Err - I have kept my credit reports frozen for years, only unfreezing when I make a large purchase like my house or a car (the last vehicle purchase we 4 months ago so I'm pretty sure the process it current). Never have I had to sent a certified letter. I have a PIN number for each of the 3 major agencies that I keep in a lock-box and use that to deactivate the freeze for a set amount of time. It takes me all of 20 minutes to lift the freeze on all of them, and I generally to a "timeframe" lift so that after a few weeks or however long I expect the transaction to take, the freeze will automatically reapply.
Thankfully, in my state (SC) it's illegal for them to charge for a credit freeze, so they've always been free anyways.
That may actually be a good thing long term. Sometimes people won't "fix" something that's already working, even if it needs maintenance. If it's destroyed, then it can be built back up better.
As an example, after the great Chicago fire it was rebuilt much better than it was before and there was a large influx of money and people for the reconstruction. The city of Myrtle Beach, SC was rebuilt into a resort town when it was largely destroyed by Hurricane Hazel back in the 1950's.
Most ads for products are for complete junk nobody actually needs. The advertising industry is a leach on society
True, but only for "most". There are some companies I actively follow on Facebook and/or Twitter simply because I'm truly interested in seeing their new products when they come out. Sideshow Collectibles being a prime example.
The ting is, from what I can tell, they STILL haven't gotten a computer algorithm that really targets things you actually want to see. Sure, if I'm searching for a guitar it might start showing guitar ads, but that's something was actively looking for already, so I don't really need to see NEW information beyond my previous targetted research, and it very well may be an item I've already purchased.
Plus gift shopping totally throws it for a loop. I have three nieces aged 9, 8, and 6. Every time one of their birthdays rolls around the Internet ad services become convinced for a week or so that I am totally into Princess Sofia and The Winx Club, when in reality I just went and bough them a gift.
If they truly could show me ads that I want to see, I'd have no issue with it. They just have never managed to do that.
I think they have to eventually accept that "Moore's Law" is no law at all. Eventually any technology matures and you then get very incremental improvements.
Take automobiles for example: While there have been a lot of efficiency improvements and such over the years, you could take a car from 1945 and while it will certainly look "retro", if it's in good condition it's still perfectly workable in a modern setting. On the flip side, you COULDN'T really do that with a Model T.
Computers, much like everything else, will eventually plateau and improvements will be of the slow and steady type, not the drastic "your gear will be obsolete in 5 years" pace that we had become accustomed to.
It's more an issue that in less developed countries there is a combination of factors that lead one to have more children:
1. Lack of wide availability of birth control. 2. In more agriculturally based societies, more children are more mouths to feed, but they're also more hands to help out. 3. Sadly, in less developed nations, there's a higher instance of infant mortality. People have a lot of kids because there's no guarantee that all of them will survive to adulthood, so you hedge your bets by having more.
In our environment where kids don't meaningfully help out the household's ability to flourish and even if you have 1 or 2 they'll most likely survive just fine, people just don't feel the need. You have one, maybe 2, for the experience of being a parent, and you're good. Besides, it seems like smaller families are better anyways. In the pre-birth control days when you'd see families of 14 and 15 children it's hard to imagine being able to pay enough attention to each of them. That multiplies when it comes to grandparents. My parents have a total of 3 grandchildren - they dote on them and spoil them to no end. If they had 75-100 I doubt they'd even know all of their names.
Um, it's been years since IE was the defacto standard. Nowadays I've noticed that IE is the MOST likely browser to misrender a page.
These days everyone seems to be building with Chrome (or at least Webkit) in mind. Afterall, not only is is common on the desktop, but both of the dominant smartphone platforms are generally running Webkit based browsers.
Meh - at least on the desktop, few users directly use the GNU crap either - it's just as buried as the kernel.
GNU/x.org/Gnome/Firefox/Linux just doesn't roll off the tongue too well, so the desktop system that we're all familar with is just "Linux". The smartphone OS, despite running the Linux kernel, is "Android".
The kernel might not be the whole system, but for one the whole system got colloquially named after the kernel - on the other it didn't.
The expiration thing is outdated too, though indeed if they're scratched it's problematic
Per NASA's website:
Note: If your eclipse glasses or viewers are compliant with the ISO 12312-2 safety standard, you may look at the uneclipsed or partially eclipsed Sun through them for as long as you wish. Furthermore, if the filters aren't scratched, punctured, or torn, you may reuse them indefinitely. Some glasses/viewers are printed with warnings stating that you shouldn't look through them for more than 3 minutes at a time and that you should discard them if they are more than 3 years old. Such warnings are outdated and do not apply to eclipse viewers compliant with the ISO 12312-2 standard adopted in 2015.
For one, startups often focus on unique business sectors - some fail, some succeed, but they're not representative of "normal business". Not all business workers travel or need to be mobile. Heck some CAN'T be mobile - what we call "counter users" who sit at a counter and are there to interface with the public as needed. They're going to be in a chair in front of a workstation all day. Think of the people over at the DMV for example.
So many people have this glorious image of the office road warrior in their heads that they forget that for a ton of people office work is just boring routine crap where you don't need to go anywhere.
As to the dockable component - that's simply semantics. If you dock your phone and then start using an external keyboard, mouse and monitor, then you're USING A DESKTOP. It doesn't matter that the phone is doing the processing work - the platform is still desktop based.
Personal users still use smartphones heavily. As a matter of fact I know quite a number of people who no longer own a computer and do all their personal tasks ONLY on a smartphone.
That said, business users are just as much into the desktop as ever, and that isn't likely to change any time soon. Smartphones make for decent media consumption devices, but they're not great and working with lots of plain old data.
Between the business sector and power users, the desktop will likely be around for just as long as mobile devices are - it just will be relegated to a niche product.
I wonder if this includes Chromebooks? If it does, that's likely the uptick. They've saw decent adoption rates. My niece in third grade was actually just given one for the school year to take home.
The "more than a few minutes" thing is outdated. Basically, if you have proper, certified, modern glasses, you can stare at the sun with no time limit. If you have counterfeits though, then obvious YMMV.
No, something didn't have to. Even in our own universe random chance exists. In a universe that hosts random chance, it's not out of line to suppose that it could have been born out of such.
Besides, that line of thinking leads to an infinite loop anyways. If because the universe exists "something had to create" it, then whatever created it also exists and in turn also must have had creator. And that creator, ALSO needs a creator, and so forth and so forth. It just doesn't hold weight. Eventually there has to point where we get to a level where something just *IS* and has no creator. It's no less logical to assume that that is the universe than it is to assume it's God.
Live music is cool when you're actually there. Listening to "live" music through a radio is sort of pointless.
As to audio dramas - that medium is far better suited to podcasts where users can listen at their leisure rather than tuning in to a scheduled broadcast.
Honestly, while RF communications as a technology has a bright future, "Radio stations" as in places broadcasting out scheduled audio programming seem like a doomed technology no matter what they do. They're not necessarily even doing anything wrong, except that nobody wants their product anymore.
It's refreshing to see people who will readily admit when they're wrong, since they're looking for the truth, not to prove a point.
That's always what I fall back two when people compare science to a religion: religion relies on faith - sticking to your beliefs no matter the evidence presented. Science will readily toss out everything they know and start over if something is proven to be wrong.
Yeah. While there were small gains here and there, for the most part a 1st Gen Intel i7 is nearly as capable as the ones they're still releasing now 9 years later.
Granted, they're not BAD, but then again since Intel has been the benchmark they're only not bad because even though they were making minimal improvements nothing was faster.
Heck in my gaming rig I was running a Core 2 Quad that I'd likely STILL be running if I didn't have to upgrade the CPU and motherboard to go beyond 4GB of RAM.
I've always been an AMD fan, but their offerings have been lackluster lately. On my gaming rig I finally went Intel and on my regular desktop machine I'm still running AMD but it's an ancient 7-8 year old Phenom II. I haven't had much reason to upgrade it until now but I'm thinking I may finally pull the trigger on a system built on the "budget" Threadripper.
Most local bars were charging admission for this (or any big fight). Typically $20-50 per person.
Also, a lot of people who are purchasing the fight for home viewing are hosting parties. I'd much rather view the fight with 15-20 friends than with 100-200 strangers.
For whatever reason, I've found that while Nintendo is amazing at game design, they SUCK at general software design. If you look at the dashboard setup for any of their systems it's horrendous, and like you said transferring games becomes a nightmare. Half the stuff wants to stick with the console rather than a central account.
I don't get it - half their problems are so obvious that anybody with half a brain could tell the coders "Just make it work this way" and fix a ton of issues.
It's basically a needless service that gets mandated through paperwork.
That's not even for the sales - it applies to the service too. Since this article talks about software: my new vehicle has one of the new info-tainment systems built it where it does bluetooth, interfaces with my phone, etc. It's pretty neat - when it works. The problem is half the time I plug in my phone and the screen just goes black. Unplug it, replug. Screen goes black again. TURN THE VEHICLE OFF, then back on, and it'll work.
That's annoying. I'm sure it's software related, but is there a patch available? I don't know. The manufacturer doesn't post any release notes or version histories. They won't let you download an update. The only way to find out anything is to "take it to the dealer".
Same with the damned remove for unlocking the doors. You can buy a new one on eBay for $25 . . . . but only a dealer can program them. Oh and if they ever die you can't just use the key (which I did with my last car for many years after the remotes stopped working). If you unlock the door with the key . . . the alarm sounds. Completely valid key that goes with that vehicle, but using the key to unlock the door sets off the alarm.
I have to admit that it's hard to see the value in a lot of these "schools".
I've actually attended a few of the classes attempting to pickup new skills, even though I've got a degree in Computer Science already.
Eg, I took a class in Ruby, which wasn't really popularized when I was in school.
It wasn't a good experience. The class length was nowhere near long enough to get someone completely up to speed from scratch, yet since the class was billed as "beginner friendly", they started out with the standard "Hello world" and "this is what a variable is" stuff. Basically at the end of the class I'd gotten about as much benefit out of it as I'd have gotten in an afternoon of reading, yet any student who came in from scratch probably didn't have a clue on how to do anything useful.
Actually, yes. When this type of thing happens with a traditional project the company either dies a slow death or you just make do with crap until someone comes along and reinvents the wheel.
With open source a project isn't truly dead until it's user-base no longer cares about it, regardless of leadership.
Granted, I'm not a zealot - I use a ton of closed source software too - but open source certainly does have it's benefits. I'd certainly rather be able to contact a vendor of some of the systems we use and be able to say "This is where the problem is - fix it in your codebase.", rather than "The program keeps crashing. It seems random and I don't know why it happens.".
Downstairs, 2 is enough. It's a dumb TV and I run a Roku stick and a Raspberry Pi to it.
Upstairs, I have an Xbox One, PS4, and a Switch. If not for the fact that it was a smart TV I'd have to remove a device or use one of the consoles for Netflix/Youtube/etc (which wouldn't be the end of the world but small devices like a Roku or a player built into the TV are way more power efficient).
They've established a brand by starting in the market early (most people do recognize the name Roku), and they're priced pretty competitively. The cheapest one is $30 and though it lacks a few features of the more expensive models it's still a perfectly functional device.
Granted, there's not much actual differentiation in function between the different manufacturer's here so I'd consider any company's lead being "fragile", but still - I don't see any reason why Roku wouldn't be doing well.
Slashdot Mirror
Err - I have kept my credit reports frozen for years, only unfreezing when I make a large purchase like my house or a car (the last vehicle purchase we 4 months ago so I'm pretty sure the process it current). Never have I had to sent a certified letter. I have a PIN number for each of the 3 major agencies that I keep in a lock-box and use that to deactivate the freeze for a set amount of time. It takes me all of 20 minutes to lift the freeze on all of them, and I generally to a "timeframe" lift so that after a few weeks or however long I expect the transaction to take, the freeze will automatically reapply.
Thankfully, in my state (SC) it's illegal for them to charge for a credit freeze, so they've always been free anyways.
(See also 'sheeple')
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/610/
That may actually be a good thing long term. Sometimes people won't "fix" something that's already working, even if it needs maintenance. If it's destroyed, then it can be built back up better.
As an example, after the great Chicago fire it was rebuilt much better than it was before and there was a large influx of money and people for the reconstruction. The city of Myrtle Beach, SC was rebuilt into a resort town when it was largely destroyed by Hurricane Hazel back in the 1950's.
Most ads for products are for complete junk nobody actually needs. The advertising industry is a leach on society
True, but only for "most". There are some companies I actively follow on Facebook and/or Twitter simply because I'm truly interested in seeing their new products when they come out. Sideshow Collectibles being a prime example.
The ting is, from what I can tell, they STILL haven't gotten a computer algorithm that really targets things you actually want to see. Sure, if I'm searching for a guitar it might start showing guitar ads, but that's something was actively looking for already, so I don't really need to see NEW information beyond my previous targetted research, and it very well may be an item I've already purchased.
Plus gift shopping totally throws it for a loop. I have three nieces aged 9, 8, and 6. Every time one of their birthdays rolls around the Internet ad services become convinced for a week or so that I am totally into Princess Sofia and The Winx Club, when in reality I just went and bough them a gift.
If they truly could show me ads that I want to see, I'd have no issue with it. They just have never managed to do that.
I think they have to eventually accept that "Moore's Law" is no law at all. Eventually any technology matures and you then get very incremental improvements.
Take automobiles for example: While there have been a lot of efficiency improvements and such over the years, you could take a car from 1945 and while it will certainly look "retro", if it's in good condition it's still perfectly workable in a modern setting. On the flip side, you COULDN'T really do that with a Model T.
Computers, much like everything else, will eventually plateau and improvements will be of the slow and steady type, not the drastic "your gear will be obsolete in 5 years" pace that we had become accustomed to.
It's more an issue that in less developed countries there is a combination of factors that lead one to have more children:
1. Lack of wide availability of birth control.
2. In more agriculturally based societies, more children are more mouths to feed, but they're also more hands to help out.
3. Sadly, in less developed nations, there's a higher instance of infant mortality. People have a lot of kids because there's no guarantee that all of them will survive to adulthood, so you hedge your bets by having more.
In our environment where kids don't meaningfully help out the household's ability to flourish and even if you have 1 or 2 they'll most likely survive just fine, people just don't feel the need. You have one, maybe 2, for the experience of being a parent, and you're good. Besides, it seems like smaller families are better anyways. In the pre-birth control days when you'd see families of 14 and 15 children it's hard to imagine being able to pay enough attention to each of them. That multiplies when it comes to grandparents. My parents have a total of 3 grandchildren - they dote on them and spoil them to no end. If they had 75-100 I doubt they'd even know all of their names.
Um, it's been years since IE was the defacto standard. Nowadays I've noticed that IE is the MOST likely browser to misrender a page.
These days everyone seems to be building with Chrome (or at least Webkit) in mind. Afterall, not only is is common on the desktop, but both of the dominant smartphone platforms are generally running Webkit based browsers.
Meh - at least on the desktop, few users directly use the GNU crap either - it's just as buried as the kernel.
GNU/x.org/Gnome/Firefox/Linux just doesn't roll off the tongue too well, so the desktop system that we're all familar with is just "Linux". The smartphone OS, despite running the Linux kernel, is "Android".
The kernel might not be the whole system, but for one the whole system got colloquially named after the kernel - on the other it didn't.
The expiration thing is outdated too, though indeed if they're scratched it's problematic
Per NASA's website:
Note: If your eclipse glasses or viewers are compliant with the ISO 12312-2 safety standard, you may look at the uneclipsed or partially eclipsed Sun through them for as long as you wish. Furthermore, if the filters aren't scratched, punctured, or torn, you may reuse them indefinitely. Some glasses/viewers are printed with warnings stating that you shouldn't look through them for more than 3 minutes at a time and that you should discard them if they are more than 3 years old. Such warnings are outdated and do not apply to eclipse viewers compliant with the ISO 12312-2 standard adopted in 2015.
You're looking at things a bit oddly.
For one, startups often focus on unique business sectors - some fail, some succeed, but they're not representative of "normal business". Not all business workers travel or need to be mobile. Heck some CAN'T be mobile - what we call "counter users" who sit at a counter and are there to interface with the public as needed. They're going to be in a chair in front of a workstation all day. Think of the people over at the DMV for example.
So many people have this glorious image of the office road warrior in their heads that they forget that for a ton of people office work is just boring routine crap where you don't need to go anywhere.
As to the dockable component - that's simply semantics. If you dock your phone and then start using an external keyboard, mouse and monitor, then you're USING A DESKTOP. It doesn't matter that the phone is doing the processing work - the platform is still desktop based.
Desktop isn't really over - it's just changed.
Personal users still use smartphones heavily. As a matter of fact I know quite a number of people who no longer own a computer and do all their personal tasks ONLY on a smartphone.
That said, business users are just as much into the desktop as ever, and that isn't likely to change any time soon. Smartphones make for decent media consumption devices, but they're not great and working with lots of plain old data.
Between the business sector and power users, the desktop will likely be around for just as long as mobile devices are - it just will be relegated to a niche product.
I wonder if this includes Chromebooks? If it does, that's likely the uptick. They've saw decent adoption rates. My niece in third grade was actually just given one for the school year to take home.
The "more than a few minutes" thing is outdated. Basically, if you have proper, certified, modern glasses, you can stare at the sun with no time limit. If you have counterfeits though, then obvious YMMV.
So if God created the universe (something had to)
No, something didn't have to. Even in our own universe random chance exists. In a universe that hosts random chance, it's not out of line to suppose that it could have been born out of such.
Besides, that line of thinking leads to an infinite loop anyways. If because the universe exists "something had to create" it, then whatever created it also exists and in turn also must have had creator. And that creator, ALSO needs a creator, and so forth and so forth. It just doesn't hold weight. Eventually there has to point where we get to a level where something just *IS* and has no creator. It's no less logical to assume that that is the universe than it is to assume it's God.
Live music is cool when you're actually there. Listening to "live" music through a radio is sort of pointless.
As to audio dramas - that medium is far better suited to podcasts where users can listen at their leisure rather than tuning in to a scheduled broadcast.
Honestly, while RF communications as a technology has a bright future, "Radio stations" as in places broadcasting out scheduled audio programming seem like a doomed technology no matter what they do. They're not necessarily even doing anything wrong, except that nobody wants their product anymore.
It's refreshing to see people who will readily admit when they're wrong, since they're looking for the truth, not to prove a point.
That's always what I fall back two when people compare science to a religion: religion relies on faith - sticking to your beliefs no matter the evidence presented. Science will readily toss out everything they know and start over if something is proven to be wrong.
Yeah. While there were small gains here and there, for the most part a 1st Gen Intel i7 is nearly as capable as the ones they're still releasing now 9 years later.
Granted, they're not BAD, but then again since Intel has been the benchmark they're only not bad because even though they were making minimal improvements nothing was faster.
Heck in my gaming rig I was running a Core 2 Quad that I'd likely STILL be running if I didn't have to upgrade the CPU and motherboard to go beyond 4GB of RAM.
I've always been an AMD fan, but their offerings have been lackluster lately. On my gaming rig I finally went Intel and on my regular desktop machine I'm still running AMD but it's an ancient 7-8 year old Phenom II. I haven't had much reason to upgrade it until now but I'm thinking I may finally pull the trigger on a system built on the "budget" Threadripper.
Most local bars were charging admission for this (or any big fight). Typically $20-50 per person.
Also, a lot of people who are purchasing the fight for home viewing are hosting parties. I'd much rather view the fight with 15-20 friends than with 100-200 strangers.
For whatever reason, I've found that while Nintendo is amazing at game design, they SUCK at general software design. If you look at the dashboard setup for any of their systems it's horrendous, and like you said transferring games becomes a nightmare. Half the stuff wants to stick with the console rather than a central account.
I don't get it - half their problems are so obvious that anybody with half a brain could tell the coders "Just make it work this way" and fix a ton of issues.
Indeed.
It's basically a needless service that gets mandated through paperwork.
That's not even for the sales - it applies to the service too. Since this article talks about software: my new vehicle has one of the new info-tainment systems built it where it does bluetooth, interfaces with my phone, etc. It's pretty neat - when it works. The problem is half the time I plug in my phone and the screen just goes black. Unplug it, replug. Screen goes black again. TURN THE VEHICLE OFF, then back on, and it'll work.
That's annoying. I'm sure it's software related, but is there a patch available? I don't know. The manufacturer doesn't post any release notes or version histories. They won't let you download an update. The only way to find out anything is to "take it to the dealer".
Same with the damned remove for unlocking the doors. You can buy a new one on eBay for $25 . . . . but only a dealer can program them. Oh and if they ever die you can't just use the key (which I did with my last car for many years after the remotes stopped working). If you unlock the door with the key . . . the alarm sounds. Completely valid key that goes with that vehicle, but using the key to unlock the door sets off the alarm.
I have to admit that it's hard to see the value in a lot of these "schools".
I've actually attended a few of the classes attempting to pickup new skills, even though I've got a degree in Computer Science already.
Eg, I took a class in Ruby, which wasn't really popularized when I was in school.
It wasn't a good experience. The class length was nowhere near long enough to get someone completely up to speed from scratch, yet since the class was billed as "beginner friendly", they started out with the standard "Hello world" and "this is what a variable is" stuff. Basically at the end of the class I'd gotten about as much benefit out of it as I'd have gotten in an afternoon of reading, yet any student who came in from scratch probably didn't have a clue on how to do anything useful.
Actually, yes. When this type of thing happens with a traditional project the company either dies a slow death or you just make do with crap until someone comes along and reinvents the wheel.
With open source a project isn't truly dead until it's user-base no longer cares about it, regardless of leadership.
Granted, I'm not a zealot - I use a ton of closed source software too - but open source certainly does have it's benefits. I'd certainly rather be able to contact a vendor of some of the systems we use and be able to say "This is where the problem is - fix it in your codebase.", rather than "The program keeps crashing. It seems random and I don't know why it happens.".
Depends on the TV.
Downstairs, 2 is enough. It's a dumb TV and I run a Roku stick and a Raspberry Pi to it.
Upstairs, I have an Xbox One, PS4, and a Switch. If not for the fact that it was a smart TV I'd have to remove a device or use one of the consoles for Netflix/Youtube/etc (which wouldn't be the end of the world but small devices like a Roku or a player built into the TV are way more power efficient).
They've established a brand by starting in the market early (most people do recognize the name Roku), and they're priced pretty competitively. The cheapest one is $30 and though it lacks a few features of the more expensive models it's still a perfectly functional device.
Granted, there's not much actual differentiation in function between the different manufacturer's here so I'd consider any company's lead being "fragile", but still - I don't see any reason why Roku wouldn't be doing well.