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Comment Re:Should be (Score 1) 572

Welcome to reality. The amount of electricity to your house is not limited

Not true, even ignoring the physical problems there's a main breaker (which you can't play with without the electric companies approval) which has a limit. But I've also never seen the electric company advertise "unlimited" electricity.

And I think network usage has to go the same way. The reason that's scary to a lot of people is because most "per-megabyte" rates are way, way too high.

That is a worry ... but the biggest problem is still "we sold you unlimited, but have now realized we can't give it to you".

Comment Re:You can't say NO (Score 2, Insightful) 410

The thing is the only thing overseas sub-contracting has to offer are lower costs. So it makes sense that the overseas companies will "optimize" everything for cost, this implies the cheapest labour you can get. This probably works "acceptably" for a level 1 call centre, not so much for knowledge workers.

By the same token, I've never seen a small .us contracting company primarily optimize for cost (they may exist, and I just haven't worked with/for them).

Comment Re:Take on AdBlock? (Score 1) 291

As someone who makes his living selling content through the Internet, I want people to think several times before building a tool like AdBlock.

You are speaking to the wrong people, IMO. NoScript/AdBlock/etc. are there because users want them. So you are saying "please don't do what users want, because it'll make me more money". Well, sucks to be you then.

If you really want to make a difference and see Ads be viable on the web. N years from now ... you need to speak to "most" of the large content providers. For instance my wife is pretty clueful and had happily not been using NoScript/etc. ... until recently when she hit usatoday and a giant popup came up and refused to go away (so she couldn't read the content). Now she has NoScript installed and only approved sites can run any JS.

It's the same with TV, 5 minutes of commercials every 10 minutes (33%) is just way too much and their real customers fought back ... so now they get 0% ads from a growing percentage of people. Yeh, that implies bad things for the future of TV, but then in many ways nothing really is better than what was there before.

Comment Re:What a coincidence (Score 2, Insightful) 322

They recently stopped buying third party maps, and are now reportedly paying mobile providers to put their google maps app. on the phones (which they can only do because they aren't locked into the map provider duopoly). Which speaks to, a least, a significant amount of forward planning on their side.

But, yeh, brilliance is hard to measure. Some of the DNS tricks they just released, and more, I've wanted some Linux DNS software to do for at least 10 years ... so it's not "genius". But the number of useful things they've actual got out implies they are way above average (as a company), IMO.

Comment Re:That's pretty evil. (Score 0, Troll) 802

However, even the most jaded, cynical atheist cannot deny that organized religions have also done some amazing things for the societies in which they existed.

Yeh, I'm sure Scientology has done some good. So what? Are you suggesting we try and keep some kind of score card, we can put "imprison children and malke them slaves" on one side and "feed homeless" on the other? Not sure what we do when they "convert" a follower with those "selfless acts" though.

Of course Atheists never do any charitable works on their own, so as long as the nutjobs "help" roughly as many as they screw over, it's all good.

is every bit as ignorant and superficial as claiming that someone cannot drive because their plumbing is different than mine ...

That's right, I forgot that most "organised" religions fought so hard for equal rights and civil rights, oh wait...

Comment Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox (Score 1) 383

Depends, I don't see many people using wordpad/gedit instead of MS-word/OO-writer. Features always matter, and they often matter more than speed/security/usability (all of which have their fans who ask "why can't all apps. consider X, and stop being bloated") ... but sometimes, if you do _really_ well on one of those three and you are "close enough" feature wise, then people can live without the features you don't have. But it's a big gamble, much bigger than just adding features as fast as possible.

Comment Re:It's a tough job (Score 1) 518

According to that page on that site, _minimum_ pay for a pilot is 67k (which I would put a lot of money on being BS). Of course a different page (http://www.avjobs.com/salaries-wages-pay/historical-aviation-wages.asp) says 16k-60k or 23k-250k (depending on if you are "regional" or "national"). And I assume for "average" they are using mean and not median which, from all I've heard of the industry, will make the numbers higher.

Comment Re:hey, it beats (Score 1) 545

People want free, anytime they can get it. Not a good business model.

I think the PS3 "video rental" is a good counter example, I'm a happy netflix subscriber ... and would be happy to give money to sony instead, for a comparable product. But the product is significantly worse and a lot more expensive. I assume they think the fact I can have it "instantly" should make up for that, but it doesn't.

If you then look at "buying" instead of renting, the product is a little cheaper but a lot worse -- and there are even weirdos with the price (like their "sales" which are much more arbitrary than any real shop could get away with). Plus the "instant download" feature isn't as big a hook.

I use the Amazon mp3 store all the time, I hear iTunes is doing great ... I'll likely never use the PS3 store again though. So just saying "people want free" is outright ignoring reality.

Comment Re:Err, why? (Score 1) 187

When it was launched, the DS was an experimental console, Nintendo's so-called "3rd leg". Nintendo had no significant faith in it, but threw it out there anyhow as an experiment while working on a proper Game Boy.

One consequence of this is that the components of the DS weren't necessarily picked as they would have been for a handheld designed to match the long life of a Game Boy.

It was an "experiment" sure, they didn't know it would succeed and likely had some backup plans. But to pretend it wasn't meant to succeed is just insanity. Nintendo haven't made a "top of the current gen. specs." console since the N64, so the fact they do that for the DS means nothing.

Meanwhile in Sony-land, manufacturing technology has finally caught up with the ridiculously overbuilt PSP, which was an absolute brick when launched. The Go has some pricing/design issues

hahaha ... you mean like the "issue" that it isn't backwards compatible AT ALL. So you can't buy any cheap used games, and PSP owners are basically forced to not upgrade. And combine that with the fact that it's digital only, so your gamefly subscription is useless and you need to buy two games if you have a spouse/brother/roommate/friend who likes to play occasionally (compared to the DS which not only let you share disks but often let you play limited multiplayer on one disk) and they are the same price as original PSP games (which have none of those restrictions).

I was interested in the PSP Go, when I first heard about it 3-6 months ago (mainly due to the size), but there's no way I'm getting one atm.

Comment Re:Theres one technical point (Score 1) 620

http:org/slashdot/tech/story/... (use SRV record)

I've always liked that idea (which I've seen before) because it treats subdomains in the same way it treats subdirectories under the document root

This seems like a really bad idea, to me, for that reason. Given the above, the client now has to do 4 DNS lookups (org, slashdot.org, tech.slashdot.org, story.tech.slashdot.org ... instead of one). Then depending on the rules, they'll have to see if tech.slashdot.org/story exists, before falling back to slashdotr.org/tech/story. Saying if DNS exists use that host would be terrible, saying if DNS exists and a webserver is there might be doable but would be really annoying as you'd have to migrate the entire sub-dir. On the other side testing what is there is much more expensive on the client side, and is bound to get screwed up with things like "oh someone put a global 301 mod_rewrite on tech.slashdot.org so now nothing works"

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