Chances are, they were comparing it to previous Motorola products and not other manufacturer's phones.
I live in a small city with limited selection. The RAZR really is the best phone we've ever owned in this area. In places where my wife used to lose signal altogether with her old phone, the RAZR still gets three bars and can place calls without dropping them. The point being that we actually did the research and bought what worked well for us. I couldn't care less if some teenage sells clerk thinks less of me for getting something that happens to be trendy.
As a former wireless sales representative, I can pretty much tell you this:
First off, you misspelled "clerk". Second, I can pretty much tell you this: every review I read said that your despised RAZR had the best reception of any phone available in my area. Given that my wife routinely drives between cities through sparsely-populated cattle country, that's the most critical feature we looked for. Therefore, we bought the phone that best fit our needs: the RAZR. I don't care how fetishistically retrocool your little brick is. I wanted (and got) one that did what we wanted.
Jackasses like you are why I hate corporate stores. There are few things worse than having an elitist snotnose tell me my decisions are wrong. Frankly, if I were interested in your opinion, I would have asked. The sound of me not asking was the sound of me not caring.
First, pedestrian deaths are always due to automobile mis-use (either accidental or intentional).
That's ludicrous. The logical conclusion of that statement is that if a pedestrian somehow strays into the roadway and gets run over, then the driver misused their car by not causing it to decelerate from road speed to zero instantaneously.
If everyone was running around only using guns to defend themselves, we wouldn't need guns to defend ourselves now, would we?
A meth addict with a knife would easily kill me if all I had was a knife. Sure, I might get in a few wounds - some consolation to my widow, huh? There are other things I want to defend myself from than people armed with guns.
Right, because your grand-daddy's rifle is really going to help against tanks and automatic weaponry.
How many American soldiers would be willing to open fire on their hometown for any reason less than a full-blown foreign invasion? A lot less than 100%, I can guarantee.
Frankly, I wouldn't want to work at a company who hired based largely on appearances.
Has there ever been a company in the history of companies that didn't hire based on appearance? You don't need to be a fashion model in an Armani suit, but if you can't be bothered to be well groomed and dressed in neat, clean clothing for an interview, why would you expect a company to think you cared?
I've probably never been hired for my looks, but I'm darn sure I've never been not hired because of them.
Physical appearance, manners, diction, etc..., are all important qualities to people who are insecure in their own abilities.
I couldn't possibly disagree more. A despicable or incomprehensible genius is far less valuable than a merely competent employee that can actually contribute to the office environment.
Who would have thought, places of higher learning actually caring about theories and learning and not about job skills.
I had an interview where the guy talked about his kid's football team for half an hour, then asked me what I majored in. When I told him Computer Science, he replied with, "oh, all that theory bullshit." I stood up and walked out without saying goodbye; there was no point in wasting any more of each others' time.
I'd rather die out as a species than to have to live on Mars, I tell you that.
Feel free to experience that locally, but I'm kind of a big fan of survival, truth be told. It's gotten me this far.
Re:XML Totally Sucks - All of it!
on
Tim Bray Says RELAX
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
While XML may have it's places (I've yet to encounter one in the commerical world), passing large amount of data is not one of them.
Yeah, well I have to look at EDI every day. I'd switch to XML in a heartbeat if it were up to me.
You picked some obvious strawmen to shoot down. XML isn't for building gigabyte databases (regardless of whether some people try to use it for that). It's for easily moving data between applications. If you think writing a flat text parser is easy, then you've never had to deal with nested data or escaped characters. Say what you will about XML, but it's nice to have one set standard that deals with all that, even if suboptimally, because I never want to write another ad-hoc parser for as long as I live. Been there, done that, have no desire to bother again.
I'm a doctor. And when I'm at a movie I turn my telephone OFF.
You're a doctor but have already forgotten that residency means being on call 24/7 for several years straight. Would you have been so quick to advocate something that shut down the pagers that residents used to carry before cell phones were ubiquitous?
Even if minivans get marginally better mileage than SUVs, they still both have very poor (passenger*miles)/gallon, because they are both usually driven with few passengers.
Although I wish my family was rich enough to afford special-purpose vehicles, we had to buy one that worked for all the situations we're likely to find ourselves in. This includes:
Carpooling to school with our neighbor's kids (there's no legal way to put 5 kids in a 5-passenger sedan and still have a driver).
Out-of-state trips with two adults, three kids, and luggage.
Transporting large items (we just moved a chest freezer).
And yes, driving to work.
When my wife needed a new vehicle, we bought a Toyota minivan because it actually did everything we needed it to. As others have pointed out, we didn't exactly get it because it's a sexy performance model.
My wife had a patient who threw a conniption because my wife documented that the patient "denied recreational drug use". The woman took that to mean that my wife thought she really did use drugs but wasn't admitting it. However, in medical jargon, "denies" means roughly "said 'no' when asked about". There's no connotation of trickery or deceit, just the simple fact that someone answered "no" to a question. I suspect that it has a similar meaning for legal types.
It is illegal to solicit a minor for sex, it does not matter if you do it with email, carrier pigeon, or two plastic cups on a string. What makes email, or even electronic correspondence special?
Not to defend the law, but I think the idea (right or wrong) that it was addressing is that it's easy for sexual predators to sit at home and contact a huge number of potential victims via the Internet. The purpose of the law isn't to saw that child-rape set up via the Internet is somehow worse than child-rape organized by a creep in a park. Instead, it's to make the current easiest means of meeting new victims off-limits, thereby making the "real" crime more difficult to commit.
My CompSci class dropped by about the same percentage. In all fairness, though, a lot of it is because kids don't necessarily want to learn integration by trig substitution when they really just want to write video games. I'm not saying that this stuff is important, just that a lot of people discover that they're not willing to pay the price. In much the same way, organic chemistry was a big hurdle for my wife in med school, but even though she'll literally never use it again, it was worth it to her to put in the effort. It's just a matter of desire.
We're talking about Linux distributions and you're advocating nudity? Listen, I'm sure there are one or two cute Linux-using women who'd take one for the team, but do you really want J. Random Slashdotter on your desktop background?
[from the baseline goals] Reduce the time it takes to send medical images, such as X-rays, from about four minutes to less than one minute.
I'm guessing $24B spent to get an X-ray in one minute instead of four begins to be diminished returns.
You misread that. It reduces the time to send an X-ray to one minute. If your X-ray is the twentieth in line, and you're waiting to find out of you have a broken neck, I assure you that the drop from 80 minutes to 20 minutes would seem worth the money. I'm not defending the debacle, just pointing out that there are plausible interpretations that don't seem quite as pointless.
You could say that about anyone trying to make an argument.
If by "that" you mean "like a true spinner...", I disagree. Normal debate tactics are to emphasize your point's advantages and minimize it's disadvantages:
We had to make some tough design choices, but we believe the consumers will like the finished product.
Spinning, on the other hand, is the "art" of making your disadvantages look like advantages:
Despite what reviewers are saying, the "random maiming" feature can be useful in many situations.
You can say that everyone trying to make an argument tries to make their side look good. You can't say that they're all spinning.
we'll see applications built on custom versions of Java that aren't compatible with each other or have fixed bugs differently to how someone else has fixed them.
I know. I hate navigating the maze of incompatible GCC, Perl and Python implementations we're stuck with.
There would never have been a GTK/Qt appliactions split because all software would have been written in Java.
Uh-huh. Just like how "all" software is currently written in C variants. No, you'd have JGTK and JQT fans taking potshots at the other camp just like now.
It'll be over when Aunt Tilly uses Linux on the desktop.
In that case, it's over - at least for approximations of Aunt Tilly suitably close to my in-laws. I built a little Kubuntu box for them and they love it. It works with their printer and digital camera, and they can browse every website they want to.
The key is that Linux was pre-installed (by me in this case). As long as Aunt Tilly doesn't have to install it herself, it's every bit as user friendly as Windows.
The lawyers job is to take your money, take the law, and make a best attempt at convincing the judge that the law reads in your favor, in the mean time, the other lawyers job is to take the oppositions money and try to convince the judge that THEIR interpretation is the correct one.
While that's true, that's still not an excuse.
My job is extremely technical, and my boss, while intelligent and educated, would not understand the low-level details of many of the things I do. And yet, when he asks what I'm doing or why I'm doing it, he expects me to answer him in terms he can understand that reasonably accurately explain the situation.
My wife is a doctor. She has to explain complex medical issues to patients in terms that are mostly accurate, but that they can understand.
So why do lawyers get a free pass? Is arguing a traffic ticket really that much more complex than setting up a multi-homed VPN? Does arguing against the RIAA require much more subtlety and strategy than convincing a patient that they really, really need to have a surgery or they'll die?
There are many difficult, complex fields of employment. Professionals in every other field but law are routinely expected to summarize their work in layman terms. Isn't it reasonable to expect the same from a lawyer? After all, they hack language for a living.
I have a new freak on my list as of when I wrote the above. It's apparently pretty easy to make NewYorkCountryLawyer dislike you. I wonder if he comes to hate everyone who disagrees with him in court?
That's a shame. I thought I was being pretty civil.
I certainly think you can. In case you're not aware, the law is a very complex maze that very much depends on the exact specifics of each case.
That's exactly the kind on condescension that readers were most complaining about. Yes, we're familiar with complex systems - we deal with them every day. We were hoping to get insight about a system that we're generally unfamiliar with, even if we get the basic gist of it.
Throughout that interview, people were bitching at him because he didn't give them a yes/no answer to complex questions that needed more information--a lot more information.
Look at this answer:
"It's hard to generalize about that, because each person's facts, each person's personality, each person's intellect and ability, are different. Generally, there is no real good way to handle these cases, so anything anyone does is a mistake, in that sense. But in another sense, there are no mistakes, because there is no right answer."
Well, no kidding. That was utterly and positively content-free. It imparted no information. If they couldn't or didn't want to answer the question, then they should have just said so.
Which leads back to my original position: that interview was awful. It's not fair to say that Slashdotters were overly ungrateful for their input in general, but you can't reasonably hold it against us for not swooning over the wonderful, in-depth answers they didn't provide.
Slashdot Mirror
...as long as you don't know what the artifacts of overly-compressed digital video look like. If you do, it can look absolutely awful.
Good digital is far better than good analog. Bad analog is infinitely preferable (to me) than bad digital.
I live in a small city with limited selection. The RAZR really is the best phone we've ever owned in this area. In places where my wife used to lose signal altogether with her old phone, the RAZR still gets three bars and can place calls without dropping them. The point being that we actually did the research and bought what worked well for us. I couldn't care less if some teenage sells clerk thinks less of me for getting something that happens to be trendy.
First off, you misspelled "clerk". Second, I can pretty much tell you this: every review I read said that your despised RAZR had the best reception of any phone available in my area. Given that my wife routinely drives between cities through sparsely-populated cattle country, that's the most critical feature we looked for. Therefore, we bought the phone that best fit our needs: the RAZR. I don't care how fetishistically retrocool your little brick is. I wanted (and got) one that did what we wanted.
Jackasses like you are why I hate corporate stores. There are few things worse than having an elitist snotnose tell me my decisions are wrong. Frankly, if I were interested in your opinion, I would have asked. The sound of me not asking was the sound of me not caring.
That's ludicrous. The logical conclusion of that statement is that if a pedestrian somehow strays into the roadway and gets run over, then the driver misused their car by not causing it to decelerate from road speed to zero instantaneously.
A meth addict with a knife would easily kill me if all I had was a knife. Sure, I might get in a few wounds - some consolation to my widow, huh? There are other things I want to defend myself from than people armed with guns.
How many American soldiers would be willing to open fire on their hometown for any reason less than a full-blown foreign invasion? A lot less than 100%, I can guarantee.
Has there ever been a company in the history of companies that didn't hire based on appearance? You don't need to be a fashion model in an Armani suit, but if you can't be bothered to be well groomed and dressed in neat, clean clothing for an interview, why would you expect a company to think you cared?
I've probably never been hired for my looks, but I'm darn sure I've never been not hired because of them.
I couldn't possibly disagree more. A despicable or incomprehensible genius is far less valuable than a merely competent employee that can actually contribute to the office environment.
I had an interview where the guy talked about his kid's football team for half an hour, then asked me what I majored in. When I told him Computer Science, he replied with, "oh, all that theory bullshit." I stood up and walked out without saying goodbye; there was no point in wasting any more of each others' time.
Feel free to experience that locally, but I'm kind of a big fan of survival, truth be told. It's gotten me this far.
Yeah, well I have to look at EDI every day. I'd switch to XML in a heartbeat if it were up to me.
You picked some obvious strawmen to shoot down. XML isn't for building gigabyte databases (regardless of whether some people try to use it for that). It's for easily moving data between applications. If you think writing a flat text parser is easy, then you've never had to deal with nested data or escaped characters. Say what you will about XML, but it's nice to have one set standard that deals with all that, even if suboptimally, because I never want to write another ad-hoc parser for as long as I live. Been there, done that, have no desire to bother again.
You're a doctor but have already forgotten that residency means being on call 24/7 for several years straight. Would you have been so quick to advocate something that shut down the pagers that residents used to carry before cell phones were ubiquitous?
Although I wish my family was rich enough to afford special-purpose vehicles, we had to buy one that worked for all the situations we're likely to find ourselves in. This includes:
When my wife needed a new vehicle, we bought a Toyota minivan because it actually did everything we needed it to. As others have pointed out, we didn't exactly get it because it's a sexy performance model.
My wife had a patient who threw a conniption because my wife documented that the patient "denied recreational drug use". The woman took that to mean that my wife thought she really did use drugs but wasn't admitting it. However, in medical jargon, "denies" means roughly "said 'no' when asked about". There's no connotation of trickery or deceit, just the simple fact that someone answered "no" to a question. I suspect that it has a similar meaning for legal types.
Not to defend the law, but I think the idea (right or wrong) that it was addressing is that it's easy for sexual predators to sit at home and contact a huge number of potential victims via the Internet. The purpose of the law isn't to saw that child-rape set up via the Internet is somehow worse than child-rape organized by a creep in a park. Instead, it's to make the current easiest means of meeting new victims off-limits, thereby making the "real" crime more difficult to commit.
My CompSci class dropped by about the same percentage. In all fairness, though, a lot of it is because kids don't necessarily want to learn integration by trig substitution when they really just want to write video games. I'm not saying that this stuff is important, just that a lot of people discover that they're not willing to pay the price. In much the same way, organic chemistry was a big hurdle for my wife in med school, but even though she'll literally never use it again, it was worth it to her to put in the effort. It's just a matter of desire.
We're talking about Linux distributions and you're advocating nudity? Listen, I'm sure there are one or two cute Linux-using women who'd take one for the team, but do you really want J. Random Slashdotter on your desktop background?
You misread that. It reduces the time to send an X-ray to one minute. If your X-ray is the twentieth in line, and you're waiting to find out of you have a broken neck, I assure you that the drop from 80 minutes to 20 minutes would seem worth the money. I'm not defending the debacle, just pointing out that there are plausible interpretations that don't seem quite as pointless.
If by "that" you mean "like a true spinner...", I disagree. Normal debate tactics are to emphasize your point's advantages and minimize it's disadvantages:
Spinning, on the other hand, is the "art" of making your disadvantages look like advantages:
You can say that everyone trying to make an argument tries to make their side look good. You can't say that they're all spinning.
Tell that to Google. My own company has switched to Python for all future application development. If Python is a scripting language, then so is Java.
I know. I hate navigating the maze of incompatible GCC, Perl and Python implementations we're stuck with.
Uh-huh. Just like how "all" software is currently written in C variants. No, you'd have JGTK and JQT fans taking potshots at the other camp just like now.
In that case, it's over - at least for approximations of Aunt Tilly suitably close to my in-laws. I built a little Kubuntu box for them and they love it. It works with their printer and digital camera, and they can browse every website they want to.
The key is that Linux was pre-installed (by me in this case). As long as Aunt Tilly doesn't have to install it herself, it's every bit as user friendly as Windows.
While that's true, that's still not an excuse.
My job is extremely technical, and my boss, while intelligent and educated, would not understand the low-level details of many of the things I do. And yet, when he asks what I'm doing or why I'm doing it, he expects me to answer him in terms he can understand that reasonably accurately explain the situation.
My wife is a doctor. She has to explain complex medical issues to patients in terms that are mostly accurate, but that they can understand.
So why do lawyers get a free pass? Is arguing a traffic ticket really that much more complex than setting up a multi-homed VPN? Does arguing against the RIAA require much more subtlety and strategy than convincing a patient that they really, really need to have a surgery or they'll die?
There are many difficult, complex fields of employment. Professionals in every other field but law are routinely expected to summarize their work in layman terms. Isn't it reasonable to expect the same from a lawyer? After all, they hack language for a living.
I have a new freak on my list as of when I wrote the above. It's apparently pretty easy to make NewYorkCountryLawyer dislike you. I wonder if he comes to hate everyone who disagrees with him in court?
That's a shame. I thought I was being pretty civil.
That's exactly the kind on condescension that readers were most complaining about. Yes, we're familiar with complex systems - we deal with them every day. We were hoping to get insight about a system that we're generally unfamiliar with, even if we get the basic gist of it.
Look at this answer:
"It's hard to generalize about that, because each person's facts, each person's personality, each person's intellect and ability, are different. Generally, there is no real good way to handle these cases, so anything anyone does is a mistake, in that sense. But in another sense, there are no mistakes, because there is no right answer."
Well, no kidding. That was utterly and positively content-free. It imparted no information. If they couldn't or didn't want to answer the question, then they should have just said so.
Which leads back to my original position: that interview was awful. It's not fair to say that Slashdotters were overly ungrateful for their input in general, but you can't reasonably hold it against us for not swooning over the wonderful, in-depth answers they didn't provide.