The place where I work is about to go from two+one time tracking systems to three+1 and it's going to be a disaster.
First, there is payroll. This is the +1. Depending on the country, even salaried employees have to enter time like a time card. In other countries, it's automatically populated for salaried and only the hourly have to punch in and out.
Then there is Task Tracker 1, the ancient system we use for case management. All of our performance numbers come out of this. But it does not bear on payroll whatsoever. Your manager will smack you about the ears for not using this one. But even they admit it's broken. You cannot search for anything. Nobody uses it the same as anyone else. Nobody cares.
Task Tracker 2 was brought in two years ago and is cumbersome, clunky, undocumented, and very hard to use. You get one shot at entering numbers and it locks out changes. If you forget to submit by Saturday, you lose the billing for that week. There is a ton of paperwork to undo do the loss. You have to enter the same numbers in this system and Tracker 1. It is completely redundant and incapable of automatically passing the numbers across. Do it twice. Yay. Most of us do anything we can to avoid this system. It also has no bearing on payroll. But it is used heavily for revenue prediction quarterly financial reviews and any flaws will get you dragged in front of the VPs or CEO to explain your numbers. It can be brutal. (Given nobody really understands this thing, you can bullshit your way out of most things so I have no idea why they trust anything anyone tells them about it). Tracker 1 and 2 are home grown written by programmers who have mostly quit over time so there is nobody left who understands any of the code or why text boxes float in the middle of the screen and obscure things you need to see. Oh yes, mind the 30-second screen time out. Type faster and save your work.
With that weakness in mind, Task Tracker 3 has just been introduced. This one is a third-party product which is hard to use, completely unlike either of the previous trackers, has no data connection to anything and is being used simultaneously so you get to enter time a third place. Well, if you know how. There is a TON of training to learn how to use it but nobody has time to do the training -which is full of typos and shit grammar. Very hard to keep from laughing. But it's not funny because we are all hopelessly backed up with work and screaming clients. Daily work consists of figuring out which clients can be ignored today versus which one we have to give lip service to, and which ones actually need something. Sometimes they leave and we cheer. Management, however, loves five-dollar clients. We have lots of them. We lose money every time I pick up the phone to talk to one of them.
Anyway, nobody has any great joy for this new product. It's all "best practices and workflows" and alien to the garbage we've gotten used to using. We didn't write it so we have no control over any aspect. It does stuff we don't need. It misses key things we do need. Don't click on certain help functions because that triggers an automatic Professional Services billable charge to have someone help you (I love this personally; it's like a landmine that generates billing JUST by clicking the wrong thing that is not marked in any way. It's genius!) The vaunted mobile app is totally broken out of the box. And it nags constantly to enter time. I don't have time to take the training course but damn if this thing wants me to put time in it every damn hour. What the fuck. The lady who championed this thing bet her career on it and it's probably going to be the end of that because _nobody_ is embracing this thing and yet it cost a LOT of money to buy and license. I report to her so it might well be the end of me too. They are going to flush this department like a toilet.
So to recap, three different and non-communicating systems for task tracking plus payroll. I hardly care anymo
When Newsvine began, it was a mediocre news site with one difference: users were allowed to comment on nearly everything and post stories if they wished. This was important later on when Newsvine got the AP feed. Most newspaper websites, if they allow comments, don't allow them on AP articles. Newsvine did, and for me this was wonderful. Finally a place and a way to say something when the anonymous AP writer got something wrong.
The users had a lot of great interactions, discussions, thoughtful comments, and generally made the site great.
Newsvine got acquired by MSNBC. Things did not immediately change but they did, and it wasn't the site. It was the users. Instead of useful, thought-provoking comments, and threads that inspired discussion, every single comment vine suddenly became an Obama this, or global warming that, dispute. Forget disagreement, they'd go straight for ripping out throats on the first posts. It became -and still is- a complete pile of shit, a worthless pinboard for idiots who have no ability to discuss anything unless it is somehow wrapped in a political or religious cloak.
The thing that made Newsvine unique is now also what makes it a total loss.
So for PopSci to drop comments, fine by me. Everybody has free speech. But society and businesses are under no obligation to give them a place to spew it.
Like street preachers or the insane, those with a lot to say can go stand on a corner with a cardboard sign if they want. They deserve nothing more without earning more.
On top of all of that, they have the ignominious position of being a big Canadian company, which means they need government approval to be sold. Since the government, up to recently, has made it clear they didn't want to lose BBY to a foreign owner, a sale was always going to be tricky to impossible. You'd need to find a domestic Canadian owner to buy it or else not at all. There are Canadian funds which have the capacity to make a buy. None have shown any known interest in doing that in the past or now. Nobody wants to throw good money at what is clearly a company past its prime.
Lacking a domestic buyer, a Microsoft or a Lenovo still cannot simply swoop in a buy BlackBerry like they might snap up some other company. It's against the law to do that. This complication is unavoidable and makes potential buyers look for something else to buy, and understandably so. Who wants to make a lot of press and do a lot of work to complete a purchase only to have it cancelled by a government agency on grounds of nationalism? Recently the crown has seen the writing on the wall and vast numbers of unemployed people in the future and said they would not necessarily prevent a foreign sale but they would not be happy about it either. Which again, is not much of an incentive for any buyer. Yay. They might not block us. Cough. What else is for sale? Nokia? Cool! Do it! HTC? Mmm ok. Maybe.
Meanwhile the value of Blackberry has tanked along with their prospects which make it even less likely that somebody will actually want to buy the company. Either they're headed for doom and there's no sense in buying, or they haven't stopped falling yet so might as well wait for the price to go down more. There is no rush. Their products will be as relevant (or not) a year from now as they are today.
If they totally collapse, then their patents will end up with somebody eventually who will be incentivized to license them probably for pennies on the dollar. Something like that would give lots of benefits to the usual suspect buyers for BlackBerry, but critically none of the hassle or mess of actually buying the company. So if you know you can get want you want for cheap and without hassle and all you have to do is wait... you would be silly to rush in now and try to do anything.
Waiting is the best scenario right now. Waiting until BBY has completely imploded and whatever is left is given to creditors. Then you act.
Jack: What's going on? We have a right to know the truth! Rumack: [to the passengers] All right, I'm going to level with you all. But what's most important now is that you remain calm. There is no reason to panic. [Rumack's nose grows an inch long] Rumack: Now, it is true that one of the crew members is ill... slightly ill. [Rumack's nose continues to grow longer and longer, à la Pinocchio] Rumack: But the other two pilots... they're just fine. They're at the controls flying the plane... free to pursue a life of religious fulfillment.
Given I've never used Pandora, it's hard for me to accept calling it a standard. But then I like to play songs I choose on my own, from USB drives or an ancient iPod or whatever. I'm not sure I even know what Pandora is supposed to give me that I don't already have.
It seems to me, the main thing wrong with commercial radio is the idea that somebody at a station (or these days, a software package) plays songs in the order they dictate and you sit there passively consuming it. Pandora seems awfully similar in concept, except they promise to make it more tailored. But it's still giving up control. See above. I make my own playlists and stock them. There is nothing anybody can supply to me that is more relevant to me than my own choices.
And, I have no interest in what passes for mainstream domestic US music. I listen to stuff from other countries not served by Pandora. Highly doubt Pandora could come close to supplying what I want to hear.
But it streams!!! So does AmazonMP3 and Google Music both using tracks I supply to them. For streaming audio, I do use Shoutcast streams which play on many apps, and iHeartRadio for local news.
Do they realize that the asteroid does not care, with even one atom, what the hell humans call it, or whether we classify it as an asteroid or just as a shoe tree?
And if it had sentient life on it, they'd probably have their own name for it and they would not care either what humans wanted to call it. Shoe tree or not.
This is a lesson for the future humans who will be the first human people to land on another inhabited planet: you don't get naming rights if there are already beings there. They get to name it. Not you. And you don't get to own/mine/wreck the place either. Natives or LGMs who got there first get to do that.
BTW: the search for life in Goldilocks is dumb. A sufficiently advanced civilization would have total control over their environment and could choose to change their habitat to make it more suitable, or they could live in space, or they could develop their species one place and move to another place to live (or live in multiple places), or maybe they all live in another dimension. The way humans have settled on this limited idea of where water exists life could exist and nowhere else... just shows we have no imagination at all. The LGMs are laughing at us like we might laugh at a caveman trying to make sense out of a tax form. But he is at least likely to eventually try to eat the tax form or figure out it makes a good fire. We're too busy naming asteroids. Carry on, human race!
This is true. And it's one of the reasons people breathe about three times more often than they need to. We get enough oxy in about every third breath. That's all we need to live.
However, we need to get rid of CO2 much more often than that. So we breathe more just to exhale more and wind up taking in more oxygen just because that's part of the cycle.
If you could hold your breath long enough -just by holding it, not with duct tape or ropes or something/someone helping- the CO2 would quickly build up to an unsafe level and probably cause unconsciousness at which point the will to hold one's breathing would stop along with the muscle control needed to do it, and most people would automatically start breathing again. Not something to play with though.
SL was hot a few years ago but then it became not hot when nobody with money could figure out how to make money with it. Lots of press. Nothing happened.
So now they're all gone and it's mostly guys who want to RP as women, which is fine if you are into that. But for this person, he can throw money at SL and build a dream house and put in furniture and baby beds and kitchen appliances and flying cars and scare the ever living crap out of his girlfriend by showing her the future of domestic bliss that awaits, if they ever solve this distance problem and get hitched.
Except the house will probably be "mom's basement with the old fold-out couch" and the flying car will be a 1995 Ford Taurus with a bad muffler and windows that don't work.
But other than that, SL is just like reality.
Right now, I am into playing Scarlet Blade where everybody's a girl and you kill monsters for no actual purpose. This is a lot like real life, where you work and do stuff for no actual purpose. Except I'm not a girl so I am not sure if the real ones kill monsters. Nonetheless your girlfriend would hate it so play something else.
I recommend buying some webcams. You'll figure out the game.
No no no. The stuff sitting on a grocery shelf is automatically expired before it even gets to the store.
Coffee snobs will tell you the shelf life of coffee is about after two days but less than about eight days after it is roasted. Nothing in any normal grocery store can meet that. So whatever is on the shelf is already unacceptable.
You've got to get your coffee direct from a coffee roaster to hit the goal. Mail order works great for this if you buy from a roaster who ships immediately. By the time it gets delivered to you, it will be inside the freshness target and you have about a week to use it up. Yes it makes a difference. Is the effort worth it? For most people maybe not. Most people love bad coffee and don't know any better.
One of my relatives has a serious mental disorder which manifest in many ways but primarily in total lack of self control. And he has a severe sweet tooth. For example, if there is any ice cream or candy on junk food in the house, he is likely to eat all of it on one sitting. It is not at all uncommon to see a half-gallon of ice cream disappear in moments. Or a day spent in nearly continuous eating. Food that should last a week might last a day or two.
As a result of this, the relative has awful glucose control. And as a result of the mental issues, he doesn't care about this or any other aspect of his health. He simply eats whatever he wants. He will not see doctors. And no, there is nothing I can do about it.
He is dooming himself to a life of disease in old age if he manages to live that long. Honestly he's likely to be injured or killed directly by his mental behavior long before something like Alzheimers sets in.
Bu bu bu but! It's a BUTTON! You have to click it! It's in the EULA and also comes with the combo meal. Buttons must be clicked! Which rhymes with wicked.
Easier fix.. don't click the "Save my password" button...
Where the hell is the fire? Browsers like Firefox have LONG stored passwords with a button to click to reveal said password. And they kept on making Twinkies the whole time. Holy creme-like filing
So along comes somebody who has apparently never seen this before and wow, they have stopped making Twinkies this is so serious! Except, well, it's not. And the Twinkies are back. More or less.
The fix for this is easy: don't store passwords in the browser. I know, DOH! And if you do, don't let other people use your browser. And if you do, then use a password manager, which aside from being cross-platform and mostly free, do a hella better job of inventing good passwords for you and keeping you from using the same passwords all over the internet, because remember, you don't have to worry about your OWN security. You also have to worry about the security of EVERY site where you use a password. If you use the same password and user combo everywhere, or even one that appears to be a pattern, then you are basically asking for trouble when some forum gets hacked and your password turns out to be pass+websitename=supersecretpass. Simple patterns for you to remember are also simple to reverse engineer. So don't do that. Quit whining and get a password manager. And use it right.
The burden is on YOU to wisely manage your passwords, the quality of said passwords, and who has access to them. Does not matter which browser or OS you use. Don't be a stump and try to pin responsibility anywhere other than between chair and keyboard.
Not just you. XKCD is the thing somebody occasionally prints out and leaves on my desk, or forwards as a link. I don't recall ever seeing it of my own initiative, and such is my unfamiliarity with it that the name brings to some some sort of OS version and I have to spend a moment sorting out what distro is involved before eventually realizing it's not an OS at all.
I'm sure it's perfectly fine. But I don't spend any time looking at comics these days, be they Dilbert, XKCD, whatever. Lost interest when Calvin and Hobbes ended, and then Bloom County ended, and then Far Side ended. Got tired of saying good bye so I learned to never say hello.
Nokia and Blackberry's problems are the same: many people already have smartphones that they tend to like. It's hard to get happy people to switch, so they're left with the unhappy and the curious and the ones who have no choice.
They haven't got a lock on the unhappy -afterall, they were displeased for some reason so they obviously have some sort of choosiness or needs. The curious tend to be a flighty bunch flitting from one thing to the next new thing. There is no loyalty there. And the forced? Not the best customers for life.
So what these two have to do is convince happy, contented existing smartphone owners to switch. Wow. Good luck.
Windows Phone doubly has a problem in that the name Windows does not conjure a lot of enthusiasm. And the Windows metaphor has nothing to do with the phone. It would have been better to call it something new and forget the Windows branding. No, not like Windows RT. Yet another thing named Windows that is not actually Windows. MSFT has got to stop calling everything they make the same name.
Heck, BB can just get the carriers to do product testing.
Oh wait. That would require carriers who want the product badly enough. So, that's Rogers. Anybody else? Zimbabwe Mobile? Dunno.
Actually slashing R&D is what you do when you are out of ideas and plan to rebrand as something that doesn't need R&D. Like just becoming an App. Or a sub-brand, like Sony Experia Zeta 99 powered by Blackberry. Kinda like the Facebook phone. And that worked out just fine, right?
1) Identify the one remaining way average people make use of your service. 2) Find way to eliminate it or make it more difficult to use the service. 3) ??? 4) Profi oh wait, they don't make a profit. 5) Go Go Postal Crisis! Go Go Postal FacePalm!
This is not a new way of thinking for the USPS. Years ago, they decided that they needed to push counter sales of items like gift cards, extra stamps, delivery approximation, packaging and other high profit value-added services. But the problem was, people were using stamp vending machines out in the lobbies too much and thus avoiding having to speak to a postal counter clerk. So the repair process went like this:
1) Remove stamp vending machines so the public is FORCED to stand in line to buy even one stamp. NOW we will upsell the fuck out of them! 2) Fire half the counter clerks to ensure the line -which now cannot be avoided- is literally out the door 3) ???? 4) Profit? We've heard of it.
Not surprisingly, people who had any way of avoiding having to set foot in a USPS branch did exactly that. Counter sales didn't go up, because frankly, you can get gift cards anywhere so why would you stand in line for one? Stamp sales also tanked because (get this) people don't like standing in line, and they like it less when there's a huge line and ONE clerk working where there used to be three or four. And the one that's left is angry and surly because there's this huge line in his face all day.
The USPS never does anything that will actually encourage average people to use the service. They instead threaten to cut Saturdays, then delivery to individual addresses, and next who knows? The only customers (note, this is the first time I have used the C word at all in this post, for a reason) who are in any way catered to by the USPS are the big bulk and commercial mailers. That's where the USPS makes some small money and by and large the big mailers don't complain too much because they actually need the USPS to deliver that mail, so you pretty much bend over and take it when the USPS on-site clerk says "oh there's a PROBLEM with this mailing and we'll have to reject it, because the Form MIF-50 wasn't paid."
MIF-50? That's not in the DMM! No, the Mail Incentive Form $50 is not in the DMM. It's in your wallet, and needs to be in their wallet, you know, just to be sure the mail makes it.
Just remember, the USPS never does anything that makes it easier to do business with them. Anything that looks easier is a fraud or a trap and is designed to make their life easier at your expense.
Yeah, I know what a flash flood is. And guess what? That stupid alert went off this evening. And OH I was so scared in my 100m+ office building on top of a ridge 300m above sea level nowhere near any source of water.
Oh my the flash flood might come and.... do jack, pretty much. Wash down the sidewalks. If and when I need to be worried about a flood hitting a 100m building, I promise you there will be much more to worry about than the flood.
But hey Verizon, thanks for the alert anyway. I mean it.
Comic books don't interest me but I would not mind seeing some sort of hero team-up where companies like Samsung, Apple, Google, Nokia, even Microsoft, all used their powers together to make the world a better place instead of spending a lot of their time in communal battle, either actual, in courts, or in the minds of the rabid customer base.
It will never happen because shareholders would freak, and because competition spurs innovation. But it should not be inherently wrong for Apple to source parts from Samsung and allow the best apps Google can offer for iOs. The people who lose out when the territorial walls go up are in fact the customers.
On a broader level, the future of the human race may eventually depend upon companies and even countries putting aside differences to work together toward common goals, and it seems to me that we are generally unaccustomed to and perhaps incapable of that sort of cooperative effort, and as such, we may never inherit the stars because we're too busy suing each other about the patents on the latest space toilet seat.
Is there a documentary I could watch that will give me some idea of the absurd disaster scenarios somebody has invented for this technology?
Yes, there was. Sort of. The show called Extreme Engineering has gone through a couple of completely different incarnations. The current one has a host on-camera. The show's original version was just a documentary with a narrator, normally Greg Stebner if I remember right. Stebner's version was vastly superior to the whiny current version. Not sure why they even bother to call the shows by the same name. They are nothing alike.
Anyway, the original,show did an episode on things like a transcontinental super train which was theorized to operate at supersonic speed in tunnels held at vacuum. So naturally there were examples of what would happen if the seal failed or there was an earthquake or other events. So it's not exactly like the domestic US concept but close enough.
No idea where you can find this old show. Discovery is fixated on rerunning the current version when they show it at all.
Apparently you have to go to school and study a lot to be a doctor, and then you find out that only medical doctors get to make patients wait an hour past their appointment time. So naturally, you turn to crime to inflict the same pain on people.
I was always too poor to afford any of the things written about in PCWorld or PCMag, but I had subscriptions that became sort of like the big wish book of old, where I dreamed of one day owning a Coleco Adam or Ti994A.
At that time, I actually had no computer at all. One of my friends got a complete Gateway 486DX2-66 system with a laser printer back when that sort of kit cost $5000. She would print stuff off usenet and use reams of paper just because she could. That her parents could drop 5G on a computer firmly cemented both of us on two entirely different societal levels. Or at least so it seemed for a while. I mean, everything my family owned at that time probably wasn't worth the cost of that setup,
Years later, I have too many computers laying around and nobody cares any more who has the fastest one. And nobody prints much of anything. Shrug.
The place where I worked recently junked a huge pile of old PCs. One of them was an ancient Gateway PC labeled simply as "Gateway Tower" on the brand plate. It was in fact the very same sort of 486DX2-66 that my friend had. Gateway didn't even have model numbers back then.
It junked along with much more current gear. Nobody cared.
He's right. I've got five different Android devices, no two of which run the same version of the OS. But it doesn't matter to me for two reasons:
When I browse the Play Store on each device, it filters the list for me and only shows me the apps I can run on that device. Problem Solved.
Alternately, when using the Play Store web interface, it will tell me which of my devices can run a given app and let me fling the app to the device. Problem Solved.
Maybe this is an issue for developers or people who are anal and like having only one way to do something. Never understood the appeal of that thinking.
iDen is not dead. Nextel was not and is not the only iDen network in the US. There are others, both public networks like SouthernLinc, and private operations.
iDen is also still in use outside the US.
However, the replacement for it, from Motorola's perspective, is MOTOTRBO.
Slashdot Mirror
The place where I work is about to go from two+one time tracking systems to three+1 and it's going to be a disaster.
First, there is payroll. This is the +1. Depending on the country, even salaried employees have to enter time like a time card. In other countries, it's automatically populated for salaried and only the hourly have to punch in and out.
Then there is Task Tracker 1, the ancient system we use for case management. All of our performance numbers come out of this. But it does not bear on payroll whatsoever. Your manager will smack you about the ears for not using this one. But even they admit it's broken. You cannot search for anything. Nobody uses it the same as anyone else. Nobody cares.
Task Tracker 2 was brought in two years ago and is cumbersome, clunky, undocumented, and very hard to use. You get one shot at entering numbers and it locks out changes. If you forget to submit by Saturday, you lose the billing for that week. There is a ton of paperwork to undo do the loss. You have to enter the same numbers in this system and Tracker 1. It is completely redundant and incapable of automatically passing the numbers across. Do it twice. Yay. Most of us do anything we can to avoid this system. It also has no bearing on payroll. But it is used heavily for revenue prediction quarterly financial reviews and any flaws will get you dragged in front of the VPs or CEO to explain your numbers. It can be brutal. (Given nobody really understands this thing, you can bullshit your way out of most things so I have no idea why they trust anything anyone tells them about it). Tracker 1 and 2 are home grown written by programmers who have mostly quit over time so there is nobody left who understands any of the code or why text boxes float in the middle of the screen and obscure things you need to see. Oh yes, mind the 30-second screen time out. Type faster and save your work.
With that weakness in mind, Task Tracker 3 has just been introduced. This one is a third-party product which is hard to use, completely unlike either of the previous trackers, has no data connection to anything and is being used simultaneously so you get to enter time a third place. Well, if you know how. There is a TON of training to learn how to use it but nobody has time to do the training -which is full of typos and shit grammar. Very hard to keep from laughing. But it's not funny because we are all hopelessly backed up with work and screaming clients. Daily work consists of figuring out which clients can be ignored today versus which one we have to give lip service to, and which ones actually need something. Sometimes they leave and we cheer. Management, however, loves five-dollar clients. We have lots of them. We lose money every time I pick up the phone to talk to one of them.
Anyway, nobody has any great joy for this new product. It's all "best practices and workflows" and alien to the garbage we've gotten used to using. We didn't write it so we have no control over any aspect. It does stuff we don't need. It misses key things we do need. Don't click on certain help functions because that triggers an automatic Professional Services billable charge to have someone help you (I love this personally; it's like a landmine that generates billing JUST by clicking the wrong thing that is not marked in any way. It's genius!) The vaunted mobile app is totally broken out of the box. And it nags constantly to enter time. I don't have time to take the training course but damn if this thing wants me to put time in it every damn hour. What the fuck. The lady who championed this thing bet her career on it and it's probably going to be the end of that because _nobody_ is embracing this thing and yet it cost a LOT of money to buy and license. I report to her so it might well be the end of me too. They are going to flush this department like a toilet.
So to recap, three different and non-communicating systems for task tracking plus payroll. I hardly care anymo
When Newsvine began, it was a mediocre news site with one difference: users were allowed to comment on nearly everything and post stories if they wished. This was important later on when Newsvine got the AP feed. Most newspaper websites, if they allow comments, don't allow them on AP articles. Newsvine did, and for me this was wonderful. Finally a place and a way to say something when the anonymous AP writer got something wrong.
The users had a lot of great interactions, discussions, thoughtful comments, and generally made the site great.
Newsvine got acquired by MSNBC. Things did not immediately change but they did, and it wasn't the site. It was the users. Instead of useful, thought-provoking comments, and threads that inspired discussion, every single comment vine suddenly became an Obama this, or global warming that, dispute. Forget disagreement, they'd go straight for ripping out throats on the first posts. It became -and still is- a complete pile of shit, a worthless pinboard for idiots who have no ability to discuss anything unless it is somehow wrapped in a political or religious cloak.
The thing that made Newsvine unique is now also what makes it a total loss.
So for PopSci to drop comments, fine by me. Everybody has free speech. But society and businesses are under no obligation to give them a place to spew it.
Like street preachers or the insane, those with a lot to say can go stand on a corner with a cardboard sign if they want. They deserve nothing more without earning more.
On top of all of that, they have the ignominious position of being a big Canadian company, which means they need government approval to be sold. Since the government, up to recently, has made it clear they didn't want to lose BBY to a foreign owner, a sale was always going to be tricky to impossible. You'd need to find a domestic Canadian owner to buy it or else not at all. There are Canadian funds which have the capacity to make a buy. None have shown any known interest in doing that in the past or now. Nobody wants to throw good money at what is clearly a company past its prime.
Lacking a domestic buyer, a Microsoft or a Lenovo still cannot simply swoop in a buy BlackBerry like they might snap up some other company. It's against the law to do that. This complication is unavoidable and makes potential buyers look for something else to buy, and understandably so. Who wants to make a lot of press and do a lot of work to complete a purchase only to have it cancelled by a government agency on grounds of nationalism? Recently the crown has seen the writing on the wall and vast numbers of unemployed people in the future and said they would not necessarily prevent a foreign sale but they would not be happy about it either. Which again, is not much of an incentive for any buyer. Yay. They might not block us. Cough. What else is for sale? Nokia? Cool! Do it! HTC? Mmm ok. Maybe.
Meanwhile the value of Blackberry has tanked along with their prospects which make it even less likely that somebody will actually want to buy the company. Either they're headed for doom and there's no sense in buying, or they haven't stopped falling yet so might as well wait for the price to go down more. There is no rush. Their products will be as relevant (or not) a year from now as they are today.
If they totally collapse, then their patents will end up with somebody eventually who will be incentivized to license them probably for pennies on the dollar. Something like that would give lots of benefits to the usual suspect buyers for BlackBerry, but critically none of the hassle or mess of actually buying the company. So if you know you can get want you want for cheap and without hassle and all you have to do is wait... you would be silly to rush in now and try to do anything.
Waiting is the best scenario right now. Waiting until BBY has completely imploded and whatever is left is given to creditors. Then you act.
Jack: What's going on? We have a right to know the truth!
Rumack: [to the passengers] All right, I'm going to level with you all. But what's most important now is that you remain calm. There is no reason to panic.
[Rumack's nose grows an inch long]
Rumack: Now, it is true that one of the crew members is ill... slightly ill.
[Rumack's nose continues to grow longer and longer, à la Pinocchio]
Rumack: But the other two pilots... they're just fine. They're at the controls flying the plane... free to pursue a life of religious fulfillment.
Good thing BlackBerry is not out of coffee.
Given I've never used Pandora, it's hard for me to accept calling it a standard. But then I like to play songs I choose on my own, from USB drives or an ancient iPod or whatever. I'm not sure I even know what Pandora is supposed to give me that I don't already have.
It seems to me, the main thing wrong with commercial radio is the idea that somebody at a station (or these days, a software package) plays songs in the order they dictate and you sit there passively consuming it. Pandora seems awfully similar in concept, except they promise to make it more tailored. But it's still giving up control. See above. I make my own playlists and stock them. There is nothing anybody can supply to me that is more relevant to me than my own choices.
And, I have no interest in what passes for mainstream domestic US music. I listen to stuff from other countries not served by Pandora. Highly doubt Pandora could come close to supplying what I want to hear.
But it streams!!! So does AmazonMP3 and Google Music both using tracks I supply to them. For streaming audio, I do use Shoutcast streams which play on many apps, and iHeartRadio for local news.
Do they realize that the asteroid does not care, with even one atom, what the hell humans call it, or whether we classify it as an asteroid or just as a shoe tree?
And if it had sentient life on it, they'd probably have their own name for it and they would not care either what humans wanted to call it. Shoe tree or not.
This is a lesson for the future humans who will be the first human people to land on another inhabited planet: you don't get naming rights if there are already beings there. They get to name it. Not you. And you don't get to own/mine/wreck the place either. Natives or LGMs who got there first get to do that.
BTW: the search for life in Goldilocks is dumb. A sufficiently advanced civilization would have total control over their environment and could choose to change their habitat to make it more suitable, or they could live in space, or they could develop their species one place and move to another place to live (or live in multiple places), or maybe they all live in another dimension. The way humans have settled on this limited idea of where water exists life could exist and nowhere else... just shows we have no imagination at all. The LGMs are laughing at us like we might laugh at a caveman trying to make sense out of a tax form. But he is at least likely to eventually try to eat the tax form or figure out it makes a good fire. We're too busy naming asteroids. Carry on, human race!
This is true. And it's one of the reasons people breathe about three times more often than they need to. We get enough oxy in about every third breath. That's all we need to live.
However, we need to get rid of CO2 much more often than that. So we breathe more just to exhale more and wind up taking in more oxygen just because that's part of the cycle.
If you could hold your breath long enough -just by holding it, not with duct tape or ropes or something/someone helping- the CO2 would quickly build up to an unsafe level and probably cause unconsciousness at which point the will to hold one's breathing would stop along with the muscle control needed to do it, and most people would automatically start breathing again. Not something to play with though.
SL was hot a few years ago but then it became not hot when nobody with money could figure out how to make money with it. Lots of press. Nothing happened.
So now they're all gone and it's mostly guys who want to RP as women, which is fine if you are into that. But for this person, he can throw money at SL and build a dream house and put in furniture and baby beds and kitchen appliances and flying cars and scare the ever living crap out of his girlfriend by showing her the future of domestic bliss that awaits, if they ever solve this distance problem and get hitched.
Except the house will probably be "mom's basement with the old fold-out couch" and the flying car will be a 1995 Ford Taurus with a bad muffler and windows that don't work.
But other than that, SL is just like reality.
Right now, I am into playing Scarlet Blade where everybody's a girl and you kill monsters for no actual purpose. This is a lot like real life, where you work and do stuff for no actual purpose. Except I'm not a girl so I am not sure if the real ones kill monsters. Nonetheless your girlfriend would hate it so play something else.
I recommend buying some webcams. You'll figure out the game.
No no no. The stuff sitting on a grocery shelf is automatically expired before it even gets to the store.
Coffee snobs will tell you the shelf life of coffee is about after two days but less than about eight days after it is roasted. Nothing in any normal grocery store can meet that. So whatever is on the shelf is already unacceptable.
You've got to get your coffee direct from a coffee roaster to hit the goal. Mail order works great for this if you buy from a roaster who ships immediately. By the time it gets delivered to you, it will be inside the freshness target and you have about a week to use it up. Yes it makes a difference. Is the effort worth it? For most people maybe not. Most people love bad coffee and don't know any better.
One of my relatives has a serious mental disorder which manifest in many ways but primarily in total lack of self control. And he has a severe sweet tooth. For example, if there is any ice cream or candy on junk food in the house, he is likely to eat all of it on one sitting. It is not at all uncommon to see a half-gallon of ice cream disappear in moments. Or a day spent in nearly continuous eating. Food that should last a week might last a day or two.
As a result of this, the relative has awful glucose control. And as a result of the mental issues, he doesn't care about this or any other aspect of his health. He simply eats whatever he wants. He will not see doctors. And no, there is nothing I can do about it.
He is dooming himself to a life of disease in old age if he manages to live that long. Honestly he's likely to be injured or killed directly by his mental behavior long before something like Alzheimers sets in.
Bu bu bu but! It's a BUTTON! You have to click it! It's in the EULA and also comes with the combo meal. Buttons must be clicked! Which rhymes with wicked.
Easier fix.. don't click the "Save my password" button...
Where the hell is the fire? Browsers like Firefox have LONG stored passwords with a button to click to reveal said password. And they kept on making Twinkies the whole time. Holy creme-like filing
So along comes somebody who has apparently never seen this before and wow, they have stopped making Twinkies this is so serious! Except, well, it's not. And the Twinkies are back. More or less.
The fix for this is easy: don't store passwords in the browser. I know, DOH! And if you do, don't let other people use your browser. And if you do, then use a password manager, which aside from being cross-platform and mostly free, do a hella better job of inventing good passwords for you and keeping you from using the same passwords all over the internet, because remember, you don't have to worry about your OWN security. You also have to worry about the security of EVERY site where you use a password. If you use the same password and user combo everywhere, or even one that appears to be a pattern, then you are basically asking for trouble when some forum gets hacked and your password turns out to be pass+websitename=supersecretpass. Simple patterns for you to remember are also simple to reverse engineer. So don't do that. Quit whining and get a password manager. And use it right.
The burden is on YOU to wisely manage your passwords, the quality of said passwords, and who has access to them. Does not matter which browser or OS you use. Don't be a stump and try to pin responsibility anywhere other than between chair and keyboard.
Not just you. XKCD is the thing somebody occasionally prints out and leaves on my desk, or forwards as a link. I don't recall ever seeing it of my own initiative, and such is my unfamiliarity with it that the name brings to some some sort of OS version and I have to spend a moment sorting out what distro is involved before eventually realizing it's not an OS at all.
I'm sure it's perfectly fine. But I don't spend any time looking at comics these days, be they Dilbert, XKCD, whatever. Lost interest when Calvin and Hobbes ended, and then Bloom County ended, and then Far Side ended. Got tired of saying good bye so I learned to never say hello.
So the only vessels at risk are those with 100% vegetarian crews.
Nah, they have vegetarian gyros too. Usually some sort of falafel "burger" or sometimes tofu.
Results are mixed and variable.
And you know what? That entire problem was solved by putting locks on the door.
Locked doors mean nothing. It's like asking nicely "Please don't come in here, okay?"
Forget the lock. Kick the door in. The precious deadbolt can stay locked to the frame for eternity and not make any difference.
Forget the door; make a hole in the flimsy drywall. Go in via the floor or ceiling.
Any place that exists can be entered. It's merely quicker if you don't care about the damage wake you leave behind.
Nokia and Blackberry's problems are the same: many people already have smartphones that they tend to like. It's hard to get happy people to switch, so they're left with the unhappy and the curious and the ones who have no choice.
They haven't got a lock on the unhappy -afterall, they were displeased for some reason so they obviously have some sort of choosiness or needs.
The curious tend to be a flighty bunch flitting from one thing to the next new thing. There is no loyalty there.
And the forced? Not the best customers for life.
So what these two have to do is convince happy, contented existing smartphone owners to switch. Wow. Good luck.
Windows Phone doubly has a problem in that the name Windows does not conjure a lot of enthusiasm. And the Windows metaphor has nothing to do with the phone. It would have been better to call it something new and forget the Windows branding. No, not like Windows RT. Yet another thing named Windows that is not actually Windows. MSFT has got to stop calling everything they make the same name.
Heck, BB can just get the carriers to do product testing.
Oh wait. That would require carriers who want the product badly enough. So, that's Rogers. Anybody else? Zimbabwe Mobile? Dunno.
Actually slashing R&D is what you do when you are out of ideas and plan to rebrand as something that doesn't need R&D. Like just becoming an App. Or a sub-brand, like Sony Experia Zeta 99 powered by Blackberry. Kinda like the Facebook phone. And that worked out just fine, right?
What a great business plan:
1) Identify the one remaining way average people make use of your service.
2) Find way to eliminate it or make it more difficult to use the service.
3) ???
4) Profi oh wait, they don't make a profit.
5) Go Go Postal Crisis! Go Go Postal FacePalm!
This is not a new way of thinking for the USPS. Years ago, they decided that they needed to push counter sales of items like gift cards, extra stamps, delivery approximation, packaging and other high profit value-added services. But the problem was, people were using stamp vending machines out in the lobbies too much and thus avoiding having to speak to a postal counter clerk. So the repair process went like this:
1) Remove stamp vending machines so the public is FORCED to stand in line to buy even one stamp. NOW we will upsell the fuck out of them!
2) Fire half the counter clerks to ensure the line -which now cannot be avoided- is literally out the door
3) ????
4) Profit? We've heard of it.
Not surprisingly, people who had any way of avoiding having to set foot in a USPS branch did exactly that. Counter sales didn't go up, because frankly, you can get gift cards anywhere so why would you stand in line for one? Stamp sales also tanked because (get this) people don't like standing in line, and they like it less when there's a huge line and ONE clerk working where there used to be three or four. And the one that's left is angry and surly because there's this huge line in his face all day.
The USPS never does anything that will actually encourage average people to use the service. They instead threaten to cut Saturdays, then delivery to individual addresses, and next who knows? The only customers (note, this is the first time I have used the C word at all in this post, for a reason) who are in any way catered to by the USPS are the big bulk and commercial mailers. That's where the USPS makes some small money and by and large the big mailers don't complain too much because they actually need the USPS to deliver that mail, so you pretty much bend over and take it when the USPS on-site clerk says "oh there's a PROBLEM with this mailing and we'll have to reject it, because the Form MIF-50 wasn't paid."
MIF-50? That's not in the DMM! No, the Mail Incentive Form $50 is not in the DMM. It's in your wallet, and needs to be in their wallet, you know, just to be sure the mail makes it.
Just remember, the USPS never does anything that makes it easier to do business with them. Anything that looks easier is a fraud or a trap and is designed to make their life easier at your expense.
Yeah, I know what a flash flood is. And guess what? That stupid alert went off this evening. And OH I was so scared in my 100m+ office building on top of a ridge 300m above sea level nowhere near any source of water.
Oh my the flash flood might come and.... do jack, pretty much. Wash down the sidewalks. If and when I need to be worried about a flood hitting a 100m building, I promise you there will be much more to worry about than the flood.
But hey Verizon, thanks for the alert anyway. I mean it.
Comic books don't interest me but I would not mind seeing some sort of hero team-up where companies like Samsung, Apple, Google, Nokia, even Microsoft, all used their powers together to make the world a better place instead of spending a lot of their time in communal battle, either actual, in courts, or in the minds of the rabid customer base.
It will never happen because shareholders would freak, and because competition spurs innovation. But it should not be inherently wrong for Apple to source parts from Samsung and allow the best apps Google can offer for iOs. The people who lose out when the territorial walls go up are in fact the customers.
On a broader level, the future of the human race may eventually depend upon companies and even countries putting aside differences to work together toward common goals, and it seems to me that we are generally unaccustomed to and perhaps incapable of that sort of cooperative effort, and as such, we may never inherit the stars because we're too busy suing each other about the patents on the latest space toilet seat.
Is there a documentary I could watch that will give me some idea of the absurd disaster scenarios somebody has invented for this technology?
Yes, there was. Sort of. The show called Extreme Engineering has gone through a couple of completely different incarnations. The current one has a host on-camera. The show's original version was just a documentary with a narrator, normally Greg Stebner if I remember right. Stebner's version was vastly superior to the whiny current version. Not sure why they even bother to call the shows by the same name. They are nothing alike.
Anyway, the original,show did an episode on things like a transcontinental super train which was theorized to operate at supersonic speed in tunnels held at vacuum. So naturally there were examples of what would happen if the seal failed or there was an earthquake or other events. So it's not exactly like the domestic US concept but close enough.
No idea where you can find this old show. Discovery is fixated on rerunning the current version when they show it at all.
Doctor Hell
Doctor Shrinker
Doctor Computer
Apparently you have to go to school and study a lot to be a doctor, and then you find out that only medical doctors get to make patients wait an hour past their appointment time. So naturally, you turn to crime to inflict the same pain on people.
I was always too poor to afford any of the things written about in PCWorld or PCMag, but I had subscriptions that became sort of like the big wish book of old, where I dreamed of one day owning a Coleco Adam or Ti994A.
At that time, I actually had no computer at all. One of my friends got a complete Gateway 486DX2-66 system with a laser printer back when that sort of kit cost $5000. She would print stuff off usenet and use reams of paper just because she could. That her parents could drop 5G on a computer firmly cemented both of us on two entirely different societal levels. Or at least so it seemed for a while. I mean, everything my family owned at that time probably wasn't worth the cost of that setup,
Years later, I have too many computers laying around and nobody cares any more who has the fastest one. And nobody prints much of anything. Shrug.
The place where I worked recently junked a huge pile of old PCs. One of them was an ancient Gateway PC labeled simply as "Gateway Tower" on the brand plate. It was in fact the very same sort of 486DX2-66 that my friend had. Gateway didn't even have model numbers back then.
It junked along with much more current gear. Nobody cared.
He's right. I've got five different Android devices, no two of which run the same version of the OS. But it doesn't matter to me for two reasons:
When I browse the Play Store on each device, it filters the list for me and only shows me the apps I can run on that device. Problem Solved.
Alternately, when using the Play Store web interface, it will tell me which of my devices can run a given app and let me fling the app to the device. Problem Solved.
Maybe this is an issue for developers or people who are anal and like having only one way to do something. Never understood the appeal of that thinking.
iDen is not dead. Nextel was not and is not the only iDen network in the US. There are others, both public networks like SouthernLinc, and private operations.
iDen is also still in use outside the US.
However, the replacement for it, from Motorola's perspective, is MOTOTRBO.