This is the problem that I'm having. I too work in IT (primarily server maintenance, but it never hurts to know the desktop as well), but I can't really seem to justify the expense of upgrading my hardware just to be able to run Vista at the same level of performance at which I'm currently running XP. I don't seem to remember this being as much of a problem back when XP was released. XP ran fine on my then 9 month old machine. Gaming performance degraded a bit, but that was fixed by upgrading from 256MB to 512MB of RAM -- something I'd been planning for a while anyway, and at a not very significant cost, even despite the fact that I was purchasing RDRAM. Nevermind the fact that I have supported XP installs on Celeron 667 machines with 128MB of RAM -- a machine decided well behind the curve at the time of XP's release. I even briefly ran it on my 400MHz K6-3 machine purchased in 1998 -- a machine that wasn't even cutting edge 3 years before the release of XP.
Now Vista is here. And I'm faced with a conundrum. From what I've been reading, a machine with the specs of my current desktop machine (P4 2.6GHz HT, 1 GB RAM, ATi 9800 Pro) could actually see a performance decrease... and what's the benefit? Aero? Whoop-de-fuckin-do. The new interface is OK, I guess. And I've heard that the effects are pretty, but I don't need that sort of entertainment when I'm using my PC. Unless I'm playing a game, I tend to prefer a nice clean UI that gets the job done without much fuss. Oh, but wait! Did I say games? Well, too bad if I want to play games after I upgrade to Vista. The OS overhead will have increased enough that I'll really notice the performance hit the first time I go to fire up a game of Galactic Civ II or Flight Simulator 10. I'll be stuck with my older, less intensive games... which may not work due to the new security features built in to Vista.
When XP came out, it offered a host of benefits to the consumer. For one, they finally brought NT kernel to the home desktop, along with all of the added stability that entailed. They also added compatibility modes for older 9x software in order to ease the upgrade process for people running 9x machines. (In practice, even most 16 bit software seemed to still run OK on XP.) I could go on, but since this is slashdot, it's not necessary. You guys are familiar with the features XP brought along. The differnce between then and now is that XP brought features that people actually wanted. People wanted to upgrade. I think I upgraded too good, and this is a problem.
In the end, it won't be people wanting to upgrade who will make the move to Vista, but it will instead be people who are forced to upgrade. Home users and small businesses without the technical know how and/or the pockets deep enough to remain at the older versions of the OS. Unfortunately, this alone will probably be enough to eventually force even large corporations to upgrade. Eventually enough people will be using it at home that Vista will slowly gain mindshare. At some point, upgrade time will come around and mister CEO will say, "I've been using Vista at home for months now and it isn't that bad. Let's begin switching to Vista since it's newer and has to be better!" And in a way, he will be right. Eventually Vista will be "better", if only becuase Microsoft will, further down the line, stop active development on XP. Patches will become more and more infrequent with only the most critical vulnerabilities receiving patches. Microsoft is the runaway freight train of the software world and they won't let a little thing like consumer acceptance get in their way of pushing their new product on to their captive audience. Vista will win eventually. It might take longer than XP did to achieve dominance, but it will. It's only a matter of time.
So, back to my conundrum. I make my money as a Windows Systems Admin. Do I scrape up the cash and upgrade my machine just to be able to run the latest version of Vista and stay ahead of the curve? In a word:
Actually, I usually took South America. Granted, it's probably not as easily defencable as Australia since it has 2 borders instead of one, but it give you options for breaking out from your fortress for attacks and with two heavily defended zones on the same landmass, it is generally tougher for an opponent to take the entire landmass in one turn, giving you a chance to cash in your Risk cards and mount a second chance comeback/suicide run to expel them from South America. With Australia, once they pass your one border country it's pretty much a rout for the rest of the continent. The other advantage (IMO) of South America, is that it's much easier to move up in to North America and take it than it is to move up and conquer all of Asia. Not to mention, after you finish conquering North America, you once again have a fortress with only a few border countries on which to mass your defenses.
Way cool, but not at all easy. Check out the documentary series "Long Way 'Round" starring Ewan MacGregor and Charlie Boorman. They took a motorocycle trip from London to New York along this route. The road conditions in that portion of the world are absolutley attrocious. For a large part of the ride closest to Magadan, they had to put their bikes up on top of massive Russian trucks due to the bridgeless river crossings being too high and too fast for them to ride through the rivers. While I do think it would be a very, very cool thing to do (and the documentary series was amazing with them travelling through Mongolia, Khazakstan (sp?), Ukraine, and several other places that were off the beaten path), it would not exactly be an easy and/or cheap road trip. Of course, I'd want to do it, though.:)
I unwittingly purchased one of these devices in the form of one of those outdoor digital thermometers with the indoor radio receiver. I owned the device for about 1.5 years before this "feature" made itself known when I moved to a slightly cooler climate and threw away the box and instructios in the process. As best I can tell, whenever the temperature drops below a certain threshold (~37.something fahrenheit I think) the receiver will start to sound an alarm. You can press any button on the unit to silence it, but it will eventually resound the alarm, I thought corresponding to another 1/10 of a degree change, but that's not always the case.
I've tried changing the receiving channel to one of the other 2 channels that the transmitter is not transmitting on, but the receiver will eventually reset itself to the "correct" channel. I've tried changing the batteries on both the transmitter and receiver, thinking that the drop in temperature changed the capacitance of the batteries enough to trigger a low battery alarm, but that didn't work either. I've tried stuffing the thing in my sock drawer, but I still hear it when it goes off late at night. I've tried hiding it in the medecine cabinet, the clothes dryer, and between the cushions of the couch, but I still get woken up at random hours of the night to silence the receiver. I tried duct tape over any exterior holes on the receiver from which the sound could emenate, and while partially successful, this negated the efficacy of the internal temperature sensor. My house is old and without a central thermostat the receiver is what I use to determine the temperature in the house. I've tried pressing every one of the three buttons on the front in every combination possible in the vain hope that this alarm was some sort of user changable setting, but I could not find it. I've tried throwing it against the wall in a fit of rage after being woken for the fourth time in one night... and that's when I realized the only real solution: remove the damn batteries every night before I go to bed.
So yes, during the Winter months, my daily routine includes removing the batteries from the receiver each night, and inserting the batteries again each morning while getting dressed and deciding what to wear. This kind of negates the one feature for which I originally purchased this unit -- the ability to save the absolute maximum and minimum temperatures in memory -- but at least I now get a good nights sleep. Except for those nights when I forget to remove the batteries. On those special nights, the two batteries, the receiver, and the receiver door usually seem to end up in each of the four corners of my living room as I willfully toss the unit against a wall, floor, or other immovable object at 1:00 AM.
I believe my temperature sensor is yet further proof that Radio Shack is owned and/or chaired by the devil himself.
While, I can understand the good samaritism, and you have a good point about the open AP making it easy for friends to connect, I still chose to lock mine down. In fact, the last time a friend came over, I found it just as easy to tell them to connect to another good samaratin's AP because it really is a pain to change my AP to 802.11 b/g mode (his card was B only, my router is G only), input his MAC address into the MAC address filter, print out the WEP key (I know, I know -- I keep forgetting to see if there is a firmware update for my router), and spell out the SSID for him.
The other concern that I have these days is with virii and other malware. My network is currently clean and I like it that way. I can plug in a new Windows machine without AV and not have to worry about some rogue machine infecting it with a virus immediately. I don't have to worry about some machine connecting to my network and exploiting a vulnerability in one of my machines becuase I haven't patched them this month. I don't have to worry about some zombie on my network sending out leagues of SPAM and killing my bandwidth. By not allowing unknown computers to connect to my wrouter, I can control the state of my machines currently attached to it.
A group of us on the football team, once pulled a similar prank on another member of the team. He used to drive a little Honda CRX to school. One day after practice, a group of about 4 or 5 of us went outside, picked up his car, and high-centered it on one of those parking lot bump stops. We then, of course, went to congregate across the parking lot while we waited to see him when he came out. The look on his face was classic!
Another time, myself and a friend got bored and turned his mom's little compact car (forget what model it was) sideways in the garage so that she couldn't drive out. Unfortunately, she came out just as we finished up and were exhaustedly catching our breath, and made us turn it back so she could go to the store.
For example, in the US employment is mostly "at will", whereas in the EU, notice is normally required from both employee and employer if they want to terminate the employment contract. That's not necessarily a bad thing for the employee. That would at least provide some measure of job security for the employee. In the US, I think it's generally just considered courtesy to give notice. At a prior job, I received approximately 2 months notification that my job was being outsourced. While still scary, it was nice to know that I had at least some time to begin hunting for jobs. That said, I've had friends walk in to work one day, be sat down, and summarily be "let go" with no clue that it was going to happen. Sure, they usually received a severance package, but not always, and that doesn't really make it any easier for my friend. Does the EU also have any laws regarding severance packages and whether or not they are required?
My cynical nature chooses to believe that US courts would not decide in this way. A prospective employee always has the option not to take a job, should he not agree with an AUP. In a sense, that option could be construed by the courts as the employee's bargaining power. If the corporation wanted the employee bad enough, they could always attempt to waive the AUP. I have yet to see a prospective employee challange one, though. I would really like to see it happen, but I think it would be a losing battle for the employee.
While I understand that you can't sign away your human rights, I took the article to mean, that the complaint was that she was unaware that she was being monitored. I think the court may have ruled differently had she been appraised of the fact that her communications were being monitored. It would be nice to think that one could do whatever they wish from their computer at work without fear of reprisal, but I have a hard time seeing that ever happening. (Nor should it, the computer is owned by the company and, as such, should not be abused like any other company resource.)
What I don't understand is why this university doesn't have a policy to cover this sort of monitoring. Most places that I have worked have had a policy that specifically states that the employee's use of corporate communication assets can and will be monitored, and the employee has to sign stating he read this policy. Basically, it's the company's way of covering their arses. Granted, the actions supposedly took place in 1999 and I am too young to comment on the state of corporate communication policies in 1999, but I would think it would have been naieve for any business entity not to have covered themselves legally with some sort of "you might be watched" policy.
That said, if the university didn't have such a policy, then I don't see a problem with the woman suing. Especially in light of the fact that the person monitoring her actions went so far as to call back numbers she had previously called to see who she was calling.
Anyway, lawsuits like these are why companies today have aceptable use policies.
Lisa: Excuse me, could you tell me what movie this is? Video Store Clerk: [laughs] What movie this is? Where have you been, under a rock? Lisa: No, I'm from Utah. Video Store Clerk: Oh. Sorry.
Also, consider the fact that 99% of the cars made will not be driven on a track. They will be driven on public roads. Most non controlled access roadways top out at 55mph. (Yes, I know there are exceptions -- I can think of a few myself.) To me, I look at a 0-60 time as a measure of how easily the car will be able to pull into traffic. When your 0-Speed_Limit time is a scant few seconds, you won't need much of a gap to be able to make that right turn onto a busy city street.
Actually, Mississippi's recent succeses at attracting major manufacturing facilities was one of the reasons I used your state as an example. Don't they also build the Altima at that plant? Anyway, there was a bit of an uproar in Arkansas that your state got the plant over us. Apparently we were in the running, but our politicians weren't willing to give as much as Mississippi's politicians. That was a bad move on our part.
I would love to see a Google data center here (jobs!), but central Arkansas isn't exactly a hotbed of technology. I think Acxiom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acxiom) is really the only technology company around, and it really shows by how many people I know who have gone to work for them. I would imagine the same thing would happen if Google were to build a data center here. The only problem that I see would be a lack of IT workers in sufficient quantity, hence the reason I doubt we'd ever see Google build in Arkansas. Arkansas would be great for blue collar manufacturing facilities, but I don't know that we have the brain trust in this state to support such a facility.
Actually, you may be more correct than you know. My boss and I were discussing Vista the other day. He recently installed it and he was advising me that I might want to install it as well since we are Windows system admins. I advised him that, while I have machines that will meet the requirements, I don't currently have a machine that will sufficiently exceed them -- IE it would be a downgrade on my best system. That's when I decided to check Dell Outlet, just out of curiosity for pricing comparison. I found a Scratch & Dent Sempron 1800 w/ 1GB of RAM loaded with XP Home Premium there for $279. A quick check at Amazon.com shows that they sell Vista Home Premium for... $239. $40 difference for a whole new machine... I wonder if this is why Dell charges 9.9% sales tax on all of their machines. (Freakin' sales tax and S&H totaled up to be 20% of the price of the machine. WTF?)
I and the majority of my friends purchased the linux version in the cool little tin because we couldn't find any Windows versions in the tins by the time we got in to Q3. This is despite the fact that only two of us ever actually ran the game in Linux. Even then, I just rebooted to Windows to play the game most of the time since I never could get the 3D drivers for my Voodoo3 3000 to work correctly under Linux.
OK. I didn't bother with Google shortly after the storm when I would have seen flood drenched waters. I seem to remember finding a site with arial photos of much higher resolution that I used. (Good enough to pick out the car I had to leave behind and see that it was, at least, still there.) I haven't been back to New Orleans much since the storm and I guess I rarely used the maps since I usually know where I'm going in NOLA.:)
Unless we want a 3rd-world shanty-city in the US, servicing a major port. LOL. I lived in New Orleans until the storm hit. Even before the storm, a popular bumper sticker around town was "New Orleans: Third world and proud of it."
Kind of takes on a new meaning now, eh?
Anyway, I don't really remember seeing any post-katrina imagery on Google. I didn't RTFA (this is Slashdot afterall!), but did they every show any post katrina imagery at all? Or has it always been pre-katrina imagery.
So... basically you already know of a lot of phones with cracked screens. So why would it be a big deal if the screens started cracking on this one? Because it has two of them?
Face it: phones break. It's no big deal. You just have to go get a new one.
I wish I had a memory for that kind of thing. Nah, I like to use my memory for far more important things. Like trying to remember where I parked my car after a particularly indulgent night out on the town.:)
Seriously, you make a very eloquent point, but surely there has to be some way that we can motivate the masses and the median level of idiocy? Maybe I'm too young, but I still believe in this country and its people. I most definitely think we have the capacity for greatness still in us. It's just all a matter of finding that magic motivation. I have to admit that I have no idea what it could be, but I believe that it has to be there somewhere.
The big advantage of a cell phone is portability. I've gotten so that I don't even bring my laptop with me half of the time I go on a trip these days. (Fairly frequently for me.) I went to visit some friends a couple of weekends ago, and didn't even pull my laptop out the whole time I was there. Between SMS and WAP browsing I'm able to check my email, check the latest headlines, and browse most of the other sites that I would normally browse right from my device that fits in my pocket. I can even get directions from Google either via their web page or their SMS service. (Although I have to admit that Verizon's GPS based Navigator service definitely trumps anything Google can offer me currently.)
I also don't carry my digicam as often as I used to simply becuase the camera on my newest phone is now "good enough" for most of the "embarassing party pictures" I would have taken with my Canon Digital Elph. Need to take a quick note? I either use the notepad function on my phone, or send an SMS to my email for later reference (form either my phone or a laptop).
Lastly, my phone offers the convenience of being "always there". It's always on and ready for me to quickly check my email or the headlines while waiting on an appointment or while sitting at a bar waiting for a friend to arrive. Those are generally situations where I wouldn't bring my laptop inside, even if the place did offer free WiFi.
The best part? My phone also makes really good phone calls.:) In the end, it's all about convenience. I don't find it convenient to carry a laptop with me all of the time. Some people do, and that's fine. It's just that I don't. Instead, I pay $15/month for unlimited internet access from my phone and another ~$5/month for 250 text messages. That's worth it to me.
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This is the problem that I'm having. I too work in IT (primarily server maintenance, but it never hurts to know the desktop as well), but I can't really seem to justify the expense of upgrading my hardware just to be able to run Vista at the same level of performance at which I'm currently running XP. I don't seem to remember this being as much of a problem back when XP was released. XP ran fine on my then 9 month old machine. Gaming performance degraded a bit, but that was fixed by upgrading from 256MB to 512MB of RAM -- something I'd been planning for a while anyway, and at a not very significant cost, even despite the fact that I was purchasing RDRAM. Nevermind the fact that I have supported XP installs on Celeron 667 machines with 128MB of RAM -- a machine decided well behind the curve at the time of XP's release. I even briefly ran it on my 400MHz K6-3 machine purchased in 1998 -- a machine that wasn't even cutting edge 3 years before the release of XP.
Now Vista is here. And I'm faced with a conundrum. From what I've been reading, a machine with the specs of my current desktop machine (P4 2.6GHz HT, 1 GB RAM, ATi 9800 Pro) could actually see a performance decrease... and what's the benefit? Aero? Whoop-de-fuckin-do. The new interface is OK, I guess. And I've heard that the effects are pretty, but I don't need that sort of entertainment when I'm using my PC. Unless I'm playing a game, I tend to prefer a nice clean UI that gets the job done without much fuss. Oh, but wait! Did I say games? Well, too bad if I want to play games after I upgrade to Vista. The OS overhead will have increased enough that I'll really notice the performance hit the first time I go to fire up a game of Galactic Civ II or Flight Simulator 10. I'll be stuck with my older, less intensive games... which may not work due to the new security features built in to Vista.
When XP came out, it offered a host of benefits to the consumer. For one, they finally brought NT kernel to the home desktop, along with all of the added stability that entailed. They also added compatibility modes for older 9x software in order to ease the upgrade process for people running 9x machines. (In practice, even most 16 bit software seemed to still run OK on XP.) I could go on, but since this is slashdot, it's not necessary. You guys are familiar with the features XP brought along. The differnce between then and now is that XP brought features that people actually wanted. People wanted to upgrade. I think I upgraded too good, and this is a problem.
In the end, it won't be people wanting to upgrade who will make the move to Vista, but it will instead be people who are forced to upgrade. Home users and small businesses without the technical know how and/or the pockets deep enough to remain at the older versions of the OS. Unfortunately, this alone will probably be enough to eventually force even large corporations to upgrade. Eventually enough people will be using it at home that Vista will slowly gain mindshare. At some point, upgrade time will come around and mister CEO will say, "I've been using Vista at home for months now and it isn't that bad. Let's begin switching to Vista since it's newer and has to be better!" And in a way, he will be right. Eventually Vista will be "better", if only becuase Microsoft will, further down the line, stop active development on XP. Patches will become more and more infrequent with only the most critical vulnerabilities receiving patches. Microsoft is the runaway freight train of the software world and they won't let a little thing like consumer acceptance get in their way of pushing their new product on to their captive audience. Vista will win eventually. It might take longer than XP did to achieve dominance, but it will. It's only a matter of time.
So, back to my conundrum. I make my money as a Windows Systems Admin. Do I scrape up the cash and upgrade my machine just to be able to run the latest version of Vista and stay ahead of the curve? In a word:
Actually, I usually took South America. Granted, it's probably not as easily defencable as Australia since it has 2 borders instead of one, but it give you options for breaking out from your fortress for attacks and with two heavily defended zones on the same landmass, it is generally tougher for an opponent to take the entire landmass in one turn, giving you a chance to cash in your Risk cards and mount a second chance comeback/suicide run to expel them from South America. With Australia, once they pass your one border country it's pretty much a rout for the rest of the continent. The other advantage (IMO) of South America, is that it's much easier to move up in to North America and take it than it is to move up and conquer all of Asia. Not to mention, after you finish conquering North America, you once again have a fortress with only a few border countries on which to mass your defenses.
Way cool, but not at all easy. Check out the documentary series "Long Way 'Round" starring Ewan MacGregor and Charlie Boorman. They took a motorocycle trip from London to New York along this route. The road conditions in that portion of the world are absolutley attrocious. For a large part of the ride closest to Magadan, they had to put their bikes up on top of massive Russian trucks due to the bridgeless river crossings being too high and too fast for them to ride through the rivers. While I do think it would be a very, very cool thing to do (and the documentary series was amazing with them travelling through Mongolia, Khazakstan (sp?), Ukraine, and several other places that were off the beaten path), it would not exactly be an easy and/or cheap road trip. Of course, I'd want to do it, though. :)
I unwittingly purchased one of these devices in the form of one of those outdoor digital thermometers with the indoor radio receiver. I owned the device for about 1.5 years before this "feature" made itself known when I moved to a slightly cooler climate and threw away the box and instructios in the process. As best I can tell, whenever the temperature drops below a certain threshold (~37.something fahrenheit I think) the receiver will start to sound an alarm. You can press any button on the unit to silence it, but it will eventually resound the alarm, I thought corresponding to another 1/10 of a degree change, but that's not always the case.
I've tried changing the receiving channel to one of the other 2 channels that the transmitter is not transmitting on, but the receiver will eventually reset itself to the "correct" channel. I've tried changing the batteries on both the transmitter and receiver, thinking that the drop in temperature changed the capacitance of the batteries enough to trigger a low battery alarm, but that didn't work either. I've tried stuffing the thing in my sock drawer, but I still hear it when it goes off late at night. I've tried hiding it in the medecine cabinet, the clothes dryer, and between the cushions of the couch, but I still get woken up at random hours of the night to silence the receiver. I tried duct tape over any exterior holes on the receiver from which the sound could emenate, and while partially successful, this negated the efficacy of the internal temperature sensor. My house is old and without a central thermostat the receiver is what I use to determine the temperature in the house. I've tried pressing every one of the three buttons on the front in every combination possible in the vain hope that this alarm was some sort of user changable setting, but I could not find it. I've tried throwing it against the wall in a fit of rage after being woken for the fourth time in one night... and that's when I realized the only real solution: remove the damn batteries every night before I go to bed.
So yes, during the Winter months, my daily routine includes removing the batteries from the receiver each night, and inserting the batteries again each morning while getting dressed and deciding what to wear. This kind of negates the one feature for which I originally purchased this unit -- the ability to save the absolute maximum and minimum temperatures in memory -- but at least I now get a good nights sleep. Except for those nights when I forget to remove the batteries. On those special nights, the two batteries, the receiver, and the receiver door usually seem to end up in each of the four corners of my living room as I willfully toss the unit against a wall, floor, or other immovable object at 1:00 AM.
I believe my temperature sensor is yet further proof that Radio Shack is owned and/or chaired by the devil himself.
While, I can understand the good samaritism, and you have a good point about the open AP making it easy for friends to connect, I still chose to lock mine down. In fact, the last time a friend came over, I found it just as easy to tell them to connect to another good samaratin's AP because it really is a pain to change my AP to 802.11 b/g mode (his card was B only, my router is G only), input his MAC address into the MAC address filter, print out the WEP key (I know, I know -- I keep forgetting to see if there is a firmware update for my router), and spell out the SSID for him.
The other concern that I have these days is with virii and other malware. My network is currently clean and I like it that way. I can plug in a new Windows machine without AV and not have to worry about some rogue machine infecting it with a virus immediately. I don't have to worry about some machine connecting to my network and exploiting a vulnerability in one of my machines becuase I haven't patched them this month. I don't have to worry about some zombie on my network sending out leagues of SPAM and killing my bandwidth. By not allowing unknown computers to connect to my wrouter, I can control the state of my machines currently attached to it.
A group of us on the football team, once pulled a similar prank on another member of the team. He used to drive a little Honda CRX to school. One day after practice, a group of about 4 or 5 of us went outside, picked up his car, and high-centered it on one of those parking lot bump stops. We then, of course, went to congregate across the parking lot while we waited to see him when he came out. The look on his face was classic!
Another time, myself and a friend got bored and turned his mom's little compact car (forget what model it was) sideways in the garage so that she couldn't drive out. Unfortunately, she came out just as we finished up and were exhaustedly catching our breath, and made us turn it back so she could go to the store.
My cynical nature chooses to believe that US courts would not decide in this way. A prospective employee always has the option not to take a job, should he not agree with an AUP. In a sense, that option could be construed by the courts as the employee's bargaining power. If the corporation wanted the employee bad enough, they could always attempt to waive the AUP. I have yet to see a prospective employee challange one, though. I would really like to see it happen, but I think it would be a losing battle for the employee.
While I understand that you can't sign away your human rights, I took the article to mean, that the complaint was that she was unaware that she was being monitored. I think the court may have ruled differently had she been appraised of the fact that her communications were being monitored. It would be nice to think that one could do whatever they wish from their computer at work without fear of reprisal, but I have a hard time seeing that ever happening. (Nor should it, the computer is owned by the company and, as such, should not be abused like any other company resource.)
What I don't understand is why this university doesn't have a policy to cover this sort of monitoring. Most places that I have worked have had a policy that specifically states that the employee's use of corporate communication assets can and will be monitored, and the employee has to sign stating he read this policy. Basically, it's the company's way of covering their arses. Granted, the actions supposedly took place in 1999 and I am too young to comment on the state of corporate communication policies in 1999, but I would think it would have been naieve for any business entity not to have covered themselves legally with some sort of "you might be watched" policy.
That said, if the university didn't have such a policy, then I don't see a problem with the woman suing. Especially in light of the fact that the person monitoring her actions went so far as to call back numbers she had previously called to see who she was calling.
Anyway, lawsuits like these are why companies today have aceptable use policies.
Video Store Clerk: [laughs] What movie this is? Where have you been, under a rock?
Lisa: No, I'm from Utah.
Video Store Clerk: Oh. Sorry.
Also, consider the fact that 99% of the cars made will not be driven on a track. They will be driven on public roads. Most non controlled access roadways top out at 55mph. (Yes, I know there are exceptions -- I can think of a few myself.) To me, I look at a 0-60 time as a measure of how easily the car will be able to pull into traffic. When your 0-Speed_Limit time is a scant few seconds, you won't need much of a gap to be able to make that right turn onto a busy city street.
Actually, Mississippi's recent succeses at attracting major manufacturing facilities was one of the reasons I used your state as an example. Don't they also build the Altima at that plant? Anyway, there was a bit of an uproar in Arkansas that your state got the plant over us. Apparently we were in the running, but our politicians weren't willing to give as much as Mississippi's politicians. That was a bad move on our part.
I would love to see a Google data center here (jobs!), but central Arkansas isn't exactly a hotbed of technology. I think Acxiom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acxiom) is really the only technology company around, and it really shows by how many people I know who have gone to work for them. I would imagine the same thing would happen if Google were to build a data center here. The only problem that I see would be a lack of IT workers in sufficient quantity, hence the reason I doubt we'd ever see Google build in Arkansas. Arkansas would be great for blue collar manufacturing facilities, but I don't know that we have the brain trust in this state to support such a facility.
Does anybody notice that despite the fact that land an power is cheap in Arkansas and Mississippi, they still haven't opened data centers there? :)
I would love for them to open one in the Little Rock area. I wonder if I could convince them somehow...
Actually, you may be more correct than you know. My boss and I were discussing Vista the other day. He recently installed it and he was advising me that I might want to install it as well since we are Windows system admins. I advised him that, while I have machines that will meet the requirements, I don't currently have a machine that will sufficiently exceed them -- IE it would be a downgrade on my best system. That's when I decided to check Dell Outlet, just out of curiosity for pricing comparison. I found a Scratch & Dent Sempron 1800 w/ 1GB of RAM loaded with XP Home Premium there for $279. A quick check at Amazon.com shows that they sell Vista Home Premium for... $239. $40 difference for a whole new machine... I wonder if this is why Dell charges 9.9% sales tax on all of their machines. (Freakin' sales tax and S&H totaled up to be 20% of the price of the machine. WTF?)
I and the majority of my friends purchased the linux version in the cool little tin because we couldn't find any Windows versions in the tins by the time we got in to Q3. This is despite the fact that only two of us ever actually ran the game in Linux. Even then, I just rebooted to Windows to play the game most of the time since I never could get the 3D drivers for my Voodoo3 3000 to work correctly under Linux.
OK. I didn't bother with Google shortly after the storm when I would have seen flood drenched waters. I seem to remember finding a site with arial photos of much higher resolution that I used. (Good enough to pick out the car I had to leave behind and see that it was, at least, still there.) I haven't been back to New Orleans much since the storm and I guess I rarely used the maps since I usually know where I'm going in NOLA. :)
Kind of takes on a new meaning now, eh?
Anyway, I don't really remember seeing any post-katrina imagery on Google. I didn't RTFA (this is Slashdot afterall!), but did they every show any post katrina imagery at all? Or has it always been pre-katrina imagery.
I dunno. Remember: this is the same country where McDonald's was successfully sued for serving hot coffee.
So... basically you already know of a lot of phones with cracked screens. So why would it be a big deal if the screens started cracking on this one? Because it has two of them?
Face it: phones break. It's no big deal. You just have to go get a new one.
Wait, wait, wait. Is there beer in that fridge?
Seriously, you make a very eloquent point, but surely there has to be some way that we can motivate the masses and the median level of idiocy? Maybe I'm too young, but I still believe in this country and its people. I most definitely think we have the capacity for greatness still in us. It's just all a matter of finding that magic motivation. I have to admit that I have no idea what it could be, but I believe that it has to be there somewhere.
Maybe I'm just an optimist...
Yes, yes you have. (As have I. :( )
The big advantage of a cell phone is portability. I've gotten so that I don't even bring my laptop with me half of the time I go on a trip these days. (Fairly frequently for me.) I went to visit some friends a couple of weekends ago, and didn't even pull my laptop out the whole time I was there. Between SMS and WAP browsing I'm able to check my email, check the latest headlines, and browse most of the other sites that I would normally browse right from my device that fits in my pocket. I can even get directions from Google either via their web page or their SMS service. (Although I have to admit that Verizon's GPS based Navigator service definitely trumps anything Google can offer me currently.)
:) In the end, it's all about convenience. I don't find it convenient to carry a laptop with me all of the time. Some people do, and that's fine. It's just that I don't. Instead, I pay $15/month for unlimited internet access from my phone and another ~$5/month for 250 text messages. That's worth it to me.
I also don't carry my digicam as often as I used to simply becuase the camera on my newest phone is now "good enough" for most of the "embarassing party pictures" I would have taken with my Canon Digital Elph. Need to take a quick note? I either use the notepad function on my phone, or send an SMS to my email for later reference (form either my phone or a laptop).
Lastly, my phone offers the convenience of being "always there". It's always on and ready for me to quickly check my email or the headlines while waiting on an appointment or while sitting at a bar waiting for a friend to arrive. Those are generally situations where I wouldn't bring my laptop inside, even if the place did offer free WiFi.
The best part? My phone also makes really good phone calls.