So, yes, their company sucks. Yes, all their products suck. Yes, the world would probably be a bit better of a place without Java in it, but I think you're being just a *tad* bit hyperbolic, or are you literally saying, given the choice between a world were 11 million people didn't die in the Holocaust, or one with no Java, you'd choose the latter?
I would mod you up, but I don't have mod points at the moment. So I will instead comment that this is entirely accurate: when I say that I xerox'd something, I have absolutely no clue whether the machine I used to copy a paper was actual a Xerox brand machine. When I say I used a kleenex, it's extremely *unlikely*, in fact, that I actually used a Kleenex-brand tissue.
On the other hand, when I tell someone to google something, I mean use freaking Google, not anything else. Because everything else freaking blows. (I tried using duckduckgo once, a couple years ago. I liked what they were doing, but I realized after a couple weeks that like 75% of the time I just ended up putting !google in the search if I actually wanted decent search results, so I said screw it and went back to Google.)
If your supermarket doesn't carry the kind of mustard you like, you can find another supermarket. If none of them around you carry the kind of mustard you like, you might pay more in shipping, but you can probably still get it shipped from somewhere else where that mustard is more popular.
If your ISP blows, you can... move to a different city. Maybe. If they aren't the only ISP there, too.
While I agree that this stunt was kinda idiotic of them, I would like to ask: if you have monthly data quotas, why the frack do you have your iTunes set to automatically synch off my butt while you're connected over 3/4g rather than only on wifi? You kinda deserve it at that point.
"If you want entertainment, then you really ought to pay the creator of that entertainment."
The problem is that by paying for cable, that is *not* what you're doing. It's several steps back from actually paying the people creating the content, to the point where they get basically crap-all out of it. I would *love* to pay the people responsible for creating the content; I have less love for the concept of most of my money going to the people screwing us over at [whichever one cable company your area happens to be allowed to purchase cable through.]
Wow. That does kinda blow, but sounds like an even better reason to *get* Cyanogen. Note: those "standard installation instructions" only work on a particular, rather small subset of Android phones. Cyanogenmod itself works on a much larger subset, though I think still not all of them, I have no idea if the Galaxy S Captivate is one of them or not. (Though it looks like the answer is yes?)
I installed Cyanogenmod on my previous phone that was stuck on 2.3 (and full of crapware I didn't want)... I had to first root it and install a bootloader, which was a bit of a pain to get working, but totally worth it.
Employers are, however, allowed to fire a person for any reason (other than obviously the usual set of racist, sexist, etc. reason), or for no reason at all. This includes the reason of "we require you to take an hour lunch break and you haven't been doing that". So whether or not you're required to by law is irrelevant, just whether or not the company *claims* that you're required to by law and are going to enforce that possibly-incorrect interpretation.
Ignorance of what? I have a choice between a single crappy dsl provider, and a single crappy cable internet provider. They're both terrible, and at this point, no matter what awful crap Verizon puts me through, I feel stuck with them because I know if I cancel, I'll probably be days to weeks without internet again as Charter screws up installation and turn-on just as badly as Verizon did (necessitating taking what was supposed to be a couple hours, and ended up being an entire day, off work trying to find someone, anyone who could actually fix the completely-their-fault issue that resulted in the installation guy basically throwing his hands up in confusion and leaving. After which day I still didn't have internet for about a week and a half.)
So what ignorance exactly? I have exactly 0 power to change any of that, without about 20 gajillion dollars and some senators in my pocket.
I am all for a self-driving car. I really hope my current car lasts until we can purchase decent self-driving cars, and I will be happy to purchase one for a price that I wouldn't really consider buying anything else short of houses.
But I want to be able to take entirely manual control back at any time, using a completely non-electronic, fully-mechanical override. I would hope to never have to actually *do* that, but I wouldn't trust any car that didn't have that *available*. Even if I completely trust the pseudo-AI to not bug out and do something crazy, which I wouldn't immediately but certainly could after using it for a while and not having any issues with it... I would *not* trust that some hacker couldn't find some way to hack in somehow and mess with things. Thus, I would want to trust in my ability to perform a manual override and completely temporarily shunt the computer systems off to a place where they couldn't control the car at all.
I am entirely willing to accept the minor inconvenience of hardware UI elements (i.e. steering wheel, pedals, etc.) getting in the way of aesthetics, and the slight additional cost of manufacturing said UI elements. And I'm *glad* they're pushing for that to be law, or else nobody would actually do it, even as an option - we've seen a number of examples of things I'd love to be able to pay for (phones with physical keyboards, 16:10 laptop screens), but nobody makes them because they're slightly more expensive to make, and companies feel the drive to make everything as cheap as possible and not even give the option.:(
And apparently you don't know anything about pop culture, or else are being willfully obtuse? It's pretty clear they didn't name it after the car, but after a particular famous *use* of the car to travel through time. Doesn't matter how crappy your car is, if it's also a time machine.
Seriously, slashdot, wtf? It's 2014, you're nominally a tech site for geeks, and you still don't support unicode characters? That should be a basic requirement of all websites at this point.
I also feel the same way about Tor as I do about DuckDuckGo: great ideas in theory, but way too much of a pain to use, given that I don't really have anything terribly important to hide.
Screw that. It is *definitely* about the UX. Linux doesn't even need to court the everyday "I don't know how to get pictures off my digital camera even though it's been explained to me 500 times" crowd to make some inroads into the desktop market. It'd be enough to make better inroads in the computer enthusiast world, the sort of people who know what they're doing, and are happy to mod their OSes to a certain extent, but who still *also* use their computers mainly to get things done.
I'd love to run Linux as a primary OS, but I've tried all kinds of distros, and there has not been a single desktop environment that felt robust and professional, where things were in places I'd expect and everything just worked without a lot of unnecessary fiddling and looking up of vague error messages. That is completely a UX issue. (Ok, yes, some of those error messages requiring fiddling were also device support-related, but still.)
The kernel is great, yes. So is Win8's. The UX is where Win8 failed, and it's where Linux (of various flavors) has been failing too.
I disagree. Maker is a totally great word. Makers are those with magical anti-entropy powers, who devote their lives to stymying the plots of the Unmaker. It's a pretty common trope, and a good word for that sort of character.
(On the other hand, the definition used in *this* article, is as dumb as you are arguing. I just like to imagine that people using the word are using it in the OSC definition, thus making articles just *so* much more entertaining.)
I actually did know a guy in college who majored in "science". Specifically, he was crazy intense and managed to swing a double major in physics and biochem, but we all just joked that he was majoring in "science".
Which works, though I would have had more fun going the other direction, being like "This was a FANTASTIC HOTEL. Its food was DEFINITELY NOT TERRIBLE, and when I went to check in, the guy at the front desk definitely did NOT spend half an hour ignoring me to instead post pictures on facebook. There was NOT a roach problem, and the toilet in the bathroom definitely did NOT stop up a bunch of times."
Deep down, were you secretly holding out just a tiny bit of hope that if you got down to the bottom, you'd find Builders or something like them? I know I would be.
Your second hypothesis might well be true, as that is kind of what drives publicly-traded companies. None of the handful of companies I could think of off the top of my head are public. Most notably, the Sprint MVNO Ting, which could easily charge more than they do and still be one of the cheapest around, and who totally don't technically NEED to make it so easy to talk to a competent person on the phone if you call them for help (nobody else does...).
Fresh & Easy, the west coast supermarket chain, also came to mind, though sadly their prices have been going up and variety and quality has gone down slightly since Tesco sold them to a US investor. (It was previously our favorite market by far for a number of reasons; now they're more on par with Trader Joe's, which still isn't terrible, but they used to be so much better. Of course, they also were, as a Tesco CEO said before they sold it, "hemorrhaging money". Apparently they could only accept that for so long.)
To my knowledge, though, Ting is definitely making decent profits. They could just probably make *more* profit if they wanted to cut some corners and raise their prices (as opposed to what they did a few months ago, which was to randomly decide to *lower* their prices even more).
There are - there are *occasional* corporations that actually seem to be driven by the desire to share their love of a great product and delivering that product to their customers. It's rare, but I can think of a few. Granted, they tend to also be much smaller corporations than the Comcasts of the world, but that doesn't mean they have to be tiny local companies.
Slashdot Mirror
So, yes, their company sucks. Yes, all their products suck. Yes, the world would probably be a bit better of a place without Java in it, but I think you're being just a *tad* bit hyperbolic, or are you literally saying, given the choice between a world were 11 million people didn't die in the Holocaust, or one with no Java, you'd choose the latter?
I would mod you up, but I don't have mod points at the moment. So I will instead comment that this is entirely accurate: when I say that I xerox'd something, I have absolutely no clue whether the machine I used to copy a paper was actual a Xerox brand machine. When I say I used a kleenex, it's extremely *unlikely*, in fact, that I actually used a Kleenex-brand tissue.
On the other hand, when I tell someone to google something, I mean use freaking Google, not anything else. Because everything else freaking blows. (I tried using duckduckgo once, a couple years ago. I liked what they were doing, but I realized after a couple weeks that like 75% of the time I just ended up putting !google in the search if I actually wanted decent search results, so I said screw it and went back to Google.)
If your supermarket doesn't carry the kind of mustard you like, you can find another supermarket. If none of them around you carry the kind of mustard you like, you might pay more in shipping, but you can probably still get it shipped from somewhere else where that mustard is more popular.
If your ISP blows, you can... move to a different city. Maybe. If they aren't the only ISP there, too.
While I agree that this stunt was kinda idiotic of them, I would like to ask: if you have monthly data quotas, why the frack do you have your iTunes set to automatically synch off my butt while you're connected over 3/4g rather than only on wifi? You kinda deserve it at that point.
I do! By which I mean actually a bunch of renamed pictures of goatse and tubgirl... :p
"If you want entertainment, then you really ought to pay the creator of that entertainment."
The problem is that by paying for cable, that is *not* what you're doing. It's several steps back from actually paying the people creating the content, to the point where they get basically crap-all out of it. I would *love* to pay the people responsible for creating the content; I have less love for the concept of most of my money going to the people screwing us over at [whichever one cable company your area happens to be allowed to purchase cable through.]
Wow. That does kinda blow, but sounds like an even better reason to *get* Cyanogen. Note: those "standard installation instructions" only work on a particular, rather small subset of Android phones. Cyanogenmod itself works on a much larger subset, though I think still not all of them, I have no idea if the Galaxy S Captivate is one of them or not. (Though it looks like the answer is yes?)
I installed Cyanogenmod on my previous phone that was stuck on 2.3 (and full of crapware I didn't want)... I had to first root it and install a bootloader, which was a bit of a pain to get working, but totally worth it.
It's here. You're welcome.
Employers are, however, allowed to fire a person for any reason (other than obviously the usual set of racist, sexist, etc. reason), or for no reason at all. This includes the reason of "we require you to take an hour lunch break and you haven't been doing that". So whether or not you're required to by law is irrelevant, just whether or not the company *claims* that you're required to by law and are going to enforce that possibly-incorrect interpretation.
Ignorance of what? I have a choice between a single crappy dsl provider, and a single crappy cable internet provider. They're both terrible, and at this point, no matter what awful crap Verizon puts me through, I feel stuck with them because I know if I cancel, I'll probably be days to weeks without internet again as Charter screws up installation and turn-on just as badly as Verizon did (necessitating taking what was supposed to be a couple hours, and ended up being an entire day, off work trying to find someone, anyone who could actually fix the completely-their-fault issue that resulted in the installation guy basically throwing his hands up in confusion and leaving. After which day I still didn't have internet for about a week and a half.)
So what ignorance exactly? I have exactly 0 power to change any of that, without about 20 gajillion dollars and some senators in my pocket.
I am all for a self-driving car. I really hope my current car lasts until we can purchase decent self-driving cars, and I will be happy to purchase one for a price that I wouldn't really consider buying anything else short of houses.
But I want to be able to take entirely manual control back at any time, using a completely non-electronic, fully-mechanical override. I would hope to never have to actually *do* that, but I wouldn't trust any car that didn't have that *available*. Even if I completely trust the pseudo-AI to not bug out and do something crazy, which I wouldn't immediately but certainly could after using it for a while and not having any issues with it... I would *not* trust that some hacker couldn't find some way to hack in somehow and mess with things. Thus, I would want to trust in my ability to perform a manual override and completely temporarily shunt the computer systems off to a place where they couldn't control the car at all.
I am entirely willing to accept the minor inconvenience of hardware UI elements (i.e. steering wheel, pedals, etc.) getting in the way of aesthetics, and the slight additional cost of manufacturing said UI elements. And I'm *glad* they're pushing for that to be law, or else nobody would actually do it, even as an option - we've seen a number of examples of things I'd love to be able to pay for (phones with physical keyboards, 16:10 laptop screens), but nobody makes them because they're slightly more expensive to make, and companies feel the drive to make everything as cheap as possible and not even give the option. :(
And apparently you don't know anything about pop culture, or else are being willfully obtuse? It's pretty clear they didn't name it after the car, but after a particular famous *use* of the car to travel through time. Doesn't matter how crappy your car is, if it's also a time machine.
Seriously, slashdot, wtf? It's 2014, you're nominally a tech site for geeks, and you still don't support unicode characters? That should be a basic requirement of all websites at this point.
Quoth:
aÂnomÂaÂly
É(TM)ËnÃmÉ(TM)lÄ"/
noun
Something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected.
I'd say a rocket exploding for no good reason is definitely a bug, but also pretty freaking unexpected.
I also feel the same way about Tor as I do about DuckDuckGo: great ideas in theory, but way too much of a pain to use, given that I don't really have anything terribly important to hide.
Screw that. It is *definitely* about the UX. Linux doesn't even need to court the everyday "I don't know how to get pictures off my digital camera even though it's been explained to me 500 times" crowd to make some inroads into the desktop market. It'd be enough to make better inroads in the computer enthusiast world, the sort of people who know what they're doing, and are happy to mod their OSes to a certain extent, but who still *also* use their computers mainly to get things done.
I'd love to run Linux as a primary OS, but I've tried all kinds of distros, and there has not been a single desktop environment that felt robust and professional, where things were in places I'd expect and everything just worked without a lot of unnecessary fiddling and looking up of vague error messages. That is completely a UX issue. (Ok, yes, some of those error messages requiring fiddling were also device support-related, but still.)
The kernel is great, yes. So is Win8's. The UX is where Win8 failed, and it's where Linux (of various flavors) has been failing too.
I disagree. Maker is a totally great word. Makers are those with magical anti-entropy powers, who devote their lives to stymying the plots of the Unmaker. It's a pretty common trope, and a good word for that sort of character.
(On the other hand, the definition used in *this* article, is as dumb as you are arguing. I just like to imagine that people using the word are using it in the OSC definition, thus making articles just *so* much more entertaining.)
Hey! What's wrong with being nobody? (See my username.)
No it wouldn't; there's no end-paren.
I actually did know a guy in college who majored in "science". Specifically, he was crazy intense and managed to swing a double major in physics and biochem, but we all just joked that he was majoring in "science".
i.e. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...
Which works, though I would have had more fun going the other direction, being like "This was a FANTASTIC HOTEL. Its food was DEFINITELY NOT TERRIBLE, and when I went to check in, the guy at the front desk definitely did NOT spend half an hour ignoring me to instead post pictures on facebook. There was NOT a roach problem, and the toilet in the bathroom definitely did NOT stop up a bunch of times."
Deep down, were you secretly holding out just a tiny bit of hope that if you got down to the bottom, you'd find Builders or something like them? I know I would be.
Peter Hoddie is a time lord!
Your second hypothesis might well be true, as that is kind of what drives publicly-traded companies. None of the handful of companies I could think of off the top of my head are public. Most notably, the Sprint MVNO Ting, which could easily charge more than they do and still be one of the cheapest around, and who totally don't technically NEED to make it so easy to talk to a competent person on the phone if you call them for help (nobody else does...).
Fresh & Easy, the west coast supermarket chain, also came to mind, though sadly their prices have been going up and variety and quality has gone down slightly since Tesco sold them to a US investor. (It was previously our favorite market by far for a number of reasons; now they're more on par with Trader Joe's, which still isn't terrible, but they used to be so much better. Of course, they also were, as a Tesco CEO said before they sold it, "hemorrhaging money". Apparently they could only accept that for so long.)
To my knowledge, though, Ting is definitely making decent profits. They could just probably make *more* profit if they wanted to cut some corners and raise their prices (as opposed to what they did a few months ago, which was to randomly decide to *lower* their prices even more).
There are - there are *occasional* corporations that actually seem to be driven by the desire to share their love of a great product and delivering that product to their customers. It's rare, but I can think of a few. Granted, they tend to also be much smaller corporations than the Comcasts of the world, but that doesn't mean they have to be tiny local companies.