I took a look at one of my recent paystubs. When you consider federal and state taxes, social security, medicare/medicaid, state disability insurance, state unemployment insurance, 401k, flexible spending, health, dental, vision (including the part that my employer pays) it adds up to about 50% of my gross income. Not so different from Europe, as far as I can tell... only here i get to deal with private providers that try to screw me every chance they get.
My rep voted for the health care bill, which is what I wanted. He believes in network neutrality. He runs on a platform of social liberalism. He is a scientist, while his main opponent is a lawyer. Yeah, I think he still has my vote.
True, but unless you're a professional that cares about the spectral composition of your light sources, it doesn't really matter. 99% of complaints about CFL light are related to color temperature, since most people grew up accustomed to the warm yellowish light provided by incandescent bulbs.
Get CFLs that provide light with a color temperature of 2700K. That's approximately the color temperature of an incandescent bulb, and, to my untrained eyes, the color seems identical.
Make sure you look for 2700K on the package. "Soft, warm white" might be 3000K, and you will notice the difference.
The people running this show are smarter than the average third world dictator. You can criticize all you want, but to you have enough clout to make a difference? Did your criticizing actually turned the course of an election? Or drove a big business into the ground? Are you recognized by more people that you yourself recognize, by a few orders of magnitude? Are you in a position to introduce a game changing idea into the public consciousness? If you did not answer yes to at least one of these questions then yeah, you don't matter.
I put virtually no effort into remaining anonymous or hiding my digital footprints, yet oddly enough I've never had the secret police bust down my door, or had any clear reason to believe that my privacy has been violated.
This just means you're an average Joe that makes no attempt to disturb the status quo, has no real power or influence and has nothing anybody in a position of power wants.
VoIP over a cell network would be a bad idea. At least in the traditional sense. Yes, it works, barely, but it's like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. The problem stems from the fact that voip infrastructures are usually designed around a mostly reliable network, that very occasionally drops entire packets. A cell network is designed to cope with an unreliable network, where bit errors are common. Everything, from codecs to protocols are designed with that in mind. Is the reason why G729 can get the same quality at 8kbps as AMR at around 12kbps. The extra bits are there for redundancy. In addition to that, you definitely want traffic shaping and QoS guarantees when doing voice. Otherwise your neighbor's porn downloads might crowd out your calls. You don't really notice that in broadband based voip installations, simply because there's usually a ton of bandwidth to go around. But a shared radio connection is an entirely different ballgame.
They will probably use packet switching (read IP) on the backend though. Once the bits are safely tucked in some fat fiber pipes.
Depends on your definition. If market share is the criteria, then undoubtedly the BB rules the market now. But how many articles about BB have you read recently in the general media? How many people even know about not to mention care about BB launch parties? BB does well in the marketplace because they integrate well in the enterprise and businesses issue them to their employees by default. How many of the BB people you know bought their device themselves because they preferred it? Not that many...
Mind share domination. The iphone might not have a large chunk of market share, in terms of raw numbers. But it is the device to beat, the bar every other smartphone manufacturer suddenly found itself being compared to. Sure, there are phones that are better for this and that. Geeks might go for the relative openness of Android. Corporate types will probably prefer the enterprise integration of Blackberry. But the average Joe will always compare them to the iphone.
Yes. At any geek gatherings I've been to in the past few years, the ratio was about 50-50 Macs/PCs. Much higher than in the general populace. True, that's US, where Macs are more prevalent.
I'm not claiming that expensive == good. I'm just saying that if you're a professional, the cost of your tools is secondary to quality. I wish Macs were cheaper, but I'm not willing to sacrifice quality for it.
I don't care how I look with the tool. I do care how the tool looks to me. More precisely nice antialiased fonts, nice color pallete, solid no-nonsense and visually attractive GUI, seamlessly integrated apps, etc. Ubuntu is pretty good compared to other Linux distros and I have had an instance of it installed on my machines for the past few years. Great developer environment but it's far behind OSX when it comes to the criteria I mentioned above. If this stuff has no importance to you, great, but it has to me. As you said, it's all a matter of personal preference.
Does all of the above make me a fanboy? Maybe. Couldn't care less. When something better comes along, I'll switch. Until then, Macs are best according to what's important to me.
Macs are actually less locked in than Windows machines. Worse than Linux or BSD, to be sure, but those systems are lacking in other areas. And you CAN tweak OSX, just like you can tweak any other consumer OS. Don't confuse Macs with Iphones and ipods, which are truly locked in.
And by the general concept of "out of the way" I don't mean no access to system internals. Just that I don't want to be forced to fight with my tool in order to have my tasks accomplished. No professional driver would want to have to open the hood every time they want to start the car.
Back where I was born and raised we used to have this law that required every new driver to have distinctive signs displayed on his or her car for the first year. It was a big honking yellow disc with an exclamation mark on it. You had to have it on both front and rear windshields. We used to call it "the lemon" and it was a source of endless jokes. It also made other drivers be more cautious around you and cut you some slack. Good thing, in an environment that could make New York and Boston drivers look positively tame.
That's it. That's pretty much why you'll see a large number of geeks sporting Apple hardware. When you're a professional, spending most of your time working with a tool, you want that tool to be the best there is. Yes, that's going to be expensive. You can buy a cheap regular drill for $50 at Walmart (with a set of bits) like I did, but for some reason, my carpenter friend got himself a $400 top of the line impact drill. Have you seen a professional photographer plying her trade with a pocket camera? Or even a low end DSLR? Nope, they all use heavy duty, full frame cameras that cost in the thousands, not including lenses. You can do pretty much what you want with a cheap camera or a cheap drill, but your life will be much easier with a professional tool. Because a professional tool will get out of your way and let you do your thing faster with a lot less headache and a lot more joy.
Same with computers. If I'm to spend most of my waking hours in front of a computer, I want it to be fast, reliable, look good, allow me to do whatever I want and get the hell out of my way and let me focus on the task at hand. Neither Windows nor Linux running PCs fit this bill as well as a Mac running OSX. My time and mental energy are precious which is why the cost of the hardware is no object.
The E71 is a sweet device, however it has a smaller screen and a larger capacity battery. I've found that the two biggest juice suckers on my iphone are the screen (the backlight, probably) and the 3G radio. GPS as well, but I can run for about 4-5 hrs with it on and the screen to about 10% brightness.
Oh, and there are external battery sleeves for the iphone. Not the same as replacing the internal battery, but they do the job... they also bulk up the device.
No it's actually Google's ETF that does not make sense. TMobile stands to gain if you stay with them for the duration of the contract, which is why they are subsidizing the handset and are entitled to levy an ETF if you break out earlier. Google's role ends the moment you purchase the product (except for warranty and support issues, which apparently they are keen to pass along to HTC). I don't see how they are entitled to another ETF.
Depends on your local gas and electricity prices. Where I live (central NJ), gas tends to be cheaper than average, while electricity is more expensive. Last time I did the math, the Chevy Volt was pretty much a wash - wether you run it on grid power or gas, you get pretty much the same miles per $$. That was at a specific point in time, a few months ago. Things will be wildly different at other times and other locales. And this does not take into account the environmental benefits of running on electricity.
I'm wondering, will miles per buck be the new way of measuring efficiency?:)
Part of the problem we have here in US is that our carriers would absolutely hate to become "bit/call/sms delivery pipes". So they all attempt to provide a "complete user experience", which means subsidize phones and lock people in technically as well as via contracts, build walled gardens and sell as much add-on services as they can. The side effects of that is people usually see the phone as being an integral part of the service offered by the carrier, and so expect the carrier to handle any service issues that appear.
My iPhone 3G lasts about 4 days if used smartly and sparingly. That is, Edge for voice, data through Wifi, only a few short calls per day, no bluetooth, no music/video/games. Pretty much the same functionality you got from your Palm Treo:)
Slashdot Mirror
The WSJ is a fairly reputable source ...
The WSJ USED to be a fairly reputable source. Then Murdoch bought it.
I took a look at one of my recent paystubs. When you consider federal and state taxes, social security, medicare/medicaid, state disability insurance, state unemployment insurance, 401k, flexible spending, health, dental, vision (including the part that my employer pays) it adds up to about 50% of my gross income. Not so different from Europe, as far as I can tell... only here i get to deal with private providers that try to screw me every chance they get.
Yeah, and while we're at it, can we get the "insurance" companies out of it too?
Single payer FTW!
My rep voted for the health care bill, which is what I wanted. He believes in network neutrality. He runs on a platform of social liberalism. He is a scientist, while his main opponent is a lawyer.
Yeah, I think he still has my vote.
True, but unless you're a professional that cares about the spectral composition of your light sources, it doesn't really matter. 99% of complaints about CFL light are related to color temperature, since most people grew up accustomed to the warm yellowish light provided by incandescent bulbs.
Get CFLs that provide light with a color temperature of 2700K. That's approximately the color temperature of an incandescent bulb, and, to my untrained eyes, the color seems identical.
Make sure you look for 2700K on the package. "Soft, warm white" might be 3000K, and you will notice the difference.
The people running this show are smarter than the average third world dictator. You can criticize all you want, but to you have enough clout to make a difference? Did your criticizing actually turned the course of an election? Or drove a big business into the ground? Are you recognized by more people that you yourself recognize, by a few orders of magnitude? Are you in a position to introduce a game changing idea into the public consciousness? If you did not answer yes to at least one of these questions then yeah, you don't matter.
I put virtually no effort into remaining anonymous or hiding my digital footprints, yet oddly enough I've never had the secret police bust down my door, or had any clear reason to believe that my privacy has been violated.
This just means you're an average Joe that makes no attempt to disturb the status quo, has no real power or influence and has nothing anybody in a position of power wants.
VoIP over a cell network would be a bad idea. At least in the traditional sense. Yes, it works, barely, but it's like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. The problem stems from the fact that voip infrastructures are usually designed around a mostly reliable network, that very occasionally drops entire packets. A cell network is designed to cope with an unreliable network, where bit errors are common. Everything, from codecs to protocols are designed with that in mind. Is the reason why G729 can get the same quality at 8kbps as AMR at around 12kbps. The extra bits are there for redundancy. In addition to that, you definitely want traffic shaping and QoS guarantees when doing voice. Otherwise your neighbor's porn downloads might crowd out your calls. You don't really notice that in broadband based voip installations, simply because there's usually a ton of bandwidth to go around. But a shared radio connection is an entirely different ballgame.
They will probably use packet switching (read IP) on the backend though. Once the bits are safely tucked in some fat fiber pipes.
Depends on your definition. If market share is the criteria, then undoubtedly the BB rules the market now. But how many articles about BB have you read recently in the general media? How many people even know about not to mention care about BB launch parties? BB does well in the marketplace because they integrate well in the enterprise and businesses issue them to their employees by default. How many of the BB people you know bought their device themselves because they preferred it? Not that many...
When will companies learn, it's the customers, stupid!
When customers do something about it, i.e. take their money and go to the competition. No competition due to govt. monopoly? Vote!
Mind share domination. The iphone might not have a large chunk of market share, in terms of raw numbers. But it is the device to beat, the bar every other smartphone manufacturer suddenly found itself being compared to. Sure, there are phones that are better for this and that. Geeks might go for the relative openness of Android. Corporate types will probably prefer the enterprise integration of Blackberry. But the average Joe will always compare them to the iphone.
Yes. At any geek gatherings I've been to in the past few years, the ratio was about 50-50 Macs/PCs. Much higher than in the general populace. True, that's US, where Macs are more prevalent.
I'm not claiming that expensive == good. I'm just saying that if you're a professional, the cost of your tools is secondary to quality. I wish Macs were cheaper, but I'm not willing to sacrifice quality for it.
I don't care how I look with the tool. I do care how the tool looks to me. More precisely nice antialiased fonts, nice color pallete, solid no-nonsense and visually attractive GUI, seamlessly integrated apps, etc. Ubuntu is pretty good compared to other Linux distros and I have had an instance of it installed on my machines for the past few years. Great developer environment but it's far behind OSX when it comes to the criteria I mentioned above. If this stuff has no importance to you, great, but it has to me. As you said, it's all a matter of personal preference.
Does all of the above make me a fanboy? Maybe. Couldn't care less. When something better comes along, I'll switch. Until then, Macs are best according to what's important to me.
You don't know much about Macs and OSX, do you?
Macs are actually less locked in than Windows machines. Worse than Linux or BSD, to be sure, but those systems are lacking in other areas. And you CAN tweak OSX, just like you can tweak any other consumer OS. Don't confuse Macs with Iphones and ipods, which are truly locked in.
And by the general concept of "out of the way" I don't mean no access to system internals. Just that I don't want to be forced to fight with my tool in order to have my tasks accomplished. No professional driver would want to have to open the hood every time they want to start the car.
You'd still have a lot of overlap with people running on channel 11
Wasn't THAT large and it was in the corners of the windshields. But yes, putting it on the body of the car would have made more sense
Back where I was born and raised we used to have this law that required every new driver to have distinctive signs displayed on his or her car for the first year. It was a big honking yellow disc with an exclamation mark on it. You had to have it on both front and rear windshields. We used to call it "the lemon" and it was a source of endless jokes. It also made other drivers be more cautious around you and cut you some slack. Good thing, in an environment that could make New York and Boston drivers look positively tame.
That's it. That's pretty much why you'll see a large number of geeks sporting Apple hardware. When you're a professional, spending most of your time working with a tool, you want that tool to be the best there is. Yes, that's going to be expensive. You can buy a cheap regular drill for $50 at Walmart (with a set of bits) like I did, but for some reason, my carpenter friend got himself a $400 top of the line impact drill. Have you seen a professional photographer plying her trade with a pocket camera? Or even a low end DSLR? Nope, they all use heavy duty, full frame cameras that cost in the thousands, not including lenses. You can do pretty much what you want with a cheap camera or a cheap drill, but your life will be much easier with a professional tool. Because a professional tool will get out of your way and let you do your thing faster with a lot less headache and a lot more joy.
Same with computers. If I'm to spend most of my waking hours in front of a computer, I want it to be fast, reliable, look good, allow me to do whatever I want and get the hell out of my way and let me focus on the task at hand. Neither Windows nor Linux running PCs fit this bill as well as a Mac running OSX. My time and mental energy are precious which is why the cost of the hardware is no object.
The E71 is a sweet device, however it has a smaller screen and a larger capacity battery. I've found that the two biggest juice suckers on my iphone are the screen (the backlight, probably) and the 3G radio. GPS as well, but I can run for about 4-5 hrs with it on and the screen to about 10% brightness.
Oh, and there are external battery sleeves for the iphone. Not the same as replacing the internal battery, but they do the job... they also bulk up the device.
No it's actually Google's ETF that does not make sense. TMobile stands to gain if you stay with them for the duration of the contract, which is why they are subsidizing the handset and are entitled to levy an ETF if you break out earlier. Google's role ends the moment you purchase the product (except for warranty and support issues, which apparently they are keen to pass along to HTC). I don't see how they are entitled to another ETF.
Depends on your local gas and electricity prices. Where I live (central NJ), gas tends to be cheaper than average, while electricity is more expensive. Last time I did the math, the Chevy Volt was pretty much a wash - wether you run it on grid power or gas, you get pretty much the same miles per $$. That was at a specific point in time, a few months ago. Things will be wildly different at other times and other locales. And this does not take into account the environmental benefits of running on electricity.
I'm wondering, will miles per buck be the new way of measuring efficiency? :)
Because gmail supports imap and pop3, while yahoo doesn't. Just my $0.02.
Part of the problem we have here in US is that our carriers would absolutely hate to become "bit/call/sms delivery pipes". So they all attempt to provide a "complete user experience", which means subsidize phones and lock people in technically as well as via contracts, build walled gardens and sell as much add-on services as they can. The side effects of that is people usually see the phone as being an integral part of the service offered by the carrier, and so expect the carrier to handle any service issues that appear.
North America is not "most of the world"
My iPhone 3G lasts about 4 days if used smartly and sparingly. That is, Edge for voice, data through Wifi, only a few short calls per day, no bluetooth, no music/video/games. Pretty much the same functionality you got from your Palm Treo :)