Walmart believes "Customers want the accessibility and immediacy of a physical store." That is why their online business is doomed to fail. Yes, sometimes you just want it right now, but then you'll drive to Walmart or whatever local store will have it and buy it. But often you want the real online experience with unlimited selections and no hassle with trips. Why would I buy something online and then drive to pick it up?
Completely agree with this. At my local Walmart, if I order something for in-store pickup, I drive there, park, go inside, and then walk to the BACK of the store, where I wait for an associate. If it's something large, I have to leave, go to my car, drive around to the rear of the store and wait outside at a door until an associate comes out with my package and doesn't help me load it. Or, I can order from Amazon and have UPS deliver it to my door in a couple of days. The immediacy they're talking about kills an hour of my time.
Speaking of arrogant little fucks - yes, they DO have the right to take up a full lane of traffic. A bicycle has the same right to use the road that a car, pickup, or tractor trailer has. Exactly the same. You really need to review traffic laws.
I suppose it depends on where you live. In Texas, Section 551.103 of the Transportation Code states that "a person operating a bicycle on a roadway who is moving slower than the other traffic on the roadway shall ride as near as practicable to the right curb or edge of the roadway . . . " There are obviously exceptions, but as a general rule you don't get to ride in the middle of a lane here.
I know that I am a cohort of one, but I installed 10 on a single office laptop, and it seems as if Firefox an Chrome are both noticeably slower at rendering pages than they were with 8.1. I've tried restarting the laptop, and that seemed to help a small bit, but not much. Chrome just crashed on me a minute ago while trying to load Google News. Chrome is stock, and on Firefox, I'm running NoScript, Flashblock, and Ghostery, and it's just crazy slow. When clicking on a link to read a simple news story, the images are loading like dial up. This is not happening on our other laptops and tablets, so I think it's specific to the laptop and not to my internet connection.
Phones are inconvenient compared to a fitness tracker. First, I have to charge my phone daily, and my tracker can go at least a week. Second, I don't have to keep my phone in the bedroom. I suppose I'm just showing my age for not wanting my phone in my bedroom. My tracker can silently wake me up! I'd have to actually sleep with my phone for that. Finally, I don't like running or exercising with my phone. My tracker weighs so much less, and I don't have to worry about it getting sweaty. Phones can do so much, but sometimes you just want a device which does less.
There was an article in I think Time not all that long ago, and the writeup made it sound as if notch had lost all of his drive and zeal. It sounded as if notch and the other owner were going through the motions and blowing through mountains of cash like some newly minted pop star flavor of the month with crazy expensive partying for the employees on the company dime. Seemed very dotcom.
There's some cool tech in this product, but it won't help with the most common bike collisions (#1 car pulls out in front of bike, #2 parked car door opens into bike).
Agreed. #1 is why I cut down on my biking. I would agree that bikes can be hard to see during the day, but most of the times I would commute would still be pitch dark in the morning with almost no one on the road. My bike is a rolling, blinking LED Christmas tree, and people STILL don't process it as a human being on a bicycle and pull out in front of me. Really scary. I decided that if people don't process the blinking object as a person, I was running the risk of being T-boned.
I think what they are saying is - this won't stop being hyper-competitive. Most will not end up getting that tenured professorship. But a reasonable period in academia of 4 or 5 years for a PhD should be enough to differentiate candidates and put them on that track or not, instead of leading people along for 7+ years before flushing them. Put the rest out of their misery sooner so they can go do whatever they are going to end up doing in industry.
I'm not sure most people here understand how it works to get a Ph.D. in the humanities. For example, in history the years long effort to finish a Ph.D. program happens because it takes a long time to do original research and scholarship that contributes original scholarship to the field. A history grad student can finish her coursework fairly quickly and take comprehensive exams. I have known people who had read SO MUCH and remembered SO MUCH that they were probably ready for comps day one. It's the period after comps that is so difficult. We know of history grad students who get to A.B.D. (all but dissertation) and then can never finish. The rate of history grad students who are A.B.D. and never graduate is around 75%. If you have funding in the humanities for your coursework you're a superstar, but that still does not mean you will have the resourses to finish. Usually, you can't get what you need (i.e. primary source documents) where you live, so you have to travel, sometimes for months or years, to finish. Paraphrased quote from one professor regarding this time: it's time to dig deep into your trust fund.
If you're worried about corn fed beef, buy beef labeled grass fed. Nolan Ryan sells grass fed beef for only a nominal premium over regular grocery styore beef. Vote with you wallet, avoid fast food, and consume less but higher quality beef.
I wonder if this was a policy hearing or an investigative hearing. If it was an investigative hearing he should have sworn an oath to tell the truth. If what he says is true, I am troubled that the director of national intelligence did not know of the data collection. I don't believe what he's now saying, but if it's true then WTF is going on? Otherwise, he lied to Congress and was caught. On a related note, why is intelligence policy being reviewed in a public committee? He should have just refused to answer on national security grounds.
I was actually fairly optimistic about Dell taking his company private in hopes that he could get away from the quarterly "How much did you make these last three months?" As I understood things, Michael Dell felt that Wall Street had crushed the life out of his company or its ability to innovate. Dell offered pretty good business products and services fifteen years ago (next-day warranty on-site repairs to BFE, Texas). Now it's just a target because of its cash on hand and the value of its financing business. Sigh. Of course, in the grand scheme of things, it's been so long since Dell made quality business computers, I find it hard to believe that quality would once again become important without firing everyone in management, and that almost never happens. Still, it would have been nice.
Why do they grow rice in Texas (a drought state)? There's always a big hubbub in Austin when the LCRA releases water to the south Texas rice farmers when we're in the middle of a drought.
Don't grow rice in a desert!
Parts of Texas get 45-50 inches of rain a year. East Texas is lush and green. It's pretty shocking if your only exposure to Texas has been a television show about drug smuggling through West Texas a trip to the Hill Country (Austin).
Maybe the public at large is more concerned about which husband/wife the latest Kardashian is on, but the age of the geeks is accelerating far faster than any it ever has, and it will continue to do so as long as there is the tiniest of means.
I think most people are tired of Hollywood stars, reality TV, and people famous for being famous. Mass market media is now a race to the bottom to keep the dwindling ignorant interested, and it was never very good at keeping the public informed about science and technology, and my guess would be that it's always been easier to have an "informed" interview with a Kardashian versus and informed interview of a scientist or engineer.
The multi national corporation is calling the tune, and the laws are now being adjusted to ensure that any infraction against the all mighty corporation anywhere on the planet is dealt with swiftly and with overwhelming force.
Yes, they release a new model to prevent the old model falling under the magic US$200 price point. They've got to keep the price up somehow.
This exactly. How many people aren't in the market for a game system but would buy one if the price were right. There are probably quite a few people who don't want a Wii (which is now essentially priced at as an impulse buy) who wouldn't mind a PS3. Too bad they won't crank out the old systems for cheap.
...we are aiming for support on future hardware platforms.... Existing devices cannot be supported because of those many proprietary components....
Good thing that it was so easy to install ICS on my Touchpad. I feel sorry for all those not-too-technically-savvy folks who bought one but will never be able to upgrade their devices. HP still sucks.
WHat innovation is this discouraging? Samsung copied a feature someone else created and patented 8 years ago. How is doing that innovation. Do you own a dictionary? Now they get to be real innovative and come up with their own way of doing it.
So, Samsung owners aren't supposed to do a local search on their phone, something old POS desktops have been able to do for years, because it's on a phone? Seriously? How again is the patent system not broken?
The reason for the fragmentation is that the phone manufacturers and carriers don't want old phones updated. That would cut into sales of newer shinier phones.
Is it really about making money on newer, shinier new phones? It's not like you can go and buy a cheap data & voice plan from Verizon or AT&T if you already have a phone and don't need a subsidized one. I think it's probably more a problem with the U.S. having a pretty saturated mobile market, and carriers spending most of their marketing dollars to lure customers away from other carriers with a new shiny phone. That's an easier business model for the suits to implement than, oh, I don't know, having great service at a reasonable price. I think a lot of Americans are going to follow the shiny while complaining about the mobile service.
Sigh. Like the new transatlantic cable for high speed trading, another project created solely to shave off time on automatic trades and thus print money. Does this do anything? Am I the only one who sees this as driving up transaction costs because you have "investors" who really don't invest in companies trying to take almost microscopic profit automatically? Where is the benefit to the financial system? What about the economy? I wonder how long people would stand for an extra layer being added to some other industry that does nothing but get paid for doing nothing?
These trades are like taxes, but they don't pay for any roads, health care, retirement, of national defense. They just make a few DBs who don't manufacture or invent anything rich. It will never happen, but I would like some politicians to get into an ethical debate on the socioeconomic benefits of this type of activity. Seriously. How defensible is this type of activity under Western Judeo-Christian ethical frameworks? Most American jurists publicly support natural law, at least while going through public confirmation hearings, so where exactly does this fit?
Their credit cards are a terrible deal too and they are hitting on those.
I disagree. Credit offers can be great if you're smart about using them. Personally, I love my BB credit card. You get no interest financing for 18 months, and the last computer I bought was online through the BB Marketplace and I still got the financing deal. Here's my simple two-step method for not getting stuck with a the "terrible deal interest." 1. Get irst statement. 2. Set up automatic payments to pay off the computer before the 18 month expiration. It's that simple.
Why not Linux for Security? Sure, okay, but what will run? Let's take the example of a small law office that bills by the hour. You have several needs . ..
1. Document Assembly. If your document assembly software is running on Windows, you're not going to migrate to Linux. Ever. Never EVER.The learning curve means lost revenue.
2. Time and billing. These take time to set up, they work with #1 above, and they usually work best on Windows.
3. Practice management. Once again, usually Windows only, or Windows best, and they work with #1 and #2 above.
4. Accounting and taxes. Quickbooks Enterprise works with Linux, but not the smaller packages. Also, there's not Turbotax Business for Linux.
I know a lot of people who would love to experiment with Linux, but it would be experimenting. A lot of people don't have time to experiment, and certainly don't want to pay someone to experiment. If you do everything yourself, there's a learning curve, and in a lot of industries there's a constant learning curve with new legislation, case law, and administrative decisions, there's no extra time to fiddle with your technology. There's always a bit of condescension when these posts come up, whether we're talking Linux or back in the day Mac OS, about continuing to use M$ products. It's like you're labeled for not wanting to f**k up your business by trying new software just for the sake of trying new software. If it were better, and CHEAPER, businesses would have switched years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Completely agree with this. At my local Walmart, if I order something for in-store pickup, I drive there, park, go inside, and then walk to the BACK of the store, where I wait for an associate. If it's something large, I have to leave, go to my car, drive around to the rear of the store and wait outside at a door until an associate comes out with my package and doesn't help me load it. Or, I can order from Amazon and have UPS deliver it to my door in a couple of days. The immediacy they're talking about kills an hour of my time.
I suppose it depends on where you live. In Texas, Section 551.103 of the Transportation Code states that "a person operating a bicycle on a roadway who is moving slower than the other traffic on the roadway shall ride as near as practicable to the right curb or edge of the roadway . . . " There are obviously exceptions, but as a general rule you don't get to ride in the middle of a lane here.
I know that I am a cohort of one, but I installed 10 on a single office laptop, and it seems as if Firefox an Chrome are both noticeably slower at rendering pages than they were with 8.1. I've tried restarting the laptop, and that seemed to help a small bit, but not much. Chrome just crashed on me a minute ago while trying to load Google News. Chrome is stock, and on Firefox, I'm running NoScript, Flashblock, and Ghostery, and it's just crazy slow. When clicking on a link to read a simple news story, the images are loading like dial up. This is not happening on our other laptops and tablets, so I think it's specific to the laptop and not to my internet connection.
Phones are inconvenient compared to a fitness tracker. First, I have to charge my phone daily, and my tracker can go at least a week. Second, I don't have to keep my phone in the bedroom. I suppose I'm just showing my age for not wanting my phone in my bedroom. My tracker can silently wake me up! I'd have to actually sleep with my phone for that. Finally, I don't like running or exercising with my phone. My tracker weighs so much less, and I don't have to worry about it getting sweaty. Phones can do so much, but sometimes you just want a device which does less.
And suddenly the pieces begin to come together.
There was an article in I think Time not all that long ago, and the writeup made it sound as if notch had lost all of his drive and zeal. It sounded as if notch and the other owner were going through the motions and blowing through mountains of cash like some newly minted pop star flavor of the month with crazy expensive partying for the employees on the company dime. Seemed very dotcom.
There's some cool tech in this product, but it won't help with the most common bike collisions (#1 car pulls out in front of bike, #2 parked car door opens into bike).
Agreed. #1 is why I cut down on my biking. I would agree that bikes can be hard to see during the day, but most of the times I would commute would still be pitch dark in the morning with almost no one on the road. My bike is a rolling, blinking LED Christmas tree, and people STILL don't process it as a human being on a bicycle and pull out in front of me. Really scary. I decided that if people don't process the blinking object as a person, I was running the risk of being T-boned.
I think what they are saying is - this won't stop being hyper-competitive. Most will not end up getting that tenured professorship. But a reasonable period in academia of 4 or 5 years for a PhD should be enough to differentiate candidates and put them on that track or not, instead of leading people along for 7+ years before flushing them. Put the rest out of their misery sooner so they can go do whatever they are going to end up doing in industry.
I'm not sure most people here understand how it works to get a Ph.D. in the humanities. For example, in history the years long effort to finish a Ph.D. program happens because it takes a long time to do original research and scholarship that contributes original scholarship to the field. A history grad student can finish her coursework fairly quickly and take comprehensive exams. I have known people who had read SO MUCH and remembered SO MUCH that they were probably ready for comps day one. It's the period after comps that is so difficult. We know of history grad students who get to A.B.D. (all but dissertation) and then can never finish. The rate of history grad students who are A.B.D. and never graduate is around 75%. If you have funding in the humanities for your coursework you're a superstar, but that still does not mean you will have the resourses to finish. Usually, you can't get what you need (i.e. primary source documents) where you live, so you have to travel, sometimes for months or years, to finish. Paraphrased quote from one professor regarding this time: it's time to dig deep into your trust fund.
A wonder material that turns out to be extremely dangerous?
You don't say? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
I was thinking the same thing. Mesothelioma is a horrible way to go.
If you're worried about corn fed beef, buy beef labeled grass fed. Nolan Ryan sells grass fed beef for only a nominal premium over regular grocery styore beef. Vote with you wallet, avoid fast food, and consume less but higher quality beef.
I wonder if this was a policy hearing or an investigative hearing. If it was an investigative hearing he should have sworn an oath to tell the truth. If what he says is true, I am troubled that the director of national intelligence did not know of the data collection. I don't believe what he's now saying, but if it's true then WTF is going on? Otherwise, he lied to Congress and was caught. On a related note, why is intelligence policy being reviewed in a public committee? He should have just refused to answer on national security grounds.
I was actually fairly optimistic about Dell taking his company private in hopes that he could get away from the quarterly "How much did you make these last three months?" As I understood things, Michael Dell felt that Wall Street had crushed the life out of his company or its ability to innovate. Dell offered pretty good business products and services fifteen years ago (next-day warranty on-site repairs to BFE, Texas). Now it's just a target because of its cash on hand and the value of its financing business. Sigh. Of course, in the grand scheme of things, it's been so long since Dell made quality business computers, I find it hard to believe that quality would once again become important without firing everyone in management, and that almost never happens. Still, it would have been nice.
There's this app for New Yorkers evidently. Any suggestions from anyone for those of us who don't live in NY?
Cop Tape
Why do they grow rice in Texas (a drought state)? There's always a big hubbub in Austin when the LCRA releases water to the south Texas rice farmers when we're in the middle of a drought. Don't grow rice in a desert!
Parts of Texas get 45-50 inches of rain a year. East Texas is lush and green. It's pretty shocking if your only exposure to Texas has been a television show about drug smuggling through West Texas a trip to the Hill Country (Austin).
Maybe the public at large is more concerned about which husband/wife the latest Kardashian is on, but the age of the geeks is accelerating far faster than any it ever has, and it will continue to do so as long as there is the tiniest of means.
I think most people are tired of Hollywood stars, reality TV, and people famous for being famous. Mass market media is now a race to the bottom to keep the dwindling ignorant interested, and it was never very good at keeping the public informed about science and technology, and my guess would be that it's always been easier to have an "informed" interview with a Kardashian versus and informed interview of a scientist or engineer.
Couple of issues ago. Sorry, no link, read it in the paper edition.
The multi national corporation is calling the tune, and the laws are now being adjusted to ensure that any infraction against the all mighty corporation anywhere on the planet is dealt with swiftly and with overwhelming force.
Hey!!! Corporations are people, too!
Yes, they release a new model to prevent the old model falling under the magic US$200 price point. They've got to keep the price up somehow.
This exactly. How many people aren't in the market for a game system but would buy one if the price were right. There are probably quite a few people who don't want a Wii (which is now essentially priced at as an impulse buy) who wouldn't mind a PS3. Too bad they won't crank out the old systems for cheap.
Because, as the news keeps reminding us, it's a scary world out there. Drug-Resistent Gonorrha If you need me, I'll be in my parents' basement.
...we are aiming for support on future hardware platforms.... Existing devices cannot be supported because of those many proprietary components....
Good thing that it was so easy to install ICS on my Touchpad. I feel sorry for all those not-too-technically-savvy folks who bought one but will never be able to upgrade their devices. HP still sucks.
WHat innovation is this discouraging? Samsung copied a feature someone else created and patented 8 years ago. How is doing that innovation. Do you own a dictionary? Now they get to be real innovative and come up with their own way of doing it.
So, Samsung owners aren't supposed to do a local search on their phone, something old POS desktops have been able to do for years, because it's on a phone? Seriously? How again is the patent system not broken?
The reason for the fragmentation is that the phone manufacturers and carriers don't want old phones updated. That would cut into sales of newer shinier phones.
Is it really about making money on newer, shinier new phones? It's not like you can go and buy a cheap data & voice plan from Verizon or AT&T if you already have a phone and don't need a subsidized one. I think it's probably more a problem with the U.S. having a pretty saturated mobile market, and carriers spending most of their marketing dollars to lure customers away from other carriers with a new shiny phone. That's an easier business model for the suits to implement than, oh, I don't know, having great service at a reasonable price. I think a lot of Americans are going to follow the shiny while complaining about the mobile service.
There will be consequences.
Case closed.
Nice pun.
Sigh. Like the new transatlantic cable for high speed trading, another project created solely to shave off time on automatic trades and thus print money. Does this do anything? Am I the only one who sees this as driving up transaction costs because you have "investors" who really don't invest in companies trying to take almost microscopic profit automatically? Where is the benefit to the financial system? What about the economy? I wonder how long people would stand for an extra layer being added to some other industry that does nothing but get paid for doing nothing?
These trades are like taxes, but they don't pay for any roads, health care, retirement, of national defense. They just make a few DBs who don't manufacture or invent anything rich. It will never happen, but I would like some politicians to get into an ethical debate on the socioeconomic benefits of this type of activity. Seriously. How defensible is this type of activity under Western Judeo-Christian ethical frameworks? Most American jurists publicly support natural law, at least while going through public confirmation hearings, so where exactly does this fit?
Their credit cards are a terrible deal too and they are hitting on those.
I disagree. Credit offers can be great if you're smart about using them. Personally, I love my BB credit card. You get no interest financing for 18 months, and the last computer I bought was online through the BB Marketplace and I still got the financing deal. Here's my simple two-step method for not getting stuck with a the "terrible deal interest." 1. Get irst statement. 2. Set up automatic payments to pay off the computer before the 18 month expiration. It's that simple.
Why not Linux for Security? Sure, okay, but what will run? Let's take the example of a small law office that bills by the hour. You have several needs . . .
1. Document Assembly. If your document assembly software is running on Windows, you're not going to migrate to Linux. Ever. Never EVER.The learning curve means lost revenue.
2. Time and billing. These take time to set up, they work with #1 above, and they usually work best on Windows.
3. Practice management. Once again, usually Windows only, or Windows best, and they work with #1 and #2 above.
4. Accounting and taxes. Quickbooks Enterprise works with Linux, but not the smaller packages. Also, there's not Turbotax Business for Linux.
I know a lot of people who would love to experiment with Linux, but it would be experimenting. A lot of people don't have time to experiment, and certainly don't want to pay someone to experiment. If you do everything yourself, there's a learning curve, and in a lot of industries there's a constant learning curve with new legislation, case law, and administrative decisions, there's no extra time to fiddle with your technology. There's always a bit of condescension when these posts come up, whether we're talking Linux or back in the day Mac OS, about continuing to use M$ products. It's like you're labeled for not wanting to f**k up your business by trying new software just for the sake of trying new software. If it were better, and CHEAPER, businesses would have switched years ago.