The reason that reality shows have taken over is because the advertising revenue is spread too thin to pay for quality shows. Back when it was just the 3 networks, advertising revenue was concentrated and networks had more money to put into developing quality shows. The proliferation of channels has spread the revenue to the point where few producers have the budget to put into producing a quality TV show. "Reality" TV is dirt cheap to create and produce compared to a real TV show and it generates sufficient ratings to pay for itself.
Quite honestly, it would be a good thing if there were fewer channels to choose from.
These are extremely lame products. A core 2 quad from SEVEN YEARS AGO had more cores, more cache and was probably faster. Moore's law is deader than a norwegian blue.
"No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, idn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage!"
At work, my extension is tied into my email. When someone leaves me a message, it's sent as a wav file to my email, and I can listen to it from my mobile device.
That's hardly evolved. You still have to listen to the idiot who is just calling to ask "did you get my email?"...
I'm old enough to remember when voice mail was a privilege and you had to get your superiors to give you access because you were special. Even back then I didn't want it. I hated having to sift through the menus to listen to some irrelevant crap that someone could just as easily put in an email. I politely declined when my supervisor asked. That is, until the new phone system was installed and everyone was given their own voicemail. I hated getting pestered by some IT flunky to clear out my inbox because it was using up limited space, otherwise I would have let my inbox fill up to the point where it would reject incoming messages. I wasn't high enough on the food chain at that point to be able to get them to remove my inbox entirely but I did know at least one senior staff engineer who was able to make that happen. Though later in my career, once hard drive space was cheap enough to have way more storage than you needed because you couldn't even buy a hard drive that was too small, I did just let the inbox fill up. And after leaving a job of 3.5 years, I did log in to clear out the messages and I had a whopping 13, about half of which were from family members who ended up calling my cell phone. The rest were people who were following up on emails they had sent within 1-2 minutes of calling me.
So count me in the over 40 crowd that is happy to see voice mail going the way of the floppy disk. Good riddance. I look forward to not having to deal with it.
Or maybe the rest of the industry isn't willing to risk the liability for when something goes horribly wrong. Fear of litigation is a real impediment to innovation. But in this case, there is a huge amount of risk. Dealing with the real world happing around you while you're trying to make the computer drive the car has a ton of non-trivial potential disasters waiting to be exposed.
Exactly. On the one hand I'm surprised it took over 50 years to figure out the embargo wasn't going to work. Even more surprising is that it's over 20 years since the fall of the Soviet empire. But hey, when have politicians every been quick learners?
Sure, all of the Cuban refugees will be really pissed off for a while. But in the long term, I think this will be a good thing for both countries.
I know several people with English degrees that got into technical writing jobs at engineering companies. They took advantage of the 100% tuition reimbursement offered by the company to get a second degree in comp sci or engineering and went on to become successful programmers/engineers. It was a lot of work to have a full time job and take classes but they did it and they didn't have to go deeper in debt while doing it.
Yeah, it would be interesting to see what happens if the residents of Gaza were turned into civilized people who were industrious and turned Gaza into an economically prosperous beachfront resort and started winning Nobel Prizes, just like regular Israel.
It would be a bit of a change from murdering their own children to dig tunnels underneath their neighbors for the sole purposes of indiscriminately murdering people they've never met.
The Israelites don't have to do that because they have an American backed and supplied military to do that for them.
I was not aware of the patents. Thank you for bringing that to my attention.
I bet all of the other single serve machines that use the old design will continue to be sold and Keurig's attempt to "control" the single serve market will fail miserably. I think my analogy to the PS/2 (scroll down to find it) just makes that much more sense now.
Because the ability to make a single serving of exactly the coffee one wants and to then have someone else do the exact same thing for their particular tastes is worth something.
US Airways private lounges have these things. Friends of mine have one. Honestly, if there wasn't DRM, I'd be tempted to get one for work, so that I don't have to brew a lot of coffee when I only want one cup.
There are many other brands of brewers that make single serving coffee and none of them force you to use any particular brand of cup.
This smacks of IBM and the PS/2. Long after they lost control of the market they created, they attempted to force their own propeitary expansion bus and other architecture on everyone. The end result is that the market took from them the few bits they liked and shoved them aside like yesterday's trash.
With so many alternatives out there, why on earth would anyone buy this idiotic machine that attempts to force you to use their cups yet fails miserably at doing do?
They are porting some features. But in a way that makes sense and is usable in the other platform. They aren't putting the same UI on both operating systems.
Slashdot Mirror
The bigger problem is that a lot of these channels will probably go away if they get rid of bundling.
And this is a bad thing.... why?
The reason that reality shows have taken over is because the advertising revenue is spread too thin to pay for quality shows. Back when it was just the 3 networks, advertising revenue was concentrated and networks had more money to put into developing quality shows. The proliferation of channels has spread the revenue to the point where few producers have the budget to put into producing a quality TV show. "Reality" TV is dirt cheap to create and produce compared to a real TV show and it generates sufficient ratings to pay for itself.
Quite honestly, it would be a good thing if there were fewer channels to choose from.
These are extremely lame products. A core 2 quad from SEVEN YEARS AGO had more cores, more cache and was probably faster. Moore's law is deader than a norwegian blue.
"No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, idn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage!"
That's still double the price of this phone.
Those phones are subsidized by the carriers. If you had to pay full price for them they'd be hundreds of dollars.
The unsubsidized full price for this phone is $29, which is less than 10% of the price of the latest Android/iPhone.
You must mean a "Reaganphone"... http://www.snopes.com/politics...
We're well into the 21st century. Cell phones and computers come with the ability to connect to 4G networks.
If the person doesn't answer, send a text
Have you tried sending a text on a flip phone? Or a land line?
That's what email is for.
or email.
And you end up waiting for hours for someone to get to a desk to compose and send the email.
As opposed to waiting forever because no one bothers to check their voice mail any more?
All the better to weed out the unwanted sales calls and so forth.
Not if he can't leave a voicemail. :D
Voicemail can still die, even with all of that.
If the person doesn't answer, send a text or email. Problem solved without voicemail.
Proper voicemail systems are evolved.
At work, my extension is tied into my email. When someone leaves me a message, it's sent as a wav file to my email, and I can listen to it from my mobile device.
That's hardly evolved. You still have to listen to the idiot who is just calling to ask "did you get my email?"...
I'm old enough to remember when voice mail was a privilege and you had to get your superiors to give you access because you were special. Even back then I didn't want it. I hated having to sift through the menus to listen to some irrelevant crap that someone could just as easily put in an email. I politely declined when my supervisor asked. That is, until the new phone system was installed and everyone was given their own voicemail. I hated getting pestered by some IT flunky to clear out my inbox because it was using up limited space, otherwise I would have let my inbox fill up to the point where it would reject incoming messages. I wasn't high enough on the food chain at that point to be able to get them to remove my inbox entirely but I did know at least one senior staff engineer who was able to make that happen. Though later in my career, once hard drive space was cheap enough to have way more storage than you needed because you couldn't even buy a hard drive that was too small, I did just let the inbox fill up. And after leaving a job of 3.5 years, I did log in to clear out the messages and I had a whopping 13, about half of which were from family members who ended up calling my cell phone. The rest were people who were following up on emails they had sent within 1-2 minutes of calling me.
So count me in the over 40 crowd that is happy to see voice mail going the way of the floppy disk. Good riddance. I look forward to not having to deal with it.
Or maybe the rest of the industry isn't willing to risk the liability for when something goes horribly wrong. Fear of litigation is a real impediment to innovation. But in this case, there is a huge amount of risk. Dealing with the real world happing around you while you're trying to make the computer drive the car has a ton of non-trivial potential disasters waiting to be exposed.
I just hope they're smarter than Rimmer and Kryten, that's all I have to say.
Exactly. On the one hand I'm surprised it took over 50 years to figure out the embargo wasn't going to work. Even more surprising is that it's over 20 years since the fall of the Soviet empire. But hey, when have politicians every been quick learners?
Sure, all of the Cuban refugees will be really pissed off for a while. But in the long term, I think this will be a good thing for both countries.
I know several people with English degrees that got into technical writing jobs at engineering companies. They took advantage of the 100% tuition reimbursement offered by the company to get a second degree in comp sci or engineering and went on to become successful programmers/engineers. It was a lot of work to have a full time job and take classes but they did it and they didn't have to go deeper in debt while doing it.
Yeah, it would be interesting to see what happens if the residents of Gaza were turned into civilized people who were industrious and turned Gaza into an economically prosperous beachfront resort and started winning Nobel Prizes, just like regular Israel.
It would be a bit of a change from murdering their own children to dig tunnels underneath their neighbors for the sole purposes of indiscriminately murdering people they've never met.
The Israelites don't have to do that because they have an American backed and supplied military to do that for them.
I was not aware of the patents. Thank you for bringing that to my attention.
I bet all of the other single serve machines that use the old design will continue to be sold and Keurig's attempt to "control" the single serve market will fail miserably. I think my analogy to the PS/2 (scroll down to find it) just makes that much more sense now.
I bet they'll still call them "K Cups" but like the modern "PC", the new generation will have no idea where the name comes from.
Because the ability to make a single serving of exactly the coffee one wants and to then have someone else do the exact same thing for their particular tastes is worth something.
US Airways private lounges have these things. Friends of mine have one. Honestly, if there wasn't DRM, I'd be tempted to get one for work, so that I don't have to brew a lot of coffee when I only want one cup.
There are many other brands of brewers that make single serving coffee and none of them force you to use any particular brand of cup.
This smacks of IBM and the PS/2. Long after they lost control of the market they created, they attempted to force their own propeitary expansion bus and other architecture on everyone. The end result is that the market took from them the few bits they liked and shoved them aside like yesterday's trash.
With so many alternatives out there, why on earth would anyone buy this idiotic machine that attempts to force you to use their cups yet fails miserably at doing do?
Hell, they don't even need to pull me over to search my phone. What could possibly go wrong?
Having nothing in common besides some of the foundational kernel elements certainly qualifies them as "entirely different".
They are porting some features. But in a way that makes sense and is usable in the other platform. They aren't putting the same UI on both operating systems.