Why not use one of the cheap ass video players that sell for 80 bucks and can hold video and PDF documents and pretty much nothing else?
My kids have these Coby knockoffs that they love and have no trouble using. They play video (in way more formats than most tablets) and PDF and picturse, and that's about it, no pesky browser or wireless networking to bother with. Best of all it isn't a 500 dollar item people will want to walk off with, and even if they do walk off with it, you are out 80 bucks instead of 500.
Of course if what you are trying to do is show that you can throw thousands of dollars into the waiting room, that won't really accomplish what you are trying to do.
Executives that elect for stock only compensation might seem to be extremely magnanimous in not taking a salary. In reality it is a nice way to shield yourself from nearly all of your income tax burden. Candidates for office whose first names rhyme with bullshit tend to lose in the court of public opinion when it comes out they pay buffet level taxes instead of their "fair share."
It's funny that when people talk about 1 dollar executives they get all lovey-eyed, but when they talk about executives paying no taxes they get all torchy-pitch-forkey. When in actuality the two are the exact same thing.
You know how much Larry Paige pays in income tax on his salary? $0. Know how much Zuck will pay? about 270k (assuming the bonus is cash). One sounds like a billionaire asshole, the other sounds like a billionaire asshole who pays at least some taxes.
I am not saying Google does no good, or that Facebook does, but I am sick of the fluttery $1 salary non-sense.
Try selling that to people who want explosions and rayguns. It's actually very important to capture the imagination of the people whose tax dollars would fund the initative. Space travel is not required for research any more than beer commercials are required to play football.
The true benefit to society is in research. Sure we might find unobtanium under the moon's crust, we might trip over an ET's iPhone and learn the secrets of intergalactic travel. Or we might have an eventful and fruitful journey of invention and exploration, flexing the limits of human ingenuity and eventually breaking through the ceiling of what we thought was possible. Even if all we find is dirt, it will be worth it just for the trip.
Exploration doesn't need a concrete obvious benefit, the true benefit is that it forces us to think outside of our stratosphere, drives innovation and cooperation in a way that nothing else really does.
The first time around, space travel gave us advances in things as rudimentary to society as ceramics, gave us scratch resistant glass, infrared sensors, battery-powered hand tools, even items that were improved for space, like the microwave oven, and Velcro were unintended consequences of exploration. We didn't invent those things because we thought they would be good for consumers, we invented them because they were necessary for exploration. The same will need to happen if we try to establish a moon base, even if we fail.
Vacation is too much fucking work, travel is a nightmare, and visiting other countries is like my own little version of hell. My company gives me 4 weeks of vacation (I have worked there for a decade) and they REQUIRE that I take at least 2 weeks off in a row once a year (for security reasons), I prefer routines and when I take that much time off I get totally messed up, can't sleep properly, eat way too much or not enough, and I am constantly distracted. Work keeps me from becoming some compulsive handwasher who counts his peas at dinner and only eats the odd numbered ones. It's therapy, addiction, and a paycheck all rolled into one... But I recognize that I am a freak.
The final season of Enterprise dealt primarily with the Xindi, one of the Xindi races (5 different sentient species on one planet) were spacefaring water creatures that weren't humanoid, and flew in ships filled with water, this fact was not particularly shocking or foreign to the captain of Enterprise, nor his highly experienced Vulcan crewmate. But also the Federation are a bunch of bigots who only let humanoids in anyway.
I totally agree. I try very hard to honor the user experience, and really, I am the only one in my department that does (and I am not that great at it). The internal usability expert was shared at a rate of 75(dev):1(usability) and really he was one of the first to go in the layoffs, because "what does he even do??"
Even our requirements analysts think I am crazy when I nitpick tab order and that is a minor and obvious thing.
I have never felt the need to activate starcraft 2's "Offline mode" because even when I am at my grandmother's house or the dentist, or even camping in Texas state parks, I have a constant internet connection. If I didn't have a constant internet connection I would be too busy fixing my network equipment to play a video game.
Controllers for PC are cheaper and have more variety than controllers for console... I played torchlight on a ps2 controller with a usb adaptor for my laptop, just to see if it would work, but I vastly prefer the mouse/keyboard configuration.
I work for a very large company that is not a software company, but which publishes a lot of software. I can tell you everything that a customer sees has UI designed by usability experts and UI designers working together, everything else the UI is an afterthought, thrown together by developers such as myself, who suck at UI (90% of our software is only used by employees). That is why you download slick iPhone apps, but then go into the store and the employees are using text based terminals on 20 year old hardware.
The actual problem with publishing and the ebook quality lag is that they already had developers (publishers make all kinds of tools for in-house use) but they didn't have any experience with the difference between asking Mister Anderson to write a regular expression, and publishing consumer software. It will get better. Probably.
There are trade-offs both ways. If you have a server that you think is so redundant and bulletproof that it will never go down, well you are wrong. You can either plan your application deployment with occasional hardware and datacenter failures built in or not. If 20 servers each have 99% uptime, but my application doesn't go down if I lose one or two or 10 servers then I have a much higher uptime then if my iron warhorse of a host machine has 99.9% uptime.
I like to compare IDE Raid 5 to a really good scsi back in the day. Sure the IDE drives failed more, but it didn't matter if they failed, because you could just pop another cheap IDE in there and the volume never actually went down.
The thing is I have to plan for servers to go down unexpectedly anyway. Multiplying my server cost by 10, then dividing my server count by 10 sometimes feels like chasing buzzwords is all.
No shit. We are almost done virtualizing our entire datacenter, I assume the next step is to realize that having a single point of failure for 20 virtual servers isn't as cool as having 20 dirt cheap real servers, each independant. So maybe we can squeeze a few more years bouncing back with de-virtualization. "From the cloud to localization, the next revolution! Have a little piece of the cloud right in your own office!"
My dad's friends couldn't believe he was letting his CHILDREN touch a COMPUTER, he would tell them "this is the future, these are life skills now". I learned to load programs before I could write by hand. My older brother and I typed in a game from a magazine. The rest is history, I have been a hacker ever since, it's how I make my living and how I pass the time.
I was very fortunate to be born at a time when computers were suddenly affordable.
I don't want to like IE9, because MS is the company we love to hate... but I vastly prefer it to chrome.
My first complaint: Chrome's gigantic header is 18 pixels taller than IE, on my netbook that extra 3% of the tiny screen that is unusable for content is kind of a big deal.
There are chrome add ons to make the URL textbox into a combo box with recently visited pages, something that has been standard in browsers since like 1998, and pretty much the only way I am used to browsing. I guess it feels weird to have to use some third party extension (That doesn't work perfectly) to add my most used feature, when it is not an obscure or weird feature.
Home. There is no home button... I know I can search from the address bar, but I vastly prefer to just hit the home button and search on google's homepage... I mean, I want to give your site more traffic, don't make that harder on your own browser.
5 years ago I never would have thought I would be saying this, but with firefox completely ruined to the point of being unusably slow and buggy, and with chrome being the monstrosity of user interface that it is... IE9 is the only browser that I like right now.
No other legal service touches netflix for value. Even if they trippled their price again tomorrow, it would still have more content, and be cheaper than cable for me.
hardly similar. I have prime (for the other value prime adds, shipping and kindle lending books) and netflix, prime video is a joke compared to netflix. Not only is the user experience 100x better with netflix, there is a ton more content (not to mention 99% of the prime content is already on Netflix),
just so you don't have to read a million internet rants and raves I will attempt to summarize:
Ayn Rand lived in a time when people thought that all you needed to become rich and powerful was hard work and brains. She also wrote very thick books in which she ranted about how everyone else sucks on the teat of said hard working brainey people, especially through government wealth redistribution like welfare, taxes, environmental regulation, social security, etc. Basically she wrote books that tell every nerdy 14 year old that he will someday invent something cool and the world will be forced to bow to him. Atlas Shrugged is the story about how the rich Industry tycoons are proping up the rest of the country with their genius and hard work, and what happens if they shrug off this responsibility like Atlas did? The sky would fall, because these people are the heroes. Not. Very. Accessible. There is a 79 page monologue of epic fappery. It is basically the opposite of occupy wallstreet, but just as extreme.
Sushi is more expensive than gasoline, so are most "lean and trendy" foods that I tend to see the bike commuter crowd eat (at least at my work). I sincerely doubt they are saving money on gas, as they are replacing it with the kinds of expensive food that you can use to sustain exercise.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not use one of the cheap ass video players that sell for 80 bucks and can hold video and PDF documents and pretty much nothing else?
My kids have these Coby knockoffs that they love and have no trouble using. They play video (in way more formats than most tablets) and PDF and picturse, and that's about it, no pesky browser or wireless networking to bother with. Best of all it isn't a 500 dollar item people will want to walk off with, and even if they do walk off with it, you are out 80 bucks instead of 500.
Of course if what you are trying to do is show that you can throw thousands of dollars into the waiting room, that won't really accomplish what you are trying to do.
Executives that elect for stock only compensation might seem to be extremely magnanimous in not taking a salary. In reality it is a nice way to shield yourself from nearly all of your income tax burden. Candidates for office whose first names rhyme with bullshit tend to lose in the court of public opinion when it comes out they pay buffet level taxes instead of their "fair share."
It's funny that when people talk about 1 dollar executives they get all lovey-eyed, but when they talk about executives paying no taxes they get all torchy-pitch-forkey. When in actuality the two are the exact same thing. You know how much Larry Paige pays in income tax on his salary? $0. Know how much Zuck will pay? about 270k (assuming the bonus is cash). One sounds like a billionaire asshole, the other sounds like a billionaire asshole who pays at least some taxes.
I am not saying Google does no good, or that Facebook does, but I am sick of the fluttery $1 salary non-sense.
Try selling that to people who want explosions and rayguns. It's actually very important to capture the imagination of the people whose tax dollars would fund the initative. Space travel is not required for research any more than beer commercials are required to play football.
The true benefit to society is in research. Sure we might find unobtanium under the moon's crust, we might trip over an ET's iPhone and learn the secrets of intergalactic travel. Or we might have an eventful and fruitful journey of invention and exploration, flexing the limits of human ingenuity and eventually breaking through the ceiling of what we thought was possible. Even if all we find is dirt, it will be worth it just for the trip.
Exploration doesn't need a concrete obvious benefit, the true benefit is that it forces us to think outside of our stratosphere, drives innovation and cooperation in a way that nothing else really does.
The first time around, space travel gave us advances in things as rudimentary to society as ceramics, gave us scratch resistant glass, infrared sensors, battery-powered hand tools, even items that were improved for space, like the microwave oven, and Velcro were unintended consequences of exploration. We didn't invent those things because we thought they would be good for consumers, we invented them because they were necessary for exploration. The same will need to happen if we try to establish a moon base, even if we fail.
because they wouldn't be allowed to log overtime.
Vacation is too much fucking work, travel is a nightmare, and visiting other countries is like my own little version of hell. My company gives me 4 weeks of vacation (I have worked there for a decade) and they REQUIRE that I take at least 2 weeks off in a row once a year (for security reasons), I prefer routines and when I take that much time off I get totally messed up, can't sleep properly, eat way too much or not enough, and I am constantly distracted. Work keeps me from becoming some compulsive handwasher who counts his peas at dinner and only eats the odd numbered ones. It's therapy, addiction, and a paycheck all rolled into one... But I recognize that I am a freak.
The final season of Enterprise dealt primarily with the Xindi, one of the Xindi races (5 different sentient species on one planet) were spacefaring water creatures that weren't humanoid, and flew in ships filled with water, this fact was not particularly shocking or foreign to the captain of Enterprise, nor his highly experienced Vulcan crewmate. But also the Federation are a bunch of bigots who only let humanoids in anyway.
I totally agree. I try very hard to honor the user experience, and really, I am the only one in my department that does (and I am not that great at it). The internal usability expert was shared at a rate of 75(dev):1(usability) and really he was one of the first to go in the layoffs, because "what does he even do??"
Even our requirements analysts think I am crazy when I nitpick tab order and that is a minor and obvious thing.
I have never felt the need to activate starcraft 2's "Offline mode" because even when I am at my grandmother's house or the dentist, or even camping in Texas state parks, I have a constant internet connection. If I didn't have a constant internet connection I would be too busy fixing my network equipment to play a video game.
Controllers for PC are cheaper and have more variety than controllers for console... I played torchlight on a ps2 controller with a usb adaptor for my laptop, just to see if it would work, but I vastly prefer the mouse/keyboard configuration.
I work for a very large company that is not a software company, but which publishes a lot of software. I can tell you everything that a customer sees has UI designed by usability experts and UI designers working together, everything else the UI is an afterthought, thrown together by developers such as myself, who suck at UI (90% of our software is only used by employees).
That is why you download slick iPhone apps, but then go into the store and the employees are using text based terminals on 20 year old hardware.
The actual problem with publishing and the ebook quality lag is that they already had developers (publishers make all kinds of tools for in-house use) but they didn't have any experience with the difference between asking Mister Anderson to write a regular expression, and publishing consumer software. It will get better. Probably.
I wish something like this would have existed when I chose my current house.
Crime statistics have been google-able since, before yahoo was a search engine. So I guess they were Altavista-able.
There are trade-offs both ways. If you have a server that you think is so redundant and bulletproof that it will never go down, well you are wrong. You can either plan your application deployment with occasional hardware and datacenter failures built in or not. If 20 servers each have 99% uptime, but my application doesn't go down if I lose one or two or 10 servers then I have a much higher uptime then if my iron warhorse of a host machine has 99.9% uptime.
I like to compare IDE Raid 5 to a really good scsi back in the day. Sure the IDE drives failed more, but it didn't matter if they failed, because you could just pop another cheap IDE in there and the volume never actually went down.
The thing is I have to plan for servers to go down unexpectedly anyway. Multiplying my server cost by 10, then dividing my server count by 10 sometimes feels like chasing buzzwords is all.
No shit. We are almost done virtualizing our entire datacenter, I assume the next step is to realize that having a single point of failure for 20 virtual servers isn't as cool as having 20 dirt cheap real servers, each independant. So maybe we can squeeze a few more years bouncing back with de-virtualization. "From the cloud to localization, the next revolution! Have a little piece of the cloud right in your own office!"
Good idea! That would make hoaxes way easier.
Or they would buy those man years for $0.50 a day from China.
My dad's friends couldn't believe he was letting his CHILDREN touch a COMPUTER, he would tell them "this is the future, these are life skills now". I learned to load programs before I could write by hand. My older brother and I typed in a game from a magazine. The rest is history, I have been a hacker ever since, it's how I make my living and how I pass the time.
I was very fortunate to be born at a time when computers were suddenly affordable.
Thank you. Really.
I don't want to like IE9, because MS is the company we love to hate... but I vastly prefer it to chrome.
My first complaint: Chrome's gigantic header is 18 pixels taller than IE, on my netbook that extra 3% of the tiny screen that is unusable for content is kind of a big deal.
There are chrome add ons to make the URL textbox into a combo box with recently visited pages, something that has been standard in browsers since like 1998, and pretty much the only way I am used to browsing. I guess it feels weird to have to use some third party extension (That doesn't work perfectly) to add my most used feature, when it is not an obscure or weird feature.
Home. There is no home button... I know I can search from the address bar, but I vastly prefer to just hit the home button and search on google's homepage... I mean, I want to give your site more traffic, don't make that harder on your own browser. 5 years ago I never would have thought I would be saying this, but with firefox completely ruined to the point of being unusably slow and buggy, and with chrome being the monstrosity of user interface that it is... IE9 is the only browser that I like right now.
No other legal service touches netflix for value. Even if they trippled their price again tomorrow, it would still have more content, and be cheaper than cable for me.
hardly similar. I have prime (for the other value prime adds, shipping and kindle lending books) and netflix, prime video is a joke compared to netflix. Not only is the user experience 100x better with netflix, there is a ton more content (not to mention 99% of the prime content is already on Netflix),
You can write whatever you want for WIndows CE/Phone7/Phone8 in Visual Basic.net.
This is one of my favorite things about Slashdot, "Why doesn't windows exist? Somebody should make something like windows."
I mean sure it's like 1.5% of phone market share, but that never stopped us from talking about great development tools for Linux.
just so you don't have to read a million internet rants and raves I will attempt to summarize:
Ayn Rand lived in a time when people thought that all you needed to become rich and powerful was hard work and brains. She also wrote very thick books in which she ranted about how everyone else sucks on the teat of said hard working brainey people, especially through government wealth redistribution like welfare, taxes, environmental regulation, social security, etc. Basically she wrote books that tell every nerdy 14 year old that he will someday invent something cool and the world will be forced to bow to him. Atlas Shrugged is the story about how the rich Industry tycoons are proping up the rest of the country with their genius and hard work, and what happens if they shrug off this responsibility like Atlas did? The sky would fall, because these people are the heroes. Not. Very. Accessible. There is a 79 page monologue of epic fappery. It is basically the opposite of occupy wallstreet, but just as extreme.
Also Treo, blackberry, Hiptop(sidekick), those are only the ones I happened to have owned.
Sushi is more expensive than gasoline, so are most "lean and trendy" foods that I tend to see the bike commuter crowd eat (at least at my work). I sincerely doubt they are saving money on gas, as they are replacing it with the kinds of expensive food that you can use to sustain exercise.