It kills me that most cell phones make noise when you turn them off so they won't make noise.
You know, I thought about this the other day in class. (See upthread where I mention returning to school.) I can't imagine wanting a phone that does this, but it happens all the time: Phone rings in class. Person silences ring. Person turns off phone, and phone makes 'shutdown' sound. Baffling.
But on some computers, especially many laptops with softkeys for volume, you've got to ALREADY BE IN WINDOWS to turn the sound off.
I'm not remotely defending this, but really? I can adjust volume on my Thinkpad during the entire boot process. Also, if you're that concerned about making sound in a meeting, why don't you just keep your laptop volume turned off all the time? How many things on a business/school laptop need sound, anyway?
Imagine being in a large university class with 100 or 200 students and half of them boot their laptops at the beginning of the class. The sound will be played 50-100 times, how much more annoying can it get!
Um, this is exactly what already happens.:) The majority of college laptop users (myself not included) do not turn off Windows start-up sounds. At least in my experience in the 9 months since I returned to school. Hell, I consider it a victory if a cell phone doesn't go off in a class of 40 people.
I think you're pretty on with the distinction there. I probably fall into a combination of the categories (as I'm pretty sure many do): If I'm at a place where MarioKart is being played amongst many people, I will without a doubt sit down and whip ass, I don't play games a lot due to a lack of time (though I do own an XBox with ~10 games), and when I do, I rarely devote more than an hour to it.
Like someone upthread, I was raised on Sierra games (Christmas in the (mid?) late 80s, I got a Tandy and King's Quest, and I own virtually every Sierra title up to KQ V; incidentally, that original KQ box is autographed by Roberta Williams, from the time I spent at a game design firm in the 90s), and I have to say that these days I miss games with a discrete set of problems, saveable at any time, where I can tackle one problem, save, and then come back in a few days. Too many games these days forget that people need to be able to save/restore at any point and at any time.
Is there some kind of etiquette involving read receipts that I don't know about?
Yes. Don't use them. "I need to know you read this", blah blah blah, I've heard it. Read receipts suck, and people who use them (on a regular basis; I can see an argument if you either rarely use them when you send email to me, or you always use them but don't send a lot of email to any one person) suck worse. I've only recently had to start using Outlook again (at work), after about a 5-year hiatus of working either for myself, places that didn't have company email, or places that didn't default to Outlook. I had forgotten how much I hate that crap.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but you can't use 802.11x to describe a bunch of different 802.11 protocols. I've recently rejoined the tech field (University HD) while I return to school, and we are rolling out 802.11x authentication support. When "802.11x support" was first mentioned to me, I asked "We already use b & g, so don't we already support 802.11x?" and was summarily pointed to about a billion articles on 802.11x.
I'm not a patent guy (I'm not nearly technically minded enough), but I asked this when this was first floated: Why exactly should we be doing their job for them? I know, I know, the patent system is broken. But this is the best they can come up with?
How many times have we all told our relatives "Okay go to this link, 'www.site.com slash bla dot html'" only to spend five minutes figuring out that they think slashes are backslashes, causing them to type in a syntactically incorrect URL?
I've found it easiest to say "type blah blah blah slash, which goes up as it moves left to right". It takes them a second to realize what I mean, but then they don't forget it.
While I don't disagree with the overall point of your post, you would do well to remember that for some people, taking the family out to McDonald's IS a treat. Because they don't have much money, it's relatively cheap, and the kids get to run around and be kids at the nifty little playground. Looking down on these people does you no good.
I'm not saying Apple did anything. A poster above is correct in that this is happening to lots of companies, so it wouldn't surprise me in the least to find out that they did. But really,
If it really was that bad, would Apple really do it?
Well, there are homeless people elsewhere. Here in Austin, one of the major homeless and panhandler hangouts is "The Drag", which is Guadalupe St. running alongside the UT campus. I'm a Bank One customer. Guess where the Bank One is? You got it, ATM right on the drag.
You just learn that you don't have to have excuses, and that it's much easier to just say "No."
It's ProctEr and Gamble. Trust me, with a parent who has worked there for 20 years, you learn how much they hate to see their name misspelled.
2 things I learned as a child: don't misspell the Procter, and don't bring up the Satanist urban legend. The first gets them annoyed, the second gets you a batch of literature in the mail or a nasty telephone call.
This is a really bad omen, but for right now, this means nothing. I already have to use Central Coin as a middleman for Poker Stars. I deposit $50 in my Central Coin account, which acts as an online "credit card", with which I deposit money to Stars. Withdrawal is the reverse, and takes about 6 days from the time I withdraw it at Stars to the time it hits my bank account again. This won't affect me or most people who gamble online.
Note: Central Coin sucks ass. Don't use them. If I could go back and use something else, I would.
The "conversation" view provided by gmail (and some others, but not as well IMHO) has really changed how I use email, however.
Agreed. I disliked it at first, but now I don't know how I ever lived without it. Interestingly, the integrated chat would be a lot more useful on something like Hotmail. Because Gmail makes it so easy to send short messages, I don't really use the chat feature at all. Also, tangentially related, being able to have part of my inbox on my home page, which is Google (so combining the personalized Google pages with Gmail) is possibly my favorite thing on the Intarweb, especially when I can also have 10 other RSS feeds there.
You say lack of AM/FM is seen as a negative. But is it a missing feature that would influence a significant amount of people's buying decisions?
And these business students are sorely lacking in their education if they don't understand this underlying concept, which is the basis for target costing models. If you are unfamiliar with the term, you're familiar with the concept (simplified): instead of a production model where product developers come up with a product and marketing tries to sell it, marketing goes to the consumers and (through intensive studying) determines what they are willing to pay for certain things, builds a product model and then asks the developers if they can build that product for $X, X being what consumers would be willing to pay plus an appropriate margin.
Perhaps the glory days of the internet are over no matter what happens.
Depends on what you mean by "glory days of the internet ae over". If you mean "It won't be as relatively free as it is now", then maybe. If you mean "It will go away" in any meaningful sense, no way. The cat's out of the bag. It's done. It won't go away.
I recently returned to school to finish my degree. I have a Facebook profile, but it's mainly for searching purposes (there's very little on there.) I did wonder, for internship purposes, what would show up in a Google search for my name, which I haven't done in a few years. I stumbled across some Answer.com pages where they posted the credits from two games I worked tangentially on.
Now all those people who doubt me when I tell them I worked for a game design company will pay! (Of course, now they'll know that those games were Rugrats and Rocket Power titles instead of just "Really cool stuff, but you wouldn't have heard of it", but still.)
i'd be hard pressed to find someone who runs anything pre-win2000 as their main/only computer and also has technical sense enough to want to use firefox.
My home computer is a Pentium 450 with 512 MB of RAM (I have a laptop as well, but that's XP and I only use it away from the house.) I run Win98. Why not? I use the computer for one thing: doing things on the internet. I run the latest version of Firefox on it. I play at PokerStars. I use Gmail. I use mIRC once a week. What do I need XP for?
As for having the technical sense, I did sysadmin and network admin work for two years, and since I've gone back to college to finish my degree, I'm working at the Help Desk. I'm certainly under the median for a/. user, but I'm in the 10th percentile of most people.
--- David Puttnam, movie producer - GQ magazine, April 1987
As I sit here, I'm looking at my bookshelf, which contains The Undeclared War by Mr. Puttnam. If you enjoyed that interview enough to remember it, you'll enjoy his book.
Slashdot Mirror
1) This thing is addictive as all hell.
2) I'm #134!
3) People who don't type quickly suck.
It kills me that most cell phones make noise when you turn them off so they won't make noise.
You know, I thought about this the other day in class. (See upthread where I mention returning to school.) I can't imagine wanting a phone that does this, but it happens all the time: Phone rings in class. Person silences ring. Person turns off phone, and phone makes 'shutdown' sound. Baffling.
But on some computers, especially many laptops with softkeys for volume, you've got to ALREADY BE IN WINDOWS to turn the sound off.
I'm not remotely defending this, but really? I can adjust volume on my Thinkpad during the entire boot process. Also, if you're that concerned about making sound in a meeting, why don't you just keep your laptop volume turned off all the time? How many things on a business/school laptop need sound, anyway?
Imagine being in a large university class with 100 or 200 students and half of them boot their laptops at the beginning of the class. The sound will be played 50-100 times, how much more annoying can it get!
:) The majority of college laptop users (myself not included) do not turn off Windows start-up sounds. At least in my experience in the 9 months since I returned to school. Hell, I consider it a victory if a cell phone doesn't go off in a class of 40 people.
Um, this is exactly what already happens.
I think you're pretty on with the distinction there. I probably fall into a combination of the categories (as I'm pretty sure many do): If I'm at a place where MarioKart is being played amongst many people, I will without a doubt sit down and whip ass, I don't play games a lot due to a lack of time (though I do own an XBox with ~10 games), and when I do, I rarely devote more than an hour to it.
Like someone upthread, I was raised on Sierra games (Christmas in the (mid?) late 80s, I got a Tandy and King's Quest, and I own virtually every Sierra title up to KQ V; incidentally, that original KQ box is autographed by Roberta Williams, from the time I spent at a game design firm in the 90s), and I have to say that these days I miss games with a discrete set of problems, saveable at any time, where I can tackle one problem, save, and then come back in a few days. Too many games these days forget that people need to be able to save/restore at any point and at any time.
Is there some kind of etiquette involving read receipts that I don't know about?
Yes. Don't use them. "I need to know you read this", blah blah blah, I've heard it. Read receipts suck, and people who use them (on a regular basis; I can see an argument if you either rarely use them when you send email to me, or you always use them but don't send a lot of email to any one person) suck worse. I've only recently had to start using Outlook again (at work), after about a 5-year hiatus of working either for myself, places that didn't have company email, or places that didn't default to Outlook. I had forgotten how much I hate that crap.
"Wi-Fi (802.11x) networks
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but you can't use 802.11x to describe a bunch of different 802.11 protocols. I've recently rejoined the tech field (University HD) while I return to school, and we are rolling out 802.11x authentication support. When "802.11x support" was first mentioned to me, I asked "We already use b & g, so don't we already support 802.11x?" and was summarily pointed to about a billion articles on 802.11x.
I'm not a patent guy (I'm not nearly technically minded enough), but I asked this when this was first floated: Why exactly should we be doing their job for them? I know, I know, the patent system is broken. But this is the best they can come up with?
How many times have we all told our relatives "Okay go to this link, 'www.site.com slash bla dot html'" only to spend five minutes figuring out that they think slashes are backslashes, causing them to type in a syntactically incorrect URL?
I've found it easiest to say "type blah blah blah slash, which goes up as it moves left to right". It takes them a second to realize what I mean, but then they don't forget it.
Smallville abortion clinic? Did this person get knocked up by Clark Kent?
And is it possible for a doctor to abort Superbaby?
While I don't disagree with the overall point of your post, you would do well to remember that for some people, taking the family out to McDonald's IS a treat. Because they don't have much money, it's relatively cheap, and the kids get to run around and be kids at the nifty little playground. Looking down on these people does you no good.
I'm not saying Apple did anything. A poster above is correct in that this is happening to lots of companies, so it wouldn't surprise me in the least to find out that they did. But really,
If it really was that bad, would Apple really do it?
Are you really that naive?
Wtf? No internet checkers? That's the only good thing about XP.
Well, there are homeless people elsewhere. Here in Austin, one of the major homeless and panhandler hangouts is "The Drag", which is Guadalupe St. running alongside the UT campus. I'm a Bank One customer. Guess where the Bank One is? You got it, ATM right on the drag.
You just learn that you don't have to have excuses, and that it's much easier to just say "No."
It's ProctEr and Gamble. Trust me, with a parent who has worked there for 20 years, you learn how much they hate to see their name misspelled.
2 things I learned as a child: don't misspell the Procter, and don't bring up the Satanist urban legend. The first gets them annoyed, the second gets you a batch of literature in the mail or a nasty telephone call.
Isn't it good to know the state's hiring policy is still based on who's-your-daddy?
Man, when I did hiring, I always made sure to ask that questin of every attractive female applicant. And I wasn't asking about their father.
This is a really bad omen, but for right now, this means nothing. I already have to use Central Coin as a middleman for Poker Stars. I deposit $50 in my Central Coin account, which acts as an online "credit card", with which I deposit money to Stars. Withdrawal is the reverse, and takes about 6 days from the time I withdraw it at Stars to the time it hits my bank account again. This won't affect me or most people who gamble online.
Note: Central Coin sucks ass. Don't use them. If I could go back and use something else, I would.
The "conversation" view provided by gmail (and some others, but not as well IMHO) has really changed how I use email, however.
Agreed. I disliked it at first, but now I don't know how I ever lived without it. Interestingly, the integrated chat would be a lot more useful on something like Hotmail. Because Gmail makes it so easy to send short messages, I don't really use the chat feature at all. Also, tangentially related, being able to have part of my inbox on my home page, which is Google (so combining the personalized Google pages with Gmail) is possibly my favorite thing on the Intarweb, especially when I can also have 10 other RSS feeds there.
Has so many possibilities for juvenile jokes.
You say lack of AM/FM is seen as a negative. But is it a missing feature that would influence a significant amount of people's buying decisions?
And these business students are sorely lacking in their education if they don't understand this underlying concept, which is the basis for target costing models. If you are unfamiliar with the term, you're familiar with the concept (simplified): instead of a production model where product developers come up with a product and marketing tries to sell it, marketing goes to the consumers and (through intensive studying) determines what they are willing to pay for certain things, builds a product model and then asks the developers if they can build that product for $X, X being what consumers would be willing to pay plus an appropriate margin.
Yahoo was a horrible experiment gone wrong in seeing how much crap could be jammed into a portal!
Was?
Perhaps the glory days of the internet are over no matter what happens.
Depends on what you mean by "glory days of the internet ae over". If you mean "It won't be as relatively free as it is now", then maybe. If you mean "It will go away" in any meaningful sense, no way. The cat's out of the bag. It's done. It won't go away.
I recently returned to school to finish my degree. I have a Facebook profile, but it's mainly for searching purposes (there's very little on there.) I did wonder, for internship purposes, what would show up in a Google search for my name, which I haven't done in a few years. I stumbled across some Answer.com pages where they posted the credits from two games I worked tangentially on.
Now all those people who doubt me when I tell them I worked for a game design company will pay! (Of course, now they'll know that those games were Rugrats and Rocket Power titles instead of just "Really cool stuff, but you wouldn't have heard of it", but still.)
i'd be hard pressed to find someone who runs anything pre-win2000 as their main/only computer and also has technical sense enough to want to use firefox.
/. user, but I'm in the 10th percentile of most people.
My home computer is a Pentium 450 with 512 MB of RAM (I have a laptop as well, but that's XP and I only use it away from the house.) I run Win98. Why not? I use the computer for one thing: doing things on the internet. I run the latest version of Firefox on it. I play at PokerStars. I use Gmail. I use mIRC once a week. What do I need XP for?
As for having the technical sense, I did sysadmin and network admin work for two years, and since I've gone back to college to finish my degree, I'm working at the Help Desk. I'm certainly under the median for a
--- David Puttnam, movie producer - GQ magazine, April 1987
As I sit here, I'm looking at my bookshelf, which contains The Undeclared War by Mr. Puttnam. If you enjoyed that interview enough to remember it, you'll enjoy his book.