My wife and I recently took over a business that was still using Windows 2000. I had forgotten that a Windows computer could handle email, web-browsing, and QuickBooks just fine on a 6 year old computer with 512MB of RAM.
Please tell me you just like to exaggerate and don't actually think that's true. Ever hear of San Diego, Santa Clara, Alameda, Sacramento, and Contra Costa counties? Each of those counties has a population of over 1 million (way over in a few of them). The GP's 5 counties account for a lot of people (over 18 million, or about half of California), but nowhere near "80% of California's population."
The real problem with the GP's argument is that he's flat out wrong. My dad has FIOS in San Jose, so it's at least available in counties other than the 5 he listed.
While it's true that the providers are (most) responsible for the limited Bluetooth functionality on phones, most of the things you mention being able to do are possible with a year-old KRZR on Verizon (although I can't believe I'm defending them). Out of the box I was able to transfer pictures and songs (not ringtones) to/from my Mac Mini using Bluetooth. With a few tweaks to iSync, the KRZR was able to sync my calendar and address book as well. Of course, it also synced with the TL Handsfree, but that's to be expected.
Some hacking of the phone allows you to use it as a modem without signing up for Verizon's expensive data plans, but I don't believe that feature is available out of the box (I didn't try until after I had flashed my phone). Of course, the Verizon firmware that they put on every phone is so bad that I flashed my KRZR over to the Alltel/Motorola firmware within 2 days of getting the phone, but that wasn't necessary to use most of the bluetooth functions.
Did you even look at the Norm page? It doesn't have any "kind of navigation feature that someone compared to some aspect of the one-click process", it has a bunch of text (the quotes) and a single link at the bottom of the page (link to the "Cheers Main Page"). There is nothing on that page that has anything to do with one-click in any way unless you are saying that a regular old link is somehow related to one-click, in which case you better submit just about every page on the web. There's no possible explanation for it other than "Amazon's lawyers trying to bury relevant prior art". Look at the page before you state is "is not obviously irrelevant".
Having a different price in store than what you have on your website is one thing. If you read the linked article (or the story/discussion on/. a while back) you would know that the issue is Best Buy has a "secret" site that looks exactly like the real site but has different (read: higher) prices which they then use to deny price matching to their own website (which they claim to allow).
I had an issue with this back before I heard anything about the secret site where I was attempting to use a coupon from bestbuy.com. The Best Buy employee stated they weren't honoring the coupon because it was a fake, and when I told them I had just printed off of their site 10 minutes earlier, they brought up "bestbuy.com" and I couldn't find the coupon anywhere. I left, went home, verified the coupon was available at bestbuy.com and called up customer service. Eventually the customer service rep called the manager of my local store and forced them to accept the coupon. I wrote the incident off as a freak occurrence, but after learning about their "secret" site I think it's pretty obvious they brought up the secret site (whether intentionally or not I leave to your opinion of Best Buy employees) and used that to "prove" the coupon wasn't available from their website.
We're actually spending more money because DST has a specific effect (ask any retailer) - more sales. People shop more during DST, and it's an immediate noticeable increase. I notice increased sales on the web as well.
I'm sure that the fact that DST just happens to include summer, when people are much more likely to travel and spend money, has nothing to do with increased sales.
While I'm still pushing anyone who asks my opinion towards OS X instead of Vista, I do agree that Vista/Office 2007 are improvements on XP/2003 (assuming you're system can handle the Vista system requirements). I received a copy of Office 2007 at a recent MS launch event and am happy with it. However, there is a definite learning curve for people who are used to using XP.
Today I watched a co-worker spend 15 minutes (no exaggeration) trying to figure out how to print a Word document (I finally showed him). Just for fun, we asked his office mate to try, and after 5 minutes of searching (again, no exaggeration) he eventually found the Print Preview function and used that to print. Neither one of them ever thought to click on the logo in the upper-left corner of the application. They both are so used to double-clicking that corner to close an application that it never occurred to them to look there for common functions like print.
I just got a Verizon KRZR and flashed it to the Alltel firmware in a few hours. Once you get the Alltel firmware loaded (pretty much the standard Motorola firmware), the phone is much better. At least on the KRZR Verizon doesn't cripple the bluetooth functionality (not as much as on my V710), but it's worth the effort to flash just to get better battery life and to get rid of the horribly slow Verizon firmware.
As a previous poster noted, you could lose the ability to update the PRL using *228 (although some people have claimed to have success), but it is pretty easy to just manually update the PRL when needed.
and there is a minimum of two providers (the two satellite companies) available to every American
Every American except those living in a home that can't receive a satellite signal. You know, like people who live in areas with tall buildings that make satellite reception impossible. Of course, there couldn't possibly be any place like that in America.
I know that MythTV also uses other methods including looking for the network logo which anymore is included on almost every station. I can't speak for ReplayTV, but using MythTV's combination method it probably catches about 90% of commercial breaks properly (and even the ones it misses are not big deal with a 30s skip).
It's really quite nice being able to completely power down the MythTV box that sits in my living room. If I do the same to my Tivo, not only does stuff not get recorded but I will have to re-enter that stupid hack to get my 30-second skip back again.
Are you saying that if you "completely power down the MythTV box" it somehow continues to record your shows? Are you talking about your master backend machine or a remote frontend? If you're talking about a frontend-only machine, that really isn't the same as turning off the TiVo. Also, does turning the power off on a TiVo (not pulling the power plug or anything) actually stop the box from recording? I haven't had a TiVo in my house for about 5 years (been using MythTV and cable company HD DVRs), but I thought the TiVo would turn itself on and record when your shows come on. I have been using MythTV for around 3 years and am a huge fan, but if you turn the box off, it isn't going to record. There are plenty of advantages of using MythTV over TiVo (the commercial skip and remote frontends you mention being 2), you don't need to be making more up.
Haven't we gone over this on every PS3/Wii article with regards to MS and the 360? No company is going to come out and say that there's going to be a pricecut soon. If they did that, everyone would sit around and wait for the pricedrop and no one would be buying PSPs. I'm not saying that there's going to be a price cut, but the fact that Sony denies it means nothing.
I was about to post this same thing. The ability to play multiplayer without having to re-purchase the game is great. I bought a DS Lite because I wanted to play New Super Mario Brothers. A week after I had purchased mine (and Mario Kart to go with it) I had to go out and buy the fiancee her own DS so that we could play against each other (as well as each play separate games at the same time. there were some arguments over who got to play when). If we would have also had to re-purchase any games we already had to play multiplayer, we probably wouldn't have gotten the second one. Sure I wish players w/o a cartridge weren't restricted to one driver/kart in Mario Kart, but it's still a blast.
Also, someone else already said this but I wanted to restate it. My fiancee is not a gamer, but she loves the DS. She would play the Sims occassionally, but that was about it. Now, she takes her DS to work to play on lunch breaks and pretty much any other downtime she has.
One last note, it seems like we aren't the only ones that love the DS Lite. I had no problem buying the DS/Mario Bros combo at Costco, but when I tried to buy the second DS Lite I couldn't find one anywhere (this was about a month ago). I went to Best Buy, Target, Fry's, Gamestop, even Wal-Mart(shudder). Fry's had a few of the old DS's, but no one else had any. I finally got one two days later when I swung by a Target and got lucky that they had just received a shipment. Also worth noting that all of the stores I checked had tons of PSPs on their shelves.
That's great that you're a fan of Amazon Prime, but that really doesn't have anything to do with whether or not it's a valid patent. I used Amazon Prime when they offered me the free trial. It was pretty nice and actually resulted in me buying items from Amazon that I might normally have purchased somewhere else if I would have had to pay for shipping at Amazon (or wait the two weeks or so it takes a package to be delivered using their "Super Saver" shipping). However, whether or not it's a good product doesn't change the fact that this patent application should be rejected (of course, it won't). I'm a huge fan of buy-one-get-one-free promotions, that doesn't mean that Vons should be able to patent the business plan of giving customers two cases of Pepsi for the price of one.
Even Apple's "switch" ads didn't produce any perceptible benefit for the company.
Offtopic, I know, but I see a lot of posts about the Apple "switch" ads and how they are stupid or don't have any benefit for Apple. I don't know about anyone else but almost every non-geek I talk to that has seen them loves them. I personally know several people (friends' parents, my mother-in-law) who have even gone into the Apple store and played with a Mac because the commercials got their attention. My in-laws are now planning on purchasing an iMac as their next computer instead of a PC after their visit to the Apple store. I personally find them kind of dumb, but they definitely are being noticed (my mom and all of her friends routinely mention how much they love them) and are drawing in customers. I'm not trying to say that everyone I know is switching to a Mac because of Apple's great ads, but it is making people think about buying a Mac instead of a PC.
I don't know about the GP, but in San Diego my monthly bill runs ~$100/mo for a 2 bedroom apartment w/o running the AC. I'm still waiting/dreading my bill for the last month when the AC was on most of the time. We aren't running anything out of the ordinary (for Slashdot at least). Just one PC on full time and then a couple of laptops, 2 TVs, and the standard appliances.
Slashdot Mirror
My wife and I recently took over a business that was still using Windows 2000. I had forgotten that a Windows computer could handle email, web-browsing, and QuickBooks just fine on a 6 year old computer with 512MB of RAM.
Please tell me you just like to exaggerate and don't actually think that's true. Ever hear of San Diego, Santa Clara, Alameda, Sacramento, and Contra Costa counties? Each of those counties has a population of over 1 million (way over in a few of them). The GP's 5 counties account for a lot of people (over 18 million, or about half of California), but nowhere near "80% of California's population."
The real problem with the GP's argument is that he's flat out wrong. My dad has FIOS in San Jose, so it's at least available in counties other than the 5 he listed.
While it's true that the providers are (most) responsible for the limited Bluetooth functionality on phones, most of the things you mention being able to do are possible with a year-old KRZR on Verizon (although I can't believe I'm defending them). Out of the box I was able to transfer pictures and songs (not ringtones) to/from my Mac Mini using Bluetooth. With a few tweaks to iSync, the KRZR was able to sync my calendar and address book as well. Of course, it also synced with the TL Handsfree, but that's to be expected.
Some hacking of the phone allows you to use it as a modem without signing up for Verizon's expensive data plans, but I don't believe that feature is available out of the box (I didn't try until after I had flashed my phone). Of course, the Verizon firmware that they put on every phone is so bad that I flashed my KRZR over to the Alltel/Motorola firmware within 2 days of getting the phone, but that wasn't necessary to use most of the bluetooth functions.
Did you even look at the Norm page? It doesn't have any "kind of navigation feature that someone compared to some aspect of the one-click process", it has a bunch of text (the quotes) and a single link at the bottom of the page (link to the "Cheers Main Page"). There is nothing on that page that has anything to do with one-click in any way unless you are saying that a regular old link is somehow related to one-click, in which case you better submit just about every page on the web. There's no possible explanation for it other than "Amazon's lawyers trying to bury relevant prior art". Look at the page before you state is "is not obviously irrelevant".
Having a different price in store than what you have on your website is one thing. If you read the linked article (or the story/discussion on /. a while back) you would know that the issue is Best Buy has a "secret" site that looks exactly like the real site but has different (read: higher) prices which they then use to deny price matching to their own website (which they claim to allow).
I had an issue with this back before I heard anything about the secret site where I was attempting to use a coupon from bestbuy.com. The Best Buy employee stated they weren't honoring the coupon because it was a fake, and when I told them I had just printed off of their site 10 minutes earlier, they brought up "bestbuy.com" and I couldn't find the coupon anywhere. I left, went home, verified the coupon was available at bestbuy.com and called up customer service. Eventually the customer service rep called the manager of my local store and forced them to accept the coupon. I wrote the incident off as a freak occurrence, but after learning about their "secret" site I think it's pretty obvious they brought up the secret site (whether intentionally or not I leave to your opinion of Best Buy employees) and used that to "prove" the coupon wasn't available from their website.
While I'm still pushing anyone who asks my opinion towards OS X instead of Vista, I do agree that Vista/Office 2007 are improvements on XP/2003 (assuming you're system can handle the Vista system requirements). I received a copy of Office 2007 at a recent MS launch event and am happy with it. However, there is a definite learning curve for people who are used to using XP.
Today I watched a co-worker spend 15 minutes (no exaggeration) trying to figure out how to print a Word document (I finally showed him). Just for fun, we asked his office mate to try, and after 5 minutes of searching (again, no exaggeration) he eventually found the Print Preview function and used that to print. Neither one of them ever thought to click on the logo in the upper-left corner of the application. They both are so used to double-clicking that corner to close an application that it never occurred to them to look there for common functions like print.
I just got a Verizon KRZR and flashed it to the Alltel firmware in a few hours. Once you get the Alltel firmware loaded (pretty much the standard Motorola firmware), the phone is much better. At least on the KRZR Verizon doesn't cripple the bluetooth functionality (not as much as on my V710), but it's worth the effort to flash just to get better battery life and to get rid of the horribly slow Verizon firmware.
As a previous poster noted, you could lose the ability to update the PRL using *228 (although some people have claimed to have success), but it is pretty easy to just manually update the PRL when needed.
Isn't it?
And the four labels are...wait for it...RIAA members. Kind of like the title: "RIAA Members Sue Allofmp3.com Over Infringement"
I know that MythTV also uses other methods including looking for the network logo which anymore is included on almost every station. I can't speak for ReplayTV, but using MythTV's combination method it probably catches about 90% of commercial breaks properly (and even the ones it misses are not big deal with a 30s skip).
I'm going with heartlarious, but that's just me.
Haven't we gone over this on every PS3/Wii article with regards to MS and the 360? No company is going to come out and say that there's going to be a pricecut soon. If they did that, everyone would sit around and wait for the pricedrop and no one would be buying PSPs. I'm not saying that there's going to be a price cut, but the fact that Sony denies it means nothing.
I was about to post this same thing. The ability to play multiplayer without having to re-purchase the game is great. I bought a DS Lite because I wanted to play New Super Mario Brothers. A week after I had purchased mine (and Mario Kart to go with it) I had to go out and buy the fiancee her own DS so that we could play against each other (as well as each play separate games at the same time. there were some arguments over who got to play when). If we would have also had to re-purchase any games we already had to play multiplayer, we probably wouldn't have gotten the second one. Sure I wish players w/o a cartridge weren't restricted to one driver/kart in Mario Kart, but it's still a blast.
Also, someone else already said this but I wanted to restate it. My fiancee is not a gamer, but she loves the DS. She would play the Sims occassionally, but that was about it. Now, she takes her DS to work to play on lunch breaks and pretty much any other downtime she has.
One last note, it seems like we aren't the only ones that love the DS Lite. I had no problem buying the DS/Mario Bros combo at Costco, but when I tried to buy the second DS Lite I couldn't find one anywhere (this was about a month ago). I went to Best Buy, Target, Fry's, Gamestop, even Wal-Mart(shudder). Fry's had a few of the old DS's, but no one else had any. I finally got one two days later when I swung by a Target and got lucky that they had just received a shipment. Also worth noting that all of the stores I checked had tons of PSPs on their shelves.
That's great that you're a fan of Amazon Prime, but that really doesn't have anything to do with whether or not it's a valid patent. I used Amazon Prime when they offered me the free trial. It was pretty nice and actually resulted in me buying items from Amazon that I might normally have purchased somewhere else if I would have had to pay for shipping at Amazon (or wait the two weeks or so it takes a package to be delivered using their "Super Saver" shipping). However, whether or not it's a good product doesn't change the fact that this patent application should be rejected (of course, it won't). I'm a huge fan of buy-one-get-one-free promotions, that doesn't mean that Vons should be able to patent the business plan of giving customers two cases of Pepsi for the price of one.
Huh...I always thought the majority of Slashdotters don't actually read the articles.
I thought that the server OS was still going to be called Longhorn.
Am I missing something? How does 3965 kWH * 2 = 8 kWH?
I don't know about the GP, but in San Diego my monthly bill runs ~$100/mo for a 2 bedroom apartment w/o running the AC. I'm still waiting/dreading my bill for the last month when the AC was on most of the time. We aren't running anything out of the ordinary (for Slashdot at least). Just one PC on full time and then a couple of laptops, 2 TVs, and the standard appliances.