When someone is giving away exceedingly powerful, linux-equipped servers for free, let me know where and when. Until then, software (as in Microsoft vs. Linux) is *not* equal to software/hardware (as in Cisco). Plain and simple.
So Cisco makes billions of dollars a year selling some ungodly expensive, ungodly powerful head end router like devices (not even routers in the IP sense) and somehow you suspect a Linux distribution with the same features is going to unpack itself and be everything you want it to be? You need to tell us what the rest of your platform looks like if you expect any answers that go beyond 'any linux distribution can act like a router!'. What subscriber equipment is in use? How much user control do you need (access on/off vs. bandwidth filtering, etc.) Details, details, details.
No, sorry, it doesn't make sense at all. The point of an ETF is to deter people from signing a contract then bailing, just like you pointed out. However, when you buy the phone, it still costs you $179 with a new contract via Tmobile (last I checked) so if the phone is $550 it would be fair that they would somehow have a $371 etf somewhere in there to cover the gap on the handset cost.
Aside from that, who is eating the handset cost here, and who is making up in subscription fees... Google or tmobile? If it's google, then tmobile better not charge one red cent for the privilege of signing a contract for a paid for phone. If it's Google, then why does t mobile get to charge an ETF at all?
Finally, unless Google is getting a kickback from t mobile for every month the phone is in contract, why would they care if you bought the phone then left t mobile? You aren't going to put the phone on a shelf and never use it after you leave your contract; you will likely subscribe and keep on using it just the way Google wants. They keep winning. Why should they try to penalize you for leaving t mobile?
The only answers that make sense are thus:
A) Google is super greedy, plus tmobile is super greedy. B) Google is kind of greedy, plus t mobile was too lazy to adjust the contract to exclude the ETF considering google fronts the phone.
So *very* many companies manage to have vast, effective, happy work forces without the need to unionize... While we can sit here all day and go back and forth about who should have the power, management or employees, the fact remains that it is demonstrably possible to have a sizable company with a diverse work force succeed without a union of any sort...
The other thing that is hard to argue is that supply and demand is a bad thing for a free market economy. If a company is treating their employees poorly, the employees leave to go to another company. If a union steps in to decide how much employees should make, and who gets hired/fired (along with taking a nice cut for themselves) all you accomplish is a short-circuit of the free market and the company then gets to live and die by it's union contract negotiating skills alone. GM and Chrysler are examples of this. Management certainly played a role but ultimately the management could have been as good or bad as they wanted to be; the contracts of old didn't meet with the auto market of new, plain and simple.
Unions exist to balance the power between employers and employees, and thus give them an equal negotiation position.
The Federal and State governments exist to ensure safe, effective working conditions. Unions exist for a far more nefarious reason; 'balancing power' is only where they start, in the long run they are a god awful mess. But this isn't an anti-union rant, really. It would be much worse if it were.
You know what would make everyone more productive, give them more leisure time, and make their bosses happy? Eliminating the 25% federal taxes they pay and giving them the time off instead. Employees only work 30 hours and those 30 hours are wildly productive because they get to take home just as much as if they worked 40. Their bosses like that they only have to keep the lights on for three quarters of the time.
Oh, wait. It turns out that doing something just to make everyone happy doesn't always work out in the long run. Funny, that.
You make a good point, but I defy you to correlate the success of foreign auto makers in the US with the decline of US auto makers in the US without noting that unions are a huge part of the equation.
Let's see, GM, Ford, Chrysler: Unionized.
Toyota, Huyndai/Kia, Honda: Non unionized.
They all develop and produce cars inside the US, for the US. They all borrow and/or share designs with overseas companies/subsidiaries/etc. The only real difference is the union status and the parent companies' nationality. I will concede that there is certainly a component of 'Americanism' in play at all levels of management decision making.
Nevertheless, how can you say with a straight face that a) the US auto makers aren't hindered at all by wildly expensive and inhibiting union contracts, and b) the foreign auto makers would be more competitive if they had unions? That's the burden of proof unions are up against if they want a place in the US going forward.
The difference may stem from the US tendency to turn EVERYTHING into a data center. Have 100 employees? You need a room full of computers for that! 1:1 server ratio, after all, your team of medical transcriptioners needs sub millisecond response time for their document shares and non-work-related emails about cats saying funny things.
I don't have any evidence to back it up but I would suspect that more mature companies (read: Western European ones) realize how and where to apply IT. In the US, it was a free for all with no expense spared up until the dotcom crash, which left a lot of people scratching their heads asking "do we really need 50 servers for our company web page that serves 1000 hits a day?"
There are plenty of US companies that still spare no expense when it comes to IT; the ones that are understaffed are probably almost exclusively the ones that shouldn't be in the business of owning a data center in the first place.
You aren't trying to troll and neither am I. It IS the kind of situation a union would prevent, however considering everything else that has been done for union's sake lately (see: destruction of US auto industry) I would suggest you take the unionization decision VERY seriously. How exactly, considering that funding isn't sufficient for staffing at the current expense, do you expect companies to afford to bankroll a union AND get more staff to man the servers? In all likelihood you will end up with lower pay and more work; but hey at least you will have a contract!
In all fairness, (not trying to troll, honest) unions aren't for educated workers who can make rational decisions. Unions were invented to protect unsuspecting workers from manipulative business owners, when the education gap was huge. Now, you probably have a very comparable education to your boss, and probably to his boss and most of the rest of the organization. You are smart, start making your own decisions.
You know what else would prevent you from having to take work calls after hours? Stand up, tell your boss you won't give up your personal time anymore, and let him fix the situation or fire you. Presto, no more late nights!
It's only worrisome when it negatively affects the consumer.
I think you meant to say "it's only worrisome when it creates the risk of negatively affecting the consumer". The notion that "it's okay to do X until it hurts someone" is an argument that has been pretty well run into the ground.
Not to mention the fact that Microsoft has no problem with you paying up front for the software and playing it as much as you want. Honestly, why bag on this feature when it's basically a full featured demo of the game for a fraction of a dollar? If you don't like the game, you can take your coins elsewhere; when else has browsing through titles been that affordable? (aside from either pirating, or an actual arcade?)
You can occaisonally dip down to 24 and be alright (24 is supposedly the speed that most Movie theatres play at) - but when you get around 20 or so its really does take away from the experience.
If by 'supposedly' you mean 'definitely' and if by 'most movie theaters' you mean 'all theaters and even all motion picture production processes in recent years', then yes. The difference is lost on most people, but the reason 24fps is acceptable in movies is that the frame you see isn't what happened at that instant in time when it's displayed, it's everything that happened in the last 1/24th of a second, since it's recorded on film that exposed for that 24th of a second to derive the image. When a computer does it, it only cares about what is happening at that exact 24th of a second; so the difference between a series of exact frames of motion and a series of frames that include the blur of what happens between frames is HUGE.
However, this nuance is lost on pretty much everyone who fires up a computer game, notes the FPS indicator, and goes "OMG I CAN TOTALLY TELL ITS ONLY 30FPSZZZZ!!!! HOW INFERIOR!!!". Whine about framerates all you want, but they are only a small part of the experience.
After all, when coding an program they know will be open sourced, programmers are much less likely to add a vulnerable piece of code in the hope it won't be spotted or with the intention to fix it at some later date.
Beg the question much? Your conclusion is just as vague as the one in the article. I don't have any actual data either, but I would venture that accidental bugs are a much much much greater security risk than malicious ones, open source or not. Of course, it's pretty darn hard to spot a cleverly hidden bit of malicious code (and be able to distinguish it from a bug), so we may never know anyway.
My thoughts exactly. Darwinawards.com offers simple HTML and images. That's all, no fancy graphics, interactive multimedia or web 2.0 style forums to ring up traffic. Nevertheless, the site has self-destructed due to an 'unprecedented' (most would call it 'obvious') surge in traffic following the announcement of the 2009 winners.
Thank you, darwinawards.com, for removing yourself from the internet pool.
Do we? Do we really? Not that this is the forum for such discussion, but I defy you to demonstrate that our world today truly values intelligence any more than it does luck, perseverance, or aggression. Sure there are some areas where more intelligence would be a great benefit, but I would argue that most of the world competes in struggle that has little to do with basic intelligence.
While more gray matter isn't a direct cause of more brain power, we do know a little about how different parts of the brain work and which are more useful for what. This creature has a lot more volume in the upper brain area, where more conscious thoughts and memories take place. If it were just a bigger head overall, sure it wouldn't point to something inherently 'smarter'. However, with more of the 'right stuff' in it's head it is highly likely that it was smarter than comparable creatures with smaller prefrontal/forebrain areas (particularly, humans).
While you are correct that it's a relative scale, they are comparing it to the current population (i.e. 100% homo sapiens sapiens) to arrive at the above average IQ figure. It may be disingenuous since we know so little about the rest of their physiology, but it's a fair guess that compared to us they were a lot smarter (since intelligence is almost entirely derived from the upper region of the brain)
What I want to know is, can we clone them (vis-a-vis the de-extinction process discussed a few days ago) and create a clone army of super-brainiacs to do our bidding? This could be the just the solution to outsourcing that the US has been hoping for.
As it doesn't seem to be sinking in, *you cannot generalize* when it comes to medical effects of various materials. You are completely wrong that "120mg of orange juice is comparable to 100mg of vitamin c" as it takes 200g of orange fruit to carry 100mg of vitamin c. Just because something is available from unrefined plant material does NOT mean it is trivial in substance. Furthermore, the term "plant extract" is completely undefined when it comes to modern medicine, so trying to base an argument on it is pretty hollow. Lastly, any statement on medical effectiveness that uses the term "probably" can go right back in your mouth. It's useless.
You would need to follow that up with a third control group that took nothing and KNEW nothing, just to see if there is a psychosomatic element of being studied.
Hint: Evidence has been found to support the 'placebo problem' and the 'being studied at all problem'.
Never mind then that Vitamin C (arguably an 'unrefined plant material') has the odd effect of making you *not get scurvy and die* as a result of a daily dosage of around 100mg.
Relatively small doses of simple things can affect you in lots of interesting ways. Look at medication that treats thyroid disorders; it's a simple material (although it doesn't grow on trees) dosed out in *micrograms*, the slightest variation of which (less than 15 micrograms for some people, myself included) your body WILL feel the difference of.
Most things, sure, your body sends in one end and it comes out the other relatively unchanged. Certain things, though, are profoundly influential.
Or perhaps it's best put, wonders often never materialize in the first place. Is anyone really surprised that something sold with a big "these claims have not been evaluated by the FDA" on the bottle has, in fact, been found to do nothing close to the claim?
Hopefully herbal viagra is next, and some day spammers will be emailing about things people actually can use...*
*(warning the claims in this post have not been evaluated by the FDA)
Before you decided to be a total tool did you consider the fact that I noticed the outage yesterday afternoon (when my BBMs weren't getting through), followed the situation to it's completion on crackberry.com, and just decided to post in order to get a laugh (after laughing that slashdot just now started covering the 'story' right around the same time it was over and done with)?
Of course you didn't, you're a tool with no sense of humor. I would nickname you 'Chainsaw', but irony is probably lost on you too.
Slashdot Mirror
When someone is giving away exceedingly powerful, linux-equipped servers for free, let me know where and when. Until then, software (as in Microsoft vs. Linux) is *not* equal to software/hardware (as in Cisco). Plain and simple.
So Cisco makes billions of dollars a year selling some ungodly expensive, ungodly powerful head end router like devices (not even routers in the IP sense) and somehow you suspect a Linux distribution with the same features is going to unpack itself and be everything you want it to be? You need to tell us what the rest of your platform looks like if you expect any answers that go beyond 'any linux distribution can act like a router!'. What subscriber equipment is in use? How much user control do you need (access on/off vs. bandwidth filtering, etc.) Details, details, details.
No, sorry, it doesn't make sense at all. The point of an ETF is to deter people from signing a contract then bailing, just like you pointed out. However, when you buy the phone, it still costs you $179 with a new contract via Tmobile (last I checked) so if the phone is $550 it would be fair that they would somehow have a $371 etf somewhere in there to cover the gap on the handset cost.
Aside from that, who is eating the handset cost here, and who is making up in subscription fees... Google or tmobile? If it's google, then tmobile better not charge one red cent for the privilege of signing a contract for a paid for phone. If it's Google, then why does t mobile get to charge an ETF at all?
Finally, unless Google is getting a kickback from t mobile for every month the phone is in contract, why would they care if you bought the phone then left t mobile? You aren't going to put the phone on a shelf and never use it after you leave your contract; you will likely subscribe and keep on using it just the way Google wants. They keep winning. Why should they try to penalize you for leaving t mobile?
The only answers that make sense are thus:
A) Google is super greedy, plus tmobile is super greedy.
B) Google is kind of greedy, plus t mobile was too lazy to adjust the contract to exclude the ETF considering google fronts the phone.
So *very* many companies manage to have vast, effective, happy work forces without the need to unionize... While we can sit here all day and go back and forth about who should have the power, management or employees, the fact remains that it is demonstrably possible to have a sizable company with a diverse work force succeed without a union of any sort...
The other thing that is hard to argue is that supply and demand is a bad thing for a free market economy. If a company is treating their employees poorly, the employees leave to go to another company. If a union steps in to decide how much employees should make, and who gets hired/fired (along with taking a nice cut for themselves) all you accomplish is a short-circuit of the free market and the company then gets to live and die by it's union contract negotiating skills alone. GM and Chrysler are examples of this. Management certainly played a role but ultimately the management could have been as good or bad as they wanted to be; the contracts of old didn't meet with the auto market of new, plain and simple.
Unions exist to balance the power between employers and employees, and thus give them an equal negotiation position.
The Federal and State governments exist to ensure safe, effective working conditions. Unions exist for a far more nefarious reason; 'balancing power' is only where they start, in the long run they are a god awful mess. But this isn't an anti-union rant, really. It would be much worse if it were.
You know what would make everyone more productive, give them more leisure time, and make their bosses happy? Eliminating the 25% federal taxes they pay and giving them the time off instead. Employees only work 30 hours and those 30 hours are wildly productive because they get to take home just as much as if they worked 40. Their bosses like that they only have to keep the lights on for three quarters of the time.
Oh, wait. It turns out that doing something just to make everyone happy doesn't always work out in the long run. Funny, that.
You make a good point, but I defy you to correlate the success of foreign auto makers in the US with the decline of US auto makers in the US without noting that unions are a huge part of the equation.
Let's see, GM, Ford, Chrysler: Unionized.
Toyota, Huyndai/Kia, Honda: Non unionized.
They all develop and produce cars inside the US, for the US. They all borrow and/or share designs with overseas companies/subsidiaries/etc. The only real difference is the union status and the parent companies' nationality. I will concede that there is certainly a component of 'Americanism' in play at all levels of management decision making.
Nevertheless, how can you say with a straight face that a) the US auto makers aren't hindered at all by wildly expensive and inhibiting union contracts, and b) the foreign auto makers would be more competitive if they had unions? That's the burden of proof unions are up against if they want a place in the US going forward.
"First we're gonna deduplicate it, then we're gonna replicate it! Why? Cutting edge cost savings, that's why!!!"
The difference may stem from the US tendency to turn EVERYTHING into a data center. Have 100 employees? You need a room full of computers for that! 1:1 server ratio, after all, your team of medical transcriptioners needs sub millisecond response time for their document shares and non-work-related emails about cats saying funny things.
I don't have any evidence to back it up but I would suspect that more mature companies (read: Western European ones) realize how and where to apply IT. In the US, it was a free for all with no expense spared up until the dotcom crash, which left a lot of people scratching their heads asking "do we really need 50 servers for our company web page that serves 1000 hits a day?"
There are plenty of US companies that still spare no expense when it comes to IT; the ones that are understaffed are probably almost exclusively the ones that shouldn't be in the business of owning a data center in the first place.
You aren't trying to troll and neither am I. It IS the kind of situation a union would prevent, however considering everything else that has been done for union's sake lately (see: destruction of US auto industry) I would suggest you take the unionization decision VERY seriously. How exactly, considering that funding isn't sufficient for staffing at the current expense, do you expect companies to afford to bankroll a union AND get more staff to man the servers? In all likelihood you will end up with lower pay and more work; but hey at least you will have a contract!
In all fairness, (not trying to troll, honest) unions aren't for educated workers who can make rational decisions. Unions were invented to protect unsuspecting workers from manipulative business owners, when the education gap was huge. Now, you probably have a very comparable education to your boss, and probably to his boss and most of the rest of the organization. You are smart, start making your own decisions.
You know what else would prevent you from having to take work calls after hours? Stand up, tell your boss you won't give up your personal time anymore, and let him fix the situation or fire you. Presto, no more late nights!
It's only worrisome when it negatively affects the consumer.
I think you meant to say "it's only worrisome when it creates the risk of negatively affecting the consumer". The notion that "it's okay to do X until it hurts someone" is an argument that has been pretty well run into the ground.
Not to mention the fact that Microsoft has no problem with you paying up front for the software and playing it as much as you want. Honestly, why bag on this feature when it's basically a full featured demo of the game for a fraction of a dollar? If you don't like the game, you can take your coins elsewhere; when else has browsing through titles been that affordable? (aside from either pirating, or an actual arcade?)
You can occaisonally dip down to 24 and be alright (24 is supposedly the speed that most Movie theatres play at) - but when you get around 20 or so its really does take away from the experience.
If by 'supposedly' you mean 'definitely' and if by 'most movie theaters' you mean 'all theaters and even all motion picture production processes in recent years', then yes. The difference is lost on most people, but the reason 24fps is acceptable in movies is that the frame you see isn't what happened at that instant in time when it's displayed, it's everything that happened in the last 1/24th of a second, since it's recorded on film that exposed for that 24th of a second to derive the image. When a computer does it, it only cares about what is happening at that exact 24th of a second; so the difference between a series of exact frames of motion and a series of frames that include the blur of what happens between frames is HUGE.
However, this nuance is lost on pretty much everyone who fires up a computer game, notes the FPS indicator, and goes "OMG I CAN TOTALLY TELL ITS ONLY 30FPSZZZZ!!!! HOW INFERIOR!!!". Whine about framerates all you want, but they are only a small part of the experience.
After all, when coding an program they know will be open sourced, programmers are much less likely to add a vulnerable piece of code in the hope it won't be spotted or with the intention to fix it at some later date.
Beg the question much? Your conclusion is just as vague as the one in the article. I don't have any actual data either, but I would venture that accidental bugs are a much much much greater security risk than malicious ones, open source or not. Of course, it's pretty darn hard to spot a cleverly hidden bit of malicious code (and be able to distinguish it from a bug), so we may never know anyway.
Oh come on. You get a C for effort on that one. Watch and learn...
Horatio, the star next to Sagittarius A was killed and only .01 percent of it's gasses were actually accreted!
Well Calleigh, just because it's appetite sucks, that doesn't mean it's not guilty of *murder*...
YEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH
Guess we'll just have to wait for the rest of the world to turn to total shit before living in a storage unit becomes 'appealing'.
My thoughts exactly. Darwinawards.com offers simple HTML and images. That's all, no fancy graphics, interactive multimedia or web 2.0 style forums to ring up traffic. Nevertheless, the site has self-destructed due to an 'unprecedented' (most would call it 'obvious') surge in traffic following the announcement of the 2009 winners.
Thank you, darwinawards.com, for removing yourself from the internet pool.
Do we? Do we really? Not that this is the forum for such discussion, but I defy you to demonstrate that our world today truly values intelligence any more than it does luck, perseverance, or aggression. Sure there are some areas where more intelligence would be a great benefit, but I would argue that most of the world competes in struggle that has little to do with basic intelligence.
While more gray matter isn't a direct cause of more brain power, we do know a little about how different parts of the brain work and which are more useful for what. This creature has a lot more volume in the upper brain area, where more conscious thoughts and memories take place. If it were just a bigger head overall, sure it wouldn't point to something inherently 'smarter'. However, with more of the 'right stuff' in it's head it is highly likely that it was smarter than comparable creatures with smaller prefrontal/forebrain areas (particularly, humans).
While you are correct that it's a relative scale, they are comparing it to the current population (i.e. 100% homo sapiens sapiens) to arrive at the above average IQ figure. It may be disingenuous since we know so little about the rest of their physiology, but it's a fair guess that compared to us they were a lot smarter (since intelligence is almost entirely derived from the upper region of the brain)
What I want to know is, can we clone them (vis-a-vis the de-extinction process discussed a few days ago) and create a clone army of super-brainiacs to do our bidding? This could be the just the solution to outsourcing that the US has been hoping for.
As it doesn't seem to be sinking in, *you cannot generalize* when it comes to medical effects of various materials. You are completely wrong that "120mg of orange juice is comparable to 100mg of vitamin c" as it takes 200g of orange fruit to carry 100mg of vitamin c. Just because something is available from unrefined plant material does NOT mean it is trivial in substance. Furthermore, the term "plant extract" is completely undefined when it comes to modern medicine, so trying to base an argument on it is pretty hollow. Lastly, any statement on medical effectiveness that uses the term "probably" can go right back in your mouth. It's useless.
You would need to follow that up with a third control group that took nothing and KNEW nothing, just to see if there is a psychosomatic element of being studied.
Hint: Evidence has been found to support the 'placebo problem' and the 'being studied at all problem'.
Never mind then that Vitamin C (arguably an 'unrefined plant material') has the odd effect of making you *not get scurvy and die* as a result of a daily dosage of around 100mg.
Relatively small doses of simple things can affect you in lots of interesting ways. Look at medication that treats thyroid disorders; it's a simple material (although it doesn't grow on trees) dosed out in *micrograms*, the slightest variation of which (less than 15 micrograms for some people, myself included) your body WILL feel the difference of.
Most things, sure, your body sends in one end and it comes out the other relatively unchanged. Certain things, though, are profoundly influential.
Or perhaps it's best put, wonders often never materialize in the first place. Is anyone really surprised that something sold with a big "these claims have not been evaluated by the FDA" on the bottle has, in fact, been found to do nothing close to the claim?
Hopefully herbal viagra is next, and some day spammers will be emailing about things people actually can use...*
*(warning the claims in this post have not been evaluated by the FDA)
Nature will find a way, apparently, to do everything except avert the extinction in the first place...
I think that should tell us something.
Before you decided to be a total tool did you consider the fact that I noticed the outage yesterday afternoon (when my BBMs weren't getting through), followed the situation to it's completion on crackberry.com, and just decided to post in order to get a laugh (after laughing that slashdot just now started covering the 'story' right around the same time it was over and done with)?
Of course you didn't, you're a tool with no sense of humor. I would nickname you 'Chainsaw', but irony is probably lost on you too.