So you get fat of things you shouldn't get fat of and there is no way to know because typically American foodstuff doesn't have to declare how much sugar they contain like in more regulated countries.
You don't know what you're talking about. Every bit of packaged food sold in the US needs to have a nutrition facts label stuck to it, which lists the sugar/fat/protein/vitamin/fiber content of the food. The US was one of the first countries (if not the first) to require this label.
As an example, removing subsidies from corn producers shouldn't cost too much money. The farmers will need a short time to plant different crops but it needn't take long. The subsequent reduction in carbohydrates (in the form of HFCS etc) in foodstuffs which do not need it will not cost the manufacturers anything. The only change will be one of taste. People will get used to it in my opinion.
No need to do any of that; the oil crisis will quickly take care of the HFCS problem. The price of corn has already shot up drastically because more corn is being used in ethanol production, and at some point the price of HFCS production will make it more expensive than sugar. The subsudies for corn producers only kick in when their corn isn't selling above a certain price per bushel, and right now it's selling at three times that level.
I have a question about downloading TV shows from iTunes. Are you entitled to delete and redownload, or are you forced to be the custodian of the content you download? In other words, if your computer crashes, can you get it all back?
No, You can't.
Also, how easy would downloading from iTunes and burning the content to DVD and then sticking it in a CD wallet with an appropriate Sharpie labeled identification? Does Digital Rights Management step in to prevent this, or would I need software that can circumvent DRM?
Actually, as soon as you download more than a handful of things from iTunes, a little window pops up suggesting that you back up your purchases. Pop a CD or DVD in and it'll burn them all to disc for you. The videos you download are files stored in your music folder just like the other iTunes downloads are, and you can copy them around as much as you like. Of course, they'll only ever play in a computer with iTunes that's authorized with your account.
I don't really understand why people need so many minutes. I spend the daytime during weekdays at work, not yakking on the phone. I talk to friends and family on mainly weeknights or on the weekends -- i.e. mostly when I'm NOT at work. Am I that weird?
I, and most of the people I work with, use cell phones quite a bit while at work for work related calls. The managers/executives do this most often because they spend their day wandering from meeting to meeting. I've disabled my desk phone and just have it forward to my cell because I'm rarely at my desk. Of course, my employer picks up cell phone bills for anyone that uses them for business related calls, so no one minds. This has been the case at every company I've worked at over the past 5 years. So, in my experience, yes, you're weird.
voice dailing on your phone works cos the voice tags are recording of your own voice.
Not on my Nokia E61. The voice dialing is speaker independent and required no training whatsoever. It's been 100% accurate on my voice, and about 80% accurate on my fiancee's voice. It can even handle shortened versions of people's names eg. saying "Jim Smith" when the address book has an entry for "James Smith."
The key is that the phone has a limited number of possible things that it's listening for. I don't think it could handle transcribing email with the same accuracy, for example. As long as the car has a limited number of possible voice commands, it should do quite well without any training.
In the Boston area, I know plenty of people in software development making > 100K with about 4 years experience or a masters degree. Of course, the real estate market is insane in this area and you can't even think of owning a house unless you make > 130K/year.
Comments like these drive me insane. There aren't enough qualified people for the jobs that are available? Bull. I was the best programmer in my graduating undergrad class. I looked for a job for 18 months, living on money I made from DJ'ing frickin' wedding dances before giving up and going to law school. There are people out there -- talented people -- willing to work. Give one of them a shot before crying about being able to hire more foreign help.
You obviously weren't looking very hard for a job, or your expectations were way too high for someone fresh out of school. If you're going to come straight out of school with no experience and demand a high salary or a job that technically interests you, you're not going to find much. Your first job out of school isn't going to be your dream job, and if you haven't realized that by the time you graduate law school, you'll find the same "lack of jobs" then.
Assuming that on average a new episode is available for 20 of those shows in a typical week, that is $40 per week. My satellite bill is about $40/month for two tuners. $2/show is just way too much.
The math changes again when you take into account the following:
1) A full season of a TV show is $35 on iTunes, not $2/episode. 2) With satellite, you're paying for the 6 months of the year when the networks are only playing re-runs.
Assume your family watches 20 different shows over the course of the year. iTunes: 20*35 = $700/year Satellite: 40*12 = $480/year
iTunes is still more expensive, but not "way more expensive." Plus, you don't have to skip around commercials or leave a computer on 24/7.
You have the wrong "other end" identified. The "other end" that needs to be fixed is the human creating the profile. People should not be entering data that can be used against them (birth date, sex, full name, etc).
Ah, yes, people revealing incredibly personal details like their name is the problem. Phone books must scare the crap out of you.
No, the problem has nothing to do with myspace or any other directory of names, the problem is that it's trivially easy to do things (like getting a credit card or a bank loan) pretending that you're someone else. The only possibly secret bit of information needed to do either of those things is the social security number. Anything else can be pulled out of the phone book or public records.
Once someone has your social security number, they can do *anything* as you. And people will put their social security number into any form that asks for it, because so many things require it.
We desperately need a better form of verifiable identity. Unfortunately, I don't know what that is.
You've obviously never had to deal with Comcast, Time Warner, or Cablevision. Compared to those three, dealing with Verizon is a dream.
Two years ago I had Comcast for Internet and TV and was constantly fighting with them regarding both services. The Internet was dog slow and would routinely drop out for hours at a time. They'd simply acknowledge that they were having problems in my area and that the problem was being worked on. After about two months of that, I switched to Speakeasy for DSL, but had to stick with Comcast for TV since there was no other option. The Comcast digital TV service was snowy on every local channel, and I was told that that was the best quality service they had, and it had nothing to do with my TV or the lines inside my house. All this, and I was paying $70/month just for standard cable.
I switched to FiOS internet when it became available about 6 months ago, and to FiOS TV last month when it was approved by my town. FiOS TV ($30) and FiOS Internet ($40) are both way better quality than anything Comcast would ever offer, and Comcast would be charging me $120/month for similar services.
My past experiences with Time Warner and Cablevision were better, but still not as good as Verizon. Cablevision's Optimum Online was *fast* but routinely dropped out and was expensive as hell. Time Warner's Roadrunner was dog slow but reliable and affordable.
Linux requires me to think too much (recompiling the kernel to install a driver? -- why would a home user ever want to do that??)
I don't know. Why would a home user ever have to do that? My Thinkpad running Ubuntu has never had a compiler installed on it and it's got plenty of drivers installed. Perhaps you haven't run linux since 1995? Perhaps you'd think it silly if I said: MacOS X forces me to put up with cooperative multi-tasking, no command line, and regular system crashes. Why would anyone ever use that?
Do many people really have fully reliable connection?
Yes.
Every place that I've lived had spotty high speed internet connection. It was up MOST of the time but there were definitely periods here and there where it would go out and be a bit before it came back on. Most people are used to much greater reliability with their phone lines.
Get off the cable network. I've had DSL (speakeasy) and fttp (verizon) service that never goes down.
I have FIOS and two copper phone lines still running into my house. During the installation they asked me if I wanted them to pull out the existing lines, I said "no, please leave them" and they did. I still have emergency service on those lines if I need it. When verizon asks you if you want to keep the lines, say "yes" and you get to keep them. It's no big deal.
Almost every area they offer it is very urban and that offering is pretty sparse. It covers selected cities within less than half of US states.
I live in eastern Massachusetts and have FIOS. The area I live in isn't "very urban" by any stretch of the imagination. The town I live in has two stop lights. The town next to mine also has FIOS and they only have one stop light. I'd consider both of those towns sparsely populated suburban areas. Most of urban Boston (possibly all of it) isn't serviced by FIOS.
In addition, the parts of New York that were first serviced by FIOS aren't in New York City; They're suburban and rural areas on Long Island and in Westchester.
You probably see "New York" or "Massachusetts" and think that those states are one huge city. You couldn't be more wrong.
When my wan interface or network interface dies at 2am I don't think anyone from the OSS community is going to have a parts depot within 4 hours to fix the problem. I also don't see 24x7 tech support phone numbers manned by volunteers anytime soon. Vendors don't make the money on the hardware, they make it on services and support. I love OSS, but Linux and OSS are not the magic pill for everything.
I've never encountered a problem with a business critical system that could wait 4 hours that couldn't wait 24. If the wan port on critical networking gear is down for 4 hours, someone's head is going to roll. It doesn't matter if you bought cisco gear and cisco had someone out 4 hours after the problem was reported; if the equipment was important, you should have had two of them on site with one in hot or warm standby mode ready to go. Once your dead gear is swapped out, you can go get it replaced however you damn well please. At that point, having the 4 hour response time isn't all that important.
Computers are cheap. People are expensive. Lost business is expensive. If your critical router dies at noon on a Tuesday and no one in your organization can get work done all afternoon, you've blown through the cost of a second router several times over.
I see a lot of people making this kind of association. "I used superaggressiveblacklist.com's list and all my mail got blocked! RBL's are a complete waste!" That's kind of thinking is just silly. There are hundreds of popular lists on the internet, and not all of them are as aggressive as that other list you used. I use list.dsbl.org and xbl.spamhaus.org on all the mail servers I run. I check mail logs regularly and inspect rejected messages for false positives, and haven't found one yet. Those two lists also drop a staggering amount of mail every day; around 90%. I let spamassassin pick up the rest (around 8%.) Spamassassin, unfortunately, does have false positives, so anything that spamassassin tags gets delivered with a 'possibly spam' header added.
Heres how it is. While you are employed by the company towards a specific end, during those hours the company is putting money into your pocket, you work to meet those ends. If you need to make a personal phone call, use your own phone, on your own time, unless its an emergency and you have no alternative.
You do not get to use company equipment, company internet access, company phone calls, or company time for your own personal needs.
That kind of attitude from an employer only works if you're paying by the hour for unskilled labor.
Personally, I take home the same pay if I work 30 hours or 70 hours a week. I get projects assigned and I have deadlines, and those things come due no matter where I am. If I have to leave in the middle of the day to take care of something personal, I might work from home that night or over the weekend to make sure my projects get done. The end result? I probably work more hours a week (and am more productive) than someone who works straight from 9 to 5 but never a second over. Plus, I'm happy doing it.
From a business point of view, company equipment, company internet access and company phone lines are dirt cheap compared to an employee. For a medium sized company, those other expenses wouldn't even comprise 1/10th of a single employee's salary. (I know; I pay all of those bills for a medium sized company) As long as that employee is getting their work done on time it doesn't matter if they're sitting on IM all day talking to their wife, occasionally unwinding on slashdot, or calling their doctor.
This is actually amusing. Your argument is that speed limits are "unsafely low." As evidence, you suggest that the person driving the speed limit is at a higher risk then those driving twenty miles over the limit. But, as you have kindly explained, it's unsafe to drive the speed limit ONLY because the drivers around you are SPEEDING.
That was some interesting logic you used, but I don't buy it. Yes, the guy doing 20 miles less then the traffic flow IS an obstacle. But it's not his fault. It's people like you, who feel you're entitled to drive 75 in a 55, who look at the guy driving 55 as the problem.
Speeding isn't particularly dangerous, it's just the easiest thing to measure and enforce. Most accidents are a result of carelessness or inattentiveness, and would happen at any speed. However, with the exception of DUI, it's difficult to ticket people for being careless or inattentive. Changing lanes without looking, taking your eyes off the road, following too closely, making abrupt changes in direction without signaling. Those actvities are many times more dangerous than going 10 or 20 mph over the limit, yet no one seems to realize it. I've known people who were completely incapable of maintaining a consistant speed and direction in a car, and couldn't go 5 seconds without fiddling with the radio or their cell phone, but that complained about people exceeding the speed limit being dangerous. And their logic? Fiddling with the radio or cell phone isn't illegal, but speeding is. Therefore, speeding is evil.
More than rent is higher, look at something as simple as car insurance. It might cost $50 a month if you live in Arkansas, but it could be $350 a month if you live in Boston or Los Angeles. Let's compare utilities as well.
Car insurance in Boston is a bit of an oddity; The prices are state regulated, so you pay less for insurance in Boston than you would just about anywhere else. I moved from rural New York to metro Boston about a year ago and my insurance premium dropped by 60%. Had I moved from metro NY to metro Boston, it would have dropped by 80%.
Beyond that, the only utility that went up was electricity. Phone, Cable TV, and Internet were all the same or less. Food prices are lower at the supermarket due to there being competition instead of the "one supermarket for 30 miles" crap that I dealt with in NY. Gas is cheaper, taxes are lower, and my income is much higher.
As a result: 2 years ago I was working as a sysadmin for a start-up in Upstate NY. I rented an apartment and drove a 12 year old car, and I wasn't saving anything. Now I work as a sysadmin for a start-up outside of Boston. I own a house, an '05 model car, 2 boats, and I've got cash in the bank.
Satellite is still better because I can get it anywhere in the US, Canada and Northern Mexico (Assuming you are in the US), you never have to hunt for "good" stations while on the road, there are no or very few commercials (Howard Stern is 3 or 6 minutes per hour, if that) and the content is MUCH MUCH better.
The problem is that normal radio or HD radio is pretty much broadcasting crap. No matter how good it sounds, it is still crap.
There's usually one or two stations in an area that play decent content with very few commercials. In Boston I've found 4. Also, I like the fact that with normal radio I can hear local news, events, sports, traffic, whatever. All you're going to hear about on XM or Sirius is what's going on in New York or Washington, and because they're broadcasting the same stream to the rest of the country, they won't even talk about that.
Sure, maybe they've got some guy reading through regional weather and traffic reports, but that's not what I'm looking for either.
If you want just music out of your radio, you can get an iPod for really cheap these days.
and this doesn't put that money into the artists hands. ticketmaster is auctioning them off, not the artist. some artists simply do not want their fans to have to pay top dollar to see them. in fact, many of the more popular touring groups charge a flat rate for tickets, front row being the same price as the worst seats in the house (phish, used to be this way when they existed, selling out every concert they put on from 1995 through their breakup in 2004).
While you're right that Phish did sell all their tickets for the same amount, you're not right about them selling out every show. I definately was at least 3 or 4 shows at the tail end of the Summer '98 tour, as well as the Island tour, where tickets were still for sale at the door well after the "start" of the show. Lemonwheel, the Great Went, and IT also never had any real ticket cap. I've been to a bunch that were sold out well in advance, and the majority of their shows did sell out, but not every single one.
Tickets by mail was a great system, though. Certainly preferable to dealing with ticketmaster or camping out in line at the box office.
ACPI support is woeful in Linux. It barely works on my laptop.
If you want easy bluetooth then you dont' want Linux. I couldn't get it to see anything with Bluetooth, let-alone make it talk to things. Some say they have success, but I couldn't get anything happening.
If you want things to work, stick with Windows on your laptop. I'm a linux man through and through. All my servers are Linux. All my desktops are Linux.
I got my laptop and all hell broke loose. Things don't work, things crash, hibernate (something I use a lot) doesn't work. Linux is too disk-heavy and the disk is continually starting and stopping (for logs) even while idle. Battery life with Linux is attrocious. With windows I can get about 5 hours out of it. With Linux less than 2.
Sounds like you bought a shitty laptop.
On my thinkpad T42's and T43's:
1) Suspend and hibernate work perfectly, right out of the box. I just hit fn-f4 and the system goes to sleep. I hit any key and it wakes back up. The system properly drops all network connections when it goes to sleep, and brings them back up again when it comes back. 2) Wireless works perfectly, right out of the box. My T43's Broadcom wireless card shows up as eth1, and the T42's Atheros shows up as ath0. 3) Bluetooth works perfectly with bluez. 4) Battery life with the 9 cell battery is about 6 hours, compared to around 4 or 5 with windows.
Get a thinkpad T series, toss an Ubuntu disk in the drive, and you won't have any problems.
As to being a better platform for DVDs, what??!!? Dvd.. insert... play movie. On modern hardware Linux and Windows basically render the same quality output, both have basically the same functional specs. What exactly makes linux the better ( or worse ) platform for DVDs here?
I've come across Windows machines that would noticably drop frames, let the video fall out of sync with the audio, and pixelate due to some background process suddenly grabbing part of the CPU where similarly speced linux machines never had the same problems. Not to mention that Windows XP SP2 doesn't ship with DVD playback support, you have to buy it from a third party.
And, TBH, I'm not aware of any OSS that lets you throw together an intranet with shared documents, task lists, announcements and other dynamic elements as easily as Sharepoint.
Twiki and Mediawiki are easier, and more featureful. They don't have a whole ton of desktop integration, but it's phenominally easy to throw together an intranet with all the stuff you listed (plus a bunch more) using a wiki.
Re:Stories are old. PayPal got better.
on
PayPal Goes Mobile
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· Score: 1
Look at the number on the website. Area code (402)? Doesn't look toll-free to me.
Who TF actually pays extra for long distance these days? No one. What, are you calling paypal from a coinop pay phone or something?
Until they provide a 1-800 number that works from Canada; then they're still scumbags.
They may be scumbags, but not catering to the whims of one guy in canada who can't be bothered to get reasonable phone service isn't why.
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So you get fat of things you shouldn't get fat of and there is no way to know because typically American foodstuff doesn't have to declare how much sugar they contain like in more regulated countries.
l
You don't know what you're talking about. Every bit of packaged food sold in the US needs to have a nutrition facts label stuck to it, which lists the sugar/fat/protein/vitamin/fiber content of the food. The US was one of the first countries (if not the first) to require this label.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrition_facts_labe
As an example, removing subsidies from corn producers shouldn't cost too much money. The farmers will need a short time to plant different crops but it needn't take long. The subsequent reduction in carbohydrates (in the form of HFCS etc) in foodstuffs which do not need it will not cost the manufacturers anything. The only change will be one of taste. People will get used to it in my opinion.
No need to do any of that; the oil crisis will quickly take care of the HFCS problem. The price of corn has already shot up drastically because more corn is being used in ethanol production, and at some point the price of HFCS production will make it more expensive than sugar. The subsudies for corn producers only kick in when their corn isn't selling above a certain price per bushel, and right now it's selling at three times that level.
I have a question about downloading TV shows from iTunes. Are you entitled to delete and redownload, or are you forced to be the custodian of the content you download? In other words, if your computer crashes, can you get it all back?
No, You can't.
Also, how easy would downloading from iTunes and burning the content to DVD and then sticking it in a CD wallet with an appropriate Sharpie labeled identification? Does Digital Rights Management step in to prevent this, or would I need software that can circumvent DRM?
Actually, as soon as you download more than a handful of things from iTunes, a little window pops up suggesting that you back up your purchases. Pop a CD or DVD in and it'll burn them all to disc for you. The videos you download are files stored in your music folder just like the other iTunes downloads are, and you can copy them around as much as you like. Of course, they'll only ever play in a computer with iTunes that's authorized with your account.
I don't really understand why people need so many minutes. I spend the daytime during weekdays at work, not yakking on the phone. I talk to friends and family on mainly weeknights or on the weekends -- i.e. mostly when I'm NOT at work. Am I that weird?
I, and most of the people I work with, use cell phones quite a bit while at work for work related calls. The managers/executives do this most often because they spend their day wandering from meeting to meeting. I've disabled my desk phone and just have it forward to my cell because I'm rarely at my desk. Of course, my employer picks up cell phone bills for anyone that uses them for business related calls, so no one minds. This has been the case at every company I've worked at over the past 5 years. So, in my experience, yes, you're weird.
voice dailing on your phone works cos the voice tags are recording of your own voice.
Not on my Nokia E61. The voice dialing is speaker independent and required no training whatsoever. It's been 100% accurate on my voice, and about 80% accurate on my fiancee's voice. It can even handle shortened versions of people's names eg. saying "Jim Smith" when the address book has an entry for "James Smith."
The key is that the phone has a limited number of possible things that it's listening for. I don't think it could handle transcribing email with the same accuracy, for example. As long as the car has a limited number of possible voice commands, it should do quite well without any training.
In the Boston area, I know plenty of people in software development making > 100K with about 4 years experience or a masters degree. Of course, the real estate market is insane in this area and you can't even think of owning a house unless you make > 130K/year.
Comments like these drive me insane. There aren't enough qualified people for the jobs that are available? Bull. I was the best programmer in my graduating undergrad class. I looked for a job for 18 months, living on money I made from DJ'ing frickin' wedding dances before giving up and going to law school. There are people out there -- talented people -- willing to work. Give one of them a shot before crying about being able to hire more foreign help.
You obviously weren't looking very hard for a job, or your expectations were way too high for someone fresh out of school. If you're going to come straight out of school with no experience and demand a high salary or a job that technically interests you, you're not going to find much. Your first job out of school isn't going to be your dream job, and if you haven't realized that by the time you graduate law school, you'll find the same "lack of jobs" then.
Assuming that on average a new episode is available for 20 of those shows in a typical week, that is $40 per week. My satellite bill is about $40/month for two tuners. $2/show is just way too much.
The math changes again when you take into account the following:
1) A full season of a TV show is $35 on iTunes, not $2/episode.
2) With satellite, you're paying for the 6 months of the year when the networks are only playing re-runs.
Assume your family watches 20 different shows over the course of the year.
iTunes: 20*35 = $700/year
Satellite: 40*12 = $480/year
iTunes is still more expensive, but not "way more expensive." Plus, you don't have to skip around commercials or leave a computer on 24/7.
You have the wrong "other end" identified. The "other end" that needs to be fixed is the human creating the profile. People should not be entering data that can be used against them (birth date, sex, full name, etc).
Ah, yes, people revealing incredibly personal details like their name is the problem. Phone books must scare the crap out of you.
No, the problem has nothing to do with myspace or any other directory of names, the problem is that it's trivially easy to do things (like getting a credit card or a bank loan) pretending that you're someone else. The only possibly secret bit of information needed to do either of those things is the social security number. Anything else can be pulled out of the phone book or public records.
Once someone has your social security number, they can do *anything* as you. And people will put their social security number into any form that asks for it, because so many things require it.
We desperately need a better form of verifiable identity. Unfortunately, I don't know what that is.
I love my cable company.
You've obviously never had to deal with Comcast, Time Warner, or Cablevision. Compared to those three, dealing with Verizon is a dream.
Two years ago I had Comcast for Internet and TV and was constantly fighting with them regarding both services. The Internet was dog slow and would routinely drop out for hours at a time. They'd simply acknowledge that they were having problems in my area and that the problem was being worked on. After about two months of that, I switched to Speakeasy for DSL, but had to stick with Comcast for TV since there was no other option. The Comcast digital TV service was snowy on every local channel, and I was told that that was the best quality service they had, and it had nothing to do with my TV or the lines inside my house. All this, and I was paying $70/month just for standard cable.
I switched to FiOS internet when it became available about 6 months ago, and to FiOS TV last month when it was approved by my town. FiOS TV ($30) and FiOS Internet ($40) are both way better quality than anything Comcast would ever offer, and Comcast would be charging me $120/month for similar services.
My past experiences with Time Warner and Cablevision were better, but still not as good as Verizon. Cablevision's Optimum Online was *fast* but routinely dropped out and was expensive as hell. Time Warner's Roadrunner was dog slow but reliable and affordable.
-Fred
Linux requires me to think too much (recompiling the kernel to install a driver? -- why would a home user ever want to do that??)
I don't know. Why would a home user ever have to do that? My Thinkpad running Ubuntu has never had a compiler installed on it and it's got plenty of drivers installed. Perhaps you haven't run linux since 1995? Perhaps you'd think it silly if I said: MacOS X forces me to put up with cooperative multi-tasking, no command line, and regular system crashes. Why would anyone ever use that?
Do many people really have fully reliable connection?
Yes.
Every place that I've lived had spotty high speed internet connection. It was up MOST of the time but there were definitely periods here and there where it would go out and be a bit before it came back on. Most people are used to much greater reliability with their phone lines.
Get off the cable network. I've had DSL (speakeasy) and fttp (verizon) service that never goes down.
I have FIOS and two copper phone lines still running into my house. During the installation they asked me if I wanted them to pull out the existing lines, I said "no, please leave them" and they did. I still have emergency service on those lines if I need it. When verizon asks you if you want to keep the lines, say "yes" and you get to keep them. It's no big deal.
Almost every area they offer it is very urban and that offering is pretty sparse. It covers selected cities within less than half of US states.
I live in eastern Massachusetts and have FIOS. The area I live in isn't "very urban" by any stretch of the imagination. The town I live in has two stop lights. The town next to mine also has FIOS and they only have one stop light. I'd consider both of those towns sparsely populated suburban areas. Most of urban Boston (possibly all of it) isn't serviced by FIOS.
In addition, the parts of New York that were first serviced by FIOS aren't in New York City; They're suburban and rural areas on Long Island and in Westchester.
You probably see "New York" or "Massachusetts" and think that those states are one huge city. You couldn't be more wrong.
When my wan interface or network interface dies at 2am I don't think anyone from the OSS community is going to have a parts depot within 4 hours to fix the problem. I also don't see 24x7 tech support phone numbers manned by volunteers anytime soon. Vendors don't make the money on the hardware, they make it on services and support. I love OSS, but Linux and OSS are not the magic pill for everything.
I've never encountered a problem with a business critical system that could wait 4 hours that couldn't wait 24. If the wan port on critical networking gear is down for 4 hours, someone's head is going to roll. It doesn't matter if you bought cisco gear and cisco had someone out 4 hours after the problem was reported; if the equipment was important, you should have had two of them on site with one in hot or warm standby mode ready to go. Once your dead gear is swapped out, you can go get it replaced however you damn well please. At that point, having the 4 hour response time isn't all that important.
Computers are cheap. People are expensive. Lost business is expensive. If your critical router dies at noon on a Tuesday and no one in your organization can get work done all afternoon, you've blown through the cost of a second router several times over.
I see a lot of people making this kind of association. "I used superaggressiveblacklist.com's list and all my mail got blocked! RBL's are a complete waste!" That's kind of thinking is just silly. There are hundreds of popular lists on the internet, and not all of them are as aggressive as that other list you used. I use list.dsbl.org and xbl.spamhaus.org on all the mail servers I run. I check mail logs regularly and inspect rejected messages for false positives, and haven't found one yet. Those two lists also drop a staggering amount of mail every day; around 90%. I let spamassassin pick up the rest (around 8%.) Spamassassin, unfortunately, does have false positives, so anything that spamassassin tags gets delivered with a 'possibly spam' header added.
Heres how it is. While you are employed by the company towards a specific end, during those hours the company is putting money into your pocket, you work to meet those ends. If you need to make a personal phone call, use your own phone, on your own time, unless its an emergency and you have no alternative.
You do not get to use company equipment, company internet access, company phone calls, or company time for your own personal needs.
That kind of attitude from an employer only works if you're paying by the hour for unskilled labor.
Personally, I take home the same pay if I work 30 hours or 70 hours a week. I get projects assigned and I have deadlines, and those things come due no matter where I am. If I have to leave in the middle of the day to take care of something personal, I might work from home that night or over the weekend to make sure my projects get done. The end result? I probably work more hours a week (and am more productive) than someone who works straight from 9 to 5 but never a second over. Plus, I'm happy doing it.
From a business point of view, company equipment, company internet access and company phone lines are dirt cheap compared to an employee. For a medium sized company, those other expenses wouldn't even comprise 1/10th of a single employee's salary. (I know; I pay all of those bills for a medium sized company) As long as that employee is getting their work done on time it doesn't matter if they're sitting on IM all day talking to their wife, occasionally unwinding on slashdot, or calling their doctor.
This is actually amusing. Your argument is that speed limits are "unsafely low." As evidence, you suggest that the person driving the speed limit is at a higher risk then those driving twenty miles over the limit. But, as you have kindly explained, it's unsafe to drive the speed limit ONLY because the drivers around you are SPEEDING.
That was some interesting logic you used, but I don't buy it. Yes, the guy doing 20 miles less then the traffic flow IS an obstacle. But it's not his fault. It's people like you, who feel you're entitled to drive 75 in a 55, who look at the guy driving 55 as the problem.
Speeding isn't particularly dangerous, it's just the easiest thing to measure and enforce. Most accidents are a result of carelessness or inattentiveness, and would happen at any speed. However, with the exception of DUI, it's difficult to ticket people for being careless or inattentive. Changing lanes without looking, taking your eyes off the road, following too closely, making abrupt changes in direction without signaling. Those actvities are many times more dangerous than going 10 or 20 mph over the limit, yet no one seems to realize it. I've known people who were completely incapable of maintaining a consistant speed and direction in a car, and couldn't go 5 seconds without fiddling with the radio or their cell phone, but that complained about people exceeding the speed limit being dangerous. And their logic? Fiddling with the radio or cell phone isn't illegal, but speeding is. Therefore, speeding is evil.
More than rent is higher, look at something as simple as car insurance. It might cost $50 a month if you live in Arkansas, but it could be $350 a month if you live in Boston or Los Angeles. Let's compare utilities as well.
Car insurance in Boston is a bit of an oddity; The prices are state regulated, so you pay less for insurance in Boston than you would just about anywhere else. I moved from rural New York to metro Boston about a year ago and my insurance premium dropped by 60%. Had I moved from metro NY to metro Boston, it would have dropped by 80%.
Beyond that, the only utility that went up was electricity. Phone, Cable TV, and Internet were all the same or less. Food prices are lower at the supermarket due to there being competition instead of the "one supermarket for 30 miles" crap that I dealt with in NY. Gas is cheaper, taxes are lower, and my income is much higher.
As a result: 2 years ago I was working as a sysadmin for a start-up in Upstate NY. I rented an apartment and drove a 12 year old car, and I wasn't saving anything. Now I work as a sysadmin for a start-up outside of Boston. I own a house, an '05 model car, 2 boats, and I've got cash in the bank.
Satellite is still better because I can get it anywhere in the US, Canada and Northern Mexico (Assuming you are in the US), you never have to hunt for "good" stations while on the road, there are no or very few commercials (Howard Stern is 3 or 6 minutes per hour, if that) and the content is MUCH MUCH better.
The problem is that normal radio or HD radio is pretty much broadcasting crap. No matter how good it sounds, it is still crap.
There's usually one or two stations in an area that play decent content with very few commercials. In Boston I've found 4. Also, I like the fact that with normal radio I can hear local news, events, sports, traffic, whatever. All you're going to hear about on XM or Sirius is what's going on in New York or Washington, and because they're broadcasting the same stream to the rest of the country, they won't even talk about that.
Sure, maybe they've got some guy reading through regional weather and traffic reports, but that's not what I'm looking for either.
If you want just music out of your radio, you can get an iPod for really cheap these days.
and this doesn't put that money into the artists hands. ticketmaster is auctioning them off, not the artist. some artists simply do not want their fans to have to pay top dollar to see them. in fact, many of the more popular touring groups charge a flat rate for tickets, front row being the same price as the worst seats in the house (phish, used to be this way when they existed, selling out every concert they put on from 1995 through their breakup in 2004).
While you're right that Phish did sell all their tickets for the same amount, you're not right about them selling out every show. I definately was at least 3 or 4 shows at the tail end of the Summer '98 tour, as well as the Island tour, where tickets were still for sale at the door well after the "start" of the show. Lemonwheel, the Great Went, and IT also never had any real ticket cap. I've been to a bunch that were sold out well in advance, and the majority of their shows did sell out, but not every single one.
Tickets by mail was a great system, though. Certainly preferable to dealing with ticketmaster or camping out in line at the box office.
ACPI support is woeful in Linux. It barely works on my laptop.
If you want easy bluetooth then you dont' want Linux. I couldn't get it to see anything with Bluetooth, let-alone make it talk to things. Some say they have success, but I couldn't get anything happening.
If you want things to work, stick with Windows on your laptop. I'm a linux man through and through. All my servers are Linux. All my desktops are Linux.
I got my laptop and all hell broke loose. Things don't work, things crash, hibernate (something I use a lot) doesn't work. Linux is too disk-heavy and the disk is continually starting and stopping (for logs) even while idle. Battery life with Linux is attrocious. With windows I can get about 5 hours out of it. With Linux less than 2.
Sounds like you bought a shitty laptop.
On my thinkpad T42's and T43's:
1) Suspend and hibernate work perfectly, right out of the box. I just hit fn-f4 and the system goes to sleep. I hit any key and it wakes back up. The system properly drops all network connections when it goes to sleep, and brings them back up again when it comes back.
2) Wireless works perfectly, right out of the box. My T43's Broadcom wireless card shows up as eth1, and the T42's Atheros shows up as ath0.
3) Bluetooth works perfectly with bluez.
4) Battery life with the 9 cell battery is about 6 hours, compared to around 4 or 5 with windows.
Get a thinkpad T series, toss an Ubuntu disk in the drive, and you won't have any problems.
As to being a better platform for DVDs, what??!!? Dvd.. insert... play movie. On modern hardware Linux and Windows basically render the same quality output, both have basically the same functional specs. What exactly makes linux the better ( or worse ) platform for DVDs here?
I've come across Windows machines that would noticably drop frames, let the video fall out of sync with the audio, and pixelate due to some background process suddenly grabbing part of the CPU where similarly speced linux machines never had the same problems. Not to mention that Windows XP SP2 doesn't ship with DVD playback support, you have to buy it from a third party.
And, TBH, I'm not aware of any OSS that lets you throw together an intranet with shared documents, task lists, announcements and other dynamic elements as easily as Sharepoint.
Twiki and Mediawiki are easier, and more featureful. They don't have a whole ton of desktop integration, but it's phenominally easy to throw together an intranet with all the stuff you listed (plus a bunch more) using a wiki.
Look at the number on the website. Area code (402)? Doesn't look toll-free to me.
Who TF actually pays extra for long distance these days? No one. What, are you calling paypal from a coinop pay phone or something?
Until they provide a 1-800 number that works from Canada; then they're still scumbags.
They may be scumbags, but not catering to the whims of one guy in canada who can't be bothered to get reasonable phone service isn't why.