And you're USPS guy comes at the same time every day? Hell, my UPS driver is nearly always at my house between 5:30 and 6:30. At work he hits the office at 1pm, give or take a bit. Same with my USPS guy, but the time can vary.
If I need a package somewhere by 10am, I can select that with Fedex. I can't with USPS (though you pay dearly for that service).
When I lived "off the beaten path, I had a 1/2 mile long driveway. The USPS guy never brought any package to my door, I just got a slip that says he took it to the PO. Fedex and UPS both drove up to my front door.
I should have said "Parcel Service", which is what most of the money shipments seem to be.
Example: 37lb package, Roanoke, VA to Cleveland, OH, Ground service (2-3 days) FedEx Ground: $30.48 USPS $64.65 (checked today on USPS, price from Fedex from last Wednesday when I had to mail a tire back to the manufacturer)
Sure, for packages less than 2lb, USPS will be cheaper usually. 2lb or more, you may as well send them UPS or Fedex and actually get real tracking data, not just a delivery confirmation. As a bonus, UPS/Fedex include $100 of insurance with the base fee; with USPS, you pay separately (and dearly, I might add). $100 in insurance is $2.30. Want a confirmation that the package was delivered? $0.80 more. Want a signature with that? That's another $2.45. Fedex gives me all three as part of the package, and for $7 I can send a package to Richmond, Virginia or Raleigh, NC and Fedex will GUARANTEE next day delivery. USPS will "hopefully get a parcel package there in 2-4 days" and will offer to charge you double for "priority" service which will speed that up to 1-3 days, but with no guarantee.
No, no, no - blinding an opponent is against the Geneva Convention. You're only allowed to humanely kill them by ripping holes in them with supersonic slugs of heavy metal, or burning them alive and violently dismembering them with incendiary devices dropped gently from aerial craft.
They've got a delivery route to every single household in America every single day, and yet they can't seem to track a package through their system or guarantee a delivery day. Even their "Next Day" service is "We'll do our best, but it's not really a guarantee, and even then there are some places where we charge you the "next day" rate but we know it will be two days."
Fedex and UPS do essentially a semi-custom route each day, and they drivers are pretty well taken care of (though they have long hours certain times of the year), and they can track and guarantee your delivery dates, for essentially the same price as USPS. USPS needs to be a value option, or a better/more reliable service. Right now they're neither, and they cannot compete.
Seriously, if you reward certain jobs with lots of money, the smart people who don't care what they do will go there. It's the same problem with engineers, general practice physicians, teachers, and nearly every other skilled position. They are paid on a fixed basis, and there is only so much "fixed" to go around. Find some smart kid and tell him he can have 2% of a transaction if he manages it, and show him billions of dollars of transactions a day - then tell him he can get $40/hr to work in the system or 2% of ten million dollars to close a deal, directing the $40/hr people to do all the work. Which will he choose?
If I knew now what I knew in college, I'd have gone Wall Street and been retired by now. As it was I wanted to work for NASA as an aerospace engineer, so I did - and I've got some really cool memories and patches of missions I was in charge of, and a $100k in a 401k that's gone nowhere for the last decade.
Shit, last class I took (3-4 years ago), the text - less than 1.5cm thick, maybe A5 size, few diagrams (though lots of formulas), was $135. The accompanying reference set (A4, probably 5cm over three softcover books) was another $100.
Tablets still fail as computers, and I don't think Jobs' ideas about them have changed. But there are a lot of people who can afford $500 as their "third" computer (or now "second" with laptops being powerful enough to be a primary). And Jobs said there was a market for that, it's just a lot bigger than it was 8 years ago.
There's a reason there isn't a keyboard accessory sold by Apple. If you want a keyboard, and you're going to type so much you need one, get a MacBook. Unfortunately, I think that's holding back the desire to get a pressure sensitive stylus added to the interface options on the iPad (well, that and probably a ton of patents held by Wacom), which would expand the usability of a tablet quite a bit.
There are lots of cool things you could do with tablets, but most of those things would be more productive on a fixed platform. AutoCAD, or drawings, or Photoshop with a stylus and finger interface with pressure sensitivity like a Wacom pad? Hell yes, but if I can get that in a 10" tablet, I think it might even be cooler on a 30" surface, or a 60" desktop (which is about what my current desktop is - 4960x1600 with a 20(portrait)-30-20(portrait) monitor setup).
That's not to say that a 10" screen might still be useful, but just as my 12" laptop works well in a pinch, or if I'm in a conference/seminar I would never want that to be where I do my content creation.
Oh, and I'm still waiting for someone to make a really robust, extensible touch-pad interface for CAD/photoshop/etc out of an iPad. There's an app out there, but it's pretty clunky, and can't do full macros (just single or double keypresses).
I'm doing the same thing. It's wonky at best. And I was hoping Plex/Roku2 would be the answer, but Roku broke the app with the new hardware and I don't have the time to sift through 1000 forum posts to figure out what hacks are needed to make it work. SABnzbd+ seems to work okay with the feed I'm using http://85.214.105.230/rss.php?sections=teevee as my rss feed. The whole feed is at http://85.214.105.230/rss.php and, no, I have no idea what the ip resolves to (I may have looked it up), but I just know it works.
Until it works better I can't get the wife to sever the $1200/yr DirecTV cable for feat that she can't watch her History Channel shows. I'm fully convinced that my 9yo could live without Good Luck Charlie (or whatever Disney has churned this quarter) since she watches them on the DVR anyway and has no concept of TV time schedules.
If it weren't for live sports and the niche stuff my wife watches, we could probably get along with buying/renting/streaming content (though Hulu and Netflix on Roku/WMC/ATV2 boxes are awful to use for finding stuff).
China is subsidizing their solar panel industry so that when solar finally gets traction, they will be in the driver's seat. Of course, it helps that they're less concerned about dumping waste and paying western-level wages.
It sounds, though, that this particular process was doomed to failure from the beginning, since the manufacturing process turned out not to be "scalable".
It's what I'd like to see the Feds use to go over the CxO compensation records and reports. I'm all for advancing technology and helping out, but if they guys at the top managed to walk away with more than $150-200k/year in total compensation, I would like to see them brought up on fraud charges for accelerating the demise of a company which used federal guarantee dollars.
Now, if it was all on the up and up, and they suffered with the masses, I'd be inclined to be more lenient. CxOs of start-ups should get no more than their highest paid technical employee until the company becomes profitable. Anything else, imo, is mismanagement of company resources.
That's not to say you can't so work with them. In fact, I do. But tablets are about consumption right now, and Apple's taught that dog to hunt. Tech folks need to step out of Mom's basement and realize that the rest of us just want to be able to do shit, and if we've got $500 to drop on a toy like the iPad, we sure as hell have $40 a month to pay for content through the iTMS.
If you buy a $150-$200 tablet so that you can rip/download content and serve it up in its native format, it means working on that house of cards to get everything operating. I know, I set up a media center PC and a usenet scraper, and have MyMedia to catalog my movies after I rip them. It's all quite snazzy, but God damned it takes too much time to keep running and if anything goes wrong my wife looks at me like she's never seen a PC or a remote control and expects me to fix it.
Tablets are about quick access to things you want to do. It's all the things you want a smartphone to do, but in the right form factor and without having to worry about making or receiving phone calls (and in return you can't put a tablet in your pocket).
Those of us who go back far enough to remember programming in BASIC to generate stats for D&D characters should be the ones to realize that these are not computers as we know them, but entertainment devices. Once you get past that hurdle, the usefulness of tablets makes a lot more sense.
A 10m object. Even if there were a non-destructive way to get the material earthside, there wouldn't be enough material to make it worth while. It's a mighty expensive technology demo, otherwise.
We (the citizens of the world) have not given monopoly powers to content creators to maximize their profits nor to allow them to prevent or limit dissemination of their creations. We gave them those privileges to allow (in this case) art to flourish and advance so that all people could reasonably partake in the enjoyment. Part of that is ensuring that the artist does no go hungry, and part of that is that the works are available for others to enjoy.
These "rights" you speak of are no more rights than you have to drive a car. It is a privilege. The mere fact that the rules change drastically based on the type of content and the way in which it is distributed is proof that these are not some innate, fixed rights.
It's not just a FOSS issue. There are bugs throughout commercial software that never get fixed. They usually promise that it will be fixed with the next release, though often it never does, but you've paid $6k a seat, so you build a workaround.
And with the correct time-of-use incentives (i.e. lower rates) this will happen. Sure, I'd gladly let the power co choose when to charge my car for $0.04/kWh, provided I get 4 hours of charge sometime during the day. If I really need a charge in the peak heat time, well, maybe it's worth $0.30/kWh.
Not with a finger it isn't. Ever trued to use an XP tablet (or the old winmo) without a sharp stylus? Epic fail. Though there are some fails in the iOS UI (buttons too close, usually), it works well with fingers. I just wish they would/could add back accurate, pressure sensitive stylus in addition to the capacitive finger input.
Well, I bought one for $299 - a v1 when the v2 when on the market. I knew that I could sell it for what I bought it for via ebay - I "tried out" an iPhone 3Gs that way for 4 months before deciding to switch to it (instead of android). I sold it right after the iP4 came out - probably the worst time to do so - and my net loss was $30.
So I tried the 16gb iPad, and liked it, but for work I realized I needed cell data, so I sold it on ebay for a net PROFIT of $20 just 3 weeks later and bought a 64GB GSM iPad 1. Why the 1? Well, $300 for one thing, but I also didn't feel the v2 had enough extras to justify that $300 and I decided that I would wait to see what was in the next version. When it comes along, I genuinely expect to recover 85-90% of what I paid for my iPad.
You may truly have no use for a wrench, but if you think it might be useful it's worth a try. If you run your own business, like I do, you know what a couple of hours of "found" productive time can mean to either your bottom line or time with your family. Stuck at an airport? Why not clean out that email box, organize your calendar, get replies back to a bunch of people, and maybe even get some education credits out of the way online or review and mark up documents? If you consider the cost of being unproductive, $300 is pissing in the wind.
I'm afraid you really are stuck in your box. Take a tablet (my colleague used an iPad, but a Xoom would have worked just as well) - take a photo of a condition on a building site, then use a stylus to sketch a new assembly that needed to be added to a component, then email it back to the office for preliminary drafting.
I much (MUCH) prefer reading on my tablet to reading on a laptop. I can also scan all of my music scores (I sing in a chorus) and load them up in a PDF reader - then use the tablet to bring up any of a hundred charts in our extended repertoire to work on or polish, even when standing on the risers - not something that can be done with a laptop. Same goes for a piano - can't put most laptops on a music stand.
When I'm out of my office, I have used my tablet to hold reference material while I work on my laptop - a poor man's dual screen. (I use a 3-screen setup at work).
That said, I don't like to produce "work" on my tablet, but I consume a lot of material for "work," and often the pad is all I need. With a 10 hours useful life, it lasts about 2-4 hours longer than my Acer notebook (11.6" timeline) and is 1-1.5 lbs lighter. If I'm mixing business and pleasure, it's ideal - I can do work if I need to, but it functions better for fun things and is lighter. BTW - I have a second battery for my laptop, and it's nice to be able to swap, but it was 1/3 of the price of the laptop and weighs more than two laptop chargers or about 10 tablet chargers. Also, cell data access for my tablet costs 1/4 of what it costs for a laptop ($15 vs $60/mo) - I save the cost of the tablet in a year in just data charges.
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And you're USPS guy comes at the same time every day? Hell, my UPS driver is nearly always at my house between 5:30 and 6:30. At work he hits the office at 1pm, give or take a bit. Same with my USPS guy, but the time can vary.
If I need a package somewhere by 10am, I can select that with Fedex. I can't with USPS (though you pay dearly for that service).
When I lived "off the beaten path, I had a 1/2 mile long driveway. The USPS guy never brought any package to my door, I just got a slip that says he took it to the PO. Fedex and UPS both drove up to my front door.
I should have said "Parcel Service", which is what most of the money shipments seem to be.
Example:
37lb package, Roanoke, VA to Cleveland, OH, Ground service (2-3 days)
FedEx Ground: $30.48
USPS $64.65
(checked today on USPS, price from Fedex from last Wednesday when I had to mail a tire back to the manufacturer)
Sure, for packages less than 2lb, USPS will be cheaper usually. 2lb or more, you may as well send them UPS or Fedex and actually get real tracking data, not just a delivery confirmation. As a bonus, UPS/Fedex include $100 of insurance with the base fee; with USPS, you pay separately (and dearly, I might add). $100 in insurance is $2.30. Want a confirmation that the package was delivered? $0.80 more. Want a signature with that? That's another $2.45. Fedex gives me all three as part of the package, and for $7 I can send a package to Richmond, Virginia or Raleigh, NC and Fedex will GUARANTEE next day delivery. USPS will "hopefully get a parcel package there in 2-4 days" and will offer to charge you double for "priority" service which will speed that up to 1-3 days, but with no guarantee.
No, no, no - blinding an opponent is against the Geneva Convention. You're only allowed to humanely kill them by ripping holes in them with supersonic slugs of heavy metal, or burning them alive and violently dismembering them with incendiary devices dropped gently from aerial craft.
What kind of cruel bastard are you?
Our economic system is built on growth. when growth slows to a crawl or stops, the entire basis of corporate economics will fail.
Bad news - the other guys deliver on Saturday, too.
The only USPS monopoly services are media mail and cheap, lightweight stuff, neither of which are profitable.
They've got a delivery route to every single household in America every single day, and yet they can't seem to track a package through their system or guarantee a delivery day. Even their "Next Day" service is "We'll do our best, but it's not really a guarantee, and even then there are some places where we charge you the "next day" rate but we know it will be two days."
Fedex and UPS do essentially a semi-custom route each day, and they drivers are pretty well taken care of (though they have long hours certain times of the year), and they can track and guarantee your delivery dates, for essentially the same price as USPS. USPS needs to be a value option, or a better/more reliable service. Right now they're neither, and they cannot compete.
Available from which major online store?
Seriously, if you reward certain jobs with lots of money, the smart people who don't care what they do will go there. It's the same problem with engineers, general practice physicians, teachers, and nearly every other skilled position. They are paid on a fixed basis, and there is only so much "fixed" to go around. Find some smart kid and tell him he can have 2% of a transaction if he manages it, and show him billions of dollars of transactions a day - then tell him he can get $40/hr to work in the system or 2% of ten million dollars to close a deal, directing the $40/hr people to do all the work. Which will he choose?
If I knew now what I knew in college, I'd have gone Wall Street and been retired by now. As it was I wanted to work for NASA as an aerospace engineer, so I did - and I've got some really cool memories and patches of missions I was in charge of, and a $100k in a 401k that's gone nowhere for the last decade.
How many NASA engineers does it take to put up a rocket?
NONE!
NASA only employs contract managers to mange contractors.
Shit, last class I took (3-4 years ago), the text - less than 1.5cm thick, maybe A5 size, few diagrams (though lots of formulas), was $135. The accompanying reference set (A4, probably 5cm over three softcover books) was another $100.
Tablets still fail as computers, and I don't think Jobs' ideas about them have changed. But there are a lot of people who can afford $500 as their "third" computer (or now "second" with laptops being powerful enough to be a primary). And Jobs said there was a market for that, it's just a lot bigger than it was 8 years ago.
There's a reason there isn't a keyboard accessory sold by Apple. If you want a keyboard, and you're going to type so much you need one, get a MacBook. Unfortunately, I think that's holding back the desire to get a pressure sensitive stylus added to the interface options on the iPad (well, that and probably a ton of patents held by Wacom), which would expand the usability of a tablet quite a bit.
There are lots of cool things you could do with tablets, but most of those things would be more productive on a fixed platform. AutoCAD, or drawings, or Photoshop with a stylus and finger interface with pressure sensitivity like a Wacom pad? Hell yes, but if I can get that in a 10" tablet, I think it might even be cooler on a 30" surface, or a 60" desktop (which is about what my current desktop is - 4960x1600 with a 20(portrait)-30-20(portrait) monitor setup).
That's not to say that a 10" screen might still be useful, but just as my 12" laptop works well in a pinch, or if I'm in a conference/seminar I would never want that to be where I do my content creation.
Oh, and I'm still waiting for someone to make a really robust, extensible touch-pad interface for CAD/photoshop/etc out of an iPad. There's an app out there, but it's pretty clunky, and can't do full macros (just single or double keypresses).
I'm doing the same thing. It's wonky at best. And I was hoping Plex/Roku2 would be the answer, but Roku broke the app with the new hardware and I don't have the time to sift through 1000 forum posts to figure out what hacks are needed to make it work. SABnzbd+ seems to work okay with the feed I'm using http://85.214.105.230/rss.php?sections=teevee as my rss feed. The whole feed is at http://85.214.105.230/rss.php and, no, I have no idea what the ip resolves to (I may have looked it up), but I just know it works.
Until it works better I can't get the wife to sever the $1200/yr DirecTV cable for feat that she can't watch her History Channel shows. I'm fully convinced that my 9yo could live without Good Luck Charlie (or whatever Disney has churned this quarter) since she watches them on the DVR anyway and has no concept of TV time schedules.
If it weren't for live sports and the niche stuff my wife watches, we could probably get along with buying/renting/streaming content (though Hulu and Netflix on Roku/WMC/ATV2 boxes are awful to use for finding stuff).
China is subsidizing their solar panel industry so that when solar finally gets traction, they will be in the driver's seat. Of course, it helps that they're less concerned about dumping waste and paying western-level wages.
It sounds, though, that this particular process was doomed to failure from the beginning, since the manufacturing process turned out not to be "scalable".
Only 33% of the people in my house pay taxes. Then again, my wife makes less than $10k/yr, and my 9 year old doesn't work at all. Is that unfair?
It's what I'd like to see the Feds use to go over the CxO compensation records and reports. I'm all for advancing technology and helping out, but if they guys at the top managed to walk away with more than $150-200k/year in total compensation, I would like to see them brought up on fraud charges for accelerating the demise of a company which used federal guarantee dollars.
Now, if it was all on the up and up, and they suffered with the masses, I'd be inclined to be more lenient. CxOs of start-ups should get no more than their highest paid technical employee until the company becomes profitable. Anything else, imo, is mismanagement of company resources.
That's not to say you can't so work with them. In fact, I do. But tablets are about consumption right now, and Apple's taught that dog to hunt. Tech folks need to step out of Mom's basement and realize that the rest of us just want to be able to do shit, and if we've got $500 to drop on a toy like the iPad, we sure as hell have $40 a month to pay for content through the iTMS.
If you buy a $150-$200 tablet so that you can rip/download content and serve it up in its native format, it means working on that house of cards to get everything operating. I know, I set up a media center PC and a usenet scraper, and have MyMedia to catalog my movies after I rip them. It's all quite snazzy, but God damned it takes too much time to keep running and if anything goes wrong my wife looks at me like she's never seen a PC or a remote control and expects me to fix it.
Tablets are about quick access to things you want to do. It's all the things you want a smartphone to do, but in the right form factor and without having to worry about making or receiving phone calls (and in return you can't put a tablet in your pocket).
Those of us who go back far enough to remember programming in BASIC to generate stats for D&D characters should be the ones to realize that these are not computers as we know them, but entertainment devices. Once you get past that hurdle, the usefulness of tablets makes a lot more sense.
A 10m object. Even if there were a non-destructive way to get the material earthside, there wouldn't be enough material to make it worth while. It's a mighty expensive technology demo, otherwise.
Why else would they want to be part of the Apple right to fame and then get cancer. Goddamned copycats, if you ask me.
Nice Troll, but I'll play:
We (the citizens of the world) have not given monopoly powers to content creators to maximize their profits nor to allow them to prevent or limit dissemination of their creations. We gave them those privileges to allow (in this case) art to flourish and advance so that all people could reasonably partake in the enjoyment. Part of that is ensuring that the artist does no go hungry, and part of that is that the works are available for others to enjoy.
These "rights" you speak of are no more rights than you have to drive a car. It is a privilege. The mere fact that the rules change drastically based on the type of content and the way in which it is distributed is proof that these are not some innate, fixed rights.
It's not just a FOSS issue. There are bugs throughout commercial software that never get fixed. They usually promise that it will be fixed with the next release, though often it never does, but you've paid $6k a seat, so you build a workaround.
And with the correct time-of-use incentives (i.e. lower rates) this will happen. Sure, I'd gladly let the power co choose when to charge my car for $0.04/kWh, provided I get 4 hours of charge sometime during the day. If I really need a charge in the peak heat time, well, maybe it's worth $0.30/kWh.
Not with a finger it isn't. Ever trued to use an XP tablet (or the old winmo) without a sharp stylus? Epic fail. Though there are some fails in the iOS UI (buttons too close, usually), it works well with fingers. I just wish they would/could add back accurate, pressure sensitive stylus in addition to the capacitive finger input.
Well, I bought one for $299 - a v1 when the v2 when on the market. I knew that I could sell it for what I bought it for via ebay - I "tried out" an iPhone 3Gs that way for 4 months before deciding to switch to it (instead of android). I sold it right after the iP4 came out - probably the worst time to do so - and my net loss was $30.
So I tried the 16gb iPad, and liked it, but for work I realized I needed cell data, so I sold it on ebay for a net PROFIT of $20 just 3 weeks later and bought a 64GB GSM iPad 1. Why the 1? Well, $300 for one thing, but I also didn't feel the v2 had enough extras to justify that $300 and I decided that I would wait to see what was in the next version. When it comes along, I genuinely expect to recover 85-90% of what I paid for my iPad.
You may truly have no use for a wrench, but if you think it might be useful it's worth a try. If you run your own business, like I do, you know what a couple of hours of "found" productive time can mean to either your bottom line or time with your family. Stuck at an airport? Why not clean out that email box, organize your calendar, get replies back to a bunch of people, and maybe even get some education credits out of the way online or review and mark up documents? If you consider the cost of being unproductive, $300 is pissing in the wind.
I'm afraid you really are stuck in your box. Take a tablet (my colleague used an iPad, but a Xoom would have worked just as well) - take a photo of a condition on a building site, then use a stylus to sketch a new assembly that needed to be added to a component, then email it back to the office for preliminary drafting.
I much (MUCH) prefer reading on my tablet to reading on a laptop. I can also scan all of my music scores (I sing in a chorus) and load them up in a PDF reader - then use the tablet to bring up any of a hundred charts in our extended repertoire to work on or polish, even when standing on the risers - not something that can be done with a laptop. Same goes for a piano - can't put most laptops on a music stand.
When I'm out of my office, I have used my tablet to hold reference material while I work on my laptop - a poor man's dual screen. (I use a 3-screen setup at work).
That said, I don't like to produce "work" on my tablet, but I consume a lot of material for "work," and often the pad is all I need. With a 10 hours useful life, it lasts about 2-4 hours longer than my Acer notebook (11.6" timeline) and is 1-1.5 lbs lighter. If I'm mixing business and pleasure, it's ideal - I can do work if I need to, but it functions better for fun things and is lighter. BTW - I have a second battery for my laptop, and it's nice to be able to swap, but it was 1/3 of the price of the laptop and weighs more than two laptop chargers or about 10 tablet chargers. Also, cell data access for my tablet costs 1/4 of what it costs for a laptop ($15 vs $60/mo) - I save the cost of the tablet in a year in just data charges.