Well, they'll now have to use one of the other (non web-based) delivery services. But it'll cost a bit more, probably.
Yeah, it's called their daughters. My mother and her younger sister do pretty much all their shopping for them. It's fortunate that most of the family is so convenient; I'm the farthest one away: about 500 miles.
I agree about WebVan needed a better system. I was not aware of their internal structure; I'd think that large chains of grocery stores like Publix, Kroger, Big Star or whatever, could be talked into this kind of thing.
Eighty miles is a very long distance to cover with a delivery truck, anyway. How far apart are UPS centers? Post Offices? That's the delivery radius they should have shot for.
My grandparents (who live in East Point, an Atlanta suburb) found WebVan to be quite convenient. Grandpa has macular degeneration and can't see well enough to drive anymore; Grandma has muscular atrophy and doesn't get around much either.
It makes you wonder how the old practice of delivering milk door-to-door worked. I remember as recently as fifteen years ago my grandparents had their milk delivered every morning in glass quart bottles.
I keep the checkbook for our local church, and received the books from the previous treasurer in Quicken Deluxe 99.
Currently I use Wine to run Quicken Deluxe on my RedHat box, and it almost works. I've never been able to get the printer to do anything from Wine, and although I've read floppies to generate backups, I can't get Quicken/Wine to write them.
I have looked at GnuCash several times in the past, and it has yet to impress me enough to change due to several features:
Reporting facilities: perhaps it's changed in more recent releases, but I could not find any way to customize or organize reports. I prepare reports for session meetings, and it would be nice to be able to customize the reports.
User Interface: GnuCash seems to treat each budget item as a seperate account from which transactions are made. While this is probably the "correct" way to do it, I find it extremely difficult to handle the mountian of split checks I write each month. I have come to enjoy Quicken's much simpler handling of split checks.
Data Interoperability Although GnuCash can read QIF files, it can't write them. I can imagine that one day I'll hand over the checkbook to somebody else; I would be remiss in locking them into a particular checkbook manager. By giving GnuCash the ability to interoperate with other checkbook managers, it makes the data more available to everyone. Let's not forget: the data is always more important than the application that it was created/edited in.
I do understand and appreciate the effort that goes in to writing a full-strength application like GnuCash. I just have philosophical differences with the choices that the authors have made.
Precisely! I think the previous poster missed the point. It's not the flammability that'll kill you, it's the explosive release of pressurized gas and the resultant hail of schrapnel.
Thank you to all; I sincerely thought he meant to say, "surcharge." All of the offered definitions for "seachange" make sense and I appreciate all the responses.
Cars don't have big engines for sustained speed; they have/need big engines for acceleration.
I used to have a 1984 Pontiac Sunbird with a 1.8-liter inline four. Brand new, that engine was rated for 80 horsepower (when I bought it it hasd 124k miles and a blown head gasket, which I fixed). It had a five-speed manual transmission and was therefore barely drivable in traffic (downtown Atlanta). I can't imagine how lethargic it would have been with a manual transmission. It would have been dangerous!
Going down the road takes little more than 25 HP for the average car. Getting up to speed and merging with traffic is where POWER is needed.
I mentioned this before-- this car would be a BOMB in an accident. Think of any aerosol can in your house: "Do not puncture or incinerate." Ever wonder why?
Compressed gases are incredibly dangerous. Moreso than barely-flammable liquids like gasoline, in my opinion. I think I'll pass.
No, that's not the system that screwed up California's electricity supply.
What screwed up California's electricity supply was the environmentalists' rabid insistance on not building new generating facilities. Their wishes were adopted by the state government as law, and as I often heard growing up: "If you want to dance, you've got to pay the piper."
Since utilities were not allowed to build new generating facilities in-state (even if it was legal to build them, they were strongly discouraged to do so by the regulatory burden placed on them), they had to buy power from sources outside the state.
A few years ago the California state government, in its infinitesimal wisdom, "de-regulated" the electric power industry in the state: they lifted all regulations on the wholesale price of electricity, while leaving in place all caps and regulations on the retail price of electric power. In other words, they could sell/buy electricity to/from other utilities for whatever price they wanted, but they couldn't charge any more to their retail consumers (the public).
Since they couldn't build more generating facilities, the cost per megawatt has steadily increased due to many in-state factors: aging generating equipment, fuel costs, maintenance of aging transmission systems. Furthermore, many out-of-state factors come into play. Two examples: drought is a bane for hydroelectric generators. EPA regulations on sulphur content of coal is causing problems nation-wide. These costs were passed between utilties who were then UNable to recoup their costs from consumers, leading to all the utility bankruptcies.
Lack of generating capacity is California's problem; it's been a long time coming and it will be a long time fixing. Californians have come to expect electric power, and they're going to have to pay for it, just like everyone else. They're going to have to build generating facilities. Real ones, not just windmill farms. New generating capacity is the only way to fix California's electricty problems.
This reminds me of one of the pro-abortion arguments: "All those pro-life protestors should go home unless they're going to *personally* pay for these babies!" Why not couch the California problem like this: "All those pro-environment protestors should go home unless they're going to *personally* pay for the extra costs of electricity not having generators creates!"
DSL is sent as a higher frequency radio signal.Ever try to make radio signals work over fiber? It doesn't work!
Sure it does! The fiber doesen't care!
The phone companies don't just hook up a wire and a fiber at a terminal strip and have it work, even for voice. Optical transmitters are used to MODULATE whatever signal is to be transmitted on a laser that is then sent down the fiber. That signal could be voice, data, whatever.
Dielectric waveguides work just fine-- you could send "radio signals" over fiber if you could find a fiber big enough. Just like any other waveguide, the physical size of the guide determines the portion of the EM spectrum that it will propagate. Dielectric waveguides like optical fibers are discussed in most good Microwave engineering texts.
The idea of recording a signal for later playback is novel. The encoding method and media are not relavent.
This patent can't be valid since a VTR would be prior art. The mere fact that they use a particular recording scheme doesn't matter-- different VTRs have different data formats, some analog some digital, some even compressed digital. The mere fact they're using a disk instead of tape isn't important-- video disk recorders were used for years for things like still stores and instant playback at sporting events.
It's just not valid to say that their timeshifting is novel since they use MPEG and computer hard disks.
Oh, that's right. The first thing that came to my mind when I read, "Family Guy," was instead the "Family Man" of Family Auto Mart, which started here in Melbourne and now has another used car lot in Orlando.
The Family Man runs some infomercials on local cable that have to be seen to be believed.
I send them to my own postmaster so that he can be looking for floods from those people. If he gets complaints about a certian domain name, they can shut the offenders off closer to the source.
A couple of weeks ago a colleague of mine here at work showed me a patent abstract that had been published in one of his IEEE periodicals.
Seems like I remember the title being something to the effect of, "Method for Shortening the Guided Wavelength of an Electromagnetic Wave in a Waveguide," or something like that.
After reading the abstract, it occurred to me that these guys had been awarded a patent for dielectrically loading waveguide, a concept found in any EM/Microwave text book. I know my Pozar book covers it.
General consensus around here: "That's one patent to ignore..." or "Duh!"
A previous poster noted that there was almost no plagarism found in the latest batch of submitted essays; he quoted a bit saying that this "diff" software was a good preventative.
It will be so only for a short time. Very soon it will become too much work to scan each paper against every paper ever submitted, and that's what the task will devolve to. Pretty soon it will become an intractable problem to search through N*(N-m) combinations, where N is the total number of papers ever submitted, and (N-m) are the papers submitted before this quarter/semester. To do any less thorough of a search is to defeat the purpose of the search.
For example, lets say that 300 people took the class this semester, and that is the average number of people in the class each semester for the past ten years. That means that 9,000 papers have been submitted, and 2.6 MILLION combinations of papers need to be examined. Yikes!
I suppose that the job could be "chunked" into groups and run in parallel on more than one machine, but that does not degate the raw volume of data that would have to be examined.
If companies like Magnequench (oi, what a name -- I'm thirsty, anyone
want a big glass of magnet?)
I read that and was thinking that since "quench" means to extinguish, would not a company called "Magnaquench" make products that cause things to NOT be magnetic? Demagnatizing stuff, like degaussing coils.
What makes these patent fees (better known as licenses fees) any more Stupid than any others? Magnaquench holds a real, live patent on a process for making a very strong magnet. People want to use these very strong magnets in things like disk drives and video tape recorders.
Magnaquench, I am sure, expended a lot of time and effort creating these things. Their legally obtained and perfectly valid patents are still in force, and won't expire for a few more years. They're legally, and I would say ethically, entitled to compensation for the world's use of their stuff. Should they just give it away>
Slashdot Mirror
No, because "Word" is not trademarked, but "Microsoft Word" is.
I agree about WebVan needed a better system. I was not aware of their internal structure; I'd think that large chains of grocery stores like Publix, Kroger, Big Star or whatever, could be talked into this kind of thing.
Eighty miles is a very long distance to cover with a delivery truck, anyway. How far apart are UPS centers? Post Offices? That's the delivery radius they should have shot for.
It makes you wonder how the old practice of delivering milk door-to-door worked. I remember as recently as fifteen years ago my grandparents had their milk delivered every morning in glass quart bottles.
THe Open Group would have to call it "X Microsoft Windows" for your senario to work, and they don't.
Or the name of a mutual funds company.
Isn't it spelled, "acronym?"
If I were using KDE I could call it Kwicken!
I think I'll call it, "Slacken," instead!
I would also bet that gun control laws wouldn't stop people from killing each other with firearms.
I guess there's no cure for cluelessness.
Now, having said that, would you like to take a moment to calm down and cite some sources for your accusations?
Currently I use Wine to run Quicken Deluxe on my RedHat box, and it almost works. I've never been able to get the printer to do anything from Wine, and although I've read floppies to generate backups, I can't get Quicken/Wine to write them.
I have looked at GnuCash several times in the past, and it has yet to impress me enough to change due to several features:
- Reporting facilities: perhaps it's changed in more recent releases, but I could not find any way to customize or organize reports. I prepare reports for session meetings, and it would be nice to be able to customize the reports.
- User Interface: GnuCash seems to treat each budget item as a seperate account from which transactions are made. While this is probably the "correct" way to do it, I find it extremely difficult to handle the mountian of split checks I write each month. I have come to enjoy Quicken's much simpler handling of split checks.
- Data Interoperability Although GnuCash can read QIF files, it can't write them. I can imagine that one day I'll hand over the checkbook to somebody else; I would be remiss in locking them into a particular checkbook manager. By giving GnuCash the ability to interoperate with other checkbook managers, it makes the data more available to everyone. Let's not forget: the data is always more important than the application that it was created/edited in.
I do understand and appreciate the effort that goes in to writing a full-strength application like GnuCash. I just have philosophical differences with the choices that the authors have made.I used to have a 1984 Pontiac Sunbird with a 1.8-liter inline four. Brand new, that engine was rated for 80 horsepower (when I bought it it hasd 124k miles and a blown head gasket, which I fixed). It had a five-speed manual transmission and was therefore barely drivable in traffic (downtown Atlanta). I can't imagine how lethargic it would have been with a manual transmission. It would have been dangerous!
Going down the road takes little more than 25 HP for the average car. Getting up to speed and merging with traffic is where POWER is needed.
A perfect hydrocarbon-fuel combustion process produces nothing but carbon dioxide and water.
Compressed gases are incredibly dangerous. Moreso than barely-flammable liquids like gasoline, in my opinion. I think I'll pass.
What's a seachange?
What screwed up California's electricity supply was the environmentalists' rabid insistance on not building new generating facilities. Their wishes were adopted by the state government as law, and as I often heard growing up: "If you want to dance, you've got to pay the piper."
Since utilities were not allowed to build new generating facilities in-state (even if it was legal to build them, they were strongly discouraged to do so by the regulatory burden placed on them), they had to buy power from sources outside the state.
A few years ago the California state government, in its infinitesimal wisdom, "de-regulated" the electric power industry in the state: they lifted all regulations on the wholesale price of electricity, while leaving in place all caps and regulations on the retail price of electric power. In other words, they could sell/buy electricity to/from other utilities for whatever price they wanted, but they couldn't charge any more to their retail consumers (the public).
Since they couldn't build more generating facilities, the cost per megawatt has steadily increased due to many in-state factors: aging generating equipment, fuel costs, maintenance of aging transmission systems. Furthermore, many out-of-state factors come into play. Two examples: drought is a bane for hydroelectric generators. EPA regulations on sulphur content of coal is causing problems nation-wide. These costs were passed between utilties who were then UNable to recoup their costs from consumers, leading to all the utility bankruptcies.
Lack of generating capacity is California's problem; it's been a long time coming and it will be a long time fixing. Californians have come to expect electric power, and they're going to have to pay for it, just like everyone else. They're going to have to build generating facilities. Real ones, not just windmill farms. New generating capacity is the only way to fix California's electricty problems.
This reminds me of one of the pro-abortion arguments: "All those pro-life protestors should go home unless they're going to *personally* pay for these babies!" Why not couch the California problem like this: "All those pro-environment protestors should go home unless they're going to *personally* pay for the extra costs of electricity not having generators creates!"
The phone companies don't just hook up a wire and a fiber at a terminal strip and have it work, even for voice. Optical transmitters are used to MODULATE whatever signal is to be transmitted on a laser that is then sent down the fiber. That signal could be voice, data, whatever.
Dielectric waveguides work just fine-- you could send "radio signals" over fiber if you could find a fiber big enough. Just like any other waveguide, the physical size of the guide determines the portion of the EM spectrum that it will propagate. Dielectric waveguides like optical fibers are discussed in most good Microwave engineering texts.
This patent can't be valid since a VTR would be prior art. The mere fact that they use a particular recording scheme doesn't matter-- different VTRs have different data formats, some analog some digital, some even compressed digital. The mere fact they're using a disk instead of tape isn't important-- video disk recorders were used for years for things like still stores and instant playback at sporting events.
It's just not valid to say that their timeshifting is novel since they use MPEG and computer hard disks.
The Family Man runs some infomercials on local cable that have to be seen to be believed.
At least that's the idea...
- abuse@isp.com
- postmaster@isp.com
- abuse@k2net.cc (my ISP)
- postmaster@k2net.c (again, my ISP)
More often than not the first one or two bounceSeems like I remember the title being something to the effect of, "Method for Shortening the Guided Wavelength of an Electromagnetic Wave in a Waveguide," or something like that.
After reading the abstract, it occurred to me that these guys had been awarded a patent for dielectrically loading waveguide, a concept found in any EM/Microwave text book. I know my Pozar book covers it.
General consensus around here: "That's one patent to ignore..." or "Duh!"
It will be so only for a short time. Very soon it will become too much work to scan each paper against every paper ever submitted, and that's what the task will devolve to. Pretty soon it will become an intractable problem to search through N*(N-m) combinations, where N is the total number of papers ever submitted, and (N-m) are the papers submitted before this quarter/semester. To do any less thorough of a search is to defeat the purpose of the search.
For example, lets say that 300 people took the class this semester, and that is the average number of people in the class each semester for the past ten years. That means that 9,000 papers have been submitted, and 2.6 MILLION combinations of papers need to be examined. Yikes!
I suppose that the job could be "chunked" into groups and run in parallel on more than one machine, but that does not degate the raw volume of data that would have to be examined.
Magnaquench, I am sure, expended a lot of time and effort creating these things. Their legally obtained and perfectly valid patents are still in force, and won't expire for a few more years. They're legally, and I would say ethically, entitled to compensation for the world's use of their stuff. Should they just give it away>