Because very few people have reliable push email on their phones, but everyone has SMS. Text messaging also tends to be better integrated into the phone's display etc.
Example: At the mall with my wife I text something like "meet me @ car in 5 mins". I know she'll get that message pretty much right away, unless she's out of coverage. I also know her phone will make a noise/vibrate and when she looks at it the full text of the message will be displayed on the screen (not buried in an app/menu). Sure there's nothing stopping you adding that functionality to an email app, but it's more complex. You'd need whitelisting, as there's no way I want my phone to make a noise every time I get an email from just anyone. You'd also need push, obviously, and something which displayed the messages on the home screen. All possible, sure, but not there yet - and certainly not on regular (non smartphone) handsets. For $5 a month SMS is convenient to use and I know it just works on basically every handset out there.
And, before anybody tells me I have no idea what it's like, etc, etc, etc - I work in London, and on the day of the tube bombings was sat in my offices, right above a train station. My boss was out of the country and asked if I was going to evacuate, so I explained that anything that hadn't gone off by 11am probably wasn't going to, and got back on with work.
Hypothetical situation: You're sitting on the tube. Suddenly a guy stands up and starts shouting something in a language you don't understand whilst waving around a backpack with smoke coming out of it. At the same moment, an announcement comes on the loudspeakers saying that there's an emergency situation and everyone should exit the train at the next station (which you're just pulling into).
Do you:
A) Get up and leave the train. b) Sit there whilst everyone else leaves smug in the knowledge that it's a false alarm?
Because that's what happened today. I evacuated because I was told to by my company's security team, at that point none of us knew what was going on - just that there was an unidentified low flying plane in the area and we should leave. I work in a 50 story block right by the waterline - we'd probably be one of the first hit in a repeat of 9/11. Was I nervous? Sure I was. And you would be too.
(BTW, I grew up in London and know all about IRA bombs and all that stuff, and I also was on the scene on 9/11. I'm a security theater skeptic of the highest order but in this case I think the evacuations were 100% justified. I thank my company for being on the ball enough to get us out so fast).
I help out on a product forum for a major (unnamed) electronics company. I certainly don't do 20 hours a week, but I do fulfill a pseudo-support role as well as just chewing the cud with a great band of other regulars. Why? Well mainly because I love the product and want to both see it do well, also because in this position I get to help shape it's development direction. If I could work for the company in question I might well do so, but instead I get to be a sideline member of the team. I don't get paid, but they send me more freebies than I know what to do with, which is a nice perk! I honestly don't see the difference between what I do and contributing to Linux, MySQL, JBoss or any of the other OSS projects with commercial interests attached.
It probably wouldn't involve people running through the streets screaming because their cable TV was out.
(Of course I realise that "fiber cables" can be used for much more important things than TV, but on a serious point I do think the word "terror" has had it's definition watered down a lot in the past few years).
That simply isn't true in the general sense of "banking relationships", the Patriot Act only requires that the institution confirms your identity and checks you against a blacklist. Many US banks will open checking & savings accounts for non-residents, although getting something like a credit card would be harder (and may be impossible, but I doubt it). I did it myself a few years ago, and I know a number of non-US residents living outside the US with perfectly legal US based accounts. You will need to do some paperwork to prove your identity if you don't already have a relationship with the institution, but a US mailing address/SSN etc is not required.
This site lists some of them, for example Citi who offer savings, checking, brokerage and Amex cards.
Does this version come with the lpia kernel? I recently got a Dell Mini and am still using the lpia-enabled 8.04 distro it comes with. I'd like to give Netbook Remix a go but I'm concerned that the stock x86 kernel will reduce battery life (which is already not quite as great as I'd hoped for).
Huh? It's $200. How is that "ridiculously overpriced"? It may be more than you want to pay, which is fine, but compared to similar products I think it's quite fair.
I personally use an MP3 player which doesn't have a screen at all. I don't need one. I don't need to be able to see what tune I'm playing, I can hear which one it is! Maybe with the crappy earphones you get on an iPhone it's harder to hear what tune is playing!
Personally, I like to be able to choose what I want to listen to rather than leave it to chance. That's what the screen is for. Not to mention the whole web/email/games/facebook thing. But whatever floats your boat, choice is a wonderful thing.
You seem to think that firing the local staff and offshoring means the company is "failing". I don't see why. The CEOs job is to maximise shareholder value - to get the best return on their investment. I don't know any more than you've told me about this case but if she's figured out she can improve profits by lowering costs, then she's doing her job and deserves the payrise.
Meanwhile they also pat each other on the back and increase their own wages if company performance improves as a result. Their money doesn't come from the money fairy. The employees and the share holders all lose out as the company is sold out from under them
This makes no sense whatsoever. If company performance improves then the CEO is doing well and the shareholders win. How on earth are shareholders losing in this scenario? The company can't be "sold our from under them" - they own the company! You clearly have a poor grasp of economics.
Perhaps you can tell me what shutter release timings correspond to "poor", "okay", "acceptable", and "good", because I certainly don't know that information
Compare with others, or read the review, where they will certainly point out if it's particularly fast or slow.
Are the times dpreview gives from the shutter button half-way down and AF set, or including the AF time
They usually give both, plus "power off to first shot" and intra-shot recycle times (e.g. SD 1100 IS).
What's the shutter release time of the SD 780 IS?
Who knows, it hasn't been released yet. Manufacturers don't always provide that data, and if they did - would you trust them? So the thing has to be reviewed and tested, and that usually means it has to be in the channel. DPReview aren't always the fastest at getting reviews out the door, but I personally wouldn't buy anything they hadn't tested - they do a MUCH better job than I could with 5 mins in Best Buy playing with the thing.
It's not an easy balance to get right, but it's not impossible. Compare to restaurant waiters. A common complaint in cheap restaurants is that when you need something your waiter is nowhere to be found. The big chains responded to this with the asinine "how is everything" questions every 5 minutes, which are very annoying when I'm trying to have a conversation. The mantra with really good restaurants is that the wait staff should be entirely invisible until you need something, and then they should know before you even do and be right there. For example, if someone starts to stand up from a table the waiter will appear from nowhere to pull out their chair, grab their napkin and refold it, and push the chair back in. I'm not expecting chain big box stores to send their staff to sliver service school, but there is a middle ground between absent and annoying!
I can't walk into Amazon's camera department and give a bunch of the cameras a try to test their shutter release delay.
No, but you can go to dpreview.com and read the shutter release stats (and usually a full review) for pretty much every camera out there. I can't really think of any product category which requires me to go to a B&M store anymore, except maybe last minute groceries and alcohol (stupid state laws).
OK, here's a question. Why does the store go down for new products? Newegg add new products every day, as do Amazon, eBay, and every other store I can think of, all without downtime. And it's not only a reboot blip, but a gone-fishing page for hours. Is it just to make sure that all the blogs "notice" and sit around waiting to see what's coming? I can't imagine they lack the technical know-how to keep the thing up.
It's not a toolbar (what made you think it was?). It's just an extension which preloads some java stuff so that applets load faster. Don't want it? Uninstall it.
A rouge machine in the Czech Republic was making bad AS advertisements that caused systems world wide to fail.
Now I really don't know all that much about large-scale networking so maybe someone could explain this to me. What difference does it make if the router is rouge, versus say, green? or black?
The bulk of the area maybe not, but the bulk of the population certainly does. And it's the population that matters. Most car journeys are short, most people never take these long cross-country drives you're talking about. They want something to play music for the 10-60 min commute each day. Personally I don't do streaming (because I like to choose what I hear) but both me & my wife use our ipods in the car every day (she listens to audiobooks - try getting those on XM). I haven't ever even switched on the radio in my car, and I certainly have no interest whatsoever in paying $13 a month for more channels. I'm sure I'm not representative of "the common man" - but I'm sure I'm not unique either.
Kids that spend day and night working on pet projects, open source software, etc. have more motivation and experience than any 'me-too' 'look how many projects I've done' resumes.
And that's exactly the kind of thing that should be on their resumes. But time after time it isn't.
It's obvious to everyone outside Wall St. that these people just don't get it.
And, sorry to say, it's obvious to everyone _inside_ Wall St that people like you just don't get it. "Wall St" is not just 20 super rich people lighting cigars with $100 bills, it's 10's of thousands of talented, hard working people who contribute far more than their share to the economy of the city, state and nation. Many of whom are now unemployed, or is desperate financial straits. They don't deserve any more pity than the laid off steel workers or car makers, but they don't deserve any less either. Just like the "war on terror" or the "war on drugs", the "war on wall st" is a convenient way to distract the masses and make them feel better because they have an "enemy" who can be "defeated". It was crap then, it's crap now.
Indeed, this is reactionary xenophobic crap. I work in a bank, I'm heavily involved in hiring both domestically and from overseas. Banks haven't been hiring _anyone_ in the last 6 months, and pretty much no-one for 6 months before that (didn't anyone see all the layoffs?). Also, to dispel some of the BS I read about H1-B, the vast majority of those candidates are people who are brought over here temporarily on contracts (through agencies) and who turn out to be excellent people who we want to keep. We pay the agencies, we pay their expenses, and we pay their legal fees. Then we pay them the same salary as we would anyone else - they're _not_ a cheap source of labor.
H1-B holders are allowed to transfer to another employer provided the new employer is willing to employ them in that status. In fact, the H1-B is one of the most employee-friendly of all the visa categories - I used to be on an L1-B and I really was tied to my employer. If I quite (or they fired me) it's off to the airport - regardless of how long I might have lived here or how much I paid in taxes. Luckily I'm now a greencard holder but being an immigrant in this country really isn't fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Because very few people have reliable push email on their phones, but everyone has SMS. Text messaging also tends to be better integrated into the phone's display etc.
Example: At the mall with my wife I text something like "meet me @ car in 5 mins". I know she'll get that message pretty much right away, unless she's out of coverage. I also know her phone will make a noise/vibrate and when she looks at it the full text of the message will be displayed on the screen (not buried in an app/menu). Sure there's nothing stopping you adding that functionality to an email app, but it's more complex. You'd need whitelisting, as there's no way I want my phone to make a noise every time I get an email from just anyone. You'd also need push, obviously, and something which displayed the messages on the home screen. All possible, sure, but not there yet - and certainly not on regular (non smartphone) handsets. For $5 a month SMS is convenient to use and I know it just works on basically every handset out there.
Hypothetical situation: You're sitting on the tube. Suddenly a guy stands up and starts shouting something in a language you don't understand whilst waving around a backpack with smoke coming out of it. At the same moment, an announcement comes on the loudspeakers saying that there's an emergency situation and everyone should exit the train at the next station (which you're just pulling into).
Do you:
A) Get up and leave the train.
b) Sit there whilst everyone else leaves smug in the knowledge that it's a false alarm?
Because that's what happened today. I evacuated because I was told to by my company's security team, at that point none of us knew what was going on - just that there was an unidentified low flying plane in the area and we should leave. I work in a 50 story block right by the waterline - we'd probably be one of the first hit in a repeat of 9/11. Was I nervous? Sure I was. And you would be too.
(BTW, I grew up in London and know all about IRA bombs and all that stuff, and I also was on the scene on 9/11. I'm a security theater skeptic of the highest order but in this case I think the evacuations were 100% justified. I thank my company for being on the ball enough to get us out so fast).
I help out on a product forum for a major (unnamed) electronics company. I certainly don't do 20 hours a week, but I do fulfill a pseudo-support role as well as just chewing the cud with a great band of other regulars. Why? Well mainly because I love the product and want to both see it do well, also because in this position I get to help shape it's development direction. If I could work for the company in question I might well do so, but instead I get to be a sideline member of the team. I don't get paid, but they send me more freebies than I know what to do with, which is a nice perk! I honestly don't see the difference between what I do and contributing to Linux, MySQL, JBoss or any of the other OSS projects with commercial interests attached.
Define terrorism
It probably wouldn't involve people running through the streets screaming because their cable TV was out.
(Of course I realise that "fiber cables" can be used for much more important things than TV, but on a serious point I do think the word "terror" has had it's definition watered down a lot in the past few years).
That simply isn't true in the general sense of "banking relationships", the Patriot Act only requires that the institution confirms your identity and checks you against a blacklist. Many US banks will open checking & savings accounts for non-residents, although getting something like a credit card would be harder (and may be impossible, but I doubt it). I did it myself a few years ago, and I know a number of non-US residents living outside the US with perfectly legal US based accounts. You will need to do some paperwork to prove your identity if you don't already have a relationship with the institution, but a US mailing address/SSN etc is not required.
This site lists some of them, for example Citi who offer savings, checking, brokerage and Amex cards.
Well, it's a shame about the kitten, and the guy that died. But as far as I'm concerned the more guns off the streets/store shelves the better.
Actually, it's almost the price of TWO 360's.
You mean like the PS3?
Yes, exactly.
(you can get a 360 for $300, a Wii for $250, a PS3 for $400).
Actually, the base level 360 is $200, which makes this an even more absurd product.
Does this version come with the lpia kernel? I recently got a Dell Mini and am still using the lpia-enabled 8.04 distro it comes with. I'd like to give Netbook Remix a go but I'm concerned that the stock x86 kernel will reduce battery life (which is already not quite as great as I'd hoped for).
Anyone know the status of the lpia stuff?
Heh :) I was just thinking of what your take on this would be!
Welcome to 2009! Both of those are included in 3.0 (although tethering is pending carrier agreement).
Huh? It's $200. How is that "ridiculously overpriced"? It may be more than you want to pay, which is fine, but compared to similar products I think it's quite fair.
Personally, I like to be able to choose what I want to listen to rather than leave it to chance. That's what the screen is for. Not to mention the whole web/email/games/facebook thing. But whatever floats your boat, choice is a wonderful thing.
You seem to think that firing the local staff and offshoring means the company is "failing". I don't see why. The CEOs job is to maximise shareholder value - to get the best return on their investment. I don't know any more than you've told me about this case but if she's figured out she can improve profits by lowering costs, then she's doing her job and deserves the payrise.
Meanwhile they also pat each other on the back and increase their own wages if company performance improves as a result. Their money doesn't come from the money fairy. The employees and the share holders all lose out as the company is sold out from under them
This makes no sense whatsoever. If company performance improves then the CEO is doing well and the shareholders win. How on earth are shareholders losing in this scenario? The company can't be "sold our from under them" - they own the company! You clearly have a poor grasp of economics.
Compare with others, or read the review, where they will certainly point out if it's particularly fast or slow.
They usually give both, plus "power off to first shot" and intra-shot recycle times (e.g. SD 1100 IS).
Who knows, it hasn't been released yet. Manufacturers don't always provide that data, and if they did - would you trust them? So the thing has to be reviewed and tested, and that usually means it has to be in the channel. DPReview aren't always the fastest at getting reviews out the door, but I personally wouldn't buy anything they hadn't tested - they do a MUCH better job than I could with 5 mins in Best Buy playing with the thing.
It's not an easy balance to get right, but it's not impossible. Compare to restaurant waiters. A common complaint in cheap restaurants is that when you need something your waiter is nowhere to be found. The big chains responded to this with the asinine "how is everything" questions every 5 minutes, which are very annoying when I'm trying to have a conversation. The mantra with really good restaurants is that the wait staff should be entirely invisible until you need something, and then they should know before you even do and be right there. For example, if someone starts to stand up from a table the waiter will appear from nowhere to pull out their chair, grab their napkin and refold it, and push the chair back in. I'm not expecting chain big box stores to send their staff to sliver service school, but there is a middle ground between absent and annoying!
No, but you can go to dpreview.com and read the shutter release stats (and usually a full review) for pretty much every camera out there. I can't really think of any product category which requires me to go to a B&M store anymore, except maybe last minute groceries and alcohol (stupid state laws).
OK, here's a question. Why does the store go down for new products? Newegg add new products every day, as do Amazon, eBay, and every other store I can think of, all without downtime. And it's not only a reboot blip, but a gone-fishing page for hours. Is it just to make sure that all the blogs "notice" and sit around waiting to see what's coming? I can't imagine they lack the technical know-how to keep the thing up.
It's not a toolbar (what made you think it was?). It's just an extension which preloads some java stuff so that applets load faster. Don't want it? Uninstall it.
Now I really don't know all that much about large-scale networking so maybe someone could explain this to me. What difference does it make if the router is rouge, versus say, green? or black?
Thanks for any insight :)
The bulk of the area maybe not, but the bulk of the population certainly does. And it's the population that matters. Most car journeys are short, most people never take these long cross-country drives you're talking about. They want something to play music for the 10-60 min commute each day. Personally I don't do streaming (because I like to choose what I hear) but both me & my wife use our ipods in the car every day (she listens to audiobooks - try getting those on XM). I haven't ever even switched on the radio in my car, and I certainly have no interest whatsoever in paying $13 a month for more channels. I'm sure I'm not representative of "the common man" - but I'm sure I'm not unique either.
And that's exactly the kind of thing that should be on their resumes. But time after time it isn't.
And, sorry to say, it's obvious to everyone _inside_ Wall St that people like you just don't get it. "Wall St" is not just 20 super rich people lighting cigars with $100 bills, it's 10's of thousands of talented, hard working people who contribute far more than their share to the economy of the city, state and nation. Many of whom are now unemployed, or is desperate financial straits. They don't deserve any more pity than the laid off steel workers or car makers, but they don't deserve any less either. Just like the "war on terror" or the "war on drugs", the "war on wall st" is a convenient way to distract the masses and make them feel better because they have an "enemy" who can be "defeated". It was crap then, it's crap now.
Indeed, this is reactionary xenophobic crap. I work in a bank, I'm heavily involved in hiring both domestically and from overseas. Banks haven't been hiring _anyone_ in the last 6 months, and pretty much no-one for 6 months before that (didn't anyone see all the layoffs?). Also, to dispel some of the BS I read about H1-B, the vast majority of those candidates are people who are brought over here temporarily on contracts (through agencies) and who turn out to be excellent people who we want to keep. We pay the agencies, we pay their expenses, and we pay their legal fees. Then we pay them the same salary as we would anyone else - they're _not_ a cheap source of labor.
H1-B holders are allowed to transfer to another employer provided the new employer is willing to employ them in that status. In fact, the H1-B is one of the most employee-friendly of all the visa categories - I used to be on an L1-B and I really was tied to my employer. If I quite (or they fired me) it's off to the airport - regardless of how long I might have lived here or how much I paid in taxes. Luckily I'm now a greencard holder but being an immigrant in this country really isn't fun.