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Comment Re:It's only fair (Score 1) 147

Another company is quietly doing its own shaking these days and I find its approach very interesting. ION has local stations in most of the large metropolitan markets. It has started leveraging those stations by selling a set top box that decodes sub channels on its local broadcast to deliver premium channels from Showtime and Starz as well as PPV content. It uses your existing antenna and you still get all the local channels. If Aero were to offer something like that for ~$30-$40 like ION does I'd be very interested.

Comment Re:why the word needs openstreetmap (Score 1) 132

The grandparent was talking about the One Book To Rule Them All - Ma Bell's

"Ma Bell" hasn't been a thing since 1982 when AT&T volunteered to divest itself of its regional local telcos. AT&T retained ownership of YellowPages and they remained the dominant business directory but competition in the last decade has been fierce. It's so vast it even has its own association. And while you are correct about businesses getting a line for "free" it still required them to be an AT&T customer so it was a value ad for service not free.

The point of TFA is that a business owner shouldn't have to spend time and money policing multiple sites in order to protect himself from trolls and malicious mischief. Especially because so many of them manipulate the information presented so that bad reviews predominate - which they then charge the business to clear up.

That's not what I took away from TFA and anyone who did should not try and run a business as it is wishful thinking. In fact it is entirely the business owner's responsibility to ensure information about his business is accurate. If he is benefiting from positive or hurting from negative reviews he needs to be pro-active. There are unscrupulous businesses that berate competitors and post glowing reviews on their own business all over the place. You cannot expect you won't be a target at some point especially if you are successful because the better you are doing the bigger the target you are.

From a user's perspective - it's pretty much nothing but bad. Between the tendency of people to complain more than they congratulate, deliberate manipulation by website operators, and various forms of trolling and mischief... the 'net is virtually completely unreliable.

While all of this is going on it isn't as pervasive as you make it out. It is pervasive but it's not absolute like you make it out to be. And much of it can be spotted in a heartbeat if you know what you are looking at. I often see overly praising reviews of products or services and I completely discard these as they are clearly planted by the review-e. Same goes for over the top lambasting of a subject. If you take the objective posts and throw out the extremes you're left with a pretty good picture of what to expect.

Comment Re:why the word needs openstreetmap (Score 3, Informative) 132

What you might not have known (but should have) is all those listings in the yellow pages were paid advertisements. The yellow page market used to be extremely competitive with numerous companies fighting for a business' 2" x 2" to full page ad. We're talking about free (as in beer) marketing and the ole adage "you get what you pay for" applies here. It's word of mouth in the internet age which is both good and bad. If just one person can get your customers to believe something unflattering about your business it can ruin you. That's why another adage "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" is just as true. The quicker you can catch the nefarious mischief the quicker you can curtail any damage.

Comment Re:The web is not a runtime environment. (Score 1) 608

then you are an idiot.

You had a nice semi-informative argument but couldn't help but show your true color in the end.

The reason you can't use TurboPascal is because web pages run in the browser virtual machine, and TurboPascal code runs in the TurboPascal runtime environment linked into the native code TurboPascal application.

Which does not preclude an interpreter being written to convert the code into the browser VM readable code. Just because a language was originally designed to be compiled doesn't mean it can't be redesigned. Whether it's the best use of resources not withstanding.

All of your arguments are irrelevant to my comment. They might very well be valid but only because the people designing the newer systems made decisions that precluded the use of existing technologies. Which in fact validates my claim more than nullifies it.

Comment Re:Cry Me A River (Score 2) 608

You are right of course it is similar to the 80's and 90's in that companies that wanted to steal the sales of other companies simply created new fangled languages and marketed the hell out of them instead of embracing what works and adapting it to the new paradigms. The only reason you can't use Turbo Pascal to make web pages is the compiler was never updated for the functionality but it very well could have been. In fact its progeny Delphi is alive and well and building apps for almost every popular platform out there today including the web. As long as there is competition there will be someone who chooses to create from scratch rather than use someone else's tool.

Comment Submarines have been doing just fine for year (Score 1) 468

Why do they need windows in the first place? I mean subs don't have any and they do just fine without them. There's arguably less things to hit flying than there are in a sub as well. OK there is the small matter of subs cruising at 32 MPH ( ~31 knots) and a plane cruising at 750 MPH (0.75 Mach) but really a pilot should be able to compensate for that...right?

Comment Re:Have you actually tried hiring these days? (Score 2) 401

Your comment and the first response kinda paints the picture. NYC and Seattle. Two places I have no desire to live. The cost of living in NYC would mean I'd have to double my current salary to maintain my current standard of living and it's too crowded. Seattle is nice but again it costs more to live there and...winter. The reason companies can't find skilled workers in the US is they aren't looking in the US they're looking on the East and West coast.

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