Does OSX have some magical browser interface that is remote control driven, or are you going to end up with a keyboard and mouse (or touchpad) anyway? If so, you may as well spend half the money, get a Zino, and put Firefox on it in kiosk mode. You can use the extra $400 for hookers and blow.
Media center = single remote control. Period. If you need a keyboard, your media center has already failed. There's a reason that WMC exists, and as horrifically unstable as it is if you want to play anything other than WMV, it's a decent enough interface. The gold standard is still TiVo.
That's because you're using the wrong file type. If you sent the machince a wmv, it plays just fine.
'But that's ridiculous, why should I have to convert everything to a proprietary format?" I hear you cry.
I'm just trying to compare apples to Apples*. Get your HD video from MS and show it can't play, and we'll have a discussion.
*I've made mkvs work with my WMC, but it took a lot of work. My apple devices won't even play that format. Period. You MUST convert to play on apple CS items, yet nobody seems to complain about that. *shrug*
You know, people keep saying the AT&T network is crap. They must be lousy in the population centers, because I've found (after having 4 carriers over the last decade) that they're all crap in some places, and they're all good in others. Cell data, regardless of the carrier, seems to be crap everywhere compared to the DSL I have on my desk, and kicks the ass of any dialup line I've ever used. Sometimes it's slow, sometimes not. Then again, maybe getting tiered service into place will get all these 24/7 Pandora and Youtube losers off the grid and we'll get real service.
I don't think the iPod ever owned the smartphone market. HTC had great handsets 4 years ago, and the first iPhone was a toy. In the last two years, the iPhone has gotten some legs, but when you have BB, HTC/WM, and all the Android variants, it's hardly by itself. It's main claim to fame is that it's the ONLY handset that apple produces, and the only one with the iOS interface - so if you like that particular UI or app availability, you've only got one choice. Imagine if HTC and WM or Android only had a single handset every year. You could bet your ass there'd be lines.
FWIW, openness is probably the last thing that matters in a phone. Unless you're a developer or buy the phone as a geek-toy. For the rest of the world that uses it as a phone/pda/gaming/media device, open means almost nothing.
You're not paying for individual tutoring in public schools. You're paying for a system which provides a basic skill set which allows a majority of people to attain employment which is sufficient to keep them from delinquency and crime. That's the public benefit - fewer people with so few skills that larceny is the prime means of support.
Generally, the middle 80% do okay in the schools. The bottom 15% are pretty much hopeless, and tend to drag down the middle, so by middle school they weed them out to the slow classes which give them the most basic of life skills. The top 5% will always be beyond the ability of the public schools to keep att heir accelerated learning pace. The best results are if the parents are actually engaged and can offer them private and/or specialty schooling, or the parents can augment the schooling to keep them moving forward while staying with their developmental peer group.
Does it really matter at that distance? wouldn't the trajectory of the bullet be so significantly different due to gravity, wind, optical atmosphereics, etc that it would be no better than a high powered scope?
You might get a raise if you ask for more money, but on the odd chance that you get it, three things will happen:
1) They will feel that they are paying you appropriately for the 70h/wk you're working, even if they give you a very small raise 2) Whatever this raise is, you may consider it an advance on your next [n] raises. In other words, in two to five years, you will be back to what you would have made if you'd never gotten this raise in the first place. 3) They will likely start looking for someone less bothersome to fill your position, especially after the launch when they don't need the massive support hours, and you're now getting paid "too much" for the reduced effort, 50 hour weeks you'll have.
Again, there's a one in a million shot (okay, maybe one in 1,000) that you'll get a title, a pay bump, and if things pick up a new staff below you and you'll be headed for an ownership position or at least toward a spot in the senior staff. IMHO, I would make sure that you're in the market before you make the play.
FWIW, if you're really good, it's worth floating your resume on all the major employment boards. Many HR teams troll them to see if their employees are looking around. They may bring up the conversation first, at which point, you can simply state your concerns about the additional work. They may come around.
I know people for whom this has happened: a cousin was contacted by a headhunter, and ended up with a 25% raise - completely unsolicited, my brother in law was disappointed with the organization and lack of expertise in his dept, he floated his CV on monster and his dept head called him the next day. He was honest that they didn't have the expertise to perform their mission, and had good examples. They made him the group leader, moved staff to another area, and let him re-start the group.
Now, I'm going to lend a cautionary tale to this. I've had several employees over the years. Some have been disappointed with raises and/or salary offers. With two exceptions, I would have happily let them find other jobs. I have found that the top 5-8% of employees are truly independent. The next 30% are useful if carefully watched and managed. The rest do nothing more than provide CO2 to the plants and add heat to the building in the winter. Remember that, in the world of business, you are worth about 1/2 of the revenue you can GUARANTEE to produce EVERY YEAR (if you're in marketing or management, that drops to at most 5%, or half of a 10% "commission"). The rest of the revenue gets eaten up by G&A, mkt, overhead, taxes, and profit. If the last one in line - profit - doesn't stay significantly positive, then nothing else matters. Business isn't a jobs program. Personally, I give out bonuses twice a year based on production and profit. I'm too small to guarantee large fixed salaries.
By New York, I meant Manhattan. Clearly NOT the middle of New York. Not that the middle of New York wouldn't be bad, but I was trying to show how the inconveniencing of millions of people and a major financial center would be worse than an area which is exceptionally sparsely populated.
Yes, statistically speaking. A big oil leak sucks. A big oil leak in your back yard, or at your vaction home, sucks WAY more to you than an oil leak in a place you will never, ever visit.
Note that an oil leak in the sahara, or the unpopulated southwest US, is far less of a big deal than an oil leak in, say, the Galapogos, or the center of New York. Different impact means different importance. Did you really give a shit about the oil leaks in the Iraqi desert, or were you mostly concerned that the soot would carry to other areas?
Because it isn't going through rock, it's going through mud. If you think it's hard to stop a gusher from a 2' diameter pipe, imagine how hard it would be to stop a 40,000 BBL/dy, methane propelled ooze from a 500 foot radius area with no containment.
JPL isn't a NASA facility. CalTech owns and operates under a contract from NASA. There are no NASA engineers doing actual engineering in Pasadena. Actually, most of what NASA does today is hand out money. You can "thank" Ronald Reagan for that.
Again, why? There's no good reason I can think of to be transcoding on your phone.
(1) you want to watch a movie in the "wrong" format
>>> get a player/codec that reads it.
(2) you need to reduce the resolution (i.e. you put a 1080p MKV rip of Avatar on your phone)
>>> Why would you waste storage memory like that? a 12GB file isn't really suitable to uSD.
>>> It would still be faster to t/c, downres on your workstation by an order of magnitude, and as a bonus the fil would get transferred to your memory card / phone that much faster.
(3) because you can
>>> Fair enough, but that's going to be one hot, low battery* level phone.
(note: batteries have a finite life. The more you drain them, the shorter time they last. I figure it costs me about 25c per charge in battery replacement on my laptop, and the annoyance of having a shorter battery life sooner. I do as little on battery as I can, so that when I need it, I get the most for my money. YMMV)
How do you know that the 5G level is 90%? I doubt the graph fits any standard distribution curve - the center may be close to one, but this is is an outlying point. I suspect they've got several bumps in the mix.
AT&T is pulling the same thing. I'm certain that they've decide some people are getting "too much" for their dollar (pound), and they're always getting grief over the extra fee for data. I'm sure they've looked at usage patters and chosen a new structure which will keep their income the same, make most people pay less, and get the "abusers" (those who make the rest of us complain about how slow the f'ing internet is) off the wagon.
Every wonder why data is so damned slow in some cells? Ever wonder how may people are streaming Pandora or Youtube or Hulu at the same time? This isn't an OC3 line we're sharing.
FWIW, I don't stream (much), and I've never been over 200MB in a month, even when I used tethering for some "remote" access. My typical month is 100MB, and I get three email addresses delivered to my phone, I run Evernote, my entire calendar and tasklist, and look up stuff on the web. The only difference is I don't "browse" or "stream".
What could you possibly be doing on a 4" screen that requires multiple cores? Are you running a folding program? Massive game platform?
Hell, there are a total of three things I might be doing "at once" on a phone - listening to streaming (or onboard) music, browsing (whether it be web, contacts, reading, whatever) and sharing an internet connection with someone else. Everything else that's running in the background is essentially timer or interrupt based (alarms, calendar, notifications) and takes practically zero cycles (relative to the billion per second we currently have).
I'll be honest - I'm rarely doing more than two things at once on my desktop. I leave programs open so I can switch quickly, but even the non-multitasking iPhone saves the state of the program when it "exits" so you come back to right where you left off.
I'm missing where I would even want two processors eating at my battery life, at least until there's a really pressing reason for it.
Sure, there will be niche, but I think we've just entered the penis measurement realm here. Personally, I'm going to be impressed when one of these devices can be charged once a week, not every night.* 2GHz will be nice at times - don't get me wrong - but I'm more interested in how little power it will take when in an active sleep state, and how well it will throttle back for background apps. This is no better than that stupid, non-standard 640x960, too-small-to-be-useful screen that Apple is putting on their new phone.
Perhaps Adobe should figure out how to make flash less processor intensive, rather than having to beef up every mobile processor and suck the battery dry to play video/games with poorly optimized code.
All apologies to the seventeen developers who plan on using their new android phones as their primary workstation.
*Yes, both my iPhone and my HTC Fuze can last more than a day, but two days is really pressing your luck if you find you really need them towards the end of the second day.
We're actually nice folks, and everybody loves working here (though we all get frustrated occasionally). I just don't abide stupidity. I expect every employee to solve every problem on their desk, efficiently. You might think of it as an office where everyone respects everyone else's ability. Since people's lives depend on our getting the job done right, I don't allow anything less.
Oh, I don't know. There are THOUSANDS of wells in the Gulf, each capable of toasting the fishing waters. If you thought about how many 9s you need to prevent a disaster like this, it's pretty damned hard. Spills have happened before. I don't know whether private insurers would offer coverage for this, but similar coverage is available for oddball contingencies in other industries.
I've been in business for myself for 7 years. In that time I've lived frugally to pay off my house, car, and all other debts, and put away an emergency fund that could keep me and my family solvent for a year (without dipping into my retirement savings). I have insurance for most major events which could wipe me out financially. I carry no debt in my business, save for a key piece of equipment which I'll finish paying off this summer. If my business was utterly destroyed tomorrow, I could start anew in another field and make ends meet for an extended period of time. If necessary, my wife or I could probably work for basic wages ($8-10/hr) in a 40 hour a week job and still pay all the bills and keep food on the table indefinitely with what we've saved for retirement. It would suck, but it wouldn't ruin our lives.
Yes, but safe bicycle travel requires more road maintenance, as cleaning is expensive (ever tried cycling on a rocky street?), and requires the addition of lane areas for the traffic which cannot (generally) accelerate or maintain traffic speeds. The sales tax on a bike isn't really going to cover that.
Exactly. It's not like Facebook, where there are privacy setting which are getting shifted (and hence there will be a mapping, at least somewhat flawed in the best cases). This is new, so just start with everything turned off. If people want to be social, they can decide how "social" they want their information to be.
Me? I don't use Yahoo, and I no longer hire anyone who uses Yahoo. Yes, "What is your favorite search engine" is actually one of my hiring questions. Yahoo employees are batting zero.
Slashdot Mirror
...and got to feel the thrill of competition again.
on OSX servers and apple hardware. Proof that Apple products really aren't suitable for commercial use.
Unless, of course, you want to out Steve for using non-Apple for his backend.
Does OSX have some magical browser interface that is remote control driven, or are you going to end up with a keyboard and mouse (or touchpad) anyway? If so, you may as well spend half the money, get a Zino, and put Firefox on it in kiosk mode. You can use the extra $400 for hookers and blow.
Wow, that sucks. Hard.
Media center = single remote control. Period. If you need a keyboard, your media center has already failed. There's a reason that WMC exists, and as horrifically unstable as it is if you want to play anything other than WMV, it's a decent enough interface. The gold standard is still TiVo.
That's because you're using the wrong file type. If you sent the machince a wmv, it plays just fine.
'But that's ridiculous, why should I have to convert everything to a proprietary format?" I hear you cry.
I'm just trying to compare apples to Apples*. Get your HD video from MS and show it can't play, and we'll have a discussion.
*I've made mkvs work with my WMC, but it took a lot of work. My apple devices won't even play that format. Period. You MUST convert to play on apple CS items, yet nobody seems to complain about that. *shrug*
You know, people keep saying the AT&T network is crap. They must be lousy in the population centers, because I've found (after having 4 carriers over the last decade) that they're all crap in some places, and they're all good in others. Cell data, regardless of the carrier, seems to be crap everywhere compared to the DSL I have on my desk, and kicks the ass of any dialup line I've ever used. Sometimes it's slow, sometimes not. Then again, maybe getting tiered service into place will get all these 24/7 Pandora and Youtube losers off the grid and we'll get real service.
I don't think the iPod ever owned the smartphone market. HTC had great handsets 4 years ago, and the first iPhone was a toy. In the last two years, the iPhone has gotten some legs, but when you have BB, HTC/WM, and all the Android variants, it's hardly by itself. It's main claim to fame is that it's the ONLY handset that apple produces, and the only one with the iOS interface - so if you like that particular UI or app availability, you've only got one choice. Imagine if HTC and WM or Android only had a single handset every year. You could bet your ass there'd be lines.
FWIW, openness is probably the last thing that matters in a phone. Unless you're a developer or buy the phone as a geek-toy. For the rest of the world that uses it as a phone/pda/gaming/media device, open means almost nothing.
You're not paying for individual tutoring in public schools. You're paying for a system which provides a basic skill set which allows a majority of people to attain employment which is sufficient to keep them from delinquency and crime. That's the public benefit - fewer people with so few skills that larceny is the prime means of support.
Generally, the middle 80% do okay in the schools. The bottom 15% are pretty much hopeless, and tend to drag down the middle, so by middle school they weed them out to the slow classes which give them the most basic of life skills. The top 5% will always be beyond the ability of the public schools to keep att heir accelerated learning pace. The best results are if the parents are actually engaged and can offer them private and/or specialty schooling, or the parents can augment the schooling to keep them moving forward while staying with their developmental peer group.
Does it really matter at that distance? wouldn't the trajectory of the bullet be so significantly different due to gravity, wind, optical atmosphereics, etc that it would be no better than a high powered scope?
...then no one is special.
You might get a raise if you ask for more money, but on the odd chance that you get it, three things will happen:
1) They will feel that they are paying you appropriately for the 70h/wk you're working, even if they give you a very small raise
2) Whatever this raise is, you may consider it an advance on your next [n] raises. In other words, in two to five years, you will be back to what you would have made if you'd never gotten this raise in the first place.
3) They will likely start looking for someone less bothersome to fill your position, especially after the launch when they don't need the massive support hours, and you're now getting paid "too much" for the reduced effort, 50 hour weeks you'll have.
Again, there's a one in a million shot (okay, maybe one in 1,000) that you'll get a title, a pay bump, and if things pick up a new staff below you and you'll be headed for an ownership position or at least toward a spot in the senior staff. IMHO, I would make sure that you're in the market before you make the play.
FWIW, if you're really good, it's worth floating your resume on all the major employment boards. Many HR teams troll them to see if their employees are looking around. They may bring up the conversation first, at which point, you can simply state your concerns about the additional work. They may come around.
I know people for whom this has happened: a cousin was contacted by a headhunter, and ended up with a 25% raise - completely unsolicited, my brother in law was disappointed with the organization and lack of expertise in his dept, he floated his CV on monster and his dept head called him the next day. He was honest that they didn't have the expertise to perform their mission, and had good examples. They made him the group leader, moved staff to another area, and let him re-start the group.
Now, I'm going to lend a cautionary tale to this. I've had several employees over the years. Some have been disappointed with raises and/or salary offers. With two exceptions, I would have happily let them find other jobs. I have found that the top 5-8% of employees are truly independent. The next 30% are useful if carefully watched and managed. The rest do nothing more than provide CO2 to the plants and add heat to the building in the winter. Remember that, in the world of business, you are worth about 1/2 of the revenue you can GUARANTEE to produce EVERY YEAR (if you're in marketing or management, that drops to at most 5%, or half of a 10% "commission"). The rest of the revenue gets eaten up by G&A, mkt, overhead, taxes, and profit. If the last one in line - profit - doesn't stay significantly positive, then nothing else matters. Business isn't a jobs program. Personally, I give out bonuses twice a year based on production and profit. I'm too small to guarantee large fixed salaries.
Sorry to self reply, I caught myself mid-click:
By New York, I meant Manhattan. Clearly NOT the middle of New York. Not that the middle of New York wouldn't be bad, but I was trying to show how the inconveniencing of millions of people and a major financial center would be worse than an area which is exceptionally sparsely populated.
Yes, statistically speaking. A big oil leak sucks. A big oil leak in your back yard, or at your vaction home, sucks WAY more to you than an oil leak in a place you will never, ever visit.
Note that an oil leak in the sahara, or the unpopulated southwest US, is far less of a big deal than an oil leak in, say, the Galapogos, or the center of New York. Different impact means different importance. Did you really give a shit about the oil leaks in the Iraqi desert, or were you mostly concerned that the soot would carry to other areas?
Because it isn't going through rock, it's going through mud. If you think it's hard to stop a gusher from a 2' diameter pipe, imagine how hard it would be to stop a 40,000 BBL/dy, methane propelled ooze from a 500 foot radius area with no containment.
JPL isn't a NASA facility. CalTech owns and operates under a contract from NASA. There are no NASA engineers doing actual engineering in Pasadena.
Actually, most of what NASA does today is hand out money. You can "thank" Ronald Reagan for that.
Again, why? There's no good reason I can think of to be transcoding on your phone.
(1) you want to watch a movie in the "wrong" format
>>> get a player/codec that reads it.
(2) you need to reduce the resolution (i.e. you put a 1080p MKV rip of Avatar on your phone)
>>> Why would you waste storage memory like that? a 12GB file isn't really suitable to uSD.
>>> It would still be faster to t/c, downres on your workstation by an order of magnitude, and as a bonus the fil would get transferred to your memory card / phone that much faster.
(3) because you can
>>> Fair enough, but that's going to be one hot, low battery* level phone.
(note: batteries have a finite life. The more you drain them, the shorter time they last. I figure it costs me about 25c per charge in battery replacement on my laptop, and the annoyance of having a shorter battery life sooner. I do as little on battery as I can, so that when I need it, I get the most for my money. YMMV)
How do you know that the 5G level is 90%? I doubt the graph fits any standard distribution curve - the center may be close to one, but this is is an outlying point. I suspect they've got several bumps in the mix.
AT&T is pulling the same thing. I'm certain that they've decide some people are getting "too much" for their dollar (pound), and they're always getting grief over the extra fee for data. I'm sure they've looked at usage patters and chosen a new structure which will keep their income the same, make most people pay less, and get the "abusers" (those who make the rest of us complain about how slow the f'ing internet is) off the wagon.
Every wonder why data is so damned slow in some cells? Ever wonder how may people are streaming Pandora or Youtube or Hulu at the same time? This isn't an OC3 line we're sharing.
FWIW, I don't stream (much), and I've never been over 200MB in a month, even when I used tethering for some "remote" access. My typical month is 100MB, and I get three email addresses delivered to my phone, I run Evernote, my entire calendar and tasklist, and look up stuff on the web. The only difference is I don't "browse" or "stream".
Shoes are technically optional, but asphalt and concrete are pretty hard on bare feet!
What could you possibly be doing on a 4" screen that requires multiple cores? Are you running a folding program? Massive game platform?
Hell, there are a total of three things I might be doing "at once" on a phone - listening to streaming (or onboard) music, browsing (whether it be web, contacts, reading, whatever) and sharing an internet connection with someone else. Everything else that's running in the background is essentially timer or interrupt based (alarms, calendar, notifications) and takes practically zero cycles (relative to the billion per second we currently have).
I'll be honest - I'm rarely doing more than two things at once on my desktop. I leave programs open so I can switch quickly, but even the non-multitasking iPhone saves the state of the program when it "exits" so you come back to right where you left off.
I'm missing where I would even want two processors eating at my battery life, at least until there's a really pressing reason for it.
Sure, there will be niche, but I think we've just entered the penis measurement realm here. Personally, I'm going to be impressed when one of these devices can be charged once a week, not every night.* 2GHz will be nice at times - don't get me wrong - but I'm more interested in how little power it will take when in an active sleep state, and how well it will throttle back for background apps. This is no better than that stupid, non-standard 640x960, too-small-to-be-useful screen that Apple is putting on their new phone.
Perhaps Adobe should figure out how to make flash less processor intensive, rather than having to beef up every mobile processor and suck the battery dry to play video/games with poorly optimized code.
All apologies to the seventeen developers who plan on using their new android phones as their primary workstation.
*Yes, both my iPhone and my HTC Fuze can last more than a day, but two days is really pressing your luck if you find you really need them towards the end of the second day.
I wasn't aware that "as much as possible" was an exact figure.
We're actually nice folks, and everybody loves working here (though we all get frustrated occasionally). I just don't abide stupidity. I expect every employee to solve every problem on their desk, efficiently. You might think of it as an office where everyone respects everyone else's ability. Since people's lives depend on our getting the job done right, I don't allow anything less.
Oh, I don't know. There are THOUSANDS of wells in the Gulf, each capable of toasting the fishing waters. If you thought about how many 9s you need to prevent a disaster like this, it's pretty damned hard. Spills have happened before. I don't know whether private insurers would offer coverage for this, but similar coverage is available for oddball contingencies in other industries.
I've been in business for myself for 7 years. In that time I've lived frugally to pay off my house, car, and all other debts, and put away an emergency fund that could keep me and my family solvent for a year (without dipping into my retirement savings). I have insurance for most major events which could wipe me out financially. I carry no debt in my business, save for a key piece of equipment which I'll finish paying off this summer. If my business was utterly destroyed tomorrow, I could start anew in another field and make ends meet for an extended period of time. If necessary, my wife or I could probably work for basic wages ($8-10/hr) in a 40 hour a week job and still pay all the bills and keep food on the table indefinitely with what we've saved for retirement. It would suck, but it wouldn't ruin our lives.
You waste energy every time you stop and start. Even the best regenerative system is not 100% efficient.
Also, you clearly put no value on your time. Since you probably get paid a fixed salary, I pity your employer.
Yes, but safe bicycle travel requires more road maintenance, as cleaning is expensive (ever tried cycling on a rocky street?), and requires the addition of lane areas for the traffic which cannot (generally) accelerate or maintain traffic speeds. The sales tax on a bike isn't really going to cover that.
Exactly. It's not like Facebook, where there are privacy setting which are getting shifted (and hence there will be a mapping, at least somewhat flawed in the best cases). This is new, so just start with everything turned off. If people want to be social, they can decide how "social" they want their information to be.
Me? I don't use Yahoo, and I no longer hire anyone who uses Yahoo. Yes, "What is your favorite search engine" is actually one of my hiring questions. Yahoo employees are batting zero.