...Apple ships 99% of the products that pass certain internal milestones. By way of contrast... Philips would axe 9 projects out of 10, even if a particular product was about to ship.... "Nine times out of ten, or 99 times out of 100, they would kill the project, either at the beginning, the middle or right before the product was supposed to be shipped."
OK, I ready I read TFA - is this incomprehensible? Does it mean anything? Is there any useful data anywhere in this?
I'll second that. Although I've pretty much stripped FB of any real info, my contact info is, and has been, on-line for years, and I really don't see enough spam to care, and thus far don't seem to have had my identity stolen.
(Pause while some guy jumps up to tell his tale of woe when he lost house, job, car, girl, and hamster to an Internet fraudster... yeah, yeah it happens...)
Just today CBC Radio was in a dither warning people about the dangers of Internet dating sites because some twit handed over $200,000 to some guy who claimed to be in love with her. Guess what? Crooked lovers have been taking advantage of well heeled women for generations - long before AT&F&C1&D2 was invented. Fraud has always been with us, and always will be - at least as long as there are greedy and gullible people.
There's a really simple reason why lots of people have their contact info on-line: So that people who need to can phone them, e-mail them, and generally get hold of them.
The old Nexus S is starting to show its age - and I don't just mean the scuffs and the cracked screen - so I'm shopping.
Like many folks here, the lack of a real keyboard annoys me. I do tend to draft e-mails that are more than one or two sentences long, and the on-screen keyboard just doesn't cut it. My last phone was a Moto Charm, sort of a low powered android BB clone, and having real clicky keys was SO much better.
As for apps, the sad fact is that 90% of them are crap. Including many from large corporations. I tend to judge by comparing anything to the Craigslist app - a model of simplicity, speed, and ease of use - better than the real CL site. I can't fathom why every narrow focus app isn't the same, and I'm still amazed that people have time to develop multiple skins for an app that is otherwise half-baked.
What I'll be looking for in the new BB is a mobile computing tool/phone that is aimed at real live business stuff, not Angry Birds or iTunes. I'll be looking at how well it integrates with Gmail, Calendar, and other G-services, and how easy it is to create documents.
For those not overly up to date on their acronyms:
"SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) is a type of industrial control system (ICS). Industrial control systems are computer controlled systems that monitor and control industrial processes that exist in the physical world. SCADA systems historically distinguish themselves from other ICS systems by being large scale processes that can include multiple sites, and large distances."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCADA
My experience exactly, except that for "tablet" write "smartphone." There's stuff that needs a "real" computer, then there's all of the routine e-mail, blog, RSS checking, Google searching and such that can be handled just fine with my Nexus S.
Wound up giving away my laptop to my girlfriend's kid, who is getting much more use out of it than I was.
Seriously, in an age of 20 minute cataract surgery (lens replacement) and laser for anything less than that, declining eyesight is just not that big an issue any more.
And obviously neither is the OP: "He currently lives abroad and cannot be served with legal papers. His websites are hosted overseas as well, and do not respond to conventional letters or petitions. Because of his freedom of speech rights, few U.S. courts will assert that his websites are truly libelous, either,
For God's sake begin by hiring someone who actually knows about this stuff instead of relying on what you learned from daytime TV.
I'm assuming that the same folks that root iPhones and Android phones, and seemingly every other bit of hardware on the planet will defeat this pretty fast as well. So yeah, let's buy up all of those cheap MicroSoft tablets and install Cyanogenmod!
Just yesterday on another./ thread someone suggested to me: I also messed around with Servio, Plex and some other open source DLNA servers. I found that the best DLNA option was Wild Media Server which will run fine in Wine on your Ubuntu box. That shit just worked with my Sony Bravia without a lot of hassle and the license for WMS is only 15 bucks.
Gotta say that WMS installed under wine with no hassle whatsoever, and it feeds my Sony BluRay with ease - something that neither Plex nor Serviio did.
Not free, but is cheap, although rather bizarre licencing terms.
I bought Sony BluRay specifically because I wanted to access content via the 'net instead of paying robber baron cable company prices.
My immediate thought was NetFlix, until I found out that we low-life Canadians only are allowed to access one quarter of the content available in the US. Despite paying the same price. So as well as paying Netflix their $8 a month, I pay a second company another $5 a month so that it looks like we're living in the US. Of course the Sony box is the one Internet unit in the house that won't let you set the DNS address - despite being the only thing that needs it, so the entire house is now pretending to be American.
I still have to say that Netflix interface sucks big time, either on the 'net, or on the TV. The only way to use it is to search, as there's no sensible browse method.
Because we're in Canada our Sony box doesn't get us stuff like Hulu or Google TV or Amazon Prime. We do get Crackle. Oh joy. And the option to pay Sony on a pay per view basis for whatever they're flogging.
What I found with this box: I can't use the built in browser to play back content on the web. I mean really folks?? My hometown TV station streams their newscast, but you won't allow me to see it? There's a thing called vRadio that plays streaming radio stations, but again you only get what Sony decides you want. There's no option to add other stations.
Gave Servioo a whirl, and Plex, but haven't had the time or patience to figure out why they won't get video from my Ubuntu box to the TV via the Sony.
Really, my complaint isn't that I'm locked into Sony's choices, it's that I'm locked out of 95% of the Internet.
Including, and this really surprised me, any and all sports programming.
I guess I'm spoiled by using Linux and Android/Cyanogenmod, but I really feel that this box needs to be jailbroken so that the user can make full use of it's capabilities.
99% of people on Slashdot use smart phones and tablets that inevitably use a touchscreen. Yet when a Desktop machine uses, or even suggests that a touchscreen would be useful, the same people howl like banshees.
I'd love to see some of what my Android phone UI has on my desktop system - seems like sensible thing to use touch for some things.
And another large part of the Slashdot community are Linux users who quite happily choose a Desktop UI to suit their specific needs and tastes. And do so proudly. Yet the suggestion that a Windows 8 user would choose to "turn off" the Metro UI in favour of a the Classic desktop is met yet again by howls of outrage, either that you're only using "half of Windows 8" or that making that choice somehow suggests that Microsoft is deficient.
Yes, I'm amused.
(Disclaimer: have only used Windows 8 for a few minutes in a store. Didn't find that it offended me. But then again I only use Windows anything for about 20 minutes a month.)
"However, no parental notice and consent is required when an operator collects a persistent identifier for the sole purpose of supporting the website or online service's internal operations, such as contextual advertising, frequency capping, legal compliance, site analysis, and network communications,"
In legal terms that's what you call a Loophole Big Enough To Drive A Truck Through.
Seriously, how would this work anyhow? Surely kids will figure out pretty fast to lie about their age - who's going to follow up and prove them wrong? Or they'll just click the "Yes, I'm the Parent and Approve this Activity" Button. Think Facebook is going to try to track down Mommy or Daddy to confirm that it really was them that gave approval?
I admit to not really knowing or caring about graphics cards (not a gamer), but skimming through TFA's charts, it looks like almost every test had more or less the same performance out of 3.7 and 3.8.
To all those "unions are past their prime" "people should be happy with any shitty job" "we can't COMPETE and pay living wages" "I'm a big enough asshole that I don't need a union" types.
Keep me posted so that I can come laugh in your face when your employer offshores your job, bounces you out the door, there are no more unemployment benefits, and you wind up working as a minimum wage, no benefits or insurance greeter at WalMart while your elderly mother dies a slow, painful death because you can't afford medical care or prescription medicine that used to be covered by your employer provided insurance.
You know NOTHING about how unions work, what they do, and why they matter to an a awful lot of people. You are also entirely ignoring the fact that an awful lot of employers are cheap, nasty, dishonest scum (yes Caterpillar, I mean you) who will shit on their employees at every chance.
Here's hoping you find yourself at the bottom of the food chain very fast.
Our business has Twitter, and Facebook, and I'm on LinkedIn, and Quora, and Slashdot, and... damn I probably even have a MySpace account hanging around somewhere. The problem with anything online is that you can never, ever stop updating, fixing it, redesigning it, monitoring it....
Beyond that, all that you can do with Facebook is try to get people to "like" you (aka subscribe). E-mail does that better - Constant Contact seems good. All that you're really doing is building a list of people who already know you and probably buy your product. A public list. Is that really of much value?
At the end of the day, I seriously doubt how much any of those drive business for the small operator. Facebook in particular will bury your content in a barrage of cat pictures and weird and sometimes offensive ads - who in hell programs their ad servers? Algorithms by chimps?.
I'm thinking that if time and resources are limited you would do better with a really tight and well designed website, and some money spent on Google Adsense placements. Unlike Facebook, Google seems to be able to hit me with ads that actually might interest me.
It's fun to speculate, but it's too soon to guess what's coming. At a minimum we need to wait until the case is underway, lawyers have jumped in, and the inevitable appeals have happened.
In the meantime, they're out to scare end users (easy) and probably more particularly, ISPs (not quite so easy, but not hard either). Because it's much, much easier, and quieter, to bully ISPs into monitoring and controlling their customer's traffic.
TekSavvy is making a big noise about not releasing information until there's a court order. Likely that order will be pretty easy to get. Equally likely TekSavvy won't be willing or able to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight the courts that make the order. And of course the big ISPs in Canada are generally owned by very large companies that are also content producers, so aren't likely to expend much effort in fighting to shield customers.
The question of damages is still very much up in the air, and Voltage will surely argue that every separate downstream IP address counts as another unique infringement. It would be foolhardy to think that no judge would accept that interpretation.
Finally, even though the Harper government passed this legislation, and told us how reasonable it was, don't for a minute think that they won't roll over at the behest of the American government or the big media corporations. These, after all, are the guys who are allowing the sale of a big chunk of the Tar Sands to the Chinese government.
Slashdot Mirror
...Apple ships 99% of the products that pass certain internal milestones. By way of contrast ... Philips would axe 9 projects out of 10, even if a particular product was about to ship. ... "Nine times out of ten, or 99 times out of 100, they would kill the project, either at the beginning, the middle or right before the product was supposed to be shipped."
OK, I ready I read TFA - is this incomprehensible? Does it mean anything? Is there any useful data anywhere in this?
I'll second that. Although I've pretty much stripped FB of any real info, my contact info is, and has been, on-line for years, and I really don't see enough spam to care, and thus far don't seem to have had my identity stolen.
(Pause while some guy jumps up to tell his tale of woe when he lost house, job, car, girl, and hamster to an Internet fraudster... yeah, yeah it happens...)
Just today CBC Radio was in a dither warning people about the dangers of Internet dating sites because some twit handed over $200,000 to some guy who claimed to be in love with her. Guess what? Crooked lovers have been taking advantage of well heeled women for generations - long before AT&F&C1&D2 was invented. Fraud has always been with us, and always will be - at least as long as there are greedy and gullible people.
There's a really simple reason why lots of people have their contact info on-line: So that people who need to can phone them, e-mail them, and generally get hold of them.
" a $22,000 humanoid robot named "Baxter" that could give cheap offshore labor a run for its money and return manufacturing jobs to U.S. soil.
Uh... seems like someone is unclear on the definition of "job."
The old Nexus S is starting to show its age - and I don't just mean the scuffs and the cracked screen - so I'm shopping.
Like many folks here, the lack of a real keyboard annoys me. I do tend to draft e-mails that are more than one or two sentences long, and the on-screen keyboard just doesn't cut it. My last phone was a Moto Charm, sort of a low powered android BB clone, and having real clicky keys was SO much better.
As for apps, the sad fact is that 90% of them are crap. Including many from large corporations. I tend to judge by comparing anything to the Craigslist app - a model of simplicity, speed, and ease of use - better than the real CL site. I can't fathom why every narrow focus app isn't the same, and I'm still amazed that people have time to develop multiple skins for an app that is otherwise half-baked.
What I'll be looking for in the new BB is a mobile computing tool/phone that is aimed at real live business stuff, not Angry Birds or iTunes. I'll be looking at how well it integrates with Gmail, Calendar, and other G-services, and how easy it is to create documents.
For those not overly up to date on their acronyms: "SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) is a type of industrial control system (ICS). Industrial control systems are computer controlled systems that monitor and control industrial processes that exist in the physical world. SCADA systems historically distinguish themselves from other ICS systems by being large scale processes that can include multiple sites, and large distances." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCADA
... there's US elected officials.
WHO nominates these guys?
WHO votes for them?
All over Europe people are rioting in the streets, protesting the actions of their politicians. Why in God's name aren't Americans doing the same??
Pining for 5.1 of course!
Seriously, I thought they had disappeared along with Pets.com..... any company that could destroy WordPerfect deserves to die.
Thank you for stating the stunningly obvious!!!!
My experience exactly, except that for "tablet" write "smartphone." There's stuff that needs a "real" computer, then there's all of the routine e-mail, blog, RSS checking, Google searching and such that can be handled just fine with my Nexus S.
Wound up giving away my laptop to my girlfriend's kid, who is getting much more use out of it than I was.
Seriously, in an age of 20 minute cataract surgery (lens replacement) and laser for anything less than that, declining eyesight is just not that big an issue any more.
And obviously neither is the OP: "He currently lives abroad and cannot be served with legal papers. His websites are hosted overseas as well, and do not respond to conventional letters or petitions. Because of his freedom of speech rights, few U.S. courts will assert that his websites are truly libelous, either,
For God's sake begin by hiring someone who actually knows about this stuff instead of relying on what you learned from daytime TV.
Probably my one gripe with most phones/tablets - the lack of real clickety click type buttons.
Not for everything, but at least four or five that can do specific things. Like work as a camera shutter button instead of using the touchscreen.
Or to trigger essential functions like "Answer phone" when your hands are cold and wet, and the touchscreen doesn't work.
I'm assuming that the same folks that root iPhones and Android phones, and seemingly every other bit of hardware on the planet will defeat this pretty fast as well. So yeah, let's buy up all of those cheap MicroSoft tablets and install Cyanogenmod!
Just yesterday on another ./ thread someone suggested to me: I also messed around with Servio, Plex and some other open source DLNA servers. I found that the best DLNA option was Wild Media Server which will run fine in Wine on your Ubuntu box. That shit just worked with my Sony Bravia without a lot of hassle and the license for WMS is only 15 bucks.
Gotta say that WMS installed under wine with no hassle whatsoever, and it feeds my Sony BluRay with ease - something that neither Plex nor Serviio did.
Not free, but is cheap, although rather bizarre licencing terms.
Checking it out - installed easily and thus far "just works." bizarro licencing.....
I bought Sony BluRay specifically because I wanted to access content via the 'net instead of paying robber baron cable company prices.
My immediate thought was NetFlix, until I found out that we low-life Canadians only are allowed to access one quarter of the content available in the US. Despite paying the same price. So as well as paying Netflix their $8 a month, I pay a second company another $5 a month so that it looks like we're living in the US. Of course the Sony box is the one Internet unit in the house that won't let you set the DNS address - despite being the only thing that needs it, so the entire house is now pretending to be American.
I still have to say that Netflix interface sucks big time, either on the 'net, or on the TV. The only way to use it is to search, as there's no sensible browse method.
Because we're in Canada our Sony box doesn't get us stuff like Hulu or Google TV or Amazon Prime. We do get Crackle. Oh joy. And the option to pay Sony on a pay per view basis for whatever they're flogging.
What I found with this box: I can't use the built in browser to play back content on the web. I mean really folks?? My hometown TV station streams their newscast, but you won't allow me to see it? There's a thing called vRadio that plays streaming radio stations, but again you only get what Sony decides you want. There's no option to add other stations.
Gave Servioo a whirl, and Plex, but haven't had the time or patience to figure out why they won't get video from my Ubuntu box to the TV via the Sony.
Really, my complaint isn't that I'm locked into Sony's choices, it's that I'm locked out of 95% of the Internet.
Including, and this really surprised me, any and all sports programming.
I guess I'm spoiled by using Linux and Android/Cyanogenmod, but I really feel that this box needs to be jailbroken so that the user can make full use of it's capabilities.
OK, let's see if I understand this...
99% of people on Slashdot use smart phones and tablets that inevitably use a touchscreen. Yet when a Desktop machine uses, or even suggests that a touchscreen would be useful, the same people howl like banshees.
I'd love to see some of what my Android phone UI has on my desktop system - seems like sensible thing to use touch for some things.
And another large part of the Slashdot community are Linux users who quite happily choose a Desktop UI to suit their specific needs and tastes. And do so proudly. Yet the suggestion that a Windows 8 user would choose to "turn off" the Metro UI in favour of a the Classic desktop is met yet again by howls of outrage, either that you're only using "half of Windows 8" or that making that choice somehow suggests that Microsoft is deficient.
Yes, I'm amused.
(Disclaimer: have only used Windows 8 for a few minutes in a store. Didn't find that it offended me. But then again I only use Windows anything for about 20 minutes a month.)
"However, no parental notice and consent is required when an operator collects a persistent identifier for the sole purpose of supporting the website or online service's internal operations, such as contextual advertising, frequency capping, legal compliance, site analysis, and network communications,"
In legal terms that's what you call a Loophole Big Enough To Drive A Truck Through.
Seriously, how would this work anyhow? Surely kids will figure out pretty fast to lie about their age - who's going to follow up and prove them wrong? Or they'll just click the "Yes, I'm the Parent and Approve this Activity" Button. Think Facebook is going to try to track down Mommy or Daddy to confirm that it really was them that gave approval?
Ahem. I know of one user who lists their names "Anal Medusa", an anagram of their legit name.
Does anyone really think that more than 70% of names on Facebook are for real?
I admit to not really knowing or caring about graphics cards (not a gamer), but skimming through TFA's charts, it looks like almost every test had more or less the same performance out of 3.7 and 3.8.
Am I missing something?
The anti-union types will hate this idea, but STOP WORKING FOR THEM!
If you're essential they'll find a way to pay you.
To all those "unions are past their prime" "people should be happy with any shitty job" "we can't COMPETE and pay living wages" "I'm a big enough asshole that I don't need a union" types.
Keep me posted so that I can come laugh in your face when your employer offshores your job, bounces you out the door, there are no more unemployment benefits, and you wind up working as a minimum wage, no benefits or insurance greeter at WalMart while your elderly mother dies a slow, painful death because you can't afford medical care or prescription medicine that used to be covered by your employer provided insurance.
You know NOTHING about how unions work, what they do, and why they matter to an a awful lot of people. You are also entirely ignoring the fact that an awful lot of employers are cheap, nasty, dishonest scum (yes Caterpillar, I mean you) who will shit on their employees at every chance.
Here's hoping you find yourself at the bottom of the food chain very fast.
Our business has Twitter, and Facebook, and I'm on LinkedIn, and Quora, and Slashdot, and... damn I probably even have a MySpace account hanging around somewhere. The problem with anything online is that you can never, ever stop updating, fixing it, redesigning it, monitoring it....
Beyond that, all that you can do with Facebook is try to get people to "like" you (aka subscribe). E-mail does that better - Constant Contact seems good. All that you're really doing is building a list of people who already know you and probably buy your product. A public list. Is that really of much value?
At the end of the day, I seriously doubt how much any of those drive business for the small operator. Facebook in particular will bury your content in a barrage of cat pictures and weird and sometimes offensive ads - who in hell programs their ad servers? Algorithms by chimps?.
I'm thinking that if time and resources are limited you would do better with a really tight and well designed website, and some money spent on Google Adsense placements. Unlike Facebook, Google seems to be able to hit me with ads that actually might interest me.
-
It's fun to speculate, but it's too soon to guess what's coming. At a minimum we need to wait until the case is underway, lawyers have jumped in, and the inevitable appeals have happened.
In the meantime, they're out to scare end users (easy) and probably more particularly, ISPs (not quite so easy, but not hard either). Because it's much, much easier, and quieter, to bully ISPs into monitoring and controlling their customer's traffic.
TekSavvy is making a big noise about not releasing information until there's a court order. Likely that order will be pretty easy to get. Equally likely TekSavvy won't be willing or able to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight the courts that make the order. And of course the big ISPs in Canada are generally owned by very large companies that are also content producers, so aren't likely to expend much effort in fighting to shield customers.
The question of damages is still very much up in the air, and Voltage will surely argue that every separate downstream IP address counts as another unique infringement. It would be foolhardy to think that no judge would accept that interpretation.
Finally, even though the Harper government passed this legislation, and told us how reasonable it was, don't for a minute think that they won't roll over at the behest of the American government or the big media corporations. These, after all, are the guys who are allowing the sale of a big chunk of the Tar Sands to the Chinese government.