While I detest the whole IE 6 fiasco, and generally IEs before that were useless, mixing "the whole COM idiocy" into the discussion shows you're, well, clueless. COM is a way of instantiating and calling methods on objects. Nothing more, nothing less It comes with a bunch of OLE APIs for other things (say structured storage, control embedding,...), but nobody forces those upon you. I'd say there's nothing to complaing about w.r.t. COM, apart from the fact that the design has some unnecessary idiosyncracies and complexities that weren't properly hidden away. Some of the complexity in COM is needed simply for it to do what it does -- for example the threading model is what you need to do in order to be explicit about how instances are shared among threads and to avoid the fiascos of running threading-usafe methods from multiple threads. COM is slightly obsolete at this point, and pretty much a necessary evil. If you're developing a windows application, you can either use COM and be out-of-the-box compatible with C/C++ code out there, or you can expose SOAP interfaces and pay the performance penalty, or you can provide.net interface. Otherwise you're irrelevant, pretty much. There are of course various ad-hoc and industry-specific things out there, like, say, OPC, but they either use COM or are conceptually quite simple (say a fixed-packet-format remote control interface).
In other words, they still don't recognize some electric vehicles. To them, it's not an electric vehicle unless it was made that way in the factory. The most stupid aspect of this law is that it's not like the law is from an era when there were no EVs around. There just are shortsighted bureaucrats in their legislature as there are everywhere else.
With companies that don't offer dividends, selling high is the only way to go, pretty much. Apple is volatile enough to give a good ride on highs and lows alone.
It's not about the size of the market. It's about whatever slap on the wrist they'll get for being naughty. Sure they love the market, I only said they don't give fuck about laws where they can, duh:)
Apple doesn't really give a fuck about those EU laws. They got so much money they could fund a couple smaller european countries for a year or two if they so wished. When ordered by court, they'll obey, other than that -- well, they have learned well enough from Microsoft, I guess. FUD.
Such comparisons are IMHO only in order right after the Apple has released its product. The deal is that Apple doesn't lower their prices really, while others come out with cheaper products. Besides, nobody forces you to buy brand new Apple. There's buyers remorse and you can usually get it a couple hundred bucks cheaper just weeks after release, and $500+ cheaper months after release. That doesn't seem to happen to other hardware that was much cheaper to begin with.
Envy 15 looks pretty much like a product made to look like Apple as much as possible without getting sued into oblivion. I'm pretty damn sure without healthy competition from Apple it'd never have seen the light of day. Not from the sedentary headless monster HP currently is.
No legit reason? Have you looked at their stock prices lately?! I don't care if it's no legit reason you you. Myself, if they keep at it, I'll get a free house courtesy of Apple.
At this point I can't but agree. Either the original article is very poorly written, or it's just fiction. The kid supposedly started harassing him when he was 15. Yeah, there are plenty of sickos even younger than that, but they don't act quite that way most of the time AFAIK. How the fuck does one get his Facebook account "hacked"?! I keep hearing this and all I can come up with that they used some trivial password that took 10 manual tries to figure out for someone who knows the target, or that the same password was reused on many sites, one of which has a breach. Hacked, to me, means that the perp either rooted (or otherwise had control over) the machine the target used to log in to FB, or that they got access to FB's very own password database and managed to brute-force the surely hashed and salted password hash to recover the plaintext password. Doesn't sound very plausible unless you the target is routinely using public workstations, and the perp can simply attach a keylogger a bit in advance.
What I don't particularly get is what extreme libertarianism has got to do with being a nutcase in the sense of believing in a made up version of recent world history. Yes, the specimen you mention might be both libertarian and a nutcase, but it's a coincidence IMHO.
If I ever meet you, I'll buy you as much beer as you can stomach and then some. More people like you is what the world needs. Thank you. There never seem to be enough thank you's, you know.
Oh, and a big red button for the BOFH to initiate discharge. Preferably with PFY and his (perhaps imaginary) girlfriend snuggling behind a warm rack;)
But seriously, just deal with two CAT6 cables going to every desk -- that's all. You don't need any phone wiring, because in this day and age, you can buy cheap IP phones -- say used Zultys ZIP4x4s that cost at most $50 each and work well (but look like crap, sorry) with Asterisk. They have managed ethernet switches built-in. You'll want a decent Linux server, capable of running Asterisk. For the phones, probably you should get a PRI line coming in, or get a decent Internet connection and use VOIP, but PRI is less of an unknown if you need to deal with faxes. The PCI or PCI-X PRI card from Digium will cost between $500 and $1000 IIRC, but is well worth the investment. Get some nice HP ProCurve PoE switches, you can get them used. For your secretary and the CEO you'll want Aastra 6755i as that looks better and has fully documented bells and whistles, and isn't doesn't cost much more used either. You can get Suzy's Twitter feed on them if you so wish:)
Just look on eBay, be careful, and you'll figure out there's a couple of sellers there who are good and have first hand knowledge of HP gear and they do actually refurbish it, apply updates so you won't waste time, etc. I suggest HP gear over Cisco, as with HP you don't need any support contracts and updates are free as long as product remains in support. Cisco won't speak to you unless you fork over some money or already have a "blanket" support contract with them.
Avoid any sort of vendor lock-in. Don't go for closed systems.
It doesn't seem to matter what the ratios are, as all those sugars are metabolized to the same thing. As long as the metabolic process for one of them doesn't somehow generate more bad harmful byproducts (including, say, "bad" hormonal modulation), it doesn't matter. So far there have been no mechanisms described, not even untested hypothetical ones, that would indicate the exact type of sugar matters in anything. What matters is that people drink, en masse, what is essentially sugared water. That is quite, quite new, evolutionarily speaking. Our bodies demonstrably don't cope very well. I can presume that a hundred generations later it won't be that much of a problem.
a businessman starts a business not just to produce enough for himself, he has to overproduce
There are two problems with your sentiment.
First of all, I think you're cornered into thinking about food or things that are directly usable to a person. Many people work in businesses that produce things that most of us have no direct use for. I have, for example, never had to deal with any ball bearings outside of my job. At home I have never had a need for a replacement ball bearing for anything, if I recall correctly. If I had a ball bearing business, I'd still not need any ball bearings for myself -- they come, after all, conveniently already installed in various things you buy, you're rarely a direct consumer of ball bearings. So, for me personally, a "subsistence" of ball bearings is nil. As a business leader, any bearings I made would be "overproduced".
Secondly, even if you don't depart the little food corner of concern, it's entirely untrue that what people produced "before they were hired" never had any overproduction. It's not very hard for a subsistence farmer to generate more food in good years than their family will consume, and not all food can be preserved in rudimentary circumstances (before sealed jars became available, for example). I think as soon as you produce anything for your own use, the excess capacity is fairly easy to achieve, and often simply "just there". Moreover, as you make things for yourself, you gain skills, and eventually your productivity and quality is good enough that it's not a big deal to offer your products or services to others. It happens quite naturally for many people, and I don't think that thousands of years ago were any different in that regard. Someone had to fix a hole in the roof, and eventually they may have ended up having a sole proprietorship roofing business. Others would notice you being good at something, and they'd ask you to peruse your skills. Barter ensues, and you have business, plain and simple. You "overproduce" but simply by the virtue of working beyond your immediate needs. No big organization stands beside you, you're on your own, helping your neighbor out, perhaps getting some cheese or veggies in exchange. It's no biggie.
You just wait until various acronymous industry groups start blaming Portugal's "lax" IP laws on their financial problems. With entertainment revenue's bottom dropping out, as it does to an extent when people have little or no disposable income, we're bound to hear industry groups blaming it all on legalized file sharing. Sigh.
How is that left leg "sleeping"? In city traffic you use brake all the time, and even in congested highway traffic you use it at least once a minute. I've done some tests on myself and while I didn't look at situations where the brake is dormant for minutes or more, in repeated use it shaves off in the ballpark of 100ms from my reaction time, and that's conservative. If you're on an empty highway with cruise control enabled, then there's no difference in how "engaged" either leg would be. They both do nothing for long periods of time, so there's no difference between the legs. Ergo, you still save time on not having to move the right foot to the left pedal, because otherwise they are both just as slow in reacting.
Two foot driving also permanently solves the problem of slamming the wrong pedal, because you never ever use right foot to brake, so your learned and trivial response to the perceived need to brake is to slam the left leg. You also mostly avert the problem of pressing two pedals at once if you mistarget the foot's landing, or having your foot caught between the pedals as you move it sideways. Not that pressing two pedals at once is tragic like some dumbasses out there would want you to believe.
The labor involved is same, parts cost similarly as well. In any case you either replace the entire module, or replace the entire board subassembly that has all the controls on it, or the screen+touchscreen assembly. So that's not the issue.
The issue is that designers cave in to some perceived need for "hot and trendy" solutions that simply don't apply in given problem domain. Touchscreens for tablets and perhaps even phones: great idea. Touchscreens for body controls in a car: silliness.
Slashdot Mirror
While I detest the whole IE 6 fiasco, and generally IEs before that were useless, mixing "the whole COM idiocy" into the discussion shows you're, well, clueless. COM is a way of instantiating and calling methods on objects. Nothing more, nothing less It comes with a bunch of OLE APIs for other things (say structured storage, control embedding, ...), but nobody forces those upon you. I'd say there's nothing to complaing about w.r.t. COM, apart from the fact that the design has some unnecessary idiosyncracies and complexities that weren't properly hidden away. Some of the complexity in COM is needed simply for it to do what it does -- for example the threading model is what you need to do in order to be explicit about how instances are shared among threads and to avoid the fiascos of running threading-usafe methods from multiple threads. COM is slightly obsolete at this point, and pretty much a necessary evil. If you're developing a windows application, you can either use COM and be out-of-the-box compatible with C/C++ code out there, or you can expose SOAP interfaces and pay the performance penalty, or you can provide .net interface. Otherwise you're irrelevant, pretty much. There are of course various ad-hoc and industry-specific things out there, like, say, OPC, but they either use COM or are conceptually quite simple (say a fixed-packet-format remote control interface).
In other words, they still don't recognize some electric vehicles. To them, it's not an electric vehicle unless it was made that way in the factory. The most stupid aspect of this law is that it's not like the law is from an era when there were no EVs around. There just are shortsighted bureaucrats in their legislature as there are everywhere else.
So you're saying law in Alaska doesn't recognize electric vehicles?
There are no emissions because there is no engine. Emissions only applies to internal combustion engines of any sort. That one doesn't have one. Duh.
With companies that don't offer dividends, selling high is the only way to go, pretty much. Apple is volatile enough to give a good ride on highs and lows alone.
Oh, they'll notice, but the question is -- will those extra AppleCares sold perhaps just cover it, with some tidy excess?
It's not about the size of the market. It's about whatever slap on the wrist they'll get for being naughty. Sure they love the market, I only said they don't give fuck about laws where they can, duh :)
If the cells are the same, two extra cells won't get the 2hr work time up to 5hr 30 min...
Apple doesn't really give a fuck about those EU laws. They got so much money they could fund a couple smaller european countries for a year or two if they so wished. When ordered by court, they'll obey, other than that -- well, they have learned well enough from Microsoft, I guess. FUD.
Such comparisons are IMHO only in order right after the Apple has released its product. The deal is that Apple doesn't lower their prices really, while others come out with cheaper products. Besides, nobody forces you to buy brand new Apple. There's buyers remorse and you can usually get it a couple hundred bucks cheaper just weeks after release, and $500+ cheaper months after release. That doesn't seem to happen to other hardware that was much cheaper to begin with.
Envy 15 looks pretty much like a product made to look like Apple as much as possible without getting sued into oblivion. I'm pretty damn sure without healthy competition from Apple it'd never have seen the light of day. Not from the sedentary headless monster HP currently is.
s/you you/to you/ sigh
No legit reason? Have you looked at their stock prices lately?! I don't care if it's no legit reason you you. Myself, if they keep at it, I'll get a free house courtesy of Apple.
At this point I can't but agree. Either the original article is very poorly written, or it's just fiction. The kid supposedly started harassing him when he was 15. Yeah, there are plenty of sickos even younger than that, but they don't act quite that way most of the time AFAIK. How the fuck does one get his Facebook account "hacked"?! I keep hearing this and all I can come up with that they used some trivial password that took 10 manual tries to figure out for someone who knows the target, or that the same password was reused on many sites, one of which has a breach. Hacked, to me, means that the perp either rooted (or otherwise had control over) the machine the target used to log in to FB, or that they got access to FB's very own password database and managed to brute-force the surely hashed and salted password hash to recover the plaintext password. Doesn't sound very plausible unless you the target is routinely using public workstations, and the perp can simply attach a keylogger a bit in advance.
IOW, the relationship between you and X varies the outcome of X's stay in the slammer, everything else being equal? That's news to me, I must say.
A sane person knows the cops won't do a thing.
What I don't particularly get is what extreme libertarianism has got to do with being a nutcase in the sense of believing in a made up version of recent world history. Yes, the specimen you mention might be both libertarian and a nutcase, but it's a coincidence IMHO.
If I ever meet you, I'll buy you as much beer as you can stomach and then some. More people like you is what the world needs. Thank you. There never seem to be enough thank you's, you know.
Oh, and a big red button for the BOFH to initiate discharge. Preferably with PFY and his (perhaps imaginary) girlfriend snuggling behind a warm rack ;)
But seriously, just deal with two CAT6 cables going to every desk -- that's all. You don't need any phone wiring, because in this day and age, you can buy cheap IP phones -- say used Zultys ZIP4x4s that cost at most $50 each and work well (but look like crap, sorry) with Asterisk. They have managed ethernet switches built-in. You'll want a decent Linux server, capable of running Asterisk. For the phones, probably you should get a PRI line coming in, or get a decent Internet connection and use VOIP, but PRI is less of an unknown if you need to deal with faxes. The PCI or PCI-X PRI card from Digium will cost between $500 and $1000 IIRC, but is well worth the investment. Get some nice HP ProCurve PoE switches, you can get them used. For your secretary and the CEO you'll want Aastra 6755i as that looks better and has fully documented bells and whistles, and isn't doesn't cost much more used either. You can get Suzy's Twitter feed on them if you so wish :)
Just look on eBay, be careful, and you'll figure out there's a couple of sellers there who are good and have first hand knowledge of HP gear and they do actually refurbish it, apply updates so you won't waste time, etc. I suggest HP gear over Cisco, as with HP you don't need any support contracts and updates are free as long as product remains in support. Cisco won't speak to you unless you fork over some money or already have a "blanket" support contract with them.
Avoid any sort of vendor lock-in. Don't go for closed systems.
Natural rubber FTW :)
It doesn't seem to matter what the ratios are, as all those sugars are metabolized to the same thing. As long as the metabolic process for one of them doesn't somehow generate more bad harmful byproducts (including, say, "bad" hormonal modulation), it doesn't matter. So far there have been no mechanisms described, not even untested hypothetical ones, that would indicate the exact type of sugar matters in anything. What matters is that people drink, en masse, what is essentially sugared water. That is quite, quite new, evolutionarily speaking. Our bodies demonstrably don't cope very well. I can presume that a hundred generations later it won't be that much of a problem.
a businessman starts a business not just to produce enough for himself, he has to overproduce
There are two problems with your sentiment.
First of all, I think you're cornered into thinking about food or things that are directly usable to a person. Many people work in businesses that produce things that most of us have no direct use for. I have, for example, never had to deal with any ball bearings outside of my job. At home I have never had a need for a replacement ball bearing for anything, if I recall correctly. If I had a ball bearing business, I'd still not need any ball bearings for myself -- they come, after all, conveniently already installed in various things you buy, you're rarely a direct consumer of ball bearings. So, for me personally, a "subsistence" of ball bearings is nil. As a business leader, any bearings I made would be "overproduced".
Secondly, even if you don't depart the little food corner of concern, it's entirely untrue that what people produced "before they were hired" never had any overproduction. It's not very hard for a subsistence farmer to generate more food in good years than their family will consume, and not all food can be preserved in rudimentary circumstances (before sealed jars became available, for example). I think as soon as you produce anything for your own use, the excess capacity is fairly easy to achieve, and often simply "just there". Moreover, as you make things for yourself, you gain skills, and eventually your productivity and quality is good enough that it's not a big deal to offer your products or services to others. It happens quite naturally for many people, and I don't think that thousands of years ago were any different in that regard. Someone had to fix a hole in the roof, and eventually they may have ended up having a sole proprietorship roofing business. Others would notice you being good at something, and they'd ask you to peruse your skills. Barter ensues, and you have business, plain and simple. You "overproduce" but simply by the virtue of working beyond your immediate needs. No big organization stands beside you, you're on your own, helping your neighbor out, perhaps getting some cheese or veggies in exchange. It's no biggie.
You just wait until various acronymous industry groups start blaming Portugal's "lax" IP laws on their financial problems. With entertainment revenue's bottom dropping out, as it does to an extent when people have little or no disposable income, we're bound to hear industry groups blaming it all on legalized file sharing. Sigh.
How is that left leg "sleeping"? In city traffic you use brake all the time, and even in congested highway traffic you use it at least once a minute. I've done some tests on myself and while I didn't look at situations where the brake is dormant for minutes or more, in repeated use it shaves off in the ballpark of 100ms from my reaction time, and that's conservative. If you're on an empty highway with cruise control enabled, then there's no difference in how "engaged" either leg would be. They both do nothing for long periods of time, so there's no difference between the legs. Ergo, you still save time on not having to move the right foot to the left pedal, because otherwise they are both just as slow in reacting.
Two foot driving also permanently solves the problem of slamming the wrong pedal, because you never ever use right foot to brake, so your learned and trivial response to the perceived need to brake is to slam the left leg. You also mostly avert the problem of pressing two pedals at once if you mistarget the foot's landing, or having your foot caught between the pedals as you move it sideways. Not that pressing two pedals at once is tragic like some dumbasses out there would want you to believe.
If that is conservative, every penny you have and could possibly be found should be put into AAPL.
I'm not complaining so far, if you must really know :)
The labor involved is same, parts cost similarly as well. In any case you either replace the entire module, or replace the entire board subassembly that has all the controls on it, or the screen+touchscreen assembly. So that's not the issue.
The issue is that designers cave in to some perceived need for "hot and trendy" solutions that simply don't apply in given problem domain. Touchscreens for tablets and perhaps even phones: great idea. Touchscreens for body controls in a car: silliness.