I've always thought that one typically gets one what one pays for...
if you want cheap airline call takers who have no power and wouldn't be able to tell you if Bismark is in America or an international destination, then boy do I have an international solution for you...!
>I hate windows, but I'm pretty much forced to use it because
>I have no idea how to run Linux well,
>and apple doesn't run any of the applications I use often.
Such as....?
I found the conversion from PC to Mac to be very easy, and the Mac applications are much better than their corresponding Windows ones (think Safari vs IE, iPhoto vs (nothing), iTunes, etc.)! It's very strange: on a Mac, things just kinda work.
Seriously, about the only thing a PC is good for is game playing. Some might argue you need a PC to mainly do Office type tasks (word, excel, etc), but Office works on a Mac as well.
Doing anything of a serious nature on a PC is like leaving all the windows in your house broken and hoping that the wrong attention is not drawn.
> "Would you buy a Ferrari and put regular gas into it?
Actually, I put regular gas in my Ferrari. Works just great.
Everyone once in a while that weird "Check Engine" light goes on. I just ignore it.
Oh wait, I meant that I put regular gas in my Toyota Echo. That works great. Gets 44 mpg winter/39mpg summer (Phoenix resident). I live 7 miles from work. I fill up once a month. I love it.
Ya, M$ plays favorites-- their applications are their favorites. If you don't believe me, try this:
1] format your hard drive
2] reinstall Windows
3] see which applications are the native defaults
4] realize that you now have a cleaned out system, and it is useless to you in this state. Worse, left this way, you know that it will only serve as a magnet for spyware and related crap, so...
5] throw out the PC and go buy a mac.
>a banner ad running on Myspace.com and other Web sites
>used a Windows security flaw to push adware and spyware
>out to more than one million computer users this week.
>The attack leveraged the Windows Metafile (WMF) exploit
want to be immune from crap like this?
get a Mac.
Just becuase it is dying doesn't mean that it is going to end anytime soon. For example, Vice President Cheney said a few months agao that the Iraq insurgency was in its "final throes", and I don't see that dying down anytime in the foreseeable future....
Email will never go away, but it is dying in that technically savvy system designers are moving away from email as the best/primary way to interact with customers. Customers may still want mass email today, but that will only last until their organizations adopt good RSS, integrated readers, which is starting to happen.
I'll elaborate:
1] if you were designing email today, you would not design it they way it currently is. Principally becuase of the spam issue, but also becuase things like distribution lists don't fit quite right into the email paradigm: for senders when email addresses are no longer active, for receivers having 40 billion unread emails when they return from vacations, etc. Add to that "HTML versus Text" versions and the filtering headaches that afflict everything but gmail....
2] New techonologies, like RSS, that avoid the problems associated with email are seeing steady increased adoption. For me, I try to get everything I can out of my email box and into RSS: These include news alerts (the BBC, the Globe and Mail, the NY Times, the Washington Post, the USA Today) , NASA website articles / press releases, updates for programs that I regularly watch (PBS's NOW, NOVA, Frontline, etc), alerts from daily deal sites (woot, midnightbox, weeklycloseouts, etc), and more.
3] RSS still leaves a "paper trail". I only posted in this thread originally because Safari informed me of a new/. entry via their RSS feed. I could click on that original RSS feed again right now.
4] Personalized RSS is beginning to happen. Look at Travelocity's personalized RSS FareWatcherAndAlerting capability. That used to be over email and (for me) is now exclusively done over RSS
Basically, any email which is not personalized directly to me I try to get out of my email box. When people start doing that en masse, then the techonology is dying (at least in-as-much-as the Iraq insurgency is in its "last throes"....)
I consider email to be a dying technology. Email is useful for contacting people whom you have an existing relationship with (and only if they have a stable, or several stable, email address). That's about it. For almost all other communications, RSS is a better solution. When spammers use email, email is being abused. When companies you do business with send you generic (ie: applicable to all customers) updates over email, email is being misused.
I don't think anyone (even NASA) still has the full blueprints for the Saturn V rockets anymore. As I recall, Apollo 17 went up and then the rockets for 18 and 19 were still in the launch pipeline when the moon program was canceled.
Now, over 3 decades later, you are looking at military contractors which have gone bankrupt or merged or been acquired or who-knows-what-else. Beyond that, the "people knowledge" of those who designed and built the Saturn 5's is long gone by now, and I'm willing to bet that in something as complex as a Saturn V, there is at least one piece of now-undocumented design information, waiting to spoil someone's day...
In short: the two remaining Saturn V's that are still around (Johnson and Kennedy Space Flight centers, serial numbers SA-514 and SA-515) are the only two to exist for the foreseeable future. When we, as a nation, decide to go to the moon again, we'll have to build a new rocket from scratch.
I think it is more that the internet removes barriers and allows you to be more who you really are. E.G: if you are naturally really social, then the internet allows you to really be more social by allowing you interact with lots of people; whereas, if you are really anti-social, it also allows you to interact with really few quantities of people, and thus allows you to be more anti-social.
That being said, I still think there is an inverse relationship between the quantity of conversation and the quality of it.
So now we know exactly how much it takes for Libertarian-thinking-Republicans to toss in the towel....
Careful though, if those Democrats get in power they're only going to want to do evil things like make sure kids have healthcare...;-)
...or when you call them up to cancel, simply state up front to the rep that this call is being recorded. That would curtail any rep's ideas, I would think.
Whether it is being recorded on tape, a hard disk, or simply as a lifetime memory can remain unspoken
>the phone companies' assault as it were is $25 a month for 256Kbit DSL >the cable companies' prices are $45 a month for 6Mbit Cable. >only an idiot would choose DSL if those are the options.
I disagree. The question is more properly phrased:
How much bandwidth does the typical home user need?
I have 256K DSL thru Qwest for 24.99/month. No long term requirements or subscription.
As a general rule, one does not need to upgrade capacity unless one is consistently already using over 70% of the existing capacity. [This "rule" applies to lots of things, I would suspect, including airplane sizes on routes for airlines.] I think most home users are like me-- they want reliable, instant-on service that can serve up a few fast loading webpages (their email, RSS links, liveatc.net running in the background, etc) which are commonly viewed.
DSL 256k @ $25/month is perfect for that. Why anyone would spend more when those are their needs is beyond me, but they do.
The websites I visit load so fast on my mac that I would not notice them loading in an extra.2 microseconds quicker, and the $20 savings a month (I think it is more a difference here between DSL and cable, but nonetheless) is quite nice for other purposes.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about that.
The last movie I saw was "An Inconvienant Truth" and that was a really good movie. I'd highly recommend it to others.
Of course, I tend to go for the factual, brainy type movies...
I'm faily good with computer programming....
BS from Carnegie-Mellon in Physics and CS and a Master's degree on top of that.
Give me until the year 2400 and I bet I'd get that "Star Trek NG" computer for ya.
Of course, someone needs to develop an "eternal-life" pill first...
I've always thought that one typically gets one what one pays for...
if you want cheap airline call takers who have no power and wouldn't be able to tell you if Bismark is in America or an international destination, then boy do I have an international solution for you...!
>I hate windows, but I'm pretty much forced to use it because
>I have no idea how to run Linux well,
>and apple doesn't run any of the applications I use often.
Such as....?
I found the conversion from PC to Mac to be very easy, and the Mac applications are much better than their corresponding Windows ones (think Safari vs IE, iPhoto vs (nothing), iTunes, etc.)! It's very strange: on a Mac, things just kinda work.
Seriously, about the only thing a PC is good for is game playing. Some might argue you need a PC to mainly do Office type tasks (word, excel, etc), but Office works on a Mac as well.
Doing anything of a serious nature on a PC is like leaving all the windows in your house broken and hoping that the wrong attention is not drawn.
> "Would you buy a Ferrari and put regular gas into it?
Actually, I put regular gas in my Ferrari. Works just great.
Everyone once in a while that weird "Check Engine" light goes on. I just ignore it.
Oh wait, I meant that I put regular gas in my Toyota Echo. That works great. Gets 44 mpg winter/39mpg summer (Phoenix resident). I live 7 miles from work. I fill up once a month. I love it.
>at least Microsoft doesn't play favorites!
;-)
Ya, M$ plays favorites-- their applications are their favorites. If you don't believe me, try this:
1] format your hard drive
2] reinstall Windows
3] see which applications are the native defaults
4] realize that you now have a cleaned out system, and it is useless to you in this state. Worse, left this way, you know that it will only serve as a magnet for spyware and related crap, so...
5] throw out the PC and go buy a mac.
Now you will see the bright side...
>a banner ad running on Myspace.com and other Web sites >used a Windows security flaw to push adware and spyware >out to more than one million computer users this week. >The attack leveraged the Windows Metafile (WMF) exploit want to be immune from crap like this? get a Mac.
Just becuase it is dying doesn't mean that it is going to end anytime soon. For example, Vice President Cheney said a few months agao that the Iraq insurgency was in its "final throes", and I don't see that dying down anytime in the foreseeable future....
/. entry via their RSS feed. I could click on that original RSS feed again right now.
Email will never go away, but it is dying in that technically savvy system designers are moving away from email as the best/primary way to interact with customers. Customers may still want mass email today, but that will only last until their organizations adopt good RSS, integrated readers, which is starting to happen.
I'll elaborate:
1] if you were designing email today, you would not design it they way it currently is. Principally becuase of the spam issue, but also becuase things like distribution lists don't fit quite right into the email paradigm: for senders when email addresses are no longer active, for receivers having 40 billion unread emails when they return from vacations, etc. Add to that "HTML versus Text" versions and the filtering headaches that afflict everything but gmail....
2] New techonologies, like RSS, that avoid the problems associated with email are seeing steady increased adoption. For me, I try to get everything I can out of my email box and into RSS: These include news alerts (the BBC, the Globe and Mail, the NY Times, the Washington Post, the USA Today) , NASA website articles / press releases, updates for programs that I regularly watch (PBS's NOW, NOVA, Frontline, etc), alerts from daily deal sites (woot, midnightbox, weeklycloseouts, etc), and more.
3] RSS still leaves a "paper trail". I only posted in this thread originally because Safari informed me of a new
4] Personalized RSS is beginning to happen. Look at Travelocity's personalized RSS FareWatcherAndAlerting capability. That used to be over email and (for me) is now exclusively done over RSS
Basically, any email which is not personalized directly to me I try to get out of my email box. When people start doing that en masse, then the techonology is dying (at least in-as-much-as the Iraq insurgency is in its "last throes"....)
I consider email to be a dying technology. Email is useful for contacting people whom you have an existing relationship with (and only if they have a stable, or several stable, email address). That's about it. For almost all other communications, RSS is a better solution. When spammers use email, email is being abused. When companies you do business with send you generic (ie: applicable to all customers) updates over email, email is being misused.
I don't think anyone (even NASA) still has the full blueprints for the Saturn V rockets anymore. As I recall, Apollo 17 went up and then the rockets for 18 and 19 were still in the launch pipeline when the moon program was canceled.
Now, over 3 decades later, you are looking at military contractors which have gone bankrupt or merged or been acquired or who-knows-what-else. Beyond that, the "people knowledge" of those who designed and built the Saturn 5's is long gone by now, and I'm willing to bet that in something as complex as a Saturn V, there is at least one piece of now-undocumented design information, waiting to spoil someone's day...
In short: the two remaining Saturn V's that are still around (Johnson and Kennedy Space Flight centers, serial numbers SA-514 and SA-515) are the only two to exist for the foreseeable future. When we, as a nation, decide to go to the moon again, we'll have to build a new rocket from scratch.
I think it is more that the internet removes barriers and allows you to be more who you really are. E.G: if you are naturally really social, then the internet allows you to really be more social by allowing you interact with lots of people; whereas, if you are really anti-social, it also allows you to interact with really few quantities of people, and thus allows you to be more anti-social.
That being said, I still think there is an inverse relationship between the quantity of conversation and the quality of it.
So now we know exactly how much it takes for Libertarian-thinking-Republicans to toss in the towel.... ;-)
Careful though, if those Democrats get in power they're only going to want to do evil things like make sure kids have healthcare...
I don't know if that statistic is accurate. Let's all google it and check...
Ah yes, I remember those days of dealing with the unwanted, preinstalled, crap on my computers... ...then I got a Mac.
...or when you call them up to cancel, simply state up front to the rep that this call is being recorded. That would curtail any rep's ideas, I would think. Whether it is being recorded on tape, a hard disk, or simply as a lifetime memory can remain unspoken
>the phone companies' assault as it were is $25 a month for 256Kbit DSL
.2 microseconds quicker, and the $20 savings a month (I think it is more a difference here between DSL and cable, but nonetheless) is quite nice for other purposes.
>the cable companies' prices are $45 a month for 6Mbit Cable.
>only an idiot would choose DSL if those are the options.
I disagree. The question is more properly phrased:
How much bandwidth does the typical home user need?
I have 256K DSL thru Qwest for 24.99/month. No long term requirements or subscription.
As a general rule, one does not need to upgrade capacity unless one is consistently already using over 70% of the existing capacity. [This "rule" applies to lots of things, I would suspect, including airplane sizes on routes for airlines.] I think most home users are like me-- they want reliable, instant-on service that can serve up a few fast loading webpages (their email, RSS links, liveatc.net running in the background, etc) which are commonly viewed.
DSL 256k @ $25/month is perfect for that. Why anyone would spend more when those are their needs is beyond me, but they do.
The websites I visit load so fast on my mac that I would not notice them loading in an extra