> Some basic computer literacy and basic sense of organization (which has nothing to do with tech) are both very useful
For technically inclined people I think that's a given. Unfortunately for others, there are a lot of users of computers, tablets and smartphones out there who have little or no literacy because the things are sold as consumer commodity devices. Computers now are cars of 30 years ago in terms of user competence. Grandma can open Chrome but can't interpret a warning on a potentially hostile site correctly any more than she could change the oil in her car - or even know the oil needed changing! And of course it's easy to tut-tut her when her error becomes a costly mistake, but that doesn't change the fact that she and millions like her don't have the required literacy for that subject, and never will.
> You can protect yourself against a hostile world or pretend that the world will magically change to be safer for you.
While you're correct, part of the problem is that Apple's advertising over the last 15 years has stressed that they are going out of their way to make their products fulfill that whole "safer for you" bit. So you can see how a reasonable person would think that by buying an Apple product or service that they were doing something proactive to ensure they were safe(r). And at the same time it's a bit of a stretch to expect the average person to dig into the nitty gritty of how every software does certain things. Do you have Dropbox for example? Did you do a whole bunch of looking into if it would delete or consolidate files? What about Spotify? Before installing it did you poke around and see what it would do to all music on your system? So how is it reasonable to have someone defensively look for information on how Apple Music (a streaming service) might consolidate and delete existing music and sound files on your computer?
Whew. For a second there I was worried Slashdot was becoming something else, more inclusive, even compassionate. But you doubled down on tech elitism and victim blaming, so all is right in the world again.
Newsflash: Most people in the world don't have the tech skills to operate a Windows computer or a Mac properly, they're sure as hell not going to get on board with a linux distro that won't run the software they do their work with. And Apple and others go out of their way to sing the praises of their "just works" music services so how is the average non-tech literate Joe on the street supposed to find out about obscure incidents where music disappears. And this guy does deserve praise over and above the average non tech because at least he made a backup: "I recovered my original music files only by using a backup I made weeks earlier."
You're like that stereotypical IT troll who when they hear that someone's Lenovo or Dell workstation died on them and need help, launches into a 20 minute rant about how that wouldn't have happened at all if they'd just taken the time to learn to build their own bespoke workstation from the finest parts with a $200 power supply and water cooling setup, so how are they supposed to have sympathy for a useless pleb who just buys off the shelf computers like a mindless peasant?
You've got a 4 digit account, so presumably you're old enough that you're making decent money and you're still pirating books when they're being nearly given away? The authors' time and effort is really worth so little to you?
You want to pirate them, pirate them. But don't come back and boast about it, that's just an asshole move.
Tickets? Who cares about tickets? I'd much rather check my mailbox and find a handful of tickets than a notice that Google or Ford is suing my ass for doing something bad to one of their driverless cars. Tickets would be on the low end of the spectrum for corrective behavior there.
Oh I am sure it doesn't cost Valve anything other than some developer time to explore the idea so it's no skin off their back, but even the tweenage argument doesn't make a lot of sense in the age of shared Netflix and Prime accounts. My kid's had their own Netflix profile on my account for years, works great.
I have. It still doesn't make any sense. I have a Steam link hooked up to my TV, which also has a Chromecast on it. Why would I pay $4 to rent a movie there when I already pay $9 a month for all I can eat Netflix that I can see on the same TV?
Unless they're planning on renting movies for 50 cents a pop on here, I don't really see what they can bring to the table. You can already stream movies elsewhere for flat subscription fees and they have an integrated UI that works with most smart TVs and playback devices. From the screenshot of this I saw earlier today they want to charge you $4 to rent Kill Bill 2 for 48 hours and you'll have to watch it on a computer unless you've already got a Steam Box, Steam Link, or other PC with Steam installed already hooked to your TV. That's not value for money. The reason Steam is so liked with PC gamers is because of 2 things:
1. Easy game and save management where it didn't exist before, with excellent social/community integration
2. Steam SALES where you get games that are a couple of years old at rock bottom prices.
Neither of these things will apply to movies on Steam from what I see so far, so there's just no benefit to renting one there.
And not even then. The PC part is just fine, the only gains to be had are with the video card. My home gaming rig has an i5 chip and motherboard from 2010 in it and it works great, the only improvements I've made to it were an SSD boot drive, bumped the RAM up a while back and a new video card last year. I don't expect to have to spend a nickel on it for the next couple of years unless a component actually dies.
> The 5 year old computer is within an order of magnitude of power as todays computers.
Oh it's not even that far. I'd say it's a matter of percentages. We recently did a hardware refresh at the office and when I went to spec out the replacements I realized the workstations I bought 4 years ago we'd only see a 20% boost on average replacing them with comparably positioned chips today (Sandy Bridge i5s and i7s vs Skylake i5s and i7s). So I felt the money would go way further buying SSDs and bigger monitors, better chairs and desks instead. Even Xeon architecture is the same, they're not going faster, just adding a buttload of cores. Which of course increases your licensing on databases and other per-core licensed software so your incentive to upgrade disappears...
You have a point, but not in this case. The issue here isn't that UC Davis was haunted by their old mistake. The issue is that they have committed another compounding mistake by spending a lot of money in an attempt to whitewash their history of that old mistake. And they're being rightly pilloried for it again.
Well simple logic would be able to say that with a fair amount of certainty. Similar alien probes moving at.2 speol would only be in the system for a couple of days, and pumping out 10,000,000 of them every 2-3 days continuously is just crazy talk from a resource management standpoint.
Now, we wouldn't be able to say with any certainty that 10,000,000 similar sized probes haven't previously transited our solar system with more coming through periodically.
The premium (pay) version of Spotify allows you to download playlists for offline play, yes. You just need to mark the list with a toggle to be available offline and it syncs it locally, and then once a month it asks you to go online to ensure you're still a paying member. I've got my own music uploaded to Play as well, and am thinking I might jump ship to Play for a few months on their streaming service to see how it is vs Spotify.
Even 1% isn't exactly what I'd call rare. That would mean in the high school I went to you could fill a small classroom with the offspring of cuckoldry from the student body, presuming they held to the average.
> Some people are freeloading asshats and will never pay anything. But you can't get money out of those people.
I would take some exception to this and say that some of those people are broke kids who have little or no money but scads of time on their hands that they use to track down things they want. Then those kids grow up as fans of the artists, get an income and shift to paying customers because they no longer have the time and energy to search things down like they used to. So you can get money out of them with time.
Personally I really like streaming services like Spotify and Netflix, but I'm starting to think that maybe having local copies of some things is a good thing as one of the problems with streaming services is the ephemeral nature of availability. For example I queued up Fringe a while back to watch when I got through some of my other backlog, and when I go to watch it, suddenly it's not part of the Netflix catalog for my country any longer (!). Or I made a playlist on Spotify for work and sometime in the last month or so a half dozen songs just vanished from it and only appear in the playlist greyed out if I activate the "show content no longer available" option.
> Snowden's point is devalued when from the protection of the Russian state he criticizes the UK Prime Minister for his dead father's activities, but says nothing about Putin's close personal connections to several living Russian oligarchs who clearly stole and laundered money from Russia.
I'm not sure you're aware of this, but Russia isn't the US. Everyone and their dog knows Putin and crew are into shady shit, and most people with two brain cells to rub together also know that if Snowden started flinging that accusation around he'd probably meet with some unfortunate accident not long after. Calling out Putin as a crook when everyone already knows he's a crook and getting killed (or tossed out of Russia where he'd certainly be scooped up by a CIA black team and disappear forever) by the crook for the act would be the height of stupidity. Snowden isn't stupid, and he has no intention of tossing his life away for an ungrateful American people on a pointless gesture.
So do I. When a cop utters the words "If you've done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to hide", the public should expect that someone in a position of authority over them like that cop would also be expected to have nothing to hide and would willingly submit to scrutiny in the event that anything untoward would appear to have occurred. Instead it's quite the opposite with cops doing their damndest to keep their affairs from ever seeing the public light.
>They were already taking off nicely with the likes of Amigas, Amstrads, BBC micros, Commodores etc
I've been using microcomputers since the late 70s, thing were not "taking off nicely" with Commodores, Amigas, Atari 400/800/1200/600XL, Tandys, etc. Most software companies didn't write for more than a couple of platforms so there was a ton of fragmentation in the market. Even with the PC and MSDOS people had to fiddle with 2 or 3 copies of their autoexec.bat and config.sys files to get different things to run. Want to play X-Wing? Gonna have to load up your other boot batch file to allocate XMS and EMS correctly. Want to use Wordperfect? Load the other ones. It was a huge pain to many people and it greatly limited who would even be interested in using a computer with all the bother.
Windows brought CONSISTENCY. WIndows brought usability and simplicity. When you got a program "designed for Windows 3.1" you knew you just had to install it and it would *work*. That was the missing piece. That was the moment companies started seeing value in everyone having a computer because the experience would be the same for everyone, and it was simple to train people to use them.
Ah yes, that old chestnut. Never change, Slashdot.
Windows was probably the single biggest driver for the mass adoption of computers in the 90s that transitioned them from a work/niche device to a home must have.
> 2. You'd have to drive more than 3,800 miles... a MONTH... to save $200 in gas...
You know, not everyone lives in the states.. Hello from Canada, land of the $6 gallon of gas, coupled with my old 2 hour each way commute meant I was easily spending $400 CDN a month on gas. I just picked $200 out of the air as it seemed more reasonable than a Vancouver commute.
>Combined city/highway is 29 MPG. At $1.50 a gallon for gas, you're spending $1 for every 19.3 miles you drive. >If you average 12,000 miles a year (a reasonable number), that is 33 miles per day. So you're spending about $1.60 per day, or $48 per month in gas.
Again, do that as a stop and go commute and see your 29MPG plummet below 20 or less. On the highway my car gets 5-6l/100km (I prefer MPG but it is what it is for metric) but in commute stop and go that shoots up to 11+/l per 100km, which means I am spending at today's prices in Vancouver - 11 liters to go 100km or 11 liters to 62 miles.
11 liters @ $1.14 per liter (at today's prices) means I spend $1 for 4.9 miles I drive commuting in traffic. Just a bit of a difference.
Sure, but if you're using it to commute and you have a decent commute, that $624 a month will be more like $424 a month with all the gas you're no longer buying. Lots of people have cars with payments in that range.
Ivars is a moderate to higher tier seafood restaurant, and Seattle isn't the cheapest place for restaurants to begin with. This isn't out of line with other places around the city in the same category.
Slashdot Mirror
> Some basic computer literacy and basic sense of organization (which has nothing to do with tech) are both very useful
For technically inclined people I think that's a given. Unfortunately for others, there are a lot of users of computers, tablets and smartphones out there who have little or no literacy because the things are sold as consumer commodity devices. Computers now are cars of 30 years ago in terms of user competence. Grandma can open Chrome but can't interpret a warning on a potentially hostile site correctly any more than she could change the oil in her car - or even know the oil needed changing! And of course it's easy to tut-tut her when her error becomes a costly mistake, but that doesn't change the fact that she and millions like her don't have the required literacy for that subject, and never will.
> You can protect yourself against a hostile world or pretend that the world will magically change to be safer for you.
While you're correct, part of the problem is that Apple's advertising over the last 15 years has stressed that they are going out of their way to make their products fulfill that whole "safer for you" bit. So you can see how a reasonable person would think that by buying an Apple product or service that they were doing something proactive to ensure they were safe(r). And at the same time it's a bit of a stretch to expect the average person to dig into the nitty gritty of how every software does certain things. Do you have Dropbox for example? Did you do a whole bunch of looking into if it would delete or consolidate files? What about Spotify? Before installing it did you poke around and see what it would do to all music on your system? So how is it reasonable to have someone defensively look for information on how Apple Music (a streaming service) might consolidate and delete existing music and sound files on your computer?
Whew. For a second there I was worried Slashdot was becoming something else, more inclusive, even compassionate. But you doubled down on tech elitism and victim blaming, so all is right in the world again.
Newsflash: Most people in the world don't have the tech skills to operate a Windows computer or a Mac properly, they're sure as hell not going to get on board with a linux distro that won't run the software they do their work with. And Apple and others go out of their way to sing the praises of their "just works" music services so how is the average non-tech literate Joe on the street supposed to find out about obscure incidents where music disappears. And this guy does deserve praise over and above the average non tech because at least he made a backup: "I recovered my original music files only by using a backup I made weeks earlier."
You're like that stereotypical IT troll who when they hear that someone's Lenovo or Dell workstation died on them and need help, launches into a 20 minute rant about how that wouldn't have happened at all if they'd just taken the time to learn to build their own bespoke workstation from the finest parts with a $200 power supply and water cooling setup, so how are they supposed to have sympathy for a useless pleb who just buys off the shelf computers like a mindless peasant?
Kill the Beeb's ratings and then they'll claim it can't compete and should be shut down or sold off to one of their cronies for pennies.
You've got a 4 digit account, so presumably you're old enough that you're making decent money and you're still pirating books when they're being nearly given away? The authors' time and effort is really worth so little to you?
You want to pirate them, pirate them. But don't come back and boast about it, that's just an asshole move.
Tickets? Who cares about tickets? I'd much rather check my mailbox and find a handful of tickets than a notice that Google or Ford is suing my ass for doing something bad to one of their driverless cars. Tickets would be on the low end of the spectrum for corrective behavior there.
Oh I am sure it doesn't cost Valve anything other than some developer time to explore the idea so it's no skin off their back, but even the tweenage argument doesn't make a lot of sense in the age of shared Netflix and Prime accounts. My kid's had their own Netflix profile on my account for years, works great.
I have. It still doesn't make any sense. I have a Steam link hooked up to my TV, which also has a Chromecast on it. Why would I pay $4 to rent a movie there when I already pay $9 a month for all I can eat Netflix that I can see on the same TV?
Unless they're planning on renting movies for 50 cents a pop on here, I don't really see what they can bring to the table. You can already stream movies elsewhere for flat subscription fees and they have an integrated UI that works with most smart TVs and playback devices. From the screenshot of this I saw earlier today they want to charge you $4 to rent Kill Bill 2 for 48 hours and you'll have to watch it on a computer unless you've already got a Steam Box, Steam Link, or other PC with Steam installed already hooked to your TV. That's not value for money. The reason Steam is so liked with PC gamers is because of 2 things:
1. Easy game and save management where it didn't exist before, with excellent social/community integration
2. Steam SALES where you get games that are a couple of years old at rock bottom prices.
Neither of these things will apply to movies on Steam from what I see so far, so there's just no benefit to renting one there.
And not even then. The PC part is just fine, the only gains to be had are with the video card. My home gaming rig has an i5 chip and motherboard from 2010 in it and it works great, the only improvements I've made to it were an SSD boot drive, bumped the RAM up a while back and a new video card last year. I don't expect to have to spend a nickel on it for the next couple of years unless a component actually dies.
> The 5 year old computer is within an order of magnitude of power as todays computers.
Oh it's not even that far. I'd say it's a matter of percentages. We recently did a hardware refresh at the office and when I went to spec out the replacements I realized the workstations I bought 4 years ago we'd only see a 20% boost on average replacing them with comparably positioned chips today (Sandy Bridge i5s and i7s vs Skylake i5s and i7s). So I felt the money would go way further buying SSDs and bigger monitors, better chairs and desks instead. Even Xeon architecture is the same, they're not going faster, just adding a buttload of cores. Which of course increases your licensing on databases and other per-core licensed software so your incentive to upgrade disappears...
You have a point, but not in this case. The issue here isn't that UC Davis was haunted by their old mistake. The issue is that they have committed another compounding mistake by spending a lot of money in an attempt to whitewash their history of that old mistake. And they're being rightly pilloried for it again.
Well simple logic would be able to say that with a fair amount of certainty. Similar alien probes moving at .2 speol would only be in the system for a couple of days, and pumping out 10,000,000 of them every 2-3 days continuously is just crazy talk from a resource management standpoint.
Now, we wouldn't be able to say with any certainty that 10,000,000 similar sized probes haven't previously transited our solar system with more coming through periodically.
The premium (pay) version of Spotify allows you to download playlists for offline play, yes. You just need to mark the list with a toggle to be available offline and it syncs it locally, and then once a month it asks you to go online to ensure you're still a paying member. I've got my own music uploaded to Play as well, and am thinking I might jump ship to Play for a few months on their streaming service to see how it is vs Spotify.
Even 1% isn't exactly what I'd call rare. That would mean in the high school I went to you could fill a small classroom with the offspring of cuckoldry from the student body, presuming they held to the average.
Ah. I stand corrected. That is actually far more clever and likely to work.
What the hell kind of idiots are sending ransomware to people looking for jobs? Can't get blood from a stone...
> Some people are freeloading asshats and will never pay anything. But you can't get money out of those people.
I would take some exception to this and say that some of those people are broke kids who have little or no money but scads of time on their hands that they use to track down things they want. Then those kids grow up as fans of the artists, get an income and shift to paying customers because they no longer have the time and energy to search things down like they used to. So you can get money out of them with time.
Personally I really like streaming services like Spotify and Netflix, but I'm starting to think that maybe having local copies of some things is a good thing as one of the problems with streaming services is the ephemeral nature of availability. For example I queued up Fringe a while back to watch when I got through some of my other backlog, and when I go to watch it, suddenly it's not part of the Netflix catalog for my country any longer (!). Or I made a playlist on Spotify for work and sometime in the last month or so a half dozen songs just vanished from it and only appear in the playlist greyed out if I activate the "show content no longer available" option.
> Snowden's point is devalued when from the protection of the Russian state he criticizes the UK Prime Minister for his dead father's activities, but says nothing about Putin's close personal connections to several living Russian oligarchs who clearly stole and laundered money from Russia.
I'm not sure you're aware of this, but Russia isn't the US. Everyone and their dog knows Putin and crew are into shady shit, and most people with two brain cells to rub together also know that if Snowden started flinging that accusation around he'd probably meet with some unfortunate accident not long after. Calling out Putin as a crook when everyone already knows he's a crook and getting killed (or tossed out of Russia where he'd certainly be scooped up by a CIA black team and disappear forever) by the crook for the act would be the height of stupidity. Snowden isn't stupid, and he has no intention of tossing his life away for an ungrateful American people on a pointless gesture.
So do I. When a cop utters the words "If you've done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to hide", the public should expect that someone in a position of authority over them like that cop would also be expected to have nothing to hide and would willingly submit to scrutiny in the event that anything untoward would appear to have occurred. Instead it's quite the opposite with cops doing their damndest to keep their affairs from ever seeing the public light.
Are you daft?
>They were already taking off nicely with the likes of Amigas, Amstrads, BBC micros, Commodores etc
I've been using microcomputers since the late 70s, thing were not "taking off nicely" with Commodores, Amigas, Atari 400/800/1200/600XL, Tandys, etc. Most software companies didn't write for more than a couple of platforms so there was a ton of fragmentation in the market. Even with the PC and MSDOS people had to fiddle with 2 or 3 copies of their autoexec.bat and config.sys files to get different things to run. Want to play X-Wing? Gonna have to load up your other boot batch file to allocate XMS and EMS correctly. Want to use Wordperfect? Load the other ones. It was a huge pain to many people and it greatly limited who would even be interested in using a computer with all the bother.
Windows brought CONSISTENCY. WIndows brought usability and simplicity. When you got a program "designed for Windows 3.1" you knew you just had to install it and it would *work*. That was the missing piece. That was the moment companies started seeing value in everyone having a computer because the experience would be the same for everyone, and it was simple to train people to use them.
Ah yes, that old chestnut. Never change, Slashdot.
Windows was probably the single biggest driver for the mass adoption of computers in the 90s that transitioned them from a work/niche device to a home must have.
> 2. You'd have to drive more than 3,800 miles... a MONTH... to save $200 in gas...
You know, not everyone lives in the states.. Hello from Canada, land of the $6 gallon of gas, coupled with my old 2 hour each way commute meant I was easily spending $400 CDN a month on gas. I just picked $200 out of the air as it seemed more reasonable than a Vancouver commute.
>Combined city/highway is 29 MPG. At $1.50 a gallon for gas, you're spending $1 for every 19.3 miles you drive.
>If you average 12,000 miles a year (a reasonable number), that is 33 miles per day. So you're spending about $1.60 per day, or $48 per month in gas.
Again, do that as a stop and go commute and see your 29MPG plummet below 20 or less. On the highway my car gets 5-6l/100km (I prefer MPG but it is what it is for metric) but in commute stop and go that shoots up to 11+/l per 100km, which means I am spending at today's prices in Vancouver - 11 liters to go 100km or 11 liters to 62 miles.
11 liters @ $1.14 per liter (at today's prices) means I spend $1 for 4.9 miles I drive commuting in traffic. Just a bit of a difference.
Sure, but if you're using it to commute and you have a decent commute, that $624 a month will be more like $424 a month with all the gas you're no longer buying. Lots of people have cars with payments in that range.
Ivars is a moderate to higher tier seafood restaurant, and Seattle isn't the cheapest place for restaurants to begin with. This isn't out of line with other places around the city in the same category.
What "through the nose" might look like at a US restaurant that pays their people $15 an hour right now:
https://www.ivars.com/locations/acres-of-clams
Funny, that's not crazy at all. And tipping is optional there.