Posts by Armando 123 1116 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Aug 2011
We still play Civ at the house; the boys are addicted to it (and now they're interested in history). My wife, who was a history major, thought it was silly until she tried it, after hearing the rest of us talking about it. Now she's hooked, badly. We might need an intervention.
I still think my favorite Civ moment came when I was playing Civ II and changed governments, causing anarchy. The "advisors" wanted to talk to me, and, well, search on youtube for this if you haven't seen it.
Sounds more like a kindle(-ing).
I feel like we should now here John Cleese from the I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again era say "Good evening, here are the tree jokes" with a barrage of puns about how she was "board" but is now
"pining", the "beech", and complaining to her mother's father (known as "pawpaw") and she's seeing "red, bud" and I'll stop now.
Mine's the one with "Paul Bunyan" in the pocket
T-Mobile USA will go the way of SNET, Ameritech, and other companies in being swallowed by AT&T. In all cases, customer service dropped. In the case of the Ameritech buyout, the five Midwestern states that were served by Ameritech sued AT&T for people going, IIRC, over a month without service after the promised date. This includes businesses (not good for business, obviously) and individuals at a time when cell phones were less common and did not have 911 service. AT&T, in court and in the press, blamed the Midwesterners for expecting good customer service. What, like keeping you to your promised dates?
A pox on AT&T and all their money-grubbing ivy-league-monkeys. Even Texans can't stand them.
You have to pay for the service. (Well, someone does, so let's assume you're a big boy and pay your own way through life.) Are you going to show up with cash, on time, every 30 days? Oh, you'll want to use a credit card (which has your name on it). Fine, can you show some ID to prove this you are who you say you are? Because, you know, some people do that sort of thing.
Sorry for the kids of the UK, but as a Yank, it's nice to see that we're not the only first world nation with such a bad education system. We're often told just how bad it is here, mostly (I suspect) because "things are going well" doesn't induce the panic often needed to part taxpayers from even more of their money.
Remember MS' XBox "shipments" and how they stuffed the channel? Don't equate shifting a million units with selling them.
I do like my kindle, but the user interface leaves something to be desired. And a tablet, which is a more generalized piece of equipment than a reader, needs better UI design. So consider me skeptical.
Given that they can already use Bada, Android, and Bada, none of which might be the right option, does something with WebOS' shortcomings (mostly on the App side and the customer familiarity side) solve these problems? I wonder if they're just trying to drive up the price for a potential competitor who might be interested; I've seen it before.
I own a Macbook Air, and I'll replace it with another. It's been beaten to death the last three years, including on drop onto concrete from four feet while it was open and running, but the darn thing keeps running fine. And it is ideal if you have to travel because it's so light but the build quality is still darn good ... unlike a lot of bigger, heavier laptops.
Follow the money, as the man once said.
The one thing that gets me -- and I'll admit a bias as I studied stellar astronomy -- is that we naked apes are the primary cause of the Earth's warming. That nearby star known as "the sun" is the primary engine for our weather; you'd think that its variations MIGHT have some effect, since that's the energy source driving everything else except for a few rogue volcanoes.
I happened to be in grad school at a fairly lefty US university when the Berlin Wall came down. I remember all the budding hippies and commies being caught with their dogmas around their ankles. About a year later, they were starting to go on about global warming. And in both cases, there seemed to be an underlying hatred of the industry, the accumulation of wealth, western civilization, western culture, private property ... in short, the very things that, over a couple-three thousand years, made their college education possible.
The "heretics" who say that maybe the solar wind affecting cosmic rays reaching the earth's atmosphere, which affects cloud formation, which affects weather, which could explain the tight correlation between sunspots and earth's temperatures, might be right?
Well, okay, but Al Gore isn't going to like this. Heh.
Mine's the one with the wikipedia article on the Maunder Minimum in the pocket.
Acer struck me as vulnerable. They were yet another player in the thin-margin PC field, with MS' OS "quality" being a big factor in their market's health and their product. Then they accelerated to the bottom with the netbook, which while it had even thinner margins, allowed them to get the cream off the first skim.
Once the iPad came along and people preferred iPads over netbooks, the writing was on the wall.
You know how often we say that the CEOs and suits don't deserve their money and benefits? In Jobs' case, must of us who can remember Apple in '96 and '97 would agree that Jobs has earned it as much as any one else has.
Here's hoping his health is okay, and if not, that he recovers well and soon.
I studied astrophysics in grad school back in the early 90s and one day asked this. I said that, given that most of the light is in O and B stars, but the M stars, though individually small, are so much more numerous that they contain most of the mass, couldn't small M dwarfs, neutron stars, cooled white dwarfs, and brown dwarfs account for some significant portion of the "missing mass"? I was scoffed for thinking like a stellar astronomer.
Odd, but the people I know who've complained about VW have all been Passat owners. Okay, in one case it was a Golf owner who'd have complained about being hung with an old rope, but still, thinking of the VW owners I know -- five Golfs, two Touaregs, three Jettas, a Phaeton, a Rouaton, and even an Eos -- only the four Passat owners have complained.
Having worked in pharma/IT, and knowing what can be used as inactive ingredients in some countries, I'll happily pay the higher price for domestic pharmaceuticals. In fact, those from *cough* certain East Asian nations can have nothing like they're supposed to have. One firm was selling pills to lower blood sugar that were found to contain only salts and powdered plaster. It was kept quiet, considering whom the company who'd bought the Chinese pills for redistribution contributed to certain political entities.
Have you SEEN what kids are like with objects? Particularly ones they don't buy?
I swear, young males can break anvils. It's not until they are on their own and break something they bought that you start to see them take care of stuff. And not just laptops: cars, tools, phones, furniture, etc.
When people get desperate they start reaching and doing things they normally wouldn't do when able to think normally. I've seen it in sports, I've seen it in poker games, I've seen it when guys pursue women, and this is where we see it in business. Apple, whatever their flaws, sell things people want to own. Other companies can't do this, they want/need to, and not knowing how or having some flaw or missing some piece, they get desperate.
All those Ivy League domineerers will tell you that Europeans got here in 1620! Do no doubt them! They've cut me down when I mentioned my ancestors being in Jamestown, VA, in 1618 ...
But you make a good point. There was at least one German among the Vikings in Greenland and/or Vinland. There is some evidence that the English were fishing off Cape Cod well before Jamestown was founded. So could be.
(Obvious icon, I hope.)
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