That's quite a grudge you carry. What about in 50 years when none of the people involved in the root-kit fiasco even work there anymore. Sony isn't a single person. You could probably find plenty of anti-consumer actions taken by just about any company out there. If you want to boycott any company who ever did anything anti-consumer, you'd probably have to live self sustained on a desert island. Sony has done some truly stupid things over the years. But they've also brought us some pretty cool products.
First, I didn't see any comments, alluding to the fact that all people with liver problems are drunks. What I did read, is that a lot of people with drinking problems happen to have liver problems, and they will be very happy about this discovery. Also, there's a lot of ways to combat anxiety without any drugs at all. it may not work for people who are really far gone, but for many people, who have a moderate amount of anxiety, there are a few things you can do without spending any money.
#1, cut out the aritificial stimulants, coffee does nothing good for anxiety
#2. Get a good night's sleep. Ok some people can't sleep well, but (and I admit this might cost money) but sleep aid drugs are easily available (Nytol), and if not abused, can be beneficial.
#3. Get some exercise. I know, it sounds crazy, but exercise can really help to relieve some anxiety. And it also helps with the sleep. It's easy to fall asleep when your body is physically drained.
#4. Talk it out. Find a friend or family member and just talk it out. Talking about stuff with somebody supportive can go a lot way to getting you to stop worrying about stuff. Sometimes just saying stuff out loud is enough for you to figure stuff out for yourself.
Yeah, it really is just stupid users. I saw a "trending" game on the app store one day. It was basically an emulated copy of Mario Kart 64. However, it required just about every permission it could ask for. A ton of the comments where saying that it was a virus/spyware/malware, but "THE SAME USERS" were claiming that it was pretty good anyway, and that people should get this version, because it played better than any of the other versions out there. People are seriously so stupid. They get what they deserve.
I took software engineering and one of my classmates took some philosophy courses for fun. One of the classes was basically boolean algebra. Stuff like, If all foos are bars, and some bars are blats, then some foos are blats (answer true, false, or insufficient information). We had recently taken a course which dealt with quite a bit of boolean algebra in our required math courses. He said that it was pretty sad watching the philosophy students try to wrap their head around the boolean algebra stuff. Stuff that was easy to us in engineering/computer science because we deal with boolean logic all the time was completely over their heads. Multiple lectures had to be spent just to get through De Morgan's Laws.
Maybe it's all about value for money. I could either spend $10 a month, and have access to all the music ever recorded, or I could spend $10 a month and get one (maybe less) album per month. After 6 years of buying albums, I'd have 72 albums, or about 1000 songs. Why would I bother buying music when I could spend less and get more? Obviously there's no service that has all the music ever recorded but there are some services out there that have quite a large selection of music. Why would I want to spend money on buying CDs when I could have them stolen or broken. Why would I want to spend money on MP3s when a hard drive crash could mean that I have to buy them all over again (has Appled fixed this issue yet with iTunes, I know in the past you couldn't re-download songs you had already purchased).
I think the reason that laptops are outpacing desktops is because desktops hit the "good enough" stage quite a while ago. If you look at people who aren't power users, they have no reason to upgrade. Most now only buy desktops to replace their current one when it breaks down. Also, most households probably have one desktop computer. Laptops on the other hand are still in the position where they are worth upgrading every 2 years because of lack of ability to upgrade certain components, and because there are still quite a few advancements being made. My desktop is currently 5 years old, and I see no reason to upgrade it. It still does every thing I need it to do. My laptop on the other hand is only 1.5 years old, and I can already see some reasons for getting a new one, although I'll probably hold onto it until it's at least 3 years old. Also many households probably have 2 or 3 laptops. If you got a family with 2 teenage kids, it wouldn't be uncommon to have 4 laptops in the house..
Re:"I'm still waiting for my under $50 Macbook."
on
The $45 Windows Laptop
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I think that hasn't been true in a long time. You might be able to get a similarly spec'ed laptop if you didn't care about form-factor or style that much, but then it's not really the same product. The new Mac Book Pro has taken things even further by giving the best resolution available for the money. Doing a quick price comparison can show you they aren't overpriced at all. The Dell Ultrabook XPS 13 currently retails for $999, while the Mac Book Air 13" retails at $1199. Of course the Mac is more, but it has a 1400x900 screen as opposed to 720p resolution, 1.8GHz CPU as opposed to 1.6GHz CPU and a height of 0.68 inches vs. 0.71 inches. The rest of the main features seem to be about the same, and while some may say, what's the difference between.68 and.71 inches, well, it's still 5%, which takes quite a lot of engineering to get rid of when you are looking at laptops of this size. Mac laptops are quite competitively priced, the only problem is they've decided not to make $400 laptops. Which is fine, because there is no money to be made in that market anyway.
I live in Ontario, so all this seems weird to me. We don't have school lunches in grade schools. Parents pack a lunch for the kids. I've always thought it was odd that kids got cafeteria meals in grade school. Even in highschool, we had a cafeteria, but still most kids brought their own lunch anyway. Most people's lunches consisted of a sandwich, some fruit, a juice box, and many of us even had some kind of snack like fruit roll-ups (always hated these) or something like a twinkie. Still it seemed like we were much better fed than the fries burgers and pizza that kids get in their cafeteria lunches. Now that my kids are at school, they still bring in their own lunches, but the school frowns upon bringing things like twinkies. Although to tell the truth, most granola bars aren't much healthier anyway. It seems counter productive to have the schools serve lunches if they aren't going to be healthy. Let the parents decide what the kids are going to eat. It only takes 5 minutes to make a lunch for your kids in the morning, and by the time they are 8, they can do it themselves.
I'm not sure what kind of journalist he is (has his own blog, writes for some major paper, etc.) but I would think for the most part, using MS word wouldn't be the best choice for a journalist anyway. The article is most likely going to be edited and reformatted anyway when printed, so there's no point in do any formatting at all, especially not by the journalist.
6 billion cell phone subscriptions seems quite high. Citation needed on this one. Even if you count more than 1 per person. That number, wherever you got it from, must be skewed by people who got pay-as-you-go phones, and then trashed them with some remaining balance, or criminals who get burner phones and throw them out after a couple weeks. Once you discount children, elderly, and extremely impoverished people, I don't see how there could possibly be 6 billion active cell phone subscribers. I know plenty of people without cell phones right here in Canada, and an even larger number of people without smart phones. There's lots of room for the market to grow.
Yeah, I'm using them too. One small caveat. They only work in the city, and are only available in a few cities, although their network is growing. For the number of times I travel in a year, it makes much more sense to have a phone that only works in the city. I'll buy a disposable SIM card from Walmart for the two weeks a year that I might happen to be out of town. Unlimited data and long distance for $40 a month is much easier to stomach. Oh, and I signed up during the back to school rush, so I only pay $29 a month for that plan. Watch out next august/september. They charged me $10-15 for setting me up on that plan because I was an existing customer, but I saved that much in the first month.
So why couldn't you buy a similar device that's not rated for medical use off the internet? Last time this question came up on slashdot, I stated something along the lines of, it should be really cheap, especially with bluetooth headsets becoming so fashionable/acceptable (not that I personally think they look good, but you won't get too many weird looks walking around with a bluetooth earpiece) to produce a functional hearing aid for a good price. A quick google search came up with this result. Looks like a bluetooth earpiece, costs $14.95. I'm sure there's room for a whole range of products at various prices.
No, something like this toaster would be equivalent of your $25,000 military laptop. The $2000 toaster I pointed to before is just some run of the mill you'd find and any local diner. When you business is serving toast to people, having a $2000 toaster isn't all that extravagant. It's practically a necessity. Same thing. If you're a professional who works on a computer every day, then spending $2000 on a laptop is nothing.
You can easily pay more than $2000 for a toaster. That's just first link I clicked on after searching commercial toasters on Google. I'm pretty sure people who own these types of toasters get them serviced quite regularly.
I can think of one major reason to switch from Windows XP. Good 64 bit support. That alone is a major reason for upgrading. I skipped the whole Vista thing, and have nothing good to say about that OS, but Windows 7 is actually quite nice, and I'd easily pick that over XP for any new machine. Windows 7 has been very stable ever since I got it. I only ever reboot when there are updates. Windows XP is still fine, and I'll run it on my older computers until the hardware dies. But when it comes time to buy new hardware, I'll definitely opt for running Windows 7 over just reusing my old Windows XP license.
The problem is that Coca-Cola and Pepsi are not the best soft drinks, and McDonald's is not the best burger. Coca-Cola is good at selling lots of mediocre soft drinks, McDonald's is great at selling a whole lot of sub-par burgers. For 2 trips to McDonald's I could go to the local burger place and get a burger made with locally farmed Elk meat. For the price of a single McDonald's trip I could make the burgers at home out of ground sirloin. Similarly with the MS certifications, I've met Microsoft certified DBAs who couldn't write a JOIN query to save their life. Sure there's some people who have certifications who are very qualified, but I don't think there's a big correlation between being microsoft certified and being qualified.
I thought that was more due to the lag between moving your head and actually seeing the picture move. I remember trying these out a few times at gaming stores, and this was always the biggest problem as far as I was concerned. For the VR headset to work well, the lag between moving your head, and the picture moving inside the glasses has to be extremely small. I don't have any hard numbers, but I'm guessing something even as small 10 ms might be too much lag.
Not only those people, but a lot of other people as well. If you only graduated highschool, you probably aren't much more educated than the people who dropped out. Especially with the way the current system is set up, so nobody ever fails. All it really shows is that you attended classes for 4 years. someone who graduated highschool may actually be less suited to making a living than the person who dropped out at the age of 16 and started working in a field where paper certifications don't really hold much value anyway. Even people who go to university and end up with something like a psychology, english lit, or history degree might have a very hard time finding a job, especially compared to those who have actual concrete skills, like mechanics, barbers, plumbers and electricians.
You think that's bad, when I was in highschool, in Ontario Canada, math class wasn't required after grade 10. Also science wasn't required after grade 10 either. Checking out the current requirements, it seems that grade 11 math is now required, but you don't have to take grade 11 science still. As a student who took math every year, plus 2 maths in grade 13, plus 1 or 2 science courses every year, I find it hard to imagine even getting enough credits without taking science or math courses. But I guess one could take phys ed, wood shop, and home every year to make up for the difference. I don't think that students should really be required to take math courses above grade 10, because, for the most part, nobody will ever use calculus or linear algebra in their day to day life, or even in a workplace setting. However what I think should be done is to incorporate math and science into the other courses. Make fractions part of auto shop by learning about gear ratios. Teach the the basic chemistry behind the combustion engine, and talk about the chemical properties of various fuels. Math and physics can easily be worked into wood shop. Home economics is full of math and chemistry just waiting to be taught. The same could be done for English courses. Get rid of teaching English for the sake of teaching English and incorporate essay writing and reading comprehension into the other courses.
This has always been seen as a big problem. People thought that all the advances in technology would obsolete a bunch of jobs. It wasn't long ago that many white collar workers had their own secretary. Those jobs don't exist anymore. We've been pretty good at finding jobs for "normal" or "mediocre" people for the past 100 years, but I see it slowly coming to a point where there are very few jobs in America (or "the west" for that matter) for normal people. Self checkout grocery stores, online shopping, no more music and video stores, robots assembling cars, all of this stuff adds up. People will either have to get a skill doing something that can't be off-shored or done by robots, like car mechanic, barber, tailor, etc. There won't be much room for people working in the manufacturing sector, retail sector, or many other shrinking industries.
Slashdot Mirror
Can the Visual Basic GUI be used to track IP Addresses?
That's quite a grudge you carry. What about in 50 years when none of the people involved in the root-kit fiasco even work there anymore. Sony isn't a single person. You could probably find plenty of anti-consumer actions taken by just about any company out there. If you want to boycott any company who ever did anything anti-consumer, you'd probably have to live self sustained on a desert island. Sony has done some truly stupid things over the years. But they've also brought us some pretty cool products.
+1 trillion if I had mod points.
First, I didn't see any comments, alluding to the fact that all people with liver problems are drunks. What I did read, is that a lot of people with drinking problems happen to have liver problems, and they will be very happy about this discovery. Also, there's a lot of ways to combat anxiety without any drugs at all. it may not work for people who are really far gone, but for many people, who have a moderate amount of anxiety, there are a few things you can do without spending any money.
#1, cut out the aritificial stimulants, coffee does nothing good for anxiety
#2. Get a good night's sleep. Ok some people can't sleep well, but (and I admit this might cost money) but sleep aid drugs are easily available (Nytol), and if not abused, can be beneficial.
#3. Get some exercise. I know, it sounds crazy, but exercise can really help to relieve some anxiety. And it also helps with the sleep. It's easy to fall asleep when your body is physically drained.
#4. Talk it out. Find a friend or family member and just talk it out. Talking about stuff with somebody supportive can go a lot way to getting you to stop worrying about stuff. Sometimes just saying stuff out loud is enough for you to figure stuff out for yourself.
Yeah, it really is just stupid users. I saw a "trending" game on the app store one day. It was basically an emulated copy of Mario Kart 64. However, it required just about every permission it could ask for. A ton of the comments where saying that it was a virus/spyware/malware, but "THE SAME USERS" were claiming that it was pretty good anyway, and that people should get this version, because it played better than any of the other versions out there. People are seriously so stupid. They get what they deserve.
I took software engineering and one of my classmates took some philosophy courses for fun. One of the classes was basically boolean algebra. Stuff like, If all foos are bars, and some bars are blats, then some foos are blats (answer true, false, or insufficient information). We had recently taken a course which dealt with quite a bit of boolean algebra in our required math courses. He said that it was pretty sad watching the philosophy students try to wrap their head around the boolean algebra stuff. Stuff that was easy to us in engineering/computer science because we deal with boolean logic all the time was completely over their heads. Multiple lectures had to be spent just to get through De Morgan's Laws.
Maybe it's all about value for money. I could either spend $10 a month, and have access to all the music ever recorded, or I could spend $10 a month and get one (maybe less) album per month. After 6 years of buying albums, I'd have 72 albums, or about 1000 songs. Why would I bother buying music when I could spend less and get more? Obviously there's no service that has all the music ever recorded but there are some services out there that have quite a large selection of music. Why would I want to spend money on buying CDs when I could have them stolen or broken. Why would I want to spend money on MP3s when a hard drive crash could mean that I have to buy them all over again (has Appled fixed this issue yet with iTunes, I know in the past you couldn't re-download songs you had already purchased).
I think the reason that laptops are outpacing desktops is because desktops hit the "good enough" stage quite a while ago. If you look at people who aren't power users, they have no reason to upgrade. Most now only buy desktops to replace their current one when it breaks down. Also, most households probably have one desktop computer. Laptops on the other hand are still in the position where they are worth upgrading every 2 years because of lack of ability to upgrade certain components, and because there are still quite a few advancements being made. My desktop is currently 5 years old, and I see no reason to upgrade it. It still does every thing I need it to do. My laptop on the other hand is only 1.5 years old, and I can already see some reasons for getting a new one, although I'll probably hold onto it until it's at least 3 years old. Also many households probably have 2 or 3 laptops. If you got a family with 2 teenage kids, it wouldn't be uncommon to have 4 laptops in the house..
I think that hasn't been true in a long time. You might be able to get a similarly spec'ed laptop if you didn't care about form-factor or style that much, but then it's not really the same product. The new Mac Book Pro has taken things even further by giving the best resolution available for the money. Doing a quick price comparison can show you they aren't overpriced at all. The Dell Ultrabook XPS 13 currently retails for $999, while the Mac Book Air 13" retails at $1199. Of course the Mac is more, but it has a 1400x900 screen as opposed to 720p resolution, 1.8GHz CPU as opposed to 1.6GHz CPU and a height of 0.68 inches vs. 0.71 inches. The rest of the main features seem to be about the same, and while some may say, what's the difference between .68 and .71 inches, well, it's still 5%, which takes quite a lot of engineering to get rid of when you are looking at laptops of this size. Mac laptops are quite competitively priced, the only problem is they've decided not to make $400 laptops. Which is fine, because there is no money to be made in that market anyway.
Do the same thing we did when we were kids. Learn to fix it and bring a spare tube, or start walking.
I live in Ontario, so all this seems weird to me. We don't have school lunches in grade schools. Parents pack a lunch for the kids. I've always thought it was odd that kids got cafeteria meals in grade school. Even in highschool, we had a cafeteria, but still most kids brought their own lunch anyway. Most people's lunches consisted of a sandwich, some fruit, a juice box, and many of us even had some kind of snack like fruit roll-ups (always hated these) or something like a twinkie. Still it seemed like we were much better fed than the fries burgers and pizza that kids get in their cafeteria lunches. Now that my kids are at school, they still bring in their own lunches, but the school frowns upon bringing things like twinkies. Although to tell the truth, most granola bars aren't much healthier anyway. It seems counter productive to have the schools serve lunches if they aren't going to be healthy. Let the parents decide what the kids are going to eat. It only takes 5 minutes to make a lunch for your kids in the morning, and by the time they are 8, they can do it themselves.
I'm not sure what kind of journalist he is (has his own blog, writes for some major paper, etc.) but I would think for the most part, using MS word wouldn't be the best choice for a journalist anyway. The article is most likely going to be edited and reformatted anyway when printed, so there's no point in do any formatting at all, especially not by the journalist.
6 billion cell phone subscriptions seems quite high. Citation needed on this one. Even if you count more than 1 per person. That number, wherever you got it from, must be skewed by people who got pay-as-you-go phones, and then trashed them with some remaining balance, or criminals who get burner phones and throw them out after a couple weeks. Once you discount children, elderly, and extremely impoverished people, I don't see how there could possibly be 6 billion active cell phone subscribers. I know plenty of people without cell phones right here in Canada, and an even larger number of people without smart phones. There's lots of room for the market to grow.
I live in Ottawa, whenever my phone roams over to the Rogers network. I can never seem to place a call.
Yeah, I'm using them too. One small caveat. They only work in the city, and are only available in a few cities, although their network is growing. For the number of times I travel in a year, it makes much more sense to have a phone that only works in the city. I'll buy a disposable SIM card from Walmart for the two weeks a year that I might happen to be out of town. Unlimited data and long distance for $40 a month is much easier to stomach. Oh, and I signed up during the back to school rush, so I only pay $29 a month for that plan. Watch out next august/september. They charged me $10-15 for setting me up on that plan because I was an existing customer, but I saved that much in the first month.
So why couldn't you buy a similar device that's not rated for medical use off the internet? Last time this question came up on slashdot, I stated something along the lines of, it should be really cheap, especially with bluetooth headsets becoming so fashionable/acceptable (not that I personally think they look good, but you won't get too many weird looks walking around with a bluetooth earpiece) to produce a functional hearing aid for a good price. A quick google search came up with this result. Looks like a bluetooth earpiece, costs $14.95. I'm sure there's room for a whole range of products at various prices.
No, something like this toaster would be equivalent of your $25,000 military laptop. The $2000 toaster I pointed to before is just some run of the mill you'd find and any local diner. When you business is serving toast to people, having a $2000 toaster isn't all that extravagant. It's practically a necessity. Same thing. If you're a professional who works on a computer every day, then spending $2000 on a laptop is nothing.
You can easily pay more than $2000 for a toaster. That's just first link I clicked on after searching commercial toasters on Google. I'm pretty sure people who own these types of toasters get them serviced quite regularly.
For all who are wondering 6489, or more obviously 6/4/89 (June 4, 1989) is the date of the Tianamen Square massacre.
I can think of one major reason to switch from Windows XP. Good 64 bit support. That alone is a major reason for upgrading. I skipped the whole Vista thing, and have nothing good to say about that OS, but Windows 7 is actually quite nice, and I'd easily pick that over XP for any new machine. Windows 7 has been very stable ever since I got it. I only ever reboot when there are updates. Windows XP is still fine, and I'll run it on my older computers until the hardware dies. But when it comes time to buy new hardware, I'll definitely opt for running Windows 7 over just reusing my old Windows XP license.
The problem is that Coca-Cola and Pepsi are not the best soft drinks, and McDonald's is not the best burger. Coca-Cola is good at selling lots of mediocre soft drinks, McDonald's is great at selling a whole lot of sub-par burgers. For 2 trips to McDonald's I could go to the local burger place and get a burger made with locally farmed Elk meat. For the price of a single McDonald's trip I could make the burgers at home out of ground sirloin. Similarly with the MS certifications, I've met Microsoft certified DBAs who couldn't write a JOIN query to save their life. Sure there's some people who have certifications who are very qualified, but I don't think there's a big correlation between being microsoft certified and being qualified.
I thought that was more due to the lag between moving your head and actually seeing the picture move. I remember trying these out a few times at gaming stores, and this was always the biggest problem as far as I was concerned. For the VR headset to work well, the lag between moving your head, and the picture moving inside the glasses has to be extremely small. I don't have any hard numbers, but I'm guessing something even as small 10 ms might be too much lag.
Not only those people, but a lot of other people as well. If you only graduated highschool, you probably aren't much more educated than the people who dropped out. Especially with the way the current system is set up, so nobody ever fails. All it really shows is that you attended classes for 4 years. someone who graduated highschool may actually be less suited to making a living than the person who dropped out at the age of 16 and started working in a field where paper certifications don't really hold much value anyway. Even people who go to university and end up with something like a psychology, english lit, or history degree might have a very hard time finding a job, especially compared to those who have actual concrete skills, like mechanics, barbers, plumbers and electricians.
You think that's bad, when I was in highschool, in Ontario Canada, math class wasn't required after grade 10. Also science wasn't required after grade 10 either. Checking out the current requirements, it seems that grade 11 math is now required, but you don't have to take grade 11 science still. As a student who took math every year, plus 2 maths in grade 13, plus 1 or 2 science courses every year, I find it hard to imagine even getting enough credits without taking science or math courses. But I guess one could take phys ed, wood shop, and home every year to make up for the difference. I don't think that students should really be required to take math courses above grade 10, because, for the most part, nobody will ever use calculus or linear algebra in their day to day life, or even in a workplace setting. However what I think should be done is to incorporate math and science into the other courses. Make fractions part of auto shop by learning about gear ratios. Teach the the basic chemistry behind the combustion engine, and talk about the chemical properties of various fuels. Math and physics can easily be worked into wood shop. Home economics is full of math and chemistry just waiting to be taught. The same could be done for English courses. Get rid of teaching English for the sake of teaching English and incorporate essay writing and reading comprehension into the other courses.
This has always been seen as a big problem. People thought that all the advances in technology would obsolete a bunch of jobs. It wasn't long ago that many white collar workers had their own secretary. Those jobs don't exist anymore. We've been pretty good at finding jobs for "normal" or "mediocre" people for the past 100 years, but I see it slowly coming to a point where there are very few jobs in America (or "the west" for that matter) for normal people. Self checkout grocery stores, online shopping, no more music and video stores, robots assembling cars, all of this stuff adds up. People will either have to get a skill doing something that can't be off-shored or done by robots, like car mechanic, barber, tailor, etc. There won't be much room for people working in the manufacturing sector, retail sector, or many other shrinking industries.