Wait wait wait. Perhaps you hear the Motorola name and think this is a vendor with a proud and respected name and a great reputation. And that's true. 30 years ago.
The Motorola Solutions of here and now is notorious among Public Safety agencies for installing crap equipments, failures like this where the failover doesn't work, system problems, interface problems, junk radios, and all the while overcharging for all of it. Even when they low-bid something, they can be counted on to deliver a solution that doesn't actually, you know, work, and then negotiate extra fees to fix it. And fix it again, and again, Because by then, the agency has already spend X+Y dollars on it so they can't throw it away and get Kenwood or Harris in there. Besides, bad things happen when Moto loses contracts. Like it drops dead suddenly and mysteriously and doesn't come back for a long time. Sabotage? No. They just quit with the zero-day hot fixes.
Chiefs of Police and Fire and other agencies know this stuff goes on but good old/\/\ has lots of lobbyists and sales weasels throwing dinner and junkets at anything that breathes and can vote for or endorse a Motorola contract. If the local Chief doesn't want to play, then they go for the city managers, the city council people, the Mayor, the dog catcher, anyone they have to. They totally act like a big defense contractor except on a local level where the local yokels have no response this sort of action except to vote for Team/\/\ every time.
So in other words, the crap that happened to Detroit is FAR from the only similar situation where the system dies. NY has had problems, San Francisco, DeKalb County GA, Denver, systems all over the place. It happens so often that it's considered normal Moto behaviour and THAT'S scary.
Where are the other vendors? They're out there bidding too. But Motorola is sort of the penis enhancement of radios where "all the BIG GUYS have Motorola so you KNOW you want to have it too, don't you?" is what the sales reps say. You know that big city you want to be like? Yeah? They have Motorola. So sign right here. No no, that's not a contract change. We just corrected a mistake for you. Just sign it.
There are generally two reasons anything would want to attack Earth: 1) we're a threat. 2) we have resources not more easily obtained elsewhere
For the first point, we are a threat to nothing and noone. Our weapons are simple and not very powerful. They are also very short-ranged and we are tremendously preoccupied with killing each other. We're not externally dangerous and unlikely to become so any time soon. We have no ability to wage war in space, much less across any sort of stellar distances. We possess exactly zero capability to use wormholes, warps, time travel, or other exotic ways to move the human initiative anywhere else.
For the second point, essentially all the elements and minerals found on Earth can also be found elsewhere, where there might not be so many humans in the way. What weapons we do have would make an invasion troublesome and needlessly complicated. Suppose aliens need water? No need to come all the way to Earth to invade when you can harvest a few Oort comets and you're done. Earth would never even notice and couldn't object even if it wanted to. But in practice, any advanced space-faring species would have probably figured out how to manufacture resources when needed, so they may have even less need to harvest anything.
A lot of scifi is bogged down with the concept of aliens needing something from Earth, but this concept is mostly not plausible. Water is everywhere. Minerals are everywhere. No, they don't even need to eat us. If you can cross space by whatever method, you have probably figured out food or evolved or engineered yourselves beyond the need to eat constantly like humans do.
Really, the only reasons to bother with Earth would be to obtain samples, to observe what's happening, or to manipulate the planet or it's contents (people, animals, resources) in some manner. The classic concepts of an invasion force and human extermination don't fit with either of those plans.
OS/2 is still used in many ATMs, although flavors of Windows are finally making major inroads in that market.
The place where I work once had a US Gov issued "black box" server on our network, doing data compare tasks that are of no major import but the agency responsible mandated that this work had to happen on their PC. So they supplied the box. It had all the IO blocked and the case was sprayed with a bed liner material to seal the seams and cracks. The only open connections were power, ethernet, VGA and a keyboard they supplied which was also sealed. The bed liner spray made it a pain to fit in a rack.
Interestingly, the box had no way to communicate with the agency that owned it. It had LAN connectivity only. When they wanted to put something new on the box, they had to mail a stack of CDs and get somebody from our company to open drive, put in disc, wait. Put in next disc when prompted. Wait. Repeat. Sometimes it would reboot and we would see the Warp 4.0 logo before the monitor went blank again. The discs were encrypted. Yes we looked.
The point is, they used Warp 4.0 for a reason. It had to be totally reliable because the box was going to be on its own in what was essentially an environment out of their physical control.
Since I don't game much any more, mainly because I have nothing to prove to 14-year-olds who would mow me down, the only aspect of Xbone that remotely appealed to me was the promise to revolutionize TV.
Luckily, TV and "sparts" were most of what they talked about! Oh joy. Just the same old TV repackaged. Wow this is totally what everyone wanted. Um.. yeah.
The thing is, I already have several TV gadgets that do most of that, or at least the parts I care about. One is a Roku box. Microsoft should get one. It was $90 at Costco and ranks up there among the best decisions I've ever made in electronics. The thing OWNS my TV on the weekends. Key points: it was under $100 and I already have it. Two of them, actually. Roku in the kitchen over wifi is like wireless cable. Now what am I missing again?
Another gadget is the new Dish Hopper with Sling. The box they tried to ban. Sure, I have to pay every month for it and it only gets "a whole lot of channels" mostly in HD, for not a lot of money. But it does a very good job at it the one thing it does. It also happily feeds ALL of that content to my phone, wherever I might happen to be. Or a PC or tablet or whatever.
Wait, RDB. What about playing pirated video files? What about porn files!? Roku doesn't do that very well! Nope. But the Hopper can play some and I also have an old WDTV Live box which can play nearly anything. It plays some things VLC won't touch. The WD box doesn't do much else but it does do file playback. A perfect companion device. It, too, was cheap.
So I am not feeling the need to drop $500 on another STB. What I have works. Nothing Microsoft demoed or talked about poses any threat at all to these devices. And even if they did, the price tag still kills it.
this is Slashdot, a website dominated by young, wealthy, white men.
Do you have proof of this assertion?
Slashdot is open to be used by anybody dumb enough to figure out how to use the website. Actually creating an account is not even required to post. To the best of my knowledge, there is nothing anywhere which establishes with any certainty the race or social-economic makeup of the users.
While it can be generally assumed that most of the users are male based on post content, young, wealthy, and white are impossible to determine and largely irrelevant in any case.
Surely Microsoft is aware of their own foot traffic counts (hint: you can't count your own employees, Microsoft. Just sayin') and it doesn't take any effort to count feet at Best Buy. Both numbers are low, in my unprofessional anecdotal observations. Shoppers leaving both stores empty-handed are also rather high.
The last time I was in a Best Buy was the first Saturday and Monday in December. Just a few weeks before Christmas, the store was almost entirely empty of shoppers except for the mobile phone counter. That little area had a line and you had to sign in to get on the wait list to be served. Like everyone else, I went there to get a new phone and went back to exchange it for a different one. Both times, I had to wait about two hours.
Cause for the delay? People coming in with old phones asking to have their phone books transferred to newer devices. For example, somebody with an old flip phone trying to migrate to an iPhone. Or from an old iPhone to a new one. Best Buy has some sort of terminal to do this and it was dog slow and there were many people in line for this sort of thing, which was apparently free free free. They never said no to anyone.
Best Buy would do a lot for everyone if they either stopped coddling the technically challenged or made this some kind of automated kiosk. There is NO reason to tie up paid mobile sales people with zero revenue tasks that also happen to piss off the people in line waiting to drop several hundred bucks on some device. I hate to be crude but I don't care if some dood can't figure out how to migrate from an old iPhone to a new one.
Anyway, wandering around during that wait, it was easy to watch the traffic. There was very little. A few people browsing games. Clerks standing around with literally nothing to do. Nobody in checkout lines. Remember, this was three weeks before Christmas. There should have been lines. There was nothing.
This is not the first time I have seen Best Buy nearly dead on a Saturday afternoon. Other nearby stores like Walmart, Target, Costco, Sams, all hopping busy at the same time of day. No foot traffic means it's not showrooming that's killing you. It's not having shoppers AT ALL.
Seems doubtful to me. Yahoogroups is the only thing I use made by Yahoo, and they don't really "make" it as such. The content is all from other users. Yahoo hasn't done a good job monetizing it either. They happily send me a digest every so often which has no branding or ads or anything.
Clearly some sort of brilliant minimalist marketing strategy I don't comprehend.
My ISP converted all their email accounts over to Yahoo, but I don't exactly use Yahoo for that either. I have Gmail POP it. From my perspective, it's a Gmail account. And after that, it's an account with my ISP, not Yahoo.
For the others, well, never used Flickr. Once or twice used Yahoo auctions. Do they even still have them? Yahoo Japan auctions are good but that's not really the same company. Never used Tumblr. Had to stop and think, who was it again Yahoo bought. It's so irrelevant I paid it almost no attention.
Marissa Mayer DOES bother me, though. My boss has started emulating certain aspects of Ms. Mayer's work habits and compelling myself and fellow employees to follow along. That's great if you actually are a Marissa Mayer with huge responsibilities and commensurate compensation. But when you are a low-level mid-five-figure team lead for a software company which actively hates its customers and employees, these superboss work habits amount to jack shit. They don't fix anything at our level and they don't matter to anyone above you either, much less the executive team. Riding the team under you as if you are a Mayer when you are not is like watching whatshisname do his funky cowboy hop. It's not a real cowboy. My boss is not a real Marissa Mayer.
The big "spoilers" are all over wikipedia and IMDB so is there truly a LOT of point in going so far out of the way to avoid talking about them that you can't actually review the movie?
Look, if a film has to tentpole on spoilers that are going to get revealed the first time people I dunno, SEE THE MOVIE, then the film needs something else to drive it. You cannot structurally support an entire movie meant to be in theaters for months based on the idea that the major plot device is going to be a secret the entire time. And then when the DVDs and BDs come out, is this charade going to repeat again?
Shhhh! Don't talk about Khan or Klingons being in the movie! Oh oooops.
At what point will it be acceptable again to discuss who is actually IN the damn film? Years from now? Instead of protecting this great secret, we SHOULD be asking why it has to be such a secret and why is that secret so important to the movie. What about whether these things -or anything else- makes the movie GOOD.
Where the hell is Roger Ebert when we need him to teach us about movies. Oh yeah. Well, that is a problem.
MY response to this movie was or order Wrath of Khan on BD. There was damn little wrong with that movie that ever needed to be fixed and it looks great on a nice HD screen.
Worked on a DR project this week with a MAJOR consulting company. Everything was going peachy until they let drop that a major part of the DR process involved restoring data they kept on a Jaz drive.
This is not some old leftover process step, either. We've done this DR thing with them for years and this is the first year they have mentioned a Jaz drive. An awful lot of things ended up relying upon this Jaz drive.
The Herschel Space Observatory is 1,500,000 km away at a Lagrangian point. Servicing missions of any kind are out of the question.
Well, the telescope GOT there somehow so it's possible to GET there again with a robotic resupply vehicle. Couple of manipulator arms, hoses and fittings and a load of helium transferred in no time flat.
Refueling telescopes is not as sexy as rovers finding more rocks ("They're still rocks -beige this time!") or astronauts bobbing around doing whatever the heck they DO on the ISS, but a service mission to L2 is certainly doable. The telescope would need to have been designed with this idea in mind, which did not happen, so it's all moot anyway.
Nobody wants to bother with stuff like this. Ultimately that's the real answer why it's not done.
Ever since they stuck their heads in the sand and said the iPhone cannot be done, therefore it would not be done, BB has had a habit of pretending challenges can't exist, therefore they don't exist, and they keep on the track they had already decided to follow.
The iPhone got done. I can't stand the device myself but I admire the heck out of Apple for upsetting the, er, apple cart that was the feature phone and forced everybody to innovate. Except BB. No, they had it mapped out and figured out and BES was going to live forever!
Except, well, the sand BB stuck their head into got fused into glass when the fires of innovation rolled across Waterloo.
For a pillow fight, this one needs more coeds in lingerie.
MyPillow was naive for expecting some product that didn't exist and hadn't been tested to deliver advertising effectiveness rates, or whatever. This is holy grail stuff of advertising wet dreams. IF this could be done so easily that a small company could just sort of order it up like dinner, then the big ad agencies with deep pockets would be doing it. In which case MyPillow should, um, hire an ad agency to tell them this stuff. Believe me, they will work for money. Amazing how that works.
OR you hire the TV infomercial people. Many of them have very good sales metric tracking. They know what sells, which channels, when, to whom, etc. Call Sully Sullivan.
These pillow people are also naive for going to a huge complex company like Salesforce with apparently not clue one about what they were getting into. You don't walk up to a company like Salesforce or SAP or IBM or Northrup Grumman or Oracle or Xerox or whatever with a checkbook and a wish list and ask them to sell you something. The salesperson will love it and will sign you up for it, of course. Alligators love raw meat. They'll eat as much of it as you've got, and then eat you too. Big consulting companies are the same except they want cash. It's not what you want to pay; it's what can you pay. Never walk up to a man or woman who bills for a living and tell them to send you a bill.
And involving AMEX is profoundly stupid. That company is like a focal point for idiotic member spending and they are used to idiots overspending and refusing to pay so there's nothing they haven't seen before. They will play hard ball to collect. AMEX is a great product but it's a lot like a gun: when used properly and carefully and respectfully, it is safe. When used carelessly and stupidly, it will bite you, blow off your foot and make you hurt in ways you didn't know you could hurt. And then you get to meet Junebug and Bubba and see how lonely they are.
OK OK, I forgot Playboy. But that one is running out. There's a joke there. I used to be a stockholder in that company but I've stopped caring as much since they went, er, private. Hef's gotten on my nerves lately. So not going to renew that. The Playboy Bunny Harlem Shake video is amazing but completely a-typical for that brand. Not enough to keep me.
I would also get QST from the ARRL except I figured out you could get a "blind persons" membership for cheap and the only difference was that they won't send the magazine, which I don't want. They provide it for free online anyway.
Only two now: MaximumPC and Consumer Reports. MaxPC makes their back issues available for free and I also pay for access to CR's website, but I find the dead tree version works better on the throne, quite honestly. And I don't have time to sit and read anywhere else.
Why pay for these? Both mags offer content that I like and which is more or less difficult to obtain elsewhere, and it's in a format I like. For MaxPC, I am a long-time reader going back to when it launched as boot magazine, and I prepay for years in advance because I want the mag to stick around. CR I simply use as an info source and comparison tool when I need to buy something out of my usual areas of expertise. I pay them to offer advise on which paint or vacuum cleaner or laundry detergent to buy, because I have no idea myself and no time or money to just guess. It works well. Don't have to agree with their choices. As with MaxPC's reviews, having their opinion is useful even if I may not blindly follow it.
And I have tried the digital magazines. The tablet PDF version does not tolerate moisture well and requires things like a charged battery, some pre-planning to take the device along, etc. and you are stuck holding it and usually can't also use it for something else. The paper mags simply sit there waiting for someone to read. Doesn't care if I take a shower -there are no moisture sensors to trip. Does not matter if I drop it on the floor. It won't shatter into hundreds of dollars worth of parts or get flushed.
Total cost for the two mags is about $30 a year plus another $60 for the CR website.... bleah actually that's a lot of money. Maybe I need to rethink CR.
FB has to try this because the media says they do, and thus, so do their investors. And when it flops, because it will, this will be the final step in FB's rise to prominence and the first media -identified step on their path to being the next Myspace.
Besides... HTC? Really? That's like betting your future on a brand that may cease to exist any moment. What is FB thinking? Maybe they can blame any flop on the poor choice of partner.
My cheap employer has a better way for dealing with supplies. Mostly, the employees buy their own.
You figure out what you want, you go to Walmart or Staples or whatever and you buy it. That's it. No reimbursement either. You buy it. It's yours. You own it. You take it home at night if you want.
If somebody leaves or gets fired, the coworkers descend upon the desk and strip it of any goodies left behind. In this way, the desks are self-cleaned by ravenous office supply cravers.
Now the company will supply some very cheap pens, but they are crap nobody would want to use. So you are better off buying your own anyway.
Well, I have a cheap Chinese JXD S6600 Android tablet which works ok as a photo gallery display, little more than a glorified digital photo frame.
But. The screen res sucks. It's dim, the colors are something "other than photo realistic" and it does weird scaling and resizing. So this makes porn pics look weird, off-color, and just not very appealing. By comparison, the same images look stunning on a Nexus 7. I've tested this quite a lot.
Perhaps a cheap tablet stuck in a humid bathroom is fine though.
Can you suggest a good dashcam? I ordered one online and it worked well for a whopping three days before it just broke. Got a refund. Now I need to find a good one that will last.
And a fine scripted comedy show it is, perhaps the funniest comedy show on TV. I'd grant them a LOT of leeway to make jokes. They tend to make them pay off.
Have you BEEN to gun store lately? There's few firearms available and damn near zero ammo, especially in common sizes like 9mm. All you will find are bare shelves -and if you do find some ammo, you better buy it. Don't even stop to look at the prices.
About the only ammo easily in stock is shotgun shells and slugs. Everything else is gone the moment it hits the shelves. It's been this way since 2008, had gotten better but went to hell in a handbasket after Sandy Hook.
Microsoft has deep pockets and deep connections with numerous hardware suppliers and could have stocked tens of millions of these devices, if they'd wanted to do so. Apple often does this prior to their product launches and has provided what is effectively a blueprint on how to do these sorts of things. There is no magic to it. You spend a lot of money making devices. You spend a lot of money on air freight -although arguably Microsoft had so much lead time, regular sea shipments would have been enough, and you stage stock where it will be available for sale on launch day. It is not very hard to do.
So the fact that Microsoft did not do this means they essentially chose not to. They deliberately didn't put product in the channel. This a marketing choice, not necessarily a sign that there's huge unfulfilled demand or even moderate unfulfilled demand. If anything, it says they don't have tremendous faith in the product OR that they never intended this to be a tent-product but merely a tent-pole product designed to capture buzz that can be redirected into general interest in the platform.
It's not a right or left-wing problem. It's a human problem. Solving the really big issues will take a commitment and outlook of decades. Solving things like putting people on Mars or the moon might take longer.
But we ruthlessly and efficiently recycle our leaders every 2-4-8 years and ensure that none of them have the ability to push an agenda for more than a few years at best, and the opposing party is always standing by waiting to gut whatever the other side wanted to do. Both sides do it. Nothing major ever sneaks through. Nothing.
What we need is a 10-year, a 20-year, a 50-year and a 100-year plan. And some kind of ability to stick to them. But it will never happen.
Aliens looking down on us might use this as a measure of our "advancement" when we are finally able to break free of tying our societal goals to unstable things that change every election and instead make the goal much bigger than any one party element. When we do that, when we start achieving huge goals, we will advance the human race beyond being just slightly smarter apes.
I don't have much hope. We seem to have no interest in advancement.
The problem with the current educational method is that nobody stops to ask if this is the best way to educate someone. We merely keep doing it this way because dozens of generations before us did it this way. Because people a few thousand years ago decided to do it this way.
You go to school. You go to a higher school. Then eventually to some sort of college, where you obtain a degree that prepares you for.... a job where you may not actually use what you spent the last 22 years learning. You spent a lot and filled your head because somebody in ancient Rome, who knew nothing of our modern world, figure this was better than nothing.
On the face of it, this system is nuts. You take a human youth in some of the prime years of their lives and stuff them in a classroom. Make them sit and learn wrote things they may never use. Make them pay a lot for it. But mainly make sure they show up for class for two, four, eight, ten years, The entire rest of their lives, they won't have the energy they have at that age. They could do so much. But you make them sit and learn things they may not ever use, in ways that haven't changed in a hundred years, managed by an enormous education construct that exists mainly to promote itself.
Is this right? Is there a better way? Is there something better we can do with our people than having them spend between a quarter and a third of their lives in a classroom? Or do we simply do it this way because that's how our parents did it, and dammit if we're going to let anyone have it easier? Is it education to educate, or more of a rite of passage or initiation ritual?
If people are a product, and education is the factory, then the factory is a mess badly in need of something like the Toyota Production Methods because what comes out the other end is often not what business needs. If we wanted to do something great for education, we would revisit every element. Root out inefficiencies and waste. Develop ways of finding continuous improvement, etc.. Just like making cars.
Just not the cars that keep getting recalled, of course.
When I inquired as to why a local fast food restaurant was selling "shakes", not "milkshakes", I found out that they could not sell them as "milk" shakes because there was not enough milk in them. They were selling sweetened sawdust ( aka "cellulose" ).
The situation with Ice Cream is similar to Milkshake versus Shake.
Many ice cream-type products no longer contain enough of the right ingredients to be called "ice cream" so new labels like "light ice cream" or "frozen dairy product" now appear on packaging.
This has happened to formerly top tier products like Breyer's which used to contain "Milk, cream, sugar and vanilla" which now contains an array of fillers and modifiers and other ingredients, and is no longer a top-tier brand. As a result, it is no longer legally allowed to call itself ice cream. It's also no longer a full half gallon but some smaller size closer to a quart. But that is a whole other change.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait wait wait. Perhaps you hear the Motorola name and think this is a vendor with a proud and respected name and a great reputation. And that's true. 30 years ago.
The Motorola Solutions of here and now is notorious among Public Safety agencies for installing crap equipments, failures like this where the failover doesn't work, system problems, interface problems, junk radios, and all the while overcharging for all of it. Even when they low-bid something, they can be counted on to deliver a solution that doesn't actually, you know, work, and then negotiate extra fees to fix it. And fix it again, and again, Because by then, the agency has already spend X+Y dollars on it so they can't throw it away and get Kenwood or Harris in there. Besides, bad things happen when Moto loses contracts. Like it drops dead suddenly and mysteriously and doesn't come back for a long time. Sabotage? No. They just quit with the zero-day hot fixes.
Chiefs of Police and Fire and other agencies know this stuff goes on but good old /\/\ has lots of lobbyists and sales weasels throwing dinner and junkets at anything that breathes and can vote for or endorse a Motorola contract. If the local Chief doesn't want to play, then they go for the city managers, the city council people, the Mayor, the dog catcher, anyone they have to. They totally act like a big defense contractor except on a local level where the local yokels have no response this sort of action except to vote for Team /\/\ every time.
So in other words, the crap that happened to Detroit is FAR from the only similar situation where the system dies. NY has had problems, San Francisco, DeKalb County GA, Denver, systems all over the place. It happens so often that it's considered normal Moto behaviour and THAT'S scary.
Where are the other vendors? They're out there bidding too. But Motorola is sort of the penis enhancement of radios where "all the BIG GUYS have Motorola so you KNOW you want to have it too, don't you?" is what the sales reps say. You know that big city you want to be like? Yeah? They have Motorola. So sign right here. No no, that's not a contract change. We just corrected a mistake for you. Just sign it.
There are generally two reasons anything would want to attack Earth: 1) we're a threat. 2) we have resources not more easily obtained elsewhere
For the first point, we are a threat to nothing and noone. Our weapons are simple and not very powerful. They are also very short-ranged and we are tremendously preoccupied with killing each other. We're not externally dangerous and unlikely to become so any time soon. We have no ability to wage war in space, much less across any sort of stellar distances. We possess exactly zero capability to use wormholes, warps, time travel, or other exotic ways to move the human initiative anywhere else.
For the second point, essentially all the elements and minerals found on Earth can also be found elsewhere, where there might not be so many humans in the way. What weapons we do have would make an invasion troublesome and needlessly complicated. Suppose aliens need water? No need to come all the way to Earth to invade when you can harvest a few Oort comets and you're done. Earth would never even notice and couldn't object even if it wanted to. But in practice, any advanced space-faring species would have probably figured out how to manufacture resources when needed, so they may have even less need to harvest anything.
A lot of scifi is bogged down with the concept of aliens needing something from Earth, but this concept is mostly not plausible. Water is everywhere. Minerals are everywhere. No, they don't even need to eat us. If you can cross space by whatever method, you have probably figured out food or evolved or engineered yourselves beyond the need to eat constantly like humans do.
Really, the only reasons to bother with Earth would be to obtain samples, to observe what's happening, or to manipulate the planet or it's contents (people, animals, resources) in some manner. The classic concepts of an invasion force and human extermination don't fit with either of those plans.
OS/2 is still used in many ATMs, although flavors of Windows are finally making major inroads in that market.
The place where I work once had a US Gov issued "black box" server on our network, doing data compare tasks that are of no major import but the agency responsible mandated that this work had to happen on their PC. So they supplied the box. It had all the IO blocked and the case was sprayed with a bed liner material to seal the seams and cracks. The only open connections were power, ethernet, VGA and a keyboard they supplied which was also sealed. The bed liner spray made it a pain to fit in a rack.
Interestingly, the box had no way to communicate with the agency that owned it. It had LAN connectivity only. When they wanted to put something new on the box, they had to mail a stack of CDs and get somebody from our company to open drive, put in disc, wait. Put in next disc when prompted. Wait. Repeat. Sometimes it would reboot and we would see the Warp 4.0 logo before the monitor went blank again. The discs were encrypted. Yes we looked.
The point is, they used Warp 4.0 for a reason. It had to be totally reliable because the box was going to be on its own in what was essentially an environment out of their physical control.
Since I don't game much any more, mainly because I have nothing to prove to 14-year-olds who would mow me down, the only aspect of Xbone that remotely appealed to me was the promise to revolutionize TV.
Luckily, TV and "sparts" were most of what they talked about! Oh joy. Just the same old TV repackaged. Wow this is totally what everyone wanted. Um.. yeah.
The thing is, I already have several TV gadgets that do most of that, or at least the parts I care about. One is a Roku box. Microsoft should get one. It was $90 at Costco and ranks up there among the best decisions I've ever made in electronics. The thing OWNS my TV on the weekends. Key points: it was under $100 and I already have it. Two of them, actually. Roku in the kitchen over wifi is like wireless cable. Now what am I missing again?
Another gadget is the new Dish Hopper with Sling. The box they tried to ban. Sure, I have to pay every month for it and it only gets "a whole lot of channels" mostly in HD, for not a lot of money. But it does a very good job at it the one thing it does. It also happily feeds ALL of that content to my phone, wherever I might happen to be. Or a PC or tablet or whatever.
Wait, RDB. What about playing pirated video files? What about porn files!? Roku doesn't do that very well! Nope. But the Hopper can play some and I also have an old WDTV Live box which can play nearly anything. It plays some things VLC won't touch. The WD box doesn't do much else but it does do file playback. A perfect companion device. It, too, was cheap.
So I am not feeling the need to drop $500 on another STB. What I have works. Nothing Microsoft demoed or talked about poses any threat at all to these devices. And even if they did, the price tag still kills it.
this is Slashdot, a website dominated by young, wealthy, white men.
Do you have proof of this assertion?
Slashdot is open to be used by anybody dumb enough to figure out how to use the website. Actually creating an account is not even required to post. To the best of my knowledge, there is nothing anywhere which establishes with any certainty the race or social-economic makeup of the users.
While it can be generally assumed that most of the users are male based on post content, young, wealthy, and white are impossible to determine and largely irrelevant in any case.
Surely Microsoft is aware of their own foot traffic counts (hint: you can't count your own employees, Microsoft. Just sayin') and it doesn't take any effort to count feet at Best Buy. Both numbers are low, in my unprofessional anecdotal observations. Shoppers leaving both stores empty-handed are also rather high.
The last time I was in a Best Buy was the first Saturday and Monday in December. Just a few weeks before Christmas, the store was almost entirely empty of shoppers except for the mobile phone counter. That little area had a line and you had to sign in to get on the wait list to be served. Like everyone else, I went there to get a new phone and went back to exchange it for a different one. Both times, I had to wait about two hours.
Cause for the delay? People coming in with old phones asking to have their phone books transferred to newer devices. For example, somebody with an old flip phone trying to migrate to an iPhone. Or from an old iPhone to a new one. Best Buy has some sort of terminal to do this and it was dog slow and there were many people in line for this sort of thing, which was apparently free free free. They never said no to anyone.
Best Buy would do a lot for everyone if they either stopped coddling the technically challenged or made this some kind of automated kiosk. There is NO reason to tie up paid mobile sales people with zero revenue tasks that also happen to piss off the people in line waiting to drop several hundred bucks on some device. I hate to be crude but I don't care if some dood can't figure out how to migrate from an old iPhone to a new one.
Anyway, wandering around during that wait, it was easy to watch the traffic. There was very little. A few people browsing games. Clerks standing around with literally nothing to do. Nobody in checkout lines. Remember, this was three weeks before Christmas. There should have been lines. There was nothing.
This is not the first time I have seen Best Buy nearly dead on a Saturday afternoon. Other nearby stores like Walmart, Target, Costco, Sams, all hopping busy at the same time of day. No foot traffic means it's not showrooming that's killing you. It's not having shoppers AT ALL.
Seems doubtful to me. Yahoogroups is the only thing I use made by Yahoo, and they don't really "make" it as such. The content is all from other users. Yahoo hasn't done a good job monetizing it either. They happily send me a digest every so often which has no branding or ads or anything.
Clearly some sort of brilliant minimalist marketing strategy I don't comprehend.
My ISP converted all their email accounts over to Yahoo, but I don't exactly use Yahoo for that either. I have Gmail POP it. From my perspective, it's a Gmail account. And after that, it's an account with my ISP, not Yahoo.
For the others, well, never used Flickr. Once or twice used Yahoo auctions. Do they even still have them? Yahoo Japan auctions are good but that's not really the same company. Never used Tumblr. Had to stop and think, who was it again Yahoo bought. It's so irrelevant I paid it almost no attention.
Marissa Mayer DOES bother me, though. My boss has started emulating certain aspects of Ms. Mayer's work habits and compelling myself and fellow employees to follow along. That's great if you actually are a Marissa Mayer with huge responsibilities and commensurate compensation. But when you are a low-level mid-five-figure team lead for a software company which actively hates its customers and employees, these superboss work habits amount to jack shit. They don't fix anything at our level and they don't matter to anyone above you either, much less the executive team. Riding the team under you as if you are a Mayer when you are not is like watching whatshisname do his funky cowboy hop. It's not a real cowboy. My boss is not a real Marissa Mayer.
You, sir, have earned a beer.
The big "spoilers" are all over wikipedia and IMDB so is there truly a LOT of point in going so far out of the way to avoid talking about them that you can't actually review the movie?
Look, if a film has to tentpole on spoilers that are going to get revealed the first time people I dunno, SEE THE MOVIE, then the film needs something else to drive it. You cannot structurally support an entire movie meant to be in theaters for months based on the idea that the major plot device is going to be a secret the entire time. And then when the DVDs and BDs come out, is this charade going to repeat again?
Shhhh! Don't talk about Khan or Klingons being in the movie! Oh oooops.
At what point will it be acceptable again to discuss who is actually IN the damn film? Years from now? Instead of protecting this great secret, we SHOULD be asking why it has to be such a secret and why is that secret so important to the movie. What about whether these things -or anything else- makes the movie GOOD.
Where the hell is Roger Ebert when we need him to teach us about movies. Oh yeah. Well, that is a problem.
MY response to this movie was or order Wrath of Khan on BD. There was damn little wrong with that movie that ever needed to be fixed and it looks great on a nice HD screen.
Worked on a DR project this week with a MAJOR consulting company. Everything was going peachy until they let drop that a major part of the DR process involved restoring data they kept on a Jaz drive.
This is not some old leftover process step, either. We've done this DR thing with them for years and this is the first year they have mentioned a Jaz drive. An awful lot of things ended up relying upon this Jaz drive.
I kept the horror to myself.
The Herschel Space Observatory is 1,500,000 km away at a Lagrangian point. Servicing missions of any kind are out of the question.
Well, the telescope GOT there somehow so it's possible to GET there again with a robotic resupply vehicle. Couple of manipulator arms, hoses and fittings and a load of helium transferred in no time flat.
Refueling telescopes is not as sexy as rovers finding more rocks ("They're still rocks -beige this time!") or astronauts bobbing around doing whatever the heck they DO on the ISS, but a service mission to L2 is certainly doable. The telescope would need to have been designed with this idea in mind, which did not happen, so it's all moot anyway.
Nobody wants to bother with stuff like this. Ultimately that's the real answer why it's not done.
Ever since they stuck their heads in the sand and said the iPhone cannot be done, therefore it would not be done, BB has had a habit of pretending challenges can't exist, therefore they don't exist, and they keep on the track they had already decided to follow.
The iPhone got done. I can't stand the device myself but I admire the heck out of Apple for upsetting the, er, apple cart that was the feature phone and forced everybody to innovate. Except BB. No, they had it mapped out and figured out and BES was going to live forever!
Except, well, the sand BB stuck their head into got fused into glass when the fires of innovation rolled across Waterloo.
This.
For a pillow fight, this one needs more coeds in lingerie.
MyPillow was naive for expecting some product that didn't exist and hadn't been tested to deliver advertising effectiveness rates, or whatever. This is holy grail stuff of advertising wet dreams. IF this could be done so easily that a small company could just sort of order it up like dinner, then the big ad agencies with deep pockets would be doing it. In which case MyPillow should, um, hire an ad agency to tell them this stuff. Believe me, they will work for money. Amazing how that works.
OR you hire the TV infomercial people. Many of them have very good sales metric tracking. They know what sells, which channels, when, to whom, etc. Call Sully Sullivan.
These pillow people are also naive for going to a huge complex company like Salesforce with apparently not clue one about what they were getting into. You don't walk up to a company like Salesforce or SAP or IBM or Northrup Grumman or Oracle or Xerox or whatever with a checkbook and a wish list and ask them to sell you something. The salesperson will love it and will sign you up for it, of course. Alligators love raw meat. They'll eat as much of it as you've got, and then eat you too. Big consulting companies are the same except they want cash. It's not what you want to pay; it's what can you pay. Never walk up to a man or woman who bills for a living and tell them to send you a bill.
And involving AMEX is profoundly stupid. That company is like a focal point for idiotic member spending and they are used to idiots overspending and refusing to pay so there's nothing they haven't seen before. They will play hard ball to collect. AMEX is a great product but it's a lot like a gun: when used properly and carefully and respectfully, it is safe. When used carelessly and stupidly, it will bite you, blow off your foot and make you hurt in ways you didn't know you could hurt. And then you get to meet Junebug and Bubba and see how lonely they are.
Combine all of this and wow what fun!
OK OK, I forgot Playboy. But that one is running out. There's a joke there. I used to be a stockholder in that company but I've stopped caring as much since they went, er, private. Hef's gotten on my nerves lately. So not going to renew that. The Playboy Bunny Harlem Shake video is amazing but completely a-typical for that brand. Not enough to keep me.
I would also get QST from the ARRL except I figured out you could get a "blind persons" membership for cheap and the only difference was that they won't send the magazine, which I don't want. They provide it for free online anyway.
Only two now: MaximumPC and Consumer Reports. MaxPC makes their back issues available for free and I also pay for access to CR's website, but I find the dead tree version works better on the throne, quite honestly. And I don't have time to sit and read anywhere else.
Why pay for these? Both mags offer content that I like and which is more or less difficult to obtain elsewhere, and it's in a format I like. For MaxPC, I am a long-time reader going back to when it launched as boot magazine, and I prepay for years in advance because I want the mag to stick around. CR I simply use as an info source and comparison tool when I need to buy something out of my usual areas of expertise. I pay them to offer advise on which paint or vacuum cleaner or laundry detergent to buy, because I have no idea myself and no time or money to just guess. It works well. Don't have to agree with their choices. As with MaxPC's reviews, having their opinion is useful even if I may not blindly follow it.
And I have tried the digital magazines. The tablet PDF version does not tolerate moisture well and requires things like a charged battery, some pre-planning to take the device along, etc. and you are stuck holding it and usually can't also use it for something else. The paper mags simply sit there waiting for someone to read. Doesn't care if I take a shower -there are no moisture sensors to trip. Does not matter if I drop it on the floor. It won't shatter into hundreds of dollars worth of parts or get flushed.
Total cost for the two mags is about $30 a year plus another $60 for the CR website. ... bleah actually that's a lot of money. Maybe I need to rethink CR.
FB has to try this because the media says they do, and thus, so do their investors. And when it flops, because it will, this will be the final step in FB's rise to prominence and the first media -identified step on their path to being the next Myspace.
Besides... HTC? Really? That's like betting your future on a brand that may cease to exist any moment. What is FB thinking? Maybe they can blame any flop on the poor choice of partner.
My cheap employer has a better way for dealing with supplies. Mostly, the employees buy their own.
You figure out what you want, you go to Walmart or Staples or whatever and you buy it. That's it. No reimbursement either. You buy it. It's yours. You own it. You take it home at night if you want.
If somebody leaves or gets fired, the coworkers descend upon the desk and strip it of any goodies left behind. In this way, the desks are self-cleaned by ravenous office supply cravers.
Now the company will supply some very cheap pens, but they are crap nobody would want to use. So you are better off buying your own anyway.
Well, I have a cheap Chinese JXD S6600 Android tablet which works ok as a photo gallery display, little more than a glorified digital photo frame.
But. The screen res sucks. It's dim, the colors are something "other than photo realistic" and it does weird scaling and resizing. So this makes porn pics look weird, off-color, and just not very appealing. By comparison, the same images look stunning on a Nexus 7. I've tested this quite a lot.
Perhaps a cheap tablet stuck in a humid bathroom is fine though.
Can you suggest a good dashcam? I ordered one online and it worked well for a whopping three days before it just broke. Got a refund. Now I need to find a good one that will last.
And a fine scripted comedy show it is, perhaps the funniest comedy show on TV. I'd grant them a LOT of leeway to make jokes. They tend to make them pay off.
Have you BEEN to gun store lately? There's few firearms available and damn near zero ammo, especially in common sizes like 9mm. All you will find are bare shelves -and if you do find some ammo, you better buy it. Don't even stop to look at the prices.
About the only ammo easily in stock is shotgun shells and slugs. Everything else is gone the moment it hits the shelves. It's been this way since 2008, had gotten better but went to hell in a handbasket after Sandy Hook.
Microsoft has deep pockets and deep connections with numerous hardware suppliers and could have stocked tens of millions of these devices, if they'd wanted to do so. Apple often does this prior to their product launches and has provided what is effectively a blueprint on how to do these sorts of things. There is no magic to it. You spend a lot of money making devices. You spend a lot of money on air freight -although arguably Microsoft had so much lead time, regular sea shipments would have been enough, and you stage stock where it will be available for sale on launch day. It is not very hard to do.
So the fact that Microsoft did not do this means they essentially chose not to. They deliberately didn't put product in the channel. This a marketing choice, not necessarily a sign that there's huge unfulfilled demand or even moderate unfulfilled demand. If anything, it says they don't have tremendous faith in the product OR that they never intended this to be a tent-product but merely a tent-pole product designed to capture buzz that can be redirected into general interest in the platform.
These are risky choices.
It's not a right or left-wing problem. It's a human problem. Solving the really big issues will take a commitment and outlook of decades. Solving things like putting people on Mars or the moon might take longer.
But we ruthlessly and efficiently recycle our leaders every 2-4-8 years and ensure that none of them have the ability to push an agenda for more than a few years at best, and the opposing party is always standing by waiting to gut whatever the other side wanted to do. Both sides do it. Nothing major ever sneaks through. Nothing.
What we need is a 10-year, a 20-year, a 50-year and a 100-year plan. And some kind of ability to stick to them. But it will never happen.
Aliens looking down on us might use this as a measure of our "advancement" when we are finally able to break free of tying our societal goals to unstable things that change every election and instead make the goal much bigger than any one party element. When we do that, when we start achieving huge goals, we will advance the human race beyond being just slightly smarter apes.
I don't have much hope. We seem to have no interest in advancement.
The problem with the current educational method is that nobody stops to ask if this is the best way to educate someone. We merely keep doing it this way because dozens of generations before us did it this way. Because people a few thousand years ago decided to do it this way.
You go to school. You go to a higher school. Then eventually to some sort of college, where you obtain a degree that prepares you for.... a job where you may not actually use what you spent the last 22 years learning. You spent a lot and filled your head because somebody in ancient Rome, who knew nothing of our modern world, figure this was better than nothing.
On the face of it, this system is nuts. You take a human youth in some of the prime years of their lives and stuff them in a classroom. Make them sit and learn wrote things they may never use. Make them pay a lot for it. But mainly make sure they show up for class for two, four, eight, ten years, The entire rest of their lives, they won't have the energy they have at that age. They could do so much. But you make them sit and learn things they may not ever use, in ways that haven't changed in a hundred years, managed by an enormous education construct that exists mainly to promote itself.
Is this right? Is there a better way? Is there something better we can do with our people than having them spend between a quarter and a third of their lives in a classroom? Or do we simply do it this way because that's how our parents did it, and dammit if we're going to let anyone have it easier? Is it education to educate, or more of a rite of passage or initiation ritual?
If people are a product, and education is the factory, then the factory is a mess badly in need of something like the Toyota Production Methods because what comes out the other end is often not what business needs. If we wanted to do something great for education, we would revisit every element. Root out inefficiencies and waste. Develop ways of finding continuous improvement, etc.. Just like making cars.
Just not the cars that keep getting recalled, of course.
When I inquired as to why a local fast food restaurant was selling "shakes", not "milkshakes", I found out that they could not sell them as "milk" shakes because there was not enough milk in them. They were selling sweetened sawdust ( aka "cellulose" ).
The situation with Ice Cream is similar to Milkshake versus Shake.
Many ice cream-type products no longer contain enough of the right ingredients to be called "ice cream" so new labels like "light ice cream" or "frozen dairy product" now appear on packaging.
This has happened to formerly top tier products like Breyer's which used to contain "Milk, cream, sugar and vanilla" which now contains an array of fillers and modifiers and other ingredients, and is no longer a top-tier brand. As a result, it is no longer legally allowed to call itself ice cream. It's also no longer a full half gallon but some smaller size closer to a quart. But that is a whole other change.