Are you implying that people who don't have awful-quality power aren't running with "real-world" power sources? What you're describing isn't normal by almost any stretch of the imagination.
Personally i've been using CFLs in all our lamps for close to 10 years, I think maybe 1 or 2 have failed out of about 9 or so during that period.
You use a check for Rent?? Mine is paid using PayPal (for both of my rental spaces)
I would quit writing a check in a second if I could, but unfortunately my property manager is stuck in the stone age...it's hard enough getting them off their asses to fix maintenance issues, let alone set up Paypal rent payment.
I can tell you I may never deposit a check in person again though - the remote deposit app on my phone is a godsend.
Seriously, I moved to the US last year... and I'm shocked that I can't pay my bills electronically and automatically... WTF? I have never used a check before coming to the US, no wonder people end up in collections because of wrong addresses, etc.
Please tell me you're trolling and not really this ignorant.
I've lived in the US my whole life, currently reside in a town of about 20,000 people, and I haven't paid using a check for anything besides my rent for about 15 years now. My cable, electric, water, trash, phone, Netflix, credit cards, etc. can all be paid electronically, and set up to automatically pay what's due (or any amount of my choosing) every month, on-time, via their websites. Although I prefer to keep a few things on manual for better control, all the bills can still be seen online with all the pertinent information & due dates.
They other day I just found out that I hadn't payed my electricity bill for 3 months, because apparent that's not what an ebill does...
So you signed up for e-billing, which if it's like my local utility, sends you an email every month with an electronic copy of the bill basically saying "Hey, you have $xxx due, log in and pay it by this date". And then...what? Just ignored it or figured you were getting free power?
Also as an IT guy, I find his comments pretty accurate. I work somewhere that employs a lot of recent college grads, and anything that doesn't involve going to their email or into our main software package (which better look exactly the same with all the icons in the same place) might as well be ancient magic to many of them.
For example, when it involves a computer, many of them don't seem able to go through a thought process like "X isn't working. X needs to be turned on through Y, I should check Y and see if X is turned on."
Maybe you think you're some kind of genius because you learned the very obscure Ctrl-c, Ctrl-v shortcuts, but... you're obviously not.
You joke, but i've had users treat me like i'm a goddammned wizard for simple stuff like that many a time, it's actually a bit disheartening.
Just to nitpick/be pedantic - Hulu Plus is not ad-free. I signed up for it back over the winter, and promptly canceled a few days into the free trial after seeing that the commercials were the same as watching OTA, if not worse.
And to make it even more bothersome, they couldn't be bothered to use a feed that just streamed the show with ads inserted after the fact, they more or less just straight rebroadcasted a station about 2 hours away and included their local ads.
I'm sure there's some sort of technical or monetary reason for that, but it annoyed the hell out of me.
Depends on the sport, but there's still solutions in some cases - my wife and I dropped our cable TV service about a year ago in favor of Netflix, Amazon, and MLB's streaming service.
The MLB streaming is $29.99/month for the duration of the season, and obviously comes out way cheaper than keeping an $80+/month TV package all year. Plus I can always tune in the game(s) I want regardless of what the networks feel like showing, aside from blackouts (and even then there's still a radio feed).
I see something similar at work even without Glass involved, although not quite to "frothing psychotic" level - our Dell laptop of choice has a webcam, which leads to a (small, granted) subset of our users being utterly convinced that they are being watched through it at all times....so they tape paper/stickers/etc. over them, and are very resistant to being convinced otherwise.
One user even went so far as to call the IT dept. of a local university in high dudgeon after being asked to remove the obstruction, who told them (jokingly, I hope), that asking them to take the junk off the camera meant that we really were watching them:):P
If you actually have a real choice, then great for you, most of us don't.
In my neck of the woods, it's either one cable company ($89.95 for 25 meg at the moment) or craptastic 1-3 meg Verizon DSL for whatever they charge.
Even when I lived 10 miles from DC, the only choice was still Cox or DSL. Verizon never did deign to bring FIOS out, despite a neverending barrage of ads and mailers.
What sort of dodgy bank are you with that doesn't have a 24-hour line for reporting card loss/theft?
A couple years ago, my wife's check card number was stolen and run for about $300 at a Wal-Mart in Dallas - at about 10 PM local time on a Sunday, I was able to call and report the theft on a 24-hour number, get the number blocked, and even managed to get the store manager at the Wal-Mart to pull video from the checkout line of the thief. The next morning I faxed in the appropriate form, and the money was back in our account by Tuesday.
Sure thing, lil' AC buddy, i'll get right on that.
It's always a good time to bash DRM. While this may have only happened briefly, you absolutely should not lose access to anything. You shouldn't have to run Steam to play your games, either. Valve should scrap the DRM and turn Steam into a platform to buy games (like it partly is now) and keep all the additional functionality. The only change would be that you wouldn't have to run games from Steam.
Would that be nice? Sure. Would it increase piracy of their game catalog even more than there is now? Probably - I mean, take a look at TPB, pretty sure you could get most of the GOG catalog there, if not the entire thing.
DRM-free like GOG is awesome (and i've bought about 45 games from them also), but I can't really blame Valve or the publishers that sell on Steam for not wanting to open up another piracy avenue.
Do you have any solid evidence that there's a majority that wants Steam's DRM gone for reasons other than getting free stuff?
Seriously...I guess maybe this would have affected access to save games and settings for some people briefly? I was actively playing games and didn't even notice till I saw this story.
Probably someone hoping to start a firestorm about Valves eeeeeeevilllll DRM.
Sounds about like my local company (Shentel) too - we had outages 5 separate times in October, each time the idiots on the phone were convinced that something was wrong with our router or computers, how dare we insinuate that their equipment could POSSIBLY be broken.
Finally after 5 calls, a 15-minute browbeating of one of their phone monkeys, and 3 dispatches....they futzed around for almost 3 hours and finally figured out that someone sliced a line putting in a privacy fence.
And this after I had to talk to 3 separate people to actually get the provisioning right on our modem to get the speeds we were paying for.
Oh, you would rather have two cars, cable, and a big house than health insurance? That is your choice, stop whining to me about it.
No, it's more like I would rather have food, electricity, and a place to rent than health insurance at that cost. I'm pretty well-off (but no big house), and it would still be a serious hit, probably close to 15-20% of our combined monthly income, depending on what figure you use.
I know you're being facetious to prove a point, but Linux isn't exactly obscure or old anymore.
Their main customer base is XBLA & Steam at the moment....is the pool of Linux gamers really on par with that combination enough to make it worth the effort?
True, but they appear to be misinformed about Linux and are instead going off a stereotype. They're programmers, shouldn't they be at least aware of what's out there? Or am I just being naive?
At the risk of being a bit pedantic, of the 2 developers, only one of them is a programmer.
I just came back from a stay at a bed & breakfast in rural Virginia, where the innkeeper's husband also happens to keep 10 hives of bees on the property - very poor cellphone service in the whole area, 1 bar of EDGE reception, if even that much. He lost 8 of the 10 hives to apparent Colony Collapse a few years ago, but completely back to normal now.
i don't know about you but i prefer to be alone while i'm taking a dump, and I generally flush before opening the door. so, if someone is in there with me flushing before i leave, then i'd probably be a little pissed.
And GunBound - wanted to try it again after having played several years ago...GameGuard made my system immediately BSOD and reboot every single time I tried to start the game.
And of course, the drivers in D.C. and Seattle don't know how to deal with snow/ice: at the first flake, ancient reptilian instincts cause them to drive straight into trees, jersey barriers, other cars, etc.
Yep, annoying, but also keeps me (originally from Syracuse area, college at RIT) amused - if we ever got the multi-foot snowstorms here in DC/NoVA on a regular basis, it would be utter chaos. I still remember the day my wife and I moved here, 1.5 inches of snow and everything closed like 2 hours early.
DC was on the list of Best Places, as there are a LOT of IT jobs in the area.
Jobs may be plentiful, but the living costs suck. I live in Northern VA at the moment, but planning to GTFO as soon as my lease is up - looking forward to owning a house for less than what it takes to rent a 1.5 bedroom condo here.
Honestly, if they need to use it that much why have they not bought their own?
While I would use a bit more tact than this (to start, anyway), it's basically what I would recommend - loaning it out to help someone for a one-time presentation or other emergency is one thing, but if these people are mooching off you almost every time they need a computer for anything....There's something wrong there.
It really depends on how much you care about staying on good terms with these people - maybe start with politely telling them they have one more freebie before they need to buy their own or use a public terminal, and work up from there to "fuck you, die in a fire" as needed.
I would also agree with the sentiment that they're probably spending more on art supplies than it would take to buy the low-powered laptop to suit their needs - you're providing an easy excuse for them to be cheap and/or lazy.
This was my exact thought also - when I first heard of this possibility, I felt an immediate urge to make sure I knew where all the DVDs were to wash the horror away later.
I rarely keep the games I buy since, as Isaac Asimov wisely observed, only 1% of anything is truly good. The other 99% I play, don't like, and then sell online.
Perhaps you should stop making so many impulse buys, then.
Ever consider actually doing some research before you buy via reviews & demos & message boards?
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Are you implying that people who don't have awful-quality power aren't running with "real-world" power sources? What you're describing isn't normal by almost any stretch of the imagination.
Personally i've been using CFLs in all our lamps for close to 10 years, I think maybe 1 or 2 have failed out of about 9 or so during that period.
You use a check for Rent?? Mine is paid using PayPal (for both of my rental spaces)
I would quit writing a check in a second if I could, but unfortunately my property manager is stuck in the stone age...it's hard enough getting them off their asses to fix maintenance issues, let alone set up Paypal rent payment.
I can tell you I may never deposit a check in person again though - the remote deposit app on my phone is a godsend.
Seriously, I moved to the US last year... and I'm shocked that I can't pay my bills electronically and automatically... WTF?
I have never used a check before coming to the US, no wonder people end up in collections because of wrong addresses, etc.
Please tell me you're trolling and not really this ignorant.
I've lived in the US my whole life, currently reside in a town of about 20,000 people, and I haven't paid using a check for anything besides my rent for about 15 years now. My cable, electric, water, trash, phone, Netflix, credit cards, etc. can all be paid electronically, and set up to automatically pay what's due (or any amount of my choosing) every month, on-time, via their websites. Although I prefer to keep a few things on manual for better control, all the bills can still be seen online with all the pertinent information & due dates.
They other day I just found out that I hadn't payed my electricity bill for 3 months, because apparent that's not what an ebill does...
So you signed up for e-billing, which if it's like my local utility, sends you an email every month with an electronic copy of the bill basically saying "Hey, you have $xxx due, log in and pay it by this date". And then...what? Just ignored it or figured you were getting free power?
Also as an IT guy, I find his comments pretty accurate. I work somewhere that employs a lot of recent college grads, and anything that doesn't involve going to their email or into our main software package (which better look exactly the same with all the icons in the same place) might as well be ancient magic to many of them.
For example, when it involves a computer, many of them don't seem able to go through a thought process like "X isn't working. X needs to be turned on through Y, I should check Y and see if X is turned on."
Maybe you think you're some kind of genius because you learned the very obscure Ctrl-c, Ctrl-v shortcuts, but... you're obviously not.
You joke, but i've had users treat me like i'm a goddammned wizard for simple stuff like that many a time, it's actually a bit disheartening.
Just to nitpick/be pedantic - Hulu Plus is not ad-free. I signed up for it back over the winter, and promptly canceled a few days into the free trial after seeing that the commercials were the same as watching OTA, if not worse.
And to make it even more bothersome, they couldn't be bothered to use a feed that just streamed the show with ads inserted after the fact, they more or less just straight rebroadcasted a station about 2 hours away and included their local ads.
I'm sure there's some sort of technical or monetary reason for that, but it annoyed the hell out of me.
Depends on the sport, but there's still solutions in some cases - my wife and I dropped our cable TV service about a year ago in favor of Netflix, Amazon, and MLB's streaming service.
The MLB streaming is $29.99/month for the duration of the season, and obviously comes out way cheaper than keeping an $80+/month TV package all year. Plus I can always tune in the game(s) I want regardless of what the networks feel like showing, aside from blackouts (and even then there's still a radio feed).
I see something similar at work even without Glass involved, although not quite to "frothing psychotic" level - our Dell laptop of choice has a webcam, which leads to a (small, granted) subset of our users being utterly convinced that they are being watched through it at all times....so they tape paper/stickers/etc. over them, and are very resistant to being convinced otherwise.
One user even went so far as to call the IT dept. of a local university in high dudgeon after being asked to remove the obstruction, who told them (jokingly, I hope), that asking them to take the junk off the camera meant that we really were watching them :):P
If you actually have a real choice, then great for you, most of us don't.
In my neck of the woods, it's either one cable company ($89.95 for 25 meg at the moment) or craptastic 1-3 meg Verizon DSL for whatever they charge.
Even when I lived 10 miles from DC, the only choice was still Cox or DSL. Verizon never did deign to bring FIOS out, despite a neverending barrage of ads and mailers.
What sort of dodgy bank are you with that doesn't have a 24-hour line for reporting card loss/theft?
A couple years ago, my wife's check card number was stolen and run for about $300 at a Wal-Mart in Dallas - at about 10 PM local time on a Sunday, I was able to call and report the theft on a 24-hour number, get the number blocked, and even managed to get the store manager at the Wal-Mart to pull video from the checkout line of the thief. The next morning I faxed in the appropriate form, and the money was back in our account by Tuesday.
Get over yourself.
Sure thing, lil' AC buddy, i'll get right on that.
It's always a good time to bash DRM. While this may have only happened briefly, you absolutely should not lose access to anything. You shouldn't have to run Steam to play your games, either. Valve should scrap the DRM and turn Steam into a platform to buy games (like it partly is now) and keep all the additional functionality. The only change would be that you wouldn't have to run games from Steam.
Would that be nice? Sure. Would it increase piracy of their game catalog even more than there is now? Probably - I mean, take a look at TPB, pretty sure you could get most of the GOG catalog there, if not the entire thing.
DRM-free like GOG is awesome (and i've bought about 45 games from them also), but I can't really blame Valve or the publishers that sell on Steam for not wanting to open up another piracy avenue.
Do you have any solid evidence that there's a majority that wants Steam's DRM gone for reasons other than getting free stuff?
Seriously...I guess maybe this would have affected access to save games and settings for some people briefly? I was actively playing games and didn't even notice till I saw this story.
Probably someone hoping to start a firestorm about Valves eeeeeeevilllll DRM.
Sounds about like my local company (Shentel) too - we had outages 5 separate times in October, each time the idiots on the phone were convinced that something was wrong with our router or computers, how dare we insinuate that their equipment could POSSIBLY be broken.
Finally after 5 calls, a 15-minute browbeating of one of their phone monkeys, and 3 dispatches....they futzed around for almost 3 hours and finally figured out that someone sliced a line putting in a privacy fence.
And this after I had to talk to 3 separate people to actually get the provisioning right on our modem to get the speeds we were paying for.
Oh, you would rather have two cars, cable, and a big house than health insurance? That is your choice, stop whining to me about it.
No, it's more like I would rather have food, electricity, and a place to rent than health insurance at that cost. I'm pretty well-off (but no big house), and it would still be a serious hit, probably close to 15-20% of our combined monthly income, depending on what figure you use.
I know you're being facetious to prove a point, but Linux isn't exactly obscure or old anymore.
Their main customer base is XBLA & Steam at the moment....is the pool of Linux gamers really on par with that combination enough to make it worth the effort?
True, but they appear to be misinformed about Linux and are instead going off a stereotype. They're programmers, shouldn't they be at least aware of what's out there? Or am I just being naive?
At the risk of being a bit pedantic, of the 2 developers, only one of them is a programmer.
I just came back from a stay at a bed & breakfast in rural Virginia, where the innkeeper's husband also happens to keep 10 hives of bees on the property - very poor cellphone service in the whole area, 1 bar of EDGE reception, if even that much. He lost 8 of the 10 hives to apparent Colony Collapse a few years ago, but completely back to normal now.
They seemed to have patched this problem now but it's very dismaying and I avoid whenever possible buying games through Steam.
So they fixed the bug, but you're still going to hold a grudge anyway? Seems like a bit of an overreaction to me.
i don't know about you but i prefer to be alone while i'm taking a dump, and I generally flush before opening the door. so, if someone is in there with me flushing before i leave, then i'd probably be a little pissed.
Ah, I miss those days, before I had cats...
"Summon Lich" vs. "Summon Rich"
I always kinda liked that one, I imagined some guy named Rich in a Grim Reaper costume appearing to smite my enemies.
And GunBound - wanted to try it again after having played several years ago...GameGuard made my system immediately BSOD and reboot every single time I tried to start the game.
And of course, the drivers in D.C. and Seattle don't know how to deal with snow/ice: at the first flake, ancient reptilian instincts cause them to drive straight into trees, jersey barriers, other cars, etc.
Yep, annoying, but also keeps me (originally from Syracuse area, college at RIT) amused - if we ever got the multi-foot snowstorms here in DC/NoVA on a regular basis, it would be utter chaos. I still remember the day my wife and I moved here, 1.5 inches of snow and everything closed like 2 hours early.
DC was on the list of Best Places, as there are a LOT of IT jobs in the area.
Jobs may be plentiful, but the living costs suck. I live in Northern VA at the moment, but planning to GTFO as soon as my lease is up - looking forward to owning a house for less than what it takes to rent a 1.5 bedroom condo here.
Or tell them to go fuck themselves.
Honestly, if they need to use it that much why have they not bought their own?
While I would use a bit more tact than this (to start, anyway), it's basically what I would recommend - loaning it out to help someone for a one-time presentation or other emergency is one thing, but if these people are mooching off you almost every time they need a computer for anything....There's something wrong there.
It really depends on how much you care about staying on good terms with these people - maybe start with politely telling them they have one more freebie before they need to buy their own or use a public terminal, and work up from there to "fuck you, die in a fire" as needed.
I would also agree with the sentiment that they're probably spending more on art supplies than it would take to buy the low-powered laptop to suit their needs - you're providing an easy excuse for them to be cheap and/or lazy.
Same here, worked fine using AdBlock Plus and Firefox.
This was my exact thought also - when I first heard of this possibility, I felt an immediate urge to make sure I knew where all the DVDs were to wash the horror away later.
I rarely keep the games I buy since, as Isaac Asimov wisely observed, only 1% of anything is truly good. The other 99% I play, don't like, and then sell online.
Perhaps you should stop making so many impulse buys, then.
Ever consider actually doing some research before you buy via reviews & demos & message boards?