I want to live in a world where I can stream music via a phone sized device instead of lugging around hundreds of CDs. I want to live in a world where I can read what I want off of an eReader instead of devoting hundreds of square feet of my home to bookshelves and books. I want to live in a world where I can stream content to my TV instead of managing a DVD/BluRay/whatever-else-is-next collection. I get that other people like owning physical media. I used to be that way but personally I had unhealthy habits where collecting looked a lot more like hoarding. So instead of spending hundreds of dollars on media these days I spend about $50-$60 with music streaming, Kindle Unlimited, and whatever TV streaming I'm doing that month. And my house is clean. And my entire collection can for the most part come with me wherever I go. And I miss some things sometimes, but overall I'm a lot happier and I spend a lot less money per month on this type of entertainment. I own plenty of things myself. Music, movies, and television just aren't in that classification anymore.
I was the dummy who got a Pentium. Mine was probably slower than a DX100 because I opted to find one with VESA local bus. I didn't understand the technical hoops a Pentium board had to jump through to support VLB. It was a major step up from my 386SX though and at least I could enjoy my ludicrous gibs at a decent speed and screen size.
I spent a lot of time writing Delphi code back in the early 2000's. I didn't particularly like it but I didn't hate it either. I do like some of its conventions like having an actual assignment operator. I don't like how wordy it is. It always felt like I was doing way more typing than I should be. But hate? I don't get it either.
In my area Amazon does a lot of their own delivery, especially on same day or next day Prime. Out of the 12 things I've bought from them using their own couriers only 8 ever got to me. USPS, FedEx, and UPS have all been 100% during that time. I think maybe Amazon should focus on actually getting to my house before they worry about whether or not I'll let them inside.
I do the same thing with subscriptions. I subscribe to watch what I want to see and then drop them. This isn't cable or satellite with their equipment fees and/or yearly contracts. I subscribed to Showtime for Twin Peaks. I just dropped that one. It worked out to about $1.50 per episode and I got to watch it as soon as each episode started airing on Showtime. I'll probably do the same with Discovery. I do Hulu for prime time network TV season. I have Sling for college football season as it's the cheapest way to get ESPN. With more and more streaming options and everyone wanting a larger slice of the pie, I think this behavior will soon become the norm. Either that or people will keep one service full time like Netflix/Hulu/etc and skip around for others.
This seems like legit news for nerds. Most of the posts do. I see a post about cyber attacks, a post about Amazon's suggestions algorithm going awry, this post, the obligatory FOSS post (this time pertaining to patents), Apple's latest portable touchscreen Next cube isn't selling, and so on. Maybe the problem is that you're just not excited by the news anymore. It seems to be a pretty good cross section of news for nerds and stuff that would matter to nerds.
Can't speak for everyone but an exclusive is what got me. This is my first Playstation console. I owned an xbox 360 and had no intention of ever buying a Playstation until Street Fighter V was announced as a PS4 exclusive. Not everyone is going to go out and buy a new console (and mod their fight sticks) just to play Street Fighter V. I have no illusions V is why PS4 is outselling xbox one. But the more exclusives a console can carry, the more chance their is for this sort of thing to happen.
I'm surprised that Star Trek did not occur to you. I'd classify Wrath of Kahn as great, especially compared to The Motion Picture. But that was also due in large part to an amazing performance by the villain.
Yeah, QA is where you need to start. Our company has a mix of in-house and contract developers, but ALL code goes through QA. If it doesn't meet acceptance criteria and pass all tests, it's not complete.
I've found that upper floors and specialty libraries (science, law, etc) are the place to go when looking for a quiet place to study. Our science library even had soundproof booths you could reserve.
Two characters from Star Wars were completely and totally awesome: Han Solo and Darth Vader. Han wasn't in the prequels at all. Vader got maybe 5 minutes of screen time and IIRC Vader doesn't even force choke someone, threaten people, or do any other badassery in that 5 minutes. He just whines and breaks stuff. The decision to bring back just about everyone in the Star Wars universe except for its two resident badasses is just as terrible as all of those Police Academy movies that happened after Steve Guttenberg said "Fuck it. I'm outta here." Tackleberry is cool but he can't carry a movie.
JJ Abram's whole life is about time travel: Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, JJ Abrams stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator and vanished... He woke to find himself trapped in the past, directing movies that were not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Jerry Bruckheimer, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only JJ can see and hear. And so JJ Abrams finds himself leaping from movie to movie, striving to put right what Uwe Boll once put wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home
I just hope they get the right Ronald P Moore. Despite what James Callis says, the Ronald P Moore in the Portland phone book is NOT the same one who did Battlestar Galactica.
" the GOP could have filibustered it into the dirt and they did not."
No, they couldn't. The legislation as it exists was passed was passed in two parts. One part was passed through the Senate in the brief period when the Senate had 60 members caucusing with the Democrats. Republicans did not have the votes to stop cloture. The second part was passed under reconciliation which does not require cloture but is limited in scope. That part was basically comprised of tweaks the House wanted to make to the Senate bill. Republicans couldn't do anything about either part of the legislation at the time it was passed.
Well if you were raised on the show that should be par for the course. The big surprise villain at the end of Episode 1 of Day of the Daleks is:... wait for it... wait for it... the Daleks. That character in Keeper of Trakken who looks JUST like Roger Delgado? He's going to be the next Master. It's a predictable show. It always has been. If the predictability bothers you now that probably says more about how your taste in television has evolved than it does about the series itself.
The OP probably got this idea from driving in Dallas. Some toll roads like Bush still physically have the booths, but they're not open anymore. Newer toll roads like SRT don't have the booths at all. With the exception of DFW airport, I'm not aware of a toll road in the DFW area where paying at the booth is still an option.
Microsoft: "If you're a researcher on this Windows 8 thing and you were on Earth, you must have been gathering material on it."
Gartner analyst: "Well, I was able to extend the original entry a bit, yes."
Microsoft: "Let me see what it says in this edition, then. I've got to see it." ... "What? Bad! Is that all it's got to say? Bad! One word!... Well, for God's sake I hope you managed to recitify that a bit."
Gartner analyst: "Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor. He had to trim it a bit, but it's still an improvement."
Microsoft: "And what does it say now?"
Gartner analyst: "Mostly bad."
Did that person manufacture their own tiles or did they go to the store and buy them by the box? Everyone is building something from a kit these days (and by "these days" I mean "since the industrial revolution"). Some kits are just easier to assemble than others. There's nothing more glorious about gluing tile to the ground than there is about gluing vinyl to the ground. They didn't "do it themselves." They just did part of the assembly. The amount of effort put into the creation of ceramic tile is far greater than the amount of effort it takes someone to put that tile on the floor and make sure it doesn't move. Ditto with everything else mentioned in the article. We have a romantic view of what it is to be a craftsman, but really a craftsman is just using an older kit that's a little harder to put together.
Well, consumers right now are buying what they think they want. A lot of consumers are new to smartphones and don't know exactly what they want. On top of that, the consumer is likely in at least a two year contract on whatever they do choose. Their exposure to the phones will consist of looking at and maybe holding a security-tethered phone in the store right next to a bunch of other similarly-sized phones. That's going to lead a lot of people to buy as big, shiny, etc a phone as they can afford out of fear of not getting a capable enough phone. While I think that for now a run-up in phone screen size is inevitable, I do think that phones will settle into a small range of screen sizes over time just like has happened with things that have experienced similar run-ups like number of steam holes in an iron, SPF on sunscreen, amount of Vitamin C in vitamin supplements, etc.
TracFone and its subsidiaries (Straight Talk, NET10, etc) have been around since 1996. Page Plus began offering cell service in 1998. Virgin Mobile has been around since 2001. Boost has been in the US since 2003. Simple Mobile since 2009. There will be plenty of MVNOs that are here today and gone tomorrow. But at the same time, MVNOs aren't something new and many have built up reasonable track records of success. There are plenty of serious player driving prices down. You just refuse to look at them because once upon a time you decided to be a pilot for wireless service through that bastion of reliability and customer service that is the cable company and it didn't turn out so well.
The majors will never be price competitive because they don't have to be. Worst case scenario is that they get out of the retail business and sell service strictly to the MVNOs. And the MVNOs are getting better. They're not all "crap vendors" anymore (though plenty still are). They have incredibly competitive prices and some have even heard of customer service. I personally think as MVNOs improve, the big boys will be more than content to lose market share to them because they'll make money either way. I foresee a situation like long distance service in the late 90's. Sure you could use AT&T, Sprint, or MCI for long distance, but if you wanted a decent price for the exact same product you went elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
I want to live in a world where I can stream music via a phone sized device instead of lugging around hundreds of CDs. I want to live in a world where I can read what I want off of an eReader instead of devoting hundreds of square feet of my home to bookshelves and books. I want to live in a world where I can stream content to my TV instead of managing a DVD/BluRay/whatever-else-is-next collection. I get that other people like owning physical media. I used to be that way but personally I had unhealthy habits where collecting looked a lot more like hoarding. So instead of spending hundreds of dollars on media these days I spend about $50-$60 with music streaming, Kindle Unlimited, and whatever TV streaming I'm doing that month. And my house is clean. And my entire collection can for the most part come with me wherever I go. And I miss some things sometimes, but overall I'm a lot happier and I spend a lot less money per month on this type of entertainment. I own plenty of things myself. Music, movies, and television just aren't in that classification anymore.
I was the dummy who got a Pentium. Mine was probably slower than a DX100 because I opted to find one with VESA local bus. I didn't understand the technical hoops a Pentium board had to jump through to support VLB. It was a major step up from my 386SX though and at least I could enjoy my ludicrous gibs at a decent speed and screen size.
I spent a lot of time writing Delphi code back in the early 2000's. I didn't particularly like it but I didn't hate it either. I do like some of its conventions like having an actual assignment operator. I don't like how wordy it is. It always felt like I was doing way more typing than I should be. But hate? I don't get it either.
In my area Amazon does a lot of their own delivery, especially on same day or next day Prime. Out of the 12 things I've bought from them using their own couriers only 8 ever got to me. USPS, FedEx, and UPS have all been 100% during that time. I think maybe Amazon should focus on actually getting to my house before they worry about whether or not I'll let them inside.
I do the same thing with subscriptions. I subscribe to watch what I want to see and then drop them. This isn't cable or satellite with their equipment fees and/or yearly contracts. I subscribed to Showtime for Twin Peaks. I just dropped that one. It worked out to about $1.50 per episode and I got to watch it as soon as each episode started airing on Showtime. I'll probably do the same with Discovery. I do Hulu for prime time network TV season. I have Sling for college football season as it's the cheapest way to get ESPN. With more and more streaming options and everyone wanting a larger slice of the pie, I think this behavior will soon become the norm. Either that or people will keep one service full time like Netflix/Hulu/etc and skip around for others.
This seems like legit news for nerds. Most of the posts do. I see a post about cyber attacks, a post about Amazon's suggestions algorithm going awry, this post, the obligatory FOSS post (this time pertaining to patents), Apple's latest portable touchscreen Next cube isn't selling, and so on. Maybe the problem is that you're just not excited by the news anymore. It seems to be a pretty good cross section of news for nerds and stuff that would matter to nerds.
Can't speak for everyone but an exclusive is what got me. This is my first Playstation console. I owned an xbox 360 and had no intention of ever buying a Playstation until Street Fighter V was announced as a PS4 exclusive. Not everyone is going to go out and buy a new console (and mod their fight sticks) just to play Street Fighter V. I have no illusions V is why PS4 is outselling xbox one. But the more exclusives a console can carry, the more chance their is for this sort of thing to happen.
I'm surprised that Star Trek did not occur to you. I'd classify Wrath of Kahn as great, especially compared to The Motion Picture. But that was also due in large part to an amazing performance by the villain.
Yeah, QA is where you need to start. Our company has a mix of in-house and contract developers, but ALL code goes through QA. If it doesn't meet acceptance criteria and pass all tests, it's not complete.
I've found that upper floors and specialty libraries (science, law, etc) are the place to go when looking for a quiet place to study. Our science library even had soundproof booths you could reserve.
Orson, stop telling our secrets.
My common sense is tingling.
Two characters from Star Wars were completely and totally awesome: Han Solo and Darth Vader. Han wasn't in the prequels at all. Vader got maybe 5 minutes of screen time and IIRC Vader doesn't even force choke someone, threaten people, or do any other badassery in that 5 minutes. He just whines and breaks stuff. The decision to bring back just about everyone in the Star Wars universe except for its two resident badasses is just as terrible as all of those Police Academy movies that happened after Steve Guttenberg said "Fuck it. I'm outta here." Tackleberry is cool but he can't carry a movie.
JJ Abram's whole life is about time travel: Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, JJ Abrams stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator and vanished... He woke to find himself trapped in the past, directing movies that were not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Jerry Bruckheimer, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only JJ can see and hear. And so JJ Abrams finds himself leaping from movie to movie, striving to put right what Uwe Boll once put wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home
I just hope they get the right Ronald P Moore. Despite what James Callis says, the Ronald P Moore in the Portland phone book is NOT the same one who did Battlestar Galactica.
" the GOP could have filibustered it into the dirt and they did not."
No, they couldn't. The legislation as it exists was passed was passed in two parts. One part was passed through the Senate in the brief period when the Senate had 60 members caucusing with the Democrats. Republicans did not have the votes to stop cloture. The second part was passed under reconciliation which does not require cloture but is limited in scope. That part was basically comprised of tweaks the House wanted to make to the Senate bill. Republicans couldn't do anything about either part of the legislation at the time it was passed.
Well if you were raised on the show that should be par for the course. The big surprise villain at the end of Episode 1 of Day of the Daleks is:... wait for it... wait for it... the Daleks. That character in Keeper of Trakken who looks JUST like Roger Delgado? He's going to be the next Master. It's a predictable show. It always has been. If the predictability bothers you now that probably says more about how your taste in television has evolved than it does about the series itself.
All I got from this article is that once you add in the cost of the Surface's most notable feature, it costs $20 - $30 more than an equivalent iPad.
The OP probably got this idea from driving in Dallas. Some toll roads like Bush still physically have the booths, but they're not open anymore. Newer toll roads like SRT don't have the booths at all. With the exception of DFW airport, I'm not aware of a toll road in the DFW area where paying at the booth is still an option.
The conversation went something like this:
... "What? Bad! Is that all it's got to say? Bad! One word! ... Well, for God's sake I hope you managed to recitify that a bit."
Microsoft: "If you're a researcher on this Windows 8 thing and you were on Earth, you must have been gathering material on it."
Gartner analyst: "Well, I was able to extend the original entry a bit, yes."
Microsoft: "Let me see what it says in this edition, then. I've got to see it."
Gartner analyst: "Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor. He had to trim it a bit, but it's still an improvement."
Microsoft: "And what does it say now?"
Gartner analyst: "Mostly bad."
Did that person manufacture their own tiles or did they go to the store and buy them by the box? Everyone is building something from a kit these days (and by "these days" I mean "since the industrial revolution"). Some kits are just easier to assemble than others. There's nothing more glorious about gluing tile to the ground than there is about gluing vinyl to the ground. They didn't "do it themselves." They just did part of the assembly. The amount of effort put into the creation of ceramic tile is far greater than the amount of effort it takes someone to put that tile on the floor and make sure it doesn't move. Ditto with everything else mentioned in the article. We have a romantic view of what it is to be a craftsman, but really a craftsman is just using an older kit that's a little harder to put together.
Well, consumers right now are buying what they think they want. A lot of consumers are new to smartphones and don't know exactly what they want. On top of that, the consumer is likely in at least a two year contract on whatever they do choose. Their exposure to the phones will consist of looking at and maybe holding a security-tethered phone in the store right next to a bunch of other similarly-sized phones. That's going to lead a lot of people to buy as big, shiny, etc a phone as they can afford out of fear of not getting a capable enough phone. While I think that for now a run-up in phone screen size is inevitable, I do think that phones will settle into a small range of screen sizes over time just like has happened with things that have experienced similar run-ups like number of steam holes in an iron, SPF on sunscreen, amount of Vitamin C in vitamin supplements, etc.
"The most advanced tech they can operate is the play button on the dvd."
I'm going to have to call BS on that one. They can quite easily navigate on-screen menus to order UFC pay-per-view fights, thank you very much.
TracFone and its subsidiaries (Straight Talk, NET10, etc) have been around since 1996. Page Plus began offering cell service in 1998. Virgin Mobile has been around since 2001. Boost has been in the US since 2003. Simple Mobile since 2009. There will be plenty of MVNOs that are here today and gone tomorrow. But at the same time, MVNOs aren't something new and many have built up reasonable track records of success. There are plenty of serious player driving prices down. You just refuse to look at them because once upon a time you decided to be a pilot for wireless service through that bastion of reliability and customer service that is the cable company and it didn't turn out so well.
The majors will never be price competitive because they don't have to be. Worst case scenario is that they get out of the retail business and sell service strictly to the MVNOs. And the MVNOs are getting better. They're not all "crap vendors" anymore (though plenty still are). They have incredibly competitive prices and some have even heard of customer service. I personally think as MVNOs improve, the big boys will be more than content to lose market share to them because they'll make money either way. I foresee a situation like long distance service in the late 90's. Sure you could use AT&T, Sprint, or MCI for long distance, but if you wanted a decent price for the exact same product you went elsewhere.