I don't worry about the national or state gov't abusing something like this, they're too disorganized in the U.S. to make a difference.
The *local* gov't is corrupt as can be. I can only imagine small towns doing sweeps of hotels or rest stops and writing citations for minor offenses: burned out headlight, not having your windshield wipers in good working order, etc. For a small town, the fees generated by the police department make-up a scary proportion of the entire revenue pot. So long as the residents don't end-up paying fines too often, this is viewed as a "good thing" by the locals.
>> First teach how its done before we give them a tool to do it for them.
Well said. No tool will make you better at a craft unless you know the basics inside and out. Once you've mastered the skill, you'll seek out the right tools.
If you want to make an investment for your kids, buy thier books from the school and teach them how to highlight the important parts and put thier thoughts in the margins. I go back to my old text books and they're 10x more useful with my notes.
I'm sitting here with my '70's style Sony headphones, uplugged, too. They do a great job of blocking out most random office noise. People, at this company at least, assume you're focused and working when you have them on and are less likely to distrub you.
Having them work as devices to reproduce music is also a nice side-effect.
When I work with loud power tools, I use something like these. They're not as comfortable as the Sony headphones, but you can't hear a thing when wearing them.
>> ARM (the company) collaborated on desgin of the StrongARM, but it was DEC, and
Such is ARM's business model. They're a fab-less chip company, with, to generalize, two kinds of customers:
- Those who just mint the chips from the designs - Those who are allowed to tinker with the designs + produce chips
This is a very interesting (and profitable) business model, as it allows ARM just to concentrate on the design and leaves the capital-intensive manufacturing to somebody else.
IIRC, the iPod has at least one ARM chip, but I'm not sure who makes it.
It all depends on the job you're doing. I have power tools that I use for working at home that are *very* simple (and unfriendly) and downright distructive in if not used properly (think SawzAll. This tool lives up to its name! Come to think of it, all of my Milwaukee tools fit this description). I have other tools that contain lots of safety features that don't let me do dumb things.
With linux, I use fluxbox + xterms (when I want to do graphical stuff) because much of anything else gets in my way. With windows, I don't have the option of getting a low-impact UI and I can't circumvent the existing UI by edting text files. It would be nice if MS (or another party) offered a reduced feature UI for users who aren't interested in the safety features.
Until then, I'll have to make due with cygwin and the Win2K interface.
The Science center in Chicago has an exibit with a ton of movie props, with several from Star Wars. The most interesting was a cardboard box with a bunch of Q-Tips dipped in pastel paint. Under the box, an oscillating fan moved air past the bottom of the Q-Tips so the tops bobbed a little. With this rig, the producers made the pod race crowd scenes in Star Wars.
As for the rest (masks, guns, cars), they look much less impressive in person. I guess the art of prop making involves understanding the loss of fidelity that occurs when filming/photographing. The huge difference in detail between the close-up props versus the ones designed to be in the background was amazing.
The EU shows exactly how bad this kind of idea works.
This worked fine until the 1920's. The Senate is balanced by the House, that keeps them in check. Most legislation must oringinate in the House, so the Senate just can't do as they please. When the consitiution was framed, the Senate was supposed to balance the "mob rule" effects of the House as well as protect the interests of the States, which were much more independent of the central governement at the time.
Having done the tech support thing, callers like that aren't stupid, they're _lazy_ and want to be spoon fed, but want to make it difficult at the same time. In retrospect, I think they enjoy manipulating people for entertainment. Arg!
Given the lengths they'll go to in order to avoid work or thinking, they must be pretty smart. I'd just wish they put the same effort into being productive themselves.
DISCLAIMER: most people who I've dealt with for support are not of this ilk. Most people called because they had a problem to solve and worked with me to find the solution. This crowd was usually pleasant and it was my pleasure helping them.
My Dad (as a result of a stroke) was totally disabled, but could move a few fingers. In order to communicate, the PT group at the hospital got together with a local university and created a thumb-driven Morse code input device hooked-up to the latest marvel in computer technology at the time... an Apple II. The designers added some extra codes for the control keys and other symbols not in Morse code.
After about 3 weeks of training, Dad could "type" rapidly; and this was a person who didn't have full hand/finger dexterity. In a few months, he was going faster than the computer could process the keystrokes. Before getting the Morse code adapter, he had tried several other specialized communication devices, but none let him be as expressive, worked as well, or was as flexible.
We never did get a WpM measurement, but 40 WpM sounds about right.
Packaging means a lot in the consumer market. Consider these non-geek products:
- Method soap. Clear, tear-dropped shaped bottles drive sales, consumers pay 20% for these products. Soap is soap.
- Iron City beer in Alum. "bottles". Same beer + different package = big sales increase. It's a can with a bottle cap!
- Oxo. Does the handle make that much difference to most users?
- Dyson. If it didn't look different, there's no way folks would be paying more for this product. I doubt a $500 vac works 5X better than a $100 product.
Real estate is no different than some other asset, other than at time the country was founded, that's how most folks held thier wealth. Following this logic, I guess the gov't could compel you to work (for the common good!) and pay you what it decides is market value. What's the difference?
This will make holding real estate much more risky, depressing prices in the long run. Thus reducing values, thus reducing tax revenue. If you have cash to invest, you'll want to put it someplace with the highest return with minimal political risk. This ruling vastly increased the political risk in involved in holding your wealth in real estate.
Nobody should be foolish enough to think the gov't will have power that won't be abused; if not now, then later. This is an excellent example, the common sense statement that the gov't can't take your property without paying you and it has to be for some legit *public* use. That's been transformed into the gov't can take property from you (after paying "market value", like that won't be abused) if it decides there's some other higher-valued use, even if that is a private entity. This is the gov't acting as an agent on behalf of a private company/person, and that's just wrong.
>> The public deserves well designed land use. Who determines what is "well designed"? How does one determine what's optimal use for land?
Check out newspapers from the 50's discussing the greatness of suburban living, strip malls and all. This was a land use pattern that made sense at the time.
>> It doesn't mean that Walmart can take any land it wants. Why not? WalMart will be making something well designed, as far as thier concerned. Prove that it's not. Prove that it's not to a local zoning board that's been on a WalMart junket somewhere.
You don't realize is in business, buying off gov't officals is dirt cheap. A 25K donation can secure a lot of influence. Consider a small real estate transation, make a nice donation (25-50k), you get to purchase newly condemed a tract of land at a hefty discount over the true market value, making your investment worth your while.
I guess my problem is what's keeping this from expanding to seizing other assets? Like your car, stocks or bonds? Hey, we're claiming 1/4 of your 401(k) account for the common good! Or, we're taking your car because we don't like the noise and pollution... It's for the common good! (Later, they'll get your bicycle for the scrap metal, after that your shoes for the rubber...:-)
What makes real estate different, other than that's the way wealth was held at the time the country was founded?
You said it! Local goverments are much more corrupt than the state or national. I'm in western PA, and there's more municipalities than you can shake a stick at, filled with people that couldn't get a job elsewhere if it wasn't for thier uncle who has some sort of political connection.
What's to keep my better connected neighbor from annexing part of my property (after paying me a token sum) to put in a better driveway or pool? This would result in a higher assessment for the property, resulting in more taxes, and so be for the "common good".
It's time for this amendment to be struck considering how it has been contorted. When the country was founded, I could understand the need, but now, it does more harm than good.
The hugness of today's monitors is really impacting the benefits from Fitt's Law Even though the menu ajacent to the top of the dialog is a large target (because you don't have to worry about going past it in the Y axis when you're mousing) you're still covering a lot of distance. Depending on the work you're doing, making the round trip from the object being manipulated and the menu, this can get tedious.
>> object-oriented The standard pipe-model for bash is OO enough for me. Each object has an execute method, two file descriptor objects with a read method and one file descriptor with a write method. We've overloaded just about all combinations of >,,|,&,[0-9] to produce operators to make sure the right methods get invoked when we string together a group of objects. It works too.
Not to mention that the MS SQL client-side tools rock and make developing for SQL server, dare I say, kinda fun. The only thing that comes close for Oralce is TOAD.
>> Human Beings are as natural a part of the Earth's ecosystem as earthworms
That said, aren't we just behaving as nature created us? Evolution created humans, with our slash-n-burn (later farm-n-hunt, which has morphed into shop-n-golf...) genes, maybe we're acting just the way we need to be.
Asked a different way, how could we be considered dangerous to the Earth's ecosystem when the process of natural selection resulted in creating an animal with our attributes. Does natural selection sometime create beings that endanger the process of natural selection itself?
I looked at the specs, and this isn't a mower for the US; it has the ability to cut only about.25 acre. If you have >.25 acre lot, get a reel lawn mower, as you don't have much grass after your house + driveway. Most folks in the outer 'burbs have much more grass to cut; when you head into the mid-west, 1 - 2 acres isn't uncommon.
The mowing isn't the problem, a good mower will make short work out of a 1 - 5 acre lot. Weeding the flower beds, applying mulch and doing the trimming take the most time, it would be nice to have a robot do that work.
Re:I don't know what
on
Layoffs at OSDL
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Non-profit != not profitable && Non-profit != charity:-)
No matter what non-profit your running, you still need to make money above your expenses to fund expansion, capital investments and keep a few bucks around for a rainy day or unexpected expenses.
In the US, there's rules for how much you can retain depending on how you solicit funds. I can't recall the particulars at this point, sorry... Non-profits operating as charities that keep large margins between income and expenses can still get around these rules be setting-up special funds or endowments.
>> never get counted because they're not universal nation wide The report shows tax collections as a portion of GDP, so the figure includes all taxes, no matter how the taxman tries to hide them.
>> Then there's the local land taxes to fund local public schools (that can vary by a huge degree This is true, letting market forces work, muni's with lower taxes that provide similar services compared to others attract residents. This trend is writ large in the migration of folks out of the high-tax/poor-service cities into the suburbs. I'd rather live in town too, but even after paying for a commute, my kids get a better education in the burbs than in the city at a lower cost. Where I'm at, the property tax is 1/3 that of the urban center, plus the services are better, or they muni doesn't provide services I don't want anyway.
>> employers in the US have to pay for the employees healthcare insurance Employees pay for insurance in the form of lower wages. Health benefits provided by your employer are not taxed so this is a nice way of compensating people without paying taxes. Furthermore, employers aren't required to offer health benefits (some don't!), it's a way of attacting and retaining good employees.
>> highest health costs in the world I'd also argue that the costs pay for better services. Let the price system ration medical services not the gov't.
Re:I don't know what
on
Layoffs at OSDL
·
· Score: 5, Informative
They apparently collect monies from different membership levels. For a smallish sized organization that wants to participate in the decision-making, you're out 12K. Once you get beyond a bronze membership, it looks like OSDL wants some cut of your revenue stream. Membership gets you a voting slot on some working groups.
That's a lot for what's really a club membership, without the golfing and semi-nice place to eat. For most like vendors, OSDL membership doesn't drive sales and on the technical side, you can be a free-rider. IMHO, this doesn't look like a winning business model.
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I don't worry about the national or state gov't abusing something like this, they're too disorganized in the U.S. to make a difference.
The *local* gov't is corrupt as can be. I can only imagine small towns doing sweeps of hotels or rest stops and writing citations for minor offenses: burned out headlight, not having your windshield wipers in good working order, etc. For a small town, the fees generated by the police department make-up a scary proportion of the entire revenue pot. So long as the residents don't end-up paying fines too often, this is viewed as a "good thing" by the locals.
>> First teach how its done before we give them a tool to do it for them.
Well said. No tool will make you better at a craft unless you know the basics inside and out. Once you've mastered the skill, you'll seek out the right tools.
If you want to make an investment for your kids, buy thier books from the school and teach them how to highlight the important parts and put thier thoughts in the margins. I go back to my old text books and they're 10x more useful with my notes.
I'm sitting here with my '70's style Sony headphones, uplugged, too. They do a great job of blocking out most random office noise. People, at this company at least, assume you're focused and working when you have them on and are less likely to distrub you.
Having them work as devices to reproduce music is also a nice side-effect.
When I work with loud power tools, I use something like these. They're not as comfortable as the Sony headphones, but you can't hear a thing when wearing them.
That's my point :-) All of these are as "dead" as the floppy; well maybe except of ARCnet, FDDI & LocalTalk, those really are dead.
I should have added reel-to-reel data tapes.
Here's a grab-bag of ideas for the next death-of article for an author lacking inpiration
- Null-modem cable
- cdroms (everyone has dvd's now!)
- CRT monitors
- Modems
- Pick old-tyme key combo: CTRL-ALT-DEL/PrtScrn/ScrLck/SysRq
- Centronics printer cables
- Pick a non-Ethernet Layer 2 technology: ARCnet, Token Ring, ATM, LocalTalk, FDDI
>> ARM (the company) collaborated on desgin of the StrongARM, but it was DEC, and
Such is ARM's business model. They're a fab-less chip company, with, to generalize, two kinds of customers:
- Those who just mint the chips from the designs
- Those who are allowed to tinker with the designs + produce chips
This is a very interesting (and profitable) business model, as it allows ARM just to concentrate on the design and leaves the capital-intensive manufacturing to somebody else.
IIRC, the iPod has at least one ARM chip, but I'm not sure who makes it.
It all depends on the job you're doing. I have power tools that I use for working at home that are *very* simple (and unfriendly) and downright distructive in if not used properly (think SawzAll. This tool lives up to its name! Come to think of it, all of my Milwaukee tools fit this description). I have other tools that contain lots of safety features that don't let me do dumb things.
With linux, I use fluxbox + xterms (when I want to do graphical stuff) because much of anything else gets in my way. With windows, I don't have the option of getting a low-impact UI and I can't circumvent the existing UI by edting text files. It would be nice if MS (or another party) offered a reduced feature UI for users who aren't interested in the safety features.
Until then, I'll have to make due with cygwin and the Win2K interface.
The Science center in Chicago has an exibit with a ton of movie props, with several from Star Wars. The most interesting was a cardboard box with a bunch of Q-Tips dipped in pastel paint. Under the box, an oscillating fan moved air past the bottom of the Q-Tips so the tops bobbed a little. With this rig, the producers made the pod race crowd scenes in Star Wars.
As for the rest (masks, guns, cars), they look much less impressive in person. I guess the art of prop making involves understanding the loss of fidelity that occurs when filming/photographing. The huge difference in detail between the close-up props versus the ones designed to be in the background was amazing.
The EU shows exactly how bad this kind of idea works.
This worked fine until the 1920's. The Senate is balanced by the House, that keeps them in check. Most legislation must oringinate in the House, so the Senate just can't do as they please. When the consitiution was framed, the Senate was supposed to balance the "mob rule" effects of the House as well as protect the interests of the States, which were much more independent of the central governement at the time.
Having done the tech support thing, callers like that aren't stupid, they're _lazy_ and want to be spoon fed, but want to make it difficult at the same time. In retrospect, I think they enjoy manipulating people for entertainment. Arg!
Given the lengths they'll go to in order to avoid work or thinking, they must be pretty smart. I'd just wish they put the same effort into being productive themselves.
DISCLAIMER: most people who I've dealt with for support are not of this ilk. Most people called because they had a problem to solve and worked with me to find the solution. This crowd was usually pleasant and it was my pleasure helping them.
My Dad (as a result of a stroke) was totally disabled, but could move a few fingers. In order to communicate, the PT group at the hospital got together with a local university and created a thumb-driven Morse code input device hooked-up to the latest marvel in computer technology at the time... an Apple II. The designers added some extra codes for the control keys and other symbols not in Morse code.
After about 3 weeks of training, Dad could "type" rapidly; and this was a person who didn't have full hand/finger dexterity. In a few months, he was going faster than the computer could process the keystrokes. Before getting the Morse code adapter, he had tried several other specialized communication devices, but none let him be as expressive, worked as well, or was as flexible.
We never did get a WpM measurement, but 40 WpM sounds about right.
Packaging means a lot in the consumer market. Consider these non-geek products:
- Method soap. Clear, tear-dropped shaped bottles drive sales, consumers pay 20% for these products. Soap is soap.
- Iron City beer in Alum. "bottles". Same beer + different package = big sales increase. It's a can with a bottle cap!
- Oxo. Does the handle make that much difference to most users?
- Dyson. If it didn't look different, there's no way folks would be paying more for this product. I doubt a $500 vac works 5X better than a $100 product.
Here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=153727&cid=128 99894
Real estate is no different than some other asset, other than at time the country was founded, that's how most folks held thier wealth. Following this logic, I guess the gov't could compel you to work (for the common good!) and pay you what it decides is market value. What's the difference?
This will make holding real estate much more risky, depressing prices in the long run. Thus reducing values, thus reducing tax revenue. If you have cash to invest, you'll want to put it someplace with the highest return with minimal political risk. This ruling vastly increased the political risk in involved in holding your wealth in real estate.
Nobody should be foolish enough to think the gov't will have power that won't be abused; if not now, then later. This is an excellent example, the common sense statement that the gov't can't take your property without paying you and it has to be for some legit *public* use. That's been transformed into the gov't can take property from you (after paying "market value", like that won't be abused) if it decides there's some other higher-valued use, even if that is a private entity. This is the gov't acting as an agent on behalf of a private company/person, and that's just wrong.
>> The public deserves well designed land use.
:-)
Who determines what is "well designed"? How does one determine what's optimal use for land?
Check out newspapers from the 50's discussing the greatness of suburban living, strip malls and all. This was a land use pattern that made sense at the time.
>> It doesn't mean that Walmart can take any land it wants.
Why not? WalMart will be making something well designed, as far as thier concerned. Prove that it's not. Prove that it's not to a local zoning board that's been on a WalMart junket somewhere.
You don't realize is in business, buying off gov't officals is dirt cheap. A 25K donation can secure a lot of influence. Consider a small real estate transation, make a nice donation (25-50k), you get to purchase newly condemed a tract of land at a hefty discount over the true market value, making your investment worth your while.
I guess my problem is what's keeping this from expanding to seizing other assets? Like your car, stocks or bonds? Hey, we're claiming 1/4 of your 401(k) account for the common good! Or, we're taking your car because we don't like the noise and pollution... It's for the common good! (Later, they'll get your bicycle for the scrap metal, after that your shoes for the rubber...
What makes real estate different, other than that's the way wealth was held at the time the country was founded?
>> used by city or county commissions
You said it! Local goverments are much more corrupt than the state or national. I'm in western PA, and there's more municipalities than you can shake a stick at, filled with people that couldn't get a job elsewhere if it wasn't for thier uncle who has some sort of political connection.
What's to keep my better connected neighbor from annexing part of my property (after paying me a token sum) to put in a better driveway or pool? This would result in a higher assessment for the property, resulting in more taxes, and so be for the "common good".
It's time for this amendment to be struck considering how it has been contorted. When the country was founded, I could understand the need, but now, it does more harm than good.
It should have been the 11110100001001000000 robot march.
The hugness of today's monitors is really impacting the benefits from Fitt's Law Even though the menu ajacent to the top of the dialog is a large target (because you don't have to worry about going past it in the Y axis when you're mousing) you're still covering a lot of distance. Depending on the work you're doing, making the round trip from the object being manipulated and the menu, this can get tedious.
>> object-oriented
The standard pipe-model for bash is OO enough for me. Each object has an execute method, two file descriptor objects with a read method and one file descriptor with a write method. We've overloaded just about all combinations of >,,|,&,[0-9] to produce operators to make sure the right methods get invoked when we string together a group of objects. It works too.
>> Have you ever actually used Oracle?
:-) DB app, but they certainly make life easier.
Yes. Daily. Nice database. Have you used SQL Server?
>> a bullet-proof database application
I don't think you need _either_ tool to develop an bullet-proof (if such a thing exists
Not to mention that the MS SQL client-side tools rock and make developing for SQL server, dare I say, kinda fun. The only thing that comes close for Oralce is TOAD.
>> Human Beings are as natural a part of the Earth's ecosystem as earthworms
That said, aren't we just behaving as nature created us? Evolution created humans, with our slash-n-burn (later farm-n-hunt, which has morphed into shop-n-golf...) genes, maybe we're acting just the way we need to be.
Asked a different way, how could we be considered dangerous to the Earth's ecosystem when the process of natural selection resulted in creating an animal with our attributes. Does natural selection sometime create beings that endanger the process of natural selection itself?
I looked at the specs, and this isn't a mower for the US; it has the ability to cut only about .25 acre. If you have > .25 acre lot, get a reel lawn mower, as you don't have much grass after your house + driveway. Most folks in the outer 'burbs have much more grass to cut; when you head into the mid-west, 1 - 2 acres isn't uncommon.
The mowing isn't the problem, a good mower will make short work out of a 1 - 5 acre lot. Weeding the flower beds, applying mulch and doing the trimming take the most time, it would be nice to have a robot do that work.
Non-profit != not profitable && Non-profit != charity :-)
No matter what non-profit your running, you still need to make money above your expenses to fund expansion, capital investments and keep a few bucks around for a rainy day or unexpected expenses.
In the US, there's rules for how much you can retain depending on how you solicit funds. I can't recall the particulars at this point, sorry... Non-profits operating as charities that keep large margins between income and expenses can still get around these rules be setting-up special funds or endowments.
>> never get counted because they're not universal nation wide
The report shows tax collections as a portion of GDP, so the figure includes all taxes, no matter how the taxman tries to hide them.
>> Then there's the local land taxes to fund local public schools (that can vary by a huge degree
This is true, letting market forces work, muni's with lower taxes that provide similar services compared to others attract residents. This trend is writ large in the migration of folks out of the high-tax/poor-service cities into the suburbs. I'd rather live in town too, but even after paying for a commute, my kids get a better education in the burbs than in the city at a lower cost. Where I'm at, the property tax is 1/3 that of the urban center, plus the services are better, or they muni doesn't provide services I don't want anyway.
>> employers in the US have to pay for the employees healthcare insurance
Employees pay for insurance in the form of lower wages. Health benefits provided by your employer are not taxed so this is a nice way of compensating people without paying taxes. Furthermore, employers aren't required to offer health benefits (some don't!), it's a way of attacting and retaining good employees.
>> highest health costs in the world
I'd also argue that the costs pay for better services. Let the price system ration medical services not the gov't.
They apparently collect monies from different membership levels. For a smallish sized organization that wants to participate in the decision-making, you're out 12K. Once you get beyond a bronze membership, it looks like OSDL wants some cut of your revenue stream. Membership gets you a voting slot on some working groups.
That's a lot for what's really a club membership, without the golfing and semi-nice place to eat. For most like vendors, OSDL membership doesn't drive sales and on the technical side, you can be a free-rider. IMHO, this doesn't look like a winning business model.