Re:Not right in soooo many ways
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Why TV Lost
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· Score: 1
It does not have to boot for a minute or two.
That's because it's "always-on" - how do you think it's able to respond to the remote to "turn on"? Standby is still "on", whether it's a TV or a PC.
Try unplugging it overnight, THEN turn it on, and try to tell me that your TV is "no wiat, instant-on".
Re:Welcome to the Brave New World
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Why TV Lost
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· Score: 1
Game consoles and computers (i.e. desktops and laptops) seem unlikely to merge, except by hacking the game console so it can be used as a computer.
The Wii, right out of the box, has wifi connectivity, email, and video. You can download Opera for $5 and do your web-based stuff. Seems the boundary between computer and game console is already blurred for what most people "need" a computer for - browsing the web and email. Buy Wii Speak (get it bundled with a game and points card on the cheap) and you can also do VoIP with anyone else who has a Wii - and this can be in conference calls (and you can send them pics at the same time, and point on the screen to what part of the picture you're talking about, for more interactivity). All for under $300. Oh, and you get a free game console thrown in with every Wii Home Computer!
Game console manufactures are willing take a loss on the hardware because of the control it gives them,
The Wii has never been sold at a loss. Only the crappy consoles (HellOOO XBox!) have to be sold at a loss (hey, it's the market that decided the XBox is crap - I'm just reporting the facts... go look at the market numbers)
Re:Not everyone has an HDTV
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Why TV Lost
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· Score: 1
So use the s-video connector on your laptop to connect to your standard-def tv set. If you have a vcr or dvd player kicking around, you have one of those. As for the audio, a $5 patch cord from your laptops' earphone jack to the audio in on the TV will do it. Carry them around with you when you visit friends and family and you can show them pretty much anything on your laptop, even on a 10-year-old tv.
Ads might be a neccessary evil, but once you've "unplugged" from mainstream advertising, if you go to someone's house and watch something live, like say the Superbowl, ads (even amazing ads like superbowl ads) seem obnoxiously obtrusive.
So, when DO you go for a pee break, or to the fridge, or to make a quick phone call, or let the dog in or out, or switch channels to see what else is on? Commercials are there for a reason, and it's up to YOU to come up with better reasons than just being held hostage to them, especially since you can get 3-4 minute breaks.
So why can't it be run off a bootable dc/dvd and scan+clean the system locally? Oh, that's right, it's crap. "your system is too infected for our anti-virus to run!"
Either it can remove viruses, or it can't. If it can, then there's no reason not to make it so that it can launch from bootable media. In fact, it SHOULD load from bootable media so that it's running in a known-good environment. "Oh, but it needs windows to run..." Yeah, riiiight.... it's just a file scanner/pattern matcher.
Get a real operating system. Or if that's not easy enough, get a mac.
Did you bring a watch..... really?! Are you sure they didn't just change the clock at the other end to make it look like you got there on time?
I know a restaurant that does that - their big clock is 10 minutes fast, so people think they've been there longer, and leave sooner, allowing for more seatings during busy times... until you catch on and then take your sweet time... but most people never catch on.
When there are hundreds or thousands of applicants for a position there is no incentive for the process to be fair to a particular applicant.
So don't put yourself in a position where you're competing with hundreds or thousands of people for the same job...
If the field is that crowded, GTFO - it's dying! Retrain for something different. It's not like we weren't warned way back in the '70x that in the future, the average person would have multiple careers, and that education would have to become a life-long process. The days of sliding along for 40 years on a curriculum designed 60 years ago are gone - most of the jobs today didn't even exist back then.
Yes, it's painful. Yes, there are disruptions. But it is what it is, and whining won't change it. Bailouts won't change it. Retraining and repositioning yourself are YOUR responsibility - you're an adult.
Making what you have to offer to an employer stand out is also your responsibility - not some mindless HR droid. If you trust HR to get you a job, you're naive. 80% of all jobs don't get an interview via the HR department or recruiters, so learn to bypass them. REFUSE to work with recruiters, REUSE to hand out your resume to them - all they'll do is shop it around to anyone and everyone, because they're in it for what's best for them, not you, and they don't care if they burn you at 50 places.
DO give an outline of your skillset and experience to friends and family, and your network of contacts, both online and in 3D, and let THEM help you get a foot in the door. Keep that 80% in mind - concentrate on it, and ignore the 20% playing field that all the losers are competing on. Life is too short for that.
Old companies tend to get encrusted with old ways of thinking - like "We only hire a certain type of person". That worked when EVERYONE did it, but those days are gone. Too many older companies had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age, fined, shamed, exposed, outed - for discrimination against women, hispanics, blacks, people from the "wrong schools", or gender-variant or GLBT.
In the meantime, they lost out on a lot of talented people. The competition benefited.
And getting people so pissed off that they unionize, and vote in legislators favourable to workers' writes, is part of the great marketplace of ideas... and the market ALWAYS works it out. Even if it means revolution in some countries (cf. "The 4 boxes":-).
Right, like the market worked out overpaid idiotic executives and badly designed operating systems.
It's in the process of working itself out. Like natural selection, it takes time. And it certainly is showing up the greedy and the dumb-asses.
Also, intellectual property isn't a barrier to efficiency - the GPL proves that. Code that *requires* a give-back (enforced by intellectual property rights in the GPL) will have the advantage over both public-domain AND proprietary software. The former has no protection, the latter doesn't need (since secrecy and stripping the binaries is enough).
Any job with responsibility also requires the exercise of decision-making by the employee - not just blindly obeying your bosses and similarly coercing those under you. You're supposed to all be in it together, because if the company fails, you are out of a job, just like everyone else. A democracy doesn't mean "do your own thing" - it means youhave the freedom of choice to unite with other people to work towards a common goal - sort of like the Declaration of Independence.
Companies like Toyota "get it." ANYONE can stop the line at any time if they think there's a problem. More importantly, the average employee submits 173 suggestions per year - compare that with North American companies that have official suggestion programs - and don't even average half a dozen.
So a government like Franco's Spain or Mao's China could be considered democratic as long as you had the right to leave your own country or the government could throw you out?
One problem with your China analogy is that people are NOT free to leave. Just as they weren't free to leave in Franco's Spain. Unlike a job, where you are free to leave / quit.
Even the "majority of waking hours" would still work out to more than 2,920 hours (about 60 hours/week, 50 weeks a year). That's serfdom. Bad for your health, etc., plus you won't be as productive as if you got more rest.
Potential employer "We saw some bad stuff about you on the Internet."
You: "Well, I saw some pretty crappy stuff about you too, but I certainly don't believe everything I read on the Internet. Or did you really have sex with a goat AND a chicken?"
Employers that are that clueless and can't adapt to the new realities won't last, so you're better off looking elsewhere anyway.
although we our government is democratic in America, our workplace is not
Really? You don't have a vote into whether you have to stay there? Usually, your boss has a vote on it, and you do. You want to leave, your vote overrides his. He wants to fire you, his vote overrides yours. In other words, you have more say in one way, they have more say in another, so it's "checks and balances" time.
Employers who use irrelevant criteria in their hiring decisions will pay the price long-term, in lower-quality hires, since they'll be disqualifying some high-quality candidates for stupid reasons., The market will work it out, as they go out of business, replaced by employers with saner hiring policies.
And frankly it's at work that we spend the majority of our hours,
Holy crapola, Batman, this person really IS a serf. They spend more than 4,380 hours a year at work! That's way more than the 40-hour week. Hope you're at least getting overtime.
Well, part of the problem is the "magic of compounding",,, so our dollar has actually lost about 94% of its' value over 50 years. For examples, just look at comic books or paperbacks, a loaf of bread, a dozen eggs, a gallon of gas, or the minimum wage (50 years ago, it was a buck an hour).
If everything stays "in sync", then everyone survives, and everyone has enough money to participate in the economy. The problem is that we have, as you pointed out, NOT kept wages in line with inflation for a decade (the Bush years), and instead replaced wage growth with debt growth as a way to maintain or "improve" the standard of living - but it was a lie for most people; higher debts are not an improvement.
Some debt can be a good thing, for example if its' used to improve your productivity, so that you can earn more, retire the debt, and come out ahead. Most consumer debt is just "I want it and I want it NOW!" type of debt, which just means that you're paying an "impatience tax", akin to the tax on stupidity known as the lottery.
Something similar happened at my (now ex-)work, they ran out of funding and told people to go home until they could pay us. Then a couple of weeks ago they sent out an email saying "hi folks, we really need to get working again to keep the company viable, no we don't have any money but you'll start work again Monday right?". To which the answer was "um, no" for me, but a surprising number of people said "oh, uh, ok then".
Is that even legal in any place with minimum wage and Workers Compensation laws?
You should have gone back and made everyone who shows up the same offer - and offered them equity interest. If they're willing to work for free without a piece of the action, how much more so with...
This leads to the paradox that the more everyone tries to pay off their debts, the higher the debt becomes in real terms (eg in relation to inflation / deflation adjusted incomes).
Nope. The longer someone avoids paying off their debits, the bigger the debt becomes (thanks to the wonder of compound interest). Then, when their interest rate goes up (as it must, since rather than reduce debt, they've increased it and become a higher risk), you get a second whammy.
If nobody had debt, all earnings could be spent on direct consumption, without some (a lot, in many cases) being bled off by interest payments.
We've just come to the end of a very unnatural cycle - one where people not just continually rolled over debt, but also threw in additional debt with every roll-over, to the point where they were using new debt as their chief way of making debt payments (that's what average spending of 103% of income really means - people are using their credit cards to make payments on their cars and mortgages).
Deflation? After a decade of overinflated housing, we NEED a decade of housing deflation, just to get back to historic norms.
Bail-outs? Why bother - this just rewards the greedy, penalizes the prudent, and shows that nobody in government knows the meaning of "keep your powder dry". All the bailout money is not just a waste - it also carries the hidden cost of missed opportunities to both rationalize the car and banking industries, and to invest elsewhere. Every dollar spent out bailing crooks is a buck taken away from schools and infrastructure and retraining - money that could BUILD the economy.
For those who eschewed debt, delaying gratification, deflating prices back down to historic norms brings the reward of buying at proper value, not bubble prices. Call the bailouts what they are, a global "tax on stupdiity and greed."
You're living in a dream world. The '90s called, and they don't want it back.
The BSDs don't have the problem Linux does. They *do* maintain a stable platform
With a broken ports system. FreeBSD 7.1 bit us on the rear last week with exactly that problem... fresh install on new hardware, and it wrongly insisted on adding other dependencies that then prevented apache from installing because of previously-installed APM??? That's b0rked.
And your 10 to 15 year timeframe is also nonsense - try upgrading from FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE to 7.0-RELEASE... much of the software is no longer available via ports - it's manual install time. So, 7 years out, and yuor "10-15 years stability" is already in the crapper. The cure for that is, of course, update early, update often. Not patch, but update.
Anyway, keep dreaming... the world has changed, and those who insist on standing in place "in the name of stability" will be left behind.
>p>"Real businesses?" - well, let's see. Real businesses look at the bottom line. That's why they do virtualization, consolidation, and upgrades (not just patches).
As platforms get older, the cost of support rises, as does the cost of adding new features or services; additionally, it often doesn't make sense to repurpose a machine when a newer one can do a better job cheaper, and has a larger base of capable programmers and support personnel. We don't use 12" green-screen or amber monitors any more for a reason - they're not cost-effective. If we're smart, we don't use a mix of older and newer versions of operating systems because it's easier and cheaper to maintain everything if it's all up to date (I'm not talking pseudo-operating systems like Windows, obviously. An OS that can't easily run headless, tail-less, and without a graphics card is not a real operating system - it's a pistache of ____ [fill in the blank] ).
It doesn't make sense, when using an OS such as *bsd or linux, to not keep current. If you don't, eventually you end up with a box that simply cannot be successfully maintained. The only option then is to wipe it, since otherwise it's worse than a paperweight (at least paperweights don't consume electricity).
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That's because it's "always-on" - how do you think it's able to respond to the remote to "turn on"? Standby is still "on", whether it's a TV or a PC.
Try unplugging it overnight, THEN turn it on, and try to tell me that your TV is "no wiat, instant-on".
The Wii, right out of the box, has wifi connectivity, email, and video. You can download Opera for $5 and do your web-based stuff. Seems the boundary between computer and game console is already blurred for what most people "need" a computer for - browsing the web and email. Buy Wii Speak (get it bundled with a game and points card on the cheap) and you can also do VoIP with anyone else who has a Wii - and this can be in conference calls (and you can send them pics at the same time, and point on the screen to what part of the picture you're talking about, for more interactivity). All for under $300. Oh, and you get a free game console thrown in with every Wii Home Computer!
The Wii has never been sold at a loss. Only the crappy consoles (HellOOO XBox!) have to be sold at a loss (hey, it's the market that decided the XBox is crap - I'm just reporting the facts ... go look at the market numbers)
So use the s-video connector on your laptop to connect to your standard-def tv set. If you have a vcr or dvd player kicking around, you have one of those. As for the audio, a $5 patch cord from your laptops' earphone jack to the audio in on the TV will do it. Carry them around with you when you visit friends and family and you can show them pretty much anything on your laptop, even on a 10-year-old tv.
So, when DO you go for a pee break, or to the fridge, or to make a quick phone call, or let the dog in or out, or switch channels to see what else is on? Commercials are there for a reason, and it's up to YOU to come up with better reasons than just being held hostage to them, especially since you can get 3-4 minute breaks.
What is this "content that is of quality worth watching" you speak of?
The only thing I watch on TV is a half-hour of comedy on Friday nights - IF I remember, and happen to be in the room at the time.
I get my news and local weather off the net - which I can do either from the PC or from the Wii ...
Other than that, the TV is on just to keep the dogs company (background noise so they don't bark when they hear a car driving by) during the day.
I haven't watched a single TV show this year - and I have a satellite dish.
So why can't it be run off a bootable dc/dvd and scan+clean the system locally? Oh, that's right, it's crap. "your system is too infected for our anti-virus to run!"
Either it can remove viruses, or it can't. If it can, then there's no reason not to make it so that it can launch from bootable media. In fact, it SHOULD load from bootable media so that it's running in a known-good environment. "Oh, but it needs windows to run ..." Yeah, riiiight .... it's just a file scanner/pattern matcher.
Get a real operating system. Or if that's not easy enough, get a mac.
I know a restaurant that does that - their big clock is 10 minutes fast, so people think they've been there longer, and leave sooner, allowing for more seatings during busy times ... until you catch on and then take your sweet time ... but most people never catch on.
So don't put yourself in a position where you're competing with hundreds or thousands of people for the same job ...
If the field is that crowded, GTFO - it's dying! Retrain for something different. It's not like we weren't warned way back in the '70x that in the future, the average person would have multiple careers, and that education would have to become a life-long process. The days of sliding along for 40 years on a curriculum designed 60 years ago are gone - most of the jobs today didn't even exist back then.
Yes, it's painful. Yes, there are disruptions. But it is what it is, and whining won't change it. Bailouts won't change it. Retraining and repositioning yourself are YOUR responsibility - you're an adult.
Making what you have to offer to an employer stand out is also your responsibility - not some mindless HR droid. If you trust HR to get you a job, you're naive. 80% of all jobs don't get an interview via the HR department or recruiters, so learn to bypass them. REFUSE to work with recruiters, REUSE to hand out your resume to them - all they'll do is shop it around to anyone and everyone, because they're in it for what's best for them, not you, and they don't care if they burn you at 50 places.
DO give an outline of your skillset and experience to friends and family, and your network of contacts, both online and in 3D, and let THEM help you get a foot in the door. Keep that 80% in mind - concentrate on it, and ignore the 20% playing field that all the losers are competing on. Life is too short for that.
If they took that long to hire you, imagine how long it'd have taken to fire you!
There, fixed it for you ;-) (the way the economy's going, gotta find the silver lining)
Old companies tend to get encrusted with old ways of thinking - like "We only hire a certain type of person". That worked when EVERYONE did it, but those days are gone. Too many older companies had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age, fined, shamed, exposed, outed - for discrimination against women, hispanics, blacks, people from the "wrong schools", or gender-variant or GLBT.
In the meantime, they lost out on a lot of talented people. The competition benefited.
And getting people so pissed off that they unionize, and vote in legislators favourable to workers' writes, is part of the great marketplace of ideas ... and the market ALWAYS works it out. Even if it means revolution in some countries (cf. "The 4 boxes" :-).
It's in the process of working itself out. Like natural selection, it takes time. And it certainly is showing up the greedy and the dumb-asses.
Also, intellectual property isn't a barrier to efficiency - the GPL proves that. Code that *requires* a give-back (enforced by intellectual property rights in the GPL) will have the advantage over both public-domain AND proprietary software. The former has no protection, the latter doesn't need (since secrecy and stripping the binaries is enough).
Any job with responsibility also requires the exercise of decision-making by the employee - not just blindly obeying your bosses and similarly coercing those under you. You're supposed to all be in it together, because if the company fails, you are out of a job, just like everyone else. A democracy doesn't mean "do your own thing" - it means youhave the freedom of choice to unite with other people to work towards a common goal - sort of like the Declaration of Independence.
Companies like Toyota "get it." ANYONE can stop the line at any time if they think there's a problem. More importantly, the average employee submits 173 suggestions per year - compare that with North American companies that have official suggestion programs - and don't even average half a dozen.
One problem with your China analogy is that people are NOT free to leave. Just as they weren't free to leave in Franco's Spain. Unlike a job, where you are free to leave / quit.
Even the "majority of waking hours" would still work out to more than 2,920 hours (about 60 hours/week, 50 weeks a year). That's serfdom. Bad for your health, etc., plus you won't be as productive as if you got more rest.
Have you tried the RNC? I hear they're in a "Rush" to find someone like that ...
Potential employer "We saw some bad stuff about you on the Internet."
You: "Well, I saw some pretty crappy stuff about you too, but I certainly don't believe everything I read on the Internet. Or did you really have sex with a goat AND a chicken?"
Employers that are that clueless and can't adapt to the new realities won't last, so you're better off looking elsewhere anyway.
Really? You don't have a vote into whether you have to stay there? Usually, your boss has a vote on it, and you do. You want to leave, your vote overrides his. He wants to fire you, his vote overrides yours. In other words, you have more say in one way, they have more say in another, so it's "checks and balances" time.
Employers who use irrelevant criteria in their hiring decisions will pay the price long-term, in lower-quality hires, since they'll be disqualifying some high-quality candidates for stupid reasons., The market will work it out, as they go out of business, replaced by employers with saner hiring policies.
Holy crapola, Batman, this person really IS a serf. They spend more than 4,380 hours a year at work! That's way more than the 40-hour week. Hope you're at least getting overtime.
Well, part of the problem is the "magic of compounding" ,,, so our dollar has actually lost about 94% of its' value over 50 years. For examples, just look at comic books or paperbacks, a loaf of bread, a dozen eggs, a gallon of gas, or the minimum wage (50 years ago, it was a buck an hour).
If everything stays "in sync", then everyone survives, and everyone has enough money to participate in the economy. The problem is that we have, as you pointed out, NOT kept wages in line with inflation for a decade (the Bush years), and instead replaced wage growth with debt growth as a way to maintain or "improve" the standard of living - but it was a lie for most people; higher debts are not an improvement.
Fair enough, and certainly true :-)
Some debt can be a good thing, for example if its' used to improve your productivity, so that you can earn more, retire the debt, and come out ahead. Most consumer debt is just "I want it and I want it NOW!" type of debt, which just means that you're paying an "impatience tax", akin to the tax on stupidity known as the lottery.
Is that even legal in any place with minimum wage and Workers Compensation laws?
You should have gone back and made everyone who shows up the same offer - and offered them equity interest. If they're willing to work for free without a piece of the action, how much more so with ...
Nope. The longer someone avoids paying off their debits, the bigger the debt becomes (thanks to the wonder of compound interest). Then, when their interest rate goes up (as it must, since rather than reduce debt, they've increased it and become a higher risk), you get a second whammy.
If nobody had debt, all earnings could be spent on direct consumption, without some (a lot, in many cases) being bled off by interest payments.
We've just come to the end of a very unnatural cycle - one where people not just continually rolled over debt, but also threw in additional debt with every roll-over, to the point where they were using new debt as their chief way of making debt payments (that's what average spending of 103% of income really means - people are using their credit cards to make payments on their cars and mortgages).
Deflation? After a decade of overinflated housing, we NEED a decade of housing deflation, just to get back to historic norms.
Bail-outs? Why bother - this just rewards the greedy, penalizes the prudent, and shows that nobody in government knows the meaning of "keep your powder dry". All the bailout money is not just a waste - it also carries the hidden cost of missed opportunities to both rationalize the car and banking industries, and to invest elsewhere. Every dollar spent out bailing crooks is a buck taken away from schools and infrastructure and retraining - money that could BUILD the economy.
For those who eschewed debt, delaying gratification, deflating prices back down to historic norms brings the reward of buying at proper value, not bubble prices. Call the bailouts what they are, a global "tax on stupdiity and greed."
You're living in a dream world. The '90s called, and they don't want it back.
With a broken ports system. FreeBSD 7.1 bit us on the rear last week with exactly that problem ... fresh install on new hardware, and it wrongly insisted on adding other dependencies that then prevented apache from installing because of previously-installed APM??? That's b0rked.
And your 10 to 15 year timeframe is also nonsense - try upgrading from FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE to 7.0-RELEASE ... much of the software is no longer available via ports - it's manual install time. So, 7 years out, and yuor "10-15 years stability" is already in the crapper. The cure for that is, of course, update early, update often. Not patch, but update.
Anyway, keep dreaming ... the world has changed, and those who insist on standing in place "in the name of stability" will be left behind.
As platforms get older, the cost of support rises, as does the cost of adding new features or services; additionally, it often doesn't make sense to repurpose a machine when a newer one can do a better job cheaper, and has a larger base of capable programmers and support personnel. We don't use 12" green-screen or amber monitors any more for a reason - they're not cost-effective. If we're smart, we don't use a mix of older and newer versions of operating systems because it's easier and cheaper to maintain everything if it's all up to date (I'm not talking pseudo-operating systems like Windows, obviously. An OS that can't easily run headless, tail-less, and without a graphics card is not a real operating system - it's a pistache of ____ [fill in the blank] ).
It doesn't make sense, when using an OS such as *bsd or linux, to not keep current. If you don't, eventually you end up with a box that simply cannot be successfully maintained. The only option then is to wipe it, since otherwise it's worse than a paperweight (at least paperweights don't consume electricity).