I don't see the problem.... Hulu Plus only costs $12 (compared to $8 for the basic service) and you get commercial free. So $4 a month extra for commercial free. I am disappointed in the service, as shortly after I subscribed they seem to have lost a lot of the current (day-of or day-after) shows that I'm interested in. If I want to watch past seasons of something, I have netflix. However, for the shows I do watch, $4 for no commercials is very nice. I'd pay double the price of Hulu plus to get all the current basic cable stuff. The big question here is, if you use their DVR service, can you fast forward through commercials? If not then it's pointless to me.
I've been waiting for something like that to come along, and found one on Indiegogo (Turn Your Smartphone Into A Laptop). I don't own a compatible phone, nor do I see buying one any time soon, but I'd get the four pack for my family in a heartbeat if I did. It is compatible (in addition to Apple and Android) with some Windows phones.
It's inevitable to me that we ultimately will have just the one device we take everywhere that can be used on it's own, but also attached to something that makes it more usable for all sorts of work (like actual code development). I could even picture eventually having a desktop that your phone plugs into that will still allow it the flexibility of upgrading graphics and sound (like the Surface Book with Nvidia... the Nvidia hardware is actually in the keyboard, so you only get the Nvidia acceleration when the tablet is attached to the keyboard).
I have a smartphone, but it seems to me that I have also bought into the hype and think perhaps trading down to a simple phone would be better. First, the voice quality on all these phones suck... Consumer Reports doesn't give a good rating to anybody.
I do use my phone for correspondence - mostly text messaging though. It wouldn't be a problem for me to wait until I get home or to the office - if there's really an emergency, you wouldn't send email anyway, you'd call or text, both of which are available on "non" smart phones.
I also can't imagine considering a smart phone something that "can't be beat" for consumption of media... it's something that you can carry around with you for convenience, but it's hardly the best way to consume video or books. Most web sites still suck for mobile, but there are some useful things you can do, so I'll grant you that, but I'd only watch TV or movies, or read a book, even on my "phablet," 5.5 inch screen, as a last resort.
Not going to argue about surveillance, but how many smartphones you've bought is irrelevant - how much did each one cost you? I think about the monthly average I'm paying (amortized cost of smartphone plus service), and can't, for the life of me, think it's actually worth it. It might be for some, but I think a lot of us would be better off without one (both financially and otherwise). For the vast majority of smartphone users the return on investment is not there at all.
One of the main "outcomes" that people want is equal "opportunity" for their children.
I don't know if it's just because most Americans are profoundly ignorant of the world outside their own country or what. But I find the amount of hopelessness and defeatism in the USA to be striking.
Absolutely - I think people here have a distinct lack of perspective. Lord Tytler explained the eight stages of democracy: bondage to spiritual faith; spiritual faith to great courage; courage to liberty; liberty to abundance; abundance to complacency; complacency to apathy; apathy to dependence, and dependence back to bondage. Which stage is the U.S.? I'd say we're in the middle of the final stage. People are not really all that happy, but as bad as anybody in the U.S. may have it, we're far better off than the majority of the rest of the world.
As you already pointed out (with food stamps) there's more than one "welfare" system people are using. Subsidized housing, free day care programs, school breakfast and lunch programs... all take the sting out of not having a steady (or having low) income. There's also the EITC every year - perhaps the most direct income redistribution program we have (in the U.S.).
I think Windows RT was actually a different version of Windows, the "mobile" version of Windows 8 - even if you could install other software on it, it wouldn't run. Windows S is supposedly a full version of Windows 10 where installs are locked to the Windows Store. I would bet it'll be broken soon enough, and people will be able to install from other sources (or "side load"). I guess if it's like a Chromebook version of Windows where you can actually get a laptop with decent enough specs (for a student) for under $200 it could make a lot of sense.
I disagree. If there's one area that OO blows other types of programming out of the water it's user interfaces. After cursory reading, I don't know that this is a great implementation and, honestly, mostly you're using some server side script to generate the HTML (and that script, IMO, is better suited to OO as I believe most interfaces and XML like structures are better suited to OO). I'd rather be using python on the back-end anyway. However, if you were writing complicated static pages (I don't know why you would do that), an object oriented approach to markup certainly seems like it could be useful.
It's one of those sort-of catch-22s. I am all for the free market - if it's actually free. I'd like it if businesses "played fair," but they don't, so I grudgingly accept government intervention - but only to help keep the free market free. I do feel the government intervenes too much in some ways, but not enough in others.
Product makers apply for Energy Star ratings, they pay a small fee (how much can this program actually cost, anyway?). Consumers who care will be more interested in the products that are rated. I don't see the problem.
I have to raise an eyebrow about your comments. Granted, I'm not out in the middle of nowhere, but I live in North GA and can drive all the way to Orlando, FL and not lose service, although it may not be as strong in some places, it's still there. On the other hand, there's a control room at work, buried deep in the middle of the building, and if the door to the room is closed, I get nothing. If the door is open, I get enough to get the occasional text message. I have to go to my office to make a call. I have T-Mobile, and had the same problem when I had Virgin (Sprint network). On the upside, I've traveled to Canada, and my son to Germany, and our phones "just worked." So I can't attest to network performance for where anyone may live, nor customer service (haven't needed it, which is the best service, IMO), but if you travel internationally, T-Mobile can be very handy to have. I pay $160/month for my family of four. I was paying the same at Virgin, but for prepaid without as many minutes and much less total bandwidth.
You imagined wrong. Some people do that. Most do not. The reason is quite simple - the whole point of K-Cup is that it's easy and fast. If you just turn it into a mini drip coffee maker, you're not gaining anything - now you just have a smaller "brew basked" to clean after making coffee. I do think a lot of people have backtracked to single-cup drip coffee makers (that don't require "cups" or "pods"), but most people using K-Cups are doing it for the convenience. It's quite wasteful, but I admit to having one. On a normal day we brew a half pot with our Ninja coffee maker, but if I'm making one cup for myself, I'll just use the K-Cup. I do have the refillable, but they are practically pointless. The other upside is getting variety packs of K-Cups. Also, since we make most of our coffee with the Ninja, I have the luxury of walking through the coffee aisle and just getting what's on sale.
To continue on with the conversation, as it seems to relate to the "internet connected" portion of the article about the juicer, the most boneheaded thing Keurig did was to make the 2.0 makers that will not make a cup that doesn't have their blessed RFID chip in it. These juicers apparently double-check the barcode on the juice bag. Way to alienate your customers, idiots!
I read the article. The packets are moronically expensive, but there's a sucker born every minutes. At the same time, while, on the whole, it may be cheaper to do it yourself, if you don't use your juicer a lot then it may be more expensive in the long run when you have to buy many different ingredients that don't last that long. It all depends on how much you use it. Like any recipe, if I don't cook a lot, then I often need to buy a bunch of ingredients that other cooks might take for granted - certain uncommon spices, for example, that end up costing me several dollars for the bottle when I only use it once because I don't cook that much. Suddenly it would have been cheaper to go out or buy it ready made.
Ok, but that's not what I meant. You need to clean the brew basket (at least throw away the paper filter, or clean and rinse the permanent one) after every brew. With Keurig you just throw away the cup. Yes, very wasteful - but easy, convenient, and most importantly: fast. On a "daily" basis the only thing Keurig needs is adding water to the reservoir.
I don't know why "internet connected" is a selling point for something like this, but the "bags" are actually a very good idea to capture the same market that Keurig captured with K-Cups. A decent drip coffee maker can cost a fraction of a K-Cup machine, and even if you don't want to grind the beans yourself (the best option for the freshest coffee), pre-ground coffee by the bag/can costs WAY less than a comparable amount of K-Cups. Yet K-Cups were wildly successful - because there are too many things going on in life - people don't want to waste time grinding coffee of cleaning up the pot and brew basket when all they wanted was an easy cup of coffee that they could just push a button for while getting ready for work in the morning.
So sure, having just a "regular" juicer not only gives you a lot more options, but it's healthier and you get fresher fruits and vegetables in your juices (plus whatever little extras you want to throw in). But then you have to keep fresh fruits in your home - they often don't last the week at my home, people don't want to make multiple trips to the supermarket because they ran out of one of the fruits or vegetables they'd be blending in, then they have to wash (and often cut up) the produce, and then clean everything up. It's frankly pretty easy to see the appeal of something like this. It may not be for you, it may not be for me, but then there are probably a lot of products like that - like an Amazon Echo or Google Home device. I don't know why people like them, I don't care, but there's obviously a market for it.
I started on a PET. Our school library had four, but they had a shared floppy drive instead of cassette. I did ultimately buy an Atari 400 with paper route money; that had a cassette that I eventually smashed into pieces with my bare fist after working day and night on a galaxian clone that it then wouldn't read back. I then just stopped using it for a while, and when my parents asked why, and I explained, they bought me a floppy drive. Yes, I was spoiled. In those days, the floppy drive cost more than the Atari.
The ST was the last Atari I had. I was hoping they'd have an Amiga comparable system, and doing computer graphics and some video editing in the early 90s, Amiga was what some local TV stations were using for their graphics. The ST was a vast departure from my previous Ataris, but it was awesome. My first was a 400 with 8k, upgraded to 16k; the membrane keyboard upgraded to a third party keyboard. I learned assembly language on it (the 400). Upgraded to 800XL and ultimately 130XE with paper route money. I feel bad for kids today - I don't think you get the same experience and understanding given a modern computer and incredibly complicated (by comparison) operating systems. I just feel like you don't really get the same kind of "aha! so that's how it works!" experiences you could with the simpler computers.
Not the GP poster, but yes to your questions... My first was an Atari 400 with the membrane keyboard. I eventually got a third party keyboard with full travel keys. I bought the assembler cartridge and a 6502 programming book. I had NO idea WTF I was doing, I'd never learned any of that in school - my knowledge was limited to was BASIC I could glean off fellow students at the computers in our school library (4 Commodore PETS).
I eventually figured it all out, learning how to do "player/missile" graphics (sprites to everyone else) and figuring out how to optimize slow parts of my BASIC programs with stuff I wrote with the assembler. NOTHING could prepare you better for a career like this than working on things like that. NOTHING. I feel bad for people getting into programming later on and not really understanding how things are working underneath the surface. Sure, a lot of them figure it out, but a lot don't, and I think learning how it all fits together and THEN programming for it is better. By the end I'd gone through the 800XL and 130XE Ataris... ah, the good old days.
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I don't see the problem.... Hulu Plus only costs $12 (compared to $8 for the basic service) and you get commercial free. So $4 a month extra for commercial free. I am disappointed in the service, as shortly after I subscribed they seem to have lost a lot of the current (day-of or day-after) shows that I'm interested in. If I want to watch past seasons of something, I have netflix. However, for the shows I do watch, $4 for no commercials is very nice. I'd pay double the price of Hulu plus to get all the current basic cable stuff. The big question here is, if you use their DVR service, can you fast forward through commercials? If not then it's pointless to me.
I've been waiting for something like that to come along, and found one on Indiegogo (Turn Your Smartphone Into A Laptop). I don't own a compatible phone, nor do I see buying one any time soon, but I'd get the four pack for my family in a heartbeat if I did. It is compatible (in addition to Apple and Android) with some Windows phones.
It's inevitable to me that we ultimately will have just the one device we take everywhere that can be used on it's own, but also attached to something that makes it more usable for all sorts of work (like actual code development). I could even picture eventually having a desktop that your phone plugs into that will still allow it the flexibility of upgrading graphics and sound (like the Surface Book with Nvidia... the Nvidia hardware is actually in the keyboard, so you only get the Nvidia acceleration when the tablet is attached to the keyboard).
I have a smartphone, but it seems to me that I have also bought into the hype and think perhaps trading down to a simple phone would be better. First, the voice quality on all these phones suck... Consumer Reports doesn't give a good rating to anybody.
I do use my phone for correspondence - mostly text messaging though. It wouldn't be a problem for me to wait until I get home or to the office - if there's really an emergency, you wouldn't send email anyway, you'd call or text, both of which are available on "non" smart phones.
I also can't imagine considering a smart phone something that "can't be beat" for consumption of media... it's something that you can carry around with you for convenience, but it's hardly the best way to consume video or books. Most web sites still suck for mobile, but there are some useful things you can do, so I'll grant you that, but I'd only watch TV or movies, or read a book, even on my "phablet," 5.5 inch screen, as a last resort.
Not going to argue about surveillance, but how many smartphones you've bought is irrelevant - how much did each one cost you? I think about the monthly average I'm paying (amortized cost of smartphone plus service), and can't, for the life of me, think it's actually worth it. It might be for some, but I think a lot of us would be better off without one (both financially and otherwise). For the vast majority of smartphone users the return on investment is not there at all.
In an attempt to complete with Apple: New phone unveiled!
One of the main "outcomes" that people want is equal "opportunity" for their children.
I don't know if it's just because most Americans are profoundly ignorant of the world outside their own country or what. But I find the amount of hopelessness and defeatism in the USA to be striking.
Absolutely - I think people here have a distinct lack of perspective. Lord Tytler explained the eight stages of democracy: bondage to spiritual faith; spiritual faith to great courage; courage to liberty; liberty to abundance; abundance to complacency; complacency to apathy; apathy to dependence, and dependence back to bondage. Which stage is the U.S.? I'd say we're in the middle of the final stage. People are not really all that happy, but as bad as anybody in the U.S. may have it, we're far better off than the majority of the rest of the world.
As you already pointed out (with food stamps) there's more than one "welfare" system people are using. Subsidized housing, free day care programs, school breakfast and lunch programs... all take the sting out of not having a steady (or having low) income. There's also the EITC every year - perhaps the most direct income redistribution program we have (in the U.S.).
I think Windows RT was actually a different version of Windows, the "mobile" version of Windows 8 - even if you could install other software on it, it wouldn't run. Windows S is supposedly a full version of Windows 10 where installs are locked to the Windows Store. I would bet it'll be broken soon enough, and people will be able to install from other sources (or "side load"). I guess if it's like a Chromebook version of Windows where you can actually get a laptop with decent enough specs (for a student) for under $200 it could make a lot of sense.
I disagree. If there's one area that OO blows other types of programming out of the water it's user interfaces. After cursory reading, I don't know that this is a great implementation and, honestly, mostly you're using some server side script to generate the HTML (and that script, IMO, is better suited to OO as I believe most interfaces and XML like structures are better suited to OO). I'd rather be using python on the back-end anyway. However, if you were writing complicated static pages (I don't know why you would do that), an object oriented approach to markup certainly seems like it could be useful.
It's one of those sort-of catch-22s. I am all for the free market - if it's actually free. I'd like it if businesses "played fair," but they don't, so I grudgingly accept government intervention - but only to help keep the free market free. I do feel the government intervenes too much in some ways, but not enough in others.
Product makers apply for Energy Star ratings, they pay a small fee (how much can this program actually cost, anyway?). Consumers who care will be more interested in the products that are rated. I don't see the problem.
Yes, this... and when my son traveled to Germany we were able to talk to him at no extra cost.
I have to raise an eyebrow about your comments. Granted, I'm not out in the middle of nowhere, but I live in North GA and can drive all the way to Orlando, FL and not lose service, although it may not be as strong in some places, it's still there. On the other hand, there's a control room at work, buried deep in the middle of the building, and if the door to the room is closed, I get nothing. If the door is open, I get enough to get the occasional text message. I have to go to my office to make a call. I have T-Mobile, and had the same problem when I had Virgin (Sprint network). On the upside, I've traveled to Canada, and my son to Germany, and our phones "just worked." So I can't attest to network performance for where anyone may live, nor customer service (haven't needed it, which is the best service, IMO), but if you travel internationally, T-Mobile can be very handy to have. I pay $160/month for my family of four. I was paying the same at Virgin, but for prepaid without as many minutes and much less total bandwidth.
You imagined wrong. Some people do that. Most do not. The reason is quite simple - the whole point of K-Cup is that it's easy and fast. If you just turn it into a mini drip coffee maker, you're not gaining anything - now you just have a smaller "brew basked" to clean after making coffee. I do think a lot of people have backtracked to single-cup drip coffee makers (that don't require "cups" or "pods"), but most people using K-Cups are doing it for the convenience. It's quite wasteful, but I admit to having one. On a normal day we brew a half pot with our Ninja coffee maker, but if I'm making one cup for myself, I'll just use the K-Cup. I do have the refillable, but they are practically pointless. The other upside is getting variety packs of K-Cups. Also, since we make most of our coffee with the Ninja, I have the luxury of walking through the coffee aisle and just getting what's on sale.
To continue on with the conversation, as it seems to relate to the "internet connected" portion of the article about the juicer, the most boneheaded thing Keurig did was to make the 2.0 makers that will not make a cup that doesn't have their blessed RFID chip in it. These juicers apparently double-check the barcode on the juice bag. Way to alienate your customers, idiots!
I read the article. The packets are moronically expensive, but there's a sucker born every minutes. At the same time, while, on the whole, it may be cheaper to do it yourself, if you don't use your juicer a lot then it may be more expensive in the long run when you have to buy many different ingredients that don't last that long. It all depends on how much you use it. Like any recipe, if I don't cook a lot, then I often need to buy a bunch of ingredients that other cooks might take for granted - certain uncommon spices, for example, that end up costing me several dollars for the bottle when I only use it once because I don't cook that much. Suddenly it would have been cheaper to go out or buy it ready made.
Ok, but that's not what I meant. You need to clean the brew basket (at least throw away the paper filter, or clean and rinse the permanent one) after every brew. With Keurig you just throw away the cup. Yes, very wasteful - but easy, convenient, and most importantly: fast. On a "daily" basis the only thing Keurig needs is adding water to the reservoir.
But it doesn't seem like the machine actually makes juice, it sounds like it's just a press that squeezes the juice out of the bags.
I don't know why "internet connected" is a selling point for something like this, but the "bags" are actually a very good idea to capture the same market that Keurig captured with K-Cups. A decent drip coffee maker can cost a fraction of a K-Cup machine, and even if you don't want to grind the beans yourself (the best option for the freshest coffee), pre-ground coffee by the bag/can costs WAY less than a comparable amount of K-Cups. Yet K-Cups were wildly successful - because there are too many things going on in life - people don't want to waste time grinding coffee of cleaning up the pot and brew basket when all they wanted was an easy cup of coffee that they could just push a button for while getting ready for work in the morning.
So sure, having just a "regular" juicer not only gives you a lot more options, but it's healthier and you get fresher fruits and vegetables in your juices (plus whatever little extras you want to throw in). But then you have to keep fresh fruits in your home - they often don't last the week at my home, people don't want to make multiple trips to the supermarket because they ran out of one of the fruits or vegetables they'd be blending in, then they have to wash (and often cut up) the produce, and then clean everything up. It's frankly pretty easy to see the appeal of something like this. It may not be for you, it may not be for me, but then there are probably a lot of products like that - like an Amazon Echo or Google Home device. I don't know why people like them, I don't care, but there's obviously a market for it.
I think most people realize that, but Carpenter's "The Thing" is clearly the best of the bunch.
Agree... that was my second computer after my original 400. These computers were amazing to learn on.
I started on a PET. Our school library had four, but they had a shared floppy drive instead of cassette. I did ultimately buy an Atari 400 with paper route money; that had a cassette that I eventually smashed into pieces with my bare fist after working day and night on a galaxian clone that it then wouldn't read back. I then just stopped using it for a while, and when my parents asked why, and I explained, they bought me a floppy drive. Yes, I was spoiled. In those days, the floppy drive cost more than the Atari.
The ST was the last Atari I had. I was hoping they'd have an Amiga comparable system, and doing computer graphics and some video editing in the early 90s, Amiga was what some local TV stations were using for their graphics. The ST was a vast departure from my previous Ataris, but it was awesome. My first was a 400 with 8k, upgraded to 16k; the membrane keyboard upgraded to a third party keyboard. I learned assembly language on it (the 400). Upgraded to 800XL and ultimately 130XE with paper route money. I feel bad for kids today - I don't think you get the same experience and understanding given a modern computer and incredibly complicated (by comparison) operating systems. I just feel like you don't really get the same kind of "aha! so that's how it works!" experiences you could with the simpler computers.
Not the GP poster, but yes to your questions... My first was an Atari 400 with the membrane keyboard. I eventually got a third party keyboard with full travel keys. I bought the assembler cartridge and a 6502 programming book. I had NO idea WTF I was doing, I'd never learned any of that in school - my knowledge was limited to was BASIC I could glean off fellow students at the computers in our school library (4 Commodore PETS).
I eventually figured it all out, learning how to do "player/missile" graphics (sprites to everyone else) and figuring out how to optimize slow parts of my BASIC programs with stuff I wrote with the assembler. NOTHING could prepare you better for a career like this than working on things like that. NOTHING. I feel bad for people getting into programming later on and not really understanding how things are working underneath the surface. Sure, a lot of them figure it out, but a lot don't, and I think learning how it all fits together and THEN programming for it is better. By the end I'd gone through the 800XL and 130XE Ataris... ah, the good old days.
Yes, I get it, but that's not why most people are using Linux.
From a user's perspective, the only real benefit that open source brings to the table is easy and free procurement.
I don't think you really understand what open source software is about. The cost of procurement is not the main benefit of FOSS.
For us it's not, for 90% of the users it is, rightly or wrongly.
Yeah.... I'm not going to belittle people who want that shit... but I don't want that shit.