Any argument that I put forward you'd immediately dismiss as 'brainwashing'.
No, I can accept reason. I can't accept a simple "A is better than B and that's that" as if it's like saying "it's dark at night." Yes, iPhones are more expensive, the question is, is there any extra functionality that justifies the extra expense? I've seen none looking at friends' phones. Lamborghinis are nice, but my ten year old Chrysler gets me to work just as fast and safely as that $100,000 status symbol (which, without evidence to the contrary, is what I see Apple as).
FTR, I own neither an Android nor an iPhone. I'll get one or the other when I can use wifi without data charges. There's a damned good reaosn people like "cheaper" -- most people have to work for their money and don't want to waste in on a "cool" name like Apple, Nike, or Jaguar.
Customer service sucks with all cell phone carriers. I've tried them all and have stories for each.
Same here, until fairly recently when I found out about BOOST Mobile. Unmetered everything except tethering, which is against the TOS. It was only $50 per month, and someone at/. clued me in to a plan they have where you can get your bill down to $45, so that's what I'm paying.
What's even better is since I paid cash for the phone (a $100 motorola blackberry lookalike) and sign up fee ($50) and cash for the monthly bills, there's no identity stalking from them.
I've been with them about two years now, and the few issues I've had were cleared up promptly.
Their voicemail menu system sucks, but whose doesn't?
And there are two kinds of phones: iPhones, and phones that WANT to be iPhones.
Say, Mister shill, I think this tread might suit you better.
I know a few people with iPhones and quite a few with droids, and I see little difference between them. There are some damned good reasons why Androids outsell iPhones, and "android wants to be iphone" ain't one.
If you're not really a paid shill I feel sorry for you, because it means the PR has brainwashed you.
Interesting. Do you have a citation? I'd not heard of that before.
GP, if you're reading this, your journal was the place for that, not here. And there is at least one JE about it right now. Mods, please mod the GP and everyone who responded to him (including me) offtopic. Thx.
I work for a big pharma company, as a sysadmin. I don't know much about the science though. Any company finding a cure for HIV or cancer or the common cold would have its stock skyrocket, turning the board instant billionaires.
Once in the mid nineties I was in a car wreck, and looking at the X-Rays the radiologist remarked that I had spinal arthritis. I said "I know, when are you guys going to find a cure for arthritis?"
He just smiled and said "there's no money in cures; we do treatments."
Cure you and you're only their customer once. Treat you and you're a customer forever. And... it seems a little perverse to me that you are a doctor's customer. In other countries, doctors have patients. You can bet that if any pharma comes up with a cure for a disease they have a profitable treatment for, they're going to bury it as deeply as they can.
Actually, I thought 6 was the only pre-GNU OS I ever got that was worth the money, but that was because of DoubleSpace... which the "not evil" Microsoft stole from their "partner", Stack Electronics. It was good for me, but completely evil in the business dealing with the partner they crushed.
The "expert" the sponsor will be providing to take part in the conversation will have an account which is "badged", meaning that it will be visually apparent when the a comment was posted by the sponsor.
The world is no longer isolated little cities spread across the planet. It's one global city now with the internet here. And treating people like shit for any reason WILL bite you in the ass.
And conversely, since it is a "single city" there are seven billion more where you came from, which is where the multinationals' anti-customer bias comes from. You don't matter, you're only one in seven billion.
Sheesh, the post office isn't shutting down. Yes, some post offices in tiny towns, and distribution centers are closing (the distribution center here in Springfield is slated to close, Durbin is fighting it), but you're still going to get paper bills and junk mail and Netflix DVDs in your snailbox. It wil just take a day or two longer for you to get it.
HIV is no more a "sexually transmitted disease" than influenza is; you can catch either disease having sex and in fact your odds of catching the flu are far greater. HIV is transmitted through blood. Which means that if you're in a knife fight with someone with HIV, you're far more likely to catch AIDS than if you had vaginal intercourse with her; if her blood hits your open wound, you're probably infected.
Most cases of HIV have come form tainted transfusions, shared needles, and anal sex (the tissues tear and the infected semen gets in the blood).
but as long as you bought into the MARKETING that more channels == better sound, hey, have fun.
Well, it's only a partial fallacy. Surround sound makes no sense. When listening to music, are you sitting in the middle of the orchestra, or in the audience where the theater's acoustics have been engineered for you to listen in, with all the sound from in front of you? In a movie, I find having sounds come from anywhere but the screen itself a distraction. Quad sound would make sense for movies if there were a speaker at each corner of the screen, so sounds could travel up and down as well as right and left.
However, the more drivers of different sizes you put in an enclosure, the better it will sound, especially if you separate the different frequencies into channels for each speakers.
And if you have real speakers (at least three ways with a real woofer in each one twelve inches or more diameter, eighteen is better), subwoofers are not only unnecessary, they will actually degrade the sound. Subwoofers are only necessary to overcome what was the downfall of quadraphonics in the '70s -- the cost of good woofers. I argued with a professor in an undergrad physics class about this when quadraphonics were new, and he actually conceded that I was right when I brought my two Kenwood 777s and a cheap stereo amp in. The trouble with quadraphonic was that you had to have twice everything, so a $1000 stereo would sound remarkably better than a $1000 quad setup. That, and you have the (planned and engineered) interference between the left channel's low frequencies and the right channel's. That is missing with a subwoofer, even though the ear can't discern the position of a sound with a wavelength longer than your head is wide.
Surround only worked because the price of the amps had come down so far, and the price of four big woofers was mitigated by having a single sub.
its is NOT hifi, though.
Even stereo CDs aren't. People misunderstand Nyquist, and think it means that you get perfect sound until you hit the Nyquist limit, but in actuality the closer you get to the limit, the more aliasing you get. There is no way to discern a 15kHz sine wave from a 15kHz sawtooth wave with only three samples per wave. I have never heard a CD through any equipment that would make me think it was a live performance, but I have heard LPs that were that good (and yes, it has to be well engineered in the studio or it's still not high fidelity).
And as you point out, people don't think of interference, with waves doubling and cancelling each other.
Well, there's quality, and there's quality. There's the quality of the music, and the quality of the sound. Crap in hifi is still crap, but your artful mono lofi would be far more enjoyable in stereophonic high fidelity.
I look at Netflix as something that I can test out movies I wouldn't have otherwise watched.
That's what the Pirate Bay is for. I'm not going to pay to watch something I wouldn't pay to watch... even if I pay less for less quality.
people were upset about having to pay the equivalent of one days coffee for something that lasts a lot longer and enriches their lives far more. (it is just television...but c'mon...in the scheme of things, it is still better than coffee!
Your priorities are really screwed up, dude. Coffee? I drink Folgers or Maxwell House, Starbucks is for rich people and fools. And I not only can live without TV, I have lived without TV, but I'm addictied to coffee. I can't function well without it. Can't say the same for TV.
A two pound can of coffee costs about as much as a month's Netflix, and lasts about a month. A pot of that coffee will last all day, a Netflix movie won't.
It usually wasn't cassettes over vinyl, with most of us it was record the vinyl on cassette so we could hear it in the car, as well as folks without much room to store those LPs.
VHS over Laserdisc
Laserdisk was read-only. It was a product without a clear cut purpose. People bought VCRs so they could record shows and discovered rented movies. The laserdisk was doomed from the start.
VHS quality is probably okay
Betamaxes cost twice what VHS cost, and for most of us a small increase in quality isn't worth paying double for. Plus, Betamax was limited to two hours per tape, while the VHS had a six hour length in slow speed.
DVD definitely is.
DVD was superior to anything out at the time, FAR superior in every way to VCRs (except that until recently they were read-only).
I have a Nike T-shirt (St Louis Cardinals logo on it). Paid seventy five cents for it at a garage sale five years ago.
Anyone who pays full price for fashion is no nerd. In fact, if you care about fashion at all you probably aren't a nerd. If you just want to meet women, ask women what to wear.
This advice comes from personal experience. After my divorce I couldn't get as much as a dinner date for 3 years, until one night in a bar a woman suggested I cut my beard into a goatee. So I did an informal survey of women 18 to eighty seven, and seventeen of eighteen respondants said "goatee" (the eighteenth was standing next to her boyfriend, who was wearing a full beard).
The dry spell ended almost immediately. I guess women don't like the RMS look.
You don't need an eighteen wheeler to move a single TV set. Doing spreadsheets or databases with only a few thousand records on a mainframe is wasteful. As is putting an apostrophe in PCs.
laptops over PC's
Same thing. No reason to be tied to a desk if the laptop does the job. No reason to carry a travelling trunk when you're only going to be gone two days. The thing with both of them is use of the proper tool, not convinience. You don't need a sledgehammer to open a walnut.
I don't think the "serviced by Yahoo" has to do with customer service, I think it has to do with web-based infrastructure (but I could be wrong).
It does seem that TFS is straight on, from my personal experience anyway. I had Cingular for years and was happy with them. AT&T bought them out and my bill skyrocketed, so I switched carriers.
When I went to see about internet connections when I moved, there was Comcast at $40 and AT&T for $20, even though it was a slower connection than Comcast. After talking with the AT&T guy on the phone, I opted for their "double speed" for an extra five bucks. Still slower than Comcast, but as I'm the only one living at my house, I don't do the fast internet games any more, and there are only two computers running at any one time, the speed was fine for me.
The latest bill came yesterday. All of a sudden it's $40. I'll be calling them this afternoon after I get my phone fixed/replaced to bitch about it, and will probably be going with Comcast after the contract is up.
However, like Russel's teapot, the logical inference is... that without evidence, we should assume something extraordinary doesn't exist.
I find that a universe coming into being from nothingness, complete with creatures sentient enough to wonder where stuff came from and how stuff works to be pretty unbelievable. I find that eyeballs wired to a brain to come from evolution alone to be pretty unlikely.
It also seems that a universe coming out of nothingnesss from nowhere violates the laws of thermodynamics.
Slashdot Mirror
Any argument that I put forward you'd immediately dismiss as 'brainwashing'.
No, I can accept reason. I can't accept a simple "A is better than B and that's that" as if it's like saying "it's dark at night." Yes, iPhones are more expensive, the question is, is there any extra functionality that justifies the extra expense? I've seen none looking at friends' phones. Lamborghinis are nice, but my ten year old Chrysler gets me to work just as fast and safely as that $100,000 status symbol (which, without evidence to the contrary, is what I see Apple as).
FTR, I own neither an Android nor an iPhone. I'll get one or the other when I can use wifi without data charges. There's a damned good reaosn people like "cheaper" -- most people have to work for their money and don't want to waste in on a "cool" name like Apple, Nike, or Jaguar.
Customer service sucks with all cell phone carriers. I've tried them all and have stories for each.
Same here, until fairly recently when I found out about BOOST Mobile. Unmetered everything except tethering, which is against the TOS. It was only $50 per month, and someone at /. clued me in to a plan they have where you can get your bill down to $45, so that's what I'm paying.
What's even better is since I paid cash for the phone (a $100 motorola blackberry lookalike) and sign up fee ($50) and cash for the monthly bills, there's no identity stalking from them.
I've been with them about two years now, and the few issues I've had were cleared up promptly.
Their voicemail menu system sucks, but whose doesn't?
Most people don't record DVD movies on DVDs either, and yet they took off quite well.
That's true, but by then people had been using their VCRs mainly for watching rented movies.
And there are two kinds of phones: iPhones, and phones that WANT to be iPhones.
Say, Mister shill, I think this tread might suit you better.
I know a few people with iPhones and quite a few with droids, and I see little difference between them. There are some damned good reasons why Androids outsell iPhones, and "android wants to be iphone" ain't one.
If you're not really a paid shill I feel sorry for you, because it means the PR has brainwashed you.
Interesting. Do you have a citation? I'd not heard of that before.
GP, if you're reading this, your journal was the place for that, not here. And there is at least one JE about it right now. Mods, please mod the GP and everyone who responded to him (including me) offtopic. Thx.
I work for a big pharma company, as a sysadmin. I don't know much about the science though. Any company finding a cure for HIV or cancer or the common cold would have its stock skyrocket, turning the board instant billionaires.
Once in the mid nineties I was in a car wreck, and looking at the X-Rays the radiologist remarked that I had spinal arthritis. I said "I know, when are you guys going to find a cure for arthritis?"
He just smiled and said "there's no money in cures; we do treatments."
Cure you and you're only their customer once. Treat you and you're a customer forever. And... it seems a little perverse to me that you are a doctor's customer. In other countries, doctors have patients. You can bet that if any pharma comes up with a cure for a disease they have a profitable treatment for, they're going to bury it as deeply as they can.
MSDOS 5 and 6 were good.
Actually, I thought 6 was the only pre-GNU OS I ever got that was worth the money, but that was because of DoubleSpace... which the "not evil" Microsoft stole from their "partner", Stack Electronics. It was good for me, but completely evil in the business dealing with the partner they crushed.
The "expert" the sponsor will be providing to take part in the conversation will have an account which is "badged", meaning that it will be visually apparent when the a comment was posted by the sponsor.
What will the badge look like?
The world is no longer isolated little cities spread across the planet. It's one global city now with the internet here. And treating people like shit for any reason WILL bite you in the ass.
And conversely, since it is a "single city" there are seven billion more where you came from, which is where the multinationals' anti-customer bias comes from. You don't matter, you're only one in seven billion.
I was stationed in Thailand in 1974. Unlike most of our western countries, hookers are respeced, even revered, in Thailand. Nobody has to force them.
The summary writer was being excessively lazy at the expense of accuracy. That is not acceptable.
Well, what are you going to do? Lower his pay?
Sheesh, the post office isn't shutting down. Yes, some post offices in tiny towns, and distribution centers are closing (the distribution center here in Springfield is slated to close, Durbin is fighting it), but you're still going to get paper bills and junk mail and Netflix DVDs in your snailbox. It wil just take a day or two longer for you to get it.
HIV is no more a "sexually transmitted disease" than influenza is; you can catch either disease having sex and in fact your odds of catching the flu are far greater. HIV is transmitted through blood. Which means that if you're in a knife fight with someone with HIV, you're far more likely to catch AIDS than if you had vaginal intercourse with her; if her blood hits your open wound, you're probably infected.
Most cases of HIV have come form tainted transfusions, shared needles, and anal sex (the tissues tear and the infected semen gets in the blood).
but as long as you bought into the MARKETING that more channels == better sound, hey, have fun.
Well, it's only a partial fallacy. Surround sound makes no sense. When listening to music, are you sitting in the middle of the orchestra, or in the audience where the theater's acoustics have been engineered for you to listen in, with all the sound from in front of you? In a movie, I find having sounds come from anywhere but the screen itself a distraction. Quad sound would make sense for movies if there were a speaker at each corner of the screen, so sounds could travel up and down as well as right and left.
However, the more drivers of different sizes you put in an enclosure, the better it will sound, especially if you separate the different frequencies into channels for each speakers.
And if you have real speakers (at least three ways with a real woofer in each one twelve inches or more diameter, eighteen is better), subwoofers are not only unnecessary, they will actually degrade the sound. Subwoofers are only necessary to overcome what was the downfall of quadraphonics in the '70s -- the cost of good woofers. I argued with a professor in an undergrad physics class about this when quadraphonics were new, and he actually conceded that I was right when I brought my two Kenwood 777s and a cheap stereo amp in. The trouble with quadraphonic was that you had to have twice everything, so a $1000 stereo would sound remarkably better than a $1000 quad setup. That, and you have the (planned and engineered) interference between the left channel's low frequencies and the right channel's. That is missing with a subwoofer, even though the ear can't discern the position of a sound with a wavelength longer than your head is wide.
Surround only worked because the price of the amps had come down so far, and the price of four big woofers was mitigated by having a single sub.
its is NOT hifi, though.
Even stereo CDs aren't. People misunderstand Nyquist, and think it means that you get perfect sound until you hit the Nyquist limit, but in actuality the closer you get to the limit, the more aliasing you get. There is no way to discern a 15kHz sine wave from a 15kHz sawtooth wave with only three samples per wave. I have never heard a CD through any equipment that would make me think it was a live performance, but I have heard LPs that were that good (and yes, it has to be well engineered in the studio or it's still not high fidelity).
And as you point out, people don't think of interference, with waves doubling and cancelling each other.
Well, there's quality, and there's quality. There's the quality of the music, and the quality of the sound. Crap in hifi is still crap, but your artful mono lofi would be far more enjoyable in stereophonic high fidelity.
I look at Netflix as something that I can test out movies I wouldn't have otherwise watched.
That's what the Pirate Bay is for. I'm not going to pay to watch something I wouldn't pay to watch... even if I pay less for less quality.
people were upset about having to pay the equivalent of one days coffee for something that lasts a lot longer and enriches their lives far more. (it is just television...but c'mon...in the scheme of things, it is still better than coffee!
Your priorities are really screwed up, dude. Coffee? I drink Folgers or Maxwell House, Starbucks is for rich people and fools. And I not only can live without TV, I have lived without TV, but I'm addictied to coffee. I can't function well without it. Can't say the same for TV.
A two pound can of coffee costs about as much as a month's Netflix, and lasts about a month. A pot of that coffee will last all day, a Netflix movie won't.
That professionals line always makes me laugh.
IINM they're professional special effects artists for film makers. One would have to have at least a little knowledge of physics to do that job.
Audio cassettes over vinyl
It usually wasn't cassettes over vinyl, with most of us it was record the vinyl on cassette so we could hear it in the car, as well as folks without much room to store those LPs.
VHS over Laserdisc
Laserdisk was read-only. It was a product without a clear cut purpose. People bought VCRs so they could record shows and discovered rented movies. The laserdisk was doomed from the start.
VHS quality is probably okay
Betamaxes cost twice what VHS cost, and for most of us a small increase in quality isn't worth paying double for. Plus, Betamax was limited to two hours per tape, while the VHS had a six hour length in slow speed.
DVD definitely is.
DVD was superior to anything out at the time, FAR superior in every way to VCRs (except that until recently they were read-only).
I have a Nike T-shirt (St Louis Cardinals logo on it). Paid seventy five cents for it at a garage sale five years ago.
Anyone who pays full price for fashion is no nerd. In fact, if you care about fashion at all you probably aren't a nerd. If you just want to meet women, ask women what to wear.
This advice comes from personal experience. After my divorce I couldn't get as much as a dinner date for 3 years, until one night in a bar a woman suggested I cut my beard into a goatee. So I did an informal survey of women 18 to eighty seven, and seventeen of eighteen respondants said "goatee" (the eighteenth was standing next to her boyfriend, who was wearing a full beard).
The dry spell ended almost immediately. I guess women don't like the RMS look.
I agree, except for a couple of small nits.
PC's over main frames
You don't need an eighteen wheeler to move a single TV set. Doing spreadsheets or databases with only a few thousand records on a mainframe is wasteful. As is putting an apostrophe in PCs.
laptops over PC's
Same thing. No reason to be tied to a desk if the laptop does the job. No reason to carry a travelling trunk when you're only going to be gone two days. The thing with both of them is use of the proper tool, not convinience. You don't need a sledgehammer to open a walnut.
The ball was fired from a home-made cannon at ... a water target
The nerds who couldn't shoot straight.
The ball was fired from a home-made cannon at the Alameda County Sheriff's Department...
All of a sudden a Bob Marley song is running through my head...
I don't think the "serviced by Yahoo" has to do with customer service, I think it has to do with web-based infrastructure (but I could be wrong).
It does seem that TFS is straight on, from my personal experience anyway. I had Cingular for years and was happy with them. AT&T bought them out and my bill skyrocketed, so I switched carriers.
When I went to see about internet connections when I moved, there was Comcast at $40 and AT&T for $20, even though it was a slower connection than Comcast. After talking with the AT&T guy on the phone, I opted for their "double speed" for an extra five bucks. Still slower than Comcast, but as I'm the only one living at my house, I don't do the fast internet games any more, and there are only two computers running at any one time, the speed was fine for me.
The latest bill came yesterday. All of a sudden it's $40. I'll be calling them this afternoon after I get my phone fixed/replaced to bitch about it, and will probably be going with Comcast after the contract is up.
DIE, AT&T, DIE!!!
However, like Russel's teapot, the logical inference is... that without evidence, we should assume something extraordinary doesn't exist.
I find that a universe coming into being from nothingness, complete with creatures sentient enough to wonder where stuff came from and how stuff works to be pretty unbelievable. I find that eyeballs wired to a brain to come from evolution alone to be pretty unlikely.
It also seems that a universe coming out of nothingnesss from nowhere violates the laws of thermodynamics.
Ah, so I think we're almost on the same page.
Yes, it seems so to me. I'm as annoyed with Jehova's Witnesses as any athiest is. That "Jake" troll annoys me to no end.
Odd. I wonder what's causing it.
I was never a fantasy fan, but Tolkien was a great writer. The only other fantasy I like is Terry Pratchett, he's even funnier than Douglas Adams.