Okay, here is where USPS falls short compared to FedEx and UPS:
* ridiculous restrictions on what can be shipped * Severely under-staffed at practically every location * Inflexible pickup policies * Bankers' hours * Poor package tracking (often won't indicate an item has shipped until days after it arrived at destination) * No guarantees. "Priority" shipping "may be 2-3 days" but then again it might take a week
If I call FedEx I can get a small shipment picked up usually within an hour, often as late as 6:30 or 7. A large shipment is a little different but even if I need to ship half a ton or a ton worth of goods, I can get a pickup the same day.
UPS is a little less flexible.
I used to have a UPS vs. FedEx comparison on my web site. It went something like this:
FedEx
* if the driver bothers to find you, the package will be delivered in one piece
* If they bother to find you, the package will arrive on time
* Your package will be handled carefully
* You deliveryperson is probably an ex con
* Your FedEx air driver can't pick up ground packages
UPS
* The driver will always find you, but the package might be beat up
* Your package might sit at the local UPS hub or UPS center a day or two before going out for delivery
* Your package will have fallen off a conveyor belt 30' onto the concrete floor because UPS insists on running 60,000-120,000 packages over four hours through a conveyor system designed to handle maybe 30,000 packages over four hours
* your deliveryperson is probably an ex con
* Your UPS ground or UPS air driver can pick up either air or ground packages
UPS used to be excellent - going public has really hurt them a lot. It seemed middle management cared a lot more when they were owner-operated so their net wealth had a lot more to do with how they performed than what their perceived market value is. Now that market cap drives managements' personal profits, they have little regard for customer service.
But honestly, I don't expect the USPS can ever do any better than either of them. USPS already does a craptacular job that makes either UPS or FedEx look good.
I've still yet to see a digital camera produce colours as well and vividly as slide film.
You have yet to discover post processing, just like you have to do with film, to achieve the final results. Digital Photo Professional, Capture NX, Adobe (Photoshop) Lightroom, Photoshop, and The Gimp are your friends. Think of them as developer+fixer. Think what I am suggesting is not a fair comparison? Read up on the C-41 and RA-4 processes.:)
a) "stealing" their content, depriving them of what they own b) it would require massive security holes in their system.
Copy & paste, with attribution, is not nearly as bad. Even better is summarizing, and using copy & pasted snippets in accordance with Fair Use guidelines.
This has been my obligatory pedantic post for today.:)
So, when the WP7 phone they hand out proves to have reception worse than the iPhone4+"deathgrip" employees will be recorded as absent and docked one day's pay per missed call. Nice!
One of the very best things about Windows Mobile up to now was the lack of locking it down. You could install any damn app you want, or code your own, and very easily install it. It is very easy to integrate into corporate environments and to develop tools for deploying app updates. This new locked-down WP7 completely destroys any remaining advantage Microsoft had over Apple.
Dell was not forced to lower their price, they choose to compete on price alone.
That is true of some of their desktops and low-end laptops - they're cheap in terms of both price and build quality, and the failure rate is abysmal.
When you move up to the Precision line, everything changes. I bought a Precision M6400 notebook for the build quality, full keyboard, performance, and parts availability. It uses a desktop chipset, has a Quadro video card, more ports than pretty much any other notebook (plus ExpressCard and Cardbus/PCMCIA), and the best screen I could find (glosst 1080p with an RGB-LED backlight). I know the notebook will still be running three years from now, and if I need a part in five years, there's a 99% chance Dell will be able to provide the part I need. (and yeah, calling a mobile workstation a "notebook" is a stretch, I know - this thing weighs in at almost 10 lbs)
Their servers - they're not bad at all, but proprietary wherever Dell can possibly make them proprietary, and even rebadged RAID cards which you would think are fairly standard, have firmware which makes them proprietary (their Perc line). I like their PowerVaults - the first time I set one up in a Windows cluster it was a royal pain in the ass though, because the jumper and DIP switch setting documentation was completely wrong, technical support had it just as backwards, so I was on my own. The chassis build quality was great though - almost up to anything from Chenbro or SuperMicro. If you price out any of the enterprise-quality servers, Dell is certainly not competing on price alone - in fact they are more costly than others. They compete based on their support contracts and their next-day parts or service delivery.
They engage in predatory business practices though. If you are a Dell reseller and are quoting a number of servers or large number of desktops for a client, Dell will attempt an end-around and sell directly to your client.
Also, the form factors they use are proprietary, locking you into Dell when it comes to upgrades, and - oops, you can't upgrade the motherboard in that server, guess you will have to buy a whole new server!
Downmarket they compete on price. Upmarket they compete on service contracts and vendor lock-in.
THANK YOU for pointing this out. I'm sure that the global warming alarmists will conveniently discount it though.
I'm glad someone mentioned this. In New England you can observe sublimation in your backyard; you can watch each day packed snow and ice decrease even in a single-digit-*F cold snap. Where did the snow and ice go, when it's too packed or solid to be blown around? It sublimated directly to water vapor; it never had to "melt." Imagine that happening on a much larger scale all year on a mountain as Scorp1us described with upwind water availability having been eliminated.
Well with a EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM imagine what the equivalent focal length is if you take crop factor into account. What would the crop factor be anyhow - 32.0?
Anyway this is not an SLR. SLR = Single Lens Reflex. Last I checked, there is no optical viewfinder, no pentaprism or pentamirror, nothing that would make it an SLR. In fact for a camera to be an SLR, technically speaking, interchangable lenses are not even required. What is required is a single lens provides the image for both the sensor/film and the optical viewfinder. This is more similar to the increasingly popular 4/3 format where the sensor provides the image for an EVF, but the lenses are interchangeable.
It is a neat project but it seems like it would be a royal pain in the ass to use. Your EF lens will be stuck at full-open aperture (so you will have no DOF) and while you are trying to use the manual focus on the lens, your iPhone will be trying to use its internal focus, making it very, very difficult to focus. It will also be incredibly difficult to hold steady enough to capture sharp images; the crop factor will be like using a really, really long lens and because the lens isn't powered by the iPhone you will not be able to use the lens's IS/VR/OS feature so there is no way to counteract camera shake. To make matters worse there is zero control over the iPhone's "shutter speed" so there is no way to even use the 1/(equivalent focal length) rule of thumb, so you would be restricted to using a very steady tripod.
Also, EF-S lenses would have been a better (and generally less expensive) choice as they mount closer to the sensor. Sample images? I didn't see any.
Since Apple's "fix" is "don't hold it the way we show it held in our marketing collateral" I think that Consumer Reports is clearly in the wrong here. Maybe Apple should, instead of actually fix the problem, consider suing Consumer Union another overpriced niche-product maker did. (too bad the case was dismissed)
And, from one of the linked articles:
"If the only thing that Apple is changing in this software fix is how the bars are calculated, then this is simply a pacifier for people who like to watch bars," said Spencer Webb, president of AntennaSys, an antenna design firm. "And signal 'bar watching' is a dangerous way to draw technical conclusions about a phone's reception."
Indeed, the bars that one sees displayed on any cell phone can be misleading. This is not just an issue for the iPhone, but for all cell phones, Webb explains.
If checking the number of bars "is a dangerous way to draw technical conclusions about a phone's reception" then a) why include the bar graph at all b) by what means do you recommend customers determine reception c) the bars are supposed to reflect dBm in a user-friendly way, and last I checked dBm is exactly what is used to determine an antenna's performance and d) when cell companies tout "more bars" as a key feature of their network, shouldn't it mean better reception and fewer dropped calls throughout their network?
That's not true. If they are the owners of the project and I am not a paying customer, they are under no obligation to provide me a copy of the source.
If they claim to be open source (as defined by OSI) then they have to give me 100% of the source as a paying customer, and if it is truly open source, I can choose to distribute that same source code to others, or even create a derivative product, like the folks over at CentOS (and previously White Box Enterprise Linux) do with Red Hat (er, I mean, "a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor") Enterprise Linux.:)
SugarCRM has been guilty of decepting customers with their "open source" claims in the past. They originally released under a modified Mozilla public license (the Sugar Public License), with requirements that derivatives remove any and all SugarCRM branding. A few enterprising folks forked it to form vtiger, which supposedly led to SugarCRM threatening to file suit for actually exercising their rights outlined under the license, and the CEO publicly lambasting the vtiger folks for actually taking SugarCRM up on their offer extended by the original SPL.
I've posted previously about sugar vs. vtiger before: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=223770&cid=18118754 (which drew out anti-F/OSS zealots and folks who didn't bother to read the licenses fully and obviously did not compare it to the previous SPL as it was originally written and released)
Now, the SugarCRM folks may have updated their licensing to remove the restrictions about moving to the free/community edition after having used the "enterprise" edition but honestly those folks were so scummy when they threw a fit after folks actually exercised their rights to create a derivative project that I can't be bothered to check.
Does vtiger functionality stack up well against SugarCRM's enterprise version? Not exactly. However, reverse is also true; vtiger offers some bells and whistles you don't get with Sugar - but in any event, vtiger does not use a license to try to restrict using your own data in another product.
Don't get me wrong: SugarCRM is a pretty good product, but I don't like to use products made by companies which engage in deceptive practices, even when some of the product editions may be "free."
Windows is not "backed by a large company" in any way when it comes to reliability, maintainability, or liability. You're better off with F/OSS solutions because you get the same backing, but save thousands per server and the ability for your staff to review code if liability really is such a large concern.
Better yet, if you need "backing of a large company" check out either SUSE Enterprise Linux or RedHat Linux.
They just upgraded to Windows 2008? That's not a great use of resources.
Liability? Have you read Microsoft's EULA? They disclaim all liability (even for their negligence), retain the right to install whatever they want to your system, and expressly disclaim any warranty. There goes any argument of a big company backing Windows.
. . . and this is superior to F/OSS how, exactly?
Why spend thousands to tens of thousands on a server OS and licensing on fast hardware, only to have to install third-party firewall, antivirus, antispyware, antirookit software on it, all of which slows it down to a crawl?
Why not pick an OS where the firewall is native and doesn't totally suck, where on-access antivirus is largely superfluous (except on file shares used by Windows clients), where file I/O is blazingly fast and is designed to be secure from the ground up?
Why not pick an OS and mail database which is not stored in an obfuscated proprietary format, where you can easily run nearly all maintenance tasks on a hot/mounted system, and where if the very worst case does happen you can still access your data?
With UNIX usually you can back up your data and/etc/* contents and copy that over to a new box and be up and running in minutes. Even backups of live databases can be mounted with little to no effort.
Patches? F/OSS developers tend to respond more quickly than M$ when it comes to security holes, and are a lot more open about what was fixed. They don't hide behind "Security Update for Windows 2003" or "Security Update for Windows XP" kind of descriptions. They generally indicate what was fixed and why.
Plus, in order to achieve the uptimes Microsoft claims, they redefine "downtime" to not include "scheduled maintenance windows." If you compare the real uptimes of *NIX (be it BSD, Linux, OS X, Solaris, or other) you'll find that the real-world uptime of unixy type systems is much higher.
It's too bad Windows 2000 support is ending - it was a great release - taking into consideration it is based on Windows code and backwards compatibility requirements had a huge negative impact on the security model the NT family can theoretically provide. The worst part is the backwards compatibility baggage haunts even Windows 2008 - which while being a decent release for Microsoft, is still vastly inferior to UNIX-type systems.
That is not taking into consideration the nickle-and-dime licensing that exists in the Windows world.
You should have taken advantage of the situation, showed the PHBs the EULA you get with Windows, what it really means for liability and warranty, and show them options which give them the same kind of assurance but costs many thousands less, and makes more efficient use of the hardware you install it on.
The $129 Internet-based A/V streaming set-top box will offer a variety of user-selectable media-streaming apps, but is unlikely at launch to include Netflix instant downloads (promised at announcement), Pandora music, or Amazon pay-per-view video support.
Oh, so in other words, it's dead on arrival.
When you figure that Blu-Ray players can be had for $12 more than this piece of crap and the Blu-Ray player can do not only Netflix, Amazon, Pandora, Youtube, and so on, it can also play Blu-Ray, DVD, and CD media.
. Well all you do is write your name on the paper when you drop them off
What I do is write YOUR name on the paper when I drop them off - and you're right they don't check at the time. You should be receiving the fines in the mail long after the fact.
It looks like Comcast is trying to make the tradition "boxless cable option" disappear.
. . . and you can assist them by watching Netflix,Crackle, and Hulu instead. End result: Comcast will have no choice but to end the douchebaggery and then everybody wins!
So our analog TVs are going to stop working soon? Why haven't we heard about this? It seems like they would have talked about it in the press or something.
Comcast did, before the digital cutover when they said they would continue to offer analog channels through 2012 or 2013 (I don't remember which)
But don't forget - this is the company selling "Unlimited* Internet"
*Unlimited defined as we reserve the right to anally rape you if we so wish, thank you for choosing Comcast
**sigh** It's frightening that she is actually allowed to function in society. She's so typical of Obama supporters. I can't help but wonder if she is the reason we have "texting" laws now, despite that if officers enforced actual safety related laws (improper lane changes, improper turns, driving left of center, failure to maintain control of the vehicle, reckless driving, hindering the flow of traffic, failure to yield, and so on and so forth). "Why there oughtta be a law" then when reminded there are already literally DOZENS of laws which make something unlawful or illegal the answer is "yeah but we need this law."
These people are so batshit stupid that we keep relecting the same frigging crooks every election day.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, here is where USPS falls short compared to FedEx and UPS:
* ridiculous restrictions on what can be shipped
* Severely under-staffed at practically every location
* Inflexible pickup policies
* Bankers' hours
* Poor package tracking (often won't indicate an item has shipped until days after it arrived at destination)
* No guarantees. "Priority" shipping "may be 2-3 days" but then again it might take a week
If I call FedEx I can get a small shipment picked up usually within an hour, often as late as 6:30 or 7. A large shipment is a little different but even if I need to ship half a ton or a ton worth of goods, I can get a pickup the same day.
UPS is a little less flexible.
I used to have a UPS vs. FedEx comparison on my web site. It went something like this:
FedEx
* if the driver bothers to find you, the package will be delivered in one piece
* If they bother to find you, the package will arrive on time
* Your package will be handled carefully
* You deliveryperson is probably an ex con
* Your FedEx air driver can't pick up ground packages
UPS
* The driver will always find you, but the package might be beat up
* Your package might sit at the local UPS hub or UPS center a day or two before going out for delivery
* Your package will have fallen off a conveyor belt 30' onto the concrete floor because UPS insists on running 60,000-120,000 packages over four hours through a conveyor system designed to handle maybe 30,000 packages over four hours
* your deliveryperson is probably an ex con
* Your UPS ground or UPS air driver can pick up either air or ground packages
UPS used to be excellent - going public has really hurt them a lot. It seemed middle management cared a lot more when they were owner-operated so their net wealth had a lot more to do with how they performed than what their perceived market value is. Now that market cap drives managements' personal profits, they have little regard for customer service.
But honestly, I don't expect the USPS can ever do any better than either of them. USPS already does a craptacular job that makes either UPS or FedEx look good.
You have yet to discover post processing, just like you have to do with film, to achieve the final results. Digital Photo Professional, Capture NX, Adobe (Photoshop) Lightroom, Photoshop, and The Gimp are your friends. Think of them as developer+fixer. Think what I am suggesting is not a fair comparison? Read up on the C-41 and RA-4 processes. :)
"I agree. Cut and paste is bad."
Why? Because if you cut & paste, then you are:
a) "stealing" their content, depriving them of what they own
b) it would require massive security holes in their system.
Copy & paste, with attribution, is not nearly as bad. Even better is summarizing, and using copy & pasted snippets in accordance with Fair Use guidelines.
This has been my obligatory pedantic post for today. :)
Why, are you imagining a beowulf cluster of them?
So, when the WP7 phone they hand out proves to have reception worse than the iPhone4+"deathgrip" employees will be recorded as absent and docked one day's pay per missed call. Nice!
One of the very best things about Windows Mobile up to now was the lack of locking it down. You could install any damn app you want, or code your own, and very easily install it. It is very easy to integrate into corporate environments and to develop tools for deploying app updates. This new locked-down WP7 completely destroys any remaining advantage Microsoft had over Apple.
That is true of some of their desktops and low-end laptops - they're cheap in terms of both price and build quality, and the failure rate is abysmal.
When you move up to the Precision line, everything changes. I bought a Precision M6400 notebook for the build quality, full keyboard, performance, and parts availability. It uses a desktop chipset, has a Quadro video card, more ports than pretty much any other notebook (plus ExpressCard and Cardbus/PCMCIA), and the best screen I could find (glosst 1080p with an RGB-LED backlight). I know the notebook will still be running three years from now, and if I need a part in five years, there's a 99% chance Dell will be able to provide the part I need. (and yeah, calling a mobile workstation a "notebook" is a stretch, I know - this thing weighs in at almost 10 lbs)
Their servers - they're not bad at all, but proprietary wherever Dell can possibly make them proprietary, and even rebadged RAID cards which you would think are fairly standard, have firmware which makes them proprietary (their Perc line). I like their PowerVaults - the first time I set one up in a Windows cluster it was a royal pain in the ass though, because the jumper and DIP switch setting documentation was completely wrong, technical support had it just as backwards, so I was on my own. The chassis build quality was great though - almost up to anything from Chenbro or SuperMicro. If you price out any of the enterprise-quality servers, Dell is certainly not competing on price alone - in fact they are more costly than others. They compete based on their support contracts and their next-day parts or service delivery.
They engage in predatory business practices though. If you are a Dell reseller and are quoting a number of servers or large number of desktops for a client, Dell will attempt an end-around and sell directly to your client.
Also, the form factors they use are proprietary, locking you into Dell when it comes to upgrades, and - oops, you can't upgrade the motherboard in that server, guess you will have to buy a whole new server!
Downmarket they compete on price. Upmarket they compete on service contracts and vendor lock-in.
THANK YOU for pointing this out. I'm sure that the global warming alarmists will conveniently discount it though.
I'm glad someone mentioned this. In New England you can observe sublimation in your backyard; you can watch each day packed snow and ice decrease even in a single-digit-*F cold snap. Where did the snow and ice go, when it's too packed or solid to be blown around? It sublimated directly to water vapor; it never had to "melt." Imagine that happening on a much larger scale all year on a mountain as Scorp1us described with upwind water availability having been eliminated.
The obvious solution is to get AT&T to put a cell tower on your property, like Apple did for their campus. Problem solved!
Who needs games? Linux comes with plenty of games. There's lbreakout/kbreakout, tuxkart, and . . . ltris.
I used to be a gamer. /shamelessripoffofredvsbluesmacswitchparody
Well with a EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM imagine what the equivalent focal length is if you take crop factor into account. What would the crop factor be anyhow - 32.0?
Anyway this is not an SLR. SLR = Single Lens Reflex. Last I checked, there is no optical viewfinder, no pentaprism or pentamirror, nothing that would make it an SLR. In fact for a camera to be an SLR, technically speaking, interchangable lenses are not even required. What is required is a single lens provides the image for both the sensor/film and the optical viewfinder. This is more similar to the increasingly popular 4/3 format where the sensor provides the image for an EVF, but the lenses are interchangeable.
It is a neat project but it seems like it would be a royal pain in the ass to use. Your EF lens will be stuck at full-open aperture (so you will have no DOF) and while you are trying to use the manual focus on the lens, your iPhone will be trying to use its internal focus, making it very, very difficult to focus. It will also be incredibly difficult to hold steady enough to capture sharp images; the crop factor will be like using a really, really long lens and because the lens isn't powered by the iPhone you will not be able to use the lens's IS/VR/OS feature so there is no way to counteract camera shake. To make matters worse there is zero control over the iPhone's "shutter speed" so there is no way to even use the 1/(equivalent focal length) rule of thumb, so you would be restricted to using a very steady tripod.
Also, EF-S lenses would have been a better (and generally less expensive) choice as they mount closer to the sensor.
Sample images? I didn't see any.
Since Apple's "fix" is "don't hold it the way we show it held in our marketing collateral" I think that Consumer Reports is clearly in the wrong here. Maybe Apple should, instead of actually fix the problem, consider suing Consumer Union another overpriced niche-product maker did. (too bad the case was dismissed)
And, from one of the linked articles:
If checking the number of bars "is a dangerous way to draw technical conclusions about a phone's reception" then a) why include the bar graph at all b) by what means do you recommend customers determine reception c) the bars are supposed to reflect dBm in a user-friendly way, and last I checked dBm is exactly what is used to determine an antenna's performance and d) when cell companies tout "more bars" as a key feature of their network, shouldn't it mean better reception and fewer dropped calls throughout their network?
Changing it to refer to it as "shared source" would make it a whole lot more palatable. Their claiming it is open source is a flat-out lie.
Wow so they brought it even further from being open source.
That's not true. If they are the owners of the project and I am not a paying customer, they are under no obligation to provide me a copy of the source.
If they claim to be open source (as defined by OSI) then they have to give me 100% of the source as a paying customer, and if it is truly open source, I can choose to distribute that same source code to others, or even create a derivative product, like the folks over at CentOS (and previously White Box Enterprise Linux) do with Red Hat (er, I mean, "a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor") Enterprise Linux. :)
Check out vtiger
SugarCRM has been guilty of decepting customers with their "open source" claims in the past. They originally released under a modified Mozilla public license (the Sugar Public License), with requirements that derivatives remove any and all SugarCRM branding. A few enterprising folks forked it to form vtiger, which supposedly led to SugarCRM threatening to file suit for actually exercising their rights outlined under the license, and the CEO publicly lambasting the vtiger folks for actually taking SugarCRM up on their offer extended by the original SPL.
http://forums.vtiger.com/viewtopic.php?t=11
http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/crm/sugarcrm-vs-vtiger.html
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=188554&cid=15541264
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/is-sugarcrm-open-source/867
I've posted previously about sugar vs. vtiger before:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=223770&cid=18118754 (which drew out anti-F/OSS zealots and folks who didn't bother to read the licenses fully and obviously did not compare it to the previous SPL as it was originally written and released)
Now, the SugarCRM folks may have updated their licensing to remove the restrictions about moving to the free/community edition after having used the "enterprise" edition but honestly those folks were so scummy when they threw a fit after folks actually exercised their rights to create a derivative project that I can't be bothered to check.
Does vtiger functionality stack up well against SugarCRM's enterprise version? Not exactly. However, reverse is also true; vtiger offers some bells and whistles you don't get with Sugar - but in any event, vtiger does not use a license to try to restrict using your own data in another product.
Don't get me wrong: SugarCRM is a pretty good product, but I don't like to use products made by companies which engage in deceptive practices, even when some of the product editions may be "free."
Yes. Yes it does.
Windows is not "backed by a large company" in any way when it comes to reliability, maintainability, or liability. You're better off with F/OSS solutions because you get the same backing, but save thousands per server and the ability for your staff to review code if liability really is such a large concern.
Better yet, if you need "backing of a large company" check out either SUSE Enterprise Linux or RedHat Linux.
They just upgraded to Windows 2008? That's not a great use of resources.
Liability? Have you read Microsoft's EULA? They disclaim all liability (even for their negligence), retain the right to install whatever they want to your system, and expressly disclaim any warranty. There goes any argument of a big company backing Windows.
. . . and this is superior to F/OSS how, exactly?
Why spend thousands to tens of thousands on a server OS and licensing on fast hardware, only to have to install third-party firewall, antivirus, antispyware, antirookit software on it, all of which slows it down to a crawl?
Why not pick an OS where the firewall is native and doesn't totally suck, where on-access antivirus is largely superfluous (except on file shares used by Windows clients), where file I/O is blazingly fast and is designed to be secure from the ground up?
Why not pick an OS and mail database which is not stored in an obfuscated proprietary format, where you can easily run nearly all maintenance tasks on a hot/mounted system, and where if the very worst case does happen you can still access your data?
With UNIX usually you can back up your data and /etc/* contents and copy that over to a new box and be up and running in minutes. Even backups of live databases can be mounted with little to no effort.
Patches? F/OSS developers tend to respond more quickly than M$ when it comes to security holes, and are a lot more open about what was fixed. They don't hide behind "Security Update for Windows 2003" or "Security Update for Windows XP" kind of descriptions. They generally indicate what was fixed and why.
Plus, in order to achieve the uptimes Microsoft claims, they redefine "downtime" to not include "scheduled maintenance windows." If you compare the real uptimes of *NIX (be it BSD, Linux, OS X, Solaris, or other) you'll find that the real-world uptime of unixy type systems is much higher.
It's too bad Windows 2000 support is ending - it was a great release - taking into consideration it is based on Windows code and backwards compatibility requirements had a huge negative impact on the security model the NT family can theoretically provide. The worst part is the backwards compatibility baggage haunts even Windows 2008 - which while being a decent release for Microsoft, is still vastly inferior to UNIX-type systems.
That is not taking into consideration the nickle-and-dime licensing that exists in the Windows world.
You should have taken advantage of the situation, showed the PHBs the EULA you get with Windows, what it really means for liability and warranty, and show them options which give them the same kind of assurance but costs many thousands less, and makes more efficient use of the hardware you install it on.
Oh, so in other words, it's dead on arrival.
When you figure that Blu-Ray players can be had for $12 more than this piece of crap and the Blu-Ray player can do not only Netflix, Amazon, Pandora, Youtube, and so on, it can also play Blu-Ray, DVD, and CD media.
Fail.
The word is rarely ever* used that way in this context.
* "rarely ever" as in practically never
HTH
What I do is write YOUR name on the paper when I drop them off - and you're right they don't check at the time. You should be receiving the fines in the mail long after the fact.
. . . and you can assist them by watching Netflix,Crackle, and Hulu instead. End result: Comcast will have no choice but to end the douchebaggery and then everybody wins!
Comcast did, before the digital cutover when they said they would continue to offer analog channels through 2012 or 2013 (I don't remember which)
But don't forget - this is the company selling "Unlimited* Internet"
*Unlimited defined as we reserve the right to anally rape you if we so wish, thank you for choosing Comcast
He lost me at "what are midichlorians"
**sigh** It's frightening that she is actually allowed to function in society. She's so typical of Obama supporters. I can't help but wonder if she is the reason we have "texting" laws now, despite that if officers enforced actual safety related laws (improper lane changes, improper turns, driving left of center, failure to maintain control of the vehicle, reckless driving, hindering the flow of traffic, failure to yield, and so on and so forth). "Why there oughtta be a law" then when reminded there are already literally DOZENS of laws which make something unlawful or illegal the answer is "yeah but we need this law."
These people are so batshit stupid that we keep relecting the same frigging crooks every election day.
I vote for the giant douche -- I'm not into scat.