Decent list, except voice dialing, I've come to realize is not much of an issue at all for me.
Most decent in-car bluetooth kits handle the voice dialing part of things on their own, after downloading a copy of your most current phone directory from your phone.
There's also the "Say Who?" dialer application you can always download (lite edition is free) and use, too.
Not that it probably helps you, but I have to count myself and the other managers in my company among those who have Exchange support working on our iPhones without any real issues.
The only hassle I ever had with it was when I initially configured one of the new iPhones, and it refused to log in to the Exchange server properly. Kept rejecting the password, despite it being the correct one. I really don't quite understand what happened there - but the issue seemed to resolve itself after enough time passed, and after a number of attempts. It's been working flawlessly ever since.
Actually, I often use the Google Maps feature on my iPhone in TANDEM with my in-car GPS unit.
For example, I had to locate a new house a guy just had built, so I could go out there and help him get his broadband Internet set up.
My GPS, despite having the latest available map data (Jan. 2009) didn't know the name of his street. I remembered, though, he told me about a recycling center landmark I'd see just before I turned - so I searched for it on Google Maps, and obtained a street address for it. My GPS was able to find THAT one - so it took me right up to his neighborhood.
I'm not sure I'd really want turn-by-turn navigation on my iPhone anyway. It sounds great, until you consider the device is primarily still a phone. What happens if you try to take a phone call that comes in while you're driving, trying to find a place? Do you really want it to stop navigation the whole time you're talking?
I largely agree with you, although I've also read a counter-argument from a telco engineer where he claims the SMS messaging rides over a "control" channel that's also used for sending digits when placing calls on the cellular network, communicating with phones about switching towers, etc. etc.
As SMS traffic increases, the control channels get full and it starts impacting quality of service for the carrier -- so they do have *some* validity behind the rationale of charging users for texting.
Wow... another "anti free market" diatribe on here!
Greenspan never apologized for his "mistake" in believing in the free market. He simply agreed that maybe the situation was more complicated than he originally envisioned (primarily because he didn't count on people's personal greed being such a driving force that they'd tear apart their OWN businesses for the sake of some short-term personal gain).
Since the beginning of this country, people have demanded government be as SMALL as possible, to prevent it putting too much of a drain on people's incomes. Yes, government requires money to run, and yes, it's unfortunately a necessity to keep a nation running. But every time someone says "There oughta be a law...." or "Government needs to help out with...." -- they should stop and consider the gravity of those statements.
Lately, there seems to be this groundswell of people wanting to throw the baby out with the bath-water when it comes to the free market.
I, for one, think a free marketplace is the ONLY option of government I want to live under! We've given the bankers FAR too much power and authority, and we're all suffering for it now. But that doesn't justify moving towards a socialist system, or towards an authoritarian system, or any other such option.
Several of the "founding fathers" were very afraid the idea of "central banking" would lead us into serious problems, while others were strongly for it. It appears those against it (like Jefferson) were more correct than wrong....
Unfortunately, it all seems to boil down to intimidation and trying to hammer home the whole "respect my authority!" thing.
Back in the early 90's, I had a whole group of FBI agents descend on my parents' home (while I was off at work), to search for and seize my computer systems that ran my hobby bulletin board system. They had guns drawn and the whole bit for that, as well.
(After sitting on my property for about 3 years and doing absolutely nothing with it, it was all returned to me one evening, by a rather sheepish and apologetic agent, who dropped it all off in the family station wagon.
Obviously, there's NO reason to go into ANY of these scenarios with guns ready to shoot, unless they had expectations the person in question was going to put up a gunfight or something. Yet they do and HAVE been doing it for over a decade. Go figure.....
I completely agree with what you said, except as much as I dislike the recording industry and their tactics? I think their quest to find "unbreakable DRM" has more rationality behind it than you give them credit for.
The problem in their scenario is, they count on making their money via a high volume of music sales. (So to use one of your analogies, it's as though their business is costume jewelry sales. No individual piece would seem to be worth spending much money to protect, from a customer's perspective. Yet from their point of view, anything less than "unbreakable DRM" is like leaving their entire inventory sitting out on a table where anyone can walk by and help themselves to as many free pieces as they'd like to take.) DRM that's easily defeated by some free utility or music player plug-in is about as useful to the music industry as taping those pieces of costume jewelery down to the table with scotch tape.....
And really, that's why DRM is a hopeless endeavor. People implementing it WANT it to be like a safe, with thick walls that take hours to cut open, and a combination lock you'll stand no chance of randomly guessing the combination to. Yet it's not, because unlike a safe, once the first person goes through the effort to crack it open, they can transfer that ability to everyone else with VERY little effort. (Imagine a situation where magically, a cutting torch that cut through the wall of one safe could cut through ALL future safes instantly, after the effort was made on the first one. That's what DRM is like.)
It's always sad to see hard-working people lose their jobs, and more-so in a tough economy.
But I don't think you can let that stand in the way of letting the free market work in its Darwinian fashion. The strongest survive and the weak are culled out. The long-term "bright side" to this is that a new company will eventually rise up and take over where the old (Circuit City in this case) left off, and hopefully the new one will learn from the former's mistakes and offer people a better, more stable and lucrative place to be employed.
I can actually believe that.... As the competition has dried up in my area (we used to have a number of Ultimate Electronics stores competing with BB before they went bankrupt, restructured, and now seem to be doing kind of a "niche" thing selling TVs and appliances out of only 1 or 2 stores), I've noticed a corresponding improvement in the attitudes and knowledge levels of the average Best Buy employee.
I've been politely offered service plans on most items, but never felt pressured to take one from Best Buy staff either.
I assume the stores aren't hurting so badly for sales now, so they're less likely to treat their employees as "disposable"?
What I think annoys me most about Best Buy, currently, is their failure to stock items that would be big sellers for them, and instead, dabbling in areas I think are mistakes. EG. Some of the stores around here are opening full-size music stores within their store, selling synthesizers, guitars, and other instruments. Obviously, they think maybe they can take business from chains like Guitar Center -- but I think they're wrong. Musicians don't want to shop for gear at a place that also sells clothes washers and vacuums, and not from a place that doesn't seem like they can really service what they sell. (Who in the world would take an electric guitar back to Best Buy for a truss rod adjustment?)
What they NEED is to pick up a bit more where stores like CompUSA left off. Start selling things like empty mini and mid-tower PC cases and at least a small selection of ATX and ITX type motherboards and CPUs. Cater to the system builders out there!
The very reason they HAVE an "erotic services" category is to dissuade people from mis-using/abusing the other categories.
When they didn't have such a category, they started getting numerous complaints of escorts trying to offer their services in covert ways. EG. Posting ads in the real-estate category, offering "short term rental of fine tracts of land", and filling the ad with other "code words" so people seeking such a thing out would know what the ad was really implying. (Inevitably, they'd post a phone number to some voice mailbox, so they could screen the calls and only call back people who they thought really wanted an escort or prostitute.)
You're never going to stop people from using a free service to advertise things of a sexual nature -- so better to provide proper areas for it to go. Then people who don't want to see it can easily bypass it.
I realize it's been around a while, but their CEO still showed it at CES as the "latest product" of theirs. I think the real issue is, it wasn't marketed too well. I remember seeing it years ago in a Popular Science "What's New" feature, but never ran across a single one sold in a local store after that, and forgot all about it.
I don't know if they have a consumer product any newer than it to hawk. (Everything else is just another Roomba revision or Scooba floor cleaner revision, and both of those have been out longer than the gutter cleaner bot.)
I've played around quite a bit with the Roomba vacuums, and IMHO, the 5th. generation is about the first model that really works well enough to justify using it as a primary vacuum for the house -- and even then, don't count on long-term reliability or "hassle free cleaning".
Until the current generation, they didn't really perfect the concept of the spinning bristle brush that sticks out from the Roomba's frame far enough to push debris out from edges of walls and into the path of its main brushes, so it could be sucked up. (They first tried it on generation 4, I believe, but that brush had a poor design that broke regularly.)
This spinning bristle brush is a pretty important feature because the Roomba is a disc-shaped device. (A disc-shaped unit will never be able to fit itself into corners.)
It still suffers from serious issues with its plastic gearbox though. (Carpet fibers and lint eventually work their way into the gearbox and generate enough friction to melt the teeth of the gears and damage it.)
iRobot's "latest" household creation seems to be the device that moves on treads (like a tank) and cleans leaves out of your gutters. Not a bad idea, but also not something I suspect a LOT of people will invest in. (Gutter guards solve the problem adequately for me.)
When I caught the brief interview with them on the "G4 channel" at the CES expo, it sounded to me like they were really putting 90% of their effort into military robots. The household products could even be viewed, at this point, as more of a "front" to keep the corporate image friendly and to increase acceptance of robotics across the board.
I think these are very valid points, but in the end, I'd also think you're in a position where your patient is your customer.
If he/she is essentially telling you, "Look doc, I know you're advising me I probably don't need an x-ray -- but I'd feel better seeing the proof."?
It sounds to me like you have no reason to be surprised when they run off to the chiropractor and get those x-rays, if you still refused.
These days, people have a lot of access to medical information. If I think something's wrong with me, I can get online and read all about the symptoms and possible causes on sites like webmd or the Mayo clinic's web site. Heck, I could probably get a lot of useful info off Wikipedia - as long as I understand it's just more possibly useful info, and not the "last word" on what's wrong with me.
Therefore, I'm not usually going to see a doctor because something's wrong and I have no clue. I'm going in, informed, and looking for a professional to confirm what I already suspect, or perhaps make a strong case to dissuade me from my initial opinion. A big part of my going is because I know he/she has access to the equipment necessary to do the tests or take the x-rays....
The problem I see with your logic is, you make the assumption that doctors will generally opt to offer "ineffective treatments" and order wasteful tests because doing so generates more income for them.
A doctor *could* go that route, but he/she would also run the risk of earning a poor reputation and losing patients.
ANYONE working in a field that involves repair of some sort, whether it's fixing your car, your clothes washer, or a human being, has the option to bill for ineffective/unnecessary work to pad their bill. And yes, some of them do. But overall, I think you have to realize that most people opt for those careers because they really do enjoy fixing something that's broken. They really do care about their reputation, and have some sense of pride in a job well done.
The problem with the conclusions you draw are, they devalue all of that, in favor of assuming people usually want to do the dishonest/crooked thing, and "government" is the solution to FORCE a level of fairness on all these dishonest doctors and hospitals out there.
It's not that you CAN'T do very basic things. It's that on the whole, females reject these things as "stuff for the guys to handle".
Meanwhile, I think I speak for the majority of guys working in I.T. when I say that we're tired of being asked/expected to do such "technical" things as burning a CD for you, or showing you how to install the drivers for the new inkjet printer you bought.
I think it depends on how you look at it, though. If I was in charge of Microsoft (and wow, I'm glad I'm not!)... I'd look at the things I could change instead of worrying about the things I couldn't.
Linux, being open-source and essentially "free", isn't sensible to compete with for "market share". There will always be a crowd interested in free software that allows modification of the source code that makes it up. There will always be a crowd interested in using alternatives to whatever is deemed the "mainstream", too.
Microsoft is a business with a goal of making a profit from their code. That means they're not achieving their goal by giving stuff away free, OR by handing out the source code and letting just anybody modify or improve what they offer.
So which "competitor" works within the same constraints they do, and has similar goals? Yep, Apple.
Microsoft has already been able to do a lot to improve their offerings by "looking over Apple's shoulder" and copying their ideas. (Look at Windows 7 and the way they're improving their "gadget bar" by making it float over the desktop, just like Apple's widgets do in OS X, for example.)
For that matter, which division of Microsoft is the most profitable, per employee? Their Mac division! Microsoft gets to compete directly with Apple on the OS front, yet still SELL to the people who prefer Apple's offerings!
I have an eee701 myself, and I played with several Linux OS's on it, but kept coming back to Xandros as well.
There's apparently a guy who has an ongoing project to take the original Asus distribution of Xandros for eeePC and tweak, update and improve it.
Links to his latest builds can be found over at http://www.xepc.org/en. (Unfortunately for me, the site is basically a blog written in Chinese, that gets run through a translator when you ask for the English version with the/en on the end of the URL. So it's still hard to read at times.)
It doesn't look like he's posted anything new since the end of 2008... but if I understand it correctly, he's saying his last build of his customized Xandros was submitted to Asus to become an official update image at some point in the near future.
Sure, but IMHO, that changes nothing. Any company trying to avoid "potential" problems that haven't even happened yet is in the wrong. In my mind, that's just like the idea of "thought crime" protecting society, a la "Minority Report". (EG. Make arrests because someone appeared to have the POTENTIAL to commit a crime.)
If a woman comes back after a miscarriage, you handle it like you would any other employee. Their performance has dropped off upon their return? Fine.... Every place I've worked has some kind of regular employee review process. At the first one, you're informed of the areas you're falling short and you're given a chance to improve. By the next review, management has a legitimate reason to let you go or give you another chance. Either you're showing some improvement in at least SOME of the "trouble areas" or you're not.
If you're gone for medical reasons often enough that your work isn't getting done, it's a legitimate reason to get called into a meeting where it's discussed, too. At that point, a smart manager has to use his/her judgment. If this is someone with a lot of experience who they have reason to believe can get past this temporary problem, then working something out with them is the best option.
First of all, my impression of Cory D. is, he's just another "tech guy" out there who likes to write. He's sometimes insightful, and sometimes WAY out there. Regardless, he has some experience in the I.T. industry, and he seems to be an intelligent guy as well - meaning he's every bit as "worth reading" as anyone commenting here on Slashdot, at the very least.
(I read his short story, "When Sysadmins Ruled the World", recently. Honestly? It's not particularly "well written" - but I got a good laugh out of his realistic, yet "over the top" depiction of a sysadmin's personal life at home, plus his concept that in the future, Disney will be an "evil empire" and the "Googleplex" will be one of the last things standing, post-apocalypse.)
All that being said? I do see the local newspaper as a dying thing. Here in St. Louis, our long-running Post Dispatch paper is on the brink of death. One of my friends delivers their paper for a living, and they've been cutting back on delivery routes for some time now. They've even resorted to throwing a BUNCH of free Sunday papers on everyone's lawns, presumably to boost the "readership" they can claim to have so advertisers stay with them.
I understand, too, a little-known fact with the Post is, they never paid their debt after the merger with Pulitzer Publishing. They've been granted continual extensions on paying off their bank loan, but a final deadline is coming due quickly -- and they don't have enough money to cover the bill.
The future I see for newspapers? I think you're going to wind up with only a few "top papers" standing (like the New York Times), and other cities will have to order those to read, if they want one. Maybe we'll also see more people turn to something like "USA Today" or equivalents, that try to be "one paper for all of America"?
As an iPhone owner myself, I know the apps I keep coming back to very regularly (and have been using for almost a year now, non-stop) are NOT the games, but rather, the information-related apps.
For example, the AP Wire News program, is great. I read the daily news with it all the time when I'm waiting someplace in line or what-not.
Many of the other apps I keep on my iPhone and like a lot are simply "special purpose" programs I wouldn't have a use for very often, but they're really nice to have when the need arises. (EG. I recently got one that gives you average price estimates for various automotive repairs, and lets you find shops in your area along with recommendations/reviews from other users of the app.)
I do know a few people who tend to do a lot of program purchasing/downloading and rapid deletion afterwards -- but they tend to be parents who share their iPhone with their younger kids. Half the time, it boils down to the kid not using really good judgment about what's worth installing, so the parent has to go back through and do some "clean up" of all the unused stuff.
I really don't get the huge fuss over this particular situation though -- because for starters, we're talking about the biggest notebook in Apple's product line, with a 17" display!
If you're doing all sorts of long-distance traveling and feel a need to swap batteries regularly for more run-time, why aren't you buying a smaller laptop in the first place? The 15" version of the same thing from Apple has a very easily removable battery!
As far as I'm concerned, this was a conscious design decision that made sense. People using a big 17" display notebook should primarily be people who use it sitting on a table or desk someplace, where there's likely a wall outlet to plug it in anyway. If not? Well, put as high capacity a battery in the thing as you can possibly cram in there, and that should get people through most other situations until they can get back to a wall outlet.
I know on airline flights, it's been a struggle for me to even get a 15" laptop's lid open to a usable angle without hitting the back of the seat in front of me. (Yeah, I don't fly first class.) So a 17"? Not practical....
I don't know... Accusations are constantly flying about the folks over at Ars having a bias towards the PS3. Perhaps they do. But as someone who is, by and large, not even really a "console gamer" - I came to the same conclusion they have.
I bought a PS3 only 2-3 months after they were released. At that time, Resistance and EA's Fight Night boxing title were about the only noteworthy releases I could find for it. Still, I saw the potential the hardware had, and realized it was finally a "console that made sense to own, along-side of whatever high-end computer system I was gaming with".
At the end of the day, a Wii is "doing its own thing" with inferior hardware, but a creative new angle on what a console should do. Great, but I didn't really WANT my gaming to be that physically involved. The XBox 360 is too much like buying another PC with embedded Windows and controllers replacing the mouse and keyboard.
The PS3 earns its space in my living room by serving as a blu-ray disc player and "media center" (as it can display slideshows of my photos from a computer on my LAN, play music from one, and even stream video content from one).
If anything, I think it's really a shame the current PS3s ditched the backwards compatibility with PS2 games. That was yet another big positive with the purchase of the one I got.... I can literally buy PS2 titles for about $1.99 each in discount bins at local game shops, making the whole console gaming proposition much more cost-effective than it might have looked when people first saw that sticker price for the PS3 itself.
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Decent list, except voice dialing, I've come to realize is not much of an issue at all for me.
Most decent in-car bluetooth kits handle the voice dialing part of things on their own, after downloading a copy of your most current phone directory from your phone.
There's also the "Say Who?" dialer application you can always download (lite edition is free) and use, too.
Not that it probably helps you, but I have to count myself and the other managers in my company among those who have Exchange support working on our iPhones without any real issues.
The only hassle I ever had with it was when I initially configured one of the new iPhones, and it refused to log in to the Exchange server properly. Kept rejecting the password, despite it being the correct one. I really don't quite understand what happened there - but the issue seemed to resolve itself after enough time passed, and after a number of attempts. It's been working flawlessly ever since.
Actually, I often use the Google Maps feature on my iPhone in TANDEM with my in-car GPS unit.
For example, I had to locate a new house a guy just had built, so I could go out there and help him get his broadband Internet set up.
My GPS, despite having the latest available map data (Jan. 2009) didn't know the name of his street. I remembered, though, he told me about a recycling center landmark I'd see just before I turned - so I searched for it on Google Maps, and obtained a street address for it. My GPS was able to find THAT one - so it took me right up to his neighborhood.
I'm not sure I'd really want turn-by-turn navigation on my iPhone anyway. It sounds great, until you consider the device is primarily still a phone. What happens if you try to take a phone call that comes in while you're driving, trying to find a place? Do you really want it to stop navigation the whole time you're talking?
I largely agree with you, although I've also read a counter-argument from a telco engineer where he claims the SMS messaging rides over a "control" channel that's also used for sending digits when placing calls on the cellular network, communicating with phones about switching towers, etc. etc.
As SMS traffic increases, the control channels get full and it starts impacting quality of service for the carrier -- so they do have *some* validity behind the rationale of charging users for texting.
Wow... another "anti free market" diatribe on here!
Greenspan never apologized for his "mistake" in believing in the free market. He simply agreed that maybe the situation was more complicated than he originally envisioned (primarily because he didn't count on people's personal greed being such a driving force that they'd tear apart their OWN businesses for the sake of some short-term personal gain).
Since the beginning of this country, people have demanded government be as SMALL as possible, to prevent it putting too much of a drain on people's incomes. Yes, government requires money to run, and yes, it's unfortunately a necessity to keep a nation running. But every time someone says "There oughta be a law...." or "Government needs to help out with...." -- they should stop and consider the gravity of those statements.
Lately, there seems to be this groundswell of people wanting to throw the baby out with the bath-water when it comes to the free market.
I, for one, think a free marketplace is the ONLY option of government I want to live under! We've given the bankers FAR too much power and authority, and we're all suffering for it now. But that doesn't justify moving towards a socialist system, or towards an authoritarian system, or any other such option.
Several of the "founding fathers" were very afraid the idea of "central banking" would lead us into serious problems, while others were strongly for it. It appears those against it (like Jefferson) were more correct than wrong....
Unfortunately, it all seems to boil down to intimidation and trying to hammer home the whole "respect my authority!" thing.
Back in the early 90's, I had a whole group of FBI agents descend on my parents' home (while I was off at work), to search for and seize my computer systems that ran my hobby bulletin board system. They had guns drawn and the whole bit for that, as well.
(After sitting on my property for about 3 years and doing absolutely nothing with it, it was all returned to me one evening, by a rather sheepish and apologetic agent, who dropped it all off in the family station wagon.
Obviously, there's NO reason to go into ANY of these scenarios with guns ready to shoot, unless they had expectations the person in question was going to put up a gunfight or something. Yet they do and HAVE been doing it for over a decade. Go figure.....
To commemorate this historical event, it appears AT&T knocked out all the phones here at work....
Had to unplug the Adtran unit for about 20 seconds to hard reset it, to get the voice T1 circuits to come back up again.
I completely agree with what you said, except as much as I dislike the recording industry and their tactics? I think their quest to find "unbreakable DRM" has more rationality behind it than you give them credit for.
The problem in their scenario is, they count on making their money via a high volume of music sales. (So to use one of your analogies, it's as though their business is costume jewelry sales. No individual piece would seem to be worth spending much money to protect, from a customer's perspective. Yet from their point of view, anything less than "unbreakable DRM" is like leaving their entire inventory sitting out on a table where anyone can walk by and help themselves to as many free pieces as they'd like to take.) DRM that's easily defeated by some free utility or music player plug-in is about as useful to the music industry as taping those pieces of costume jewelery down to the table with scotch tape.....
And really, that's why DRM is a hopeless endeavor. People implementing it WANT it to be like a safe, with thick walls that take hours to cut open, and a combination lock you'll stand no chance of randomly guessing the combination to. Yet it's not, because unlike a safe, once the first person goes through the effort to crack it open, they can transfer that ability to everyone else with VERY little effort. (Imagine a situation where magically, a cutting torch that cut through the wall of one safe could cut through ALL future safes instantly, after the effort was made on the first one. That's what DRM is like.)
It's always sad to see hard-working people lose their jobs, and more-so in a tough economy.
But I don't think you can let that stand in the way of letting the free market work in its Darwinian fashion. The strongest survive and the weak are culled out. The long-term "bright side" to this is that a new company will eventually rise up and take over where the old (Circuit City in this case) left off, and hopefully the new one will learn from the former's mistakes and offer people a better, more stable and lucrative place to be employed.
I can actually believe that.... As the competition has dried up in my area (we used to have a number of Ultimate Electronics stores competing with BB before they went bankrupt, restructured, and now seem to be doing kind of a "niche" thing selling TVs and appliances out of only 1 or 2 stores), I've noticed a corresponding improvement in the attitudes and knowledge levels of the average Best Buy employee.
I've been politely offered service plans on most items, but never felt pressured to take one from Best Buy staff either.
I assume the stores aren't hurting so badly for sales now, so they're less likely to treat their employees as "disposable"?
What I think annoys me most about Best Buy, currently, is their failure to stock items that would be big sellers for them, and instead, dabbling in areas I think are mistakes. EG. Some of the stores around here are opening full-size music stores within their store, selling synthesizers, guitars, and other instruments. Obviously, they think maybe they can take business from chains like Guitar Center -- but I think they're wrong. Musicians don't want to shop for gear at a place that also sells clothes washers and vacuums, and not from a place that doesn't seem like they can really service what they sell. (Who in the world would take an electric guitar back to Best Buy for a truss rod adjustment?)
What they NEED is to pick up a bit more where stores like CompUSA left off. Start selling things like empty mini and mid-tower PC cases and at least a small selection of ATX and ITX type motherboards and CPUs. Cater to the system builders out there!
The very reason they HAVE an "erotic services" category is to dissuade people from mis-using/abusing the other categories.
When they didn't have such a category, they started getting numerous complaints of escorts trying to offer their services in covert ways. EG. Posting ads in the real-estate category, offering "short term rental of fine tracts of land", and filling the ad with other "code words" so people seeking such a thing out would know what the ad was really implying. (Inevitably, they'd post a phone number to some voice mailbox, so they could screen the calls and only call back people who they thought really wanted an escort or prostitute.)
You're never going to stop people from using a free service to advertise things of a sexual nature -- so better to provide proper areas for it to go. Then people who don't want to see it can easily bypass it.
How does the Chinese government view the use of such software as OpenVPN?
Is that also an illegal encryption technology for individuals?
I realize it's been around a while, but their CEO still showed it at CES as the "latest product" of theirs. I think the real issue is, it wasn't marketed too well. I remember seeing it years ago in a Popular Science "What's New" feature, but never ran across a single one sold in a local store after that, and forgot all about it.
I don't know if they have a consumer product any newer than it to hawk. (Everything else is just another Roomba revision or Scooba floor cleaner revision, and both of those have been out longer than the gutter cleaner bot.)
I've played around quite a bit with the Roomba vacuums, and IMHO, the 5th. generation is about the first model that really works well enough to justify using it as a primary vacuum for the house -- and even then, don't count on long-term reliability or "hassle free cleaning".
Until the current generation, they didn't really perfect the concept of the spinning bristle brush that sticks out from the Roomba's frame far enough to push debris out from edges of walls and into the path of its main brushes, so it could be sucked up. (They first tried it on generation 4, I believe, but that brush had a poor design that broke regularly.)
This spinning bristle brush is a pretty important feature because the Roomba is a disc-shaped device. (A disc-shaped unit will never be able to fit itself into corners.)
It still suffers from serious issues with its plastic gearbox though. (Carpet fibers and lint eventually work their way into the gearbox and generate enough friction to melt the teeth of the gears and damage it.)
iRobot's "latest" household creation seems to be the device that moves on treads (like a tank) and cleans leaves out of your gutters. Not a bad idea, but also not something I suspect a LOT of people will invest in. (Gutter guards solve the problem adequately for me.)
When I caught the brief interview with them on the "G4 channel" at the CES expo, it sounded to me like they were really putting 90% of their effort into military robots. The household products could even be viewed, at this point, as more of a "front" to keep the corporate image friendly and to increase acceptance of robotics across the board.
I think these are very valid points, but in the end, I'd also think you're in a position where your patient is your customer.
If he/she is essentially telling you, "Look doc, I know you're advising me I probably don't need an x-ray -- but I'd feel better seeing the proof."?
It sounds to me like you have no reason to be surprised when they run off to the chiropractor and get those x-rays, if you still refused.
These days, people have a lot of access to medical information. If I think something's wrong with me, I can get online and read all about the symptoms and possible causes on sites like webmd or the Mayo clinic's web site. Heck, I could probably get a lot of useful info off Wikipedia - as long as I understand it's just more possibly useful info, and not the "last word" on what's wrong with me.
Therefore, I'm not usually going to see a doctor because something's wrong and I have no clue. I'm going in, informed, and looking for a professional to confirm what I already suspect, or perhaps make a strong case to dissuade me from my initial opinion. A big part of my going is because I know he/she has access to the equipment necessary to do the tests or take the x-rays....
The problem I see with your logic is, you make the assumption that doctors will generally opt to offer "ineffective treatments" and order wasteful tests because doing so generates more income for them.
A doctor *could* go that route, but he/she would also run the risk of earning a poor reputation and losing patients.
ANYONE working in a field that involves repair of some sort, whether it's fixing your car, your clothes washer, or a human being, has the option to bill for ineffective/unnecessary work to pad their bill. And yes, some of them do. But overall, I think you have to realize that most people opt for those careers because they really do enjoy fixing something that's broken. They really do care about their reputation, and have some sense of pride in a job well done.
The problem with the conclusions you draw are, they devalue all of that, in favor of assuming people usually want to do the dishonest/crooked thing, and "government" is the solution to FORCE a level of fairness on all these dishonest doctors and hospitals out there.
It's not that you CAN'T do very basic things. It's that on the whole, females reject these things as "stuff for the guys to handle".
Meanwhile, I think I speak for the majority of guys working in I.T. when I say that we're tired of being asked/expected to do such "technical" things as burning a CD for you, or showing you how to install the drivers for the new inkjet printer you bought.
I think it depends on how you look at it, though. If I was in charge of Microsoft (and wow, I'm glad I'm not!) ... I'd look at the things I could change instead of worrying about the things I couldn't.
Linux, being open-source and essentially "free", isn't sensible to compete with for "market share". There will always be a crowd interested in free software that allows modification of the source code that makes it up. There will always be a crowd interested in using alternatives to whatever is deemed the "mainstream", too.
Microsoft is a business with a goal of making a profit from their code. That means they're not achieving their goal by giving stuff away free, OR by handing out the source code and letting just anybody modify or improve what they offer.
So which "competitor" works within the same constraints they do, and has similar goals? Yep, Apple.
Microsoft has already been able to do a lot to improve their offerings by "looking over Apple's shoulder" and copying their ideas. (Look at Windows 7 and the way they're improving their "gadget bar" by making it float over the desktop, just like Apple's widgets do in OS X, for example.)
For that matter, which division of Microsoft is the most profitable, per employee? Their Mac division! Microsoft gets to compete directly with Apple on the OS front, yet still SELL to the people who prefer Apple's offerings!
I have an eee701 myself, and I played with several Linux OS's on it, but kept coming back to Xandros as well.
There's apparently a guy who has an ongoing project to take the original Asus distribution of Xandros for eeePC and tweak, update and improve it.
Links to his latest builds can be found over at http://www.xepc.org/en. (Unfortunately for me, the site is basically a blog written in Chinese, that gets run through a translator when you ask for the English version with the /en on the end of the URL. So it's still hard to read at times.)
It doesn't look like he's posted anything new since the end of 2008 ... but if I understand it correctly, he's saying his last build of his customized Xandros was submitted to Asus to become an official update image at some point in the near future.
Sure, but IMHO, that changes nothing. Any company trying to avoid "potential" problems that haven't even happened yet is in the wrong. In my mind, that's just like the idea of "thought crime" protecting society, a la "Minority Report". (EG. Make arrests because someone appeared to have the POTENTIAL to commit a crime.)
If a woman comes back after a miscarriage, you handle it like you would any other employee. Their performance has dropped off upon their return? Fine.... Every place I've worked has some kind of regular employee review process. At the first one, you're informed of the areas you're falling short and you're given a chance to improve. By the next review, management has a legitimate reason to let you go or give you another chance. Either you're showing some improvement in at least SOME of the "trouble areas" or you're not.
If you're gone for medical reasons often enough that your work isn't getting done, it's a legitimate reason to get called into a meeting where it's discussed, too. At that point, a smart manager has to use his/her judgment. If this is someone with a lot of experience who they have reason to believe can get past this temporary problem, then working something out with them is the best option.
Uh, I'm not so sure....
First of all, my impression of Cory D. is, he's just another "tech guy" out there who likes to write. He's sometimes insightful, and sometimes WAY out there. Regardless, he has some experience in the I.T. industry, and he seems to be an intelligent guy as well - meaning he's every bit as "worth reading" as anyone commenting here on Slashdot, at the very least.
(I read his short story, "When Sysadmins Ruled the World", recently. Honestly? It's not particularly "well written" - but I got a good laugh out of his realistic, yet "over the top" depiction of a sysadmin's personal life at home, plus his concept that in the future, Disney will be an "evil empire" and the "Googleplex" will be one of the last things standing, post-apocalypse.)
All that being said? I do see the local newspaper as a dying thing. Here in St. Louis, our long-running Post Dispatch paper is on the brink of death. One of my friends delivers their paper for a living, and they've been cutting back on delivery routes for some time now. They've even resorted to throwing a BUNCH of free Sunday papers on everyone's lawns, presumably to boost the "readership" they can claim to have so advertisers stay with them.
I understand, too, a little-known fact with the Post is, they never paid their debt after the merger with Pulitzer Publishing. They've been granted continual extensions on paying off their bank loan, but a final deadline is coming due quickly -- and they don't have enough money to cover the bill.
The future I see for newspapers? I think you're going to wind up with only a few "top papers" standing (like the New York Times), and other cities will have to order those to read, if they want one. Maybe we'll also see more people turn to something like "USA Today" or equivalents, that try to be "one paper for all of America"?
As an iPhone owner myself, I know the apps I keep coming back to very regularly (and have been using for almost a year now, non-stop) are NOT the games, but rather, the information-related apps.
For example, the AP Wire News program, is great. I read the daily news with it all the time when I'm waiting someplace in line or what-not.
Many of the other apps I keep on my iPhone and like a lot are simply "special purpose" programs I wouldn't have a use for very often, but they're really nice to have when the need arises. (EG. I recently got one that gives you average price estimates for various automotive repairs, and lets you find shops in your area along with recommendations/reviews from other users of the app.)
I do know a few people who tend to do a lot of program purchasing/downloading and rapid deletion afterwards -- but they tend to be parents who share their iPhone with their younger kids. Half the time, it boils down to the kid not using really good judgment about what's worth installing, so the parent has to go back through and do some "clean up" of all the unused stuff.
I really don't get the huge fuss over this particular situation though -- because for starters, we're talking about the biggest notebook in Apple's product line, with a 17" display!
If you're doing all sorts of long-distance traveling and feel a need to swap batteries regularly for more run-time, why aren't you buying a smaller laptop in the first place? The 15" version of the same thing from Apple has a very easily removable battery!
As far as I'm concerned, this was a conscious design decision that made sense. People using a big 17" display notebook should primarily be people who use it sitting on a table or desk someplace, where there's likely a wall outlet to plug it in anyway. If not? Well, put as high capacity a battery in the thing as you can possibly cram in there, and that should get people through most other situations until they can get back to a wall outlet.
I know on airline flights, it's been a struggle for me to even get a 15" laptop's lid open to a usable angle without hitting the back of the seat in front of me. (Yeah, I don't fly first class.) So a 17"? Not practical....
I don't know... Accusations are constantly flying about the folks over at Ars having a bias towards the PS3. Perhaps they do. But as someone who is, by and large, not even really a "console gamer" - I came to the same conclusion they have.
I bought a PS3 only 2-3 months after they were released. At that time, Resistance and EA's Fight Night boxing title were about the only noteworthy releases I could find for it. Still, I saw the potential the hardware had, and realized it was finally a "console that made sense to own, along-side of whatever high-end computer system I was gaming with".
At the end of the day, a Wii is "doing its own thing" with inferior hardware, but a creative new angle on what a console should do. Great, but I didn't really WANT my gaming to be that physically involved. The XBox 360 is too much like buying another PC with embedded Windows and controllers replacing the mouse and keyboard.
The PS3 earns its space in my living room by serving as a blu-ray disc player and "media center" (as it can display slideshows of my photos from a computer on my LAN, play music from one, and even stream video content from one).
If anything, I think it's really a shame the current PS3s ditched the backwards compatibility with PS2 games. That was yet another big positive with the purchase of the one I got.... I can literally buy PS2 titles for about $1.99 each in discount bins at local game shops, making the whole console gaming proposition much more cost-effective than it might have looked when people first saw that sticker price for the PS3 itself.
Umm, what about Fink?
http://www.finkproject.org/