Leave those two things out and all the evil splendor they imply: no CD/DVD, no deep color bits, no sound, no floppy, no CCD camera. Use all the extra space for another battery. You could get some battery life out of mono-no backlit LCD screen.
Something is : A member of set of elements called 'yes', a member of the set of elements called 'no' and a member of the set of elements called the intersection of 'yes' and 'no'.
I've had a Thinkpad sent back to IBM 8 times. After that I got another model which caught on fire. Its replacement had 4 different MWave modem/DAA failures. Finally it was just stolen. They were nothing if not persistant. Of course it didn't do me very much good.
Over the years there are the boxes that had persistant quality control problems which could not be easily fixed and/or required changes that were pretty exotic:
AST - BIOS replacement
SBC - replace MoBo twice
Gateway - power supply (2x), Wren7 drive (2x)
Compaq notebook - system board
ALR - power supply, MoBo
HP (PC) - SIMMs - replaced 5x in 3 different machines, keyboards replaced in 3 different machines.
But for hands down crappy service you have to talk to a software company. Solaris support once told me and I quote: "Oh that patch is on the web somewhere. CLICK." Oracle VARs - Silver level support would decide which problems they were going to help with and which they couldn't be bothered with after they asked you questions about something for a half hour.
They all pretty much suck. Of course wouldn't the nbest thing to have happen is for it not to break?
Laws about unreasonable search and seizures do not apply in the context of being employed by and in the normal operations of government on their own facilities. OTOH if they demanded to search your home they'd need a warrant (one would hope, more or less as it relates to criminal investigation). If they stopped your car off premises they'd need a search warrant or a criminal complaint or arrest warrant. But while you are on site they own your ass and there is nothing you can do about it.
Then automating it will just make your students as dumb, faster. Use the computer as a tool and then offer courses in computers for people who want to go that way. For example there are lots more people who can get something out of using Photoshop or Microsoft Project then there are people who can make something out of Java or Python. And since we all pretty much wear aprons and smocks we'd be better off, eating and bill paying-wise, knowing something about Photoshop and MS Project then we would as poor crappy programmers.
I don't know about you but I've been hearing the same thing for over 25 years on everything from new residential services to ISDN to ADSL and everything in between.
Here's a generic news blurb. Cut and paste it into your next announcement about the death of a phone company's attempt to do something:
"(company name) announced today they were discontinuing their (service name) service. After much hoopla (company name) discovered several severe technical and financial problems associated with the rollout. (Company name) over estimated customer demand and did not anticipate customer backlash from poor service quality, unreliability, longer than anticipated provisioning times, poor customer service and recurring billing problems. (CEO's name), (company name's) CEO announced that no new customers would be accepted, existing customers would be discontinued immediately and those customers should receive partial billing credits in the next 3 months. In a related note (company name) announced 1,500 layoffs associated with the closing of their (service name) service subsidiary. Financial markets responded by hiking the stock price 3%. (Company name) also announced they have filed for a rate increase with the FCC.
"Hello this is Ms. Johnson from down the street. The computer is broken and you have to fix it now. I didn't do ANYTHING to it it just stopped working. Don't ask me anything about it cause I don't understand computers. Just come over my house and fix it. Thanks."
Beeeeep!
"Yo you luser my skilz rule and I will h4xor your shit everyday!"
Beeeeep!
"Hi, can you - hey you kids shut the fuck up!!!, put that rock down!" click.
You're renting the camera and paying for someone to make prints. Both costs are bundled into one charge. Shit I could do this at Kinko's today. Even if I don't have a PC I can bring my camera to Kinko's download the images and manipulate them myself. If I want I can even burn a PhotoCD and hand that off to anyone to make an unlimited number of prints.
I don't see how this 'disposable' makes any sense.
DRM could be used to efficiently distribute lending materials over the web while maintaining copywrite. That way you could view or download material from your house and be able to use it for the same 2 week or so period of time you can now from the library. When the time is up you can renew or ignore. Now today authors and copywrite owners are paid by some factor of unit sales be they private or to libraries. In the digital version copywrite owners get paid per a licence fee arragement. If the library wants to be able to distribute 'x' copies of the material it purchases a license to do so. Not one more version is permitted and if you the customer see it in the catalog you might be given a "all available copies have been lent out until 'xxxx'" message. That way the whole notion of infinite copies can be ignored. And certainly material could be copy protected or encrypted so that you couldn't relend. Allow printing just like photocopying is allowed today.
There are fewer and less restrictive editorial conventions on the net compared to other media. In it's thirst to be first, every agency from the government to the RNC to CNN to your local al-Wazir website pretty much pushes whatever they want without verification, vetting, substantiation of sources or accurate quoting. We accept that there is a higher probability that anything we read on the web even if it's from The Washington Post, may be pure bullshit or at best, inaccurate or uninformed. We're traded signal to noise for speed. But then again the standards for mass media are pretty low anyhow since there is little or no distinction among news, editorial, political advertising and commercial advertising.
My coworker has a framed wallmount of very expensive and specialized stamps commemorating NASA - some are round, some have holograms, embedded photographs, etc. Some of them are over $30 dollars. This a big money maker for the USPS because those are stamps that no one will ever use.
SuSE is the cat's ass and all that but WTF do they make a distro which is the bowlegged whore of all distros from a security standpoint? SuSE is unique in that almost everything is turned on by default and hardening an installation is very time consuming and error prone. Once we have a standard build locked down we are loathe to change anything because of all the handwork involved. If SuSE could do one thing I would ask that they change their policies so that the default install is locked down at least as tightly as RH.
That's really the answer in the end. To play a given CD you should be required to buy a unique player. OK maybe that's going too far but certainly we should be required to buy another player for every BRAND of CD. You know, a Sony branded, a BMG branded and so on. That way the poor victimized record companies can be assured that not only are not avoiding our patriotic duty in peeling off every last dime to them but they can help democracy and the poor record companies the world over by generating yet more revenue from the hardware sales themselves. I think $1000 for a branded CD player is about right and $100 per CD per year renewable online but only through your $25/membership to the record companies online club. Oh and don't forget that each player must be individually keyed so that only YOUR CD's can play in the branded player insuring that no evil pirates could possibly ever play their own CDs in your player and visa versa.
Back in the Middle Ages when I went to school, the assignments were boring and rote and professors and GA's would mandate that there was ONE solution. Feel free to think freely as long as you do exactly and only what I'm thinking of right now. So of course all the assignments, if they were right at all, looked nearly identical.
The problem is that in the workplace this is a GOOD thing. It's called good change management and version control. You want a consistant repeatable way to do something even where, especially where it is not optimal. In the workplace there are rarely if ever purely isolated competing teams trying to solve the same problem. Maybe that's a luxury in some specialized arena like embedded systems defence avionics or strategic weapons systems but in the commercial world that never happens. At least not to me in 20 years.
Why? - well damn if they can send a man to the moon then those there geekers in NAZER should be able to get me mah TV phone lika Dick Tracy.
There is simply too much money to be made with the crappy service you already get and no incentive to cooperate in billing or roaming systems. I mean who do you think actually bought the congressmen and the FCC leverage? The phone companies.
Look at it another way. The spectrum auction drove the prices so high that phone companies no longer have the billions of dollars it would take to actually deliver the service. And you know what? That was the plan. Keep it on the shelf and off the market from anyone else so they could suck dollars for 1G 2G service now.
This is utter crap. They can't MAKE you pay attention. Their weapon is grades for which you pay money. If you don't or don't want to pay attention your grades MAY suffer. Or they MAY not. At any rate that's your problem. If they want a closed network then they should have a closed network. Otherwise they should work at building courses that don't bore people to tears.
Those Symbol Palm based barcode machines are pretty damn tough. But here I have a hard time seeing the value in a $1000 PDA except for the most specialized industrial or military/law enforcement preprogrammed purposes. Sure all that 'throw it off the roof and run it over with the patrol car' shit is neat-o and I'd love a waterproof, shockproof EMP resistant that can operate in subzero temp survive a three story fall and a battery leak but a thousand bucks ??????
Slashdot Mirror
Leave those two things out and all the evil splendor they imply: no CD/DVD, no deep color bits, no sound, no floppy, no CCD camera. Use all the extra space for another battery. You could get some battery life out of mono-no backlit LCD screen.
Something is : A member of set of elements called 'yes', a member of the set of elements called 'no' and a member of the set of elements called the intersection of 'yes' and 'no'.
I've had a Thinkpad sent back to IBM 8 times. After that I got another model which caught on fire. Its replacement had 4 different MWave modem/DAA failures. Finally it was just stolen. They were nothing if not persistant. Of course it didn't do me very much good.
Over the years there are the boxes that had persistant quality control problems which could not be easily fixed and/or required changes that were pretty exotic:
AST - BIOS replacement
SBC - replace MoBo twice
Gateway - power supply (2x), Wren7 drive (2x)
Compaq notebook - system board
ALR - power supply, MoBo
HP (PC) - SIMMs - replaced 5x in 3 different machines, keyboards replaced in 3 different machines.
But for hands down crappy service you have to talk to a software company. Solaris support once told me and I quote: "Oh that patch is on the web somewhere. CLICK." Oracle VARs - Silver level support would decide which problems they were going to help with and which they couldn't be bothered with after they asked you questions about something for a half hour.
They all pretty much suck. Of course wouldn't the nbest thing to have happen is for it not to break?
Laws about unreasonable search and seizures do not apply in the context of being employed by and in the normal operations of government on their own facilities. OTOH if they demanded to search your home they'd need a warrant (one would hope, more or less as it relates to criminal investigation). If they stopped your car off premises they'd need a search warrant or a criminal complaint or arrest warrant. But while you are on site they own your ass and there is nothing you can do about it.
Then automating it will just make your students as dumb, faster. Use the computer as a tool and then offer courses in computers for people who want to go that way. For example there are lots more people who can get something out of using Photoshop or Microsoft Project then there are people who can make something out of Java or Python. And since we all pretty much wear aprons and smocks we'd be better off, eating and bill paying-wise, knowing something about Photoshop and MS Project then we would as poor crappy programmers.
Make the computer a tool not an altar.
Make that sucka tough as nails and make it waterproof and float then we'll be danncin in the streets and firin our AK's to the sky to Allah and shit.
It is the manifold way of Dharma. You crash you come back of something less worthy.
I don't know about you but I've been hearing the same thing for over 25 years on everything from new residential services to ISDN to ADSL and everything in between.
Here's a generic news blurb. Cut and paste it into your next announcement about the death of a phone company's attempt to do something:
"(company name) announced today they were discontinuing their (service name) service. After much hoopla (company name) discovered several severe technical and financial problems associated with the rollout. (Company name) over estimated customer demand and did not anticipate customer backlash from poor service quality, unreliability, longer than anticipated provisioning times, poor customer service and recurring billing problems. (CEO's name), (company name's) CEO announced that no new customers would be accepted, existing customers would be discontinued immediately and those customers should receive partial billing credits in the next 3 months. In a related note (company name) announced 1,500 layoffs associated with the closing of their (service name) service subsidiary. Financial markets responded by hiking the stock price 3%. (Company name) also announced they have filed for a rate increase with the FCC.
You have 61 new messages.
Beeeeep!-
"Hello this is Ms. Johnson from down the street. The computer is broken and you have to fix it now. I didn't do ANYTHING to it it just stopped working. Don't ask me anything about it cause I don't understand computers. Just come over my house and fix it. Thanks."
Beeeeep!
"Yo you luser my skilz rule and I will h4xor your shit everyday!"
Beeeeep!
"Hi, can you - hey you kids shut the fuck up!!!, put that rock down!" click.
Beeeeep!
"Can I buy a computer from you?"
You're renting the camera and paying for someone to make prints. Both costs are bundled into one charge. Shit I could do this at Kinko's today. Even if I don't have a PC I can bring my camera to Kinko's download the images and manipulate them myself. If I want I can even burn a PhotoCD and hand that off to anyone to make an unlimited number of prints.
I don't see how this 'disposable' makes any sense.
Clicks, wheezes, pops, random onscenities. Sounds like the way I interract with my computer NOW!
Fucking Lame
/. it's just sad how little of real anything is here anymore.
Between the 12 year olds on one hand and the screaming Libertarians on the other
DRM could be used to efficiently distribute lending materials over the web while maintaining copywrite. That way you could view or download material from your house and be able to use it for the same 2 week or so period of time you can now from the library. When the time is up you can renew or ignore. Now today authors and copywrite owners are paid by some factor of unit sales be they private or to libraries. In the digital version copywrite owners get paid per a licence fee arragement. If the library wants to be able to distribute 'x' copies of the material it purchases a license to do so. Not one more version is permitted and if you the customer see it in the catalog you might be given a "all available copies have been lent out until 'xxxx'" message. That way the whole notion of infinite copies can be ignored. And certainly material could be copy protected or encrypted so that you couldn't relend. Allow printing just like photocopying is allowed today.
There are fewer and less restrictive editorial conventions on the net compared to other media. In it's thirst to be first, every agency from the government to the RNC to CNN to your local al-Wazir website pretty much pushes whatever they want without verification, vetting, substantiation of sources or accurate quoting. We accept that there is a higher probability that anything we read on the web even if it's from The Washington Post, may be pure bullshit or at best, inaccurate or uninformed. We're traded signal to noise for speed. But then again the standards for mass media are pretty low anyhow since there is little or no distinction among news, editorial, political advertising and commercial advertising.
For large scale DDNS servers solid state disks are great for when you have to write huge zone transfer files very frequently!!!
My coworker has a framed wallmount of very expensive and specialized stamps commemorating NASA - some are round, some have holograms, embedded photographs, etc. Some of them are over $30 dollars. This a big money maker for the USPS because those are stamps that no one will ever use.
Exactly who do I have to fuck and/or kill to get this code bundle?
It's Free Software, dummy!
Register register register register register.
Is there any other information you'd like like cocksize or eyecolor or the number of blades of grass in my lawn?
You can't accept the address I use which is fine for the USPS - why is that?
And then the download doesn't kick off - hangs hangs hangs hangs.
Great PR for the "The Company that runs the Internet" - assholes !
SuSE is the cat's ass and all that but WTF do they make a distro which is the bowlegged whore of all distros from a security standpoint? SuSE is unique in that almost everything is turned on by default and hardening an installation is very time consuming and error prone. Once we have a standard build locked down we are loathe to change anything because of all the handwork involved. If SuSE could do one thing I would ask that they change their policies so that the default install is locked down at least as tightly as RH.
That's really the answer in the end. To play a given CD you should be required to buy a unique player. OK maybe that's going too far but certainly we should be required to buy another player for every BRAND of CD. You know, a Sony branded, a BMG branded and so on. That way the poor victimized record companies can be assured that not only are not avoiding our patriotic duty in peeling off every last dime to them but they can help democracy and the poor record companies the world over by generating yet more revenue from the hardware sales themselves. I think $1000 for a branded CD player is about right and $100 per CD per year renewable online but only through your $25/membership to the record companies online club. Oh and don't forget that each player must be individually keyed so that only YOUR CD's can play in the branded player insuring that no evil pirates could possibly ever play their own CDs in your player and visa versa.
Sounds reasonable to me.
Back in the Middle Ages when I went to school, the assignments were boring and rote and professors and GA's would mandate that there was ONE solution. Feel free to think freely as long as you do exactly and only what I'm thinking of right now. So of course all the assignments, if they were right at all, looked nearly identical.
The problem is that in the workplace this is a GOOD thing. It's called good change management and version control. You want a consistant repeatable way to do something even where, especially where it is not optimal. In the workplace there are rarely if ever purely isolated competing teams trying to solve the same problem. Maybe that's a luxury in some specialized arena like embedded systems defence avionics or strategic weapons systems but in the commercial world that never happens. At least not to me in 20 years.
As in NEVER. Ever.
Why? - well damn if they can send a man to the moon then those there geekers in NAZER should be able to get me mah TV phone lika Dick Tracy.
There is simply too much money to be made with the crappy service you already get and no incentive to cooperate in billing or roaming systems. I mean who do you think actually bought the congressmen and the FCC leverage? The phone companies.
Look at it another way. The spectrum auction drove the prices so high that phone companies no longer have the billions of dollars it would take to actually deliver the service. And you know what? That was the plan. Keep it on the shelf and off the market from anyone else so they could suck dollars for 1G 2G service now.
should I just type dots?
ok
dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dit dit dot
happy now?
That having an opinion gets marked as a troll. Whichever of you cowards who marked this down should contact me personally.
All hail the new fascism!
This is utter crap. They can't MAKE you pay attention. Their weapon is grades for which you pay money. If you don't or don't want to pay attention your grades MAY suffer. Or they MAY not. At any rate that's your problem. If they want a closed network then they should have a closed network. Otherwise they should work at building courses that don't bore people to tears.
Those Symbol Palm based barcode machines are pretty damn tough. But here I have a hard time seeing the value in a $1000 PDA except for the most specialized industrial or military/law enforcement preprogrammed purposes. Sure all that 'throw it off the roof and run it over with the patrol car' shit is neat-o and I'd love a waterproof, shockproof EMP resistant that can operate in subzero temp survive a three story fall and a battery leak but a thousand bucks ??????
Holy bulletproof little black book Batman !!!