But hiring the likes of these Yankee Group guys to do fake surveys and such as some kind of guerrilla or astroturf marketing is very uncharacteristic of Apple and Steve Jobs. Whatever you think of Apple, you must admit that their PR and advertising is effective, yes? And it's fairly straightforward and predictable at this point: Absolute silence and secrecy, drop the hammer hard on anything that resembles a leak while the rumor-mill stews, announce a press date, and then go all-out with a media blitz that's very polished and on-message.
Using a hack research group to do a fake survey is just too clumsy and PHB-ish for Steve Jobs and Apple. It's the sort of thing that... well... microsoft would do.
To my mind, that's just the trade-off you get in exchange for the advantages of living out in the middle of nowhere...
You get things like a larger house on a much larger lot, easy access to lakes, forests or whatever, peace and quiet, a lower crime rate, cleaner air, less traffic, and so on. I get broadband, culture, good restaurants, a nightlife, public transit, and other such services.
Here's an idea. How about, instead of curing their diseases, we put out efforts instead into eradicating the bastards. It's not like we don't know how to drive a species into extinction. We've done it, or are on the verge of doing it, to many cool species. So why the hell can't we do it to one of the more bastardly unpleasant ones?
Any hippy that objects... let's make them extinct too.
Bingo! In order to reproduce this flaw, I have to:
1) Take my iPhone 4 out of its case. The very first thing I did when I had it in hand was put it in the (rather nice, actually... nicer than the one I'd ordered earlier in the week.) case that Dexim's promotions guys were handing out to people in the line.
2) Disconnect my headset. About 90% of the time I don't hold my iPhone like a phone, but use either my bluetooth or wired headset so my hands are free to take notes or type or look stuff up on the net or drive or just because I'd rather have the thing in my pocket if I'm talking while walking.
3) Contort my hand to hold it in a way that's unnatural and actually slightly painful when it's up to my ear...
4)... after licking, or otherwise moistening, my thumb so it's conductive enough to bridge those two pieces of metal...
5)... in an area that already has really crappy reception.
Basically, unless I'm intentionally trying to find fault, I'm never... ever... throughout the life of the phone, going to do all of that again. And even then, the iPhone 4 still gets better reception than my 3G did and the last time I had a phone that DIDN'T lose some signal if I held it in a certain way was ten years ago when I had a StarTac with an external antenna. (And I expect that if I were to hang on to the antenna on that one, I'd lose signal too.)
So I, for one, write this whole affair off as the usual crowd of we-hate-every-thing-Apple types digging up any little nit they can pick, and engaging in their usual ludicrous hyperbole.
Nobody I know talks about the recalls, accelerator pedals, or any of that hullabaloo when the name Toyota comes up. The conversation pretty much instantly turns to how they helped Tesla to buy the old NUMMI factory and what new cars and technology might come out of the partnership and just how cool is that anyway?
> Couldn't Google have done an iPhone and pretty much say > "This is the way we're doing it, and if you don't like it, tough!" > like Apple?
To be fair; the first time around Apple also tried to do things the traditional way and partner with an established handset manufacturer, provide software for somebody else's hardware, and release t through a carrier the way phones always were. The result of said union was that motorola abortion called the ROKR. We all saw how well *that* worked out.
I can understand Google not learning from Apple's example. Douglas Adams had a saying about how even though humans are unique in being able to learn from the mistakes of others we are notoriously disinclined to do so. Why should Google be different? But what I don't get is how, considering how much potential Android has but how awful it is so far in practice, Google has failed to learn from their OWN mistake as well as Apple's; and continues to outsource the hardware to various assclowns instead of doing the whole widget properly in-house.
A true and pure Google phone, without the albatross of htc or motorola or whoever hanging around its neck and dragging it down, with ubiquitous and seamless integration to Google services (Including the ability to port my existing phone number into Google Voice.), might actually be enough to lure me away from the iPhone. All these sad half-breeds? Not a chance.
> Priority Mail is NOT First Class. Priority Mail has a guaranteed 3-day > delivery time in the continental US. First Class has no such guarantee.
If you read the fine print, neither does priority mail.
Heck, the USPS themselves advertise that 3-day time only for "most domestic destinations". That's not just "continental US excluding Alaska and Hawaii". (That would be understandable and is an easy and common enough exclusion to be explicit about.) That's "we'll get around to delivering your "priority" mail when we damn well please and you can eat it". I once had a package sent to me "priority" mail, and it took eleven days!
And just try making a claim against the post office when you get your "priority" mail in four days or more. You'll get about as far as nowhere.
You know... It's not like that oil is going anywhere. (Except into the waters of the gulf.)
It'll still be there when the moratorium ends. It'll still be there years down the road when a technology or technique other than "spew tens of thousands of barrels of oil daily into the ecosystem for four months while we drill a relief well", is available to deal with potential accidents.
And it's not like there's more oil being created. It's not going to lose it's value just because you leave it in the ground for a while longer than originally planned. In fact, it'll probably be worth more and be even more profitable years into the future.
Re:The iPhone and finally walk and chew gum!
on
iOS 4 Releases Today
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Jailbroken 3G user here. And backgrounder/circuitous is frankly the only reason I have to jailbreak the thing. I do have to say, the ability to go do something else while Pandora or iHeartRadio is playing in the background is very, VERY nice. But I've never run into another need for multitasking on the thing. And *nothing* else I've found on Cydia has been compelling enough to keep.
When I get my iPhone 4 on Thursday, I will most like never jailbreak it. There's just nothing in the jailbreak scene that I need or want besides backgrounder.
And it's not like there's anything new on the iPhone lockdown/DRM/appStore front. At this point, if you have a problem with Apple's policies, you either spend the whole five minutes it takes to download Spirit and jailbreak the thing, or you do without and get a Nexus One or an EVO. Or you're okay with Apple's approach and you get a standard un-jailbroken iPhone.
That's been the status quo for quite a while now. With nothing new, there's no news to post; unless you count self-indulgent pontificating.
Where I work, IE6 represents about the same 6% that the 1G iPhone does for you. But we're still expected to devote considerable effort supporting that decrepit old fossil. Every once and a while somebody decides, for this project or that, that we can leave IE6 behind. But no one's stood up and made the decision that the company as a whole will do so.
Ironic... in an industry where we talk so much about Moore's law and how your latest shiny new toy is already obsolete when you walk out the store and such; that we still haven't dropped something so godawfully old and busted as IE6.
Fear and dislike are completely different. And being a "strong willed woman" is not the problem. I've happily been voting for Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer for years now. And it'd be very hard to say that any on them are not strong-willed. In palin's case though. the overt malice, mind-boggling stupidity, and insufferably snotty attitude just lead to a pure and intense visceral emotional dislike of her. And that's *before* considering the damage she would do to the country if she were ever to wind up in a position of significant power.
> Anyway, I have no problem with Starbucks. I just think they provide > an inferior product to what I can get elsewhere. When I lived in a > different place that had fewer choices, that wasn't the case.
See, here's the thing... In The City, Berkeley, and parts of San Jose, I know exactly where to go for a much better cup of coffee than I can get at Starbucks. In the rest of the Bay Area, Yelp can probably direct me to a better cup of coffee if I'm willing to drive to it. But if I'm somewhere unfamiliar, and outside an area that has lots of Yelpers doing reviews; I have no idea whether joe schmoe's local coffee shop is decent or if it's swill. But bad coffee is far more common than good.
With Starbucks and Peets I get at least a reliably better-than-average cup of coffee. And if I'm in an unfamiliar location, or a better coffee shop is too far away, and Yelp isn't helpful where I am; it's better than taking the chance of getting swill.
> It's not very good as a defensive weapon: it doesn't really have very good > stopping power - even if blinded, a gunman could still kill you (and he > might have even higher motivation to do so). It has a very high chance > of collateral damage.
You know... I've personally never mugged anyone, nor been shot with a gun that has "stopping power". So I can't really say 100% for sure. But I would imagine that if I were blind and on fire, I wouldn't be able to continue mugging my would-be victim.
> I hate to be defending US carriers. But keep in mind that a wireless > plan from a major US carrier buys you access to way way way way > more wireless towers than your Hong Kong plan.
That's true enough. But a US carrier like AT&T also has access to a far larger subscriber base to cover he cost of those extra towers. Also, cells out in the middle of godforsaken nowhere are a lot cheaper to install and require far less capacity than cells installed in an urban center like Hong Kong. So there's still no excuse for AT&T beyond blatant price gouging.
> Does the Northwest have exotic women and/or liquors? > We might have trouble getting 007 out here.
None that are native to the region; but there are a few evil billionaires up there. And, as I'm sure 007 is well aware, evil billionaires can be relied upon to import both.
I think the point is that there should be a whole series of set and tested escalating responses *between* "bottom of page 19" and "finally cut off the flow after three months of spilling tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of gallons of oil per day into the gulf, doing untold damage to the ecosystem and peoples' livelihoods.".
Just off the top of my head, how about always drilling two wells in parallel; so that if one has the big whoopsie, the relief well is already there and ready go go?
Even the smallest IT outfit knows... even the most entry-level certifications teach... that you never EVER design with a single point of failure. Certianly a behemoth of a multinational corporation like BP has *someone* on the payroll who understands the concept of planning for redundancy, failover, and recovery. Any CCNA could explain the concepts to them. Or to put it another way; I once worked for a company that guaranteed our clients three-nines, usually delivered four, and had a three-year plan to get up to five. How many nines has BP delivered on this well?
> If every song made was available for $0.50 with a good client, > guaranteed results and all that, there would be very little song piracy.
Even the full $1 that iTunes charges would be perfectly fine... if it was split only between Apple (for providing the service) and the artist (for producing the work). Over the last ten years or so the RIAA/metallica have shown beyond all doubt that they are contemptible, loathsome, and evil beyond redemption. I want to see them ruined.
Doesn't windows come with sound themes to do exactly that? I remember for a while, before everyone realized what an awful idea it was, you could even buy third party ones in stores like: "The Official Star Trek: The Next Generation(tm) Font and Sound Pack for Windows(tm)".
No, he doesn't get to take the keys with him. But he DOES get to take the knowledge with him. There's a big difference. And if the rail bosses are dumb enough to fire the only person who knows how to operate the train, tough cookies. He's not getting paid, so he should be under no obligation to train the replacement conductor. The railroad can pound sand and go figure it out themselves.
You don't need to know the laws of every state or any state to know which documents prove citizenship and which do not. All you need is to have had a job anywhere in the US at any point in your life. The lists are on the back of your form I-9.
Nope. The only national identification the US issues are passports. Like anywhere else, a passport is proof of both identity and citizenship. But ludicrously few Americans have passports. There are a couple of others... military ID cards (do not prove citizenship) and Social Security cards (prove neither ID nor citizenship). Hardly anyone carries their passport unless they're traveling internationally though. Mine sits in a folder on my shelf and the only time I've brought it out in the last few years was when I lost my driver's license and I used it for ID at bars and clubs until I cot a new DL.
Each state issues its own driver's license; which is all most americans carry in the way of ID. And (except in arizona if you have brown skin) you don't even have to carry that unless your operating a motor vehicle. But driver's licenses prove only identity, not citizenship.
Then there's your birth certificate; which proves citizenship, but needs other ID to back it up to prove identity (for obvious reasons). But who the heck carries a copy of their birth certificate around? Heck, for more than a few years, I didn't even have a copy of mine.
Slashdot Mirror
Who knows what's going on?
But hiring the likes of these Yankee Group guys to do fake surveys and such as some kind of guerrilla or astroturf marketing is very uncharacteristic of Apple and Steve Jobs. Whatever you think of Apple, you must admit that their PR and advertising is effective, yes? And it's fairly straightforward and predictable at this point: Absolute silence and secrecy, drop the hammer hard on anything that resembles a leak while the rumor-mill stews, announce a press date, and then go all-out with a media blitz that's very polished and on-message.
Using a hack research group to do a fake survey is just too clumsy and PHB-ish for Steve Jobs and Apple. It's the sort of thing that... well... microsoft would do.
To my mind, that's just the trade-off you get in exchange for the advantages of living out in the middle of nowhere...
You get things like a larger house on a much larger lot, easy access to lakes, forests or whatever, peace and quiet, a lower crime rate, cleaner air, less traffic, and so on. I get broadband, culture, good restaurants, a nightlife, public transit, and other such services.
Probably the same thing that's wrong with Americans who can recite Shakespeare in the original Klingon.
Great... just great.
Here's an idea. How about, instead of curing their diseases, we put out efforts instead into eradicating the bastards. It's not like we don't know how to drive a species into extinction. We've done it, or are on the verge of doing it, to many cool species. So why the hell can't we do it to one of the more bastardly unpleasant ones?
Any hippy that objects... let's make them extinct too.
Bingo! In order to reproduce this flaw, I have to:
1) Take my iPhone 4 out of its case. The very first thing I did when I had it in hand was put it in the (rather nice, actually... nicer than the one I'd ordered earlier in the week.) case that Dexim's promotions guys were handing out to people in the line.
2) Disconnect my headset. About 90% of the time I don't hold my iPhone like a phone, but use either my bluetooth or wired headset so my hands are free to take notes or type or look stuff up on the net or drive or just because I'd rather have the thing in my pocket if I'm talking while walking.
3) Contort my hand to hold it in a way that's unnatural and actually slightly painful when it's up to my ear...
4) ... after licking, or otherwise moistening, my thumb so it's conductive enough to bridge those two pieces of metal...
5) ... in an area that already has really crappy reception.
Basically, unless I'm intentionally trying to find fault, I'm never... ever... throughout the life of the phone, going to do all of that again. And even then, the iPhone 4 still gets better reception than my 3G did and the last time I had a phone that DIDN'T lose some signal if I held it in a certain way was ten years ago when I had a StarTac with an external antenna. (And I expect that if I were to hang on to the antenna on that one, I'd lose signal too.)
So I, for one, write this whole affair off as the usual crowd of we-hate-every-thing-Apple types digging up any little nit they can pick, and engaging in their usual ludicrous hyperbole.
Hell... Toyota's already redeemed themselves, PR-wise.
Nobody I know talks about the recalls, accelerator pedals, or any of that hullabaloo when the name Toyota comes up. The conversation pretty much instantly turns to how they helped Tesla to buy the old NUMMI factory and what new cars and technology might come out of the partnership and just how cool is that anyway?
> Couldn't Google have done an iPhone and pretty much say
> "This is the way we're doing it, and if you don't like it, tough!"
> like Apple?
To be fair; the first time around Apple also tried to do things the traditional way and partner with an established handset manufacturer, provide software for somebody else's hardware, and release t through a carrier the way phones always were. The result of said union was that motorola abortion called the ROKR. We all saw how well *that* worked out.
I can understand Google not learning from Apple's example. Douglas Adams had a saying about how even though humans are unique in being able to learn from the mistakes of others we are notoriously disinclined to do so. Why should Google be different? But what I don't get is how, considering how much potential Android has but how awful it is so far in practice, Google has failed to learn from their OWN mistake as well as Apple's; and continues to outsource the hardware to various assclowns instead of doing the whole widget properly in-house.
A true and pure Google phone, without the albatross of htc or motorola or whoever hanging around its neck and dragging it down, with ubiquitous and seamless integration to Google services (Including the ability to port my existing phone number into Google Voice.), might actually be enough to lure me away from the iPhone. All these sad half-breeds? Not a chance.
> Priority Mail is NOT First Class. Priority Mail has a guaranteed 3-day
> delivery time in the continental US. First Class has no such guarantee.
If you read the fine print, neither does priority mail.
Heck, the USPS themselves advertise that 3-day time only for "most domestic destinations". That's not just "continental US excluding Alaska and Hawaii". (That would be understandable and is an easy and common enough exclusion to be explicit about.) That's "we'll get around to delivering your "priority" mail when we damn well please and you can eat it". I once had a package sent to me "priority" mail, and it took eleven days!
And just try making a claim against the post office when you get your "priority" mail in four days or more. You'll get about as far as nowhere.
You know... It's not like that oil is going anywhere. (Except into the waters of the gulf.)
It'll still be there when the moratorium ends. It'll still be there years down the road when a technology or technique other than "spew tens of thousands of barrels of oil daily into the ecosystem for four months while we drill a relief well", is available to deal with potential accidents.
And it's not like there's more oil being created. It's not going to lose it's value just because you leave it in the ground for a while longer than originally planned. In fact, it'll probably be worth more and be even more profitable years into the future.
Jailbroken 3G user here. And backgrounder/circuitous is frankly the only reason I have to jailbreak the thing. I do have to say, the ability to go do something else while Pandora or iHeartRadio is playing in the background is very, VERY nice. But I've never run into another need for multitasking on the thing. And *nothing* else I've found on Cydia has been compelling enough to keep.
When I get my iPhone 4 on Thursday, I will most like never jailbreak it. There's just nothing in the jailbreak scene that I need or want besides backgrounder.
And it's not like there's anything new on the iPhone lockdown/DRM/appStore front. At this point, if you have a problem with Apple's policies, you either spend the whole five minutes it takes to download Spirit and jailbreak the thing, or you do without and get a Nexus One or an EVO. Or you're okay with Apple's approach and you get a standard un-jailbroken iPhone.
That's been the status quo for quite a while now. With nothing new, there's no news to post; unless you count self-indulgent pontificating.
Where I work, IE6 represents about the same 6% that the 1G iPhone does for you. But we're still expected to devote considerable effort supporting that decrepit old fossil. Every once and a while somebody decides, for this project or that, that we can leave IE6 behind. But no one's stood up and made the decision that the company as a whole will do so.
Ironic... in an industry where we talk so much about Moore's law and how your latest shiny new toy is already obsolete when you walk out the store and such; that we still haven't dropped something so godawfully old and busted as IE6.
Scared? Hardly.
Fear and dislike are completely different. And being a "strong willed woman" is not the problem. I've happily been voting for Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer for years now. And it'd be very hard to say that any on them are not strong-willed. In palin's case though. the overt malice, mind-boggling stupidity, and insufferably snotty attitude just lead to a pure and intense visceral emotional dislike of her. And that's *before* considering the damage she would do to the country if she were ever to wind up in a position of significant power.
> Anyway, I have no problem with Starbucks. I just think they provide
> an inferior product to what I can get elsewhere. When I lived in a
> different place that had fewer choices, that wasn't the case.
See, here's the thing... In The City, Berkeley, and parts of San Jose, I know exactly where to go for a much better cup of coffee than I can get at Starbucks. In the rest of the Bay Area, Yelp can probably direct me to a better cup of coffee if I'm willing to drive to it. But if I'm somewhere unfamiliar, and outside an area that has lots of Yelpers doing reviews; I have no idea whether joe schmoe's local coffee shop is decent or if it's swill. But bad coffee is far more common than good.
With Starbucks and Peets I get at least a reliably better-than-average cup of coffee. And if I'm in an unfamiliar location, or a better coffee shop is too far away, and Yelp isn't helpful where I am; it's better than taking the chance of getting swill.
> It's not very good as a defensive weapon: it doesn't really have very good
> stopping power - even if blinded, a gunman could still kill you (and he
> might have even higher motivation to do so). It has a very high chance
> of collateral damage.
You know... I've personally never mugged anyone, nor been shot with a gun that has "stopping power". So I can't really say 100% for sure. But I would imagine that if I were blind and on fire, I wouldn't be able to continue mugging my would-be victim.
> I hate to be defending US carriers. But keep in mind that a wireless
> plan from a major US carrier buys you access to way way way way
> more wireless towers than your Hong Kong plan.
That's true enough. But a US carrier like AT&T also has access to a far larger subscriber base to cover he cost of those extra towers. Also, cells out in the middle of godforsaken nowhere are a lot cheaper to install and require far less capacity than cells installed in an urban center like Hong Kong. So there's still no excuse for AT&T beyond blatant price gouging.
> Does the Northwest have exotic women and/or liquors?
> We might have trouble getting 007 out here.
None that are native to the region; but there are a few evil billionaires up there. And, as I'm sure 007 is well aware, evil billionaires can be relied upon to import both.
I think the point is that there should be a whole series of set and tested escalating responses *between* "bottom of page 19" and "finally cut off the flow after three months of spilling tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of gallons of oil per day into the gulf, doing untold damage to the ecosystem and peoples' livelihoods.".
Just off the top of my head, how about always drilling two wells in parallel; so that if one has the big whoopsie, the relief well is already there and ready go go?
Even the smallest IT outfit knows... even the most entry-level certifications teach... that you never EVER design with a single point of failure. Certianly a behemoth of a multinational corporation like BP has *someone* on the payroll who understands the concept of planning for redundancy, failover, and recovery. Any CCNA could explain the concepts to them. Or to put it another way; I once worked for a company that guaranteed our clients three-nines, usually delivered four, and had a three-year plan to get up to five. How many nines has BP delivered on this well?
I, for one, understand perfectly why one would fly out of Detroit. What I don't get. is why the heck would anyone fly back in???
> If every song made was available for $0.50 with a good client,
> guaranteed results and all that, there would be very little song piracy.
Even the full $1 that iTunes charges would be perfectly fine... if it was split only between Apple (for providing the service) and the artist (for producing the work). Over the last ten years or so the RIAA/metallica have shown beyond all doubt that they are contemptible, loathsome, and evil beyond redemption. I want to see them ruined.
Doesn't windows come with sound themes to do exactly that? I remember for a while, before everyone realized what an awful idea it was, you could even buy third party ones in stores like: "The Official Star Trek: The Next Generation(tm) Font and Sound Pack for Windows(tm)".
> Slight paranoia?
What you described strikes me as well beyond "slight". That level of paranoia says "mentally ill" to me.
I didn't think he belonged in jail before. And his mistreatment is beyond appalling to me now. He needs help, not prison.
I hope you're proud of yourself.
No, he doesn't get to take the keys with him. But he DOES get to take the knowledge with him. There's a big difference. And if the rail bosses are dumb enough to fire the only person who knows how to operate the train, tough cookies. He's not getting paid, so he should be under no obligation to train the replacement conductor. The railroad can pound sand and go figure it out themselves.
Now, just substitute router back in for train.
You don't need to know the laws of every state or any state to know which documents prove citizenship and which do not. All you need is to have had a job anywhere in the US at any point in your life. The lists are on the back of your form I-9.
Nope. The only national identification the US issues are passports. Like anywhere else, a passport is proof of both identity and citizenship. But ludicrously few Americans have passports. There are a couple of others... military ID cards (do not prove citizenship) and Social Security cards (prove neither ID nor citizenship). Hardly anyone carries their passport unless they're traveling internationally though. Mine sits in a folder on my shelf and the only time I've brought it out in the last few years was when I lost my driver's license and I used it for ID at bars and clubs until I cot a new DL.
Each state issues its own driver's license; which is all most americans carry in the way of ID. And (except in arizona if you have brown skin) you don't even have to carry that unless your operating a motor vehicle. But driver's licenses prove only identity, not citizenship.
Then there's your birth certificate; which proves citizenship, but needs other ID to back it up to prove identity (for obvious reasons). But who the heck carries a copy of their birth certificate around? Heck, for more than a few years, I didn't even have a copy of mine.