The parent submission is a serious troll. I mean, I started working the lowest level helpdesk in 97, and when I got my first tour of the server room, I was shown the PBX. Now, I had no idea what PBX stood for, or how it worked (and to be honest, I still don't), but I was told that its primary purpose was to handle all the phone switching.
I mean, come on. It's almost all but impossible to work in the IT field and not at least see a PBX.
Slashdot isn't supposed to spell out every single technology that it features. It's assuming that you either have an idea what the article is about, or you know how to at least use google. Go google for "what is a PBX". There, done.
Check out the sidebar to that article, printed back in February. You know you're doing a bad job if your ex-employees open champagne upon hearing of your leaving. Wow.
Sorry man, but I've got the zelda ringtone, and it's the cat's ass. Plus, my treo plays MIDI files directly, so I downloaded the tone for free and imported it from my memory card.
People get pissed off when I answer my phone before they can figure out what the tone is.
On Demand lets you view a limited number of shows or movies that Comcast decides are available. And very few of them are free. The vast majority of the shows or movies you can pick cost extra.
As for Comcast's DVR. It's an additional $10 per month for the box, so there's your subscription. I priced the difference between Comcast and Tivo per month, and Comcast won by a whopping 3 dollars.
Granted, that doesn't count the inital cost of the Tivo hardware. But, I've had the Comcast DVR for 6 months or so, and it is a pile of crap. The list of complaints I have are so large that I'm not going to spell them out here. The only reason I haven't brought it back is because I'm a lazy bastard.
I was in a hurry when I wrote it, and I'm far from being a writer, so I'm sure I mixed terms up.
When I say Apple has cornered the market, I meant the MP3 sales market. iTunes is the only online music retailer with the blessing of all 4 major record companies, and sells what, 70% of all online MP3s?
As for the interface: Yes, other MP3 players/ retailers have interfaces. Everything has to. But they don't have the interface. That thing that makes the ipod experience more sexy and streamlined than any of its competitors. And Apple is making money off of this fact because they're charging a premium for The Interface. While this may sound like the same strategy they've had for years in the PC market, the key difference is the amount of a premium they're charging. Apple was smart enough to keep its margins lower than normal in return for larger market share (which in this respect is the exact opposite of their PC strategy).
I chastised Apple for the past couple of years for focusing primarily on its iPod and iTunes, while largely ignoring its PC business. It turns out that I was mistaken - The focus on the iPod as a revenue generator and (dare I say it) mindshare generator was a genius idea by Jobs. I just wish I had bought stock in them when they were at $20/share.
To extend your statement a bit, another reason that the Gillette blade is essential to the handle is that it is the only blade that will work with that razor.
Other services work with the iPod. Sure, they may not be as easy to configure for your iPod as iTunes is, but they're not impossible to use. It's a lot easier to use an iPod with Napster than it is to duct tape a Schick blade to your Gillette Mach 3 Turbo.
However, the analogy was close: If the iPod is the razor, then the interface is the blade. You're not necessarily paying for an ipod per se, you're paying for the experience of the user interface. Same with iTunes, and the same with the Mac. This was always Apple's cornerstone: Don't sell the hardware, sell the experience. But make the hardware so tied to the software that users were forced to pay inflated premiums just to get to The Experience.
What's funny is, that has been Apple's strategy for the past 20 years (at least, the years under Jobs). But it's never really worked out... Other manufacturers came along and produced a platform that, while it wasn't as elegant as the Mac Experience, it still got the job done for far cheaper.
Here Apple goes once again, with the same strategy. But this time they've learned what to do: Corner the market on the most important part of the business - The content, and produce hardware that has a unique, slick experience, and is still somewhat competitive with other manufacturers' prices.
In essence, Apple is doing what Microsoft did 15 years ago with the PC platform, while still retaining the Apple Experience that it so holds dear. Apple's razor has always been its experience; it's just taken them 20 years to bring it to market effectively.
You have to read The One Minute Manager . It's a wonderful read on how to get people to want to work for you.
Yeah, it's short, and yeah, it's a little cheesy in some parts, but the over all benefit you gain is enormous. This should be the first management book you read.
Comcast just changed its Usenet policies as well
on
AOL Kills Usenet Access
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· Score: 2, Informative
I used to access Usenet via netnews.comcast.net. About a week ago I noticed that I could no longer log in via that address. I jumped on Comcast's support site and found that they had outsourced their usenet access to Giganews. I had to change my reader to point to newsgroups.comcast.com, and was now required to use my username and password.
The biggest policy change was that they only allow 2GB of data transfer per month. That sounds like a lot, but to a data addict like me, I can go through that amount of data in a day. Actually, I did, and now have to wait a month before my quota is reset.
Right now I have a couple options if I want to continue to support my usenet addiction. I can subscribe to a monthly service like giganews for $25 a month (in addition to my $40/month Comcast bill), or I can switch to Verizon DSL for cheaper. I'm most likely going to jump on Verizon, but part of me wants to sign up with giganews and use Comcast's network to download ungodly amounts of data, just to say fuck you to them for shutting me off.
You never know where they got the batch of kids from. It could have been the gifted class at some local school, or they could all be the children of computer programmers or something.
The people writing the article had plenty of chances to stack the deck, and who knows how many groups of kids they paraded in before they got enough sound bites?
There's a MUCH better trailer floating around...
on
Sin City Trailer
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· Score: 3, Interesting
There's a much longer, better trailer for this movie out on the net. I saw it a few months ago via the Ars Technica forums. Supposedly it was shown at a comic convention and subseequently leaked onto the net.
The story of the trailer goes like this: Miller refused for years to allow anybody to make a movie based on his graphic novels. Robert Rodriguez took it upon himself to make a very short (less than 5 minute) film based on a situation from the comic, and sent it to Miller. The film was very well done, and had Josh Hartnett in the leading role. Rodriguez sent this to Miller and said something like, "This is the kind of movie I want to make. If you like it, give me a call. If not, here's a nice gift to show your friends." Miller liked it, and the rest is history.
That five minute short is at the beginning of the leaked trailer. I'm sure anyone with some google skills could find it. Otherwise you could get a membership to the Ars Lounge and ask somebody in there.
I don't think that increasing browser awareness was the number one goal here. I think that having a fullpage ad in a major publication like the NYT is a way for Firefox to show its validity as an alternative browser. They're trying to say that they're not just a small fly-by-night operation, but someone with the potential to take on the 800-pound gorilla that is Microsoft.
Remember when Jobs came back to Apple, and they launched fullpage ads in the NYT, as well as Time and Newsweek? That wasn't meant to sell computers per se, it was meant to let the corporate world know that Apple was back. I think Mozilla is doing the same thing with this ad.
It appears to be working, judging by the amount of free press they're getting from the event.
Re:Hope the level design is better this time
on
Halo 2 Reviews
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· Score: 5, Informative
Yeah, that's the biggest complaint of the game, but it's well documented as to why that happened.
From what I understand, Bungie was in mid-development when MS came to them with truckloads of cash. They wanted to buy the company, and release Halo at the same time as the Xbox.
So, level design was scrapped, and the production time on the game was pushed up considerably, to get it ready for the Xbox launch date.
Since the game was so short in its original format, they just added a few layers of repetition to the single player maps, and shoved it out the door.
From a game design perspective, it wasn't the best thing to do... But from a monetary perspective, any economist would tell you they did the right thing.
You're missing the convenience factor. No PC to boot up means no noise, no hassle with crashes and the like, etc. Plus, it's a small, familiar form factor. It fits nicely in your entertainment center with all your other equipment. Sure, you could buuild a small form-factor HTPC, but it would be arguably more expensive, and much more complicated to set up.
I think there's a decent niche market for a product like this. I know quite a few people that would buy something like this at the $250 price point instead of trying to build their own boxes.
Tell your Tivo to grab "Spiderman and His Amazing Friends", the old cartoon series that (I believe) Fox Family is re-running. It's awesome. I don't mean awesome in that it's a good show; I mean awesome in an MST3K-type way.
Basically, Spiderman has 2 friends/ roommates. Firestarter is this hot chick that turns into a fireball at a moment's notice and burns everything in her path. As an added bonus, she has a permanent cameltoe.
Then there's Iceman, the other roommate who can (you guessed it) turn into a frozen bald guy that looks strikingly like Silver Surfer, and freeze everything in his path.
The best part about this show (besides the aforementioned cameltoe) is the shoestring budget it must have had. The voice of Iceman is the same dude that voiced Fred in the Scooby Doo cartoon. But what's funny is that he's also the voice of virtually every erroneous character in the show. He doesn't even try to mask it. New bad guy? Give him Iceman's voice. Shopkeeper at the local store? Iceman.
The show is great fun to watch, especially while drinking. I highly recommend it to everyone. Let's hope that this F4 cartoon is slightly higher quality... or if it sucks, let's hope it's the same level of sucktitude that envelops Spidey and his amazing friends. Either way, we win.
I just upgraded my home file server. 4 x 200GB WD IDE drives on a 3Ware card at RAID 5, giving me 540GB of space (each drive formatted down to 180GB).
Anyways, my pr0n drive alone was over 150GB (yeah, I know). All I'd have to do is bring the server into work, stick it on the T1, configure QOS on the router to give my box preference (good to be the admin), and let er rip.
Anybody know how long it would take to upload 100gb at 1.5mb/sec?
I've been in the computer industry since 1995 or so. In that time, I've seen lots of software come and go, and lots of less-than-ethical tricks to keep users hooked on one piece of software instead of another. In my 9 years or so, I've never seen any product as consistently sneaky as Real's media player. I remember back when RealAudio would make itself the default player for every media type it could without asking, which would annoy the tech-savvy user and scare those of us that are less technical.
While it seems that Real has backed its intrusiveness down a notch during the install, I still feel like Real is telling me what to do on my computer instead of the other way around. For example - Telling Real not to start when windows starts is no easy task. I have to go through 3 or four submenus in the preferences until I find the vaguely-named SmartCenter (or StartCenter? I don't have a machine handy to doublecheck the name). Even then, when I tell it not to start with Windows, I am greeted by a scary warning message. Even with SmartCenter disabled, Real's update service still lives in my registry, starting every time I boot windows.
So my question is, why try so hard to force your software on the user? Is it worth the market share to anger and confuse your core audience? Mention Real to the average user, and their first response is "I hate that software. I wish I knew how to delete it."
I've always been taught that it's best to make your customers happy, instead of holding them hostage. Does your business model say otherwise?
Anybody that still calls them IBM clones is probably too out of touch to be able to comment on price comparisons, IMHO.
Granted, you're not going to get the integration or nice OS from a PC that you get with this imac, but it's pretty easy to get a ~3GHZ brand name box with 17" LCD for roughly the same money.
The controversy. The versions of Lucas' beloved films that are on these new DVDs are not the original theatrical releases but the special editions that played in theaters in 1997. Rumor have circulated about additional changes, but Ward would not deny or confirm them. "We want to encourage our fans to check them out themselves."
(Bold emphasis mine) Now, you mind answering my question, since the article didn't? Or do you have other posts to troll?
Slashdot Mirror
The parent submission is a serious troll. I mean, I started working the lowest level helpdesk in 97, and when I got my first tour of the server room, I was shown the PBX. Now, I had no idea what PBX stood for, or how it worked (and to be honest, I still don't), but I was told that its primary purpose was to handle all the phone switching.
I mean, come on. It's almost all but impossible to work in the IT field and not at least see a PBX.
Slashdot isn't supposed to spell out every single technology that it features. It's assuming that you either have an idea what the article is about, or you know how to at least use google. Go google for "what is a PBX". There, done.
Check out the sidebar to that article, printed back in February. You know you're doing a bad job if your ex-employees open champagne upon hearing of your leaving. Wow.
Sorry man, but I've got the zelda ringtone, and it's the cat's ass. Plus, my treo plays MIDI files directly, so I downloaded the tone for free and imported it from my memory card.
People get pissed off when I answer my phone before they can figure out what the tone is.
You're comparing apples to oranges.
On Demand lets you view a limited number of shows or movies that Comcast decides are available. And very few of them are free. The vast majority of the shows or movies you can pick cost extra.
As for Comcast's DVR. It's an additional $10 per month for the box, so there's your subscription. I priced the difference between Comcast and Tivo per month, and Comcast won by a whopping 3 dollars.
Granted, that doesn't count the inital cost of the Tivo hardware. But, I've had the Comcast DVR for 6 months or so, and it is a pile of crap. The list of complaints I have are so large that I'm not going to spell them out here. The only reason I haven't brought it back is because I'm a lazy bastard.
I was in a hurry when I wrote it, and I'm far from being a writer, so I'm sure I mixed terms up.
When I say Apple has cornered the market, I meant the MP3 sales market. iTunes is the only online music retailer with the blessing of all 4 major record companies, and sells what, 70% of all online MP3s?
As for the interface: Yes, other MP3 players/ retailers have interfaces. Everything has to. But they don't have the interface. That thing that makes the ipod experience more sexy and streamlined than any of its competitors. And Apple is making money off of this fact because they're charging a premium for The Interface. While this may sound like the same strategy they've had for years in the PC market, the key difference is the amount of a premium they're charging. Apple was smart enough to keep its margins lower than normal in return for larger market share (which in this respect is the exact opposite of their PC strategy).
I chastised Apple for the past couple of years for focusing primarily on its iPod and iTunes, while largely ignoring its PC business. It turns out that I was mistaken - The focus on the iPod as a revenue generator and (dare I say it) mindshare generator was a genius idea by Jobs. I just wish I had bought stock in them when they were at $20/share.
To extend your statement a bit, another reason that the Gillette blade is essential to the handle is that it is the only blade that will work with that razor.
Other services work with the iPod. Sure, they may not be as easy to configure for your iPod as iTunes is, but they're not impossible to use. It's a lot easier to use an iPod with Napster than it is to duct tape a Schick blade to your Gillette Mach 3 Turbo.
However, the analogy was close: If the iPod is the razor, then the interface is the blade. You're not necessarily paying for an ipod per se, you're paying for the experience of the user interface. Same with iTunes, and the same with the Mac. This was always Apple's cornerstone: Don't sell the hardware, sell the experience. But make the hardware so tied to the software that users were forced to pay inflated premiums just to get to The Experience.
What's funny is, that has been Apple's strategy for the past 20 years (at least, the years under Jobs). But it's never really worked out... Other manufacturers came along and produced a platform that, while it wasn't as elegant as the Mac Experience, it still got the job done for far cheaper.
Here Apple goes once again, with the same strategy. But this time they've learned what to do: Corner the market on the most important part of the business - The content, and produce hardware that has a unique, slick experience, and is still somewhat competitive with other manufacturers' prices.
In essence, Apple is doing what Microsoft did 15 years ago with the PC platform, while still retaining the Apple Experience that it so holds dear. Apple's razor has always been its experience; it's just taken them 20 years to bring it to market effectively.
I too just started a new life as a manager.
You have to read The One Minute Manager . It's a wonderful read on how to get people to want to work for you.
Yeah, it's short, and yeah, it's a little cheesy in some parts, but the over all benefit you gain is enormous. This should be the first management book you read.
I used to access Usenet via netnews.comcast.net. About a week ago I noticed that I could no longer log in via that address. I jumped on Comcast's support site and found that they had outsourced their usenet access to Giganews. I had to change my reader to point to newsgroups.comcast.com, and was now required to use my username and password.
The biggest policy change was that they only allow 2GB of data transfer per month. That sounds like a lot, but to a data addict like me, I can go through that amount of data in a day. Actually, I did, and now have to wait a month before my quota is reset.
Right now I have a couple options if I want to continue to support my usenet addiction. I can subscribe to a monthly service like giganews for $25 a month (in addition to my $40/month Comcast bill), or I can switch to Verizon DSL for cheaper. I'm most likely going to jump on Verizon, but part of me wants to sign up with giganews and use Comcast's network to download ungodly amounts of data, just to say fuck you to them for shutting me off.
You never know where they got the batch of kids from. It could have been the gifted class at some local school, or they could all be the children of computer programmers or something.
The people writing the article had plenty of chances to stack the deck, and who knows how many groups of kids they paraded in before they got enough sound bites?
There's a much longer, better trailer for this movie out on the net. I saw it a few months ago via the Ars Technica forums. Supposedly it was shown at a comic convention and subseequently leaked onto the net.
The story of the trailer goes like this: Miller refused for years to allow anybody to make a movie based on his graphic novels. Robert Rodriguez took it upon himself to make a very short (less than 5 minute) film based on a situation from the comic, and sent it to Miller. The film was very well done, and had Josh Hartnett in the leading role. Rodriguez sent this to Miller and said something like, "This is the kind of movie I want to make. If you like it, give me a call. If not, here's a nice gift to show your friends." Miller liked it, and the rest is history.
That five minute short is at the beginning of the leaked trailer. I'm sure anyone with some google skills could find it. Otherwise you could get a membership to the Ars Lounge and ask somebody in there.
I don't think that increasing browser awareness was the number one goal here. I think that having a fullpage ad in a major publication like the NYT is a way for Firefox to show its validity as an alternative browser. They're trying to say that they're not just a small fly-by-night operation, but someone with the potential to take on the 800-pound gorilla that is Microsoft.
Remember when Jobs came back to Apple, and they launched fullpage ads in the NYT, as well as Time and Newsweek? That wasn't meant to sell computers per se, it was meant to let the corporate world know that Apple was back. I think Mozilla is doing the same thing with this ad.
It appears to be working, judging by the amount of free press they're getting from the event.
Perhaps you've never heard of Apple?
Yeah, that's the biggest complaint of the game, but it's well documented as to why that happened.
From what I understand, Bungie was in mid-development when MS came to them with truckloads of cash. They wanted to buy the company, and release Halo at the same time as the Xbox.
So, level design was scrapped, and the production time on the game was pushed up considerably, to get it ready for the Xbox launch date.
Since the game was so short in its original format, they just added a few layers of repetition to the single player maps, and shoved it out the door.
From a game design perspective, it wasn't the best thing to do... But from a monetary perspective, any economist would tell you they did the right thing.
You're missing the convenience factor. No PC to boot up means no noise, no hassle with crashes and the like, etc. Plus, it's a small, familiar form factor. It fits nicely in your entertainment center with all your other equipment. Sure, you could buuild a small form-factor HTPC, but it would be arguably more expensive, and much more complicated to set up.
I think there's a decent niche market for a product like this. I know quite a few people that would buy something like this at the $250 price point instead of trying to build their own boxes.
Tell your Tivo to grab "Spiderman and His Amazing Friends", the old cartoon series that (I believe) Fox Family is re-running. It's awesome. I don't mean awesome in that it's a good show; I mean awesome in an MST3K-type way.
Basically, Spiderman has 2 friends/ roommates. Firestarter is this hot chick that turns into a fireball at a moment's notice and burns everything in her path. As an added bonus, she has a permanent cameltoe.
Then there's Iceman, the other roommate who can (you guessed it) turn into a frozen bald guy that looks strikingly like Silver Surfer, and freeze everything in his path.
The best part about this show (besides the aforementioned cameltoe) is the shoestring budget it must have had. The voice of Iceman is the same dude that voiced Fred in the Scooby Doo cartoon. But what's funny is that he's also the voice of virtually every erroneous character in the show. He doesn't even try to mask it. New bad guy? Give him Iceman's voice. Shopkeeper at the local store? Iceman.
The show is great fun to watch, especially while drinking. I highly recommend it to everyone. Let's hope that this F4 cartoon is slightly higher quality... or if it sucks, let's hope it's the same level of sucktitude that envelops Spidey and his amazing friends. Either way, we win.
But he's dead!
I just upgraded my home file server. 4 x 200GB WD IDE drives on a 3Ware card at RAID 5, giving me 540GB of space (each drive formatted down to 180GB).
Anyways, my pr0n drive alone was over 150GB (yeah, I know). All I'd have to do is bring the server into work, stick it on the T1, configure QOS on the router to give my box preference (good to be the admin), and let er rip.
Anybody know how long it would take to upload 100gb at 1.5mb/sec?
HardOCP did a review of the Visiontek Xtreme 2GO drive, which survived a trip through the washing machine. Might be a good choice for durability.
From the caption in the first picture:
Damien Stolarz of CarBot. The equipment can include, from left, a CD changer, CarBot unit and amplifier.
Look at that picture... somebody needs to tell the NYT the difference between right and left.
I've been in the computer industry since 1995 or so. In that time, I've seen lots of software come and go, and lots of less-than-ethical tricks to keep users hooked on one piece of software instead of another. In my 9 years or so, I've never seen any product as consistently sneaky as Real's media player. I remember back when RealAudio would make itself the default player for every media type it could without asking, which would annoy the tech-savvy user and scare those of us that are less technical.
While it seems that Real has backed its intrusiveness down a notch during the install, I still feel like Real is telling me what to do on my computer instead of the other way around. For example - Telling Real not to start when windows starts is no easy task. I have to go through 3 or four submenus in the preferences until I find the vaguely-named SmartCenter (or StartCenter? I don't have a machine handy to doublecheck the name). Even then, when I tell it not to start with Windows, I am greeted by a scary warning message. Even with SmartCenter disabled, Real's update service still lives in my registry, starting every time I boot windows.
So my question is, why try so hard to force your software on the user? Is it worth the market share to anger and confuse your core audience? Mention Real to the average user, and their first response is "I hate that software. I wish I knew how to delete it."
I've always been taught that it's best to make your customers happy, instead of holding them hostage. Does your business model say otherwise?
Apparently it shrinks your laundry too.
Anybody that still calls them IBM clones is probably too out of touch to be able to comment on price comparisons, IMHO.
Granted, you're not going to get the integration or nice OS from a PC that you get with this imac, but it's pretty easy to get a ~3GHZ brand name box with 17" LCD for roughly the same money.
I did. The closest I found was this:
The controversy. The versions of Lucas' beloved films that are on these new DVDs are not the original theatrical releases but the special editions that played in theaters in 1997. Rumor have circulated about additional changes, but Ward would not deny or confirm them. "We want to encourage our fans to check them out themselves."
(Bold emphasis mine)
Now, you mind answering my question, since the article didn't? Or do you have other posts to troll?
Come on! This article has been up for seven minutes, and nobody has answered the most important question:
Does Greedo shoot first???
Come on! You call yourselves geeks?
How can Solitaire be useless? I'd say it's the most widely used app in my company...