I don't think you can fight this sort of human nature though. I have a cheap espresso machine at home. To make a coffee, I put two scoops into the portafilter, press it down, stick it into the machine and turn the knob to push the water through. 30s later I have espresso. To clean, I take the portafilter off and smack it on the top of the rubbish bin.
How on earth it is considered better or easier to use a capsule machine is beyond me, yet millions of consumers choose to become enslaved to those expensive little non-biodegradable pods every year. It is just the way humans work. If anything it is the scourge of middle class apathy - the same thing that is causing many of the problems with our politics right now.
I absolutely agree. I have a french press. I pour in boiling water, wait 30 seconds, press it and pour coffee. To clean is only slightly more work than you do for your expresso.
Despite this, wife bought one 'a' those capsule machines, so now we have a drawer full of those little single-use plastic cups and lots of new trash. 'Cause it's convenient and trendy and cute. When I mention the waste, I get told that they also have a reusable strainer thingy, but I don't know of anyone who actually uses one.
In general, I find curious and a little disturbing that these young 'uns, in the current young-adult generation, who are supposed to be all environmentally conscious, are so in love with their disposable coffee gadgets and disposable personal electronic gadgets.
It's true that pigment based printers fare much better than dye based printers. I didn't mention them because they're more difficult to find and you have to know what to look for. So yes, you're right, a printer with pigment based inks does not have the drawbacks of a dye based printer.
I still think that outsourcing my printing makes more sense. Let someone else manage the hardware. Of course, I have an enterprise-class laser printer for stuff that isn't photography. I've had it for years and it's still on its first toner cartridge.
You're right, it's inconvenient sometimes to have stuff reprinted that didn't come out exactly right, but if you're careful and your monitor is calibrated, it doesn't happen too often, and the cost per print is low enough to make reprints practical.
What's especially annoying with liquid dye printers is that you KNOW that the great majority of users don't use them regularly, so the ink dries out or the inevitable head cleaning uses up a significant portion of the ink, and the price per page becomes ridiculous. Printer companies *know* this -- it's part of their business plan.
For mothers and mothers-in-law, I recommend mid-level color laser printers. The quality is Good Enough for printing facebook photos to tack on the wall, the toner cartridges last a long time, and they never dry out. It's fairly easy to make this case financially, especially to someone frustrated with how much it's costing, and how much they have to dink with the hardware, just to print pictures of their grandkids.
I do photography, but I outsource all my printing. When customers order prints from my website, an outside service does the actual printing and delivery. For ad-hoc printing, I sneaker-net a thumb drive over to some place that can print it for me. And recently, with grocery store chains and drug store chains buying the same Epson roll printers that used to be found only in professional print services, it doesn't really matter who does your printing, if you do your own color correction and don't need special paper.
In the rare instance I need art gallery level printing, I'm not going to do that at home anyway. I'm going to upload my image to a professional print service and either will-call it or have it shipped to me.
The POINT being, there's NO REASON TO OWN A DAMNED DYE-BASED PRINTER and a whole lot of reasons NOT to own one.
Or if you're going to buy one of the stupid things, buy the printer on sale, and when the demo cartridges run out, THROW THE WHOLE PRINTER AWAY and buy another printer on sale. E-waste be damned. Tell the manufacturers to adopt a less wasteful business model.
Let's all as consumers stop acting like battered wives, shall we? Stop playing the game, and the game will change.
...Is called "a moon". Think about it -- let's say you're living on an earth-sized rocky moon orbiting a super-Jupiter, and the moon on which you live has a moon. So you think you and your girl are sitting on the bleeflap of your gringleblop looking up at that shiny object in the sky and you're going to say, oh, look at the moonmoon? No, you're going to say, oh, look at the moon. It reflects wonderfully in your infuscate faceted seeing-patches. Only astro-geeks and pedants will insist on "moonmoon". And they don't get dates, so it's a mootmoot point.
When Latitude was shut down, we were told to do Google+ instead. It's fun it's easy etc etc. In actuality, as we all found out, it was a wasteland of (1) a few people who wanted to be on a social network that wasn't Facebook, (2) people who will join anything, and (3) people who had a use for the Latitude functionality.
Ok, so the first group is screwed. Nothing to be done for that. The second group probably won't even notice. Now is the time to do the right thing for the third group and re-enable Latitude in Maps, where it should have been all this time.
Don't EVER give out private information to a cold call. Never, for any reason. If there's a problem, and it's urgent, tell them you'll call them back on a known number. (Not a number they provide./duh) Legitimate callers will agree to this. Non-legitimate callers will try to steer you to a different number or insist that you must take care of this now, on this call. Don't fall for it.
Let me repeat this for the cognitively impared: If they call YOU, do NOT give out private information. If you call THEM on a legitimate number, it's a different story.
Chromebooks taking over schools don't present a credible threat to Microsoft. Test by: Apple has long ruled the schools, going clear back to those weirdly shaped translucent all-in-one CRT macs in designer colors. And although one could argue that this has almost certainly increased the popularity of Apple among young adults, and made Apple extremely profitable, the most used OS on the desktop remains firmly Microsoft.
Chrome taking over in the schools doesn't change that equation. If a large footprint in schools wasn't Apple's key to taking over the desktop OS, it won't be Google's either.
What this *might* do is reduce Apple's market share among young adults by some measurable amount. But it's unreasonable to expect Chrome making inroads into Apple's market share in schools to somehow pose a treat to Microsoft. Were it that easy, Apple would already rule the desktop.
That said, as more and more casual users realize that their laptops are essentially just browser appliances, they may be attracted to the price and relative lack of bloat of chromebooks. Or tend to buy them for kids or grandparents who only need something for facebook, logging into the medical portal and maybe Amazon. The REAL threat to Microsoft is when casual users discover that they don't really need Windows for anything they do. It's been true for awhile, but Windows has a huge installed base and huge momentum. It'll take a long time to turn that around.
I had a similar experience with Verizon, and like you transferred us to T-mobile. We had originally gone to Verizon from AT&T because Verizon didn't suck quite as badly. Now we're at t-mobile for the same reason.
That said, if you *buy* a phone at t-mobile (you went to them, as did I, with pre-existing phones) they will probably offer you "free" stuff along with your phone, like a tablet or a waterproof bluetooth speaker. If your experience is similar to mine, the salesperson will say to your face that the additional gadget is free. They will use the word "free".
But what they mean by "free", as explained on literally page five of the six page, single spaced, small font contract, is that the retail cost will be amortized over 18 months in your monthly bill. This is what has come to mean "free" as in when you buy a "free phone", and is, I guess, why the salesperson can say that it is "free".
Then, you will discover that the price they're charging contains a heavy premium over the commercial price for the same object. For instance, aforementioned waterproof bluetooth speaker, available across the street at Best Buy for $79 costs $300 (I'm not making this up) at t-mobile if included as a "free" add-on when purchasing a phone. Be warned!
And yes, I got bit by this. My own fault for not reading through six pages of very dense, intentionally unreadable contract while standing at the cash register in a busy store.
When I got my first bill, I went back to the store to have a discussion with the salesperson, and then his manager, about what the word "free" means. After a lengthy conversation, which I confess got rather loud at a couple of points, they took the entire $300 off my bill. Which is fortunate, because I was running out of carriers to move to.
The point is, they may have different techniques, but *all* carriers are trying to screw you. You *have* to read the fine print, especially towards the end of the document where the warhead lurks.
My daughter, an adult, recently bought a phone at Best Buy. She had saved up some money and wanted to pay cash for a phone and get it activated. The salesperson sold her on a better phone than she was originally looking at, naming a price for it that was in her budget. She said "are you SURE that this is the ENTIRE price?" He insisted, multiple times, that it was. And then, she got charged an additional $350 for the phone in her bill amortized over 18 months. These people are the scum of the earth and should be treated precisely like Kaa in The Jungle Book. For the same reasons.
or Google, yes. You can use a different search engine (and I do) but there ain't a lot of choices in phones. I have a very old Galaxy that I've been thinking of replacing, but Apple support royally pissed me off yesterday, so it's not likely to be replaced with anything running IOS. Maybe I'll look at Blackberry again.
This article is serendipitous. Just so happens that yesterday I talked to "Amadou" at Apple Support to try to get our ABM account activated. We'd gone through the enrollment process, which took 3 days, got the "enrollment complete" message, and then discovered we couldn't log into the portal with our Apple ID credentials. (Literally, "Your Apple ID is not allowed to sign in to this application."). "Amadou" said we'd have to create a new Apple ID and go through the process again. I said we went through the process documented on the Apple website, what went wrong? How do we know it'll work this time?
He got hostile at that point (mind you, this is customer service, for Apple!) and wouldn't give any more detail except repeating louder and louder that we would have to create a new Apple ID and go through the enrollment process again. Rather than degenerate into a shouting match, it seemed better just to say "thank you" politely and hang up. I outlined the experience to our local sales rep but he can't really help -- apparently his influence at Apple stops at selling us stuff.
The snarky side of me would say that Apple consumers have been trained to take whatever Apple decides to toss their way, ("mindshare") but honestly, it's not just Apple, customer service suckage appears to have increased across the board. I think part (but not all) of this has to do with outsourcing your technical support to cheap, untrained labor who's involvement is limited to whatever has been scripted, which usually means they have access to the same knowledge base that you do, but without the context or technical background to understand what they're reading.
But this has been the case for a long while -- it's the reason we as IT professionals tend to go to forums first for technical issues. Lately things seem to have gotten a lot worse.
The solution, in my opinion, is to drop vendors with bad technical support. Consider: If you're paying a huge yearly fee for support for a commercial product, and it just ain't happening, mighten't it be time to look into open source alternatives? Yeah, I know, no support. But you have essentially no support ANYWAY.
In the same free market, I can choose not to do business with companies that piss me off. And have.
I have fewer choices with government run enterprise. The example conservatives keep dragging into the discussion is the DMV, which is an easy target, but it applies to any enterprise where you don't have a choice.
Lilly Tomlin said it best, years ago. "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." Replace that with Social Security, most utilities, Comcast, any business where choice is artificially limited.
Mark f'n Hamill criticized the movie. I think it's pretty safe to say bad things about it in the nerd community when you've got a Jedi Master on your side.
Good point. One would think so. Oddly enough, nobody called Hamill a nazi or a russian bot. Or a misogynist. (At least, as far as I know. I don't do twitter...)
the expanded universe isn't canon, but your points about Leia being more than just a courier, and that the beginning of the original film (I still can't bring myself to call it "a new hope", when I saw it, it was just "star wars") was invalidated by the end of Rogue One, are still valid. Moreover, this could have been fixed with a little work on the script, by replacing "death star plans" with "a key component of the death star plans" (say, the location of the vent) and a couple of additional scenes (ship-to-ship transfer at some remote location) at the end. As for fitting into the rest of the films, it was lazy writing.
Nevertheless, Rogue One as a stand-alone film is one of the best of the star wars films released this century, despite the continuity screw-up, although I realize that's probably damning with faint praise.
> The main thing that really bothers me about The Last Jedi, is that all the hate and trolling has managed to pretty much taint any and all actual criticism of the movie.
Hm. It's almost like that was the intention.
They learned it works to deflect at least some criticism from the genderswapped Ghostbusters.
Some of the same people involved too. Must be a coincidence.
I think these particular techniques were first tried with that really terrible Fantastic Four remake, (if you didn't like it you were a racist) and perfected for the Ghostbusters remake (if you didn't like it, you were a misogynist).
I suspect it made perfect sense to the suits. If you have a risky property, include something that most of us wouldn't care about one way or another (race swapping or gender swapping) and then "help along" the inevitable trolls who take violent issue with the swap. And then, if the sock puppets come to light, blame it on the Russians, I guess. As if Putin would care about some fantasy film.
So what we need is one service we can buy that combines all the streaming and web services under one roof for, oh, probably the sum of all the individual costs plus some overhead. But you wouldn't have to hunt around and it'd all be in one bill. The disadvantage is that you'd have to take some services you didn't really want, but people would get used to that. Municipalities could decide which consolidation service got to play in which geographical area.
....wait a minute, this is starting to sound familiar...
> The main thing that really bothers me about The Last Jedi, is that all the hate and trolling has managed to pretty much taint any and all actual criticism of the movie.
Slashdot Mirror
The report might be self-serving, but it does serve to illustrate the difference between "zero emissions" and "zero point emissions".
I don't think you can fight this sort of human nature though. I have a cheap espresso machine at home. To make a coffee, I put two scoops into the portafilter, press it down, stick it into the machine and turn the knob to push the water through. 30s later I have espresso. To clean, I take the portafilter off and smack it on the top of the rubbish bin.
How on earth it is considered better or easier to use a capsule machine is beyond me, yet millions of consumers choose to become enslaved to those expensive little non-biodegradable pods every year. It is just the way humans work. If anything it is the scourge of middle class apathy - the same thing that is causing many of the problems with our politics right now.
I absolutely agree. I have a french press. I pour in boiling water, wait 30 seconds, press it and pour coffee. To clean is only slightly more work than you do for your expresso.
Despite this, wife bought one 'a' those capsule machines, so now we have a drawer full of those little single-use plastic cups and lots of new trash. 'Cause it's convenient and trendy and cute. When I mention the waste, I get told that they also have a reusable strainer thingy, but I don't know of anyone who actually uses one.
In general, I find curious and a little disturbing that these young 'uns, in the current young-adult generation, who are supposed to be all environmentally conscious, are so in love with their disposable coffee gadgets and disposable personal electronic gadgets.
It's true that pigment based printers fare much better than dye based printers. I didn't mention them because they're more difficult to find and you have to know what to look for. So yes, you're right, a printer with pigment based inks does not have the drawbacks of a dye based printer.
I still think that outsourcing my printing makes more sense. Let someone else manage the hardware. Of course, I have an enterprise-class laser printer for stuff that isn't photography. I've had it for years and it's still on its first toner cartridge.
You're right, it's inconvenient sometimes to have stuff reprinted that didn't come out exactly right, but if you're careful and your monitor is calibrated, it doesn't happen too often, and the cost per print is low enough to make reprints practical.
What's especially annoying with liquid dye printers is that you KNOW that the great majority of users don't use them regularly, so the ink dries out or the inevitable head cleaning uses up a significant portion of the ink, and the price per page becomes ridiculous. Printer companies *know* this -- it's part of their business plan.
For mothers and mothers-in-law, I recommend mid-level color laser printers. The quality is Good Enough for printing facebook photos to tack on the wall, the toner cartridges last a long time, and they never dry out. It's fairly easy to make this case financially, especially to someone frustrated with how much it's costing, and how much they have to dink with the hardware, just to print pictures of their grandkids.
I do photography, but I outsource all my printing. When customers order prints from my website, an outside service does the actual printing and delivery. For ad-hoc printing, I sneaker-net a thumb drive over to some place that can print it for me. And recently, with grocery store chains and drug store chains buying the same Epson roll printers that used to be found only in professional print services, it doesn't really matter who does your printing, if you do your own color correction and don't need special paper.
In the rare instance I need art gallery level printing, I'm not going to do that at home anyway. I'm going to upload my image to a professional print service and either will-call it or have it shipped to me.
The POINT being, there's NO REASON TO OWN A DAMNED DYE-BASED PRINTER and a whole lot of reasons NOT to own one.
Or if you're going to buy one of the stupid things, buy the printer on sale, and when the demo cartridges run out, THROW THE WHOLE PRINTER AWAY and buy another printer on sale. E-waste be damned. Tell the manufacturers to adopt a less wasteful business model.
Let's all as consumers stop acting like battered wives, shall we? Stop playing the game, and the game will change.
Brilliant observation.
> (But it rarely wins bitches)
Sadly, true.
oh, look at the moon. It reflects wonderfully in your infuscate faceted seeing-patches
The sun is a bit dim, but that distant star at the center of our miniature galaxy is making the moon shine brightly.
Yes, precisely like that.
> #`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER
Wow, that's old school. But then again, so is Flash.
Wasn't Flash supposed to be gone in, like, 2005?
What the hell. Really. Ok, I'll take that ribbing. Thanks for the info.
Now, bring back Latitude on Google Maps.
When Latitude was shut down, we were told to do Google+ instead. It's fun it's easy etc etc. In actuality, as we all found out, it was a wasteland of (1) a few people who wanted to be on a social network that wasn't Facebook, (2) people who will join anything, and (3) people who had a use for the Latitude functionality.
Ok, so the first group is screwed. Nothing to be done for that. The second group probably won't even notice. Now is the time to do the right thing for the third group and re-enable Latitude in Maps, where it should have been all this time.
Don't EVER give out private information to a cold call. Never, for any reason. If there's a problem, and it's urgent, tell them you'll call them back on a known number. (Not a number they provide./duh) Legitimate callers will agree to this. Non-legitimate callers will try to steer you to a different number or insist that you must take care of this now, on this call. Don't fall for it.
Let me repeat this for the cognitively impared: If they call YOU, do NOT give out private information. If you call THEM on a legitimate number, it's a different story.
Let's be safe out there.
Chromebooks taking over schools don't present a credible threat to Microsoft. Test by: Apple has long ruled the schools, going clear back to those weirdly shaped translucent all-in-one CRT macs in designer colors. And although one could argue that this has almost certainly increased the popularity of Apple among young adults, and made Apple extremely profitable, the most used OS on the desktop remains firmly Microsoft.
Chrome taking over in the schools doesn't change that equation. If a large footprint in schools wasn't Apple's key to taking over the desktop OS, it won't be Google's either.
What this *might* do is reduce Apple's market share among young adults by some measurable amount. But it's unreasonable to expect Chrome making inroads into Apple's market share in schools to somehow pose a treat to Microsoft. Were it that easy, Apple would already rule the desktop.
That said, as more and more casual users realize that their laptops are essentially just browser appliances, they may be attracted to the price and relative lack of bloat of chromebooks. Or tend to buy them for kids or grandparents who only need something for facebook, logging into the medical portal and maybe Amazon. The REAL threat to Microsoft is when casual users discover that they don't really need Windows for anything they do. It's been true for awhile, but Windows has a huge installed base and huge momentum. It'll take a long time to turn that around.
I had a similar experience with Verizon, and like you transferred us to T-mobile. We had originally gone to Verizon from AT&T because Verizon didn't suck quite as badly. Now we're at t-mobile for the same reason.
That said, if you *buy* a phone at t-mobile (you went to them, as did I, with pre-existing phones) they will probably offer you "free" stuff along with your phone, like a tablet or a waterproof bluetooth speaker. If your experience is similar to mine, the salesperson will say to your face that the additional gadget is free. They will use the word "free".
But what they mean by "free", as explained on literally page five of the six page, single spaced, small font contract, is that the retail cost will be amortized over 18 months in your monthly bill. This is what has come to mean "free" as in when you buy a "free phone", and is, I guess, why the salesperson can say that it is "free".
Then, you will discover that the price they're charging contains a heavy premium over the commercial price for the same object. For instance, aforementioned waterproof bluetooth speaker, available across the street at Best Buy for $79 costs $300 (I'm not making this up) at t-mobile if included as a "free" add-on when purchasing a phone. Be warned!
And yes, I got bit by this. My own fault for not reading through six pages of very dense, intentionally unreadable contract while standing at the cash register in a busy store.
When I got my first bill, I went back to the store to have a discussion with the salesperson, and then his manager, about what the word "free" means. After a lengthy conversation, which I confess got rather loud at a couple of points, they took the entire $300 off my bill. Which is fortunate, because I was running out of carriers to move to.
The point is, they may have different techniques, but *all* carriers are trying to screw you. You *have* to read the fine print, especially towards the end of the document where the warhead lurks.
My daughter, an adult, recently bought a phone at Best Buy. She had saved up some money and wanted to pay cash for a phone and get it activated. The salesperson sold her on a better phone than she was originally looking at, naming a price for it that was in her budget. She said "are you SURE that this is the ENTIRE price?" He insisted, multiple times, that it was. And then, she got charged an additional $350 for the phone in her bill amortized over 18 months. These people are the scum of the earth and should be treated precisely like Kaa in The Jungle Book. For the same reasons.
or Google.
or Google, yes. You can use a different search engine (and I do) but there ain't a lot of choices in phones. I have a very old Galaxy that I've been thinking of replacing, but Apple support royally pissed me off yesterday, so it's not likely to be replaced with anything running IOS. Maybe I'll look at Blackberry again.
This article is serendipitous. Just so happens that yesterday I talked to "Amadou" at Apple Support to try to get our ABM account activated. We'd gone through the enrollment process, which took 3 days, got the "enrollment complete" message, and then discovered we couldn't log into the portal with our Apple ID credentials. (Literally, "Your Apple ID is not allowed to sign in to this application."). "Amadou" said we'd have to create a new Apple ID and go through the process again. I said we went through the process documented on the Apple website, what went wrong? How do we know it'll work this time?
He got hostile at that point (mind you, this is customer service, for Apple!) and wouldn't give any more detail except repeating louder and louder that we would have to create a new Apple ID and go through the enrollment process again. Rather than degenerate into a shouting match, it seemed better just to say "thank you" politely and hang up. I outlined the experience to our local sales rep but he can't really help -- apparently his influence at Apple stops at selling us stuff.
The snarky side of me would say that Apple consumers have been trained to take whatever Apple decides to toss their way, ("mindshare") but honestly, it's not just Apple, customer service suckage appears to have increased across the board. I think part (but not all) of this has to do with outsourcing your technical support to cheap, untrained labor who's involvement is limited to whatever has been scripted, which usually means they have access to the same knowledge base that you do, but without the context or technical background to understand what they're reading.
But this has been the case for a long while -- it's the reason we as IT professionals tend to go to forums first for technical issues. Lately things seem to have gotten a lot worse.
The solution, in my opinion, is to drop vendors with bad technical support. Consider: If you're paying a huge yearly fee for support for a commercial product, and it just ain't happening, mighten't it be time to look into open source alternatives? Yeah, I know, no support. But you have essentially no support ANYWAY.
In the same free market, I can choose not to do business with companies that piss me off. And have.
I have fewer choices with government run enterprise. The example conservatives keep dragging into the discussion is the DMV, which is an easy target, but it applies to any enterprise where you don't have a choice.
Lilly Tomlin said it best, years ago. "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." Replace that with Social Security, most utilities, Comcast, any business where choice is artificially limited.
Mark f'n Hamill criticized the movie. I think it's pretty safe to say bad things about it in the nerd community when you've got a Jedi Master on your side.
Good point. One would think so. Oddly enough, nobody called Hamill a nazi or a russian bot. Or a misogynist. (At least, as far as I know. I don't do twitter...)
the expanded universe isn't canon, but your points about Leia being more than just a courier, and that the beginning of the original film (I still can't bring myself to call it "a new hope", when I saw it, it was just "star wars") was invalidated by the end of Rogue One, are still valid. Moreover, this could have been fixed with a little work on the script, by replacing "death star plans" with "a key component of the death star plans" (say, the location of the vent) and a couple of additional scenes (ship-to-ship transfer at some remote location) at the end. As for fitting into the rest of the films, it was lazy writing.
Nevertheless, Rogue One as a stand-alone film is one of the best of the star wars films released this century, despite the continuity screw-up, although I realize that's probably damning with faint praise.
> The main thing that really bothers me about The Last Jedi, is that all the hate and trolling has managed to pretty much taint any and all actual criticism of the movie.
Hm. It's almost like that was the intention.
They learned it works to deflect at least some criticism from the genderswapped Ghostbusters.
Some of the same people involved too. Must be a coincidence.
I think these particular techniques were first tried with that really terrible Fantastic Four remake, (if you didn't like it you were a racist) and perfected for the Ghostbusters remake (if you didn't like it, you were a misogynist).
I suspect it made perfect sense to the suits. If you have a risky property, include something that most of us wouldn't care about one way or another (race swapping or gender swapping) and then "help along" the inevitable trolls who take violent issue with the swap. And then, if the sock puppets come to light, blame it on the Russians, I guess. As if Putin would care about some fantasy film.
So what we need is one service we can buy that combines all the streaming and web services under one roof for, oh, probably the sum of all the individual costs plus some overhead. But you wouldn't have to hunt around and it'd all be in one bill. The disadvantage is that you'd have to take some services you didn't really want, but people would get used to that. Municipalities could decide which consolidation service got to play in which geographical area.
> The main thing that really bothers me about The Last Jedi, is that all the hate and trolling has managed to pretty much taint any and all actual criticism of the movie.
Hm. It's almost like that was the intention.
Obviously this is a nefarious plot to destroy American culture by taking down the Star Wars franchise. Will the country survive?? /sarcasm
If Rocky and Bullwinkle returned to TV, this could be one of the story lines.
What if the bot identifies as human? Huh?