With a smart phone you can get rid of your two land lines and your dumb phones
Except, I can't. As much as maybe you could, it's not an option for me.
My wife works from home 100%, and I do most of the time. The land lines are an absolute requirement -- in fact, her employer won't pay for a smart phone the way they will a land line and an internet connection. Plus, I still need a contact number for other things, and I don't want everything to go to a smart phone.
So, while your solution may be viable for you, it simply isn't viable for everybody. A smart phone is nice in principle, but for some of us, it is not a viable replacement for the telecoms we already have -- it's a pricey add-on that we don't need.
If I'm going to be at home most of the time, my existing cordless phones give me far more hours of battery life for talk-time than any smart phone I've ever seen and I already have several spare handsets so I can switch over mid-day.
So, no, I can't consolidate all of what I have into two smart phones and get the same damned thing.
It's got all of the crap that I carry with me on a daily basis because that has long ago exceeded the reasonable capacity of pockets. (Which can also include my camera, GPS, a water bottle, and several other things.)
As much as it's a messenger sling-bag, it is, effectively, a purse. However, it is far more convenient that carrying everything in my pockets.
Some people are smart enough to realise (and have the restraint) that you don't need to be connected all the time; that it's actually healthier not to be.
And, as much as I have no desire to be connected all of the time and don't have a smart phone... cost is also a big factor.
My wife and I have two land lines, long distance plans, two fairly basic cell phones, digital TV, internet, plus the rental of my wife's PVR. Adding two smart phones to that would take our bill of close to $300 to close to $400 every month.
I'm just not willing to pay what it costs to have a smart phone. The gouge me enough for all of the other services already.
Or, you know, I don't carry it -- which is what I do now.
Why is it so hard to understand that many of us simply do not carry our cell phones all of the time, nor do we want to? Are you guys so obsessed with your phone you never put it down and walk away and can't fathom that other people don't?
I sure as hell don't want a cell-phone to be an integral part of logging into my webmail.
Google will send that code to the user via SMS or a phone call. Users also will have the option of installing an app on the mobile device that can generate the code locally.
So, if I don't use SMS, and if I refuse to give a phone number to Google... this is basically useless to me.
I sure as fsck hope to hell that I'm not eventually told I have to use an authentication method I refuse to use -- why does everybody assume I'm willing to give them my mobile number for such things?
If she had spoken to the parents, privately, about their children that's one thing. To speak about the children in this fashion on a public forum is extremely unprofessional behavior.
Purely playing Devil's Advocate here....
But haven't kids repeatedly gotten their right to say what they want about teachers online upheld over and over?
I've know a fair few teachers... as much as they start out really giving a shit, after a sufficiently long period of time babysitting other people's ill-behaved, spoiled brats with various anti-social disorders... well, eventually, they're mostly just putting in time.
Nowadays they're so hand-cuffed by not wanting to hurt little Billy's feelings by telling him he can't spell, I can see why she would be ranting about the things she'd like to say.
Everyone keeps lamenting how we need more educators -- make it less of a thankless job, and let teachers actually fail kids and be able to enforce some form of discipline.
Ahhh the old "if you are innocent, then you shouldn't have a right to privacy" argument. Obviously I disagree.
Actually, it's more of the old "destroying evidence of a crime" scenario. And, since this involves insider trading, it should be covered under Sarbaes Oxley, which basically makes it a crime to delete evidence once you're engaged in legal proceedings.
When you're being investigated for fraud destroying the evidence isn't a matter of protecting your privacy. It's a matter of evading the law. Completely different things.
This guy could find himself in some pretty serious hot water.
I want to use a plastic toy instrument to emulate real musicians, not lame sell-outs.
Waaah waaah waaah. My band it teh l337 band, and your band is the sux0r.
Dude, get over yourself... other people like other music than you do. They went with big name bands they knew would attract audiences -- as good as Knoplfer is, the vast majority of the people out there wouldn't go out of their way for Dire Straits. Hell, they probably only know one or two of their songs anyway.
I think future generations will look back on the days where everyone thought 'Guitar Hero' was 'cool' much in the same way as my generation looks back at the days where 'air guitar' was cool: with a shudder of embarrassment.
*shrug* Like it or hate it, from my perspective, I credit Guitar Hero et al with teaching me to understand the musicality of a lot of music I had previously been unable to listen to.
I didn't grow up listening to punk, metal, or alternative -- as a result, I found them to be overly dissonant with no clear structure or rhythm. These games taught me to appreciate what was actually going on in there, and as a result, my music tastes have expanded to encompass a lot more things (and as a result, buy a lot of CDs I'd never have considered).
From that perspective, I am quite happy for the time I spent playing Guitar Hero -- I sure as hell wouldn't have bought any Rise Against or Social Distortion before playing those games.
From what I have seen, they have a box attached to the TV which will take video sources, your laptop. You name it.
They have an instruction sheet in the room, and I believe it is called "Plugged In" or something. On my last business trip, I was having problems, called down to the desk, and a technician was at my door in five minutes and got it working.
They made it about as easy as you could possibly get.
Also, will it have video-out capability yet? Or possibly video-in so I can use it to pretend I have a portable DVD player?
it already had video out. Buy the same cable that you can already buy for an iPod which gives you the standard L/R/Video cables, and it works like a charm.
I watched movies from my hotel room on my last business trip using both my iPod and iPad as video sources.
The ability to do video out had been there since day one.
If I was on the board, I would have screamed for Ballmer's dismissal in September 1999, when he drove the MS share price down by 3.8% in a single day by saying "There is such an overvaluation of technology stocks that it is absurd. I would include our stock in that category."
Except it was, what, October of 1999 when the value of tech stocks crashed because they were grossly overvalued. (OK, maybe it was a little longer than that.)
There was a time when simply registering a.COM in Silicon Valley would get you millions in VC money if you had anything like a business plan (or at least a concept). I remember watching people leave for out west in the new gold-rush of pre-IPO options. In the early days of the.COM-era, some people did make money. By the end, a lot of people ended up holding the bag, and with leases/car payments they'd never realistically be able to afford.
Companies were 'worth' 100 years of projected revenue because they had... well, nothing really. After the collapse when Herman Miller Aerons would go on the auction block in lots of 100+ at a time it was fairly obvious, because those self-same.COMs which were failing in droves. Investors would just buy any IPO in the hopes that it would do what Amazon, Red Hat, and a few others had done. Speculative investment run amok.
Ballmer may have damaged MS stock when he said that, but in reality, the emperor did have no clothes. It was a big house of cards (not MS per se, but the whole tech market).
There's just no way that there's an internal tech person with the force of will to push the business guys around and all he or she needed was Ballmer's okay to make more impact.
"Why not?"
In part because of the sheer number of shares Bill Gates owned.
If you throw around your "force of will" to senior management, and you own a huge chunk of the company, they don't have a choice but to listen. If you're "just some engineer", they'll push back if they don't like what they hear.
In many ways, Microsoft was a bit of a "cult of personality" in terms of running the show -- and that isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as it moves you forward. From the sounds of it, Ballmer didn't know nearly enough about tech to make things happen.
I think it's going to be very difficult to get out of the rut of being a huge megacorp ran by business-types -- those guys don't know how to create shiny new technology. They know how to do a different set of things.
Once you no longer have a tech company being led by technologists, it becomes difficult to get the real work done. I'm sure more than a few people around here have been the ones who make product that goes into the field, but the admin staff walks all over you because they feel their job is more important to the company and you're just the guy in the back room who does the fiddly bits.
When your company is the fiddly bits, losing sight of that can be a bad thing.
That headline just seems seriously broken to me... you can fire up a generator, or a boiler... because, you know, there's fire involved... but "firing up offshore wind energy" just seems rather incongruous.
Sounds like someone is mixing their batter into their metaphors, or something like that.
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Except, I can't. As much as maybe you could, it's not an option for me.
My wife works from home 100%, and I do most of the time. The land lines are an absolute requirement -- in fact, her employer won't pay for a smart phone the way they will a land line and an internet connection. Plus, I still need a contact number for other things, and I don't want everything to go to a smart phone.
So, while your solution may be viable for you, it simply isn't viable for everybody. A smart phone is nice in principle, but for some of us, it is not a viable replacement for the telecoms we already have -- it's a pricey add-on that we don't need.
If I'm going to be at home most of the time, my existing cordless phones give me far more hours of battery life for talk-time than any smart phone I've ever seen and I already have several spare handsets so I can switch over mid-day.
So, no, I can't consolidate all of what I have into two smart phones and get the same damned thing.
I've given up and started calling mine just that.
It's got all of the crap that I carry with me on a daily basis because that has long ago exceeded the reasonable capacity of pockets. (Which can also include my camera, GPS, a water bottle, and several other things.)
As much as it's a messenger sling-bag, it is, effectively, a purse. However, it is far more convenient that carrying everything in my pockets.
And, as much as I have no desire to be connected all of the time and don't have a smart phone ... cost is also a big factor.
My wife and I have two land lines, long distance plans, two fairly basic cell phones, digital TV, internet, plus the rental of my wife's PVR. Adding two smart phones to that would take our bill of close to $300 to close to $400 every month.
I'm just not willing to pay what it costs to have a smart phone. The gouge me enough for all of the other services already.
Then, don't buy it and get over it.
Or, you know, I don't carry it -- which is what I do now.
Why is it so hard to understand that many of us simply do not carry our cell phones all of the time, nor do we want to? Are you guys so obsessed with your phone you never put it down and walk away and can't fathom that other people don't?
I sure as hell don't want a cell-phone to be an integral part of logging into my webmail.
What, on my non-smart phone which doesn't have apps?
Just because you want to have one, doesn't mean that I do.
If this comes down to SMS, a phone call, or an app ... none of these are viable options for a large number of people.
Because I used my cell phone very little and don't use it for stuff like signing onto gmail?
Not all of us are tethered to a cell phone 24/7, nor do we want to be.
I love seeing stuff like this:
So, if I don't use SMS, and if I refuse to give a phone number to Google ... this is basically useless to me.
I sure as fsck hope to hell that I'm not eventually told I have to use an authentication method I refuse to use -- why does everybody assume I'm willing to give them my mobile number for such things?
OK, I admit ... while I R'd TFA, I didn't W TFV -- I never W TFV. ;-)
So, I hadn't realized that it was fairly clear which kids she was talking about -- I was more thinking it was something in the abstract.
Yeah, if she's railing on about identifiable students, and not under a pseudonym, she might be "frightfully dim" herself.
Purely playing Devil's Advocate here ....
But haven't kids repeatedly gotten their right to say what they want about teachers online upheld over and over?
I've know a fair few teachers ... as much as they start out really giving a shit, after a sufficiently long period of time babysitting other people's ill-behaved, spoiled brats with various anti-social disorders ... well, eventually, they're mostly just putting in time.
Nowadays they're so hand-cuffed by not wanting to hurt little Billy's feelings by telling him he can't spell, I can see why she would be ranting about the things she'd like to say.
Everyone keeps lamenting how we need more educators -- make it less of a thankless job, and let teachers actually fail kids and be able to enforce some form of discipline.
Only if it really completes the outfit. ;-)
Actually, it's more of the old "destroying evidence of a crime" scenario. And, since this involves insider trading, it should be covered under Sarbaes Oxley, which basically makes it a crime to delete evidence once you're engaged in legal proceedings.
When you're being investigated for fraud destroying the evidence isn't a matter of protecting your privacy. It's a matter of evading the law. Completely different things.
This guy could find himself in some pretty serious hot water.
Waaah waaah waaah. My band it teh l337 band, and your band is the sux0r.
Dude, get over yourself ... other people like other music than you do. They went with big name bands they knew would attract audiences -- as good as Knoplfer is, the vast majority of the people out there wouldn't go out of their way for Dire Straits. Hell, they probably only know one or two of their songs anyway.
*shrug* Like it or hate it, from my perspective, I credit Guitar Hero et al with teaching me to understand the musicality of a lot of music I had previously been unable to listen to.
I didn't grow up listening to punk, metal, or alternative -- as a result, I found them to be overly dissonant with no clear structure or rhythm. These games taught me to appreciate what was actually going on in there, and as a result, my music tastes have expanded to encompass a lot more things (and as a result, buy a lot of CDs I'd never have considered).
From that perspective, I am quite happy for the time I spent playing Guitar Hero -- I sure as hell wouldn't have bought any Rise Against or Social Distortion before playing those games.
Stay at a Marriott.
From what I have seen, they have a box attached to the TV which will take video sources, your laptop. You name it.
They have an instruction sheet in the room, and I believe it is called "Plugged In" or something. On my last business trip, I was having problems, called down to the desk, and a technician was at my door in five minutes and got it working.
They made it about as easy as you could possibly get.
it already had video out. Buy the same cable that you can already buy for an iPod which gives you the standard L/R/Video cables, and it works like a charm.
I watched movies from my hotel room on my last business trip using both my iPod and iPad as video sources.
The ability to do video out had been there since day one.
Still less scary than "printer on fire". The first time I saw that one was a big WTF moment.
Ever written code? By the time I graduated university, that was just part of the process. :-P
Are you *sure*?
I'm surprised that 61% of people claim to have never cursed aloud at their computer.
Heck, I want to know what percentage of people have merely spoken aloud to it. I'm betting it's pretty much all of 'em.
Except it was, what, October of 1999 when the value of tech stocks crashed because they were grossly overvalued. (OK, maybe it was a little longer than that.)
There was a time when simply registering a .COM in Silicon Valley would get you millions in VC money if you had anything like a business plan (or at least a concept). I remember watching people leave for out west in the new gold-rush of pre-IPO options. In the early days of the .COM-era, some people did make money. By the end, a lot of people ended up holding the bag, and with leases/car payments they'd never realistically be able to afford.
Companies were 'worth' 100 years of projected revenue because they had ... well, nothing really. After the collapse when Herman Miller Aerons would go on the auction block in lots of 100+ at a time it was fairly obvious, because those self-same .COMs which were failing in droves. Investors would just buy any IPO in the hopes that it would do what Amazon, Red Hat, and a few others had done. Speculative investment run amok.
Ballmer may have damaged MS stock when he said that, but in reality, the emperor did have no clothes. It was a big house of cards (not MS per se, but the whole tech market).
In part because of the sheer number of shares Bill Gates owned.
If you throw around your "force of will" to senior management, and you own a huge chunk of the company, they don't have a choice but to listen. If you're "just some engineer", they'll push back if they don't like what they hear.
In many ways, Microsoft was a bit of a "cult of personality" in terms of running the show -- and that isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as it moves you forward. From the sounds of it, Ballmer didn't know nearly enough about tech to make things happen.
I think it's going to be very difficult to get out of the rut of being a huge megacorp ran by business-types -- those guys don't know how to create shiny new technology. They know how to do a different set of things.
Once you no longer have a tech company being led by technologists, it becomes difficult to get the real work done. I'm sure more than a few people around here have been the ones who make product that goes into the field, but the admin staff walks all over you because they feel their job is more important to the company and you're just the guy in the back room who does the fiddly bits.
When your company is the fiddly bits, losing sight of that can be a bad thing.
Not to dispute what you say, I'm sure it's true ... but, really, the Library of Congress?
How is it that they have any authority on this issue? I'm totally confused by this.
Any country in which NOT believing in the prevailing religion is a crime, is fucking crazy.
Any country which still has public stonings, is fucking crazy.
Simple enough for 'ya?
That headline just seems seriously broken to me ... you can fire up a generator, or a boiler ... because, you know, there's fire involved ... but "firing up offshore wind energy" just seems rather incongruous.
Sounds like someone is mixing their batter into their metaphors, or something like that.