RadioShack could stick to its core demographic, and be poised to take advantage of an absolute ton of very high dollar and high margin business. The RC hobby industry is lucrative and stable. We're probably less than a decade away from bridging the gap between that and personal "drones." We live in an electronic age where most communication is STILL handled by radio waves. And the tech behind it all is becoming more and more accessible to average consumers.
And RadioShack wants to focus on cell phones.
They have tons of options. But yeah, if they stick to the current plan of being some weird mini-BestBuy, then they are screwed. Believe me, in ten years, there will be some company acting as an industry leader for things that RadioShack used to have a hand in. It *could* be RadioShack, if they want it to be.
Is this really something that's best fixed by expecting Nvidia/ATI/Intel to release higher quality drivers for every distro? Or is this a distro problem, where LInux will simply never have ability to handle acceleration very well because it's a constantly-moving target?
It's an honest question. I'm curious to see what people involved with either Linux or GPU drivers thinks.
RadioShack reminds me a lot of how CompUSA was run into the ground during its final decade of business. You basically had upper management throwing random ideas at the wall hoping to see what sticks (not much). The truth is, companies like these fail because the they are constantly trying to hitch themselves to the latest "bandwagon" rather than focusing on their core business.
With CompUSA, it was a result of them trying to become a BestBuy clone. In doing so, they relegated their core business of computer parts to one or two small isles of video cards, and their tech services devolved into being middle men shipping laptops out for warranty service. They chose instead to focus selling printers (because the ink and cables were high margin), TV's (because they wanted to be like BestBuy), cameras (because most could only be returned to the manufacturer back then, bypassing the store's bottom line or a while), and a shitload of laptops (but only because they could sell TAP on them). They replaced that stuff with such a wide variety of product that sometimes it felt like they had absorbed one of the generic Indian retailers that hangs out in mall hallways selling cheap RC copters, or Sega Genesis emulators. There was even a laughable attempt by the store manager to try and sell this new HD VHS system as being the next big thing, and how the AV quality was better then either HD-DVD or BluRay.
The biggest sign of trouble, however, was TAP (Technology Assurance Program, if I remember correctly). It was basically your standard high-margin warranty extension that most places offer. You can tell when a company is truly screwed because they begin to view these "products" as the only viable source of revenue, and begin training staff to push them as hard as possible. There were times where employees were basically instructed to use fear tactics to sell TAP, where they would play out scenarios for the customer like "You don't want to open this new monitor and find out there's a dead pixel do you? We can't return it if you don't purchase TAP!" Of course you also people like the best salesmen claiming TAP covered practically everything from flooding to divine retribution, when in reality it was basically an extension of the manufacturer's warranty.
The reason I bring all of this up is because the same patterns happened with Circuit City, and now RadioShack. They've confused their core business model with newer shiny opportunities, like cell phones, and service plans. It's fine to expand your business with those things, but it should never push your bread and butter out of the spotlight. RadioShack can branch out all it wants, as long as its stores continue to offer the core services (hacker parts, electronics, and knowledgeable staff) front and center. Since it isn't doing that, it will become another CompUSA.
Settlements are sometimes used that way, but I don't see what the problem is. Especially when you're talking about large companies with various branches and regions. It gives them a chance to avoid court expenses, compensate the wronged party, and not disrupt their stock or other business dealings as a result. That doesn't mean they are a "scumbag company" that was just trying to bribe someone into shutting up. And even if they were, go bitch to the person who took the settlement.
What is a big part why? Because it limits the winner's ability to act like a spoiled asshole, as well as disclosing the actual amount of money involved?
I still think his claim that his daughter was "psychologically scarred" is kind of funny. Yeah, she's so scarred from the experience of her father not getting a job that she's bragging about a paid trip to Europe.
Just remember your comments the next time you want to get angry at the various domestic spying issues, police state misteps, or other violations of privacy.
And if I somehow new that a particular pen being worn was one of those, I'd probably get pretty angry about it as well. I keep seeing this basic argument come up here, and it's kind of amazing how everyone keeps missing the point. Glass is NOT a spy device. It's not designed to be. It's not marketed as one. It's just supposed to be some cool new tech toy that also happens to record video. Someone wearing Glass isn't trying to disguise it or anything.
But seriously, next time you are in a line at a store or something, take out your phone and start pretending to record people next to you. Don't try and hide it, just hold it up to your face and record. If they ask, tell them you aren't recording anything, but still continue point the camera at them and their family anyway. See what kind of reaction you get.
No it doesn't bother me because the "spy equipment" you're talking about is designed specifically for that purpose. Glass is not spy equipment. It's a normal electronic device that Google will be bringing to the open market (supposedly) this year, that also happens to allow a for some pretty massive breaches in privacy.
I wouldn't be surprised if this leads to some weird social version of MAD, where the main defense against having random people recording you in a public place is to be able to record them as well. We'll have everyone trying to stare each other down with their best "come at me bro" facial expression.
In the long-term, there probably isn't much of a solution to this problem. I just think it's laughable and a bit sad to see the same people who rail against NSA activities, and expanded government monitoring, etc, to sit here and pretend that normal citizens with access to even more overtly creepy recording capabilities are somehow going to be more responsible with the devices. Because, you know, people are nice like that.
Something in the black market is still harder to come by for criminals than if it were freely available. The only part of your argument that makes sense is that it decreases the available for good uses.
Except that I do understand how it works, and definitely do not like the idea of having that kind of product around. But yeah, I must be buying into fear and hype because there's no other reason for people to not like the idea of having a fairly concealed recording device that may or may not be recording.
If you're checking your email by holding it up like a camera and pointing it at people, then I guess you have an argument. The problem with Glass is that there's no real visual or physical cue of what the person is doing with it. Is there a light on? What does it mean? Am I being recorded (or being included in a recording of someone else)?.
As for your last comment, I think you're wrong. People don't really have access to video cameras that "give little to no indication that they are recording." If someone wants to be deliberately sneaky, they could certainly use a recorder without holding it up or something, but that's entirely different than a product that is in the same position regardless of which function is in use.
Well, apparently RadioShack must not be able to afford such a standard response. Or maybe some random manager is just trying to pass the buck in an effort to salvage a quarterly bonus or something. Either way, maybe they shouldn't have blown their wad on a superbowl commercial, and instead focused on just being a quality store where you can get electronics and electronic parts. Not every company needs to exist as a industry behemoth.
Anytime an employer complains about not being able to find "qualified" workers, what they really mean is they are having a hard time finding qualified workers willing to work for the wages being offered. The bottleneck is on their end, not the workforce.
I don't think these elevators would operate like a normal elevator, where you have cables pulling a structure up, so you wouldn't have to worry about a spool of anything getting tangled. Most designs have the structure actually "crawling" up the cable.
Financial gain may be the most likely reason for advancement now, but it won't take more than another 50 to 100 years for it to become a necessity due to any combination of pollution, population, warfare, and resource depletion. Humans have always been really crappy at innovating unless we absolutely have to. When we aren't faced with some kind of crisis, we tend to get really good at perfecting known technologies and ideas, but that's about it.
So yeah, space exploration is pretty much out of the question as long as people (both investors and consumers) are more interested in mobile phone games and reality TV. As soon as shit hits the fan again -- and it will -- we'll see another big leap in advancement.
I know of a lot of companies where developing and maintaining an app is cheaper than doing the same for a mobile website, where they have to keep better track of things like bandwidth and security. Having said that, I've also seen a lot of instances where a mobile app ends up being nothing more than a glorified browser that can only access their mobile web page, which I guess is a cost-effective method of getting an app out to your audience fast.
Like it or not, people expect websites and services to be available as an app. They probably also use their phones home screen as a traditional bookmark system, where they can launch the service without having to first open a browser.
I'm not going to argue that the system is technically better than simply having mobile site for people to access, but the current system isn't really the result of lazy or shortsighted developers who don't understand what people want.
It's worth it when you think it's worth it. There's no checklist or mathematical breaking point to tell you when to switch. This sounds more like you lack a solid structure of friends, so you're coming here in search of a support group.
Neither are very good analogies. Not all writers are great with the technical sides of written language, even if they are better than the average person. That's why most writers have a working relationship with at least one editor. Ultimately, it all comes down to knowing what tools are available to you, and when to use (or not use) those tools.
Assuming this is true, I'm curious about why Sarah Harrison is still involved as closely as she is. I've sometimes wondered if she found Snowden to be more of the kind of person she thought or hoped Assange was.
Break your password up into two parts: the root and the suffix. The root part of the password is the complex part, that you want to change periodically yet is the same for all of your services. The suffix part is simple to remember and unique to each service, and should be consistently derived from the service itself.
For example, lets say you are setting up a password for your Yahoo account. The root part is "TLi945!zx" and the suffix would be "yahoo" resulting in a password of "TLi945!zxyahoo".
Your password for Outlook might be "TLi945!zxoutlook". And so on. Each password is strong enough to hold up to pretty much any brute force attack, and when it comes time to changing your passwords, all you have to worry about memorizing is the root part. Then you just think about what service you are logging into and append it. Since the root part of your password gets used very frequently across all of your accounts, you can make it more complex than normal due to muscle memory building up faster.
Also, it might be worth making the suffix a little less obvious than the name of the service. You could instead do something like the first, second, and last letter of the name, so the Yahoo password would look like "TLi945zxyao" and the Outlook password would look like "TLi945zxouk".
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Except that DX 12 will more than likely require Win 8, so it will be a mostly underutilized option.
RadioShack could stick to its core demographic, and be poised to take advantage of an absolute ton of very high dollar and high margin business. The RC hobby industry is lucrative and stable. We're probably less than a decade away from bridging the gap between that and personal "drones." We live in an electronic age where most communication is STILL handled by radio waves. And the tech behind it all is becoming more and more accessible to average consumers.
And RadioShack wants to focus on cell phones.
They have tons of options. But yeah, if they stick to the current plan of being some weird mini-BestBuy, then they are screwed. Believe me, in ten years, there will be some company acting as an industry leader for things that RadioShack used to have a hand in. It *could* be RadioShack, if they want it to be.
Is this really something that's best fixed by expecting Nvidia/ATI/Intel to release higher quality drivers for every distro? Or is this a distro problem, where LInux will simply never have ability to handle acceleration very well because it's a constantly-moving target?
It's an honest question. I'm curious to see what people involved with either Linux or GPU drivers thinks.
They obviously mean "beta" quality. Google Maps is hardly beta quality, regardless of what they label it.
RadioShack reminds me a lot of how CompUSA was run into the ground during its final decade of business. You basically had upper management throwing random ideas at the wall hoping to see what sticks (not much). The truth is, companies like these fail because the they are constantly trying to hitch themselves to the latest "bandwagon" rather than focusing on their core business.
With CompUSA, it was a result of them trying to become a BestBuy clone. In doing so, they relegated their core business of computer parts to one or two small isles of video cards, and their tech services devolved into being middle men shipping laptops out for warranty service. They chose instead to focus selling printers (because the ink and cables were high margin), TV's (because they wanted to be like BestBuy), cameras (because most could only be returned to the manufacturer back then, bypassing the store's bottom line or a while), and a shitload of laptops (but only because they could sell TAP on them). They replaced that stuff with such a wide variety of product that sometimes it felt like they had absorbed one of the generic Indian retailers that hangs out in mall hallways selling cheap RC copters, or Sega Genesis emulators. There was even a laughable attempt by the store manager to try and sell this new HD VHS system as being the next big thing, and how the AV quality was better then either HD-DVD or BluRay.
The biggest sign of trouble, however, was TAP (Technology Assurance Program, if I remember correctly). It was basically your standard high-margin warranty extension that most places offer. You can tell when a company is truly screwed because they begin to view these "products" as the only viable source of revenue, and begin training staff to push them as hard as possible. There were times where employees were basically instructed to use fear tactics to sell TAP, where they would play out scenarios for the customer like "You don't want to open this new monitor and find out there's a dead pixel do you? We can't return it if you don't purchase TAP!" Of course you also people like the best salesmen claiming TAP covered practically everything from flooding to divine retribution, when in reality it was basically an extension of the manufacturer's warranty.
The reason I bring all of this up is because the same patterns happened with Circuit City, and now RadioShack. They've confused their core business model with newer shiny opportunities, like cell phones, and service plans. It's fine to expand your business with those things, but it should never push your bread and butter out of the spotlight. RadioShack can branch out all it wants, as long as its stores continue to offer the core services (hacker parts, electronics, and knowledgeable staff) front and center. Since it isn't doing that, it will become another CompUSA.
Settlements are sometimes used that way, but I don't see what the problem is. Especially when you're talking about large companies with various branches and regions. It gives them a chance to avoid court expenses, compensate the wronged party, and not disrupt their stock or other business dealings as a result. That doesn't mean they are a "scumbag company" that was just trying to bribe someone into shutting up. And even if they were, go bitch to the person who took the settlement.
Maybe they should start probing the constant raping going on. What a fucked up country.
What is a big part why? Because it limits the winner's ability to act like a spoiled asshole, as well as disclosing the actual amount of money involved?
I still think his claim that his daughter was "psychologically scarred" is kind of funny. Yeah, she's so scarred from the experience of her father not getting a job that she's bragging about a paid trip to Europe.
Just remember your comments the next time you want to get angry at the various domestic spying issues, police state misteps, or other violations of privacy.
And if I somehow new that a particular pen being worn was one of those, I'd probably get pretty angry about it as well. I keep seeing this basic argument come up here, and it's kind of amazing how everyone keeps missing the point. Glass is NOT a spy device. It's not designed to be. It's not marketed as one. It's just supposed to be some cool new tech toy that also happens to record video. Someone wearing Glass isn't trying to disguise it or anything.
But seriously, next time you are in a line at a store or something, take out your phone and start pretending to record people next to you. Don't try and hide it, just hold it up to your face and record. If they ask, tell them you aren't recording anything, but still continue point the camera at them and their family anyway. See what kind of reaction you get.
No it doesn't bother me because the "spy equipment" you're talking about is designed specifically for that purpose. Glass is not spy equipment. It's a normal electronic device that Google will be bringing to the open market (supposedly) this year, that also happens to allow a for some pretty massive breaches in privacy.
I wouldn't be surprised if this leads to some weird social version of MAD, where the main defense against having random people recording you in a public place is to be able to record them as well. We'll have everyone trying to stare each other down with their best "come at me bro" facial expression.
In the long-term, there probably isn't much of a solution to this problem. I just think it's laughable and a bit sad to see the same people who rail against NSA activities, and expanded government monitoring, etc, to sit here and pretend that normal citizens with access to even more overtly creepy recording capabilities are somehow going to be more responsible with the devices. Because, you know, people are nice like that.
Something in the black market is still harder to come by for criminals than if it were freely available. The only part of your argument that makes sense is that it decreases the available for good uses.
Except that I do understand how it works, and definitely do not like the idea of having that kind of product around. But yeah, I must be buying into fear and hype because there's no other reason for people to not like the idea of having a fairly concealed recording device that may or may not be recording.
If you're checking your email by holding it up like a camera and pointing it at people, then I guess you have an argument. The problem with Glass is that there's no real visual or physical cue of what the person is doing with it. Is there a light on? What does it mean? Am I being recorded (or being included in a recording of someone else)?.
As for your last comment, I think you're wrong. People don't really have access to video cameras that "give little to no indication that they are recording." If someone wants to be deliberately sneaky, they could certainly use a recorder without holding it up or something, but that's entirely different than a product that is in the same position regardless of which function is in use.
I'm just amazed he wasn't sued by Nintendo.
Well, apparently RadioShack must not be able to afford such a standard response. Or maybe some random manager is just trying to pass the buck in an effort to salvage a quarterly bonus or something. Either way, maybe they shouldn't have blown their wad on a superbowl commercial, and instead focused on just being a quality store where you can get electronics and electronic parts. Not every company needs to exist as a industry behemoth.
Anytime an employer complains about not being able to find "qualified" workers, what they really mean is they are having a hard time finding qualified workers willing to work for the wages being offered. The bottleneck is on their end, not the workforce.
I don't think these elevators would operate like a normal elevator, where you have cables pulling a structure up, so you wouldn't have to worry about a spool of anything getting tangled. Most designs have the structure actually "crawling" up the cable.
Financial gain may be the most likely reason for advancement now, but it won't take more than another 50 to 100 years for it to become a necessity due to any combination of pollution, population, warfare, and resource depletion. Humans have always been really crappy at innovating unless we absolutely have to. When we aren't faced with some kind of crisis, we tend to get really good at perfecting known technologies and ideas, but that's about it.
So yeah, space exploration is pretty much out of the question as long as people (both investors and consumers) are more interested in mobile phone games and reality TV. As soon as shit hits the fan again -- and it will -- we'll see another big leap in advancement.
I know of a lot of companies where developing and maintaining an app is cheaper than doing the same for a mobile website, where they have to keep better track of things like bandwidth and security. Having said that, I've also seen a lot of instances where a mobile app ends up being nothing more than a glorified browser that can only access their mobile web page, which I guess is a cost-effective method of getting an app out to your audience fast.
Like it or not, people expect websites and services to be available as an app. They probably also use their phones home screen as a traditional bookmark system, where they can launch the service without having to first open a browser.
I'm not going to argue that the system is technically better than simply having mobile site for people to access, but the current system isn't really the result of lazy or shortsighted developers who don't understand what people want.
It's worth it when you think it's worth it. There's no checklist or mathematical breaking point to tell you when to switch. This sounds more like you lack a solid structure of friends, so you're coming here in search of a support group.
Neither are very good analogies. Not all writers are great with the technical sides of written language, even if they are better than the average person. That's why most writers have a working relationship with at least one editor. Ultimately, it all comes down to knowing what tools are available to you, and when to use (or not use) those tools.
Assuming this is true, I'm curious about why Sarah Harrison is still involved as closely as she is. I've sometimes wondered if she found Snowden to be more of the kind of person she thought or hoped Assange was.
Break your password up into two parts: the root and the suffix. The root part of the password is the complex part, that you want to change periodically yet is the same for all of your services. The suffix part is simple to remember and unique to each service, and should be consistently derived from the service itself.
For example, lets say you are setting up a password for your Yahoo account. The root part is "TLi945!zx" and the suffix would be "yahoo" resulting in a password of "TLi945!zxyahoo".
Your password for Outlook might be "TLi945!zxoutlook". And so on. Each password is strong enough to hold up to pretty much any brute force attack, and when it comes time to changing your passwords, all you have to worry about memorizing is the root part. Then you just think about what service you are logging into and append it. Since the root part of your password gets used very frequently across all of your accounts, you can make it more complex than normal due to muscle memory building up faster.
Also, it might be worth making the suffix a little less obvious than the name of the service. You could instead do something like the first, second, and last letter of the name, so the Yahoo password would look like "TLi945zxyao" and the Outlook password would look like "TLi945zxouk".