Satellite TV is still head and shoulders above cable TV. And, it is cheaper.
The key is that is't cheaper. It really doesn't have anything else going for it one way or the other. When you plug your TiVO in, the only difference between cable and sattelite is the bill... And maybe that cable goes out a little more frequently than sattelite.
If the price was the same, I'd pick the service with the TiVO instead of the generic DVR. I don't want any company that has contractual ties to the content providers to control the software on my set top box.
The Dish box has a bigger hard drive
But the TiVO's hard drive is upgradeable.
the Dish box has the ability to add an extra few minutes of recording to a show, if I desire
The Tivo will do the same if you use season passes instead of specifiying every show to record manually. It allows up to three additional minutes at both the beginning and the end of a scheduled program. If you're not using Season Passes, why bother with a TiVO?
Both record what I want, when I want.
You have a 'when' that you want? Why do you even know when Lost is on and what network shows it? Your DVR should be protecting you from needing to know that.
Four million seems a hell of a lot more than 700,000 to me... I don't think those problems will be in the same realm of reality.
If the 360 wasn't compelling to buyers already, and the PS3 isn't doing it for them now either, it seems the winner becomes Nintendo.
The lesson here, regardless of what happens, will be that the analysts were wrong, and we listened to 9 months of obnoxious fanboy flamewars about what the analysts were saying for no good reason.
That still doesn't make sense though, because they already have the digital signal. It would be surprising to me if they didn't make it available, even if that means re-using a connector to save money/generate additional accessories revenue.
I forgot to add to my other response... The lack of memory slots is unacceptable, regardless of the likelyhood that the lower end model is fully digital video capable.
Given that the original specs from Sony mentioned dual-DVI outs, that the A/V multi-out port has had the pins multiplexed to support component video for the PS2, and that there are exactly enough pins in the multi-out connector to support HDMI out, it wouldn't be too surprising if the less expensive PS3 supported digital video out over the MultiOut port. This would have the added benefit (for sony) of allowing them to sell an expensive adapter to people buying the cheaper model, but wanting a digital connection.
The way HDCP works will require the same digital signals internal to the machine that would be used to drive an HDMI interface, so it would actually be more expensive for them to then convert that to an analog signal.
Ok, the thing is expensive, but let's cut the crap. It's exactly the same price as a similarly equipped 360. At least... As similarly equipped as you can get on the 360, what with the 360 not supporting digital video out and all.
Or are you forgetting that it's $100 for wireless networking on your 360?
Even as somebody who does not claim to be an English expert, I can say with authority both that he is an ass, and that he's wrong.
What he is saying is essentially like saying you shouldn't read the Bible, because it's old, it deals in customs that are no longer in practice, and people may take it litterally, so clearly it doesn't contain any insight into modern day values and situations. He should have some respect for his predecessors, and as an educated man he should both respect and understand the value of historical context. Without his predecessors, after all, he wouldn't have a job. Also, old and wrong are not the same thing; especially when it comes to language. Clearly anybody with half a brain would apply their knowledge of the modern world to the older text invalidating every point he made in that article, which it appears he wrote for no reason other than he felt like trash talking some dead guys.
I don't care what letters you have after your name, or how many years you've studied, or what you happen to be the foremost authority of. It's no excuse to be a pretentious ass.
Employers and recruiters are looking on these websites for qualified people. Maybe they just aren't looking for you.
More likely, you didn't read what I actually said. Of course you get one or more calls a day. It's not because you're special, it's because recruiters work like spammers. Phone calls are cheap, and it can't hurt to troll you for permission to submit your resume.
Those recruiters that call you look for job listings posted by employers, call you, and hook you up with the employer for a fee. If you had looked for postings instead of just posting your resume, you could have gotten many of those same contacts and you wouldn't have had the recruiter's fee taken out of your salary.
Recruiters most certainly *do* look at resume postings because they make mony off of you if you're foolish enough to respond to their e-mail. I, however, only mentioned employers. Sure, there are exceptions to the rule, but not many.
If you're going to use a recruiter, you're way better off finding one yourself instead of having one find you.
You never want to do business with a recruiter that finds you. You should find the recruiter, and you should do it based on recommendations. You want a recruiter that works for you, and you want the recruiter to understand that you have the upper hand in the relationship. A recruiter gets paid when you get a job, so the good recruiters understand it's in their best interests to find you something that fits, and perhaps even to do some salary negotiations for you. I've had a headhunter play two companies offers off each other for me to get me an extra $20,000 a year in salary... That's the kind of thing you should be looking for. If you've been working in industry for any reasonable amount of time, you know somebody that knows a good recruiter (or headhunter, or whatever you want to call them).
I'd say that responding to a recruiter that is soliciting you is just as bad as responding to spam, but it usually *is* responding to spam, so it would be redundant. It's not worth dealing with a recruter that makes money off your signed offer letter, but considers themselves an employee of the hiring company. You can get that job anyway every time, and their fee could be part of your salary.
That recruiter you're talking about, and that headhunter you mentioned... They're the same person. Don't let what they put on their business card fool you.
Also, hunting for jobs is hard enough, if you dont do everything you can, including putting your resume on sites like the ones above, then you are doing yourself a disservice.
I'm sorry, I would agree if you were unemployed, but if putting your resume online puts you at risk of losing your job, then not only are you not doing yourself any disservice by not posting it, you'd have to be an utter fool to post it... Especially, as I said before, since there are other effective ways to find employment. If you don't have a job, by all means, do everything in your power. There is no downside, but...
Just like when it comes to sales, you want to sell for the most and produce for the cheapest, when it comes to employment you want to produce the most and pay the least.
People in hell want ice water.
Employers want to be able to treat their employees like any other commodity. It has even become acceptable to refer to them as 'Human Resources'. That means it's a two way street though. If your employees are commodities, then the price can go up when there is another buyer. You can't corner the market.
The 'bad' employers end up losing in the end, because their poor management and attitudes cost them in productivity. The 'evil' companies get what's coming to them, and will continue to as long as there are plenty of non-evil companies out there.
The real problem is actually that his management probably didn't consider that the people may just have their resumes out there to see what's going on... Testing the waters. It doesn't have to mean that they actually are actively seeking to leave. They got upset because they expect loyalty, so innocent explanations escaped them. It really would be best if managers realized that they were in a business relationship with their employees, and nothing more. Just keep that relationship mutually beneficial and you don't have to worry about your employees leaving.
Most employers don't hire by searching resumes on the web anyway. They post a listing and wait for the applicants to come to them. Also, the old way of finding a job is still the best. Use your network of contacts, or find a reputable headhunter (ask around. 1 headhunter in 100 isn't a schmuck, and somebody you know probably knows which one it is).
If your resume isn't out there in the public sense, you don't have to worry about your employer finding it. If posting your resume is all you're doing to find a job, you certainly don't have to worry about getting hired either.
A system that automates where possible is not treating the users like "idiots".
Selective automation at the expense of a uniform interface *is* treating the users like idiots.
Any automation that doesn't have the intermediate steps exposed to allow the user to execute manually or seperately *is* treating the users like idiots.
Clearly, you're one of the people who thinks he's good at UI design, yet remains responsible for the crap-piles that are modern applications. Of course, I am a bit biased. I think the "desktop" paradigm is broken, and I think dialog boxes shouldn't exist. Windows, and Windows-like GUIs maintain no visual history. Any good UI would show you at least a hint of the last few things you did. There is also no reason to interrupt user input do display errors and informational messages. Designers should eliminate the dialog box and look towards game designers for clues on how better to alert the user to important events. How can we put all this effort into into interface design and still have interfaces which wouldn't look all that surprising to a user from 1985? We don't have the limitations we had back then, and we've seen other ways to do it, so we should get with the times.
Yes, there is. It's confusing, disruptive and alarming for end users.
It doesn't need to be confusing if there is uniformity and a decent description of what is happening easily available. It's not any more disruptive than what they've implemented here, and it's only alarming if you assume the user is an idiot.
Clearly you've not used OS X much.
I do, actually, but I'm not a drag and drop kind of guy. I open a console for file operations. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've used the finder to move files around in the last five years.
You're right, of course, and I think it's broken, but at least it's not as rediculous as these Vista screenshots.
No, this imlementation (which is basically the same as OS X's) merely recognises that the vast majority of users won't know they'll need elevated privileges before they try and do something.
They can be informed by a simple "Permission Denied" message.
This system is nothing like the OSX system. They OSX system obtains authentication before attempting the operation. Apple got away with that mostly by breaking backwards compatability, but there is no reason legacy apps can't use pre-authentication with the proper error messages.
Treating your users like idiots creates an application for idiots. Treating your users like intellegent people creates intellegent users.
XP didn't have sudo so you were always admin, Vista has sudo, enabled via annoying popups rather than a config file.
It's not the config file part that is broken, it's the UI part.
You see, first of all sudo specifies you want the permissions up front rather than asking for permission after the fact. If you try to do something using the legacy windows APIs, and you don't have permission, you shouldn't get a series of popups, the program's system call should fail, and the program should die. Programs should either ask you for permission (once) up front (like installers do on OSX), or you should specify that a program should run with permissions (via the right click menu "Run As..." or maybe with a modifier key held down). Second, sudo caches your authentication, so if you want to do multiple privlidged operations in a row, you aren't continually annoyed.
It's the post-authentication rather than the pre-authentication that Microsoft got wrong though. Microsoft clearly doesn't get it, and this implementation is completely broken.
Your golf cart batteries contain, but Lead (II) Sulfate and distilled water, and only when they carry no charge. When you charge them, the electrodes become lead and lead (IV) oxide, and the distilled water becomes sulfuric acid. Overcharging generates heat. If the overcharging current is high enough, the heat is generated more quickly than it is radiated off the surface of the battery, and the sulfuric acid (the electrolyte) boils. At that point, the little bit of lead that is disolved in the electrolyte isn't really your problem.
Not only that, but the electrolosis that occurs during overcharge generates hydrogen and oxygen in exactly the right proportions to be explosive. This is why sealed lead acid batteries sometime explode, and why you should look away when you connect jumper cables to your car battery.
Be careful with your lead-acid batteries. They are great tools, but there is a lot of energy stored up in there, and they can hurt you if you don't treat them with respect. I can tell you from first hand experience that the month of your life that comes directly after the day you explode a deep cycle lead acid battery sucks.
Overcharging lead-acid batteries can boil the electrolyte. Breathing in the fumes is both chemicaly toxic and corrosive. The battery may be fine assuming you don't melt anything, but you won't. I don't recommend it.
I've searched, but it seems neither product has it's manual online, so I can't give you any more details than above. The toothbrush is an Oral-B Sonic Elite, and the shaver is a norelco Spectra 8894 XL.
Both devices are marked with a NiCD/(recycling symbol) next to the area where they break open. The manual describes the process, and the toothbrush even has a pictogram on the bottom of the base showing how to do it and the words "battery recycling" embossed right next to the diagram.
Cadmium is *very* common. There aren't very many types of batteries that can deliver sustained, high current like a Nickel Cadmium battery. That's why they use them in Hybrid cars. There aren't any other types of battery that would be suitable for that use that wouldn't either be prohibitively expensive or heavy.
The batteries I would wonder about are the imports that sell for a fifth of the price of a set of duracels.
The same stuff that's in the duracells... just a lot less of it. Weigh a cheap battery sometime, and then weigh a duracell or an energizer, and you can see for yourself.
As for banning cadmium - how will cordless power tools go?
Or hybrid cars, for that matter...
All that's going to happen is the manufacturers will provide a facility for you to return the device so they can remove the battery. I don't think the bill says batteries have to be user-removable, just removable.
Many cordless appliances are already made in a way where, if you do something specific but non-obvious, the device breaks open and releases the battery. Both my electric razor and toothbrush have such facilities. The bottom of the charger base for the toothbrush has a protrusion that can twist the base of the brush in such a way that snaps it open. The razor has a "screw" that can be turned by the prongs on the plug. These are destructive operations... Plastic breaks and the device will be useless after you do it, but it gets the battery out.
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Satellite TV is still head and shoulders above cable TV. And, it is cheaper.
The key is that is't cheaper. It really doesn't have anything else going for it one way or the other. When you plug your TiVO in, the only difference between cable and sattelite is the bill... And maybe that cable goes out a little more frequently than sattelite.
If the price was the same, I'd pick the service with the TiVO instead of the generic DVR. I don't want any company that has contractual ties to the content providers to control the software on my set top box.
The Dish box has a bigger hard drive
But the TiVO's hard drive is upgradeable.
the Dish box has the ability to add an extra few minutes of recording to a show, if I desire
The Tivo will do the same if you use season passes instead of specifiying every show to record manually. It allows up to three additional minutes at both the beginning and the end of a scheduled program. If you're not using Season Passes, why bother with a TiVO?
Both record what I want, when I want.
You have a 'when' that you want? Why do you even know when Lost is on and what network shows it? Your DVR should be protecting you from needing to know that.
Four million seems a hell of a lot more than 700,000 to me... I don't think those problems will be in the same realm of reality.
If the 360 wasn't compelling to buyers already, and the PS3 isn't doing it for them now either, it seems the winner becomes Nintendo.
The lesson here, regardless of what happens, will be that the analysts were wrong, and we listened to 9 months of obnoxious fanboy flamewars about what the analysts were saying for no good reason.
That still doesn't make sense though, because they already have the digital signal. It would be surprising to me if they didn't make it available, even if that means re-using a connector to save money/generate additional accessories revenue.
I forgot to add to my other response... The lack of memory slots is unacceptable, regardless of the likelyhood that the lower end model is fully digital video capable.
Given that the original specs from Sony mentioned dual-DVI outs, that the A/V multi-out port has had the pins multiplexed to support component video for the PS2, and that there are exactly enough pins in the multi-out connector to support HDMI out, it wouldn't be too surprising if the less expensive PS3 supported digital video out over the MultiOut port. This would have the added benefit (for sony) of allowing them to sell an expensive adapter to people buying the cheaper model, but wanting a digital connection.
The way HDCP works will require the same digital signals internal to the machine that would be used to drive an HDMI interface, so it would actually be more expensive for them to then convert that to an analog signal.
Perhaps you meant to link to a different PDF? The one you linked to says nothing like that.
Ok, the thing is expensive, but let's cut the crap. It's exactly the same price as a similarly equipped 360. At least... As similarly equipped as you can get on the 360, what with the 360 not supporting digital video out and all.
Or are you forgetting that it's $100 for wireless networking on your 360?
Even as somebody who does not claim to be an English expert, I can say with authority both that he is an ass, and that he's wrong.
What he is saying is essentially like saying you shouldn't read the Bible, because it's old, it deals in customs that are no longer in practice, and people may take it litterally, so clearly it doesn't contain any insight into modern day values and situations. He should have some respect for his predecessors, and as an educated man he should both respect and understand the value of historical context. Without his predecessors, after all, he wouldn't have a job. Also, old and wrong are not the same thing; especially when it comes to language. Clearly anybody with half a brain would apply their knowledge of the modern world to the older text invalidating every point he made in that article, which it appears he wrote for no reason other than he felt like trash talking some dead guys.
I don't care what letters you have after your name, or how many years you've studied, or what you happen to be the foremost authority of. It's no excuse to be a pretentious ass.
Holy fuck that guy is pretentious.
How many of those recruiters were the employers?
Employers and recruiters are looking on these websites for qualified people. Maybe they just aren't looking for you.
More likely, you didn't read what I actually said. Of course you get one or more calls a day. It's not because you're special, it's because recruiters work like spammers. Phone calls are cheap, and it can't hurt to troll you for permission to submit your resume.
Those recruiters that call you look for job listings posted by employers, call you, and hook you up with the employer for a fee. If you had looked for postings instead of just posting your resume, you could have gotten many of those same contacts and you wouldn't have had the recruiter's fee taken out of your salary.
Recruiters most certainly *do* look at resume postings because they make mony off of you if you're foolish enough to respond to their e-mail. I, however, only mentioned employers. Sure, there are exceptions to the rule, but not many.
If you're going to use a recruiter, you're way better off finding one yourself instead of having one find you.
You never want to do business with a recruiter that finds you. You should find the recruiter, and you should do it based on recommendations. You want a recruiter that works for you, and you want the recruiter to understand that you have the upper hand in the relationship. A recruiter gets paid when you get a job, so the good recruiters understand it's in their best interests to find you something that fits, and perhaps even to do some salary negotiations for you. I've had a headhunter play two companies offers off each other for me to get me an extra $20,000 a year in salary... That's the kind of thing you should be looking for. If you've been working in industry for any reasonable amount of time, you know somebody that knows a good recruiter (or headhunter, or whatever you want to call them).
I'd say that responding to a recruiter that is soliciting you is just as bad as responding to spam, but it usually *is* responding to spam, so it would be redundant. It's not worth dealing with a recruter that makes money off your signed offer letter, but considers themselves an employee of the hiring company. You can get that job anyway every time, and their fee could be part of your salary.
That recruiter you're talking about, and that headhunter you mentioned... They're the same person. Don't let what they put on their business card fool you.
Also, hunting for jobs is hard enough, if you dont do everything you can, including putting your resume on sites like the ones above, then you are doing yourself a disservice.
I'm sorry, I would agree if you were unemployed, but if putting your resume online puts you at risk of losing your job, then not only are you not doing yourself any disservice by not posting it, you'd have to be an utter fool to post it... Especially, as I said before, since there are other effective ways to find employment. If you don't have a job, by all means, do everything in your power. There is no downside, but...
Just like when it comes to sales, you want to sell for the most and produce for the cheapest, when it comes to employment you want to produce the most and pay the least.
People in hell want ice water.
Employers want to be able to treat their employees like any other commodity. It has even become acceptable to refer to them as 'Human Resources'. That means it's a two way street though. If your employees are commodities, then the price can go up when there is another buyer. You can't corner the market.
The 'bad' employers end up losing in the end, because their poor management and attitudes cost them in productivity. The 'evil' companies get what's coming to them, and will continue to as long as there are plenty of non-evil companies out there.
The real problem is actually that his management probably didn't consider that the people may just have their resumes out there to see what's going on... Testing the waters. It doesn't have to mean that they actually are actively seeking to leave. They got upset because they expect loyalty, so innocent explanations escaped them. It really would be best if managers realized that they were in a business relationship with their employees, and nothing more. Just keep that relationship mutually beneficial and you don't have to worry about your employees leaving.
Don't post your resume on a job site.
Most employers don't hire by searching resumes on the web anyway. They post a listing and wait for the applicants to come to them. Also, the old way of finding a job is still the best. Use your network of contacts, or find a reputable headhunter (ask around. 1 headhunter in 100 isn't a schmuck, and somebody you know probably knows which one it is).
If your resume isn't out there in the public sense, you don't have to worry about your employer finding it. If posting your resume is all you're doing to find a job, you certainly don't have to worry about getting hired either.
A system that automates where possible is not treating the users like "idiots".
Selective automation at the expense of a uniform interface *is* treating the users like idiots.
Any automation that doesn't have the intermediate steps exposed to allow the user to execute manually or seperately *is* treating the users like idiots.
Clearly, you're one of the people who thinks he's good at UI design, yet remains responsible for the crap-piles that are modern applications. Of course, I am a bit biased. I think the "desktop" paradigm is broken, and I think dialog boxes shouldn't exist. Windows, and Windows-like GUIs maintain no visual history. Any good UI would show you at least a hint of the last few things you did. There is also no reason to interrupt user input do display errors and informational messages. Designers should eliminate the dialog box and look towards game designers for clues on how better to alert the user to important events. How can we put all this effort into into interface design and still have interfaces which wouldn't look all that surprising to a user from 1985? We don't have the limitations we had back then, and we've seen other ways to do it, so we should get with the times.
Yes, there is. It's confusing, disruptive and alarming for end users.
It doesn't need to be confusing if there is uniformity and a decent description of what is happening easily available. It's not any more disruptive than what they've implemented here, and it's only alarming if you assume the user is an idiot.
Clearly you've not used OS X much.
I do, actually, but I'm not a drag and drop kind of guy. I open a console for file operations. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've used the finder to move files around in the last five years.
You're right, of course, and I think it's broken, but at least it's not as rediculous as these Vista screenshots.
No, this imlementation (which is basically the same as OS X's) merely recognises that the vast majority of users won't know they'll need elevated privileges before they try and do something.
They can be informed by a simple "Permission Denied" message.
This system is nothing like the OSX system. They OSX system obtains authentication before attempting the operation. Apple got away with that mostly by breaking backwards compatability, but there is no reason legacy apps can't use pre-authentication with the proper error messages.
Treating your users like idiots creates an application for idiots. Treating your users like intellegent people creates intellegent users.
Isn't a restriction on censorship sofware, censorship in itself?
Close, but no.
XP didn't have sudo so you were always admin, Vista has sudo, enabled via annoying popups rather than a config file.
It's not the config file part that is broken, it's the UI part.
You see, first of all sudo specifies you want the permissions up front rather than asking for permission after the fact. If you try to do something using the legacy windows APIs, and you don't have permission, you shouldn't get a series of popups, the program's system call should fail, and the program should die. Programs should either ask you for permission (once) up front (like installers do on OSX), or you should specify that a program should run with permissions (via the right click menu "Run As..." or maybe with a modifier key held down). Second, sudo caches your authentication, so if you want to do multiple privlidged operations in a row, you aren't continually annoyed.
It's the post-authentication rather than the pre-authentication that Microsoft got wrong though. Microsoft clearly doesn't get it, and this implementation is completely broken.
You are only partially correct.
Your golf cart batteries contain, but Lead (II) Sulfate and distilled water, and only when they carry no charge. When you charge them, the electrodes become lead and lead (IV) oxide, and the distilled water becomes sulfuric acid. Overcharging generates heat. If the overcharging current is high enough, the heat is generated more quickly than it is radiated off the surface of the battery, and the sulfuric acid (the electrolyte) boils. At that point, the little bit of lead that is disolved in the electrolyte isn't really your problem.
Not only that, but the electrolosis that occurs during overcharge generates hydrogen and oxygen in exactly the right proportions to be explosive. This is why sealed lead acid batteries sometime explode, and why you should look away when you connect jumper cables to your car battery.
Be careful with your lead-acid batteries. They are great tools, but there is a lot of energy stored up in there, and they can hurt you if you don't treat them with respect. I can tell you from first hand experience that the month of your life that comes directly after the day you explode a deep cycle lead acid battery sucks.
I would suggest two things then. First: don't eat it. Second, recycle your batteries.
Overcharging lead-acid batteries can boil the electrolyte. Breathing in the fumes is both chemicaly toxic and corrosive. The battery may be fine assuming you don't melt anything, but you won't. I don't recommend it.
I've searched, but it seems neither product has it's manual online, so I can't give you any more details than above. The toothbrush is an Oral-B Sonic Elite, and the shaver is a norelco Spectra 8894 XL.
Both devices are marked with a NiCD/(recycling symbol) next to the area where they break open. The manual describes the process, and the toothbrush even has a pictogram on the bottom of the base showing how to do it and the words "battery recycling" embossed right next to the diagram.
Cadmium is *very* common. There aren't very many types of batteries that can deliver sustained, high current like a Nickel Cadmium battery. That's why they use them in Hybrid cars. There aren't any other types of battery that would be suitable for that use that wouldn't either be prohibitively expensive or heavy.
The batteries I would wonder about are the imports that sell for a fifth of the price of a set of duracels.
The same stuff that's in the duracells... just a lot less of it. Weigh a cheap battery sometime, and then weigh a duracell or an energizer, and you can see for yourself.
As for banning cadmium - how will cordless power tools go?
Or hybrid cars, for that matter...
All that's going to happen is the manufacturers will provide a facility for you to return the device so they can remove the battery. I don't think the bill says batteries have to be user-removable, just removable.
Many cordless appliances are already made in a way where, if you do something specific but non-obvious, the device breaks open and releases the battery. Both my electric razor and toothbrush have such facilities. The bottom of the charger base for the toothbrush has a protrusion that can twist the base of the brush in such a way that snaps it open. The razor has a "screw" that can be turned by the prongs on the plug. These are destructive operations... Plastic breaks and the device will be useless after you do it, but it gets the battery out.