhone, BlackBerry or their "special" and they don't have a clue. I asked them the features of phone X was and the most they could tell me was just their spec sheet. And the phone itself was just a dummy phone so you couldn't turn it on and see. They only have 30 phones at most, and the average employee can only tell you anything about 5 of them.
The only right way to do a "virus removal" is check for tell-tale signs of spyware and the likes- then boot GNU/Linux, backup critical data, wipe (partitions included) and reload.
That works fine, but most people don't have a clue what is critical. The times that I have done that I either get "I don't have anything on that computer", "Just keep -these- 3 files" or some other form of that and when the data is wiped I get a call 3 days later in a panic because they didn't tell me that they needed X even though I told them multiple times to look for -all- their data, or better yet their "backup" that they told me they had is... wait for it... on the same HDD.
In most cases wiping it is too much trouble than what its worth.
high percentage of people just need more ram though...
Depends, a lot of people just need a new computer. By the time you buy expensive RAM (yeah, DDR2 is dirt cheap but DDR and earlier start to get expensive), a new HDD (eventually the old 15 gig HDD is too large for their music collection), etc. It comes pretty close to $300 when you figure in all the components, labor and the general pain of the computer.
A lot of the time you will see ancient computers with many viruses and other pieces of malware.
Depends by "questionable", I've had many bottom-line computers keep chugging right along while I've had high-end systems fail quicker. In fact, I prefer buying the cheaper hardware because there is usually less proprietary crap and components are usually a lot easier to swap out.