Well now that's surprising (to me), because nearly every respectable restaurant where I live has at least some form of electronic cash register. The notable exceptions are the noodle houses, but they are highly suspected of dodging taxes anyway...
The big problem with hand-written paperwork is that it's near impossible to verify. The only way to know if your cash balances or not, is to manually add up all the amounts and hope you haven't lost a receipt (or ten). How can you know your staff isn't robbing you blind ? It's a very common problem, and don't try to tell me family-run businesses aren't at risk - it's all-too common!
The other great benefit (or not, if you're a crook) is automatic accounting. That alone is often well worth the rather low cost of a basic computer-based point-of-sale system, unless your accountant likes to tally your receipts for free:P
So frankly, in this day and age, if someone is "unable" or unwilling to produce one total per person upon request, I consider it pathetic and lazy. It's not rocket science...
I'll one-up you: I was once a game developer. Sure sure, nothing huge but I had a good following back in the day.
At one point I was contemplating deals with several dominant "indie" publishers, and that's the precise moment I lost interest. It was painfully obvious that these organizations were of the "pump and dump" type. They wanted a rather perversely large piece of the pie, in exchange for piling my game alongside a dozen other titles.
Perhaps more importantly, I contacted some of their "biggest successes" and quickly found out they were broke asses with day jobs. It seemed very much like the music industry we love to hate. Everyone was rich except the people actually making the games.
Things have changed a bit now, since anyone can pretty much self-publish on the internet, but there is still a publicity advantage to teaming up with a big shop like Popcap or Reflexive, and they still eat up a big piece of the pie, in return for the favorable branding. It's all rather perverted and that environment has turned many people off of game development.
My question is: What will we do once we've automated every boring old task and are free to live our lives outside of forced servitude ? We're gonna play a shitload of games, for sure!
You're making the assumption that the bad customer's opinion has any traction. When the market is so huge, as it is in the computer industry, we don't need to be fighting over the bony scraps of consumerism. Inevitably, some bottom feeder will come along and pander to all the scum, and he will earn his living. The rest of us can enjoy a scum-free business.
You needn't look further than the PC vs Mac debate for an example of this. Apple doesn't want a piece of the competitive budget segment, because it's too much work and not enough profit. They've identified their targets, and they try to stay focused. Now the problem with Apple is they're offering shoddier products with each passing year, while still expecting top-shelf profits - but that's a separate topic altogether.
You're probably right, but I personally think we shouldn't enable those cretins. Who's the expert ? The guy writing the kernel, or the guy who can't tell the difference between Java and Javascript ?
This is the computer version of whiny soccer moms telling their mechanic how to change an oil filter, and just the same they should all be shot.
It ended up biting Steinberg in the ass, because the crack was no simple EXE patch, it was a full-blown dongle emulator. By making Cubase SX3 hard to crack, they directly encouraged H2O to write a universal crack for all their dongle-infected apps.
To make things worse, the protection was so invasive, many layers of just-in-time decryption, that it significantly slowed down the app and led to all sorts of weird timing issues. As a result, a staggering number of people stayed on the previous version, which was quite similar in features.
The same nonsense is happening with Cubase 4. They've added a handful of crap features few people care about, so all those in the know are sticking with their existing version. You obviously can't go out and buy an older version in-store, so new folks wind up with C4 simply because they don't have a choice.
In this situation, one has to wonder how much money they've lost due to the DRM. It has taken a lackluster upgrade and made it worse, so a bunch of people are jumping ship to a competitor's product, such as Ableton, Sonar or the extremely popular Reaper. They all do pretty much the same things, support the same plugins (or more), and often provide more efficient interfaces (Cubase is kind of backwards for some things). How long until Cubase gets pwned by its own copy protection ?
* Intel sucks at making zillion-dollar computers * AMD sucks at everything * Supercomputer engineers are worried for their jobs
I realize these people have a legitimate complaint, but quite frankly if you're worried about a certain processor affecting your code, maybe you suck at programming ?! So what if the internal bandwidth is ho-hum ? These old dogs need to stop complaining and learn to adapt, else their overpaid jobs will be given to others who can.
Here's an analogy I find quite fitting, but first of all let's clear it up: the OP is asking about "swap space", which Windows calls "Virtual Memory".
Think of your computer as a bank, the Ram as money, applications as clients. Swap space is credit.
You might lend out 5 times more credit than you have actual money, and as long as your clients don't all claim it at once, you're fine. This way, each client can "have" a ton of money at their disposal, if and when they need it.
Well swap space is a way to "lend" memory to a process that may or may not use it all, or may not need it at that point in time. Memory that's sitting idle gets pushed into swap, to free up real memory for another program that needs it more.
If you disable the swap file(s) on your PC, you're basically forcing your computer to live on "cash". If one program needs 80% of your Ram, and another program needs 25%, one of them will get canned because you can't "borrow" any more memory. The potential problem with this scenario is that many programs allocate more memory than they actually need. Some developers do this for efficiency, since it's faster and simpler to reserve a big contiguous block of memory at once, rather than many small ones as needed. The rest do it because they're DeVry graduates.
Since MS-Dos is a Microsoft product, they were free to resell it to anyone else, and they did! You can be damned sure that if Microsoft were in the hardware business, they would lock Windows down so it only ran on MS hardware, just like Apple has done.
Is it dirty ? I think it is. They shouldn't collude like that. Software and hardware should be available separately, especially when the hardware itself is just commodity parts in a pretty shell. Come to think of it, so's the software.
Yep you said it. Just because a shop is participating in a "Cyber Monday promotion" doesn't mean much. They could throw up a banner that says "Welcome to Cyber Monday - regular prices still apply SUCKERS!" and well, technically they're participating.
In no way does it require or even imply any sort of incentive for shoppers to buy on that particular day.
bad companies see it as being punished as bad customers
So where's the problem ? If I'm fed up with a resource-hogging deadbeat, I let them know and they are free to hog someone else's time instead. They stick around because they have nowhere else to go, or they know the competition sucks...
If HP has a legitimate reason to charge a different price, I think they should man up and be perfectly frank about it, like saying "Shitty clients pay more, because they cost more to support".
Coddling those shitty clients only leads to more shitty clients draining your resources, often at the detriment of your awesome clients... unless you're in the business of cleaning shit up.
You're implying that SSDs fail as often and disastrously as fast-spinning disk platters.
They don't, which is why a beowulf cluster of SSDs is a beautiful thing, though my concern is DDR2 can deliver much faster throughput and ns-latency, while the density trails a bit behind SSD but not that bad.
With 4gb DDR2 modules hitting the mainstream, and 8gb modules in the high end, what's stopping someone from putting a bunch of them on something like Gigabyte's i-Ram (minus the stupid SATA bottleneck) and having themselves a DIY uber-SSD ? Sure, there are differences but it's nothing a battery can't fix.
If the waiter isn't willing to produce individual checks, I wouldn't be willing to produce a 20% tip. How hard is it to hit "Print" in-between each item ?
Funny how they keep whining, they should all be dead and gone by now, since there's obviously no money to be made when everyone are copying their valuable intellectual property.
God, I wish! I miss the good old days when games were made by people who:
a. Like to write code, and b. Like to play games
NOT c. Like to work unpaid overtime so they can ship a half-baked release that just happens to compile, to appease their foreign shareholders who are going to scuttle the company anyway.
The fact that I see game ads on TV all the freaking time is proof that these companies don't get it. If the game were any good, they wouldn't need to spend 42 bajillion dollars on advertising. The games would sell themselves, because gamers read the rags, troll the forums, loiter at EB... they're not watching Survivor, they're playing their friggin' XBOX!
If anything, I'd say TV advertising actually encourages piracy, because all these non-gamers who DON'T want to spend the money, now they know about this game, and they've been seduced by the misleading FMV clips. They hit Limewire or TPB and devour it whole, while the hardcore gamer's still waiting for his goddamned pre-order to arrive in the mail.
The game houses that do well today, are the ones that are lightweight, nimble and gamer-centric. They don't reskin last year's game and charge another $70 for it, they produce FRESH CONTENT. John Carmack isn't sucking some wall street tycoon's tit, he's writing code! Stardock aren't waiting for the holiday season to release GalCiv 2009, they're producing content-rich expansion packs that deliver real gameplay, not just higher-poly models. Oddly enough, you don't hear those developers whine about piracy much. They drive their ferraris, they pay their staff and taxes, and wouldn't you know, their customers actually have some sense of loyalty.
1. American corps have a history of being greedy and unscrupulous, employing strong-arm tactics to get their way
2. The US Government has been the laughing stock of the world since WWII (at least that's the extend of my knowledge). Just a long string of imbecilic presidents, and that one slightly better guy who forgot to choke his hooker after he had finished.
3. It's just plain trendy to hate the USA, because the USA hates everyone else. It's the only thing the world has in common.
I've yet to work in an IT department that doesn't have at least half the techs using some sort of P2P app, whether it's Limewire/Shareaza garbage or BitTorrent.
And no, I'm not in the 3rd world. These are mostly legit offices, but like any industry, 75% of all techs are shifty imbeciles with worthless credentials.
We coat the boards with an insulating polymer, most commonly the "Spray-on electrical tape" stuff. You cover the whole board with several layers of that gunk, so condensation forms on the insulant and drips off. Some long-term installations use a drip pan, but most guys only run it for the benchmark, then go back to sane temps for regular operation.
What does an Atom processor and board cost ? $75 or so ? What does the cheapest Core-2 processor and board cost ? $90
Somehow, I'm not impressed by those numbers. Bring the Atom kit down to $30 and we'll talk. Building it into $300 subnotes is not what I call impressive, they just scored because people are magpies and they like the cute little paperweights.
Slashdot Mirror
No, screw them! They're all cunts!
Well now that's surprising (to me), because nearly every respectable restaurant where I live has at least some form of electronic cash register. The notable exceptions are the noodle houses, but they are highly suspected of dodging taxes anyway...
The big problem with hand-written paperwork is that it's near impossible to verify. The only way to know if your cash balances or not, is to manually add up all the amounts and hope you haven't lost a receipt (or ten). How can you know your staff isn't robbing you blind ? It's a very common problem, and don't try to tell me family-run businesses aren't at risk - it's all-too common!
The other great benefit (or not, if you're a crook) is automatic accounting. That alone is often well worth the rather low cost of a basic computer-based point-of-sale system, unless your accountant likes to tally your receipts for free :P
So frankly, in this day and age, if someone is "unable" or unwilling to produce one total per person upon request, I consider it pathetic and lazy. It's not rocket science...
I'll one-up you: I was once a game developer. Sure sure, nothing huge but I had a good following back in the day.
At one point I was contemplating deals with several dominant "indie" publishers, and that's the precise moment I lost interest. It was painfully obvious that these organizations were of the "pump and dump" type. They wanted a rather perversely large piece of the pie, in exchange for piling my game alongside a dozen other titles.
Perhaps more importantly, I contacted some of their "biggest successes" and quickly found out they were broke asses with day jobs. It seemed very much like the music industry we love to hate. Everyone was rich except the people actually making the games.
Things have changed a bit now, since anyone can pretty much self-publish on the internet, but there is still a publicity advantage to teaming up with a big shop like Popcap or Reflexive, and they still eat up a big piece of the pie, in return for the favorable branding. It's all rather perverted and that environment has turned many people off of game development.
My question is: What will we do once we've automated every boring old task and are free to live our lives outside of forced servitude ? We're gonna play a shitload of games, for sure!
You're making the assumption that the bad customer's opinion has any traction. When the market is so huge, as it is in the computer industry, we don't need to be fighting over the bony scraps of consumerism. Inevitably, some bottom feeder will come along and pander to all the scum, and he will earn his living. The rest of us can enjoy a scum-free business.
You needn't look further than the PC vs Mac debate for an example of this. Apple doesn't want a piece of the competitive budget segment, because it's too much work and not enough profit. They've identified their targets, and they try to stay focused. Now the problem with Apple is they're offering shoddier products with each passing year, while still expecting top-shelf profits - but that's a separate topic altogether.
You're probably right, but I personally think we shouldn't enable those cretins. Who's the expert ? The guy writing the kernel, or the guy who can't tell the difference between Java and Javascript ?
This is the computer version of whiny soccer moms telling their mechanic how to change an oil filter, and just the same they should all be shot.
I pity you, if you write code and game on the same machine.
That's a feature! It's to ensure no developers ever play-test the game before release.
If they did, nobody would release any games anymore, because they would realize what filth they're unleashing upon the world.
It ended up biting Steinberg in the ass, because the crack was no simple EXE patch, it was a full-blown dongle emulator. By making Cubase SX3 hard to crack, they directly encouraged H2O to write a universal crack for all their dongle-infected apps.
To make things worse, the protection was so invasive, many layers of just-in-time decryption, that it significantly slowed down the app and led to all sorts of weird timing issues. As a result, a staggering number of people stayed on the previous version, which was quite similar in features.
The same nonsense is happening with Cubase 4. They've added a handful of crap features few people care about, so all those in the know are sticking with their existing version. You obviously can't go out and buy an older version in-store, so new folks wind up with C4 simply because they don't have a choice.
In this situation, one has to wonder how much money they've lost due to the DRM. It has taken a lackluster upgrade and made it worse, so a bunch of people are jumping ship to a competitor's product, such as Ableton, Sonar or the extremely popular Reaper. They all do pretty much the same things, support the same plugins (or more), and often provide more efficient interfaces (Cubase is kind of backwards for some things). How long until Cubase gets pwned by its own copy protection ?
This just in:
* Intel sucks at making zillion-dollar computers
* AMD sucks at everything
* Supercomputer engineers are worried for their jobs
I realize these people have a legitimate complaint, but quite frankly if you're worried about a certain processor affecting your code, maybe you suck at programming ?! So what if the internal bandwidth is ho-hum ? These old dogs need to stop complaining and learn to adapt, else their overpaid jobs will be given to others who can.
Here's an analogy I find quite fitting, but first of all let's clear it up: the OP is asking about "swap space", which Windows calls "Virtual Memory".
Think of your computer as a bank, the Ram as money, applications as clients. Swap space is credit.
You might lend out 5 times more credit than you have actual money, and as long as your clients don't all claim it at once, you're fine. This way, each client can "have" a ton of money at their disposal, if and when they need it.
Well swap space is a way to "lend" memory to a process that may or may not use it all, or may not need it at that point in time. Memory that's sitting idle gets pushed into swap, to free up real memory for another program that needs it more.
If you disable the swap file(s) on your PC, you're basically forcing your computer to live on "cash". If one program needs 80% of your Ram, and another program needs 25%, one of them will get canned because you can't "borrow" any more memory. The potential problem with this scenario is that many programs allocate more memory than they actually need. Some developers do this for efficiency, since it's faster and simpler to reserve a big contiguous block of memory at once, rather than many small ones as needed. The rest do it because they're DeVry graduates.
ANSWER:
Because Apple owns the software. IBM does not.
Since MS-Dos is a Microsoft product, they were free to resell it to anyone else, and they did! You can be damned sure that if Microsoft were in the hardware business, they would lock Windows down so it only ran on MS hardware, just like Apple has done.
Is it dirty ? I think it is. They shouldn't collude like that. Software and hardware should be available separately, especially when the hardware itself is just commodity parts in a pretty shell. Come to think of it, so's the software.
Yep you said it. Just because a shop is participating in a "Cyber Monday promotion" doesn't mean much. They could throw up a banner that says "Welcome to Cyber Monday - regular prices still apply SUCKERS!" and well, technically they're participating.
In no way does it require or even imply any sort of incentive for shoppers to buy on that particular day.
bad companies see it as being punished as bad customers
So where's the problem ? If I'm fed up with a resource-hogging deadbeat, I let them know and they are free to hog someone else's time instead. They stick around because they have nowhere else to go, or they know the competition sucks...
If HP has a legitimate reason to charge a different price, I think they should man up and be perfectly frank about it, like saying "Shitty clients pay more, because they cost more to support".
Coddling those shitty clients only leads to more shitty clients draining your resources, often at the detriment of your awesome clients... unless you're in the business of cleaning shit up.
You're implying that SSDs fail as often and disastrously as fast-spinning disk platters.
They don't, which is why a beowulf cluster of SSDs is a beautiful thing, though my concern is DDR2 can deliver much faster throughput and ns-latency, while the density trails a bit behind SSD but not that bad.
With 4gb DDR2 modules hitting the mainstream, and 8gb modules in the high end, what's stopping someone from putting a bunch of them on something like Gigabyte's i-Ram (minus the stupid SATA bottleneck) and having themselves a DIY uber-SSD ? Sure, there are differences but it's nothing a battery can't fix.
Did they even think before choosing that name ?
National Instutite on Media and the Family.
N.I.M.F. ... Nymph?!
I'm going to found the Coalition of Unsolicited Neutering of Fundamentalist Sectists.
If the waiter isn't willing to produce individual checks, I wouldn't be willing to produce a 20% tip. How hard is it to hit "Print" in-between each item ?
How about a wine called WineX ?
Is Transgaming gonna have to choke a bitch ?
Someone should register courtzilla.com and point it to Toho.
I believe you were looking for some lame-ass BBForum.
Off with you!
Funny how they keep whining, they should all be dead and gone by now, since there's obviously no money to be made when everyone are copying their valuable intellectual property.
God, I wish! I miss the good old days when games were made by people who:
a. Like to write code, and
b. Like to play games
NOT c. Like to work unpaid overtime so they can ship a half-baked release that just happens to compile, to appease their foreign shareholders who are going to scuttle the company anyway.
The fact that I see game ads on TV all the freaking time is proof that these companies don't get it. If the game were any good, they wouldn't need to spend 42 bajillion dollars on advertising. The games would sell themselves, because gamers read the rags, troll the forums, loiter at EB... they're not watching Survivor, they're playing their friggin' XBOX!
If anything, I'd say TV advertising actually encourages piracy, because all these non-gamers who DON'T want to spend the money, now they know about this game, and they've been seduced by the misleading FMV clips. They hit Limewire or TPB and devour it whole, while the hardcore gamer's still waiting for his goddamned pre-order to arrive in the mail.
The game houses that do well today, are the ones that are lightweight, nimble and gamer-centric. They don't reskin last year's game and charge another $70 for it, they produce FRESH CONTENT. John Carmack isn't sucking some wall street tycoon's tit, he's writing code! Stardock aren't waiting for the holiday season to release GalCiv 2009, they're producing content-rich expansion packs that deliver real gameplay, not just higher-poly models. Oddly enough, you don't hear those developers whine about piracy much. They drive their ferraris, they pay their staff and taxes, and wouldn't you know, their customers actually have some sense of loyalty.
A few reasons.
1. American corps have a history of being greedy and unscrupulous, employing strong-arm tactics to get their way
2. The US Government has been the laughing stock of the world since WWII (at least that's the extend of my knowledge). Just a long string of imbecilic presidents, and that one slightly better guy who forgot to choke his hooker after he had finished.
3. It's just plain trendy to hate the USA, because the USA hates everyone else. It's the only thing the world has in common.
I've yet to work in an IT department that doesn't have at least half the techs using some sort of P2P app, whether it's Limewire/Shareaza garbage or BitTorrent.
And no, I'm not in the 3rd world. These are mostly legit offices, but like any industry, 75% of all techs are shifty imbeciles with worthless credentials.
Are you suggesting they negotiate with terrorists ? Because that's what these litigating spammers are.
There is no such thing as "good faith belief", unless you work for the police. Recent RIAA court failures should be a sign.
Get them to show you undeniable proof, or else they can fuck right off!
We coat the boards with an insulating polymer, most commonly the "Spray-on electrical tape" stuff. You cover the whole board with several layers of that gunk, so condensation forms on the insulant and drips off. Some long-term installations use a drip pan, but most guys only run it for the benchmark, then go back to sane temps for regular operation.
I say it's not cheap enough.
What does an Atom processor and board cost ? $75 or so ? What does the cheapest Core-2 processor and board cost ? $90
Somehow, I'm not impressed by those numbers. Bring the Atom kit down to $30 and we'll talk. Building it into $300 subnotes is not what I call impressive, they just scored because people are magpies and they like the cute little paperweights.
Just use a Sony battery. It will explode in their lap, sooner or later!