Also I count on myself to make an error for roughly 1/100 'quanta' of a task or assignment that I do, be it typo, inattention, etc.
Automating is a great way to force yourself to really understand the task and all vagaries before you dive in underprepared, and it reduces that error rate to zero (until the environment changes, but then it's usually obvious that it goes up to 100% and the tool needs to be updated).
Taxis outside the very largest cities in the US are a consistently miserable experience. I encourage Uber, Lyft, and all other comers to dance around the rules and legalese in whatever way they need to, because in my experience they are night-and-day better than the ripoff taxis we had become inured to.
Dropbox does start at 2GB, and this is a severe shortcoming compared to 15GB, but they give free additional storage for just about everything. I've gotten an additional 10GB, in smaller chunks, for:
Having.edu address
Using photo backup on smartphone
Referring other users
Reading their tutorial page
Installing the application - per device
Et cetera. It does kind of stink jumping through hoops to get there, but unlike OneDrive (YMMV), Dropbox's syncing program actually works.
And it's dreadfully clear that Slashdot readership doesn't have any idea what the fuck it's talking about here either. This particular discussion is worse than Reddit.
The way America's poor 20-somethings get on the Internet now is through their smartphones. (In my experience the older poor don't get online at all). The plethora of $30-$40/mo. "unlimited" 3G services and used 1+ year old smartphones means you can do it and have phone service for about $100 upfront and $40/mo thereafter, and not tied to a landline either. However this is a recent development. US prepaid data plans before 2012 were woefully inadequate.
I won't pretend that we don't live in an age of technological wonder, that a person who can barely keep a roof over their head can talk to people globally instantly and everywhere, but there are some caveats:
(1) It is significantly more challenging to use a smartphone for a "creative" (v. consumptive) purpose than a desktop. Smartphone users who never see a PC are much less likely to get into programming or otherwise become tech-savvy. They are much less likely to write, edit photos, etc. other than for what they have to. The mobile document editing applications out there are generously a decade behind even LibreOffice. To some extent the form factor will just never permit this kind of usage. (2) These users frequently only see hobbled mobile versions of websites. (3) A lot of data and functionality is still locked away for desktop browsers only, either because the website operator is pigheaded and thinks the mobile user only needs to see very basic info, or the feature is provided through a kludge of technologies that don't play nice with the mobile screen size (or don't support mobile platforms).
As for people saying "well just go to the library" - yes, there are 40,000 odd libraries in the US, but many of them are open 9-5 M-F or even shorter hours, you have to wait in line for a computer, and they're often day centers for the homeless. In all honesty a better option is to borrow a friend's notebook, walk to McDonald's (you're going to eat anyway), and use their wifi until they kick you out.
Chrome also does not always correctly handle catching the CTRL key. It's intermittent (maybe certain website behaviors trigger it), but it just doesn't do anything. A couple years back I made a serious effort to use Chrome and gave up for this reason. At the time I found a bug report saying that it had been a known issue since pretty much the beginning of the project. When I have needed to use Chrome since (the rare page that doesn't like my combination of Firefox plugins, or testing for work) the bug will rear its ugly head occasionally.
It's a bummer because Firefox is slow as molasses compared to Chrome and it doesn't have quite the extensions edge that it used to, but at least it actually works.
The data cap appears to be an old, unloved corporate policy. Apparently it did get bumped to 400gb according to other posts here, but for years (including through multiple speed increases) I remember that it had been stuck on 250gb. That said I have never heard of anyone's account getting shut off for going over the "cap". I think they just auto-send you a whiny email.
Mary Roach mentions a study on the effects of not bathing or not changing clothes in Packing for Mars. IIRC after about seven days the dirt, oils, etc. on your skin reach equilibrium - old oils fall off as fast as new oils accumulate.
The Surface Pro 2 is quite literally the best laptop I have ever had the pleasure of using. (Before being accused of partisanship, that crown previously went to the MacBook Air). It does _everything_ and goes _everywhere_.
That said, most of the additional utility for me is from using it while travelling, or using it to take notes and drawings. The vast majority of business users never actually need to interact with their work away from their desks, in which case, stick to your $400 barebones desktop or thin client.
In all seriousness, other than blown caps and hard disk failures, and assuming a cool and dry environment, the MTBF for GRRM's computer would be in the decades, right?
Whenever I have set up ISP accounts (all Cox plus a couple small-time locals mind you) they have a setting in their online user account settings to turn off the DNS hijacking.
People are generally smart enough to figure out what "server not found" means, and they look to see if they typed something wrong, and they generally know what a malformed web address looks like. Ruining that functionality and taking them to an ads page that looks vaguely like the Googles is rage-inducing.
I've had the same debate with friends regarding airlines: first class vs. priority boarding vs. the rest of us, the dregs of society.
I used to agree with your "nickel and diming" theory, but I gradually have realized that the morons paying for the premium service are subsidizing the rest of us, and I'm okay with that. My $100 fare is probably not keeping the plane in the air. The guy up front who paid $1000 for a seat with 3 more inches on either side, and closer attention from the staff, is "doing" 10x as much as me to get the plane moving, and he is definitely not getting $900 extra of service out of it. So let him have his creature comforts and pretend extra-special-customer status; I'll save my money for things that matter, and we will both land in the same place at the same time.
The thing is, the world has always been this way: it's just that in 2011 we are better informed about exactly how much the rich get to enjoy over the rest of us. But if you think that the green pieces of paper didn't let you bribe your way into better service in the past, well, you have been misled.
Slashdot Mirror
Also I count on myself to make an error for roughly 1/100 'quanta' of a task or assignment that I do, be it typo, inattention, etc.
Automating is a great way to force yourself to really understand the task and all vagaries before you dive in underprepared, and it reduces that error rate to zero (until the environment changes, but then it's usually obvious that it goes up to 100% and the tool needs to be updated).
Unfortunately documentation is the epitome of "in a perfect world, yeah, but we have another problem to tackle right now."
...is often better than a master of one.
Taxis outside the very largest cities in the US are a consistently miserable experience. I encourage Uber, Lyft, and all other comers to dance around the rules and legalese in whatever way they need to, because in my experience they are night-and-day better than the ripoff taxis we had become inured to.
Dropbox does start at 2GB, and this is a severe shortcoming compared to 15GB, but they give free additional storage for just about everything. I've gotten an additional 10GB, in smaller chunks, for:
Et cetera. It does kind of stink jumping through hoops to get there, but unlike OneDrive (YMMV), Dropbox's syncing program actually works.
And it's dreadfully clear that Slashdot readership doesn't have any idea what the fuck it's talking about here either. This particular discussion is worse than Reddit.
The way America's poor 20-somethings get on the Internet now is through their smartphones. (In my experience the older poor don't get online at all). The plethora of $30-$40/mo. "unlimited" 3G services and used 1+ year old smartphones means you can do it and have phone service for about $100 upfront and $40/mo thereafter, and not tied to a landline either. However this is a recent development. US prepaid data plans before 2012 were woefully inadequate.
I won't pretend that we don't live in an age of technological wonder, that a person who can barely keep a roof over their head can talk to people globally instantly and everywhere, but there are some caveats:
(1) It is significantly more challenging to use a smartphone for a "creative" (v. consumptive) purpose than a desktop. Smartphone users who never see a PC are much less likely to get into programming or otherwise become tech-savvy. They are much less likely to write, edit photos, etc. other than for what they have to. The mobile document editing applications out there are generously a decade behind even LibreOffice. To some extent the form factor will just never permit this kind of usage.
(2) These users frequently only see hobbled mobile versions of websites.
(3) A lot of data and functionality is still locked away for desktop browsers only, either because the website operator is pigheaded and thinks the mobile user only needs to see very basic info, or the feature is provided through a kludge of technologies that don't play nice with the mobile screen size (or don't support mobile platforms).
As for people saying "well just go to the library" - yes, there are 40,000 odd libraries in the US, but many of them are open 9-5 M-F or even shorter hours, you have to wait in line for a computer, and they're often day centers for the homeless. In all honesty a better option is to borrow a friend's notebook, walk to McDonald's (you're going to eat anyway), and use their wifi until they kick you out.
Chrome also does not always correctly handle catching the CTRL key. It's intermittent (maybe certain website behaviors trigger it), but it just doesn't do anything. A couple years back I made a serious effort to use Chrome and gave up for this reason. At the time I found a bug report saying that it had been a known issue since pretty much the beginning of the project. When I have needed to use Chrome since (the rare page that doesn't like my combination of Firefox plugins, or testing for work) the bug will rear its ugly head occasionally.
It's a bummer because Firefox is slow as molasses compared to Chrome and it doesn't have quite the extensions edge that it used to, but at least it actually works.
The data cap appears to be an old, unloved corporate policy. Apparently it did get bumped to 400gb according to other posts here, but for years (including through multiple speed increases) I remember that it had been stuck on 250gb. That said I have never heard of anyone's account getting shut off for going over the "cap". I think they just auto-send you a whiny email.
Mary Roach mentions a study on the effects of not bathing or not changing clothes in Packing for Mars. IIRC after about seven days the dirt, oils, etc. on your skin reach equilibrium - old oils fall off as fast as new oils accumulate.
The Surface Pro 2 is quite literally the best laptop I have ever had the pleasure of using. (Before being accused of partisanship, that crown previously went to the MacBook Air). It does _everything_ and goes _everywhere_.
That said, most of the additional utility for me is from using it while travelling, or using it to take notes and drawings. The vast majority of business users never actually need to interact with their work away from their desks, in which case, stick to your $400 barebones desktop or thin client.
In all seriousness, other than blown caps and hard disk failures, and assuming a cool and dry environment, the MTBF for GRRM's computer would be in the decades, right?
Whenever I have set up ISP accounts (all Cox plus a couple small-time locals mind you) they have a setting in their online user account settings to turn off the DNS hijacking.
People are generally smart enough to figure out what "server not found" means, and they look to see if they typed something wrong, and they generally know what a malformed web address looks like. Ruining that functionality and taking them to an ads page that looks vaguely like the Googles is rage-inducing.
I used to agree with your "nickel and diming" theory, but I gradually have realized that the morons paying for the premium service are subsidizing the rest of us, and I'm okay with that. My $100 fare is probably not keeping the plane in the air. The guy up front who paid $1000 for a seat with 3 more inches on either side, and closer attention from the staff, is "doing" 10x as much as me to get the plane moving, and he is definitely not getting $900 extra of service out of it. So let him have his creature comforts and pretend extra-special-customer status; I'll save my money for things that matter, and we will both land in the same place at the same time.
The thing is, the world has always been this way: it's just that in 2011 we are better informed about exactly how much the rich get to enjoy over the rest of us. But if you think that the green pieces of paper didn't let you bribe your way into better service in the past, well, you have been misled.