I don't shop at the cheap grocery store to save money, I shop there because they're the only store with a self-checkout. Self-checkout means I can buy junkfood, cheap dvds, and necessary girl products without having to make eye contact with the wage-slave behind the till.
As long as you realize that the only reason the store has those self-checkout lines is to avoid paying real live people, some of whom may not be as lucky as you are and may not have the other income opportunities that you may have (seeing as you call those employees wage-slaves).
I never go through those self-checkout lanes, probably because I prefer to see people working then trying to collect welfare.
It's actually named Ralphs'. Note the position of the apostrophe. The founder's last name was Ralphs. Yet he overcame his name-handicap to build a decent sized supermarket empire in Southern California. Then his heirs sold out and it became just another chain.
I have a 65" 3D home theater; same technology as in theaters, except it's rear projection. With Dolby surround sound. I'd have larger but that's the best size for the room size, and there are only two recliners with a TV table between them.
And what about the Jewish residents and the Muslim residents (probably more Muslim than Jewish) who are very invested in the day of the Sabbath. What do they do?
In the early 90s I was a Sr. Analyst at a Mortgage Bank. One of the first to bundle loans and sell them as securities, though not then what later became known as junk. So it is with direct knowledge I can tell you that to get a loan you need to demonstrate two things:
1. Ability to pay
2. Willingness to pay
The former you demonstrate with proof of income, and the latter you demonstrate with a history of paying off credit accounts on time.
Which is why you need credit to get credit, and why you should start with a (secured) car loan if you can get it, an (unsecured) student load if you can get it, or a low-limit (unsecured) credit card, and then develop a history of paying them off over time. That's what shows up in your fico score.
On another note, there's a difference between a charge account, a credit account, and a revolving credit account, though they may all use what we commonly call credit cards:
Charge Account: Very few of these left any more; you charge something when you want it, and pay it off within the agreed upon terms. American Express may still offer charge asccounts; I'm not sure. Neiman Marcus, in their early history, gave their customers (they called them clientelle) charge accounts with a bit of a twist: you bought when you needed/or wanted, and paid when you had. Generally these accounts were offered to what some of us would call old money people, who had stock and bond investments and didn't get paid regularly. I had one of these cards back in the late 60s or early 70s (have no recollection of how I convinced them to give it to me; I was a small business owner at the time, living in University Park, an of Dallas, Texas ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Park,_Texas ). I remember when they switched to revolving credit and started charging interest if you didn't pay promptly, but I don't remember the year.
Credit Account: Also not common any more. You get credit from a company to buy an item you don't have the money to pay for all at once, and you pay it off with a fixed amount, monthly, generally including interest, until it's paid off. I can't really think of an example right now, but years ago you could do this to get a large appliance from Sears, and get better terms than you would on their revolving credit account, which they incorrectly called a charge card
Revolving Credit Account: The most common account; you can pay it off monthly, paying interest on the unpaid balance, thus using it as a credit account, or you can pay it in full when you get the bill, usually avoiding the interest if you pay in full within the grace period.
If you were in the printing ink industry you'd probably be looking for a new career. I was in my mid 20s when the 70s began; I spent almost a decade moving around the country working as a typographer; in every city I visited, the day I looked at the paper there were at least multiple jobs in typesetting and typography. Now there are a grand total of none. Per year. None.
And now printing is going in the same direction. Except for the newspaper industry (and they're consolidating/dying fast) there really aren't any more pressman jobs. Most small presses have gone the way of on-demand digital printing, even for books you may buy from Amazon. The digital presses require at most one person to oversee the paperfeed and one to oversee the binding.
Much of what you ask is in the Wikipedia article. Gary and his first wife founded Intergalactic Digital Research (nowadays we need URLs so we use short company names which often make no sense; in those days we used long company names which likewise didn't make much sense but were at least grandiose), to market his CP/M (Control Program for Microprocessors), one of the first (if not the first) operating systems which enabled microprocessors to control floppy drives. He wrote CP/M in PL/M, a language he also wrote. The command set was very similar to the early MS-DOS command set, which was modeled to some extent after CP/M.
(As a complete aside, I ran both CP/M and TRS-DOS on my early TRS-80 Model 1 with lowercase mod, and later my TRS-80 Model III with 80-column mod.)
DR-DOS and GEM came much later, after such projects as CBASIC and CBASIC Compiler, both fully capable BASIC implementations offering functions and linking so huge programs could be written in only 64KB of memory.
CBASIC was written by Gordon Eubanks, later CEO of Symantic, specifically for CP/M, and was sold by his own company, Compiler Systems, which was acquired by Digital Research in 1981.
There appear to be a bunch of minor mistakes in the Wikipedia articles, though none of them critical, and I won't attempt to change them as Wikipedia doesn't like entries without citations, and they don't count memory as a citation, as I found out years ago when I corrected a reference to a restaurant chain my family owned.
Nevertheless there's a lot of good historical stuff in Wikipedia; good searches are Digital Research, Gary Kildall, CP/M, CBASIC, and Gordon Eubanks.
Bill Gates came from what some of us would call a well to do family; he most likely could have gotten the money to visit IBM if he needed it. But he didn't need it; IBM went to him, immediately after their trip to visit Gary Kildall.
They wanted Kildall's CP/M and Gates's BASIC. But Kildall didn't think they were important enough to meet personally so he went out to deliver some software to Bill Godbout, and left negotiations to his wife. His wife wouldn't sign the standard IBM non-disclosure form without his approval, and of course cellphones hadn't been invented yet, so before he could be reached, IBM folk left for a prescheduled meeting with Gates to negotiate for his BASIC. They mentioned to Gates they needed an OS as well, and Gates said he could deliver that (he didn't own one but he was shrewd, and he knew which one he could buy and sell of to IBM as his own).
The owner of prgmr.com is one of the authors of The Book of Xen; he does an excellent job, worth more than the $5 you pay for the smallest instance, and he really does know what he's doing (read the book to see just how much he knows).
Immediately after reading these posts I called Barnes & Noble and found out a few things about my Barnes & Noble Tablet.
1. It's true; they're locking it with the upgrade.
2. The lady who told me I could put any android app on it was wrong; I can't.
3. Since I bought it during this year's holiday shopping season I have until after Christmas to return it.
I still have the receipt and all the wrapping. So I'm taking advantage of step 3 above. I'll buy a sub-$100 tablet, load both the Kindle & Nook apps on it, and use it the way God and nature intended:).
Well, not quite, since either can still remove my books if they want, but closer.
Why then, since my membership card doesn't get me anything from Barnes & Noble when I use it for eBooks, don't I switch back to physical books? (There's an article somewhere recently showing eBooks are no longer much cheaper than physical books, and may in some cases be more expensive.)
Only because as I age I find it easier to read backlt text in large type, than I do to read physical books. I'll buy what I want, from whom I want (within the limits of the new duopoly) but I won't bite off my nose to spite my face.
recently realized that I was leaving all sorts of benefits on the table and have started mile-collecting.
As long as you realize those miles are being paid for by a higher commission rate charged the accepting merchant. I'm not saying you shouldn't use it, but you might consider using a non-rewards card at that local indepenent store down the street; to them the rate difference could be important.
Its not hard to build a duplicator and when you hand your card off to a waiter he could easily swipe it on the
duplicator and clone it onto a blank.
Doesn't need to be a blank. In fact if it were the perps who got my info (as you suppose, most likely a restaurant server) couldn't have used it in three separate big-box stores within a half hour of each other. Card Fraud department caught it, but not because anyone checked name/address/anything, but rather because it was used in two separate checkout lines of one big-box store, within a minute of each other.
Real science fiction writers, are merely using a genre setting to comment on the PRESENT, and perhaps on the human condition in general.
Thanks for pointing that out as the best first post I've seen in years. I came to this post from the daily newsletter and was going to post it myself if no one else had.
or they make some assumption that turns out to be untrue (Arthur Clarke assuming that NASA would continue on with Apollo-level funding for example).
You're spamming us Chris. And you're also wrong. Amazon gave in to the state; they're now in favor of a national sales tax on Internet sales so everyone will have to pay it.
Penguin has done more to improve the overall level of culture and intelligence in society than any number of toy-makers like Steve Jobs.
For a segment of society, the segment that can learn to read from teachers, you're probably right. But for those whom we haven't figured out how to teach (we often call them learning disabled), many can teach themselves if they have a reason. Texting may be a toy for you and I, but my godson went through school until he was eighteen, and went to programs that were supposed to be good at teaching kids such as he. But he didn't teach himself to read until he wanted to text.
Funny thing was his parents considered a cell-phone to be a toy; he didn't get one until he became an older teen and started roaming out of his neighborhood. Then they got him a phone so in case he got lost he could call home and someone could find him.
He's teaching himself a lot now that he knows he can.
What Netflix has shown us is that they're (a) transparent, and (b) agile.
We've said for years that new companies beat old companies hands-down because of their agility. We've said we value transparency.
So now we get both, with all the messiness that implies, from one company, making one misstep after another, and then backtracking as it needs to.
And we complain.
Note I'm not saying that I like Netflix's new pricing; I don't. And I'm not saying I've liked the drama of the past few weeks; I haven't. But by taking this step they've removed most of the reasons I would have to quit, and I'm staying.
Disclaimer: Within the last month I took delivery of an internet-connected home-theater system with 65" screen and 5.1 Dolby sound. I didn't buy the 3D glasses because currently available 3D content sucks, and I'm not paying more for the Netflix BlueRay subscription because there just aren't enough BlueRay discs available. But I am going to keep both my three-at-a-time DVD plan and my streaming plan, because between them (and with their usually good-enough recommendation engine) I'm getting movies I might never see otherwise.
Nobody pays per GB at the wholesale level. More like us$30 per mbps ( IIRC that's circa 500 GB/Mo at full speed 24/7), or in other words about 6c per GB, if you use your connection full time at the limit. 95 percentile billing, used by many providers, changes the numbers a bit as the top 5% of your transit speed use doesn't get counted. And some providers are still charging for the highest bandwidth used in either direction and you get the other direction for free.
Which, by the way, lets many local ISPs who buy transit have a free ride on outgoing data when they overcharge you for hosting your website.
Sprint has had Free nationwide roaming on the Sprint network since they started the Sprint PCS network. The network was much smaller years ago than it is now, and yes, it is possible to be offnetwork even in the relatively populous SoCal area, but Sprint now offers free voice roaming (and limited data roaming) on all the plans I've looked at recently.
Slashdot Mirror
But they at least offer 18 months financing :).
I don't shop at the cheap grocery store to save money, I shop there because they're the only store with a self-checkout. Self-checkout means I can buy junkfood, cheap dvds, and necessary girl products without having to make eye contact with the wage-slave behind the till.
As long as you realize that the only reason the store has those self-checkout lines is to avoid paying real live people, some of whom may not be as lucky as you are and may not have the other income opportunities that you may have (seeing as you call those employees wage-slaves).
I never go through those self-checkout lanes, probably because I prefer to see people working then trying to collect welfare.
It's actually named Ralphs'. Note the position of the apostrophe. The founder's last name was Ralphs. Yet he overcame his name-handicap to build a decent sized supermarket empire in Southern California. Then his heirs sold out and it became just another chain.
I have a 65" 3D home theater; same technology as in theaters, except it's rear projection. With Dolby surround sound. I'd have larger but that's the best size for the room size, and there are only two recliners with a TV table between them.
The only theaters I go to are Imax.
And what about the Jewish residents and the Muslim residents (probably more Muslim than Jewish) who are very invested in the day of the Sabbath. What do they do?
In the early 90s I was a Sr. Analyst at a Mortgage Bank. One of the first to bundle loans and sell them as securities, though not then what later became known as junk. So it is with direct knowledge I can tell you that to get a loan you need to demonstrate two things:
1. Ability to pay
2. Willingness to pay
The former you demonstrate with proof of income, and the latter you demonstrate with a history of paying off credit accounts on time.
Which is why you need credit to get credit, and why you should start with a (secured) car loan if you can get it, an (unsecured) student load if you can get it, or a low-limit (unsecured) credit card, and then develop a history of paying them off over time. That's what shows up in your fico score.
On another note, there's a difference between a charge account, a credit account, and a revolving credit account, though they may all use what we commonly call credit cards:
Charge Account: Very few of these left any more; you charge something when you want it, and pay it off within the agreed upon terms. American Express may still offer charge asccounts; I'm not sure. Neiman Marcus, in their early history, gave their customers (they called them clientelle) charge accounts with a bit of a twist: you bought when you needed/or wanted, and paid when you had. Generally these accounts were offered to what some of us would call old money people, who had stock and bond investments and didn't get paid regularly. I had one of these cards back in the late 60s or early 70s (have no recollection of how I convinced them to give it to me; I was a small business owner at the time, living in University Park, an of Dallas, Texas ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Park,_Texas ). I remember when they switched to revolving credit and started charging interest if you didn't pay promptly, but I don't remember the year.
Credit Account: Also not common any more. You get credit from a company to buy an item you don't have the money to pay for all at once, and you pay it off with a fixed amount, monthly, generally including interest, until it's paid off. I can't really think of an example right now, but years ago you could do this to get a large appliance from Sears, and get better terms than you would on their revolving credit account, which they incorrectly called a charge card
Revolving Credit Account: The most common account; you can pay it off monthly, paying interest on the unpaid balance, thus using it as a credit account, or you can pay it in full when you get the bill, usually avoiding the interest if you pay in full within the grace period.
PayPal is still giving me 1.5% cash back on payments I make with my debit card and they're doing it monthly, only a few days into the next month.
If you were in the printing ink industry you'd probably be looking for a new career. I was in my mid 20s when the 70s began; I spent almost a decade moving around the country working as a typographer; in every city I visited, the day I looked at the paper there were at least multiple jobs in typesetting and typography. Now there are a grand total of none. Per year. None.
And now printing is going in the same direction. Except for the newspaper industry (and they're consolidating/dying fast) there really aren't any more pressman jobs. Most small presses have gone the way of on-demand digital printing, even for books you may buy from Amazon. The digital presses require at most one person to oversee the paperfeed and one to oversee the binding.
Much of what you ask is in the Wikipedia article. Gary and his first wife founded Intergalactic Digital Research (nowadays we need URLs so we use short company names which often make no sense; in those days we used long company names which likewise didn't make much sense but were at least grandiose), to market his CP/M (Control Program for Microprocessors), one of the first (if not the first) operating systems which enabled microprocessors to control floppy drives. He wrote CP/M in PL/M, a language he also wrote. The command set was very similar to the early MS-DOS command set, which was modeled to some extent after CP/M.
(As a complete aside, I ran both CP/M and TRS-DOS on my early TRS-80 Model 1 with lowercase mod, and later my TRS-80 Model III with 80-column mod.)
DR-DOS and GEM came much later, after such projects as CBASIC and CBASIC Compiler, both fully capable BASIC implementations offering functions and linking so huge programs could be written in only 64KB of memory.
CBASIC was written by Gordon Eubanks, later CEO of Symantic, specifically for CP/M, and was sold by his own company, Compiler Systems, which was acquired by Digital Research in 1981.
There appear to be a bunch of minor mistakes in the Wikipedia articles, though none of them critical, and I won't attempt to change them as Wikipedia doesn't like entries without citations, and they don't count memory as a citation, as I found out years ago when I corrected a reference to a restaurant chain my family owned.
Nevertheless there's a lot of good historical stuff in Wikipedia; good searches are Digital Research, Gary Kildall, CP/M, CBASIC, and Gordon Eubanks.
Bill Gates came from what some of us would call a well to do family; he most likely could have gotten the money to visit IBM if he needed it. But he didn't need it; IBM went to him, immediately after their trip to visit Gary Kildall.
They wanted Kildall's CP/M and Gates's BASIC. But Kildall didn't think they were important enough to meet personally so he went out to deliver some software to Bill Godbout, and left negotiations to his wife. His wife wouldn't sign the standard IBM non-disclosure form without his approval, and of course cellphones hadn't been invented yet, so before he could be reached, IBM folk left for a prescheduled meeting with Gates to negotiate for his BASIC. They mentioned to Gates they needed an OS as well, and Gates said he could deliver that (he didn't own one but he was shrewd, and he knew which one he could buy and sell of to IBM as his own).
Good article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall
but supplemented by my personal knowledge; I knew Kildall and Godbout personally.
The owner of prgmr.com is one of the authors of The Book of Xen; he does an excellent job, worth more than the $5 you pay for the smallest instance, and he really does know what he's doing (read the book to see just how much he knows).
Did you RTFA? They did it to avoid a union fight. Not that they give a care about their workers.
Immediately after reading these posts I called Barnes & Noble and found out a few things about my Barnes & Noble Tablet.
1. It's true; they're locking it with the upgrade.
2. The lady who told me I could put any android app on it was wrong; I can't.
3. Since I bought it during this year's holiday shopping season I have until after Christmas to return it.
I still have the receipt and all the wrapping. So I'm taking advantage of step 3 above. I'll buy a sub-$100 tablet, load both the Kindle & Nook apps on it, and use it the way God and nature intended :).
Well, not quite, since either can still remove my books if they want, but closer.
Why then, since my membership card doesn't get me anything from Barnes & Noble when I use it for eBooks, don't I switch back to physical books? (There's an article somewhere recently showing eBooks are no longer much cheaper than physical books, and may in some cases be more expensive.)
Only because as I age I find it easier to read backlt text in large type, than I do to read physical books. I'll buy what I want, from whom I want (within the limits of the new duopoly) but I won't bite off my nose to spite my face.
Not anymore than plugging any other user computer into your TV will turn your TV into a usable computer.
recently realized that I was leaving all sorts of benefits on the table and have started mile-collecting.
As long as you realize those miles are being paid for by a higher commission rate charged the accepting merchant. I'm not saying you shouldn't use it, but you might consider using a non-rewards card at that local indepenent store down the street; to them the rate difference could be important.
Its not hard to build a duplicator and when you hand your card off to a waiter he could easily swipe it on the duplicator and clone it onto a blank.
Doesn't need to be a blank. In fact if it were the perps who got my info (as you suppose, most likely a restaurant server) couldn't have used it in three separate big-box stores within a half hour of each other. Card Fraud department caught it, but not because anyone checked name/address/anything, but rather because it was used in two separate checkout lines of one big-box store, within a minute of each other.
Fake readers. Despite their appearances in sci-fi movies like Terminator 2, they do actually exist.
Not only do they exist, you can find them for sale in those checkout line displays at Frys, convenient, relatively cheap, impulse items.
Real science fiction writers, are merely using a genre setting to comment on the PRESENT, and perhaps on the human condition in general.
Thanks for pointing that out as the best first post I've seen in years. I came to this post from the daily newsletter and was going to post it myself if no one else had.
or they make some assumption that turns out to be untrue (Arthur Clarke assuming that NASA would continue on with Apollo-level funding for example).
Or even that PanAm would still be around in 2001.
Noted that the poster should have written copyrights.
The fact is the copyrights would most likely be determined to be invalid, at least in the U.S., where there is plenty of precedent, and actual rules:
http://www.k-state.edu/academicpersonnel/intprop/webtutor/tsld007.htm
Note second and third bullet points.
You're spamming us Chris. And you're also wrong. Amazon gave in to the state; they're now in favor of a national sales tax on Internet sales so everyone will have to pay it.
Penguin has done more to improve the overall level of culture and intelligence in society than any number of toy-makers like Steve Jobs.
For a segment of society, the segment that can learn to read from teachers, you're probably right. But for those whom we haven't figured out how to teach (we often call them learning disabled), many can teach themselves if they have a reason. Texting may be a toy for you and I, but my godson went through school until he was eighteen, and went to programs that were supposed to be good at teaching kids such as he. But he didn't teach himself to read until he wanted to text.
Funny thing was his parents considered a cell-phone to be a toy; he didn't get one until he became an older teen and started roaming out of his neighborhood. Then they got him a phone so in case he got lost he could call home and someone could find him.
He's teaching himself a lot now that he knows he can.
I should have been more specific; my meaning is intended to be the collective we and the collective us.
What Netflix has shown us is that they're (a) transparent, and (b) agile.
We've said for years that new companies beat old companies hands-down because of their agility. We've said we value transparency.
So now we get both, with all the messiness that implies, from one company, making one misstep after another, and then backtracking as it needs to.
And we complain.
Note I'm not saying that I like Netflix's new pricing; I don't. And I'm not saying I've liked the drama of the past few weeks; I haven't. But by taking this step they've removed most of the reasons I would have to quit, and I'm staying.
Disclaimer: Within the last month I took delivery of an internet-connected home-theater system with 65" screen and 5.1 Dolby sound. I didn't buy the 3D glasses because currently available 3D content sucks, and I'm not paying more for the Netflix BlueRay subscription because there just aren't enough BlueRay discs available. But I am going to keep both my three-at-a-time DVD plan and my streaming plan, because between them (and with their usually good-enough recommendation engine) I'm getting movies I might never see otherwise.
Nobody pays per GB at the wholesale level. More like us$30 per mbps ( IIRC that's circa 500 GB/Mo at full speed 24/7), or in other words about 6c per GB, if you use your connection full time at the limit. 95 percentile billing, used by many providers, changes the numbers a bit as the top 5% of your transit speed use doesn't get counted. And some providers are still charging for the highest bandwidth used in either direction and you get the other direction for free.
Which, by the way, lets many local ISPs who buy transit have a free ride on outgoing data when they overcharge you for hosting your website.
Sprint has had Free nationwide roaming on the Sprint network since they started the Sprint PCS network. The network was much smaller years ago than it is now, and yes, it is possible to be offnetwork even in the relatively populous SoCal area, but Sprint now offers free voice roaming (and limited data roaming) on all the plans I've looked at recently.
Including in Las Vegas.