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Comment Re:Hire bad programmers with good social skills (Score 1) 211

I can't even stress how much sense this makes.

I'm a *lousy* programmer. In theory, I understand the basic concepts, I get the jargon, and I can talk the talk, but I will be damned if I can walk the walk though.

I got into sales while I was suffering through school, not enjoying what I was studying, but loving what I was doing at work to put myself through school, so I made a career out of sales, and I'm currently the Sales Manager for a pair of Bell Mobility Corporate stores in Canada. My staff give me all the geeky clients, the nerds who are trying to hack out a living as app developers, and I love it.

Comment Why Android? (Score 3) 229

Just a question, but why Android?

If you indeed NEED the security (I do for work, which is why I have a BlackBerry) why not just go the tried and true route of BlackBerry? Security is built in, everything except SMS (to my knowledge) can be encrypted, and you don't have to worry about updates from a 3rd party firmware (CM) breaking your apps or security model.

Other things I LOVE about my BlackBerry...

  • Every key is a speed dial, I have about 20 of them mapped to the people I call the most. Very intuitive.
  • The keyboard is wonderful of hammering out mid to long emails. Swype helps, but I still find the keyboard faster.
  • Kick Ass Speaker Phone.
  • Full day battery life. Don't underestimate this.
  • It's easier to decipher who an email comes from, as it uses the same display info as my phone book does. On anything that uses active sync, my email is addressed in the same format as the Exchange server, which means every shows in my list as come from "Lastname, Firstname (EMPLOYEE#)" On my Berry, is shows as "Dad" or "Jeff (Regional)" instead. This is invaluable, as I can name people in my phone book in regards to my relationship with them, and I don't have to go digging through the exchange directory to find out what a persons job title is if I only correspond with them twice a year, and have forgotten who they are."
  • You can encrypt the device, as well as any memory cards.

This is a sincere question. I carry two devices (BB 9900 for work, and a CM9 rom'd SGS2 for my personal phone) and I personally cannot stand the exchange email client on Android, it just seems slow and clunky, and CM9 helped a little bit, but not much. Use the right tool for the job, instead of trying to shoehorn a tool into the job you want it to do.

Comment Re:Even free speech has its limit (Score 1) 174

Context is key.... Carlin said it best. There's a different group to get pissed off at you in this country for everything your not supposed to say. Can't say nigger, boogie, jig, jigaboo, skinhead, moulli, moullignon, schvartze, jungle bunny, greaser, greaseball, dago, guinea, wop, ginzo, kike, zebe, hebe, yid, mocky, hymie, mick, donkey, turkey, limey, frog, zip, zipperhead, squarehead, krout, hiney, jerry, hun, slope, slopehead, chink, gook. There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of those words in and of themselves. They're only words. It's the context that counts. It's the user. It's the intention behind the words that makes them good or bad. The words are completely neutral. The words are innocent. I get tired of people talking about bad words and bad language. Bullshit! It's the context that makes them good or bad. The context. That makes them good or bad. For instance, you take the word "nigger." There is absolutely nothing wrong with the word "nigger" in and of itself. It's the racist asshole who's using it that you ought to be concerned abkout. We don't care when Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy say it. Why? Because we know they're not racist. They're niggers! Context. Context. We don't mind their context because we know their black. Hey, I know I'm whitey, the blue-eyed devil, paddy-o, fay gray boy, honky, motherfucker myself. Don't bother my ass. They're only words. You can't be afraid of words that speak the truth, even if it's an unpleasant truth, like the fact that there's a bigot and a racist in every living room on every street corner in this country. - George Carlin.

Comment Mine is excessive... (Score 1) 280

I'm probably close to 25% all told, due to the excessive number of cell phones that I have with 16GB (15 or so) or greater built in, and a couple of them (one work, one personal) have 32GB SD cards in them as well. (Samsung SGS2 and HTC Raider) I'm an anomaly though, because I work for a wireless provider in canada as a Store Manager, and I get a metric fuckton of pre-production devices from Samsung to play with before they go live on the network, so provide feedback on.

Comment Re:Maybe I'm wrong on this... (Score 1) 211

I've been through the hard times, and was looking for work in the hard times, and, walked out of an interview during the hard times because a company wanted access to a password protected area of my personal website.

when I refused the job, I told them exactly why, and thanked them for their time, and went to work for a competitor.

Comment Re:I'm Confused.... (Score 4, Informative) 195

“Subsonic cruise missiles, aircraft, fast-moving boats, unmanned aerial vehicles” — Mike Deitchman, who oversees future weapons development for the Office of Naval Research, promises Danger Room that the Navy laser cannons just over the horizon will target them all. I'm confused. Surely the one thing a laser canon can't do is target things from over the horizon.

I think he is using the word horizon as a metaphor for "coming soon" not a target on the literal horizon. Sloppy wording for sure, it took me a moment to process as well.

Comment Debian (Score 2) 685

I recently fled Ubuntu myself (well, 6 months ago give or take) but I fled back to Vanilla Debian, and I have never been happier. I have never looked at Mint, and the only reason that I even gave Ubuntu a try all those years ago was that the Debian installer at that time wasn't detecting the SATA drive in my laptop, and Ubuntu was essentially the path of least resistance. Is there something that I am missing, as to why people are fleeing to a derivative, instead of the real deal?

Comment What about shitty products? (Score 1) 341

I've had a high end BlackBerry on my hip, every day of my life since May of 2005.

I just returned my last RIM device, and exchanged it for a Samsung Galaxy S 2. Let me rephrase that. After exchanging 4 DOA units, I finally gave up on the new Bold 9900, and swapped it for Android.

The issues I have had with the 9900 (apparently, a flagship device)

  • 1st one had a screen that flickered like a CRT @ 60hz. When I was exchanging this one in store, the RIM rep was there, and confirmed that he had seen the issue, in fact his own device did the same thing, he excused it as being "a preproduction issue"
  • 2nd one, was swapped not even 15 minutes later, as it would not boot if there was a MicroSD card in the memory slot. We tested the 32GB card that I had in the first one, as well as the 8GB card from the store rep's phone.
  • 3rd one asked me to reboot after installing a new version of BlackBerry App world. Went into what I can only call as a boot loop. It would show the BlackBerry boot screen, scroll all the way across and then reboot. Continuously.
  • 4th one had a half dozen dead pixels on the screen, out of the box...

  • 5th one, did the boot loop thing again. I reflashed the device using BlackBerry desktop manager, and started from scratch.

I've since reflashed it a half dozen times, because every time it reboots, it refuses to boot again, until I flash it completely. So, I took the bloody thing back. The sales rep that I spoke to mentioned that he was on his 4th device as well, citing the boot loop issues, as well as unknown JVM errors on boot.

I won't touch their garbage again, ever.

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