That reminds me of an incident that happened in the Phoenix area a few years ago. Some guy was running for local office; his last name was "Robson" (I forget his first name now). Anyway, to help with the campaign, his son went out with other people to post campaign signs around town (in the PHX area, you'll usually see campaign posters on the corners at main boulevard intersections for a few months before an election). He was out one night posting signs, and got robbed. The first comment in the local paper's news story about the incident shouldn't be hard to guess.
I haven't seen a free checking account in ages. Some of them can be free, if you meet certain qualifications, but I seriously doubt there's any truly free ones out there any more. At the very least, they usually have a minimum balance requirement; at my bank, it's $100 for their lowest-level checking account. If you drop below that at any point, they sock you with fees. Poor people can't handle an account like that because they won't be able to keep up the minimum balance; at some point, they'll need the money NOW and their balance will drop, and that $8 fee will really hurt them. That's why they're called "poor": they can't afford an $8 service fee every month because some multibillion dollar bank wants fees on top of the interest they get for holding peoples' money.
It wasn't always like this. Back in the 80s (a much better time than now, in most respects), bank accounts were usually free, had good interest rates, and there were no fees for almost anything. Even though ATMs were brand-new technology, they were really reliable (no BSODs then), AND you could use other banks' ATMs, without a fee!
It's not that you can't see it, but you have to strain your iris muscles to focus on things close-up, whereas you can relax them when you're looking at things farther away. That equates to eyestrain, plus it's a semi-conscious thing and affects your perception. In an IMAX dome theater, for instance, because the movie takes up your whole field-of-view, it can give you motion sickness or make you feel like you're moving; that's probably not going to happen the same way with a high-res laptop screen (even a really wide curved one) because subconsciously you know you're looking at something close-up so it can't be real.
I don't think this is quite right. The main difference between the IMAX-res laptop and the normal IMAX screen is that the laptop is too close to your face, forcing you to use near-sighted vision. For larger screens (like an 80" LCD screen in your home theater room), this effect shouldn't be so significant.
No, it wouldn't, because the laptop is too close to your face. However, a smaller screen with the same resolution as the movie projector (which isn't that high-res BTW) will look just as good, as long as it's a sufficient distance that you aren't using your near-sighted vision to see it (as you would with the laptop).
Unless it's your local electric or water utility, there's no requirement that you have that service.
If the only Italian restaurant in town has nasty food, I'm not going to keep going there just because it's the only one. I'll stay at home and cook my own pasta instead.
Third party mods from small companies can't be used by the IT departments of major corporations. If it were built into Windows, this wouldn't be a problem, but since it's not built into Windows, it's a show-stopper.
Communication is definitely important, but if everyone's just going to sit around bitching, but then continue to give these companies their money, then nothing's going to change. You actually have to put your money where your mouth is. I do agree, communication is very important, and FWIW I haven't been to a theater in ages, and I'm doing my part by advocating that people not go to these places whenever stuff like this comes up. However, I don't see many like me; I just see people complaining, and then continuing to patronize these businesses, and then making up excuses in response to my anti-theater postings: "it's the only theater in town", "I can't not go to movies at a theater!" "I don't care if they do a cavity search as long as they keep the comfy seats!" etc.
If you're going to let someone continue to rape you, and you're not actually going to do anything about it, then you really have no right to complain IMO.
What's that supposed to mean? It doesn't take any acts of bravery or personal risk to buy from a different company (or go without), or to vote for someone different.
That's exactly my point. It doesn't matter how great it is underneath if the thing is so fucking ugly it makes you vomit every time you have to drive it. "It's so great, except for the ugly looks!" Yeah, well, how do you fix the ugly looks? You don't. You take it as-is, or you leave it. Most people choose to leave it, and pick something else, which is why the Aztek has been credited by some as being the main reason Pontiac no longer exists.
Yes, obviously there's big costs to changing from a MS infrastructure to a Linux one. However, Windows 8 (and Vista before it) show the danger of relying on a single, proprietary vendor: you're stuck with whatever that vendor does. So if they want to switch you to some wacky new UI, if they want to double their license costs, if they want to remove important features, whatever it is they do, you're stuck with their decisions, like it or not. You can try to stick with older versions for a while, but you can only do that for so long before you run into too many problems.
With a Linux-based infrastructure, you don't have this problem for the most part. Useful features aren't generally removed in FOSS-land; when they are (GNOME3 being the poster child here), someone gets pissed and forks it (leading to MATE and Cinnamon). There's choice in many things; don't like Gnome3 (or MATE or Cinnamon)? Use KDE instead. Don't like that? Use XCFE instead. More importantly, there's no single source vendor. Is Red Hat pissing you off? Switch to SUSE. Think they suck? Move to Canonical. Think they're assholes? Move to someone else. Think they all suck? Roll your own distro based on one of the others (not too hard for a large enterprise). You don't get that kind of freedom with a proprietary vendor.
Yes, it's hard to abandon the cushy walled garden that your single-source vendor provides you, but the sooner you do it, the sooner you'll reap the benefits of the increased freedom you've earned, while everyone around you is suffering more and more with the proprietary vendor's bad choices and technical decisions that are compromised by business/financial interests.
Not only that, you don't have to worry about some retired cop with anger-management issues getting pissed at you and shooting you dead in your home theater room.
You also don't have to worry about being annoyed by teenagers texting throughout the movie, or small children talking out loud, or suffering with shitty and overpriced concessions, etc.
If you do that, you'll have to nuke the entire US to be fair. NJ's main fault is that it isn't quite as good at hiding its corruption as many other states. This whole country is hopelessly corrupt.
If they're so terrible, why do you keep going back there and arguing with them about your bag?
"You guys totally suck! You don't know how to run a business! Here, take my money!!"
It's no wonder everything is going down the shitter in America these days. People just sit around on online forums and bitch and complain about stuff, but never actually do anything to force a change: they keep throwing their money at the same shitty companies, and keep voting for the same shitty politicians, and expecting things to improve somehow.
Even more idiotic are all the people that continue to buy MS products after all this. Yeah, it's pretty dumb when a company pisses off its customers by trying to force something on them they don't want. But it's much more stupid when customers keep buying their crap. This is what you get for making yourself reliant on a single source.
That's it entirely, but you say it like it's something small. That's like saying, "what's to fix on the Pontiac Aztek other than the butt-ugly exterior?" Or, "what's to fix in the New Jersey government other than all the corruption?"
What a pile of crap. For one thing, I can't count how many white male MS-product programmers I've met. And as for "brogrammers", what degree do you think they got? (Hint: it's CS, making them the "nerds" complained about above).
A keyboard, HDD, and CD drive died? Of all the parts in a computer, those should be some of the easiest to replace. Surely you can easily find a new Mac keyboard on Ebay or wherever, or at an Apple store of course. HDDs are all standard (I assume, I guess in 1998 they would have been 40-pin IDE), so it should have been possible to replace that one easily with any off-the-shelf model. The CD drive may have been more tricky if they used some odd model instead of a fairly standard one.
It's when you have problems with motherboards, or power supplies in proprietary cases, where repair of the computer becomes less economically viable.
And this doesn't apply to other professions? How many people go into law school because they think reading court cases and writing legal letters are SO interesting? Even lots of doctors go into the field because it pays well; they don't spend all their off-hours talking about anatomy and medical studies.
Don't be an idiot. Nerds aren't the ones who make management decisions leading to government IT disasters, Win8, etc. That's like blaming the assembly-line workers for the failure of GM and its need to be bailed out a few years ago.
It's a cultural phenomenon, it's just that westerners like you hate to admit it. Women in India and China go into STEM professions at far higher rates than in Western countries. Obviously, Western women just aren't interested in these things for some reason, most likely because they're taught by their parents or society to not be interested in them. America in particular is extremely anti-intellectual in most ways, so it's a wonder anyone goes into CS, but it's traditionally been a haven for socially-awkward men who don't go along with the anti-intellectual trends that most Americans subscribe to, so it's no big surprise women aren't interested since they have much lower rates of social awkwardness than men.
Slashdot Mirror
That reminds me of an incident that happened in the Phoenix area a few years ago. Some guy was running for local office; his last name was "Robson" (I forget his first name now). Anyway, to help with the campaign, his son went out with other people to post campaign signs around town (in the PHX area, you'll usually see campaign posters on the corners at main boulevard intersections for a few months before an election). He was out one night posting signs, and got robbed. The first comment in the local paper's news story about the incident shouldn't be hard to guess.
In the US, most banks have free checking accounts
Citation needed.
I haven't seen a free checking account in ages. Some of them can be free, if you meet certain qualifications, but I seriously doubt there's any truly free ones out there any more. At the very least, they usually have a minimum balance requirement; at my bank, it's $100 for their lowest-level checking account. If you drop below that at any point, they sock you with fees. Poor people can't handle an account like that because they won't be able to keep up the minimum balance; at some point, they'll need the money NOW and their balance will drop, and that $8 fee will really hurt them. That's why they're called "poor": they can't afford an $8 service fee every month because some multibillion dollar bank wants fees on top of the interest they get for holding peoples' money.
It wasn't always like this. Back in the 80s (a much better time than now, in most respects), bank accounts were usually free, had good interest rates, and there were no fees for almost anything. Even though ATMs were brand-new technology, they were really reliable (no BSODs then), AND you could use other banks' ATMs, without a fee!
And while you're at it, don't forget to learn to work in CMMI5 and Agile/Scrum environments.
It's not that you can't see it, but you have to strain your iris muscles to focus on things close-up, whereas you can relax them when you're looking at things farther away. That equates to eyestrain, plus it's a semi-conscious thing and affects your perception. In an IMAX dome theater, for instance, because the movie takes up your whole field-of-view, it can give you motion sickness or make you feel like you're moving; that's probably not going to happen the same way with a high-res laptop screen (even a really wide curved one) because subconsciously you know you're looking at something close-up so it can't be real.
This has nothing to do with goodwill. They're legally unable to void your warranty because of the Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act.
I don't think this is quite right. The main difference between the IMAX-res laptop and the normal IMAX screen is that the laptop is too close to your face, forcing you to use near-sighted vision. For larger screens (like an 80" LCD screen in your home theater room), this effect shouldn't be so significant.
No, it wouldn't, because the laptop is too close to your face. However, a smaller screen with the same resolution as the movie projector (which isn't that high-res BTW) will look just as good, as long as it's a sufficient distance that you aren't using your near-sighted vision to see it (as you would with the laptop).
Unless it's your local electric or water utility, there's no requirement that you have that service.
If the only Italian restaurant in town has nasty food, I'm not going to keep going there just because it's the only one. I'll stay at home and cook my own pasta instead.
Third party mods from small companies can't be used by the IT departments of major corporations. If it were built into Windows, this wouldn't be a problem, but since it's not built into Windows, it's a show-stopper.
Communication is definitely important, but if everyone's just going to sit around bitching, but then continue to give these companies their money, then nothing's going to change. You actually have to put your money where your mouth is. I do agree, communication is very important, and FWIW I haven't been to a theater in ages, and I'm doing my part by advocating that people not go to these places whenever stuff like this comes up. However, I don't see many like me; I just see people complaining, and then continuing to patronize these businesses, and then making up excuses in response to my anti-theater postings: "it's the only theater in town", "I can't not go to movies at a theater!" "I don't care if they do a cavity search as long as they keep the comfy seats!" etc.
If you're going to let someone continue to rape you, and you're not actually going to do anything about it, then you really have no right to complain IMO.
Moreover, by refusing to patronize shitty movie theaters, I have more time to spend behind the keyboard (or watching something on my home theater).
What's that supposed to mean? It doesn't take any acts of bravery or personal risk to buy from a different company (or go without), or to vote for someone different.
That's exactly my point. It doesn't matter how great it is underneath if the thing is so fucking ugly it makes you vomit every time you have to drive it. "It's so great, except for the ugly looks!" Yeah, well, how do you fix the ugly looks? You don't. You take it as-is, or you leave it. Most people choose to leave it, and pick something else, which is why the Aztek has been credited by some as being the main reason Pontiac no longer exists.
You can buy a really nice and giant LCD TV for that price. And then you won't have to be worry about being shot to death by a deranged retired cop.
Yes, obviously there's big costs to changing from a MS infrastructure to a Linux one. However, Windows 8 (and Vista before it) show the danger of relying on a single, proprietary vendor: you're stuck with whatever that vendor does. So if they want to switch you to some wacky new UI, if they want to double their license costs, if they want to remove important features, whatever it is they do, you're stuck with their decisions, like it or not. You can try to stick with older versions for a while, but you can only do that for so long before you run into too many problems.
With a Linux-based infrastructure, you don't have this problem for the most part. Useful features aren't generally removed in FOSS-land; when they are (GNOME3 being the poster child here), someone gets pissed and forks it (leading to MATE and Cinnamon). There's choice in many things; don't like Gnome3 (or MATE or Cinnamon)? Use KDE instead. Don't like that? Use XCFE instead. More importantly, there's no single source vendor. Is Red Hat pissing you off? Switch to SUSE. Think they suck? Move to Canonical. Think they're assholes? Move to someone else. Think they all suck? Roll your own distro based on one of the others (not too hard for a large enterprise). You don't get that kind of freedom with a proprietary vendor.
Yes, it's hard to abandon the cushy walled garden that your single-source vendor provides you, but the sooner you do it, the sooner you'll reap the benefits of the increased freedom you've earned, while everyone around you is suffering more and more with the proprietary vendor's bad choices and technical decisions that are compromised by business/financial interests.
Not only that, you don't have to worry about some retired cop with anger-management issues getting pissed at you and shooting you dead in your home theater room.
You also don't have to worry about being annoyed by teenagers texting throughout the movie, or small children talking out loud, or suffering with shitty and overpriced concessions, etc.
If you do that, you'll have to nuke the entire US to be fair. NJ's main fault is that it isn't quite as good at hiding its corruption as many other states. This whole country is hopelessly corrupt.
If they're so terrible, why do you keep going back there and arguing with them about your bag?
"You guys totally suck! You don't know how to run a business! Here, take my money!!"
It's no wonder everything is going down the shitter in America these days. People just sit around on online forums and bitch and complain about stuff, but never actually do anything to force a change: they keep throwing their money at the same shitty companies, and keep voting for the same shitty politicians, and expecting things to improve somehow.
Even more idiotic are all the people that continue to buy MS products after all this. Yeah, it's pretty dumb when a company pisses off its customers by trying to force something on them they don't want. But it's much more stupid when customers keep buying their crap. This is what you get for making yourself reliant on a single source.
That's it entirely, but you say it like it's something small. That's like saying, "what's to fix on the Pontiac Aztek other than the butt-ugly exterior?" Or, "what's to fix in the New Jersey government other than all the corruption?"
What a pile of crap. For one thing, I can't count how many white male MS-product programmers I've met. And as for "brogrammers", what degree do you think they got? (Hint: it's CS, making them the "nerds" complained about above).
A keyboard, HDD, and CD drive died? Of all the parts in a computer, those should be some of the easiest to replace. Surely you can easily find a new Mac keyboard on Ebay or wherever, or at an Apple store of course. HDDs are all standard (I assume, I guess in 1998 they would have been 40-pin IDE), so it should have been possible to replace that one easily with any off-the-shelf model. The CD drive may have been more tricky if they used some odd model instead of a fairly standard one.
It's when you have problems with motherboards, or power supplies in proprietary cases, where repair of the computer becomes less economically viable.
And this doesn't apply to other professions? How many people go into law school because they think reading court cases and writing legal letters are SO interesting? Even lots of doctors go into the field because it pays well; they don't spend all their off-hours talking about anatomy and medical studies.
Don't be an idiot. Nerds aren't the ones who make management decisions leading to government IT disasters, Win8, etc. That's like blaming the assembly-line workers for the failure of GM and its need to be bailed out a few years ago.
It's a cultural phenomenon, it's just that westerners like you hate to admit it. Women in India and China go into STEM professions at far higher rates than in Western countries. Obviously, Western women just aren't interested in these things for some reason, most likely because they're taught by their parents or society to not be interested in them. America in particular is extremely anti-intellectual in most ways, so it's a wonder anyone goes into CS, but it's traditionally been a haven for socially-awkward men who don't go along with the anti-intellectual trends that most Americans subscribe to, so it's no big surprise women aren't interested since they have much lower rates of social awkwardness than men.