My T-Mobile Dash that the company pays for has unlimited data and it's substantially cheaper.:) But if I could get an unencombered iPhone, I might, if for no other reason than it would be one less thing to carry around.
As it is, I'll wait and see what Android can do.
This would be the same Britain that released guys that hijacked a plane, landed on British soil, and then held police at bay for three days.
I think it says more about their incompetence and unwillingness of the British judiciary and politicians to risk angering the Muslim minority than it says about the so-called innocence of those captured fighing allied forces.
In addition to a lot of the reasons mentioned above, it's only recently that it's become reasonably durable and reliable. I remember the early touch screens, and the damn things couldn't hold up in public. Something that's always on the fritz, no matter how cool or easy to use, is inferior to something that's functional and reliable.
In some regards, the technology probably arrived too early, and enough people got burned on the early generations that it hurt the development.
Every person I've ever worked with that hadn't worked helpdesk was a tool. They had no ability to deal with users. They were sloppy because they (consciously or not) figured someone else would have to deal with the aftermath. And they had an attitude when it came to doing the periodic shit-work that always comes up and doesn't require a brain, just a pair of hands.
Is that really an issue, though? I've supported laptops in a corporate environment for, well, too damn long, and I've *never* seen a hard drive failure. There might be instances where the user trashed the whole damn thing so bad we threw it out with out checking to see if the drive survived. But laptops fail because the user drops it and the screen dies, or the power supply fries, the AC connector to the motherboard breaks, they spill their coffee in it, or something else. About the only thing I've not seen get screwed up is the hard drive.
People delete stuff? Not where I work. I think most of the people I support would rather give up their first born than delete some piece of 4 year old spam that they never even opened.
They already fucked that up by letting every hack writer with a word processor turn his fanfic into canon. Those bitching about what Lucas has done to his own creation should check out what some people have done with the EU. Read enough of that crap and you'll eventually come to regard Phantom Menace as high art.
OTOH, with cloning, it would be much easier to recover from that sort of disaster, since you could clone the animals that survived and introduce that resistance/immunity into the animal population much faster. Food animals are already pretty homogenous through selective breeding already, so the likelyhood of an epidemic is already there. The (relative) lack of mobility of animals will do more to prevent a widespread outbreak than anything else, anyway, unless it's a disease that can use humans as a vector.
For big business, that's fine. Most small businesses are lucky to have a single full-time IT person, and redundant systems just aren't going to happen. A week's downtime without customer records for billing, etc., while servers get rebuilt and data restored could kill them.
I wonder if that makes things worse, though. Patch a known hole and create a new one because of the time pressure, and you might go from a situation that could have been remediated short of an emergency patch to a complete unkown.
That'd be cool with me. Let's make the reporters asking do the same. They're just as culpable for the shallow and sensationalist charades that that compose the election cycle. Actually, more so, since they hold themselves up as the self-appointed watchdogs.
And in the end, it wouldn't matter. I work in DC and probably 75% of the companies I deal with are 'minority owned'. In probably 90% of those, it's a polite fiction. Some of them are in a wife's name, etc. but the actual workings and policies of the company are no different.
As an early 8800 adopter (January 15th), I've been pretty happy. To be honest, though, I got the board as a Christmas gift. The Vista drivers were a little rough, but I've been around enough to know that brand new hardware + brand new OS is going to cause trouble. Suck it up and deal.
For the first month or so, I dual-booted XP, but since the middle of March I've been running Vista only, and played Vanguard, Company of Heroes, LotRO, Civ4 and a bunch of other stuff with almost no issues. Except for Vanguard, and, well, big shock there. Even then after the March driver rev, I could play that just fine, too. The other day I had to reboot for the latest round of patches, and it had been almost two months since the PC had been shut down.
I could until Blockbuster closed the only store within 5 miles of me. I used to be able to stop in on my way back from work; now I can't. And since I get movies from Netflix next-day, and BB takes two or three, they've lost their competitive advantage as far as I'm concerned. Plus, with Netflix I can watch stuff on-line, too, for no additional cost.
Two different beasts. If you can substitute EQ2 for a PnP game and not miss the latter, then you weren't doing it right. MMOs (and I've played em all) are a nice diversion, but the face-to-face socializing and wide-open gameplay of a good D&D game kick the snot out of killing the same mob for the 1000th time hoping for a good drop, or sitting around for 45 minutes waiting for the other 30 people in the raid to get thier shit together. And you can play a perfectly fun game of D&D without buying any books at all. If you think you need every splatbook WotC publishes, you're a sucker.
Perhaps AmeriTrade could do something similar -- once a stock is identified as being promoted in spams sent to AmeriTrade customers, any customer attempting to buy that stock would be presented with a message saying that AmeriTrade was blocking the transaction for security reasons. (If this runs afoul of some SEC regulation that a brokerage has to let you buy any stock you want any time you want, then at least display a big warning when AmeriTrade users try to buy it through their system, saying that the stock has been the subject of a fraudulent promotion scheme and is an extremely high-risk buy.)
Wouldn't this also be abusable? Pick a stock, short it, spam the hell out of everybody, watch Ameritrade or whoever blacklist it, and watch the price drop.
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As opposed to the current President, who didn't finish his Senate term?
My T-Mobile Dash that the company pays for has unlimited data and it's substantially cheaper. :) But if I could get an unencombered iPhone, I might, if for no other reason than it would be one less thing to carry around.
As it is, I'll wait and see what Android can do.
This would be the same Britain that released guys that hijacked a plane, landed on British soil, and then held police at bay for three days. I think it says more about their incompetence and unwillingness of the British judiciary and politicians to risk angering the Muslim minority than it says about the so-called innocence of those captured fighing allied forces.
In addition to a lot of the reasons mentioned above, it's only recently that it's become reasonably durable and reliable. I remember the early touch screens, and the damn things couldn't hold up in public. Something that's always on the fritz, no matter how cool or easy to use, is inferior to something that's functional and reliable. In some regards, the technology probably arrived too early, and enough people got burned on the early generations that it hurt the development.
Every person I've ever worked with that hadn't worked helpdesk was a tool. They had no ability to deal with users. They were sloppy because they (consciously or not) figured someone else would have to deal with the aftermath. And they had an attitude when it came to doing the periodic shit-work that always comes up and doesn't require a brain, just a pair of hands.
Is that really an issue, though? I've supported laptops in a corporate environment for, well, too damn long, and I've *never* seen a hard drive failure. There might be instances where the user trashed the whole damn thing so bad we threw it out with out checking to see if the drive survived. But laptops fail because the user drops it and the screen dies, or the power supply fries, the AC connector to the motherboard breaks, they spill their coffee in it, or something else. About the only thing I've not seen get screwed up is the hard drive.
People delete stuff? Not where I work. I think most of the people I support would rather give up their first born than delete some piece of 4 year old spam that they never even opened.
They already fucked that up by letting every hack writer with a word processor turn his fanfic into canon. Those bitching about what Lucas has done to his own creation should check out what some people have done with the EU. Read enough of that crap and you'll eventually come to regard Phantom Menace as high art.
OTOH, with cloning, it would be much easier to recover from that sort of disaster, since you could clone the animals that survived and introduce that resistance/immunity into the animal population much faster. Food animals are already pretty homogenous through selective breeding already, so the likelyhood of an epidemic is already there. The (relative) lack of mobility of animals will do more to prevent a widespread outbreak than anything else, anyway, unless it's a disease that can use humans as a vector.
For big business, that's fine. Most small businesses are lucky to have a single full-time IT person, and redundant systems just aren't going to happen. A week's downtime without customer records for billing, etc., while servers get rebuilt and data restored could kill them.
Yeah, how dare they corrupt those poor human-sacrificing, slave-trading innocent peoples.
I wonder if that makes things worse, though. Patch a known hole and create a new one because of the time pressure, and you might go from a situation that could have been remediated short of an emergency patch to a complete unkown.
That'd be cool with me. Let's make the reporters asking do the same. They're just as culpable for the shallow and sensationalist charades that that compose the election cycle. Actually, more so, since they hold themselves up as the self-appointed watchdogs.
And in the end, it wouldn't matter. I work in DC and probably 75% of the companies I deal with are 'minority owned'. In probably 90% of those, it's a polite fiction. Some of them are in a wife's name, etc. but the actual workings and policies of the company are no different.
So, basically 1's and 0's. We're boned.
As an early 8800 adopter (January 15th), I've been pretty happy. To be honest, though, I got the board as a Christmas gift. The Vista drivers were a little rough, but I've been around enough to know that brand new hardware + brand new OS is going to cause trouble. Suck it up and deal.
For the first month or so, I dual-booted XP, but since the middle of March I've been running Vista only, and played Vanguard, Company of Heroes, LotRO, Civ4 and a bunch of other stuff with almost no issues. Except for Vanguard, and, well, big shock there. Even then after the March driver rev, I could play that just fine, too. The other day I had to reboot for the latest round of patches, and it had been almost two months since the PC had been shut down.
That's just what they want you to think. Much cheaper than actually building one.
Does the iPod support remote-kill functionality if it's lost? If not, that will keep it out of a lot of places I deal with.
I could until Blockbuster closed the only store within 5 miles of me. I used to be able to stop in on my way back from work; now I can't. And since I get movies from Netflix next-day, and BB takes two or three, they've lost their competitive advantage as far as I'm concerned. Plus, with Netflix I can watch stuff on-line, too, for no additional cost.
Two different beasts. If you can substitute EQ2 for a PnP game and not miss the latter, then you weren't doing it right. MMOs (and I've played em all) are a nice diversion, but the face-to-face socializing and wide-open gameplay of a good D&D game kick the snot out of killing the same mob for the 1000th time hoping for a good drop, or sitting around for 45 minutes waiting for the other 30 people in the raid to get thier shit together. And you can play a perfectly fun game of D&D without buying any books at all. If you think you need every splatbook WotC publishes, you're a sucker.
Create a 'Myspace' page and let them do all the work.
Wouldn't this also be abusable? Pick a stock, short it, spam the hell out of everybody, watch Ameritrade or whoever blacklist it, and watch the price drop.
I'd have to liquidate all my SCO stock to afford the concession stand prices!
He keeps using that word. I do not think it means what he thinks it means.
It sure wouldn't be an exciting 8 years.