Not to sound too brusque, but you do realize that was a complete d1ck move to do to the people working in the store, right? To prevent fraud and abuse, they're not allowd to make exceptions. They clearly could have been fired for violating company security and financial policy in approving someone with insolvent credit. And getting fired happens all the time: having worked retail before, you become expendable hours that gets thrown out at the drop of a hat.
As the poor low-level suckers who got stuck working in the retail arm of the company, even if they could authorize a transaction like that (hint: they can't) they probably didn't even have a way in their system to accept all of the money up front. So kicking up a stink in the store for 2 hours is mostly just making their (and your) life miserable for something they probably can't do, and if they could they'd probably get fired for doing it.
When you encounter situations like that, please quickly escalate to their customer service lines or head office. Directly interact with people who *can* actually do something about it. But railing on the poor floor people is just unnecessarily causing discomfort in an already crappy job, without any chance of success, due to a fundamental misunderstanding of how retail works.
Personally, I love how I can spend all day streaming radio over the iPhone, and that's fine. But the moment I buy an album, I have to find a wi-fi hotspot to actually download it.
Whoever was running AT&T simply had no idea how much bandwidth "unlimited bandwidth" can really suck up. They clearly lacked vision as to what a tiny internet-enabled programmable device that wasn't terrible could become. I'm guessing they based their bandwidth predictions around the LG 3G phones that they offered at the time, with their terrible, limited video and music services.
And they're still in the wrong business. Metered audio, metered texting, and unlimited digital bits as an afterthought? They're selling the wrong thing.
At this point, it could also be that Twitter was the only reliable way for the US State Department to know what was going on in Iran. As Iran is a nuclear country, the US haves a vested interest in knowing as much as they can about what is going on currently there, especially when a revolution might be involved.
Asking a private company to delay scheduled maintenence so that they can get a sense for whether or not a nuclear country is experiencing a revolution doesn't seem surprising or out of scope.
The next step up would be to crowdsource it. Have users give each game a star rating and an age-appropriateness rating. Let the broad population decide what is and isn't appropriate.
Only after self-rating and crowd rating have failed, should you resort to rating by elite secret boards.
For simplicity's sake, let's imagine that Cell Phones are the only source of EM radiation. Say a cellphone gets half of its energy from harvested signals. Where did those signals come from? Other Cellphones. Every Watt that is harvested to power the current cellphone came off of the signal of another cellphone nearby. And in turn, every watt of power the current cellphone puts out is degraded by being captured by surrounding cellphones.
Now if you want to maintain the same transmissive properties, you need to increase the power of the cellphones. In a completely closed system, you might be doing something like increasing the battery capacity by 50%, but then increasing power transmission by 50% to compensate. Essentially, a race full of cellphones vamping off eachother, taking blood and energy from one phone and putting it into another, then putting it back, without really accomplishing anything. In a world where you spend a lot of power to get a clearer signal, spending signal clarity to get a little power back seems wrong.
The *one* real flip side of this is ground-based transmitters. You can get power from both the other cellphones going off in an area, and the plugged-in cell towers that are anchored to the roofs. Essentially, individual cellphones would be vamping energy off eachother, but the cell towers could be adding more energy to the overall system. Assuming a great capture / conversion rate, there is no reason why a cellphone couldn't recharge fully on nothing more than the cell towers themselves. Add in TV transmitters which wouldn't bat an eye at a few thousand cellphones (even if they had to increase transmission power by 1% to do so) and you could have a handy recharger.
What exactly is the difference between the government of a town owning a library and the people of a town getting together, deciding to build a library, funding the immediate building of the library with town-issued bonds, and paying off the interest on the bonds with town coffers. In one case you have the governing body of an area paying for something through taxes, and in the other you're going through mental gymnastics to pretend the creepy "gov'ment man's hand" isn't on your money.
Face it: when a group of people get together, vote, and come to a decision, that's a government. There are times that it works well, and times that it doesn't. Libraries are a classic example where it worked well in the past.
Actually, the 3G iphone was subsidised for all users, including return first generation iphone users. The reasons for this are simple: The first generation was not subsidised, and the 3G phones cost a full 15$ per month more.
According to AT&T's announcement from 2008, their current early termination fee is 175 dollars minus 5 dollars per month that the contract was completed. For half-way through a 2-year contract, that's 115 dollars.
So if you are thinking of paying the extra money and upgrading your phone, first pay the 115 bucks and cancel your account. Then apply for a new account with the no-contract discount. Instead of paying 399 for the phone, you'll only pay 314, or a savings of 85 dollars.
Opera has always had an emphasis on keyboard navigation and shortcuts. Every function has a shortcut, and Opera regularly culls / re-organizes / otherwise intelligently manages their keyboard shortcuts. Unlike a lot of other browsers, Opera works just fine with only a keyboard (no mouse required).
So yes, while Firefox / I.E. / Chrome has keyboard shortcuts, none of them actively manage it to the same degree. None of them really work without a mouse.
1: story titles showing up as dark grey on the dark green title bars in opera 2: floating comment bar on the left, frequently floating way over things it shouldn't 3: (unrelated to Opera, and probably standards-compliant) the floating divs covering up content on smaller screens, like the iphone
Personally, for the next version fo Slashdot I'd dump the dynamically floating divs, dump the fancy / fragile display techs, and just rely on a more traditional layout system.
Yes, HDMI is overpriced, but it is a cheap cable. You can pick them up for 5 bucks if you know where you're looking. USB cables used to have this problem when they were first released, but they're still a cheap cable. Optical cables, on the other hand, will probably not come down in price to the same degree.
And for the 15' distances that you normally find home theater equipment, it works fine. You're not supposed to go past the rated distance... that's why it's rated for that distance. But in general (and I know there are special configurations out there), 15 feet is fine for the application.
HDMI for the most part is a pretty nice, simple, it-just-works standard. It transmits both audio (up to 7:1 I think) and video digitally in that one cable. It is nicely vertically shaped, so that it can't go in upside-down (BOO USB!), and in such a way that is really obvious when looking at it from a distance. There are no pins that bend or break. It's pretty easy to shove in while reaching around behind a TV without looking, and things don't seem to break when you hot plug it. While I think network over HDMI is a solution in serch of a problem (Does your TV need network access from your Xbox? Does your Xbox need display info from Fios?), it is still an interesting simplification.
This is why a lot of computers now come with HDMI ports, and a lot of displays take HDMI in. It's not some panacea high-end thingie. It's a cheap cable that does everything... or at least everything we will soon be doing wirelessly. And thanks to the digital nature, the cheapest HDMI cables work basically as well as the most expensive ones.
I connect laptops and computers to 5' Plasma TV's via HDMI all the time. It's not something designed to keep these two worlds apart, but a simplification that helps make them play better.
Coming from a mac world originally, it's all about the software.
To most people, the Operating System doesn't matter. People want to do stuff with their computers. They want their printers to all work, they want to run Skypeitterillian, they want to edit photos using tools they know. The OS is the invisible glue that makes that all happen. Unfortunately, that OS could be utter junk, and it wouldn't matter because it runs the stuff they want it to run.
I could rant on and on about the many, many improvements needed to Linux before it is really good as a desktop OS. But really what it needs are 99.99% reliable Windows and Mac emulation layers. Once people no longer have to worry that their 20 year-old copy of Quickbooks won't work, then you can push the advantages of > 4GB memory space, free software on-demand, a real security infrastructure, etc, etc.
I'm kind of surprised they don't just charge "either a % of MSRP or a flat rate, whichever is lower." That way, they could set a sliding price scale for any devices below, way, 400$, but maintain a high price on those above. Otherwise, over a certain spec Linux just becomes much more attractive.
I do have to say, I find the 1GB of RAM limitation quite ironic, considering that we've been bumping hard into Window's 4GB RAM limitation for some time now. If it weren't for Window's domination of the marketplace, 1GB would be a complete dawdle by now. Heck, 4GB of RAM is cheaper now than a nice Keyboard.
No, it means they have to use other IP addresses. It's stupid of Wikipedia to think this stops anything.
Real-world interaction systems don't need to be perfect, they just need to discourage or encourage certain behaviors.
This makes for one more step that members of the Church of Scientology have to make before they can edit. I'd guess that would cut down the edits that would need to be rolled back by half, which would be a sizeable improvement for any organization.
Further, this sends the clear and documented message that any editor which finds CoS propaganda should just go ahead and revert the change. And it is arguable, but if Scientology is banned from editing Wikipedia, Wikimedia might have a stronger court case that Scientology is tresspassing on their servers. This could be important if Wikimedia is ever sued by Scientologists.
One of the points of the article, though, is that by copying WoW, you're just going to get people getting bored faster. WoW took a fun but flawed formula and more or less perfected it. If you want to compete with that (and the hundreds of millions of development dollars that beast is getting), you need to find a different formula. Otherwise you're game is going to be same old - same old, and not as polished.
Visa used to call me about gas purchases... I didn't have a car, but I'd fill up friend's tanks occasionally. I'd get a call asking if this was something I had meant to do, and I'd say yes. Or I'd miss that call, and have to call them back when I couldn't use the card.
They always just instantly re-instated the same card, since there was no fraud.
Friend comments also get an automatic +1. If you see a commenter that find interesting, friending them will make their comments stick out from the noise.
It is exactly the same type of restrictions that Apple applies to all their products; be it iPod, iPhone, OSX or whatever else you can think of.
The NIN content that Apple found objectionable can currently be bought from iTunes, just not as an app. Similarly, OSX is a pretty well understood platform that really only needs hardware developers to bother creating compatible drivers. You can put any content you want on iPods, and there are a wide variety of secondary apps to do this if you don't like iTunes.
Really, the only thing Apple has this much control over is the App store. Friends of mine have had far less trouble getting music onto the iTunes store than onto the app store. This whole thing smacks of expecting the iPhone to be just a Nokia Candybar ++, and being overwhelmened when people are using it like a genuine platform.
If you lived in an agrarian society all of your life, these differences would be significant.
How about this revision:
19 Yet she increased her whoring, remembering the days of her youth, when she played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her paramours there, whose genitals were the size of Playstation 3s, and whose emissions burned with the fire of the Xbox 360.
They also won't remember that you warned them. They'll remember that somewhere along the line, IT oversaw this intranet for them. It worked for a while, then something broke. Even if they're aware that this is related to IE6 (probably not), nobody will remember who made that call, especially not the idiot who said "let's just go with that blue E internet thingie."
They'll just know that IT made it, and it broke after a few years.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to sound too brusque, but you do realize that was a complete d1ck move to do to the people working in the store, right? To prevent fraud and abuse, they're not allowd to make exceptions. They clearly could have been fired for violating company security and financial policy in approving someone with insolvent credit. And getting fired happens all the time: having worked retail before, you become expendable hours that gets thrown out at the drop of a hat.
As the poor low-level suckers who got stuck working in the retail arm of the company, even if they could authorize a transaction like that (hint: they can't) they probably didn't even have a way in their system to accept all of the money up front. So kicking up a stink in the store for 2 hours is mostly just making their (and your) life miserable for something they probably can't do, and if they could they'd probably get fired for doing it.
When you encounter situations like that, please quickly escalate to their customer service lines or head office. Directly interact with people who *can* actually do something about it. But railing on the poor floor people is just unnecessarily causing discomfort in an already crappy job, without any chance of success, due to a fundamental misunderstanding of how retail works.
Personally, I love how I can spend all day streaming radio over the iPhone, and that's fine. But the moment I buy an album, I have to find a wi-fi hotspot to actually download it.
Whoever was running AT&T simply had no idea how much bandwidth "unlimited bandwidth" can really suck up. They clearly lacked vision as to what a tiny internet-enabled programmable device that wasn't terrible could become. I'm guessing they based their bandwidth predictions around the LG 3G phones that they offered at the time, with their terrible, limited video and music services.
And they're still in the wrong business. Metered audio, metered texting, and unlimited digital bits as an afterthought? They're selling the wrong thing.
It's a good thing these guys can't do any more damage.
At this point, it could also be that Twitter was the only reliable way for the US State Department to know what was going on in Iran. As Iran is a nuclear country, the US haves a vested interest in knowing as much as they can about what is going on currently there, especially when a revolution might be involved.
Asking a private company to delay scheduled maintenence so that they can get a sense for whether or not a nuclear country is experiencing a revolution doesn't seem surprising or out of scope.
The next step up would be to crowdsource it. Have users give each game a star rating and an age-appropriateness rating. Let the broad population decide what is and isn't appropriate.
Only after self-rating and crowd rating have failed, should you resort to rating by elite secret boards.
For simplicity's sake, let's imagine that Cell Phones are the only source of EM radiation. Say a cellphone gets half of its energy from harvested signals. Where did those signals come from? Other Cellphones. Every Watt that is harvested to power the current cellphone came off of the signal of another cellphone nearby. And in turn, every watt of power the current cellphone puts out is degraded by being captured by surrounding cellphones.
Now if you want to maintain the same transmissive properties, you need to increase the power of the cellphones. In a completely closed system, you might be doing something like increasing the battery capacity by 50%, but then increasing power transmission by 50% to compensate. Essentially, a race full of cellphones vamping off eachother, taking blood and energy from one phone and putting it into another, then putting it back, without really accomplishing anything. In a world where you spend a lot of power to get a clearer signal, spending signal clarity to get a little power back seems wrong.
The *one* real flip side of this is ground-based transmitters. You can get power from both the other cellphones going off in an area, and the plugged-in cell towers that are anchored to the roofs. Essentially, individual cellphones would be vamping energy off eachother, but the cell towers could be adding more energy to the overall system. Assuming a great capture / conversion rate, there is no reason why a cellphone couldn't recharge fully on nothing more than the cell towers themselves. Add in TV transmitters which wouldn't bat an eye at a few thousand cellphones (even if they had to increase transmission power by 1% to do so) and you could have a handy recharger.
What exactly is the difference between the government of a town owning a library and the people of a town getting together, deciding to build a library, funding the immediate building of the library with town-issued bonds, and paying off the interest on the bonds with town coffers. In one case you have the governing body of an area paying for something through taxes, and in the other you're going through mental gymnastics to pretend the creepy "gov'ment man's hand" isn't on your money.
Face it: when a group of people get together, vote, and come to a decision, that's a government. There are times that it works well, and times that it doesn't. Libraries are a classic example where it worked well in the past.
Maybe if they learned more, they'd know why they should give a shit about education.
Actually, the 3G iphone was subsidised for all users, including return first generation iphone users. The reasons for this are simple: The first generation was not subsidised, and the 3G phones cost a full 15$ per month more.
According to AT&T's announcement from 2008, their current early termination fee is 175 dollars minus 5 dollars per month that the contract was completed. For half-way through a 2-year contract, that's 115 dollars.
So if you are thinking of paying the extra money and upgrading your phone, first pay the 115 bucks and cancel your account. Then apply for a new account with the no-contract discount. Instead of paying 399 for the phone, you'll only pay 314, or a savings of 85 dollars.
Opera has always had an emphasis on keyboard navigation and shortcuts. Every function has a shortcut, and Opera regularly culls / re-organizes / otherwise intelligently manages their keyboard shortcuts. Unlike a lot of other browsers, Opera works just fine with only a keyboard (no mouse required).
So yes, while Firefox / I.E. / Chrome has keyboard shortcuts, none of them actively manage it to the same degree. None of them really work without a mouse.
Opera 9.60 here. The main problems I have are
1: story titles showing up as dark grey on the dark green title bars in opera
2: floating comment bar on the left, frequently floating way over things it shouldn't
3: (unrelated to Opera, and probably standards-compliant) the floating divs covering up content on smaller screens, like the iphone
Personally, for the next version fo Slashdot I'd dump the dynamically floating divs, dump the fancy / fragile display techs, and just rely on a more traditional layout system.
Yes, HDMI is overpriced, but it is a cheap cable. You can pick them up for 5 bucks if you know where you're looking. USB cables used to have this problem when they were first released, but they're still a cheap cable. Optical cables, on the other hand, will probably not come down in price to the same degree.
And for the 15' distances that you normally find home theater equipment, it works fine. You're not supposed to go past the rated distance... that's why it's rated for that distance. But in general (and I know there are special configurations out there), 15 feet is fine for the application.
HDMI for the most part is a pretty nice, simple, it-just-works standard. It transmits both audio (up to 7:1 I think) and video digitally in that one cable. It is nicely vertically shaped, so that it can't go in upside-down (BOO USB!), and in such a way that is really obvious when looking at it from a distance. There are no pins that bend or break. It's pretty easy to shove in while reaching around behind a TV without looking, and things don't seem to break when you hot plug it. While I think network over HDMI is a solution in serch of a problem (Does your TV need network access from your Xbox? Does your Xbox need display info from Fios?), it is still an interesting simplification.
This is why a lot of computers now come with HDMI ports, and a lot of displays take HDMI in. It's not some panacea high-end thingie. It's a cheap cable that does everything... or at least everything we will soon be doing wirelessly. And thanks to the digital nature, the cheapest HDMI cables work basically as well as the most expensive ones.
I connect laptops and computers to 5' Plasma TV's via HDMI all the time. It's not something designed to keep these two worlds apart, but a simplification that helps make them play better.
Coming from a mac world originally, it's all about the software.
To most people, the Operating System doesn't matter. People want to do stuff with their computers. They want their printers to all work, they want to run Skypeitterillian, they want to edit photos using tools they know. The OS is the invisible glue that makes that all happen. Unfortunately, that OS could be utter junk, and it wouldn't matter because it runs the stuff they want it to run.
I could rant on and on about the many, many improvements needed to Linux before it is really good as a desktop OS. But really what it needs are 99.99% reliable Windows and Mac emulation layers. Once people no longer have to worry that their 20 year-old copy of Quickbooks won't work, then you can push the advantages of > 4GB memory space, free software on-demand, a real security infrastructure, etc, etc.
I'm kind of surprised they don't just charge "either a % of MSRP or a flat rate, whichever is lower." That way, they could set a sliding price scale for any devices below, way, 400$, but maintain a high price on those above. Otherwise, over a certain spec Linux just becomes much more attractive.
I do have to say, I find the 1GB of RAM limitation quite ironic, considering that we've been bumping hard into Window's 4GB RAM limitation for some time now. If it weren't for Window's domination of the marketplace, 1GB would be a complete dawdle by now. Heck, 4GB of RAM is cheaper now than a nice Keyboard.
If I can do any one of those things, I'll preorder the damn thing right now.
You can kill your family. Lead them into the bathroom. Remove door and toilet. Wait.
No, it means they have to use other IP addresses. It's stupid of Wikipedia to think this stops anything.
Real-world interaction systems don't need to be perfect, they just need to discourage or encourage certain behaviors.
This makes for one more step that members of the Church of Scientology have to make before they can edit. I'd guess that would cut down the edits that would need to be rolled back by half, which would be a sizeable improvement for any organization.
Further, this sends the clear and documented message that any editor which finds CoS propaganda should just go ahead and revert the change. And it is arguable, but if Scientology is banned from editing Wikipedia, Wikimedia might have a stronger court case that Scientology is tresspassing on their servers. This could be important if Wikimedia is ever sued by Scientologists.
One of the points of the article, though, is that by copying WoW, you're just going to get people getting bored faster. WoW took a fun but flawed formula and more or less perfected it. If you want to compete with that (and the hundreds of millions of development dollars that beast is getting), you need to find a different formula. Otherwise you're game is going to be same old - same old, and not as polished.
Visa used to call me about gas purchases... I didn't have a car, but I'd fill up friend's tanks occasionally. I'd get a call asking if this was something I had meant to do, and I'd say yes. Or I'd miss that call, and have to call them back when I couldn't use the card.
They always just instantly re-instated the same card, since there was no fraud.
Friend comments also get an automatic +1. If you see a commenter that find interesting, friending them will make their comments stick out from the noise.
It is exactly the same type of restrictions that Apple applies to all their products; be it iPod, iPhone, OSX or whatever else you can think of.
The NIN content that Apple found objectionable can currently be bought from iTunes, just not as an app. Similarly, OSX is a pretty well understood platform that really only needs hardware developers to bother creating compatible drivers. You can put any content you want on iPods, and there are a wide variety of secondary apps to do this if you don't like iTunes.
Really, the only thing Apple has this much control over is the App store. Friends of mine have had far less trouble getting music onto the iTunes store than onto the app store. This whole thing smacks of expecting the iPhone to be just a Nokia Candybar ++, and being overwhelmened when people are using it like a genuine platform.
If you lived in an agrarian society all of your life, these differences would be significant.
How about this revision:
19 Yet she increased her whoring, remembering the days of her youth, when she played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her paramours there, whose genitals were the size of Playstation 3s, and whose emissions burned with the fire of the Xbox 360.
Attach an LED readout screen, and create an MP3 server for your car.
There's a mild irony here. The one profession' great concern for spelling misspelled professing.
They also won't remember that you warned them. They'll remember that somewhere along the line, IT oversaw this intranet for them. It worked for a while, then something broke. Even if they're aware that this is related to IE6 (probably not), nobody will remember who made that call, especially not the idiot who said "let's just go with that blue E internet thingie."
They'll just know that IT made it, and it broke after a few years.