Letters to the Editor
mattwa33186
Published Letters: 432 Editor's Choice: 45
-
I prefer Gmail because
[Read the article: Yahoo beefs up e-mail. Should you ditch Gmail?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I can use my desktop mail client to access my gmail accounts for free - Yahoo wants me to upgrade to Plus to do that.
The other reason is a lot more subjective and maybe just shows I am old or elitist, but to my mind a Yahoo address has become the equivalent of an AOL address, and I would be embarassed to give someone an email ending in @yahoo.com, particularly if I was communicating with them in a professional capacity. Same goes for HotMail. I have accounts with both, but they are reserved for instances where I don't want to give out my "real" email address. Gmail suffers from 0 stigma, and actually seems to make people think more highly of you, maybe because of the invitation only history of the product.
-
There's more to it than that
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'd like it a lot better if the top teams had to play each other, too. After years of the Gators and Notre Dame ducking my 'Canes, I'm kind of sick of the current system which gives us National Champions who only played 2 good teams before their bowl game. But there is another side to the story.
While the ranked teams are definitely using the small schools to pad their records and give themselves what amount to scrimmages before the important games, the small schools couldn't survive without those games. They get paid to play them. They get TV revenue that they would never see if they stuck to playing teams they might actually beat. The players get to travel and play in a real stadium, and pro scouts get to see them play, at least on film. Some kid from Murray State might get himself invited to the combine because of that game against Louisville.
And believe it or not, there is some good football to be enjoyed in those games. The first string players for a lot of the also-ran schools are good enough to be competitive against a ranked team. The second and third strings look like junior high schoolers, that's why they are also-rans, but a small school with a decent program can give you 15 or 20 minutes of entertaining play, especially early or late in the season. And of course there is always the potential for a massive upset. Remember Boise State.
So while I wish the system didn't make it so easy for teams to duck each other for decades on end, there are some benefits to the way things are, mostly for the kids but that's important too.
-
Your husband is being an asshole
[Read the article: I've had three miscarriages and my husband won't wear a yarmulke]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]First, sorry about your problems with having a baby.
Second, tell him that non-Jews wear yarmulkes in temple out of respect for the congregation members, not as an acknowledgement of God. I've done it many times. Just like he would have to remove his shoes on entering a mosque.
He probably wouldn't care for guests holding a prayer circle in his house. This is their house, and he needs to show a little courtesy.
-
There are alternatives
[Read the article: Has NBC gone mad?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Not perfect yet, but give them time. NBC is hoping that the bad taste they are leaving in people's mouths will be gone before it can bite them in the ass.
Right now iTunes is the best solution for a lot of people, because the interface is killer. But they are leaving that solution anyway.
Tivo and DVR solutions from content providers are good, but they still record commercials (and always will thanks to the ReplayTV decision) and even the Tivo interface is too confusing for some people. All other commercially available DVR interfaces I have seen just suck.
MythTV. Build your own DVR with a couple of terabytes of storage for the cost of a high-end DVR, including over the air HD. And it deletes the commercials very effectively and easily - click one checkbox one time and you'll never see another ad. Yes, you have to be able to install Linux, but rolling your own is now about as easy as installing Windows. MythTV is how a lot of BitTorrent content is being created.
And BitTorrent. At this point BT is just a standardized file-naming structure away from being Tivo. uTorrent already has an RSS scraper built in. If the file names become organized enough to eliminate the need for a doctorate in regular expressions to get it to work, which is a lot more likely than it might sound, people will be able to simply add a show to their favorites and watch it appear on their system later.
The point is that you have some powerful enities working against NBC (and the other broadcasters) because their users want simpler and easier ways to record and timeshift. NBC would be wise to avoid taking advantage of current and possibly short lived gaps between technology and user ability and start getting ready for the day when the only control they have over their content will be how happy they can make people with it.
-
This is new?
[Read the article: IBM squeezes computers to atomic scale]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]A friend went to Comdex (or somesuch) about 10 years ago and told me he saw something like this at the IBM booth. Laser mounted on an arm and pointed at a 1 inch cube of quartz. They told him he was looking at 3 terabytes of memory, using the spin of the atoms to represent 1's and 0's. Maybe this announcement means they are close to production.
-
Maybe they posted your column in the locker room
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Appalachian State 34 - Michigan 32.
That's why they have to play the games :)