Wait, those are actual quotes? "Who cares, it's done" "We'll probably be fine" "it's wrong a lot"
These are the engineering geniuses we have doing the most complicated oil drilling possible? WTF! Last I checked "probably be fine" and "wrong a lot" don't count for sound scientific basis.
So your car will be able to drive itself but doesn't Lexus have a patent on cars that parallel park themselves? Is this going to be a problem? Your car can do everything except park...
I would agree with you except that's not what they're selling. To get tethering you need to be on a pay-for-what-you-get data plan for $25/month for 2GB. You then pay an additional $20/month for the tethering. (Note: GB 2-3 cost $10)
AT&T is doing something I've never understood why people let companies get away with. They're charging an extra $20/month for the tethering plan. Tethering is something that the iPhone does by itself it doesn't require any expense at all for AT&T. I could understand their tactic if they were still offering unlimited data plans because you would expect someone who uses their cell phone as a modem for their computer to use a lot more data. That's not what they're doing though, they're selling 2gb of data for $25/month. What's AT&T's excuse exactly? That for tethering users they're worried that people will actually use the data that they're paying for?
This is one of the reasons companies like to offer "unlimited" one-size-fits-all plans. The plan is unlimited but really it's more like 5gb, and almost nobody actually uses that much, and it's not ok to tether because then you'll be using more than they planned for, and nobody complains because you think of it as a plan that's "unlimited" but only up to the point that a cell phone would be expected to use. (Essentially Comcast and their ilk do the same, my "home" internet is "unlimited" but not exactly and only in the amount and reliability that a home user would expect, and in some ways that's ok.) But when these companies decide to change the plan to "you get 2gb/month" then I damn well expect that my 2gb should be given to me in whatever way I want it.
There's another little thing in this press release that I'm a fan of. For the 200mb plan (really, 200mb, really?): "If customers exceed 200 MB in a monthly billing cycle, they will receive an additional 200 MB of data usage for $15 for use in the cycle." And for the 2gb plan, "Should a customer exceed 2 GB during a billing cycle, they will receive an additional 1 GB of data for $10 for use in the cycle." Hooray everybody, it's the old Blockbuster late fee model! Use 2.001gb of data in a month pay for 4! Hooray!
A thousand pairs of eyeballs isn't a huge advertisment target.
This is one of those points about internet advertising that I don't quite understand. Sure the number of eyeballs reached is fewer for most websites than most traditional media outlets but they're tremendously more targeted eyeballs. At least when you're advertising on the web you can know a lot better that you're reaching the right thousand people.
Cream butter and sugar. Stir in eggs. Add half of the flour, mix. Add half of the milk, mix. Add the other half of the flour, then the other half of the milk. Fold in the flint and pour into your favorite upside down cake pan. Blow bubbles into the mixture with a straw. Bake for 45 min or until a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean. Let cool upside down for at least one hour before removing from the mold.
Go look at the cost of a T1 and realize it is only 1.5 Mbps, now look at the cost of that 12 Mbps residential cable. Why do you think the T1 is so much more expensive for almost 1/10th the speed? Technology may change, bandwidth may get so cheap it doesn't matter, but right now, guaranteeing 100% throughput at residential service prices simply wont work.
I agree with you fully. But where's my in-between? Residential internet services are quickly becoming a race to the bottom scenario. Sure I could haul off and spend the multiple thousands of dollars it would cost to install a T1 line. But I don't need a T1 because if my internet goes down for an hour or so every few weeks or my IP address changes from time to time my world doesn't end. So my question is, where's my middle ground? Where's the plan for someone who wants to watch TV shows online, play some games and download big files here and there?
Like you would suddenly not use the operating system you have been using for the past 20 years by buying a computer that runs something different.
Umm... I did exactly that. About five years ago my PC met its end in the form of a hard drive failure that came after a whole series of smaller problems. I bought a mac and haven't looked back since. The only "PC" I've owned since then has been the windows partition of my new(ish) macBook that I think I've booted into fewer than five times since installing it.
Do I still use PC's? Sure, sometimes at work... and I think the library's card catalog is on a PC. That's it though.
Are you kidding? I'd love to win one of these awards.
Some of the research is actually pretty solid scientific stuff. It's also highly applicable to my every-day life.
My personal favorite winners:
Physics - Presented to David Schmidt of the University of Massachusetts, for his partial explanation of the shower-curtain effect: a shower curtain tends to billow inwards while a shower is being taken.
Public Health - Presented to Jillian Clarke of the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, and then Howard University, for investigating the scientific validity of the five-second rule about whether it's safe to eat food that's been dropped on the floor.
That's the reason why Microsoft is trying to place their stores in close proximity to Apple's, for example.
I wonder if that's the type of thing that will be good for the sales of both companies. Sort of like having the "auto mile" where lots of car dealerships are. When you're in the market for a certain type of product you go to the place where lots of competing stores are. It makes comparison shopping easier. Instead of going online or to BestBuy a customer might just go to the place where the Apple and Microsoft stores are because they can evaluate all their choices in one place.
My wife spent an hour an a half waiting for a "genius" to do a 5 minute phone swap (LCD had cracked).
Ok, that's a long wait. The first time I read that I saw "half an hour". I've almost never seen lines that long and don't they let you make an appointment and at least go shopping elswhere if the lines are that long? How about this, I'll tell my genius bar story, I think it's basically the same story only I look at it the other way.
I bought a new MacBook online. When it arrived it didn't work, wouldn't even turn on. I called Apple's tech support and they had me bring it to the nearest Apple store, also they made an appointment for me. I went to the apple store, waited a few minutes for my 'Genius' who took one look at it and told me he had to swap out the RAM, which he did. Then I took my now working computer home.
Would I rather that my computer had worked in the first place? Yes. Have I spent hours on the phone with tech support from every other imaginable company where they did absolutely nothing to help without first having me do things like "unplug it and plug it back in"? Yes.
Y'know what, I have another story. A coworker of mine bought a laptop from Sony. When it showed up it the camera didn't work. Not the most important part in the world but it's nice to have your new thousand-dollar toy work out of the box. So she called Sony. I have no idea how long this took. In the end their solution was for her to ship the computer back to them so they could fix it. Remember how I live near an apple store? I also work near a SonyStyle store. Instead of doing the fix there, or replacing the computer as I suspect Apple would have done, they had her wait several weeks for the item she had just purchased. Could she have pushed them to replace the computer at their store? Probably, but it wasn't their first response.
What I'm not trying to say is that Apple is perfect, but they have a better commitment to helping solve customer problems then lots of other companies I've dealt with.
"I'm not getting a Mac laptop if I have to make an appointment to some pretentious technician for the simplest of problems".
I'm not sure what you expect to buy with such better support then. I'd rather wait 30 minutes to see a pretentious tech who can fix my problem than an hour for a phone support tech who spends three hours trying instruction manual fixes and can't.
Sure, there are violent sex offenders who generally stay in prison more often than not, but there those who did something like sleep with their girlfriend of 2 years whose parents pressed charges because she was 17, and 3 months to 18, and that guy who may end up marrying her, is now a "sex offender" for the rest of his life.
That's exactly what Amouth was saying. European plans can be less expensive because the population is much denser and therefore easier to serve (fewer towers). Also since each company only needs to serve a single country customers aren't paying for free access all across Europe.
On the other hand I think US carriers are guilty of heavy upselling. If I live in a dense city in a dense area (Boston, New York, DC, etc) and do 99% of my calling from there why can't I pay for a local plan and avoid subsidizing the tower/person costs of residents of Wyoming?
Sure, with any return/warranty program you open yourself up to abuse. But of course your methods for detecting the difference between abusers and honest customers are never going to be 100% accurate. So I think the question is do you design your policies so that no abuses slip through the cracks but you also prevent honest repairs thereby screwing over some of your customers? Or do you design policies that open you up to abuse but only in some very extreme incidents make you falsely deny claims?
Personally I like to buy from companies that offer service with less hassle involved. I think a lot of people feel this way. Heck it's the type of thing Apple has built their reputation on. And since, as is often extremely well elaborated here on Slashdot, purchases of Apple products are largely based on reputation instead of technical aspects they're a company that especially risks screwing themselves over with a policy like this.
I think one major reason that the XBox gets so much coverage of its hardware failures is because they have a good name and visual. It's easy to talk about the dreaded Red Ring of Death much less interesting to talk about hardware failures or scratched disks. Language goes a long way towards shaping the debate.
The best move Apple made was the free-means-free policy. If an app is free, you can't go charging for bits inside it. I would not be happy to download a free app and find that I had to pay $.99 per widget in order to unlock all the useful bits.
I don't understand what's so wrong with that though. If you didn't pay anything for the app then who cares, so you lost 30 seconds. I'd be much angrier if I paid for something only to discover later that it's useless unless I pay more.
A better solution would be to allow in ap payments but only if users were notified before they purchased the original ap. That way at least you know what you're getting.
There's a little company out there called Berkshire Hathaway. They're down a bit right now trading at a little under $100,000 per share. But if Warren Buffett died you could watch that number tumble like baby Jessica falling down a well.
If germs actually could mutate in a manner that made themselves invulnerable to vaccines, we better start vaccinating the population of the Third World! Imagine all those non-vaccinated Mexicans with super-mumps and rubella!
Nah. I actually doubt that vaccinations and antibiotics work in that manner. With the exception of the flu, I'm unaware of a vaccine that stops working because the targeted bug evolved into a new form.
I don't have an example but it's easy enough to hypothesize a situation where having a significant portion of vaccinated people in a mostly vaccinated population would cause a virus to make the jump.
It's pretty simple really, a vaccine causes your body to make antibodies against a specific portion of the virus's outer coating. All the virus really needs to do to make your vaccine useless is change this part of its coating. Sometimes it'll change to something you can't easily make antibodies against. (Quick note: No you can't make antibodies against everything, it's one of the reasons making an HIV vaccine is so hard) Sometimes it's just something different enough that it's no longer recognizable.
All of this happens completely randomly as the virus reproduces, it doesn't matter if it's in a small cluster of cases in the US or a large cluster in the Congo. The thing is, in the Congo that new guy who can easily avoid your vaccine is out competed by the ten trillion normal guys hopping around so he never hits the vaccinated population in the US.
But lets say we're talking about the small cluster in the US. Most of the people the virus is exposed to are vaccinated. Now when we introduce the new mutated virus into the population odds are the first person it lands on is only succeptable to the mutated virus and so it easily out competes its trillion brothers. Congratulations, we have just created a measles epidemic.
Or to put it in a format Slashdot understands
1: Introduce small clusters of disease into largely vaccinated public.
2: Mutate disease so it can affect vaccinated people.
Slashdot Mirror
These are the engineering geniuses we have doing the most complicated oil drilling possible? WTF! Last I checked "probably be fine" and "wrong a lot" don't count for sound scientific basis.
So your car will be able to drive itself but doesn't Lexus have a patent on cars that parallel park themselves? Is this going to be a problem? Your car can do everything except park...
Unfortunately I'll still be stuck with the low end Toyotas which crash 80% of the time.
I would agree with you except that's not what they're selling. To get tethering you need to be on a pay-for-what-you-get data plan for $25/month for 2GB. You then pay an additional $20/month for the tethering. (Note: GB 2-3 cost $10)
This is one of the reasons companies like to offer "unlimited" one-size-fits-all plans. The plan is unlimited but really it's more like 5gb, and almost nobody actually uses that much, and it's not ok to tether because then you'll be using more than they planned for, and nobody complains because you think of it as a plan that's "unlimited" but only up to the point that a cell phone would be expected to use. (Essentially Comcast and their ilk do the same, my "home" internet is "unlimited" but not exactly and only in the amount and reliability that a home user would expect, and in some ways that's ok.) But when these companies decide to change the plan to "you get 2gb/month" then I damn well expect that my 2gb should be given to me in whatever way I want it.
There's another little thing in this press release that I'm a fan of. For the 200mb plan (really, 200mb, really?): "If customers exceed 200 MB in a monthly billing cycle, they will receive an additional 200 MB of data usage for $15 for use in the cycle." And for the 2gb plan, "Should a customer exceed 2 GB during a billing cycle, they will receive an additional 1 GB of data for $10 for use in the cycle." Hooray everybody, it's the old Blockbuster late fee model! Use 2.001gb of data in a month pay for 4! Hooray!
A thousand pairs of eyeballs isn't a huge advertisment target.
This is one of those points about internet advertising that I don't quite understand. Sure the number of eyeballs reached is fewer for most websites than most traditional media outlets but they're tremendously more targeted eyeballs. At least when you're advertising on the web you can know a lot better that you're reaching the right thousand people.
That whole "Luke, I am your father." line isn't nearly as surprising if you saw episode 3 first.
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
1/4lb (8tbl) butter
4 cups (18oz) unbleached all purpose flour
1/2 cup milk
2tbl Flint
1.5 tsp baking powder
2 eggs
Preheat oven to 350.
Cream butter and sugar. Stir in eggs. Add half of the flour, mix. Add half of the milk, mix. Add the other half of the flour, then the other half of the milk. Fold in the flint and pour into your favorite upside down cake pan. Blow bubbles into the mixture with a straw. Bake for 45 min or until a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean. Let cool upside down for at least one hour before removing from the mold.
Scaramouch, Scaramouch, will you do the Fandango?
I agree with you fully. But where's my in-between? Residential internet services are quickly becoming a race to the bottom scenario. Sure I could haul off and spend the multiple thousands of dollars it would cost to install a T1 line. But I don't need a T1 because if my internet goes down for an hour or so every few weeks or my IP address changes from time to time my world doesn't end. So my question is, where's my middle ground? Where's the plan for someone who wants to watch TV shows online, play some games and download big files here and there?
Umm... I did exactly that. About five years ago my PC met its end in the form of a hard drive failure that came after a whole series of smaller problems. I bought a mac and haven't looked back since. The only "PC" I've owned since then has been the windows partition of my new(ish) macBook that I think I've booted into fewer than five times since installing it.
Do I still use PC's? Sure, sometimes at work... and I think the library's card catalog is on a PC. That's it though.
Sounds to me like exactly how the US Medical System works.
Some of the research is actually pretty solid scientific stuff. It's also highly applicable to my every-day life.
My personal favorite winners:
Physics - Presented to David Schmidt of the University of Massachusetts, for his partial explanation of the shower-curtain effect: a shower curtain tends to billow inwards while a shower is being taken.
Public Health - Presented to Jillian Clarke of the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, and then Howard University, for investigating the scientific validity of the five-second rule about whether it's safe to eat food that's been dropped on the floor.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/86510619/PDFSTART
The response to the article though, that's great.
I wonder if that's the type of thing that will be good for the sales of both companies. Sort of like having the "auto mile" where lots of car dealerships are. When you're in the market for a certain type of product you go to the place where lots of competing stores are. It makes comparison shopping easier. Instead of going online or to BestBuy a customer might just go to the place where the Apple and Microsoft stores are because they can evaluate all their choices in one place.
Ok, that's a long wait. The first time I read that I saw "half an hour". I've almost never seen lines that long and don't they let you make an appointment and at least go shopping elswhere if the lines are that long? How about this, I'll tell my genius bar story, I think it's basically the same story only I look at it the other way.
I bought a new MacBook online. When it arrived it didn't work, wouldn't even turn on. I called Apple's tech support and they had me bring it to the nearest Apple store, also they made an appointment for me. I went to the apple store, waited a few minutes for my 'Genius' who took one look at it and told me he had to swap out the RAM, which he did. Then I took my now working computer home.
Would I rather that my computer had worked in the first place? Yes. Have I spent hours on the phone with tech support from every other imaginable company where they did absolutely nothing to help without first having me do things like "unplug it and plug it back in"? Yes.
Y'know what, I have another story. A coworker of mine bought a laptop from Sony. When it showed up it the camera didn't work. Not the most important part in the world but it's nice to have your new thousand-dollar toy work out of the box. So she called Sony. I have no idea how long this took. In the end their solution was for her to ship the computer back to them so they could fix it. Remember how I live near an apple store? I also work near a SonyStyle store. Instead of doing the fix there, or replacing the computer as I suspect Apple would have done, they had her wait several weeks for the item she had just purchased. Could she have pushed them to replace the computer at their store? Probably, but it wasn't their first response.
What I'm not trying to say is that Apple is perfect, but they have a better commitment to helping solve customer problems then lots of other companies I've dealt with.
I'm not sure what you expect to buy with such better support then. I'd rather wait 30 minutes to see a pretentious tech who can fix my problem than an hour for a phone support tech who spends three hours trying instruction manual fixes and can't.
Sure, there are violent sex offenders who generally stay in prison more often than not, but there those who did something like sleep with their girlfriend of 2 years whose parents pressed charges because she was 17, and 3 months to 18, and that guy who may end up marrying her, is now a "sex offender" for the rest of his life.
Man, that would be an awkward wedding.
On the other hand I think US carriers are guilty of heavy upselling. If I live in a dense city in a dense area (Boston, New York, DC, etc) and do 99% of my calling from there why can't I pay for a local plan and avoid subsidizing the tower/person costs of residents of Wyoming?
Personally I like to buy from companies that offer service with less hassle involved. I think a lot of people feel this way. Heck it's the type of thing Apple has built their reputation on. And since, as is often extremely well elaborated here on Slashdot, purchases of Apple products are largely based on reputation instead of technical aspects they're a company that especially risks screwing themselves over with a policy like this.
You seem to be writing an inflammatory email. Should I help make sure it doesn't go to your boss?
Or
You seem to be writing a drunken email to your ex-girlfriend. Are you sure you want to do this?
I think one major reason that the XBox gets so much coverage of its hardware failures is because they have a good name and visual. It's easy to talk about the dreaded Red Ring of Death much less interesting to talk about hardware failures or scratched disks. Language goes a long way towards shaping the debate.
The best move Apple made was the free-means-free policy. If an app is free, you can't go charging for bits inside it. I would not be happy to download a free app and find that I had to pay $.99 per widget in order to unlock all the useful bits.
I don't understand what's so wrong with that though. If you didn't pay anything for the app then who cares, so you lost 30 seconds. I'd be much angrier if I paid for something only to discover later that it's useless unless I pay more.
A better solution would be to allow in ap payments but only if users were notified before they purchased the original ap. That way at least you know what you're getting.
There's a little company out there called Berkshire Hathaway. They're down a bit right now trading at a little under $100,000 per share. But if Warren Buffett died you could watch that number tumble like baby Jessica falling down a well.
Really? My cell phone doesn't work in the basement of my house. Was this some sort of magic super cell phone? And where do I buy one?
If germs actually could mutate in a manner that made themselves invulnerable to vaccines, we better start vaccinating the population of the Third World! Imagine all those non-vaccinated Mexicans with super-mumps and rubella!
Nah. I actually doubt that vaccinations and antibiotics work in that manner. With the exception of the flu, I'm unaware of a vaccine that stops working because the targeted bug evolved into a new form.
I don't have an example but it's easy enough to hypothesize a situation where having a significant portion of vaccinated people in a mostly vaccinated population would cause a virus to make the jump.
It's pretty simple really, a vaccine causes your body to make antibodies against a specific portion of the virus's outer coating. All the virus really needs to do to make your vaccine useless is change this part of its coating. Sometimes it'll change to something you can't easily make antibodies against. (Quick note: No you can't make antibodies against everything, it's one of the reasons making an HIV vaccine is so hard) Sometimes it's just something different enough that it's no longer recognizable.
All of this happens completely randomly as the virus reproduces, it doesn't matter if it's in a small cluster of cases in the US or a large cluster in the Congo. The thing is, in the Congo that new guy who can easily avoid your vaccine is out competed by the ten trillion normal guys hopping around so he never hits the vaccinated population in the US.
But lets say we're talking about the small cluster in the US. Most of the people the virus is exposed to are vaccinated. Now when we introduce the new mutated virus into the population odds are the first person it lands on is only succeptable to the mutated virus and so it easily out competes its trillion brothers. Congratulations, we have just created a measles epidemic.
Or to put it in a format Slashdot understands
1: Introduce small clusters of disease into largely vaccinated public.
2: Mutate disease so it can affect vaccinated people.
3: Millions die.
4: ????
5: Profit!