Yeah, this is what I came in here to say. Figure out an exercise routine that doesn't require any equipment (e.g. lunges, squats, push-ups, sit-ups), and do that during your down-time at work. Go ahead and schedule a few 15 minute breaks during the day, and if you miss one of the breaks because you're busy, reschedule it (don't just skip it).
Some people might think you're crazy, but if it's your only option for getting in shape, it might be worth getting a little flack from your coworkers.
This is something that a lot of people don't seem to know about when they say, "More calories will add more weight if you don't burn them." Your digestive system isn't 100% efficient, and the human body will, at times, dump excess calories.
So in effect, your body is capable of saying, "I have enough food for now, so I'm going to poop out the rest." Some bodies seem to do this more readily than others, and science doesn't yet know all the factors. It could be genetics, emotional state, the kind of bacteria living in your gut, or what you're eating rather than how much you're eating.
But the point is, yes, someone else can have the same diet and exercise routine as you have, and still weigh a very different amount.
I'm very much looking forward to the element - because every other solution tends to suck bigtime under Linux.
I'm looking forward to it because every other solution tends to suck under every OS. Flash is a resource hog and crashes frequently-- and besides, why should I need flash just to view a video? I don't understand that one.
AFAICT, the only reason we're all using Flash is that it was a stop-gap measure to deal with the fact that normal video support in web browsers wasn't what it should have been. It's like all the various mutli-column HTML/CSS tricks that people use because HTML just doesn't directly support columns. It works well enough for now, but it should be seen as "something to be fixed".
I'm not quite so against Gladwell generally. I don't find him particularly interesting, but not so completely awful. Still, there's a certain irony in us all reading this article for free (not even with ads) in which someone who makes their money from IP is arguing that IP cannot be free. The whole thing reeks slightly of self-interest contrary to facts in evidence-- of "but how will I get my money, then?"
Now I doubt that all IP will become free anytime soon, but it will have to be cheap. Companies who sell IP will have to recognize that their prices have to shrink at least as much as their distribution costs, and maybe more. They may see their profits shrink to almost nothing, and they may even have to find new sources of revenue.
There's the quote, "Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive.... That tension will not go away." I'd never read the second two-thirds of that quote until today, and it seems much more complete for it. Information wants to be free *and* it wants to be expensive. In the past, that tension had rested much closer to the "expensive" end. Now that distribution is so cheap and available, it will have to move closer to "free", but the tension will not go away.
I'm surprised to seeso many college educated US slashdot readers act so aggressively to devalue the one thing their economic future really does depend upon.
I'm always surprised to see so many intelligent people talk about how the US economy is dependent on IP without seeing that as a problem. The devaluation of IP is a reality we're faced with, and insofar as we're relying on our ability to legislate artificially high prices and prop up obsolete business models to keep our economy afloat, we should all be terrified of what happens when all that fails.
which means they will get more money from their ads.
Which basically means YouTube will make money for Google.
I'm not really saying you're wrong. YouTube doesn't need to be directly profitable, but Google has to have a business model where running Youtube is worth the money they put into it. Somehow it needs to work out that way, or else Google won't keep doing it.
I can remember several cases ( MacBooks, iMacs, what have you) where they've had overheating issues... pretty sloppy engineering if you ask me.
Citation needed? How many different models have had overheating issues, and what was the failure rate?
I know some of their laptops would become noticeably warm, but some of that is specifically because they're leading heat away from the device by using parts of the case as a heat sink. I remember reading that some people had problems where the MacBook Air would run slowly at times because, when it started running too hot, it would go into some kind of "reduced power mode". Neither of those things are really sloppy engineering, but only design choices.
I'm not saying that "a skilled player [should be] just as bad off as a terrible player," but rather that good game design, IMO, makes the game challenging by allowing strategy to take precedence over "who has practiced this particular random sequence of button pressing the most."
There are exceptions, but it had better be as creative as Guitar Hero. Having a fighter where the main skill to learn is "how to pull off the move" or a FPS where the big challenge is "learning to aim," then I find that to be pretty lame. You may as well have a RTS where the main challenge of the game is, "how to figure out what the hell is going on with the control scheme," or a RPG where the only determination of who wins is "who has spent more time grinding."
The only reason to prefer that games are hard to control is if you sit around playing them all day and then get off on proving your superiority to those who have other things to do.
Yeah, my first thought was "Great, one of those freaks who could actually pull off every single move and combination in Street Fighter at will is whining because he might have an unreasonable edge in new games." For games like FPS, game controllers aren't anywhere near as precise as keyboard/mouse or using the wiimote as a pointing device. Button-mashing mechanics will only be missed by those who had an over-reliance on it for winning.
Yeah, like I said, I'm not trying to apply this to technology or Americans specifically. I've never had a job outside of America, so I can't really compare it to anything else, but I've definitely seen this problem in non-technical situations.
In fact, what I really had in mind when I wrote this is I once was in charge of a project that had a really simple position. I basically needed someone to hang around for 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, but really there was only ever about 4 hours a day worth of work. Most of it was just to have someone present, in case that person was needed. The work wasn't hard, and it wasn't bad work. It was fairly boring, but there wasn't all that much difficulty in figuring out what you were supposed to do. To be honest, I sometimes wanted to take the job myself. It would have paid less, but it was just so easy and really light on responsibility.
It was sort of like, "If A happens, do B. If C happens, do D. If anything else happens, let your manager know and he'll tell you what to do." The position even paid fairly well, and all I needed was for the person filling the job to be reliable. The person had to show up on time and follow the simple directions.
But it was relatively hard to find someone who would do it. One guy was doing it for a while, and he kept complaining about being treated like a "drone". It was the first time someone had complained to me about being treated like a drone instead of me being the one complaining, so it kind of stuck out in my head. He would try to get inventive with his responsibilities, but didn't understand the situation very well and so made lots of mistakes. And then things would pile up, get out of control because he wasn't doing what he was supposed to, and when he barely managed to fix the problems before they became serious, he would go around looking for applause like some kind of conquering hero.
And then the same guy would look at me like I'm crazy when I made checklists for myself. He thought I was a joke, like making a checklist was a sign you were too stupid to just remember everything. Meanwhile, he'd only have 5 things to get done in a day, and he'd forget 2 of them.
I'm not in favor of people being mindless. If you see a way in which things could be done better, speak up and let's do it better. But most jobs have a component that's just following procedure, doing what your supposed to, and being a bit of a drone. Failing to do that stuff because your too cool for school doesn't help anybody.
it's decent preparation for becoming a Dilbertian drone
This makes me want to comment on something that may well be a valid point in all of this. I've run into a common problem in lots of companies with lots of workers. I'm not saying that it's limited to Americans or technical people, and I'm American after all, but it can be a problem: everyone wants to be a cowboy, and nobody is willing to be a drone.
Now lots of people are probably going to get pissed off that I'm claiming that "nobody is willing to be a drone" is a problem, but hear me out because it's not that simple. I'm not saying we need more "mindless drones", but I've seen the cowboy mentality go bad lots of times. People love to be the hero who saves the day, but in lots of real-life work situations, the day only needs saving when someone wasn't following directions in the first place.
Lots of people are so bored and frustrated with the menial tasks of their everyday work day that they let things slide. Then when all the things they've let slide come to bite them in the ass, they really enjoy the thrill, drama, and glory of pulling a quickie solution out of their asses just in the nick of time. They save the day, feel important, and get to tell the story of how clever and skilled they were right when their skills were most needed. It's very understandable, but it doesn't encourage people to do things right the first time, and so there are a lot more problems than their need to be.
It'd be really nice if people were willing to document things, make checklists for their regular procedures, and take notes in meetings. It'd be great if people were just thorough and actually paid attention to directions-- things like that. But I don't know if that has anything to do with a "hacker ethic". I'm not sure what the "hacker ethic" is, but the Wikipedia article doesn't make it sound too bad.
rate of energy in - rate of energy out = rate of accumulation
So according to that, doesn't it seem like it'd be a bit unusual to be able to have a calorie-restricted diet (according to wikipedia, "limiting dietary energy intake below the average needs") and still remain overweight?
Perhaps it's because I'm quite bright, but apart from the metal switch, I never had any of those questions when I first picked up a tape deck.
Maybe because tape decks were in common use when you were a kid, and you saw them being operated?
I'm not sure it's fair to call kids "spoiled rotten" because they see the superiority of current technology over what was in use years/decades before they were born. Kids may have a hard time imagining life without iPods and the Internet, but many young adults have a hard time imagining life before TVs and telephones were in every house. Many of us have a hard time imagining life without electricity, automobiles, or indoor plumbing. Insofar as this kid is spoiled, we're all spoiled.
For me, it was salt. Loved it. The more the better. Then I read about how bad it is for your heart. So I cut it out dramatically. Then a couple years later, I read about how it isn't very bad at all, unless you already have a heart condition, or family history. So basically I got duped into giving up something I enjoyed. Makes me more skeptical about the next scientific finding about my diet.
You have a point about the sort of science-reporting that media outlets engage in. One year, coffee is bad for you and eggs are good. 2 years later, coffee is good for your and eggs are bad. A year after that, coffee and eggs are both good for you.
But a fair amount of that isn't the fault of science, it's the fault of reporters. The truth is, things are rarely "good" or "bad", at least not completely and in all situations. Take your example of salt-- the science behind it really hasn't changed that much, as far as I know. Salt is definitely good for you up to a point. You can get sick or even die of a sodium deficiency. Too much of it is bad for you though. This isn't unique to salt; you also need water to survive, but even with water there's such a thing as "too much". It's possible to consume so much water that it becomes toxic and kills you.
Now the "safe range" for salt isn't the same in everyone, but because of how much salt is in most pre-prepared foods (including restaurants, frozen foods, etc.) most of us are already consuming more than we should. It's not as dangerous as it seemed when the dangers were at their most over-hyped, but eating excessive amounts of salt still isn't good for you. It's just that, as with many things that are fairly bad for you, you can probably get away with indulging until you start experiencing adverse side-effects.
The carriers do care - a lot of the profit for the stores is accessories.
That may be, but for one thing, the carriers don't even own a lot of those stores. People buy stuff at Best Buy and Radio Shack, and even a lot of those dedicated cell phone stores don't have a direct relationship with the carriers.
And anyway, it would only support my claim that the current lack of standardization isn't caused by carriers trying to "lock you in". If they're making huge profits from selling accessories when people get new phones, then it only stands to reason that they'd want more churn, and not less.
Well that's what they're talking about-- except using micro USB instead of the normal connector, obviously. But if you're asking why that's a PITA, it's just because you have to get a lot of different people with different interests to agree on something. At least one company is going to want the standard to be whatever they're already using, and at least one company is going to want it to be their own proprietary connector which they can collect licensing fees on. Once agreement is reached, anyone not already using that connector is going to have to make some design changes for their products (however minor they may be), buy different components from their suppliers, and/or retool their factory a little.
It may be a simple change and it may be a good idea, but institutional inertia alone will keep a lot of changes from happening. People don't want to spend effort and money working on something that they don't have to do.
Yeah, I didn't RTFA so I don't know if this info is included, but I've read elsewhere that the plan is to stop boxing chargers with the phones and instead sell it as an optional accessory.
I'm not trying to claim that others involved in the story are blameless. The principal sending the letter pretending to be someone else seems particularly crappy. The newspapers actions don't seem very professional. And people in a town going out of their way to punish a family because one of their teenage children expressed annoyance with the town seems downright insane.
Still, I wish people would learn the lesson: don't post things on the Internet if you don't want people to know about it. Or at least post anonymously or use an alias.
Well also, whatever the legal question, it doesn't seem to me like the real problem here is the publication of her writing. Her rant against the town was already public, and I only have so much sympathy for people who post things on sites like MySpace and then get upset when those posts "become public".
Does she technically have a case for copyright infringement? I don't know, but I don't feel like copyright was designed to keep people from publicizing already public writings.
I would suspect that if you're buying a new phone, old accessories tend to share the same fate as the phone. If you're throwing away the phone, you generally throw away the chargers, too. And why not? The new phone will come with a new charger. The only real exception I can see is if your new phone has the same charger and you want a second charger-- but then again, if you really need a second charger, you may have already bought a second charger for your old phone, still leaving you with an extra.
And so this is where the standardization comes into play: new phones won't be packaged with their own chargers. It will be an optional add-on, since the manufacturer can assume that you probably have an appropriate charger already. And even if you don't, it will be easy enough to find one. Because all phones will charge using the same port, compatible chargers will be sold everywhere.
It's not too much of a lock-in. I can't imagine someone saying, "Man, I'd love to change carriers, but I just don't want to have to use a new charger (which comes with the free phone I'll get). I guess I'll stick with my current carrier!"
I think it's more an issue of the carriers not caring, and the manufacturers using whatever charger is convenient and cheap for them at the time. Standardization is the sort of thing that benefits pretty much everyone over the long term, but can be a PITA for interested players at the time it's started up. So absent of some external impetus, it often just doesn't get started.
Many of the most successful FOSS projects have corporate contributors, so this "design conundrum" doesn't really exist.
The second half of that sentence doesn't necessarily follow from the first. FOSS projects often have corporate contributors, and so they aren't entirely lacking in funding. On the other hand, what are those corporate contributors prioritizing? Server software or desktop software? New features or bug fixes? Making things to keep experts happy or trying to make things easier for those who aren't experts?
I could give a long list of outstanding problems in Linux, that either aren't being addressed or aren't making very quick progress. But then I could say the same about Windows and OSX. It would take tremendous resources to fix everything, so in each case it's a question of which priorities the developers are choosing.
Maybe he's using ext3. A fsck, given the size of modern disks, could take th 52 minutes in a single reboot. Of course, I guess you don't use ext3 if you need 99.99% uptime.
It's not clear to me how this all plays out, but it seems like it's too soon to conclude that "big, expensive shows like Lost may simply be squeezed out one day". I suspect that if we stopped trying so hard to preserve business models, trying to force the Internet to work like network TV, we'd find new ways of raising funds for these things.
Honestly, I don't know why people are so opposed to the idea of a pay-per-view or subscription model. Take the amount of money that Lost makes per episode from ads, and divide that by the number of viewers. What do think that number looks like? I bet it's small enough that, if that were the only legitimate way that you could watch Lost, lots of people would pay it.
Cut all the middle-men out of the deal-- the networks, the ad agencies, and everyone else who isn't involved in the actual creation of the show, and sell it through distributors like iTunes or Amazon. Or release it into theaters, or straight to DVD, as something more like episodic movies. Like Harry Potter, but release 5 movies a year instead of one every year or two.
If forced to, someone would make it work. Worst case scenario, lots of people would have to take a pay-cut. High-end directors and actors and executives might only make a decent living rather than ridiculous amounts of money. Boo hoo.
Yeah, it seems to me that it might be that ads cost more to the advertisers, but there are fewer ads and fewer viewers, meaning overall it's less profitable for the show. It seems to me that profit per episode for the content owners is a much more important number than cost to advertisers per viewer. After all, if you're trying to figure out whether something like Hulu can replace TV networks, the question is whether there's enough profit per show to fund the production of new shows.
I would imagine that even making less per episode could still net a greater profit on Hulu, since I would also imagine that Hulu is less expensive to operate than television networks.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, this is what I came in here to say. Figure out an exercise routine that doesn't require any equipment (e.g. lunges, squats, push-ups, sit-ups), and do that during your down-time at work. Go ahead and schedule a few 15 minute breaks during the day, and if you miss one of the breaks because you're busy, reschedule it (don't just skip it).
Some people might think you're crazy, but if it's your only option for getting in shape, it might be worth getting a little flack from your coworkers.
Fiber will flush calories.
This is something that a lot of people don't seem to know about when they say, "More calories will add more weight if you don't burn them." Your digestive system isn't 100% efficient, and the human body will, at times, dump excess calories.
So in effect, your body is capable of saying, "I have enough food for now, so I'm going to poop out the rest." Some bodies seem to do this more readily than others, and science doesn't yet know all the factors. It could be genetics, emotional state, the kind of bacteria living in your gut, or what you're eating rather than how much you're eating.
But the point is, yes, someone else can have the same diet and exercise routine as you have, and still weigh a very different amount.
I'm very much looking forward to the element - because every other solution tends to suck bigtime under Linux.
I'm looking forward to it because every other solution tends to suck under every OS. Flash is a resource hog and crashes frequently-- and besides, why should I need flash just to view a video? I don't understand that one.
AFAICT, the only reason we're all using Flash is that it was a stop-gap measure to deal with the fact that normal video support in web browsers wasn't what it should have been. It's like all the various mutli-column HTML/CSS tricks that people use because HTML just doesn't directly support columns. It works well enough for now, but it should be seen as "something to be fixed".
I'm not quite so against Gladwell generally. I don't find him particularly interesting, but not so completely awful. Still, there's a certain irony in us all reading this article for free (not even with ads) in which someone who makes their money from IP is arguing that IP cannot be free. The whole thing reeks slightly of self-interest contrary to facts in evidence-- of "but how will I get my money, then?"
Now I doubt that all IP will become free anytime soon, but it will have to be cheap. Companies who sell IP will have to recognize that their prices have to shrink at least as much as their distribution costs, and maybe more. They may see their profits shrink to almost nothing, and they may even have to find new sources of revenue.
There's the quote, "Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. ... That tension will not go away." I'd never read the second two-thirds of that quote until today, and it seems much more complete for it. Information wants to be free *and* it wants to be expensive. In the past, that tension had rested much closer to the "expensive" end. Now that distribution is so cheap and available, it will have to move closer to "free", but the tension will not go away.
I'm surprised to seeso many college educated US slashdot readers act so aggressively to devalue the one thing their economic future really does depend upon.
I'm always surprised to see so many intelligent people talk about how the US economy is dependent on IP without seeing that as a problem. The devaluation of IP is a reality we're faced with, and insofar as we're relying on our ability to legislate artificially high prices and prop up obsolete business models to keep our economy afloat, we should all be terrified of what happens when all that fails.
which means they will get more money from their ads.
Which basically means YouTube will make money for Google.
I'm not really saying you're wrong. YouTube doesn't need to be directly profitable, but Google has to have a business model where running Youtube is worth the money they put into it. Somehow it needs to work out that way, or else Google won't keep doing it.
I can remember several cases ( MacBooks, iMacs, what have you) where they've had overheating issues ... pretty sloppy engineering if you ask me.
Citation needed? How many different models have had overheating issues, and what was the failure rate?
I know some of their laptops would become noticeably warm, but some of that is specifically because they're leading heat away from the device by using parts of the case as a heat sink. I remember reading that some people had problems where the MacBook Air would run slowly at times because, when it started running too hot, it would go into some kind of "reduced power mode". Neither of those things are really sloppy engineering, but only design choices.
I'm not saying that "a skilled player [should be] just as bad off as a terrible player," but rather that good game design, IMO, makes the game challenging by allowing strategy to take precedence over "who has practiced this particular random sequence of button pressing the most."
There are exceptions, but it had better be as creative as Guitar Hero. Having a fighter where the main skill to learn is "how to pull off the move" or a FPS where the big challenge is "learning to aim," then I find that to be pretty lame. You may as well have a RTS where the main challenge of the game is, "how to figure out what the hell is going on with the control scheme," or a RPG where the only determination of who wins is "who has spent more time grinding."
The only reason to prefer that games are hard to control is if you sit around playing them all day and then get off on proving your superiority to those who have other things to do.
Yeah, my first thought was "Great, one of those freaks who could actually pull off every single move and combination in Street Fighter at will is whining because he might have an unreasonable edge in new games." For games like FPS, game controllers aren't anywhere near as precise as keyboard/mouse or using the wiimote as a pointing device. Button-mashing mechanics will only be missed by those who had an over-reliance on it for winning.
Yeah, like I said, I'm not trying to apply this to technology or Americans specifically. I've never had a job outside of America, so I can't really compare it to anything else, but I've definitely seen this problem in non-technical situations.
In fact, what I really had in mind when I wrote this is I once was in charge of a project that had a really simple position. I basically needed someone to hang around for 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, but really there was only ever about 4 hours a day worth of work. Most of it was just to have someone present, in case that person was needed. The work wasn't hard, and it wasn't bad work. It was fairly boring, but there wasn't all that much difficulty in figuring out what you were supposed to do. To be honest, I sometimes wanted to take the job myself. It would have paid less, but it was just so easy and really light on responsibility.
It was sort of like, "If A happens, do B. If C happens, do D. If anything else happens, let your manager know and he'll tell you what to do." The position even paid fairly well, and all I needed was for the person filling the job to be reliable. The person had to show up on time and follow the simple directions.
But it was relatively hard to find someone who would do it. One guy was doing it for a while, and he kept complaining about being treated like a "drone". It was the first time someone had complained to me about being treated like a drone instead of me being the one complaining, so it kind of stuck out in my head. He would try to get inventive with his responsibilities, but didn't understand the situation very well and so made lots of mistakes. And then things would pile up, get out of control because he wasn't doing what he was supposed to, and when he barely managed to fix the problems before they became serious, he would go around looking for applause like some kind of conquering hero.
And then the same guy would look at me like I'm crazy when I made checklists for myself. He thought I was a joke, like making a checklist was a sign you were too stupid to just remember everything. Meanwhile, he'd only have 5 things to get done in a day, and he'd forget 2 of them.
I'm not in favor of people being mindless. If you see a way in which things could be done better, speak up and let's do it better. But most jobs have a component that's just following procedure, doing what your supposed to, and being a bit of a drone. Failing to do that stuff because your too cool for school doesn't help anybody.
it's decent preparation for becoming a Dilbertian drone
This makes me want to comment on something that may well be a valid point in all of this. I've run into a common problem in lots of companies with lots of workers. I'm not saying that it's limited to Americans or technical people, and I'm American after all, but it can be a problem: everyone wants to be a cowboy, and nobody is willing to be a drone.
Now lots of people are probably going to get pissed off that I'm claiming that "nobody is willing to be a drone" is a problem, but hear me out because it's not that simple. I'm not saying we need more "mindless drones", but I've seen the cowboy mentality go bad lots of times. People love to be the hero who saves the day, but in lots of real-life work situations, the day only needs saving when someone wasn't following directions in the first place.
Lots of people are so bored and frustrated with the menial tasks of their everyday work day that they let things slide. Then when all the things they've let slide come to bite them in the ass, they really enjoy the thrill, drama, and glory of pulling a quickie solution out of their asses just in the nick of time. They save the day, feel important, and get to tell the story of how clever and skilled they were right when their skills were most needed. It's very understandable, but it doesn't encourage people to do things right the first time, and so there are a lot more problems than their need to be.
It'd be really nice if people were willing to document things, make checklists for their regular procedures, and take notes in meetings. It'd be great if people were just thorough and actually paid attention to directions-- things like that. But I don't know if that has anything to do with a "hacker ethic". I'm not sure what the "hacker ethic" is, but the Wikipedia article doesn't make it sound too bad.
rate of energy in - rate of energy out = rate of accumulation
So according to that, doesn't it seem like it'd be a bit unusual to be able to have a calorie-restricted diet (according to wikipedia, "limiting dietary energy intake below the average needs") and still remain overweight?
Perhaps it's because I'm quite bright, but apart from the metal switch, I never had any of those questions when I first picked up a tape deck.
Maybe because tape decks were in common use when you were a kid, and you saw them being operated?
I'm not sure it's fair to call kids "spoiled rotten" because they see the superiority of current technology over what was in use years/decades before they were born. Kids may have a hard time imagining life without iPods and the Internet, but many young adults have a hard time imagining life before TVs and telephones were in every house. Many of us have a hard time imagining life without electricity, automobiles, or indoor plumbing. Insofar as this kid is spoiled, we're all spoiled.
For me, it was salt. Loved it. The more the better. Then I read about how bad it is for your heart. So I cut it out dramatically. Then a couple years later, I read about how it isn't very bad at all, unless you already have a heart condition, or family history. So basically I got duped into giving up something I enjoyed. Makes me more skeptical about the next scientific finding about my diet.
You have a point about the sort of science-reporting that media outlets engage in. One year, coffee is bad for you and eggs are good. 2 years later, coffee is good for your and eggs are bad. A year after that, coffee and eggs are both good for you.
But a fair amount of that isn't the fault of science, it's the fault of reporters. The truth is, things are rarely "good" or "bad", at least not completely and in all situations. Take your example of salt-- the science behind it really hasn't changed that much, as far as I know. Salt is definitely good for you up to a point. You can get sick or even die of a sodium deficiency. Too much of it is bad for you though. This isn't unique to salt; you also need water to survive, but even with water there's such a thing as "too much". It's possible to consume so much water that it becomes toxic and kills you.
Now the "safe range" for salt isn't the same in everyone, but because of how much salt is in most pre-prepared foods (including restaurants, frozen foods, etc.) most of us are already consuming more than we should. It's not as dangerous as it seemed when the dangers were at their most over-hyped, but eating excessive amounts of salt still isn't good for you. It's just that, as with many things that are fairly bad for you, you can probably get away with indulging until you start experiencing adverse side-effects.
The carriers do care - a lot of the profit for the stores is accessories.
That may be, but for one thing, the carriers don't even own a lot of those stores. People buy stuff at Best Buy and Radio Shack, and even a lot of those dedicated cell phone stores don't have a direct relationship with the carriers.
And anyway, it would only support my claim that the current lack of standardization isn't caused by carriers trying to "lock you in". If they're making huge profits from selling accessories when people get new phones, then it only stands to reason that they'd want more churn, and not less.
Well that's what they're talking about-- except using micro USB instead of the normal connector, obviously. But if you're asking why that's a PITA, it's just because you have to get a lot of different people with different interests to agree on something. At least one company is going to want the standard to be whatever they're already using, and at least one company is going to want it to be their own proprietary connector which they can collect licensing fees on. Once agreement is reached, anyone not already using that connector is going to have to make some design changes for their products (however minor they may be), buy different components from their suppliers, and/or retool their factory a little.
It may be a simple change and it may be a good idea, but institutional inertia alone will keep a lot of changes from happening. People don't want to spend effort and money working on something that they don't have to do.
Yeah, I didn't RTFA so I don't know if this info is included, but I've read elsewhere that the plan is to stop boxing chargers with the phones and instead sell it as an optional accessory.
I'm not trying to claim that others involved in the story are blameless. The principal sending the letter pretending to be someone else seems particularly crappy. The newspapers actions don't seem very professional. And people in a town going out of their way to punish a family because one of their teenage children expressed annoyance with the town seems downright insane.
Still, I wish people would learn the lesson: don't post things on the Internet if you don't want people to know about it. Or at least post anonymously or use an alias.
Well also, whatever the legal question, it doesn't seem to me like the real problem here is the publication of her writing. Her rant against the town was already public, and I only have so much sympathy for people who post things on sites like MySpace and then get upset when those posts "become public".
Does she technically have a case for copyright infringement? I don't know, but I don't feel like copyright was designed to keep people from publicizing already public writings.
Do people really throw away their old chargers?
I would suspect that if you're buying a new phone, old accessories tend to share the same fate as the phone. If you're throwing away the phone, you generally throw away the chargers, too. And why not? The new phone will come with a new charger. The only real exception I can see is if your new phone has the same charger and you want a second charger-- but then again, if you really need a second charger, you may have already bought a second charger for your old phone, still leaving you with an extra.
And so this is where the standardization comes into play: new phones won't be packaged with their own chargers. It will be an optional add-on, since the manufacturer can assume that you probably have an appropriate charger already. And even if you don't, it will be easy enough to find one. Because all phones will charge using the same port, compatible chargers will be sold everywhere.
It's not too much of a lock-in. I can't imagine someone saying, "Man, I'd love to change carriers, but I just don't want to have to use a new charger (which comes with the free phone I'll get). I guess I'll stick with my current carrier!"
I think it's more an issue of the carriers not caring, and the manufacturers using whatever charger is convenient and cheap for them at the time. Standardization is the sort of thing that benefits pretty much everyone over the long term, but can be a PITA for interested players at the time it's started up. So absent of some external impetus, it often just doesn't get started.
Many of the most successful FOSS projects have corporate contributors, so this "design conundrum" doesn't really exist.
The second half of that sentence doesn't necessarily follow from the first. FOSS projects often have corporate contributors, and so they aren't entirely lacking in funding. On the other hand, what are those corporate contributors prioritizing? Server software or desktop software? New features or bug fixes? Making things to keep experts happy or trying to make things easier for those who aren't experts?
I could give a long list of outstanding problems in Linux, that either aren't being addressed or aren't making very quick progress. But then I could say the same about Windows and OSX. It would take tremendous resources to fix everything, so in each case it's a question of which priorities the developers are choosing.
Maybe he's using ext3. A fsck, given the size of modern disks, could take th 52 minutes in a single reboot. Of course, I guess you don't use ext3 if you need 99.99% uptime.
It's not clear to me how this all plays out, but it seems like it's too soon to conclude that "big, expensive shows like Lost may simply be squeezed out one day". I suspect that if we stopped trying so hard to preserve business models, trying to force the Internet to work like network TV, we'd find new ways of raising funds for these things.
Honestly, I don't know why people are so opposed to the idea of a pay-per-view or subscription model. Take the amount of money that Lost makes per episode from ads, and divide that by the number of viewers. What do think that number looks like? I bet it's small enough that, if that were the only legitimate way that you could watch Lost, lots of people would pay it.
Cut all the middle-men out of the deal-- the networks, the ad agencies, and everyone else who isn't involved in the actual creation of the show, and sell it through distributors like iTunes or Amazon. Or release it into theaters, or straight to DVD, as something more like episodic movies. Like Harry Potter, but release 5 movies a year instead of one every year or two.
If forced to, someone would make it work. Worst case scenario, lots of people would have to take a pay-cut. High-end directors and actors and executives might only make a decent living rather than ridiculous amounts of money. Boo hoo.
Yeah, it seems to me that it might be that ads cost more to the advertisers, but there are fewer ads and fewer viewers, meaning overall it's less profitable for the show. It seems to me that profit per episode for the content owners is a much more important number than cost to advertisers per viewer. After all, if you're trying to figure out whether something like Hulu can replace TV networks, the question is whether there's enough profit per show to fund the production of new shows.
I would imagine that even making less per episode could still net a greater profit on Hulu, since I would also imagine that Hulu is less expensive to operate than television networks.