Just imagine how much more funding they'd have if they sold it to the general public at a profit, and then used those profits for R&D, paying their employees, and creating more OLPC laptops? And their public sales figures would definitely help sell their laptops to leaders of 3rd world nations.
The buy-two-get-one was a pretty dumb business decision, too. I have no clue why anyone thought that would've gotten them out of the hole.
Instead, they decided to move to Windows (which made no sense from a cost and configurability aspect) and for some reason thought that the average first worlder was too "bourgeoisie" for their special little laptops. Now they're a sinking ship because nobody cares about them anymore, and instead, everybody is more concerned with the new netbook market.
They might as well make the Apple dork from their commercials their mascot. Apple is more of form over function than anything else, so hip coffee-house hipsters can look up to him as an icon agsint the "bourgeosie" and spend money for overpriced hardware and a bad O/S simply to be the coolest kid on the street.
It really seems like these businesses don't know how to make reliable hardware anymore: with this recent Seagate fiasco, Microsoft's laughable Zune Day of Death as well as their XBox red ring of death problem, Apple's (or I think Samsung's...) battery recall problem, and the capacitor theft of a few years back, and who knows what else I'm forgetting. It really seems like hardware is much more unreliable than years ago.
Of the list of common problems I've mentioned, I know of at least 1 person who has suffered them. And the fact that such things are so common makes me wonder if quality is really going down the toilet.
I was in the same boat: I loved Western Digital and I hated Maxtor, as all my Maxtor drives committed suicide while the WD drives were still chugging away.
One thing, however, is that I also have a Seagate drive, and it's been acting weird, as well... sometimes my computer won't read the HDD upon bootup and reboots (and sometimes had some cable error or something), and I have to shut it the computer off until it decides to boot like a good little hard drive. I don't think it's dying, at least mechanically, since it works compeletly fine once it boots and doesn't make a clicking noise. I don't think it's the motherboard, unless my motherboard has issues with SATA and not IDE.
My brother's seagate also died on him recently after six months of use. So I guess that's another anecdote of seagate quickly becoming a rather terrible HD manufacturer.
Oops, it says staffers, not Congressmen, but I think members of congress had their blackberries taken away, as well. At least, I remember reading that somewhere.
Lower taxes means that corporations are more likely to come and play in your playground, thus leading to increased economic activity and employment in the area.
America could increase it's economic activity if it decided to lower taxes (and that also goes for individual states as well) but politicians would rather put some crazy ban on outsourcing than actually combat the problem: ridiculously high taxes.
It's an extreme example, but just compare Hong Kong to the rest of China. Which area has less regulation, and which one would you rather live in? It goes without saying, honestly.
I'll probably get modded down by some crazy armchair e-warrior socialist, but whatever.
Just how many coupons do you think they honestly will give out? They'd probably just only check the DNA samples found on the ground because that generates revenue; they're honestly not going to use a costly procedure just to reward citizens.
Actually, how much does DNA analysis of dog droppings cost? I'm skeptical that this will be done very often, as I believe DNA testing isn't really that cheap.
How's the googling going? I hope you like reading my slashdot posts.
And if you have karma, mod my posts up, too. In addition to hiring me with a nice fat salary.
Just because you don't know how to use linux doesn't mean it is linux that sucks.
Ubuntu seems to have a lot of bugs and KDE 4 isn't stable; so maybe blame the distro and desktop environment instead?
Angry customer was probably annoyed that the technician couldn't solve the problem, so she overreacted and the technician got annoyed that the incompetence of others led to verbal abuse against him though he had nothing to do with what happened prior, and then called the cops.
I read the headline, figured the customer was irate and overreacted against the technician, and the technician retaliated. Then I read the article and it pretty much proved my theory.
Journalists can be blatantly false or incompetent, but at least they're supposed to document existing events and not simply create stories. I suppose I was trying to highlight that false documents are created while journalists observe (and misinterpret).
But I guess I was arguing on semantics, so maybe I just need to get to bed.
Is this money going to pay for wikileaks's legal bills, or for the site owners' new porshe? Think about it. Either wikileaks sinks from being unable to defend themselves in court, or find themselves a way to pay for their lawyers and other fees.
Journalists don't create stories, they document existing events. The problem is that wikileaks doesn't need to provide an incentive for people to create false documents.
Sites like this have a hard time obtaining any sort of revenue to pay for their costs, so it's only logical to allow short-term exclusive access to information in order to maintain site costs and legal expenses. Donations only go so far, and many people are probably afraid of contributing with their credit cards as to not end up on any FBI watch lists.
I'm sure many/.ers will have a problem with this, but how else is wikileaks going to be able to defend themselves from lawsuits designed to shut them down through ridiculous, unpayable court fees?
It's a win-win situation: news sources get profit from being the first to break the story, and wikileaks obtains money to keep their site going and defend freedom of speech while remaining true to their mission.
No, because you spelled "organisations" and not the American "organizations," so unless you somehow talked to me elsewhere on the internet, you don't know me. I'm sure the same thing has happened before, anyways.
Agreed. And I would imagine many managers don't have highly refined IT skills, either, which is why IIS is still used instead of Apache. Or why Windows is still used for servers in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Just imagine how much more funding they'd have if they sold it to the general public at a profit, and then used those profits for R&D, paying their employees, and creating more OLPC laptops? And their public sales figures would definitely help sell their laptops to leaders of 3rd world nations.
The buy-two-get-one was a pretty dumb business decision, too. I have no clue why anyone thought that would've gotten them out of the hole.
Instead, they decided to move to Windows (which made no sense from a cost and configurability aspect) and for some reason thought that the average first worlder was too "bourgeoisie" for their special little laptops. Now they're a sinking ship because nobody cares about them anymore, and instead, everybody is more concerned with the new netbook market.
Steve Jobs is a god among men! I mean, he did steal from Wozniak a long time ago, but that was an accident.
They might as well make the Apple dork from their commercials their mascot. Apple is more of form over function than anything else, so hip coffee-house hipsters can look up to him as an icon agsint the "bourgeosie" and spend money for overpriced hardware and a bad O/S simply to be the coolest kid on the street.
It really seems like these businesses don't know how to make reliable hardware anymore: with this recent Seagate fiasco, Microsoft's laughable Zune Day of Death as well as their XBox red ring of death problem, Apple's (or I think Samsung's...) battery recall problem, and the capacitor theft of a few years back, and who knows what else I'm forgetting. It really seems like hardware is much more unreliable than years ago.
Of the list of common problems I've mentioned, I know of at least 1 person who has suffered them. And the fact that such things are so common makes me wonder if quality is really going down the toilet.
I was in the same boat: I loved Western Digital and I hated Maxtor, as all my Maxtor drives committed suicide while the WD drives were still chugging away.
One thing, however, is that I also have a Seagate drive, and it's been acting weird, as well... sometimes my computer won't read the HDD upon bootup and reboots (and sometimes had some cable error or something), and I have to shut it the computer off until it decides to boot like a good little hard drive. I don't think it's dying, at least mechanically, since it works compeletly fine once it boots and doesn't make a clicking noise. I don't think it's the motherboard, unless my motherboard has issues with SATA and not IDE.
My brother's seagate also died on him recently after six months of use. So I guess that's another anecdote of seagate quickly becoming a rather terrible HD manufacturer.
Yes, people cling to guns because they lost their jobs. Great logic.
Yeah, I reread it after posting, though I thought I heard that congress also had them taken away. I probably misread that, though.
The coffee hasn't kicked in yet. But I'm kicking myself, instead.
Oops, it says staffers, not Congressmen, but I think members of congress had their blackberries taken away, as well. At least, I remember reading that somewhere.
.... why did they take away Congressmen's blackberries away from them during the height of the bailout debate? http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/09/staffers-for-th.html
Lower taxes means that corporations are more likely to come and play in your playground, thus leading to increased economic activity and employment in the area.
America could increase it's economic activity if it decided to lower taxes (and that also goes for individual states as well) but politicians would rather put some crazy ban on outsourcing than actually combat the problem: ridiculously high taxes.
It's an extreme example, but just compare Hong Kong to the rest of China. Which area has less regulation, and which one would you rather live in? It goes without saying, honestly.
I'll probably get modded down by some crazy armchair e-warrior socialist, but whatever.
Just how many coupons do you think they honestly will give out? They'd probably just only check the DNA samples found on the ground because that generates revenue; they're honestly not going to use a costly procedure just to reward citizens. Actually, how much does DNA analysis of dog droppings cost? I'm skeptical that this will be done very often, as I believe DNA testing isn't really that cheap.
How's the googling going? I hope you like reading my slashdot posts. And if you have karma, mod my posts up, too. In addition to hiring me with a nice fat salary.
Just because you don't know how to use linux doesn't mean it is linux that sucks. Ubuntu seems to have a lot of bugs and KDE 4 isn't stable; so maybe blame the distro and desktop environment instead?
I'll explain it to you when you're older :'(
But I think most slashdot users won't get it, because they're not used to being on top of things, if you know what I mean.
Angry customer was probably annoyed that the technician couldn't solve the problem, so she overreacted and the technician got annoyed that the incompetence of others led to verbal abuse against him though he had nothing to do with what happened prior, and then called the cops. I read the headline, figured the customer was irate and overreacted against the technician, and the technician retaliated. Then I read the article and it pretty much proved my theory.
No different than paying for this
Journalists can be blatantly false or incompetent, but at least they're supposed to document existing events and not simply create stories. I suppose I was trying to highlight that false documents are created while journalists observe (and misinterpret).
But I guess I was arguing on semantics, so maybe I just need to get to bed.
Is this money going to pay for wikileaks's legal bills, or for the site owners' new porshe? Think about it. Either wikileaks sinks from being unable to defend themselves in court, or find themselves a way to pay for their lawyers and other fees.
Journalists don't create stories, they document existing events. The problem is that wikileaks doesn't need to provide an incentive for people to create false documents.
Sites like this have a hard time obtaining any sort of revenue to pay for their costs, so it's only logical to allow short-term exclusive access to information in order to maintain site costs and legal expenses. Donations only go so far, and many people are probably afraid of contributing with their credit cards as to not end up on any FBI watch lists.
I'm sure many /.ers will have a problem with this, but how else is wikileaks going to be able to defend themselves from lawsuits designed to shut them down through ridiculous, unpayable court fees?
It's a win-win situation: news sources get profit from being the first to break the story, and wikileaks obtains money to keep their site going and defend freedom of speech while remaining true to their mission.
No, because you spelled "organisations" and not the American "organizations," so unless you somehow talked to me elsewhere on the internet, you don't know me. I'm sure the same thing has happened before, anyways.
Agreed. And I would imagine many managers don't have highly refined IT skills, either, which is why IIS is still used instead of Apache. Or why Windows is still used for servers in the first place.
Time to relive the glory days of high school...
Well, you know your public school's IT is bad when a kid gets in trouble for sending a message to every school computer through netsend.
The school's solution? Forbid the kid from using computers for the rest of the year, instead of disabling the netsend service.
Ah, school administrators, how we love thee...
Exactly. Which is why Red Hat fills a niche: they have a corporation behind their software.
Seriously, though, it's government. You're not going to have competent people running things.