5) because the description on the wally world register receipt is horrendously truncated. For one whole year, Home Office (Bentonville) put 'LEGO TOY' as the register description for a large percentage of the LEGO toy items. Regardless of weather it was a $1.99 Bionicle Mask Pack or a big $89.97 Hogwart's Castle. Now how in the hell is the register person going to know if what rings up is correct ?
6) When WalMart does markdowns (either clearances or rollbacks) the physical item does not always get restickered with the garvey gun. Sometimes it is clearanced at a lower price than what the last red/white sticker shows. Only the computer knows for sure.
7) Sometimes overanxious department managers start slashing clearance prices and MISS putting a new price in the hand terminal. But they DO put a lower price sticker on the item. So the customer picks it up, goes to the checkout, it scans at a higher price, the customer points out the red/white price sticker, and the checker (or CSM) has to override it at checkout.
8) Since WM is so linient about taking back stuff, I have heard stories of people buying stuff on clearance at one store (WM or another brand) then returning it to a store that had a higher price on the system. Its illegal, but they do it anyway.
9) Because WM (in their infinite wisdom) keeps local pricing on a per store basis. When something appears to have very low inventory (like 0 or 1) and has not been scanned for a while, they drop the local pricing record. If someone tried to return that item next week, guess what happens... the local store system pulls the master price (MSRP) from home office and suddenly it might be worth more than what they paid for it.
The whole point here is that WM has 100's of thousands and SKUs/UPCs in any given supercenter. There is NO way that any checker can really tell if something is correctly ringing or not. They tend to give preference to the computer and register (unless some customer points out a lower price sticker, see #7 above). I have seen the checker call the CSM who calls the dept manager. They usually huddle and say OK just override it. No one is perfect (about pricing), not even WM. And everything I pointed out above is due to WM errors and the nature of the beast... not a criminal scam.
There are a couple of ways to do this. One would be like a little keypad mini-calculator given to you by the bank, and flashed with your unique codes. The bank site gives you a 6-8 digit challenge. You punch it in the mini-calc, then type in the result. This could also be done with a little USB dongle with 5 mini buttons on it (and a bunch of unique values inside). Bank site puts up 1-5 in an animated wavy gif file (try to decode that folks). You press the correct button, it takes the challenge string, and sends back the result. That would slow down the phishermen.
Re:not "oh jesus" - just 10 300gb disk..
on
The Music Man
·
· Score: 1
Mac OS 8 and 9 had RAID ! Apple RAID and SoftRAID. I should know, I used to work on the code... lol
The chinese economy is on the way up. When they finally decouple the yuan from the dollar, then watch out. All of a sudden their currency will be worth more than the dollar. And all that US public debt that they bought over the years ?
Should be an interesting time. Read
this for a hint of what may be around the corner.
Oh thats the easy part... You do it with privatly leased fiber and redundant data centers located some judicious distance from one another (to protect from tornados, aircraft crashes, earthquakes, etc). Then apply the remote-mirroring software from your multi-terabyte hardware vendor (EMC or whoever) and presto... instant redundant data somewhere else. Most likely two somewhere else's. For all I know, one of the remote data centers might be leased floorspace at a secure server farm (which already has the connectivity).
Remember one thing... NMR could not care less what you download... they care what you watch. Which is also the point of the DVR stuff (unchanged from the days when I worked there oh so many years ago) is the same as with VCR playback. They care what you actually have your eyeballs on, not what you recorded (or downloaded in this case).
Ummm... as the risk of sounding commercial, http://www.bricklink.com/ is currently the best place to find all those LEGO sets from your childhood. Yeah, I sell a few sets there... and thanks to dot.com.go.boom and outsourcing for my career change. Go ahead,/. the server.. I'll prolly get a nasty note from admin lol
Perhaps because HP has access to other, and different, retail outlets than Apple does... like wal*mart ? We are starting the holiday buying season. Apple wants to move iPods, which will help make the iTMS sell more tracks. Its all about synergy baby.
Sometime between now and new years, the Fed will activate a new business function (based on the Check21 law, passed by Congress in 2003). That will allow banks (who wish to do so) to 'truncate' the paper-passing of physical checks and send an image of the check (along with the MICR scanned data). Those images will be in B/W TIFF files. Now, any bank that handles a sizeable number of checks per day, is going to have quite a bit of data to move in the evening. The fed-cutoff times that have been posted, make it monetarily adventagious to the banks to get the data moved sooner rather than later. And who do you think has the biggest pipes to move some of that data ?
Why the internet of course. google Check21 to see more info on how this in being handled. Oh, and don't expect your checks to take 2-3 days to clear cross country anymore.
Actually what happened was Apple tried to stay in the hardware business *and* license the OS to the fruit-cloners. IIRC, Apple expected the cloners to go after the mass consumer market and Apple would deal with the hi-end users. Only it didn't work out that way. Several of the cloners decided that *they* wanted the hi-end business, so Apple butted heads with them. I think the way it was setup had something to do with licensing the various versions of MacOS 7.x. So Apple just pulled the rug by rolling forward to OS 8.x when no one was expecting it. At least thats how I recall it.
One other thing... the cloners got the rug yanked by the same man who held the Mac near and dear to his heart... yup, Mr Jobs.
so you can hack the moto iTMS enabled phone via the blue shotgun ? insert new songs ? R.E.M. anyone ? or... play with the ringtone... this guys phone rings and Jimmy Hendrix starts whaling with the Star Spangled Banner... I like it !
Because... how do we know what Apple's exact terms are with the content owners ? Perhaps Apple gets a better percentage after, say... 100 million downloads ? Would not surprise me if that were the case here.
This would now open the door to states charging sales tax on internet purchases, regardless of the nexus of the merchant.
I always thought it curious that the online merchant I would buy various stuff from (who is in a different state btw), would forward the order to another corporate entity (in-state) and I would receive it next day... no sales tax.
Some telcos (eg telstra) offer "half price second telephone lines" which actually consist of a digital line to the home, and a "splitter" in the home. A bellsouth tech told me about those once, they use them in extreme cases where there are insufficient cable pairs to get the second subscriber line out to the house. Turns out that it is some kind on specific application ISDN unit. Only run from the SLC to the customer premises, so they can piggyback two subscriber lines on one pair of copper.
>The glut of fiber tends to be more in the metro space. I really don't see the middle of Iowa with a ton of fiber.
Where I live, north Florida, my best connect speed is 26K pots. No DSL, No ISDN, No Cable, No 56K. About 10 miles from my place is a Level-3 light-regen facility. They have 12 1.25" ID ducts in the ground (3 or 4 of which I believe have fiber in them). Rumor has it, there is cage space available over there (I have not verified this yet). Hmmm 10 miles away... hmmm 802.11b... hmmm I wonder if they would sell me a DS-1 and be partial to hosting a short tower... hmmm.
Yep, I have two of those, one large and one small. Nice thing about circular slide-rules is that the stick was never extended in the wrong direction. "what goes around, comes around" it seems:) Rumor had it that the german rocket scientists were *big* on using circular slide rules during WWII.
Without the creation of new music by artists and then published and promoted by the record companies, pirates would have nothing to ever pirate.
I'm not sure I agree with this. The large record companies are behaving like a big bloated organism. Along comes a new distribution mechanism (Napster) that threatens their existance. So they haul out the DDT spray gun (the legal team) to kill the invading entity.
If Napster were left completely alone, I doubt that the record companies sales would be affected that much. But profit is a funny thing. Getting to the profit-point is a long road. Once you get there, almost every sale after it is pure gravy. So every sale (no matter how few or how many) is eating directly at the gravy. They don't like that.
A number of states have brought legal action just today. While this does not directly affect the Napster case, the ramifications of a victory by the plaintiffs will affect the record companies profit line.
a datapoint: in 1990 (IIRC) I had a hundred CD-ROMs burned at one of the pressing plants (Colombus Ohio I think). The cost then was $1500 to master and $1 each (which included screening 2 color art work & jewel boxes). It was $1 each up into the many many thousands (might have been 10K) before they had to create a new stamper. So in 1990, the price per platter for pressing whould have around $1 (+/-).
Gee, 'look and feel'. Didn't we do this one once before ? About 15 years ago. Apple got where they are today, because of look and feel. M$ lifted some of it, hell, even Apple may have lifted a bit. But, without look and feel, Apple would have been just another box with a command line.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll give you a couple of more reasons...
5) because the description on the wally world register receipt is horrendously truncated. For one whole year, Home Office (Bentonville) put 'LEGO TOY' as the register description for a large percentage of the LEGO toy items. Regardless of weather it was a $1.99 Bionicle Mask Pack or a big $89.97 Hogwart's Castle. Now how in the hell is the register person going to know if what rings up is correct ?
6) When WalMart does markdowns (either clearances or rollbacks) the physical item does not always get restickered with the garvey gun. Sometimes it is clearanced at a lower price than what the last red/white sticker shows. Only the computer knows for sure.
7) Sometimes overanxious department managers start slashing clearance prices and MISS putting a new price in the hand terminal. But they DO put a lower price sticker on the item. So the customer picks it up, goes to the checkout, it scans at a higher price, the customer points out the red/white price sticker, and the checker (or CSM) has to override it at checkout.
8) Since WM is so linient about taking back stuff, I have heard stories of people buying stuff on clearance at one store (WM or another brand) then returning it to a store that had a higher price on the system. Its illegal, but they do it anyway.
9) Because WM (in their infinite wisdom) keeps local pricing on a per store basis. When something appears to have very low inventory (like 0 or 1) and has not been scanned for a while, they drop the local pricing record. If someone tried to return that item next week, guess what happens... the local store system pulls the master price (MSRP) from home office and suddenly it might be worth more than what they paid for it.
The whole point here is that WM has 100's of thousands and SKUs/UPCs in any given supercenter. There is NO way that any checker can really tell if something is correctly ringing or not. They tend to give preference to the computer and register (unless some customer points out a lower price sticker, see #7 above). I have seen the checker call the CSM who calls the dept manager. They usually huddle and say OK just override it. No one is perfect (about pricing), not even WM. And everything I pointed out above is due to WM errors and the nature of the beast... not a criminal scam.
Has slashdot ever been slashdotted ?
Yep...
There are a couple of ways to do this. One would be like a little keypad mini-calculator given to you by the bank, and flashed with your unique codes. The bank site gives you a 6-8 digit challenge. You punch it in the mini-calc, then type in the result. This could also be done with a little USB dongle with 5 mini buttons on it (and a bunch of unique values inside). Bank site puts up 1-5 in an animated wavy gif file (try to decode that folks). You press the correct button, it takes the challenge string, and sends back the result. That would slow down the phishermen.
Mac OS 8 and 9 had RAID ! Apple RAID and SoftRAID. I should know, I used to work on the code... lol
The chinese economy is on the way up. When they finally decouple the yuan from the dollar, then watch out. All of a sudden their currency will be worth more than the dollar. And all that US public debt that they bought over the years ?
Should be an interesting time. Read this for a hint of what may be around the corner.
More to the point - how do they back it up?
Oh thats the easy part... You do it with privatly leased fiber and redundant data centers located some judicious distance from one another (to protect from tornados, aircraft crashes, earthquakes, etc). Then apply the remote-mirroring software from your multi-terabyte hardware vendor (EMC or whoever) and presto... instant redundant data somewhere else. Most likely two somewhere else's. For all I know, one of the remote data centers might be leased floorspace at a secure server farm (which already has the connectivity).
Remember one thing... NMR could not care less what you download... they care what you watch. Which is also the point of the DVR stuff (unchanged from the days when I worked there oh so many years ago) is the same as with VCR playback. They care what you actually have your eyeballs on, not what you recorded (or downloaded in this case).
Ummm... as the risk of sounding commercial, http://www.bricklink.com/ is currently the best place to find all those LEGO sets from your childhood. Yeah, I sell a few sets there... and thanks to dot.com.go.boom and outsourcing for my career change. Go ahead, /. the server.. I'll prolly get a nasty note from admin lol
Lets just rename it Vile Fault...
(with appol to the Mouseketeer, who in 1984 coined the name VileFision... what happened to him anyway ?)
Perhaps because HP has access to other, and different, retail outlets than Apple does... like wal*mart ? We are starting the holiday buying season. Apple wants to move iPods, which will help make the iTMS sell more tracks. Its all about synergy baby.
Sometime between now and new years, the Fed will activate a new business function (based on the Check21 law, passed by Congress in 2003). That will allow banks (who wish to do so) to 'truncate' the paper-passing of physical checks and send an image of the check (along with the MICR scanned data). Those images will be in B/W TIFF files. Now, any bank that handles a sizeable number of checks per day, is going to have quite a bit of data to move in the evening. The fed-cutoff times that have been posted, make it monetarily adventagious to the banks to get the data moved sooner rather than later. And who do you think has the biggest pipes to move some of that data ?
Why the internet of course. google Check21 to see more info on how this in being handled. Oh, and don't expect your checks to take 2-3 days to clear cross country anymore.
Ray
Actually what happened was Apple tried to stay in the hardware business *and* license the OS to the fruit-cloners. IIRC, Apple expected the cloners to go after the mass consumer market and Apple would deal with the hi-end users. Only it didn't work out that way. Several of the cloners decided that *they* wanted the hi-end business, so Apple butted heads with them. I think the way it was setup had something to do with licensing the various versions of MacOS 7.x. So Apple just pulled the rug by rolling forward to OS 8.x when no one was expecting it. At least thats how I recall it.
One other thing... the cloners got the rug yanked by the same man who held the Mac near and dear to his heart... yup, Mr Jobs.
so you can hack the moto iTMS enabled phone via the blue shotgun ? insert new songs ? R.E.M. anyone ? or... play with the ringtone... this guys phone rings and Jimmy Hendrix starts whaling with the Star Spangled Banner... I like it !
Because... how do we know what Apple's exact terms are with the content owners ? Perhaps Apple gets a better percentage after, say... 100 million downloads ? Would not surprise me if that were the case here.
This would now open the door to states charging sales tax on internet purchases, regardless of the nexus of the merchant.
I always thought it curious that the online merchant I would buy various stuff from (who is in a different state btw), would forward the order to another corporate entity (in-state) and I would receive it next day... no sales tax.
Some telcos (eg telstra) offer "half price second telephone lines" which actually consist of a digital line to the home, and a "splitter" in the home.
A bellsouth tech told me about those once, they use them in extreme cases where there are insufficient cable pairs to get the second subscriber line out to the house. Turns out that it is some kind on specific application ISDN unit. Only run from the SLC to the customer premises, so they can piggyback two subscriber lines on one pair of copper.
Ray
>The glut of fiber tends to be more in the metro space. I really don't see the middle of Iowa with a ton of fiber.
Where I live, north Florida, my best connect speed is 26K pots. No DSL, No ISDN, No Cable, No 56K. About 10 miles from my place is a Level-3 light-regen facility. They have 12 1.25" ID ducts in the ground (3 or 4 of which I believe have fiber in them). Rumor has it, there is cage space available over there (I have not verified this yet). Hmmm 10 miles away... hmmm 802.11b... hmmm I wonder if they would sell me a DS-1 and be partial to hosting a short tower... hmmm.
Cosmic Ray
"another one, not like the other one"
Yep, I have two of those, one large and one small. Nice thing about circular slide-rules is that the stick was never extended in the wrong direction. "what goes around, comes around" it seems :) Rumor had it that the german rocket scientists were *big* on using circular slide rules during WWII.
Cosmic Ray (another one, not like the other one)
I'm not sure I agree with this. The large record companies are behaving like a big bloated organism. Along comes a new distribution mechanism (Napster) that threatens their existance. So they haul out the DDT spray gun (the legal team) to kill the invading entity.
If Napster were left completely alone, I doubt that the record companies sales would be affected that much. But profit is a funny thing. Getting to the profit-point is a long road. Once you get there, almost every sale after it is pure gravy. So every sale (no matter how few or how many) is eating directly at the gravy. They don't like that.
A number of states have brought legal action just today. While this does not directly affect the Napster case, the ramifications of a victory by the plaintiffs will affect the record companies profit line.
- j a c r -
a datapoint: in 1990 (IIRC) I had a hundred CD-ROMs burned at one of the pressing plants (Colombus Ohio I think). The cost then was $1500 to master and $1 each (which included screening 2 color art work & jewel boxes). It was $1 each up into the many many thousands (might have been 10K) before they had to create a new stamper. So in 1990, the price per platter for pressing whould have around $1 (+/-).
Should be quite a bit less today.
- j a c r -
Let us hope that the 'powers that be' don't get the lame idea that HDs should be copy-taxed like they do for other things (tape, CD-Rs).
- j a c r -
Does this mean that I was creating buckyballs and nanotubes when I used to run a carbon-arc theatre spotlight ?
- j a c r -
But only in French. No anglophile function calls, if you please.
- j a c r -
Anyone else see the movie "Too Wong Fu" ? Remember the scene in the used car lot where the queens are pondering the delimma "Style or Substance ?"
- j a c r -
Gee, 'look and feel'. Didn't we do this one once before ? About 15 years ago. Apple got where they are today, because of look and feel. M$ lifted some of it, hell, even Apple may have lifted a bit. But, without look and feel, Apple would have been just another box with a command line.
- j a c r -