Monitors got better, and printers got... well not better necessarily, but better printers got cheaper. (Cheap enough that you can get Kodak kiosk level quality for a modest price at home.) I'd argue that presentation (display, print) has improved, but at the same time, consumer expectations have changed -- now they're not looking for a few high quality photos, they're looking for snaps of everyday life, in a format that is easily shared and (in some cases) easily manipulated.
I park right in front of Starbucks and meet prospective sellers or buyers inside. If I'm buying an item, they have to bring it inside with them. No "it's in the car a couple blocks over down this alley". I get there a little early to case the joint and get a coffee. Adjust for items that can't easily be carried into Starbucks. (No, you park right here. I'm not going to park down that alley.)
I've had zero issues so far. Where I think people get into trouble is when they want the sale so badly that they can be talked into doing stupid things. Like meeting alone in unsecure locations.
> So, will you be paying attention to the game today? Ignoring it? Practicing your cultivated disinterest?
Well lessee. Wife is the football fanatic in the family. The only one in the family who actually watches the sport, in fact. Wife is making snacks.... Wife makes pretty good snacks, and is highly motivated on Superbowl Sunday.
And so, I skipped dinner last night and breakfast this morning to save room for food this afternoon. But watch the game? It's noisy and boring. That's not out of some affected "cultivated disinterest", it's because football is noisy and boring.
I have some photos to process, a script to write and a laptop to fix. But I won't be hungry.
(For some reason, I kept writing "snakes" instead of "snacks" above and had to go back and correct it. Hopefully that's not prophetic...)
I know there's SMART and other tools, but oddly enough, with offshore admins supposedly monitoring our equipment 24/7, I can still walk through our (fairly large) machine room and identify three or five warning lights that they did not know about. (I'm a "legacy" IT employee who still has access to the room.) Software alerts are important, but they're only as good as the people watching them. Even with an alert automatically spawning a trouble ticket, things can go bad if the ticket is dropped into a week-long queue, or even if it happens during local daylight hours and the offshore crew aren't coming online until 8:00 PM local time. Later, when the smoke clears, the offshore admins will insist they were just following process, and we'll just set things up to be knocked down again at a future date.
Secondly, you're right about IT making recommendations that are ignored by the pencil pushers. But in my opinion that's the CIO not doing his or her job.
A service call? Seriously? A syadmin (or operator if it's a big place) can't see the yellow light on a disk and replace the pack with in-house spares? Have we become so inept as an IT community that we can no longer do a walk-through of our machine room and service simple things like this? Maybe we do deserve to be outsourced.
And if one must have a service contract such that only the vendor can touch the hardware, (why would you do that? never mind) wouldn't you negotiate a provision that includes drive replacement (as drives are consumables that must eventually be replaced) without being charged for an "office visit"?
> This has nothing to do with the RT not being able to run a plethora of Windows apps. It's a much more fundamental fail.
Upon re-reading that, I see I wasn't clear. I was trying to say that it's not the fault of the RT as a product, at all. It's entirely the lack of truly touch-centric content creation apps and a reasonable way to manipulate them. This is true on all touch platforms, and is the fundamental reason why they're largely used to watch Netflix and draw mustaches on blurry photos of kittens, not for serious work. Unless you add a keyboard and pointing device. Which defeats the point of having a tablet.
The irony is that the much reviled Surface RT tablets were an attempt to change that. It was pretty much full-on desktop Windows in a tablet format.
But that misses the point. The solution is not to make tablets more like laptops. That's just a bandaid. The solution is to develop apps that allowed people to do useful, creative things with touch only. The fact that the Surface exists, (a tablet that tries to also be a laptop so you have a better chance of being able to do something useful) is indicative of this basic fail.
Try to do power user things with Windows applications using only the touch screen. Beyond playing music, movies and checking mail, it's a pretty dismal experience. This is not the fault on the hardware. It's the fault of the software. This has nothing to do with the RT not being able to run a plethora of Windows apps. It's a much more fundamental fail.
Regrettably, the M$ of today can't find its own ass with both hands and a map, so naturally the Surface RT was horribly unattractive to consumers and failed.
Well, my own take on the Surface RT was that Microsoft spent what was actually a fairly small amount of their total operating budget on a product that allowed them to say that they had an entry in the ARM market, and to further muddy the waters in that market segment. I don't believe they were ever really committed to making the RT concept work.
The reason tablets haven't replaced conventional computers is that there are few compelling apps that rely on touch, and the ones that exist are for consumption only. All those commercials we saw in the early days of people doing creative things with esoteric hand motions... yeah, that didn't happen. Not the fault of the hardware, I think, but because those touch-centric content creation apps never really materialized.
Anyone still want to bitch about the lack of flash support in iOS?
How's that android plug in working for you? Oooh. Right. The one the stopped supporting and distributing years ago.
Speaking for my wife, who bought a tablet specifically to play videos from various TV channel and sports websites, only to discover they all used flash, they've been really sucky years. Regular users don't know or care why, they just know that it doesn't work. And I have to listen to her complain about it.
I don't trust any kind of cd/dvd/BR for archiving my stuff. I back up to hard drive, detached from the system when I'm not backing up, and I cycle the hardware every 1 - 2 years, because hard drives don't last forever either.
Hard drives are so cheap these days that backing up to traditional backup media just doesn't make any sense anymore.
Companies like Comcast can rest assured that when their politicians are bought they stay bought!
Can they? "Staying bought" assumes some level of integrity, which leads one to a contradiction. It seems to me that if politicians can be bought at all, in all probability they can be bought multiple times.
> So if you will not be able to upgrade the OS and MS eventually stops providing updates to that OS will they at least release the keys to install something else?
No of course not. And the reason is, if you continue using your Surface RT, regardless of what OS you're running, you aren't buying some other Microsoft product. I think the expected behavior is to throw your RT away and buy a "real" Surface. So hop to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Monitors got better, and printers got ... well not better necessarily, but better printers got cheaper. (Cheap enough that you can get Kodak kiosk level quality for a modest price at home.) I'd argue that presentation (display, print) has improved, but at the same time, consumer expectations have changed -- now they're not looking for a few high quality photos, they're looking for snaps of everyday life, in a format that is easily shared and (in some cases) easily manipulated.
Film at eleven.
I park right in front of Starbucks and meet prospective sellers or buyers inside. If I'm buying an item, they have to bring it inside with them. No "it's in the car a couple blocks over down this alley". I get there a little early to case the joint and get a coffee. Adjust for items that can't easily be carried into Starbucks. (No, you park right here. I'm not going to park down that alley.)
I've had zero issues so far. Where I think people get into trouble is when they want the sale so badly that they can be talked into doing stupid things. Like meeting alone in unsecure locations.
> So, will you be paying attention to the game today? Ignoring it? Practicing your cultivated disinterest?
Well lessee. Wife is the football fanatic in the family. The only one in the family who actually watches the sport, in fact. Wife is making snacks.... Wife makes pretty good snacks, and is highly motivated on Superbowl Sunday.
And so, I skipped dinner last night and breakfast this morning to save room for food this afternoon. But watch the game? It's noisy and boring. That's not out of some affected "cultivated disinterest", it's because football is noisy and boring.
I have some photos to process, a script to write and a laptop to fix. But I won't be hungry.
(For some reason, I kept writing "snakes" instead of "snacks" above and had to go back and correct it. Hopefully that's not prophetic...)
And who exactly will comrpise the team that has the time and money to actively develop it?
Some organization without a vested interest in some other virtualization suite, I'm guessing.
Wiki says that virtualbox is Gnu GPL2. If Oracle has abandoned, fork it?
I know there's SMART and other tools, but oddly enough, with offshore admins supposedly monitoring our equipment 24/7, I can still walk through our (fairly large) machine room and identify three or five warning lights that they did not know about. (I'm a "legacy" IT employee who still has access to the room.) Software alerts are important, but they're only as good as the people watching them. Even with an alert automatically spawning a trouble ticket, things can go bad if the ticket is dropped into a week-long queue, or even if it happens during local daylight hours and the offshore crew aren't coming online until 8:00 PM local time. Later, when the smoke clears, the offshore admins will insist they were just following process, and we'll just set things up to be knocked down again at a future date.
Secondly, you're right about IT making recommendations that are ignored by the pencil pushers. But in my opinion that's the CIO not doing his or her job.
Ouch. Good point.
Are privacy and security issues the leverage that finally puts Linux in people's hands in significant numbers?"
(Are there enough people who *care* about these issues?)
Well I am surprised we don't have someone complaining and saying we should just by POTUS a bicycle yet.
Specifically.....
A service call? Seriously? A syadmin (or operator if it's a big place) can't see the yellow light on a disk and replace the pack with in-house spares? Have we become so inept as an IT community that we can no longer do a walk-through of our machine room and service simple things like this? Maybe we do deserve to be outsourced.
And if one must have a service contract such that only the vendor can touch the hardware, (why would you do that? never mind) wouldn't you negotiate a provision that includes drive replacement (as drives are consumables that must eventually be replaced) without being charged for an "office visit"?
I've got it! The service is free to users because it's paid for by ad robocalls.
No, wait...
> This has nothing to do with the RT not being able to run a plethora of Windows apps. It's a much more fundamental fail.
Upon re-reading that, I see I wasn't clear. I was trying to say that it's not the fault of the RT as a product, at all. It's entirely the lack of truly touch-centric content creation apps and a reasonable way to manipulate them. This is true on all touch platforms, and is the fundamental reason why they're largely used to watch Netflix and draw mustaches on blurry photos of kittens, not for serious work. Unless you add a keyboard and pointing device. Which defeats the point of having a tablet.
> the ones that exist are for consumption only
The irony is that the much reviled Surface RT tablets were an attempt to change that. It was pretty much full-on desktop Windows in a tablet format.
But that misses the point. The solution is not to make tablets more like laptops. That's just a bandaid. The solution is to develop apps that allowed people to do useful, creative things with touch only. The fact that the Surface exists, (a tablet that tries to also be a laptop so you have a better chance of being able to do something useful) is indicative of this basic fail.
Try to do power user things with Windows applications using only the touch screen. Beyond playing music, movies and checking mail, it's a pretty dismal experience. This is not the fault on the hardware. It's the fault of the software. This has nothing to do with the RT not being able to run a plethora of Windows apps. It's a much more fundamental fail.
Regrettably, the M$ of today can't find its own ass with both hands and a map, so naturally the Surface RT was horribly unattractive to consumers and failed.
Well, my own take on the Surface RT was that Microsoft spent what was actually a fairly small amount of their total operating budget on a product that allowed them to say that they had an entry in the ARM market, and to further muddy the waters in that market segment. I don't believe they were ever really committed to making the RT concept work.
The reason tablets haven't replaced conventional computers is that there are few compelling apps that rely on touch, and the ones that exist are for consumption only. All those commercials we saw in the early days of people doing creative things with esoteric hand motions... yeah, that didn't happen. Not the fault of the hardware, I think, but because those touch-centric content creation apps never really materialized.
I have both flash and java turned off. It's really surprising how much faster web pages load without all those autoplay ads.
Anyone still want to bitch about the lack of flash support in iOS?
How's that android plug in working for you? Oooh. Right. The one the stopped supporting and distributing years ago.
Speaking for my wife, who bought a tablet specifically to play videos from various TV channel and sports websites, only to discover they all used flash, they've been really sucky years. Regular users don't know or care why, they just know that it doesn't work. And I have to listen to her complain about it.
I don't trust any kind of cd/dvd/BR for archiving my stuff. I back up to hard drive, detached from the system when I'm not backing up, and I cycle the hardware every 1 - 2 years, because hard drives don't last forever either.
Hard drives are so cheap these days that backing up to traditional backup media just doesn't make any sense anymore.
Argh that came out all mangled. Should be:
No, it doesn't assume integrity. It works on the fact that Comcast pays more.
Seems to me that this only works if Comcast pays something now with the promise of more after the vote. -- which may be the case.
Companies like Comcast can rest assured that when their politicians are bought they stay bought!
Can they? "Staying bought" assumes some level of integrity, which leads one to a contradiction. It seems to me that if politicians can be bought at all, in all probability they can be bought multiple times.
I think you're right, they're at maximum heel. I wonder at what point the sails touch the water. Or has this already happened?
> Despite all the bashing, Microsoft has done a decent job with server operating systems lately
Well, at least up until October 26, 2012. (Wow, was it really that long ago?)
> So if you will not be able to upgrade the OS and MS eventually stops providing updates to that OS will they at least release the keys to install something else?
No of course not. And the reason is, if you continue using your Surface RT, regardless of what OS you're running, you aren't buying some other Microsoft product. I think the expected behavior is to throw your RT away and buy a "real" Surface. So hop to it.
Which might have happened.
dodged that bullet.