Wal-Mart wields its power for just one purpose: to bring the lowest possible prices to its customers. At Wal-Mart, that goal is never reached. The retailer has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don't change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year after year. But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and its 21,000 suppliers knows is the high cost of those low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas.
Of course, U.S. companies have been moving jobs offshore for decades, long before Wal-Mart was a retailing power. But there is no question that the chain is helping accelerate the loss of American jobs to low-wage countries such as China. Wal-Mart, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s trumpeted its claim to "Buy American," has doubled its imports from China in the past five years alone, buying some $12 billion in merchandise in 2002. That's nearly 10% of all Chinese exports to the United States.
I'd love to see an updated story with new numbers, and that covers Amazon.
By my math this thing is close to 600 pixels per inch. WHY? 300ppii, 400ppi at the most is just all that most people can see from any reasonable distance. The rest is just waste, resulting in worse battery life and slower performance as useless pixels are driven.
5. Don't make SUCH a big damn deal about 'https' -- big green text, giant padlock icons, etc. I've been telling people for YEARS that an HTTPS connection to bankofamurica.ru is worth NOTHING.
This won't solve everything, but the least that browser makers can do is give people the tools they need to help them make good decisions. Long story short, QUIT HIDING SHIT!
6. Bonus: enough with all these new shit TLDs. Is a world where http://blog.google/ exists (note: it does) REALLY a better place than one where it doesn't? Or is it just more confusing?
"Health Apps Could Be Doing More Harm Than Good, Warn Scientists"
Or, they could be doing more good than harm. Way to take a stand, guys. ANYTHING is possible.
A dozen articles a day that contain the phrase "scientists warn" is about as useful as Outlook telling me that attachments MIGHT harm my computer -- every... single... fucking... time.
And are these the same scientists that once said I shouldn't eat eggs, and now they say I should? Or that I should avoid cholesterol -- wait, sorry, now it's only *bad* cholesterol that I should avoid. And I should drink a bunch of water every day... but not *too* much. And I should eat lots of fruits and vegetables... well, not so much fruits, actually, because of the sugar.
"... they... force people to focus on ambitious goals that they will never reach."
Like when an overweight person goes to their doctor and is told for the tenth time in as many years that they should lose weight? Useful, that.
You and the morons who modded you up need to RTFA. Here, I'l bold the important parts so you don't have to work so hard.
Over the next few months, I began to meet more women engineers in the company. As I got to know them, and heard their stories, I was surprised that some of them had stories similar to my own. Some of the women even had stories about reporting the exact same manager I had reported, and had reported inappropriate interactions with him long before I had even joined the company. It became obvious that both HR and management had been lying about this being "his first offense", and it certainly wasn't his last. Within a few months, he was reported once again for inappropriate behavior, and those who reported him were told it was still his "first offense".
Actually, you PROBABLY are, if you're in the U.S. The 23 states and DC add up to about 162 million people (2010 census) which is a little over half of the 308 million people in the U.S.
So I assume he's perfected an anti-gravity system that doesn't require power? Because as long as the failure mode of a flying vehicle is "drop out of the sky like a fucking rock onto people below"... might have a little problem there.
It's so you can HOLD the damn thing with HUMAN FINGERS comfortably, without covering the screen. My current phone has a mere 4mm between the left and right sides of the screen and the physical edge of the phone. My life would not be made better if the screen itself were 8mm wider or if the phone itself were 8mm narrower. It would, in fact, be a bit *worse* because my fingers would cover little bits of the content every so often.
I don't think scores need to be changed, but it is definitely annoying when idiots get to vote in numbers and "win" in ways that contradict provable facts just because there are more loud idiots than quiet smart people.* I lost a point (from +2 to +1) for taking the radical position of "[If] the results are inconsistent and non-repeatable... they should be tossed out until the root problem is discovered, regardless of if the fault is theirs or Apple's."
But no, CR would rather have CLICKSCLICKSCLICKSRIGHTNOW than calmly wait and post the truth once -- FIRST -- after all the facts are known. Sad. They used to be above that.
* Luckily, that is not a problem ANYWHERE outside of this site.:-/
Tim Cook, 2014: Hardware sales are going well, but OBVIOUSLY they won't continue to climb FOREVER. We should think of some other things so we can keep making money once THE INEVITABLE happens. Maybe we can get into content. People will ALWAYS need content. And it takes time. You can't just build a substantial amount overnight. We'd better start thinking about this now. The Market, 2016: Hardware sales slump. The Internet, 2017: Shits itself writing about how Apple is doomed.
Bah. Meant to fix a couple points above -- the report is about the "holiday season 2016" and some of my other numbers are for whole years. Still, we're in the ballpark. Assuming sales went UP -- drastically -- during the holidays, we're probably looking at 20k sales in the year. More likely something like 15k. If they're uninfluenced by the holidays and it was a typical quarter, that's still ~50k in the year. Still a ways to go to 250 billion. Hell, that's still less than 1/5th of 274,000.
O M F G. I clicked through to the report (warning: PDF) (more dire warnings: crappy infographic style; pages are portrait orientation) and it's even more hysterical than I thought. "Booming", you say?
There were 11,489 cassettes purchased during the Holiday Season (an increase of 140% over 2015).
Compare that to
AUDIO STREAMS reached a new record high of 250.7 BILLION, up 82.6% over 2015.
To an ant, a firecracker looks like an atomic bomb. There were TWENTY-TWO MILLION times more streams than cassettes sold. Even if you call 1 stream = 1 song and figure a cassette has 10 songs, that's still TWO MILLION to ONE.
Two words: statistically insignificant.
From Wikipedia: "Sales of pre-recorded music cassettes in the U.S. dropped from 442 million in 1990 to 274,000 by 2007." So 2016 saw ONE TWENTY-FOURTH of what was sold in disamal 2007, which was 1/1613 the size of the market in 1990. "Booming", indeed.
Fucking A. The numbers are fine but the "story" is BULLSHIT. What a complete waste of (virtual) ink.
In a related story, my sex life is booming -- there was a 100% increase from 2015 to 2016. (Got some twice last year, versus once the year before.)
"We learned that when testing battery life on Mac notebooks, Consumer Reports uses a hidden Safari setting for developing web sites which turns off the browser cache. This is not a setting used by customers and does not reflect real-world usage. Their use of this developer setting also triggered an obscure and intermittent bug reloading icons which created inconsistent results in their lab. After we asked Consumer Reports to run the same test using normal user settings, they told us their MacBook Pro systems consistently delivered the expected battery life."
Slashdot Mirror
My favorite article on the subject is now almost 15 years old. December, 2003: https://www.fastcompany.com/47...
Wal-Mart wields its power for just one purpose: to bring the lowest possible prices to its customers. At Wal-Mart, that goal is never reached. The retailer has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don't change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year after year. But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and its 21,000 suppliers knows is the high cost of those low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas.
Of course, U.S. companies have been moving jobs offshore for decades, long before Wal-Mart was a retailing power. But there is no question that the chain is helping accelerate the loss of American jobs to low-wage countries such as China. Wal-Mart, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s trumpeted its claim to "Buy American," has doubled its imports from China in the past five years alone, buying some $12 billion in merchandise in 2002. That's nearly 10% of all Chinese exports to the United States.
I'd love to see an updated story with new numbers, and that covers Amazon.
Can we just accept that different people like different things, and that maybe, just MAYBE, some of these might be related to gender?
I don't keep up on the news for other industries. Are there big pushes elsewhere to get more men into female-dominated professions?
By my math this thing is close to 600 pixels per inch. WHY? 300ppii, 400ppi at the most is just all that most people can see from any reasonable distance. The rest is just waste, resulting in worse battery life and slower performance as useless pixels are driven.
"Every time you solve one problem, you create two more." * My guess is that circular runways would solve a few problems and create dozens more.
* I went looking for the source of that quote. Couldn't find it, but it appears in Popular Science, May 1942.
https://books.google.com/books...
(... because I'm sure they read /. and value my opinion... )
1. NEVER hide ANY part of the URL. If the URL extends beyond the size of the location box, give a nice big '...' for people to click on to see it.
2. ALWAYS show a status bar that ALWAYS shows what URL I'll go to if I click a link. NEVER allow ANYTHING to change this behavior.
3. NEVER hide the protocol.
4. Don't allow 'data' URIs in the URL bar by default. https://www.wordfence.com/blog... (This also relates to #1)
5. Don't make SUCH a big damn deal about 'https' -- big green text, giant padlock icons, etc. I've been telling people for YEARS that an HTTPS connection to bankofamurica.ru is worth NOTHING.
This won't solve everything, but the least that browser makers can do is give people the tools they need to help them make good decisions. Long story short, QUIT HIDING SHIT!
6. Bonus: enough with all these new shit TLDs. Is a world where http://blog.google/ exists (note: it does) REALLY a better place than one where it doesn't? Or is it just more confusing?
The slow pan past a Lexus in Suits is a commercial.
http://www.lexusnxforum.com/fo...
... or explain what a 'Famer' is.
"Sadly, our famous [Azure Window] landmark..."
Did it report that the dog was evil, paranoid, a Nazi, in the KKK, or planning a coup?
http://searchengineland.com/go...
"Health Apps Could Be Doing More Harm Than Good, Warn Scientists"
Or, they could be doing more good than harm. Way to take a stand, guys. ANYTHING is possible.
A dozen articles a day that contain the phrase "scientists warn" is about as useful as Outlook telling me that attachments MIGHT harm my computer -- every... single... fucking... time.
And are these the same scientists that once said I shouldn't eat eggs, and now they say I should? Or that I should avoid cholesterol -- wait, sorry, now it's only *bad* cholesterol that I should avoid. And I should drink a bunch of water every day... but not *too* much. And I should eat lots of fruits and vegetables... well, not so much fruits, actually, because of the sugar.
"... they... force people to focus on ambitious goals that they will never reach."
Like when an overweight person goes to their doctor and is told for the tenth time in as many years that they should lose weight? Useful, that.
You and the morons who modded you up need to RTFA. Here, I'l bold the important parts so you don't have to work so hard.
Over the next few months, I began to meet more women engineers in the company. As I got to know them, and heard their stories, I was surprised that some of them had stories similar to my own. Some of the women even had stories about reporting the exact same manager I had reported, and had reported inappropriate interactions with him long before I had even joined the company. It became obvious that both HR and management had been lying about this being "his first offense", and it certainly wasn't his last. Within a few months, he was reported once again for inappropriate behavior, and those who reported him were told it was still his "first offense".
Came here to say this. It'd be *really* embarrassing if the error went unnoticed and was still there a day later. Oh, wait...
... they're saying it's time to bring back Short Attention Span Theater?
Actually, you PROBABLY are, if you're in the U.S. The 23 states and DC add up to about 162 million people (2010 census) which is a little over half of the 308 million people in the U.S.
Yes, I should be working right now.
So I assume he's perfected an anti-gravity system that doesn't require power? Because as long as the failure mode of a flying vehicle is "drop out of the sky like a fucking rock onto people below"... might have a little problem there.
Disable pacemaker before committing crimes. Got it.
No matter what, the old saying will still be true: "I know that half of what I spend on advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half."
It's so you can HOLD the damn thing with HUMAN FINGERS comfortably, without covering the screen. My current phone has a mere 4mm between the left and right sides of the screen and the physical edge of the phone. My life would not be made better if the screen itself were 8mm wider or if the phone itself were 8mm narrower. It would, in fact, be a bit *worse* because my fingers would cover little bits of the content every so often.
If any writers for Timeless are here, I will personally send you $100 if you end an episode with a star saying "Donald Trump is President?!?"
Funny that their logo includes "://" when Firefox itself hides those characters by default on non-https sites.
I don't think scores need to be changed, but it is definitely annoying when idiots get to vote in numbers and "win" in ways that contradict provable facts just because there are more loud idiots than quiet smart people.* I lost a point (from +2 to +1) for taking the radical position of "[If] the results are inconsistent and non-repeatable... they should be tossed out until the root problem is discovered, regardless of if the fault is theirs or Apple's."
https://slashdot.org/comments....
But no, CR would rather have CLICKSCLICKSCLICKSRIGHTNOW than calmly wait and post the truth once -- FIRST -- after all the facts are known. Sad. They used to be above that.
* Luckily, that is not a problem ANYWHERE outside of this site. :-/
Tim Cook, 2014: Hardware sales are going well, but OBVIOUSLY they won't continue to climb FOREVER. We should think of some other things so we can keep making money once THE INEVITABLE happens. Maybe we can get into content. People will ALWAYS need content. And it takes time. You can't just build a substantial amount overnight. We'd better start thinking about this now.
The Market, 2016: Hardware sales slump.
The Internet, 2017: Shits itself writing about how Apple is doomed.
Bah. Meant to fix a couple points above -- the report is about the "holiday season 2016" and some of my other numbers are for whole years. Still, we're in the ballpark. Assuming sales went UP -- drastically -- during the holidays, we're probably looking at 20k sales in the year. More likely something like 15k. If they're uninfluenced by the holidays and it was a typical quarter, that's still ~50k in the year. Still a ways to go to 250 billion. Hell, that's still less than 1/5th of 274,000.
O M F G. I clicked through to the report (warning: PDF) (more dire warnings: crappy infographic style; pages are portrait orientation) and it's even more hysterical than I thought. "Booming", you say?
There were 11,489 cassettes purchased during the Holiday Season (an increase of 140% over 2015).
Compare that to
AUDIO STREAMS reached a new record high of 250.7 BILLION, up 82.6% over 2015.
To an ant, a firecracker looks like an atomic bomb. There were TWENTY-TWO MILLION times more streams than cassettes sold. Even if you call 1 stream = 1 song and figure a cassette has 10 songs, that's still TWO MILLION to ONE.
Two words: statistically insignificant.
From Wikipedia: "Sales of pre-recorded music cassettes in the U.S. dropped from 442 million in 1990 to 274,000 by 2007." So 2016 saw ONE TWENTY-FOURTH of what was sold in disamal 2007, which was 1/1613 the size of the market in 1990. "Booming", indeed.
Fucking A. The numbers are fine but the "story" is BULLSHIT. What a complete waste of (virtual) ink.
In a related story, my sex life is booming -- there was a 100% increase from 2015 to 2016. (Got some twice last year, versus once the year before.)
Fuck you, and fuck whoever modded me down. Idiots, all.
http://www.imore.com/consumer-...
"We learned that when testing battery life on Mac notebooks, Consumer Reports uses a hidden Safari setting for developing web sites which turns off the browser cache. This is not a setting used by customers and does not reflect real-world usage. Their use of this developer setting also triggered an obscure and intermittent bug reloading icons which created inconsistent results in their lab. After we asked Consumer Reports to run the same test using normal user settings, they told us their MacBook Pro systems consistently delivered the expected battery life."