Indeed, truly horrible accidents where helmets make the difference between life and death are pretty rare. Possibly more rare than airplanes making water landings or horrible car accidents. However, if we're fine with (and prefer) conceding to the last two scenarios, why is wearing a small thing like a helmet such a big deal?
Perhaps the author (thankfully) hasn't seen how much a helmet works, but I, and many others, who commute and ride often have certain been in such situations. They work.
I do think that a lot of serious accidents and fatalities are due to cyclists doing completely stupid things like riding against traffic on a major road or blowing stop lights (without looking!) in areas with high car traffic.
It's kind of ironic that the companies that talk about innovating the most are usually the companies that also internally stifle it the most. It is extremely hard to "innovate" with tight and usually colluding deadlines, little room for error and little breathing room from heavy-handed "auditing."
Coming up with new and cool ideas requires time and room for mistakes. These cost money. Bigger companies can't have that.
At its core, Android and AOSP do not contain anything that infringes on Apple's IP. I think the stuff that it used to have that did (slide-to-unlock, for example) were removed.
However, it doesn't take anyone more than five minutes to notice that Samsung ripped off of Apple's stuff nearly-wholesale since their first Galaxy S device.
If paying a small tax will guarantee completely free, uncapped and non-filtered broadband with a certain reasonable speed guarantee, then yes!
Otherwise, what's the point?
In fact, I use them extensively in making decisions on buying lots of stuff. It's pretty easy to know which products have a lot of reviews from shills. I first find products with lots and lots of reviews (or sites that have lots of reviews about the product). I read some of the positives, then some of the negatives to see how they stack up. It's pretty easy to tell who put a negative review in because of a bad experience and not necessarily because of a bad product.
If I'm making a really serious buy, I'll check forums too. It's really rare for forum posts to have many paid comments and communities are good at pointing them out. I've been using Reddit for this lately too; I've found EVERYTHING on there and can usually get some good commentary on a product (unless it's really, really obscure).
At my previous gig, I was a technical lead in a pretty large technical project. Because the company didn't want to budget for having software testers in our main office in New York (and, more or less, rightfully so; most of the company's internal software was coming from Manila by that point) and deadlines were tight, I had to be online with our testers over there for most of their shift so we could resolve bugs somewhat quickly. While I came in much later than normal to adjust for this (12pm instead of 9-10am), I was also working later as a result (b/w 2am and 3am, usually).
Being pulled apart by two other similarly-major projects didn't help either and my team-mate was way too busy and burnt out to take on much more. My sleeping cycles were definitely thrown out of whack for a while, which never helps. As a result, I was more irritable and less tolerable and social than I normally am. I usually enjoy spending my free time going out with old friends and making new ones, which became practically impossible with this setup. I thought I was fine since my health was still fit and it didn't feel that bad, but I realised how bad things actually got after I switched jobs a few weeks later.
It's not about the hours you work. It's about the results that come out of your time at work. Someone that works three hours a day but produces significant value for his or her company is way more useful than someone who puts in his or her "eight hours" with nothing to show for it.
That's true, but it doesn't make them any less weird. They aren't funny like their Mac vs PC commercials were or impressive through subtlety like their iPod/iPhone/iPad commercials usually are. They seemed kind of pointless...almost like Microsoft commercials, except with more obviousness.
photorec does a pretty damned good job at getting data back if the drive is still readable. Even "simpler" methods, like chkdsk/f/r, work sometimes as well, though you might have to wait a long time to see results. (I once tried to recover a drive for a client that had several thousand bad sectors using chkdsk and it took about a month of continuous operation to recover about 40GB of data. Which was unfortunate because the drive was 1TB large.)
I use the physical methods as last resorts, since all of the ones I'm aware of can cause further damage. I wonder how many people shell up the $1500+ for professional recovery when a few hours or days would have solved it for them...
Hard drives are really, really finicky. What works for some might not work for others, even if they are encountering the same problem. For instance, sticking a drive in the freezer worked for an older drive I was repairing for my mom but not for a former girlfriend's drive that, all things considered, had the same issue. I also once owned a Dell DJ (piece of shit, if anyone is considering getting this) that used a full-height 1.8" hard drive whose actuator would frequently stick; dropping or tapping it worked every time (to everyone else's curiosity), but has never, ever worked for any other drive that seemed to have the same issue.
I think you're pretty much fucked if your SSD starts going south, which is unfortunate. Thankfully, backups are easier to make these days.
Having a "geeky" office with tons of amenities will not do much for attrition if the team is beleaguered with the usual office politics or uncontrolled management pressure that affects many IT and development houses. Based on what I've seen with my few years of working experience, I strongly believe that the most important element in a successful developer-oriented culture is encouraging continuing education and the proliferation of ideas. From what I've seen, this requires having a management team that is *really* good at separating the wheat from the chaff when client or business demands come in and having a team that has very good chemistry with each other. This is really hard to assemble, since it's already somewhat hard to find people that fit what companies want from a technical perspective and harder still to find people that will gel well with everyone else, especially when the pressure cooker starts getting hot and work flows in.
Fair remuneration is pretty damn important too, but a bad office culture will only attract people who are looking to gain in the short term. There is a hedge fund that is notorious for this here in the East Coast; they pay their IT staff *wayyy* over market but have office politics that would put the US government to shame and an extremely socially stifling office culture that makes it tough to stay there longer than six months.
If they're going to lie about why they've removed the Start menu, at least they could've been creative with their excuse. I have never seen anyone use the pinning feature to the extent discussed here. I have, however, seen the recent applications section in the Start Menu used extremely frequently.
Removing the Start Menu was a really bad decision, and using the big Metro landing page as a substitute is, to me, an extremely poor alternative. It remains to be seen how everyone else will take it, though.
You don't work at the Apple Store to make any sort of serious cash. There are many better conduits for people to travel down in both IT and sales if money is a concern. People work there for the *coolness* factor. It's about as hot as working for Google or Facebook, and employee discounts are never a bad thing. Its also an easy experience builder for people, especially given the floor traffic.
And not to nitpick, but $10/hr ain't bad. Especially if you're earning tips.
Apple's tight integration of hardware and software gives them a significantly greater advantage when it comes to releasing hardware that people actually want with software that further fuels their excitement. It's not like the established players (Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung) will go broke or lose Microsoft's partnership overnight; the former three will probably, as hinted by the article, concentrate more on their enterprise products (as they should, as they are very good in that space and invest truck-lodes of their R&D budget there anyway) and Samsung will probably be used as the key hardware manufacturer for executing Microsoft's vision (which allows them the opportunity, if it's successful, to exit the direct-to-consumer business completely).
I think MS is very much on the right track. Despite some idiosyncrasies, it is pretty easy to see the amount of effort they've invested in making Windows 8 friendly for content consumption *and* creation. If the hardware is right (i.e. comparable to iPad) and comes with Office and a tight screen for drawing and writing on, I'm hard-pressed to believe that these won't sell.
I don't agree with most of your post. Here is why:
IE 10: Better HTML 5 support - not much else - who cares? Everyone that uses the default browser by default because they don't want to deal with downloading and installing new stuff. And everyone that will be using Metro by default (most likely)
Sign in with MS Account: Who cares? Is anyone gonna use this? Heck yeah; SSO is good! (Live lets you create an account with your primary email as the username, so very convenient for lots of folks.
Picture Password and PIN Login: Picture pass is kinda cool, but PIN login? Really?this will be *REALLY* useful on tablets. Think of trying to login on a train with a touch keypad.
Ribbon in Windows Explorer: Holy cow no thank you.I think, and my experience supporting others supports this, that the ribbon has helped a lot of people navigate Office much easier. So it follows that it will make improvements on the Explorer side. We'll agree to disagree here.
Refresh and Reset Recovery - How about making it so you don't need recovery in the first place? How is this better than a decent backup system? This thing is going to be pushed hard on tablets. Wouldn't it be convenient to factory reset your Windows tablet just like you can on your iPad or Android tablet?
Native USB 3 - This shouldn't be a Windows 8 "feature," this should be in a service pack for Vista and Seven Good chance it will be; remember USB1.1 support for Windows 98? Rolled back to 95 via OSR2 update.
New Windows Task Manager - Yawn You obviously haven't supported Windows enough to know how much of an improvement it is. (Yes, third-party tools do it better. It's still good for the improvements to be native.)
XBox Live integration - I don't think anyone will care about this - are they thinking about competing with steam? Good luck. You do know how popular XBox live is, right?
Family Safety - Wasn't this included with Windows Live? Yawn
Antivirus in Windows Defender - In other words, they are just including MSE. Which is awesome since people can stop paying McAfee/Symantec for their bloated products and not have to worry (as much) about making sure everything is up to date.
Secure Boot Support - Holy cow no thank you Yeah, that does kind of suck.
...it's laundry list of issues just don't make it attractive when I can easily resolve them by buying a comparably nice phone that runs Android. Yes, the UI is incredible and a huge leap from their previous iteration. Yes, the quality of its applications is significantly better as is the set of phones it currently runs on. However, almost all of the applications I currently use on Android are *still* unavailable and all of the ones that are available pale significantly in comparison to their Android or iPhone partners. A few examples:
Yelp: Very popular app I use for finding, mostly, good restaurants to try. Awesome on iPhone and Android. Slow and awkward to use on Windows Mobile, and lack of proper multitasking causes it to lose state every time I use it.
Evernote: Very popular app for storing notes and other various pieces of information. I use this religiously, mostly because it's easily accessible from PCs and their Android releases are really, really good. Tons of missing functionality on Windows Phone (no alternative layout options, can't attach anything, at least from the last time I tried)
Google Voice: I use this almost extensively to call and text people. It works pretty well on iOS and integrates so deeply in Android one could easily mistake it for being native. Notifications barely work on the third-party clients I've tried on WP and the UX is just not there.
Maps: Great native app, but you need a third-party application to get public transit directions (it works somewhat awkwardly last time I tried it) and no GPS-guided voice navigation, which is included with Android and works really, really well.
Additionally, WP is supremely locked down and jailbreaking is not as simple (or, for some phones, impossible) as it is on Android or iOS. This makes a lot of the things we can do in iPhone and Android impossible in WP. For example, it's possible (and very easy) to backup text messages on iPhone and Android. No way to do this on WP at this time of writing and I don't think they get backed up when you sync with Zune. To worsen matters, WP is *still* vulnerable to a two-year old SMS bug that can make a phone completely inoperable (even after a reboot) when it receives a special text message!
Finally, you need to use Zune to sync stuff. I personally hate using a huge software package to sync stuff, and while Zune is pretty nice, it's still a huge step backward from not needing anything at all on Android.
It's not that Windows Phone is bad; it's just that they don't have anything valuable enough for most Android or iPhone users to switch over. It's great for people new to the smartphone world, but that segment of the market has been pretty small for a while now.
I bought a pair of Klipsch s3 In-ear headphones about a year ago for $35. These are, hands down, the best canalphones you are going to get for that money anywhere. Full stop. J&R might still have an open-box pair for $15.
If you're into cans on your head, the Sennheiser HD201S is $30 or so. These sound just as good and don't leak too much.
I've bought really expensive headphones over the years (not worth it if you abuse them like I do); these are my new go-tos. Good luck!
I have a Windows Phone as well, a HD7. (I use a Galaxy SII on a daily basis, though.) I *loved* using it. The Windows Phone team got a lot of things right, especially with their UX. The Zune application is, hands down, the best mobile music player out there today and its integration with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is phenomenal (i.e. makes a third-party application for this useless).
The problem is that UX advances isn't nearly as important for users as it was when iPhone broke ground. There is definitely a baseline that competitors in this market need to meet, but like regular computers, people (at least in Europe, Asia and US where smartphones are king) care way more about apps and looks than anything else. Windows Phone is still very light in this department, which is preventing it from really taking off. Case in point: Angry Birds is free on almost every OS (even Chrome!)...except on Windows Phone (2.99). Words with Friends, another super hit, isn't even available there.
He's been vehemently against Nokia's decision to leverage their smartphone strategy on Windows Phone. For more awesome reading explaining why, check this out.
As explained in the link above, it's not Nokia's decision to use Windows Phone on their smartphones that is the chief problem. They are, essentially, hedging their entire existence on the platform, which is a very bad bet for a company whose popularity has always been stronger in Europe, Asia and developing nations. It's almost like a Kodak in reverse in that they are, more or less, giving less importance to their bread and butter and more importance to a huge, HUGE risk. (Notice that HTC and Samsung, the top dogs in the non-iPhone smartphone world, use more of their resources for building Android and their own OS's than Windows Phone.)
The sole fact that, to this day and despite a very recent system update, Windows Phones still have the crippling text-message-of-death bug clearly demonstrates where Microsoft thinks they're at with the OS. I haven't seen any of the major players on Android/iOS commit serious time to Windows Phone yet; until this happens, it's a sinking ship.
For many people, handing out a business card is much quicker than using something like Bump. They also add a layer of expression and professionalism that is easily lost with other mediums. There are people who charge companies a bunch of money per hour just for customising cards, and for good reason; some companies get hoardes of new business just from their cards alone.
I'm not giving up my cards anytime soon. Actually, I need to refresh my design soon! (I take pics of all the cards I get and store them in Evernote; no more mountains of cards or clouding up my address book.)
The United States can learn from other countries, particularly in northern Europe, Professor Schwartz says. In Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland, for instance, between 40 and 70 percent of high-schoolers opt for programs that combine classroom and workplace learning, many of them involving apprenticeships. These pathways result in a âoequalificationâ that has real currency in the labor marketâ
Cooperative education (at the college level) and intern/externships (at high school or college level), more or less, give people the same experiential value described here. I was part of the co-op program at my school (which boasts a 99% placement rate, which I found to be true), and I had no problems landing a great (and extremely well-paying) job before graduation. A lot of the people I interviewed with were impressed by the year and a half of work experience I accumulated during school. Most good co-op or internship programs also teach you how to interview, create a sharp resume and make good first impressions, which is an absolutely essential skill to have (that so many people seem to lack, at least if my limited recruiting experience is indicative of anything).
Community college or technical school would have been way cheaper (free in the former case), but I'm not sure if I would have had the same network, accessibility or approach to things I do now had I gone down those routes.
I would think that most people who absolutely needed to remote into their machines over the Internet would use some kind of tunnelling to a jumpbox or remote access appliance to RDP to an internal server...
Memory management has improved somewhat in their later releases and I believe Mozilla has changed the plugin system to be compatible with their new release cycle. Additionally, the JavaScript engine is so much faster in later releases and HTML5 support has improved a lot as well.
Let it die.
(Then again, I became a Chrome user recently and haven't looked back. Their plugin and web app support is fantastic and built-in Firebug capabilities are great. Really love how well it synchronises with Google services and their Android version is looking very promising.
I really doubt the efficacy of this privilege when it's currently completely optional and advertising companies, by their definition, rely on less privacy to make a profit.
Until the do-not-track feature becomes a law (which I hope it does, though I'm sure these companies will find ways around it), there should be more education about NoScript and other such alternatives to those who really care about controlling their privacy and exposure.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, truly horrible accidents where helmets make the difference between life and death are pretty rare. Possibly more rare than airplanes making water landings or horrible car accidents. However, if we're fine with (and prefer) conceding to the last two scenarios, why is wearing a small thing like a helmet such a big deal?
Perhaps the author (thankfully) hasn't seen how much a helmet works, but I, and many others, who commute and ride often have certain been in such situations. They work.
I do think that a lot of serious accidents and fatalities are due to cyclists doing completely stupid things like riding against traffic on a major road or blowing stop lights (without looking!) in areas with high car traffic.
Stupid me; I meant "colliding," not colluding. Though I guess the deadlines can agree to be as tight and inconvenient as possible.
It's kind of ironic that the companies that talk about innovating the most are usually the companies that also internally stifle it the most. It is extremely hard to "innovate" with tight and usually colluding deadlines, little room for error and little breathing room from heavy-handed "auditing."
Coming up with new and cool ideas requires time and room for mistakes. These cost money. Bigger companies can't have that.
At its core, Android and AOSP do not contain anything that infringes on Apple's IP. I think the stuff that it used to have that did (slide-to-unlock, for example) were removed.
However, it doesn't take anyone more than five minutes to notice that Samsung ripped off of Apple's stuff nearly-wholesale since their first Galaxy S device.
A $10/person/month tax to bring Google Fiber-like service to everyone's home is essentially free in my eyes.
If paying a small tax will guarantee completely free, uncapped and non-filtered broadband with a certain reasonable speed guarantee, then yes! Otherwise, what's the point?
In fact, I use them extensively in making decisions on buying lots of stuff. It's pretty easy to know which products have a lot of reviews from shills. I first find products with lots and lots of reviews (or sites that have lots of reviews about the product). I read some of the positives, then some of the negatives to see how they stack up. It's pretty easy to tell who put a negative review in because of a bad experience and not necessarily because of a bad product.
If I'm making a really serious buy, I'll check forums too. It's really rare for forum posts to have many paid comments and communities are good at pointing them out. I've been using Reddit for this lately too; I've found EVERYTHING on there and can usually get some good commentary on a product (unless it's really, really obscure).
At my previous gig, I was a technical lead in a pretty large technical project. Because the company didn't want to budget for having software testers in our main office in New York (and, more or less, rightfully so; most of the company's internal software was coming from Manila by that point) and deadlines were tight, I had to be online with our testers over there for most of their shift so we could resolve bugs somewhat quickly. While I came in much later than normal to adjust for this (12pm instead of 9-10am), I was also working later as a result (b/w 2am and 3am, usually).
Being pulled apart by two other similarly-major projects didn't help either and my team-mate was way too busy and burnt out to take on much more. My sleeping cycles were definitely thrown out of whack for a while, which never helps. As a result, I was more irritable and less tolerable and social than I normally am. I usually enjoy spending my free time going out with old friends and making new ones, which became practically impossible with this setup. I thought I was fine since my health was still fit and it didn't feel that bad, but I realised how bad things actually got after I switched jobs a few weeks later.
It's not about the hours you work. It's about the results that come out of your time at work. Someone that works three hours a day but produces significant value for his or her company is way more useful than someone who puts in his or her "eight hours" with nothing to show for it.
That's true, but it doesn't make them any less weird. They aren't funny like their Mac vs PC commercials were or impressive through subtlety like their iPod/iPhone/iPad commercials usually are. They seemed kind of pointless...almost like Microsoft commercials, except with more obviousness.
photorec does a pretty damned good job at getting data back if the drive is still readable. Even "simpler" methods, like chkdsk /f /r, work sometimes as well, though you might have to wait a long time to see results. (I once tried to recover a drive for a client that had several thousand bad sectors using chkdsk and it took about a month of continuous operation to recover about 40GB of data. Which was unfortunate because the drive was 1TB large.)
I use the physical methods as last resorts, since all of the ones I'm aware of can cause further damage.
I wonder how many people shell up the $1500+ for professional recovery when a few hours or days would have solved it for them...
Hard drives are really, really finicky. What works for some might not work for others, even if they are encountering the same problem. For instance, sticking a drive in the freezer worked for an older drive I was repairing for my mom but not for a former girlfriend's drive that, all things considered, had the same issue. I also once owned a Dell DJ (piece of shit, if anyone is considering getting this) that used a full-height 1.8" hard drive whose actuator would frequently stick; dropping or tapping it worked every time (to everyone else's curiosity), but has never, ever worked for any other drive that seemed to have the same issue.
I think you're pretty much fucked if your SSD starts going south, which is unfortunate. Thankfully, backups are easier to make these days.
Having a "geeky" office with tons of amenities will not do much for attrition if the team is beleaguered with the usual office politics or uncontrolled management pressure that affects many IT and development houses. Based on what I've seen with my few years of working experience, I strongly believe that the most important element in a successful developer-oriented culture is encouraging continuing education and the proliferation of ideas. From what I've seen, this requires having a management team that is *really* good at separating the wheat from the chaff when client or business demands come in and having a team that has very good chemistry with each other. This is really hard to assemble, since it's already somewhat hard to find people that fit what companies want from a technical perspective and harder still to find people that will gel well with everyone else, especially when the pressure cooker starts getting hot and work flows in.
Fair remuneration is pretty damn important too, but a bad office culture will only attract people who are looking to gain in the short term. There is a hedge fund that is notorious for this here in the East Coast; they pay their IT staff *wayyy* over market but have office politics that would put the US government to shame and an extremely socially stifling office culture that makes it tough to stay there longer than six months.
Good luck!
If they're going to lie about why they've removed the Start menu, at least they could've been creative with their excuse. I have never seen anyone use the pinning feature to the extent discussed here. I have, however, seen the recent applications section in the Start Menu used extremely frequently.
Removing the Start Menu was a really bad decision, and using the big Metro landing page as a substitute is, to me, an extremely poor alternative. It remains to be seen how everyone else will take it, though.
You don't work at the Apple Store to make any sort of serious cash. There are many better conduits for people to travel down in both IT and sales if money is a concern. People work there for the *coolness* factor. It's about as hot as working for Google or Facebook, and employee discounts are never a bad thing. Its also an easy experience builder for people, especially given the floor traffic.
And not to nitpick, but $10/hr ain't bad. Especially if you're earning tips.
Apple's tight integration of hardware and software gives them a significantly greater advantage when it comes to releasing hardware that people actually want with software that further fuels their excitement. It's not like the established players (Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung) will go broke or lose Microsoft's partnership overnight; the former three will probably, as hinted by the article, concentrate more on their enterprise products (as they should, as they are very good in that space and invest truck-lodes of their R&D budget there anyway) and Samsung will probably be used as the key hardware manufacturer for executing Microsoft's vision (which allows them the opportunity, if it's successful, to exit the direct-to-consumer business completely).
I think MS is very much on the right track. Despite some idiosyncrasies, it is pretty easy to see the amount of effort they've invested in making Windows 8 friendly for content consumption *and* creation. If the hardware is right (i.e. comparable to iPad) and comes with Office and a tight screen for drawing and writing on, I'm hard-pressed to believe that these won't sell.
I don't agree with most of your post. Here is why:
IE 10: Better HTML 5 support - not much else - who cares? Everyone that uses the default browser by default because they don't want to deal with downloading and installing new stuff. And everyone that will be using Metro by default (most likely)
Sign in with MS Account: Who cares? Is anyone gonna use this? Heck yeah; SSO is good! (Live lets you create an account with your primary email as the username, so very convenient for lots of folks.
Picture Password and PIN Login: Picture pass is kinda cool, but PIN login? Really?this will be *REALLY* useful on tablets. Think of trying to login on a train with a touch keypad.
Ribbon in Windows Explorer: Holy cow no thank you.I think, and my experience supporting others supports this, that the ribbon has helped a lot of people navigate Office much easier. So it follows that it will make improvements on the Explorer side. We'll agree to disagree here.
Refresh and Reset Recovery - How about making it so you don't need recovery in the first place? How is this better than a decent backup system? This thing is going to be pushed hard on tablets. Wouldn't it be convenient to factory reset your Windows tablet just like you can on your iPad or Android tablet?
Native USB 3 - This shouldn't be a Windows 8 "feature," this should be in a service pack for Vista and Seven Good chance it will be; remember USB1.1 support for Windows 98? Rolled back to 95 via OSR2 update.
New Windows Task Manager - Yawn You obviously haven't supported Windows enough to know how much of an improvement it is. (Yes, third-party tools do it better. It's still good for the improvements to be native.)
XBox Live integration - I don't think anyone will care about this - are they thinking about competing with steam? Good luck. You do know how popular XBox live is, right?
Family Safety - Wasn't this included with Windows Live? Yawn Antivirus in Windows Defender - In other words, they are just including MSE. Which is awesome since people can stop paying McAfee/Symantec for their bloated products and not have to worry (as much) about making sure everything is up to date.
Secure Boot Support - Holy cow no thank you Yeah, that does kind of suck.
Additionally, WP is supremely locked down and jailbreaking is not as simple (or, for some phones, impossible) as it is on Android or iOS. This makes a lot of the things we can do in iPhone and Android impossible in WP. For example, it's possible (and very easy) to backup text messages on iPhone and Android. No way to do this on WP at this time of writing and I don't think they get backed up when you sync with Zune. To worsen matters, WP is *still* vulnerable to a two-year old SMS bug that can make a phone completely inoperable (even after a reboot) when it receives a special text message!
Finally, you need to use Zune to sync stuff. I personally hate using a huge software package to sync stuff, and while Zune is pretty nice, it's still a huge step backward from not needing anything at all on Android.
It's not that Windows Phone is bad; it's just that they don't have anything valuable enough for most Android or iPhone users to switch over. It's great for people new to the smartphone world, but that segment of the market has been pretty small for a while now.
I bought a pair of Klipsch s3 In-ear headphones about a year ago for $35. These are, hands down, the best canalphones you are going to get for that money anywhere. Full stop. J&R might still have an open-box pair for $15.
If you're into cans on your head, the Sennheiser HD201S is $30 or so. These sound just as good and don't leak too much.
I've bought really expensive headphones over the years (not worth it if you abuse them like I do); these are my new go-tos. Good luck!
I have a Windows Phone as well, a HD7. (I use a Galaxy SII on a daily basis, though.) I *loved* using it. The Windows Phone team got a lot of things right, especially with their UX. The Zune application is, hands down, the best mobile music player out there today and its integration with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is phenomenal (i.e. makes a third-party application for this useless).
The problem is that UX advances isn't nearly as important for users as it was when iPhone broke ground. There is definitely a baseline that competitors in this market need to meet, but like regular computers, people (at least in Europe, Asia and US where smartphones are king) care way more about apps and looks than anything else. Windows Phone is still very light in this department, which is preventing it from really taking off. Case in point: Angry Birds is free on almost every OS (even Chrome!)...except on Windows Phone (2.99). Words with Friends, another super hit, isn't even available there.
He's been vehemently against Nokia's decision to leverage their smartphone strategy on Windows Phone. For more awesome reading explaining why, check this out.
As explained in the link above, it's not Nokia's decision to use Windows Phone on their smartphones that is the chief problem. They are, essentially, hedging their entire existence on the platform, which is a very bad bet for a company whose popularity has always been stronger in Europe, Asia and developing nations. It's almost like a Kodak in reverse in that they are, more or less, giving less importance to their bread and butter and more importance to a huge, HUGE risk. (Notice that HTC and Samsung, the top dogs in the non-iPhone smartphone world, use more of their resources for building Android and their own OS's than Windows Phone.)
The sole fact that, to this day and despite a very recent system update, Windows Phones still have the crippling text-message-of-death bug clearly demonstrates where Microsoft thinks they're at with the OS. I haven't seen any of the major players on Android/iOS commit serious time to Windows Phone yet; until this happens, it's a sinking ship.
For many people, handing out a business card is much quicker than using something like Bump. They also add a layer of expression and professionalism that is easily lost with other mediums. There are people who charge companies a bunch of money per hour just for customising cards, and for good reason; some companies get hoardes of new business just from their cards alone.
I'm not giving up my cards anytime soon. Actually, I need to refresh my design soon! (I take pics of all the cards I get and store them in Evernote; no more mountains of cards or clouding up my address book.)
The United States can learn from other countries, particularly in northern Europe, Professor Schwartz says. In Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland, for instance, between 40 and 70 percent of high-schoolers opt for programs that combine classroom and workplace learning, many of them involving apprenticeships. These pathways result in a âoequalificationâ that has real currency in the labor marketâ
Cooperative education (at the college level) and intern/externships (at high school or college level), more or less, give people the same experiential value described here. I was part of the co-op program at my school (which boasts a 99% placement rate, which I found to be true), and I had no problems landing a great (and extremely well-paying) job before graduation. A lot of the people I interviewed with were impressed by the year and a half of work experience I accumulated during school. Most good co-op or internship programs also teach you how to interview, create a sharp resume and make good first impressions, which is an absolutely essential skill to have (that so many people seem to lack, at least if my limited recruiting experience is indicative of anything).
Community college or technical school would have been way cheaper (free in the former case), but I'm not sure if I would have had the same network, accessibility or approach to things I do now had I gone down those routes.
I would think that most people who absolutely needed to remote into their machines over the Internet would use some kind of tunnelling to a jumpbox or remote access appliance to RDP to an internal server...
Memory management has improved somewhat in their later releases and I believe Mozilla has changed the plugin system to be compatible with their new release cycle. Additionally, the JavaScript engine is so much faster in later releases and HTML5 support has improved a lot as well.
Let it die.
(Then again, I became a Chrome user recently and haven't looked back. Their plugin and web app support is fantastic and built-in Firebug capabilities are great. Really love how well it synchronises with Google services and their Android version is looking very promising.
I really doubt the efficacy of this privilege when it's currently completely optional and advertising companies, by their definition, rely on less privacy to make a profit.
Until the do-not-track feature becomes a law (which I hope it does, though I'm sure these companies will find ways around it), there should be more education about NoScript and other such alternatives to those who really care about controlling their privacy and exposure.