I have DSL and it drives me nuts. Everything is very slow anymore, it's gotten worse. My kid is watching a youtube video, and the rest of us in the house seem to crawl. FIOS will never be available where I live, so my only real option is to drop Verizon and switch to Comcast, whom I have no love for either, but I have no other choices. The 6Mbps download speed or so that I get though DSL is not enough for HD streaming for my BluRay or TV, it's almost like I'm wasting a good chunk of Amazon Prime since SD looks pretty crappy on a 50" flat screen (Samsung UHD). I'd have switched last year, but I have about 40 accounts that all use my various verizon email addresses, and I have to switch them over to GMail in the interim. I could probably have a month's worth of overlap and just use Verizon's webmail, but I find it problematic, since I use 6 different sub-email accounts with them. You used to be able to just switch. Now it wants to use a default.
I think the truth is, it's more a case of NASA giving Hollywood a bump, as well as Matt Damon, not the other way around.
The movie starts off as sort of a disaster flick, doesn't it? How does that make a Mars mission look attractive? Then it has Damon almost magically managing to do the impossible, alone, to survive, because.. Hollywood.
I would agree, but I never said we were playing together.. unfortunately, I'm playing solo 97% of the time. He didn't really get into Skyrim that much, he stopped just before killing the first dragon; he's more into Minecraft and Garry's Mod, which is great, but not my cup of tea. We've played some Quake and a little Portal MP though, and I agree, that's not a waste of time at all. I bought him L4D as well, but he lost interest in about 45 minutes. Most of my gaming is single player campaigns.
Weelll, you say that now. I stopped playing games for years, and thought I was done with them. Then my son grew older, and discovered Skyrim. So then, I discovered Skyrim. The next thing I know I'm replacing the graphics card and the power supply to support it in my computer. Since then I've bought Doom3 and Rage, older era stuff my card can support (I bought the latest GPU my mobo could support). I'm trying to quit again, it's too much unproductive (but fun!) time spent.
I know that this is a schoolyard argument "but the other kid did it too!!" but fingerpointing over who is worse never does anyone any good especially when you go down this road because it becomes circular to the point of absurdity.
Overall I'd agree, but it goes a bit beyond a schoolyard argument with, "the other kid did it too" when the accuser is particularly singling out one kid among several guilty kids, and in order to support their bias, fails to take all factors into consideration or deliberately elects to ignore certain ones. That's an injustice.
I'm not French, but that's not fair. They did a lot of underground work to undermine the nazis. If you're talking about the policy of appeasement, then Neville Chamberlain -and thus the UK- is more culpable than France.
There is both a valid point to the article and a flaw.
"Easily fixable" is in the eye of the beholder, but given the nature that this is a tech blog, I'm not surprised most people assume this is common; lots of people think they can handle something until they get elbows deep in it, and then find themselves out of their depth. Then they're likely to try to button things back up as best they can, and return the item as defective: if it was defective in the first place, they probably just made it several times worse; but if they were trying to hack or mod it, there's no excuse for returning it after they broke it. Companies are not going to settle for eating these costs, and their legal teams are there to prevent this sort of thing. I used to be a bench tech, repairing consumer electronics (chiefly VCRs, but stereos, preamps, cassette decks, etc.. as well) and, outside of head cleanings (which are also tricky on helical scanning head), idler/belt replacements, or minor alignments, the repairs I made were typically outside the capability of the average buyer (and how many people have an oscilloscope and function generator in their house?) I think it would be opening a can of worms to court their tinkering by say, posting schematics publicly on a website. But it also depends on the device and it's complexity.
On the other hand, some simple things, i.e. lack of access to batteries, is ridiculous. Also, if schematics were made available upon request (an email for example), that would probably nip a lot of the impulsive weekend hackers in the bud while still allowing serious techs access to them.
I think we'd save a lot more trees if we started putting restrictions on the ridiculous amount of junk snail mail we get everyday. It's both amazing, and sad.
IANAP, but the "copy and paste" mentality worries me. I've done basic HTML as a hobby but refused to use javascript unless I understood how it worked. But that's just web stuff. When it comes to real apps, it would be even more critical, especially if more and more programmers start cutting corners. If you don't really know how your program is doing what it's doing, how are you supposed to troubleshoot it?
I don't know about people firing guns into the air. certainly around my area they don't, but drunk driving, definitely. And the cops are totally all over that, with checkpoints and patrols.
Such irony. Have you ever actually toured Independence Hall in Philadelphia? Want the real story behind the war? Do the tour, and lay off the propaganda. And no one said anything about the TEA party. Agenda much?
You also forget, Washington, et al, was a politician *after* he was a general. A number of politicians today have served in the military in their past too, though not as many once did. That's not unique to the US, however, that's just the times.
Actually, yes, they are. Cops routinely patrol heavily on the 4th of July, looking for people setting off fireworks in their backyard. They're crawling all over my neighbor every year. And at that, that's a lot more ground to cover than a single event that also touts the use of a lot more than just beer or the odd shot of JD. People on acid shooting off fireworks without a license, and burning stuff... like nothing could go wrong? The people who run the event are probably not so much an issue, but the random attendees are a different matter.
Ah well... Let's hope these people doing this work are not subjected to too many death threats or terrorist attacks because of their findings. Some folks work really hard to keep other people in line and some folks are willing to die for their religious beliefs. Hopefully that does not happen here.
You know they will. This will be considered blasphemy in the highest degree, even by the non-fundamentalists. They're marked men.
Good point, but there may be no way around that. One thing people definitely need to be careful of, is who you donate to. Being rich doesn't translate to no work, or it shouldn't; in fact, I'd be studying my ass off learning finance so I would have a clue what's going on. I'd probably get a bit paranoid too. How would I know if my accountant and lawyer were skimming off the top? I wouldn't know if I was ignorant of the whole system.
I'd research and investigate every charity I looked to donate to, and anyone who sought me out with their hand out (besides the normal automated stuff everyone gets) would automatically get on my "no" list. I'd probably start my own foundation, really.
On a more personal level, if I hit it big, my dream is to build a sweet recording studio and finally start laying down original tracks. That would be the dream. I'm working on it now, but it's slow going. I'd be happy with that. IT pays the bills, but the stress is also taking years off my life.
We've got a neighbor who does this to us now, but we haven't identified the SOB yet. Twice now recently, on a Sunday or Monday morning, we walk out to a huge steaming pile on our lawn. When I found out who the slob is, I'd delivering it to his house via airmail.. all over the windows, walls, door, porch, etc..
FWIW, (anecdotal bit here) Back in the mid eighties, I had an (ex)girlfriend (we're from the US) who got a to take a class trip to Greece, Rome and Paris, and when she got back she said Rome and Paris were filthy, that the streets were gross, she saw things like people peeing openly on busy street corners (Paris), boys heckling the group in Rome, trash everywhere, one toilet for an entire hotel floor, etc.. She did not come back very impressed with Europe. This was, however, decades ago; but it seems perhaps some should mind their glass houses.
And the funny thing is, the buy-only-on-contract only thing was supposed to somehow level the playing field, and and get the lowest bidder, but all it really seems to do is establish virtual monopolies, as not that many vendors have contracts; further, with the purchase approval system we have in place, there is no petty cash to speak of. Merely ordering more Cat6 cable is a major undertaking. Buying anything is an ordeal. Forgot to order a SAS adapter for that new server for backups? That'll set deployment back 3 months. It's horrible.
Anytime somebody is biased towards their pet it-looks-good-on-paper-and-I-want-it-to-be-true theory, and feels the need to deny actual real word experience, they trot this "anecdotal" rebuttal. In a few cases, it's a valid rebuttal, but it's incredibly overused here.
Note to mods: modding something "troll" just because you disagree with the politics is in itself trolling. My points are valid, but apparently I pointed out something about your idols that you didn't like being pointed out. Perhaps you should look up the definition of "troll", and try to grow up a little bit.
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I have DSL and it drives me nuts. Everything is very slow anymore, it's gotten worse. My kid is watching a youtube video, and the rest of us in the house seem to crawl. FIOS will never be available where I live, so my only real option is to drop Verizon and switch to Comcast, whom I have no love for either, but I have no other choices. The 6Mbps download speed or so that I get though DSL is not enough for HD streaming for my BluRay or TV, it's almost like I'm wasting a good chunk of Amazon Prime since SD looks pretty crappy on a 50" flat screen (Samsung UHD). I'd have switched last year, but I have about 40 accounts that all use my various verizon email addresses, and I have to switch them over to GMail in the interim. I could probably have a month's worth of overlap and just use Verizon's webmail, but I find it problematic, since I use 6 different sub-email accounts with them. You used to be able to just switch. Now it wants to use a default.
Nobody bought anything.
I think the truth is, it's more a case of NASA giving Hollywood a bump, as well as Matt Damon, not the other way around.
The movie starts off as sort of a disaster flick, doesn't it? How does that make a Mars mission look attractive? Then it has Damon almost magically managing to do the impossible, alone, to survive, because.. Hollywood.
I would agree, but I never said we were playing together.. unfortunately, I'm playing solo 97% of the time. He didn't really get into Skyrim that much, he stopped just before killing the first dragon; he's more into Minecraft and Garry's Mod, which is great, but not my cup of tea. We've played some Quake and a little Portal MP though, and I agree, that's not a waste of time at all. I bought him L4D as well, but he lost interest in about 45 minutes. Most of my gaming is single player campaigns.
That'd be rather entertaining f it sounded like GladOS, or Wheatley. Anything but the Space core.
Weelll, you say that now. I stopped playing games for years, and thought I was done with them. Then my son grew older, and discovered Skyrim. So then, I discovered Skyrim. The next thing I know I'm replacing the graphics card and the power supply to support it in my computer. Since then I've bought Doom3 and Rage, older era stuff my card can support (I bought the latest GPU my mobo could support). I'm trying to quit again, it's too much unproductive (but fun!) time spent.
I know that this is a schoolyard argument "but the other kid did it too!!" but fingerpointing over who is worse never does anyone any good especially when you go down this road because it becomes circular to the point of absurdity.
Overall I'd agree, but it goes a bit beyond a schoolyard argument with, "the other kid did it too" when the accuser is particularly singling out one kid among several guilty kids, and in order to support their bias, fails to take all factors into consideration or deliberately elects to ignore certain ones. That's an injustice.
I'm not French, but that's not fair. They did a lot of underground work to undermine the nazis. If you're talking about the policy of appeasement, then Neville Chamberlain -and thus the UK- is more culpable than France.
Actually, it's "Sword of Truth", that was the name of the book series.. Legend of the Seeker was its television name.
There is both a valid point to the article and a flaw.
"Easily fixable" is in the eye of the beholder, but given the nature that this is a tech blog, I'm not surprised most people assume this is common; lots of people think they can handle something until they get elbows deep in it, and then find themselves out of their depth. Then they're likely to try to button things back up as best they can, and return the item as defective: if it was defective in the first place, they probably just made it several times worse; but if they were trying to hack or mod it, there's no excuse for returning it after they broke it. Companies are not going to settle for eating these costs, and their legal teams are there to prevent this sort of thing. I used to be a bench tech, repairing consumer electronics (chiefly VCRs, but stereos, preamps, cassette decks, etc.. as well) and, outside of head cleanings (which are also tricky on helical scanning head), idler/belt replacements, or minor alignments, the repairs I made were typically outside the capability of the average buyer (and how many people have an oscilloscope and function generator in their house?) I think it would be opening a can of worms to court their tinkering by say, posting schematics publicly on a website. But it also depends on the device and it's complexity.
On the other hand, some simple things, i.e. lack of access to batteries, is ridiculous. Also, if schematics were made available upon request (an email for example), that would probably nip a lot of the impulsive weekend hackers in the bud while still allowing serious techs access to them.
I think we'd save a lot more trees if we started putting restrictions on the ridiculous amount of junk snail mail we get everyday. It's both amazing, and sad.
IANAP, but the "copy and paste" mentality worries me. I've done basic HTML as a hobby but refused to use javascript unless I understood how it worked. But that's just web stuff. When it comes to real apps, it would be even more critical, especially if more and more programmers start cutting corners. If you don't really know how your program is doing what it's doing, how are you supposed to troubleshoot it?
Point taken. I could expect maybe the DEA, but yeah, the FBI seems quite a bit overkill.
I don't know about people firing guns into the air. certainly around my area they don't, but drunk driving, definitely. And the cops are totally all over that, with checkpoints and patrols.
But we don't do what they're talking about. It's a specific kind of cybercrime.
Such irony. Have you ever actually toured Independence Hall in Philadelphia? Want the real story behind the war? Do the tour, and lay off the propaganda. And no one said anything about the TEA party. Agenda much?
You also forget, Washington, et al, was a politician *after* he was a general. A number of politicians today have served in the military in their past too, though not as many once did. That's not unique to the US, however, that's just the times.
Actually, yes, they are. Cops routinely patrol heavily on the 4th of July, looking for people setting off fireworks in their backyard. They're crawling all over my neighbor every year. And at that, that's a lot more ground to cover than a single event that also touts the use of a lot more than just beer or the odd shot of JD. People on acid shooting off fireworks without a license, and burning stuff ... like nothing could go wrong? The people who run the event are probably not so much an issue, but the random attendees are a different matter.
Ah well... Let's hope these people doing this work are not subjected to too many death threats or terrorist attacks because of their findings. Some folks work really hard to keep other people in line and some folks are willing to die for their religious beliefs. Hopefully that does not happen here.
You know they will. This will be considered blasphemy in the highest degree, even by the non-fundamentalists. They're marked men.
Good point, but there may be no way around that. One thing people definitely need to be careful of, is who you donate to. Being rich doesn't translate to no work, or it shouldn't; in fact, I'd be studying my ass off learning finance so I would have a clue what's going on. I'd probably get a bit paranoid too. How would I know if my accountant and lawyer were skimming off the top? I wouldn't know if I was ignorant of the whole system.
I'd research and investigate every charity I looked to donate to, and anyone who sought me out with their hand out (besides the normal automated stuff everyone gets) would automatically get on my "no" list. I'd probably start my own foundation, really.
On a more personal level, if I hit it big, my dream is to build a sweet recording studio and finally start laying down original tracks. That would be the dream. I'm working on it now, but it's slow going. I'd be happy with that. IT pays the bills, but the stress is also taking years off my life.
We've got a neighbor who does this to us now, but we haven't identified the SOB yet. Twice now recently, on a Sunday or Monday morning, we walk out to a huge steaming pile on our lawn. When I found out who the slob is, I'd delivering it to his house via airmail.. all over the windows, walls, door, porch, etc..
FWIW, (anecdotal bit here) Back in the mid eighties, I had an (ex)girlfriend (we're from the US) who got a to take a class trip to Greece, Rome and Paris, and when she got back she said Rome and Paris were filthy, that the streets were gross, she saw things like people peeing openly on busy street corners (Paris), boys heckling the group in Rome, trash everywhere, one toilet for an entire hotel floor, etc.. She did not come back very impressed with Europe. This was, however, decades ago; but it seems perhaps some should mind their glass houses.
And the funny thing is, the buy-only-on-contract only thing was supposed to somehow level the playing field, and and get the lowest bidder, but all it really seems to do is establish virtual monopolies, as not that many vendors have contracts; further, with the purchase approval system we have in place, there is no petty cash to speak of. Merely ordering more Cat6 cable is a major undertaking. Buying anything is an ordeal. Forgot to order a SAS adapter for that new server for backups? That'll set deployment back 3 months. It's horrible.
Found the Vogon.
Anytime somebody is biased towards their pet it-looks-good-on-paper-and-I-want-it-to-be-true theory, and feels the need to deny actual real word experience, they trot this "anecdotal" rebuttal. In a few cases, it's a valid rebuttal, but it's incredibly overused here.
Note to mods: modding something "troll" just because you disagree with the politics is in itself trolling. My points are valid, but apparently I pointed out something about your idols that you didn't like being pointed out. Perhaps you should look up the definition of "troll", and try to grow up a little bit.