I'm pretty sure that's known as an unintended consequence, and I doubt they will be pleased to learn that the tactics they zealously believed would save their business model and earn them even more wealth than before, actually torpedoed any hope of them regaining disgruntled customers. Sure, churn works, until you piss off the entire market.
If they can write to their user directory (and chances are, unless they're on a kiosk, they can), they can "install" Firefox without installing Firefox.
The biggest potential problem that I can think of (yeah, yeah, I'm feeling paranoid) is if a bunch of thieves decide to participate and prey on solo gamers.
Actually, that's from Hebrews, so while Paul is a good guess, there's actually no verifiable attribution of the quote "... faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen."
Re: Segfaulting, in the commercial market, such a release would be called "premature" and derided by gamers everywhere, but in a world where you can see the source, it could be an invitation to get involved by finding and crushing bugs.
And guess what, if a bunch of Chinese students came to the US and flung banners around Stanford demanding we give California back to Mexico, we'd probably tell them to get their butts back to China and mind their own business.
NONSENSE! We'd laugh. That's it. We'd laugh and laugh and laugh.
And some of the less-than-friendly Stanford folks will no doubt tell them to go back to Cal, AKA UC Berkeley. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure there are some protesters in Berkeley with the same messed-up disposition.
3) Deal with them under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. They MUST inform of you their mailing address and the appropriate department. Send them a typed letter explaining that you are not the person they keep asking for, you have no knowledge of this person any debts this person has. Demand that all communications to that number cease immediately or you will seek remedies under the FDCPA.
In fact, the mere mention of an FDCPA letter will stop a borderline-reputable collector cold. I say "borderline", because they operate with just enough ethics to avoid becoming a target of a prosecutor or a litigant, while they toss any ethics aside by relying on people's ignorance of the FDCPA.
In short, if the debt isn't yours to pay and they continue to call you anyway, tell them that they're in violation over the phone, and they will most likely shut up. If they don't, start writing, because that debt collector needs a reality check.
To be fair, if a factory is forced to drastically cut costs and maintain the same production volume, it won't matter if it's made in Japan, the USA, China, Taiwan, or heck, Germany. You're going to get an increased failure rate. Japan is in pretty bad shape economically despite remaining #2 behind the US, especially in industrial jobs like manufacturing, where China and India are gobbling up contracts and resources.
A few questions to make sure you're comparing apples to apples:
1. Is the nano using LiPo batteries? (probably true) 2. Is the nano battery's size comparable to the one in the video? (very hard to tell, as there's no sense of scale; someone who knows how big a 3-cell 1.8Ah LiPo battery is can clarify here) 3. Is the nano's battery likely to fail in someone's pocket in the same manner as the video?
Unless the fellow is resourceful and remarkably clueless about electricity and recent Li battery history, no. The battery is forced to fail spectacularly by overcharging, and most chargers are intelligent enough not to shove 4 cells' worth of charge on a 3-cell battery. The reason why so few battery fires not caused by overcharging are posted on Youtube is that it's really not that easy to cause a battery to predictably fail in any other way-- which is why the only battery failures you're seeing is pillowing. Furthermore, the battery's naked; a typical battery is housed inside a device, which will change the way it burns, should it catch fire.
I'll agree with you that in oxygen-rich environments like hospitals (esp. ICUs), I wouldn't want something that can burn or go pop through mishandling, but that's what safety practices are for.
FWIW, if all 14 nanos caught fire within a few weeks of one another, that points to a bad batch of batteries. I'm sure there'll be a recall of a range of nano serial numbers, and not much more.
It is incredibly unlikely that your graphics chip is falling apart. It's soldered to the logic board.
That's true today, but there were reports of earlier-model MBP CPUs or GPUs detaching from the motherboard (I forget which), and a daring fellow with some fire (others with heat guns) forcibly re-soldered the offending component back on. This isn't a known issue with the current-gen Macbooks, but people still bring it up as a so-called "example" of poor build quality.
It's only "overheating" when something crashes (and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on that one, as I've crashed C&C Generals on Boot Camp on mine*); otherwise, that's the passive part of the cooling system heating the case to radiate the heat away from the rest of the laptop. That's why the only vents are at the hinge of the current MBP design, because it relies on the aluminum exterior case to draw heat away from the CPU, GPU, RAM, and HDD.
If you're concerned about frying yourself, get an app that mods the fan speed, like smcFanControl or Input Remapper-- set the fan speed to 4000 to 6000 RPM, and your laptop shouldn't be more than warm to the touch unless you're working in an oven or sauna. And don't touch the metal between the keyboard and the hinge vent, that's usually the hottest part of the laptop.
Leave it to Jobs and his design team to favor form over function or efficiency, but you have to admit that it's really hard to design a laptop form factor that can cool the important components and have the smooth appearance that Jobs demands.
* The MBP, due to crummy Windows drivers and/or poor handling of the SMC hard/firmware, has a default fan setting of 1000 RPM in Boot Camp, half of the default in OS X. So it is much more likely to overheat in Windows; however, if you boost the fan speed manually in OS X and then reboot into Windows without powering down or sleeping the MBP, it will retain that fan setting.
I know we could do better, and I just don't understand why we as a society choose not to.
Hm? The FCC and most corporate boards are generally outside of public accountability, so what makes you think we as a society, rather than politicians controlled by corporate interests, chose American Idol in high-definition over true high-speed Internet?
Nolan Bushnell about E.T. on the Atari 2600, which he himself once called "the worst game of all time". The difference between him and the software developers at Microsoft India is that he only needed 6 months to turn out a barely-playable game
Note to self: Fact-check, then post.
It wasn't Bushnell, it was Howard Scott Warshaw, and he only had 5 weeks.
However, that has nothing to do with Vista, because it was stupid design. And while the hardware still isn't ready for it, even if it were, it'd be a stupid design.
IIRC, Vista was a hasty retreat from an overly ambitious project to overhaul Windows. One can never get great results out of a rushed project, just ask Nolan Bushnell about E.T. on the Atari 2600, which he himself once called "the worst game of all time". The difference between him and the software developers at Microsoft India is that he only needed 6 months to turn out a barely-playable game that sort of has to do with the movie. I think Vista had about 2 years and essentially came up with Aero on a rearranged 2003 Server base.
I think many here have seen the Dilbert comic, "How Nature Protects Weak Products". Given how process-obsessed the management doubtless is, and how aggressive their sales and marketing people are, it shouldn't be a surprise that the developers came up with a product so lackluster, that they need shills, evangelists, astroturfers, "works-for-me" trolls, and an ad campaign to salvage its reputation.
Admittedly, some of the complaints are about things not being the way they are in XP-- the Start Menu comes to mind. But there are insanely weird quirks, like downloads throttled by MP3 playback, or (someone mentioned) programs performing poorly while the network is active, regardless of whether it actually uses the network. UI decisions, like the new network control mechanism, leaves one wondering whether they understand what an intuitive interface actually is. These are bugs that probably would've been caught in the first round of testing, but take a long time to find and/or fix.
I'm a FreeBSD person myself, and compared to the predictability of Unix-like operating systems, Vista is like playing scavenger hunt for quirks.
I hear they're doing some wonderful things with biological plastics. Oh, and there's this big pile of floating plastic debris in the Pacific. It'd be a shame to let all that free plastic go to waste.
RIAA is actually small fries-- any law graduate just past the bar exam ought to know not to pull that sort of shenanigans in federal court.
If you want to put PJ/Groklaw's resources to the ultimate challenge, have them whack at the Sonny Bono "Protect Mickey Mouse" Act, the USPTO, the Copyright Royalties Board, and the twin abominations of IP law in consideration in the House and Senate, brought to them by the same bozos who are treating American internet users as targets for a big racketeering scheme.
Re:Groklaw is an example of the power of open sour
on
Grokking SCO's Demise
·
· Score: 1
SCO v. IBM was filed in 2003, well after Phil Gramm's deregulation legislation was enacted. Essentially, SCO is Enron, but with a litigation theater complete with lawyers.
What we need is a Lewis Black rant on McBride and his cronies, along the lines of:
"Three people took a billion dollars. Three people, a billion. What were they gonna do!?! Start their own space program!?! 'Let's send the monkey to Mars, Dad!'"
- Being the sort of person to rub salt in an opponent's wound, hopefully figuratively. - Being subject to the same treatment from critics when the shoe's on the other foot. - Being derided anyway by critic and spectator alike, because no one likes a jackass. - Being, equivocatingly, a neoconservative (Right) or a libertarian (politically right). One would need a very flexible dictionary in this case.
Method A: A good start, but with only a fraction of the content visible, someone's bound to complain, or worse, claim that the site is censoring content. Not so good. Method B: This is probably the most reasonable, given the stated goals of the site. The only ones that might possibly complain are the visual designers who actually created the UI, the armchair visual designers in the audience, and the less intelligent of the whiners who now complain that their content isn't higher up or more to the left, instead of being hidden. Method C: Arguably the best solution of the three if the tabs are essential as PP mentioned. However, this requires someone who can actually design and code solid database handlers. But whereas the earlier solutions could be coded with HTML, CSS, and some Javascript, this one requires a server-side language like PHP or ASP, if it wants to avoid heavy use of Javascript.
A sufficiently large, diverse, and dedicated body of active participants can neutralize most astroturfing efforts.
I don't know if NewsTrust has that sort of community. Slashdot could certainly encourage more diversity in its views, especially political perspectives.
In the weightiest of matters that great men have decided alone...
Okay, that was too hasty. Great men decided such matters after hearing counsel from many perspectives. Cheney has bamboozled Bush into believing that only Dick Cheney's perspective matters.
Why do we have the biggest deficit in history? Because Cheney repeatedly told Bush, "Deficits don't matter."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure that's known as an unintended consequence, and I doubt they will be pleased to learn that the tactics they zealously believed would save their business model and earn them even more wealth than before, actually torpedoed any hope of them regaining disgruntled customers. Sure, churn works, until you piss off the entire market.
If they can write to their user directory (and chances are, unless they're on a kiosk, they can), they can "install" Firefox without installing Firefox.
The biggest potential problem that I can think of (yeah, yeah, I'm feeling paranoid) is if a bunch of thieves decide to participate and prey on solo gamers.
Actually, that's from Hebrews, so while Paul is a good guess, there's actually no verifiable attribution of the quote "... faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen."
Re: Segfaulting, in the commercial market, such a release would be called "premature" and derided by gamers everywhere, but in a world where you can see the source, it could be an invitation to get involved by finding and crushing bugs.
And some of the less-than-friendly Stanford folks will no doubt tell them to go back to Cal, AKA UC Berkeley. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure there are some protesters in Berkeley with the same messed-up disposition.
Bah, you medieval types. Let us have some fun with rockets, centrifuges, and mass drivers.
In fact, the mere mention of an FDCPA letter will stop a borderline-reputable collector cold. I say "borderline", because they operate with just enough ethics to avoid becoming a target of a prosecutor or a litigant, while they toss any ethics aside by relying on people's ignorance of the FDCPA.
In short, if the debt isn't yours to pay and they continue to call you anyway, tell them that they're in violation over the phone, and they will most likely shut up. If they don't, start writing, because that debt collector needs a reality check.
To be fair, if a factory is forced to drastically cut costs and maintain the same production volume, it won't matter if it's made in Japan, the USA, China, Taiwan, or heck, Germany. You're going to get an increased failure rate. Japan is in pretty bad shape economically despite remaining #2 behind the US, especially in industrial jobs like manufacturing, where China and India are gobbling up contracts and resources.
A few questions to make sure you're comparing apples to apples:
1. Is the nano using LiPo batteries? (probably true)
2. Is the nano battery's size comparable to the one in the video? (very hard to tell, as there's no sense of scale; someone who knows how big a 3-cell 1.8Ah LiPo battery is can clarify here)
3. Is the nano's battery likely to fail in someone's pocket in the same manner as the video?
Unless the fellow is resourceful and remarkably clueless about electricity and recent Li battery history, no. The battery is forced to fail spectacularly by overcharging, and most chargers are intelligent enough not to shove 4 cells' worth of charge on a 3-cell battery. The reason why so few battery fires not caused by overcharging are posted on Youtube is that it's really not that easy to cause a battery to predictably fail in any other way-- which is why the only battery failures you're seeing is pillowing. Furthermore, the battery's naked; a typical battery is housed inside a device, which will change the way it burns, should it catch fire.
I'll agree with you that in oxygen-rich environments like hospitals (esp. ICUs), I wouldn't want something that can burn or go pop through mishandling, but that's what safety practices are for.
FWIW, if all 14 nanos caught fire within a few weeks of one another, that points to a bad batch of batteries. I'm sure there'll be a recall of a range of nano serial numbers, and not much more.
It is incredibly unlikely that your graphics chip is falling apart. It's soldered to the logic board.
That's true today, but there were reports of earlier-model MBP CPUs or GPUs detaching from the motherboard (I forget which), and a daring fellow with some fire (others with heat guns) forcibly re-soldered the offending component back on. This isn't a known issue with the current-gen Macbooks, but people still bring it up as a so-called "example" of poor build quality.
It's only "overheating" when something crashes (and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on that one, as I've crashed C&C Generals on Boot Camp on mine*); otherwise, that's the passive part of the cooling system heating the case to radiate the heat away from the rest of the laptop. That's why the only vents are at the hinge of the current MBP design, because it relies on the aluminum exterior case to draw heat away from the CPU, GPU, RAM, and HDD.
If you're concerned about frying yourself, get an app that mods the fan speed, like smcFanControl or Input Remapper-- set the fan speed to 4000 to 6000 RPM, and your laptop shouldn't be more than warm to the touch unless you're working in an oven or sauna. And don't touch the metal between the keyboard and the hinge vent, that's usually the hottest part of the laptop.
Leave it to Jobs and his design team to favor form over function or efficiency, but you have to admit that it's really hard to design a laptop form factor that can cool the important components and have the smooth appearance that Jobs demands.
* The MBP, due to crummy Windows drivers and/or poor handling of the SMC hard/firmware, has a default fan setting of 1000 RPM in Boot Camp, half of the default in OS X. So it is much more likely to overheat in Windows; however, if you boost the fan speed manually in OS X and then reboot into Windows without powering down or sleeping the MBP, it will retain that fan setting.
I know we could do better, and I just don't understand why we as a society choose not to.
Hm? The FCC and most corporate boards are generally outside of public accountability, so what makes you think we as a society, rather than politicians controlled by corporate interests, chose American Idol in high-definition over true high-speed Internet?
Nolan Bushnell about E.T. on the Atari 2600, which he himself once called "the worst game of all time". The difference between him and the software developers at Microsoft India is that he only needed 6 months to turn out a barely-playable game
Note to self: Fact-check, then post.
It wasn't Bushnell, it was Howard Scott Warshaw, and he only had 5 weeks.
However, that has nothing to do with Vista, because it was stupid design. And while the hardware still isn't ready for it, even if it were, it'd be a stupid design.
IIRC, Vista was a hasty retreat from an overly ambitious project to overhaul Windows. One can never get great results out of a rushed project, just ask Nolan Bushnell about E.T. on the Atari 2600, which he himself once called "the worst game of all time". The difference between him and the software developers at Microsoft India is that he only needed 6 months to turn out a barely-playable game that sort of has to do with the movie. I think Vista had about 2 years and essentially came up with Aero on a rearranged 2003 Server base.
I think many here have seen the Dilbert comic, "How Nature Protects Weak Products". Given how process-obsessed the management doubtless is, and how aggressive their sales and marketing people are, it shouldn't be a surprise that the developers came up with a product so lackluster, that they need shills, evangelists, astroturfers, "works-for-me" trolls, and an ad campaign to salvage its reputation.
Admittedly, some of the complaints are about things not being the way they are in XP-- the Start Menu comes to mind. But there are insanely weird quirks, like downloads throttled by MP3 playback, or (someone mentioned) programs performing poorly while the network is active, regardless of whether it actually uses the network. UI decisions, like the new network control mechanism, leaves one wondering whether they understand what an intuitive interface actually is. These are bugs that probably would've been caught in the first round of testing, but take a long time to find and/or fix.
I'm a FreeBSD person myself, and compared to the predictability of Unix-like operating systems, Vista is like playing scavenger hunt for quirks.
I hear they're doing some wonderful things with biological plastics. Oh, and there's this big pile of floating plastic debris in the Pacific. It'd be a shame to let all that free plastic go to waste.
RIAA is actually small fries-- any law graduate just past the bar exam ought to know not to pull that sort of shenanigans in federal court.
If you want to put PJ/Groklaw's resources to the ultimate challenge, have them whack at the Sonny Bono "Protect Mickey Mouse" Act, the USPTO, the Copyright Royalties Board, and the twin abominations of IP law in consideration in the House and Senate, brought to them by the same bozos who are treating American internet users as targets for a big racketeering scheme.
SCO v. IBM was filed in 2003, well after Phil Gramm's deregulation legislation was enacted. Essentially, SCO is Enron, but with a litigation theater complete with lawyers.
What we need is a Lewis Black rant on McBride and his cronies, along the lines of:
"Three people took a billion dollars. Three people, a billion. What were they gonna do!?! Start their own space program!?! 'Let's send the monkey to Mars, Dad!'"
We have that rock, and for 6 easy payments of $119, we'll throw in a suspension bridge in New York, absolutely free!
But wait! There's more!! We'll even give you a free Orc samurai!
"My blade can cut through armor, and still cut tomato!"
But you must call within 5 minutes to take advantage of this amazing offer!
Being partisan and right means:
- Being the sort of person to rub salt in an opponent's wound, hopefully figuratively.
- Being subject to the same treatment from critics when the shoe's on the other foot.
- Being derided anyway by critic and spectator alike, because no one likes a jackass.
- Being, equivocatingly, a neoconservative (Right) or a libertarian (politically right). One would need a very flexible dictionary in this case.
Commenting on the 3 UI improvement suggestions:
Method A: A good start, but with only a fraction of the content visible, someone's bound to complain, or worse, claim that the site is censoring content. Not so good.
Method B: This is probably the most reasonable, given the stated goals of the site. The only ones that might possibly complain are the visual designers who actually created the UI, the armchair visual designers in the audience, and the less intelligent of the whiners who now complain that their content isn't higher up or more to the left, instead of being hidden.
Method C: Arguably the best solution of the three if the tabs are essential as PP mentioned. However, this requires someone who can actually design and code solid database handlers. But whereas the earlier solutions could be coded with HTML, CSS, and some Javascript, this one requires a server-side language like PHP or ASP, if it wants to avoid heavy use of Javascript.
I do miss a lot of drug commercials that way but I think I cankive [sic] (longer?) without that.
Yeah, but I bet the commentary isn't as easy on the typing fingers as flipping channels.
A sufficiently large, diverse, and dedicated body of active participants can neutralize most astroturfing efforts.
I don't know if NewsTrust has that sort of community. Slashdot could certainly encourage more diversity in its views, especially political perspectives.
In the weightiest of matters that great men have decided alone...
Okay, that was too hasty. Great men decided such matters after hearing counsel from many perspectives. Cheney has bamboozled Bush into believing that only Dick Cheney's perspective matters.
Why do we have the biggest deficit in history? Because Cheney repeatedly told Bush, "Deficits don't matter."