This is so sad. College isn't about just learning your major; it's also a place where you can widen your horizons. By cutting out liberal arts programs they are significantly reducing the value of the education. It's not enough to program, you also need to be able to talk to your users and clients, understand subjects outside your narrow field, and just get along with people who aren't engineers.
My wife is in an accelerated business (BA) program. Nothing is cut out: it's the same curriculum as the normal program, just that classes are over in 8 weeks instead of 14 and many classes are offered online. It's an intense workload and not for the unmotivated, but the upside is you get done faster and for those of us who learn quickly and are always bored waiting for the class to catch up, it would be a godsend!
greeted by a very visible arc that left a soot trail on the PCI connector
It's easier on the ISA bus. I had a job where we used to test ISA bus industrial control cards by plugging them into a live PC. It took too long to shut down/wait for PC to boot up just to run a 10 second test, so we simply hotplugged them while the test software was running. At first the PC crashes a lot until you get the hang of inserting the card at just the right angle.I could go through a box of 100 of those devices in about 15 minutes after I got used to doing it.
I had one cheap one (don't remember the brand) that didn't. Also as I've been researching this week, I'm finding people complaining that some of the cameras I was considering either don't work at all or not all features are supported.
why would any linux user use MS Office, especially when they have to pay for it?
Because they may want the combination of an extremely stable OS, coupled with a very popular office suite? There are many reasons, but the heart of your question is the unspoken assumption that Linux users don't want to pay for software.
I think you're wrong. Using myself as an example: right now I'm in the market for another digital camera. Since my home desktop PC runs Linux, unless I want to use my wife's XP machine every time I need to get images off the camera, I have to start by finding out which cameras have Linux support then I can look at specs and reviews to see what good cameras fit my budget!
I would happily pay for a Linux version of whatever Windows software the camera maker supplies so I wouldn't have to go through this process. Instead, I think in the end I'll just get a camera I like assuming I'll use my wife's PC to access the pix and if it turns out to have gphoto2 support, that's just icing on the cake.
the first time you sell a copy the customer can redistribute for free
But since most customers aren't so philantropic, this is unlikely to happen. I doubt most people would pay $500 for something they need and then turn around and give it away to strangers for free. They may give it to others in their organization for "free" (amortizing a $500 package over 10 people), but that's a separate license issue. If the software, besides being GPL'd, doesn't have a per-seat license, you can't do anything about it.
When an alternative appears on the scene, and you have a means of lowering your cost of production, you can compete more effectively by lowering your price by passing along that savings
Which is why I was careful to state that prior to the $0.75 improvement on the cost side, all available supply was being moved quickly. In that scenario there is no incentive to lower prices and I think the record companies find themselves in a similar situation.
That's right: cheaper to produce. What makes you think they'll sell for less?
Basic economics (from a software engineer, no less:-) I am selling apples for $1.50 per lb and my gross profit is $0.25 per lb. Now, I find a way to drop my cost by $0.75, so I could in theory drop my price by the same amount and still make the same profit. But I have little incentive to do so. I already know you'll pay $1.50/lb so why should I lower my prices? I already sell out all the apples my distributor can get to me, so there's no way I could sell more even if I lowered the price, so I keep selling them for $1.50/lb and now make $1.00 in profit.
the implicit assumption the guilty will do the best to comply with the penalty phase?
I believe it is; however, even more important is that they comply with the letter of the decision. So if you do, and you can also make a case that you're trying to do it to reasonable expectations, you're probably going be OK.
how much time artists spent on the Billboard charts
I seem to remember both Whitney Houston & Will Smith having top ten hits. Just not from these CDs... Their lawyers found a loophole and this surprises you?
What else did anyone expect? If you force me to give away 10% of my possessions of course I'm going to find the 10% of crap that I don't like, never use, or can't even sell at a garage sale. Goodbye argyle socks!
Want a real settlement? Should have made the terms such that they only give away Top 100 stuff or something like that (or better yet, cash!); otherwise there are no grounds for complaint.
Besides, I'm pretty sure that in a country of almost 300M people, at least a few like Whitney Houston
Customers are never happy when they spend $5k and what they get back there's a completely bonehead error
You mean like when we submitted an order for a few hundred bare PCBs to our PCB shop and got them a few days later... and everything was upside down? The outfit I worked for didn't have tools that output Gerber, so we used to send 1:1 films. Some idiot tech managed to put the solder & component side layers upside down on their camera and manually panelize the board (somehow not noticing that the text was backward) and then when we called to complain, asked if we couldn't just put the parts on the underside instead.
And yes, my boss continued to use that place cause they were cheap. Yes, they did go out of business in short order. Yes, so did we:-(
saves you a huge investment in software and learning a layout system
Nothing will save you from having to learn any system you choose.
For years, I used the free PADSPCB demo version that was limited to 70 parts and ran on DOS. PCB/Schematic editor with forward and back annotation, Gerber/Excellon output, a semi-useful autorouter. I loved that thing! Made a lot of money using it and never needed anything more sophisticated. They later limited the demo version to only 20 components because a lot of small manufacturers (like me!) were not bothering to pay the $k for the full version since the demo version was all they needed. Copies of it are probably still floating around the net, but I couldn't tell you where to look.
Since retiring all my Windows/DOS machines, I now have Cadsoft Eagle which runs on Linux, but I haven't made any boards with it yet. Anyway, my point is that at least some versions of Eagle are freely downloadable from the CadSoft website.
Re:Deaf Guy Wanted For Music Listening
on
Birth of the iPod
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· Score: 1
I find it odd that he would be so influential on the sonic quality
Actually, that's exactly why he should be influential. The "perfect customer" doesn't exist; what you need is someone who can point out where your product needs improvement.
but I would say that everybody who flies should have some stall training. It might just save your life.
And it's fun:-) After I got over the initial nervousness, I really liked stalls: it's like your own personal rollercoaster. Helps to have had a great instructor. Never felt completely comfortable doing power-on stalls solo though. First time I did it, the airplane did something really nasty and scared the crap out of me. I never quite got over that.
I also wonder if health insurance companies will treat sport pilots differently
Probably not; I'm a one-time student pilot (lost interest after about 35 hours) and I remember when the small company I worked for added health benefits. We were all interviewed by the insurance guys (all 7 of us:-) When I was asked the date of my last physical I pointed out that I had just passed an FAA flight physical (needed so I could solo). It ruffled their feathers for a bit as they didn't know if student pilots should pay a higher rate, but after checking it out, the answer was no. Since I was the youngest employee and male, I actually ended up with the smallest premiums in the company.
I've only had a small number of mechanical stuff quoted, but the prices are not out of line. Most of the cost in small quantity is usually setting up the machinery/CNC tooling etc. Their prices are about what I'd expect to pay.
No, not really. Or at least, maybe I don't understand what you mean by "resources." Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, there are usually local machine shops that can build most things you'd want as long as you can pay for it.
For custom PCBs, there are dozens, if not hundreds of shops that take files emailed/FTPd and will product your custom board for under $100. In fact, this is one benefit to overseas outsourcing: one of the most popular and hobbyist-friendly outfits is Olimex in Hungary (I think) that I've heard is insanely cheap and has 1 week turnaround. They take Visa/MC
For metal/plastic stuff, just go to your local machine shop/metal fab outfit. As long as you can make legible drawings, most people are within a few miles of a shop that can do this work. Just check the Yellow Pages!
The real benefit of places like eMachineShop is that they provide tools that directly interface with their workflow, so they can give you rapid quotes and since they're online, it makes it easier to compare prices. For 10 years or so, smaller PCB outfits have had the free Easytrax PCB layout program available for download from their site with instruction on how to send them the output data.
Quite a benefit, I agree, but often local shops may be better. I once designed a mounting plate for an 8,000 lb winch for my offroading truck and it was a great help to be able to take the drawings and have the shop foreman look them over and offer suggestions for improvement. This was also a fairly chunky bit of steel (40 lbs or so!) that I wouldn't have wanted to pay to ship.
The Mac-head and the Linux mook may have equal levels of education and writing ability, but I suspect the kind of person who buys a Mac cares about it more.
Uhhh, I'm going to have to stop you there. Writing ability isn't something that just springs fully grown from your forehead: you actually have to work at it for a while before it becomes ingrained. It's going to be pretty hard to be a good writer without having cared about it at some point.
That, and don't confuse (technical) education with writing ability. The two are surprisingly dissociated.
The brand of capitalism that currently drives the U.S. is not friendly to goods and services that are expected to last a long time
Sure it is. The problem is that you're just looking at consumer goods that are expected to be cheap, so there's no incentive to make them long-lasting. Quality costs, and most people don't need the added expense if it's equivalent to the cost of a replacement unit in a few years. (and just how can anyone be *forced* into buying a warranty?)
We have bridges that have been up for over 100 years, factory equipment is generally designed to work for decades -- back in 1994 or so a small businessman showed me around his machine shop that was mostly WWII surplus lathes, etc that were still churning out parts in production quantities daily. I recently sold an 18 year-old pickup truck that was in great running condition, and I expect it to be still around 10 years from now if maintained properly. I can build you control hardware and software that I will guarantee for a 15+ year lifetime if you're willing to pay for it.
Don't assume that just 'cause your CD player dies after 2 years that all manufactured goods are like that.
less likely to be able to avoid an accident, because they don't handle as well
Yes, but how often is this even an issue? I have been in six accidents: 1) Hit from behind at a stop light when I couldn't move (car in front of me) 2) Hit from behind in stop & go highway traffic again with nowhere to go (I saw the truck skidding behind me and I tried to get out of the way, but the lanes on both sides were bumper to bumper) 3) single vehicle accident where I did something stupid at speed in a sports car and slid into a tree 4) I backed into a black car in an unlighted parking lot on a dark, rainy night. 5) Hit from behind while waiting to make a right turn at a stop sign 6) Hit from behind in slow moving traffic for no apparent reason other than the guy was screaming at his kids in the back seat or something.
In all these cases better maneuverability would not have helped, in fact (3) was a sports car that I pushed beyond its limits. In all the other auto accidents that friends have been in I can't remember a single one where a better performing car would have been able to avoid the crash.
My experience is that most accidents occur due to driver inattention; the vehicle itself is rarely a factor. To further advance the larger vehicle is better theory, (1) and (2) I was driving a pickup truck and both times the vehicle that hit me suffered serious damage: the pickup (2) was totalled while my own little Toyota pickup had less than $1,000 damage both times. (6) I was driving my SUV and the car that hit me would have been severely damaged (he hit my trailer hitch) had it not taken the impact square on the bumper (older model American car with steel bumpers)
-what's to prevent ME from bugging the store and datamining everyone's shopping habits?
Practicality, perhaps? Odds are you don't care about an individual's shopping habits, or you'd be stalking him. So if you need to know what Walmart customers are buying lots of, why not just buy lunch for a Walmart stock clerk and ask him? Easier, and probably a lot more effective.
Noone's proposing denying anyone's sacred right to buy stupid shiny stuff
Your UID's low enough that I can't ask if you're new here, but that's exactly the impression I get from a lot of posts (not in this thread, but the similarity was close enough remind me of it) when extravagant "non computer-related" purchases are mentioned.
/. understands spending lots of money on CPU/video/memory/games quite well, but conveniently forgets that to a different demographic it translates into "stupid shiny stuff."
no sane person can justify spending $1000's for a improvements that are at best going to help by a few seconds
Sure they can. You can justify whatever you want to buy with the words "I can afford it." Now, it may be a waste of money in all aspects other than the satisfaction of the desire for the product, but that's irrelevant. That said, my bicycle (Fisher Joshua X0) is 6 years old because it's still all the bike I need (IOW, my fat ass is the limiting factor; not the bike) and I'm not a gadget freak, but I accept that other people are.
To throw a bit of flamebait out there: it's like SUVs. Many, many Slashdotters hate the things for being "inefficient" while completely ignoring the fact that the owners bought them not for efficiency, but simply because they wanted one.
Slashdot Mirror
This is so sad. College isn't about just learning your major; it's also a place where you can widen your horizons. By cutting out liberal arts programs they are significantly reducing the value of the education. It's not enough to program, you also need to be able to talk to your users and clients, understand subjects outside your narrow field, and just get along with people who aren't engineers.
My wife is in an accelerated business (BA) program. Nothing is cut out: it's the same curriculum as the normal program, just that classes are over in 8 weeks instead of 14 and many classes are offered online. It's an intense workload and not for the unmotivated, but the upside is you get done faster and for those of us who learn quickly and are always bored waiting for the class to catch up, it would be a godsend!
It's easier on the ISA bus. I had a job where we used to test ISA bus industrial control cards by plugging them into a live PC. It took too long to shut down/wait for PC to boot up just to run a 10 second test, so we simply hotplugged them while the test software was running. At first the PC crashes a lot until you get the hang of inserting the card at just the right angle.I could go through a box of 100 of those devices in about 15 minutes after I got used to doing it.
I had one cheap one (don't remember the brand) that didn't. Also as I've been researching this week, I'm finding people complaining that some of the cameras I was considering either don't work at all or not all features are supported.
Because they may want the combination of an extremely stable OS, coupled with a very popular office suite? There are many reasons, but the heart of your question is the unspoken assumption that Linux users don't want to pay for software.
I think you're wrong. Using myself as an example: right now I'm in the market for another digital camera. Since my home desktop PC runs Linux, unless I want to use my wife's XP machine every time I need to get images off the camera, I have to start by finding out which cameras have Linux support then I can look at specs and reviews to see what good cameras fit my budget!
I would happily pay for a Linux version of whatever Windows software the camera maker supplies so I wouldn't have to go through this process. Instead, I think in the end I'll just get a camera I like assuming I'll use my wife's PC to access the pix and if it turns out to have gphoto2 support, that's just icing on the cake.
But since most customers aren't so philantropic, this is unlikely to happen. I doubt most people would pay $500 for something they need and then turn around and give it away to strangers for free. They may give it to others in their organization for "free" (amortizing a $500 package over 10 people), but that's a separate license issue. If the software, besides being GPL'd, doesn't have a per-seat license, you can't do anything about it.
Which is why I was careful to state that prior to the $0.75 improvement on the cost side, all available supply was being moved quickly. In that scenario there is no incentive to lower prices and I think the record companies find themselves in a similar situation.
That's right: cheaper to produce. What makes you think they'll sell for less?
Basic economics (from a software engineer, no less
I am selling apples for $1.50 per lb and my gross profit is $0.25 per lb.
Now, I find a way to drop my cost by $0.75, so I could in theory drop my price by the same amount and still make the same profit. But I have little incentive to do so. I already know you'll pay $1.50/lb so why should I lower my prices? I already sell out all the apples my distributor can get to me, so there's no way I could sell more even if I lowered the price, so I keep selling them for $1.50/lb and now make $1.00 in profit.
Now do you get it?
I believe it is; however, even more important is that they comply with the letter of the decision. So if you do, and you can also make a case that you're trying to do it to reasonable expectations, you're probably going be OK.
I seem to remember both Whitney Houston & Will Smith having top ten hits. Just not from these CDs... Their lawyers found a loophole and this surprises you?
What else did anyone expect? If you force me to give away 10% of my possessions of course I'm going to find the 10% of crap that I don't like, never use, or can't even sell at a garage sale. Goodbye argyle socks!
Want a real settlement? Should have made the terms such that they only give away Top 100 stuff or something like that (or better yet, cash!); otherwise there are no grounds for complaint.
Besides, I'm pretty sure that in a country of almost 300M people, at least a few like Whitney Houston
You mean like when we submitted an order for a few hundred bare PCBs to our PCB shop and got them a few days later... and everything was upside down? The outfit I worked for didn't have tools that output Gerber, so we used to send 1:1 films. Some idiot tech managed to put the solder & component side layers upside down on their camera and manually panelize the board (somehow not noticing that the text was backward) and then when we called to complain, asked if we couldn't just put the parts on the underside instead.
And yes, my boss continued to use that place cause they were cheap.
Yes, they did go out of business in short order.
Yes, so did we
Nothing will save you from having to learn any system you choose.
For years, I used the free PADSPCB demo version that was limited to 70 parts and ran on DOS. PCB/Schematic editor with forward and back annotation, Gerber/Excellon output, a semi-useful autorouter. I loved that thing! Made a lot of money using it and never needed anything more sophisticated. They later limited the demo version to only 20 components because a lot of small manufacturers (like me!) were not bothering to pay the $k for the full version since the demo version was all they needed. Copies of it are probably still floating around the net, but I couldn't tell you where to look.
Since retiring all my Windows/DOS machines, I now have Cadsoft Eagle which runs on Linux, but I haven't made any boards with it yet. Anyway, my point is that at least some versions of Eagle are freely downloadable from the CadSoft website.
You're not. The only thing "new" about this is that it made it into PC Magazine.
That and it's a dupe http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/16/20302
Actually, that's exactly why he should be influential. The "perfect customer" doesn't exist; what you need is someone who can point out where your product needs improvement.
And it's fun
Never felt completely comfortable doing power-on stalls solo though. First time I did it, the airplane did something really nasty and scared the crap out of me. I never quite got over that.
Probably not; I'm a one-time student pilot (lost interest after about 35 hours) and I remember when the small company I worked for added health benefits. We were all interviewed by the insurance guys (all 7 of us
I've only had a small number of mechanical stuff quoted, but the prices are not out of line. Most of the cost in small quantity is usually setting up the machinery/CNC tooling etc. Their prices are about what I'd expect to pay.
No, not really. Or at least, maybe I don't understand what you mean by "resources." Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, there are usually local machine shops that can build most things you'd want as long as you can pay for it.
For custom PCBs, there are dozens, if not hundreds of shops that take files emailed/FTPd and will product your custom board for under $100. In fact, this is one benefit to overseas outsourcing: one of the most popular and hobbyist-friendly outfits is Olimex in Hungary (I think) that I've heard is insanely cheap and has 1 week turnaround. They take Visa/MC
For metal/plastic stuff, just go to your local machine shop/metal fab outfit. As long as you can make legible drawings, most people are within a few miles of a shop that can do this work. Just check the Yellow Pages!
The real benefit of places like eMachineShop is that they provide tools that directly interface with their workflow, so they can give you rapid quotes and since they're online, it makes it easier to compare prices. For 10 years or so, smaller PCB outfits have had the free Easytrax PCB layout program available for download from their site with instruction on how to send them the output data.
Quite a benefit, I agree, but often local shops may be better. I once designed a mounting plate for an 8,000 lb winch for my offroading truck and it was a great help to be able to take the drawings and have the shop foreman look them over and offer suggestions for improvement. This was also a fairly chunky bit of steel (40 lbs or so!) that I wouldn't have wanted to pay to ship.
Uhhh, I'm going to have to stop you there. Writing ability isn't something that just springs fully grown from your forehead: you actually have to work at it for a while before it becomes ingrained. It's going to be pretty hard to be a good writer without having cared about it at some point.
That, and don't confuse (technical) education with writing ability. The two are surprisingly dissociated.
Sure it is. The problem is that you're just looking at consumer goods that are expected to be cheap, so there's no incentive to make them long-lasting. Quality costs, and most people don't need the added expense if it's equivalent to the cost of a replacement unit in a few years. (and just how can anyone be *forced* into buying a warranty?)
We have bridges that have been up for over 100 years, factory equipment is generally designed to work for decades -- back in 1994 or so a small businessman showed me around his machine shop that was mostly WWII surplus lathes, etc that were still churning out parts in production quantities daily. I recently sold an 18 year-old pickup truck that was in great running condition, and I expect it to be still around 10 years from now if maintained properly.
I can build you control hardware and software that I will guarantee for a 15+ year lifetime if you're willing to pay for it.
Don't assume that just 'cause your CD player dies after 2 years that all manufactured goods are like that.
Yes, but how often is this even an issue? I have been in six accidents:
1) Hit from behind at a stop light when I couldn't move (car in front of me)
2) Hit from behind in stop & go highway traffic again with nowhere to go (I saw the truck skidding behind me and I tried to get out of the way, but the lanes on both sides were bumper to bumper)
3) single vehicle accident where I did something stupid at speed in a sports car and slid into a tree
4) I backed into a black car in an unlighted parking lot on a dark, rainy night.
5) Hit from behind while waiting to make a right turn at a stop sign
6) Hit from behind in slow moving traffic for no apparent reason other than the guy was screaming at his kids in the back seat or something.
In all these cases better maneuverability would not have helped, in fact (3) was a sports car that I pushed beyond its limits. In all the other auto accidents that friends have been in I can't remember a single one where a better performing car would have been able to avoid the crash.
My experience is that most accidents occur due to driver inattention; the vehicle itself is rarely a factor. To further advance the larger vehicle is better theory, (1) and (2) I was driving a pickup truck and both times the vehicle that hit me suffered serious damage: the pickup (2) was totalled while my own little Toyota pickup had less than $1,000 damage both times. (6) I was driving my SUV and the car that hit me would have been severely damaged (he hit my trailer hitch) had it not taken the impact square on the bumper (older model American car with steel bumpers)
Practicality, perhaps? Odds are you don't care about an individual's shopping habits, or you'd be stalking him. So if you need to know what Walmart customers are buying lots of, why not just buy lunch for a Walmart stock clerk and ask him? Easier, and probably a lot more effective.
Not for long! I saw an ad in last Sunday's paper: the guy is selling the business.
The world gets smaller every day. I heard about this outfit in a tiny northern town no-one knows about just a week ago and now it's on Slashdot!
Sure they can. You can justify whatever you want to buy with the words "I can afford it." Now, it may be a waste of money in all aspects other than the satisfaction of the desire for the product, but that's irrelevant.
That said, my bicycle (Fisher Joshua X0) is 6 years old because it's still all the bike I need (IOW, my fat ass is the limiting factor; not the bike) and I'm not a gadget freak, but I accept that other people are.
To throw a bit of flamebait out there: it's like SUVs. Many, many Slashdotters hate the things for being "inefficient" while completely ignoring the fact that the owners bought them not for efficiency, but simply because they wanted one.