I beg to differ. As someone who travels overseas and needs a chip and pin card, they've been available for years. You're just not looking hard enough. See: http://creditcardforum.com/blog/chip-and-pin-credit-cards-usa/
I recently traveled to the UK and back on Delta on an A330. Their info-tainment system in the seatback had an 8 inch touchscreen panel with both a headphone jack and a usb jack. Plugging it in to USB allowed charging and streaming of any local content you had (provided it was non-drm'd). It was this system, although I couldn't id the manufacturer: http://boardingarea.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/pointmetotheplane/files/2013/08/tumblr_mqccx6yrK41spl3lco1_1280.jpg
In addition, you'll have access to the shows that play on cable, as well as terrestrial TV on the same day the networks get them, as opposed to just the back catalog and PPV's. Good deal if you're a fan.
I disagree. I'm still waiting for the IRS to process a form I sent back in October. I call every couple weeks and they say due to sequestration the customer service staff has been cut and they'll get to it when they get to it. It's driving me crazy.
Snow Leopard was free for a while last year. By download or by disk. As part of the MobileMe shutdown and transition to iCloud, they were giving away Snow Leopard for free to anyone that filled out the form and asked for it, just in case the lack of Snow Leopard was the reason you weren't migrated to iCloud yet. I managed to snag a couple DVDs of the OS direct from Apple. Of course if you missed it, you're SOL now:-)
" I was chatting with a learner who was taking an edX course in Krgezistan and he had to drop out half way. Later he told me that he discovered that there were three other students taking the same class in his town close to where he lived, and had he known that, he would have connected with them and stayed the course. Following these learnings, we are encouraging our students to form study groups through meetups, and facilitating this with links to meetup sites in the course introduction email. "
And this is exactly why online courses are not a good option for most people (slashdot folk excluded). Unless you are very good at self motivation and individual work, online courses are a disaster. Having to be physically present, to hand something in or be shamed, to have the pressure of knowing the right answer if the professor chooses to call on you, to having a piece in a group project and knowing you're letting real world people down if you don't do your part, etc, etc. These are all things the traditional settings brings that the MOOC's can't touch.
I'm definitely the slashdot type and generally love learning for the sake of learning (I'm actually wrapping up my 3rd college degree right now). I can say from experience though, while I might love pulling out an Objective-C book and picking and choosing the bits I want to learn to whip out an App quickly, there's no way I can function well in an online classroom. I'll put off the deliverables that bore me until the very last minute. I'm very relectutant to engage in the required "chat sessions" and mandatory "post in the forum once per week and respond to three other students posts" type of setup you see in online classes. It just hasn't worked for me. As an anonymous learner among hundreds I don't feel any peer pressure or implied social connections that would motivate me to get over the hump on some of the busy work.
When the EdX guy himself is saying that physical presence and study groups are to be encouraged, you can see this whole on-line thing isn't the panacea our politicians keep touting. They are perfect for a certain subset of learners. Great for them, but not a silver bullet for the rest of us.
You can press the eject button on every Apple keyboard. Or right-click (control-click) the disc and choose eject. Or click to highlight the CD icon and press CMD + Y (put away) or CMD + E (eject) - Not much of a difference anymore, but in the old days when floppy swapping on a single drive was the thing, "eject" would leave the disc icon and directory contents cached on the desktop even after it spit out the floppy. If you clicked into it and tried to retrieve a file or whatever it would prompt you to insert the disk so it could complete the operation. At the time it was nice, since you didn't have to remember what was on what disc through trial and error, or writing really small on the floppy label, you could just have it psedu-mounted and still see the contents of multiple disks on your desktop on a single floppy system.
If you were finally done with it, you could drag the cached image to the trash can to "unmount" it. The "put away" command OTOH ejected the disk and removed the cached image immediately. Dragging the disc from the get-go to the trash had the same effect as "put away".
Don't worry about the AC.... Politfact has your back on this... http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2013/sep/23/marco-rubio/marco-rubio-favors-defunding-obamacare-opposes-gov/
Traditional seasons are falling by the wayside. A "season" used to basically follow the traditional U.S. school year. New shows in the fall, running through the spring - with summers of re-runs. Usually 22 shows or so.
Look at shows like the walking dead. Premiered on the last day of October. Ran for only only 7 episodes, then a long break until the following October. Shows like Supernatural and Smallville traditionally kept their summer reruns going well into fall, often debuting the new "season" in late December. Way back in 2002, the show 'Felicity' had new shows in the fall, took the winter off, and had new shows again in the spring. Ensuring that new episodes were always on during 'sweeps' and in the slower periods they ran reruns. Walking dead took a similar break in season 2 (minus the reruns) with 6 shows, a 3 month break, and the rest of the season airing. This allowed them to not compete with the superbowl, as well as introduce a new show in the same time slot viewers were accustomed to tuning in. Curb your enthusiasm season 8 consisted of just a few new episodes spanning only the three summer months but it's sold as a season. Jesery Shore seasons 5 and 6 span the same summer physically but were aired a year apart as separate seasons since the first few weeks took place in Italy then they flew back to Jersey to continue the summer - which you could argues should be one 'season' as it's a continuing storyline with no break. Glee seasons 5 is being split out over two years so they can keep the actors in their "senior year" for two seasons and not advancing a grade every season as they had been.
There's all kinds of monkey business in what constitutes a tv season. The traditional understanding is falling by the wayside in a world of DVR's, streaming, and ratings grabs.
There was more than a skin change. As I said " I'm pretty happy with the work they are doing over there as well"
That includes....
This year, we got: A much better click and move player/team roster. Much better than the old drag and drop system, and better than the classic systems of reordering players.
Detailed Draft Evaluations, with quite a bit of background on how you did and how you can improve next year.
Much easier keeper administration, so much easier on the commish - if you hadn't used this you have no idea how much better it is this year. You can actually see other teams keepers. So much easier to assign players out.
Easier re-invite to bring managers back, even if the manager didn't play last year you can go back and search for all the managers that have ever played for you in prior years and pull back their data. Great way to have league continuity with an individual league record book spanning multiple years.
Much better auction drafting. It actually works like it should this year.
An updated phone app that actually has push notifications and you can both mock draft and live draft from it. This is the first year you can actually do EVERYTHING in the phone app. Quite nice.
Last year:
We got automated recaps. Really nice with a recap of your players performance. I used to spend HOURS creating a weekly email to my league with basically the same data but had to research and crunch those numbers myself. Seriously nice.
Improved league pick 'em - game within a game. We set aside some of our team dues out of the winnings pot and use this side game to wager a little extra money.
Achievements/Medals. Some of my guys think they are really cool and try to unlock them all. I think it's kind of dumb, but whatever. More interactivity and things to brag about. More competition among the league.
Gravatar/League Logomaker support. Much better than only being able to choose a colored helmet.
New stat categories... 4th down stops, tackles for loss, etc. Great to see new buckets available especially for the defense to really balance out the league and make you think even harder on who you'll draft.
None of this cost you a dime. So you can go cry boo-hoo over the new background image and squint at it if you really think it's hard to read, but I'm really happy with how things are progressing over there on this free fantasy platform. The new features far offset the "skin change" or new web design. I love all the new stuff we've gotten. As I said " I'm pretty happy with the work they are doing over there as well"
That's sort of the point though. Most of Yahoo's properties have been stagnant for years, some even for over a decade. Yahoo was the place for people who wanted web 1.0, are change resistant, and are stuck in their ways. Everyone who wanted new features or could embrace new things migrated along as better alternative popped up. Those that can't/won't remained. It's the AOL of the new millennium. It's a real challenge for Yahoo because it's a gamble that the people they will lose will be offset by newcomers.
Really, though, I think this whole "I'm taking my ball and going home" attitude is quite dumb. If you're willing to leave and learn a new platform in protest, why not stay and learn the new upgraded platform where your data already lives?
Do the updates sometimes break or remove good features? Yeah, I guess. But they've slowly been added back in over time. Basically, I see this as what Apple did with Final Cut Pro. A complete revamp that took a lot of time to gain feature parity with the version it replaced. Sometimes though it's good to clear out the dead wood so you can have a better platform for the future.
FWIW, as a paying Flickr Pro member since 2006, I love the changes. As a Fantasy Football commissioner using Yahoo as my platform since '09, I'm pretty happy with the work they are doing over there as well.
Yahoo is the 'free-est' of the 3 main choices. The basic league is free. They have only really one optional pre-draft add-on (premium draft kits) and one optional post-draft add-on (Yahoo customer service will review your trades for a fee). ESPN also offers free and paid leagues, with a few more paid features. Then there is CBS who basically doesn't offer anything the other two don't, even though they charge close to $200, but the design is much more professional, they have real customer service, and the mobile app is better.
Really, I'm not a huge fan of the redesign but there sure are a lot of cry babies out there considering this is basically free all year long. I suppose that's why their userbase is so large. Yahoo is updating all of their properties, and the FF site hadn't changed since around 2003 with the addition of the drag and drop rosters IIRC. It's not great, but not terrible.... certainly a good start as long as they keep improving it.
They've added many new features over the last two years and really invested in making it the best FF site. Things like draft grades, "Compare my team", Weekly recaps of your players formatted into a personalized email, league pick 'em, easier import of keepers and previous managers (so I as a commish don't have to find and select them). I can see it's a work in progress, but they do keep moving forward.
Ummm, if you're in a coffee shop and already carrying around an accessory (this second battery you propose), why not just carry the A/C adapter instead and plug it in?
It's my understanding that Chromecast is just a streaming receiver. You still need something, like a phone or tablet to stream to it. By itself it does nothing. Roku otoh is self contained and doesn't require another device. Could be wrong, but from the coverage I've seen (which albeit isn't clear) it seems like a device to pair your TV screen to your android device.
You totally reminded me of this story about a guy who desposited a fake check for $95,000 and due to a bunch of banking screwups ended up legally entitled to the money. Check it out... http://patrickcombs.com/95g/
Agreed. I pay for both every year! Flickr has been routinely updated and upgraded, and the Fantasy Football continues to work well every year. I even switched over my paid league from CBS Sportsline to Yahoo after seeing how well my 'fun' leagues were doing on the Yahoo platform.
Well, here's the thing, as a photographer I know that lens flare is an anomaly created by refraction of light. Generally, you try to reduce this effect as it "breaks the 4th wall" and force you as a viewer to recognize that this is a filmed event. You do this by altering lighting and camera position. Only occasionally has it even been used in a sparingly and creative way.
Now when you see it every couple of minutes, and know it was digitally inserted, that sort of just makes no sense. It's like a kid that got his hand on iMovie and had to use it's whole palette of effects as often as possible to prove their high tech. It's sort of like the instagram craze. By artificially making it look old, apparently that's cool. JJ Abrams was interviewed about this. He said it was his unique visual style, and by artificially inserting flairs he thinks it makes it look like the crew had no time to setup the shot correctly, because there's just so much action bursting off the screen. So not only is he overusing an effect, but he's artifically inserting it, to make it appear that he didn't have time to light his sets properly, and that apparently (to him) makes it EVEN MORE incredible.
Doesn't work for me though. I think it's stupid and distracting. Like when you some badly compressed gradients in black or compression artifacts on "so-called" HD cable tv. Once you start seeing it you can't look away. I don't think there's anything artistic about striving to make it look like you suck at lighting a shot.
I found the first one unwatchable due to all the fake lens flares that were artificially inserted. Is this one any easier on the eyes? I'm really hesitant to see it.
I think you're on to something. Being an adult I'd prefer to play with adults, but every LFR or PUG I ende up in is full of xbox live kiddies. I can't stand them. Being stuck in a group of teenagers is pretty much the worst possible scenario - but I suppose that's where Blizzard is trying to pull in "new blood" from.
And just to back up my claim... here's a link to their prices... although it says it's a "special"... it's the same price they've been charging since the 1st of the year...
Slashdot Mirror
I beg to differ. As someone who travels overseas and needs a chip and pin card, they've been available for years. You're just not looking hard enough. See: http://creditcardforum.com/blog/chip-and-pin-credit-cards-usa/
I recently traveled to the UK and back on Delta on an A330. Their info-tainment system in the seatback had an 8 inch touchscreen panel with both a headphone jack and a usb jack. Plugging it in to USB allowed charging and streaming of any local content you had (provided it was non-drm'd). It was this system, although I couldn't id the manufacturer: http://boardingarea.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/pointmetotheplane/files/2013/08/tumblr_mqccx6yrK41spl3lco1_1280.jpg
In addition, you'll have access to the shows that play on cable, as well as terrestrial TV on the same day the networks get them, as opposed to just the back catalog and PPV's. Good deal if you're a fan.
I disagree. I'm still waiting for the IRS to process a form I sent back in October. I call every couple weeks and they say due to sequestration the customer service staff has been cut and they'll get to it when they get to it. It's driving me crazy.
Or the whole Neverwinter Nights series?
Snow Leopard was free for a while last year. By download or by disk. As part of the MobileMe shutdown and transition to iCloud, they were giving away Snow Leopard for free to anyone that filled out the form and asked for it, just in case the lack of Snow Leopard was the reason you weren't migrated to iCloud yet. I managed to snag a couple DVDs of the OS direct from Apple. Of course if you missed it, you're SOL now :-)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/adriankingsleyhughes/2012/04/19/upgrade-your-old-mac-to-snow-leopard-for-free/
" I was chatting with a learner who was taking an edX course in Krgezistan and he had to drop out half way. Later he told me that he discovered that there were three other students taking the same class in his town close to where he lived, and had he known that, he would have connected with them and stayed the course. Following these learnings, we are encouraging our students to form study groups through meetups, and facilitating this with links to meetup sites in the course introduction email. "
And this is exactly why online courses are not a good option for most people (slashdot folk excluded). Unless you are very good at self motivation and individual work, online courses are a disaster. Having to be physically present, to hand something in or be shamed, to have the pressure of knowing the right answer if the professor chooses to call on you, to having a piece in a group project and knowing you're letting real world people down if you don't do your part, etc, etc. These are all things the traditional settings brings that the MOOC's can't touch.
I'm definitely the slashdot type and generally love learning for the sake of learning (I'm actually wrapping up my 3rd college degree right now). I can say from experience though, while I might love pulling out an Objective-C book and picking and choosing the bits I want to learn to whip out an App quickly, there's no way I can function well in an online classroom. I'll put off the deliverables that bore me until the very last minute. I'm very relectutant to engage in the required "chat sessions" and mandatory "post in the forum once per week and respond to three other students posts" type of setup you see in online classes. It just hasn't worked for me. As an anonymous learner among hundreds I don't feel any peer pressure or implied social connections that would motivate me to get over the hump on some of the busy work.
When the EdX guy himself is saying that physical presence and study groups are to be encouraged, you can see this whole on-line thing isn't the panacea our politicians keep touting. They are perfect for a certain subset of learners. Great for them, but not a silver bullet for the rest of us.
Agreed. I would have love to have voted for Huntsman. I even contributed to his campaign.
You can press the eject button on every Apple keyboard. Or right-click (control-click) the disc and choose eject. Or click to highlight the CD icon and press CMD + Y (put away) or CMD + E (eject) - Not much of a difference anymore, but in the old days when floppy swapping on a single drive was the thing, "eject" would leave the disc icon and directory contents cached on the desktop even after it spit out the floppy. If you clicked into it and tried to retrieve a file or whatever it would prompt you to insert the disk so it could complete the operation. At the time it was nice, since you didn't have to remember what was on what disc through trial and error, or writing really small on the floppy label, you could just have it psedu-mounted and still see the contents of multiple disks on your desktop on a single floppy system.
If you were finally done with it, you could drag the cached image to the trash can to "unmount" it. The "put away" command OTOH ejected the disk and removed the cached image immediately. Dragging the disc from the get-go to the trash had the same effect as "put away".
Don't worry about the AC.... Politfact has your back on this... http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2013/sep/23/marco-rubio/marco-rubio-favors-defunding-obamacare-opposes-gov/
Traditional seasons are falling by the wayside. A "season" used to basically follow the traditional U.S. school year. New shows in the fall, running through the spring - with summers of re-runs. Usually 22 shows or so.
Look at shows like the walking dead. Premiered on the last day of October. Ran for only only 7 episodes, then a long break until the following October. Shows like Supernatural and Smallville traditionally kept their summer reruns going well into fall, often debuting the new "season" in late December. Way back in 2002, the show 'Felicity' had new shows in the fall, took the winter off, and had new shows again in the spring. Ensuring that new episodes were always on during 'sweeps' and in the slower periods they ran reruns. Walking dead took a similar break in season 2 (minus the reruns) with 6 shows, a 3 month break, and the rest of the season airing. This allowed them to not compete with the superbowl, as well as introduce a new show in the same time slot viewers were accustomed to tuning in. Curb your enthusiasm season 8 consisted of just a few new episodes spanning only the three summer months but it's sold as a season. Jesery Shore seasons 5 and 6 span the same summer physically but were aired a year apart as separate seasons since the first few weeks took place in Italy then they flew back to Jersey to continue the summer - which you could argues should be one 'season' as it's a continuing storyline with no break. Glee seasons 5 is being split out over two years so they can keep the actors in their "senior year" for two seasons and not advancing a grade every season as they had been.
There's all kinds of monkey business in what constitutes a tv season. The traditional understanding is falling by the wayside in a world of DVR's, streaming, and ratings grabs.
There was more than a skin change. As I said " I'm pretty happy with the work they are doing over there as well"
That includes....
This year, we got:
A much better click and move player/team roster. Much better than the old drag and drop system, and better than the classic systems of reordering players.
Detailed Draft Evaluations, with quite a bit of background on how you did and how you can improve next year.
Much easier keeper administration, so much easier on the commish - if you hadn't used this you have no idea how much better it is this year. You can actually see other teams keepers. So much easier to assign players out.
Easier re-invite to bring managers back, even if the manager didn't play last year you can go back and search for all the managers that have ever played for you in prior years and pull back their data. Great way to have league continuity with an individual league record book spanning multiple years.
Much better auction drafting. It actually works like it should this year.
An updated phone app that actually has push notifications and you can both mock draft and live draft from it. This is the first year you can actually do EVERYTHING in the phone app. Quite nice.
Last year:
We got automated recaps. Really nice with a recap of your players performance. I used to spend HOURS creating a weekly email to my league with basically the same data but had to research and crunch those numbers myself. Seriously nice.
Improved league pick 'em - game within a game. We set aside some of our team dues out of the winnings pot and use this side game to wager a little extra money.
Achievements/Medals. Some of my guys think they are really cool and try to unlock them all. I think it's kind of dumb, but whatever. More interactivity and things to brag about. More competition among the league.
Gravatar/League Logomaker support. Much better than only being able to choose a colored helmet.
New stat categories... 4th down stops, tackles for loss, etc. Great to see new buckets available especially for the defense to really balance out the league and make you think even harder on who you'll draft.
None of this cost you a dime. So you can go cry boo-hoo over the new background image and squint at it if you really think it's hard to read, but I'm really happy with how things are progressing over there on this free fantasy platform. The new features far offset the "skin change" or new web design. I love all the new stuff we've gotten. As I said " I'm pretty happy with the work they are doing over there as well"
That's sort of the point though. Most of Yahoo's properties have been stagnant for years, some even for over a decade. Yahoo was the place for people who wanted web 1.0, are change resistant, and are stuck in their ways. Everyone who wanted new features or could embrace new things migrated along as better alternative popped up. Those that can't/won't remained. It's the AOL of the new millennium. It's a real challenge for Yahoo because it's a gamble that the people they will lose will be offset by newcomers.
Really, though, I think this whole "I'm taking my ball and going home" attitude is quite dumb. If you're willing to leave and learn a new platform in protest, why not stay and learn the new upgraded platform where your data already lives?
Do the updates sometimes break or remove good features? Yeah, I guess. But they've slowly been added back in over time. Basically, I see this as what Apple did with Final Cut Pro. A complete revamp that took a lot of time to gain feature parity with the version it replaced. Sometimes though it's good to clear out the dead wood so you can have a better platform for the future.
FWIW, as a paying Flickr Pro member since 2006, I love the changes. As a Fantasy Football commissioner using Yahoo as my platform since '09, I'm pretty happy with the work they are doing over there as well.
Yahoo is the 'free-est' of the 3 main choices. The basic league is free. They have only really one optional pre-draft add-on (premium draft kits) and one optional post-draft add-on (Yahoo customer service will review your trades for a fee). ESPN also offers free and paid leagues, with a few more paid features. Then there is CBS who basically doesn't offer anything the other two don't, even though they charge close to $200, but the design is much more professional, they have real customer service, and the mobile app is better.
Really, I'm not a huge fan of the redesign but there sure are a lot of cry babies out there considering this is basically free all year long. I suppose that's why their userbase is so large. Yahoo is updating all of their properties, and the FF site hadn't changed since around 2003 with the addition of the drag and drop rosters IIRC. It's not great, but not terrible.... certainly a good start as long as they keep improving it.
They've added many new features over the last two years and really invested in making it the best FF site. Things like draft grades, "Compare my team", Weekly recaps of your players formatted into a personalized email, league pick 'em, easier import of keepers and previous managers (so I as a commish don't have to find and select them). I can see it's a work in progress, but they do keep moving forward.
Ummm, if you're in a coffee shop and already carrying around an accessory (this second battery you propose), why not just carry the A/C adapter instead and plug it in?
It's my understanding that Chromecast is just a streaming receiver. You still need something, like a phone or tablet to stream to it. By itself it does nothing. Roku otoh is self contained and doesn't require another device. Could be wrong, but from the coverage I've seen (which albeit isn't clear) it seems like a device to pair your TV screen to your android device.
I call shenanigans. Everyone knows your department ran out of money after spending 2.7 million in taxpayer dollars doing this :-)
You totally reminded me of this story about a guy who desposited a fake check for $95,000 and due to a bunch of banking screwups ended up legally entitled to the money. Check it out... http://patrickcombs.com/95g/
I had a 56k modem like that once...
Agreed. I pay for both every year! Flickr has been routinely updated and upgraded, and the Fantasy Football continues to work well every year. I even switched over my paid league from CBS Sportsline to Yahoo after seeing how well my 'fun' leagues were doing on the Yahoo platform.
Well, here's the thing, as a photographer I know that lens flare is an anomaly created by refraction of light. Generally, you try to reduce this effect as it "breaks the 4th wall" and force you as a viewer to recognize that this is a filmed event. You do this by altering lighting and camera position. Only occasionally has it even been used in a sparingly and creative way.
Now when you see it every couple of minutes, and know it was digitally inserted, that sort of just makes no sense. It's like a kid that got his hand on iMovie and had to use it's whole palette of effects as often as possible to prove their high tech. It's sort of like the instagram craze. By artificially making it look old, apparently that's cool. JJ Abrams was interviewed about this. He said it was his unique visual style, and by artificially inserting flairs he thinks it makes it look like the crew had no time to setup the shot correctly, because there's just so much action bursting off the screen. So not only is he overusing an effect, but he's artifically inserting it, to make it appear that he didn't have time to light his sets properly, and that apparently (to him) makes it EVEN MORE incredible.
Doesn't work for me though. I think it's stupid and distracting. Like when you some badly compressed gradients in black or compression artifacts on "so-called" HD cable tv. Once you start seeing it you can't look away. I don't think there's anything artistic about striving to make it look like you suck at lighting a shot.
I found the first one unwatchable due to all the fake lens flares that were artificially inserted. Is this one any easier on the eyes? I'm really hesitant to see it.
I think you're on to something. Being an adult I'd prefer to play with adults, but every LFR or PUG I ende up in is full of xbox live kiddies. I can't stand them. Being stuck in a group of teenagers is pretty much the worst possible scenario - but I suppose that's where Blizzard is trying to pull in "new blood" from.
I have to agree. The Wii would be selling in droves if casual games with last gen graphics were the biggest market.
And just to back up my claim... here's a link to their prices... although it says it's a "special"... it's the same price they've been charging since the 1st of the year...
http://www.invergrovetoyota.com/specials/service.htm#.UYf44kriJHA