Count me as one of the people who has an Android 3.1 tablet and who occasionally uses it for Web browsing, but not much more. The Android browser renders a lot of pages in funky ways, the keyboard is pretty slow and so is the processing a lot of times, especially on JavaScript-heavy pages like Slashdot or Facebook. The keyboard layout is annoying, too, and I have to toggle in and out of various modes to type numbers, basic punctuation symbols, etc. So while it's basically OK for reading, it's annoying if I'm on a site where I actually want to participate.
Other than that, what's it good for? Streaming movies? You really want to watch movies on that? Plus, Netflix isn't supported (officially anyway). I can read The Economist on my phone, but oops! No app for that for Honeycomb tablets. Really, I encounter more things that I'm apparently not going to be doing on my tablet that actual uses for it. So it sits around, most of the time.
Other people might get more use out of theirs, but I've never seen anybody with one to ask. I see a fair amount of iPads.
I doubt they use cheaper parts. They're just models specific to their store so they don't have to price match because no other store carries those models. Even if the only difference between their model and someone else's is a single letter.
No, he's right. "Cheaper parts" makes it sound like they're buying them from the back room of some storefront in Hong Kong, and that's not the case. But Best Buy's models are designed to be cheaper.
Wal-Mart does the same thing. If you buy a Dickies jacket at a regular store, it might have a pocket on the inside front and inside left of the jacket. If you buy it at Wal-Mart, it might only have a pocket on the inside left, and the name of the product might be slightly different, but otherwise it looks the same and it will cost $10 less than anywhere else.
I bought a laptop from Best Buy and as near as I can tell the main difference is that most versions of that model come with a Core i5, while mine came with a Core i3. I made the judgment call that for a price that was roughly equivalent to what I paid for a Eee PC 901 with a single-core Atom processor a few years ago, Core i3 vs. Core i5 simply was not going to make any difference for what I actually use a laptop for.
To be accurate, availability of Windows drivers is not technically a problem, since no hardware ships without Windows drivers pre-installed on it. The problem is closed source drivers, where you have to go crawling to the manufacturer to get copies, and sometimes they're not allowed to publish them because of their OEM agreements. That leaves you relying on things like HP's "Recovery Partitions," which are chock full of bloatware.
Actually, Best Buy has a lot of models that you can't find anywhere else. You may be able to order a similar model online, but you won't know if the keyboard is the same.
In my experience, when you by a consumer laptop from Best Buy, you'll want to wipe the drive just to install Windows. Best to repartition it, actually -- whatever's on that "Recovery Partition," you don't want it coming back.
Just make sure, if it's an HP laptop, that you burn the "SWSetup" directory to a DVD before you start. It has all the hardware drivers in it, and I've seen cases where not all of those drivers are available from the Web site.
My phone came with some crapware too, and I can't remove it... but so what? The Kindle App? The Amazon.com shopping app? Some weird subscription GPS app that doesn't work as well as Google Apps? If I can't remove them, why wouldn't I just get over it and ignore them? It's not like they pop up when I don't want them to, like Norton Antivirus on a new PC. They just sit there. So what?
Trademarking the shape of a 12oz can of soda would be a helluva lot more generic. Of course they couldn't do that for practical reasons.
But you're wrong. I worked at a packaging design firm in the 1990s, and Coca-Cola most definitely was working on a trademarked shape for its 12oz cans. The idea was that it would have the same "woman's curves" shape as their (trademarked) bottles. I saw a few prototypes but I never saw one in production, I expect for practical reasons (thought maybe different reasons than you were thinking) -- it's hard to make a can that's a different shape than every other can on the market, but holds the same amount of liquid, in a volume that won't mess up anyone's commercial shelving designs.
Nah, to be fair, you probably don't need GHz processors at all. But when a 1GHz processor today costs the same or less as a 16MHz processor back then, and the OS is still serving a UI model where 90% of the time is idle, waiting for user input, what difference does it make what the clock rate is?
I'm seriously astounded that the php development community doesn't have acceptance testing around this sort of thing. In this day and age, why on earth is it the case that bugs like this get through?
Speaking as an occasional PHP developer, you must be new here.
Your model of using credit is broken, because it assumes that you should only use credit to draw upon funds you have available today, and that's not the point. You can only be "cash poor" when you don't have any cash. When you can spend cash you will have tomorrow, you are much more flexible and liquid. I know it's a hard concept for people who never use credit to understand, but credit is a valuable tool.
Let's say today is the 1st of the month, you want to buy something that costs $4,000, and you have $4,000 in the bank, and you earn $4,000 per month. You can afford the purchase if you pay either way -- but if you pay cash, you start the month with a balance of $4,000 and for the rest of the month you have a balance of $0 until you get paid again. If you buy it with credit, you can opt to pay $2,000 today, $2000 again on the first of next month, and in the meantime you have a cash reserve available for expenses and unforeseen circumstances of $2,000. Which one is "vulnerable and cash poor"?
I would argue those are really the only 2 exceptions to the rule.
I tend to disagree. I use credit quite a lot, mainly to control cash flow and to mitigate opportunity costs (e.g. I could use a new computer today to do work for which I will get paid in eight weeks).
However I may be sort of a fringe case. The credit card I use most right now has an APR of less than 5% (don't ask me how I managed that because I'm not entirely sure). Is it still inadvisable to use credit when the cost of the credit approaches nil?
Still, I think people who claim to never use credit must just have really poor money management skills. I know that's the accusation that's usually leveled against people who do buy things on credit, but I think it's the other way around.
For example, how sensible is it to save up for a vacation and plan to pay for the whole thing in cash? In which month should you start saving if you want to take the vacation this summer? If you miss your target (needed new brakes for the Dodge Omni), should you just resign yourself to skipping it and waiting until next summer? Is that the kind of long-term goal that gives extreme satisfaction? What if, once you get to your destination, you decide there are things you'd like to do or see that you hadn't budgeted for? Should you just skip it and say, "Well, if I had managed my money better, I would have been able to enjoy my vacation more, but this way I'll learn my lesson"?
The way I think about it is, for every dollar you put onto a credit card, you make yourself a little more financially vulnerable. Let's just call that "risk." There are a range of personality types in the world, insofar as how comfortable people are with what level of risk. But there are also all sorts of levels of risk. Zero risk or a hundred thousand dollars' worth of risk are not the only two choices -- and despite what people who don't use credit want to believe, zero is never really an option. Your skill at managing money is how well you navigate the various levels of risk.
You responded to a comment about "lackluster hardware" with two comments about software. Every review of a webOS phone I've read has said the phone feels kind of cheap and flimsy, the specs are sub-average when compared to competing phones, and this or that is a little buggy, but it shows a lot of promise and the next phone ought to make a real dent in the market once they get the kinks ironed out. Of course, we waited and waited, but there was no next phone.
Not to mention, the cost of Visual Studio is also a drop in the bucket compared to what it used to cost to license a C/C++ compiler from the big commercial Unix vendors, which didn't even come with an IDE. It's not as if Microsoft invented the idea that developers should have to pay something for commercial tools.
(PalmOS had 60,000+ apps and was ocnsidered far superior to PocketPC in speed and elegance, but it died because Palm couldn't keep up with flashy and the OS was creaky).
Palm had more problems than that. Palm had long been an ineptly-managed company where one hand (some pun intended) never knew nor cared what the other was doing. In the late 90s, the founders quit and formed Handspring to compete directly with Palm -- that should tell you how long things have been fishy. Eventually Palm bought Handspring back and merged it with its own hardware division, but by that time Palm had split off its software division into its own company, for reasons that doubtless must have looked good on paper but didn't seem to make much sense in the real world. The software division was busy creating a new version of Palm OS that was a little more "flashy," but meanwhile the hardware division, in its infinite wisdom, decided to start putting out Treos running Windows Mobile. The software division reasoned that it didn't have much of a future as an OS licensing company with one major customer when the customer wasn't even committed to its stuff, so it sold itself to a Japanese company. A couple years later, Palm decided it did want the new version of Palm OS after all, so it had to license it from the Japanese company for $40 million -- but never shipped a single device that used it. Instead it started over again from scratch to develop webOS. Then it got bought by HP, and the rest is history.
Palm started out with a really groundbreaking, quality product. Unfortunately its history as a company seems to have peaked right before it was bought by 3Com, and the rest has been sort of a sad joke. The later successes (Treo), can really be attributed to Handspring, which was formed because the founders weren't getting anything accomplished under 3Com.
And Bowie's casting wasn't just a gimmick, either. The first time I watched it, I thought, "Wow, were Nikola Tesla's eyes really two different colors?" It wasn't until I saw the credits roll that I realized it was Bowie. What's more, I watched it again years later and I wondered the same thing. It's a good performance that blends seamlessly into a good movie. (Bowie seems to have eyes of different colors because one eye was damaged in a fight.)
So how do you dispute what the person you were replying to was saying?
If outsourcing does not produce a better product or improve customer service, then companies that gamble everything on outsourcing are vulnerable. They can be challenged by better products and they can be challenged by superior customer service, and at the end of the day they can still be challenged on price.
Jobs outsourced domestically, eventually leads to a domestic market which cannot buy the goods you make, ala the United States
"A la the United States"? You specifically brought up the example of Apple. Is it now your contention that Apple is one of the top two largest companies in the world because nobody in the United States can afford Apple's products? And that this is because of outsourcing? You confuse me.
Why are you asking this? There is no reason you should need to know why they want to replace something.
So you tell me you want a new car. I say get a Scion. Case closed.
I'm almost certain he means that the hotel uses leased lines (which is dedicate circuit telephone wire, not circuit switched like your typical telephone) and some sort of modem to connect the APs.
Glad you're certain of that.
There is ethernet over phone line and ethernet over coax cable adapters that he can use to avoid laying new ethernet wires.
We know all that.
As a commentor, it is your job to mention these options, not to ask him back and blame him for not providing you with the detail.
Really? What's that job pay? And who's blaming anybody? You sound very defensive. Have you had your coffee?
building wiring is often a hack job just like how much of the programs are spaghetti code. Electricians who are good at wiring is hard to find. All you can do is to work with the mess and make it better.
And what does "working with the mess" entail? Might that not limit your choices?
Good that you brought it up, but why can't you answer your own questions?
Because I'm not the one who can provide the answers. How much money do I have in my pocket right now, and why can't you answer that question?
I'm sure they will take care of it.
Yes I'm sure.
That's his business, not yours.
You know what, why don't you just roll over and go back to sleep? You could obviously use a couple more hours, because you're very cranky and you aren't thinking straight -- otherwise you might see that management capabilities might be pretty important and they also might make a big difference in costs.
The point of my post is that the original submitter seemed to have a pretty blasé attitude about the whole thing, when it doesn't necessarily sound like a trivial job.
People buying them does not mean they're using them. I have one (8" Android 2.2, with an excellent 1280x768 capacitive screen), and barely use it. My dilemma is whether to double down and get a better one, or just give up on it. My tablet is not so much competing vs my netbook, as vs my HTC HD2.
Unfortunately, I totally agree. I have a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. It's one of the better Android tablets out there, but I really haven't found a way to fit it into my daily workflow. It's too big to have it on my person at all times, and it's WiFi only, so it doesn't really work in a public transit situation. Plus it runs the same OS as my phone, so I end up installing the things I need on my phone instead of the tablet. In fact, when The Economist launched its Android app a few weeks ago, it didn't support Honeycomb, so it only worked on my phone and not the tablet. I know that's not Google's fault, but nobody out there seems to be twisting my arm to use my tablet more. It's not useful for meaningful work and I can't find enough diversions to use it instead of something else.
As usual for "Ask Slashdot," you have left out key details that would allow people to give you meaningful responses. For example:
What is the hotel using now and why does it want to replace it?
What is a "proprietary encasement," and who put the APs there? Are you expected to put new APs in the same encasements? What will happen to the old APs?
You say the hotel doesn't want to lay any new cable. That might just be too bad, but it also seems to imply that there is already some cable somewhere. Why not use the existing cable? You say the APs "seem to be connected by telephone wire," but you don't sound sure. Perhaps it's just long strings with tin cans at each end? Is there any way to find out?
If the existing network is as strange and nonstandard as you make it sound, why is that? Was there something unique to the property that made that the best solution, and is it smart for you to ignore that?
Before you begin, have you verified that the hotel's contract with Comcast actually allows it to offer Internet access to the public?
You say the hotel wants to provide the network for free, so there's no need for any billing management system. Are you then comfortable with the idea that there will be no logging of the network at all, and no record of who might have used it and when? Is BitTorrent OK? How about botnets?
If the patrons aren't expected to pay for the network, can they expect it to exist at all? That is, do you have a plan to test and verify that every room will have equal access to the network, and that a guest who came last summer won't return this summer and find out that the hotel doesn't seem to have WiFi anymore (when in fact it's just their new room)?
Are you aware of FCC regulations regarding signal strength of your antennas, for those portions of the property that might be natural dark spots?
Does your task include just replacing the network or does it also include managing the network, making repairs, etc.? How much time do you plan to devote to that?
There may be more to this job than you have considered.
Oh, wow, I enjoyed Web Techniques back in the day. Thanks for that.
You're welcome, though I can't take a lot of credit.
I was hired at Web Techniques as Senior Technology Editor. It was the first full-time editorial position I'd ever held. After they hired me I asked them why me out of all the other candidates. The editor-in-chief told me that out of all of the candidates he interviewed, I was the only one who gave an acceptable answer to the question "what is the relationship between Java and JavaScript?" He said every other candidate gave an entirely different answer, and he had never heard so much made-up bullshit in his life.
Unfortunately, on the first week of my job, when I hadn't even really finished arranging things on my desk, I got called into the publisher's office for a meeting. He explained that they were going to be relaunching the magazine with more of an enterprise focus, and he was real sorry about that, but he couldn't tell me before I was hired because it was all confidential. I don't remember how many issues of Web Techniques I contributed to before the relaunch actually happened; it might have been a year's worth, but maybe less. I gave my 100 percent for the relaunched magazine, too (it was called New Architect), but I think it was a better magazine in its original format. Unfortunately, it was really difficult to sell ads against a magazine full of code listings at that time, and I don't think it's gotten any easier. So I do feel for the Linux Journal in that respect.
Ever since I discovered HTML, it’s been my preferred format for writing. Every word of mine that’s gone into Linux Journal, since I started in 1996, has been written and delivered in HTML.
Hahaha, totally typical. When I edited Randall Schwartz's column for Web Techniques magazine, he delivered his manuscripts in Perldoc format. (Note: This was neither cute nor geeky, it was just a pain in the ass.)
What’s different for me this time is that I’m not paying attention to my monthly 900-word limit (or less if images are involved). While a word limit does impose the discipline of brevity, the fact remains that brevity is not the only virtue of good writing. Yes, it’s a good one to have when your column appears on the last page of a print magazine. But when that magazine is no longer confined by the dimensions of printed pages, you’re free to go longer—or shorter, as the case may be.
It's my belief that this is precisely what is wrong with a lot of online-only writing. Nobody is bothering to edit it anymore. Writers are free to ramble on for as long as they choose, and most readers end up tuning out after the first page (or not reading TFA at all). When an editor pretends that an online brain-dump is actually better than a well-edited article, watch out: the publication is about to take a nosedive.
Linux Journal always has been a publi- cation for the Linux Community. Linux Journal will now be a publication by the Linux Community as well.
Oh, so no editing, and no actual writing either? Where's my checkbook?
That explains why IBM is out of business, unless you think that servers and POS are carrying all the load.
Right... but for the last few years HP has claimed it's competing with IBM Global Services, but I don't see much real evidence of that. And I don't see HP making a lot of software either... IBM has the DB2 and WebSphere product lines (sales of which are driven by their Global Services contracts). I don't know if IBM's hardware outsells HP's, but they have a lot of products available there, too, and they cost money.
But then again, although I have two consumer-market HP PCs here in my office, I'd categorize the tower as "average to meh" and the laptop is pretty much junk. I'd love to see HP clear some space in the retail channel if it means someone who actually knows how to make a decent PC takes their place.
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"Devastatingly simplistic" does not rule out "confusing and clunky." I, too, think the iPad UI is much better designed than the Android UI.
Count me as one of the people who has an Android 3.1 tablet and who occasionally uses it for Web browsing, but not much more. The Android browser renders a lot of pages in funky ways, the keyboard is pretty slow and so is the processing a lot of times, especially on JavaScript-heavy pages like Slashdot or Facebook. The keyboard layout is annoying, too, and I have to toggle in and out of various modes to type numbers, basic punctuation symbols, etc. So while it's basically OK for reading, it's annoying if I'm on a site where I actually want to participate.
Other than that, what's it good for? Streaming movies? You really want to watch movies on that? Plus, Netflix isn't supported (officially anyway). I can read The Economist on my phone, but oops! No app for that for Honeycomb tablets. Really, I encounter more things that I'm apparently not going to be doing on my tablet that actual uses for it. So it sits around, most of the time.
Other people might get more use out of theirs, but I've never seen anybody with one to ask. I see a fair amount of iPads.
I doubt they use cheaper parts. They're just models specific to their store so they don't have to price match because no other store carries those models. Even if the only difference between their model and someone else's is a single letter.
No, he's right. "Cheaper parts" makes it sound like they're buying them from the back room of some storefront in Hong Kong, and that's not the case. But Best Buy's models are designed to be cheaper.
Wal-Mart does the same thing. If you buy a Dickies jacket at a regular store, it might have a pocket on the inside front and inside left of the jacket. If you buy it at Wal-Mart, it might only have a pocket on the inside left, and the name of the product might be slightly different, but otherwise it looks the same and it will cost $10 less than anywhere else.
I bought a laptop from Best Buy and as near as I can tell the main difference is that most versions of that model come with a Core i5, while mine came with a Core i3. I made the judgment call that for a price that was roughly equivalent to what I paid for a Eee PC 901 with a single-core Atom processor a few years ago, Core i3 vs. Core i5 simply was not going to make any difference for what I actually use a laptop for.
To be accurate, availability of Windows drivers is not technically a problem, since no hardware ships without Windows drivers pre-installed on it. The problem is closed source drivers, where you have to go crawling to the manufacturer to get copies, and sometimes they're not allowed to publish them because of their OEM agreements. That leaves you relying on things like HP's "Recovery Partitions," which are chock full of bloatware.
Actually, Best Buy has a lot of models that you can't find anywhere else. You may be able to order a similar model online, but you won't know if the keyboard is the same.
In my experience, when you by a consumer laptop from Best Buy, you'll want to wipe the drive just to install Windows. Best to repartition it, actually -- whatever's on that "Recovery Partition," you don't want it coming back.
Just make sure, if it's an HP laptop, that you burn the "SWSetup" directory to a DVD before you start. It has all the hardware drivers in it, and I've seen cases where not all of those drivers are available from the Web site.
My phone came with some crapware too, and I can't remove it... but so what? The Kindle App? The Amazon.com shopping app? Some weird subscription GPS app that doesn't work as well as Google Apps? If I can't remove them, why wouldn't I just get over it and ignore them? It's not like they pop up when I don't want them to, like Norton Antivirus on a new PC. They just sit there. So what?
Trademarking the shape of a 12oz can of soda would be a helluva lot more generic. Of course they couldn't do that for practical reasons.
But you're wrong. I worked at a packaging design firm in the 1990s, and Coca-Cola most definitely was working on a trademarked shape for its 12oz cans. The idea was that it would have the same "woman's curves" shape as their (trademarked) bottles. I saw a few prototypes but I never saw one in production, I expect for practical reasons (thought maybe different reasons than you were thinking) -- it's hard to make a can that's a different shape than every other can on the market, but holds the same amount of liquid, in a volume that won't mess up anyone's commercial shelving designs.
Nah, to be fair, you probably don't need GHz processors at all. But when a 1GHz processor today costs the same or less as a 16MHz processor back then, and the OS is still serving a UI model where 90% of the time is idle, waiting for user input, what difference does it make what the clock rate is?
I'm seriously astounded that the php development community doesn't have acceptance testing around this sort of thing. In this day and age, why on earth is it the case that bugs like this get through?
Speaking as an occasional PHP developer, you must be new here.
Your model of using credit is broken, because it assumes that you should only use credit to draw upon funds you have available today, and that's not the point. You can only be "cash poor" when you don't have any cash. When you can spend cash you will have tomorrow, you are much more flexible and liquid. I know it's a hard concept for people who never use credit to understand, but credit is a valuable tool.
Let's say today is the 1st of the month, you want to buy something that costs $4,000, and you have $4,000 in the bank, and you earn $4,000 per month. You can afford the purchase if you pay either way -- but if you pay cash, you start the month with a balance of $4,000 and for the rest of the month you have a balance of $0 until you get paid again. If you buy it with credit, you can opt to pay $2,000 today, $2000 again on the first of next month, and in the meantime you have a cash reserve available for expenses and unforeseen circumstances of $2,000. Which one is "vulnerable and cash poor"?
I would argue those are really the only 2 exceptions to the rule.
I tend to disagree. I use credit quite a lot, mainly to control cash flow and to mitigate opportunity costs (e.g. I could use a new computer today to do work for which I will get paid in eight weeks).
However I may be sort of a fringe case. The credit card I use most right now has an APR of less than 5% (don't ask me how I managed that because I'm not entirely sure). Is it still inadvisable to use credit when the cost of the credit approaches nil?
Still, I think people who claim to never use credit must just have really poor money management skills. I know that's the accusation that's usually leveled against people who do buy things on credit, but I think it's the other way around.
For example, how sensible is it to save up for a vacation and plan to pay for the whole thing in cash? In which month should you start saving if you want to take the vacation this summer? If you miss your target (needed new brakes for the Dodge Omni), should you just resign yourself to skipping it and waiting until next summer? Is that the kind of long-term goal that gives extreme satisfaction? What if, once you get to your destination, you decide there are things you'd like to do or see that you hadn't budgeted for? Should you just skip it and say, "Well, if I had managed my money better, I would have been able to enjoy my vacation more, but this way I'll learn my lesson"?
The way I think about it is, for every dollar you put onto a credit card, you make yourself a little more financially vulnerable. Let's just call that "risk." There are a range of personality types in the world, insofar as how comfortable people are with what level of risk. But there are also all sorts of levels of risk. Zero risk or a hundred thousand dollars' worth of risk are not the only two choices -- and despite what people who don't use credit want to believe, zero is never really an option. Your skill at managing money is how well you navigate the various levels of risk.
You responded to a comment about "lackluster hardware" with two comments about software. Every review of a webOS phone I've read has said the phone feels kind of cheap and flimsy, the specs are sub-average when compared to competing phones, and this or that is a little buggy, but it shows a lot of promise and the next phone ought to make a real dent in the market once they get the kinks ironed out. Of course, we waited and waited, but there was no next phone.
Not to mention, the cost of Visual Studio is also a drop in the bucket compared to what it used to cost to license a C/C++ compiler from the big commercial Unix vendors, which didn't even come with an IDE. It's not as if Microsoft invented the idea that developers should have to pay something for commercial tools.
(PalmOS had 60,000+ apps and was ocnsidered far superior to PocketPC in speed and elegance, but it died because Palm couldn't keep up with flashy and the OS was creaky).
Palm had more problems than that. Palm had long been an ineptly-managed company where one hand (some pun intended) never knew nor cared what the other was doing. In the late 90s, the founders quit and formed Handspring to compete directly with Palm -- that should tell you how long things have been fishy. Eventually Palm bought Handspring back and merged it with its own hardware division, but by that time Palm had split off its software division into its own company, for reasons that doubtless must have looked good on paper but didn't seem to make much sense in the real world. The software division was busy creating a new version of Palm OS that was a little more "flashy," but meanwhile the hardware division, in its infinite wisdom, decided to start putting out Treos running Windows Mobile. The software division reasoned that it didn't have much of a future as an OS licensing company with one major customer when the customer wasn't even committed to its stuff, so it sold itself to a Japanese company. A couple years later, Palm decided it did want the new version of Palm OS after all, so it had to license it from the Japanese company for $40 million -- but never shipped a single device that used it. Instead it started over again from scratch to develop webOS. Then it got bought by HP, and the rest is history.
Palm started out with a really groundbreaking, quality product. Unfortunately its history as a company seems to have peaked right before it was bought by 3Com, and the rest has been sort of a sad joke. The later successes (Treo), can really be attributed to Handspring, which was formed because the founders weren't getting anything accomplished under 3Com.
If you pay with credit, you can't really afford it.
So nobody should buy cars or live in houses?
And Bowie's casting wasn't just a gimmick, either. The first time I watched it, I thought, "Wow, were Nikola Tesla's eyes really two different colors?" It wasn't until I saw the credits roll that I realized it was Bowie. What's more, I watched it again years later and I wondered the same thing. It's a good performance that blends seamlessly into a good movie. (Bowie seems to have eyes of different colors because one eye was damaged in a fight.)
So how do you dispute what the person you were replying to was saying?
If outsourcing does not produce a better product or improve customer service, then companies that gamble everything on outsourcing are vulnerable. They can be challenged by better products and they can be challenged by superior customer service, and at the end of the day they can still be challenged on price.
Jobs outsourced domestically, eventually leads to a domestic market which cannot buy the goods you make, ala the United States
"A la the United States"? You specifically brought up the example of Apple. Is it now your contention that Apple is one of the top two largest companies in the world because nobody in the United States can afford Apple's products? And that this is because of outsourcing? You confuse me.
Why are you asking this? There is no reason you should need to know why they want to replace something.
So you tell me you want a new car. I say get a Scion. Case closed.
I'm almost certain he means that the hotel uses leased lines (which is dedicate circuit telephone wire, not circuit switched like your typical telephone) and some sort of modem to connect the APs.
Glad you're certain of that.
There is ethernet over phone line and ethernet over coax cable adapters that he can use to avoid laying new ethernet wires.
We know all that.
As a commentor, it is your job to mention these options, not to ask him back and blame him for not providing you with the detail.
Really? What's that job pay? And who's blaming anybody? You sound very defensive. Have you had your coffee?
building wiring is often a hack job just like how much of the programs are spaghetti code. Electricians who are good at wiring is hard to find. All you can do is to work with the mess and make it better.
And what does "working with the mess" entail? Might that not limit your choices?
Good that you brought it up, but why can't you answer your own questions?
Because I'm not the one who can provide the answers. How much money do I have in my pocket right now, and why can't you answer that question?
I'm sure they will take care of it.
Yes I'm sure.
That's his business, not yours.
You know what, why don't you just roll over and go back to sleep? You could obviously use a couple more hours, because you're very cranky and you aren't thinking straight -- otherwise you might see that management capabilities might be pretty important and they also might make a big difference in costs.
The point of my post is that the original submitter seemed to have a pretty blasé attitude about the whole thing, when it doesn't necessarily sound like a trivial job.
People buying them does not mean they're using them. I have one (8" Android 2.2, with an excellent 1280x768 capacitive screen), and barely use it. My dilemma is whether to double down and get a better one, or just give up on it. My tablet is not so much competing vs my netbook, as vs my HTC HD2.
Unfortunately, I totally agree. I have a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. It's one of the better Android tablets out there, but I really haven't found a way to fit it into my daily workflow. It's too big to have it on my person at all times, and it's WiFi only, so it doesn't really work in a public transit situation. Plus it runs the same OS as my phone, so I end up installing the things I need on my phone instead of the tablet. In fact, when The Economist launched its Android app a few weeks ago, it didn't support Honeycomb, so it only worked on my phone and not the tablet. I know that's not Google's fault, but nobody out there seems to be twisting my arm to use my tablet more. It's not useful for meaningful work and I can't find enough diversions to use it instead of something else.
As usual for "Ask Slashdot," you have left out key details that would allow people to give you meaningful responses. For example:
There may be more to this job than you have considered.
Oh, wow, I enjoyed Web Techniques back in the day. Thanks for that.
You're welcome, though I can't take a lot of credit.
I was hired at Web Techniques as Senior Technology Editor. It was the first full-time editorial position I'd ever held. After they hired me I asked them why me out of all the other candidates. The editor-in-chief told me that out of all of the candidates he interviewed, I was the only one who gave an acceptable answer to the question "what is the relationship between Java and JavaScript?" He said every other candidate gave an entirely different answer, and he had never heard so much made-up bullshit in his life.
Unfortunately, on the first week of my job, when I hadn't even really finished arranging things on my desk, I got called into the publisher's office for a meeting. He explained that they were going to be relaunching the magazine with more of an enterprise focus, and he was real sorry about that, but he couldn't tell me before I was hired because it was all confidential. I don't remember how many issues of Web Techniques I contributed to before the relaunch actually happened; it might have been a year's worth, but maybe less. I gave my 100 percent for the relaunched magazine, too (it was called New Architect), but I think it was a better magazine in its original format. Unfortunately, it was really difficult to sell ads against a magazine full of code listings at that time, and I don't think it's gotten any easier. So I do feel for the Linux Journal in that respect.
Ever since I discovered HTML, it’s been my preferred format for writing. Every word of mine that’s gone into Linux Journal, since I started in 1996, has been written and delivered in HTML.
Hahaha, totally typical. When I edited Randall Schwartz's column for Web Techniques magazine, he delivered his manuscripts in Perldoc format. (Note: This was neither cute nor geeky, it was just a pain in the ass.)
What’s different for me this time is that I’m not paying attention to my monthly 900-word limit (or less if images are involved). While a word limit does impose the discipline of brevity, the fact remains that brevity is not the only virtue of good writing. Yes, it’s a good one to have when your column appears on the last page of a print magazine. But when that magazine is no longer confined by the dimensions of printed pages, you’re free to go longer—or shorter, as the case may be.
It's my belief that this is precisely what is wrong with a lot of online-only writing. Nobody is bothering to edit it anymore. Writers are free to ramble on for as long as they choose, and most readers end up tuning out after the first page (or not reading TFA at all). When an editor pretends that an online brain-dump is actually better than a well-edited article, watch out: the publication is about to take a nosedive.
Linux Journal always has been a publi- cation for the Linux Community. Linux Journal will now be a publication by the Linux Community as well.
Oh, so no editing, and no actual writing either? Where's my checkbook?
So, that's right now then. Now you are trying to dig your way out of an ignorant post by trying to retcon in some nonsense about the price.
My God, can you imagine what business meetings will sound like a few years from now? I just choked back a gag reflex.
That explains why IBM is out of business, unless you think that servers and POS are carrying all the load.
Right... but for the last few years HP has claimed it's competing with IBM Global Services, but I don't see much real evidence of that. And I don't see HP making a lot of software either... IBM has the DB2 and WebSphere product lines (sales of which are driven by their Global Services contracts). I don't know if IBM's hardware outsells HP's, but they have a lot of products available there, too, and they cost money.
But then again, although I have two consumer-market HP PCs here in my office, I'd categorize the tower as "average to meh" and the laptop is pretty much junk. I'd love to see HP clear some space in the retail channel if it means someone who actually knows how to make a decent PC takes their place.