My experience of offshoring to India (my company's also done it to a fair degree) is that the technical people there are well-educated and intelligent (just about all of them have degrees) and that they're willing to work VERY HARD to bring their field skills up as quickly as possible. Whereas most of us in the Western World get home and put our feet up with a beer in front of the TV, a lot of the Indian workers will stay at the office late into the evening reading technical manuals - the likes of us in Europe and the US cannot compete with that.
However, on the downside, because India is an emerging country, there are no real-world skills out there as of yet and a lot of what you do in a technical support role is not based on what you know but applying logic and standard techniques to fault-finding which you can only have taught yourself through previous field experience. As well as this, Indian workers tend to be very direct and to the point when they speak to customers and this can sometimes be taken as rudeness - this is just down to differing social attitudes.
I do personally think it is wrong that mega-corporations suck wealth from the richer countries without giving back jobs in those same countries but, IMHO, that's up to each government to step in and impose additional profit taxation on those companies to make it more expensive for them to do that - and if you don't agree with that, look at the number of neighbourhoods in the Western World that have sprung up around big technology parks (because people like to live closer to their places of work) which have subsequently been decimated because of redundancies and off-shoring. That's a very clear demonstration of the total LACK of social considerations many corporations have.
But as far as employees in India goes, if company HR departments think that they're good enough for the jobs then let them have them - none of us think of the other unsuccessful applicants for a job if you or I get offered it - so why should they care either?
I've been in telecoms now for almost 25 years, I've never done anything else but field engineering or tech support work, I thoroughly enjoy training people but have no aspirations to enter management.
From what started as a career for me with British Telecom in traditional analogue telecoms (AC15 signalling, point-to-point circuits, PCM, etc) has now ended up with VoIP & SIP. I've become a UNIX & Linux expert (even an RHCE), know my way around pretty much any Windows system, I've worked on CTI, voice recorders, voicemail, predictive diallers, programmed shell-scripts, C & Perl, written web sites in HTML & CSS, advised customers on network security...
I've achieved all this just because I'm a technology geek who's always prepared to go learn stuff "on the fly" as I need to know it, rather than insist on traditional training and certifications. This type of work is as much about knowing your limitiations and who to ask when you need help, as it is about knowing stuff yourself. Always learn & always be prepared to tech someone...
All-in-all, it's a great career, I earn enough to enjoy a comfortable life & I'll die happy with a laptop in front of me and a screwdriver in my hand.:-)
I usually hate open source because it is anti-capitalist
...And there is a lot more to life than just accruing wealth.
Ultimately, open source is about everyone competing on a level playing field whether or not they have the money to pay for expensive software licenses. No, I'm no Stallman, if people want to make money from software then good luck to them & if open source makes those people work harder for their money & market share then even better - that can only be good for the consumer ultimately.
So please stop messing with what you don't understand & go back to admiring your bank balance.
Rodenticides are "anti-rat" but then a lot of people hate rats...
This is an excellent observation & I can give a real-life example of where precisely this effect has happened.
In the UK, the clothing chain French Connection is currently suffering quite badly through poor sales. Probably about 3 years ago (I'm no expert so someone correct me on the timescale if I'm wrong), the chain decided to market itself through the logo "FCUK" (French Connection UK) with the obvious connotations of the "shock" factor of a logo that is *almost* a rude word.
This atracted the morons in their droves and you couldn't go anywhere down a UK high street without seeing the FCUK logo emblazoned somewhere on someone's clothing. However, since then, FC have discovered that the same campaign drove a lot of customers away also and now the FCUK campaign has lost its shock value, their sales are down.
What I find even more insiduous is that FC now seem to be using a different type of "shock tactic" in their advertising campaign (as I witnessed when I went to the cinema last weekend). Now we're treated to two female models catfighting in a dirty dungeon dressed in FC clothes and then kissing each other at the end of the ad. Okay, not unpleasant images for any red-blooded male to view, I agree, but am I supposed to be shocked by this ad? If the intention was to get me to buy FC clothes, then I'm at a loss to understand how they achieved that with that advert...
Perhaps, then, you're not in the best position to comment on how responsive Windows developers are to feedback ?
But that's not what I was saying in the first place.
I was making a point from the users', not developers', perspective when I made the statement that the perception with commercial software is that the user hands over money for a shrink-wrapped box and gets a product that might do all that he/she needs or might not. If it does not, my experience is that most people just sit back and do nothing, in the same way they might do if they bought a crap CD or awful DVD movie.
Whilst I accept this is probably not the case for enterprise-level applications software that costs ten/hundreds of thousands of dollars/pounds/Euros per licence, for Joe Sixpack going into his local PC World store, peering at the racks of shrinkwrapped software is no different to peering at boxes of breakfast cereal in the local supermarket - i.e. pick one that looks good, if you take it home & it isn't very good then just buy something else when you go in next time.
I'm not saying that every computer user needs to turn into a software geek but most users should learn to at least give feedback to software developers more so that the software they actually need hopefully and eventually gets created.
Why the hostility? I don't like SUVs, or jacked-up 4x4 pickup trucks, or things that imply some sense of "utility" but in practice have about zero.
Firstly, I'm in England where we have a road system that already grinds to a halt whenever we have a half-inch of snow or a car with a flat tire on the motorway 200 miles away - so any additional, needlessly oversized vehicles contribute to that. (I actually believe our goverment could do a lot by giving companies tax breaks to use rail freight more and to get haulage moved by road more at night to alleviate some of the daytime traffic problems).
Secondly, SUVs are "selfish mobiles". They're generally designed to have bigger front and rear impact bars that inflict more damage to the other vehicle in an impact than to you in the SUV. This means that in an SUV you can afford to be over-confident and less considerate to other road users - which SUV drivers frequently are here. (Incidentally, the same is true for drivers of big/sports cars here also.)
Thirdly, their size. Try getting into and out of your car in the average British car parking space where there is an SUV on each side. Personally, I'd create double-sized spaces for them and charge double the parking cost...
I've got no problem with people using them when there is a need for them - like in rural areas. But for 99.9% of SUV drivers, it's about "show", nothing more.
When was the last time you sent a developer feedback about their Windows software ?
You really are asking the wrong person here.
I support Linux-based telecoms servers in my job and most of the tools I use are in-house ones on UNIX & Linux. Any development I do is in PERL, Python and C on UNIX, all of which are available freely. I don't develop on Windows (have no need to) and use MS Office on Windows XP through a company license - but that's really only for familiarity & compatibility reasons.
Other than that, at home, I use a few small on-line registered tools within Windows like GetRight, Tag & Rename, etc.(which I have sent feedback on incidentally) but my remaining software is free software - like Firefox, GIMP, Vim, IrfanView, Crimson Editor & Ethereal.
I don't personally like paying for software (I have no problem with those that do) and don't consider piracy to be the answer to that - since I have no real need for complex, highly-specialised applications (like Photoshop for graphics for example) I can usually find a free app that suits my needs anyhow.
So you really are asking the wrong person that question - I can count the amount of commercial (Windows) apps I use on one hand...
they're finding new ways to group shoppers by age, Zip Code, and reading habits
You know something? I'll be really happy about being a member of the human race when we all turn into free-thinking individuals who appreciate uniqueness in ourselves and in others. The fact that too many people revel in mediocrity & lack of change in their lives means that the marketing vultures can use their insiduous "pigeon-holing" techniques to sucker yet more money out of us.
PLEASE don't make it easy for these people - don't just buy one type of music, don't just read political novels, have the GUTS to try something new and different occasionally.
As people, we are the sum of our experiences & if all we've ever experienced is mediocrity, then we are mediocre as people.
It's become clear in recent years that bandwidth is a pretty cheap commodity & than most of us with fast DSL & broadband connections don't use anywhere near all of the bandwidth we have anyway - so sending more stuff down that bandwidth has to be a good thing for the consumer in terms of prices.
Personally, I'm looking forward to the slow painful death of the mobile phone companies - a consortium of price-fixing, extortion-using pirates if ever there were any. The cost of mobile phone calls is *TRULY DISGUSTING*...
I'm a techie in the telecoms industry myself, in the business convergence arena, and I'm looking forward to the rollout of SIP and greater spread of wireless - then it becomes feasible for ISPs to provide telephone connectivity & mobility, together with reasonable call charging so that we can wave "Bye Bye" to the likes of Vodaphone and O2 and Orange (in the UK at least).
Now *THERE'S* something with useless features no-one ever uses...
I'd make SUV owners pay ten times the taxes on fuel if they continue to use the roads - let them have fuel at the same prices as us "road car" owners if they go cross-country wherever they go. (In which case, of course, the SUV's suspension would be shot to hell within a year, the owners would realise they'd made a big mistake buying one & can go back to being less selfish and buy a normal car.)
SUV owners? Put them on their own desert island with their vehicles and spray them orange - hanging is too good for them...
If you're handing out memberships to an "old fogeys" club, you can count me in!
I'm pretty happy with standard DVDs on my non-HDTV TV at home connected to a reasonable hifi amp with a nice pair of speakers (one for each ear, works at my knowledge level of mathematics)...
I'm in the UK and just have terrestrial TV, when I watch it. I can't justify paying for a cable/satellite service that has adverts on it - I'd pay for no ads or have it free with ads, no compromise there...
I have a Nokia 6310i mobile phone that's about 3 years old & just makes phone calls & stores numbers - no camera, colour screen but it fits into my equally old car kit fine...
I have a 1MB DSL service because that's all I can get in my area. I'd like more but I'll live with this until there's an upgrade, it's no biggie...
I think far too many people (particularly the younger generation) get dragged into this "new technology is cool" thing without thinking about it - they just fall for the hype, hand over their money and off they go for six months until the next model comes out.
To be fair, I was probably the same 10-15 years ago but then there was less choice, less advertising and less constant change - now I figure something is worth buying only if most or all of its features are useful to me.
Yes, I'm turning into a miserable old git who actively avoids brand names ("How come Gap don't pay me to wear that T-shirt with their logo on it?") but what the hell... we ALL become our fathers one day...
I've never has the need to use Apple hardware or OS X so I'm not qualified to comment on either.
Windows XP is the best OS Microsoft have done so far - provided that you get rid of the *TRULY AWFUL* default Windows XP UI & go back to the "Classic" UI, as well as doing some registry hacks to get rid of all the "patronising" features that treat you like a five year old. When you do that, and accept Windows big design flaw (the ever-expanding, ever-fragmenting registry), it's worth using. I still, personally, use Linux much more but that's because of what I do on my computers & the way I like to do it.
What I *REALLY* have a problem with is the *WINDOWS MENTALITY*...
I've been using Linux and free software now for many years & it's great when I can run my favourite free apps on Windows or Linux - Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP, Vim, OpenOffice, etc. Sure, many of free apps don't compare feature-for-feature with some of their commercial equivalents but if I've ever been in the situation where I've felt a free application needs an additional feature, then I've dropped an email to the developers of that app to say what feature their app needs and why I think it needs it. I've not always got a response but at least I hope someone is maybe considering my suggestion. But in my mind, this type of feedback is core to the advancement of free software because it gives the developers a viewpoint of their software from the usability perspective.
Unfortunately, the "Windows Mentality" deems that you don't feedback to software creators - instead, you just hand over money & have a shrink-wrapped box put in your hands. And when you try out the software, it either does what you want it to do or doesn't; if it's the latter, you just use it, put up with it & wait for the next version...
I really don't care how many people use Windows and whether or not they'll migrate to Linux. But I do wish many Windows users would make more of an effort looking for free software apps & just try them out. Rather than just handing out money, or passing round CDs of cracked commercial apps, I wish they'd put some energy into giving free software a try & contacting the developers - whether to just say "Thanks" or to suggest enhancements to their software.
I don't believe all software should be free - whether you write programs or paint ceilings, you deserve renumeration for any hard work you do if that's what you want. But the free software movement is one where everyone who has access to a computer can take part in - and with many mature free apps, they're now at a stage where it's the users who dictate "what happens next" by telling the devlopers what's needed.
Unfortunately, far too many people just sit there expecting software to just "fall into their laps" after they hand over money & it's that mentality that needs to change here.
I don't keep up on aviation news as much as I used to but I thought the RAF was going in the direction of Eurofighter Tycoon because Britain has a stake in it's development - with the exception of the Lockheed Hercules and a few Boeing airliners converted for military use, I don't think we've ever bought any military aircraft that weren't British developed or that we didn't at least have some development involvement (like the Tornado, for example).
Don't get me wrong - as a British tax payer, I hope we're buying the best aircraft that's the best value for money for our armed forces, although, if we are buying JSF, I suspect it's more as a result of Bush & Blair's love for each other than best price.
Vinyl stored properly, on edge, will last for centuries. As well as storing far more information that information is much more durable.
That's simply not true. The BBC, for example, stores a huge amount of old recordings deep within it's vaults - music, old radio shows, TV programs, etc. These are stored on tape, film & vinyl and on all the media types, they're having big problems transferring those original recordings to new storage media types due to deterioration.
Yes, if you put a CD and a vinyl album side-by-side in a pressure sealed, constant temperature vault for 50 years, it's quite possible that the vinyl album will play better than the CD 50 years later because the inks used to print on the CD have eaten through the silver film.
But, I'm sorry. Everytime you take the vinyl album out of it's sleeve, every time you play it, every time you allow the oils on your fingers to touch its surface, you will do some microscopic damage to a vinyl LP which, over a period of time, will make it unplayable.
Agreed, the surface of a CD can be affected in precisely the same way but every CD player has built in error checking meaning that you won't necessarily hear any imperfections on the CD surface.
For a majority of the music I listen to (indie, neo-folk, college, etc...)
Sorry, but I think the fact that you need to categorise what you listen to into such microscopic categories indicates that you're just promoting vinyl because it's a "cool" thing to do.
Vinyl works as a medium if you spend an extortionate amount of money to spend on a hi-fi system and have even more money to spend on a storage vault for your vinyl albums that keeps them at a fixed air temperature and humidity. Anything else and they warp very easily, you can hear every scratch, and each time you play them the quality detiorates due to the unavoidable wear you induce on them due to the friction of a stylus rubbing against the side of the grooves.
I won't pretend to understand DJs and the dance music scene but IMHO limited vinyl pressings and "white labels" are simply about creating an artificial "rareness" to make every DJ think he's that bit more special than any other DJ.
and that there is no way they will last as long as vinyl (contrary to all the hype about durability and tolerance for scratches)
In my experience, that's definitely not true. Vinyl warps at much lower temperatures than CD (if only because a vinyl LP is a much bigger disc physically than a CD) and if you scratch a vinyl album, you'll almost definitely get a click whereas if you scratch a CD, the built in error-correction in a CD means there's a pretty good chance you won't notice it.
Although I do accept that CDs are totally overhyped for tolerance - I recently started ripping my CD collection to MP3 and have thrown out about 10 CDs that were, at worst, 10 years old, where they've become unplayable. They've always been stored inside my warm, dry house, always in cases out of the light, but the silver film has become discoloured on some of them (with a gold-ish tinge around the edges) or even started to break up with pin-prick holes appearing in the film.
If they don't rip, they are useless to me. (sorry Sony artists)
There are none that don't rip (at least the one's I've tried) with Exact Audio Copy (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/ on Windows or CDParanoia on Linux - plus you can plug LAME as an external codec into both of them.
If a CD costs $10 - $17 bucks, 25% of the tracks are good, 25% are ok and the rest is crap it's just not worth it.
With respect, I think that's a far too generic statement to make. Sure, a lot of people follow very specific bands and will end up buying every CD or album a specific band produces. Consequently, because every band releases brilliant, mediocre and crap albums, some of those are not going to feel like they are worth the money because of paying for filler tracks.
My attitude to music is to appreciate the album, not necessarily the band. That means that I don't listen to my music on a track-by-track basis but on an album-by-album basis from start to finish. As a result, I have a very diverse CD collection of entire albums I love but where I have the complete back catalogue of very few bands.
And since I try to listen to every album before I buy it, I don't consider I have many CDs with filler tracks on them.
Incidentally, I'm not saying my way of listening to music is better than the way you do it, it's just a different approach and requirement for music between the two of us. I just don't accept your blanket statement.
I know you say you collect both CD and vinyl but I've never understood why some audiophiles think that vinyl in better than CD.
I do accept that keeping analogue music sound in an analogue storage format (vinyl) means that no sound quality is lost in conversion. But to *really* bring hear that difference, you need to spend a huge amount on a decent turntable, amp & speaker setup - plus, every time you play that album, it will degrade slightly anyway, both in terms of wear on the vinyl and on the stylus. Not to mention the extra caution you need to take storing vinyl albums so they don't get scratched and don't warp due to excessive temperatures.
To get excellent sound quality from CDs, you don't need to spend anywhere near as much on hifi and, providing you take reasonable care of the CD, it will sound just as good on the 100th play as it did on the 1st one.
I would never pay Tower prices ($18.99 for a new CD, who the hey are they kidding!)
Hey, come on over for a great music shopping spree to the UK! At the current dollar/pound exchange rate, you'll be lucky to pick up a music CD in HMV or Virgin for anything less than $25!!!
To me, HMV and Virgin are just showrooms anyway. Great to browse round to see what's new to buy - then just go home and buy it for half the price on Amazon or eBay.
I would dearly love someone to explain to me how these shops stay in business. I thought most people were shopping on line these days now so how these rip-off merchants survive charging these prices, I have no idea.
I have even seen countless "Sale" and "Special Offer" items in these stores that are *still* more expensive than the standard prices charged by Amazon and Play. And *even worse*, I've seen DVDs on sale at £10 one week and then at £20 the following week in a "Buy One Get One Free Offer"!!!
Are there *STILL* that many people who are that gullible???
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This is NOT true - there are plenty of vendors who sell bare machines; or rather, they give you a PC installed with one of the free DOS variants.
In the UK, I bought a blank PC for my home Linux server from Novatech - Windows XP was available for about £30 extra.
You may need to hunt around but they are available.
However, on the downside, because India is an emerging country, there are no real-world skills out there as of yet and a lot of what you do in a technical support role is not based on what you know but applying logic and standard techniques to fault-finding which you can only have taught yourself through previous field experience. As well as this, Indian workers tend to be very direct and to the point when they speak to customers and this can sometimes be taken as rudeness - this is just down to differing social attitudes.
I do personally think it is wrong that mega-corporations suck wealth from the richer countries without giving back jobs in those same countries but, IMHO, that's up to each government to step in and impose additional profit taxation on those companies to make it more expensive for them to do that - and if you don't agree with that, look at the number of neighbourhoods in the Western World that have sprung up around big technology parks (because people like to live closer to their places of work) which have subsequently been decimated because of redundancies and off-shoring. That's a very clear demonstration of the total LACK of social considerations many corporations have.
But as far as employees in India goes, if company HR departments think that they're good enough for the jobs then let them have them - none of us think of the other unsuccessful applicants for a job if you or I get offered it - so why should they care either?
From what started as a career for me with British Telecom in traditional analogue telecoms (AC15 signalling, point-to-point circuits, PCM, etc) has now ended up with VoIP & SIP. I've become a UNIX & Linux expert (even an RHCE), know my way around pretty much any Windows system, I've worked on CTI, voice recorders, voicemail, predictive diallers, programmed shell-scripts, C & Perl, written web sites in HTML & CSS, advised customers on network security...
I've achieved all this just because I'm a technology geek who's always prepared to go learn stuff "on the fly" as I need to know it, rather than insist on traditional training and certifications. This type of work is as much about knowing your limitiations and who to ask when you need help, as it is about knowing stuff yourself. Always learn & always be prepared to tech someone...
All-in-all, it's a great career, I earn enough to enjoy a comfortable life & I'll die happy with a laptop in front of me and a screwdriver in my hand. :-)
Ultimately, open source is about everyone competing on a level playing field whether or not they have the money to pay for expensive software licenses. No, I'm no Stallman, if people want to make money from software then good luck to them & if open source makes those people work harder for their money & market share then even better - that can only be good for the consumer ultimately.
So please stop messing with what you don't understand & go back to admiring your bank balance.
Rodenticides are "anti-rat" but then a lot of people hate rats...
This is an excellent observation & I can give a real-life example of where precisely this effect has happened. In the UK, the clothing chain French Connection is currently suffering quite badly through poor sales. Probably about 3 years ago (I'm no expert so someone correct me on the timescale if I'm wrong), the chain decided to market itself through the logo "FCUK" (French Connection UK) with the obvious connotations of the "shock" factor of a logo that is *almost* a rude word. This atracted the morons in their droves and you couldn't go anywhere down a UK high street without seeing the FCUK logo emblazoned somewhere on someone's clothing. However, since then, FC have discovered that the same campaign drove a lot of customers away also and now the FCUK campaign has lost its shock value, their sales are down. What I find even more insiduous is that FC now seem to be using a different type of "shock tactic" in their advertising campaign (as I witnessed when I went to the cinema last weekend). Now we're treated to two female models catfighting in a dirty dungeon dressed in FC clothes and then kissing each other at the end of the ad. Okay, not unpleasant images for any red-blooded male to view, I agree, but am I supposed to be shocked by this ad? If the intention was to get me to buy FC clothes, then I'm at a loss to understand how they achieved that with that advert...
But that's not what I was saying in the first place.
I was making a point from the users', not developers', perspective when I made the statement that the perception with commercial software is that the user hands over money for a shrink-wrapped box and gets a product that might do all that he/she needs or might not. If it does not, my experience is that most people just sit back and do nothing, in the same way they might do if they bought a crap CD or awful DVD movie.
Whilst I accept this is probably not the case for enterprise-level applications software that costs ten/hundreds of thousands of dollars/pounds/Euros per licence, for Joe Sixpack going into his local PC World store, peering at the racks of shrinkwrapped software is no different to peering at boxes of breakfast cereal in the local supermarket - i.e. pick one that looks good, if you take it home & it isn't very good then just buy something else when you go in next time.
I'm not saying that every computer user needs to turn into a software geek but most users should learn to at least give feedback to software developers more so that the software they actually need hopefully and eventually gets created.
Firstly, I'm in England where we have a road system that already grinds to a halt whenever we have a half-inch of snow or a car with a flat tire on the motorway 200 miles away - so any additional, needlessly oversized vehicles contribute to that. (I actually believe our goverment could do a lot by giving companies tax breaks to use rail freight more and to get haulage moved by road more at night to alleviate some of the daytime traffic problems).
Secondly, SUVs are "selfish mobiles". They're generally designed to have bigger front and rear impact bars that inflict more damage to the other vehicle in an impact than to you in the SUV. This means that in an SUV you can afford to be over-confident and less considerate to other road users - which SUV drivers frequently are here. (Incidentally, the same is true for drivers of big/sports cars here also.)
Thirdly, their size. Try getting into and out of your car in the average British car parking space where there is an SUV on each side. Personally, I'd create double-sized spaces for them and charge double the parking cost...
I've got no problem with people using them when there is a need for them - like in rural areas. But for 99.9% of SUV drivers, it's about "show", nothing more.
You really are asking the wrong person here.
I support Linux-based telecoms servers in my job and most of the tools I use are in-house ones on UNIX & Linux. Any development I do is in PERL, Python and C on UNIX, all of which are available freely. I don't develop on Windows (have no need to) and use MS Office on Windows XP through a company license - but that's really only for familiarity & compatibility reasons.
Other than that, at home, I use a few small on-line registered tools within Windows like GetRight, Tag & Rename, etc.(which I have sent feedback on incidentally) but my remaining software is free software - like Firefox, GIMP, Vim, IrfanView, Crimson Editor & Ethereal.
I don't personally like paying for software (I have no problem with those that do) and don't consider piracy to be the answer to that - since I have no real need for complex, highly-specialised applications (like Photoshop for graphics for example) I can usually find a free app that suits my needs anyhow.
So you really are asking the wrong person that question - I can count the amount of commercial (Windows) apps I use on one hand...
You know something? I'll be really happy about being a member of the human race when we all turn into free-thinking individuals who appreciate uniqueness in ourselves and in others. The fact that too many people revel in mediocrity & lack of change in their lives means that the marketing vultures can use their insiduous "pigeon-holing" techniques to sucker yet more money out of us.
PLEASE don't make it easy for these people - don't just buy one type of music, don't just read political novels, have the GUTS to try something new and different occasionally.
As people, we are the sum of our experiences & if all we've ever experienced is mediocrity, then we are mediocre as people.
..."Welease Wobin! Welease Wobin!"
Personally, I'm looking forward to the slow painful death of the mobile phone companies - a consortium of price-fixing, extortion-using pirates if ever there were any. The cost of mobile phone calls is *TRULY DISGUSTING*...
I'm a techie in the telecoms industry myself, in the business convergence arena, and I'm looking forward to the rollout of SIP and greater spread of wireless - then it becomes feasible for ISPs to provide telephone connectivity & mobility, together with reasonable call charging so that we can wave "Bye Bye" to the likes of Vodaphone and O2 and Orange (in the UK at least).
"Good riddance to bad rubbish" say I...
Now *THERE'S* something with useless features no-one ever uses...
I'd make SUV owners pay ten times the taxes on fuel if they continue to use the roads - let them have fuel at the same prices as us "road car" owners if they go cross-country wherever they go. (In which case, of course, the SUV's suspension would be shot to hell within a year, the owners would realise they'd made a big mistake buying one & can go back to being less selfish and buy a normal car.)
SUV owners? Put them on their own desert island with their vehicles and spray them orange - hanging is too good for them...
I'm pretty happy with standard DVDs on my non-HDTV TV at home connected to a reasonable hifi amp with a nice pair of speakers (one for each ear, works at my knowledge level of mathematics)...
I'm in the UK and just have terrestrial TV, when I watch it. I can't justify paying for a cable/satellite service that has adverts on it - I'd pay for no ads or have it free with ads, no compromise there...
I have a Nokia 6310i mobile phone that's about 3 years old & just makes phone calls & stores numbers - no camera, colour screen but it fits into my equally old car kit fine...
I have a 1MB DSL service because that's all I can get in my area. I'd like more but I'll live with this until there's an upgrade, it's no biggie...
I think far too many people (particularly the younger generation) get dragged into this "new technology is cool" thing without thinking about it - they just fall for the hype, hand over their money and off they go for six months until the next model comes out.
To be fair, I was probably the same 10-15 years ago but then there was less choice, less advertising and less constant change - now I figure something is worth buying only if most or all of its features are useful to me.
Yes, I'm turning into a miserable old git who actively avoids brand names ("How come Gap don't pay me to wear that T-shirt with their logo on it?") but what the hell... we ALL become our fathers one day...
Windows XP is the best OS Microsoft have done so far - provided that you get rid of the *TRULY AWFUL* default Windows XP UI & go back to the "Classic" UI, as well as doing some registry hacks to get rid of all the "patronising" features that treat you like a five year old. When you do that, and accept Windows big design flaw (the ever-expanding, ever-fragmenting registry), it's worth using. I still, personally, use Linux much more but that's because of what I do on my computers & the way I like to do it.
What I *REALLY* have a problem with is the *WINDOWS MENTALITY*...
I've been using Linux and free software now for many years & it's great when I can run my favourite free apps on Windows or Linux - Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP, Vim, OpenOffice, etc. Sure, many of free apps don't compare feature-for-feature with some of their commercial equivalents but if I've ever been in the situation where I've felt a free application needs an additional feature, then I've dropped an email to the developers of that app to say what feature their app needs and why I think it needs it. I've not always got a response but at least I hope someone is maybe considering my suggestion. But in my mind, this type of feedback is core to the advancement of free software because it gives the developers a viewpoint of their software from the usability perspective.
Unfortunately, the "Windows Mentality" deems that you don't feedback to software creators - instead, you just hand over money & have a shrink-wrapped box put in your hands. And when you try out the software, it either does what you want it to do or doesn't; if it's the latter, you just use it, put up with it & wait for the next version...
I really don't care how many people use Windows and whether or not they'll migrate to Linux. But I do wish many Windows users would make more of an effort looking for free software apps & just try them out. Rather than just handing out money, or passing round CDs of cracked commercial apps, I wish they'd put some energy into giving free software a try & contacting the developers - whether to just say "Thanks" or to suggest enhancements to their software.
I don't believe all software should be free - whether you write programs or paint ceilings, you deserve renumeration for any hard work you do if that's what you want. But the free software movement is one where everyone who has access to a computer can take part in - and with many mature free apps, they're now at a stage where it's the users who dictate "what happens next" by telling the devlopers what's needed.
Unfortunately, far too many people just sit there expecting software to just "fall into their laps" after they hand over money & it's that mentality that needs to change here.
...and lets see if those porn filters can cope with the prevalence of the colour green rather than pink.
My sharks with lasers beams will make mincemeat of your beetles with sub-machine guns!!!
I don't keep up on aviation news as much as I used to but I thought the RAF was going in the direction of Eurofighter Tycoon because Britain has a stake in it's development - with the exception of the Lockheed Hercules and a few Boeing airliners converted for military use, I don't think we've ever bought any military aircraft that weren't British developed or that we didn't at least have some development involvement (like the Tornado, for example).
Don't get me wrong - as a British tax payer, I hope we're buying the best aircraft that's the best value for money for our armed forces, although, if we are buying JSF, I suspect it's more as a result of Bush & Blair's love for each other than best price.
That's simply not true. The BBC, for example, stores a huge amount of old recordings deep within it's vaults - music, old radio shows, TV programs, etc. These are stored on tape, film & vinyl and on all the media types, they're having big problems transferring those original recordings to new storage media types due to deterioration.
Yes, if you put a CD and a vinyl album side-by-side in a pressure sealed, constant temperature vault for 50 years, it's quite possible that the vinyl album will play better than the CD 50 years later because the inks used to print on the CD have eaten through the silver film.
But, I'm sorry. Everytime you take the vinyl album out of it's sleeve, every time you play it, every time you allow the oils on your fingers to touch its surface, you will do some microscopic damage to a vinyl LP which, over a period of time, will make it unplayable.
Agreed, the surface of a CD can be affected in precisely the same way but every CD player has built in error checking meaning that you won't necessarily hear any imperfections on the CD surface.
Repeat after me:
THERE IS NOTHING OUTSIDE OF THE SLASHDOT BUBBLE...
THERE IS NOTHING OUTSIDE OF THE SLASHDOT BUBBLE...
THERE IS NOTHING OUTSIDE OF THE SLASHDOT BUBBLE...
Sorry, but I think the fact that you need to categorise what you listen to into such microscopic categories indicates that you're just promoting vinyl because it's a "cool" thing to do.
Vinyl works as a medium if you spend an extortionate amount of money to spend on a hi-fi system and have even more money to spend on a storage vault for your vinyl albums that keeps them at a fixed air temperature and humidity. Anything else and they warp very easily, you can hear every scratch, and each time you play them the quality detiorates due to the unavoidable wear you induce on them due to the friction of a stylus rubbing against the side of the grooves.
I won't pretend to understand DJs and the dance music scene but IMHO limited vinyl pressings and "white labels" are simply about creating an artificial "rareness" to make every DJ think he's that bit more special than any other DJ.
In my experience, that's definitely not true. Vinyl warps at much lower temperatures than CD (if only because a vinyl LP is a much bigger disc physically than a CD) and if you scratch a vinyl album, you'll almost definitely get a click whereas if you scratch a CD, the built in error-correction in a CD means there's a pretty good chance you won't notice it.
Although I do accept that CDs are totally overhyped for tolerance - I recently started ripping my CD collection to MP3 and have thrown out about 10 CDs that were, at worst, 10 years old, where they've become unplayable. They've always been stored inside my warm, dry house, always in cases out of the light, but the silver film has become discoloured on some of them (with a gold-ish tinge around the edges) or even started to break up with pin-prick holes appearing in the film.
There are none that don't rip (at least the one's I've tried) with Exact Audio Copy (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/ on Windows or CDParanoia on Linux - plus you can plug LAME as an external codec into both of them.
With respect, I think that's a far too generic statement to make. Sure, a lot of people follow very specific bands and will end up buying every CD or album a specific band produces. Consequently, because every band releases brilliant, mediocre and crap albums, some of those are not going to feel like they are worth the money because of paying for filler tracks.
My attitude to music is to appreciate the album, not necessarily the band. That means that I don't listen to my music on a track-by-track basis but on an album-by-album basis from start to finish. As a result, I have a very diverse CD collection of entire albums I love but where I have the complete back catalogue of very few bands.
And since I try to listen to every album before I buy it, I don't consider I have many CDs with filler tracks on them.
Incidentally, I'm not saying my way of listening to music is better than the way you do it, it's just a different approach and requirement for music between the two of us. I just don't accept your blanket statement.
I do accept that keeping analogue music sound in an analogue storage format (vinyl) means that no sound quality is lost in conversion. But to *really* bring hear that difference, you need to spend a huge amount on a decent turntable, amp & speaker setup - plus, every time you play that album, it will degrade slightly anyway, both in terms of wear on the vinyl and on the stylus. Not to mention the extra caution you need to take storing vinyl albums so they don't get scratched and don't warp due to excessive temperatures.
To get excellent sound quality from CDs, you don't need to spend anywhere near as much on hifi and, providing you take reasonable care of the CD, it will sound just as good on the 100th play as it did on the 1st one.
Hey, come on over for a great music shopping spree to the UK! At the current dollar/pound exchange rate, you'll be lucky to pick up a music CD in HMV or Virgin for anything less than $25!!!
To me, HMV and Virgin are just showrooms anyway. Great to browse round to see what's new to buy - then just go home and buy it for half the price on Amazon or eBay.
I would dearly love someone to explain to me how these shops stay in business. I thought most people were shopping on line these days now so how these rip-off merchants survive charging these prices, I have no idea.
I have even seen countless "Sale" and "Special Offer" items in these stores that are *still* more expensive than the standard prices charged by Amazon and Play. And *even worse*, I've seen DVDs on sale at £10 one week and then at £20 the following week in a "Buy One Get One Free Offer"!!!
Are there *STILL* that many people who are that gullible???