The only thing on my Time Warner digital cable that's better HD quality than NetFlix are my local channels, because the stations don't over-compress the signal, and I don't think Time Warner touches their feeds. All the other HD channels are still pretty good, but there are far more noticeable compression artifacts than NetFlix.
I think we should go back to the old system, where things were measured in terms of barleycorns, shaftments, cubits, furlongs and leagues.
For example, a Butt is twice the volume of a hogshead, which ends up being 128 gallons. That's what Wikipedia says anyway, and I'm too lazy to convert it to liters.:)
There is absolutely nothing stopping you from starting your own broadband company
Nothing in the Constitution, sure.
But often times, local municipalities sign deals with cable providers. Not to mention the fact that you need to get the cable laid down, which is very expensive, and again you need to get the local municipalities to sign off on it. Unfortunately, starting a company to provide internet access isn't quite as straight forward as starting a company to provide other kinds of goods and services which don't require laying cable on other peoples' land.
Noe, maybe this will change with wireless broadband. At least with wireless, you only need to buy/lease/whatever the property that your antennas sit on and get licensed by the FCC...
Not that that makes it impossible, but for most people it'd be an insurmountable challenge.
side note: I see the term 'natural monopoly' thrown around to describe this situation, except that's not what that term means. More like 'extremely high barriers to entry.'
You give your users admin rights? No wonder things are screwed up.
I like the arrangement I have with my IT department. I get admin rights... in return I ask them for nothing more than hardware fixing and the occasional re-imaging of the machine. Too bad that can't work for everyone.
When some manager realizes that his bonus is being threatened, it's amazing how obtrusive they are willing to get.
My main concern with this is that there's always the possibility that ads could be added to my existing, non-ad-supported Kindle 3. I think this is very highly unlikely, but after all, it's just software...
There you go;) I think overall functionality is probably the key for most people. Just not slashdot users. I hear you on the iTunes requirement. I live with it though.
I'm not so sure about that. I had two people show me the animated backgrounds on the home screens of their Android phones and the little windshield wiper on the weather screen - I think those are specific to HTC's custom interface? They were raving about how awesome they think that stuff is. They used that to prove that their brand new 4G phones are better than my almost-two-year-old iPhone.
Not the bigger, higher-res screens, or the faster CPUs, the fast LTE network... no. The animated wallpaper is what puts their Android devices ahead of my iPhone 3GS. I like a nice black background. Whatever. Oh, and I work at a software company, a place where you'd think people wouldn't care about that stuff.
I guess my point is - don't be so fast to dismiss the eye candy. You and I may never understand *why* people care so much about that. But for whatever reason, they really do.
Yep, +1 to that. The HP EliteBook (8530p) I have from work is a very solid machine. I don't know how tough it is - I've never dropped it - but it does seem as though it's built really well. Specs are good. And it doesn't look too fancy, which I like.
I've often found that merely defining a problem or a goal gets me a long way toward solving the problem.
On a (tangentially) related note... This is one of the tenets of David Allen's Getting Things done. I believe the phrase he uses is "desired outcome."
I'm not a manager, but in meetings, when I've asked the question "What is the desired outcome?" People really seem stunned - as if they simply hadn't thought about it. That's weird to me.
But when you finally answer that question, the steps you need to take to get there seem to reveal themselves.
Then again, I'm the kind of geek who enjoys reading self-help productivity books.
I usually consider lumens when purchasing a flashlight... but one thing I've noticed is that different manufacturers of flashlights measure lumens differently. Also, is it standard to put the lumen rating on the packaging?
I actually have a (relatively) recent HP laptop from my company - an EliteBook 8530p. It's a pretty solid machine, stable and performs pretty well. The build quality is good, although it's mostly plastic.
BTW, news flash for those of you that think google has good anti-spam. They don't. They false positive legit email as spam.
I'm only speaking from my personal experience. I find Google's spam filtering to be absolutely top-notch. I only very occasionally get false positives in the spam folder, which is an acceptable rate for me. For a while I had my oldest domain name (which I've had for 12 years) hosted there. It was getting somewhere on the order of 2,000 spam messages per day. Very rarely would I see a non-spam message in the spam box.
I've done the personal mail server dance a few times before. It's really a lot of work to make sure that your mail gets delivered everywhere and to make sure that spam is effectively filtered. I still haven't found better spam filtering than Google - although, admittedly, I haven't ever used any of the expensive or dedicated-hardware solutions like Barracuda.
Web mail SUCKS.
I think that's subjective. I really don't like any of the run-it-yourself webmail solutions (Squirrel Mail and RoundCube come to mind). I don't like Yahoo (at least as of the last time I saw it), never used Hotmail... but I've got to tell you, I've been using Gmail (and now Google Apps) since 2005, and although I occasionally download and fire up Thunderbird when a new version comes out... I still prefer the web interface. In fact, my only complaint is that there's no good way to do GPG in Gmail (that I know of). But the net benefit is still positive for me.
What made it really difficult was that when you google "dd-wrt ipv6" you get a lot of different answers, and none of them are quite correct with current firmware.
It's for that reason that I went back to having my BSD box work as my router, and I now just use the DD-WRT box as a wireless access point.
I don't have an Apple... but if I remember correctly, don't you just have to drag and drop the application from the "Mac OS Hard Disk" into the trash? And then it's totally uninstalled? No DLLs or other garbage left over on your system?
Granted, it'd be nice if they weren't there in the first place, but at least it's dead simple to get rid of them... Also, does that stuff slow down the system or make it take longer to boot?
Unfortunately, it seems that it's like that for all consumer-level printers (read: ink jets and inkjet all-in-one units in the $200 price range).
My solution to that was to buy a laser printer. It's a Brother 2170, and it sold for around $100 last year. They have some fancy software for it to tell you when the toner level runs low... or just the driver. You actually get the option to install just the driver. And the best part - it's basically just a.inf and.sys file. That's it!
Oh, and it has wifi and ethernet built-in. And supports SNMP, telnet, FTP, web management... it'll send me an e-mail when the toner is low or the paper runs out or there's a problem of some kind.
Now, granted, if you want a laser all-in-one, you'll pay another $100. If you want a color laser all-in-one, it does get pretty expensive ($300-400 at least).
But it goes back to a comment made earlier: If you want to forgo all the bullcrap, get the stuff that's designed for the corporate or enterprise market... or at least the stuff that's not for the general consumer market.
Consumers don't like laser because the toner cartridges cost $75 instead of $35. They don't care that they only get 1/10th the number of pages from the inkjet cartridge.
Slashdot Mirror
and now just torrent everything I want to watch [...] I'm not sure why more people don't do this.
Because it violates copyright law (some people really don't like to do that)...
I'm not a sports fan so the loss of sports doesn't matter to me
And if you were, you may still be covered - depending on your cable provider.
I have Time Warner Cable, so I can watch sports via ESPN3.com, and eventually it's supposed to work properly on my Xbox 360.
The only thing on my Time Warner digital cable that's better HD quality than NetFlix are my local channels, because the stations don't over-compress the signal, and I don't think Time Warner touches their feeds. All the other HD channels are still pretty good, but there are far more noticeable compression artifacts than NetFlix.
I think we should go back to the old system, where things were measured in terms of barleycorns, shaftments, cubits, furlongs and leagues.
For example, a Butt is twice the volume of a hogshead, which ends up being 128 gallons. That's what Wikipedia says anyway, and I'm too lazy to convert it to liters. :)
There is absolutely nothing stopping you from starting your own broadband company
Nothing in the Constitution, sure.
But often times, local municipalities sign deals with cable providers. Not to mention the fact that you need to get the cable laid down, which is very expensive, and again you need to get the local municipalities to sign off on it. Unfortunately, starting a company to provide internet access isn't quite as straight forward as starting a company to provide other kinds of goods and services which don't require laying cable on other peoples' land.
Noe, maybe this will change with wireless broadband. At least with wireless, you only need to buy/lease/whatever the property that your antennas sit on and get licensed by the FCC...
Not that that makes it impossible, but for most people it'd be an insurmountable challenge.
side note: I see the term 'natural monopoly' thrown around to describe this situation, except that's not what that term means. More like 'extremely high barriers to entry.'
I'm curious to know if there are any good solutions for Gmail/google apps and encryption/signing within the web application.
I gave up on hosting my own e-mail server a long time ago, and I've really embraced google apps...
You give your users admin rights? No wonder things are screwed up.
I like the arrangement I have with my IT department. I get admin rights... in return I ask them for nothing more than hardware fixing and the occasional re-imaging of the machine. Too bad that can't work for everyone.
When some manager realizes that his bonus is being threatened, it's amazing how obtrusive they are willing to get.
My main concern with this is that there's always the possibility that ads could be added to my existing, non-ad-supported Kindle 3. I think this is very highly unlikely, but after all, it's just software...
There you go ;) I think overall functionality is probably the key for most people. Just not slashdot users. I hear you on the iTunes requirement. I live with it though.
skins and visualization stuff - they fuck it up
I'm not so sure about that. I had two people show me the animated backgrounds on the home screens of their Android phones and the little windshield wiper on the weather screen - I think those are specific to HTC's custom interface? They were raving about how awesome they think that stuff is. They used that to prove that their brand new 4G phones are better than my almost-two-year-old iPhone.
Not the bigger, higher-res screens, or the faster CPUs, the fast LTE network... no. The animated wallpaper is what puts their Android devices ahead of my iPhone 3GS. I like a nice black background. Whatever. Oh, and I work at a software company, a place where you'd think people wouldn't care about that stuff.
I guess my point is - don't be so fast to dismiss the eye candy. You and I may never understand *why* people care so much about that. But for whatever reason, they really do.
I bought mine because it's a good phone.
You might have to explain that one further, because 98% of the users reading that believe that "good" and "open" must be synonymous.
That's a bit of a different machine than the 'p' model but it looks very similar.
Yep, +1 to that. The HP EliteBook (8530p) I have from work is a very solid machine. I don't know how tough it is - I've never dropped it - but it does seem as though it's built really well. Specs are good. And it doesn't look too fancy, which I like.
Not that I don't believe you, but can you cite those numbers?
Thanks!
And don't forget, Japan is already in the future (if you're on this side of the international date line).
I've often found that merely defining a problem or a goal gets me a long way toward solving the problem.
On a (tangentially) related note... This is one of the tenets of David Allen's Getting Things done. I believe the phrase he uses is "desired outcome."
I'm not a manager, but in meetings, when I've asked the question "What is the desired outcome?" People really seem stunned - as if they simply hadn't thought about it. That's weird to me.
But when you finally answer that question, the steps you need to take to get there seem to reveal themselves.
Then again, I'm the kind of geek who enjoys reading self-help productivity books.
We don't see nearly enough Super Troopers references on Slashdot. Thank you sir.
I usually consider lumens when purchasing a flashlight... but one thing I've noticed is that different manufacturers of flashlights measure lumens differently. Also, is it standard to put the lumen rating on the packaging?
I actually have a (relatively) recent HP laptop from my company - an EliteBook 8530p. It's a pretty solid machine, stable and performs pretty well. The build quality is good, although it's mostly plastic.
I disagree with you on a couple of items here:
BTW, news flash for those of you that think google has good
anti-spam. They don't. They false positive legit email
as spam.
I'm only speaking from my personal experience. I find Google's spam filtering to be absolutely top-notch. I only very occasionally get false positives in the spam folder, which is an acceptable rate for me. For a while I had my oldest domain name (which I've had for 12 years) hosted there. It was getting somewhere on the order of 2,000 spam messages per day. Very rarely would I see a non-spam message in the spam box.
I've done the personal mail server dance a few times before. It's really a lot of work to make sure that your mail gets delivered everywhere and to make sure that spam is effectively filtered. I still haven't found better spam filtering than Google - although, admittedly, I haven't ever used any of the expensive or dedicated-hardware solutions like Barracuda.
Web mail SUCKS.
I think that's subjective. I really don't like any of the run-it-yourself webmail solutions (Squirrel Mail and RoundCube come to mind). I don't like Yahoo (at least as of the last time I saw it), never used Hotmail... but I've got to tell you, I've been using Gmail (and now Google Apps) since 2005, and although I occasionally download and fire up Thunderbird when a new version comes out... I still prefer the web interface. In fact, my only complaint is that there's no good way to do GPG in Gmail (that I know of). But the net benefit is still positive for me.
I'm not claiming you're right or wrong, but I'd be interested to see the data on this demographic.
It also could be interesting to see data on people who follow MSNBC or Air America commentators religiously for the sake of comparison.
What made it really difficult was that when you google "dd-wrt ipv6" you get a lot of different answers, and none of them are quite correct with current firmware.
It's for that reason that I went back to having my BSD box work as my router, and I now just use the DD-WRT box as a wireless access point.
It's probably because most of us don't own Macs. The grass is always greener...
I don't have an Apple... but if I remember correctly, don't you just have to drag and drop the application from the "Mac OS Hard Disk" into the trash? And then it's totally uninstalled? No DLLs or other garbage left over on your system?
Granted, it'd be nice if they weren't there in the first place, but at least it's dead simple to get rid of them... Also, does that stuff slow down the system or make it take longer to boot?
Unfortunately, it seems that it's like that for all consumer-level printers (read: ink jets and inkjet all-in-one units in the $200 price range).
My solution to that was to buy a laser printer. It's a Brother 2170, and it sold for around $100 last year. They have some fancy software for it to tell you when the toner level runs low... or just the driver. You actually get the option to install just the driver. And the best part - it's basically just a .inf and .sys file. That's it!
Oh, and it has wifi and ethernet built-in. And supports SNMP, telnet, FTP, web management... it'll send me an e-mail when the toner is low or the paper runs out or there's a problem of some kind.
Now, granted, if you want a laser all-in-one, you'll pay another $100. If you want a color laser all-in-one, it does get pretty expensive ($300-400 at least).
But it goes back to a comment made earlier: If you want to forgo all the bullcrap, get the stuff that's designed for the corporate or enterprise market... or at least the stuff that's not for the general consumer market.
Consumers don't like laser because the toner cartridges cost $75 instead of $35. They don't care that they only get 1/10th the number of pages from the inkjet cartridge.