This is my philosophy, too. Who needs to spend $50 to $60 on the latest and greatest games when you can pluck plenty of gems in the $10-20 range from a few years ago? Being able to play the latest game right now is just not worth the premium to me, and I suspect many gamers feel the same way.
There will always be the die-hards who have to have the new, hot game on release day, and are willing to pay big bucks for it. But it's nice to have options such as Steam and GOG.com for those oldies but goldies.
That's seriously fucked up. The last company I worked at had about 1/3 as many QA testers as developers, and that was still more than the industry norm.
If your product has more testers than developers you are dealing with a seriously flawed product and/or development process.
I favor regulation to the point of opening the infrastructure. At that point, let the providers compete with each other. But that's what I'm interested in--a level playing field at the infrastructure level, so providers are not held back by entrenched physical monopolies and huge barriers to entry.
I'd call it "bundleware," which is relatively precise without being a loaded term.
I always thought of "shovelware" as being what you get when you buy a 10-pack of games, and only two or three of them are good--the rest are garbage, just shovelware to fill out the package.
You don't seem to have any idea how cable monopolies were established in the first place.
Cable companies struck deals with local governments in order to get permission to lay their lines on public land and on private property. It was completely infeasible for cable companies to lay their lines without the cooperation of the local government, as private properties are not contiguous enough to permit it and it's far too much hassle to ask every single property owner for permission to lay cables on their land.
In exchange for building this infrastructure, cable companies got their monopolies. At the time, nobody realized they would eventually be used for the breadth of data services we have now. In retrospect, it wasn't a great decision but it was the best option at the time.
Now that the cable monopolies are fully entrenched, the only way you're going to get fair competition is to socialize the infrastructure--which cannot be done solely at the local level. For it to work, it has to be done nationally, otherwise you just wind up with varying degrees of local/regional monopolies, which we already have.
If government at all levels just steps away from the whole thing and leaves everything status quo, you will not see more competition. The cable companies will still have their local monopolies because no one else can get in unless the local government allows someone to lay cables on public land again--which would start this whole process over and we'd be left with the same problem in the end.
Your local government did that, and only because things were setup so that the federal government had no regulatory control over local cable companies.
Requiring an open infrastructure can only be enforced at the federal level. Either way, it's not going to happen unless government is involved.
Just because wireless signals are invisible doesn't mean they don't have physical limits. Look at your AM and FM radio, or over-the-air TV broadcasts. There are hard limits as to how many signals can be present in the same geographical area, as there is only so much spectrum to go around. So, yeah, there really are physical limits to how many wireless providers can serve the same area. They can't all build their own towers, so you're again left with the notion of sharing them--something corporations generally don't do unless forced.
And it's tremendously impractical and inefficient. How on Earth are you going to get citizens to vote up/down on hundreds of thousands of employees? Who has time to read that many resumes and job descriptions? There is a reason we delegate this stuff.
You're splitting hairs. The FCC is an executive agency that answers to the President. You do vote for President. Would we like to start voting for every last government employee, too?
Guess what? You just argued in favor of regulation. If you want consumers to have choices for broadband, then you are talking about forcing companies, through regulation, to make their infrastructure available to everyone.
Somebody is going to be in control of it, one way or another. Better that it be a government agency that's at least theoretically answerable to the voting populace than a corporation that is only beholden to its investors.
The "no girls" thing was a joke, of course. And I have no problem with women who want to go all natural. I'll take that over someone with five pounds of makeup caked all over her face.
But these are servers, not consumer desktops. I guess it was naive of me to think there would be better quality checks on server hardware. Double dumbass on me.
Just because you have a third party manufacture your hardware doesn't mean you shouldn't do your own QA. After all, it's your reputation on the line, not that of the nameless sweatshop contractor.
So, yeah, this is thoroughly Dell's fault for not caring about their brand or reputation.
I've seen my share of women whose makeup makes them look worse than they would without it.
Though I know there are no girls on Slashdot, here's a tip: if I can tell you're wearing makeup, you have already failed. Proper makeup application enhances beauty, it doesn't attempt to replace it.
Do you get paid to be a pedant or do you just do it for fun?
Yes, not "everyone" uses Facebook, but it is still the #1 social networking site in the US by a large margin with at least 400M users. Myspace, by comparison, has about 130M users. There is no social networking service in the English-speaking world that even approaches Facebook's market share. For crying out loud, their Alexa page rank is two. How much more popular do they need to be before we can generalize and say "everyone"?
I realize that with most Slashdotters being technically inclined, we prefer precision in language, but there are instances like this one where it is well-understood what is meant by a particular statement ("everyone uses Facebook") even if the statement itself is an exaggeration of the facts.
The real problem with those prices is the publishers. Publishers don't view ebooks as a revenue stream, they see them as a technology that cannibalizes physical book sales. So, they don't price ebooks with the mindset that it is basically 100% margin--instead, they're thinking "how much of the cover price on a hardback or paperback am I losing on this deal?" And that is the basis for the ebook pricing. It makes sense if all you care about is preserving your dying business model.
Basically, publishers still don't take books seriously, and they price them as such.
I'll take your word for it! I've just known a lot of Mac users, and they aren't very technical people. They seem to have a much lower level of frustration than the non-technical Windows users I deal with. Whether that's up to the platform or the individual person, I don't know. The Mac users just seem to be hassled less, overall, by the quirks of their platform.
I would argue with the "new to using computers" bullet. If you're new to computing, exactly why would it be easier to learn Windows than Ubuntu? Both have their arcane peculiarities and unique paradigms you'd have to get accustomed to.
Hell, if you are totally new to computers and have no interest in learning much of anything about how they work, I'd suggest getting a Mac. Then you need never worry yourself about the internals, it "just works," as they say.
I say this as someone who doesn't use a Mac. Apple built their reputation on being idiot-proof, and as far as I can tell, they live up.
Both fantasy and science fiction are under the umbrella of "speculative fiction." Both concern stories that are not possible in the here and now, but could be possible under different circumstances. For narrative purposes, advanced technology serves the same function as magic--they allow story events to occur that would be impossible in a story with a contemporary, realistic setting.
What sets science fiction apart from fantasy is at least paying lip service to real science and plausible technology. This sort of thing is more in the eye of the beholder, though.
My organization experienced the exact same thing with GX270s. They would just spontaneously die and require a motherboard swapout. IT knew the model was faulty but generally waited until the board actually died before putting in a replacement. They kept replacements on hand so they wouldn't have to wait for Dell to ship one, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Informative? Really? Did a mod just need to burn off a point? :-p
Ah, you're right. I didn't realize that was the origin of the term "shovelware." Makes sense, though. ET's infamy lives on in the lexicon.
This is my philosophy, too. Who needs to spend $50 to $60 on the latest and greatest games when you can pluck plenty of gems in the $10-20 range from a few years ago? Being able to play the latest game right now is just not worth the premium to me, and I suspect many gamers feel the same way.
There will always be the die-hards who have to have the new, hot game on release day, and are willing to pay big bucks for it. But it's nice to have options such as Steam and GOG.com for those oldies but goldies.
That's seriously fucked up. The last company I worked at had about 1/3 as many QA testers as developers, and that was still more than the industry norm.
If your product has more testers than developers you are dealing with a seriously flawed product and/or development process.
I favor regulation to the point of opening the infrastructure. At that point, let the providers compete with each other. But that's what I'm interested in--a level playing field at the infrastructure level, so providers are not held back by entrenched physical monopolies and huge barriers to entry.
I'd call it "bundleware," which is relatively precise without being a loaded term.
I always thought of "shovelware" as being what you get when you buy a 10-pack of games, and only two or three of them are good--the rest are garbage, just shovelware to fill out the package.
You don't seem to have any idea how cable monopolies were established in the first place.
Cable companies struck deals with local governments in order to get permission to lay their lines on public land and on private property. It was completely infeasible for cable companies to lay their lines without the cooperation of the local government, as private properties are not contiguous enough to permit it and it's far too much hassle to ask every single property owner for permission to lay cables on their land.
In exchange for building this infrastructure, cable companies got their monopolies. At the time, nobody realized they would eventually be used for the breadth of data services we have now. In retrospect, it wasn't a great decision but it was the best option at the time.
Now that the cable monopolies are fully entrenched, the only way you're going to get fair competition is to socialize the infrastructure--which cannot be done solely at the local level. For it to work, it has to be done nationally, otherwise you just wind up with varying degrees of local/regional monopolies, which we already have.
If government at all levels just steps away from the whole thing and leaves everything status quo, you will not see more competition. The cable companies will still have their local monopolies because no one else can get in unless the local government allows someone to lay cables on public land again--which would start this whole process over and we'd be left with the same problem in the end.
Your local government did that, and only because things were setup so that the federal government had no regulatory control over local cable companies.
Requiring an open infrastructure can only be enforced at the federal level. Either way, it's not going to happen unless government is involved.
Just because wireless signals are invisible doesn't mean they don't have physical limits. Look at your AM and FM radio, or over-the-air TV broadcasts. There are hard limits as to how many signals can be present in the same geographical area, as there is only so much spectrum to go around. So, yeah, there really are physical limits to how many wireless providers can serve the same area. They can't all build their own towers, so you're again left with the notion of sharing them--something corporations generally don't do unless forced.
And it's tremendously impractical and inefficient. How on Earth are you going to get citizens to vote up/down on hundreds of thousands of employees? Who has time to read that many resumes and job descriptions? There is a reason we delegate this stuff.
You're splitting hairs. The FCC is an executive agency that answers to the President. You do vote for President. Would we like to start voting for every last government employee, too?
Guess what? You just argued in favor of regulation. If you want consumers to have choices for broadband, then you are talking about forcing companies, through regulation, to make their infrastructure available to everyone.
Thanks for making my point for me.
Somebody is going to be in control of it, one way or another. Better that it be a government agency that's at least theoretically answerable to the voting populace than a corporation that is only beholden to its investors.
The "no girls" thing was a joke, of course. And I have no problem with women who want to go all natural. I'll take that over someone with five pounds of makeup caked all over her face.
But these are servers, not consumer desktops. I guess it was naive of me to think there would be better quality checks on server hardware. Double dumbass on me.
Just because you have a third party manufacture your hardware doesn't mean you shouldn't do your own QA. After all, it's your reputation on the line, not that of the nameless sweatshop contractor.
So, yeah, this is thoroughly Dell's fault for not caring about their brand or reputation.
That's some great QA you've got going on over there.
Thanks for linking a perfect example. She looks decent without makeup. With it, she looks completely fake. It's not subtle at all.
I've seen my share of women whose makeup makes them look worse than they would without it.
Though I know there are no girls on Slashdot, here's a tip: if I can tell you're wearing makeup, you have already failed. Proper makeup application enhances beauty, it doesn't attempt to replace it.
Do you get paid to be a pedant or do you just do it for fun?
Yes, not "everyone" uses Facebook, but it is still the #1 social networking site in the US by a large margin with at least 400M users. Myspace, by comparison, has about 130M users. There is no social networking service in the English-speaking world that even approaches Facebook's market share. For crying out loud, their Alexa page rank is two. How much more popular do they need to be before we can generalize and say "everyone"?
I realize that with most Slashdotters being technically inclined, we prefer precision in language, but there are instances like this one where it is well-understood what is meant by a particular statement ("everyone uses Facebook") even if the statement itself is an exaggeration of the facts.
The real problem with those prices is the publishers. Publishers don't view ebooks as a revenue stream, they see them as a technology that cannibalizes physical book sales. So, they don't price ebooks with the mindset that it is basically 100% margin--instead, they're thinking "how much of the cover price on a hardback or paperback am I losing on this deal?" And that is the basis for the ebook pricing. It makes sense if all you care about is preserving your dying business model.
Basically, publishers still don't take books seriously, and they price them as such.
I'll take your word for it! I've just known a lot of Mac users, and they aren't very technical people. They seem to have a much lower level of frustration than the non-technical Windows users I deal with. Whether that's up to the platform or the individual person, I don't know. The Mac users just seem to be hassled less, overall, by the quirks of their platform.
I would argue with the "new to using computers" bullet. If you're new to computing, exactly why would it be easier to learn Windows than Ubuntu? Both have their arcane peculiarities and unique paradigms you'd have to get accustomed to.
Hell, if you are totally new to computers and have no interest in learning much of anything about how they work, I'd suggest getting a Mac. Then you need never worry yourself about the internals, it "just works," as they say.
I say this as someone who doesn't use a Mac. Apple built their reputation on being idiot-proof, and as far as I can tell, they live up.
Both fantasy and science fiction are under the umbrella of "speculative fiction." Both concern stories that are not possible in the here and now, but could be possible under different circumstances. For narrative purposes, advanced technology serves the same function as magic--they allow story events to occur that would be impossible in a story with a contemporary, realistic setting.
What sets science fiction apart from fantasy is at least paying lip service to real science and plausible technology. This sort of thing is more in the eye of the beholder, though.
My organization experienced the exact same thing with GX270s. They would just spontaneously die and require a motherboard swapout. IT knew the model was faulty but generally waited until the board actually died before putting in a replacement. They kept replacements on hand so they wouldn't have to wait for Dell to ship one, either.