I'm sure iTunes must control as much of the jukebox market as windows controls the OS market. I'm pretty sure that using your market dominance in one field to force people to buy your other products could be interpreted as anti-trust.
In many ways they are worse than microsoft who just relied on making the protocol obscure, apple appear to be actively testing for and blocking interoperability with competitors products.
I fell in love with the TomTom when i was back at my parents house.
It knows the locations of all the fixed speed cameras and knows the speed limit in each area. If you approach a camera too fast then it starts screaming at you and flashing a giant speed limit on the screen.
Yeah, i find hiking with the onscreen topo maps to be a futile exercise.
However GPS is great for getting a map reference to see exactly where you are. I had to triangulate off mountain tops last year and it took an awful lot more effort than i was expecting.
I also like to set markers at points that i've found water (particularly if many streams on the map have dried up). It's also nice to have a log afterwards of where I was at which time - i can then correlate that with my camera datestamps and geolocate my photos.
I think you have a point about incar GPS but that's been a relatively transitory product. I actually worked with an early system in the 90s but didn't know anyone that had one until 3 or 4 years ago.
However GPS was widely used before then for outdoor sports and marine applications, and for me that's often in areas that have little cellphone coverage.
My garmin probably gives me 2 solid days hiking on 2 AA batteries and I can easily carry a couple of sets of replacements just in case. It's splash proof and hardened to the point that i've never managed to break one. I've broken various cellphones.
The real killer for the standalone car GPS will surely be in-dash nav which is bound to become a standard factory option on lots of cars in the very near future.
I suppose that's a fair point, although coal mines are required to take steps to mitigate a lot of the risks. Wasn't there some huge fine assessed in that recent utah mine collapse?
I've seen bars that kept the smokers in a separate room, with it's own ventilation and away from the staffs usual working area. I'd consider that to be a responsible way to operate such an establishment - yet very few places took that initiative.
What about your employees? They spend a fairly significant portion of your day in a smoke filled room.
I have a hell of a lot more sympathy for the places that structured their business around separately ventilated spaces that employees didn't have to enter, but most bars and restaurants weren't proactive.
A better example than a patron would be an employee - the vast majority of bars i've frequented left their employees in situations where the had no choice but to breathe in second hand smoke. I know the free-market extremists will disagree, but i think your employer should be responsible for a safe working environment.
I certainly know of someone who got a nasty laceration in his foot from broken glass from a customer spill. The bar settled and covered his medical costs.
And you appear to lack the cojones to post under your own account.
Simple reality is I can only think of 2 or 3 establishments that were proactive in keeping smoking areas that were separately ventilated and which their staff weren't ordinarily required to enter while smokers were present. Most places that kicked up a fuss about new laws were the same ones that played fast and loose with the health of their patrons and employees.
Would you want to liable for a regular patron that contracted lung cancer after breathing smoke in your establishment? You'd already have some liability if your smoking customer spilled a drink and the same non-smoking patron slipped on it.
Obviously the former case is nearly impossible to prove right now
I run a discussion site that's not too different from slashdot. I code parts of that drunk off my ass on a live production server. If i fuck something up and can't fix it until the morning then it's really not that big of a deal.
When i'm writing code that handles million dollar invoices for a customer then of course it gets thoroughly reviewed and often pair-programmed.
There's some middle ground there. Code reviews DONT catch all bugs, no matter how well you do them. It's a process that costs money and improves quality - it's not magic.
Quite simply, code reviews cost money and production bugs cost money.
We do code reviews for anything where it'll either be devastating expensive if we encounter a failure or if it'll be very hard to detect a failure. Otherwise, in my particular line of work, it's more economical to accept a lower cost and faster pace of development at the expense of dealing with a few bugs that are discovered in production.
If i'm not mistaken then the whole point of a cloud is that you spread your processing around different hardware (in different geographies) and so that no part failing constitutes a total failure. Only one of Amazon's two zones went down so a well designed cloud app shouldn't have failed.
I had a TI-89 back in college and it was great because you could actually type in an equation and have it solve it symbolically. Our school had a list of banned calculators and a blanket ban on anything with a QWERTY keyboard. At the time, the TI-89 wasn't available in the UK so it dodged the ban, other students ordered TI-92s from france so they'd have an AZERTY keyboard.
I did talk to the a fairly senior staff member about it, and his point was roughly:
"If this were the real world and you worked for me, then i'd fully expect you to borrow, plagiarize and use whatever tools will help you get the right answer quicker. My job is to ensure I set exams and assignments where that won't make any difference"
From what i've seen, eBooks aren't significantly cheaper than paperbacks and usually not much less than hardbacks.
Hopefully the californian system is big enough that they can recruit teachers within their own ranks to create their own open set of books, then they can drop the licensing costs which will otherwise surely cripple the system.
Sure it's only $200 out the door, but I think that also commits you to 24 * 30 = 720 of data plan charges over and above what you are already paying for line rental. The incremental cost of AT&T providing data service just isn't that high, so some of that money is surely subsidizing the phone.
Personally i find the TCO of our two androids quite manageable, but I think our car payment and mortgage are the only higher monthly expenses.
There's a LOT of room to reduce the total cost, and I think the low end smartphone market is yet to really be tapped.
This is a perfect example of a situation where the first person to throw out a number loses.
In our cases the client had their.co.uk and needed their com too. This was back in 96 so even though they were a publicly-traded company with trademarks in multiple countries it wasn't clear that it could be enforced. The board of directors got together and established something like a $15k budget to get the name back.
I emailed the guy and he threw out $350. I literally ran to the bank and did an international wire transfer from my personal funds.
Worked out well for us, but what a fucking idiot:)
For some reason one of the british tabloids was running some kind of investigation where they encouraged members of the public to send in letters and artifacts protesting against gay rights. A few people i knew researched the royal mail freepost they had on their incoming address and realized it'd take any second-class mail package.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure iTunes must control as much of the jukebox market as windows controls the OS market. I'm pretty sure that using your market dominance in one field to force people to buy your other products could be interpreted as anti-trust.
In many ways they are worse than microsoft who just relied on making the protocol obscure, apple appear to be actively testing for and blocking interoperability with competitors products.
I haven't driven a car that uses windows for in car entertainment, but platforms like WinMo and Android are naturals for in car systems.
Hopefully it's only a matter of time before your car runs something standard and you can pick up tom tom 2009 in the app store.
I fell in love with the TomTom when i was back at my parents house.
It knows the locations of all the fixed speed cameras and knows the speed limit in each area. If you approach a camera too fast then it starts screaming at you and flashing a giant speed limit on the screen.
Yeah, i find hiking with the onscreen topo maps to be a futile exercise.
However GPS is great for getting a map reference to see exactly where you are. I had to triangulate off mountain tops last year and it took an awful lot more effort than i was expecting.
I also like to set markers at points that i've found water (particularly if many streams on the map have dried up). It's also nice to have a log afterwards of where I was at which time - i can then correlate that with my camera datestamps and geolocate my photos.
I think you have a point about incar GPS but that's been a relatively transitory product. I actually worked with an early system in the 90s but didn't know anyone that had one until 3 or 4 years ago.
However GPS was widely used before then for outdoor sports and marine applications, and for me that's often in areas that have little cellphone coverage.
My garmin probably gives me 2 solid days hiking on 2 AA batteries and I can easily carry a couple of sets of replacements just in case. It's splash proof and hardened to the point that i've never managed to break one. I've broken various cellphones.
The real killer for the standalone car GPS will surely be in-dash nav which is bound to become a standard factory option on lots of cars in the very near future.
I suppose that's a fair point, although coal mines are required to take steps to mitigate a lot of the risks. Wasn't there some huge fine assessed in that recent utah mine collapse?
I've seen bars that kept the smokers in a separate room, with it's own ventilation and away from the staffs usual working area. I'd consider that to be a responsible way to operate such an establishment - yet very few places took that initiative.
True, though working in the heat (assuming you are properly hydrated and sunscreened) doesn't have particular long term health consequences.
Should it be acceptable to hire people who'll be exposed to radioactivity in doses that we know stand some reasonable chance of causing cancer?
Maybe the US Radium Corporation has a position for you in their legal department.
What about your employees? They spend a fairly significant portion of your day in a smoke filled room.
I have a hell of a lot more sympathy for the places that structured their business around separately ventilated spaces that employees didn't have to enter, but most bars and restaurants weren't proactive.
A better example than a patron would be an employee - the vast majority of bars i've frequented left their employees in situations where the had no choice but to breathe in second hand smoke. I know the free-market extremists will disagree, but i think your employer should be responsible for a safe working environment.
I certainly know of someone who got a nasty laceration in his foot from broken glass from a customer spill. The bar settled and covered his medical costs.
And you appear to lack the cojones to post under your own account.
Simple reality is I can only think of 2 or 3 establishments that were proactive in keeping smoking areas that were separately ventilated and which their staff weren't ordinarily required to enter while smokers were present. Most places that kicked up a fuss about new laws were the same ones that played fast and loose with the health of their patrons and employees.
Would you want to liable for a regular patron that contracted lung cancer after breathing smoke in your establishment? You'd already have some liability if your smoking customer spilled a drink and the same non-smoking patron slipped on it.
Obviously the former case is nearly impossible to prove right now
Among the best things i've ever done for my mental health were to learn to meditate and buy some backcountry camping stuff.
Get out of cellphone range, away from anything that might disturb you, take a book and a camera and leave it all behind.
Sadly i'm feeling very like the OP right now and just haven't found a suitable weekend to escape :(
They collect a large amount of data on people and mine that for marketing information to turn around and target those same users.
It's the same model as google.
I was being sarcastic (like us europeans often are)
But it depends what you are reviewing.
I run a discussion site that's not too different from slashdot. I code parts of that drunk off my ass on a live production server. If i fuck something up and can't fix it until the morning then it's really not that big of a deal.
When i'm writing code that handles million dollar invoices for a customer then of course it gets thoroughly reviewed and often pair-programmed.
There's some middle ground there. Code reviews DONT catch all bugs, no matter how well you do them. It's a process that costs money and improves quality - it's not magic.
Damn europeans and their metric system.
How many shitloads are in a fucktonne?
Quite simply, code reviews cost money and production bugs cost money.
We do code reviews for anything where it'll either be devastating expensive if we encounter a failure or if it'll be very hard to detect a failure. Otherwise, in my particular line of work, it's more economical to accept a lower cost and faster pace of development at the expense of dealing with a few bugs that are discovered in production.
So should linux kernels do the same thing? Surely it'd be good if your server shut down because you didn't apply an openssh patch.
If i'm not mistaken then the whole point of a cloud is that you spread your processing around different hardware (in different geographies) and so that no part failing constitutes a total failure. Only one of Amazon's two zones went down so a well designed cloud app shouldn't have failed.
I had a TI-89 back in college and it was great because you could actually type in an equation and have it solve it symbolically. Our school had a list of banned calculators and a blanket ban on anything with a QWERTY keyboard. At the time, the TI-89 wasn't available in the UK so it dodged the ban, other students ordered TI-92s from france so they'd have an AZERTY keyboard.
I did talk to the a fairly senior staff member about it, and his point was roughly:
"If this were the real world and you worked for me, then i'd fully expect you to borrow, plagiarize and use whatever tools will help you get the right answer quicker. My job is to ensure I set exams and assignments where that won't make any difference"
From what i've seen, eBooks aren't significantly cheaper than paperbacks and usually not much less than hardbacks.
Hopefully the californian system is big enough that they can recruit teachers within their own ranks to create their own open set of books, then they can drop the licensing costs which will otherwise surely cripple the system.
T-Mobile's Tzones data plan was $5 when i last had it, and i find it hard to believe they were taking a loss on that.
I think it was capped at a gig or two, but i rarely burn through that on my smartphone and i expect i'm a relatively heavy user.
Try to buy a smartphone without a data plan and see where that gets you. The plan is absolutely subsidizing the cost of the device.
Sure it's only $200 out the door, but I think that also commits you to 24 * 30 = 720 of data plan charges over and above what you are already paying for line rental. The incremental cost of AT&T providing data service just isn't that high, so some of that money is surely subsidizing the phone.
Personally i find the TCO of our two androids quite manageable, but I think our car payment and mortgage are the only higher monthly expenses.
There's a LOT of room to reduce the total cost, and I think the low end smartphone market is yet to really be tapped.
This is a perfect example of a situation where the first person to throw out a number loses.
In our cases the client had their .co.uk and needed their com too. This was back in 96 so even though they were a publicly-traded company with trademarks in multiple countries it wasn't clear that it could be enforced. The board of directors got together and established something like a $15k budget to get the name back.
I emailed the guy and he threw out $350. I literally ran to the bank and did an international wire transfer from my personal funds.
Worked out well for us, but what a fucking idiot :)
For some reason one of the british tabloids was running some kind of investigation where they encouraged members of the public to send in letters and artifacts protesting against gay rights. A few people i knew researched the royal mail freepost they had on their incoming address and realized it'd take any second-class mail package.
They sent them a broken washing machine.