It's a shame Brother cooperated, they were initially hold-outs, but now I go out of my way to avoid them.
However, we've still got Samsung, and they're generally the best & cheapest options across the board, anyhow.
Everyone go out and by a CLP-325W now... (Only that specific model, otherwise you don't get PCL-5 support). It's only $150USD shipped, and the early bugs in the firmware have been worked-out.
How about I come over and break into your house when you are not home and leave a note telling you how I did it?
My house doesn't contain billions of dollars worth of information. Now, if you are able to break-in to my bank, without really trying, where I keep lots of uninsured assets, I'd consider that a tremendous service. In a high-crime neigborhood, I'd also consider a note that, eg. a side window doesn't lock, to be a positive public service.
I'll try breaking in again a few days later to see if you took measures to keep me out. If I can still break in then I will be justified in taking or destroying anything I want because after all you were warned
If making a copy of something inside is the only way to prove you had really breached security... let's say taking a photo of what's in my safe deposit box, I still see positive public service with no harm done. As to DESTROYING, you'll have to show me where that happened in this case.
I guess I also have some gut concerns about whether this impinges on rights such as freedom of assembly. I guess if it's being used on private property, then it's fine. On subways... that seems a bit more morally dubious.
You're going to have a hell of a time convincing the court that a little background music in a public place is depriving you of your abillity to peaceably assemble there. (Unless it's blaring so loud you actually can't carry on a conversation).
This is the same as painting the walls pink. No one is harmed, but some people will just decide they don't enjoy going there anymore, and will find some alternative.
Nonsense. The US is still #1 in manufacturing by a longshot. The US was manufacturing about twice as much as the old #2 country (Japan) was. I haven't checked on the numbers recently enough, but I'm sure China has got a long way to go to overtake the US on manufacturing alone... never mind the rest of the industries the US is very, very strong on (see: Silicon Valley).
Sure, the cheap crap you buy from Walmart is mostly made in China these days, but when's the last time you drove a Chinese-made car (GM will soon be earning MORE money in China than in the US). How about commercial jets? Not only does China (and the rest of the world) buy from Boeing, they fly them back to the US for maintenance. And the high-tech turbines on those jets? Either GE, Pratt&Whitney, or Rolls Royce. No Chinese companies in there. China also buys Caterpiller heavy machinery, just like the rest of the world.
And finally, China only attracted companies because labor was insanely cheap and plentiful, as was transportation... Rising standards of living aand rising gas prices will drive plenty of jobs back to either the US, or at least Mexico. Plus, China looks good right now because their economic bubble just didn't happen to collapse at the same time as the rest of the world... It's still going to happen, and almost overnight it will become obvious which countries' prospects are better. Anybody remember a few years back when the Euro waas strong as the US dollar was weak under the rising oil prices? Somehow, everybody who was saying how superior the Euro is, shut-up incredibly quick. I said it would happen with the Euro, and something similiar will happen with China, the question is only "when?"
My family doctor will give new patients 6 months to stop smoking or he refers them elsewhere. His line is that his job is to keep patients healthy and that he can't do that if they are smoking.
"I smoke ten to fifteen cigars a day. At my age I have to hold on to something." -- George Burns
"George Burns ignored medical advice to change his lifestyle and dedicated one of his four books to the widows of his last six doctors."
"He attributed his longevity to his regular diet of martinis, smoking the big cigars that were his lifelong trademark, and dating pretty women." -- http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/2778/
It's almost impossible to follow any programme without listening to the audio channel, but remove the video and little is lost (the exception is probably sports programmes, but for everything else it works).
When I hit mute, my TV automatically starts displaying the closed captions (think: teletext). Nothing lost.
Of course any deaf persons with a TV could have told you how wrong you are...
And TV certainly doesn't work without picture. Too much of the audio is focused on something on-screen that is never introduced. Works for some shows more than others, but you'll miss a lot.
The battery life is impressive, but otherwise, android tablets really aren't significantly more expensive than this thing, and can certainly play any video format under the sun once you load the right player app.
when compared to other companies their size Google does proportionately less evil.
Oh good. I look forward to seeing them ofiicially rolling out this updated company slogan.
Personally, between their hard-sell of google+, their collection and linking of every single thing I've ever done on my Android phone, and their updated privacy policy, I've decided it's time to diversify... at the very least breaking my google access out into multiple accounts for each different purpose, keeping them entirely seperate, and omitting as much identifying information as possible.
So, if MSFT had not mentioned avoiding "'pimp' or 'bitch"; someone raised in an environment where that was ok - (looking at you, teens and young twenty-somethings who grew up saying "That's Gay" when you meant wrong, bad, or odd) may not fully realize the problem with borderline and unacceptable language.
That's retarded... You and your Political Correctness police can go to hell.
If you want language guidelines, the proper thing to do is just state that ALL SLANG IS VERBOTTEN in business environments. Problem solved.
The other problem is non-native speakers. You can only do so much to protect them from themselves. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go do the needful...
it's a lot to send techs out to each equipment shed with portable generators and keep then fueled.
Natural gas generators. They need routine maintenance only once per year, and the local utility provides an unlimited supply of fuel. What's more, in catastrophic situations (eg. major eaarthquakes), they can be powered from portable propane tanks with the help of a fairly simple valve that dilutes propane with air to approximate the combustion properties of natural gas.
In (rurual) areas where no natural gas utiility exists, this is also the solution. There are always propane providers who will drop off a huge tank, and stop by on a bi-weekly basis to check on and refill the tank. I'm sure the phone companies will be big enough customers to get damn good pricing from providers of this service, maybe more frequent service, and contractual obligations even after natural disasters.
Its impossible to run underground cables since its all basically solid rock, and running overhead wires is pretty damn challenging as well given the lack of roads.
First off, the FCC is probably ONLY mapping roads to begin with. "Road miles" is a prominent metric on the map, and people don't get very far without roads, so no roads means no population.
Secondly, no cables doesn't mean no cell service. The phone companies invented microwave links, which gave us cheap long-distance service decades ago. Besides a data link, power is the only prereq... that can increasingly be provided by wind turbines or solar panels, perhaps supplemented by backup diesel generators. But in general, no power lines also means no people, so it's largely a moot point.
Seriously, have you ever been to those places that are all in black? The population density is less than 1 person per square mile in a lot of them.
Yeah, nobody lives in Palm Springs, San Luis Obispo, Montery, etc. Even the "middle-of-nowhere" in California has tons of people. Even the figures on the map are deflated by averaging huge areas with absolutely no people, in with real towns with reasonable population density.
Besides that, from the map it looks like the FCC is much more concerned with "road miles". ie. just because nobody lives there, doesn't mean thousands of people don't drive through there, all the time. I know that's true of the dark areas around national parts, and similar.
It doesn't simply HAPPEN to support it. There is a whole community backing up the development of it, unless the community dies or stop having motivation.
That's complete nonsense. I've been in the "community" for a good long time, and I've seen, over and over, the developers' interests often don't match the users' best interests. There's nothing wrong with this, but it means that a company is far more motivated to make sure their hardware is working right in a given configuration, than are a bunch of volunteers getting nothing out of it.
My counter-example of Intel's drivers is more what you should expect. Minimal support of the lowest-common denominator, and missing most features even at that.
Another example: ATI has been supporting open source driver development for over a decade, and very, very little came of it. It was totally hit-or-miss. 3D support was nonexistent on all but one or two chips, all-in-one devices ATI sold so many of, were non-functional, and lots of standard features never worked. NVidia's closed drivers are what has been propelling the higher standards for graphics in open systems.
Nouveau only looks vibrant right now. They've still accomplished very little, and the binary drivers being the standard option are why you don't hear screams of bloody murder about all the places nouveau drivers don't work, and only hear the opposite. Neither is going to support every configuration, and the open source community doesn't hve the magic pixie dust (in the form of unlimited time, manpower, and cash) that you attribute to them.
It's not wrong, evil or unpatriotic to pay less in taxes.
It is extrordinarily immoral when loopholes in tax law allow the very wealthy to pay a much lower rate of taxes than the middle and lower classes. If you'd like to lower everyone's taxes, so be it, but it IS EVIL to not have the tax burden distributed PROGRESSIVELY.
But there are counter-examples to that, too... I had to downgrade from RHEL6 because the latest OPEN SOURCE Intel video drivers (which require KMS) are completely unusable and ause the display to stop working within an hour or two. The drivers in RHEL5 worked perfectly well... Never any such problem with NVidia's binary blobs.
In your case, the open source driver just HAPPENS to support something the binary doesn't. I'm sure there are MANY cases where the binary blob works better and supports more, as well as cases where you're screwed with either one you use.
Firefox mobile is also slow as hell, has a lousy interface that doesn't match the rest of the platform, and is built as ARMv7 native, cutting out compatibility with a lot of Android devices, even new ones like LG Optimus Slider. Not to mention Chinas $100 MIPS tablets.
it breaks the browsing experience on just about every site out there
If "the browsing experience" is a euphemism for "full-screen ad overlays you have to click through" and "crap popping up when you incidentally mouse over a random word" then I'm happy to break it...
You see many candidates who claim to have the skills, but when you test the candidate they frequently disappoint.
Consider this: Those people with the best technical skills are those who are the worst at writing resumes, and vise versa. I personally ended up hiring someone, DESPITE the fact that his resume was full of typos and obviously hadn't be run through spell-check even once.
Frankly, I don't know how non-technical recruiters are expected to screen highly technical candidates. A resume with none of those keywords you want, might well have some very impressive accomplishments that someone technical would jump on. Additionally, someone with only a couple years of experience could potentially be a highly qualified candidate, which you will never follow-up on.
What makes it worse are worthless job titles. You get "Sr" Engineers from fortune 500 companies who can barely type. Meanwhile, someone really amazing may have been "Staff" at a company you've never heard of, for 10 years.
You very clearly asserted that without any evidence and without providing us with any way of verifying your claims. and since I don't know you from a brick in the wall then why should I believe you.
Selectively disbelieving the parts you don't like is crap. You're equally welcome to believe we don't get patent license fees at all...
But you've provided absolutely no evidence at all your your repeated idiotic assertions. Hey, it should be quite easy to prove that ALL COMPANIES EVERYWHERE hate patents, and lose money on it. Of course you won't, because it was an absolutely idiotic assertion in the first place.
If you look at a UI, and come up with the same method of accomplishing it without looking at their code, or a description of the algorithm or some such, then how they do it is fairly obviously obvious.
I can look at a typewriter and figure out every detail that was patented. That doesn't mean typewriters were obvious and shouldn't have been patentable.
It sounds to me like you are a patent troll. If you actually made products then you would be the ones paying the license fees rather than collecting them
I very clearly explained that we don't remotely fit the definition of a patent troll. If that can't penetrate your dense exterior, your willful ignorance is not my problem. Your only rationale seems to be that you can't accept a world in which there are companies other than patent trolls making money off of patents. Enjoy living in your imaginary world.
Hardware has physical constraints, software is pure abstract math.
Describing physical constraints in software does not become easier, require less costly R&D, or cease to be innovative. You've offered no argument at all. "lalalala not listening, lalalala" doesn't help your case.
It would get reverse engineered inside of two weeks
Video codecs are very complex. There are decades old codecs that haven't been reverse-engineered, and when they do, it's only for playback. It's hard work. You've clearly never done any of it. How great that you can assume others will do all kinds of hard work for you...
If Google found it cost effective to pay the money (in the form of buying the company) to develop a new codec
Except they didn't do that at all. They bought the company for other reasons, and happened to get a codec for free. The FSF and others had to publicly urge Google to release it.
what makes you think they wouldn't have done the same thing without software patents?
If you're paying several million in patent license fees, it makes lots of sense to pay a few million to develop an alternative. If you are paying $0 for patent license fees, it makes sense to spend $0 to develop an alternative.
Chrome feels fast because the ui stays responsive while the browser is busy. But on rendering any huge and complex pages, Firefox wipes the floor with chrome, not to mention Chrome using obscene amounts of RAM, which makes it an unusable nightmare on machines just a few years older.
And you can be pretty sure they weren't developed from the patent filings, as most companies prohibit engineers from looking at patents
That's a HELL OF A LOT OF ASSUMPTIONS there.
How the hell do we know that Apple isn't trollling patent filings for good ideas? We should just assume they are infallible corporate citizens? How do we know they didn't hire a bunch of ex-Motorolla engineers, who re-implemented the sme stuff they'd done (or heard about) at Moto? How do we know these guys didn't use Motorolla cell phones, see the feature (therefore learning that it was viable, and gaining some knowledge of how it was implemented by it's behavior) and copy it? With something like the Wright Brother's patents, conclusively knowing that something CAN be done may be the most valuable part.
Now, if you can prove that Apple's entire staff grew up in a vacuum, had never seen nor heard of anything Motorolla did, and yet came up with the same ideas, and implemented it in the same way that ran afoul of the patent, THEN I would accept your premise that the patent MUST be too obvious, but that's a vastly higher bar than you set of just completely assuming every company goes to great lenghts to avoid infringing patents.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a shame Brother cooperated, they were initially hold-outs, but now I go out of my way to avoid them.
However, we've still got Samsung, and they're generally the best & cheapest options across the board, anyhow.
Everyone go out and by a CLP-325W now... (Only that specific model, otherwise you don't get PCL-5 support). It's only $150USD shipped, and the early bugs in the firmware have been worked-out.
http://3btech.net/sacl80wicola.html
Okay, so just point us to any Asus, MSI, Gigabyte motherboard you used with AMD CPUs, and found "to be low-end crap".
My house doesn't contain billions of dollars worth of information. Now, if you are able to break-in to my bank, without really trying, where I keep lots of uninsured assets, I'd consider that a tremendous service. In a high-crime neigborhood, I'd also consider a note that, eg. a side window doesn't lock, to be a positive public service.
If making a copy of something inside is the only way to prove you had really breached security... let's say taking a photo of what's in my safe deposit box, I still see positive public service with no harm done. As to DESTROYING, you'll have to show me where that happened in this case.
What!? Blackbox has to be the single most forked window manager of all time...
Try:
Openbox
Fluxbox
Hackedbox
http://blackboxwm.sourceforge.net/RelatedProjects
You're going to have a hell of a time convincing the court that a little background music in a public place is depriving you of your abillity to peaceably assemble there. (Unless it's blaring so loud you actually can't carry on a conversation).
This is the same as painting the walls pink. No one is harmed, but some people will just decide they don't enjoy going there anymore, and will find some alternative.
Nonsense. The US is still #1 in manufacturing by a longshot. The US was manufacturing about twice as much as the old #2 country (Japan) was. I haven't checked on the numbers recently enough, but I'm sure China has got a long way to go to overtake the US on manufacturing alone... never mind the rest of the industries the US is very, very strong on (see: Silicon Valley).
Sure, the cheap crap you buy from Walmart is mostly made in China these days, but when's the last time you drove a Chinese-made car (GM will soon be earning MORE money in China than in the US). How about commercial jets? Not only does China (and the rest of the world) buy from Boeing, they fly them back to the US for maintenance. And the high-tech turbines on those jets? Either GE, Pratt&Whitney, or Rolls Royce. No Chinese companies in there. China also buys Caterpiller heavy machinery, just like the rest of the world.
And finally, China only attracted companies because labor was insanely cheap and plentiful, as was transportation... Rising standards of living aand rising gas prices will drive plenty of jobs back to either the US, or at least Mexico. Plus, China looks good right now because their economic bubble just didn't happen to collapse at the same time as the rest of the world... It's still going to happen, and almost overnight it will become obvious which countries' prospects are better. Anybody remember a few years back when the Euro waas strong as the US dollar was weak under the rising oil prices? Somehow, everybody who was saying how superior the Euro is, shut-up incredibly quick. I said it would happen with the Euro, and something similiar will happen with China, the question is only "when?"
"I smoke ten to fifteen cigars a day. At my age I have to hold on to something." -- George Burns
"George Burns ignored medical advice to change his lifestyle and dedicated one of his four books to the widows of his last six doctors."
"He attributed his longevity to his regular diet of martinis, smoking the big cigars that were his lifelong trademark, and dating pretty women." -- http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/2778/
When I hit mute, my TV automatically starts displaying the closed captions (think: teletext). Nothing lost.
Of course any deaf persons with a TV could have told you how wrong you are...
And TV certainly doesn't work without picture. Too much of the audio is focused on something on-screen that is never introduced. Works for some shows more than others, but you'll miss a lot.
The battery life is impressive, but otherwise, android tablets really aren't significantly more expensive than this thing, and can certainly play any video format under the sun once you load the right player app.
How about this one:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B005HUH88K/ref=mp_s_a_1?qid=1329192256&sr=8-1
Oh good. I look forward to seeing them ofiicially rolling out this updated company slogan.
Personally, between their hard-sell of google+, their collection and linking of every single thing I've ever done on my Android phone, and their updated privacy policy, I've decided it's time to diversify... at the very least breaking my google access out into multiple accounts for each different purpose, keeping them entirely seperate, and omitting as much identifying information as possible.
That's retarded... You and your Political Correctness police can go to hell.
If you want language guidelines, the proper thing to do is just state that ALL SLANG IS VERBOTTEN in business environments. Problem solved.
The other problem is non-native speakers. You can only do so much to protect them from themselves. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go do the needful...
Natural gas generators. They need routine maintenance only once per year, and the local utility provides an unlimited supply of fuel. What's more, in catastrophic situations (eg. major eaarthquakes), they can be powered from portable propane tanks with the help of a fairly simple valve that dilutes propane with air to approximate the combustion properties of natural gas.
In (rurual) areas where no natural gas utiility exists, this is also the solution. There are always propane providers who will drop off a huge tank, and stop by on a bi-weekly basis to check on and refill the tank. I'm sure the phone companies will be big enough customers to get damn good pricing from providers of this service, maybe more frequent service, and contractual obligations even after natural disasters.
First off, the FCC is probably ONLY mapping roads to begin with. "Road miles" is a prominent metric on the map, and people don't get very far without roads, so no roads means no population.
Secondly, no cables doesn't mean no cell service. The phone companies invented microwave links, which gave us cheap long-distance service decades ago. Besides a data link, power is the only prereq... that can increasingly be provided by wind turbines or solar panels, perhaps supplemented by backup diesel generators. But in general, no power lines also means no people, so it's largely a moot point.
Yeah, nobody lives in Palm Springs, San Luis Obispo, Montery, etc. Even the "middle-of-nowhere" in California has tons of people. Even the figures on the map are deflated by averaging huge areas with absolutely no people, in with real towns with reasonable population density.
Besides that, from the map it looks like the FCC is much more concerned with "road miles". ie. just because nobody lives there, doesn't mean thousands of people don't drive through there, all the time. I know that's true of the dark areas around national parts, and similar.
That's complete nonsense. I've been in the "community" for a good long time, and I've seen, over and over, the developers' interests often don't match the users' best interests. There's nothing wrong with this, but it means that a company is far more motivated to make sure their hardware is working right in a given configuration, than are a bunch of volunteers getting nothing out of it.
My counter-example of Intel's drivers is more what you should expect. Minimal support of the lowest-common denominator, and missing most features even at that.
Another example: ATI has been supporting open source driver development for over a decade, and very, very little came of it. It was totally hit-or-miss. 3D support was nonexistent on all but one or two chips, all-in-one devices ATI sold so many of, were non-functional, and lots of standard features never worked. NVidia's closed drivers are what has been propelling the higher standards for graphics in open systems.
Nouveau only looks vibrant right now. They've still accomplished very little, and the binary drivers being the standard option are why you don't hear screams of bloody murder about all the places nouveau drivers don't work, and only hear the opposite. Neither is going to support every configuration, and the open source community doesn't hve the magic pixie dust (in the form of unlimited time, manpower, and cash) that you attribute to them.
It is extrordinarily immoral when loopholes in tax law allow the very wealthy to pay a much lower rate of taxes than the middle and lower classes. If you'd like to lower everyone's taxes, so be it, but it IS EVIL to not have the tax burden distributed PROGRESSIVELY.
But there are counter-examples to that, too... I had to downgrade from RHEL6 because the latest OPEN SOURCE Intel video drivers (which require KMS) are completely unusable and ause the display to stop working within an hour or two. The drivers in RHEL5 worked perfectly well... Never any such problem with NVidia's binary blobs.
In your case, the open source driver just HAPPENS to support something the binary doesn't. I'm sure there are MANY cases where the binary blob works better and supports more, as well as cases where you're screwed with either one you use.
Firefox mobile is also slow as hell, has a lousy interface that doesn't match the rest of the platform, and is built as ARMv7 native, cutting out compatibility with a lot of Android devices, even new ones like LG Optimus Slider. Not to mention Chinas $100 MIPS tablets.
If "the browsing experience" is a euphemism for "full-screen ad overlays you have to click through" and "crap popping up when you incidentally mouse over a random word" then I'm happy to break it...
Consider this: Those people with the best technical skills are those who are the worst at writing resumes, and vise versa. I personally ended up hiring someone, DESPITE the fact that his resume was full of typos and obviously hadn't be run through spell-check even once.
Frankly, I don't know how non-technical recruiters are expected to screen highly technical candidates. A resume with none of those keywords you want, might well have some very impressive accomplishments that someone technical would jump on. Additionally, someone with only a couple years of experience could potentially be a highly qualified candidate, which you will never follow-up on.
What makes it worse are worthless job titles. You get "Sr" Engineers from fortune 500 companies who can barely type. Meanwhile, someone really amazing may have been "Staff" at a company you've never heard of, for 10 years.
Selectively disbelieving the parts you don't like is crap. You're equally welcome to believe we don't get patent license fees at all...
But you've provided absolutely no evidence at all your your repeated idiotic assertions. Hey, it should be quite easy to prove that ALL COMPANIES EVERYWHERE hate patents, and lose money on it. Of course you won't, because it was an absolutely idiotic assertion in the first place.
I can look at a typewriter and figure out every detail that was patented. That doesn't mean typewriters were obvious and shouldn't have been patentable.
I very clearly explained that we don't remotely fit the definition of a patent troll. If that can't penetrate your dense exterior, your willful ignorance is not my problem. Your only rationale seems to be that you can't accept a world in which there are companies other than patent trolls making money off of patents. Enjoy living in your imaginary world.
Describing physical constraints in software does not become easier, require less costly R&D, or cease to be innovative. You've offered no argument at all. "lalalala not listening, lalalala" doesn't help your case.
Video codecs are very complex. There are decades old codecs that haven't been reverse-engineered, and when they do, it's only for playback. It's hard work. You've clearly never done any of it. How great that you can assume others will do all kinds of hard work for you...
Except they didn't do that at all. They bought the company for other reasons, and happened to get a codec for free. The FSF and others had to publicly urge Google to release it.
If you're paying several million in patent license fees, it makes lots of sense to pay a few million to develop an alternative. If you are paying $0 for patent license fees, it makes sense to spend $0 to develop an alternative.
Chrome feels fast because the ui stays responsive while the browser is busy. But on rendering any huge and complex pages, Firefox wipes the floor with chrome, not to mention Chrome using obscene amounts of RAM, which makes it an unusable nightmare on machines just a few years older.
That's a HELL OF A LOT OF ASSUMPTIONS there.
How the hell do we know that Apple isn't trollling patent filings for good ideas? We should just assume they are infallible corporate citizens? How do we know they didn't hire a bunch of ex-Motorolla engineers, who re-implemented the sme stuff they'd done (or heard about) at Moto? How do we know these guys didn't use Motorolla cell phones, see the feature (therefore learning that it was viable, and gaining some knowledge of how it was implemented by it's behavior) and copy it? With something like the Wright Brother's patents, conclusively knowing that something CAN be done may be the most valuable part.
Now, if you can prove that Apple's entire staff grew up in a vacuum, had never seen nor heard of anything Motorolla did, and yet came up with the same ideas, and implemented it in the same way that ran afoul of the patent, THEN I would accept your premise that the patent MUST be too obvious, but that's a vastly higher bar than you set of just completely assuming every company goes to great lenghts to avoid infringing patents.