...but kept your money that whole time anyway. Everything is okay (assholeish, no doubt, but okay) right up to the part where they took his money, IMHO.
They're always expensive. You charge $500-1000/hr, racking up the charges against the client's account while charging a minim monthly retainer (say, a moderate percentage of your total fees) which is applied to the balance until the case is complete. If you win and successfully argue that your client is due fees, you collect. If you lose (or win and don't get fees paid by the other side), you "write off" the unpaid portion of the fee as bad debt, and still end up with the $250-350hr you were paid monthly.
Now, I have no idea if this is what actually happens, but it's what I would do if I were a Lawyer.
Who needs backwards compatibility for the iPad anyways?
Because that's where all the consumers are. Sure, there are lots of users out there, but the metrosexuals with paychecks and spending money are all on their iPads, and they're still buying all sorts of shit. In the portable market, I would expect that two platforms are making the lion's share of purchases - Kindle and iPad. Throw in iPhone to that group if you want to include the smaller format market. Their devices are for consuming, and the only reason people spend time and money on websites to get people (the viewers) to spend money. Flash is just eyecandy to get you to spend more. Why would you throw away the bulk of the emerging market devices?
Android tablets? Well, based on the success off the Xoom, it will be in the recycle pile before they get flash running properly on it.
Well, if your internal sites are flash, you are, indeed, hosed. Since the A4/A5 processors aren't x86 compatible, and you'd have to write your internal apps from scratch anyway, why not move to a secure web interface instead? Then - if you weren't too reliant on a particular browser - you would be cross platform for whomever needed to access the system. Of course, if flash is what the devs are using...well, that sucks on many levels.
As for sending large files, you may as well use a cloud service or your own internal ftp server - upload the file and send the link. You can probably fashion a custom app for that right in you web portal, or just get each person a mobileme/dropbox/spideroak/carbonite/mozy/livedrive account if you don't mind outside branding. That way their presentation is already backed up, cached locally, and available via a custom link.
I don't mean to necessarily defend the iPad for a particular application. I'm pretty disappointed in what was added this year, but given the alternatives, I'm going to get one. One of the oddities I've learned about my iPhone over the past 10 months is that it generally does things well, or it doesn't do them at all. There are very few things it does poorly or inconsistently. As frustrating as it is to have the "not at all" category, it's actually less frustrating than things which function poorly or intermittently. If it doesn't work at all, you find an alternate way of doing things. I've found that I a much more adaptable to working around iOS than I am at trying to force Windows to bow to my will. Both work, but the latter, I find, takes more of my time and effort. I curse Jobs regularly for the little inefficiencies he has put in his devices, but I have come to realize that by skipping all of the technical hard things (wireless sync, removable storage, flash) he has made the device more reliable. In a production environment, there's value in that.
The iPad is a large form factor, personal media consumption device with social networking. It's not for taking notes, or writing term papers, or shooting a Filipino horror movie in NYC. I don't think capacitive screens will do what you want to do with any sort of accuracy. Its the trade off of a smooth, finger based interface - accuracy sucks.
Personally, I'd like the idea of that feature, too. I'd also like a higher resolution camera and a "digital copier" function that would let me capture pages to PDF with all the lighting fixed automagically. It's a "known limitation". I haven't found another device that meets all my specs yet either, though.
You probably are. If you'd been around before HD, you would probably remember that HD is at least one million pixels - well, at least "nominally" one million. You can argue about which side of 1M matters, but 720p (720x1280=920k) is HD, - you can thank the TV guys who advertised that a 12" TV screen was really 13" because the tub was that size, you just couldn't see it since there was a bezel in the way.
If you want to know my feeling, interlaced video had no business existing past about 1975, so I've always hated 1080i, and felt is was actually inferior to 720p.
WTF are you letting your people put removable storage into your devices? I thought that was phased out a decade ago to keep virii from jumping on the corporate network. And what are you going to use it for - it all comes with wireless N, email and a web browser that can be pointed to your internal server. You're not going to get any faster transfer with a marketing USB dongle (that is usually dog slow) or a class 6 (or even class 10) SD card. I suppose I can buy the HDMI thing, but you're going to have to carry a dongle for that VGA connection anyway, and presuming you even allow Macs on your network they already have to carry an adapter to go from DP to, well, anything useful.
Now, if you want to complain about having to install iTunes on your corporate machines - THAT is, imho, a real issue.
Why would you want to stream MKVs? Why not just rip your BR discs to MP4 containers with x264? Or are you not getting those MKVs from your own masters, and you're too fucking lazy to put them in a different container?
Emulator? Flash Browsing (by choice? are you a masochist?)? SD? Okay, I guess I can give you that last one...I suppose...though with 64GB SD cards hitting the $150-200 mark, I don't think I'll be carrying many of them around with me to use in a $500 device. Might as well drop the extra $330 and get that 64GB embedded and have a $130 cell/gps card in the thing. Please don't even think about complaining about price, and then tell me you're going to go drop $10000 on SD cards so you can take your ripped MKV bluray collection with you (mine is about 3TB, so whether I use SD cards or transcode, I'm going to have to cull what I take with me).
Sad fact is that, unless you goal is to tinker, you won't really find anything better for less money; and if you really need something with power, you're going to step up to a real laptop or tablet.
I was waiting for this announcement to decide between a Xoom (or other honeycomb) tablet and the iPad2. Funny thing is, I'm having a hard time finding the apps I plan on using for the tablet version of android. I use lots of Google stuff so Android would be a perfect fit, but I also own an iPhone because when I bought it the android phones were very, very immature. Now it looks like all the devices can do what I need, and its going to come down to the market. That's not good for Android this year. Lucklily, if the market catches up in a year, an iDevice will still sell to fanbois on eBay for nearly what I pay for it today.
Dell charges $125 for a cell modem and GPS on their laptops which have the guts for it. Apple wants $130. Sure it sucks. I was hoping GPS would be on the wifi models, too, as I don't really need it. Still, there isn't an alternative out there, and even the Xoom - which costs more, but has some minor additional features, only comes in Verizon, and my phone plan is with AT&T.
How do you access the backup if mailstore folds? Is the database in a cleartext or html readable format, or is it proprietary? I couldn't find the answers on the website, as everything is geared (naturally) toward the paid version.
Does Tbird even store all that stuff locally? It always seems to connect whenever I search (though my profile is 13GB). I agree with you on the annoying way it shows multiple instances of the same email.
No, not generally. But, just to pull out my geek credentials, I learned to program assembly language on a 6502 processor before I could afford an assembler, so I hand assembled my code into machine language. I worked with command line OSes for almost a decade before "modern" windowed environments showed up on consumer machines.
In Linux, it would be a three or four letter command followed by about four hundred switches, three hundred of which are not covered in the man page.
You clearly have a bootleg mac built by some third party Chinese vendor which you bought off of eBay. Real MacBooks don't have any problems. Period. All the other posters here can't possibly be wrong.;-)
Yeah, but everyone who seems to be justifying the high price of these machines is also a graphic or video artist using this, churning out video on ten-hour-a-day remote consulting gigs. The money they make with this portability is the justification for the price. They, apparently, do intend to render 1080p files all day, which is why they need this kind of power.
On the contrary, he's streamlining the system so that it works for his users. I seriously doubt that the users like to have to delete, confirm a delete, and then empty the bin. They're also probably pissed if they accidentally get rid of a file and he can't recover it because they've emptied the bin.
There's no great use to having the bin icon on the desktop. It's a convenience if you happen to frequently delete a lot of files you meant to keep (huh?), but otherwise it's probably a "me to" remnant of some UI designer that though the apple trashcan was a good idea.
Wait, it's not? I open mine and I get an explorer list of everything in it. Sure, I can't view the actual files, or go into subdirectories, without restoring them. But I can sort by date modified, size, date deleted, container type, name, or location - and those are just the default columns.
Well, that's great, except that what if you wanted to see the status of your network conenctions - your method (which requires a lot of typing) doesn't work.
Even better, I decided to type "configure network card," and the only usable option that popped up was "Manage Devices and Printers," which, interestingly, doesn't even show my network card as a device.
Why, might I ask, do you need 3-4 different ways to manage the network, some of which are inaccessible from other areas.
Why, in the network and sharing area, does a right-click on 'Home Network" not allow you to change the relationship, a right click on "Joined" for he home group does not allow you to unjoin or change the home group, and a right click on "local area connection" not bring up status, ipcongif info, the network card properties, or anything else? Why not put all those single clicks to new levels of dialog boxes into a unified interface? Why does doubl;e clicking your wireless icon in the tray disconnect you?
I can only assume that this guarantees more training dollars for everyone that has to use this stuff.
100 vs 17? Are you nuts - you may as well replace that 100 with a 40 or a 60, becuase that's all you'll get out of a 17W CFL.
An what happens when one of your CFLs dies and you can't find the exact color temperature and CRI? You get christmas tree lights in red green and blue (well, pale pink, sickly greenish cast, and brilliant white-blue) all over your room. Nasty.
And transparent. Thermal loss on most modern houses (hell, old ones, too) is through the windows. You can put R-100 in your attic and walls, and it's going to save less than if you boarded up all of your windows with an R-15 batt.
My thought exactly. Simple OCR and lookups can validate bills. If each bill gets scanned and location data, timecode, and (unique, already printed) S/N, you could know for certain if there was a duplicate somewhere. You could add other data, too. It's not like they don't already get individually counted when they're deposited at a bank.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, I thought everybody just hit the "cached" link and scrolled down to see the answer for free.
...but kept your money that whole time anyway. Everything is okay (assholeish, no doubt, but okay) right up to the part where they took his money, IMHO.
They're always expensive. You charge $500-1000/hr, racking up the charges against the client's account while charging a minim monthly retainer (say, a moderate percentage of your total fees) which is applied to the balance until the case is complete. If you win and successfully argue that your client is due fees, you collect. If you lose (or win and don't get fees paid by the other side), you "write off" the unpaid portion of the fee as bad debt, and still end up with the $250-350hr you were paid monthly.
Now, I have no idea if this is what actually happens, but it's what I would do if I were a Lawyer.
Who needs backwards compatibility for the iPad anyways?
Because that's where all the consumers are. Sure, there are lots of users out there, but the metrosexuals with paychecks and spending money are all on their iPads, and they're still buying all sorts of shit. In the portable market, I would expect that two platforms are making the lion's share of purchases - Kindle and iPad. Throw in iPhone to that group if you want to include the smaller format market. Their devices are for consuming, and the only reason people spend time and money on websites to get people (the viewers) to spend money. Flash is just eyecandy to get you to spend more. Why would you throw away the bulk of the emerging market devices?
Android tablets? Well, based on the success off the Xoom, it will be in the recycle pile before they get flash running properly on it.
Well, if your internal sites are flash, you are, indeed, hosed. Since the A4/A5 processors aren't x86 compatible, and you'd have to write your internal apps from scratch anyway, why not move to a secure web interface instead? Then - if you weren't too reliant on a particular browser - you would be cross platform for whomever needed to access the system. Of course, if flash is what the devs are using...well, that sucks on many levels.
As for sending large files, you may as well use a cloud service or your own internal ftp server - upload the file and send the link. You can probably fashion a custom app for that right in you web portal, or just get each person a mobileme/dropbox/spideroak/carbonite/mozy/livedrive account if you don't mind outside branding. That way their presentation is already backed up, cached locally, and available via a custom link.
I don't mean to necessarily defend the iPad for a particular application. I'm pretty disappointed in what was added this year, but given the alternatives, I'm going to get one. One of the oddities I've learned about my iPhone over the past 10 months is that it generally does things well, or it doesn't do them at all. There are very few things it does poorly or inconsistently. As frustrating as it is to have the "not at all" category, it's actually less frustrating than things which function poorly or intermittently. If it doesn't work at all, you find an alternate way of doing things. I've found that I a much more adaptable to working around iOS than I am at trying to force Windows to bow to my will. Both work, but the latter, I find, takes more of my time and effort. I curse Jobs regularly for the little inefficiencies he has put in his devices, but I have come to realize that by skipping all of the technical hard things (wireless sync, removable storage, flash) he has made the device more reliable. In a production environment, there's value in that.
The iPad is a large form factor, personal media consumption device with social networking. It's not for taking notes, or writing term papers, or shooting a Filipino horror movie in NYC. I don't think capacitive screens will do what you want to do with any sort of accuracy. Its the trade off of a smooth, finger based interface - accuracy sucks.
Personally, I'd like the idea of that feature, too. I'd also like a higher resolution camera and a "digital copier" function that would let me capture pages to PDF with all the lighting fixed automagically. It's a "known limitation". I haven't found another device that meets all my specs yet either, though.
You probably are. If you'd been around before HD, you would probably remember that HD is at least one million pixels - well, at least "nominally" one million. You can argue about which side of 1M matters, but 720p (720x1280=920k) is HD, - you can thank the TV guys who advertised that a 12" TV screen was really 13" because the tub was that size, you just couldn't see it since there was a bezel in the way.
If you want to know my feeling, interlaced video had no business existing past about 1975, so I've always hated 1080i, and felt is was actually inferior to 720p.
WTF are you letting your people put removable storage into your devices? I thought that was phased out a decade ago to keep virii from jumping on the corporate network. And what are you going to use it for - it all comes with wireless N, email and a web browser that can be pointed to your internal server. You're not going to get any faster transfer with a marketing USB dongle (that is usually dog slow) or a class 6 (or even class 10) SD card. I suppose I can buy the HDMI thing, but you're going to have to carry a dongle for that VGA connection anyway, and presuming you even allow Macs on your network they already have to carry an adapter to go from DP to, well, anything useful.
Now, if you want to complain about having to install iTunes on your corporate machines - THAT is, imho, a real issue.
Why would you want to stream MKVs? Why not just rip your BR discs to MP4 containers with x264? Or are you not getting those MKVs from your own masters, and you're too fucking lazy to put them in a different container?
Emulator? Flash Browsing (by choice? are you a masochist?)? SD? Okay, I guess I can give you that last one...I suppose...though with 64GB SD cards hitting the $150-200 mark, I don't think I'll be carrying many of them around with me to use in a $500 device. Might as well drop the extra $330 and get that 64GB embedded and have a $130 cell/gps card in the thing. Please don't even think about complaining about price, and then tell me you're going to go drop $10000 on SD cards so you can take your ripped MKV bluray collection with you (mine is about 3TB, so whether I use SD cards or transcode, I'm going to have to cull what I take with me).
Sad fact is that, unless you goal is to tinker, you won't really find anything better for less money; and if you really need something with power, you're going to step up to a real laptop or tablet.
I was waiting for this announcement to decide between a Xoom (or other honeycomb) tablet and the iPad2. Funny thing is, I'm having a hard time finding the apps I plan on using for the tablet version of android. I use lots of Google stuff so Android would be a perfect fit, but I also own an iPhone because when I bought it the android phones were very, very immature. Now it looks like all the devices can do what I need, and its going to come down to the market. That's not good for Android this year. Lucklily, if the market catches up in a year, an iDevice will still sell to fanbois on eBay for nearly what I pay for it today.
Dell charges $125 for a cell modem and GPS on their laptops which have the guts for it. Apple wants $130. Sure it sucks. I was hoping GPS would be on the wifi models, too, as I don't really need it. Still, there isn't an alternative out there, and even the Xoom - which costs more, but has some minor additional features, only comes in Verizon, and my phone plan is with AT&T.
How do you access the backup if mailstore folds? Is the database in a cleartext or html readable format, or is it proprietary? I couldn't find the answers on the website, as everything is geared (naturally) toward the paid version.
Does Tbird even store all that stuff locally? It always seems to connect whenever I search (though my profile is 13GB). I agree with you on the annoying way it shows multiple instances of the same email.
No, not generally. But, just to pull out my geek credentials, I learned to program assembly language on a 6502 processor before I could afford an assembler, so I hand assembled my code into machine language. I worked with command line OSes for almost a decade before "modern" windowed environments showed up on consumer machines.
In Linux, it would be a three or four letter command followed by about four hundred switches, three hundred of which are not covered in the man page.
But it doesn't have Thunderbolt. And it's not cool.
Mac wins again!
You clearly have a bootleg mac built by some third party Chinese vendor which you bought off of eBay. Real MacBooks don't have any problems. Period. All the other posters here can't possibly be wrong. ;-)
Yeah, but everyone who seems to be justifying the high price of these machines is also a graphic or video artist using this, churning out video on ten-hour-a-day remote consulting gigs. The money they make with this portability is the justification for the price. They, apparently, do intend to render 1080p files all day, which is why they need this kind of power.
On the contrary, he's streamlining the system so that it works for his users. I seriously doubt that the users like to have to delete, confirm a delete, and then empty the bin. They're also probably pissed if they accidentally get rid of a file and he can't recover it because they've emptied the bin.
There's no great use to having the bin icon on the desktop. It's a convenience if you happen to frequently delete a lot of files you meant to keep (huh?), but otherwise it's probably a "me to" remnant of some UI designer that though the apple trashcan was a good idea.
Wait, it's not? I open mine and I get an explorer list of everything in it. Sure, I can't view the actual files, or go into subdirectories, without restoring them. But I can sort by date modified, size, date deleted, container type, name, or location - and those are just the default columns.
Well, that's great, except that what if you wanted to see the status of your network conenctions - your method (which requires a lot of typing) doesn't work.
Even better, I decided to type "configure network card," and the only usable option that popped up was "Manage Devices and Printers," which, interestingly, doesn't even show my network card as a device.
Why, might I ask, do you need 3-4 different ways to manage the network, some of which are inaccessible from other areas.
Why, in the network and sharing area, does a right-click on 'Home Network" not allow you to change the relationship, a right click on "Joined" for he home group does not allow you to unjoin or change the home group, and a right click on "local area connection" not bring up status, ipcongif info, the network card properties, or anything else? Why not put all those single clicks to new levels of dialog boxes into a unified interface? Why does doubl;e clicking your wireless icon in the tray disconnect you?
I can only assume that this guarantees more training dollars for everyone that has to use this stuff.
100 vs 17? Are you nuts - you may as well replace that 100 with a 40 or a 60, becuase that's all you'll get out of a 17W CFL.
An what happens when one of your CFLs dies and you can't find the exact color temperature and CRI? You get christmas tree lights in red green and blue (well, pale pink, sickly greenish cast, and brilliant white-blue) all over your room. Nasty.
Think aerogels, but cheap and easy.
And transparent. Thermal loss on most modern houses (hell, old ones, too) is through the windows. You can put R-100 in your attic and walls, and it's going to save less than if you boarded up all of your windows with an R-15 batt.
Man, I wish I had mod points for you.
"I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further. "
My thought exactly. Simple OCR and lookups can validate bills. If each bill gets scanned and location data, timecode, and (unique, already printed) S/N, you could know for certain if there was a duplicate somewhere. You could add other data, too. It's not like they don't already get individually counted when they're deposited at a bank.
Apparently many, with the 'Cowards being the standard bearer for falling into the trap.