If they would just support RHEL it'd be plenty enough. RHEL Desktop is $49, if you don't care about support you install CentOS, or perhaps Scientific Linux.
I agree, the GP is not accurate at all. I use TurboTax Online and it supports pretty much every tax form and tax deduction out there, including lesser known things like mortgage credit certificates. About those: if you're lucky and have one, you may end up with a nice negative federal tax rate, as in "in soviet USA they pay taxes to the citizen!" -- YMMV of course.
I'll feed the troll. How the heck can nayone know what the growth "should have been"? The world doesn't sit still, things change. If you expect to make more money then you don't and you whine about it, the person to blame is usually to be seen in the mirror...
I'd certainly like it if it were true that you can make it "just fine" without more than $1M, having to invest everything in excess. Alas, this would prevent, let's say, SpaceX from happening. Sometimes you have to accumulate wealth before you can start something big. Sometimes even you may not know what's there for you to do with the money. Now, I do know that many people who make over $1M a year are hypocritical jerks (of the Richard Guilt kind from Terry Pratchett's excellent Going Postal), but there are a few good ones thrown in for good measure. It'd be hard to know in advance who's who, you know.
Your cynical view of humanity is not accurate. There is such a thing as altruism. Charities somehow manage to persuade people to donate. There are actually many people who do NOT like free shit, because we don't believe it really is free, we're suspicious there's some catch.
Sorry but liking free shit is orthogonal to being altruistic. I think myself of reasonably altruistic but I like some free (or cheap) stuff nevertheless. I don't see where's the problem, except that you made it up.
There is quite a bit of stuff not available on iTunes, it was even worse years ago. The iTunes Store introduced in 2003 is somewhat younger than, say, original Napster from 1999.
A sheetmetal aluminum enclosure plus a little adapter board for pack balancing, charging and energy metering. I don't think there'd be any way to even use those packs naked.
Here's how I understand it, and please correct me if I'm wrong: "International" is a joke word they put on the code to make it seem more important. Yes, technically it's international because they use it in Canada, too, and that's probably it. International, ha ha. Should be called North American. At least no one in most of Europe has ever heard of that joke of a code in their daily dealings. Most of residential U.S. construction would get you laughed at in many places in central and western Europe.
Protip: almost any organization that's located in the U.S.A. and has got "international" in its name should be raising red flags. They almost universally abuse this term, and while technically it's correct, it's really a joke.
Everything depends on the industry. There's plenty of cheap microprocessor based products that may be covered by standards costing a couple tens of thousands of dollars, easy. I'm talking about a BOM cost of $50 or less in small quantities -- yet you're expected to pay 3 orders of magnitude more for standards that would cover that. Oh, and don't forget, you'll need those standards even if you were to make it for your own hobbyist purposes.
You're silly. The bicycle helmet manufacturers have already paid for that standard, almost every damn cent of it!!! Where do you think those industry standards come from (as opposed to military and federal standards, of course)? Does ISO, ANSI, etc. just decide one day: hey, let's standardize this or that? Nope. The bicycle helmet manufacturers pay through the nose to join the working group at ISO, ANSI, etc, then they pay their engineers to go there and work on the standard. ISO/ANSI provides clerical work and server administration, pretty much like any other parasitic publisher out there. They provide no more and no less service than, say, Elsevier does. Industry standards organizations don't hire engineers who write the standards, that's not how it works, it seems to be a major misconception AFAIK.
The ASME code for nuclear pressure vessels does not come from some sort of deep will of ASME I don't think. ASME bureaucrats don't just decide one day: hey, they are making those newfangled reactors nowadays, let's hire some engineers and write some codes for that. Nope. This comes from the industry -- the industry decides the time is ripe for standardization, they pay to participate in the standard writing process -- twofold: they pay membership fees in the standard bodies, and they pay their engineers to go there and participate in the meetings where the standards are laid out.
You're either uninformed or a troll for the standards bodies.
Suppose you want to sell a product for hobbyist market, something simple like, say, a small development board for a CPU. Something that may have limited market and lifetime, and would be sold on thin margins. Heck, something that you may make not even for any profit but just as a hobby to help fellow hobbyists in a particular need. For most "trivial" electronics with any sort of digital logic ICs on it, you need around $1k+ worth of standards - for EMC and electrical safety at least. This presumes you don't dare get recursively all the references they invoke, because that may be another $5k. Seriously.
If there are application-specific standards covering your device -- even if it's just a CPU and a couple simple peripherals, it'll probably jump by another $1k. If this is any sort of a modern communications device, you're looking at another $3k+ on top of that. If you want to design a "simple" protocol converter that may fit in under 10k lines of C code and you've chosen your protocols unluckily, you'll be spending another $3k+ extra (say you want to go from DeviceNet to Ethernet/IP). Just to design a product that has maybe $40 worth of parts on it in small quantities.
Oh, and let's not forget that IIRC almost all specialist people who work on those standards bodies are NOT paid by the standards bodies at all, but by the companies that have a stake in the standardization effort. Heck, the companies have to pay the standards bodies to participate in the process, and then they have to pay their employees for their time on top of that! The standards body is here about as useful as Elsevier is for science publishing. That's how ODVA works, that's how apparently ISO, IEC, ANSI, IETF, ITU work, and I'm sure many others too. At least ITU stuff is free, but there's another catch: a lot of their still-relevant standards are patent encumbered:(
It's six 95Wh battery packs, so you're close. Cost about $600 or so for the batteries, but comes mighty handy when you go across 3 hemispheres and happen not to sit in a seat with a charger outlet:)
Agreed. I can't help but chuckle at the outrage when I tell the neighbors that we had a fairly decent intro to mammalian reproductory systems in grade 4 biology. Oh yeah, we did have biology and history as separate subjects starting in grade 4, then chemistry and physics starting in grade 5.
The biggest conservative idiocy IMHO is the whine about sexualizing/objectifying children. Well, it's the adults who do it for crying out loud, not kids! For a kid, learning about the reproductive system has no subtexts at all, and is just as much of a non-loaded topic as learning about, say, basics of organic chemistry like perchance simple hydrocarbons. People who believe that knowledge of the reproductive system is somehow a taboo/dirty subject are the ones where the problem is -- it's not with the subject, nor with the kids, it's with the parents who unfortunately were not brought up in a sane environment, and their minds got so warped around those subjects that they can't deal with them in a normal way.
I don't consider replacing the battery in a recent iPod nano to be a big hassle, so - to me personally - none of their OS X devices would so far qualify as more than an afterthought w.r.t. battery replacement. It's neat to be able to swap batteries on my aging 17" macbook pro (pre-unibody), but then I've already fashioned an external power supply for it that uses a big li-ion brick used in pro video cameras, and it can keep it going for 24 hours straight at 100% CPU load, so whenever I'll myself upgrade to a unibody w/o the battery access door, I won't worry too much about it. My daughter got the unibody, one of the last ones that still has the battery access door on the bottom.
I'd think people who get Android mostly don't care either way, or they can't afford Apple, that's about it. I use some Apple products and I'd hardly call myself a gullible fool. For one, OS X has a sane user mode driver framework that makes interfacing with custom USB devices a breeze. You're not pestered with silly device manager popups. It also has less visual clutter - the windows decorations and controls simply have less overhead area than the ones furnished with Windows 7. Those are just two fairly technical reasons for why I'm sticking with Apple on the desktop end of things. My wife used to run Fedora Core as her desktop and she had no problem switching to OS X; even in times of Fedora Core she hated Windows with a passion. My daughter's Acer Aspire One is shortly going up for an eBay auction, Windows XP is a usability nightmare in comparison to OS X, on so many fronts...
As for the mobile stuff, I don't care about mobile smartphones no matter what OS they run anyway because the whole "make it small" mantra is thoroughly stupid. They need to be 2-3 times thicker to accommodate batteries that will last longer than a day. I have a Nokia 1100 that I have to charge less than twice a month. Seriously, how stupid is it that you may have a phone where you'd need to bother with inspecting an energy consumption breakdown (screen, cpu, wifi, mobile radios, etc). I'm a geek but I want the damn thing to work for a reasonable amount of time, with usage patterns that suit my needs, not the other way around (yep, I do want the screen to be bright enough to be readable, for one). For me personally, the smartphones aren't there yet when it comes to endurance. I'll get an iPhone when it lasts a week of normal use on a battery that had a 100 cycles on it.
I guess it goes this way: you really don't need to buy their stuff if you don't want to. They figured out the market, that's all there's to it. The market doesn't care if the case can be opened...
Slashdot Mirror
If they would just support RHEL it'd be plenty enough. RHEL Desktop is $49, if you don't care about support you install CentOS, or perhaps Scientific Linux.
Many times Chrome is the simplest pdf reader out there. Very fast, too.
I agree, the GP is not accurate at all. I use TurboTax Online and it supports pretty much every tax form and tax deduction out there, including lesser known things like mortgage credit certificates. About those: if you're lucky and have one, you may end up with a nice negative federal tax rate, as in "in soviet USA they pay taxes to the citizen!" -- YMMV of course.
I'll feed the troll. How the heck can nayone know what the growth "should have been"? The world doesn't sit still, things change. If you expect to make more money then you don't and you whine about it, the person to blame is usually to be seen in the mirror...
7 months is too short, but 7 years IMHO would be just fine.
I'd certainly like it if it were true that you can make it "just fine" without more than $1M, having to invest everything in excess. Alas, this would prevent, let's say, SpaceX from happening. Sometimes you have to accumulate wealth before you can start something big. Sometimes even you may not know what's there for you to do with the money. Now, I do know that many people who make over $1M a year are hypocritical jerks (of the Richard Guilt kind from Terry Pratchett's excellent Going Postal), but there are a few good ones thrown in for good measure. It'd be hard to know in advance who's who, you know.
People like free shit
Your cynical view of humanity is not accurate. There is such a thing as altruism. Charities somehow manage to persuade people to donate. There are actually many people who do NOT like free shit, because we don't believe it really is free, we're suspicious there's some catch.
Sorry but liking free shit is orthogonal to being altruistic. I think myself of reasonably altruistic but I like some free (or cheap) stuff nevertheless. I don't see where's the problem, except that you made it up.
There is quite a bit of stuff not available on iTunes, it was even worse years ago. The iTunes Store introduced in 2003 is somewhat younger than, say, original Napster from 1999.
A sheetmetal aluminum enclosure plus a little adapter board for pack balancing, charging and energy metering. I don't think there'd be any way to even use those packs naked.
Here's how I understand it, and please correct me if I'm wrong: "International" is a joke word they put on the code to make it seem more important. Yes, technically it's international because they use it in Canada, too, and that's probably it. International, ha ha. Should be called North American. At least no one in most of Europe has ever heard of that joke of a code in their daily dealings. Most of residential U.S. construction would get you laughed at in many places in central and western Europe.
Protip: almost any organization that's located in the U.S.A. and has got "international" in its name should be raising red flags. They almost universally abuse this term, and while technically it's correct, it's really a joke.
Everything depends on the industry. There's plenty of cheap microprocessor based products that may be covered by standards costing a couple tens of thousands of dollars, easy. I'm talking about a BOM cost of $50 or less in small quantities -- yet you're expected to pay 3 orders of magnitude more for standards that would cover that. Oh, and don't forget, you'll need those standards even if you were to make it for your own hobbyist purposes.
You're silly. The bicycle helmet manufacturers have already paid for that standard, almost every damn cent of it!!! Where do you think those industry standards come from (as opposed to military and federal standards, of course)? Does ISO, ANSI, etc. just decide one day: hey, let's standardize this or that? Nope. The bicycle helmet manufacturers pay through the nose to join the working group at ISO, ANSI, etc, then they pay their engineers to go there and work on the standard. ISO/ANSI provides clerical work and server administration, pretty much like any other parasitic publisher out there. They provide no more and no less service than, say, Elsevier does. Industry standards organizations don't hire engineers who write the standards, that's not how it works, it seems to be a major misconception AFAIK.
The ASME code for nuclear pressure vessels does not come from some sort of deep will of ASME I don't think. ASME bureaucrats don't just decide one day: hey, they are making those newfangled reactors nowadays, let's hire some engineers and write some codes for that. Nope. This comes from the industry -- the industry decides the time is ripe for standardization, they pay to participate in the standard writing process -- twofold: they pay membership fees in the standard bodies, and they pay their engineers to go there and participate in the meetings where the standards are laid out.
You're either uninformed or a troll for the standards bodies.
Suppose you want to sell a product for hobbyist market, something simple like, say, a small development board for a CPU. Something that may have limited market and lifetime, and would be sold on thin margins. Heck, something that you may make not even for any profit but just as a hobby to help fellow hobbyists in a particular need. For most "trivial" electronics with any sort of digital logic ICs on it, you need around $1k+ worth of standards - for EMC and electrical safety at least. This presumes you don't dare get recursively all the references they invoke, because that may be another $5k. Seriously.
If there are application-specific standards covering your device -- even if it's just a CPU and a couple simple peripherals, it'll probably jump by another $1k. If this is any sort of a modern communications device, you're looking at another $3k+ on top of that. If you want to design a "simple" protocol converter that may fit in under 10k lines of C code and you've chosen your protocols unluckily, you'll be spending another $3k+ extra (say you want to go from DeviceNet to Ethernet/IP). Just to design a product that has maybe $40 worth of parts on it in small quantities.
Oh, and let's not forget that IIRC almost all specialist people who work on those standards bodies are NOT paid by the standards bodies at all, but by the companies that have a stake in the standardization effort. Heck, the companies have to pay the standards bodies to participate in the process, and then they have to pay their employees for their time on top of that! The standards body is here about as useful as Elsevier is for science publishing. That's how ODVA works, that's how apparently ISO, IEC, ANSI, IETF, ITU work, and I'm sure many others too. At least ITU stuff is free, but there's another catch: a lot of their still-relevant standards are patent encumbered :(
You're making stuff up. It's free on bulk.resource.org, but even if that wasn't available, the NEC is usually around $50.
It's six 95Wh battery packs, so you're close. Cost about $600 or so for the batteries, but comes mighty handy when you go across 3 hemispheres and happen not to sit in a seat with a charger outlet :)
It's selection bias at play, but just go to notalwaysright and weep at the stories there...
Agreed. I can't help but chuckle at the outrage when I tell the neighbors that we had a fairly decent intro to mammalian reproductory systems in grade 4 biology. Oh yeah, we did have biology and history as separate subjects starting in grade 4, then chemistry and physics starting in grade 5.
The biggest conservative idiocy IMHO is the whine about sexualizing/objectifying children. Well, it's the adults who do it for crying out loud, not kids! For a kid, learning about the reproductive system has no subtexts at all, and is just as much of a non-loaded topic as learning about, say, basics of organic chemistry like perchance simple hydrocarbons. People who believe that knowledge of the reproductive system is somehow a taboo/dirty subject are the ones where the problem is -- it's not with the subject, nor with the kids, it's with the parents who unfortunately were not brought up in a sane environment, and their minds got so warped around those subjects that they can't deal with them in a normal way.
You've made my day ifyouwereasculptor, thanks! :)
I don't consider replacing the battery in a recent iPod nano to be a big hassle, so - to me personally - none of their OS X devices would so far qualify as more than an afterthought w.r.t. battery replacement. It's neat to be able to swap batteries on my aging 17" macbook pro (pre-unibody), but then I've already fashioned an external power supply for it that uses a big li-ion brick used in pro video cameras, and it can keep it going for 24 hours straight at 100% CPU load, so whenever I'll myself upgrade to a unibody w/o the battery access door, I won't worry too much about it. My daughter got the unibody, one of the last ones that still has the battery access door on the bottom.
I'd think people who get Android mostly don't care either way, or they can't afford Apple, that's about it. I use some Apple products and I'd hardly call myself a gullible fool. For one, OS X has a sane user mode driver framework that makes interfacing with custom USB devices a breeze. You're not pestered with silly device manager popups. It also has less visual clutter - the windows decorations and controls simply have less overhead area than the ones furnished with Windows 7. Those are just two fairly technical reasons for why I'm sticking with Apple on the desktop end of things. My wife used to run Fedora Core as her desktop and she had no problem switching to OS X; even in times of Fedora Core she hated Windows with a passion. My daughter's Acer Aspire One is shortly going up for an eBay auction, Windows XP is a usability nightmare in comparison to OS X, on so many fronts...
As for the mobile stuff, I don't care about mobile smartphones no matter what OS they run anyway because the whole "make it small" mantra is thoroughly stupid. They need to be 2-3 times thicker to accommodate batteries that will last longer than a day. I have a Nokia 1100 that I have to charge less than twice a month. Seriously, how stupid is it that you may have a phone where you'd need to bother with inspecting an energy consumption breakdown (screen, cpu, wifi, mobile radios, etc). I'm a geek but I want the damn thing to work for a reasonable amount of time, with usage patterns that suit my needs, not the other way around (yep, I do want the screen to be bright enough to be readable, for one). For me personally, the smartphones aren't there yet when it comes to endurance. I'll get an iPhone when it lasts a week of normal use on a battery that had a 100 cycles on it.
That's true. I've got an otherwise nice late 2008 unibody 15" macbook pro for $500 on eBay and I consider it a steal.
I guess it goes this way: you really don't need to buy their stuff if you don't want to. They figured out the market, that's all there's to it. The market doesn't care if the case can be opened...
I don't think Walmart's prices are anything special. Several chain grocers near the local Walmart have very similar prices.
Ohh, knowing how many people reuse passwords, this has suddenly made them a rather high-stakes target.