And I can tell a HUGE difference in the performance of the connection during normal browsing activities. When downloading a new distribution or flac files their DSL connections seem unusable to me.
try to solve a problem. The symptom of the problem is that Apple only supports one DRM scheme. This is not anti-competative, it's forced on them by the vendors who sell through their store. The problem is DRM, which is by its very nature anticompetative Any laws passed to control DRM will seem hypocritical in different cases. If you pass a law that says you can't have DRM and must use standard formats (which Apple does), then the playing field opens up with fair competition and you don't have the hypocrisy and market problems that arise by trying to pass ad-hoc legislation for each case of a vendor with a popular DRM scheme. I personally won't buy DRM'd music. There are plenty of cheap and fast way to get music legally without DRM restrictions.
Mostly it's used in meetings where it is on the desk or table. It could also be on the dash of my car or on my knee where I can enter data while on the phone. This is something that just cannot be done with a keypad because you must hold it. Also there the fact that the tip of my thumb covers about 4 keys on the thing. Plus the keypad takes up screen space that could be used to make the palm applications on the phone as usable as they are on a full screen palm where the graffiti area disappears when not in use.
... and I can't stand it. I could enter data incredibly fast with one hand with pen on the palm, with the treo I have to fumble using those stupid small keyboards, which takes two hands and is very, very , very slow compared to just writing something with the pen. I have just about given up on entering any data into the thing because it is so difficult. I want a palm phone with no keyboard. I guess I'll be going back to my regular old palm and separate phone though.
I have rarely talked to a tech support person. I never talked to one with Vonage (that was a typo in the original post) In the three times have it was because of defective hardware and in those three times I could actually hear them reading the lines (awkwardly with mispronunciations) and I could hear the pages turning. With Vonage it was sales people who gave me trouble. Bastards referred to my experience with the company in general. And anyone who considers themselves important or takes themselves serious probably isn't worth talking to.
Technically, it was not tech support that I had the problem with, I know that they have to follow a script and cannot answer your actual question. When I called to cancel the subscription. I had to go through three layers of customer service people who berated me and belittled me like I have never had happen before. I said that Vonage did not perform adequately for me and they gave me the third degree making it sound like I was too stupid to use their product. When the third person gave me the exact same "Lily Tomlin" customer harassment, I realized it must have been a scripted, heavy handed tactic to force easily intimidated people to keep the service. If Comcast can put Vonage out of business I'm all for it. Then I'll go back to hating Comcast. I have Comcast, and my upload and downlaod speed have been consistent and very high. I do a lot of bitorrent and full-screen video chats and it is flawless. The only other option in my area is Bell South and the people with that don't get a quarter of the bandwidth I do.
It was a few years ago that I had Vonage, but at the time I had a spec sheet from Comcast that listed a lower upload speed than Vonage (in the fine print) said they recommended. I am fairly ignorant of networking details, but that was what my paperwork said.
I had Comcast and Vonage. Comcast's lower lever service has a limited upload cap which is not quite enough to get consistently clear calls, especially if you are doing anything else with the computer at the same time. It is not clear that this is a problem because they don't talk about upload bandwidth on the Vonage box, only total bandwidth, which Comcast technically meets. I cancelled Vonage after a couple of months, when I encountered almost comical ass-ness from the Vonage customer support. Those guys are complete bastards.
How about this? Theaters install metal detectors and take cell phone away from people. If you can't be out of contact for a 90 min movie then you don't need technological help, you need psychological help.
I disagree with this wholeheartedly. I work in a very specialized field and hiring a person without a BS in chemistry is almost completely out of the question. All professions require training and training my folks is one of the most time consuming tasks I undertake. The people who take the most time to train are the ones with years of real-world experience. All of our work involves making decisions from fundamental theory and the people with experience but no education know what buttons to push to get things done, but it is impossible to get them to design new buttons. On the other hand you can bring in well educated people with no experience and although the still require a lot of training the flow right into the process very smoothly. Admittedly there are poorly educated people with degrees and stupid people with degrees but that is what the interview process is for. For techical jobs like our there is a ton of fundamental stuff that you must know and you are not likely to "pick up" with real-world experience because it is so fundamental.
The Squeezebox streams internet radio quite well to all the rooms in my house, and quite invisibly too. No different than all my other audio equipment and distinctly not computerish.
The problem is not the technology....
on
Vonage IPO
·
· Score: 1
The problem is that Vonage sucks as a company. I had Vonage, the call quality was poor, the modem had problems which required technical support (for which I had to endure the reading of scripted questions by non-english-speakers), my ISP has enough of an upload cap that you can't really do anything significant on the internet AND get a call at the same time, the call quality is poor, calls are frequently dropped or don't connect, and they aren't groqing fast enough to provide local access numbers to a lot of people outside big cities. When I finally got completely fed up I called to cancel the service... that's when I was abosultely attacked by customer service rep who essentially called me a moron for not wanting his service... this was pure Lily Tomlin "without us, you got no damn phone" behavior. I was then transfered to another individual who gave me same treatment and then another, which suggests that this is not poor individual behavior, but rather a company policy of trying to intimidate people into keeping the service. The short of it... I still have a phone... I don't and won't use Vonage. Any company who has this type of poor customer service attitude cannot have huge growth prospects.
...swimmng, biking, I guess the virus just can't catch up with you. Or maybe the increased oxygen levels kill it, or something in all those vegatables. Oh, wait.. this is slashdot... I better stop before someone takes this comment seriously.
You are assuming a single donation, an individual donor, and no change in the value of the donated assets over time. Turner's was donted corporately over time, so it is possible that he was able to shield some money from taxes which then appreciated. There are a lot of convoluted ways to donate money.
I read that years ago when Ted Turner became the first person to donate a billion dollars to charity it turned out eventually that after all the accounting was done, he turned a profit on the donation. I suspect the same thing motivates Gates and possibly Jobs. If you're rich you may make less money by not giving it away.
I'll do what I did with DVD, DVD-A, SACD, HDCD. I won't buy anything until one player can play all of them. This was an impossible situation with Beta/VHS. I expect it will happen quickly with the hardware this time. The formats will confuse the hell out of people who just want a DVD though, sort of like back when Apple had a 100 models of macs that were all pretty much the same.
They are very similar implementations of the same idea.
Konfabulator - much better designed widgets in that the shape of the widget conveys information (the weather widget has a big cloud when raining, moon at night etc. However, it seems to be a VERY inefficient javascript engine as it seem to consume huge amounts of CPU to do very simple things. I also prefer the widgets to sit on the desktop and appear at the touch of a button.
Dashboard - so far much poorer widget design, the vast majority are just squares with some kind of pretty information in them, not nearly as useful. For instance a package tracker widget should be a box when it is mailed, a plane when its on the plane, etc. On the plus side it seems to be VERY efficient and I have never notice a significant draw on the CPU. A downside is that you a pretty much stuck with Steve Jobs version of where widgets should be and how they should be seen. Unless you hack a little the widgets onl;y sit on the Dashboard and as far as I can tell there is no way to make them seemlessly go back and forth between the dashboard and the desktop.
If Wikipedia would just change it's tagline to say "Wikipedia: A maliable freeform database of community knowledge" It couldn't really be criticised by either side of the argument and it would remian equally useful.
about this story that I could find it certainly seems that no podjacking occurred. It seems more like podkeyword is a bad service for people interested in the stats about their audience, but it seems that they did nothing wrong. It seems the creator of the podcast did not understand all the workings of the process and created a great deal of confusion about how his feed was disseminated and then expected others to fix it for him. Perhaps podkeyword could be more clear that they are not publishing your url, but rather assuming control of traffic going to your url. (I have not been to podkeyword so maybe they are clear about what they are doing and the author clicked through something without reading it?) It seems the author could have kept control, initially with the right info, but I would also think that he has no right to make demands because of his mistakes.
I pay 11.99 for some popular cd at Best Buy when it comes out, because they know they will sell millions of them. I pay 18.99 or more for the obscure stuff that only a few of us want.
The real evil here is that if people understood their computers, they would never allowed this to be installed, if it was, the would remove it and Claria would not see these huge profits. If you can only make money off stupid people you are evil by definition.
Every small New York City Electronics store I have ever been in has done these same type of things. Back in the 80's a guy tried to sell me an original Game Boy for $200, but he had openned the box and tried to sell the included items for even more. I went to another small shop, and another and found exactly the same thing. Even at Circuit City I get lied to about half the time, at Best Buy I haven't caught them lying, but they certainly don't seem to know what they are talking about the majority of the time. It's not like the guy in this shop is some type of anomalous criminal, I bet he is in the majority.
Amen. I don't know why all the major download places don't just use flac. With broadband its only 10-25 minute download for a cd and you get the good quality sound. Some places even offer DVD-Audio quality sound. I would literarly never stop downloading CDs if I could get them as flac with the cover art for about $8. I already download 100 of them from the smaller independent band sellers.
from Cingular. I have had several mobile providers and I am having more problems getting a signal with Cingular than with any other provider. I wish they'd improve the network before they add useless extra features.
Go phone, good reception, prompt voicemail, caller ID. No convergence with other devices. Simplicity made the iPod popular. I want a phone with the same philiosphy.
Funny how people stumble on something from the past (blogging) and call it the future. Some people are so detached that they cannot even manage the present.
Slashdot Mirror
And I can tell a HUGE difference in the performance of the connection during normal browsing activities. When downloading a new distribution or flac files their DSL connections seem unusable to me.
try to solve a problem. The symptom of the problem is that Apple only supports one DRM scheme. This is not anti-competative, it's forced on them by the vendors who sell through their store. The problem is DRM, which is by its very nature anticompetative Any laws passed to control DRM will seem hypocritical in different cases. If you pass a law that says you can't have DRM and must use standard formats (which Apple does), then the playing field opens up with fair competition and you don't have the hypocrisy and market problems that arise by trying to pass ad-hoc legislation for each case of a vendor with a popular DRM scheme. I personally won't buy DRM'd music. There are plenty of cheap and fast way to get music legally without DRM restrictions.
Mostly it's used in meetings where it is on the desk or table. It could also be on the dash of my car or on my knee where I can enter data while on the phone. This is something that just cannot be done with a keypad because you must hold it. Also there the fact that the tip of my thumb covers about 4 keys on the thing. Plus the keypad takes up screen space that could be used to make the palm applications on the phone as usable as they are on a full screen palm where the graffiti area disappears when not in use.
... and I can't stand it. I could enter data incredibly fast with one hand with pen on the palm, with the treo I have to fumble using those stupid small keyboards, which takes two hands and is very, very , very slow compared to just writing something with the pen. I have just about given up on entering any data into the thing because it is so difficult. I want a palm phone with no keyboard. I guess I'll be going back to my regular old palm and separate phone though.
I have rarely talked to a tech support person. I never talked to one with Vonage (that was a typo in the original post) In the three times have it was because of defective hardware and in those three times I could actually hear them reading the lines (awkwardly with mispronunciations) and I could hear the pages turning. With Vonage it was sales people who gave me trouble. Bastards referred to my experience with the company in general. And anyone who considers themselves important or takes themselves serious probably isn't worth talking to.
Technically, it was not tech support that I had the problem with, I know that they have to follow a script and cannot answer your actual question. When I called to cancel the subscription. I had to go through three layers of customer service people who berated me and belittled me like I have never had happen before. I said that Vonage did not perform adequately for me and they gave me the third degree making it sound like I was too stupid to use their product. When the third person gave me the exact same "Lily Tomlin" customer harassment, I realized it must have been a scripted, heavy handed tactic to force easily intimidated people to keep the service. If Comcast can put Vonage out of business I'm all for it. Then I'll go back to hating Comcast. I have Comcast, and my upload and downlaod speed have been consistent and very high. I do a lot of bitorrent and full-screen video chats and it is flawless. The only other option in my area is Bell South and the people with that don't get a quarter of the bandwidth I do.
It was a few years ago that I had Vonage, but at the time I had a spec sheet from Comcast that listed a lower upload speed than Vonage (in the fine print) said they recommended. I am fairly ignorant of networking details, but that was what my paperwork said.
I had Comcast and Vonage. Comcast's lower lever service has a limited upload cap which is not quite enough to get consistently clear calls, especially if you are doing anything else with the computer at the same time. It is not clear that this is a problem because they don't talk about upload bandwidth on the Vonage box, only total bandwidth, which Comcast technically meets. I cancelled Vonage after a couple of months, when I encountered almost comical ass-ness from the Vonage customer support. Those guys are complete bastards.
How about this? Theaters install metal detectors and take cell phone away from people. If you can't be out of contact for a 90 min movie then you don't need technological help, you need psychological help.
I disagree with this wholeheartedly. I work in a very specialized field and hiring a person without a BS in chemistry is almost completely out of the question. All professions require training and training my folks is one of the most time consuming tasks I undertake. The people who take the most time to train are the ones with years of real-world experience. All of our work involves making decisions from fundamental theory and the people with experience but no education know what buttons to push to get things done, but it is impossible to get them to design new buttons. On the other hand you can bring in well educated people with no experience and although the still require a lot of training the flow right into the process very smoothly. Admittedly there are poorly educated people with degrees and stupid people with degrees but that is what the interview process is for. For techical jobs like our there is a ton of fundamental stuff that you must know and you are not likely to "pick up" with real-world experience because it is so fundamental.
The Squeezebox streams internet radio quite well to all the rooms in my house, and quite invisibly too. No different than all my other audio equipment and distinctly not computerish.
The problem is that Vonage sucks as a company. I had Vonage, the call quality was poor, the modem had problems which required technical support (for which I had to endure the reading of scripted questions by non-english-speakers), my ISP has enough of an upload cap that you can't really do anything significant on the internet AND get a call at the same time, the call quality is poor, calls are frequently dropped or don't connect, and they aren't groqing fast enough to provide local access numbers to a lot of people outside big cities. When I finally got completely fed up I called to cancel the service... that's when I was abosultely attacked by customer service rep who essentially called me a moron for not wanting his service... this was pure Lily Tomlin "without us, you got no damn phone" behavior. I was then transfered to another individual who gave me same treatment and then another, which suggests that this is not poor individual behavior, but rather a company policy of trying to intimidate people into keeping the service. The short of it... I still have a phone... I don't and won't use Vonage. Any company who has this type of poor customer service attitude cannot have huge growth prospects.
...swimmng, biking, I guess the virus just can't catch up with you. Or maybe the increased oxygen levels kill it, or something in all those vegatables. Oh, wait.. this is slashdot... I better stop before someone takes this comment seriously.
You are assuming a single donation, an individual donor, and no change in the value of the donated assets over time. Turner's was donted corporately over time, so it is possible that he was able to shield some money from taxes which then appreciated. There are a lot of convoluted ways to donate money.
I read that years ago when Ted Turner became the first person to donate a billion dollars to charity it turned out eventually that after all the accounting was done, he turned a profit on the donation. I suspect the same thing motivates Gates and possibly Jobs. If you're rich you may make less money by not giving it away.
Lets all sing together... "Apple is in the Hardware Business"
I'll do what I did with DVD, DVD-A, SACD, HDCD. I won't buy anything until one player can play all of them. This was an impossible situation with Beta/VHS. I expect it will happen quickly with the hardware this time. The formats will confuse the hell out of people who just want a DVD though, sort of like back when Apple had a 100 models of macs that were all pretty much the same.
They are very similar implementations of the same idea.
Konfabulator - much better designed widgets in that the shape of the widget conveys information (the weather widget has a big cloud when raining, moon at night etc. However, it seems to be a VERY inefficient javascript engine as it seem to consume huge amounts of CPU to do very simple things. I also prefer the widgets to sit on the desktop and appear at the touch of a button.
Dashboard - so far much poorer widget design, the vast majority are just squares with some kind of pretty information in them, not nearly as useful. For instance a package tracker widget should be a box when it is mailed, a plane when its on the plane, etc. On the plus side it seems to be VERY efficient and I have never notice a significant draw on the CPU. A downside is that you a pretty much stuck with Steve Jobs version of where widgets should be and how they should be seen. Unless you hack a little the widgets onl;y sit on the Dashboard and as far as I can tell there is no way to make them seemlessly go back and forth between the dashboard and the desktop.
If Wikipedia would just change it's tagline to say "Wikipedia: A maliable freeform database of community knowledge" It couldn't really be criticised by either side of the argument and it would remian equally useful.
about this story that I could find it certainly seems that no podjacking occurred. It seems more like podkeyword is a bad service for people interested in the stats about their audience, but it seems that they did nothing wrong. It seems the creator of the podcast did not understand all the workings of the process and created a great deal of confusion about how his feed was disseminated and then expected others to fix it for him. Perhaps podkeyword could be more clear that they are not publishing your url, but rather assuming control of traffic going to your url. (I have not been to podkeyword so maybe they are clear about what they are doing and the author clicked through something without reading it?) It seems the author could have kept control, initially with the right info, but I would also think that he has no right to make demands because of his mistakes.
I pay 11.99 for some popular cd at Best Buy when it comes out, because they know they will sell millions of them. I pay 18.99 or more for the obscure stuff that only a few of us want.
The real evil here is that if people understood their computers, they would never allowed this to be installed, if it was, the would remove it and Claria would not see these huge profits. If you can only make money off stupid people you are evil by definition.
Every small New York City Electronics store I have ever been in has done these same type of things. Back in the 80's a guy tried to sell me an original Game Boy for $200, but he had openned the box and tried to sell the included items for even more. I went to another small shop, and another and found exactly the same thing. Even at Circuit City I get lied to about half the time, at Best Buy I haven't caught them lying, but they certainly don't seem to know what they are talking about the majority of the time. It's not like the guy in this shop is some type of anomalous criminal, I bet he is in the majority.
Amen. I don't know why all the major download places don't just use flac. With broadband its only 10-25 minute download for a cd and you get the good quality sound. Some places even offer DVD-Audio quality sound. I would literarly never stop downloading CDs if I could get them as flac with the cover art for about $8. I already download 100 of them from the smaller independent band sellers.
Actually I do know why... but I want flac anyway.
from Cingular. I have had several mobile providers and I am having more problems getting a signal with Cingular than with any other provider. I wish they'd improve the network before they add useless extra features.
Go phone, good reception, prompt voicemail, caller ID. No convergence with other devices. Simplicity made the iPod popular. I want a phone with the same philiosphy.
Funny how people stumble on something from the past (blogging) and call it the future. Some people are so detached that they cannot even manage the present.