I've been a Mac user for a really long time. I've owned a lot of them over the years. And a lot of PCs.
I used to support Windows and Linux machines (servers/desktops) in various capacities at various employers. (Federal and state government and corporate.)
I really enjoyed having a machine that worked consistently every time I turned it on. (or now, when I wake it from sleep. I reboot so rarely these days). Predominantly, the only time my Macs exhibited strange behavior was when they had hardware issues.
It wasn't like Windows 95 which would refuse to acknowledge some random accessory because a change had been made to the registry by some other app. I never had to worry about some $.30 interface chip crashing the machine because the vendor had cut corners writing the driver software and I bumped into a crash situation trying to do an every day task, like printing. Or plugging in a USB device.
Or Windows 98 which was a slightly more stable house of cards.
Or Windows XP which was a breeding ground for viruses and system compromises no matter how securely you locked the system down. I remember when you would race to install Service Pack 3 on Windows XP before the IP scanners would compromise the machine. Never had to worry about that on the Mac.
I've never had to deal with Microsoft's wavering tendencies to see how invasive their software could be on your machine. Yes, I'm looking at you, Internet Explorers 4 through 7. And you too, Active Desktop.
And before you hold Linux up as the shining jewel of computing perfection, I have two words for you: dependency hell.
Side note: My personal uptime record is on a Linux file server. 253 days without a reboot. A nice Dell box with a SCSI RAID array. Supporting a 200 user design department the entire time (server hosted home directories and a few other services, not just a file server.) Stayed up just a hair longer than the school year. Then I decided to perform a package update. It took 3 days to get the machine back to its former state.
My Macs have always "just worked" more often than most PCS. Yes, they've had their problems. I ran a lab of them in a student environment for years. Many of them worked perfectly fine in a fairly abusive situation. And yes, there were a few machines with problems. There was one Mac G4 that had all of it's internal components replaced twice. The only original part was the external case, and it still never ran 100%. But even at 90%, it was more consistently reliable than most of the Dell's in the lab across the hall.
A week ago, I finished an 11 day Deep Dream render on my MacBook Pro. (No NVidia card, so CPU only). I continued to use the machine for my daily tasks while that render ground on. It never hitched, I never had a problem. Even though it was eating up CPU resources like crazy. Heck, I even let it go to sleep a few times and accidentally let my battery run to zero after forgetting to plug it back in. And when I woke it up/restored it from suspend, everything continued on as though nothing had gone wrong.
Yes, Apple, Macs and the OS have their flaws. But they're consistent flaws. Yet they still offer the one thing I've struggled to find in the Windows or Linux worlds: A user experience I can trust.
I live and work in SV. If you're making $50k with 20 years of experience, you really need to have a talk with your manager or look for another job.
Every job I've had in the area, $50k is what we pay people when we allow them to take the plastic protector off the sharp edge of the butter knives in the company kitchen. It's junior level pay. Or Uber-driver pay.
I know for a fact there are homeless people in the streets bringing home more than that.
Seriously dude, it might be worth reevaluating where your career is. Keep living frugally, that's admirable. But you're being taken advantage of.
Cable TV was "invented" to service a town in Pennsylvania that lived in the valley between two mountains that blocked terrestrial broadcast TV signals. Someone had the bright idea to put antennae at the top of each mountain to capture the signals, combine the channels to provide a consolidated feed to the town and charge people for the convenience/service.
I hate to ask this, but has anyone measured how much ink was in the cartridge to start with?
Measuring how much is left can give you a distorted answer, since it's possible that Epson is overfilling the cartridge to ensure you 700mL worth out of it, with some leftover to account for evaporation and filling the ink lines if the printer goes completely empty, etc.
This could very well just be a classic case of Selection bias.
Now, if he cracks open a fresh cartridge, and there's 700mL exactly, then there's an issue. But, if there's more (which also would make sense, since there's more leftover in the larger cartridge than in the smaller one.), then we have a relative non-issue here.
Accepted by people everywhere. (Except BBC viewers, but I'll get to that.)
Technically advertising has been around since Survival of the Fittest became the order of the day. So, about the second day after the first amoeba crawled out of the oceanic ooze. But, more relevant to the issue at hand, it's been accepted ever since the inception of mass media. You can draw your line in history where ever you want. Go back as far as ancient Rome. Advertising has been there. "Come see men almost get eaten by lions! Enjoy food while you're there!"
But you probably want a more modern example. Then ever since the dawn of radio. Pumping 1000 W into the air wasn't cheap (the power of the first FM radio station.) Neither is pumping 100,000 W (modern FM station broadcast levels). Again, not to mention staffing and building maintenance, etc. But, in order to get wide adoption, they had to get people to listen. Many people felt that they shouldn't have to continue to pay after shelling out $100 (NOT inflation adjusted) for a radio. So they experimented with various revenue models, because even then, content wasn't free. So, the broadcasters entered into implied contract with the public. You get the content for "free", all you have to do is give up a little bit of attention in exchange.
And it worked fairly well for a period of time. TV came around, and all was good. Newspapers. Whatever other media used a similar model.
The BBC used a slightly different model where people had to pay a monthly license fee for every TV they owned. That license fee went straight to the BBC which paid for the content they saw. There were steep fees if you got caught watching TV without having paid your license fee. (Americans see it as a tax, which it essentially was.) And it worked for a while, until the advent of cable and satellite TV. Then the model came crumbling down.
And I don't know if you remember the early days of the internet (I do, check my slashdot ID#). Many other revenue models were tried. Ultimately, people, as always, are reluctant to pay for content. So, the advertising showed up, and we get to enjoy our content for "free". You just have to exchange some attention. And most people are happy with it.
Side note: Most people's discontent with online advertising is because Flash... blows. Well, that's changing. Within the next year, HTML5 ads are going to become the de facto standard, which will probably break AdBlock, at least for a little while. But, it ought to reduce the resource load. And for a brief shining moment, ads will become less annoying. Until they're not anymore.
As for your targeted marketing, there's a few issues at stake. Many people are creeped right the fuck out when ads get too targeted at them. Target already knows when women are pregnant, even before they do. It scares people enough to receive the mailer. Imagine having a "pregnant" cookie in your browser. It would become inescapable. (I don't want to get into a long discussion about cookies and privacy and what not. Regardless of how it's set, the advertisers would know.) So there's a careful balance that the advertisers deliberately strike between providing relevant ads and being too creepy. Again, be careful what you wish for.
As for your Fluke and circuit puller problems. Running ads targeted like that is expensive. Most of your Fluke vendors aren't exactly rolling in the dough. And they're trying to sell you on a product you're going to buy once a decade. It's not financially feasible for them to do highly targeted marketing. So, instead, you'll be stuck with Amazon's terrible retargeted ads (that are carefully designed to not freak you out too much.) since Amazon knows you'll probably buy something else to cover the costs of running the ads (plus, they get a mass discount due to the sheer volume of ads they run and they have an automated system to generate them that your Fluke vendor can't afford.)
You're not rewarding gross incompetence so much as you are dealing with uncanny valley of what consumers are comfor
Would you enter your credit card # (defaulting to the most common payment method in the US) for a $.02 transaction?
Would you hold money in a third party account that handles all those $.02 transactions?
Or, more likely, would you just resign yourself to enjoying a slashdot with an empty comments section? I can tell you one thing, with a nearly non-existent comment section, slashdot's operating costs would plummet. Thereby solving most of your advertising problem.:)
Slashdot sels no product. Sells no service. And wouldn't get enough donations to cover its costs. So they deserve to die?
I'm not arguing that advertising in the second coming. I despise most of it as much as everyone else. But, it is an accepted social structure that allows for the social contract between a content provider and the general public to stay intact. Because people generally don't want to pay for anything. And running these things isn't free.
What is the alternate solution? Are you willing to pay for a subscription to every site you visit? Do you want more "native content" intermixed with all these articles?
Let's face it, hosting sites and entertainment on the Internet isn't free. Soulskill has to eat and put a roof over his head. Along with the rest of the Slashdot staff. And those colo costs are non-zero.
Which do you want? Your "free" ad-based internet? Or the worse solutions that are coming if sites continue to not be able to cover their costs + profit using banner ads?
Seriously. Think about it. Then reply.
Start with this math. Take your personal salary. Divide it by $.001 (the cost to display a typical banner ad). Figure out how many banner ad views you need to cover your salary + benefits (they're not free either) at a moderately popular website. It's a frightening number. Even if you're just a lowly intern making minimum wage.
Then, think about other ways a site can generate that kind of revenue.
Apple's default WiFi network behavior is to find an open WiFi access point to jump on, then one the "trusted" default WiFi networks (one you've connected to already, or one the AT&T or Starbucks networks), and if it can't find that, it tried to connect to the one with the strongest signal and bring up the login page for username/pass challenges. Since most consumer routers have that standardized, it knows where to look. That's probably the traffic you're seeing.
Because the presentation isn't working as platforms and standards evolve.
I wasn't kidding about the site CSS template not working on a mobile phone. Try it.
Which means the site needs a code overhaul.
Which if you're going to go in and make the changes required to make it work on the fastest growing computer platform in the world (mobile devices), it means it's time to drag out the redesign boots. Because there are other issues you're bound to uncover as you go forward.
Slashdot Mirror
The part that got me about the article was that there were no pictures of actual compromised motherboards.
Supposedly they were sold by the thousand, and the IT crews pulled them all out and replaced them. No one thought to keep one?
Or there isn't one still lying on some shelf somewhere?
Huh? What? Did someone say something over there on Slashdot?
Speak up! I can't hear you.
I've been a Mac user for a really long time. I've owned a lot of them over the years. And a lot of PCs.
I used to support Windows and Linux machines (servers/desktops) in various capacities at various employers. (Federal and state government and corporate.)
I really enjoyed having a machine that worked consistently every time I turned it on. (or now, when I wake it from sleep. I reboot so rarely these days). Predominantly, the only time my Macs exhibited strange behavior was when they had hardware issues.
It wasn't like Windows 95 which would refuse to acknowledge some random accessory because a change had been made to the registry by some other app. I never had to worry about some $.30 interface chip crashing the machine because the vendor had cut corners writing the driver software and I bumped into a crash situation trying to do an every day task, like printing. Or plugging in a USB device.
Or Windows 98 which was a slightly more stable house of cards.
Or Windows XP which was a breeding ground for viruses and system compromises no matter how securely you locked the system down. I remember when you would race to install Service Pack 3 on Windows XP before the IP scanners would compromise the machine. Never had to worry about that on the Mac.
I've never had to deal with Microsoft's wavering tendencies to see how invasive their software could be on your machine. Yes, I'm looking at you, Internet Explorers 4 through 7. And you too, Active Desktop.
And before you hold Linux up as the shining jewel of computing perfection, I have two words for you: dependency hell.
Side note: My personal uptime record is on a Linux file server. 253 days without a reboot. A nice Dell box with a SCSI RAID array. Supporting a 200 user design department the entire time (server hosted home directories and a few other services, not just a file server.) Stayed up just a hair longer than the school year. Then I decided to perform a package update. It took 3 days to get the machine back to its former state.
My Macs have always "just worked" more often than most PCS. Yes, they've had their problems. I ran a lab of them in a student environment for years. Many of them worked perfectly fine in a fairly abusive situation. And yes, there were a few machines with problems. There was one Mac G4 that had all of it's internal components replaced twice. The only original part was the external case, and it still never ran 100%. But even at 90%, it was more consistently reliable than most of the Dell's in the lab across the hall.
A week ago, I finished an 11 day Deep Dream render on my MacBook Pro. (No NVidia card, so CPU only). I continued to use the machine for my daily tasks while that render ground on. It never hitched, I never had a problem. Even though it was eating up CPU resources like crazy. Heck, I even let it go to sleep a few times and accidentally let my battery run to zero after forgetting to plug it back in. And when I woke it up/restored it from suspend, everything continued on as though nothing had gone wrong.
Yes, Apple, Macs and the OS have their flaws. But they're consistent flaws. Yet they still offer the one thing I've struggled to find in the Windows or Linux worlds: A user experience I can trust.
You mean the same Steve Jobs that let the PowerMac towers wither on the branch for 18 months without an upgrade?
Yes.
I live and work in SV. If you're making $50k with 20 years of experience, you really need to have a talk with your manager or look for another job.
Every job I've had in the area, $50k is what we pay people when we allow them to take the plastic protector off the sharp edge of the butter knives in the company kitchen. It's junior level pay. Or Uber-driver pay.
I know for a fact there are homeless people in the streets bringing home more than that.
Seriously dude, it might be worth reevaluating where your career is. Keep living frugally, that's admirable. But you're being taken advantage of.
Cable TV was "invented" to service a town in Pennsylvania that lived in the valley between two mountains that blocked terrestrial broadcast TV signals. Someone had the bright idea to put antennae at the top of each mountain to capture the signals, combine the channels to provide a consolidated feed to the town and charge people for the convenience/service.
Everything else was added on afterwards.
Bah!
I hate to ask this, but has anyone measured how much ink was in the cartridge to start with?
Measuring how much is left can give you a distorted answer, since it's possible that Epson is overfilling the cartridge to ensure you 700mL worth out of it, with some leftover to account for evaporation and filling the ink lines if the printer goes completely empty, etc.
This could very well just be a classic case of Selection bias.
Now, if he cracks open a fresh cartridge, and there's 700mL exactly, then there's an issue. But, if there's more (which also would make sense, since there's more leftover in the larger cartridge than in the smaller one.), then we have a relative non-issue here.
Back when slashdot tried that, people were against paying for subscriptions to websites.
Maybe it's viable to revisit it now. Times have changed.
It would be interesting to see what perks they can make. Especially when the readership plummets as soon as the subscription goes live.
Get your mom to start using BitCoin then report back. :)
Or your granddad.
That's only mostly tongue in cheek.
That's the hurdle.
Ask that same question of the million other people who come here.
Then why are you here? :)
Accepted by people everywhere. (Except BBC viewers, but I'll get to that.)
Technically advertising has been around since Survival of the Fittest became the order of the day. So, about the second day after the first amoeba crawled out of the oceanic ooze. But, more relevant to the issue at hand, it's been accepted ever since the inception of mass media. You can draw your line in history where ever you want. Go back as far as ancient Rome. Advertising has been there. "Come see men almost get eaten by lions! Enjoy food while you're there!"
But you probably want a more modern example. Then ever since the dawn of radio. Pumping 1000 W into the air wasn't cheap (the power of the first FM radio station.) Neither is pumping 100,000 W (modern FM station broadcast levels). Again, not to mention staffing and building maintenance, etc. But, in order to get wide adoption, they had to get people to listen. Many people felt that they shouldn't have to continue to pay after shelling out $100 (NOT inflation adjusted) for a radio. So they experimented with various revenue models, because even then, content wasn't free. So, the broadcasters entered into implied contract with the public. You get the content for "free", all you have to do is give up a little bit of attention in exchange.
And it worked fairly well for a period of time. TV came around, and all was good. Newspapers. Whatever other media used a similar model.
The BBC used a slightly different model where people had to pay a monthly license fee for every TV they owned. That license fee went straight to the BBC which paid for the content they saw. There were steep fees if you got caught watching TV without having paid your license fee. (Americans see it as a tax, which it essentially was.) And it worked for a while, until the advent of cable and satellite TV. Then the model came crumbling down.
And I don't know if you remember the early days of the internet (I do, check my slashdot ID#). Many other revenue models were tried. Ultimately, people, as always, are reluctant to pay for content. So, the advertising showed up, and we get to enjoy our content for "free". You just have to exchange some attention. And most people are happy with it.
Side note: Most people's discontent with online advertising is because Flash... blows. Well, that's changing. Within the next year, HTML5 ads are going to become the de facto standard, which will probably break AdBlock, at least for a little while. But, it ought to reduce the resource load. And for a brief shining moment, ads will become less annoying. Until they're not anymore.
As for your targeted marketing, there's a few issues at stake. Many people are creeped right the fuck out when ads get too targeted at them. Target already knows when women are pregnant, even before they do. It scares people enough to receive the mailer. Imagine having a "pregnant" cookie in your browser. It would become inescapable. (I don't want to get into a long discussion about cookies and privacy and what not. Regardless of how it's set, the advertisers would know.) So there's a careful balance that the advertisers deliberately strike between providing relevant ads and being too creepy. Again, be careful what you wish for.
As for your Fluke and circuit puller problems. Running ads targeted like that is expensive. Most of your Fluke vendors aren't exactly rolling in the dough. And they're trying to sell you on a product you're going to buy once a decade. It's not financially feasible for them to do highly targeted marketing. So, instead, you'll be stuck with Amazon's terrible retargeted ads (that are carefully designed to not freak you out too much.) since Amazon knows you'll probably buy something else to cover the costs of running the ads (plus, they get a mass discount due to the sheer volume of ads they run and they have an automated system to generate them that your Fluke vendor can't afford.)
You're not rewarding gross incompetence so much as you are dealing with uncanny valley of what consumers are comfor
Would you pay?
Would you enter your credit card # (defaulting to the most common payment method in the US) for a $.02 transaction?
Would you hold money in a third party account that handles all those $.02 transactions?
Or, more likely, would you just resign yourself to enjoying a slashdot with an empty comments section? I can tell you one thing, with a nearly non-existent comment section, slashdot's operating costs would plummet. Thereby solving most of your advertising problem. :)
True. And then it starts to become a compounding problem.
Your favorite sites start to run ads to cover their escalating costs.
The users semi-revolt, so they run adblocker.
As the site see their revenue go down, they either a) run more ads to make up for it, or b) go out of business.
For most sites (unless you really love those listicle content mills), that's the tragedy. For others, well most of them have chosen A.
Sure. Patreon is an option.
Maybe slashdot could generate enough money in the first year running a patreon campaign to cover its costs.
But what about year two?
Everyone already hates it when wikipedia runs their yearly donation campaign. And they have an order of magnitude more traffic than slashdot.
Then what are you going to do, limit slashdot content to those who have donated through patreon? What's the difference between that and a paywall?
Ok. That's a good solution for exactly one website.
Say, reddit develops an ad-blocking solution that you have to pay for.
How does that help slashdot stay in business?
Slashdot sels no product. Sells no service. And wouldn't get enough donations to cover its costs. So they deserve to die?
I'm not arguing that advertising in the second coming. I despise most of it as much as everyone else. But, it is an accepted social structure that allows for the social contract between a content provider and the general public to stay intact. Because people generally don't want to pay for anything. And running these things isn't free.
Again, offer up another solution.
Ok. Everyone hates ads.
What is the alternate solution? Are you willing to pay for a subscription to every site you visit? Do you want more "native content" intermixed with all these articles?
Let's face it, hosting sites and entertainment on the Internet isn't free. Soulskill has to eat and put a roof over his head. Along with the rest of the Slashdot staff. And those colo costs are non-zero.
Which do you want? Your "free" ad-based internet? Or the worse solutions that are coming if sites continue to not be able to cover their costs + profit using banner ads?
Seriously. Think about it. Then reply.
Start with this math. Take your personal salary. Divide it by $.001 (the cost to display a typical banner ad). Figure out how many banner ad views you need to cover your salary + benefits (they're not free either) at a moderately popular website. It's a frightening number. Even if you're just a lowly intern making minimum wage.
Then, think about other ways a site can generate that kind of revenue.
Which is the greater evil?
Like all things, the simplest solution is the best one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Built to last. No moving parts. Encased in its own perfect environment.
This will be the first thing to power back on. It may burn out immediately after, but it'll fire right up.
Step 1: Embrace.
Step 2: Extend.
Step 3: Extinguish.
They see this as step 1.
Apple's default WiFi network behavior is to find an open WiFi access point to jump on, then one the "trusted" default WiFi networks (one you've connected to already, or one the AT&T or Starbucks networks), and if it can't find that, it tried to connect to the one with the strongest signal and bring up the login page for username/pass challenges. Since most consumer routers have that standardized, it knows where to look. That's probably the traffic you're seeing.
When an app is running, you can't see the OS. And depending on the apps UI/graphic design, there may be no indication which OS it's running on.
Simple mistakes for most people.
Nobody. Absolutely NOBODY.
Anyone whose career depended on CP/M or any of the what we now consider non-standard hardware.
Because the presentation isn't working as platforms and standards evolve.
I wasn't kidding about the site CSS template not working on a mobile phone. Try it.
Which means the site needs a code overhaul.
Which if you're going to go in and make the changes required to make it work on the fastest growing computer platform in the world (mobile devices), it means it's time to drag out the redesign boots. Because there are other issues you're bound to uncover as you go forward.