That's OK by me! If they don't want to keep their operations in this country, fine. They don't want to pay a living wage, abide by our laws, rules, and culture, or just be a good citizen in general, then I say good riddance! Go screw some other country with your indentured servants building crap products.
What we want here are companies that are PROUD of how well they pay their employees, not curse them as an expense to be minimized, a resource to be plundered.
Seriously, if you can't talk and drive at the same time, I don't want you behind the wheel of a car.
"Now, Mr. Jones, for this part of the test, I want you to drive to the second traffic light and make a legal left-hand turn. Also, using your cell phone, check your voice messages, change your password, and call your mother."
I can imagine what happens when the accounting routines gain their own profit motive: the building decides it can up its income by adding a few floors, reducing the headroom in all the apartments by a foot and a half.
Have you ever thought that if you wanted something to be improved, then maybe you should just speak up and offer a solution instead of quietly or publicly venting without offering any input?
. . . and that's to hide the fact that there's not much that's special about the hardware.
The pool of chips from which I/O devices are made is pretty small. Modern WiFi cards are each based on one of a small handful of "solution" chips, for example. Of course, manufacturers don't want to admit this -- their product is different and special, after all!
The order of a few bits/bytes in a hardware control block don't make for much innovation.
The way things are now, there's so much advertising on TV that I just tune it out -- it's white noise. If there's an ad, I don't even know it, I'm reading a magazine or surfing on my laptop WHILE watching TV.
So, how about this: cut the amount of advertising time from 20 minutes per hour to five or six. The networks can raise their rates appropriately. We customers would get more actual content, the signal-to-noise ratio would go down below the auto-ignore level.
With each advertising minute being more precious, commercials would probably get BETTER, would actually make more of an impression on consumers, and the return on marketing dollar would acutally go up!
Oh, and cut the crap with commercials being 12 dB louder than programming!
Yup, corps need to stop thinking of salaries as an expense to be minimized or eliminated.
If you want to build a real company, be proud of the quality of your employees and the wages they make! Besides, the less you pay employees, the fewer cuatomers you have for your product.
Yes, all these sites are gameable -- delicious, digg, google, etc. The real solution is to teach people what actions are acceptable in polite society, and what are not. Many can't seem to figure it out for themselves, but will respond to polite guidance if offered in a friendly manner -- we all need to do that.
The childishly disruptive will probably respond to simple public embarassment and peer pressure.
Ultimately though, the real parasites and greedsters, like these blog-spammers, need to be hunted down and stripped of privileges.
Yup, lots of issues about who defines what's allowed, etc. I'm willing to accept that kind of discussion in place of all this spam-crap!
what they need now isn't technology, not even electricity, but to be moved out from their hell hole
Yes, those are critical needs. I wish I could help with that! I can't, and besides, they don't want me (I already checked). There are massive organizations of responders set up to take care of the immediate needs.
So what can I (you/we) do? We can get warmed up on the secondary needs, the things that will help these folks get their lives back on track:
o help reconnect seperated families
o help victims communicate with relatives
o find places for them to stay
o find transport for them out of the area
o find a way for them to replace lost identity papers
o help them track down their cars and other belongings
o build a system to help submit and track insurance claims
o find a way for them to get their mail/paychecks/bills
o help them find jobs to keep the money rolling in
o let them register skills that might help in the relief effort
o organize a cell-phone drive
o organize a day-care center
o set up a classroom for the displaced kids
Hell, I bet a TV projector and a stack of DVDs would be welcome over the next few weeks -- but even better if someone could round up dozens of them, all the same, packed into kits with instructions, and ready to ship.
These kinds of things are tough logistical problems! (And they might just be the kind of thing we techies do best!)
You want to do something? Get an effort organized yourself -- don't even bug the busy people with the "What can I do to help?" nonsense. The guy running the Astrodome relief shelter would much rather hear "I have 1500 cell phones with batteries charged and 10 hours credit. Where do you want them?"
Good reviewers would be a nice step. How about reducing the load on the system?
We should include a way to actually punish people who abuse the system by submitting these totally obvious patents. They're supposed to be checking this stuff before they submit anyway.
At the least, there should be an increasing fine for wasting time and resources every time you submit a bogus application. (After five or so, your apps would just be ignored, but the fine would still apply.)
I gave away all my printers a few years ago. No more ink, no more paper!
With the savings, I was able to buy a slick little 2.5 lb Vaio laptop. It goes with me everywhere -- I use it instead of printouts. It's 40 Gig hard drive can hold the equivalent of about a zillion printed pages.
Are there drawbacks to this system? Yes. But come on. . . printers. . . ink. . . paper?
(sigh) Here's the blog entry.
Skip the direct link unless you feel the need to wait for the screenshots to download.
Review of the iRiver iFP-899
Thor's blog
Sunday, June 12. 2005
Review of the iRiver iFP-899
Introduction
The iRiver iIFP-899 at $179.99 is a portable (8.9 x 3.6 x 2.7 cm), lightweight (75 grams w/battery) solid state music player. With a capacity of 1 GB, it can store ~170 songs at 6 MB each. The iFP-899 features MP3, WMA and OGG support, an FM tuner and a 3-way (line/mic-in, internal mic, FM tuner) MP3 recorder.
User interface
The iIFP-899 is controlled with 3 buttons (Stereo, Memory/EQ, Mode) on the back of the player, plus a 4-way joystick to the right of the display. The joystick feels clumsy at first, but you adjust to it given some time. The display is easy to read, and has a bright blue backlight with contrast and time-out adjustments. Overall, the interface is very fast and responsive.
Score: 6 / 6
Player
Playback of MP3, WMA and OGG files is supported for bitrates of 8 to 320 kbps for MP3/WMA, and 96 to 225 kbps for OGG. The player lets you organize your music in directories. These can be browsed hierarchically, and there are several playback modes to accomodate for this. There is also a user-adjustable 5-band graphical equalizer, which is neat. Using the iRiver Music Manager you can rearrange your files, and they will appear in that specific order on the player.
Score: 4 / 6
FM tuner
The tuner uses the earphone cord for reception. This works only moderately well. Only the strongest stations come out static-free, and even those frequently switch to mono because of poor reception. If you want to catch the 9 o'clock news, it works for that, but if you want record the Top of the Pops using the recorder, don't expect high fidelity. On that note, the equalizer doesn't work in the tuner, presumably because its signal chain is purely analog, and bypasses the DSP. Using the iTunes Music Manager, you can set 6 letter names for the stations.
Score: 3.5 / 6
Recorder
The recorder is actually two recorders in the menu, but they behave identically. The only difference between them is the sound source. The internal mic sounds surprisingly good, has a high distortion threshold and saturates gently. There is some degree of hiss from the preamp, so you won't be doing concert recordings with it. The impedance of the line input can be adjusted, meaning it can actually double as an external microphone input. I tested this with a Behringer XM2000S (roughly comparable to a Shure SM58) and it worked fine. The recorder's sample rate and bit rate an be adjusted individually, in mono and stereo for the line input and the FM tuner, and in mono for the internal mic. Convenient!
Score: 3 / 6
Firmware
The iFP-899 can be outfitted with two different firmwares, known as the Manager and the UMS firmwares. The Manager firmware is the default, and lets you transfer and manage files using the included iRiver Music Manager software. The UMS firmware enables support for USB Mass Storage, making the player appear as a disk drive to the operating system, but disabling the manager.
Drawbacks
- OGG support is very limited and glitches regularly. A major drawback for audiophiles. I can only hope iRiver will fix the glitches in a future firmware version.
- UMS and iTunes Music Manager support are mutually exclusive, and UMS seems to be a little slower.
- No support for song alphabetization. This is very unpractical if you're using UMS, and can't manually change the file ordering.
- The equalizer doesn't work on the FM tuner.
- Noisy voice/microphone recording.
Conclusion
My major draw for buying this player was the OGG support. It didn't deliver on that promise, or at least, it hasn't delivered very well on it yet. It's a quality player in every other aspect, though, and fills my need for entertainment while I excersize. It has a rich surplus of volume and could do a decent job at driving larger headphones than my Koss PortaPro's. Compared to other players in the same price class, it sometimes comes short on space.
. . . goes beyond what you say about keeping the company relevant. This transition allows Apple to boost their margin and be a more viable business (rather than just an iPod maker).
Think about it: this switch lets them take advantage of the same economies of scale their primary competitors enjoy. By cutting the cost of building a Mac, but selling the thing at about the same price as always, they pocket a significant chunk of change.
I'll bet the cost of those big connectors, board space, and punch-forming metal openings for the ports add up.
Still, you're right, the UART is cheap -- perhaps they should consider keeping it, and just put cheapo internal-style multi-pin connectors on the motherboard. People who want to use the ports can add adapter cables to the old-fashined connectors.
We understand the intent of the slogan is really "don't expect something for nothing," but all too often in the modern business climate we pay "something" and get "nothing."
You're lucky if "you get what you pay for."
What happens when AT&T pisses off a SlashDotte
on
Where's Your 'D-Spot?'
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I finally dumped AT&T as my wireless carrier after a marathon of bullshit. You don't have to read the story below. I'll be happy if you (and everyone you know) just refuses to do business with them ever again.
Long story short:
o lousy signal and poor reception EVERYWHERE
o connections that mysteriously go bad at exactly 4:00 minutes into the call (unless you're calling AT&T)
o months of phone calls to their so called "customer service" getting put on hold, transferred at least three times, then dropped
o "corrected" bills that never show up
o same billing mistakes repeated month after month, with compounding fees and charges
o wasted a day in the store with a face-to-face that took over two hours
o the final straw: they disconnected my service in the middle of an extremely important phone interview. This after I had been assured my newly fixed bill was on it's way, and that there was plenty of time in my billing cycle -- BTW: the disconnection occurred on the same day I received the new (and still incorrect) bill.
o I gave AT&T what turned out to be yet another three hours of my time (five phone calls due to being dropped four times). I gave them every chance to be reasonable -- finally just spelling out a list of demands and suggesting they have someone call me before close-of-business if they wanted to keep a customer. They'd rather transfer me 15 (yes, fifteen) times, asking me to reconfirm my address and re-tell my whole story each time.
By now you're thinking this was a long way to go, especially when it's so easy to change carriers these days. But, I had been a CellularOne customer since 1989 before AT&T took over last September. Think about that! Fourteen years! I had always been able to work out problems before. I had a bunch of resumes out with my cell number on them. (And I really didn't want to punch my whole address book into a new phone!)
Too bad, AT&T. You took a winning, mutually beneficial arrangement, and turned it into a losing proposition for both of us. Say good-bye to a fourteen-year customer. One who had multiple phone lines and had, at times, spent thousands of dollars a year on telecom.
You'll never see another cent from me. It's all going to one of your competitors now. The money you think I owe you? Try to collect -- I'll make you spend even more.
Forget about ever getting a recommendation or referral. In fact, every time your name comes up, expect me to tell my story. When I see your other customers on the street, I'll strike up a conversation -- guess what the topic will be. In a business setting, I'll advise people to build their own phone company before choosing AT&T.
Oh, you've also managed to anger someone who knows how to use the internet. Know how to remove piss from a swimming pool? You're welcome to try.
Slashdot Mirror
The question is. . . Will the Canadians put up with it?
Or will they insist that Microsoft hire qualified Canadian programmers first (as the US gubermint refuses to do)?
That's OK by me! If they don't want to keep their operations in this country, fine. They don't want to pay a living wage, abide by our laws, rules, and culture, or just be a good citizen in general, then I say good riddance! Go screw some other country with your indentured servants building crap products.
What we want here are companies that are PROUD of how well they pay their employees, not curse them as an expense to be minimized, a resource to be plundered.
'Have you ever been arrested?'
'Yes, I was arrested and jailed while standing up for our rights.
I'd do it again, too.'
Seriously, if you can't talk and drive at the same time, I don't want you behind the wheel of a car.
"Now, Mr. Jones, for this part of the test, I want you to drive to the second traffic light and make a legal left-hand turn. Also, using your cell phone, check your voice messages, change your password, and call your mother."
I can imagine what happens when the accounting routines gain their own profit motive: the building decides it can up its income by adding a few floors, reducing the headroom in all the apartments by a foot and a half.
Have you ever thought that if you wanted something to be improved, then maybe you should just speak up and offer a solution instead of quietly or publicly venting without offering any input?
(snort!) Yeah, that'll work!
Hey! Two great evils that go great together!
. . . and that's to hide the fact that there's not much that's special about the hardware. The pool of chips from which I/O devices are made is pretty small. Modern WiFi cards are each based on one of a small handful of "solution" chips, for example. Of course, manufacturers don't want to admit this -- their product is different and special, after all! The order of a few bits/bytes in a hardware control block don't make for much innovation.
The problem with all these "fan-based" approaches is that, as they add users, they asymptotically approach mediocracy.
I want a system that goes out and finds stuff that's off the beaten path, but that still maches my preferences.
The way things are now, there's so much advertising on TV that I just tune it out -- it's white noise. If there's an ad, I don't even know it, I'm reading a magazine or surfing on my laptop WHILE watching TV.
So, how about this: cut the amount of advertising time from 20 minutes per hour to five or six. The networks can raise their rates appropriately. We customers would get more actual content, the signal-to-noise ratio would go down below the auto-ignore level.
With each advertising minute being more precious, commercials would probably get BETTER, would actually make more of an impression on consumers, and the return on marketing dollar would acutally go up!
Oh, and cut the crap with commercials being 12 dB louder than programming!
. .
Yup, corps need to stop thinking of salaries as an expense to be minimized or eliminated.
If you want to build a real company, be proud of the quality of your employees and the wages they make! Besides, the less you pay employees, the fewer cuatomers you have for your product.
Hey, if you know of a mob with torches and pitchforks, sign me up!
Yes, all these sites are gameable -- delicious, digg, google, etc. The real solution is to teach people what actions are acceptable in polite society, and what are not. Many can't seem to figure it out for themselves, but will respond to polite guidance if offered in a friendly manner -- we all need to do that.
The childishly disruptive will probably respond to simple public embarassment and peer pressure.
Ultimately though, the real parasites and greedsters, like these blog-spammers, need to be hunted down and stripped of privileges.
Yup, lots of issues about who defines what's allowed, etc. I'm willing to accept that kind of discussion in place of all this spam-crap!
what they need now isn't technology, not even electricity, but to be moved out from their hell hole
Yes, those are critical needs. I wish I could help with that! I can't, and besides, they don't want me (I already checked). There are massive organizations of responders set up to take care of the immediate needs.
So what can I (you/we) do? We can get warmed up on the secondary needs, the things that will help these folks get their lives back on track:
o help reconnect seperated families
o help victims communicate with relatives
o find places for them to stay
o find transport for them out of the area
o find a way for them to replace lost identity papers
o help them track down their cars and other belongings
o build a system to help submit and track insurance claims
o find a way for them to get their mail/paychecks/bills
o help them find jobs to keep the money rolling in
o let them register skills that might help in the relief effort o organize a cell-phone drive
o organize a day-care center
o set up a classroom for the displaced kids
Hell, I bet a TV projector and a stack of DVDs would be welcome over the next few weeks -- but even better if someone could round up dozens of them, all the same, packed into kits with instructions, and ready to ship.
These kinds of things are tough logistical problems! (And they might just be the kind of thing we techies do best!)
You want to do something? Get an effort organized yourself -- don't even bug the busy people with the "What can I do to help?" nonsense. The guy running the Astrodome relief shelter would much rather hear "I have 1500 cell phones with batteries charged and 10 hours credit. Where do you want them?"
Hey, 99.44% is way better than I get from my cell-phone carrier!
Good reviewers would be a nice step. How about reducing the load on the system?
We should include a way to actually punish people who abuse the system by submitting these totally obvious patents. They're supposed to be checking this stuff before they submit anyway.
At the least, there should be an increasing fine for wasting time and resources every time you submit a bogus application. (After five or so, your apps would just be ignored, but the fine would still apply.)
I gave away all my printers a few years ago. No more ink, no more paper!
With the savings, I was able to buy a slick little 2.5 lb Vaio laptop. It goes with me everywhere -- I use it instead of printouts. It's 40 Gig hard drive can hold the equivalent of about a zillion printed pages.
Are there drawbacks to this system? Yes. But come on. . . printers. . . ink. . . paper?
What's next, how to send information by FAX?
(sigh) Here's the blog entry.
Skip the direct link unless you feel the need to wait for the screenshots to download.
Review of the iRiver iFP-899
Thor's blog
Sunday, June 12. 2005
Review of the iRiver iFP-899
Introduction
The iRiver iIFP-899 at $179.99 is a portable (8.9 x 3.6 x 2.7 cm), lightweight (75 grams w/battery) solid state music player. With a capacity of 1 GB, it can store ~170 songs at 6 MB each. The iFP-899 features MP3, WMA and OGG support, an FM tuner and a 3-way (line/mic-in, internal mic, FM tuner) MP3 recorder.
User interface
The iIFP-899 is controlled with 3 buttons (Stereo, Memory/EQ, Mode) on the back of the player, plus a 4-way joystick to the right of the display. The joystick feels clumsy at first, but you adjust to it given some time. The display is easy to read, and has a bright blue backlight with contrast and time-out adjustments. Overall, the interface is very fast and responsive.
Score: 6 / 6
Player
Playback of MP3, WMA and OGG files is supported for bitrates of 8 to 320 kbps for MP3/WMA, and 96 to 225 kbps for OGG. The player lets you organize your music in directories. These can be browsed hierarchically, and there are several playback modes to accomodate for this. There is also a user-adjustable 5-band graphical equalizer, which is neat. Using the iRiver Music Manager you can rearrange your files, and they will appear in that specific order on the player.
Score: 4 / 6
FM tuner
The tuner uses the earphone cord for reception. This works only moderately well. Only the strongest stations come out static-free, and even those frequently switch to mono because of poor reception. If you want to catch the 9 o'clock news, it works for that, but if you want record the Top of the Pops using the recorder, don't expect high fidelity. On that note, the equalizer doesn't work in the tuner, presumably because its signal chain is purely analog, and bypasses the DSP. Using the iTunes Music Manager, you can set 6 letter names for the stations.
Score: 3.5 / 6
Recorder
The recorder is actually two recorders in the menu, but they behave identically. The only difference between them is the sound source. The internal mic sounds surprisingly good, has a high distortion threshold and saturates gently. There is some degree of hiss from the preamp, so you won't be doing concert recordings with it. The impedance of the line input can be adjusted, meaning it can actually double as an external microphone input. I tested this with a Behringer XM2000S (roughly comparable to a Shure SM58) and it worked fine. The recorder's sample rate and bit rate an be adjusted individually, in mono and stereo for the line input and the FM tuner, and in mono for the internal mic. Convenient!
Score: 3 / 6
Firmware
The iFP-899 can be outfitted with two different firmwares, known as the Manager and the UMS firmwares. The Manager firmware is the default, and lets you transfer and manage files using the included iRiver Music Manager software. The UMS firmware enables support for USB Mass Storage, making the player appear as a disk drive to the operating system, but disabling the manager.
Drawbacks
- OGG support is very limited and glitches regularly. A major drawback for audiophiles. I can only hope iRiver will fix the glitches in a future firmware version.
- UMS and iTunes Music Manager support are mutually exclusive, and UMS seems to be a little slower.
- No support for song alphabetization. This is very unpractical if you're using UMS, and can't manually change the file ordering.
- The equalizer doesn't work on the FM tuner.
- Noisy voice/microphone recording.
Conclusion
My major draw for buying this player was the OGG support. It didn't deliver on that promise, or at least, it hasn't delivered very well on it yet. It's a quality player in every other aspect, though, and fills my need for entertainment while I excersize. It has a rich surplus of volume and could do a decent job at driving larger headphones than my Koss PortaPro's. Compared to other players in the same price class, it sometimes comes short on space.
Overall score: 4 / 6
. . . goes beyond what you say about keeping the company relevant. This transition allows Apple to boost their margin and be a more viable business (rather than just an iPod maker).
Think about it: this switch lets them take advantage of the same economies of scale their primary competitors enjoy. By cutting the cost of building a Mac, but selling the thing at about the same price as always, they pocket a significant chunk of change.
. .
They asked me to change my name to Earl, to avoid confusion.
I'll bet the cost of those big connectors, board space, and punch-forming metal openings for the ports add up.
Still, you're right, the UART is cheap -- perhaps they should consider keeping it, and just put cheapo internal-style multi-pin connectors on the motherboard. People who want to use the ports can add adapter cables to the old-fashined connectors.
. . . when you get what you pay for.
We understand the intent of the slogan is really "don't expect something for nothing," but all too often in the modern business climate we pay "something" and get "nothing."
You're lucky if "you get what you pay for."
I finally dumped AT&T as my wireless carrier after a marathon of bullshit. You don't have to read the story below. I'll be happy if you (and everyone you know) just refuses to do business with them ever again.
Long story short:
o lousy signal and poor reception EVERYWHERE
o connections that mysteriously go bad at exactly 4:00 minutes into the call (unless you're calling AT&T)
o months of phone calls to their so called "customer service" getting put on hold, transferred at least three times, then dropped
o "corrected" bills that never show up
o same billing mistakes repeated month after month, with compounding fees and charges
o wasted a day in the store with a face-to-face that took over two hours
o the final straw: they disconnected my service in the middle of an extremely important phone interview. This after I had been assured my newly fixed bill was on it's way, and that there was plenty of time in my billing cycle -- BTW: the disconnection occurred on the same day I received the new (and still incorrect) bill.
o I gave AT&T what turned out to be yet another three hours of my time (five phone calls due to being dropped four times). I gave them every chance to be reasonable -- finally just spelling out a list of demands and suggesting they have someone call me before close-of-business if they wanted to keep a customer. They'd rather transfer me 15 (yes, fifteen) times, asking me to reconfirm my address and re-tell my whole story each time.
By now you're thinking this was a long way to go, especially when it's so easy to change carriers these days. But, I had been a CellularOne customer since 1989 before AT&T took over last September. Think about that! Fourteen years! I had always been able to work out problems before. I had a bunch of resumes out with my cell number on them. (And I really didn't want to punch my whole address book into a new phone!)
Too bad, AT&T. You took a winning, mutually beneficial arrangement, and turned it into a losing proposition for both of us. Say good-bye to a fourteen-year customer. One who had multiple phone lines and had, at times, spent thousands of dollars a year on telecom.
You'll never see another cent from me. It's all going to one of your competitors now. The money you think I owe you? Try to collect -- I'll make you spend even more.
Forget about ever getting a recommendation or referral. In fact, every time your name comes up, expect me to tell my story. When I see your other customers on the street, I'll strike up a conversation -- guess what the topic will be. In a business setting, I'll advise people to build their own phone company before choosing AT&T.
Oh, you've also managed to anger someone who knows how to use the internet. Know how to remove piss from a swimming pool? You're welcome to try.
Instead of calling it a "Tricoder" [sic], call it an "AstroNote"