But at the same time, there are different divisions of the company. The music side is different from the gaming side. The cellphone side is different than the movie side. If you buy a product of theirs that is actually GOOD (the ebook reader comes with SD, not just their closed memory stick and support for open ebook formats - epub), you can vote with your wallet. If they make BAD products (ie rootkit music cds) and we don't buy those, they will be forced to make a change in that area. So while it doesn't hurt the company AS MUCH as a whole, each division can suffer differently and have to make changes.
I dislike the iPhone Apple makes (the lockdown deters me), but I purchased a Macbook Pro because I like the UNIX like Operating System. So Apple sees a COMPUTER sale from ME, but not a PHONE sale.
If you think that a company with that size can change that quickly, you really need to understand change. It's hard to find 'good' change happen overnight, especially a company the size of Sony.
I dislike Sony too and I try to stay clear of them as much as possible. However, when you compare the price of the Amazon Kindle to the Sony eReader... It's really a great bargain (even though it's still 2-300 dollars). Sure still pricey, but it's a relatively new technology and you should expect to pay a little more.
My brother owns a PS3 for gaming, because his MICROSOFT XBox360 gave him the RROD and he didn't want to mess around with multiple consoles - got it replaced with a PS3 a while back and has had NO issues.
So while it sometimes make sense to exclude Sony from the picture, it's not always the best way.
I ordered a domain for my friend with the +$30 Google advertising crap. I don't remember whether I chose if it should auto renew, or whether it's enabled by default.
So anyways, half way into it, I cancel the domain auto renewal. You'd think that everything would be fine and dandy, right? WRONG. After the domain expired, I noticed a weird charge on my credit card. I called GoDaddy up and the rep said "There is NO way to refund this charge." She didn't realize how stupid it was to have a website promotion service on a domain name that's not even registered anymore!!!
Anyways, I didn't spend too much time on the phone (that's not my job). I immediately called up VISA, told them what happened (which you're normally supposed to wait 30 days before, but I got away with it in a week), and said I wouldn't need to pay that amount on my card and that there would be no accumulating interest. A few weeks later I noticed a credit on my card for the amount they originally deducted.
For reasons like that, I will continue to use them. They succeeded in my Broadvoice refund as well. I got a free trial, but if you cancel in the "Free" trial period they charge you for the cost of the period. If you cancel AFTER the period ends, they charge you for the next month. There's no way to tell them to cancel your account on a certain day. See anything funny here? Anyways, VISA fixed that up for me too.
Since when did Atom have the highest power/performance per watt? People buy them because they are CHEAP and use only 3watts. That doesn't mean they score high on the P:W scale. The Core2 doesn't have that much higher of a TDP than that of the Atom, yet has the option of increasing its draw if required. While some tasks will pin the Atom to 100% CPU, the Core2 can do it with much less CPU utilization and get the job done way faster (and resume to idle).
For hamburgers that's true.. They even add fats to the meat so they appear bigger, but when you cook them they shrivel up like a frightened turtle (like they do with water injected frozen chicken).
However, with steak it's not really the case. Eye of round is cheaper than any of the higher quality steaks. It's not as tender (because it has less fat), but that doesn't mean you can't do things to prepare it and make it more tender.
Though not entirely Amazon's fault, I still think they still take some of the blame for this.
If they threatened the Author's Guild (not sure how big they are) to not release their ebooks, period, perhaps they would have reconsidered. Are they really that ignorant thinking that people can't take a pdf file and setup text-to-speech audio files? Sure Amazon would have lost some possible income to this, but I think the Author's Guild would have had more to lose. The (f?)AG is making a LOT more selling an ebook vs a physical book - no warehouse, shelves to store it, shipping, etc. There's little to no extra overhead selling an electronic ebook, so there's a huge cost saving there. They *should* pass on some of the savings to the consumer (maybe even giving a FREE audio book as an incentive).
This is just another example of these people getting greedy and not embracing the digital age. I, for one, will now go out of my way to ensure I don't purchase anything from this "Author's Guild" (which I never even heard of before), and I will pass the word onto fellow friends and relatives. I hope Amazon (AT LEAST) puts in BIG BOLD LETTERS on their site for those using this 'kill switch'.
One of the courses I had last year in Macroeconomics brought in a new system. When you buy the textbook, it comes with an online access code (yada yada, most do). However, the instructor FORCED you to do your assignments via this website. This website uses ActiveX controls, thus Windows was the OS to do assignments on - which is sad since quite a few people in the class (including myself) have Macs. Their 'brilliant' suggestion was to load BOOTCAMP or Parallels on there, paying for a Windows license unnecessarily, and running the website via Windows. They simply told me to use the lab at school to do all your assignments if you didn't have access to a Windows machine at home.
The access code itself cost something like $50-60 to purchase from the library - a mere $10-20 difference between the 'pack' with the textbook and code. Reselling the book was therefore useless, since the next person could buy it new for next to nothing. I spoke to the Dean regarding this concept, but he merely brushed me off saying it was a part of 'paying tuition.'
The name of the publisher is Pearson Publishing up here in Canada. I will continue to badmouth them and their tactics. I bet more and more publishers will get into doing this, since the colleges and universities will also get extra monies out of it.
Though not free (there is a trial), I played around with an appliance with a program called Lanforge installed. It's pretty sophisticated. You can setup a number of different "errors" (packet loss, jitter, delay, etc) and it can cycle between them - never constantly the same. It runs on Linux and Windows for sure, but I'm unsure about other OS's. It will also "learn" link statistics between two particular nodes and save that configuration for testing.
Kind of neat, but I'm unsure about how much license costs are. There may easily be open source applications that could be just as good.
I read online a while back that the half life (no, not the computer game) of caffeine is typically like 6 hours. So, drinking a 100mg cup of coffee 6 hours before bed means you'll have about 50mg left in your system. Taking 400mg (1 Venti quad-shot Americano) at the same time will yield 200mg when you go to bed at the same time.. I'm sure these numbers are different on a case-by-case basis, but I'm sure that's the ballpark.
A couple years ago (before I started liking espresso) I did a week long all-inclusive trip to Mexico. I left my caffeine tablets (great for workouts and knowing your exact intake) at home, and leveraged binge drinking for a week to get off my caffeine crave. It worked - yes I know it's not the healthiest way- but when I got back I no longer had the craving I did when I left. I eventually got back into it, but I ensured I never ingested more than 300-400mg per day at the most. I work 65 hour work weeks now at 2 jobs: waking up at 6am and getting home at 11pm (sleep at 12am), thus it's sometimes difficult to NOT intake some type of caffeine. After I stop working this amount, I'll drop down to 100mg/day.
I refuse to drink any caffeine (except green tea) after 12-noon. It really sucks when you realize the amount of time you're spending sleeping is really diminished if you still have caffeine in your system when going to bed.
PS: Afternoon naps when you're tired while trying to quit caffeine really helps a lot. Heck, bring a healthy lunch from home and sleep during your hour-long lunches!
VLC plays fine over my lan and 802.11g/n network as well. You may want to increase the buffer in VLC to a longer delay - that should fix your problem. I watch xvids on my netbook over wireless all the time.
Agreed. I thought the whole point of April Fools was to 'fool' someone with unpredictability - not make 80% of the articles FALSE and predictable.
I think this year is more like "April Smarts Day", where you think every article is fake and gotta guess which one is REAL. It's definitely a little outrageous today.
Remember your dns queries still go through by regular, unencrypted, means... That 'could' draw attention to whoever is using it. A friend of mine gives access to his SSH server for tunneling for his buddy is Saudi Arabia - just needs to be careful.
It's also included with the PortableApps bundle. It makes for one hellova tool to carry around with you on a flash drive. At less than 1.5MB, you can't go wrong.
Believe it or not, this is EXACTLY what I think the CRTC (up here in Canada, eh) should have done with their stupid DO NOT CALL LIST. If you don't know what I'm talking about, look here: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/24/1312203 .
Everyone that I've talked to, who has put their number on that list, has received an astounding greater number of phone calls. If I ever see the decision maker(s) in public... Let's just say they hope to never see me.
All I can say is: F'ing ignorant people... What did they EXPECT was going to happen, really?
Slashdot Mirror
But at the same time, there are different divisions of the company. The music side is different from the gaming side. The cellphone side is different than the movie side. If you buy a product of theirs that is actually GOOD (the ebook reader comes with SD, not just their closed memory stick and support for open ebook formats - epub), you can vote with your wallet. If they make BAD products (ie rootkit music cds) and we don't buy those, they will be forced to make a change in that area. So while it doesn't hurt the company AS MUCH as a whole, each division can suffer differently and have to make changes.
I dislike the iPhone Apple makes (the lockdown deters me), but I purchased a Macbook Pro because I like the UNIX like Operating System. So Apple sees a COMPUTER sale from ME, but not a PHONE sale.
If you think that a company with that size can change that quickly, you really need to understand change. It's hard to find 'good' change happen overnight, especially a company the size of Sony.
I dislike Sony too and I try to stay clear of them as much as possible. However, when you compare the price of the Amazon Kindle to the Sony eReader ... It's really a great bargain (even though it's still 2-300 dollars). Sure still pricey, but it's a relatively new technology and you should expect to pay a little more.
My brother owns a PS3 for gaming, because his MICROSOFT XBox360 gave him the RROD and he didn't want to mess around with multiple consoles - got it replaced with a PS3 a while back and has had NO issues.
So while it sometimes make sense to exclude Sony from the picture, it's not always the best way.
Micro has double's mini usb's connect-disconnect cycle, putting it to 10,000 versus the mini's 5,000.
and it worked for 2Pac as well..
plus, he's STILL making music!
GoDaddy did something to me a few years back.
I ordered a domain for my friend with the +$30 Google advertising crap. I don't remember whether I chose if it should auto renew, or whether it's enabled by default.
So anyways, half way into it, I cancel the domain auto renewal. You'd think that everything would be fine and dandy, right? WRONG. After the domain expired, I noticed a weird charge on my credit card. I called GoDaddy up and the rep said "There is NO way to refund this charge." She didn't realize how stupid it was to have a website promotion service on a domain name that's not even registered anymore!!!
Anyways, I didn't spend too much time on the phone (that's not my job). I immediately called up VISA, told them what happened (which you're normally supposed to wait 30 days before, but I got away with it in a week), and said I wouldn't need to pay that amount on my card and that there would be no accumulating interest. A few weeks later I noticed a credit on my card for the amount they originally deducted.
For reasons like that, I will continue to use them. They succeeded in my Broadvoice refund as well. I got a free trial, but if you cancel in the "Free" trial period they charge you for the cost of the period. If you cancel AFTER the period ends, they charge you for the next month. There's no way to tell them to cancel your account on a certain day. See anything funny here? Anyways, VISA fixed that up for me too.
Long live the Credit Card companies!
Since when did Atom have the highest power/performance per watt? People buy them because they are CHEAP and use only 3watts. That doesn't mean they score high on the P:W scale. The Core2 doesn't have that much higher of a TDP than that of the Atom, yet has the option of increasing its draw if required. While some tasks will pin the Atom to 100% CPU, the Core2 can do it with much less CPU utilization and get the job done way faster (and resume to idle).
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-atom-efficiency,2069-12.html
Paypal does that.
PS: No, I don't like to use Paypal when preventable.
For hamburgers that's true.. They even add fats to the meat so they appear bigger, but when you cook them they shrivel up like a frightened turtle (like they do with water injected frozen chicken).
However, with steak it's not really the case. Eye of round is cheaper than any of the higher quality steaks. It's not as tender (because it has less fat), but that doesn't mean you can't do things to prepare it and make it more tender.
I thought that what they said was more along the lines of "Hey, it's Beta!"
Though not entirely Amazon's fault, I still think they still take some of the blame for this.
If they threatened the Author's Guild (not sure how big they are) to not release their ebooks, period, perhaps they would have reconsidered. Are they really that ignorant thinking that people can't take a pdf file and setup text-to-speech audio files? Sure Amazon would have lost some possible income to this, but I think the Author's Guild would have had more to lose. The (f?)AG is making a LOT more selling an ebook vs a physical book - no warehouse, shelves to store it, shipping, etc. There's little to no extra overhead selling an electronic ebook, so there's a huge cost saving there. They *should* pass on some of the savings to the consumer (maybe even giving a FREE audio book as an incentive).
This is just another example of these people getting greedy and not embracing the digital age. I, for one, will now go out of my way to ensure I don't purchase anything from this "Author's Guild" (which I never even heard of before), and I will pass the word onto fellow friends and relatives. I hope Amazon (AT LEAST) puts in BIG BOLD LETTERS on their site for those using this 'kill switch'.
They kind of already do this.
One of the courses I had last year in Macroeconomics brought in a new system. When you buy the textbook, it comes with an online access code (yada yada, most do). However, the instructor FORCED you to do your assignments via this website. This website uses ActiveX controls, thus Windows was the OS to do assignments on - which is sad since quite a few people in the class (including myself) have Macs. Their 'brilliant' suggestion was to load BOOTCAMP or Parallels on there, paying for a Windows license unnecessarily, and running the website via Windows. They simply told me to use the lab at school to do all your assignments if you didn't have access to a Windows machine at home.
The access code itself cost something like $50-60 to purchase from the library - a mere $10-20 difference between the 'pack' with the textbook and code. Reselling the book was therefore useless, since the next person could buy it new for next to nothing. I spoke to the Dean regarding this concept, but he merely brushed me off saying it was a part of 'paying tuition.'
The name of the publisher is Pearson Publishing up here in Canada. I will continue to badmouth them and their tactics. I bet more and more publishers will get into doing this, since the colleges and universities will also get extra monies out of it.
Though not free (there is a trial), I played around with an appliance with a program called Lanforge installed. It's pretty sophisticated. You can setup a number of different "errors" (packet loss, jitter, delay, etc) and it can cycle between them - never constantly the same. It runs on Linux and Windows for sure, but I'm unsure about other OS's. It will also "learn" link statistics between two particular nodes and save that configuration for testing.
Kind of neat, but I'm unsure about how much license costs are. There may easily be open source applications that could be just as good.
Link is here: http://www.candelatech.com/
I read online a while back that the half life (no, not the computer game) of caffeine is typically like 6 hours. So, drinking a 100mg cup of coffee 6 hours before bed means you'll have about 50mg left in your system. Taking 400mg (1 Venti quad-shot Americano) at the same time will yield 200mg when you go to bed at the same time.. I'm sure these numbers are different on a case-by-case basis, but I'm sure that's the ballpark.
A couple years ago (before I started liking espresso) I did a week long all-inclusive trip to Mexico. I left my caffeine tablets (great for workouts and knowing your exact intake) at home, and leveraged binge drinking for a week to get off my caffeine crave. It worked - yes I know it's not the healthiest way- but when I got back I no longer had the craving I did when I left. I eventually got back into it, but I ensured I never ingested more than 300-400mg per day at the most. I work 65 hour work weeks now at 2 jobs: waking up at 6am and getting home at 11pm (sleep at 12am), thus it's sometimes difficult to NOT intake some type of caffeine. After I stop working this amount, I'll drop down to 100mg/day.
I refuse to drink any caffeine (except green tea) after 12-noon. It really sucks when you realize the amount of time you're spending sleeping is really diminished if you still have caffeine in your system when going to bed.
PS: Afternoon naps when you're tired while trying to quit caffeine really helps a lot. Heck, bring a healthy lunch from home and sleep during your hour-long lunches!
Hey, you got your information all wrong! Everyone knows you can go to your local neighbourhood Tim Horton's and buy an Ice Cap for $2.99.
VLC plays fine over my lan and 802.11g/n network as well. You may want to increase the buffer in VLC to a longer delay - that should fix your problem. I watch xvids on my netbook over wireless all the time.
100% identical! +1
It's similar to eating a week's worth of food in 1 day and not eating for the other 6 days...
Shh.. Don't tell the MPAA that! Now they're REALLY going to take it down (again?)
Agreed. I thought the whole point of April Fools was to 'fool' someone with unpredictability - not make 80% of the articles FALSE and predictable.
I think this year is more like "April Smarts Day", where you think every article is fake and gotta guess which one is REAL. It's definitely a little outrageous today.
This demonstration never really took place. They made up a bogus story that will get Slashdot to DoS the site for them.
EXCEPT I can't do online banking with Wachovia, and SLASHDOT corrcetly
Apparently your spell checker isn't either
If that law passes, I know what's gonna happen. People are simply gonna run around with clevers and start chopping people up instead! Brilliant!
Remember your dns queries still go through by regular, unencrypted, means... That 'could' draw attention to whoever is using it. A friend of mine gives access to his SSH server for tunneling for his buddy is Saudi Arabia - just needs to be careful.
It's also included with the PortableApps bundle. It makes for one hellova tool to carry around with you on a flash drive. At less than 1.5MB, you can't go wrong.
Believe it or not, this is EXACTLY what I think the CRTC (up here in Canada, eh) should have done with their stupid DO NOT CALL LIST. If you don't know what I'm talking about, look here: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/24/1312203 .
Everyone that I've talked to, who has put their number on that list, has received an astounding greater number of phone calls. If I ever see the decision maker(s) in public... Let's just say they hope to never see me.
All I can say is: F'ing ignorant people... What did they EXPECT was going to happen, really?
You've clearly been hanging around Him too long sir