It's a fallacy? Shit. I guess that all these years that I have been working on open source software, fixing bugs, adding features, has actually been a big long dream. I'll wake up and finally see that I've been living in the Matrix, and finally see Bill G in his true Borg form hanging over me grinning...
I believe he's referring to the thought that just because it's open source means that someone not on actively working on the project will fix it. You are obviously working on an active project, so there is some hope for support. The problem is, there probably isn't a guaranteed contract of support.
Unfortunately, not everyone working on open source is a qualified professional, and we do see some horrible code out there, but it's no worse than a lot of the commercial code I've seen over the years.
I see bad stuff all the time, even from my own piles of code. "We need to release by this date, can you do it faster?" is typically one big cause for bad code. But of all the open source projects, I have yet to find a project that values documentation and design work prior to jumping in the code. Even higher quality pieces of code are nothing if there's a million lines and not a single requirements or design document. Comments and well structured code are great, but if I had the opportunity to read a requirements document (aka the what and why) and a design document (aka the how) that would have saved countless of hours of staring and trying to make sense of even good code.
Open source by nature is ALWAYS disclosed.
If there are 2 million lines of code (not including whitespace and comments) and a bug/vulnerability might exist somewhere in those 2 million lines, is that disclosed? Just because the source is open does not mean all vulnerabilities are disclosed. It only means that others have equal opportunity to find the issues, but it is still up to the individual that finds the issue to disclose it or not.
How many vulnerabilities are known about and fixed in a certain time frame is meaningless.
It's not meaningless to a business that decided to invest in Microsoft software and services for their systems, especially one that must account for internet access. But it may be meaningless to you who may not care about Microsoft products and services.
That's interesting, but I'm the complete opposite:
I never cared much for the album art (I bought it to listen to the music, not look at some random artists' pictures/paintings).
I hate physical objects, not because it's proof that I have it and that my money bought something tangible, but that it means I have to physically store and maintain junk. With digital, I can near instantaneously make a dozen copies, store them in multiple places/devices and even send them off on the internet. Meanwhile in the physical world, it's as if nothing happened. And when I do lose track of something, in the digital world there are all kinds of search tools available to help. If I lost something physical, I have to physically look for the stupid thing and there's a good chance I won't be able to find it (because I let someone borrow it 5 years ago and they never gave it back!).
Copy protection sucks, but I make it a point not to rarely buy copy-protected music.
There are so many devices these days that play music: computers, car stereos, ipods/portable music players, cell phones, pdas, etc. As such, I don't find it a hassle at all to find a device that can play my digital music.
The only problem with digital is that the storage medium is not infinite. But I'm getting closer to solving that problem storage hardware/software comes out.
Those days have been gone for quite a while. The only time google wasn't really evil was when their search actually only returned results. Then came in the bright idea of adding advertisements to it. It was only downhill from there.
In fact their entire business model is evil by design: provide useful service people need, bloat it with ads, collect information and statistics on user, show more ads, etc. The entire scheme is setup to convert your time using their service into advertising opportunities. Everyday the text advertisements are getting worse than the images. At least with images it was obvious that it was an advertisement. With the text ads and ads that are slightly related to the content, they're starting to blend too well with the rest of the page that accidental clicks are more likely.
Offtopic but, some people like it, some people don't. I don't like the tag system in any form.
I'm guessing the people that liked it like it because they feel their opinion can get expressed. But in the end it usually disolves into a poor selection of tags that are mostly opinion and give you nothing in return.
On the other hand if user input is taken away, then the tags become kinda worthless because they're too obvious. For example a headline like "sun releases zfs" will get tagged "sun" and "zfs." Well duh, that doesn't help me, I can read the headline and figure that out.
So the tag system is pointless either way. The tags should be kept hidden and not displayed. They should only be used to categorize things which would help searches. But one rarely searches slashdot so I think the tags here will always have very little purpose.
Google can be my default desktop search when they stop integrating advertisements in the web search engine or they allow other competitors to advertise free of cost on their web search results page. Until then, sorry Google, you're just as evil as MS.
What are the nicer features of google video? Are you talking about the fact that it always fills up the browser screen? I didn't really find that to be a nice feature since most videos were of low bitrate and on a big monitor that turns into giant pixel blocks. With google video I almost always found myself resizing the browser window smaller just to avoid the big pixel blocks but when I was done or I flipped to another tab, I had to resize the window larger again. I also found that youtube's "related videos" section is pretty good at not only finding related videos, but not-so related videos that also may match your interest. Now the comments section however...
Qwerty is all you need? You make it too easy. My perfect phone would:
Be so tiny I didn't have to carry it around. They'd just attach it to my forehead or something.
When I needed to check my voicemail, the thing would fricken start playing the first message, not go off about how I've got 5 messages in archive that I should delete.
Would never need to be recharged because it would run off of my awesomness.
It would automatically get girl's phone numbers for me just by being in the general vicinity of a "hot" girl.
And when I dialed the number it would do something to my voice and instantly get the girl to fall madly in love with me.
And when I was, you know, all excited, it would make giant sparks fly out of my ass.
But for when I was in deep shit, it would shoot out lasers from my forehead!
For any telemarketer call it receives, it would grab the telemarketer's ceo and punch him in the face.
Whenever I called some support service about my phone bill, or some other service I need, the phone would automatically bypass the BS automated menu system and put me through to a live human.
Of course the live human support person would actually turn out to be a hot girl in her mid twenties and have a sweet/sexy voice.
The storage capacity would make google mail cry: I'd be able to store an unlimited number of mp3s, ringtones, pictures, and videos on my phone.
I could download the entire internet without any reception therefore avoiding BS data service premiums.
But because the phone would always have reception (even when it was off or a billion light years away from earth), it would come with internet pre-downloaded.
I'd own soviet russia on my phone.
It would shoot lasers at all the insenstive clods that disagree with me on slashdot and other geek websites.
And I wouldn't need a beowulf cluster because it'd already have the answer to any question before I even ask it.
It would be called "Overlord 1.0"
It would erase the number "2.0" from all numbering systems, vocabularies, and writing systems as well as all other stupid buzzwords terms and phrases.
Recently I logged into World of Warcraft and I wound up questing alongside a mage and two dwarf warriors. I was the lowest-level newbie in the group, and the mage was the de-facto leader. He coached me on the details of each new quest, took the point position in dangerous fights and suggested tactics. He seemed like your classic virtual-world group leader: Confident, bold and streetsmart.
But after a few hours he said he was getting tired of using text chat -- and asked me to switch over to Ventrilo, an app that lets gamers chat using microphones and voice. I downloaded Ventrilo, logged in, dialed him up and...
... realized he was an 11-year-old boy
I'm gonna have to call this one and say that the author probably thought the mage was a girl. Just probably. Otherwise, why would he be so quick to download ventrillo?
One solution: have battery station and replaceable battery packs. Charge runs out, stop by battery station, swap batteries, and you're back on the road.
But really, most commuting is done because of commuting between work and home. Most people probably don't need to commute more than 200 miles a day. Even if you did commute 200 miles in one direction, office could have charging stations and your car could charge while you were at work. 200 miles is pretty damn good range for an electric car.
However if you're commuting 200 miles in one direction every day, something is wrong with you. At 65mph, that's 3 hours of driving in one direction and in two directions that 6 hours on the road. I would think in that situation you just might want to move a little closer to work.
It's easy to say that but I wouldn't say there's a complete correlation. Sometimes people get hired to lead something that was already bad, starting to go bad, or just had a batch of bad luck. I'd say in those times, companies often switch out who's running the show with another person. The new guy then takes a beating for all the crap that happens. After that the company goes back to the original founder and suddenly everything that was bad in the past gets associated with the guy that was briefly there. But the original icon guy when rehired is back to a clean slate.
I'm not sure why anyone would go to Yahoo anymore.
Off the top of my head, I can think of plenty of people that use yahoo. My parents, my aunt, my coworker. The thing I've noticed with yahoo is that they have always tried very hard to cover a wide range of information and they've always tried to make that obvious. They're essentially what AOL tried to do but better. For some people (geeks and people that only care about getting one thing done) that isn't ok, but for many people, that is actually better.
Most people on slashdot probably use Google because we're knowledgeable enough about other things that we don't need a portal website like yahoo. For other people that aren't as tech savvy, yahoo is their choice because it offers a majority of the things they need at a decent quality.
There are also a lot of other people that at some point opened an email account with yahoo and ever since haven't bothered to switch services. Google mail, while a fairly good service, doesn't contain anything essential to all emails users so for them it is easier to just stick with their old email address than to move to another account.
I used to house all crap "we need an email address" email at yahoo, but after having to read about some idiotic thing Britney or Paris did, or some foolish article about "Office tips you should follow!" for the umpteenth time on the front page of Yahoo, I've moved my crap email to Google.
And Google is any better? Google Mail has this really annoying blue bar at the top of the "body" section of your email controls that shows you information totally unrelated to mail. In fact, right now, it is showing me the following: "Yahoo! News: Entertainment News - Milan To Create a Via Versace (Fashion Wire Daily) - 2½ hours ago." Every time I see it I loathe it because meaningful titles (like the email title) or controls/buttons should go there. Not some stupid link that's cleverly disguised.
I hate dealing with both the phone companies and the cable companies. I only have two options where I live: ATT or Timewarner. I think both companies are equally incompetent and the services are crap. For example ATT phone bills don't make much sense and have lots of additional charges. If there is a technical problem, they will charge you an arm and a leg. Meanwhile, Timewarner prices are too high and they will only offer lower rates as long as you purchase more services from them. Even then, the service you do get may have problems or have setup fees and miscellaneous tech charges associated with having some idiot tech come to your house just to flip a switch. (Side note: we all know that he's not really just flipping a switch, but rather intentionally making it so that only the cables connected to the TVs you asked are functional while the other cables are not!)
And because both companies know they're so close to having a monopoly over the services, they do not put any effort into making the service better. Instead they offer less service at cheaper prices and increase the top end service (which was really yesterday's normal service), call it "Pro" and charge an arm and leg for it. At the end of the day, no matter who's charging you, you're still paying a premium for poor service.
It's the new business strategy of America: don't hire engineers or researchers to improve your technology to have a superior product or service, instead just hire more marketers and business people to come up with new ways to sell the same crappy product.
If the game is so badly designed that it's more fun to pay someone else to do 90% of the playing for you, then I can't help but wonder why people play it at all.
I don't play WoW, I actually play a different MMO. But I've been around and between MMOs and the farming issue always comes up and in almost any MMO there are always farmers. So you ask, if there are farmers there is obviously some tedious part of the game that isn't fun. And almost always that's true. MMOs are intentionally built with a grind in mind to keep players subscribed.
But why do some players keep playing the game? Probably because there are aspects of the game that they do enjoy but are not available in other games. I would have to say that one very big influence is the social aspect.
In many online games, you often just join a game and immediately start playing with a random group of people. This was the norm and it could be very fun. For example in most FPS games you just find a server, join it, and there you are in the middle of the battle. The problem is that the teams are random, the players are random, and there is very little communication. So while you are competing against other people in the game, you aren't necessarily communicating.
MMOs are quite different because they encourage the social aspect. To do things like take out a really tough monster, you need to form a group. If the group does not communicate or work together as a team, inevitably they will fail. This encourages the players to create social bonds even if they're only temporary.
Beyond that, players begin to see the advantages of having well defined groups and begin forming guilds or sets of players that commonly trust and work together. At the very peak, you begin to have stable and consistent players playing together. Just as the article said, as soon as you achieve cohesiveness, the communication dies out. But in MMOs there is always the next challenge, so the better a group of players get, the more challenges they seek. They can do this either by seeking additional harder game content, or by reducing their numbers and relying on fewer players.
So anyhow, not all players are aware of this but most of what keeps people playing MMOs is social. Once a player figures out that he can get the same social benefit outside of the game and he no longer feels that the game offers him anything beneficial outside of that, he will quit. Most players haven't reached that point or they aren't aware of it, so they keep logging in because they don't understand that there are alternatives.
I've been through this process more than once and I've seen many of my friends get sucked in as well as others that had been hardcore players quit the game. So everything I've said is first hand experience. There are also a lot of people who "say" they are quitting, but we all understand that they're quitting for the wrong reasons and they'll just get sucked back in a year later.
You must be one of those guys that has a bad case with lemons. My experience has been totally different. My Dell 600m is more than 2.5 years old now and has had zero problems since I bought it. The only portion that really "broke" on the machine was the rubber feet things below the laptop. The glue was wearing out so they're starting to come off. I don't care too much about them because the actual functionality of the laptop is unaffected.
The only part that started to show serious defects was the battery which gradually lost capacity. But even at 2 years, it was still decent capacity (barely 2 hours on a full charge). This is unavoidable as all batteries tend to lose capacity over time. But lucky for me, the battery never failed, and the big Sony battery recall fiasco caused me to get a free battery replacement. Now my battery is as good as new.
I will admit that at times the casing can seem flimsy, but at the same time it can be a pretty expensive requirement to make a laptop with more rigid casing material. On the other hand, my friend owned a 14" macbook when we first entered college. Around the three year mark, the thing was falling apart and his battery wouldn't hold a charge. At least with a cheap dell, if it starts falling apart after three years, I don't feel bad about it. Had it been something more expensive and it starts to fall apart, I feel like my investment never paid for itself. But my 600m has far outlived my expectations and unless there's a seriously good laptop deal in the near future, I doubt I'll be replacing it for another year or so.
It's such a hassle to get a good deal from Dell. Between their rebates, coupons, instant discounts, and special offers the entire process is like buying a car!
I haven't seen a rebate on a Dell deal yet (though I may be wrong) though they do have just about every other type of discount: coupons, percent off threshold, dollars off threshold, special base configuration prices, certain upgrade promotions (double memory, upgraded hard drive, upgraded CPU, etc.) and so on.
While you can relate the process to buying a car, the nice thing about Dell is that it is all online and it is fast. The online portion is great because there's not a team of salesmen trying pull a sale out of you; it's just you and the website and a simple click ends it all. And because it is online, the smart people postpone buying until they've found a deal they like. It is very advantagous to you (the consumer) because Dell cannot sit a sales rep that will try every trick in to the book to get a profit off you right at that moment. Instead, you can just go to the website, see what's offered, and compare their offer to others on the internet. If you like it, you buy, if you don't, you just close the window. All they can do is keep putting up different offers hoping that you'll eventually bite. But sometimes, they screw up.
For example, just last week they made a small boo-boo and priced a Dell C521 with an AMD dual-core, 1gb ram machine for $219. As a side note, the deal was posted 12:17AM early Friday morning which happens to match a certain piece of information in the article. The mistake was quickly fixed but not before it had spread the internet and was posted on various websites. Many users reported their sales going through (shipped) while some reported some orders getting cancelled.
Anyhow, the point is the system actually works for you as long as you're willing to wait a bit (there are typically good deals every couple months) for a deal that suits you. If you're extremely wealthy on time (waiting about a full year), then you can eventually hit one of these rare deals and come out on top. Some people have been able to get a good car sale, but it requires a lot of preparation and research beforehand, and it requires that you know exactly what you want to buy. With Dell, you can just check the website once every day (only takes a minute) to see if a deal suits you. (But smart people will just check deal websites so that they only get fed the times a good Dell deal comes up;)
Ebay is in a bad position, really, because they don't drive their own traffic.
Hmm, let's see. Go talk to anybody that has used the internet, ask them about selling and buying stuff online and there's a pretty good chance the verb ebay will come up. That's right, people don't always say, auction/sell it online, instead they just say, ebay it. Because of that, ebay, at least in the U.S. is the most common online auction site and probably gets direct hits all the time.
If Google decides to launch an auction website, it'd be a real bloodbath, because Ebay is nothing without it's famously massive traffic, much of with it has to buy.
This is another easy one. There was this great idea about putting video content on the internet inside of a website. You know, you go to a website and you can view a large selection of videos! Well, there was once youtube and google video. Youtube, even though was not necessarily superior in technical terms, was the leader in traffic even against google's own video site! So if Google was so powerful/smart that it could make a superior product/service, why didn't Youtube fold to Google video?
The answer is: not everyone uses Google's services. In fact, Google isn't a success because of the services it provides alone, it is a success because of its advertising business. I know several people that like to use Yahoo more than Google not only for searches but also email. I'm sure Google's services do drive a large portion of it's advertising business but when you as a publisher look for competitors to adwords, there's no comparison. There are many competitors but their technology in advertising and their market reach is nothing compared to Google.
Google has it great right now because many people perceive it as a search engine company when really it is an advertising company. This helps their image quite a bit because people don't know that google is the online advertising giant. Instead, everyone associates google with a search engine because of the phrase "google it."
Easy solution: get two computers. One for gaming and one for everyday tasks.
I've tried looking around for power efficient desktop parts and it's pretty much trial and error. For example I went through three desktop athlon 64 motherboards trying to find one with low power consumption but I could never get close to my laptop.
Once you've done that, the next thing I suggest is trying to run Vista (/ducks). You may laugh at first but I recently bought a dell c521 athlon X2 machine for my parents with vista business loaded on it. The machine supports a low power sleep state which consumes 2 to 3 watts at the outlet. That rivals many PSUs in standby mode! The nice thing about Vista's sleep state is that it comes back up practically instantly (2 to 3 seconds). You can literally just hit a key on your keyboard to wake up the computer and be working within 5 seconds.
The only problem with two different computers is now you have separate configurations (install certain software twice) and you have to come up with some way of sharing data between them. But I agree, I wish video manufacturers would start putting similar power saving technology as CPU manufacturers into their GPUs. The idle power consumption numbers are getting out of hand.
Why not make it a contract sort of deal instead of an auction. If the government was really interested in serving the public, they would force companies to come up with proposals and prototypes of what they would do with the spectrum and the best concept wins the spectrum in the form of a contract. The auction has no guarantees that the spectrum will be used in an efficient or "for the better of the public" manner. In fact, it is more likely that it will just turn into another form of high end real estate and monopolization tool than anything else.
Ok, I'm tired of this population density argument. The U.S. does have a lot of population dense cities, but the thing that really gets me is the fact that the U.S. has roads that go everywhere. If we can plop down a 2-lane road with asphalt or concrete why the hell can't we put down a stupid cable? And if cabling was really the issue, then why are our cellular networks still trash?
The point is that the US isn't improving as rapidly in technology.
Example 1: Timewarner was the first provider of cable internet access where I live and that was 10 or so years ago. Today, Timewarner is STILL the only cable internet access provider and instead of offering substantially better service for the same cost, they will sell you the same service at the same price or worse service at a slightly cheaper price. The only alternatives to internet access are DSL through ATT (which also hasn't improved at all) and dialup.
Example 2: The cell phone networks in the U.S. aren't any better. Our networks are behind and our cell phones are behind. Go to another country in Europe or Asia and your cell phone is an ancient brick that offends people.
So we've been paying the same rates for the same service for several years. Where is all the profit going? Obviously not towards improving our own technology.
That's not quite how it works with the carriers. The deal is this: if the cell phone manufacturer wants the carrier to carry a particular cell phone in their (the carrier's) stores, they need to customize the software on the phone to meet the carrier's requirements--meaning load the phone with all of the carrier's software/services and lock out certain features.
The reason why it feels like the carriers have too much power is because everyone purchases a cell phone contract and the carriers often provide discounts on the phones if the customer purchases a contract. So you go to the cingular/verizon/tmobile store and they say "with a 2 year contract, we'll give you $100 or whatever off on your cell phone." If you don't accept, then you go out, look for a plain cell phone, realize that cell phones are damn expensive (even the cheap ones) and come crawling back to the cingular/verizon/tmobile store ready to sign the contract. The problem is, the phone you're buying (from them) is loaded and modified with their crap so it is basically useless to you during and after the contract. Had you bought the phone and service separately, you could enjoy the full benefits of the phone's features as well as a cell phone service with no contract.
It's still possible to buy the phone and service separately (no crap loaded phone, no contract) in the U.S. with GSM providers (I believe ATT, T-mobile). It's just that nobody does it because for many people they typically only use their cell phones for talking (it does not matter how much crap is on the phone as long as they can make a call) or they're not willing to pay for the full cost of the cell phone.
So in a nutshell, the carriers effectively control the American consumers because in general the American consumers aren't cell phone/tech savvy and always go after the cheaper initial price even if it is a contract.
Personally, I'm done with contracts because without the contract, I can easily bargain the service price down anytime I want as long as there's more than one service provider. Bargaining isn't fun, but it's better than being someone's bitch for 2 years.
One fact that appears to be valid is that U.S. dollars are required to purchase oil, but it is not clear how that affects the dollar's value and more importantly the U.S. government's decisions. Perhaps someone with more knowledge (economics?) can chime in?
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It's a fallacy? Shit. I guess that all these years that I have been working on open source software, fixing bugs, adding features, has actually been a big long dream. I'll wake up and finally see that I've been living in the Matrix, and finally see Bill G in his true Borg form hanging over me grinning...
I believe he's referring to the thought that just because it's open source means that someone not on actively working on the project will fix it. You are obviously working on an active project, so there is some hope for support. The problem is, there probably isn't a guaranteed contract of support.
Unfortunately, not everyone working on open source is a qualified professional, and we do see some horrible code out there, but it's no worse than a lot of the commercial code I've seen over the years.
I see bad stuff all the time, even from my own piles of code. "We need to release by this date, can you do it faster?" is typically one big cause for bad code. But of all the open source projects, I have yet to find a project that values documentation and design work prior to jumping in the code. Even higher quality pieces of code are nothing if there's a million lines and not a single requirements or design document. Comments and well structured code are great, but if I had the opportunity to read a requirements document (aka the what and why) and a design document (aka the how) that would have saved countless of hours of staring and trying to make sense of even good code.
Open source by nature is ALWAYS disclosed.
If there are 2 million lines of code (not including whitespace and comments) and a bug/vulnerability might exist somewhere in those 2 million lines, is that disclosed? Just because the source is open does not mean all vulnerabilities are disclosed. It only means that others have equal opportunity to find the issues, but it is still up to the individual that finds the issue to disclose it or not.
How many vulnerabilities are known about and fixed in a certain time frame is meaningless.
It's not meaningless to a business that decided to invest in Microsoft software and services for their systems, especially one that must account for internet access. But it may be meaningless to you who may not care about Microsoft products and services.
That's interesting, but I'm the complete opposite:
I never cared much for the album art (I bought it to listen to the music, not look at some random artists' pictures/paintings).
I hate physical objects, not because it's proof that I have it and that my money bought something tangible, but that it means I have to physically store and maintain junk. With digital, I can near instantaneously make a dozen copies, store them in multiple places/devices and even send them off on the internet. Meanwhile in the physical world, it's as if nothing happened. And when I do lose track of something, in the digital world there are all kinds of search tools available to help. If I lost something physical, I have to physically look for the stupid thing and there's a good chance I won't be able to find it (because I let someone borrow it 5 years ago and they never gave it back!).
Copy protection sucks, but I make it a point not to rarely buy copy-protected music.
There are so many devices these days that play music: computers, car stereos, ipods/portable music players, cell phones, pdas, etc. As such, I don't find it a hassle at all to find a device that can play my digital music.
The only problem with digital is that the storage medium is not infinite. But I'm getting closer to solving that problem storage hardware/software comes out.
Who came up with that? Is it so hard to have two tags: input, device? Or did they mean development resulting in tags: input, development?
Those days have been gone for quite a while. The only time google wasn't really evil was when their search actually only returned results. Then came in the bright idea of adding advertisements to it. It was only downhill from there.
In fact their entire business model is evil by design: provide useful service people need, bloat it with ads, collect information and statistics on user, show more ads, etc. The entire scheme is setup to convert your time using their service into advertising opportunities. Everyday the text advertisements are getting worse than the images. At least with images it was obvious that it was an advertisement. With the text ads and ads that are slightly related to the content, they're starting to blend too well with the rest of the page that accidental clicks are more likely.
Offtopic but, some people like it, some people don't. I don't like the tag system in any form.
I'm guessing the people that liked it like it because they feel their opinion can get expressed. But in the end it usually disolves into a poor selection of tags that are mostly opinion and give you nothing in return.
On the other hand if user input is taken away, then the tags become kinda worthless because they're too obvious. For example a headline like "sun releases zfs" will get tagged "sun" and "zfs." Well duh, that doesn't help me, I can read the headline and figure that out.
So the tag system is pointless either way. The tags should be kept hidden and not displayed. They should only be used to categorize things which would help searches. But one rarely searches slashdot so I think the tags here will always have very little purpose.
Google can be my default desktop search when they stop integrating advertisements in the web search engine or they allow other competitors to advertise free of cost on their web search results page. Until then, sorry Google, you're just as evil as MS.
What are the nicer features of google video? Are you talking about the fact that it always fills up the browser screen? I didn't really find that to be a nice feature since most videos were of low bitrate and on a big monitor that turns into giant pixel blocks. With google video I almost always found myself resizing the browser window smaller just to avoid the big pixel blocks but when I was done or I flipped to another tab, I had to resize the window larger again. I also found that youtube's "related videos" section is pretty good at not only finding related videos, but not-so related videos that also may match your interest. Now the comments section however...
Qwerty is all you need? You make it too easy. My perfect phone would:
I'm gonna have to call this one and say that the author probably thought the mage was a girl. Just probably. Otherwise, why would he be so quick to download ventrillo?
One solution: have battery station and replaceable battery packs. Charge runs out, stop by battery station, swap batteries, and you're back on the road.
But really, most commuting is done because of commuting between work and home. Most people probably don't need to commute more than 200 miles a day. Even if you did commute 200 miles in one direction, office could have charging stations and your car could charge while you were at work. 200 miles is pretty damn good range for an electric car.
However if you're commuting 200 miles in one direction every day, something is wrong with you. At 65mph, that's 3 hours of driving in one direction and in two directions that 6 hours on the road. I would think in that situation you just might want to move a little closer to work.
It's easy to say that but I wouldn't say there's a complete correlation. Sometimes people get hired to lead something that was already bad, starting to go bad, or just had a batch of bad luck. I'd say in those times, companies often switch out who's running the show with another person. The new guy then takes a beating for all the crap that happens. After that the company goes back to the original founder and suddenly everything that was bad in the past gets associated with the guy that was briefly there. But the original icon guy when rehired is back to a clean slate.
I'm not sure why anyone would go to Yahoo anymore.
Off the top of my head, I can think of plenty of people that use yahoo. My parents, my aunt, my coworker. The thing I've noticed with yahoo is that they have always tried very hard to cover a wide range of information and they've always tried to make that obvious. They're essentially what AOL tried to do but better. For some people (geeks and people that only care about getting one thing done) that isn't ok, but for many people, that is actually better.
Most people on slashdot probably use Google because we're knowledgeable enough about other things that we don't need a portal website like yahoo. For other people that aren't as tech savvy, yahoo is their choice because it offers a majority of the things they need at a decent quality.
There are also a lot of other people that at some point opened an email account with yahoo and ever since haven't bothered to switch services. Google mail, while a fairly good service, doesn't contain anything essential to all emails users so for them it is easier to just stick with their old email address than to move to another account.
I used to house all crap "we need an email address" email at yahoo, but after having to read about some idiotic thing Britney or Paris did, or some foolish article about "Office tips you should follow!" for the umpteenth time on the front page of Yahoo, I've moved my crap email to Google.
And Google is any better? Google Mail has this really annoying blue bar at the top of the "body" section of your email controls that shows you information totally unrelated to mail. In fact, right now, it is showing me the following: "Yahoo! News: Entertainment News - Milan To Create a Via Versace (Fashion Wire Daily) - 2½ hours ago." Every time I see it I loathe it because meaningful titles (like the email title) or controls/buttons should go there. Not some stupid link that's cleverly disguised.
I hate dealing with both the phone companies and the cable companies. I only have two options where I live: ATT or Timewarner. I think both companies are equally incompetent and the services are crap. For example ATT phone bills don't make much sense and have lots of additional charges. If there is a technical problem, they will charge you an arm and a leg. Meanwhile, Timewarner prices are too high and they will only offer lower rates as long as you purchase more services from them. Even then, the service you do get may have problems or have setup fees and miscellaneous tech charges associated with having some idiot tech come to your house just to flip a switch. (Side note: we all know that he's not really just flipping a switch, but rather intentionally making it so that only the cables connected to the TVs you asked are functional while the other cables are not!)
And because both companies know they're so close to having a monopoly over the services, they do not put any effort into making the service better. Instead they offer less service at cheaper prices and increase the top end service (which was really yesterday's normal service), call it "Pro" and charge an arm and leg for it. At the end of the day, no matter who's charging you, you're still paying a premium for poor service.
It's the new business strategy of America: don't hire engineers or researchers to improve your technology to have a superior product or service, instead just hire more marketers and business people to come up with new ways to sell the same crappy product.
I don't play WoW, I actually play a different MMO. But I've been around and between MMOs and the farming issue always comes up and in almost any MMO there are always farmers. So you ask, if there are farmers there is obviously some tedious part of the game that isn't fun. And almost always that's true. MMOs are intentionally built with a grind in mind to keep players subscribed.
But why do some players keep playing the game? Probably because there are aspects of the game that they do enjoy but are not available in other games. I would have to say that one very big influence is the social aspect.
In many online games, you often just join a game and immediately start playing with a random group of people. This was the norm and it could be very fun. For example in most FPS games you just find a server, join it, and there you are in the middle of the battle. The problem is that the teams are random, the players are random, and there is very little communication. So while you are competing against other people in the game, you aren't necessarily communicating.
MMOs are quite different because they encourage the social aspect. To do things like take out a really tough monster, you need to form a group. If the group does not communicate or work together as a team, inevitably they will fail. This encourages the players to create social bonds even if they're only temporary.
Beyond that, players begin to see the advantages of having well defined groups and begin forming guilds or sets of players that commonly trust and work together. At the very peak, you begin to have stable and consistent players playing together. Just as the article said, as soon as you achieve cohesiveness, the communication dies out. But in MMOs there is always the next challenge, so the better a group of players get, the more challenges they seek. They can do this either by seeking additional harder game content, or by reducing their numbers and relying on fewer players.
So anyhow, not all players are aware of this but most of what keeps people playing MMOs is social. Once a player figures out that he can get the same social benefit outside of the game and he no longer feels that the game offers him anything beneficial outside of that, he will quit. Most players haven't reached that point or they aren't aware of it, so they keep logging in because they don't understand that there are alternatives.
I've been through this process more than once and I've seen many of my friends get sucked in as well as others that had been hardcore players quit the game. So everything I've said is first hand experience. There are also a lot of people who "say" they are quitting, but we all understand that they're quitting for the wrong reasons and they'll just get sucked back in a year later.
You must be one of those guys that has a bad case with lemons. My experience has been totally different. My Dell 600m is more than 2.5 years old now and has had zero problems since I bought it. The only portion that really "broke" on the machine was the rubber feet things below the laptop. The glue was wearing out so they're starting to come off. I don't care too much about them because the actual functionality of the laptop is unaffected.
The only part that started to show serious defects was the battery which gradually lost capacity. But even at 2 years, it was still decent capacity (barely 2 hours on a full charge). This is unavoidable as all batteries tend to lose capacity over time. But lucky for me, the battery never failed, and the big Sony battery recall fiasco caused me to get a free battery replacement. Now my battery is as good as new.
I will admit that at times the casing can seem flimsy, but at the same time it can be a pretty expensive requirement to make a laptop with more rigid casing material. On the other hand, my friend owned a 14" macbook when we first entered college. Around the three year mark, the thing was falling apart and his battery wouldn't hold a charge. At least with a cheap dell, if it starts falling apart after three years, I don't feel bad about it. Had it been something more expensive and it starts to fall apart, I feel like my investment never paid for itself. But my 600m has far outlived my expectations and unless there's a seriously good laptop deal in the near future, I doubt I'll be replacing it for another year or so.
I haven't seen a rebate on a Dell deal yet (though I may be wrong) though they do have just about every other type of discount: coupons, percent off threshold, dollars off threshold, special base configuration prices, certain upgrade promotions (double memory, upgraded hard drive, upgraded CPU, etc.) and so on.
While you can relate the process to buying a car, the nice thing about Dell is that it is all online and it is fast. The online portion is great because there's not a team of salesmen trying pull a sale out of you; it's just you and the website and a simple click ends it all. And because it is online, the smart people postpone buying until they've found a deal they like. It is very advantagous to you (the consumer) because Dell cannot sit a sales rep that will try every trick in to the book to get a profit off you right at that moment. Instead, you can just go to the website, see what's offered, and compare their offer to others on the internet. If you like it, you buy, if you don't, you just close the window. All they can do is keep putting up different offers hoping that you'll eventually bite. But sometimes, they screw up.
For example, just last week they made a small boo-boo and priced a Dell C521 with an AMD dual-core, 1gb ram machine for $219. As a side note, the deal was posted 12:17AM early Friday morning which happens to match a certain piece of information in the article. The mistake was quickly fixed but not before it had spread the internet and was posted on various websites. Many users reported their sales going through (shipped) while some reported some orders getting cancelled.
Anyhow, the point is the system actually works for you as long as you're willing to wait a bit (there are typically good deals every couple months) for a deal that suits you. If you're extremely wealthy on time (waiting about a full year), then you can eventually hit one of these rare deals and come out on top. Some people have been able to get a good car sale, but it requires a lot of preparation and research beforehand, and it requires that you know exactly what you want to buy. With Dell, you can just check the website once every day (only takes a minute) to see if a deal suits you. (But smart people will just check deal websites so that they only get fed the times a good Dell deal comes up ;)
Hmm, let's see. Go talk to anybody that has used the internet, ask them about selling and buying stuff online and there's a pretty good chance the verb ebay will come up. That's right, people don't always say, auction/sell it online, instead they just say, ebay it. Because of that, ebay, at least in the U.S. is the most common online auction site and probably gets direct hits all the time.
This is another easy one. There was this great idea about putting video content on the internet inside of a website. You know, you go to a website and you can view a large selection of videos! Well, there was once youtube and google video. Youtube, even though was not necessarily superior in technical terms, was the leader in traffic even against google's own video site! So if Google was so powerful/smart that it could make a superior product/service, why didn't Youtube fold to Google video?
The answer is: not everyone uses Google's services. In fact, Google isn't a success because of the services it provides alone, it is a success because of its advertising business. I know several people that like to use Yahoo more than Google not only for searches but also email. I'm sure Google's services do drive a large portion of it's advertising business but when you as a publisher look for competitors to adwords, there's no comparison. There are many competitors but their technology in advertising and their market reach is nothing compared to Google.
Google has it great right now because many people perceive it as a search engine company when really it is an advertising company. This helps their image quite a bit because people don't know that google is the online advertising giant. Instead, everyone associates google with a search engine because of the phrase "google it."
You've just made it even easier. Now they have a 1 in 3 chance of guessing the right answer.
Easy solution: get two computers. One for gaming and one for everyday tasks.
I've tried looking around for power efficient desktop parts and it's pretty much trial and error. For example I went through three desktop athlon 64 motherboards trying to find one with low power consumption but I could never get close to my laptop.
Once you've done that, the next thing I suggest is trying to run Vista (/ducks). You may laugh at first but I recently bought a dell c521 athlon X2 machine for my parents with vista business loaded on it. The machine supports a low power sleep state which consumes 2 to 3 watts at the outlet. That rivals many PSUs in standby mode! The nice thing about Vista's sleep state is that it comes back up practically instantly (2 to 3 seconds). You can literally just hit a key on your keyboard to wake up the computer and be working within 5 seconds.
The only problem with two different computers is now you have separate configurations (install certain software twice) and you have to come up with some way of sharing data between them. But I agree, I wish video manufacturers would start putting similar power saving technology as CPU manufacturers into their GPUs. The idle power consumption numbers are getting out of hand.
Why not make it a contract sort of deal instead of an auction. If the government was really interested in serving the public, they would force companies to come up with proposals and prototypes of what they would do with the spectrum and the best concept wins the spectrum in the form of a contract. The auction has no guarantees that the spectrum will be used in an efficient or "for the better of the public" manner. In fact, it is more likely that it will just turn into another form of high end real estate and monopolization tool than anything else.
Ok, I'm tired of this population density argument. The U.S. does have a lot of population dense cities, but the thing that really gets me is the fact that the U.S. has roads that go everywhere. If we can plop down a 2-lane road with asphalt or concrete why the hell can't we put down a stupid cable? And if cabling was really the issue, then why are our cellular networks still trash?
The point is that the US isn't improving as rapidly in technology.
Example 1: Timewarner was the first provider of cable internet access where I live and that was 10 or so years ago. Today, Timewarner is STILL the only cable internet access provider and instead of offering substantially better service for the same cost, they will sell you the same service at the same price or worse service at a slightly cheaper price. The only alternatives to internet access are DSL through ATT (which also hasn't improved at all) and dialup.
Example 2: The cell phone networks in the U.S. aren't any better. Our networks are behind and our cell phones are behind. Go to another country in Europe or Asia and your cell phone is an ancient brick that offends people.
So we've been paying the same rates for the same service for several years. Where is all the profit going? Obviously not towards improving our own technology.
That's not quite how it works with the carriers. The deal is this: if the cell phone manufacturer wants the carrier to carry a particular cell phone in their (the carrier's) stores, they need to customize the software on the phone to meet the carrier's requirements--meaning load the phone with all of the carrier's software/services and lock out certain features.
The reason why it feels like the carriers have too much power is because everyone purchases a cell phone contract and the carriers often provide discounts on the phones if the customer purchases a contract. So you go to the cingular/verizon/tmobile store and they say "with a 2 year contract, we'll give you $100 or whatever off on your cell phone." If you don't accept, then you go out, look for a plain cell phone, realize that cell phones are damn expensive (even the cheap ones) and come crawling back to the cingular/verizon/tmobile store ready to sign the contract. The problem is, the phone you're buying (from them) is loaded and modified with their crap so it is basically useless to you during and after the contract. Had you bought the phone and service separately, you could enjoy the full benefits of the phone's features as well as a cell phone service with no contract.
It's still possible to buy the phone and service separately (no crap loaded phone, no contract) in the U.S. with GSM providers (I believe ATT, T-mobile). It's just that nobody does it because for many people they typically only use their cell phones for talking (it does not matter how much crap is on the phone as long as they can make a call) or they're not willing to pay for the full cost of the cell phone.
So in a nutshell, the carriers effectively control the American consumers because in general the American consumers aren't cell phone/tech savvy and always go after the cheaper initial price even if it is a contract.
Personally, I'm done with contracts because without the contract, I can easily bargain the service price down anytime I want as long as there's more than one service provider. Bargaining isn't fun, but it's better than being someone's bitch for 2 years.
I couldn't find very many reliable sources to support these claims, but for those interested, here's the wikipedia topic (a start):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrodollar_warfare
One fact that appears to be valid is that U.S. dollars are required to purchase oil, but it is not clear how that affects the dollar's value and more importantly the U.S. government's decisions. Perhaps someone with more knowledge (economics?) can chime in?
IE7 wins because 7 is the largest prime number of 3, 2, and 7.