Last year, the feature shutoff was that the older version would no longer be able to download quotes. Since this is the feature I use most, and my version was five years old, I "upgraded". Since then, I have become an expert at restoring from backup. For five years, I _never_ restored from backup, now I do it at least once a month, because Quicken regularly corrupts my data. Tech support? The guy in India was willing to charge me $20 or some such fee to walk me through the "restore from backup" procedure, but since I'd already done that several times, it wasn't necessary. He was unwilling to admit that maybe a financial product should never corrupt data, even if the file was big.
I don'k know if you are aware, but a group at MIT did a musical spoof of Star Wars about a year ago. It was actually very funny, at least if you also knew enough of the original songs as well (such as being able to guess your tune is "Luck Be A Lady Tonight"). Link to MTG past shows site.
I can generalize your comment and say mass market is what is being appealed to, rather than quality or uniqueness. There are similar arguments on Slashdot about music. And retail (Starbucks vs. Mom-and-Pop coffee). You can see it in McDonald's and McMansions. Maybe what he's talking about isn't really a Sci-Fi trend, but actually a general trend.
I know, rather than have pharmaceutical companies exist to make money by inventing and selling new drugs, let's let someone else do it. How about NADA, the National Anti Disease Administration. They could use 30 year old technology to achieve cures for diseases few people have, they could kill people because they measured their doses in ounces but prescribed them in cc's (yeah, that's a cheap shot), they could have to fight for every dollar every year in congress, and be forced to fund showy programs so they aren't viewed as irrelevant.
Or maybe we could just expect the researcher to be like teachers. We could pay them insufficiently, give them terrible working conditions, make them buy their own supplies, and blame them when all the diseases arent cured.
Maybe some genius out there has a better system, but so far, there's plenty of evidence that capitalism gets stuff done, even if it is imperfect.
I also, btw, agree with the poster who pointed out it is good this is expensive, so it doesn't get over used.
Nice try, but wasn't there a spoofed "switcher" ad posted here a while back with a user complaining about all the changes between OS9 and OSX? I have no first hand knowledge, but there was one guy who was annoyed enough to go to a lot of effort to complain.
Bingo. I know that for two viewers, my wife and I, the priority was TTT, Harry Potter, then Star Trek, and by the time we got around to the first two, we couldn't find the third at a decent theatre. So I'm sure we'll rent it, but I'm not overly disappointed by that.
Re:The predicted chain of events according to me
on
Giant Sucking Noise
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Interesting point about 1929. The way out of that depression was a war. Not a silly little war, but a huge war that resulted in huge technical advances in the US and Germany, and maybe a few other countries. Except the US bombed the crap out of Germany, so the tech advances continued here. And that drove the economy ahead of every other country for a long time. But why should that last forever?
The lowest bidder was inevitable. Even if we could force everyone in the US to buy American, eventually the same goods will be produced cheaper elsewhere, and no one else will buy our stuff. How many cars does the US export? I think it is simplistic to put the blame only on greedy companies. Its also greedy employees who would not consider working for a wage that would rivial and Indian's. Does every worker in America have an right to have a standard of living 10 times higher than your average Indian? I don't think so. It has been a nice ride, but I think it's coming to an end.
Or, it can be win/lose but not zero sum. That is, if India gets better by some measurement x, and we (USA) get worse that some measurement y, y may be less than x. Some of our goods will be lower priced, average income may be somewhat less. Probably, average income will decrease more in the US than prices, but if it means less poverty in India (which is a tad worse than poverty in America) is that something I can whine about in good conscience?
I think it is also partly the fact that writing music is an art (at least in some cases). And many artists only have one album worth of "art" in them. I like the example of Alanis Morissette, who seemed to pour a lifetimes worth of angst into one album, and hasn't really had anything else to sing about. No one cares about her being able to go to India, there's nothing for us to relate to.
Then there's Boston, who only hear from their muse once every 10 years or so, but they invent stuff so they can afford to do that.
I think there's an even worse choice, and that's turn based that pretends to be real time. I had a Starfleet game, I think Starfleet Academy, but I'm not sure, that was really turn based but pretended to be real time. This meant that even if I took an action, it would be ignored until the next "turn" began. It became obvious after a while, but there was no way of telling when one turn ended and the next began, so I couldn't use it to my advantage. Of course, I had the same complaint with Neverwinter Nights. Sometimes requesting several actions caused them to happen in succession, sometimes a new action erase the waiting action. For instance, you could queue up several potions to take one at a time, but if you then clicked on attack, all the potions disappeared. Also, in combat, if a character was casting a spell, you couldn't hit attack or the spell would stop. But there wasn't always a clear deliniation as to when a spell was finished, so I would sometimes find that my character was standing around getting whacked when I thought he was fighting back. This may be why they don't put it on the box, it's both!
I agree that California could not tax you, or the goods, or whatever. But Pennsylvania can, because from their perspective the goods are imported and thus taxable. I'm more familar with Massachusetts which can and does tax things imported. If you buy a car in New Hampshire, you can't register it in Mass. until you pay Mass. sales tax (NH doesn't have a sales tax).
The states want to tax items imported by Amazon, not items exported by Amazon. So if I order books and they're shipped from Virginia, it's Mass. that gets the money, not VA. And the court has ruled that if Amazon has ANY presence in the state, Mass can require that they collect sales tax. With Gateway, they do.
The article states: But the Supreme Court has ruled that states can't tax sales from electronic retailers that do not have a physical presence within their jurisdiction.
The court decided the requirement would put an inappropriate burden on e-tailers, especially with some 7,500 sales tax jurisdictions in the country that each have different collections procedures.
The Streamlined Sales Tax proposal, on which delegates from the 29 states will vote on Nov. 13 in Chicago, would simplify tax collection procedures. If passed, it would become effective after at least 10 states meet the provisions of the agreement, which include requiring states and its local jurisdictions to have the same tax rate.... "The end game is to go to Congress and say 'We have now simplified this enough so that it's no longer an inappropriate burden on interstate commerce and we would like you to tell retailers that they have to collect sales tax for states who have joined the agreement,"' he said.
In other words, if the states agree on this proposal, they will then go to Congress and ask that it become law, in line with the constitutional requirements. The state is not taxing the business across the states anyway, they are taxing you, a resident of their state. They're just making the business help.
In Massachusetts you legally have to charge sales tax at a garage sale (and give the money to the state). I've never heard of anyone doing so, but if we vote to eliminate the income tax next week, they might just start trying to collect:-)
Actually, later int the article they indicated that another 32-year-old should only need $50,000 saved, and the reason was the number was partially based on living expenses. I suspect that your living expenses are somewhat less, given the salary you indicate. It's more likely that the woman who they said should have saved $100K WAS driving a BMW, and she'd need the money to keep driving it. You need significantly less saved to keep your current standard of living. But that doesn't mean you don't have to save. Just don't aim for an unreasonable figure.
I recall when my first teacher told us that the language we used to talk to friends was not necessarily appropriate for writing formally. I thought this was a no-brainer, but some people had to be told. I assume that this is the same case. The parent writer and I both easily distinguished the two cases, but others may not. I think it's been said before here that the real issue is not being able to tell the difference between formal writing and slang, rather than whether the slang is 'l33t or like, more, you know, older. But by writing the article this way, they got all those extra hits from slashdot readers.
"The Lex case ships with an external power supply which allows the PC to be as small as it is, while also cutting out a major noise factor in the PC."
Isn't this kind of cheating. I've got a PC the size of a cable. It's just got this external power supply and mother board and cdrom and floppy....
And it's not like the case was smaller than say, a laptop. I don't get what's the big deal. If I want small, I'd go with a laptop. If I want a desktop, I want it big enough to add stuff, and not to have extra parts like a power supply to drag around.
I know it's way to late to add to this discussion, but the Boston Globeonline site has an article about this. Amusingly, there is also a poll, which when I voted made the vote 261 to 1 that this was going too far.
In the computer security field, you have to jump through all sorts of hoops to preserve evidence if you want to prosecute a break in. Usually you have to pull the disk from the machine (without altering it) and lock it away. Trying to figure out what happened is a good way to make the crime unprosecutable. Shouldn't there be a similar requirement for this type of evidence gathering? Or do we just trust whoever answers the phone at some ISP to copy the correct files and correlate them with the correct users and never make a mistake. Here is one link, although not exactly what I was looking for.
"The way you do it is to exchange your "defective" copy first, then return the unopened one they give you. "
The point isn't to get your money back, though. You (as in any reader of this page) knew there was a EULA attached that you probably wouldn't like. The idea was to make the point that if the EULA is supposed to be binding on us, the purchaser, that the clause about returing the product should be binding on the retailer, even if they post they only accept returns of unopened software.
Here is a link to the original report on which the article is based. I'd like to point out that the report actually states that the percentage of "worst incidents" caused by insider attacks has gone down, starting on page 11 of the document.
Actually, if someone needs to be bashed here, maybe it's ZDNet. They should know that they are a respected organization, and that if they publish a poll it will be used for making decisions, whether it is a scientific poll or not. They should probably not be creating unscientific polls on serious topics that their readers will use. Even if it causes more people to go look at their site.
There are a lot of posters hear failing to see the big picture. AIDS is a big, famous, scary disease, so of course the medicine should be free. But Heart Disease makes you just as dead. So maybe that medicine should be free, too. Oh, cancer makes you dead too? Well, lets make those drugs free, too. How about infection? You can die of infection in the third world, too. Lets make them free, too. We'll keep paying for Prosac, because only rich people take that and you don't die of depression (usually). So what about when the next big disease comes along. Who finds the cure? I'm sure all the independently wealthy scientists will work on that, since they don't need a paycheck, but will they find it? Or we could just become socialist, so the government decides which diseases the scientist work on, because all the successful counties in the world are Socialist.
The harsh reality is that rewarding people for finding a cure means that cures will get found. More people will live longer, better lives who have contracted AIDS, high blood pressure, cancer, or infections, because there was incentive for people to find cures. Not all will live, but if there were no cure (or treatment) no one would live. And if there were no incentive, very few cures would be found. Is the current balance between costs and rewards perfect? Probably not. But good luck making it perfect.
Slashdot Mirror
Last year, the feature shutoff was that the older version would no longer be able to download quotes. Since this is the feature I use most, and my version was five years old, I "upgraded". Since then, I have become an expert at restoring from backup. For five years, I _never_ restored from backup, now I do it at least once a month, because Quicken regularly corrupts my data. Tech support? The guy in India was willing to charge me $20 or some such fee to walk me through the "restore from backup" procedure, but since I'd already done that several times, it wasn't necessary. He was unwilling to admit that maybe a financial product should never corrupt data, even if the file was big.
I don'k know if you are aware, but a group at MIT did a musical spoof of Star Wars about a year ago. It was actually very funny, at least if you also knew enough of the original songs as well (such as being able to guess your tune is "Luck Be A Lady Tonight"). Link to MTG past shows site.
I can generalize your comment and say mass market is what is being appealed to, rather than quality or uniqueness. There are similar arguments on Slashdot about music. And retail (Starbucks vs. Mom-and-Pop coffee). You can see it in McDonald's and McMansions. Maybe what he's talking about isn't really a Sci-Fi trend, but actually a general trend.
I know, rather than have pharmaceutical companies exist to make money by inventing and selling new drugs, let's let someone else do it. How about NADA, the National Anti Disease Administration. They could use 30 year old technology to achieve cures for diseases few people have, they could kill people because they measured their doses in ounces but prescribed them in cc's (yeah, that's a cheap shot), they could have to fight for every dollar every year in congress, and be forced to fund showy programs so they aren't viewed as irrelevant.
Or maybe we could just expect the researcher to be like teachers. We could pay them insufficiently, give them terrible working conditions, make them buy their own supplies, and blame them when all the diseases arent cured.
Maybe some genius out there has a better system, but so far, there's plenty of evidence that capitalism gets stuff done, even if it is imperfect.
I also, btw, agree with the poster who pointed out it is good this is expensive, so it doesn't get over used.
Hmm, he has 10 Freaks and about 1000 Fans. Doesn't sound like it balences out to me...
The short answer seems to be "get a mac".
Nice try, but wasn't there a spoofed "switcher" ad posted here a while back with a user complaining about all the changes between OS9 and OSX? I have no first hand knowledge, but there was one guy who was annoyed enough to go to a lot of effort to complain.
If this is really a question, that was T-T-T as in The Two Towers. Only a couple pixels different from TIT in some fonts, it would appear.
Bingo. I know that for two viewers, my wife and I, the priority was TTT, Harry Potter, then Star Trek, and by the time we got around to the first two, we couldn't find the third at a decent theatre. So I'm sure we'll rent it, but I'm not overly disappointed by that.
Interesting point about 1929. The way out of that depression was a war. Not a silly little war, but a huge war that resulted in huge technical advances in the US and Germany, and maybe a few other countries. Except the US bombed the crap out of Germany, so the tech advances continued here. And that drove the economy ahead of every other country for a long time. But why should that last forever?
The lowest bidder was inevitable. Even if we could force everyone in the US to buy American, eventually the same goods will be produced cheaper elsewhere, and no one else will buy our stuff. How many cars does the US export? I think it is simplistic to put the blame only on greedy companies. Its also greedy employees who would not consider working for a wage that would rivial and Indian's. Does every worker in America have an right to have a standard of living 10 times higher than your average Indian? I don't think so. It has been a nice ride, but I think it's coming to an end.
Or, it can be win/lose but not zero sum. That is, if India gets better by some measurement x, and we (USA) get worse that some measurement y, y may be less than x. Some of our goods will be lower priced, average income may be somewhat less. Probably, average income will decrease more in the US than prices, but if it means less poverty in India (which is a tad worse than poverty in America) is that something I can whine about in good conscience?
I think it is also partly the fact that writing music is an art (at least in some cases). And many artists only have one album worth of "art" in them. I like the example of Alanis Morissette, who seemed to pour a lifetimes worth of angst into one album, and hasn't really had anything else to sing about. No one cares about her being able to go to India, there's nothing for us to relate to.
Then there's Boston, who only hear from their muse once every 10 years or so, but they invent stuff so they can afford to do that.
I think there's an even worse choice, and that's turn based that pretends to be real time. I had a Starfleet game, I think Starfleet Academy, but I'm not sure, that was really turn based but pretended to be real time. This meant that even if I took an action, it would be ignored until the next "turn" began. It became obvious after a while, but there was no way of telling when one turn ended and the next began, so I couldn't use it to my advantage.
Of course, I had the same complaint with Neverwinter Nights. Sometimes requesting several actions caused them to happen in succession, sometimes a new action erase the waiting action. For instance, you could queue up several potions to take one at a time, but if you then clicked on attack, all the potions disappeared. Also, in combat, if a character was casting a spell, you couldn't hit attack or the spell would stop. But there wasn't always a clear deliniation as to when a spell was finished, so I would sometimes find that my character was standing around getting whacked when I thought he was fighting back. This may be why they don't put it on the box, it's both!
I agree that California could not tax you, or the goods, or whatever. But Pennsylvania can, because from their perspective the goods are imported and thus taxable. I'm more familar with Massachusetts which can and does tax things imported. If you buy a car in New Hampshire, you can't register it in Mass. until you pay Mass. sales tax (NH doesn't have a sales tax).
The states want to tax items imported by Amazon, not items exported by Amazon. So if I order books and they're shipped from Virginia, it's Mass. that gets the money, not VA. And the court has ruled that if Amazon has ANY presence in the state, Mass can require that they collect sales tax. With Gateway, they do.
The article states:
...
But the Supreme Court has ruled that states can't tax sales from electronic retailers that do not have a physical presence within their jurisdiction.
The court decided the requirement would put an inappropriate burden on e-tailers, especially with some 7,500 sales tax jurisdictions in the country that each have different collections procedures.
The Streamlined Sales Tax proposal, on which delegates from the 29 states will vote on Nov. 13 in Chicago, would simplify tax collection procedures. If passed, it would become effective after at least 10 states meet the provisions of the agreement, which include requiring states and its local jurisdictions to have the same tax rate.
"The end game is to go to Congress and say 'We have now simplified this enough so that it's no longer an inappropriate burden on interstate commerce and we would like you to tell retailers that they have to collect sales tax for states who have joined the agreement,"' he said.
In other words, if the states agree on this proposal, they will then go to Congress and ask that it become law, in line with the constitutional requirements. The state is not taxing the business across the states anyway, they are taxing you, a resident of their state. They're just making the business help.
In Massachusetts you legally have to charge sales tax at a garage sale (and give the money to the state). I've never heard of anyone doing so, but if we vote to eliminate the income tax next week, they might just start trying to collect :-)
Actually, later int the article they indicated that another 32-year-old should only need $50,000 saved, and the reason was the number was partially based on living expenses. I suspect that your living expenses are somewhat less, given the salary you indicate. It's more likely that the woman who they said should have saved $100K WAS driving a BMW, and she'd need the money to keep driving it. You need significantly less saved to keep your current standard of living. But that doesn't mean you don't have to save. Just don't aim for an unreasonable figure.
I recall when my first teacher told us that the language we used to talk to friends was not necessarily appropriate for writing formally. I thought this was a no-brainer, but some people had to be told. I assume that this is the same case. The parent writer and I both easily distinguished the two cases, but others may not. I think it's been said before here that the real issue is not being able to tell the difference between formal writing and slang, rather than whether the slang is 'l33t or like, more, you know, older. But by writing the article this way, they got all those extra hits from slashdot readers.
"The Lex case ships with an external power supply which allows the PC to be as small as it is, while also cutting out a major noise factor in the PC."
Isn't this kind of cheating. I've got a PC the size of a cable. It's just got this external power supply and mother board and cdrom and floppy....
And it's not like the case was smaller than say, a laptop. I don't get what's the big deal. If I want small, I'd go with a laptop. If I want a desktop, I want it big enough to add stuff, and not to have extra parts like a power supply to drag around.
I know it's way to late to add to this discussion, but the Boston Globe online site has an article about this. Amusingly, there is also a poll, which when I voted made the vote 261 to 1 that this was going too far.
In the computer security field, you have to jump through all sorts of hoops to preserve evidence if you want to prosecute a break in. Usually you have to pull the disk from the machine (without altering it) and lock it away. Trying to figure out what happened is a good way to make the crime unprosecutable. Shouldn't there be a similar requirement for this type of evidence gathering? Or do we just trust whoever answers the phone at some ISP to copy the correct files and correlate them with the correct users and never make a mistake. Here is one link, although not exactly what I was looking for.
"The way you do it is to exchange your "defective" copy first, then return the unopened one they give you. "
The point isn't to get your money back, though. You (as in any reader of this page) knew there was a EULA attached that you probably wouldn't like. The idea was to make the point that if the EULA is supposed to be binding on us, the purchaser, that the clause about returing the product should be binding on the retailer, even if they post they only accept returns of unopened software.
Here is a link to the original report on which the article is based. I'd like to point out that the report actually states that the percentage of "worst incidents" caused by insider attacks has gone down, starting on page 11 of the document.
Actually, if someone needs to be bashed here, maybe it's ZDNet. They should know that they are a respected organization, and that if they publish a poll it will be used for making decisions, whether it is a scientific poll or not. They should probably not be creating unscientific polls on serious topics that their readers will use. Even if it causes more people to go look at their site.
There are a lot of posters hear failing to see the big picture. AIDS is a big, famous, scary disease, so of course the medicine should be free. But Heart Disease makes you just as dead. So maybe that medicine should be free, too. Oh, cancer makes you dead too? Well, lets make those drugs free, too. How about infection? You can die of infection in the third world, too. Lets make them free, too. We'll keep paying for Prosac, because only rich people take that and you don't die of depression (usually). So what about when the next big disease comes along. Who finds the cure? I'm sure all the independently wealthy scientists will work on that, since they don't need a paycheck, but will they find it? Or we could just become socialist, so the government decides which diseases the scientist work on, because all the successful counties in the world are Socialist.
The harsh reality is that rewarding people for finding a cure means that cures will get found. More people will live longer, better lives who have contracted AIDS, high blood pressure, cancer, or infections, because there was incentive for people to find cures. Not all will live, but if there were no cure (or treatment) no one would live. And if there were no incentive, very few cures would be found. Is the current balance between costs and rewards perfect? Probably not. But good luck making it perfect.