Ugh, I haven't seen "ze" and "hir" since I compulsively read usenet in the 90s. It made my sentance parser stumble even after years of constant exposure. It wasn't used consistently, even in the same post, often being replaced by the less popular variants or regression to gendered forms. It often provoked flamewars, or at least repetitive questions, or in some cases offtopic speculation about the gender of the person(s) involved. I grew to hate it, although I always understood the need for a gender neutral pronoun.
Sometimes I wonder if the neutral fascists ever found out about gendered languages such as Spanish or French. That would have given them spasms. I also wonder if they try this in person. I ran up against it in real life a few times. None of those poor bastards were able to keep it up for more than a few weeks.
Did you just hold up police officers as an ideal of professionalism?! Doctors as full of grace?! You couldn't have picked worse.
Police are often rude (to me, a white professional - I hear it is much worse if you are brown, black, muslim, etc.) and Doctors are notorious for overbooking, not listening to patients, and millions of mistakes per year. Hardly shows respect for your customers to make them wait for hours, misdiagnose after acting impatiently, then mix up their meds and nearly kill them.
Shit, at least if IT screws up nobody gets shot. Nobody gets a sponge left in them.
I agree with all your points, but you are mistaken about the source of the problem.
IT typically does not make the decisions about password policy, storage policy, or network policy. These things are typically dictated from "on high" and the IT department is often more angry about these policies than the users are.
I think 1 year expiry on passwords with no complexity requirements is more secure than 12-digit complex passwords that expire every month. You're basically ensuring that every workstation will have passwords written down. But I don't make that decision. Some C-level exec does. Even his hands might be tied, either from the legal department, an audit, legislation, etc. Health care being possibly the most restrictive area.
Don't blame IT for policies it didn't make and probably doesn't like. I'd rather give users full access to their machines and reimage them if things go wrong. But I can't.
The "reasoning" these ad-people use is that ads you are forced to watch, against your will, will somehow corrupt your free will. That your unconscious mind will be screaming "Ford! Coke! Gap! Etc!" every time you try to think clearly about making a purchase. Maybe it's even true. I find myself wanting to punch the monkey from time to time, and a free iPod seems compelling to me. I haven't seen an internet ad in a long time, either!
So, don't waste your time trying to be reasonable. It's all some kind of marketing voodoo that isn't bound by logic.
I like gmail. They make money faster than they can count it, and their ads don't make me crazy. I'm wary since I've been burnt so many times, but it is possible things will never go to hell since they're making money.
A small sig with a text ad is acceptable. Simple text ads are OK. Once you go to hideous flash or animated banners, you've crossed the line.
I think it's pretty easy to come up with reasonable models. Google has made billions offering non-terrible ads. I don't know why anyone does it the stupid way anymore.
You are painfully loyal to these corporations. They can change the terms of service at any time. They won't hesitate to make the service more annoying and profitable if the mood strikes.
I don't use Yahoo, but the way I've seen it work at other places is like this: 1. Offer useful, non-annoying service 2. Become successful 3. Make service annoying 4. Poor deluded users are stuck with it, or they can change providers (which often sucks or is simply impossible)
I had an account with mail.com many years ago. They had good webmail and lots of neat-o domain names. Slowly they started sucking until now it makes me want to die using their site on IE. Blinding, flashing, musical, interstitial, repetitous hell. That wasn't the deal. They changed the rules. They get blocked.
Yahoo did the same exact thing, I can guarantee it. They got wise to the getting blocked part, and now they're trying to ruin that too. Fuck 'em. I finally moved away from my mail.com account. I got tired of having to whip up a greasemonkey script every few weeks to deal with their latest retardation. It sucked. I've had that email for 10 years or so. I'll probably lose some important stuff in the future such as forgotten registrations, long-lost friends, etc.
We don't owe these bastards anything. If they can change the rules so can we. Eventually some honest company will come along with a sustainable business model instead of this bait-and-switch bullshit. I'm so sick of having something useful and good grow ad-fucked time after time.
I started blocking here when they had these super-annoying IBM ads. I can't remember exactly but they either crept into the content or flashed or something. Oh yeah, and they munged firefox margins and made the page display all narrow. I dealt with it for a week. No more ads for slashdot. I'm with you, but if I get to my increasingly low annoyance threshold the site gets no more ads.
I'm sorry for overreacting. I'm tired of people who think Apple shouldn't be subject to any criticism, but you aren't being irrational.
The problem, as I see it, is that Apple has such a large market share that they will help determine what legal online music looks like 10 years from now. The movement towards DRM-free downloads has been independant groups and limited label experiments so far. This is a big deal since mp3 was completely unacceptable to record companies for over a decade.
The risk is if Apple uses it's market clout selfishly these mp3 experiments will remain isolated events. Apple could snuff out DRM-free music's chance by refusing to sell it through iTMS, or it could use it's considerable influence with record companies to push for it. Their actions will largely determine the shape of the online media world for many years.
I don't share your optimism that Apple would eagerly drop DRM. It's too strong of a vendor lock-in to give up voluntarily. If someone ever makes an iPod-level device there will be many users who think converting will be too much of a hassle.
I remember when once you bought a specific manufacturer's computer you were stuck. You couldn't buy a different one and easily read your files. I'm glad that now things are standardized. You can buy an apple, linux box, or a Dell and easily read any CD, flash drive, etc. I'd like to see the same happen for music players. No workarounds or expertise necessary.
I don't know why you're so hung up on this. Let's make it simple. 2 options: 1) exec gets $1M. 2) 100 students get $10k.
option 1 the exec gets 650k after taxes. option 2, 100 students pay a trifle in taxes, if anything.
Also, I never paid taxes on the GRANTS I got while going to college, and you don't have to pay back a grant.
If you need to involve the exec for some reason, he gets $1M, gives $1M away, writes off $1M on his taxes. After taxes is irrelevant to this whole scenario no matter how I try to look at it.
The things I don't understand include huge bonuses for failing/fired executives, increases in executive compensation while worker compensation stays flat, and the huge difference in income ratio compared to historical US data and current global data.
Your numbers are wrong btw. It was a million dollar bonus, not a 600k bonus. College students would pay maybe 1k on 10,000 income, but I don't remember paying taxes on my student grants and loans.
So we can't even talk about apple anymore? We can't wish things were different? We can't talk about an ideal situation and what things might stand in the way?
Wow, dude, you need to step back from the conspiracy punch.
I was reading a lively debate with some interesting issues raised. You started spouting irrational conspiracy rants instead of responding. You're never going to make your point that way. You can try again, or you can give up.
You've missed the point of TFA. There is a movement towards unencumbered mp3s in the digital music sales world and apple itunes store is the strongest force against this. Why are you talking about how the DRM is liberal? Why are you talking about Vista? Why are you talking about not needing DRM on a Mac?
Wow, that's pretty cheeky. Is this the actual end-user location slingers or is it the factory workers that assemble and flash-freeze the product? I'd always assumed that the people that work in the mcNugget refinery were classified as manufacturing/chemical.
Don't forget Walmart clerk, daycare staff, fast food workers, gas station attendants, and so forth. The true bulk of service jobs. Service sector jobs aren't always low paying menial jobs, but many of them are.
That's true of all the OEMs I've dealt with. Even a current Dell "mid size business" box comes with a very clean install (and a handy OEM cd that works on any Dell PC) It's always the poor consumers that get the "special" treatment.
It isn't a stock account, it is a money market account. It pays around 5% which is typical of a money market account. It has nothing to do with paypal stock. A money market account will generally be invested in T-bills and commercial debt. It is possible to lose money investing like this, but it is considered to be very low risk.
I like 2 things about Dell: price and DOA support. When building my own machine, I can't match Dell's price. Of course I get to pick all the components, so the quality is higher. The DOA support is often a big deal, though. Most doomed parts die within a few weeks or never work at all. When I build my own and find the motherboard is bad and it took out my power supply it is a headache to get both replaced under warranty. 2 (or more) different suppliers is quite a logistical problem. I've even had cases where it took so long to get everything working that it was no longer under warranty by the time I was using it.
With Dell, I can count on spending 2 hours doing a stupid online chat and getting a new system sent. If I've got cocktails handy the chat doesn't even make me angry.
I wouldn't mind so much if they were all working apps. I was checking out the HP consumer install and couldn't believe how many were demos, pay-to-use, ads, and 30-day trials. A beginning user would be left thinking that computers were thinly featured and very expensive to use. Uninstalling all the bloat leaves acres of registry entries and files.
For me it stopped being funny after the 10,000th time. Imagine if every linux question were guaranteed to include multiple "Install the latest patch from Redmond" variants. Sure, it is funny once (especially the redmond one I just made up) but give it a rest once in a while. I'm extra unsympathetic to downmods since this used to be a guaranteed +5, Insightful. Stupid karma whores.
Anyway, even the most rabid linux fan has to admit that there are people who, for various reasons, use windows. Let them ask questions and get answers without snarky unhelpful "advice" from time to time ok?
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh, I haven't seen "ze" and "hir" since I compulsively read usenet in the 90s. It made my sentance parser stumble even after years of constant exposure. It wasn't used consistently, even in the same post, often being replaced by the less popular variants or regression to gendered forms. It often provoked flamewars, or at least repetitive questions, or in some cases offtopic speculation about the gender of the person(s) involved. I grew to hate it, although I always understood the need for a gender neutral pronoun.
Sometimes I wonder if the neutral fascists ever found out about gendered languages such as Spanish or French. That would have given them spasms. I also wonder if they try this in person. I ran up against it in real life a few times. None of those poor bastards were able to keep it up for more than a few weeks.
Did you just hold up police officers as an ideal of professionalism?! Doctors as full of grace?! You couldn't have picked worse.
Police are often rude (to me, a white professional - I hear it is much worse if you are brown, black, muslim, etc.) and Doctors are notorious for overbooking, not listening to patients, and millions of mistakes per year. Hardly shows respect for your customers to make them wait for hours, misdiagnose after acting impatiently, then mix up their meds and nearly kill them.
Shit, at least if IT screws up nobody gets shot. Nobody gets a sponge left in them.
I agree with all your points, but you are mistaken about the source of the problem.
IT typically does not make the decisions about password policy, storage policy, or network policy. These things are typically dictated from "on high" and the IT department is often more angry about these policies than the users are.
I think 1 year expiry on passwords with no complexity requirements is more secure than 12-digit complex passwords that expire every month. You're basically ensuring that every workstation will have passwords written down. But I don't make that decision. Some C-level exec does. Even his hands might be tied, either from the legal department, an audit, legislation, etc. Health care being possibly the most restrictive area.
Don't blame IT for policies it didn't make and probably doesn't like. I'd rather give users full access to their machines and reimage them if things go wrong. But I can't.
Now I know why they call it Greenwich Mean Time. Sheesh!
The "reasoning" these ad-people use is that ads you are forced to watch, against your will, will somehow corrupt your free will. That your unconscious mind will be screaming "Ford! Coke! Gap! Etc!" every time you try to think clearly about making a purchase. Maybe it's even true. I find myself wanting to punch the monkey from time to time, and a free iPod seems compelling to me. I haven't seen an internet ad in a long time, either!
So, don't waste your time trying to be reasonable. It's all some kind of marketing voodoo that isn't bound by logic.
That's the secret. Make it better enough and the ads subtle enough and you can rake in the bucks. Give 'em flash and blink and noise and get blocked.
I like gmail. They make money faster than they can count it, and their ads don't make me crazy. I'm wary since I've been burnt so many times, but it is possible things will never go to hell since they're making money.
A small sig with a text ad is acceptable. Simple text ads are OK. Once you go to hideous flash or animated banners, you've crossed the line.
I think it's pretty easy to come up with reasonable models. Google has made billions offering non-terrible ads. I don't know why anyone does it the stupid way anymore.
You are painfully loyal to these corporations. They can change the terms of service at any time. They won't hesitate to make the service more annoying and profitable if the mood strikes.
I don't use Yahoo, but the way I've seen it work at other places is like this:
1. Offer useful, non-annoying service
2. Become successful
3. Make service annoying
4. Poor deluded users are stuck with it, or they can change providers (which often sucks or is simply impossible)
I had an account with mail.com many years ago. They had good webmail and lots of neat-o domain names. Slowly they started sucking until now it makes me want to die using their site on IE. Blinding, flashing, musical, interstitial, repetitous hell. That wasn't the deal. They changed the rules. They get blocked.
Yahoo did the same exact thing, I can guarantee it. They got wise to the getting blocked part, and now they're trying to ruin that too. Fuck 'em. I finally moved away from my mail.com account. I got tired of having to whip up a greasemonkey script every few weeks to deal with their latest retardation. It sucked. I've had that email for 10 years or so. I'll probably lose some important stuff in the future such as forgotten registrations, long-lost friends, etc.
We don't owe these bastards anything. If they can change the rules so can we. Eventually some honest company will come along with a sustainable business model instead of this bait-and-switch bullshit. I'm so sick of having something useful and good grow ad-fucked time after time.
I started blocking here when they had these super-annoying IBM ads. I can't remember exactly but they either crept into the content or flashed or something. Oh yeah, and they munged firefox margins and made the page display all narrow. I dealt with it for a week. No more ads for slashdot. I'm with you, but if I get to my increasingly low annoyance threshold the site gets no more ads.
I'm sorry for overreacting. I'm tired of people who think Apple shouldn't be subject to any criticism, but you aren't being irrational.
The problem, as I see it, is that Apple has such a large market share that they will help determine what legal online music looks like 10 years from now. The movement towards DRM-free downloads has been independant groups and limited label experiments so far. This is a big deal since mp3 was completely unacceptable to record companies for over a decade.
The risk is if Apple uses it's market clout selfishly these mp3 experiments will remain isolated events. Apple could snuff out DRM-free music's chance by refusing to sell it through iTMS, or it could use it's considerable influence with record companies to push for it. Their actions will largely determine the shape of the online media world for many years.
I don't share your optimism that Apple would eagerly drop DRM. It's too strong of a vendor lock-in to give up voluntarily. If someone ever makes an iPod-level device there will be many users who think converting will be too much of a hassle.
I remember when once you bought a specific manufacturer's computer you were stuck. You couldn't buy a different one and easily read your files. I'm glad that now things are standardized. You can buy an apple, linux box, or a Dell and easily read any CD, flash drive, etc. I'd like to see the same happen for music players. No workarounds or expertise necessary.
I don't know why you're so hung up on this. Let's make it simple. 2 options: 1) exec gets $1M. 2) 100 students get $10k.
option 1 the exec gets 650k after taxes.
option 2, 100 students pay a trifle in taxes, if anything.
Also, I never paid taxes on the GRANTS I got while going to college, and you don't have to pay back a grant.
If you need to involve the exec for some reason, he gets $1M, gives $1M away, writes off $1M on his taxes. After taxes is irrelevant to this whole scenario no matter how I try to look at it.
The things I don't understand include huge bonuses for failing/fired executives, increases in executive compensation while worker compensation stays flat, and the huge difference in income ratio compared to historical US data and current global data.
Your numbers are wrong btw. It was a million dollar bonus, not a 600k bonus. College students would pay maybe 1k on 10,000 income, but I don't remember paying taxes on my student grants and loans.
So we can't even talk about apple anymore? We can't wish things were different? We can't talk about an ideal situation and what things might stand in the way?
[straps on jackboots]
Wow, dude, you need to step back from the conspiracy punch.
I was reading a lively debate with some interesting issues raised. You started spouting irrational conspiracy rants instead of responding. You're never going to make your point that way. You can try again, or you can give up.
You've missed the point of TFA. There is a movement towards unencumbered mp3s in the digital music sales world and apple itunes store is the strongest force against this. Why are you talking about how the DRM is liberal? Why are you talking about Vista? Why are you talking about not needing DRM on a Mac?
Wow, that's pretty cheeky. Is this the actual end-user location slingers or is it the factory workers that assemble and flash-freeze the product? I'd always assumed that the people that work in the mcNugget refinery were classified as manufacturing/chemical.
Don't forget Walmart clerk, daycare staff, fast food workers, gas station attendants, and so forth. The true bulk of service jobs. Service sector jobs aren't always low paying menial jobs, but many of them are.
That's true of all the OEMs I've dealt with. Even a current Dell "mid size business" box comes with a very clean install (and a handy OEM cd that works on any Dell PC) It's always the poor consumers that get the "special" treatment.
It isn't a stock account, it is a money market account. It pays around 5% which is typical of a money market account. It has nothing to do with paypal stock. A money market account will generally be invested in T-bills and commercial debt. It is possible to lose money investing like this, but it is considered to be very low risk.
What was the reason money was missing? Was it a sale you made, a purchase you didn't? a purchase gone bad?
I like 2 things about Dell: price and DOA support. When building my own machine, I can't match Dell's price. Of course I get to pick all the components, so the quality is higher. The DOA support is often a big deal, though. Most doomed parts die within a few weeks or never work at all. When I build my own and find the motherboard is bad and it took out my power supply it is a headache to get both replaced under warranty. 2 (or more) different suppliers is quite a logistical problem. I've even had cases where it took so long to get everything working that it was no longer under warranty by the time I was using it.
With Dell, I can count on spending 2 hours doing a stupid online chat and getting a new system sent. If I've got cocktails handy the chat doesn't even make me angry.
I wouldn't mind so much if they were all working apps. I was checking out the HP consumer install and couldn't believe how many were demos, pay-to-use, ads, and 30-day trials. A beginning user would be left thinking that computers were thinly featured and very expensive to use. Uninstalling all the bloat leaves acres of registry entries and files.
For me it stopped being funny after the 10,000th time. Imagine if every linux question were guaranteed to include multiple "Install the latest patch from Redmond" variants. Sure, it is funny once (especially the redmond one I just made up) but give it a rest once in a while. I'm extra unsympathetic to downmods since this used to be a guaranteed +5, Insightful. Stupid karma whores.
Anyway, even the most rabid linux fan has to admit that there are people who, for various reasons, use windows. Let them ask questions and get answers without snarky unhelpful "advice" from time to time ok?
. Much snazzier!
The Euro sounds like a middle eastern sandwich. You call that progress?