I normally buy every major console with each generation, so don't assume this some fanboy rant, but I can't imagine wanting to buy a 360.
Fans and the media wanted to compare the cheap 360 with no HDD to the most expensive PS3 SKU's and pretend there was a huge cost disparity. At most times, the price difference between truly comparable 360 and PS3 models (both having similar HDDs) was $50.
So for $50 in price difference I get a free BluRay player, free online play, the ability to put in any cheap HDD I want easily without voiding warranty, and the ability to install Linux.
Even better, Sony had a deal where they'd give you $150 off the price of a PS3 with the Playstation card. (Said deal is down to $100 off). When the PS3 80 GB model was $400, I bought it brand new for $250. That sure as heck beat paying $350 for the 360.
My PS3 doesn't get particularly hot. I've never had problems with it. The 360 eats discs, runs super hot, and has something like a 40% hardware failure rate.
Please tell me again that the 360 is a good product in comparison.
If I recall (and I can be mistaken) the big issue is that the iPhone can only do encryption one-way when syncing. Apple was literally bidding on a government contract for iPhone usage in the military, and the bid got thrown out when that was uncovered.
Oddly enough, Apple has still yet to fix the issue.
The membership page says you must make contributions to become a member. It says it gives out boxed copies to those who make contributions.
The members I've talked to have received boxed copies. I assumed to become a member, you must make the type of contributions that would also meet the threshhold for retail copies.
I tried to make contributions. I made some bug reports, helped people on the forums, and did some work on the wiki. I was also the first volunteer to lead up a new Proofreading team. (Despite the numerous typos I make when posting, I am very good at proofreading.)
I was told to request a mailing list, and project space. Neither were created. I was told I was not only going to be given a SVN account (which I did get) but the permissions to grant SVN access to others, since I would be in charge of the proofreading team. I asked several times, and that never happened.
I sent several more email requests about the team, and was ignored.
It so happens that Novell ended up having some layoffs due to the economy. Fewer employees were suddenly asked to do a lot more. I don't take it personally that I was ignored. But distros need to understand that while they can benefit a great deal from community involvement, it takes some effort on their part to get the community involved.
Who cares about touch screens and resolution. I do as a geek, but these are the real issues:
Do you need a separate server to properly sync with Exchange? How well does it sync with Exchange? How secure is it, and can it handle encryption? (The iPhone can't be used in many organizations for this very reason) Is the email app any good? The iPhone mail app for instance is very much lacking in comparison to the Blackberry email app.
Suits care about covering their asses, and checking email. If it can't do that, it won't be used in the enterprise.
I thought some have suggested this was a big reason why Flash has been ported to other platforms, but isn't on the iPhone. AT&T has publicly said it, but there are theories AT&T is terrified of what would happen to data usage if you could stream video to the iPhone via Flash from any number of sites.
Not to mention it would hurt iTunes video sales to the same devices.
I left for a company that almost doubled my salary immediately. I doubt think they couple replace me at 1/3 the cost.
I was solely responsible for their primary production center. They decided not to replace me at all because suits said they would continue not to replace any employee who left until it really bit them in the butt.
The company in question is the Omaha World-Herald which has won awards for being the most automated and technologically advanced newspaper facility in the world (at least when it opened in 2001). Those complex integrated automation systems literally have zero support today.
Part of me wishes I could see the next major outage when there is no IT presence. The company hasn't failed to put out a paper in around 120 years. But literally, with no one to keep all their automation systems running, it will happen now.
I've never once seen a strike make the news where the benefits gained outweighed the lost wages. Every single professional sports strike has worked this way. Flight attendant strikes worked this way. The Writer's Guild strike worked this way.
I see it time and time again. A union head gets pissy, demands a strike, and all the employees suffer.
The worst was the recent NHL strike. NHL players made money comparable to the NFL, despite the NHL having 2% of the TV revenue of the NFL. The union head got pissy and demanded a strike.
Not only did players lose wages and an entire season, not only did the Stanley Cup not get awarded, but the players came back under a much worse contract. They went from no cap, to a cap, with a 27% pay cut across the board. Even worse, the league lost their primary TV contracts, and it will be some time (if ever) before the league recovers.
Again, I've not once seen a single strike in my lifetime actually benefit the union members.
As someone else posted, they ended up keeing the DRM servers online.
If the retailer stays in business, and shuts the DRM servers down, they are legally required to refund your purchase, which means you got an extended rental for free.
Again, I prefer a DRM-free model. But I'm not all that worried about losing purchases via Amazon. They're one of the few companies in this country that just continue to grow, despite the recession.
I went from $40,000 salary (before pay cuts) to $35/hr hourly which is about $73,000 annually, assuming no overtime (which I qualify for now as an hourly employee).
I just went to a company that values IT significanlty more than my last shop.
Divx was always a rental if I recall. You didn't have to worry about them sticking around, because you only had the rights to watch the disc once. Divx was designed to be a fairly disposable format.
My last company was "employee owned", which meant the executives had all the stock and were able to give themselves dividends whenever they felt like it.
In 2007, the company posted a record year, despite being in the newspaper industry. Staffing levels were decreased, no one got raises, but the executives paid themselves nicely.
In 2008, they practically matched 2007 for profits despite being in the newspaper industry. They started massive layoffs and pay cuts around the board, but the executives matched their 2007 dividends.
In 2009, I and most of the IT staff finally walked.
Unions are great in concept, but I've yet to see an example that I like. My buddy works for a large company where it was basically required (even though it is illegal to do so) that he join the union to be hired. He pays dues. He gets no real benefit. And they tell him what he can and can't do.
Most strikes hurt employees considerably more with lost wages than they gain in negotiation. Humans are corrupt. Just as management is corrupt, so is union leadership. It just becomes another thing for someone to flaunt around in a pissing contest, rather than use the position to better life for union members.
Conversely, there is the free market model. My last job kept laying people off, and gave me two pay cuts. I assumed there weren't better jobs because of the economy, but I finally looked. I moved to a much better company where not only am I treated better, but I almost doubled my salary.
The reason my last company was able to cut salaries and treat people terribly is because we allowed it. When I was hired there about 3 years ago, the IT staff was about 50 people. When I left it was maybe a dozen. I was one of 3 SysAdmins standing, and they weren't even filling my position when I left. I've since heard the other 2 SysAdmins have put in their resignation. Now the company will be forced to try and hire a new staff in a hurry. More than likely, they're going to pay more to hire new staff than keep those they ran off.
I tend to agree. When the economy goes south, and you either stop giving raises, or start giving paycuts, sometimes the best way to keep employees happy is with relatively minor perks like these. I worked for a company where there was a hiring and raise freeze during a merger. No one was happy. They expaned the free coffee into free hot cocoa as well. It was a minor thing, but the gesture seemed to make people happy.
There are 50 million e-book formats and standards. What appeals to me about Kindle or Nook is that it is backed by a huge retailer. I feel fairly confident that if I buy a book from them, I can access it in the future. I know they will have a huge library of titles in their format. I feel strongly that they stand a chance to become the dominant standard. Kindle is opening themselves up to other devices and resellers. My wife has been buying books via the Kindle app on her iPhone.
Would I prefer a nice open standard with no DRM? Certainly. Will retailers ever support that? No.
It is possible their "optimization" is Windows update, updated drivers, and maybe removing some built-in bloatware. And that by swapping the video driver for another one, it can negatively affect 3D performance a great deal.
I used to recommend AVG or ClamWin, but honestly, these days Microsoft Security Essentials is the way to go.
I know, I know. I'm recommending Microsoft. But it has a great detection engine, it doesn't nag or get in your way too much, and it has a very small footprint.
It is free so long as Windows can pass validation.
Let's be fair. Best Buy tried selling me an $80 monster HDMI cable that I absolutely needed to get a good picture, even though HDMI is digital and not analog. I don't know how I get by with my $6 HDMI cable.
Change 10,000 to 100,000 and I wouldn't be shocked. He then states, "you want to be the manufacturer who gets this contract, because we will eventually order 10 million. And you don't want to do try and produce 10 million at once anyways. So give me the 10 million rate, and in you're in the door for 100,000 today."
The iPhone didn't sell well initially for a couple of reasons. Most individuals didn't think they needed smart phones. Most smart phone users didn't think the iPhone was a real smart phone. It took a while for people to realize the potential of the app store, and what the iPhone could do for them. The iPhone is also tied to one network.
The tablet could just be a plain wifi tablet with no cell phone support out of the box. You can always add a cellular modem, just like you do for your notebook today. If it isn't tied to a specific carrier, and they can launch it globally overnight (as opposed to fighting for different carrier deals in different countries) then they could easy trounce iPhone's early sales.
Apple has customers happily paying $2,900 for laptops. If they make a nice tablet for $999, I think people will eat it up.
Slashdot Mirror
I normally buy every major console with each generation, so don't assume this some fanboy rant, but I can't imagine wanting to buy a 360.
Fans and the media wanted to compare the cheap 360 with no HDD to the most expensive PS3 SKU's and pretend there was a huge cost disparity. At most times, the price difference between truly comparable 360 and PS3 models (both having similar HDDs) was $50.
So for $50 in price difference I get a free BluRay player, free online play, the ability to put in any cheap HDD I want easily without voiding warranty, and the ability to install Linux.
Even better, Sony had a deal where they'd give you $150 off the price of a PS3 with the Playstation card. (Said deal is down to $100 off). When the PS3 80 GB model was $400, I bought it brand new for $250. That sure as heck beat paying $350 for the 360.
My PS3 doesn't get particularly hot. I've never had problems with it. The 360 eats discs, runs super hot, and has something like a 40% hardware failure rate.
Please tell me again that the 360 is a good product in comparison.
If I recall (and I can be mistaken) the big issue is that the iPhone can only do encryption one-way when syncing. Apple was literally bidding on a government contract for iPhone usage in the military, and the bid got thrown out when that was uncovered.
Oddly enough, Apple has still yet to fix the issue.
The membership page says you must make contributions to become a member. It says it gives out boxed copies to those who make contributions.
The members I've talked to have received boxed copies. I assumed to become a member, you must make the type of contributions that would also meet the threshhold for retail copies.
I tried to make contributions. I made some bug reports, helped people on the forums, and did some work on the wiki. I was also the first volunteer to lead up a new Proofreading team. (Despite the numerous typos I make when posting, I am very good at proofreading.)
I was told to request a mailing list, and project space. Neither were created. I was told I was not only going to be given a SVN account (which I did get) but the permissions to grant SVN access to others, since I would be in charge of the proofreading team. I asked several times, and that never happened.
I sent several more email requests about the team, and was ignored.
It so happens that Novell ended up having some layoffs due to the economy. Fewer employees were suddenly asked to do a lot more. I don't take it personally that I was ignored. But distros need to understand that while they can benefit a great deal from community involvement, it takes some effort on their part to get the community involved.
openSUSE has had a very similar program for some time.
http://en.opensuse.org/Members
Members get to vote on the board, and get a free boxed/retail copy of each openSUSE release.
We're talking enterprise here, right?
Who cares about touch screens and resolution. I do as a geek, but these are the real issues:
Do you need a separate server to properly sync with Exchange?
How well does it sync with Exchange?
How secure is it, and can it handle encryption? (The iPhone can't be used in many organizations for this very reason)
Is the email app any good? The iPhone mail app for instance is very much lacking in comparison to the Blackberry email app.
Suits care about covering their asses, and checking email. If it can't do that, it won't be used in the enterprise.
I thought some have suggested this was a big reason why Flash has been ported to other platforms, but isn't on the iPhone. AT&T has publicly said it, but there are theories AT&T is terrified of what would happen to data usage if you could stream video to the iPhone via Flash from any number of sites.
Not to mention it would hurt iTunes video sales to the same devices.
I left for a company that almost doubled my salary immediately. I doubt think they couple replace me at 1/3 the cost.
I was solely responsible for their primary production center. They decided not to replace me at all because suits said they would continue not to replace any employee who left until it really bit them in the butt.
The company in question is the Omaha World-Herald which has won awards for being the most automated and technologically advanced newspaper facility in the world (at least when it opened in 2001). Those complex integrated automation systems literally have zero support today.
Part of me wishes I could see the next major outage when there is no IT presence. The company hasn't failed to put out a paper in around 120 years. But literally, with no one to keep all their automation systems running, it will happen now.
I've never once seen a strike make the news where the benefits gained outweighed the lost wages. Every single professional sports strike has worked this way. Flight attendant strikes worked this way. The Writer's Guild strike worked this way.
I see it time and time again. A union head gets pissy, demands a strike, and all the employees suffer.
The worst was the recent NHL strike. NHL players made money comparable to the NFL, despite the NHL having 2% of the TV revenue of the NFL. The union head got pissy and demanded a strike.
Not only did players lose wages and an entire season, not only did the Stanley Cup not get awarded, but the players came back under a much worse contract. They went from no cap, to a cap, with a 27% pay cut across the board. Even worse, the league lost their primary TV contracts, and it will be some time (if ever) before the league recovers.
Again, I've not once seen a single strike in my lifetime actually benefit the union members.
As someone else posted, they ended up keeing the DRM servers online.
If the retailer stays in business, and shuts the DRM servers down, they are legally required to refund your purchase, which means you got an extended rental for free.
Again, I prefer a DRM-free model. But I'm not all that worried about losing purchases via Amazon. They're one of the few companies in this country that just continue to grow, despite the recession.
I went from $40,000 salary (before pay cuts) to $35/hr hourly which is about $73,000 annually, assuming no overtime (which I qualify for now as an hourly employee).
I just went to a company that values IT significanlty more than my last shop.
Divx was always a rental if I recall. You didn't have to worry about them sticking around, because you only had the rights to watch the disc once. Divx was designed to be a fairly disposable format.
Amazon refunded the purchase, and they were forced to do so because they didn't have the right to legally sell it in the first place.
I've seen a few small sellers basically disappear. They shut off their DRM servers and you are left with nothing.
Again, I'd prefer an open standard with no DRM. But Kindle is probably the best we're going to get.
My last company was "employee owned", which meant the executives had all the stock and were able to give themselves dividends whenever they felt like it.
In 2007, the company posted a record year, despite being in the newspaper industry. Staffing levels were decreased, no one got raises, but the executives paid themselves nicely.
In 2008, they practically matched 2007 for profits despite being in the newspaper industry. They started massive layoffs and pay cuts around the board, but the executives matched their 2007 dividends.
In 2009, I and most of the IT staff finally walked.
Let's not stereotype all programmers.
I hear Mac coders prefer expensive herbal teas.
Unions are great in concept, but I've yet to see an example that I like. My buddy works for a large company where it was basically required (even though it is illegal to do so) that he join the union to be hired. He pays dues. He gets no real benefit. And they tell him what he can and can't do.
Most strikes hurt employees considerably more with lost wages than they gain in negotiation. Humans are corrupt. Just as management is corrupt, so is union leadership. It just becomes another thing for someone to flaunt around in a pissing contest, rather than use the position to better life for union members.
Conversely, there is the free market model. My last job kept laying people off, and gave me two pay cuts. I assumed there weren't better jobs because of the economy, but I finally looked. I moved to a much better company where not only am I treated better, but I almost doubled my salary.
The reason my last company was able to cut salaries and treat people terribly is because we allowed it. When I was hired there about 3 years ago, the IT staff was about 50 people. When I left it was maybe a dozen. I was one of 3 SysAdmins standing, and they weren't even filling my position when I left. I've since heard the other 2 SysAdmins have put in their resignation. Now the company will be forced to try and hire a new staff in a hurry. More than likely, they're going to pay more to hire new staff than keep those they ran off.
I tend to agree. When the economy goes south, and you either stop giving raises, or start giving paycuts, sometimes the best way to keep employees happy is with relatively minor perks like these. I worked for a company where there was a hiring and raise freeze during a merger. No one was happy. They expaned the free coffee into free hot cocoa as well. It was a minor thing, but the gesture seemed to make people happy.
There are 50 million e-book formats and standards. What appeals to me about Kindle or Nook is that it is backed by a huge retailer. I feel fairly confident that if I buy a book from them, I can access it in the future. I know they will have a huge library of titles in their format. I feel strongly that they stand a chance to become the dominant standard. Kindle is opening themselves up to other devices and resellers. My wife has been buying books via the Kindle app on her iPhone.
Would I prefer a nice open standard with no DRM? Certainly. Will retailers ever support that? No.
I never said it existed. I said I'd prefer they design such a model, rather than design a cheap tablet with minimal memory and a low-res screen.
It is possible their "optimization" is Windows update, updated drivers, and maybe removing some built-in bloatware. And that by swapping the video driver for another one, it can negatively affect 3D performance a great deal.
I used to recommend AVG or ClamWin, but honestly, these days Microsoft Security Essentials is the way to go.
I know, I know. I'm recommending Microsoft. But it has a great detection engine, it doesn't nag or get in your way too much, and it has a very small footprint.
It is free so long as Windows can pass validation.
Let's be fair. Best Buy tried selling me an $80 monster HDMI cable that I absolutely needed to get a good picture, even though HDMI is digital and not analog. I don't know how I get by with my $6 HDMI cable.
Am I in the minority here, but I'd rather pay $300 for a model with a nice higher res OLED screen and a full GB of RAM rather than a cheap $200 model.
Using the traditional buttons, I phone gaming to be an absolute pain in the past.
Using tilt functionality and a touch screen on the iPhone is a whole other story. I really do love it as a gaming device.
Change 10,000 to 100,000 and I wouldn't be shocked. He then states, "you want to be the manufacturer who gets this contract, because we will eventually order 10 million. And you don't want to do try and produce 10 million at once anyways. So give me the 10 million rate, and in you're in the door for 100,000 today."
The iPhone didn't sell well initially for a couple of reasons. Most individuals didn't think they needed smart phones. Most smart phone users didn't think the iPhone was a real smart phone. It took a while for people to realize the potential of the app store, and what the iPhone could do for them. The iPhone is also tied to one network.
The tablet could just be a plain wifi tablet with no cell phone support out of the box. You can always add a cellular modem, just like you do for your notebook today. If it isn't tied to a specific carrier, and they can launch it globally overnight (as opposed to fighting for different carrier deals in different countries) then they could easy trounce iPhone's early sales.
Apple has customers happily paying $2,900 for laptops. If they make a nice tablet for $999, I think people will eat it up.
They could sold a trademark license to the group for $1. Legally, they still demanded the trademark be licensed, but they allow the fan creation.
Wouldn't that move generate positive press?