and that's one of the dangers of "constant connectivity" is that it's amazingly hard to turn off. The ceremony hadn't started yet, but I felt compelled to answer the phone. Problem is if I don't answer the phone, the person at the other end panics and does something stupid in an attempt to fix the problem and ends up making things much, much worse. It's just easier to take the call and solve the problem. Needless to say, it was taken away from me.:)
There are both pros and cons to the "constantly connected".
Pros:
* I don't have to be in the office to actually "work". I am hardly there anyway as my work is supporting POS in a retail environment. * I travel around a lot and am constantly in touch with others. * I can schedule doctors, dentists, mortage, and other personal appointments whenever I feel like it. * I can see a hit movie in the middle of an afternoon if I want. I saw Spider-Man that way and it was worth the afternoon. * I hardly ever take vacation because I can take a Friday and drive to my Mom's , or Banff or wherever and take a long weekend as long as I can stay in touch with my Blackberry. As long as there is GSM service, I can be there (unless I really do take vacation). * I determine what the priorities are and what my schedule is to a large degree. Sipping a margarita in the pool at a friend's house in the middle of Summer. *sigh* That was a good Summer. * I can watch The View in the morning. OK, that's probably a con as there is nothing else on...
Cons:
* I must be on available for calls pretty much 24/7. * I sometimes have to break important plans or appointments to solve problems or go to the trouble including having to break those fun three day weekends. * I am expected to have instant answers to perplexing problems hundreds or thousands of miles away and solve those problems over the phone. * I am many times engaged with work for 12, 14 or 18 hours at a time solving large scale problems or installing new locations. * Putting down the margarita, getting out of the pool and driving six hours to a location to figure out what the alarm at a location is refusing to release a data line and having to fix the fuckup and completely rewire it and get back home at four in the morning.:( * One of only two people in the company covering the entire country with the answer to a problem. The responsibility gets to you sometimes. * When your friends tell you that you have no life other than work. * Standing at my best friends wedding as the best man at the front of the church during the service and my Blackberry rings and I insisted that I had to answer it. That's when everyone figured I had a problem. * Actually looking forward to the fucking View in the morning. God damn you Starr Jones! I hate that bitch...and that annoying skinny blonde.
So, the FCC was happy to approve IBOC AM radio and not a competing technology, D-CAM but more than happy to let the market decide which digital cell phone standard should apply? If the broadcast standard a station wants to use does not cause adjacent channel interference why does the FCC care what technolog a station wants to use? In the case of IBOC, it does cause interference and shouldn't have been approved in the first place, but that's what happens when you have money and lobbyting power.
So, is Microsoft is going to send the 11 million 360s from Japan that aren't selling to North America by year's end? I honestly don't understand how analysts could extrapolate for the end of the year; these numbers are just pulled out of their asses.
I think most people that really, really want the 360 by now have one and the rest of us that are curious and would buy one on impulse are SOL. Yes, if you're dilligent you can find one as most of my local big box stores seem to get about 25 a week, or you could buy one from the ass raping local video game store that have them marked up 25%.
I still think supply issues are hurting 360 sales and will continue to hurt them for a while to come. Mark my words, 360 sales will be no where near 12 million by year's end.
So, you think a regulatory framework where I can copy as much as I want but I am charged a small fee for the cost of the materials to do so that is then distrubuted to artists to offset any loss is government interference? You'd rather have doors kicked in, servers confiscated, torrent sites sued and Grandma and Grandpa worried about their internet use than the peace of mind of 59 cents a blank CD? Well, you can have it. Thanks.
We pay the levy in Canada because there is a private copying exemption for audio works (not video) in our copyright law. The Canadian Private Copying Collective was created to regulate the levy as it applies to recordable media and see that royalties are paid to rights holders for private copying.
As I understand it, the CPCC meets every year to decide the coming year's levies, but they are free to set the levy for the next two years if they wish.
When it comes to playing a FPS on any console it doesn't matter what machine you're running or their controllers as they all suck. Sometimes it's the game and not the controller that's the problem.
The Intellivision controller, for example, was included amongst the top ten worst, but there are several Intellivision games that really wouldn't play very well on a joystick or gamepad (yeah, the games were designed for the control disc, I know). I've always hated joysticks but I loved the Intellivison controller disc; it just worked for me. Maybe that's why I loved the Nintendo so much as the directional pad seemed like an improvement on the Intellivision control disc.
OK, I should probably turn in my geek card, but just this last weekend I rented the first season of Firefly and watched the show for the first time. I have to admit my interest was not picqued over a "space western" but seriously, the show is very, very well done. I love all of the characters, the ship, the setting, and the universe - it's just so well done and a loss for television now that it's off the air. I really only have myself to blame and had I realized sooner that Josh Whedon was involved I would have watched sooner.
I bought the DVD set and so have several of my friends. We're working on getting our out-of-touch parents to at least watch Serenity and go from there after getting our parents hooked on Smallville and Battle Star Galactica.
Shrek also had unskippable previews, but you can always just fast forward through them and if you pin the fast forward it only takes a few seconds to reach the menu. So, all those previews, notices and warnings can be fast forwarded through but, yes are still incredibly annoying.
There are a few movies though where I was quite surprised that the movie just started with out all the bullshit. The Smallville DVDs are like that in that they do not display the FBI warning and go directly to the main menu. VLC and Mplayer ignore the PUO codes so you can skip everything, but I prefer to re-author the movie only to DVD-R using DVD Shrink and keep that in a case beside the TV while the originals sit in a nice display stand. When friends come over to watch a movie they appreciate that the movie just starts and so do I.
I made this comment a long time ago when TCPA was first floated - that by encrypting your hard disk to keep out hackers and the like the government would not have access to your data and would request a backdoor, thus negating any protection you have in the first place. The "T" in Trusted Computing Platform Alliance stands for "Trusted" and if there's a backdoor then there can't be very much trust for the user can there?
The TCPA has to realize that a secure system is impossible in today's political climate as the government will want in and if the government can get in you or I will eventually find a way in as well.
from Sony $1000 (or whatever the model I saw was)? It is still a valid question how Sony can sell a game machine and DVD player for $500 and a stand alone player for $1000. The economics don't make sense to me.
inefficient. The public broadcaster in Canada, the CBC, is funded partly by the Federal Government and partly from advertising revenues, no license. What is odd is CBC Television has ads, but CBC Radio does not. CBC TV does a very good job over all in areas like Olympics coverage, Hockey Night in Canada, news, public affairs and some CBC only television series given the budget slashing from the 90s to today. CBC Radio, on the other hand is hit and miss with great public affairs programs like As it Happens and Country Canada, but some real snore fests like their arts programs that really only appeal to the wine and smoking jacket set.
I am not going to hold up the financing model for the CBC as ideal, they do have to deal with constant budget crunches from a stingy Federal Government, but it does seem a lot better than detector vans, demand letters and license fees on one hand and the pitiful pleas and annoying telethons that American public broadcasters have to go through on the other.
Didn't think so. As much as I can recall, all their rebates are applied when you check out. Why do it any other way? Costco has to be one of the most stress free places to shop: they pay and treat their employees well, they sell high quality products at low prices and they have sane, consumer friendly policies.
I used to work in electronics retail, home of the never-to-be-seen-again-mail-in-rebate. I know from my experience there that the only ones really pushing for rebates are the retailers since the cost of rebate is born by the manufacturer and the retailer can advertise the rebated price and still sell the product at full price. Yes, there are some retailer initiated rebates but they're pretty rare. The pressure from retailers pushing for rebates seems to have lead to manufacturers farming out their rebates to fulfilment centres with the intent on honoring as few as possible.
I wish the Competition Bureau in Canada had the balls that the FTC has and made retailers responsible for rebates who would then pursue the rebate from the manufacturer in case of unfulfilment. Score one for the USA!
The EFF would disagree with you, oh and so would the Supreme Court of the United States. The Supreme Court has upheld anonymity throughout history, give or take. It's a subset of free speech. That's not to say that you can fly anonymous, but you can certainly speak you mind in anonymity if you wish.
The driving controversy in the case was not necessarily the ID requirement but that the regulations requiring ID are technically illegal under FAA regulations that require all regulations to be publically available. The ID requirement is secret. A secret law in a free country. Now that should give you pause.
It's like saying my car didn't have a flat tire but the wheel did.
The article does have some legitimate myths, such as the booster rockets were an accident waiting to happen. Well, of course you're taking chances when you attempt a launch in weather the seals on the boosters weren't designed or tested for.
I lived in BC at the time and our high school was equipped with some sort of live educational satellite network at the time so we were able to watch the NASA channel live. I did not realize that the networks were not broadcasting live. Interesting.
I ambled into the library to watch and, well, we all know what happened.
We feel we have an amazing ecosystem with third parties providing content to Xbox at this time.
Now PR types are digging into the lexicon of the biological world to find new wordspeak? I guess Microsoft and ecosystems do have a lot in common: both generate vast amounts of, um,,fertilizer.
The USPTO has issued preliminary rulings that all five of NTP's patents in question are invalid and is set to issue a final ruling very soon. What happens then? Can RIM sue NTP for attempting to enforce invalid patents? Can RIM sue the USPTO for incompetence? I don't have much sympathy for RIM, regardless. They had ample opportunity to settle with NTP and they squandered it. Which raises another question, what would have happened if RIM had settled and the USPTO issues their final ruling that all of NTP's patents are invalid? Would RIM get their money back?
This entire fiasco is a poster child for how patents can discourage inovation and work against business interests. They're very much like nuclear weapons, if you don't have them you want them or end up doing the bidding of others and if you do have them you there is a sort of tacit agreement not to use them against another weapons holder.
I used to work in electronics retail in Vancouver. Rogers launched RIM service back in 1997 (I think it was 1997) and all managers were given demo RIM units to use. It became quite common among managers to jokingly ask each other to "RIM me". The Rogers area sales reps were not happy when that term caught on around work. They though it was "disrpectful". Whatever. It was funny to hear one manager yell to another manager, "RIM me with the inventory levels on [insert product], will you?" Ah, the good old days of retail.
The DS still works! I had the same experience with my nephew on my DS. He borrowed it and scratched the hell out of the screen. The only conclusion I can come to is he used the screen as a cutting board as there's no way the average person could scratch a screen that much. Anyway, when the unit is on you can't see the scratches and the touch sensitivity works fine.
Slashdot Mirror
and that's one of the dangers of "constant connectivity" is that it's amazingly hard to turn off. The ceremony hadn't started yet, but I felt compelled to answer the phone. Problem is if I don't answer the phone, the person at the other end panics and does something stupid in an attempt to fix the problem and ends up making things much, much worse. It's just easier to take the call and solve the problem. Needless to say, it was taken away from me. :)
There are both pros and cons to the "constantly connected".
:(
Pros:
* I don't have to be in the office to actually "work". I am hardly there anyway as my work is supporting POS in a retail environment.
* I travel around a lot and am constantly in touch with others.
* I can schedule doctors, dentists, mortage, and other personal appointments whenever I feel like it.
* I can see a hit movie in the middle of an afternoon if I want. I saw Spider-Man that way and it was worth the afternoon.
* I hardly ever take vacation because I can take a Friday and drive to my Mom's , or Banff or wherever and take a long weekend as long as I can stay in touch with my Blackberry. As long as there is GSM service, I can be there (unless I really do take vacation).
* I determine what the priorities are and what my schedule is to a large degree. Sipping a margarita in the pool at a friend's house in the middle of Summer. *sigh* That was a good Summer.
* I can watch The View in the morning. OK, that's probably a con as there is nothing else on...
Cons:
* I must be on available for calls pretty much 24/7.
* I sometimes have to break important plans or appointments to solve problems or go to the trouble including having to break those fun three day weekends.
* I am expected to have instant answers to perplexing problems hundreds or thousands of miles away and solve those problems over the phone.
* I am many times engaged with work for 12, 14 or 18 hours at a time solving large scale problems or installing new locations.
* Putting down the margarita, getting out of the pool and driving six hours to a location to figure out what the alarm at a location is refusing to release a data line and having to fix the fuckup and completely rewire it and get back home at four in the morning.
* One of only two people in the company covering the entire country with the answer to a problem. The responsibility gets to you sometimes.
* When your friends tell you that you have no life other than work.
* Standing at my best friends wedding as the best man at the front of the church during the service and my Blackberry rings and I insisted that I had to answer it. That's when everyone figured I had a problem.
* Actually looking forward to the fucking View in the morning. God damn you Starr Jones! I hate that bitch...and that annoying skinny blonde.
So, the FCC was happy to approve IBOC AM radio and not a competing technology, D-CAM but more than happy to let the market decide which digital cell phone standard should apply? If the broadcast standard a station wants to use does not cause adjacent channel interference why does the FCC care what technolog a station wants to use? In the case of IBOC, it does cause interference and shouldn't have been approved in the first place, but that's what happens when you have money and lobbyting power.
So, is Microsoft is going to send the 11 million 360s from Japan that aren't selling to North America by year's end? I honestly don't understand how analysts could extrapolate for the end of the year; these numbers are just pulled out of their asses.
I think most people that really, really want the 360 by now have one and the rest of us that are curious and would buy one on impulse are SOL. Yes, if you're dilligent you can find one as most of my local big box stores seem to get about 25 a week, or you could buy one from the ass raping local video game store that have them marked up 25%.
I still think supply issues are hurting 360 sales and will continue to hurt them for a while to come. Mark my words, 360 sales will be no where near 12 million by year's end.
So, you think a regulatory framework where I can copy as much as I want but I am charged a small fee for the cost of the materials to do so that is then distrubuted to artists to offset any loss is government interference? You'd rather have doors kicked in, servers confiscated, torrent sites sued and Grandma and Grandpa worried about their internet use than the peace of mind of 59 cents a blank CD? Well, you can have it. Thanks.
We pay the levy in Canada because there is a private copying exemption for audio works (not video) in our copyright law. The Canadian Private Copying Collective was created to regulate the levy as it applies to recordable media and see that royalties are paid to rights holders for private copying.
As I understand it, the CPCC meets every year to decide the coming year's levies, but they are free to set the levy for the next two years if they wish.
That's it.
I received from NAMBLA gives me the same answer!
When it comes to playing a FPS on any console it doesn't matter what machine you're running or their controllers as they all suck. Sometimes it's the game and not the controller that's the problem.
The Intellivision controller, for example, was included amongst the top ten worst, but there are several Intellivision games that really wouldn't play very well on a joystick or gamepad (yeah, the games were designed for the control disc, I know). I've always hated joysticks but I loved the Intellivison controller disc; it just worked for me. Maybe that's why I loved the Nintendo so much as the directional pad seemed like an improvement on the Intellivision control disc.
Forgent was claiming their JPEG patent was violated with the invention of the CCD. That had to be cleared up before a prize could awarded, you see.
OK, I should probably turn in my geek card, but just this last weekend I rented the first season of Firefly and watched the show for the first time. I have to admit my interest was not picqued over a "space western" but seriously, the show is very, very well done. I love all of the characters, the ship, the setting, and the universe - it's just so well done and a loss for television now that it's off the air. I really only have myself to blame and had I realized sooner that Josh Whedon was involved I would have watched sooner.
I bought the DVD set and so have several of my friends. We're working on getting our out-of-touch parents to at least watch Serenity and go from there after getting our parents hooked on Smallville and Battle Star Galactica.
Spread the word.
Shrek also had unskippable previews, but you can always just fast forward through them and if you pin the fast forward it only takes a few seconds to reach the menu. So, all those previews, notices and warnings can be fast forwarded through but, yes are still incredibly annoying.
There are a few movies though where I was quite surprised that the movie just started with out all the bullshit. The Smallville DVDs are like that in that they do not display the FBI warning and go directly to the main menu. VLC and Mplayer ignore the PUO codes so you can skip everything, but I prefer to re-author the movie only to DVD-R using DVD Shrink and keep that in a case beside the TV while the originals sit in a nice display stand. When friends come over to watch a movie they appreciate that the movie just starts and so do I.
one Office 13 install, aka Office 2010 The Year We Make Contact Pro Edition.
I made this comment a long time ago when TCPA was first floated - that by encrypting your hard disk to keep out hackers and the like the government would not have access to your data and would request a backdoor, thus negating any protection you have in the first place. The "T" in Trusted Computing Platform Alliance stands for "Trusted" and if there's a backdoor then there can't be very much trust for the user can there?
The TCPA has to realize that a secure system is impossible in today's political climate as the government will want in and if the government can get in you or I will eventually find a way in as well.
I read the headline very quickly as Google acquires Treasure Map. Woohoo! They'll be rich!
OK everyone, back to your cubicles.
from Sony $1000 (or whatever the model I saw was)? It is still a valid question how Sony can sell a game machine and DVD player for $500 and a stand alone player for $1000. The economics don't make sense to me.
inefficient. The public broadcaster in Canada, the CBC, is funded partly by the Federal Government and partly from advertising revenues, no license. What is odd is CBC Television has ads, but CBC Radio does not. CBC TV does a very good job over all in areas like Olympics coverage, Hockey Night in Canada, news, public affairs and some CBC only television series given the budget slashing from the 90s to today. CBC Radio, on the other hand is hit and miss with great public affairs programs like As it Happens and Country Canada, but some real snore fests like their arts programs that really only appeal to the wine and smoking jacket set.
I am not going to hold up the financing model for the CBC as ideal, they do have to deal with constant budget crunches from a stingy Federal Government, but it does seem a lot better than detector vans, demand letters and license fees on one hand and the pitiful pleas and annoying telethons that American public broadcasters have to go through on the other.
installed Firefox for me? Probably scanned my machine and then installed it out of pity.
Seriously though, since I installed Firefox last Summer it's made Ad Aware and HijackThis obsolete.
Didn't think so. As much as I can recall, all their rebates are applied when you check out. Why do it any other way? Costco has to be one of the most stress free places to shop: they pay and treat their employees well, they sell high quality products at low prices and they have sane, consumer friendly policies.
I used to work in electronics retail, home of the never-to-be-seen-again-mail-in-rebate. I know from my experience there that the only ones really pushing for rebates are the retailers since the cost of rebate is born by the manufacturer and the retailer can advertise the rebated price and still sell the product at full price. Yes, there are some retailer initiated rebates but they're pretty rare. The pressure from retailers pushing for rebates seems to have lead to manufacturers farming out their rebates to fulfilment centres with the intent on honoring as few as possible.
I wish the Competition Bureau in Canada had the balls that the FTC has and made retailers responsible for rebates who would then pursue the rebate from the manufacturer in case of unfulfilment. Score one for the USA!
The EFF would disagree with you, oh and so would the Supreme Court of the United States. The Supreme Court has upheld anonymity throughout history, give or take. It's a subset of free speech. That's not to say that you can fly anonymous, but you can certainly speak you mind in anonymity if you wish.
The driving controversy in the case was not necessarily the ID requirement but that the regulations requiring ID are technically illegal under FAA regulations that require all regulations to be publically available. The ID requirement is secret. A secret law in a free country. Now that should give you pause.
the booster rockets did. Wow. Huge myth.
It's like saying my car didn't have a flat tire but the wheel did.
The article does have some legitimate myths, such as the booster rockets were an accident waiting to happen. Well, of course you're taking chances when you attempt a launch in weather the seals on the boosters weren't designed or tested for.
I lived in BC at the time and our high school was equipped with some sort of live educational satellite network at the time so we were able to watch the NASA channel live. I did not realize that the networks were not broadcasting live. Interesting.
I ambled into the library to watch and, well, we all know what happened.
We feel we have an amazing ecosystem with third parties providing content to Xbox at this time.
,fertilizer.
Now PR types are digging into the lexicon of the biological world to find new wordspeak? I guess Microsoft and ecosystems do have a lot in common: both generate vast amounts of, um,
The USPTO has issued preliminary rulings that all five of NTP's patents in question are invalid and is set to issue a final ruling very soon. What happens then? Can RIM sue NTP for attempting to enforce invalid patents? Can RIM sue the USPTO for incompetence? I don't have much sympathy for RIM, regardless. They had ample opportunity to settle with NTP and they squandered it. Which raises another question, what would have happened if RIM had settled and the USPTO issues their final ruling that all of NTP's patents are invalid? Would RIM get their money back?
This entire fiasco is a poster child for how patents can discourage inovation and work against business interests. They're very much like nuclear weapons, if you don't have them you want them or end up doing the bidding of others and if you do have them you there is a sort of tacit agreement not to use them against another weapons holder.
I used to work in electronics retail in Vancouver. Rogers launched RIM service back in 1997 (I think it was 1997) and all managers were given demo RIM units to use. It became quite common among managers to jokingly ask each other to "RIM me". The Rogers area sales reps were not happy when that term caught on around work. They though it was "disrpectful". Whatever. It was funny to hear one manager yell to another manager, "RIM me with the inventory levels on [insert product], will you?" Ah, the good old days of retail.
The DS still works! I had the same experience with my nephew on my DS. He borrowed it and scratched the hell out of the screen. The only conclusion I can come to is he used the screen as a cutting board as there's no way the average person could scratch a screen that much. Anyway, when the unit is on you can't see the scratches and the touch sensitivity works fine.
Ninetendo knows how to build a durable machine.