Software, movies, music, ebooks, whatever. . Pay by the megabyte, a penny or two (whatever). Once every vendor of e-content started doing it, it would get accepted, adopted and become the norm. They could be done with it, and get back to normal business and stop this adversarial conflict with the customers.. That would work for all these various companies, they would get money, people would get their stuff, piracy would drop down severely.
Holding on to last centurys business model is insane*bonkers*nuts.
It's ludicrous, crazy, there's no need for all this BS about copying and piracy. Making copies of anything digital is so freekin cheap now, they should sell it cheap and be done with it. These greedy goons want a monopoly on technology, that's the only real crime being committed now.
Want to sell more of anything? If you can get it cheaper, or make it cheaper-like they can-, then sell it cheaper, much cheaper if that is what it takes. This works for every other product on earth now BUT this digitized stuff. Even 99 cents a track is a rip. Double digits folding money multiple dollars for stuff on a cheap plastic disk is a rip.
Digital content producers of the world-tear down those high price walls and you will see billions of happy customers on the other side!
See frequent black box voting slashdot articles, etc. This is one of those things that is just too blatant and obvious to ignore. We are living under a regime that came about because of a technological coup. It is not accurate to claim that most support the current regime,because most do *not*.
The RIAA folks could get people to switch to the new drm'ed format easily by using human nature-greed. Cheap sells. Witness Walmart. It works. By offering the disks much cheaper than standard disks are today they could influence the hardware market. Store shelf, old CD title, 20$, new DRMed disk that needs the new DRM'ed hardware, same title, 3$. Something like that, side by side. They could easily drop prices to only 10% (whatever) of what they charge now (which is what they should be doing business-ethically and then there would be no problems really), sort of a generational loss lead. the first few years they could dump the hardware cheap too for that matter. Want the cheaper discs with DRM,OK then, they work in these approved players, etc. A few years later, poof, a done deal. Millions will adopt and adapt. Cheap *works*. And because the music industry is by and large a closed shop cooperating monopolistic cartel, if they all did it at once, well there ya go, a fait accompli. You combine that with increasingly severe laws for "piracy",which is happening,and you now have the carrot and the stick approach, a time tested workable solution. You won't get everyone, but if you get the bulk of them, you win. They have the organization, the cash and the bribery expertise with congress. How are they going to lose eventually? The US in particular has an offical economic position of a raging hard on for "IP" protection, because we have decided manufacturing tangibles is passe. Copyrighted music is right up there in that scene.
They really don't care much yet in the "developing world", where copying is even more widespread and common, because there's not much cash there anyway for full price disks, so for now if they strictly enforce it law-wise and do the loss lead concept, they could conceivably win in the developed world where there's still serious cash to be grifted.
The music industry isn't in the "Music" business, they are in the music "Distribution" business. It's easier to see how they think if you look at it from that angle.
I got the cool 1000 buck ride (my used RV-works! Quite nice really once I cleaned it up some, has less than 100k on the clock) and a hundred buck computer (a mini itx mobo + RAM I bought and fit into an old AT case) but alas, my fridge was 100$ used. I imagine if I looked around I could get one for 10$ or free for hauling off.
Oh, you mean NEW? different story, but... I'll take one of the windup laptops from what I have read of the specs. so far price wise I think they have got it down to around 150$ or so theoretically. Still far from the goal of 100$ even, with with millions being the projected market, it'll get there... I dig the windup part, it has built in wifi, and pre installed linux and is solid state. What's not to like?? There's a market for these things out there beyond freebie give aways to poor folks. I mean, heck, look what they want for PDAs! That's what I think of these things, instead of calling them a laptop, call them a very large multifunctional PDA with somewhat decent specs, then they look like a deal, even at 200 bucks. Throw them on the shelf at wallyworld and electronics stores and they'll get sold. I already have two baygen windup radios, they are nice, I'd get another one if it was digital tuning with some programmable presets.
There is just as much "snakeoil" with the FDA now as before they were invented. Artificial Vanilla? That's a wholesome "food"? Really? Aspartame? Artificial colors, flavors, additives?
*chuckle* That's snakeoil man, pure snakeoil..
"Legal" drugs with suppressed bad effects tests, revolving door government agency drone, they retire, go direct to a big foodco or pharmco paycheck. Happens all the time. Google FDA,scandal, see what ya find. Pick a government agency, civil or military, it's all the same, and the FDA is no different. None. Some good meds, of course, a lot of bad ones, yep!
Naw, no snakeoil or corruption/lying there! Clean as a whistle! HAHAHAHA!
Times haven't changed, the snakeoil salesmen have just pimped out and gone uptown and are part of the government/corporate axis of maximum profits and skewed laws and brainwashing since birth on TV and in the schools. People are *just* as gullible as they always were, even moreso now, because most actually believe the fairytale that government exists to "serve them".
Modern humans are not leeter or smarter than people a hundred years ago, we are exactly the same, we just have more gadgets and a government ten times bigger and ten times more corrupt and we have a hundred times or more sleazy corporate snakeoil companies.
They are planning or trying to institute a per mile charge based off of your cars odometer. A gas tax like we have now is per gallon, and yes, it should be enough, but because consumers are choosing high MPG vehicles increasingly, they will be double taxed-a fine if you will, which is what a tax is, on "per mile". It's been covered here before in a few articles along with vehicle "black box" recorders.
You haven't had to call tech support in ten years, so therefore all these tech support centers are unnecessary??? Is that the implication? Why don't you run that by all these companies then, they can save even more money. And you have a good job, so everyone else has a good job??? Say what? And bad credit is all the consumers fault? Is that why the Fed is going to stop reporting a lot of the M3 statistics, like was announced a week or so ago?? And you are assuming everyone who is at slashdot is a white collar IT worker in silicon valley??
Personal anecdotal is not a relevant answer for generalized commentary of the macro subject. One can always find excerptions and variants.
Anyway, I was summarizing what I have read, and heard about, and experienced. My personal was only part of it, a very small part.. Even here on slashdot, run tech support through a search engine maybe and go back and review it. Tech support horror stories are negative-both ways, for the poor service rep AND the customer. It's very common. My personal tech suport problems have been there, only a few, and mostly not pleasant, ie, issue not resolved in most cases. That doesn't mean that everyone's issue isn't resolved, but a lot are like that.
you are picking an extreme example and applying it to all situations with tech support calls. I have no doubt it happens, but I reject that it's all the time,and nor did I ever say I supported such an extreme and rude interchange. So don't put words in my mouth please, and don't even think about assuming this old civil rights marcher is any sort of racist or anything of that nature, because I am not, just to further clarify on that subject. I will admit to being prejudiced against globalists and their current business practices, readily I might add, and I am totally against the current way out sourced tech support is run, because it's a consumer failure, IMO, for the reasons I previously outlined. If you want to support the way it is run now, have fun, I think it's teh sucks, and I bet if you could run any sort of accurate poll, "teh sucks" would win handily over "current out sourced consumer tech support is just great!".. This is my opinion, YMMV.
...goes into the black box where your insurance company and big brother get access to it. That part is coming, too, along with disabling it or altering the data will also be a crime.. almost forgot, the "charge per mile driven" tax that is coming.
no more so than anything else. It's just reality, I never said if I agreed with it or not or held to the same views, but I don't think it's deniable either..say I half way agree, but I totally understand to make this clear where I am standing on the issue. Just reporting what I have seen,heard and read about, and experienced myself. People don't like crap products, and the products are crap more often than not now a days. So these products need "tech support". This starts it off in a negative fashion. People don't like being lied to - "Hi, I'm 'Mike'" is not a good way to start the conversation when both parties know it's a lie. This is two negatives in a row now, bad product, customer immediately lied to. Two. Then it gets worse as the communication both ways is dismal at best. Three strikes at the ole ball game now. 3 negatives,the customer is getting very upset now. And so on. yes, it happens. No, I don't like it. Yes, I have more in common with "Mike" and with the angry customer, I think they are both victims of the globalist boss class of greed filled goons, but that's another subject.
And the economic and politics involved is undebateable news, again, just reality, data in the papers, read all about it.
And misplaced anger?? Helloo, the crap products COMPANY has made their executive decision to employ this person as their official representative for their product, it's their fault, NOT THE CUSTOMERS. To save a few bucks so that millionaires can become billionaires, they make crap products, then they chose to use tech support with a virtually unrecognizable accent. Who else is the customer supposed to talk to, it's WHO THEY GET when they call the help line. If they are upset, they are supposed to act happy?? "Hello! My product is FUBARED, so thank you for taking my money, and now making it even more difficult to figure out what is wrong or how to fix it! thankyou so very much!" You honestly expect people to act like that? On what planet? Why is the anger "unjustified" then?
You want the truth, see Jack Nicholson, he has the quote that fits. Don't shoot the messenger if you are afraid of the report. People don't really blame the poor tech support person, but that's ALL they have to talk to, so poor "Mike" has to eat it. that's what he gets paid for. that's a tech support job, at least half of it anyway. The customer has always, does now, and will always have to somehow transmit across why they are upset, and make it clear they ARE upset. It's the nature of the "tech support call" beast. You aren't ordering a pizza, you as a customer are calling up because there's aproblem serious enough that you *need to call up*. That's the job, don't like it, don't take it, as the rest of the planet is so fond of telling "over paid and pampered" USians now. The customers, who would surely like to, can't just call up Mr. Golden Parachute corporate raider CEO who has screwed up the craptacular gadget corporation and bankrupted it, you get joe lowly "tech support", no matter who that person is or where they are physically located. If "Mike" wants to be upset, "Mike" shouldn't blame the customer-victim who actually shelled out the cash for the craptacular gadget, and who is providing a piece of that cash so that "Mike" can have a paycheck where it didn't exist before. It's a tough life, almost all jobs suck bad,just the "suckage" is different, that's all. Them's the breaks.
..modern electronics is more crap throw away quality than not, necessitating a lot of customer service calls. When Americans call the handy 800#, they honestly can't understand what is going on in the conversation most of the time, leading to double frustration, a broken gadget and then no way to effectively communicate. And it doesn't help that the tech support guy calls himself "Mike" either, it's just an insult to the customer because he or she knows his name is most likely not "Mike". They are frustrated because A-nothing gets fixed, B-they get insulted right off the bat, and C-they know that this used to be a US job. All of the above and more. This has created contention unfortunately.
The US right now almost every day in the biz headlines is "more layoffs". I mean big layoffs, significant, large, important. it's *spooky* what is going on to those paying attention. The average person here is starting to get more than a bit concerned over the future. They see blue collar jobs going to china, white collar to india, and service jobs here going to illegal immigrants. Uhh-what's left exactly?
It's not personal, so don't take it personal, just there is no way to get those US bosses and politicians (who aren't sweating the mortgage payment and healthcare and whatnot) to understand that this "globalism" bill of goods they foisted on us isn't working out like they thought. Since they really started pushing it,the past 20 years or so, we've gone from the planets largest creditor nation to largest debtor nation. The middle class is shrinking fast and is exisiting on credit cards and refinancing the mortgage. This is not a good idea. Not-at-all.
No one has anything against other folks in other lands having jobs,NONE, that isn't the issue at all, the main issue is transferring existing jobs, when they should just be creating new jobs in places like where you are at. It really doesn't have to be one or the other, it can be both if the globalist boss class wasn't such greed-jerk total lamers..and I bet it's the same in India as well.
Some examples would be eBay and Amazon, Basically one big ad, very successful. Online hardware vendors do some good business, and those not even related to computing in any way, an example, I have to maintain a large variety of equipment, small engine machines, larger tractors, etc. Frequently none of my local dealers carry a part, or it's a long estimated wait, etc or I can tell it's just too expensive. I can run a search and see any number of online vendors then and find some deals. Sometimes even researching a problem, going to forums, etc, you can see ads that might help you out. I'd call it overall useful to have ads on the net, I just don't like flash animation or animated gif ads. Static images or text based are fine though.
She doesn't have one, she is the snail mail type. She uses the computer I built for her occassionaly, but really doesn't like them all that much. She has a real hard time typing and mopusing because of arthritis in her hands is part of the reason I guess... She likes other gadgets a lot, but not computers. But man, do we get junk mail! I am never at a loss for woodstove starter kindling paper. She milks the system, gets on these sweepstakes lists and whatnot and gets a lot of free stuff to try other stuff that she mostly sends back. As to email spam, I get enough for two people I think:p
...she's the spam queen, loves the stuff, signs up for every freebie she can find via snail mail. One of the gifts she got from some bozo magazine place was a box full of basic black one foot long heavy duty extension cords, sold as a power strip adapter-extender. I got them as a geek gift for B-day. Works great, take your normal power strip, slap these things on, and you can have wall to wall wallwarts lined up all off the same strip, and being flexible you can arrange them to taste, and being very short they don't get in the way or need to be bundled up. Similar to that squid device but more universal,because most likely you already have a power strip. Plug all the jazz in, scoot it behind the monitor, done. If you need to, just color code the weird plug ends that go to your devices to keep them straight. I don't know who sells them, the box is gone, but really, just very short but very decent gauge wire extension cords, I imagine you could find them with a little net searching.
I can see registering to submit comments to articles, but I certainly can't see registering to view content in the first place. As a prolific news reader and part time editor, I read a LOT of online copy, when I go to a link that requires registration I just blow that site off, not worth the hassle. Not going to register at one thousand sites. These papers seem to think they are the only place on the web or something, it's nuts. I can find (usually) the same wire service copy elsewhere without the hassle. And I am *certainly* not going to pay serious folding money to read one single article, that's ludicrous, yet some news sites and journals insist on it. No sale, no thanks.
Second annoyance these online papers will have to overcome is their habit of using annoying visual ads and flash based or scripted navigation, again, a major turn off, to enough people that blocking ads in general has become common. And insisting your visitors need active scripting turned on or Flash to use your site is a serious security concern in this age of quickly opening multiple tabs. People surf *fast* now. When the first popup or endless stream of open windows happened because of scripting, it went downhill from there, IMO. People just don't want the abuse, and abuse it is. Tasteful and relevant text ads with normal linking are preferrable and most people don't mind them if they are relevant to the site and article. Google got that part so-o-o-o correct.
..that when it sees such a page would generate a report that went out to interested parties so they could swarm the webmaster there with emails about it? A polite "hello webmaster, this sucks for such and such reasons, would you please fix it?" sort of thing? It would have to be automated in some fashion probably. One or two emails webmasters might ignore, but if everyone who had the extension was part of the swarmed response it might get noticed and acted on.
Just asking, I really don't know if something like this exists
Blueflops, 2 floppies, that's it, net connection, graphical web browsing, irc, etc. Outstanding, I run it on an old toshiba lappy with 16 megs ram and a floppy drive.
Austrumi 50 megs of coolness and no more. It does need more RAM though than a lot of other small distros, 128, but it loads into the RAM then, spits the CD back out freeing up the optical drive, and is wicked fast.
The vendors will OEM it, and if this past Black Friday shopping frenzy is an indication, people will be lining up to get it, *because* of the hardware deals that will be wrapped around it. With that said, all new major releases of windows since at least 95 have had brisk sales by disk at release time, that lasts a month or so (whatever) then slows down. I would imagine this will be similar.
It also depends on pricing, MS can afford to drop prices and still make a lot of profit. As the software costs approach or exceed the hardware costs, they will be forced to do this I think. people might be in the unusual situation of being in the same store staring at 200$ complete systems with OS installed, then staring at a set of disks for 200$ with the same OS. This will cause a few "hmmm, WTF??" moments.
I was postulating on what they *could* do if they felt like it, not what they are doing *right now* to make money.
As to financial advisors--please, 99.9% of them are clueless or crooked. As for proof of that, I give you the Great Depression and the dot bomb stock bubble crash, both orchestrated by the large financial houses and pundits and advisors. I pay little attention to what they say in public without filtering it through my crap-o-meter and then running that output through the spot-the-shill-translator. They make politicians look like honest intelligent people. Hustlers and skimmers mostly. Big smiles. Basically I think of them as three card monte dealers who work out of offices rather than on the street corner.
When I was a kid and they had real five and dime stores you could get packets of real pretty stocks,now worthless, sold as novelty items, from companies shilled to the max and sold to folks from the advice of "the pros", the casino hustlers. The stock market has long ago stopped being an "investment", it's all just speculator driven up and down programmed frenzy selling and a bewildering array of paper financial pseudo "products". Not to say people can't make money there, of course they do, but I know two professional vegas gamblers-card players- they make money too. Not so much as to get banned, but a decent steady living. but they don't produce anything themselves, except for one of them has sold quite a few books on card playing.
HGTTG reference episode: the thinkers, the doers and the middlemen, meh
some friends of mine who worked at DEC in massachusetts in the 70s just *hated* it. I mean, they always cussed when they talked about work. Now this is second hand anecdotal so don't hold me to any of the details,could be urban legend but here goes: The one thing I heard from all of them that was the worst was that they had a catwalk where the bosses walked around OVER the line workers to look down at them. It made the employees feel like utter crap and gave them a "who cares about this place" attitude.
With googles investment in fiber combined with server farms rivaled by-no one really, maybe akami comes closest- there are any number of ways they could still "make money". They are still in the mind share growing business as well as ads. I bet if they wanted to they could pop open an itunes like experience tomorrow and make money, or start a national ISP, or offer paid serious uptime and fast hosting, etc. They do some of that stuff now for free with the ads supporting it, but they could offer a "pro" version of this or that and charge cash for "no ads" for the same thing. Heck, just offering cheap offsite data backup would be a platinum mine for them. People are already using googlemail for that on a small personal scale.
How about this one, the mythical google OS & office suite & lotsa other apps,integrated email, VOIP, and chat, offered to big box vendors as an OEM install? The big box vendors are afraid to whizz off microsoft so they have been reluctant to the max to offer anything but MS, but if it was google they might think it to be doable then just from their size and branezpowerz and trackrecord so far.
Who knows what they might do in the future but one thing is certain they got some cash and a pretty large "fan" base and some decent and motivated engineers already.
And speaking of bankers....googlepay might take off as well.
The development of other fuels will not negate the usefullness or use of traditional petroleum. Nations that are oil rich will continue to use the fuel,especially if it is their primary natural resource, even if their export market diminishes. And especially then, with no imported cash from exported oil, they would be literally forced to directly use the oil themselves to the best of their ability. And it is quite possible that as the islamic world (if we want to limit the discussion to there) matures (most are under the age of 30 right now), they will want their own manufacturing and other islamo-centrist based business, rather than purchasing products from other areas. Necessity *and* desire at that point. You have to remember, petroleum is not only a transporation medium, it is also critical -today at least- for manufacturing.
With that said, I heartily welcome more R and D and deployment of biofuels. But older fuels are still used, I am using "stored solar"-wood-as my primary residential heating source, same as humans have been doing for millenia. We have a "domestic supply" and it is quite significant enough for our needs, hence no need to "export cash" to purchase someone elses developed energy product, nor do we need to "export the raw materials" for anyone else to use. That's a micro scale, macro between nations is just "larger".
Humans will use up the available petroleum, biofuels becoming massively more available or not. The use will only drop when it gets closer to a stasis point, when it takes one "barrel of energy" to produce an identical barrel of energy. Then it will stop.
Slashdot Mirror
Software, movies, music, ebooks, whatever. . Pay by the megabyte, a penny or two (whatever). Once every vendor of e-content started doing it, it would get accepted, adopted and become the norm. They could be done with it, and get back to normal business and stop this adversarial conflict with the customers.. That would work for all these various companies, they would get money, people would get their stuff, piracy would drop down severely.
Holding on to last centurys business model is insane*bonkers*nuts.
It's ludicrous, crazy, there's no need for all this BS about copying and piracy. Making copies of anything digital is so freekin cheap now, they should sell it cheap and be done with it. These greedy goons want a monopoly on technology, that's the only real crime being committed now.
Want to sell more of anything? If you can get it cheaper, or make it cheaper-like they can-, then sell it cheaper, much cheaper if that is what it takes. This works for every other product on earth now BUT this digitized stuff. Even 99 cents a track is a rip. Double digits folding money multiple dollars for stuff on a cheap plastic disk is a rip.
Digital content producers of the world-tear down those high price walls and you will see billions of happy customers on the other side!
See frequent black box voting slashdot articles, etc. This is one of those things that is just too blatant and obvious to ignore. We are living under a regime that came about because of a technological coup. It is not accurate to claim that most support the current regime,because most do *not*.
The RIAA folks could get people to switch to the new drm'ed format easily by using human nature-greed. Cheap sells. Witness Walmart. It works. By offering the disks much cheaper than standard disks are today they could influence the hardware market. Store shelf, old CD title, 20$, new DRMed disk that needs the new DRM'ed hardware, same title, 3$. Something like that, side by side. They could easily drop prices to only 10% (whatever) of what they charge now (which is what they should be doing business-ethically and then there would be no problems really), sort of a generational loss lead. the first few years they could dump the hardware cheap too for that matter. Want the cheaper discs with DRM,OK then, they work in these approved players, etc. A few years later, poof, a done deal. Millions will adopt and adapt. Cheap *works*. And because the music industry is by and large a closed shop cooperating monopolistic cartel, if they all did it at once, well there ya go, a fait accompli. You combine that with increasingly severe laws for "piracy",which is happening,and you now have the carrot and the stick approach, a time tested workable solution. You won't get everyone, but if you get the bulk of them, you win. They have the organization, the cash and the bribery expertise with congress. How are they going to lose eventually? The US in particular has an offical economic position of a raging hard on for "IP" protection, because we have decided manufacturing tangibles is passe. Copyrighted music is right up there in that scene.
They really don't care much yet in the "developing world", where copying is even more widespread and common, because there's not much cash there anyway for full price disks, so for now if they strictly enforce it law-wise and do the loss lead concept, they could conceivably win in the developed world where there's still serious cash to be grifted.
The music industry isn't in the "Music" business, they are in the music "Distribution" business. It's easier to see how they think if you look at it from that angle.
I got the cool 1000 buck ride (my used RV-works! Quite nice really once I cleaned it up some, has less than 100k on the clock) and a hundred buck computer (a mini itx mobo + RAM I bought and fit into an old AT case) but alas, my fridge was 100$ used. I imagine if I looked around I could get one for 10$ or free for hauling off.
Oh, you mean NEW? different story, but... I'll take one of the windup laptops from what I have read of the specs. so far price wise I think they have got it down to around 150$ or so theoretically. Still far from the goal of 100$ even, with with millions being the projected market, it'll get there... I dig the windup part, it has built in wifi, and pre installed linux and is solid state. What's not to like?? There's a market for these things out there beyond freebie give aways to poor folks. I mean, heck, look what they want for PDAs! That's what I think of these things, instead of calling them a laptop, call them a very large multifunctional PDA with somewhat decent specs, then they look like a deal, even at 200 bucks. Throw them on the shelf at wallyworld and electronics stores and they'll get sold. I already have two baygen windup radios, they are nice, I'd get another one if it was digital tuning with some programmable presets.
There is just as much "snakeoil" with the FDA now as before they were invented. Artificial Vanilla? That's a wholesome "food"? Really? Aspartame? Artificial colors, flavors, additives?
*chuckle* That's snakeoil man, pure snakeoil..
"Legal" drugs with suppressed bad effects tests, revolving door government agency drone, they retire, go direct to a big foodco or pharmco paycheck. Happens all the time. Google FDA,scandal, see what ya find. Pick a government agency, civil or military, it's all the same, and the FDA is no different. None. Some good meds, of course, a lot of bad ones, yep!
Naw, no snakeoil or corruption/lying there! Clean as a whistle! HAHAHAHA!
Times haven't changed, the snakeoil salesmen have just pimped out and gone uptown and are part of the government/corporate axis of maximum profits and skewed laws and brainwashing since birth on TV and in the schools. People are *just* as gullible as they always were, even moreso now, because most actually believe the fairytale that government exists to "serve them".
Modern humans are not leeter or smarter than people a hundred years ago, we are exactly the same, we just have more gadgets and a government ten times bigger and ten times more corrupt and we have a hundred times or more sleazy corporate snakeoil companies.
They are planning or trying to institute a per mile charge based off of your cars odometer. A gas tax like we have now is per gallon, and yes, it should be enough, but because consumers are choosing high MPG vehicles increasingly, they will be double taxed-a fine if you will, which is what a tax is, on "per mile". It's been covered here before in a few articles along with vehicle "black box" recorders.
You haven't had to call tech support in ten years, so therefore all these tech support centers are unnecessary??? Is that the implication? Why don't you run that by all these companies then, they can save even more money. And you have a good job, so everyone else has a good job??? Say what? And bad credit is all the consumers fault? Is that why the Fed is going to stop reporting a lot of the M3 statistics, like was announced a week or so ago?? And you are assuming everyone who is at slashdot is a white collar IT worker in silicon valley??
Personal anecdotal is not a relevant answer for generalized commentary of the macro subject. One can always find excerptions and variants.
Anyway, I was summarizing what I have read, and heard about, and experienced. My personal was only part of it, a very small part.. Even here on slashdot, run tech support through a search engine maybe and go back and review it. Tech support horror stories are negative-both ways, for the poor service rep AND the customer. It's very common. My personal tech suport problems have been there, only a few, and mostly not pleasant, ie, issue not resolved in most cases. That doesn't mean that everyone's issue isn't resolved, but a lot are like that.
you are picking an extreme example and applying it to all situations with tech support calls. I have no doubt it happens, but I reject that it's all the time,and nor did I ever say I supported such an extreme and rude interchange. So don't put words in my mouth please, and don't even think about assuming this old civil rights marcher is any sort of racist or anything of that nature, because I am not, just to further clarify on that subject. I will admit to being prejudiced against globalists and their current business practices, readily I might add, and I am totally against the current way out sourced tech support is run, because it's a consumer failure, IMO, for the reasons I previously outlined. If you want to support the way it is run now, have fun, I think it's teh sucks, and I bet if you could run any sort of accurate poll, "teh sucks" would win handily over "current out sourced consumer tech support is just great!".. This is my opinion, YMMV.
...goes into the black box where your insurance company and big brother get access to it. That part is coming, too, along with disabling it or altering the data will also be a crime.. almost forgot, the "charge per mile driven" tax that is coming.
no more so than anything else. It's just reality, I never said if I agreed with it or not or held to the same views, but I don't think it's deniable either..say I half way agree, but I totally understand to make this clear where I am standing on the issue. Just reporting what I have seen,heard and read about, and experienced myself. People don't like crap products, and the products are crap more often than not now a days. So these products need "tech support". This starts it off in a negative fashion. People don't like being lied to - "Hi, I'm 'Mike'" is not a good way to start the conversation when both parties know it's a lie. This is two negatives in a row now, bad product, customer immediately lied to. Two. Then it gets worse as the communication both ways is dismal at best. Three strikes at the ole ball game now. 3 negatives,the customer is getting very upset now. And so on. yes, it happens. No, I don't like it. Yes, I have more in common with "Mike" and with the angry customer, I think they are both victims of the globalist boss class of greed filled goons, but that's another subject.
And the economic and politics involved is undebateable news, again, just reality, data in the papers, read all about it.
And misplaced anger?? Helloo, the crap products COMPANY has made their executive decision to employ this person as their official representative for their product, it's their fault, NOT THE CUSTOMERS. To save a few bucks so that millionaires can become billionaires, they make crap products, then they chose to use tech support with a virtually unrecognizable accent. Who else is the customer supposed to talk to, it's WHO THEY GET when they call the help line. If they are upset, they are supposed to act happy?? "Hello! My product is FUBARED, so thank you for taking my money, and now making it even more difficult to figure out what is wrong or how to fix it! thankyou so very much!" You honestly expect people to act like that? On what planet? Why is the anger "unjustified" then?
You want the truth, see Jack Nicholson, he has the quote that fits. Don't shoot the messenger if you are afraid of the report. People don't really blame the poor tech support person, but that's ALL they have to talk to, so poor "Mike" has to eat it. that's what he gets paid for. that's a tech support job, at least half of it anyway. The customer has always, does now, and will always have to somehow transmit across why they are upset, and make it clear they ARE upset. It's the nature of the "tech support call" beast. You aren't ordering a pizza, you as a customer are calling up because there's aproblem serious enough that you *need to call up*. That's the job, don't like it, don't take it, as the rest of the planet is so fond of telling "over paid and pampered" USians now. The customers, who would surely like to, can't just call up Mr. Golden Parachute corporate raider CEO who has screwed up the craptacular gadget corporation and bankrupted it, you get joe lowly "tech support", no matter who that person is or where they are physically located. If "Mike" wants to be upset, "Mike" shouldn't blame the customer-victim who actually shelled out the cash for the craptacular gadget, and who is providing a piece of that cash so that "Mike" can have a paycheck where it didn't exist before. It's a tough life, almost all jobs suck bad,just the "suckage" is different, that's all. Them's the breaks.
..modern electronics is more crap throw away quality than not, necessitating a lot of customer service calls. When Americans call the handy 800#, they honestly can't understand what is going on in the conversation most of the time, leading to double frustration, a broken gadget and then no way to effectively communicate. And it doesn't help that the tech support guy calls himself "Mike" either, it's just an insult to the customer because he or she knows his name is most likely not "Mike". They are frustrated because A-nothing gets fixed, B-they get insulted right off the bat, and C-they know that this used to be a US job. All of the above and more. This has created contention unfortunately.
The US right now almost every day in the biz headlines is "more layoffs". I mean big layoffs, significant, large, important. it's *spooky* what is going on to those paying attention. The average person here is starting to get more than a bit concerned over the future. They see blue collar jobs going to china, white collar to india, and service jobs here going to illegal immigrants. Uhh-what's left exactly?
It's not personal, so don't take it personal, just there is no way to get those US bosses and politicians (who aren't sweating the mortgage payment and healthcare and whatnot) to understand that this "globalism" bill of goods they foisted on us isn't working out like they thought. Since they really started pushing it,the past 20 years or so, we've gone from the planets largest creditor nation to largest debtor nation. The middle class is shrinking fast and is exisiting on credit cards and refinancing the mortgage. This is not a good idea. Not-at-all.
No one has anything against other folks in other lands having jobs,NONE, that isn't the issue at all, the main issue is transferring existing jobs, when they should just be creating new jobs in places like where you are at. It really doesn't have to be one or the other, it can be both if the globalist boss class wasn't such greed-jerk total lamers..and I bet it's the same in India as well.
Opera number 88 in the list
r000lz
Some examples would be eBay and Amazon, Basically one big ad, very successful. Online hardware vendors do some good business, and those not even related to computing in any way, an example, I have to maintain a large variety of equipment, small engine machines, larger tractors, etc. Frequently none of my local dealers carry a part, or it's a long estimated wait, etc or I can tell it's just too expensive. I can run a search and see any number of online vendors then and find some deals. Sometimes even researching a problem, going to forums, etc, you can see ads that might help you out. I'd call it overall useful to have ads on the net, I just don't like flash animation or animated gif ads. Static images or text based are fine though.
She doesn't have one, she is the snail mail type. She uses the computer I built for her occassionaly, but really doesn't like them all that much. She has a real hard time typing and mopusing because of arthritis in her hands is part of the reason I guess... She likes other gadgets a lot, but not computers. But man, do we get junk mail! I am never at a loss for woodstove starter kindling paper. She milks the system, gets on these sweepstakes lists and whatnot and gets a lot of free stuff to try other stuff that she mostly sends back. :p
As to email spam, I get enough for two people I think
...she's the spam queen, loves the stuff, signs up for every freebie she can find via snail mail. One of the gifts she got from some bozo magazine place was a box full of basic black one foot long heavy duty extension cords, sold as a power strip adapter-extender. I got them as a geek gift for B-day. Works great, take your normal power strip, slap these things on, and you can have wall to wall wallwarts lined up all off the same strip, and being flexible you can arrange them to taste, and being very short they don't get in the way or need to be bundled up. Similar to that squid device but more universal,because most likely you already have a power strip. Plug all the jazz in, scoot it behind the monitor, done. If you need to, just color code the weird plug ends that go to your devices to keep them straight. I don't know who sells them, the box is gone, but really, just very short but very decent gauge wire extension cords, I imagine you could find them with a little net searching.
I can see registering to submit comments to articles, but I certainly can't see registering to view content in the first place. As a prolific news reader and part time editor, I read a LOT of online copy, when I go to a link that requires registration I just blow that site off, not worth the hassle. Not going to register at one thousand sites. These papers seem to think they are the only place on the web or something, it's nuts. I can find (usually) the same wire service copy elsewhere without the hassle. And I am *certainly* not going to pay serious folding money to read one single article, that's ludicrous, yet some news sites and journals insist on it. No sale, no thanks.
Second annoyance these online papers will have to overcome is their habit of using annoying visual ads and flash based or scripted navigation, again, a major turn off, to enough people that blocking ads in general has become common. And insisting your visitors need active scripting turned on or Flash to use your site is a serious security concern in this age of quickly opening multiple tabs. People surf *fast* now. When the first popup or endless stream of open windows happened because of scripting, it went downhill from there, IMO. People just don't want the abuse, and abuse it is. Tasteful and relevant text ads with normal linking are preferrable and most people don't mind them if they are relevant to the site and article. Google got that part so-o-o-o correct.
..that when it sees such a page would generate a report that went out to interested parties so they could swarm the webmaster there with emails about it? A polite "hello webmaster, this sucks for such and such reasons, would you please fix it?" sort of thing? It would have to be automated in some fashion probably. One or two emails webmasters might ignore, but if everyone who had the extension was part of the swarmed response it might get noticed and acted on.
Just asking, I really don't know if something like this exists
%^)
Although I am not sure if this is classed as hardware or software....
Blueflops, 2 floppies, that's it, net connection, graphical web browsing, irc, etc. Outstanding, I run it on an old toshiba lappy with 16 megs ram and a floppy drive.
Austrumi 50 megs of coolness and no more. It does need more RAM though than a lot of other small distros, 128, but it loads into the RAM then, spits the CD back out freeing up the optical drive, and is wicked fast.
The vendors will OEM it, and if this past Black Friday shopping frenzy is an indication, people will be lining up to get it, *because* of the hardware deals that will be wrapped around it.
With that said, all new major releases of windows since at least 95 have had brisk sales by disk at release time, that lasts a month or so (whatever) then slows down. I would imagine this will be similar.
It also depends on pricing, MS can afford to drop prices and still make a lot of profit. As the software costs approach or exceed the hardware costs, they will be forced to do this I think. people might be in the unusual situation of being in the same store staring at 200$ complete systems with OS installed, then staring at a set of disks for 200$ with the same OS. This will cause a few "hmmm, WTF??" moments.
I was postulating on what they *could* do if they felt like it, not what they are doing *right now* to make money.
As to financial advisors--please, 99.9% of them are clueless or crooked. As for proof of that, I give you the Great Depression and the dot bomb stock bubble crash, both orchestrated by the large financial houses and pundits and advisors. I pay little attention to what they say in public without filtering it through my crap-o-meter and then running that output through the spot-the-shill-translator. They make politicians look like honest intelligent people. Hustlers and skimmers mostly. Big smiles. Basically I think of them as three card monte dealers who work out of offices rather than on the street corner.
When I was a kid and they had real five and dime stores you could get packets of real pretty stocks,now worthless, sold as novelty items, from companies shilled to the max and sold to folks from the advice of "the pros", the casino hustlers. The stock market has long ago stopped being an "investment", it's all just speculator driven up and down programmed frenzy selling and a bewildering array of paper financial pseudo "products". Not to say people can't make money there, of course they do, but I know two professional vegas gamblers-card players- they make money too. Not so much as to get banned, but a decent steady living. but they don't produce anything themselves, except for one of them has sold quite a few books on card playing.
HGTTG reference episode: the thinkers, the doers and the middlemen, meh
some friends of mine who worked at DEC in massachusetts in the 70s just *hated* it. I mean, they always cussed when they talked about work. Now this is second hand anecdotal so don't hold me to any of the details,could be urban legend but here goes: The one thing I heard from all of them that was the worst was that they had a catwalk where the bosses walked around OVER the line workers to look down at them. It made the employees feel like utter crap and gave them a "who cares about this place" attitude.
With googles investment in fiber combined with server farms rivaled by-no one really, maybe akami comes closest- there are any number of ways they could still "make money". They are still in the mind share growing business as well as ads. I bet if they wanted to they could pop open an itunes like experience tomorrow and make money, or start a national ISP, or offer paid serious uptime and fast hosting, etc. They do some of that stuff now for free with the ads supporting it, but they could offer a "pro" version of this or that and charge cash for "no ads" for the same thing. Heck, just offering cheap offsite data backup would be a platinum mine for them. People are already using googlemail for that on a small personal scale.
How about this one, the mythical google OS & office suite & lotsa other apps,integrated email, VOIP, and chat, offered to big box vendors as an OEM install? The big box vendors are afraid to whizz off microsoft so they have been reluctant to the max to offer anything but MS, but if it was google they might think it to be doable then just from their size and branezpowerz and trackrecord so far.
Who knows what they might do in the future but one thing is certain they got some cash and a pretty large "fan" base and some decent and motivated engineers already.
And speaking of bankers....googlepay might take off as well.
The development of other fuels will not negate the usefullness or use of traditional petroleum. Nations that are oil rich will continue to use the fuel,especially if it is their primary natural resource, even if their export market diminishes. And especially then, with no imported cash from exported oil, they would be literally forced to directly use the oil themselves to the best of their ability. And it is quite possible that as the islamic world (if we want to limit the discussion to there) matures (most are under the age of 30 right now), they will want their own manufacturing and other islamo-centrist based business, rather than purchasing products from other areas. Necessity *and* desire at that point. You have to remember, petroleum is not only a transporation medium, it is also critical -today at least- for manufacturing.
With that said, I heartily welcome more R and D and deployment of biofuels. But older fuels are still used, I am using "stored solar"-wood-as my primary residential heating source, same as humans have been doing for millenia. We have a "domestic supply" and it is quite significant enough for our needs, hence no need to "export cash" to purchase someone elses developed energy product, nor do we need to "export the raw materials" for anyone else to use. That's a micro scale, macro between nations is just "larger".
Humans will use up the available petroleum, biofuels becoming massively more available or not. The use will only drop when it gets closer to a stasis point, when it takes one "barrel of energy" to produce an identical barrel of energy. Then it will stop.