Well, since Mr. Clarke is dead, they'd probably sell a lot of copies if they managed to interview him again.
But nah, I subscribe to that mag to support the industry that manages to coerce women out of their clothes. Sure I could just sit back and consume free porn off the net, but those bunny ears and that bunny costume do something to me. Tossing $12 a year at them is cheap fun.
The big, bad armed forces can drool over sci fi toys and drop billions on hypersonic (and I might add, unproven) missiles, but the average ground pounding militia (aren't they always militia?) will still manage to make a lot of cheap and effective missiles out of stuff they can buy at the local Mosque Depot or Al Lowes.
I'd like to think Americans would be as resourceful if there was a war on our soil.
The core, loyal, long time users need to be generating some revenue, because that's all that matters to sites like this. Sure, they may have core, loyal, long time users. But companies would cash in all of them for some knitting forums if that would bring in revenue somehow.
Or to use a more relevant example, the news site Newsvine once had many core, loyal, long time users who contributed stories to the site much as we have editors here submitting stories (several times over in most cases). The community at Newsvine thrived on the discussion model and generally had a good time even when there was disagreement.
Then MSNBC bought Newsvine, let it become a festering cesspool of political attacks -imagine if EVERY story on/. became red state versus blue, and insightful posts were reduced to the commentary version of apes flinging poo. Sure Slashdot has some of that. But imagine it ALL like that. That's what Newsvine became. And then, they used it to develop what is now the current NBC news website. You need to see it. Oh golly you should see it.
All of that crap was done in the name of generating revenue. That's what happens when dollar signs become the most important thing. Dice is already heading that way with Slashdot. Eventually they will push the button and flush Slashdot. Cash is king. And we don't generate enough. I don't think we ever could either because no matter WHAT we do, there will always be this thought in their heads that they can get more money, if only... if only they do THIS or sell THAT.
As of Monday evening, half the local weather people were predicting we'd get what we got. The other half were pooh-poohing it and predicted we'd get nothing to worry about. As I went to bed Monday night, the pooh-pooh parade was full on. Nobody was planning to be closed on Tuesday. Had there been consensus at that moment, things would have been fine.
Since it was not unanimous, the bosses and agencies and schools all said, heck yeah we will be open normal on Tuesday. And everybody went to bed thinking that.
Sometime in the middle of the night, the NWS reaffirmed the snowfall and pretty much agreed with the locals who were saying watch out. But by then it was already too late. The notice needed to have been given four or five hours earlier.
Meanwhile the city and state, both of whom suck at normal maintenance and utterly fail at emergencies, both sat on their hands and hoped for nothing. They did nearly no prep work even though they had from 3:30AM until about 1:00PM to lay down salt or sand. They didn't do it.
And by the time they realized they actually needed to do it, it was already too late. The governor and mayor were off at event slapping each other on the back.
Kasim Reed always has been a bit of a doofus. This is just par for him. Nathan Deal is a country boy befuddled in the big city. His answer to most things is to get back on a horse and ride home asking what the problem is, if his horse can make it just fine.
The human body is well known for being a disaster, physically. It's both fragile and weak, high maintenance and low productivity. So there are two ways to accomplish exploring other planets.
One, we can modify ourselves to be stronger, tougher, resilient, faster to mature, longer to live, need less food, etc. There is small chance for success here due to the deeply rooted fears of modifying stuff we eat much less who we are. And the changes would have to be pretty radical. Oh and we don't know how to do this yet.
Two, we can find other ways to travel that bypass the hazards. I.e. wormholes, warping, dimensional hops, etc. These run the risk of being dangerous, perhaps with lethal side effects which would require the modifications mentioned in 1. Also, we don't know how to do any of these things either.
We may figure out One. And the right people will eventually get there. For two, we have no known ways to generate any of the exotic electromagnetic fields or physical materials needed to use warps or wormholes. Even if we sort of grasp the outlines of how it might work, we have no way to do it. We, may, in time, get there. But this seems far away.
Until the Wii, my only Nintendo product was a GameBoy. We had only Tetris and Super Mario World to play on it. My family could not afford more games.
We never got an NES or SNES or N64 or Gamecube. Somebody gave me a Wii as a present and that became the first Nintendo console I ever owned. I don't know how much actual play time I had on it (already in the past tense) but that thing went from oh cool to oh geez in a pretty quick time. Bought games for it. eBayed them hardly opened. Bought online games through it. Never played them. The little icons dancing just reminded me I spent money on something I never used.
That Wii went into disuse immediately and a storage until not long after. It may have been thrown away entirely by now. Don't remember. Don't care.
So my point is that Nintendo has almost zero meaning to me. Never played Zelda. Don't care. Never played Superman 64 but I love watching videos of people trying to play it. ha Nintendo as a hardware company... well, I'm not going to buy a Nintendo console. It seems safe to say, ever. But I do buy things for my tablet and smartphone. So if Nintendo ever wants to sell something to me, that's where I am.
Do you seek adventure beyond the treacherous waterfalls? Do you seek the mythical being the dwells in this unreachable place? If you do, then you must first find me.
South Korea uses SSNs? AND they misuse them just like the US?
This is baffling. Any decent country would look at the way the US uses these numbers and learn from our mistakes. I.e. have a number but don't make it the key to unlock credit or subject to tax refund abuse or any of the dozens of other ways SSNs are misused.
Chrome is my go-to for now, however the system of constant updates is starting to cause issues where the browser will start an update and suddenly pages no longer work right, things don't load properly. It's like they are Frankesteining the code into place while it's running. It makes for a wobbly product which may or may not work right next time I need to use it. You never know when these updates are happening or if you have picked up some sort of exploit to pwn your machine, or if the site you are trying to look at is down.
This is all the more frustrating where I work as we have moved to a Google Apps system for everyone. We rely on it all the time. When Chrome does these updates, Gmail dies, our chat function kicks people out, the trouble tickets go nuts because scattered people suddenly starting getting logged out of Google and their managers freak out wondering if the suddenly offline person has up and left or something. Yes, They look at that status to tell if you're working or not. Because they can.
Chrome happens to not work at all with our internal case management system so we have to use IE as well. Lots of tabs everywhere. Sigh.
The big networks PAY local stations to carry their networks (well, really they pay to get the ads carried; the shows come along for free sorta), and in turn the locals get to act like big shots and ride the branding and sell local ads on whatever they can the rest of the day. They only HAVE to be "CBS yourtown" for a few hours a day. The rest of the time they use that name, they're riding coattails.
If the big networks go away and take their paychecks with them, the local stations would need to find a new business model, which in all likelihood would be a lot more lean and a lot less fat local newscasts. And probably fewer stations too, because there just isn't room for 6-12 full size independent stations in most markets.
There are only SO many ads you can run for truck driving schools and ambulance chasers and weird eccentric furniture or grocery chains. And there are only SO many reruns of 1970s sitcoms you can use to fill airtime. And less really as old SD stuff looks pretty bad on a full HD station.
I would go out on a limb here and say maybe half the existing broadcast affiliates would die if all the big networks went cable/sat only. They'd be obsolete. Buggy-whip and harness salesmen in a world of passenger cars.
They do one antenna per sub to get around retransmission and license issues. By dedicating A single antenna per user, it's not retransmission. It's more of a relay.
If they grabbed the DVB-T feed, well, first they'd have to get it from somewhere which means a license fee, and lots of boxes one per viewer. It just would not scale as and might run into license redistribution issues.
If big TV prevails, they will have successfully defended a dying business model which they will use to insulate themselves from having to evolve in what is a very evolving world, and they will die, frustrated and alone, isolated from the audiences.
If Aereo and the others prevail, they will usher in a new era of content that no longer needs as many middlemen to deliver it, and old broadcast media will wither and die.
Either way, the old way dies. They have received the Hokuto Dan Kotsukin. They are already dead.
Can relate. We live on a busy corner with stop signs and a lot of traffic. Passing emergency sirens or even cars with loud radios playing would pull my relative out into the yard where he would scream at anyone going by. He already hears things so noises make it worse.
One of his front yard tirades took a racial angle and as a result some of the people he insulted returned with baseball bats looking for the person who had offended them. They didn't understand his problem and didn't care. They wanted revenge. Luckily that day he'd already gotten arrested (this was before the incident with the riot gear police) for attacking a neighbor and ripping down phone lines and was in jail by the time the gangs came by. Instead of him they found me trying to clean up the mess and came very close to taking it out on me.
This is exactly what happens with a close relative. He thinks he no longer needs the meds and stops taking them and then degenerates into a world where he hears voices constantly, destroys everything in his home, attacks neighbors and family members, etc.
The last incident where he tried to kill another relative resulted in 13 cops in the house and the patient got tazered five times, pepper sprayed and beaten by the cops in riot gear. In their defense, he is immensely strong and it took everything the police had to control him. They only won when he finally wore down. He was hauled off to hospital where he remained for a month. He's now in a sort of nursing home and will probably never come home again.
All because he would not take his meds. Back on his meds, he is OK. Not fine but OK. But at home, nobody can make him take the meds. He will stop. And things will end up just like before.
The main thing wrong with Canada's manufacturing is the way you folks stick your noses in the air and snub anything made in the US, while down in the US, nobody pays much of any mind at all where things are made and honestly don't care if their Toyota was made in Louisiana or Ontario or Japan.
Nobody here cares that 90% of our shampoo and soaps are made in Canada. But you can BET Canadian shoppers check carefully before they buy soap and make sure it's not made in USA. Eewwww it's from America. Yuck.
I am one of the few who does care. I was honestly glad my last plane trip was on Embraer equipment instead of Canadair. I avoid buying Canadian whenever I can. Generally this works well for me.
Yeah it's TOTALLY "wow somebody with limited English skills, possibly a fresh graduate, and possibly with shaky immigration work status, we can hire a lot of them for peanuts and since they don't know who we are, they'll fall for low salary offers and not complain AT ALL when we don't train them and throw shovels of work at them"
My Canadian employer hires tons of these folks because most of them will work for 1/3rd what they'd normally pay. Lack of common languages means they are isolated in the workplace and keep their heads down and don't ask for anything. Most of them last a year or two before they bail and attempt to cash in a couple years of experience at the company.
It is quite honestly a WTF moment when HR announces we've hired somebody who is not immediately obviously an immigrant -HR passes around photos and little bios on the new hires so yes, we DO know exactly where they are from and what ethnicity they have, what they like to eat, last place they travelled, and so on. The hiring bias is incredible and somewhat of an open joke.
The company does this just because these workers are cheap.
Very glad I am adult well past having to deal with taking bullshit tests like this, and also glad I don't have kids who would have to deal with it now.
I keep hearing about how we need to throw more money at education and get kids to spend more time in school. We already put people in school from age 5-ish to their early 20s, longer for specialities. We're already BURNING the prime years of someone's life trying to stuff their heads with junk like this which offers minimal if any actual benefit and usefulness in what will become their everyday life after school. And it takes a huge chunk of years to do it.
Thank you Greece for inventing this system. Great job. Just like everything else Greece has done, it falls into ruins and debt. But great job!
The way we educate is broken. It takes far too long. The material is not nearly useful enough. And it costs too much. These are all areas that need to be improved. Faster, better, cheaper. Unfortunately, the people vested in education -teachers, boards of regents, etc, are all so heavily invested in keeping things as they are (or increasing their power or endowments), nobody will ever step back and evaluate with an open mind and blank sheet of paper what and how we are doing what we do and whether it might make sense to do something different.
The place where I work recently introduced OKRs and Stack Ranking, bragging about how teh awesome it was at great companies like Zynga, so it MUST be teh great idea at a stupid place like ours.
This was when Zynga was deep in death throes and shedding value like a hairy dog in July sheds hair. For HR, pride. We're like some internet company the executive assistant has heard of! For people who know things about struggling companies, completely laughable.
We are teh bullshit INC. Let's be like Zynga! Oh yeah!
We're about to see what the first quarter of OKRs will bring, where, as they say, the trickle down cascade goals (which nobody has bothered to discuss with me at all) are not actually supposed to be reachable. "Because reaching them means you didn't set the bar high enough." Not reaching goals ALSO means you no longer qualify for pass/fail bonuses or promotions so the meager cash kick (typically one third of a regular paycheck; that's right a fraction of, not a multiple of) we get is effectively eliminated. Nobody is going to meet goal any more. But they promise OKR scores are "not to be used" for eval purposes.
Then what the fuck ARE they for? Shits and giggles? They expect us to believe this bullshit. "Your metrics show... oh you didn't meet any of your goals! Tsk Tsk. You are now on automatic probation!"
I expect, no, I WANT to be first against the wall when the stack ranking cuts come. Cash me out. Give me my unusable vacation time and some severance and free me from this madhouse. And they damn well won't DO it! They know what I want and won't do it.
Regular, barely-used Wii are like $40 tops at yard sales, flea markets, etc. They work fine and normally have all the stuff this Mini lacks. Like, I dunno, what the hell does a Wii DO again? That Mii thing?
Well, OK old Wii aren't red. Boo hoo. $3 worth of spray paint will fix that up.
Still leaves $57 for pizza and drinks to entice your friends to come over and get bored quick playing some group game that is not actually fun.
Pity PC Power & Cooling is apparently going down with the OCZ ship. For the better part of a decade, I always heard PP&C PSUs were the best and they had prices to match that rep. I could never hope to afford one.
And then OCZ bought them, and curiously, the positive reviews became harder to find and the off-the-cuff remarks ("Hey so and so is a good brand of whatever, check it out!") stopped entirely.
Suddenly the prices had dropped into the normal range and now a 760 watt PP&C PSU is like $60. And you get an AMEX rebate card with it. The PSU itself is just some outsourced part they got from who knows where.
Having too many choices in this case is not the same as having too much choice.
This sounds like nonsense but what it means is that I can look over a huge range of Android devices and immediately reject out of hand probably 95% of them. Too big, too small, wrong shape, wrong color, wrong brand, wrong OS version, wrong features, wrong ROM options, lack of aftermarket cases, etc. The pruning is fast and brutal and ends up with a couple of models on the short list and easily down to one for the final. I had no trouble at all picking my last Android phone and tablet.
So there's a lot of choice. But a lot of it is irrelevant, and thus has no meaning. Same as there are lots of car choices but if you want a specific type, you can eliminate nearly all the others. Most people do not put all the subcompact cars on the same list with pickup trucks, vans, big rigs, or motorbikes.
I had no trouble picking the last car I bought. First, I found out which models offered some specific features I wanted. ALL the others immediately dropped out of the running. Then it was price, and again the list pruned. Very quickly the list narrowed down to one model that met what I wanted and I ordered that car online without even test-driving it. Why bother when the pruning had already determined this car we the best option? And, I was right.
Pecan trees are worse. Roots everywhere. Leaves. Oh god the leaves. And periodically the damn tree throws nuts at you. Not the tasty brown kind. No, these come as green-husked rocks 2-3 times the size of the nut. Capable of drawing blood if they hit you or shattering car windows or leaving dents worthy of hail storm,
But wait, there's more. As a defense mechanism, the tree periodically sheds whole thousand pound limbs. Which it drops on you, your house, your neighbor's house, whatever. You MAY get a warning when it drops a small green branch first. Maybe. Not always. Mostly the tree wants to kill you.
But wait there's more! The sap is acidic and rains during the spring. It will ruin car paint and make anything turn black and then stick there like glue. Getting it off is extremely hard. The leaves are bad too when wet. Your yard or car or you end up covered in a soggy mess of leaves which are slowly eating whatever they fall on. The stuff is nasty.
And to make it all fun, the stupid trees only drop useful edible nuts every few years, or less. And squirrels often get them before you can and ruin it. They also bury them in your yard so A) you hit the damn things constantly, and B) new Pecan trees pop up here and there.
Oh and they kill anything that tries to grow underneath. So forget having a nice lawn under a Pecan tree. Think dirt and weeds. Actually, think about explosives and a huge saw. Or move.
The point is, even if we unearth all those missing 106 episodes, the actual episodes might not stand up to all the hype and expectation heaped up on them.
Indeed. The show was much more firmly aimed at kids back in those days, compared to the more adult aim of recent years. Viewers accustomed to seeing the current show would be flabbergasted with those early episodes. It's the same show in name only.
The article describes some effort put forth to encourage the cell companies to stick with 3G, that 4G was a lark. See, that right there shows that RIM had NO IDEA what their customers were doing, who were, by that point, already betting billions on Wimax or LTE.
You can't in any sort of right mind expect to go to a Verizon or ATT about to spend BILLIONS on a buildout and tell them your commodity phone -which doesn't need that super expensive network- is all they need. This is like telling somebody buying a fancy car that a little putt-putt motor is all they need. No. Stupid.
If that kind of thinking represents RIM's general mindset, then they wrote their own epitaph years ago and only now are they finally realizing it. Or maybe they're in denial. I don't hear anybody saying "Wow, we screwed up!" only that the MARKET wasn't smart enough to choose the right phone. WTF.
Look, Apple has long TOLD people what they wanted to buy and gotten away with it because Apple, love them or hate them, comes up with some innovative reasons to back up this idea that Apple knows best and we should all just be quiet and buy it. There's a reason for the Apple arrogance.
At no point in RIM's history have they ever stood at that level where they could tell anyone what they should buy. They've never had that kind of appeal. Close, maybe. But it was years ago. Not now. Not even close. The problem is they lived in a feedback loop where they told themselves how important they were until they forgot to actually talk to anyone who wasn't working there.
FWIW, I work for a Canadian company which has grown by buying up other companies much like RIM bought and flopped QNX. The very same problems have hit us, hard. Three or four platforms running in different directions, new hires needed all over and none to be had, piss-poor accounts that barely contribute but demand lots of attention for dead-end products, and we've bled talent like crazy only to replace them with college students and possibly illegals. These folks can't DO what's needed. They aren't fixing the backlogs. They just answer the phone when irate customers call up.
I fear we're going to implode much like RIM has. The similarities are really spooky.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, since Mr. Clarke is dead, they'd probably sell a lot of copies if they managed to interview him again.
But nah, I subscribe to that mag to support the industry that manages to coerce women out of their clothes. Sure I could just sit back and consume free porn off the net, but those bunny ears and that bunny costume do something to me. Tossing $12 a year at them is cheap fun.
The big, bad armed forces can drool over sci fi toys and drop billions on hypersonic (and I might add, unproven) missiles, but the average ground pounding militia (aren't they always militia?) will still manage to make a lot of cheap and effective missiles out of stuff they can buy at the local Mosque Depot or Al Lowes.
I'd like to think Americans would be as resourceful if there was a war on our soil.
The core, loyal, long time users need to be generating some revenue, because that's all that matters to sites like this. Sure, they may have core, loyal, long time users. But companies would cash in all of them for some knitting forums if that would bring in revenue somehow.
Or to use a more relevant example, the news site Newsvine once had many core, loyal, long time users who contributed stories to the site much as we have editors here submitting stories (several times over in most cases). The community at Newsvine thrived on the discussion model and generally had a good time even when there was disagreement.
Then MSNBC bought Newsvine, let it become a festering cesspool of political attacks -imagine if EVERY story on /. became red state versus blue, and insightful posts were reduced to the commentary version of apes flinging poo. Sure Slashdot has some of that. But imagine it ALL like that. That's what Newsvine became. And then, they used it to develop what is now the current NBC news website. You need to see it. Oh golly you should see it.
All of that crap was done in the name of generating revenue. That's what happens when dollar signs become the most important thing. Dice is already heading that way with Slashdot. Eventually they will push the button and flush Slashdot. Cash is king. And we don't generate enough. I don't think we ever could either because no matter WHAT we do, there will always be this thought in their heads that they can get more money, if only... if only they do THIS or sell THAT.
As of Monday evening, half the local weather people were predicting we'd get what we got. The other half were pooh-poohing it and predicted we'd get nothing to worry about. As I went to bed Monday night, the pooh-pooh parade was full on. Nobody was planning to be closed on Tuesday. Had there been consensus at that moment, things would have been fine.
Since it was not unanimous, the bosses and agencies and schools all said, heck yeah we will be open normal on Tuesday. And everybody went to bed thinking that.
Sometime in the middle of the night, the NWS reaffirmed the snowfall and pretty much agreed with the locals who were saying watch out. But by then it was already too late. The notice needed to have been given four or five hours earlier.
Meanwhile the city and state, both of whom suck at normal maintenance and utterly fail at emergencies, both sat on their hands and hoped for nothing. They did nearly no prep work even though they had from 3:30AM until about 1:00PM to lay down salt or sand. They didn't do it.
And by the time they realized they actually needed to do it, it was already too late. The governor and mayor were off at event slapping each other on the back.
Kasim Reed always has been a bit of a doofus. This is just par for him. Nathan Deal is a country boy befuddled in the big city. His answer to most things is to get back on a horse and ride home asking what the problem is, if his horse can make it just fine.
The human body is well known for being a disaster, physically. It's both fragile and weak, high maintenance and low productivity. So there are two ways to accomplish exploring other planets.
One, we can modify ourselves to be stronger, tougher, resilient, faster to mature, longer to live, need less food, etc. There is small chance for success here due to the deeply rooted fears of modifying stuff we eat much less who we are. And the changes would have to be pretty radical. Oh and we don't know how to do this yet.
Two, we can find other ways to travel that bypass the hazards. I.e. wormholes, warping, dimensional hops, etc. These run the risk of being dangerous, perhaps with lethal side effects which would require the modifications mentioned in 1. Also, we don't know how to do any of these things either.
We may figure out One. And the right people will eventually get there. For two, we have no known ways to generate any of the exotic electromagnetic fields or physical materials needed to use warps or wormholes. Even if we sort of grasp the outlines of how it might work, we have no way to do it. We, may, in time, get there. But this seems far away.
Until the Wii, my only Nintendo product was a GameBoy. We had only Tetris and Super Mario World to play on it. My family could not afford more games.
We never got an NES or SNES or N64 or Gamecube. Somebody gave me a Wii as a present and that became the first Nintendo console I ever owned. I don't know how much actual play time I had on it (already in the past tense) but that thing went from oh cool to oh geez in a pretty quick time. Bought games for it. eBayed them hardly opened. Bought online games through it. Never played them. The little icons dancing just reminded me I spent money on something I never used.
That Wii went into disuse immediately and a storage until not long after. It may have been thrown away entirely by now. Don't remember. Don't care.
So my point is that Nintendo has almost zero meaning to me. Never played Zelda. Don't care. Never played Superman 64 but I love watching videos of people trying to play it. ha Nintendo as a hardware company ... well, I'm not going to buy a Nintendo console. It seems safe to say, ever. But I do buy things for my tablet and smartphone. So if Nintendo ever wants to sell something to me, that's where I am.
Do you seek adventure beyond the treacherous waterfalls? Do you seek the mythical being the dwells in this unreachable place? If you do, then you must first find me.
South Korea uses SSNs? AND they misuse them just like the US?
This is baffling. Any decent country would look at the way the US uses these numbers and learn from our mistakes. I.e. have a number but don't make it the key to unlock credit or subject to tax refund abuse or any of the dozens of other ways SSNs are misused.
Chrome is my go-to for now, however the system of constant updates is starting to cause issues where the browser will start an update and suddenly pages no longer work right, things don't load properly. It's like they are Frankesteining the code into place while it's running. It makes for a wobbly product which may or may not work right next time I need to use it. You never know when these updates are happening or if you have picked up some sort of exploit to pwn your machine, or if the site you are trying to look at is down.
This is all the more frustrating where I work as we have moved to a Google Apps system for everyone. We rely on it all the time. When Chrome does these updates, Gmail dies, our chat function kicks people out, the trouble tickets go nuts because scattered people suddenly starting getting logged out of Google and their managers freak out wondering if the suddenly offline person has up and left or something. Yes, They look at that status to tell if you're working or not. Because they can.
Chrome happens to not work at all with our internal case management system so we have to use IE as well. Lots of tabs everywhere. Sigh.
+1 Informative
If you want to reward PEOPLE, friend them. Or whatever. Mod the post based on content, contribution, value, humor, regardless of who wrote it.
The big networks PAY local stations to carry their networks (well, really they pay to get the ads carried; the shows come along for free sorta), and in turn the locals get to act like big shots and ride the branding and sell local ads on whatever they can the rest of the day. They only HAVE to be "CBS yourtown" for a few hours a day. The rest of the time they use that name, they're riding coattails.
If the big networks go away and take their paychecks with them, the local stations would need to find a new business model, which in all likelihood would be a lot more lean and a lot less fat local newscasts. And probably fewer stations too, because there just isn't room for 6-12 full size independent stations in most markets.
There are only SO many ads you can run for truck driving schools and ambulance chasers and weird eccentric furniture or grocery chains. And there are only SO many reruns of 1970s sitcoms you can use to fill airtime. And less really as old SD stuff looks pretty bad on a full HD station.
I would go out on a limb here and say maybe half the existing broadcast affiliates would die if all the big networks went cable/sat only. They'd be obsolete. Buggy-whip and harness salesmen in a world of passenger cars.
They do one antenna per sub to get around retransmission and license issues. By dedicating A single antenna per user, it's not retransmission. It's more of a relay.
If they grabbed the DVB-T feed, well, first they'd have to get it from somewhere which means a license fee, and lots of boxes one per viewer. It just would not scale as and might run into license redistribution issues.
This war is already over.
If big TV prevails, they will have successfully defended a dying business model which they will use to insulate themselves from having to evolve in what is a very evolving world, and they will die, frustrated and alone, isolated from the audiences.
If Aereo and the others prevail, they will usher in a new era of content that no longer needs as many middlemen to deliver it, and old broadcast media will wither and die.
Either way, the old way dies. They have received the Hokuto Dan Kotsukin. They are already dead.
Can relate. We live on a busy corner with stop signs and a lot of traffic. Passing emergency sirens or even cars with loud radios playing would pull my relative out into the yard where he would scream at anyone going by. He already hears things so noises make it worse.
One of his front yard tirades took a racial angle and as a result some of the people he insulted returned with baseball bats looking for the person who had offended them. They didn't understand his problem and didn't care. They wanted revenge. Luckily that day he'd already gotten arrested (this was before the incident with the riot gear police) for attacking a neighbor and ripping down phone lines and was in jail by the time the gangs came by. Instead of him they found me trying to clean up the mess and came very close to taking it out on me.
This is exactly what happens with a close relative. He thinks he no longer needs the meds and stops taking them and then degenerates into a world where he hears voices constantly, destroys everything in his home, attacks neighbors and family members, etc.
The last incident where he tried to kill another relative resulted in 13 cops in the house and the patient got tazered five times, pepper sprayed and beaten by the cops in riot gear. In their defense, he is immensely strong and it took everything the police had to control him. They only won when he finally wore down. He was hauled off to hospital where he remained for a month. He's now in a sort of nursing home and will probably never come home again.
All because he would not take his meds. Back on his meds, he is OK. Not fine but OK. But at home, nobody can make him take the meds. He will stop. And things will end up just like before.
The main thing wrong with Canada's manufacturing is the way you folks stick your noses in the air and snub anything made in the US, while down in the US, nobody pays much of any mind at all where things are made and honestly don't care if their Toyota was made in Louisiana or Ontario or Japan.
Nobody here cares that 90% of our shampoo and soaps are made in Canada. But you can BET Canadian shoppers check carefully before they buy soap and make sure it's not made in USA. Eewwww it's from America. Yuck.
I am one of the few who does care. I was honestly glad my last plane trip was on Embraer equipment instead of Canadair. I avoid buying Canadian whenever I can. Generally this works well for me.
Yeah it's TOTALLY "wow somebody with limited English skills, possibly a fresh graduate, and possibly with shaky immigration work status, we can hire a lot of them for peanuts and since they don't know who we are, they'll fall for low salary offers and not complain AT ALL when we don't train them and throw shovels of work at them"
My Canadian employer hires tons of these folks because most of them will work for 1/3rd what they'd normally pay. Lack of common languages means they are isolated in the workplace and keep their heads down and don't ask for anything. Most of them last a year or two before they bail and attempt to cash in a couple years of experience at the company.
It is quite honestly a WTF moment when HR announces we've hired somebody who is not immediately obviously an immigrant -HR passes around photos and little bios on the new hires so yes, we DO know exactly where they are from and what ethnicity they have, what they like to eat, last place they travelled, and so on. The hiring bias is incredible and somewhat of an open joke.
The company does this just because these workers are cheap.
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Very glad I am adult well past having to deal with taking bullshit tests like this, and also glad I don't have kids who would have to deal with it now.
I keep hearing about how we need to throw more money at education and get kids to spend more time in school. We already put people in school from age 5-ish to their early 20s, longer for specialities. We're already BURNING the prime years of someone's life trying to stuff their heads with junk like this which offers minimal if any actual benefit and usefulness in what will become their everyday life after school. And it takes a huge chunk of years to do it.
Thank you Greece for inventing this system. Great job. Just like everything else Greece has done, it falls into ruins and debt. But great job!
The way we educate is broken. It takes far too long. The material is not nearly useful enough. And it costs too much. These are all areas that need to be improved. Faster, better, cheaper. Unfortunately, the people vested in education -teachers, boards of regents, etc, are all so heavily invested in keeping things as they are (or increasing their power or endowments), nobody will ever step back and evaluate with an open mind and blank sheet of paper what and how we are doing what we do and whether it might make sense to do something different.
Same Pearson. They are also about to become the "official" test administrators for GED exams in my state, if not all states.
The place where I work recently introduced OKRs and Stack Ranking, bragging about how teh awesome it was at great companies like Zynga, so it MUST be teh great idea at a stupid place like ours.
This was when Zynga was deep in death throes and shedding value like a hairy dog in July sheds hair. For HR, pride. We're like some internet company the executive assistant has heard of! For people who know things about struggling companies, completely laughable.
We are teh bullshit INC. Let's be like Zynga! Oh yeah!
We're about to see what the first quarter of OKRs will bring, where, as they say, the trickle down cascade goals (which nobody has bothered to discuss with me at all) are not actually supposed to be reachable. "Because reaching them means you didn't set the bar high enough." Not reaching goals ALSO means you no longer qualify for pass/fail bonuses or promotions so the meager cash kick (typically one third of a regular paycheck; that's right a fraction of, not a multiple of) we get is effectively eliminated. Nobody is going to meet goal any more. But they promise OKR scores are "not to be used" for eval purposes.
Then what the fuck ARE they for? Shits and giggles? They expect us to believe this bullshit. "Your metrics show... oh you didn't meet any of your goals! Tsk Tsk. You are now on automatic probation!"
I expect, no, I WANT to be first against the wall when the stack ranking cuts come. Cash me out. Give me my unusable vacation time and some severance and free me from this madhouse. And they damn well won't DO it! They know what I want and won't do it.
Damn them.
Regular, barely-used Wii are like $40 tops at yard sales, flea markets, etc. They work fine and normally have all the stuff this Mini lacks. Like, I dunno, what the hell does a Wii DO again? That Mii thing?
Well, OK old Wii aren't red. Boo hoo. $3 worth of spray paint will fix that up.
Still leaves $57 for pizza and drinks to entice your friends to come over and get bored quick playing some group game that is not actually fun.
Pity PC Power & Cooling is apparently going down with the OCZ ship. For the better part of a decade, I always heard PP&C PSUs were the best and they had prices to match that rep. I could never hope to afford one.
And then OCZ bought them, and curiously, the positive reviews became harder to find and the off-the-cuff remarks ("Hey so and so is a good brand of whatever, check it out!") stopped entirely.
Suddenly the prices had dropped into the normal range and now a 760 watt PP&C PSU is like $60. And you get an AMEX rebate card with it. The PSU itself is just some outsourced part they got from who knows where.
Having too many choices in this case is not the same as having too much choice.
This sounds like nonsense but what it means is that I can look over a huge range of Android devices and immediately reject out of hand probably 95% of them. Too big, too small, wrong shape, wrong color, wrong brand, wrong OS version, wrong features, wrong ROM options, lack of aftermarket cases, etc. The pruning is fast and brutal and ends up with a couple of models on the short list and easily down to one for the final. I had no trouble at all picking my last Android phone and tablet.
So there's a lot of choice. But a lot of it is irrelevant, and thus has no meaning. Same as there are lots of car choices but if you want a specific type, you can eliminate nearly all the others. Most people do not put all the subcompact cars on the same list with pickup trucks, vans, big rigs, or motorbikes.
I had no trouble picking the last car I bought. First, I found out which models offered some specific features I wanted. ALL the others immediately dropped out of the running. Then it was price, and again the list pruned. Very quickly the list narrowed down to one model that met what I wanted and I ordered that car online without even test-driving it. Why bother when the pruning had already determined this car we the best option? And, I was right.
Pecan trees are worse. Roots everywhere. Leaves. Oh god the leaves. And periodically the damn tree throws nuts at you. Not the tasty brown kind. No, these come as green-husked rocks 2-3 times the size of the nut. Capable of drawing blood if they hit you or shattering car windows or leaving dents worthy of hail storm,
But wait, there's more. As a defense mechanism, the tree periodically sheds whole thousand pound limbs. Which it drops on you, your house, your neighbor's house, whatever. You MAY get a warning when it drops a small green branch first. Maybe. Not always. Mostly the tree wants to kill you.
But wait there's more! The sap is acidic and rains during the spring. It will ruin car paint and make anything turn black and then stick there like glue. Getting it off is extremely hard. The leaves are bad too when wet. Your yard or car or you end up covered in a soggy mess of leaves which are slowly eating whatever they fall on. The stuff is nasty.
And to make it all fun, the stupid trees only drop useful edible nuts every few years, or less. And squirrels often get them before you can and ruin it. They also bury them in your yard so A) you hit the damn things constantly, and B) new Pecan trees pop up here and there.
Oh and they kill anything that tries to grow underneath. So forget having a nice lawn under a Pecan tree. Think dirt and weeds. Actually, think about explosives and a huge saw. Or move.
The point is, even if we unearth all those missing 106 episodes, the actual episodes might not stand up to all the hype and expectation heaped up on them.
Indeed. The show was much more firmly aimed at kids back in those days, compared to the more adult aim of recent years. Viewers accustomed to seeing the current show would be flabbergasted with those early episodes. It's the same show in name only.
The article describes some effort put forth to encourage the cell companies to stick with 3G, that 4G was a lark. See, that right there shows that RIM had NO IDEA what their customers were doing, who were, by that point, already betting billions on Wimax or LTE.
You can't in any sort of right mind expect to go to a Verizon or ATT about to spend BILLIONS on a buildout and tell them your commodity phone -which doesn't need that super expensive network- is all they need. This is like telling somebody buying a fancy car that a little putt-putt motor is all they need. No. Stupid.
If that kind of thinking represents RIM's general mindset, then they wrote their own epitaph years ago and only now are they finally realizing it. Or maybe they're in denial. I don't hear anybody saying "Wow, we screwed up!" only that the MARKET wasn't smart enough to choose the right phone. WTF.
Look, Apple has long TOLD people what they wanted to buy and gotten away with it because Apple, love them or hate them, comes up with some innovative reasons to back up this idea that Apple knows best and we should all just be quiet and buy it. There's a reason for the Apple arrogance.
At no point in RIM's history have they ever stood at that level where they could tell anyone what they should buy. They've never had that kind of appeal. Close, maybe. But it was years ago. Not now. Not even close. The problem is they lived in a feedback loop where they told themselves how important they were until they forgot to actually talk to anyone who wasn't working there.
FWIW, I work for a Canadian company which has grown by buying up other companies much like RIM bought and flopped QNX. The very same problems have hit us, hard. Three or four platforms running in different directions, new hires needed all over and none to be had, piss-poor accounts that barely contribute but demand lots of attention for dead-end products, and we've bled talent like crazy only to replace them with college students and possibly illegals. These folks can't DO what's needed. They aren't fixing the backlogs. They just answer the phone when irate customers call up.
I fear we're going to implode much like RIM has. The similarities are really spooky.