I missed the part where corporations were defined as "a person".
You sure did.
A quick look at dict.org turned up the following legal definition of "corporation" from 1856:
CORPORATION. An aggregate corporation is an ideal body, created by law,
composed of individuals united under a common name, the members of which
succeed each other, so that the body continues the same, notwithstanding the
changes of the individuals who compose it, and which for certain purposes is
considered as a natural person.
(Emphasis added.)
One of the points of forming a corporation is to have a virtual "legal person" that won't change when you hire a new CEO...
I found out the hard way that credit bureaus do not use your Social Security number to identify you by default. They use your first and last name, together with your address history -- all the places you've ever lived -- and the match doesn't have to be exact.
If you happen to be a "Junior" and your credit history shows that you lived at the same address as your father ("Senior"), you really need to know this, because there's a good chance that your credit histories will become confused.
You can call and have the credit reporting bureaus add an "easily confused name" flag to your report. Then, and only then, will they require the Social Security number on reported data to match the one on the report they're filing the data into.
Otherwise, you may start wondering why your credit history is showing your Dad's debts...
It's a good idea... so good that it's been on the market for a long, long time.
Go to your local hardware or electric store and look for a timer switch. The typical model has a mechanical twist knob like an old-fashioned kitchen timer. Twist the knob to the number of minutes you want the lights on, and it counts down. They're often used in bathrooms for vent fans or built-in electric heat lamps, but they'll work just fine with lights.
Better yet, install motion-sensor switches where appropriate, so the lights are on when you're in the room...
The most likely reason for your heat to fail and cause plumbing problems would be a power outage. If a storm comes through and takes out the power, all your technology is probably for naught. Most broadband systems can't ride out the kinds of outages the Northeast gets from a good ice storm.
Based on my family's experience with a vacation home in New Hampshire, I recommend:
Find a neighbor you trust who has a clear line of sight to at least one of your house's windows. If you don't have such a neighbor, obtain one, or move to a neighborhood with trustworthy people.
Go to the hardware store and buy three things: A Honeywell "Winter Watchman" or equivalent, a clamp-on work light, and a red light bulb. The "Winter Watchman" is a simple device with a thermostat that plugs into the wall and turns on power its socket when the temperature is below the set point.
Set up the equipment where it won't be obvious when turned off, but will be clearly visible to the neighbor when on.
Ask the neighbor to watch your house. Tell them about the light. Ask them to check the house if the light goes on, or if there's a prolonged power outage. Give them a spare key to facilitate this, so they can let a repairman in if necessary. This works best if the neighbor is on the same power-utility circuit as you, so they know when your power is out.
Take appropriate safeguards anyway, including draining your fresh water supply, adding antifreeze to all the drain traps in the house, and having your furnace inspected and cleaned at the start of each heating season. Don't forget to have your mail and newspapers held, and call the local police station and let them know you'll be gone -- they will usually keep an eye out for suspicious activity. Let them know your neighbor has approved access.
No computerized McGuffin will be able to handle the range of scenarios that a good neighbor can...
The thought in my mind is... is Apple thinking of making a "game console," or is the rumor based on an idea that Apple might be making a living-room console that also plays games?
If the iTV had even rudimentary game playing ability, it would be one more feature that could entice buyers. If it were relatively easy for Apple to implement, it would make a lot of sense. At the announced price level, the iTV is close to being an impulse buy for people with disposable income. Perhaps a game feature could be the one thing that makes some people say "why not?"
I don't think I'm the only person who has ever seen something in the store, found it intriguing but not quite worth buying, and then noticed some "extra feature" that made me reconsider. "Oh... it does that too? Well... that might be worth it, then."
It doesn't have to be as good as the Wii or the PS3. It just has to play games that people find fun at the right time.
I own a Nintendo DS. I don't play with it nearly as often as I play Solitare on my Blackberry. The DS is a much better game machine than the Blackberry. However, I usually have my Blackberry with me when I'm stuck in a waiting room, and the DS isn't something I carry around all the time. It doesn't matter that the Blackberry is a poor gaming machine; it's entertaining enough at the right time.
There are a lot of people who would not buy a "game console" who would play the occasional game if it were available on the iTV they bought to watch movies or listen to their iTunes library. Even if the graphics were on par with the Atari 2600. (How many Atari Flashback2 consoles has Target sold, I wonder?)
In many cases, the HUMONGOUS BIG FONT price on the item is the price after the rebate -- not what you actually have to pay to the cashier. This is illegal in some states (as it should be), but when it's not, the retailers love to do it.
Connecticut has it very right on this one.
In Connecticut, you cannot "do the math" for the consumer in your advertisement. If you have a rebate, it must be advertised using smaller type than the price the consumer will pay in the store, and you cannot advertise a price "after rebate."
If you do advertise a "price after rebate" in Connecticut, you must sell the product to the customer at that price, before rebate.
Amazon.com put a flyer in the Hartford, CT paper a few years ago with price-after-rebate items. Of course, they didn't offer up the correct price when I visited their site. I contacted customer support and it took them several days to reply... saying that I could email customer support to order those items at the legally-required price. I never saw another newspaper insert from them again while I lived in CT.
I wonder if companies are choosing to stop using rebates in part because of the costs and risks associated with their ads. If you have to make seperate ads for Connecticut and a few other states, and make sure you never send the wrong PDF to the wrong state for printing... That's a lot of risk for small reward.
I wish New York would adopt this sort of rebate-pricing law.
Ah, but if you read all of the statute, you'll read the part that says
"Oral communication" means any oral communication uttered by a person exhibiting an expectation that such communication is not subject to interception under circumstances justifying such expectation.
I wonder... if you're standing in front of a surveilliance camera, on someone's front porch next to the street, and there are signs pointing out the camera... are you really justified in believing that the camera couldn't possibly be recording you?
Mac OS X has used CUPS for some time. The Web interface is still there. However, you never have to know that CUPS is there. There's a Mac OS X GUI layer over it that makes printer setup pretty painless.
In fact, because of the integration of CUPS and ZeroConf on OS X, for most printers there's no printer setup. You plug the printer in, turn it on, OS X automatically sees it and sets it up.
This is particularly cool when the printer in question is actually directly connected to another non-Apple UNIX box that's running CUPS, with SLP turned on...
CUPS itself is great, as far as it goes. However, that last user-interface layer is lacking for the OSS GUIs.
As a Mac user, the idea of a computer being unable to play an essentially unlimited number of simultaneous sounds is just foreign to me. I don't even think about it. I expect that I can leave iTunes playing music while playing a game that makes all sorts of noises and still hear alerts from iChat when I get an IM. There's nothing to configure, it just plain works.
The only time I've been amazed by sound on OS X was when I first played with Soundtrack. This program lets you create professional-quality music by mixing up to 99 tracks of layered audio. Not only does it mix them in realtime, but it can apply advanced audio effects in realtime as well.
Not once in the process do you have to care about audio hardware setup. Whatever you have plugged in -- analog speakers, USB speakers, S/PDIF -- the appropriate audio comes out of it.
Meanwhile, you need to spend an afternoon to get open-source UNIX to reliably make a sine-wave beep.
Macintosh is even worse: most of the USB hardware I have doesn't even have drivers for Macintosh, so it won't work at all. For supposedly supported hardware, the track record is not much better than on Windows. The only thing that I found works reliably on Macintosh is all-Apple hardware.
So, please stop spreading FUD...
Who's spreading FUD?
True, Macs work best with Apple hardware... which makes sense, since that means they've been validated to work together from day one.
Since most Macs sold today already come with 802.11g support built in, and those that don't already have the antennas and only need an AirPort Express card, who needs a USB 802.11 adapter? Why waste the port, have a dongle sticking out of the computer, and deal with the extra overhead?
One of the ways Macs outshine the low-cost competition is that most of the things you need are standard. Take the iMac: Gigabit ethernet? Standard. Optical audio? Standard. FireWire for your camcorder? Standard. 802.11g and Bluetooth? Standard.
As for third-party USB hardware, I've not had a problem. My Macs have lots of USB accessories:
USB speakers (harmon/kardon SoundSticks
Logitech mice
Contour ShuttleXpress
Belkin Nostromo n52
Palm cradle
cheapie GE TetraHub from Target
Lexar flash media reader
HP multifunction device
Targus numeric keypad
Saitek joystick
Gravis gamepad
Wacom tablet
IOgear KVM
Logitech keyboard
APC UPS
The only thing in the list that doesn't work reliably is the Targus keypad, which seems to produce some nonstandard keycodes that confuse OS X 10.4. It's not listed as Mac-compatible. It does work, except that the Num Lock key must be on to type numbers and off to hit Enter. I suspect that's the keypad's fault, not Apple's.
So what's unreliable? A lot of USB stuff doesn't have Mac drivers because it's not needed -- the Mac has built-in support for much of it. Heck, my APC UPS came with a Mac driver that was unnecessary, because the OS automatically recognizes it and does a better job managing it than the APC software does!
I've tried to get some of this stuff to work on my FreeBSD and Linux boxes. It didn't work, even when it was supposed to work. Open source UNIX-alikes will never gain much market-share so long as the programmers maintain the "it works for me, I don't know why you're so picky/you didn't read the manual/write your own fix" attitude.
I wonder if it's similar to the arrangement on VoIP phones and adapters -- you plug your router into the input, and your other devices into the output(s). Then the VoIP device -- or, in this conjecture, the PS3 -- can suck down all the bandwidth it needs and give what's left to everything else, instead of having to duke it out for the bits.
I wonder if it will come with a firewall/router/WAP function.
- unix printing still sucks big time (see 'vendor support')
This much is solved fairly easily by installing CUPS.
Most UNIXes still come with lp or lpr printing solutions, which were great when you had an honest-to-God line printer -- a printer that just printed line after line of straight text -- but are woefully inadequate for modern page printers with their page description languages.
There are all sorts of hacks to get around this. There are filters, once designed to massage ASCII text, now used to try and re-encode stuff into appropriate PDLs. There are things like JetDirect (eew).
CUPS does a much better job of making printing transparent. By converting everything to one PDL (PostScript), and then converting it to the printer's native language if required, everything gets treated evenly. There are lots of drivers. I find it far, far easier to administrate than lp and lpr.
I find it useful to monitor which technologies Apple integrates into Mac OS X, and then try installing them on my other UNIX systems. That's how I discovered CUPS. Apple has cherry-picked best-of-breed open source for OS X.
Maybe if Apple brought out one or two low-low-end products that could compete, price-wise, with all the mass-market, Windows-running junk out there, they could really pick up some market share
Let's reduce the verbiage in that sentence:
Maybe if Apple brought out... products that could compete... with... junk, they could... pick up some market share.
Perhaps even reduce it to
Maybe if Apple brought out junk, they could pick up market share.
Apple's a profitable company. Their stock is doing quite well considering the state of the industry. They've gotten to this point by releasing high-quality products with excellent design. Meanwhile, how are the "junk" makers doing? The various PC vendors are all trying to eke out a living on thin margins. Some are doing better than others; often, the ones doing better have other businesses to keep them afloat.
Maybe Apple could gain market share briefly by selling junk. It wouldn't gain repeat customers, and it wouldn't work for long.
The whole point of the iPod-to-Mac phenomenon is that many people do not want junk. If they did, Creative or iRiver or Nike or Sony would hold the portable-MP3 crown. People buy the iPod because it's anything but junk. They then wonder, "say, if this iPod isn't junk, I wonder if Macs are not-junk as well." They go to an Apple Store, and find that Macs aren't junk. They're made with good, solid design and parts, instead of bargain-basement components.
Macs may appear to be more expensive, but that's only if you're willing to accept junk. Some people have learned the lesson that you get what you pay for -- that $5 toaster won't last as long as the $30 name-brand one, the free-after-rebate CD-R won't hold a readable backup anywhere near as long as a $1.50 medical-grade CD-R, the car doesn't always start on a cold morning when you pass by the Mobil to fill up at Jim-Bob's Gaseteria.
In short, to some people, "no hassles" is worth some extra money.
There are laws in the U.S. about headlamp brightness. The problem is, there really aren't good laws about where that brightness should be.
If you compare the low beams of a traditional American car and a European car, you'll find that the European car is less dazzling to oncoming traffic, but seems to put out more useful light when you drive it. That's because the American D.O.T. headlamp specification is mainly concerned with brightness, whereas the European headlamp specs also specify the light pattern the headlamp should generate.
If you've ever driven a first-generation Dodge Intrepid, you know just how truly horrid an American car's headlamps can be and still be legal for sale.
This isn't always a good idea. If you're like me and live in an area where the humidty is extremely high, it's a good idea to only use an air compressor that removes the water vapor from the air before spitting it out.
That's not a very good idea, either.
Dry room air forced through a nozzle at high pressure is a wonderful way to generate a static-electricity charge. Dry air holds the charge particularly well, because there's no water suspended in the air to bleed off the charge. Chips don't like a bath of static electricity.
The gas in the cans is designed not to generate a static charge.
This is also why you should only use a vacuum designed for use on computers to vacuum out a computer. These vacuums have anti-static features, such as a carbon-impregnated (conductive) wand and hose to draw off static charges. Your typical household vacuum instead has a rubber belt being driven at high speeds around two smooth metal shafts. This is almost exactly like a Van de Graff Generator, a device used for generating a massive static electricity charge.
Of course, your average nail-gun compressor will spew a stream of liquid at first if you haven't drained it after every use, or if it's really humid out. Increase the density of air and you reduce its water-carrying capacity. The water gets wrung out of the air inside the compressor, pools up, and spurts out with the air...
Those little cans of compressed air aren't just for convenience.
Under Connecticut law, it's illegal to advertise a "price after rebate" in a print ad or in a store. You can have rebates, but you can't do the math for the customer. There's also a limit to the type sizes of the rebate amount. If a store does advertise a "price after rebate," they must sell the item to you for that price -- before rebate.
It's a simple law and it makes comparison shopping so much easier...
I actually caught Amazon.com out on this law once. They had an ad flyer in the Hartford Courant, and obviously their legal department was snoozing, because it was chock full of "price after rebate." Of course, the website has no way to order it for that price... I wrote 'em a letter and got a sheepish email back a few days later saying that they could manually process the transaction at that price if I wished... Funny, I haven't seen an Amazon.com print ad since then.
It also makes for some amusing page-layout choices. Often, you can tell where the "national" flyer has had "FREE after rebate!" ripped out and awkwardly replaced with "LOW PRICE after rebate!" to fly under the law...
If your printer doesn't support PostScript, CUPS gives it a PostScript interpreter.
CUPS automatically converts your print jobs from a wide range of formats to PostScript.
CUPS supports PPD files. That means it supports all the special features of your printer. If your printer isn't PostScript, it can generate a PPD allowing access to the printer's raster-driver features.
Your Windows and Mac boxes can print to your CUPS-attached printer using PostScript, too.
It supports ZeroConf, so when you add a new CUPS-equipped system to your existing network, it self-configures all the advertised print queues you already have.
It not only speaks LPR, but also HP JetDirect and IPP. You can actually get printer status.
Because everything gets converted to PostScript, you can easily change font options, page layout, etc. from the command line.
All your UNIX boxes now configure printers the same way. The print commands are all the same. Consistency is good when you have many types of system!
Convenient browser-based GUI, or traditional CLI configuration.
Better security.
There's other features, too. Those are the ones I can think of, off the top of my head. It brings UNIX printing out of the teletype era and up to the level of Mac OS and Windows.
I'd never paid attention to CUPS until Apple slid it under my Mac OS X installation. Once I took a look at it, I really came to appreciate it. Now I put it on all my UNIX boxes. I've even convinced my workplace to adopt it.
Once the software is installed, it's dead easy to set up, especially if you're using a recent PostScript-capable printer. Most recent printers support Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) directly on their network card. CUPS speaks IPP and PostScript natively. If you set up Service Location Protocol (SLP) support, you don't even have to configure the printer -- it configures itself. There's a reason Apple adopted this software!
Add the gimp-print driver package, and you can print to just about anything.
It's a far sight better than dealing with the various filters in BSD lpr, and immeasurably better than Solaris' print subsystem.
Keep dreaming. Not only do you have to pay New York state and county sales tax on any purchase you make within the state, resident or not, but if you are a New York state resident and you buy something outside of NYS, you are legally obligated to report the purchase and pay a use tax equal to the difference between the sales tax where you bought the thing and the sales tax where you live. This year, there's even a spot on the income-tax form where you're supposed to report it.
Connecticut does the same thing.
Sure, you can just not say anything. However, most states have reciprocal agreements with their neighbors. If Connecticut audits an appliance store, they're likely to forward a copy of any out-of-state receipts to New York's tax department. You can get away with a trip to Target, but if you buy a big-ticket item across state lines, there's a good chance that the budget-starved states will come looking for you.
I've heard that, at one time, Connecticut would actually have revenue agents watching the border at certain points looking for people with Connecticut plates and large appliance boxes re-entering the state...
The biggest thing that Kodak has going for it right now is the name "Kodak." It's synonymous with photography. Everyone knows what a "Kodak moment" is. There's no such thing as a "Fuji moment" or an "Olympus moment."
That said, Kodak hasn't leveraged their name very well. They were slow to produce an inkjet paper for photos. "Printed on Kodak paper" has long been a focus of their advertising as a source of quality. Getting a slice of the home consumables market should've been a no-brainer, but I think they waited too long on that one.
What's worse is that they waited way too long to get into the digital "film" market. It was just last month that I first saw a Kodak-branded memory card for sale at a local drugstore. That should've been a total no-brainer. For anyone over the age of 40, given a choice between a brand you'd never heard of, and Kodak... which memory card would you buy?
Heck, they let Lexar get away with trademark dilution. For a while now, Lexar has been selling their memory cards in Kodak-yellow packages that are about the same size and shape as a Kodak retail film box. It confused me a little when I first saw it... a less technically-astute and observant person might easily think it was a Kodak product.
Others have commented on Kodak's "Gillette model" business plan, making money on the consumables. There's still money in digital consumables. Kodak's brand name should give them a huge chunk of the market, if they don't muff it up. So far, they've conceded that market by default, I think...
The last one was, I believe, Advantix. The theme was always the same: Kodak wanted again to lock-in consumers with propietary films, and 35mm users weren't buying.
You might want to get your history straight on that one. The Advanced Photo System (APS) was jointly developed by Kodak and Fuji, along with camera makers like Canon, Minolta, and Nikon. Kodak's APS products sell under the Advantix brand name. That's hardly proprietary.
I think APS was an attempt to stave off digital photography. The companies involved realized that 35mm point-and-shoot cameras are frustrating in many ways.
APS attempted to address the limitations of 35mm for point-and-shoot users. No threading the film -- it's in a drop-in cartridge that self-loads. No negatives that need to be handled with care -- they come back in the film cartridge. You get index prints. You can have three sizes of print. On the better cameras, information about the conditions under which the camera took the photo are recorded on a magnetic data layer so the film processor doesn't have to guess what it should look like. Using 24mm film instead of 32mm allowed for less-bulky cameras, and technology developed for motion-picture film kept the pictures about the same quality as consumer-grade 32mm film.
I think the biggest problem with APS was that the product rollout was botched. You could find the cameras, and the film... but you couldn't find one-hour developing. I was living in Kodak's home city, Rochester NY, when APS was introduced. It was months before there was a one-hour photo shop in Rochester that could process APS. Then there was one. Just one. It took a while for it to spread.
Worse, the first "minilabs" for one-hour prints didn't include the magnetic data exchange feature. They were modifications of 32mm film processors -- APS film uses the same C-41 chemical process -- sometimes retrofit to existing machines. Without the data exchange, the photos from the more-expensive APS cameras really weren't any better than a cheaper 32mm point-and-shoot.
Of course, people in the target market for APS couldn't care less about magnetic data exchange. They just wanted good pictures, and quick. Sure, you could get excellent pictures by sending them to Kodak processing, but in the market at the time, it was all about the one-hour photo.
Even with mail-away processing, APS developing was at a premium. When the product was introduced, you paid a starter fee per roll, and then there was a per-print charge based on the size of the print. You could select from 4x6, 4x7, or 4x11.5 inch prints when you took the picture -- and the developer would charge a different price for each size print. You'd drop the film off and have no idea what it would cost until it came back. Eventually, developing moved to a flat-fee-per-roll system, but perhaps too late... and it was still at a premium compared to an equivalent roll of 35mm.
APS is a good system. It's not for everyone, but for the majority of people, who just want to take the occasional photo of a vacation or family event with minimal fuss, it's very well designed. The cameras and film are great products. It's the lack of attention to the crucial last step -- developing -- that I believe killed APS.
I'm peeved that nobody has produced a mouse/trackball with a hat switch.
Somebody has made a mouse with a switch like you desire. IBM makes a mouse with a ScrollPoint on top. You can scroll vertically or horizontally. You can also click with it, although that does require some practice, patience, and coordination.
The highest-rated PBS program in the nation right now is UConn Women's Basketball on Connecticut Public Television. It brings in tons of cash from donations -- enough that CPTV paid $600,000 for rights to this season's games, and the contract calls for that yearly fee to go up to $1,000,000 in a few years.
The games have "media time-outs" like network sports broadcasts. There are 30-second ad spots in these timeouts, as well as the usual pledge nag banners during the game and "pledge breaks" before and after the game and during halftime.
I love watching the Huskies, and if this is what CPTV needs to do in order to keep showing the games, so be it. Still, it shows that public TV isn't immune from "traditional" advertising. It's just that they've chosen to go without the ads in the past. There's nothing stopping them from using more ads in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
You sure did.
A quick look at dict.org turned up the following legal definition of "corporation" from 1856:
(Emphasis added.)
One of the points of forming a corporation is to have a virtual "legal person" that won't change when you hire a new CEO...
I found out the hard way that credit bureaus do not use your Social Security number to identify you by default. They use your first and last name, together with your address history -- all the places you've ever lived -- and the match doesn't have to be exact.
If you happen to be a "Junior" and your credit history shows that you lived at the same address as your father ("Senior"), you really need to know this, because there's a good chance that your credit histories will become confused.
You can call and have the credit reporting bureaus add an "easily confused name" flag to your report. Then, and only then, will they require the Social Security number on reported data to match the one on the report they're filing the data into.
Otherwise, you may start wondering why your credit history is showing your Dad's debts...
It's a good idea... so good that it's been on the market for a long, long time.
Go to your local hardware or electric store and look for a timer switch. The typical model has a mechanical twist knob like an old-fashioned kitchen timer. Twist the knob to the number of minutes you want the lights on, and it counts down. They're often used in bathrooms for vent fans or built-in electric heat lamps, but they'll work just fine with lights.
Better yet, install motion-sensor switches where appropriate, so the lights are on when you're in the room...
The most likely reason for your heat to fail and cause plumbing problems would be a power outage. If a storm comes through and takes out the power, all your technology is probably for naught. Most broadband systems can't ride out the kinds of outages the Northeast gets from a good ice storm.
Based on my family's experience with a vacation home in New Hampshire, I recommend:
No computerized McGuffin will be able to handle the range of scenarios that a good neighbor can...
The thought in my mind is... is Apple thinking of making a "game console," or is the rumor based on an idea that Apple might be making a living-room console that also plays games?
If the iTV had even rudimentary game playing ability, it would be one more feature that could entice buyers. If it were relatively easy for Apple to implement, it would make a lot of sense. At the announced price level, the iTV is close to being an impulse buy for people with disposable income. Perhaps a game feature could be the one thing that makes some people say "why not?"
I don't think I'm the only person who has ever seen something in the store, found it intriguing but not quite worth buying, and then noticed some "extra feature" that made me reconsider. "Oh... it does that too? Well... that might be worth it, then."
It doesn't have to be as good as the Wii or the PS3. It just has to play games that people find fun at the right time.
I own a Nintendo DS. I don't play with it nearly as often as I play Solitare on my Blackberry. The DS is a much better game machine than the Blackberry. However, I usually have my Blackberry with me when I'm stuck in a waiting room, and the DS isn't something I carry around all the time. It doesn't matter that the Blackberry is a poor gaming machine; it's entertaining enough at the right time.
There are a lot of people who would not buy a "game console" who would play the occasional game if it were available on the iTV they bought to watch movies or listen to their iTunes library. Even if the graphics were on par with the Atari 2600. (How many Atari Flashback2 consoles has Target sold, I wonder?)
Connecticut has it very right on this one.
In Connecticut, you cannot "do the math" for the consumer in your advertisement. If you have a rebate, it must be advertised using smaller type than the price the consumer will pay in the store, and you cannot advertise a price "after rebate."
If you do advertise a "price after rebate" in Connecticut, you must sell the product to the customer at that price, before rebate.
Amazon.com put a flyer in the Hartford, CT paper a few years ago with price-after-rebate items. Of course, they didn't offer up the correct price when I visited their site. I contacted customer support and it took them several days to reply... saying that I could email customer support to order those items at the legally-required price. I never saw another newspaper insert from them again while I lived in CT.
I wonder if companies are choosing to stop using rebates in part because of the costs and risks associated with their ads. If you have to make seperate ads for Connecticut and a few other states, and make sure you never send the wrong PDF to the wrong state for printing... That's a lot of risk for small reward.
I wish New York would adopt this sort of rebate-pricing law.
Ah, but if you read all of the statute, you'll read the part that says
I wonder... if you're standing in front of a surveilliance camera, on someone's front porch next to the street, and there are signs pointing out the camera... are you really justified in believing that the camera couldn't possibly be recording you?
Mac OS X has used CUPS for some time. The Web interface is still there. However, you never have to know that CUPS is there. There's a Mac OS X GUI layer over it that makes printer setup pretty painless.
In fact, because of the integration of CUPS and ZeroConf on OS X, for most printers there's no printer setup. You plug the printer in, turn it on, OS X automatically sees it and sets it up.
This is particularly cool when the printer in question is actually directly connected to another non-Apple UNIX box that's running CUPS, with SLP turned on...
CUPS itself is great, as far as it goes. However, that last user-interface layer is lacking for the OSS GUIs.
You couldn't be more wrong about OS X.
As a Mac user, the idea of a computer being unable to play an essentially unlimited number of simultaneous sounds is just foreign to me. I don't even think about it. I expect that I can leave iTunes playing music while playing a game that makes all sorts of noises and still hear alerts from iChat when I get an IM. There's nothing to configure, it just plain works.
The only time I've been amazed by sound on OS X was when I first played with Soundtrack. This program lets you create professional-quality music by mixing up to 99 tracks of layered audio. Not only does it mix them in realtime, but it can apply advanced audio effects in realtime as well.
Not once in the process do you have to care about audio hardware setup. Whatever you have plugged in -- analog speakers, USB speakers, S/PDIF -- the appropriate audio comes out of it.
Meanwhile, you need to spend an afternoon to get open-source UNIX to reliably make a sine-wave beep.
Perhaps you might want to review Apple's overview of OS X 10.4's Core Audio functionality?
Who's spreading FUD?
True, Macs work best with Apple hardware... which makes sense, since that means they've been validated to work together from day one.
Since most Macs sold today already come with 802.11g support built in, and those that don't already have the antennas and only need an AirPort Express card, who needs a USB 802.11 adapter? Why waste the port, have a dongle sticking out of the computer, and deal with the extra overhead?
One of the ways Macs outshine the low-cost competition is that most of the things you need are standard. Take the iMac: Gigabit ethernet? Standard. Optical audio? Standard. FireWire for your camcorder? Standard. 802.11g and Bluetooth? Standard.
As for third-party USB hardware, I've not had a problem. My Macs have lots of USB accessories:
The only thing in the list that doesn't work reliably is the Targus keypad, which seems to produce some nonstandard keycodes that confuse OS X 10.4. It's not listed as Mac-compatible. It does work, except that the Num Lock key must be on to type numbers and off to hit Enter. I suspect that's the keypad's fault, not Apple's.
So what's unreliable? A lot of USB stuff doesn't have Mac drivers because it's not needed -- the Mac has built-in support for much of it. Heck, my APC UPS came with a Mac driver that was unnecessary, because the OS automatically recognizes it and does a better job managing it than the APC software does!
I've tried to get some of this stuff to work on my FreeBSD and Linux boxes. It didn't work, even when it was supposed to work. Open source UNIX-alikes will never gain much market-share so long as the programmers maintain the "it works for me, I don't know why you're so picky/you didn't read the manual/write your own fix" attitude.
I wonder if it's similar to the arrangement on VoIP phones and adapters -- you plug your router into the input, and your other devices into the output(s). Then the VoIP device -- or, in this conjecture, the PS3 -- can suck down all the bandwidth it needs and give what's left to everything else, instead of having to duke it out for the bits.
I wonder if it will come with a firewall/router/WAP function.
This much is solved fairly easily by installing CUPS.
Most UNIXes still come with lp or lpr printing solutions, which were great when you had an honest-to-God line printer -- a printer that just printed line after line of straight text -- but are woefully inadequate for modern page printers with their page description languages.
There are all sorts of hacks to get around this. There are filters, once designed to massage ASCII text, now used to try and re-encode stuff into appropriate PDLs. There are things like JetDirect (eew).
CUPS does a much better job of making printing transparent. By converting everything to one PDL (PostScript), and then converting it to the printer's native language if required, everything gets treated evenly. There are lots of drivers. I find it far, far easier to administrate than lp and lpr.
I find it useful to monitor which technologies Apple integrates into Mac OS X, and then try installing them on my other UNIX systems. That's how I discovered CUPS. Apple has cherry-picked best-of-breed open source for OS X.
Let's reduce the verbiage in that sentence:
Perhaps even reduce it to
Apple's a profitable company. Their stock is doing quite well considering the state of the industry. They've gotten to this point by releasing high-quality products with excellent design. Meanwhile, how are the "junk" makers doing? The various PC vendors are all trying to eke out a living on thin margins. Some are doing better than others; often, the ones doing better have other businesses to keep them afloat.
Maybe Apple could gain market share briefly by selling junk. It wouldn't gain repeat customers, and it wouldn't work for long.
The whole point of the iPod-to-Mac phenomenon is that many people do not want junk. If they did, Creative or iRiver or Nike or Sony would hold the portable-MP3 crown. People buy the iPod because it's anything but junk. They then wonder, "say, if this iPod isn't junk, I wonder if Macs are not-junk as well." They go to an Apple Store, and find that Macs aren't junk. They're made with good, solid design and parts, instead of bargain-basement components.
Macs may appear to be more expensive, but that's only if you're willing to accept junk. Some people have learned the lesson that you get what you pay for -- that $5 toaster won't last as long as the $30 name-brand one, the free-after-rebate CD-R won't hold a readable backup anywhere near as long as a $1.50 medical-grade CD-R, the car doesn't always start on a cold morning when you pass by the Mobil to fill up at Jim-Bob's Gaseteria.
In short, to some people, "no hassles" is worth some extra money.
There are laws in the U.S. about headlamp brightness. The problem is, there really aren't good laws about where that brightness should be.
If you compare the low beams of a traditional American car and a European car, you'll find that the European car is less dazzling to oncoming traffic, but seems to put out more useful light when you drive it. That's because the American D.O.T. headlamp specification is mainly concerned with brightness, whereas the European headlamp specs also specify the light pattern the headlamp should generate.
If you've ever driven a first-generation Dodge Intrepid, you know just how truly horrid an American car's headlamps can be and still be legal for sale.
That's not a very good idea, either.
Dry room air forced through a nozzle at high pressure is a wonderful way to generate a static-electricity charge. Dry air holds the charge particularly well, because there's no water suspended in the air to bleed off the charge. Chips don't like a bath of static electricity.
The gas in the cans is designed not to generate a static charge.
This is also why you should only use a vacuum designed for use on computers to vacuum out a computer. These vacuums have anti-static features, such as a carbon-impregnated (conductive) wand and hose to draw off static charges. Your typical household vacuum instead has a rubber belt being driven at high speeds around two smooth metal shafts. This is almost exactly like a Van de Graff Generator, a device used for generating a massive static electricity charge.
Of course, your average nail-gun compressor will spew a stream of liquid at first if you haven't drained it after every use, or if it's really humid out. Increase the density of air and you reduce its water-carrying capacity. The water gets wrung out of the air inside the compressor, pools up, and spurts out with the air...
Those little cans of compressed air aren't just for convenience.
If I had been you, I would've had your friend the deputy arrest said "bouncer" for assault and wrongful imprisonment.
In Connecticut, they do.
Under Connecticut law, it's illegal to advertise a "price after rebate" in a print ad or in a store. You can have rebates, but you can't do the math for the customer. There's also a limit to the type sizes of the rebate amount. If a store does advertise a "price after rebate," they must sell the item to you for that price -- before rebate.
It's a simple law and it makes comparison shopping so much easier...
I actually caught Amazon.com out on this law once. They had an ad flyer in the Hartford Courant, and obviously their legal department was snoozing, because it was chock full of "price after rebate." Of course, the website has no way to order it for that price... I wrote 'em a letter and got a sheepish email back a few days later saying that they could manually process the transaction at that price if I wished... Funny, I haven't seen an Amazon.com print ad since then.
It also makes for some amusing page-layout choices. Often, you can tell where the "national" flyer has had "FREE after rebate!" ripped out and awkwardly replaced with "LOW PRICE after rebate!" to fly under the law...
CUPS beats out good old printcap thusly:
There's other features, too. Those are the ones I can think of, off the top of my head. It brings UNIX printing out of the teletype era and up to the level of Mac OS and Windows.
I'd never paid attention to CUPS until Apple slid it under my Mac OS X installation. Once I took a look at it, I really came to appreciate it. Now I put it on all my UNIX boxes. I've even convinced my workplace to adopt it.
Once the software is installed, it's dead easy to set up, especially if you're using a recent PostScript-capable printer. Most recent printers support Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) directly on their network card. CUPS speaks IPP and PostScript natively. If you set up Service Location Protocol (SLP) support, you don't even have to configure the printer -- it configures itself. There's a reason Apple adopted this software!
Add the gimp-print driver package, and you can print to just about anything.
It's a far sight better than dealing with the various filters in BSD lpr, and immeasurably better than Solaris' print subsystem.
The word you're looking for is "inarticulate."
It means "without or deprived of the use of speech or words."
Example: "That poster is inarticulate with English."
Keep dreaming. Not only do you have to pay New York state and county sales tax on any purchase you make within the state, resident or not, but if you are a New York state resident and you buy something outside of NYS, you are legally obligated to report the purchase and pay a use tax equal to the difference between the sales tax where you bought the thing and the sales tax where you live. This year, there's even a spot on the income-tax form where you're supposed to report it.
Connecticut does the same thing.
Sure, you can just not say anything. However, most states have reciprocal agreements with their neighbors. If Connecticut audits an appliance store, they're likely to forward a copy of any out-of-state receipts to New York's tax department. You can get away with a trip to Target, but if you buy a big-ticket item across state lines, there's a good chance that the budget-starved states will come looking for you.
I've heard that, at one time, Connecticut would actually have revenue agents watching the border at certain points looking for people with Connecticut plates and large appliance boxes re-entering the state...
The biggest thing that Kodak has going for it right now is the name "Kodak." It's synonymous with photography. Everyone knows what a "Kodak moment" is. There's no such thing as a "Fuji moment" or an "Olympus moment."
That said, Kodak hasn't leveraged their name very well. They were slow to produce an inkjet paper for photos. "Printed on Kodak paper" has long been a focus of their advertising as a source of quality. Getting a slice of the home consumables market should've been a no-brainer, but I think they waited too long on that one.
What's worse is that they waited way too long to get into the digital "film" market. It was just last month that I first saw a Kodak-branded memory card for sale at a local drugstore. That should've been a total no-brainer. For anyone over the age of 40, given a choice between a brand you'd never heard of, and Kodak... which memory card would you buy?
Heck, they let Lexar get away with trademark dilution. For a while now, Lexar has been selling their memory cards in Kodak-yellow packages that are about the same size and shape as a Kodak retail film box. It confused me a little when I first saw it... a less technically-astute and observant person might easily think it was a Kodak product.
Others have commented on Kodak's "Gillette model" business plan, making money on the consumables. There's still money in digital consumables. Kodak's brand name should give them a huge chunk of the market, if they don't muff it up. So far, they've conceded that market by default, I think...
You might want to get your history straight on that one. The Advanced Photo System (APS) was jointly developed by Kodak and Fuji, along with camera makers like Canon, Minolta, and Nikon. Kodak's APS products sell under the Advantix brand name. That's hardly proprietary.
I think APS was an attempt to stave off digital photography. The companies involved realized that 35mm point-and-shoot cameras are frustrating in many ways.
APS attempted to address the limitations of 35mm for point-and-shoot users. No threading the film -- it's in a drop-in cartridge that self-loads. No negatives that need to be handled with care -- they come back in the film cartridge. You get index prints. You can have three sizes of print. On the better cameras, information about the conditions under which the camera took the photo are recorded on a magnetic data layer so the film processor doesn't have to guess what it should look like. Using 24mm film instead of 32mm allowed for less-bulky cameras, and technology developed for motion-picture film kept the pictures about the same quality as consumer-grade 32mm film.
I think the biggest problem with APS was that the product rollout was botched. You could find the cameras, and the film... but you couldn't find one-hour developing. I was living in Kodak's home city, Rochester NY, when APS was introduced. It was months before there was a one-hour photo shop in Rochester that could process APS. Then there was one. Just one. It took a while for it to spread.
Worse, the first "minilabs" for one-hour prints didn't include the magnetic data exchange feature. They were modifications of 32mm film processors -- APS film uses the same C-41 chemical process -- sometimes retrofit to existing machines. Without the data exchange, the photos from the more-expensive APS cameras really weren't any better than a cheaper 32mm point-and-shoot.
Of course, people in the target market for APS couldn't care less about magnetic data exchange. They just wanted good pictures, and quick. Sure, you could get excellent pictures by sending them to Kodak processing, but in the market at the time, it was all about the one-hour photo.
Even with mail-away processing, APS developing was at a premium. When the product was introduced, you paid a starter fee per roll, and then there was a per-print charge based on the size of the print. You could select from 4x6, 4x7, or 4x11.5 inch prints when you took the picture -- and the developer would charge a different price for each size print. You'd drop the film off and have no idea what it would cost until it came back. Eventually, developing moved to a flat-fee-per-roll system, but perhaps too late... and it was still at a premium compared to an equivalent roll of 35mm.
APS is a good system. It's not for everyone, but for the majority of people, who just want to take the occasional photo of a vacation or family event with minimal fuss, it's very well designed. The cameras and film are great products. It's the lack of attention to the crucial last step -- developing -- that I believe killed APS.
Somebody has made a mouse with a switch like you desire. IBM makes a mouse with a ScrollPoint on top. You can scroll vertically or horizontally. You can also click with it, although that does require some practice, patience, and coordination.
PBS is getting more traditional advertising, too.
The highest-rated PBS program in the nation right now is UConn Women's Basketball on Connecticut Public Television. It brings in tons of cash from donations -- enough that CPTV paid $600,000 for rights to this season's games, and the contract calls for that yearly fee to go up to $1,000,000 in a few years.
The games have "media time-outs" like network sports broadcasts. There are 30-second ad spots in these timeouts, as well as the usual pledge nag banners during the game and "pledge breaks" before and after the game and during halftime.
I love watching the Huskies, and if this is what CPTV needs to do in order to keep showing the games, so be it. Still, it shows that public TV isn't immune from "traditional" advertising. It's just that they've chosen to go without the ads in the past. There's nothing stopping them from using more ads in the future.