Ok IANAL, but wouldn't Grande Communications have common carrier status? In that, they just provide the pipeline and aren't responsible for the content?
As TFA implies, the tech industry is a small world and bad decisions can come back to haunt you later. Once I had to decline an offer I'd already verbally accepted, when I got another immensely larger offer a day later. But I explained the situation (It was more money, in an area I had targeted to live in) and apologized sincerely.
I've had interviews still to go after I'd already picked a winner, but I still go to them, because (a) it's the right thing to do, and (b) you never know -- maybe they have something to offer you hadn't considered. I don't think I've ever run into a situation where I had to call and decline an interview after I'd already committed to showing up. But just not showing up would be unthinkable. What if some time later the same guy, working for a company you want to join, is on the hiring team? You're dead before you started.
We've been sold on the idea that brick-'n'-mortar are going the way of the dinosaur, and that eventually everything will be online only, with physical product only existing in huge distribution centers.
What wasn't foreseen, maybe, is a time when a high percentage of what's available online is garbage, made to sell rather than use, supported by fake reviews, and that the percentage is increasing. Maybe there will come a time when brick-'n'-mortar comes back in style, for the simple reason that you can verify for yourself that it's an actual, useful product and not a cracker-jacks prize.
Maybe or maybe not. Remember all those stories about people picking something out at Best Buy or Circuit City only to get home and find the "sealed" package didn't have the item inside?
Ok that's a good point. Best Buy and their ilk have to realize that I can buy an empty box cheaper and faster from Amazon than I can from them.
In a different thread, someone commented that he doesn't buy online anymore because most of it is fake or otherwise worthless crap.
That might be overstating the case, but at its root is pretty insightful.
We've been sold on the idea that brick-'n'-mortar are going the way of the dinosaur, and that eventually everything will be online only, with physical product only existing in huge distribution centers.
What wasn't foreseen, maybe, is a time when a high percentage of what's available online is garbage, made to sell rather than use, supported by fake reviews, and that the percentage is increasing. Maybe there will come a time when brick-'n'-mortar comes back in style, for the simple reason that you can verify for yourself that it's an actual, useful product and not a cracker-jacks prize.
Maybe Amazon will realize this at some point, and somehow arrange for you to go somewhere and actually see and touch the product before purchase?
> For most people, Firefox refers to a browser, but the company wants the brand to encompass all the various apps and services that the Firefox family of internet products cover [...]
Especially for cheaper electronic accessories, (batteries, chargers, cables) I've found that you can safely ignore all the raving five star reviews. I start with the four and three star reviews, and look for ones with meat in them -- specific details about the products, plusses and minuses, and whether they're better or worse than competing products. But now that I've said that, the fake reviewers will probably take that into account.
I wonder exactly how many small purchases from Amazon arrive and look like those prizes that used to come in breakfast cereal. I suspect, the percentage is higher than anyone realizes. There's a lot of junk out there.
One example, learned through sad experience: There are a plethora of aftermarket chargers and replacement batteries for Dell laptops. But Dell laptops (at least, ones made in the last 10 years or so) will not work with non-Dell chargers or batteries, by design. (Thanks, Dell....) So the aftermarket products are useless junk by definition. But there will be three five-star reviews (because three is a magical number, I guess) for each item and if you post a negative review you'll get an immediate rebuttal from the manufacturer that there must have been something wrong with your laptop. Stuff that's made to sell, not actually use.
Glassdoor's job ads are mostly worthless. I can't remember how times I've gone to a job listing in one of their emails and be informed that the job is no longer available. Just today I got an email for a position that had an application window that closed three days ago. Glassdoor marked it as "New". They may still be somewhat useful for researching a company (even knowing that online reviews are largely only written by the unhappy former employees) but for job leads they're just not very good.
I got into it with one of their tech support people when my Facebook profile picture suddenly appeared in the comments section of a Glassdoor article I had replied to. Their people swore up and down that this could only happen if I also had a Glassdoor account. I didn't--and they verified that I didn't--but they could not be convinced that my photo had appeared in their comment section. I even changed my FB profile photo, commented on another Glassdoor article, and verified that they were grabbing the photo from FB. Sent them screen captures of what was happening to document that they were, indeed, grabbing photos from FB but it was like talking to a brick wall. I just love it when the tech support crew doesn't even know how their application works.
Either they don't know, or are instructed to play dumb. The more I hear about Glassdoor, the more I regret ever doing business with them.
Lessee, what if you replace your profile picture with goatse, and then quickly reply to a Glassdoor article before Facebook takes it down?
Maybe I'm an old phart, but I only ONLY use Linkedin for the Curriculum Vitae of a prospective employee or employer, to track down former bosses, employees or co-workers, and communicate with same. I have no interest in a "linkedin" version of Facebook. And I'm getting a little ticked off by the thinly disguised commercials in the news stream and in my linkedin message box. Enough so that I'm wondering, is there an alternative to Linkedin. [1]
[1] Not Glassdoor. I regret ever creating an account there. Now I'm absolutely inundated by job spam from offshore recruiters. "We are being desperately needing a sign painter in (some place you've never heard of)!!"
I put the cans and bottles in, and take the receipt to the cashier. (Bottle return machines in this area still run Windows 98. Yes, I did say 98.) Except recently, the machines have been so unreliable that I've just been throwing the containers away and taking a hit on the deposit. I don't see it getting any better, because there's very little financial reason for stores to take bottles back.
I'm told by someone who services them, that a lot of POS machines are still running Windows 98. Just exactly the place you want an old, unpatched OS.
Problem was, there was, and still is, content on the web that's only available via flash. It's not just an issue of not being able to see it on phones, but that applies to tablets also, a device who's primary purpose was content consumption.
I think Apple was trying to force the issue, and make the holdouts switch to something else (html5?). Android followed suit a little later. So flash should have died then, right? Instead, the content became "desktop only".
I have many of the same concerns. Being backwards compatible to existing lenses is important. My three FX bodies are compatible to Nikon lenses back to the seventies, and not being able to use my older glass would be a deal killer. The mentioned adapter might be ok, depending on what you lose when you use it. (For instance, an adapter that didn't support AF would be unacceptable.) Making the new mount accept your old lenses natively is what Nikon had always done in the past -- I can mount almost any lens Nikon has ever made, (with AI conversion (replacing the f ring) on lenses made before 1977), on my D3s. (Exception being specialized lenses that extend into the body). I'm curious why they didn't do the same thing this time.
I didn't see a mention of what kind of card the new camera will use. Nikon killed the D4 by insisting the owner use two different types of storage. That, and outrageous prices for the D5, are the only reasons I'm sticking with the D3s.
Tiny body, tiny controls, also a deal killer here. I shoot action and sports, and having a reasonably large body with widely spaced controls is imperative. I've handled a Sony alpha mirrorless, and it seemed small and crowded. (Otherwise, astonishing feature set, like VR built into the camera instead of the lens. Sony has come a long way. They just don't feel right in my hands.)
The picture is probably a stock photo, but it *shows* a viewfinder. Hopefully they'll have an electronic viewfinder and not make you hold it a foot away from your face and stare at the back, like a pocket camera.
The good news is that our existing pro bodies are going to last a long, long time.
One wonders if they also looked at French wine using the same process/rigour? During/after the Chernobyl incident? No. France simply declared that the radioactive cloud would not pass over the french border. (That is not a joke).
Wait, what? I can easily remove *updates* to preinstalled apps, (which Google Play then nags me to update every time it runs) but barring rooting my phone and reinstalling the OS (assuming I can find a clean copy somewhere) how is this done? Or is this an unusual definition of "easily"?
As a complete coincidence, according to the last census, people in the US age 45 and over account for 39.4 percent of the population. Expect the percentage of "live TV" viewers to drop almost directly as people born in 1975 and earlier age and drop off the end.
In other words, watching "live tv" is largely an old person's pastime. What I choose to call "the TV tray generation".[1] And it's dying out.
[1] Yes, I know 45 to 85 or thereabouts can arguably be called two generations. Work with me here.
See, I think the question's wording is going to alter the calculus in one form or another.
I've got more friends who will actively sit-down-and-expressly-watch a TV show on Netflix than they will watch it on the actual cable channel when it broadcasts. At the same time, many of those same people leave NCIS reruns or HGTV running in the background just to add a little noise to their apartment. I'm not saying the TV tray generation didn't do passive TV watching at all, but I think the lack of both streaming services as an alternative and internet services competing for attention (as well as generally-better radio content for 'apartment noise') factors in pretty heavily. I think it's similarly possible that Boomers and X-ers might be more willing to call apartment noise "TV watching", while millennials and Gen-Z might limit that term only to sitting down and explicitly watching a particular show.
I think you have a point, and this is difficult to accurately categorize. I've seen examples of leaving the TV on for "background noise", so you're on to something there. (I personally hate this -- if I'm going to watch TV I'll sit down and watch it -- I saw Lion (2016) last night, and Please Stand By (2017) a week ago, otherwise haven't seen much of anything... oh, and one time-shifted episode of The Expanse around Tuesday (I'm way behind). And then I'll get up and turn it off and do something else, because the TV is a distraction to conversation in a way that music in the background is not.) Wife, on the other hand, will sit in front of the oldies channel for 18 hours on a stretch on weekends, (she has her own TV) watching reruns of Emergency!!! and Love Canal, sorry, Boat, reruns of soap operas and old black and white horror films. When I ask her what she's doing, she says "just killing time". Well, ok, I'm taking the dogs to the park, why don't you come along? Get some fresh air, a little sunshine? No, she doesn't care to do that, Judge Judy is about to come on.
I freely admit this colors my thinking. And that I'm probably blaming the device. But I observe that we (wife and I) are both of "the tv tray generation". Both sets of parents commonly ate dinner on trays in front of the TV, because dinner time was when all the good shows came on, and that was our experience growing up. As a geek, I was an early adopter of on-demand TV, and this slowly weaned me off sitting in front of the glass tube when the networks wanted me to be there. And later, I realized I was watching less and less TV overall. There's a real world out there, etc etc. Wife never broke free. Sometimes I'm really sad about that.
But to the point, what is measurable is that real time TV (broadcast and non-demand cable) is dropping in viewership. There are, what, three generations now? who have grown up or were introduced in early adulthood to the idea that TV is something they could watch on their own terms, not whatever the stations spew whenever they want to spew it. And lo and behold, the networks are finally starting to notice, and in what resembles a panic, starting their own on-demand services. Too late, I believe.
The thing that would solve everything is carding players for dissent.
A ref was punched to death in a kids' game a bit back. The fish rots from the head.
Interesting about that. I don't watch American football, although my wife is a fanatic. (Or maybe, because my wife is a fanatic. I haven't isolated those feelings yet.) And I long ago lost interest in -- whatever you call it... the game where you kick the round ball around a field -- due to the drama and fake injuries. But I note that I have yet to see or hear of a ref in American football beaten to death, or injured or attacked at all.
As a complete coincidence, according to the last census, people in the US age 45 and over account for 39.4 percent of the population. Expect the percentage of "live TV" viewers to drop almost directly as people born in 1975 and earlier age and drop off the end.
In other words, watching "live tv" is largely an old person's pastime. What I choose to call "the TV tray generation".[1] And it's dying out.
[1] Yes, I know 45 to 85 or thereabouts can arguably be called two generations. Work with me here.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok IANAL, but wouldn't Grande Communications have common carrier status? In that, they just provide the pipeline and aren't responsible for the content?
As TFA implies, the tech industry is a small world and bad decisions can come back to haunt you later. Once I had to decline an offer I'd already verbally accepted, when I got another immensely larger offer a day later. But I explained the situation (It was more money, in an area I had targeted to live in) and apologized sincerely.
I've had interviews still to go after I'd already picked a winner, but I still go to them, because (a) it's the right thing to do, and (b) you never know -- maybe they have something to offer you hadn't considered. I don't think I've ever run into a situation where I had to call and decline an interview after I'd already committed to showing up. But just not showing up would be unthinkable. What if some time later the same guy, working for a company you want to join, is on the hiring team? You're dead before you started.
We've been sold on the idea that brick-'n'-mortar are going the way of the dinosaur, and that eventually everything will be online only, with physical product only existing in huge distribution centers.
What wasn't foreseen, maybe, is a time when a high percentage of what's available online is garbage, made to sell rather than use, supported by fake reviews, and that the percentage is increasing. Maybe there will come a time when brick-'n'-mortar comes back in style, for the simple reason that you can verify for yourself that it's an actual, useful product and not a cracker-jacks prize.
Maybe or maybe not. Remember all those stories about people picking something out at Best Buy or Circuit City only to get home and find the "sealed" package didn't have the item inside?
Ok that's a good point. Best Buy and their ilk have to realize that I can buy an empty box cheaper and faster from Amazon than I can from them.
Geeze, how did we as consumers get to this point?
In a different thread, someone commented that he doesn't buy online anymore because most of it is fake or otherwise worthless crap.
That might be overstating the case, but at its root is pretty insightful.
We've been sold on the idea that brick-'n'-mortar are going the way of the dinosaur, and that eventually everything will be online only, with physical product only existing in huge distribution centers.
What wasn't foreseen, maybe, is a time when a high percentage of what's available online is garbage, made to sell rather than use, supported by fake reviews, and that the percentage is increasing. Maybe there will come a time when brick-'n'-mortar comes back in style, for the simple reason that you can verify for yourself that it's an actual, useful product and not a cracker-jacks prize.
Maybe Amazon will realize this at some point, and somehow arrange for you to go somewhere and actually see and touch the product before purchase?
> For most people, Firefox refers to a browser, but the company wants the brand to encompass all the various apps and services that the Firefox family of internet products cover [...]
Anyone remember the early phoenix/firebird/firefox plugin that would change the name of the browser every time you brought it up? I really miss that.
It was about the same time as the Abe Vigoda Is Not Dead plugin. Good times.
"We ruined our product and want people to give us a second look without realizing who we really are"
Um, no, that would be Xfinity.
Especially for cheaper electronic accessories, (batteries, chargers, cables) I've found that you can safely ignore all the raving five star reviews. I start with the four and three star reviews, and look for ones with meat in them -- specific details about the products, plusses and minuses, and whether they're better or worse than competing products. But now that I've said that, the fake reviewers will probably take that into account.
I wonder exactly how many small purchases from Amazon arrive and look like those prizes that used to come in breakfast cereal. I suspect, the percentage is higher than anyone realizes. There's a lot of junk out there.
One example, learned through sad experience: There are a plethora of aftermarket chargers and replacement batteries for Dell laptops. But Dell laptops (at least, ones made in the last 10 years or so) will not work with non-Dell chargers or batteries, by design. (Thanks, Dell....) So the aftermarket products are useless junk by definition. But there will be three five-star reviews (because three is a magical number, I guess) for each item and if you post a negative review you'll get an immediate rebuttal from the manufacturer that there must have been something wrong with your laptop. Stuff that's made to sell, not actually use.
Glassdoor's job ads are mostly worthless. I can't remember how times I've gone to a job listing in one of their emails and be informed that the job is no longer available. Just today I got an email for a position that had an application window that closed three days ago. Glassdoor marked it as "New". They may still be somewhat useful for researching a company (even knowing that online reviews are largely only written by the unhappy former employees) but for job leads they're just not very good.
I got into it with one of their tech support people when my Facebook profile picture suddenly appeared in the comments section of a Glassdoor article I had replied to. Their people swore up and down that this could only happen if I also had a Glassdoor account. I didn't--and they verified that I didn't--but they could not be convinced that my photo had appeared in their comment section. I even changed my FB profile photo, commented on another Glassdoor article, and verified that they were grabbing the photo from FB. Sent them screen captures of what was happening to document that they were, indeed, grabbing photos from FB but it was like talking to a brick wall. I just love it when the tech support crew doesn't even know how their application works.
Either they don't know, or are instructed to play dumb. The more I hear about Glassdoor, the more I regret ever doing business with them.
Lessee, what if you replace your profile picture with goatse, and then quickly reply to a Glassdoor article before Facebook takes it down?
What if we *all* do that?
Yep, welcome to the "shotgun technique" of offshore recruiting.
A show of hands, please. Who needs this?
Maybe I'm an old phart, but I only ONLY use Linkedin for the Curriculum Vitae of a prospective employee or employer, to track down former bosses, employees or co-workers, and communicate with same. I have no interest in a "linkedin" version of Facebook. And I'm getting a little ticked off by the thinly disguised commercials in the news stream and in my linkedin message box. Enough so that I'm wondering, is there an alternative to Linkedin. [1]
[1] Not Glassdoor. I regret ever creating an account there. Now I'm absolutely inundated by job spam from offshore recruiters. "We are being desperately needing a sign painter in (some place you've never heard of)!!"
I put the cans and bottles in, and take the receipt to the cashier. (Bottle return machines in this area still run Windows 98. Yes, I did say 98.) Except recently, the machines have been so unreliable that I've just been throwing the containers away and taking a hit on the deposit. I don't see it getting any better, because there's very little financial reason for stores to take bottles back.
I'm told by someone who services them, that a lot of POS machines are still running Windows 98. Just exactly the place you want an old, unpatched OS.
Problem was, there was, and still is, content on the web that's only available via flash. It's not just an issue of not being able to see it on phones, but that applies to tablets also, a device who's primary purpose was content consumption.
I think Apple was trying to force the issue, and make the holdouts switch to something else (html5?). Android followed suit a little later. So flash should have died then, right? Instead, the content became "desktop only".
I have many of the same concerns. Being backwards compatible to existing lenses is important. My three FX bodies are compatible to Nikon lenses back to the seventies, and not being able to use my older glass would be a deal killer. The mentioned adapter might be ok, depending on what you lose when you use it. (For instance, an adapter that didn't support AF would be unacceptable.) Making the new mount accept your old lenses natively is what Nikon had always done in the past -- I can mount almost any lens Nikon has ever made, (with AI conversion (replacing the f ring) on lenses made before 1977), on my D3s. (Exception being specialized lenses that extend into the body). I'm curious why they didn't do the same thing this time.
I didn't see a mention of what kind of card the new camera will use. Nikon killed the D4 by insisting the owner use two different types of storage. That, and outrageous prices for the D5, are the only reasons I'm sticking with the D3s.
Tiny body, tiny controls, also a deal killer here. I shoot action and sports, and having a reasonably large body with widely spaced controls is imperative. I've handled a Sony alpha mirrorless, and it seemed small and crowded. (Otherwise, astonishing feature set, like VR built into the camera instead of the lens. Sony has come a long way. They just don't feel right in my hands.)
The picture is probably a stock photo, but it *shows* a viewfinder. Hopefully they'll have an electronic viewfinder and not make you hold it a foot away from your face and stare at the back, like a pocket camera.
The good news is that our existing pro bodies are going to last a long, long time.
One wonders if they also looked at French wine using the same process/rigour?
During/after the Chernobyl incident? No. France simply declared that the radioactive cloud would not pass over the french border. (That is not a joke).
What, because of some kind of force field?
Well, it was the French analyzing California wine. What did you expect?
So that's the fizzy taste.
I like food that fights back.
> “It seems there is an increase in activity in 2011 by a factor of two,” conclude the team."
Thanks, that's good to know. Of course, I can't root a company phone, but it's something to try on one's personal phone.
From TFA: "can easily remove preinstalled apps"
Wait, what? I can easily remove *updates* to preinstalled apps, (which Google Play then nags me to update every time it runs) but barring rooting my phone and reinstalling the OS (assuming I can find a clean copy somewhere) how is this done? Or is this an unusual definition of "easily"?
As a complete coincidence, according to the last census, people in the US age 45 and over account for 39.4 percent of the population. Expect the percentage of "live TV" viewers to drop almost directly as people born in 1975 and earlier age and drop off the end.
In other words, watching "live tv" is largely an old person's pastime. What I choose to call "the TV tray generation".[1] And it's dying out.
[1] Yes, I know 45 to 85 or thereabouts can arguably be called two generations. Work with me here.
See, I think the question's wording is going to alter the calculus in one form or another.
I've got more friends who will actively sit-down-and-expressly-watch a TV show on Netflix than they will watch it on the actual cable channel when it broadcasts. At the same time, many of those same people leave NCIS reruns or HGTV running in the background just to add a little noise to their apartment. I'm not saying the TV tray generation didn't do passive TV watching at all, but I think the lack of both streaming services as an alternative and internet services competing for attention (as well as generally-better radio content for 'apartment noise') factors in pretty heavily. I think it's similarly possible that Boomers and X-ers might be more willing to call apartment noise "TV watching", while millennials and Gen-Z might limit that term only to sitting down and explicitly watching a particular show.
I think you have a point, and this is difficult to accurately categorize. I've seen examples of leaving the TV on for "background noise", so you're on to something there. (I personally hate this -- if I'm going to watch TV I'll sit down and watch it -- I saw Lion (2016) last night, and Please Stand By (2017) a week ago, otherwise haven't seen much of anything... oh, and one time-shifted episode of The Expanse around Tuesday (I'm way behind). And then I'll get up and turn it off and do something else, because the TV is a distraction to conversation in a way that music in the background is not.) Wife, on the other hand, will sit in front of the oldies channel for 18 hours on a stretch on weekends, (she has her own TV) watching reruns of Emergency!!! and Love Canal, sorry, Boat, reruns of soap operas and old black and white horror films. When I ask her what she's doing, she says "just killing time". Well, ok, I'm taking the dogs to the park, why don't you come along? Get some fresh air, a little sunshine? No, she doesn't care to do that, Judge Judy is about to come on.
I freely admit this colors my thinking. And that I'm probably blaming the device. But I observe that we (wife and I) are both of "the tv tray generation". Both sets of parents commonly ate dinner on trays in front of the TV, because dinner time was when all the good shows came on, and that was our experience growing up. As a geek, I was an early adopter of on-demand TV, and this slowly weaned me off sitting in front of the glass tube when the networks wanted me to be there. And later, I realized I was watching less and less TV overall. There's a real world out there, etc etc. Wife never broke free. Sometimes I'm really sad about that.
But to the point, what is measurable is that real time TV (broadcast and non-demand cable) is dropping in viewership. There are, what, three generations now? who have grown up or were introduced in early adulthood to the idea that TV is something they could watch on their own terms, not whatever the stations spew whenever they want to spew it. And lo and behold, the networks are finally starting to notice, and in what resembles a panic, starting their own on-demand services. Too late, I believe.
The thing that would solve everything is carding players for dissent.
A ref was punched to death in a kids' game a bit back. The fish rots from the head.
Interesting about that. I don't watch American football, although my wife is a fanatic. (Or maybe, because my wife is a fanatic. I haven't isolated those feelings yet.) And I long ago lost interest in -- whatever you call it... the game where you kick the round ball around a field -- due to the drama and fake injuries. But I note that I have yet to see or hear of a ref in American football beaten to death, or injured or attacked at all.
Different culture, I guess.
As a complete coincidence, according to the last census, people in the US age 45 and over account for 39.4 percent of the population. Expect the percentage of "live TV" viewers to drop almost directly as people born in 1975 and earlier age and drop off the end.
In other words, watching "live tv" is largely an old person's pastime. What I choose to call "the TV tray generation".[1] And it's dying out.
[1] Yes, I know 45 to 85 or thereabouts can arguably be called two generations. Work with me here.
Wow, this thread got weird in a hurry.
^^^^ That one rule change would eliminate the great majority of the drama. I might even start watching games again.