(I'm assuming you're using terminal and phone interchangably).
Phone prices in the US aren't cheap now. They appear to be cheap if you sign a long contract, but if you're just looking for a handset they're expensive.
I don't see why this would change with number portability, since the cheapness of the handset relates to the contract length. Breaking the contract costs money (often several hundred dollars), and even then the handset may not be usable on the network you want to switch to.
I doubt they're on ours, simply because the machine is used solely for one really old application and I don't think any 'accessory' stuff has ever been installed. We don't even have telnet installed/enabled, just the HP terminal display protocol.
We have an HP3000 system here where I work (anyone else have exposure to Datatrak?). It is indeed a pretty reliable OS & HW combination, HP DDS drives not included.
It does feel like a step back in time, though. I'm not the operator of this system, but when I've had to babysit it seems as if there's a lot that could be automated with a better scripting language and some other UNIX-style tools (grep, textuitls, perl).
I just read slashdot at +5, and hide all stories by CmdrTaco. The former guarantees I only read really good tripe and the latter eliminates redundant data.
My gripe about these kinds of text exactly. I've been running x86 unices in a professional capacity (first Linux, now FreeBSD) since '97. I don't need a UNIX how-to book, but a cross-reference book that addresses OS X as a Unix OS as compared to its BSD brethren.
I could, of course, just muddle through and figure stuff out, but I have less patience and free time than I used to.
I have OS X on two boxes, one in the office and one at home, but I've been turned off by the hiding of the UNIX stuff. I use FreeBSD daily at work and at home and would like to get more out of OS X than I have so far, but it's been obfuscated beyond my willingness to dig.
Any books that approach OS X from a BSD user's perspective? I don't care for the OS X GUI interface myself (wish I still had Finder...), but it might be fun to get more out of BSD side than I have.
Does it strike anyone else as ironic that Adobe, which began as a Macintosh-dominant company (the versions of PhotoShop always came out for the Mac first), is now becoming Windows-dominant?
The enemy is growth. Once Adobe saturated the Mac market with their products, it became hard for them to grow. They could have stayed a Mac-user-base sized company, but investors wouldn't have it (especially in the.com runup), so they had to move to the PC market where the growth options were less limited.
How are platform differences like this handled at most companies? Are the applications written from scratch by two teams who converge on a common UI?
It would seem that a good chunk (50%?) of the code could be written for overall efficiency in a platform neutral way and then the other 50% that was highly platform specific could be written for each platform.
IANAD, but I would think that the 50% common-code number could actually be much higher if an effort was made to use portable, high-level development environments.
I don't think that management is useless. It's a necessary and important part of running an organization. However, I don't think that such a skill is requires a seperate and distinct class of people that are allowed to set the rules for others as as well as themselves with distinctly higher pay packets.
Your argument of the lack of self-managed organizations existing is mooted by my assertion that those who make the rules do so to assure their continued rule-making. Democracy doesn't just happen, either -- lots of dictators argue that the little people can't make decisions without the inspired leadership of their betters as well.
My beef isn't so much with management being unneccessary, but the growth of management as a distinct class with a seperate set of privileges that are not granted to others. Coupled with the repeal of the estate tax, increasingly expensive college tuition at "good" schools and we have all the fixings for a new American aristocracy.
It's still cheaper than paying ~$300 for every release of a known-broken OS commonly used on the x86 infrastructure....
I bought a brand-new computer in 1996. It came with Win95. I ran that box until late '98, wherein I bought another box and ran Win98SE until mid-2000, then bought another box and ran 2k.
If you consider the OS with the computer as "free" (ie, you're not paying extra), then about the only OS payment I would have made would have been had I bought XP, in which case I would have paid extra. Win2K service packs haven't added much functionality, but they have been free.
I've spent more on OS X in the past two years than on MS OSes. X, X.2 and now X.3 will be much more money than I would have spent on XP, which I don't plan to buy since it doesn't offer anything that 2k doesn't.
You say this is due to the fact that the wintel hardware is of lower quality. I think it is due to the fact that there is much more hardware availale for Wintel. The users "have" to upgrade because they "have" to have that new video card that just came out (and will probably not be supported under Mac, so the mac user doesn't "have" to upgrade).
I also think this might have something to do with PC buyers' and vendors' pennywise-pound-foolish behavior. PC margins are a few microns thinner than the processes used to etch their CPU silicon and loads of corners get cut by their makers. Most people buying consumer-oriented retail systems are also "bargin" shopping and will choose cheaper systems simply because they're cheaper. It's a feedback loop that leads to systems that either break or are obsolete and require upgrading, or often replacing due to a lack of upgradability.
Apple isn't under as much pressure to play the how-flimsy-can-we-make-it game and many Mac systems are argubly better quality than their retail x86 equivilents. They're also substantively more expensive. The higher cost and marginally higher quality leads Mac users to put off upgrades they might otherwise pursue. The Mac user may not need to fix his PC right away, but he also can't afford to replace it as fast, either, nor may he feel compelled to because the peripheral market turns out fewer products, slower, as well.
PC makers do build better products with better quality than you see on retail shelves, but their lack of cost competitiveness keeps them out of retail and in vendors "workstation" and low-end "server" product lines.
The phenomena you describe I think is part of a larger (and growing!) class division in America. People who do real work (ie, that can point to a product and show their specific contribution, whether design, programming, manufacturing, etc) are being seperated from people whose real work consists solely of "managing".
People who "manage" have set themselves up as a self-ruling class that sets the rules and rewards for not only the the people they manage but for themselves as well. The important thing to note is the self-ruling aspect -- the management class very nearly always gets bonuses when workers get paycuts, for example.
The other aspects of the management class that trouble me is the way that the work done my managers is structured in such a way that many expenses are subsidized for the "managers". Many managers travel extensively and during this time have all of their expenses recouped, they dine out extensively and many often private expenses are paid for by the company (home office setups, club memberships).
It's not that any of the justifications for paying for these things (ie, meals on company trips) are illogical or wrong, but that the work is structured in such a way that an entire class of workers spends much of their working time in situations where logic dictates that their otherwise personal expenses are paid for by their employers, which is not an insignificant decrease in their overall financial burden, in spite of often exponentially larger salaries justified by the demands of "travel" and "evening dinner meetings."
Meanwhile the "do-ers" are forced to dine at the company cafeteria (short lunch periods) or brown bag it, pay for their own parking and justify office supply purchases for trivial items. Essentially they are required to bear the full costs associated with going to work, while the management class has them heavily subsidized.
What also concerns me about this is the social aspect of this; people spend so much time at work that they transfer the implied power and priviledge of their work places to the rest of their lives, presuming that a seperate set of rules applies to them vis-a-vis taxes, schools, residences, and even law enforcement and access to government decision making.
People who belong to the management classes tend to cluster in McMansions in the same wealthy suburbs and make effective use of their affluence to influence the political process to ensure their continued viability (undermining worker protections, tax cuts only they seem to benefit from, public works projects that they derive a preponderance of benefit from such as new highways to their suburbs).
I believe its just the further Brazilification of our economy and way of life.
...with LCDs is that they're generally lower res at a given size than I'd run an equivilent-sized CRT at. In other words, I can crank a CRT to a higher display resolution than an LCD can.
To get the res I'm used to on a 21" CRT (1920x1440), I need some $3k 24" LCD display.
I'm willing to forgive the Slashdot editors for duplicate story postings and the bad grammar and spelling, but I can never forgive them including the idiotic editorializing thats in story submissions.
People still want a black box that's one stereo rack unit, like the DVD/VCR/CD player/et al, and a user interface easily compatible with a remote control.
The PC based solutions are nowhere near that level of functionality yet.
I think where Cisco feels a lot of pressure is in SOHO operations where people (rightly or wrongly) may decide that they get more bang/buck by buying a Linksys or other low-end product, many of which are now including some reasonable features like IPSec that Cisco wants you to pay a lot for.
By stripping out these "high end" features from low-end products, Cisco can force you to buy the much more expensive Cisco product instead.
DV bridges (such as the Dazzle or the Canopus products) are great for creating DV streams, but they don't solve the MPEG2 or other transcoding problems since they often rely on software codecs and real-time encoding.
I had high hopes for the Hauppauge 350 card, but the one I got was awful. On the first system I used it in (PIII700) it wouldn't work at all until I re-loaded all the drivers with a batch of beta ones supplied by Tech support. The card then *mostly* worked (it did produce good MPEG2 captures), but the system was nearly frozen and at 100% cpu utlization. Changes to the capture application lagged by 3-4 seconds. I moved the card to a PIII 933 system and it didn't work *at all* no matter what drivers I used.
What I see as missing is a companion to the DV bridge that supplies hardware MPEG1/2 compression and decompression so that transcoding can take place at 2x-4x. Software-only solutions like TMPGEnc produce great video, but on my Dual 667 PIII system its at 1/4x, slower yet in multipass conversions. Basically I want an MPEG2 codec card that transcoding to/from MPEG2 can be handed off to, much like any other coprocessor solution.
There are really high end cards that appear to be able to do this, but they often cost thousands.
I also hate the patchwork software -- you need 8 applications to do one thing, and they don't all work well all the time.
Standalone DVD recorders are probably the best solution if you're just looking to convert VHS or other sources to DVD. Simple, easy to use, and produces good results (we have a Pioneer model here at work). They're still pretty expensive, though, and they're missing the obvious feature -- firewire connectivity for ripping discs (even if only ripping "open" discs made by the player). If these can hit the ~$400 mark, I'd snap one up right away.
If you come to my house and try all the doors to see what's open to the general public, you'll probably get shot or at least get to see how well your head is capable of decelerating a baseball bat.
Why? It's not polite, and rude people get treated rudely.
Virtually every MBA program worth a damn is set up as a seperate college within its University and is wholly distinct from the Liberal Arts programs that represent the humanities and the social sciences.
Furthermore, the analytical skills of a business major are based on far more objectifiable information and quantative data than are those of the typical historian, English major or other prototypical Liberal Arts major.
Business management is supposed to be an analytical profession, not an artistic one. It's got much more in common with engineering disciplines than it does with the humanities.
In many Universities, it's a seperate college from liberal arts and engineering, although I suspect that may be to keep the b-school donations and donars from worrying about the English department squandering their donations.
The same would would be true for a highly technology oriented school in the U.S.
I'm sure that these folks would vehemently disagree with that analysis, and I believe their technolgy orientation and credentials are beyond question...
Twice in the past year I've had minor medical issues that just didn't warrant the hell that is trying to get into my regular doctor on short notice, so I went to the "urgent care" center.
Each time I was worked on by a doctor who was obviously not an American. The first guy was Egyptian and the second woman was Bulgarian. I can't say that the care was substandard (a bottle of amoxicillin each time), but their English was *awful* and their bedside manner was almost rude. And not that it matters, but their personal appearance was pretty shoddy -- bad, slept-in-my-car-in-my-clothes appearance.
I found out from a friend who is a doctor that this particular chain of urgent care centers specializes in bringing in foreign MDs and certifying them as US doctors. I dunno if there's some gimmick or not (ie, a fully certified doctor "on call" or what), but I'm sure the overall trick is that they will work for $30k a year, shitty hours in order to become American citizens and doctors.
Anyway, the AMA is losing this battle or at least winning a pyhrric victory.
Moreover, the consistant argument CEOs and top officers make for their huge salaries and generous bonuses (in spite of drops in profits) is that they posess talents that are in short supply (leadership, strategic thinking, etc), and that the short supply demands large wages.
If that's the case, why isn't Americas marketing and executive class full of H1-Bs? If India is competant at generating engineers then I'm sure they're highly skilled at generating MBAs and marketing people, too.
The fact is that H1-B is solely an excuse for corporations to keep engineering pay low. There's just no other logical conclusion you can reach.
I've had this discussion with numerous marketing execs before and in the final analysis they have the idea that engineers are ALWAYS worth less than marketing and must always be paid less, and that much of their motivation for seeking H1Bs has been driven largely by the fact that they can't justify driving marketing salaries any higher in response to market-driven increases in engineering salaries.
The market-driven reality should have been that marketing salaries went lower than engineering salaries, simply due to market demand. But this didn't happen, due to some weird class system that values the marketing/executive class above all others, even when the market will not sustain it!
I seem to recall someone who knows more about this than me (cop? lawyer? misc.legal?) explaining something about shoplifting.
If you pick up something and walk out of the store carrying it in plain sight and claim it was an accident/oversight, they can't (won't?) charge you with shoplifting since you didn't attempt to conceal it. Apparently the skullduggery is necessary.
I'm probably wrong, but I've done this before -- picked up something, got to talking or browsing, forgot I was holding something and walked out of the store. Nobody stopped me (hey, maybe it's a better technique, too), but I went back and paid for it anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
(I'm assuming you're using terminal and phone interchangably).
Phone prices in the US aren't cheap now. They appear to be cheap if you sign a long contract, but if you're just looking for a handset they're expensive.
I don't see why this would change with number portability, since the cheapness of the handset relates to the contract length. Breaking the contract costs money (often several hundred dollars), and even then the handset may not be usable on the network you want to switch to.
I doubt they're on ours, simply because the machine is used solely for one really old application and I don't think any 'accessory' stuff has ever been installed. We don't even have telnet installed/enabled, just the HP terminal display protocol.
We have an HP3000 system here where I work (anyone else have exposure to Datatrak?). It is indeed a pretty reliable OS & HW combination, HP DDS drives not included.
It does feel like a step back in time, though. I'm not the operator of this system, but when I've had to babysit it seems as if there's a lot that could be automated with a better scripting language and some other UNIX-style tools (grep, textuitls, perl).
I just read slashdot at +5, and hide all stories by CmdrTaco. The former guarantees I only read really good tripe and the latter eliminates redundant data.
My gripe about these kinds of text exactly. I've been running x86 unices in a professional capacity (first Linux, now FreeBSD) since '97. I don't need a UNIX how-to book, but a cross-reference book that addresses OS X as a Unix OS as compared to its BSD brethren.
I could, of course, just muddle through and figure stuff out, but I have less patience and free time than I used to.
I have OS X on two boxes, one in the office and one at home, but I've been turned off by the hiding of the UNIX stuff. I use FreeBSD daily at work and at home and would like to get more out of OS X than I have so far, but it's been obfuscated beyond my willingness to dig.
Any books that approach OS X from a BSD user's perspective? I don't care for the OS X GUI interface myself (wish I still had Finder...), but it might be fun to get more out of BSD side than I have.
Does it strike anyone else as ironic that Adobe, which began as a Macintosh-dominant company (the versions of PhotoShop always came out for the Mac first), is now becoming Windows-dominant?
.com runup), so they had to move to the PC market where the growth options were less limited.
The enemy is growth. Once Adobe saturated the Mac market with their products, it became hard for them to grow. They could have stayed a Mac-user-base sized company, but investors wouldn't have it (especially in the
How are platform differences like this handled at most companies? Are the applications written from scratch by two teams who converge on a common UI?
It would seem that a good chunk (50%?) of the code could be written for overall efficiency in a platform neutral way and then the other 50% that was highly platform specific could be written for each platform.
IANAD, but I would think that the 50% common-code number could actually be much higher if an effort was made to use portable, high-level development environments.
I don't think that management is useless. It's a necessary and important part of running an organization. However, I don't think that such a skill is requires a seperate and distinct class of people that are allowed to set the rules for others as as well as themselves with distinctly higher pay packets.
Your argument of the lack of self-managed organizations existing is mooted by my assertion that those who make the rules do so to assure their continued rule-making. Democracy doesn't just happen, either -- lots of dictators argue that the little people can't make decisions without the inspired leadership of their betters as well.
My beef isn't so much with management being unneccessary, but the growth of management as a distinct class with a seperate set of privileges that are not granted to others. Coupled with the repeal of the estate tax, increasingly expensive college tuition at "good" schools and we have all the fixings for a new American aristocracy.
It's still cheaper than paying ~$300 for every release of a known-broken OS commonly used on the x86 infrastructure....
I bought a brand-new computer in 1996. It came with Win95. I ran that box until late '98, wherein I bought another box and ran Win98SE until mid-2000, then bought another box and ran 2k.
If you consider the OS with the computer as "free" (ie, you're not paying extra), then about the only OS payment I would have made would have been had I bought XP, in which case I would have paid extra. Win2K service packs haven't added much functionality, but they have been free.
I've spent more on OS X in the past two years than on MS OSes. X, X.2 and now X.3 will be much more money than I would have spent on XP, which I don't plan to buy since it doesn't offer anything that 2k doesn't.
You say this is due to the fact that the wintel hardware is of lower quality. I think it is due to the fact that there is much more hardware availale for Wintel. The users "have" to upgrade because they "have" to have that new video card that just came out (and will probably not be supported under Mac, so the mac user doesn't "have" to upgrade).
I also think this might have something to do with PC buyers' and vendors' pennywise-pound-foolish behavior. PC margins are a few microns thinner than the processes used to etch their CPU silicon and loads of corners get cut by their makers. Most people buying consumer-oriented retail systems are also "bargin" shopping and will choose cheaper systems simply because they're cheaper. It's a feedback loop that leads to systems that either break or are obsolete and require upgrading, or often replacing due to a lack of upgradability.
Apple isn't under as much pressure to play the how-flimsy-can-we-make-it game and many Mac systems are argubly better quality than their retail x86 equivilents. They're also substantively more expensive. The higher cost and marginally higher quality leads Mac users to put off upgrades they might otherwise pursue. The Mac user may not need to fix his PC right away, but he also can't afford to replace it as fast, either, nor may he feel compelled to because the peripheral market turns out fewer products, slower, as well.
PC makers do build better products with better quality than you see on retail shelves, but their lack of cost competitiveness keeps them out of retail and in vendors "workstation" and low-end "server" product lines.
The phenomena you describe I think is part of a larger (and growing!) class division in America. People who do real work (ie, that can point to a product and show their specific contribution, whether design, programming, manufacturing, etc) are being seperated from people whose real work consists solely of "managing".
People who "manage" have set themselves up as a self-ruling class that sets the rules and rewards for not only the the people they manage but for themselves as well. The important thing to note is the self-ruling aspect -- the management class very nearly always gets bonuses when workers get paycuts, for example.
The other aspects of the management class that trouble me is the way that the work done my managers is structured in such a way that many expenses are subsidized for the "managers". Many managers travel extensively and during this time have all of their expenses recouped, they dine out extensively and many often private expenses are paid for by the company (home office setups, club memberships).
It's not that any of the justifications for paying for these things (ie, meals on company trips) are illogical or wrong, but that the work is structured in such a way that an entire class of workers spends much of their working time in situations where logic dictates that their otherwise personal expenses are paid for by their employers, which is not an insignificant decrease in their overall financial burden, in spite of often exponentially larger salaries justified by the demands of "travel" and "evening dinner meetings."
Meanwhile the "do-ers" are forced to dine at the company cafeteria (short lunch periods) or brown bag it, pay for their own parking and justify office supply purchases for trivial items. Essentially they are required to bear the full costs associated with going to work, while the management class has them heavily subsidized.
What also concerns me about this is the social aspect of this; people spend so much time at work that they transfer the implied power and priviledge of their work places to the rest of their lives, presuming that a seperate set of rules applies to them vis-a-vis taxes, schools, residences, and even law enforcement and access to government decision making.
People who belong to the management classes tend to cluster in McMansions in the same wealthy suburbs and make effective use of their affluence to influence the political process to ensure their continued viability (undermining worker protections, tax cuts only they seem to benefit from, public works projects that they derive a preponderance of benefit from such as new highways to their suburbs).
I believe its just the further Brazilification of our economy and way of life.
...with LCDs is that they're generally lower res at a given size than I'd run an equivilent-sized CRT at. In other words, I can crank a CRT to a higher display resolution than an LCD can.
To get the res I'm used to on a 21" CRT (1920x1440), I need some $3k 24" LCD display.
I'm willing to forgive the Slashdot editors for duplicate story postings and the bad grammar and spelling, but I can never forgive them including the idiotic editorializing thats in story submissions.
People still want a black box that's one stereo rack unit, like the DVD/VCR/CD player/et al, and a user interface easily compatible with a remote control.
The PC based solutions are nowhere near that level of functionality yet.
My solution to this has been simple. Carry less gadgets when you travel.
I think where Cisco feels a lot of pressure is in SOHO operations where people (rightly or wrongly) may decide that they get more bang/buck by buying a Linksys or other low-end product, many of which are now including some reasonable features like IPSec that Cisco wants you to pay a lot for.
By stripping out these "high end" features from low-end products, Cisco can force you to buy the much more expensive Cisco product instead.
DV bridges (such as the Dazzle or the Canopus products) are great for creating DV streams, but they don't solve the MPEG2 or other transcoding problems since they often rely on software codecs and real-time encoding.
I had high hopes for the Hauppauge 350 card, but the one I got was awful. On the first system I used it in (PIII700) it wouldn't work at all until I re-loaded all the drivers with a batch of beta ones supplied by Tech support. The card then *mostly* worked (it did produce good MPEG2 captures), but the system was nearly frozen and at 100% cpu utlization. Changes to the capture application lagged by 3-4 seconds. I moved the card to a PIII 933 system and it didn't work *at all* no matter what drivers I used.
What I see as missing is a companion to the DV bridge that supplies hardware MPEG1/2 compression and decompression so that transcoding can take place at 2x-4x. Software-only solutions like TMPGEnc produce great video, but on my Dual 667 PIII system its at 1/4x, slower yet in multipass conversions. Basically I want an MPEG2 codec card that transcoding to/from MPEG2 can be handed off to, much like any other coprocessor solution.
There are really high end cards that appear to be able to do this, but they often cost thousands.
I also hate the patchwork software -- you need 8 applications to do one thing, and they don't all work well all the time.
Standalone DVD recorders are probably the best solution if you're just looking to convert VHS or other sources to DVD. Simple, easy to use, and produces good results (we have a Pioneer model here at work). They're still pretty expensive, though, and they're missing the obvious feature -- firewire connectivity for ripping discs (even if only ripping "open" discs made by the player). If these can hit the ~$400 mark, I'd snap one up right away.
If you come to my house and try all the doors to see what's open to the general public, you'll probably get shot or at least get to see how well your head is capable of decelerating a baseball bat.
Why? It's not polite, and rude people get treated rudely.
Still not buying it.
Virtually every MBA program worth a damn is set up as a seperate college within its University and is wholly distinct from the Liberal Arts programs that represent the humanities and the social sciences.
Furthermore, the analytical skills of a business major are based on far more objectifiable information and quantative data than are those of the typical historian, English major or other prototypical Liberal Arts major.
Business management is supposed to be an analytical profession, not an artistic one. It's got much more in common with engineering disciplines than it does with the humanities.
In many Universities, it's a seperate college from liberal arts and engineering, although I suspect that may be to keep the b-school donations and donars from worrying about the English department squandering their donations.
The same would would be true for a highly technology oriented school in the U.S.
I'm sure that these folks would vehemently disagree with that analysis, and I believe their technolgy orientation and credentials are beyond question...
Twice in the past year I've had minor medical issues that just didn't warrant the hell that is trying to get into my regular doctor on short notice, so I went to the "urgent care" center.
Each time I was worked on by a doctor who was obviously not an American. The first guy was Egyptian and the second woman was Bulgarian. I can't say that the care was substandard (a bottle of amoxicillin each time), but their English was *awful* and their bedside manner was almost rude. And not that it matters, but their personal appearance was pretty shoddy -- bad, slept-in-my-car-in-my-clothes appearance.
I found out from a friend who is a doctor that this particular chain of urgent care centers specializes in bringing in foreign MDs and certifying them as US doctors. I dunno if there's some gimmick or not (ie, a fully certified doctor "on call" or what), but I'm sure the overall trick is that they will work for $30k a year, shitty hours in order to become American citizens and doctors.
Anyway, the AMA is losing this battle or at least winning a pyhrric victory.
Moreover, the consistant argument CEOs and top officers make for their huge salaries and generous bonuses (in spite of drops in profits) is that they posess talents that are in short supply (leadership, strategic thinking, etc), and that the short supply demands large wages.
If that's the case, why isn't Americas marketing and executive class full of H1-Bs? If India is competant at generating engineers then I'm sure they're highly skilled at generating MBAs and marketing people, too.
The fact is that H1-B is solely an excuse for corporations to keep engineering pay low. There's just no other logical conclusion you can reach.
I've had this discussion with numerous marketing execs before and in the final analysis they have the idea that engineers are ALWAYS worth less than marketing and must always be paid less, and that much of their motivation for seeking H1Bs has been driven largely by the fact that they can't justify driving marketing salaries any higher in response to market-driven increases in engineering salaries.
The market-driven reality should have been that marketing salaries went lower than engineering salaries, simply due to market demand. But this didn't happen, due to some weird class system that values the marketing/executive class above all others, even when the market will not sustain it!
It's too bad the waste heat couldn't be used as a catalyst for a chemical reaction that generated power.
I seem to recall someone who knows more about this than me (cop? lawyer? misc.legal?) explaining something about shoplifting.
If you pick up something and walk out of the store carrying it in plain sight and claim it was an accident/oversight, they can't (won't?) charge you with shoplifting since you didn't attempt to conceal it. Apparently the skullduggery is necessary.
I'm probably wrong, but I've done this before -- picked up something, got to talking or browsing, forgot I was holding something and walked out of the store. Nobody stopped me (hey, maybe it's a better technique, too), but I went back and paid for it anyway.