I'm an advocate of mainframes, clouds, and traditional "servers". Each have their advantages / disadvantages. Just because it can doesn't mean it will.

I'd also REALLY like to see where you are pulling your reliability numbers from. I'd like to see such a study that compares modern mainframes to modern cloud technology for reliability purposes.

Ford SYNC has a few different versions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

"
SYNC v1, which debuted September 2007, offered the ability to play certain entertainment media, the ability to connect to certain mobile phones and digital audio players and to utilize SMS.[3] In January 2008, SYNC v2 was released, which enabled two new Ford developed applications: 911 Assist and Vehicle Health Report.[3] SYNC v3, released in April 2009, enabled the Traffic, Directions and Information application. Later that month, Ford Work Solutions, a collection of five applications marketed towards professionals who buy Ford trucks, was added. The applications included in the Ford Work Solution were Crew Chief, Garmin Nav, LogMeIn and Tool Link.[3][3] SYNC v4 and v5 were released in January 2010 and January 2011, respectively,
"

Owning two different Ford vehicles with SYNC v3 I can say I'm quite pleased. I passed on purchasing a new vehicle with the v5 touch screen version as it was indeed garbage. YMMV.

Having worked at a major US university as a staff member, I can attest to this. There is absolutely no incentive for improvement. And if you decide to try to make a suggestion for improvement, it will often be shot down because it tramples over somebody else's previous work / existing process in place. Note: This behavior isn't limited to universities, however, as a culture it tends to be a lot worse there.

Please provide a source on this. I'd like to read the source of the studies showing this.

Try it on a satellite connection with 700ms+ ping times. Usable, but significant delay even when trying to do a simple tab completion when changing directories ... 1 second delay between each directory change. Not bad by itself, but extremely annoying in total delay when working long periods.

I have a Windows box at work which I RDP into and then daisy-chain from the Windows box to X or VNC into other *Nix machines at work because RDP is that much better over my satellite link. If I had to pick a good second behind RDP, I'd go with NX.

Link please or mods please do NOT mark +1 Insightful.

You should be doing this regardless of whether you telecommute or not. Other than CYA, I also find it makes end of year performance writeups incredibly easy to do.

started this a LONG time ago with SimPoints. There is a good bit of fun to be had in the base version of the game. However, if you want a laundry basket in your bathroom you have to pay for it!

P.S. I have an alternate suggestion for EA: Season passes. For the Sims3, sell me a season pass for $25/year. You will probably get the same total amount of money out of me over time with this method vs. selling each expansions/stuff packs individually. However, you will have a continuous revenue stream from a flagship game ... something every gaming company desperately wants but has difficulty pulling off after initial release.

The new look and feel offered me the following five items at the top of the screen where the premium "eye candy" should be:
- World's worst tattoo fixed
- Husband's smelly revenge
- New name for Jackson
- Kendra's scary "Wife Swap"
- Boy's 911 call backfires

I can promise you I have boatloads of cookies and other tracking information available that would indicate _NEVER_ choose those items as news stories to display to me. I should not have to customize the page, it should have intelligence built in based on public data about me. Tab closed pretty quickly. If Yahoo wants to remain a portal-like site, start by leveraging technology proper. Otherwise, Yahoo will running to catch up to their competition indefinitely.

No, the lesson is work for a company that forces you to take your vacation or you lose it at the end of the year. Vacation benefits both the employee and employer. If you work for a company where management and/or HR secretly discourage vacation, GET OUT.

Where I'm at presently, we only need to work out vacation among my team. Management and/or HR could care less. If somebody hands off some shoddy work to a teammate, they _WILL_ hear about it when they get back from vacation. If somebody wants to take a long vacation and only announces it the day before, they _WILL_ be given sour looks by the team who now must scramble to provide coverage at the last minute. This system tends to work out incredibly well as we are accountable to the people we work with on a daily basis. Professional peer pressure works.

I know RTFA is unusual around here, but:

Good job by Atlanta airport for having sensible policies and rerouting traffic in the event of a real threat.

Worked at a theater for several years. A few interesting tidbits for the chain I worked for:
- Movie theaters are in the business of selling popcorn and concessions, not in the business of showing movies. You could substitute the movies with another popular activity in a public space and the same business model would exist.
- Movie theaters largely do not set prices of tickets ... the studios do that. Local market conditions do factor into the ticket price though ... one of the local towns near where I live only charges $5 for a matinee vs. $7.50+ everywhere else ... otherwise the local town theater WOULD go out of business.
- You pay for the container the food or drink is put in, not the contents of the container. Accounting is also done the same way. Management freaked out when 1000 nacho trays were lost at one point ... $0.05 to produce, $5000+ in inventory.
- Staff is not cheap. Weekdays Monday-Thursday usually operate as a loss ... the revenue is not enough to keep 3 minimum wage people (box office, usher, concessions) + 2 managers (1 customer service/other, 1 projectionist) around. On Friday-Sunday, look to a 1 employee to 250 patron ratio.
- Marketing and customer data is poorly collected and analyzed. This is probably the biggest issue with movie theaters, they do not know their customers or market well enough to make global decisions yet allow for local adjustments. Example for concessions: Mountain Dew and Hotdogs _ALWAYS_ sell more at the midnight showings then popcorn does and the hotdogs need to be thrown out at the end of the day if not consumed. Not every theater does a midnight showing. For those that do, why not discount the hotdogs at the midnight showings to sell them instead of throwing them out? This is an extremely simple example and proper analytics would reveal much more interesting customer trends.



I do agree with your point on the concession prices. During the summer twice a week they would show a kids movie from the past 1-5 years at 10am each morning. Tickets were $1 each, and kiddie popcorn trays prices were halved. The combination dropped the total price per child to about $5. Having 500+ kiddies running around at 10am in the morning was a bit of a headache, but made more money during the weekdays from those two showings than the rest of the weekdays combined. Another example, refillable plastic cups that were $10 initial purchase, $1 to refill ... had people looking in the trash for these things, taking them home + washing, then bringing back all summer. Lowering the prices all of the time does NOT make sense, but mixing up discounts, special offerings, a real rewards program, etc. all combined have a huge return on business ... and none of this is rocket science.

Biggest issue is movie theaters still operate largely in a static mode with their business model. The price is one such element of static thinking as parent pointed out. A subscription based model like this I applaud as it does give an example of dynamic thinking that will encourage customer loyalty. Otherwise, competition such as Redbox and Netflix that is more dynamic in their business model will eat away at profits. I only hope we don't see the opposite of the supply/demand curve, that is, movie theaters go bankrupt and available supply of theaters become so low that prices naturally DO go up.

From the change in the TOS:

.
Am I misreading this? It doesn't look like Instagram is selling your data, only changing how they may use it.

i.e. Instagram is choosing to your use existing data as a part of targeted advertisements delivered to you. They are _NOT_ selling the data to advertisers, but instead saying to advertisers "Here's the types of data we have, you tell us how you want it displayed when your ads come up". As another Slashdotter already mentioned, "Hey Mike, Dave just got back from an awesome trip to Rome!". The service could grab a picture of you, grab a picture of Dave from his recent Rome trip, and do some swapping of bodies in the pictures. Then inject a message of "Image yourself enjoying Rome like Dave did".

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong but if I'm reading this correctly this is a pretty smart move. Instagram holds the data, the advertisers link to the data, but do not have a copy of it. They avoid all of the legal issues by not selling the data, and, make more money in the process.

Good discussion so far on how to erode brand value. I lost my preference for Linksys when their WRT54G models cut the amount of flash memory from 4MB to 2MB for no other reason than to improve margins. Now can't flash DD-WRT to the model. And, they tried to resell the 4MB flash memory models at a higher price as the "WRT54GL" model. Good job in destroying a loyal customer base.

Used to be if you wanted a reliable wireless router in your home, you paid an extra $10-$20 and got a Linksys. Belkin, NetGear, and most other brands used to crap, but now have caught up in terms of quality and kept their prices lower. That being said, the low margins I think are the other big reason Cisco is looking to drop Linksys. From TFA:

Hi AC. For a power user, the quick launch toolbar is your friend.

- If you have not put it at the bottom of your taskbar extending the length of your screen, you are not making good use of it.
- I have about 40 icons in my quick launch bar, no scrolling required, with plenty of room to spare in a 1920x1080 monitor.
- The only time I need use the Start Menu is when I access a program I haven't used in awhile (perhaps once a month I'll need to do this).

I agree the Start button needs to die. I don't agree with its current replacement.