They didn't say "only buy from established, known companies".
They said that when you *do* bbuy from other companies, don't be surprised if you lose your money.
It's a risk. The problem is that we live in a society that doesn't want to acknowledge, or even allow, risks. Risks aren't necessarily bad. Sometimes taking them is the best thing you can do.
But be alert, determine the risk, and decide if it's worth it to you.
I want to be able to turn a knob and set how much light gets through the windows. I want this per window, with a master for each wall, a master for each room, and a master for the house.
I *don't* want my appliances to talk to me. Save that for Disneyland. Or blind people. Or people much geekier than me.
A greenhouse style back porch with variable tint windows as above, plus the ability to push a button to open or close the windows, preferably directionally (like vertical blinds) to either catch or block breezes. Full climate control for when the weather's lousy. I'd actually like a small one of these off the master BR, and a larger one that goes the full back of the house. Hot tubs in each, at floor level, with retractable lids that look like the floor and are sturdy enough to jump or dance on.
How about an indoor lap pool?
Everything else I thought of off the top of my head has been mentioned (audio/video/data everywhere, etc).
Except...
If you can get me a positronic core to run the house, complete with holgram that follows me around when I want to talk with it, but that *won't* end up with a misguided savior complex, so much the better.
To misquote the dead professor in _I, Robot_ (the movie):
``That, detective, is the wrong question.''
Why *should* I take up ebooks? What is the compelling case? Until there is a compelling case *for* switching, the reasons against aren't crucial, IMO.
I don't see the compelling case. There are environmental issues, but the biggest ones there have more to do with our book economy, which encourages inrcedible amounts of waste. If we only printed books that were worth having, instead of mass marketing thousands of worthless titles a month and having to dispose of the rest, there would be *far* less waste. (Yes, I realize we can have a huge debate about how to determine what books should be printed, and that ebooks would solve this; my point is simply that there are other ways to solve it as well.)
For me, personally? I like having some things online. But sometimes I want those things in paper as well as online, so offer me paper, digital, or both.
When ebooks have the convenience and price of paper books, ask me again.
Having said that, I will now answer the wrong question. 8^) Not exhaustively, but just some major issues for me off the top of my head.
I can read a book in the bathtub. Are any of the ebook readers waterproof? None I've heard of. (Then again, I don't pay that much attention. That compelling case thing.)
I can drop a book almost anywhere but into a fire or vat of acid and it'll survive. But the ebook isn't as hardy. (At least anything I can afford.)
I can loan, give or resell *any* book easily. With the legal nigtmares today over DRM, copyrights and everything else, I have no ieda what I can do with ebooks, and the rules change from title to title.
I don't get eyestrain from spending hours with books, as a rule. I might get a headache or cramps form sitting in one position, but that's easily solved. That's not the case with any sort of digital display I have used.
In many cases, I can spend more money and buy a book that should outlast several generaltions of my family and appeals to several of my senses, or I can buy a cheap paperback that will fall apart after a couple of readings and has less sensory appeal, or I can buy something inbetween. I like that flexibility.
I like the smell of a new book. Build that into your reader, OK?
A book is stone simple for serial reading, and not that hard (if less handy) for jumping around in. Any ebook UI will have to be as easy to use for the base case (serial reading, saving your spot, etc), and better for the other case (reread earlier section, find random stuff). Both are fairly easy to do, but being able to do both well and easily isn't as easy.
I can grab a book to use as a writing surface. I do this a lot, as it turns out.
I can take a book almost anywhere. I can read almost anywhere. While there might be places an ebook works better (rainproof it and you will have started on that compelling case), there are still plenty a book wins for me. Remember that bathtub thing? And a book won't normally slow you down getting through airport security, whereas electronic devices sometimes do (I have experience with this!)
In short, while there are a couple of advantages to ebooks, they don't even begin to make a compelling case for me. Perhaps the above will help you understand why.
I don't know that google is taking the right approach, but I am 100% convinced that the traditional approach is wrong these days. The market is too focused on short term profits. It's like a male dog in the midst of hundreds of female dogs in heat. It forgets about everything but, "I want some! Right now!" and it'll starve to death in its lust-- and kill anything that tries to get in its way in the meantime.
If we had reasonable analysts in a reasonable system giving reasonable LONG TERM analysis, the old system would work. But the rules have changed, and the old system is driving itself to destruction under the new rules.
Until someone comes up with a reasonable approach, and the shareholders start acting responsibly for the long term, I think Google's protest is an effective way to go.
Meanwhile, I'm starting to look at the average street analyst the way I do at the average lawyer who goes sniffing around for PC lawsuit material.
It's pretty pathetic the way partisan politics sucks people into blindness. As other people have noted, it's been going on for years. Clinton's administration attacked our rights in certain ways. Bush's administration attacks them in others, sometimes building on Clinton's, sometimes in new ways. But it predates both of those.
A lot of people got excited by the first Mr. Bush's comments on the New World Order. A bunch of other people got excited by Mr. Cinton's comments on the New World Order. I looked at the fact that two people and parties who are allegedly diametrically opposed on so many things agreed, and got extremely nervous.
I can watch movies about secret government agencies and enjoy them as movies. I can even laugh at the funny ones. But deep inside, I always wonder whether they aren't really helping the true enemies of freedom, because of our tendancy to then relegate such concepts to movie-land.
I have no idea whether it's a political conspiracy in the traditional sense, or just a mixture of well-intentioned but foolish do-gooders and power-mad dictators. In the end, it won't really matter. We'll all just smile and moo and baaa and pretend to be happy, because the alternative is death.
As important as I think the second amendment is to freedom in the USA, I have serious doubts it will be relevant much longer. At which point you can bet your bippy the same will be true of the others.
Such competitions certainly don't "prove" a system is secure.
But they do help in some situations. For instance, one of the things MS supporters constantly use as a defense is that the other OSes are only "safe" because nobody bothers to try and hack them.
Contests focus attention and effort on these systems. If they survive, it does undermine the original claim, which is merely an opinion to begin with, although often treated as cold, hard, fact.
First, compare the true cost of living with their COL adjustment (if any).
Then look into what it will take to live the way *you* want to there. If you're moving from say, NYC to SF, it's probably not drastically different. But if you're moving from somewhere like Augusta or Raleigh (or to some extent Atlanta), and want to live anywhere near the country, or have a decent sized place, you're in for a shock.
Check into transportation issues (parking, mass transit, etc). Consider local laws (gun ownership, vehicle inspections, home schooling, pets, whatever matters to you.)
If you have any odd medical issues, fine out what the local hospitals and doctors ar eliek. Don't just assume everything will be the same.
Every morning, she turns it on and it pulls down the OS image, in fact the same OS image that every client of the ISP gets. Tech support becomes "Reboot the box."
The vast majority of tech support these days is *already*, "Reboot the box."
With your proposed thin client, that would have a much better chance of working!
No, I believe he means that people who might not otherwise STEAL are now STEALING.
They're jackasses at best.
The fact that the people they're stealing from others who range from clueless to idiots doesn'tc hange the fact that they are stealing.
If you want to run an open WAP, great. DO it in a way everyone knows it's open, and then nobody is stealing, only you are paying, you feel good, they get free access, everyone is happy. Nothing wrong with that.
But there's precious little moral difference between "piggybacking" (how wonderful it is to create new terms, or usage for old terms, that makes crime and immorality sound OK!) and my "borrowing" your lawn mower, or boinking your spouse, or siphoning some of your gas out of your car. Or using your bus fare, or taking your bike, or otherwise impacting the cost of your getting to work. (Assuming you work. How would I know?)
The whole analysts thing has become a joke. It's all BS. A huge portion of the economy turns on whether some yahoo (not Yahoo) correctly predicted to within 0.1% the income and profits of a handful of companies. It's absurd.
I hope google tells them to crawl back into their caves with their pet mammoths.
I didn't see where she refused to pay or donate. She merely said that $400 was too much for what she does (occasional user). $400 is a bit much for, say, a student or casual hobbyist, and not everything will fit on teh tiny board the free version handles. For instance, a fairly simple tube amp needs a large board because you need bigger traces for the current, more space for the larger components, and more board space between traces because of higher voltages. But someone who does one or two tube amps a year may well not want to put out an additional $400 for the software. $25 to $100 would be a lot more palatable.
BN: When BetaNews last spoke to you in November 2004, you said another standalone release of IE was not necessary because of the community of add-ons available (like those for tabbed browsing). Now, IE7 is building in a lot of new native functionality within the browser. Why the change?
I found this question either naive or absurd. I'm not sure which.
This is Microsoft's MO. They've been doing this for years. A prime example was in the early to mid 80s when some MS VP told Information Week (I think that's who he told) that MS would *never* build in a TCP/IP stack, because that would destroy the third parties who'd already done that work. He went on and on. And of course within a short time, MS started shipping Windows with a TCP/IP stack. Or go back to almost anything in the Office suite. ``Oh, no. We just want to sell you the OS. And a compiler. The other vendors like PeachCalc and Lotus will always be our choice for those types of apps.'' (Not an actual quote, just the concept from such quotes many years ago.)
Frankly, whenever I see such statements from MS, I take it as a declaration that exactly what they say won't happen is exactly what to look for over the next 12 to 18 months. I wish I'd thought to start playing the market based on this back in the 70s. But it's not too late. Just buy stock in people selling MS add-ons, and sell a few months after MS promises the world they'll never do that themselves.
At home:
- 500MHz K6 as router running Freesco (it was $5)
- 500MHz K6 with RAID5 IDE drives as file/print/scanner server
running RH9 (cost, $40 total)
- dual 1800+ Athlon main desktop running SL4 ($150 or so)
- 1200+ AMD something as another desktop running SL4 (cost $50)
- HP SCSI scanner
- middle orf the road Epson printer
- 350MHz Dell Latitude laptop running Win98 for specialized apps
not available on Linux (cost $200 4+ years ago)
All that was bought surplus. Monitors bought new and not included. I have everything on hefty APC BackUps or SmartUps which were bought refurb from APC or new. A couple of basic SMC 10/100 switches bought new. Earthlink cable via TW/RR.
I have a 300MHz PII RM server I bought used from Berkeley Communications at a local colo as my web/email/DNS/etc server. I'm probably going to switch to a virtual server through some provider running Linux virtual servers.
Pretty wimpy by geek standards? I don't care. It does what we need it to do. It's solid. It's fast enough for us.
Would I love to have a bunch of rackmount servers like at work? Not really. One dual Opteron from Penguin Computing would be nice, but I don't need it at any level, so I'm not about to spend 2K+ on it.
I agree that technology is not to blame. Society is to blame. The education system has become a joke. Every day, less kids are motivated to learn. Every day, less kids are motivated to care. Every day, more kids are convinced that (a) nothing matters, (b) there is no right and wrong, and (c) everything should be handed to them.
It's nowhere near all of them. Yet. Speaking as someone who has been working with teenagers for 15+ years and as soemone who has been very involved in his childrens' education from their birth onward, the amazing thing is not how many kids have bad grammar and spelling skills; it's how many don't. Scary? Yes. Amazing? No.
I used computers and early networks when a 300 baud modem was a big deal. Believe me, I spent plenty of time using "computer shorthand" such as LOL, ROTFLMBO, "u" and so forth. In fact, as a geek kids, friends and I used similar conventions to write quick, small notes. Somehow we still learned proper spelling and grammar, because we were motivated. Our families, the schools, and society all helped motivate us. That occurs far, far less today.
I can spell just fine. I never learned to type, though. 8^(
When I buy systems for our compute farm here at work, I tend to lean towards AMD. At least that was the case in the past. Now I simply will *not* buy anything with Intel in it-- processor, chipset, whatever-- if there is any rational alternative.
``it didn't really matter who bought Siebel -- layoffs were inevitable.... do you really think people who had been working for Tom Siebel were worried about something like losing their jobs?
That doesn't quite jive with this:
``The majority of the cuts will be Oracle people, not Siebel.''
I left my first f/t software job, where seniority had given me the best office after VPs, for a 10% pay increase and cutting back to 50 hours a week. We'd had our first child; and money and time at home were more important than office space. That was about 21 years ago.
I'd lop off maybe $2K a year to get a windowed office with a decent view now, but that's definitely less than 10% of what I make today! And I wouldn't give more than that to get a primo office.
Slashdot Mirror
They didn't say "only buy from established, known companies".
They said that when you *do* bbuy from other companies, don't be surprised if you lose your money.
It's a risk. The problem is that we live in a society that doesn't want to acknowledge, or even allow, risks. Risks aren't necessarily bad. Sometimes taking them is the best thing you can do.
But be alert, determine the risk, and decide if it's worth it to you.
I want to be able to turn a knob and set how much light gets through the windows. I want this per window, with a master for each wall, a master for each room, and a master for the house.
I *don't* want my appliances to talk to me. Save that for Disneyland. Or blind people. Or people much geekier than me.
A greenhouse style back porch with variable tint windows as above, plus the ability to push a button to open or close the windows, preferably directionally (like vertical blinds) to either catch or block breezes. Full climate control for when the weather's lousy. I'd actually like a small one of these off the master BR, and a larger one that goes the full back of the house. Hot tubs in each, at floor level, with retractable lids that look like the floor and are sturdy enough to jump or dance on.
How about an indoor lap pool?
Everything else I thought of off the top of my head has been mentioned (audio/video/data everywhere, etc).
Except...
If you can get me a positronic core to run the house, complete with holgram that follows me around when I want to talk with it, but that *won't* end up with a misguided savior complex, so much the better.
To misquote the dead professor in _I, Robot_ (the movie):
``That, detective, is the wrong question.''
Why *should* I take up ebooks? What is the compelling case? Until there is a compelling case *for* switching, the reasons against aren't crucial, IMO.
I don't see the compelling case. There are environmental issues, but the biggest ones there have more to do with our book economy, which encourages inrcedible amounts of waste. If we only printed books that were worth having, instead of mass marketing thousands of worthless titles a month and having to dispose of the rest, there would be *far* less waste. (Yes, I realize we can have a huge debate about how to determine what books should be printed, and that ebooks would solve this; my point is simply that there are other ways to solve it as well.)
For me, personally? I like having some things online. But sometimes I want those things in paper as well as online, so offer me paper, digital, or both.
When ebooks have the convenience and price of paper books, ask me again.
Having said that, I will now answer the wrong question. 8^) Not exhaustively, but just some major issues for me off the top of my head.
I can read a book in the bathtub. Are any of the ebook readers waterproof? None I've heard of. (Then again, I don't pay that much attention. That compelling case thing.)
I can drop a book almost anywhere but into a fire or vat of acid and it'll survive. But the ebook isn't as hardy. (At least anything I can afford.)
I can loan, give or resell *any* book easily. With the legal nigtmares today over DRM, copyrights and everything else, I have no ieda what I can do with ebooks, and the rules change from title to title.
I don't get eyestrain from spending hours with books, as a rule. I might get a headache or cramps form sitting in one position, but that's easily solved. That's not the case with any sort of digital display I have used.
In many cases, I can spend more money and buy a book that should outlast several generaltions of my family and appeals to several of my senses, or I can buy a cheap paperback that will fall apart after a couple of readings and has less sensory appeal, or I can buy something inbetween. I like that flexibility.
I like the smell of a new book. Build that into your reader, OK?
A book is stone simple for serial reading, and not that hard (if less handy) for jumping around in. Any ebook UI will have to be as easy to use for the base case (serial reading, saving your spot, etc), and better for the other case (reread earlier section, find random stuff). Both are fairly easy to do, but being able to do both well and easily isn't as easy.
I can grab a book to use as a writing surface. I do this a lot, as it turns out.
I can take a book almost anywhere. I can read almost anywhere. While there might be places an ebook works better (rainproof it and you will have started on that compelling case), there are still plenty a book wins for me. Remember that bathtub thing? And a book won't normally slow you down getting through airport security, whereas electronic devices sometimes do (I have experience with this!)
In short, while there are a couple of advantages to ebooks, they don't even begin to make a compelling case for me. Perhaps the above will help you understand why.
I don't know that google is taking the right approach, but I am 100% convinced that the traditional approach is wrong these days. The market is too focused on short term profits. It's like a male dog in the midst of hundreds of female dogs in heat. It forgets about everything but, "I want some! Right now!" and it'll starve to death in its lust-- and kill anything that tries to get in its way in the meantime.
If we had reasonable analysts in a reasonable system giving reasonable LONG TERM analysis, the old system would work. But the rules have changed, and the old system is driving itself to destruction under the new rules.
Until someone comes up with a reasonable approach, and the shareholders start acting responsibly for the long term, I think Google's protest is an effective way to go.
Meanwhile, I'm starting to look at the average street analyst the way I do at the average lawyer who goes sniffing around for PC lawsuit material.
Yum.
But even more importantly, how much for a mouse than learns Visual Basic as its first programming language?
But what I *really* want is a USB mouse that will go where I tell it to and click itself. How much for that?
It's pretty pathetic the way partisan politics sucks people into blindness. As other people have noted, it's been going on for years. Clinton's administration attacked our rights in certain ways. Bush's administration attacks them in others, sometimes building on Clinton's, sometimes in new ways. But it predates both of those.
A lot of people got excited by the first Mr. Bush's comments on the New World Order. A bunch of other people got excited by Mr. Cinton's comments on the New World Order. I looked at the fact that two people and parties who are allegedly diametrically opposed on so many things agreed, and got extremely nervous.
I can watch movies about secret government agencies and enjoy them as movies. I can even laugh at the funny ones. But deep inside, I always wonder whether they aren't really helping the true enemies of freedom, because of our tendancy to then relegate such concepts to movie-land.
I have no idea whether it's a political conspiracy in the traditional sense, or just a mixture of well-intentioned but foolish do-gooders and power-mad dictators. In the end, it won't really matter. We'll all just smile and moo and baaa and pretend to be happy, because the alternative is death.
As important as I think the second amendment is to freedom in the USA, I have serious doubts it will be relevant much longer. At which point you can bet your bippy the same will be true of the others.
Such competitions certainly don't "prove" a system is secure.
But they do help in some situations. For instance, one of the things MS supporters constantly use as a defense is that the other OSes are only "safe" because nobody bothers to try and hack them.
Contests focus attention and effort on these systems. If they survive, it does undermine the original claim, which is merely an opinion to begin with, although often treated as cold, hard, fact.
First, compare the true cost of living with their COL adjustment (if any).
Then look into what it will take to live the way *you* want to there. If you're moving from say, NYC to SF, it's probably not drastically different. But if you're moving from somewhere like Augusta or Raleigh (or to some extent Atlanta), and want to live anywhere near the country, or have a decent sized place, you're in for a shock.
Check into transportation issues (parking, mass transit, etc). Consider local laws (gun ownership, vehicle inspections, home schooling, pets, whatever matters to you.)
If you have any odd medical issues, fine out what the local hospitals and doctors ar eliek. Don't just assume everything will be the same.
The vast majority of tech support these days is *already*, "Reboot the box."
With your proposed thin client, that would have a much better chance of working!
No, I believe he means that people who might not otherwise STEAL are now STEALING.
They're jackasses at best.
The fact that the people they're stealing from others who range from clueless to idiots doesn'tc hange the fact that they are stealing.
If you want to run an open WAP, great. DO it in a way everyone knows it's open, and then nobody is stealing, only you are paying, you feel good, they get free access, everyone is happy. Nothing wrong with that.
But there's precious little moral difference between "piggybacking" (how wonderful it is to create new terms, or usage for old terms, that makes crime and immorality sound OK!) and my "borrowing" your lawn mower, or boinking your spouse, or siphoning some of your gas out of your car. Or using your bus fare, or taking your bike, or otherwise impacting the cost of your getting to work. (Assuming you work. How would I know?)
The whole analysts thing has become a joke. It's all BS. A huge portion of the economy turns on whether some yahoo (not Yahoo) correctly predicted to within 0.1% the income and profits of a handful of companies. It's absurd.
I hope google tells them to crawl back into their caves with their pet mammoths.
I didn't see where she refused to pay or donate. She merely said that $400 was too much for what she does (occasional user). $400 is a bit much for, say, a student or casual hobbyist, and not everything will fit on teh tiny board the free version handles. For instance, a fairly simple tube amp needs a large board because you need bigger traces for the current, more space for the larger components, and more board space between traces because of higher voltages. But someone who does one or two tube amps a year may well not want to put out an additional $400 for the software. $25 to $100 would be a lot more palatable.
BN: When BetaNews last spoke to you in November 2004, you said another standalone release of IE was not necessary because of the community of add-ons available (like those for tabbed browsing). Now, IE7 is building in a lot of new native functionality within the browser. Why the change?
I found this question either naive or absurd. I'm not sure which.
This is Microsoft's MO. They've been doing this for years. A prime example was in the early to mid 80s when some MS VP told Information Week (I think that's who he told) that MS would *never* build in a TCP/IP stack, because that would destroy the third parties who'd already done that work. He went on and on. And of course within a short time, MS started shipping Windows with a TCP/IP stack. Or go back to almost anything in the Office suite. ``Oh, no. We just want to sell you the OS. And a compiler. The other vendors like PeachCalc and Lotus will always be our choice for those types of apps.'' (Not an actual quote, just the concept from such quotes many years ago.)
Frankly, whenever I see such statements from MS, I take it as a declaration that exactly what they say won't happen is exactly what to look for over the next 12 to 18 months. I wish I'd thought to start playing the market based on this back in the 70s. But it's not too late. Just buy stock in people selling MS add-ons, and sell a few months after MS promises the world they'll never do that themselves.
At home:
- 500MHz K6 as router running Freesco (it was $5)
- 500MHz K6 with RAID5 IDE drives as file/print/scanner server
running RH9 (cost, $40 total)
- dual 1800+ Athlon main desktop running SL4 ($150 or so)
- 1200+ AMD something as another desktop running SL4 (cost $50)
- HP SCSI scanner
- middle orf the road Epson printer
- 350MHz Dell Latitude laptop running Win98 for specialized apps
not available on Linux (cost $200 4+ years ago)
All that was bought surplus. Monitors bought new and not included.
I have everything on hefty APC BackUps or SmartUps which were
bought refurb from APC or new. A couple of basic SMC 10/100
switches bought new. Earthlink cable via TW/RR.
I have a 300MHz PII RM server I bought used from Berkeley
Communications at a local colo as my web/email/DNS/etc server.
I'm probably going to switch to a virtual server through some
provider running Linux virtual servers.
Pretty wimpy by geek standards? I don't care. It does what
we need it to do. It's solid. It's fast enough for us.
Would I love to have a bunch of rackmount servers like at
work? Not really. One dual Opteron from Penguin Computing
would be nice, but I don't need it at any level, so I'm not
about to spend 2K+ on it.
Or is it just that you're whipped, and your other half won't let you have what you want?
Whaytever that may be...
I had a chance at a free 11/780 years ago. I wanted it soooo bad. (Still do).
But I couldn't afford the wiring and A/C changes, much less the electric bill, at the time.
I really, really want some sort of VAX running VMS.
And remember, it's not just the power tu run the systems, but the power to cool them as well.
Unless you live in Alaska, just open the windows, and wear a parka in the server room.
I agree that technology is not to blame. Society is to blame. The education system has become a joke. Every day, less kids are motivated to learn. Every day, less kids are motivated to care. Every day, more kids are convinced that (a) nothing matters, (b) there is no right and wrong, and (c) everything should be handed to them.
It's nowhere near all of them. Yet. Speaking as someone who has been working with teenagers for 15+ years and as soemone who has been very involved in his childrens' education from their birth onward, the amazing thing is not how many kids have bad grammar and spelling skills; it's how many don't. Scary? Yes. Amazing? No.
I used computers and early networks when a 300 baud modem was a big deal. Believe me, I spent plenty of time using "computer shorthand" such as LOL, ROTFLMBO, "u" and so forth. In fact, as a geek kids, friends and I used similar conventions to write quick, small notes. Somehow we still learned proper spelling and grammar, because we were motivated. Our families, the schools, and society all helped motivate us. That occurs far, far less today.
I can spell just fine. I never learned to type, though. 8^(
What about the sleaze factor? Intel is winning that one hands down.
As if enough things in my life don't already find ways to hide in dark corners?
``Honey, where's the hammer?''
``Oddly enough, when I was vacuuming, I found it under the desk in the bedroom. I could have sworn it was scurrying.''
I degaussed the monitor on the cart in the computer room and reset every processor in the compute farm!
When I buy systems for our compute farm here at work, I tend to lean towards AMD. At least that was the case in the past. Now I simply will *not* buy anything with Intel in it-- processor, chipset, whatever-- if there is any rational alternative.
I encourage others to do the same.
``it didn't really matter who bought Siebel -- layoffs were inevitable.... do you really think people who had been working for Tom Siebel were worried about something like losing their jobs?
That doesn't quite jive with this:
``The majority of the cuts will be Oracle people, not Siebel.''
I left my first f/t software job, where seniority had given me the best office after VPs, for a 10% pay increase and cutting back to 50 hours a week. We'd had our first child; and money and time at home were more important than office space. That was about 21 years ago.
I'd lop off maybe $2K a year to get a windowed office with a decent view now, but that's definitely less than 10% of what I make today! And I wouldn't give more than that to get a primo office.
Dare I hope that google has a bunch of patents on this, and a trademark on "Google-sense"?
And that their lawyers are all over Amazon?
That wouldn't be evil.
It would be Justice.