Funny you should mention Germany, since that also shows what happens when the biggest playground bully takes on all the other kids. Somehow the bully always loses.
You're certainly right, like everything else in life, DIY house projects also have a learning curve. The flipside is that by doing it yourself you also gain experience and satisfaction. Especially for knowledge workers it's important to alternate squeezing your ass flat all day long with doing some physical labor, something that involves standing up, walking around, motor skillls other than typing and clicking.
What I said about the quality will still hold in the long term. Once you've gained that experience, you're still likely to do a better finish job than all but the most expensive hired help, because while they might not particularly care just how neatly the paint on the walls avoids trim detail, you certainly do and will spend the extra time and effort to make it look good.
Oh, and my renovation job has pine floors throughout, so there's no carpeting going in to be spoiled by paint. And regarding wasted materials, in the big picture the real cost is hired labor, not materials. If you waste 50% of material that cost $1000 to buy, but save yourself the $70/h installation fees which will amount to several times the material cost, you still come out way ahead. Think flooring, or painting, or woodwork.
> (b) they must not be cheap-asses > you violate condition (b) > Therefore sharp [...] have no interest in you
Yeah, but there's a lot more of us cheap-asses out there than deep-pocketed corporations. A lot of cheap-asses together still amount to buying more products than the entire corporate world combined. You should check the sales figures. Besides, I love being a cheap-ass, and a cheap-skate, and any other postfix of cheap you can think of.
Yep. At least the one I used was very well build, didn't flex at all, and had a very rigid hinge. I was quite impressed. And it was a refurbed model, too. If there's something to knock, it's the lack of ports and expansion, but hey, it's a teeny little machine. Still, two PC Card slots would be nice.
Uh, yeah and? Just because they CALL it a business notebook--ostensibly to justify the higher price--doesn't have to actually MAKE it a business notebook. The strongest thing speaking out AGAINST such a use is the crappy keyboard that PCWorld slam. One thing business users do a lot is TYPE, and if the backspace key becomes the most important key on the keyboard, well, good luck. No, sorry, the Averatec also only weighs around 4lb, but actually has a very usable keyboard (except for layout of course, but that's a general notebook thing), a very nice screen, a large HD, and pretty darn solid build quality. And they don't need to qualify it as a "business" notebook to justify a high-ish price.
As far as I'm concerned (and lots of people I know as well), the magic price point for notebooks financed from personal funds has become $1000 or less. After all, these are machines that are often "refreshed" every two years or less, I definitely don't want to spend much more than $500/year on notebooks. This Sharp is only giving me a slow processor, XGA and 20GB for $1500? Heck, I can get the ultra-slim Averatec 3150 for $900 (often for $700 refurbished), and it's got twice the HD and a faster mobile AMD to boot. Given that the backlight eats most of the power anyway, I doubt this Sharp will run all that much longer on a charge than the Averatec, Transmeta or no Transmeta.
> and is often told that he's better than the pros
I'd say with a few exceptions a DIY-er will do most things "better than a pro" because of the extra "love" involved. A professional will come in to the site and try to get the job done as quickly as possible to maximize profit (esp. if paid by job rather than by the hour). An electrician will drill holes as he sees fit, and thinks nothing of three or four attempts at a hole until he gets one right. In my current renovation job I've seen some spots where the guy attempted five holes until he got one where he wanted it in the crawlspace. Then they string the wire with zero slack, so if you change your mind about the position of an outlet or switch at the last minute, tough luck--you will have to splice the cable. There's simply no love in the work they do, just calculation.
When it's your own place, you care a lot more how every little detail is done, even if it's less important. Especially for visible stuff that can make a big difference. That's why I'm not letting the contractor anywhere near final trim stuff like window and door trim, or interior paint. That's the stuff that will meet a visitor's (or future prospective buyer's) eye first, and I want it done RIGHT and looking GOOD. Unless you get Bob Vila's crew, most people will just slap and slop it on and call it a day. Of course, the downside it the sh!tload of time it takes to do it all yourself...
> if the installation jeapordized an inspection's passing, the contractor > would have been well within his rights to do what was described.
True, but then again, with the exception of a few markets, I'd say passing inspection is a hell of a lot easier than it should be. I've seen stuff in my own house pass inspection that wasn't acceptable to ME, let alone an inspector. Yet it passed without mention.
Cute story, and I'm sure that General Contractor is still doing brisk business after the story broke on the local news. NOT! It still sounds like a contrived story. Even if you don't "own" the house yet, the contractor is still getting paid with YOUR money. Many construction loans are structured such that the owner must approve each release of money from the bank to the contractor. If the owner is not happy, the contractor gets no money. Now, usually the contractor does ok just by sticking to the terms of the contract, so if you don't have the conduit in the contract, he can probably get away with not putting it in. OTOH, since few contractors ever do an absolutely perfect job and always slop on this or that, the owner could enforce the contract to the letter in retribuition--such as fit-and-finish requirements, maximum distance of fasteners on drywall etc. These are the sorts of things that most contractors I've seen tend to be sloppy on, so the owner could throw the book at him and make the rest of the contract fulfillment living hell.
Overall it's still in the contractor's best long-term interest to please his customers. General contractors live and die by their reputation. Prospective customers usually call the last three or four clients of a contractor to see if they were satisfied. If a contractor did things like ripping out client's self-installed stuff, he wouldn't be getting too many more contracts.
That will work fine, and if you have a IR phone (such as the Ericsson R520m) you don't even need BT, although it's a lot more convenient. This week I got an HP iPAQ H4355, and typing on the thumboard is actually quite acceptable, even for longer emails. It also makes it a lot easier to enter all those awkward internetty characters that are a pain to enter with a stylus. Plus, it's got WiFi, which is da bomb;->.
Incidentally, you can get T-Zones Pro for $9.99 and enjoy practically the same unlimited access. Check out this thread on Howard Forums.
Actually, you can get their T-Zones Pro plan for $9.99 and you also get unlimited access. Not officially full Internet access, since it uses their WAP gateway, but it turns out that they don't actually restrict access to the internet anyway. Check out this thread on Howard Forums. People have been getting unlimited internet access for ten bucks for a while now.
> Companies are trying to have it both ways, and refuse to pick which one it really is.
Yeah, they'd like to specify very narrowly how your license is used. You can listen to: - this song only - on this CD only - in your Barbie CD player only - while wearing your bunny jammies only - and only in your bedroom
If you want to listen to it in you pinstripe suit, in your car, on the way to work, you BETTER be buying another license, you dirty rotten scumbag of a thief!!!
These in-between macro systems have always struck me as eventually pretty rendundant and/or useless. At first most started as fairly simple GUI automation gadgets, sending window messages to this or that window, etc. Then they started adding some simple expression evaluation to make them a bit more robust, and eventually they ended up with a pretty much full-blown scripting language. Except that they are quite proprietary and still require a fairly steep learning curve. It begs the question why one wouldn't simply choose a general purpose interpreted language like Python that is truly cross-platform, is very expressive, and has very strong GUI bindings? I think the difference between learning the macro language of one of these proprietary thingies and learning something like Python is fairly minimal, and the advantage with learning Python is that you will know an established programming language that implements modern language concepts, not someone's idea of what a scripting subsystem needs.
It could be a very useful device if the price is right. If it's around $500 or less would work, but if it's considerably more I'd rather buy something like the Averatec 3150 that's less than 4 pounds, very small and thin, and can be had for under $700 refurbished. At least it has an XGA screen and more connectivity options.
Firebird is cool, but Le Sacre Du Printemps is better. In that musically purely objective way, of course;-) If you can start an audience riot with a piece of ORCHESTRAL music, you've GOT to be one cool dude!
> I'd hardly classify "Saudi Arabia" or "Egypt" as American puppets either.
Really? Without American support the Saudi Royal family would have long been out of power. Yeah, they don't fetch W coffee in the morning, but they still have his hand up their ass, just like real puppets.
> It behaves normally, but it's singled out while others genuinely repulsive behaviour is ignored.
More power also brings more responsibility and scrutiny. If the US didn't have the military and economic might to impose its interests against world opinion and interest (which it frequently does) no-one would care what they did. When was the last time you lost sleep over Thailand's foreign policy? But as the US think of themselves as the moral beacon of this planet, they are also held to a higher standard. That holds true of political leadership, that holds true of military leadership, that holds true of economic leadership, that holds true of religious leadership...
> I'm just wondering what oppressive right-wing regimes we are currently supporting.
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China, Haiti. These are just some of the major ones, a little research will uncover plenty more. Right-wing, left-wing, no-wing, who cares--they're all oppressive and they're all regimes.
Incidentally, what took you till 28? As a devout technophile, even as a kid I much rather took apart toys to see how they worked than actually play with them, much to the bane of my parents--and, in hindsight, to my detriment, since that led to getting fewer toys, as I "just broke them anyway". That didn't stop when getting into computers later on: even if playing a game I would often wonder how a particular effect was achieved, so off I'd go trying to program it myself. Frankly, getting seriously wrapped up in programming and hardware takes up so much time, there'd be little left for hour-long game playing. I seriously believe the phenomenon of the technically highly competent nerd that plays games every waking moment is a Hollywood myth, or extremely rare in any case. I have yet to meet one of these creatures; most game enthusiasts I've met tend to be technically fairly shallow.
> Some of it is really, really clean and some of it is a mess.
Well, that's exactly what I'd expect from a large number of developers. Same thing going on around here, too. I would assume that the older the code, the more f*cked up it would be--something like the GDI code maybe. And it looks like drivers traditionally tend to be particularly obfuscated. Those hardware guys take special pride in immortalizing themselves through wacko code.
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Funny you should mention Germany, since that also shows what happens when the biggest playground bully takes on all the other kids. Somehow the bully always loses.
You're certainly right, like everything else in life, DIY house projects also have a learning curve. The flipside is that by doing it yourself you also gain experience and satisfaction. Especially for knowledge workers it's important to alternate squeezing your ass flat all day long with doing some physical labor, something that involves standing up, walking around, motor skillls other than typing and clicking.
What I said about the quality will still hold in the long term. Once you've gained that experience, you're still likely to do a better finish job than all but the most expensive hired help, because while they might not particularly care just how neatly the paint on the walls avoids trim detail, you certainly do and will spend the extra time and effort to make it look good.
Oh, and my renovation job has pine floors throughout, so there's no carpeting going in to be spoiled by paint. And regarding wasted materials, in the big picture the real cost is hired labor, not materials. If you waste 50% of material that cost $1000 to buy, but save yourself the $70/h installation fees which will amount to several times the material cost, you still come out way ahead. Think flooring, or painting, or woodwork.
> (b) they must not be cheap-asses
> you violate condition (b)
> Therefore sharp [...] have no interest in you
Yeah, but there's a lot more of us cheap-asses out there than deep-pocketed corporations. A lot of cheap-asses together still amount to buying more products than the entire corporate world combined. You should check the sales figures. Besides, I love being a cheap-ass, and a cheap-skate, and any other postfix of cheap you can think of.
> Ever used the Averatec 3150
Yep. At least the one I used was very well build, didn't flex at all, and had a very rigid hinge. I was quite impressed. And it was a refurbed model, too. If there's something to knock, it's the lack of ports and expansion, but hey, it's a teeny little machine. Still, two PC Card slots would be nice.
> Uh, RTFA?
Uh, yeah and? Just because they CALL it a business notebook--ostensibly to justify the higher price--doesn't have to actually MAKE it a business notebook. The strongest thing speaking out AGAINST such a use is the crappy keyboard that PCWorld slam. One thing business users do a lot is TYPE, and if the backspace key becomes the most important key on the keyboard, well, good luck. No, sorry, the Averatec also only weighs around 4lb, but actually has a very usable keyboard (except for layout of course, but that's a general notebook thing), a very nice screen, a large HD, and pretty darn solid build quality. And they don't need to qualify it as a "business" notebook to justify a high-ish price.
As far as I'm concerned (and lots of people I know as well), the magic price point for notebooks financed from personal funds has become $1000 or less. After all, these are machines that are often "refreshed" every two years or less, I definitely don't want to spend much more than $500/year on notebooks. This Sharp is only giving me a slow processor, XGA and 20GB for $1500? Heck, I can get the ultra-slim Averatec 3150 for $900 (often for $700 refurbished), and it's got twice the HD and a faster mobile AMD to boot. Given that the backlight eats most of the power anyway, I doubt this Sharp will run all that much longer on a charge than the Averatec, Transmeta or no Transmeta.
> and is often told that he's better than the pros
I'd say with a few exceptions a DIY-er will do most things "better than a pro" because of the extra "love" involved. A professional will come in to the site and try to get the job done as quickly as possible to maximize profit (esp. if paid by job rather than by the hour). An electrician will drill holes as he sees fit, and thinks nothing of three or four attempts at a hole until he gets one right. In my current renovation job I've seen some spots where the guy attempted five holes until he got one where he wanted it in the crawlspace. Then they string the wire with zero slack, so if you change your mind about the position of an outlet or switch at the last minute, tough luck--you will have to splice the cable. There's simply no love in the work they do, just calculation.
When it's your own place, you care a lot more how every little detail is done, even if it's less important. Especially for visible stuff that can make a big difference. That's why I'm not letting the contractor anywhere near final trim stuff like window and door trim, or interior paint. That's the stuff that will meet a visitor's (or future prospective buyer's) eye first, and I want it done RIGHT and looking GOOD. Unless you get Bob Vila's crew, most people will just slap and slop it on and call it a day. Of course, the downside it the sh!tload of time it takes to do it all yourself...
> if the installation jeapordized an inspection's passing, the contractor
> would have been well within his rights to do what was described.
True, but then again, with the exception of a few markets, I'd say passing inspection is a hell of a lot easier than it should be. I've seen stuff in my own house pass inspection that wasn't acceptable to ME, let alone an inspector. Yet it passed without mention.
Cute story, and I'm sure that General Contractor is still doing brisk business after the story broke on the local news. NOT! It still sounds like a contrived story. Even if you don't "own" the house yet, the contractor is still getting paid with YOUR money. Many construction loans are structured such that the owner must approve each release of money from the bank to the contractor. If the owner is not happy, the contractor gets no money. Now, usually the contractor does ok just by sticking to the terms of the contract, so if you don't have the conduit in the contract, he can probably get away with not putting it in. OTOH, since few contractors ever do an absolutely perfect job and always slop on this or that, the owner could enforce the contract to the letter in retribuition--such as fit-and-finish requirements, maximum distance of fasteners on drywall etc. These are the sorts of things that most contractors I've seen tend to be sloppy on, so the owner could throw the book at him and make the rest of the contract fulfillment living hell.
Overall it's still in the contractor's best long-term interest to please his customers. General contractors live and die by their reputation. Prospective customers usually call the last three or four clients of a contractor to see if they were satisfied. If a contractor did things like ripping out client's self-installed stuff, he wouldn't be getting too many more contracts.
That will work fine, and if you have a IR phone (such as the Ericsson R520m) you don't even need BT, although it's a lot more convenient. This week I got an HP iPAQ H4355, and typing on the thumboard is actually quite acceptable, even for longer emails. It also makes it a lot easier to enter all those awkward internetty characters that are a pain to enter with a stylus. Plus, it's got WiFi, which is da bomb ;->.
Incidentally, you can get T-Zones Pro for $9.99 and enjoy practically the same unlimited access. Check out this thread on Howard Forums.
Actually, you can get their T-Zones Pro plan for $9.99 and you also get unlimited access. Not officially full Internet access, since it uses their WAP gateway, but it turns out that they don't actually restrict access to the internet anyway. Check out this thread on Howard Forums. People have been getting unlimited internet access for ten bucks for a while now.
> Companies are trying to have it both ways, and refuse to pick which one it really is.
Yeah, they'd like to specify very narrowly how your license is used. You can listen to:
- this song only
- on this CD only
- in your Barbie CD player only
- while wearing your bunny jammies only
- and only in your bedroom
If you want to listen to it in you pinstripe suit, in your car, on the way to work, you BETTER be buying another license, you dirty rotten scumbag of a thief!!!
These in-between macro systems have always struck me as eventually pretty rendundant and/or useless. At first most started as fairly simple GUI automation gadgets, sending window messages to this or that window, etc. Then they started adding some simple expression evaluation to make them a bit more robust, and eventually they ended up with a pretty much full-blown scripting language. Except that they are quite proprietary and still require a fairly steep learning curve. It begs the question why one wouldn't simply choose a general purpose interpreted language like Python that is truly cross-platform, is very expressive, and has very strong GUI bindings? I think the difference between learning the macro language of one of these proprietary thingies and learning something like Python is fairly minimal, and the advantage with learning Python is that you will know an established programming language that implements modern language concepts, not someone's idea of what a scripting subsystem needs.
It could be a very useful device if the price is right. If it's around $500 or less would work, but if it's considerably more I'd rather buy something like the Averatec 3150 that's less than 4 pounds, very small and thin, and can be had for under $700 refurbished. At least it has an XGA screen and more connectivity options.
Firebird is cool, but Le Sacre Du Printemps is better. In that musically purely objective way, of course ;-) If you can start an audience riot with a piece of ORCHESTRAL music, you've GOT to be one cool dude!
> I guess George W. is also telling them to slash oil production and drive up prices.
Hey, remember YOU said that!
> there were more countries supporting US action than opposing it
Bull! 'nuff said.
> The worst part is I'm applying to get a German passport.
Unless you're Jewish you better not plan on keeper your other one. Germany doesn't allow dual citizenship, with this sole exception (I believe).
> I'd hardly classify "Saudi Arabia" or "Egypt" as American puppets either.
Really? Without American support the Saudi Royal family would have long been out of power. Yeah, they don't fetch W coffee in the morning, but they still have his hand up their ass, just like real puppets.
"Supporting" can mean a lot of things.
> It behaves normally, but it's singled out while others genuinely repulsive behaviour is ignored.
More power also brings more responsibility and scrutiny. If the US didn't have the military and economic might to impose its interests against world opinion and interest (which it frequently does) no-one would care what they did. When was the last time you lost sleep over Thailand's foreign policy? But as the US think of themselves as the moral beacon of this planet, they are also held to a higher standard. That holds true of political leadership, that holds true of military leadership, that holds true of economic leadership, that holds true of religious leadership...
Or that eating and breathing lead is actually good for you, since it makes you a more grounded person.
> I'm just wondering what oppressive right-wing regimes we are currently supporting.
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China, Haiti. These are just some of the major ones, a little research will uncover plenty more. Right-wing, left-wing, no-wing, who cares--they're all oppressive and they're all regimes.
Incidentally, what took you till 28? As a devout technophile, even as a kid I much rather took apart toys to see how they worked than actually play with them, much to the bane of my parents--and, in hindsight, to my detriment, since that led to getting fewer toys, as I "just broke them anyway". That didn't stop when getting into computers later on: even if playing a game I would often wonder how a particular effect was achieved, so off I'd go trying to program it myself. Frankly, getting seriously wrapped up in programming and hardware takes up so much time, there'd be little left for hour-long game playing. I seriously believe the phenomenon of the technically highly competent nerd that plays games every waking moment is a Hollywood myth, or extremely rare in any case. I have yet to meet one of these creatures; most game enthusiasts I've met tend to be technically fairly shallow.
> Some of it is really, really clean and some of it is a mess.
Well, that's exactly what I'd expect from a large number of developers. Same thing going on around here, too. I would assume that the older the code, the more f*cked up it would be--something like the GDI code maybe. And it looks like drivers traditionally tend to be particularly obfuscated. Those hardware guys take special pride in immortalizing themselves through wacko code.