Depends what line your dealing with. I've got an x120e and I don't see anything about it that's low quality, it was rather expensive compared to some of the competitors, but it's just a well engineered machine. A really good keyboard for the type, nice screen, good battery life and I rarely if ever find myself waiting for things to load despite it using a 1.6ghz dual core processor.
Given the way that RIM has been running itself out of business, I would be surprised if there weren't something to those assertions. It's definitely possible that it's a disgruntled ex-employee looking to bad mouth his former employers, but by the same token, RIM isn't exactly known for having competent management so a suggestion list this is at least plausible.
Firewire was great, but it was a huge security headache, you did get additional speed, but you were plugging a foreign device essentially straight into your computer's RAM. It was nice for times where you were needing to dump a stuck kernel, but you could run into some quirks. I remember one time connecting a laptop to a desktop via Firewire and then plugging a USB peripheral into the desktop, only for it to show up as attached to the laptop.
That was largely my thought on the matter. Thunderbolt has some cool features, but it doesn't bring a whole lot to the table that isn't already available from other technologies.
And that's going to be a huge problem, it does have uses, but most of them appear to have alternatives that are already on the market. I'm sure that the interface will live on for a niche audience, but bandwidth is just not compelling enough for enough people to give it much traction. At present even most HDD have a hard time keeping up with an eSATA connection. I have a feeling that those buggy mainboards that were only usably by Apple probably killed it off right there.
Burn out is really the problem, that a lot of folks don't consider when it comes to prodigies. At some point they all hit a point where the abilities they had aren't sufficient to keep moving on to bigger challenges, if they haven't been provided with the same tools that the rest use to organize and get things done, that's where it sits.
A normal school is perfectly fine, provided that the school is teaching the organizational skills necessary to manage work, and that the student isn't required to do everything super slow just because the rest of the class is.
I was personally, fortunate enough not to get that fast tracked, but I was in college by 16 and even with time off and screwing around graduated by 22. Which isn't bad considering that I was deliberately dragging it out and didn't know what I wanted and took time off in the middle to do other things.
The other bit there, is that just because they're intellectually advanced doesn't mean that they should be permitted to completely waste their childhoods without a bit of screwing around and goofing off. In the long run they'll need to have something that isn't related to their primary work, otherwise there's much less opportunity to cope with the inevitable burn out that comes later on.
I might eventually come back, but with the competition heating up, I'm not really sure that it's in my interest to do so until I see what the competition makes of this. Blockbuster has met and beaten Netflix's offer for the DVD portion, and I'm sure that somebody is going to come up with a competitive option for the streaming. But, even if they don't, I can hook my laptop up to a TV and get all sorts of free programming without having to resort to piracy.
It's tough to compete with free, and I think Netflix would do well to remember that.
In the case of Foxconn, I'm not really sure that Steve Jobs or Apple really deserves as much bad press as they've gotten. There are plenty of other companies that use their services to make their products that are also to blame for that. IIRC, the last Dell I had used a Foxconn motherboard. Apple at least made some attempt at improving the situation, I haven't heard of any of the other companies doing so.
Not a fan of Steve, but I do believe in this case Apple deserves some slack.
Steve Jobs isn't generally well liked, perhaps people like Bill Gates like him, but that's because they actually met. Most people, just know him from the product announcements and ass kissing articles in various papers.
RMS is getting flack for it, but somebody really needs to point out at this time that he did a lot of underhanded things as well that undermined the ability of people to use their hardware as they see fit. I'm not sure who else has done as much to promote the walled garden model to the masses as Steve did.
The problem is that he wasn't insanely great and that much of what he's being praised for had little to nothing to do with him.
Steve was brilliant, but mostly at getting products to market after somebody else developed it and before they took that last step to take it over. That definitely does deserve credit, but without folks like Woz and Ive, there would be no products to sell, and I think that tends to get ignored at times, the Apples wouldn't have sold as well had Woz not been able to eliminate all those extra chips and get the cost down to something that people could afford.
That was more or less my thought on the matter. I've switched to Blockbuster for my movies, same price similar selection and games thrown in there as well.
I might go back to Netflix eventually, but only if the roll out that Blockbuster has hinted at for an all you can eat streaming plan comes through. I'm not switching to Dish Network just so that I can get unlimited streaming from them through.
Beyond that there's, Crackle, Hulu, Amazon and don't forget about the official streams that some channels now have to offer. Netflix managed to screwed itself over with the sheer incompetence of recent announcements. I'm probably going to get a box to connect my laptop up to my TV until I can afford a new one with HDMI inputs.
And yet these same businesses seem to have no trouble figuring out how to game the tax code to reduce their taxes.
Also, I specifically pointed out that they could and likely would farm out the work. If it's really that prohibitive they could always just put the same sort of exemption in for small businesses that they typically do on other things.
That was more reasonable in the days of catalog sales, these days we have these things called "databases" in which people can store records and information. I suggest businesses could rent access or create their own, and then have that problem more or less dealt with.
The whole notion that it's somehow prohibitively expensive or complicated to keep track of is just an excuse in most cases to get an unfair pricing advantage over brick and mortar stores.
Because Amazon doesn't have a physical presence there and they struck the deal as a prerequisite for moving facilities there. Which ought to be blatantly illegal as it's essentially an agreement to turn a blind eye to tax evasion so Amazon will move to the state.
Which isn't really that hard unless you're a small business owner in which case you probably just pay for the service. Large companies shouldn't have any trouble keeping track of that, especially a business the size of Amazon, I can't imagine that it takes more than 1 full time employee, and I'd be surprised if it even requires that much time and energy.
Considering that many companies can figure out how much shipping should cost to various places, it shouldn't be that much harder to plug the address into another database to figure out how much tax to charge.
Anybody that cares about having control over their machine and isn't old enough to have owned an Apple ][ or older computer probably hasn't. There was a period with the old world Macs where you still had control, but they tended to have other issues.
As for Shigeru Miyamoto, just look at the projects that he's worked on during his career. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shigeru_Miyamoto It's hard for me to imagine Nintendo carrying on through the electronic era without a visionary like that.
Which completely ignores how much of ones test scores is not in the control of the student. Resources are tight and children that come from homes where the parents can afford private tutoring have a significant advantage over those that don't. And don't forget about things like learning disorders and poor quality of instruction which might lead to a student getting a poor score.
Then there's the issues that come with immigrants, you'd be surprised at how much effort it takes in some cases to get them up to speed on something as simple as a multiple choice test.
The problem is that unless the sorting mechanism is perfect you can wind up in the situation where you never see an email and don't know that it's even arrived.
I personally, cut down greatly on my work by sorting mailing lists into their own place, but unless there's an easy way of filtering it out, I let it hit my inbox so that I see it before either deleting it, acting on it or ignoring it.
I find it to be a waste of time, I have a few things that are automatically labeled for me. Usually I'll have mailinglists and ads specially labeled, pretty much everything else goes into the main inbox uncategorized. A mail client with a proper search feature makes quick work of finding things when I need them, certainly a lot faster than thumbing through folders.
Also, folders don't really handle cases where a piece of mail belongs in two different categories very well. Labels OTOH handle that quite a bit more easily and don't necessarily require you to organize everything in order to be worthwhile.
You're ignoring the fact that after identity theft the original owner no longer has access to the things that a good credit score can obtain. If it was just a matter of making a copy that had no impact on the original you'd have a point. However, the individual whose identity is stolen ends up with decreased ability to borrow and possibly out of a job as some jobs do require one to have a good credit score and limited outstanding debt.
That's a good summary of it. I always imagined it was an infinite number of monkeys out of which a smaller number typed in its entirety one of Shakespeare's plays and that a sufficient number of them did so independently so as to finish the complete works. Probably with a few duplicates and an unimaginably large number of near misses.
Breaking it up into small chunks that aren't even the size of an act really degrades the whole point of the activity in the first place. I doubt that the computing power will ever be there to really simulate this in it's full scope, but simulating it at least at the sentence or act level is really necessary for this to be of any particular value.
I'm curious, do you have any evidence that it's not the case? We've spent a large amount of money locally cleaning up the hazardous waste left by the refining industry after they left without cleaning it up.
Ultimately, the oil industry has earned it's poor reputation on the environment and having them damaging the environment which we rely upon for a large part of our income is a rather poor decision.
It's a bit of a fuzzy line such as the difference between a netbook and a low end laptop. I wouldn't personally consider Kindle Fire or Nook Color to be an ereader as they lack an eink display and can be turned into a fully functional tablet with just a simple firmware flash. But, I'm sure there are folks that would consider them to be ebooks as they're primarily focused on providing access to ebooks with the rest of the stuff as an add on.
If you bothered to read my post you notice that those would be devices that have received sanctioning from Amazon, there is no guarantee that it will continue or that Amazon will continue to support it. With epubs you know that you're going to be able to find a device in the future that supports it. Sort of the same way that you can find WMA players than can play the DRM protected tracks from years past, assuming you can still get them unlocked.
I'm curious, precisely what happens if Amazon decides that it no longer wants to support those other apps? If B&N decides that it no longer wants to support them, I can just get a different epub implementation. At this point, I can use the B&N official application or Adobe Editions and I'm sure that Adobe is going to continue to support it as long as the epubs are out there.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends what line your dealing with. I've got an x120e and I don't see anything about it that's low quality, it was rather expensive compared to some of the competitors, but it's just a well engineered machine. A really good keyboard for the type, nice screen, good battery life and I rarely if ever find myself waiting for things to load despite it using a 1.6ghz dual core processor.
Given the way that RIM has been running itself out of business, I would be surprised if there weren't something to those assertions. It's definitely possible that it's a disgruntled ex-employee looking to bad mouth his former employers, but by the same token, RIM isn't exactly known for having competent management so a suggestion list this is at least plausible.
No, it doesn't mean any such thing. I take it you've never heard of CARP or VRRP.
Firewire was great, but it was a huge security headache, you did get additional speed, but you were plugging a foreign device essentially straight into your computer's RAM. It was nice for times where you were needing to dump a stuck kernel, but you could run into some quirks. I remember one time connecting a laptop to a desktop via Firewire and then plugging a USB peripheral into the desktop, only for it to show up as attached to the laptop.
That was largely my thought on the matter. Thunderbolt has some cool features, but it doesn't bring a whole lot to the table that isn't already available from other technologies.
And that's going to be a huge problem, it does have uses, but most of them appear to have alternatives that are already on the market. I'm sure that the interface will live on for a niche audience, but bandwidth is just not compelling enough for enough people to give it much traction. At present even most HDD have a hard time keeping up with an eSATA connection. I have a feeling that those buggy mainboards that were only usably by Apple probably killed it off right there.
Burn out is really the problem, that a lot of folks don't consider when it comes to prodigies. At some point they all hit a point where the abilities they had aren't sufficient to keep moving on to bigger challenges, if they haven't been provided with the same tools that the rest use to organize and get things done, that's where it sits.
A normal school is perfectly fine, provided that the school is teaching the organizational skills necessary to manage work, and that the student isn't required to do everything super slow just because the rest of the class is.
I was personally, fortunate enough not to get that fast tracked, but I was in college by 16 and even with time off and screwing around graduated by 22. Which isn't bad considering that I was deliberately dragging it out and didn't know what I wanted and took time off in the middle to do other things.
The other bit there, is that just because they're intellectually advanced doesn't mean that they should be permitted to completely waste their childhoods without a bit of screwing around and goofing off. In the long run they'll need to have something that isn't related to their primary work, otherwise there's much less opportunity to cope with the inevitable burn out that comes later on.
I might eventually come back, but with the competition heating up, I'm not really sure that it's in my interest to do so until I see what the competition makes of this. Blockbuster has met and beaten Netflix's offer for the DVD portion, and I'm sure that somebody is going to come up with a competitive option for the streaming. But, even if they don't, I can hook my laptop up to a TV and get all sorts of free programming without having to resort to piracy.
It's tough to compete with free, and I think Netflix would do well to remember that.
In the case of Foxconn, I'm not really sure that Steve Jobs or Apple really deserves as much bad press as they've gotten. There are plenty of other companies that use their services to make their products that are also to blame for that. IIRC, the last Dell I had used a Foxconn motherboard. Apple at least made some attempt at improving the situation, I haven't heard of any of the other companies doing so.
Not a fan of Steve, but I do believe in this case Apple deserves some slack.
Steve Jobs isn't generally well liked, perhaps people like Bill Gates like him, but that's because they actually met. Most people, just know him from the product announcements and ass kissing articles in various papers.
RMS is getting flack for it, but somebody really needs to point out at this time that he did a lot of underhanded things as well that undermined the ability of people to use their hardware as they see fit. I'm not sure who else has done as much to promote the walled garden model to the masses as Steve did.
The problem is that he wasn't insanely great and that much of what he's being praised for had little to nothing to do with him.
Steve was brilliant, but mostly at getting products to market after somebody else developed it and before they took that last step to take it over. That definitely does deserve credit, but without folks like Woz and Ive, there would be no products to sell, and I think that tends to get ignored at times, the Apples wouldn't have sold as well had Woz not been able to eliminate all those extra chips and get the cost down to something that people could afford.
That was more or less my thought on the matter. I've switched to Blockbuster for my movies, same price similar selection and games thrown in there as well.
I might go back to Netflix eventually, but only if the roll out that Blockbuster has hinted at for an all you can eat streaming plan comes through. I'm not switching to Dish Network just so that I can get unlimited streaming from them through.
Beyond that there's, Crackle, Hulu, Amazon and don't forget about the official streams that some channels now have to offer. Netflix managed to screwed itself over with the sheer incompetence of recent announcements. I'm probably going to get a box to connect my laptop up to my TV until I can afford a new one with HDMI inputs.
And yet these same businesses seem to have no trouble figuring out how to game the tax code to reduce their taxes.
Also, I specifically pointed out that they could and likely would farm out the work. If it's really that prohibitive they could always just put the same sort of exemption in for small businesses that they typically do on other things.
That would be my preferred option, but ever since SCOTUS threw ours out in the '30s we haven't been able to get one by the legislature or voters.
That was more reasonable in the days of catalog sales, these days we have these things called "databases" in which people can store records and information. I suggest businesses could rent access or create their own, and then have that problem more or less dealt with.
The whole notion that it's somehow prohibitively expensive or complicated to keep track of is just an excuse in most cases to get an unfair pricing advantage over brick and mortar stores.
Because Amazon doesn't have a physical presence there and they struck the deal as a prerequisite for moving facilities there. Which ought to be blatantly illegal as it's essentially an agreement to turn a blind eye to tax evasion so Amazon will move to the state.
Which isn't really that hard unless you're a small business owner in which case you probably just pay for the service. Large companies shouldn't have any trouble keeping track of that, especially a business the size of Amazon, I can't imagine that it takes more than 1 full time employee, and I'd be surprised if it even requires that much time and energy.
Considering that many companies can figure out how much shipping should cost to various places, it shouldn't be that much harder to plug the address into another database to figure out how much tax to charge.
Anybody that cares about having control over their machine and isn't old enough to have owned an Apple ][ or older computer probably hasn't. There was a period with the old world Macs where you still had control, but they tended to have other issues.
As for Shigeru Miyamoto, just look at the projects that he's worked on during his career. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shigeru_Miyamoto It's hard for me to imagine Nintendo carrying on through the electronic era without a visionary like that.
Which completely ignores how much of ones test scores is not in the control of the student. Resources are tight and children that come from homes where the parents can afford private tutoring have a significant advantage over those that don't. And don't forget about things like learning disorders and poor quality of instruction which might lead to a student getting a poor score.
Then there's the issues that come with immigrants, you'd be surprised at how much effort it takes in some cases to get them up to speed on something as simple as a multiple choice test.
The problem is that unless the sorting mechanism is perfect you can wind up in the situation where you never see an email and don't know that it's even arrived.
I personally, cut down greatly on my work by sorting mailing lists into their own place, but unless there's an easy way of filtering it out, I let it hit my inbox so that I see it before either deleting it, acting on it or ignoring it.
I find it to be a waste of time, I have a few things that are automatically labeled for me. Usually I'll have mailinglists and ads specially labeled, pretty much everything else goes into the main inbox uncategorized. A mail client with a proper search feature makes quick work of finding things when I need them, certainly a lot faster than thumbing through folders.
Also, folders don't really handle cases where a piece of mail belongs in two different categories very well. Labels OTOH handle that quite a bit more easily and don't necessarily require you to organize everything in order to be worthwhile.
You're ignoring the fact that after identity theft the original owner no longer has access to the things that a good credit score can obtain. If it was just a matter of making a copy that had no impact on the original you'd have a point. However, the individual whose identity is stolen ends up with decreased ability to borrow and possibly out of a job as some jobs do require one to have a good credit score and limited outstanding debt.
That's a good summary of it. I always imagined it was an infinite number of monkeys out of which a smaller number typed in its entirety one of Shakespeare's plays and that a sufficient number of them did so independently so as to finish the complete works. Probably with a few duplicates and an unimaginably large number of near misses.
Breaking it up into small chunks that aren't even the size of an act really degrades the whole point of the activity in the first place. I doubt that the computing power will ever be there to really simulate this in it's full scope, but simulating it at least at the sentence or act level is really necessary for this to be of any particular value.
I'm curious, do you have any evidence that it's not the case? We've spent a large amount of money locally cleaning up the hazardous waste left by the refining industry after they left without cleaning it up.
I take it you haven't seen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRZ4LQSonXA This is a bit of an extreme example, but I don't personally trust the oil industry to be honest about the consequences of their spills making it into the water. Once that stuff gets into the ground water it does eventually make its way out to see. And don't forget about when they don't come clean about spills. http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20041106&slug=oilspill06m
Ultimately, the oil industry has earned it's poor reputation on the environment and having them damaging the environment which we rely upon for a large part of our income is a rather poor decision.
It's a bit of a fuzzy line such as the difference between a netbook and a low end laptop. I wouldn't personally consider Kindle Fire or Nook Color to be an ereader as they lack an eink display and can be turned into a fully functional tablet with just a simple firmware flash. But, I'm sure there are folks that would consider them to be ebooks as they're primarily focused on providing access to ebooks with the rest of the stuff as an add on.
If you bothered to read my post you notice that those would be devices that have received sanctioning from Amazon, there is no guarantee that it will continue or that Amazon will continue to support it. With epubs you know that you're going to be able to find a device in the future that supports it. Sort of the same way that you can find WMA players than can play the DRM protected tracks from years past, assuming you can still get them unlocked.
I'm curious, precisely what happens if Amazon decides that it no longer wants to support those other apps? If B&N decides that it no longer wants to support them, I can just get a different epub implementation. At this point, I can use the B&N official application or Adobe Editions and I'm sure that Adobe is going to continue to support it as long as the epubs are out there.