I admit that I only saw one episode about ten years ago, but what I saw was just plain awful. Canned laughter and tired geek stereotypes. What about this show was funny?
When I cut the cable 4 years ago, a big part of it was that there was nothing that I wanted to watch. The speciality channels that used to have interesting content were full of reality garbage. The networks were full of dreary CSI spinoffs and knockoffs. I didn't subscribe to the premium channels because cable was already expensive enough. Overall, cable just wasn't worth the money. The only thing I watched was the weather, and even that had gone from detailed forecasting to dogs playing in the snow. I'm willing to pay for quality content, but it just wasn't there. But there's always something to watch on Netflix or Crunchyroll.
It really depends where you live. I love my Roku, but here in Canada several streaming services don't support the Roku (the Canadian version of Amazon Prime, CraveTV). Here the Fire TV stick might be a better choice, even though the Canadian version doesn't support Alexa.
The AppleTV is badly over-priced, so I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
So I'd say you should do your research. Decide which streaming services you want to use, then find out which devices they work on in your Country.
After five years of paying 50 CAD for more data and minutes than I ever used in a month, I went to a prepaid plan with minutes and data that don't expire at the end of the month if I pay the $15 base charge (Koodo). I now average about $25 a month in cell costs without being very stingy with my data or minutes.
My wife uses her phone MUCH less than I do, so she is on a pay as you go plan and spends around $5 a month with no data (speakout7eleven).
The key is to buy phones outright and not get sucked in to contracts.
But it is still true that people in other countries with higher population densities, more competition, or more regulation still pay much less than we in Canada, especially for the heavy users.
The author is clearly missing the point of cutting the cord. He wants to replace his huge cable bundle with an identical streaming bundle. No wonder he isn't saving any money.
Successful cord cutters look at their viewing differently. Instead of, "The entertainment giants are willing to show me these programs right now, I'd better pay for a giant bundle of channels and hope there is something that I sort of want to watch." It becomes, "What programming that I have access to do I want to watch right now." It is a subtle distinction, but it can be huge. For people like me, it becomes the difference between a $70-$100 cable bill where there was often nothing the I wanted to watch, and a $10 Netflix bill where there is always something worth watching.
Cord works well for a lot of people, though often not for sports junkies.
Since most manufacturers stop caring about their phones after a year or two, custom ROMS are great for keeping 1-4 year old phones useful. My Galaxy Note 2 is still a fantastic phone running CM. The only reason I stopped using it and gave it to my wife was that the SD slot was unreliable. She doesn't need the storage, so she does very well with it. I'll likely put a custom ROM on my Moto X Pure in a year or so when Moto stops releasing new ROMs for it.
CPU: Core Duo T2400 1.83 GHz RAM: 2 GB (recently upgraded after scrounging dead stuff) Hard Disk: 160 GB
I bought it for about $200 several years back, and it still does everything I need. I had to switch from kmail/KDE to Thunderbird/LXDE after the latest Debian release (stupid akonadi), but after that switch I have no speed complaints.
My desktop has a Core 2 Duo E5200 (or so), but I don't use it that much these days.
The whole three major airport system in the NYC area is a mess. When we were looking at flying overseas we gave up on flying through New York. The flights from our local airport (YHZ) go in through LGA or Newark, but the outgoing Trans-Atlantic flights leave through JFK. We would either need to fly on separate tickets and risk loosing all of our money for a delayed flight, or make an unnecessary stopover in Detroit.
I understand that there may be too much traffic for one big airport, but there need to be airline run/approved shuttles between airports so flyers can transfer/connect without risk of losing a ton of money from a late flight.
I watched the first hobbit movie on an overnight flight from Toronto to Paris. It was the best stretch of sleep that I had on the whole flight. I caught bits and pieces of it, but the ridiculously over-long fighting and chase sequences soon put me back to sleep.
I have no desire to watch the other two, unless I need to take another red-eye.
Of course I found the LOTR movies dreadfully dull as well, and I've read the books dozens of times.
We may not have the net neutrality of our southern neighbours, but we have a much bigger problem with content. When the regulators allowed the telecoms and the networks to all merge, they put the control of the content into the hands of the telecoms.
Now we are in the situation where the telecoms buy up the streaming rights to much of the available content and require an expensive TV package to stream it. They are leveraging their content arms to boost sales of their TV delivery arms. The content that is available to stream for free (current week's episodes) is difficult for the average user to put on a TV screen. Some ISPs use caps to make Netflix (which has much less content in Canada) uneconomical, but their own streaming/VOD services don't count towards the cap. OTA is very limited outside of the biggest cities. Everything is design to protect TV subscriptions and minimize cord cutting.
The regulators need to either force a split of the content and the delivery arms, or impose very invasive regulation.
Microsoft has never really cared about confusing their users with branding. MSN was several different things at different times. Windows Live became a similar catch-all for a few months before it was killed. I still meet people who don't know if they ran Outlook or Outlook Express on their old computer.
Renaming IE would have been confusing for lots of everyday users. Maybe not as confusing as the Start Screen or the Charms bar, but plenty confusing.
The biggest mistake they made was when they killed the Hotmail name. Everybody knew what Hotmail was, and most people have had a Hotmail account at one point. Now it is outlook.com, but that can easily be confused with Office Outlook, or the old Outlook Express, or Office365 Outlook or who knows what else. Confusing branding helps no one.
I first installed Debian on my main desktop somewhere around 1997.
I don't remember why, but I wiped and re-installed Debian in early 1998.
Since then, I have upgraded hardware and software many, many times, but I have never wiped and re-installed again. Show my any other distro that you can do that with. There are different kinds of easy.
How in the world would having a white roof save me money????
I don't have air conditioning. If I want to cool my house down in the summer, I open my windows at night and close them in the morning. Of course I did spend CDN $3428.01 on home heating in 2010, but a white roof wouldn't help with that.
Yes actually, I got my MSc (Physics) in 1997. I still look back fondly on the grad school days. It may have been lots of work, but life was much more fun back then.
Some people call grad school the snooze bar of life.
So what happens when the penalty for liberty is the loss of said liberty. Then you become slaves to the idea of liberty without experiencing any of that liberty. You fight tyranny with everything you have, thus becoming tyrants. That ain't pretty either.
I fail to see much difference between this and my Dell Latitude C400. Its got a 12.1 inch screen, a Pentium III M 1 GHz CPU, 768 MB RAM (after my upgrades), wieghs less than 3 pounds and gets 2-3 hours of battery life. It's missing 3G support (but who can afford the data plans....)
This puppy isn't a netbook, its a 7 year old ultra portable.
My laptop is on older Dell (P3 1 GHz), and I use suspend to disk to get very good boot times with Linux. Suspend to ram would be better, but it isn't reliable on this model. You may have to do some hacking to make sure that the users can only "turn it off" by suspending to ram, but it would be worth it for your needs.
Slashdot Mirror
I admit that I only saw one episode about ten years ago, but what I saw was just plain awful. Canned laughter and tired geek stereotypes. What about this show was funny?
When I cut the cable 4 years ago, a big part of it was that there was nothing that I wanted to watch. The speciality channels that used to have interesting content were full of reality garbage. The networks were full of dreary CSI spinoffs and knockoffs. I didn't subscribe to the premium channels because cable was already expensive enough. Overall, cable just wasn't worth the money. The only thing I watched was the weather, and even that had gone from detailed forecasting to dogs playing in the snow. I'm willing to pay for quality content, but it just wasn't there. But there's always something to watch on Netflix or Crunchyroll.
It really depends where you live. I love my Roku, but here in Canada several streaming services don't support the Roku (the Canadian version of Amazon Prime, CraveTV). Here the Fire TV stick might be a better choice, even though the Canadian version doesn't support Alexa.
The AppleTV is badly over-priced, so I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
So I'd say you should do your research. Decide which streaming services you want to use, then find out which devices they work on in your Country.
After five years of paying 50 CAD for more data and minutes than I ever used in a month, I went to a prepaid plan with minutes and data that don't expire at the end of the month if I pay the $15 base charge (Koodo). I now average about $25 a month in cell costs without being very stingy with my data or minutes.
My wife uses her phone MUCH less than I do, so she is on a pay as you go plan and spends around $5 a month with no data (speakout7eleven).
The key is to buy phones outright and not get sucked in to contracts.
But it is still true that people in other countries with higher population densities, more competition, or more regulation still pay much less than we in Canada, especially for the heavy users.
And yet we still can't watch Amazon Prime Video on the Roku in Canada, even though the service launched about a year ago.
The author is clearly missing the point of cutting the cord. He wants to replace his huge cable bundle with an identical streaming bundle. No wonder he isn't saving any money.
Successful cord cutters look at their viewing differently. Instead of, "The entertainment giants are willing to show me these programs right now, I'd better pay for a giant bundle of channels and hope there is something that I sort of want to watch." It becomes, "What programming that I have access to do I want to watch right now." It is a subtle distinction, but it can be huge. For people like me, it becomes the difference between a $70-$100 cable bill where there was often nothing the I wanted to watch, and a $10 Netflix bill where there is always something worth watching.
Cord works well for a lot of people, though often not for sports junkies.
Crunchyroll, for the huge library of subtitled Anime.
If our sense of smell is so good, can we tell whose urine is whose by smelling it?
Since most manufacturers stop caring about their phones after a year or two, custom ROMS are great for keeping 1-4 year old phones useful. My Galaxy Note 2 is still a fantastic phone running CM. The only reason I stopped using it and gave it to my wife was that the SD slot was unreliable. She doesn't need the storage, so she does very well with it. I'll likely put a custom ROM on my Moto X Pure in a year or so when Moto stops releasing new ROMs for it.
That's because they've been married for a while, and feel like they've given up on sex already.
I spend the most time on my Thinkpad X60.
CPU: Core Duo T2400 1.83 GHz
RAM: 2 GB (recently upgraded after scrounging dead stuff)
Hard Disk: 160 GB
I bought it for about $200 several years back, and it still does everything I need. I had to switch from kmail/KDE to Thunderbird/LXDE after the latest Debian release (stupid akonadi), but after that switch I have no speed complaints.
My desktop has a Core 2 Duo E5200 (or so), but I don't use it that much these days.
The whole three major airport system in the NYC area is a mess. When we were looking at flying overseas we gave up on flying through New York. The flights from our local airport (YHZ) go in through LGA or Newark, but the outgoing Trans-Atlantic flights leave through JFK. We would either need to fly on separate tickets and risk loosing all of our money for a delayed flight, or make an unnecessary stopover in Detroit.
I understand that there may be too much traffic for one big airport, but there need to be airline run/approved shuttles between airports so flyers can transfer/connect without risk of losing a ton of money from a late flight.
Or maybe the phone manufacturers are being dog slow at rolling out Lollipop upgrades for their recent phones. We don't all have a Nexus.
Perhaps they should switch to the Libre-Office fork ;)
Would that be optional walls?
I watched the first hobbit movie on an overnight flight from Toronto to Paris. It was the best stretch of sleep that I had on the whole flight. I caught bits and pieces of it, but the ridiculously over-long fighting and chase sequences soon put me back to sleep.
I have no desire to watch the other two, unless I need to take another red-eye.
Of course I found the LOTR movies dreadfully dull as well, and I've read the books dozens of times.
We may not have the net neutrality of our southern neighbours, but we have a much bigger problem with content. When the regulators allowed the telecoms and the networks to all merge, they put the control of the content into the hands of the telecoms.
Now we are in the situation where the telecoms buy up the streaming rights to much of the available content and require an expensive TV package to stream it. They are leveraging their content arms to boost sales of their TV delivery arms. The content that is available to stream for free (current week's episodes) is difficult for the average user to put on a TV screen. Some ISPs use caps to make Netflix (which has much less content in Canada) uneconomical, but their own streaming/VOD services don't count towards the cap. OTA is very limited outside of the biggest cities. Everything is design to protect TV subscriptions and minimize cord cutting.
The regulators need to either force a split of the content and the delivery arms, or impose very invasive regulation.
Microsoft has never really cared about confusing their users with branding. MSN was several different things at different times. Windows Live became a similar catch-all for a few months before it was killed. I still meet people who don't know if they ran Outlook or Outlook Express on their old computer.
Renaming IE would have been confusing for lots of everyday users. Maybe not as confusing as the Start Screen or the Charms bar, but plenty confusing.
The biggest mistake they made was when they killed the Hotmail name. Everybody knew what Hotmail was, and most people have had a Hotmail account at one point. Now it is outlook.com, but that can easily be confused with Office Outlook, or the old Outlook Express, or Office365 Outlook or who knows what else. Confusing branding helps no one.
I first installed Debian on my main desktop somewhere around 1997. I don't remember why, but I wiped and re-installed Debian in early 1998. Since then, I have upgraded hardware and software many, many times, but I have never wiped and re-installed again. Show my any other distro that you can do that with. There are different kinds of easy.
How in the world would having a white roof save me money????
I don't have air conditioning. If I want to cool my house down in the summer, I open my windows at night and close them in the morning. Of course I did spend CDN $3428.01 on home heating in 2010, but a white roof wouldn't help with that.
Yes actually, I got my MSc (Physics) in 1997. I still look back fondly on the grad school days. It may have been lots of work, but life was much more fun back then.
Some people call grad school the snooze bar of life.
I'd say that the most miserable grad students are the former grad students. The real world is a much more miserable place than grad school.
So what happens when the penalty for liberty is the loss of said liberty. Then you become slaves to the idea of liberty without experiencing any of that liberty. You fight tyranny with everything you have, thus becoming tyrants. That ain't pretty either.
I fail to see much difference between this and my Dell Latitude C400. Its got a 12.1 inch screen, a Pentium III M 1 GHz CPU, 768 MB RAM (after my upgrades), wieghs less than 3 pounds and gets 2-3 hours of battery life. It's missing 3G support (but who can afford the data plans....)
This puppy isn't a netbook, its a 7 year old ultra portable.
To reduce AC needs, why not build the datacentre in say St John's NFLD. Never gets too hot there. Of course there is a tad more humidity.
Mark
My laptop is on older Dell (P3 1 GHz), and I use suspend to disk to get very good boot times with Linux. Suspend to ram would be better, but it isn't reliable on this model. You may have to do some hacking to make sure that the users can only "turn it off" by suspending to ram, but it would be worth it for your needs.