I one worked in retail, and part of my job was being "a low-level clerk," ringing up things ranging from digital cameras to groceries to home electronics (including, as it were, TVs).
There were softkeys on the register which would allow me to select various levels of discount: IIRC, 2%, 5%, and 10%. I could also directly adjust the price downward by up to $2, per item.
I could do this all without involving management, through a system termed by the corporate overlords as "Cashier Empowerment." (Accomplishing a greater discount required a phone call and a key.)
The usual reasons for doing this were minor customer complaints or disagreements. It's cheaper and faster to sell a widget for the $12.50 that the customer swears it was marked at, than to send someone over to investigate the physical price tag and sell it at the $13.50 that it rang up as, and the customer is happy because they feel that they're being treated fairly.
It also keeps customers happy when you can instantly knock 10% off of an item whose box has been opened, and increases the odds that they'll come back in the future.
I gave discounts whenever it was the right thing to do, and only time I heard about it from management was when they thanked me for keeping folks happy. And more to the point: If I were still in that line of work, I wouldn't be surprised if I was directed to give a small discount for cash when asked by a customer.
If Best Buy, Scam Central, or some other retailer doesn't do this (or something like this) with relative ease, then it's their own problem. Take your money elsewhere.
Fair enough -- I'm certainly not here to tell you what you might be interested in, but I'll gladly take your comment to mean that you concede to my point.
If you go for the boss they'll point to their boss, right up to the CEO who simply gave the vague order to profit.
In the beginning was the plan, and then the specification. And the plan was without form, and the specification was void. And darkness was upon the faces of the programmers.
And they spake unto their project leader, saying: "IT IS A CROCK OF SHIT, AND IT STINKETH." And the project leader went to the manager, and he spake unto him saying: "IT IS A CONTAINER OF EXCREMENT AND IT IS VERY STRONG, SUCH THAT NONE MAY ABIDE BEFORE IT." And the manager went unto the Director, and he spake unto him saying: "IT IS A VESSEL OF FERTILIZER, AND NONE MAY ABIDE ITS STRENGTH." And the director went unto the vice president, and he spake unto him saying: "IT CONTAINS THAT WHICH AIDS PLANT GROWTH AND IT IS VERY STRONG." And the vice president went unto the president, and he spake unto him saying: "IT PROMOTETH GROWTH, AND IT IS VERY POWERFUL." And the president went unto the board of directors, and he spake unto them saying: "THIS POWERFUL NEW PRODUCT WILL PROMOTE THE GROWTH OF THE COMPANY." And the corporate board of directors looked upon the product, and saw that it was good!
(courtesy of some random *nix fortune file, somewhere, that I remember from long, long ago.)
But it might be a crime to do the absolute minimum you can to appear to be in compliance with the law, while actually failing to meet the minimum required to actually comply...
Right. So, in other words: It's illegal to commit a crime.
I find myself utterly wrecked by this new and profound observation.
Thank you for your insight. You are a gifted and talented person whose grasp of obviousness is unmatched.
Or suppose during that seizure, the feds plugged in a USB drive and "moved" my files to their drive. Since the files are now gone from dropbox's copy of my directory, would their mv command delete the files from my directory on my machine, too? Seems to me it likely would.
Maybe. If a client deletes a copy, the other clients lose their local copy too.
If deleted on the server directly, I don't know what happens (who would except Dropbox?). But Dropbox does atomic(ish) updates in a way not too dissimilar from rsync, to minimize bandwidth. They also say that they do some fancy deduplication to minimize storage requirements on their end.
Combine the two, and I'd guess that an mv (or an rm for that matter) would result in failure (as in brokenness and ceasing to operate, not local loss of data).
It's just a guess, though. And I don't think it should matter if you're doing it right: I use Dropbox for all kinds of stuff that I want shared between my machines (some portable, some not), but also back it up independently just like everyone should be doing anyway for anything that is important at all.
(I don't actually have a dropbox account. I've considered it, but I haven't convinced myself that I understand their marketing jargon. I've seen disasters caused by "backup" software that responds to a file deletion on the main machine by deleting the backup copy the next time a "sync" is done, and I want nothing to do with a system that does this to me.;-)
This is the opposite of the problem you described above.
Dropbox keeps copies of things (and revisions of things) for a period of time -- 2 weeks, IIRC. It's really kind of clever in practice. You can go back to a time before you deleted (or otherwise munged up) the file and recover it easily enough if you catch it in time, or see how a file changed over time, or just undo a fuckup, or someone else's fuckup, or whatever. The rest of the time it's transparent.
If 2 weeks (or whatever it is) isn't enough, you can always throw something together that extends that using the same tricks that you'd use on any other datastore.
And, FYI: Syncing is automagic, and happens at an interval probably best defined as "as quickly as possible once something changes."
More worrisome though is the constant search for more resources to exploit while the ignoring of the fact that we cannot sustain population growth forever. Why not stop increasing the resource requirements before the inevitable war for resources happens and kills off a few billion people?
Sounds good to me. Who do you want to delete first: Your elders, or your children?
Here in the US, every gas station has to have an automatic fire suppression system. When they let go, it's very, very impressive...
Maybe in your US.
Here in in my US (which we usually just call Ohio), automatic fire suppression systems are few and far between at gas stations: There's generally a fire extinguisher prominently mounted nearby, and sometimes a highly-visible EPO on the main building, and that's it.
The batteries are themselves a spark source which means that if they are damaged they are much more likely to catch fire. Gasoline tanks in most cars are on the opposite side than the engine and all the electrical parts, so even if they leak the chance of catching fire is small.
Is that what you think?
There's "electrical parts" all over a modern car, including around and even inside of the fuel tank.
And any gasoline leaking from a fuel tank tends to flow in a very specific direction, which might introduce it to other possible ignition sources. (I think the direction is called "downhill," and the means of propulsion is called "gravity." Please feel free to correct me if I've got these terms wrong.)
While BMW might make (mostly) "family cars" by your definition, my definition differs: They were the first to offer a regular production car that could achieve greater than 1 lateral G on a skidpad, and happened to do it in a vehicle that can seat five people.
I keep an old Laserjet around for printing things that needs printed (occasional forms, instructions, grocery lists) which has cost me nothing but paper in the past 5 years.
Otherwise, I gave up on home color printing a long time ago. I have an HP Photosmart which does produce very nice results when fed decent paper and the correct assortment of ink, but it lives at the top of the closet.
I found that I either used the printer enough that it seemed expensive, or I used the printer infrequently enough that it was also expensive (ink dries in/on print heads requiring a lot of wasted ink during multiple cleaning processes, or new cartridges).
For awhile, I missed printing color maps for driving directions, but the onslaught of cheap available GPS devices has made that a practical non-issue.
But that's all I missed.
I have snapshots printed at Wal-Mart when I want them somewhere other than on a computer. I just upload them, they print them on their wet-process photo printer, and I pick them up later. They've also got a large-format HP inkjet machine there that does well with bigger things which spits stuff out on nice, heavy stock.
And that's just photos. For other print jobs that are either big or special or color (or some variation of these), I just fire off a PDF to the friendly local print shop and they've got it ready for me in an hour or two, packaged in whatever way I want, on whatever kind of paper I ask for.
It's cheap, it's adequately convenient, the output is fine for my non-critical purposes, and I don't have to maintain anything myself.
It's still a valid question -- there's lots of gear using unlicensed frequencies out there. That something operating at 928.8 should be licensed does not mean that it is.
Thanks for answering, though, anyway.
(For what it's worth, I've had decent luck getting around adjacent channel interference. Your mileage apparently varies.)
No, but it does allow a piece of malware to listen on arbitrary ports, trivially turning your local machine into an internet-visible server - something that I have seen system intruders attempt.
Right. Didn't I just say that?
If there is no value in this then why do people arguing for UPnP and against NAT care so much about the ability?
I have no idea what you're going on about. I could give a shit less about UPnP and NAT, and I'm really not for or against anything.
If Wikipedia is broken for you at this particular moment, then that is just evidence that you lack sufficient Kung-Fu to make it work anyway and are therefore unsuitable to make a valid comment in this particular discussion.
(In other words, I think that part of my point is that Wikipedia has been working just fine for me, even though it is after 12:00AM EST. YMMV.)
With an open outgoing firewall (IPv4, IPv6, NAT, whatever) without UPnP support, any malicious client can already contact any random remote node and transfer arbitrary data.
With UPnP, this changes as follows:
Any random remote node can connect to a malicious local client (server?), and that client can then serve arbitrary data.
(The common factor here, for those not keeping notes, is maliciousness -- not UPnP.)
So, either you trust your software or you don't, but UPnP in and of itself doesn't actually change the risk profile at all as far as I can see.
Looks more like the Weather gadget that comes with Windows 7 (may have been there with Vista beta too in 2005)
Nah. I don't have an OSX box to play with, but the Windows 7 widget is currently on the right side of my screen, and the screenshots from OP appear accurate: Both Samsung and Apple have widgets that extend beyond the top of a rectangle, while MSFT does not.
So it looks, to me, more like the OSX widiget.
But really, who cares? It's not like whoever is responsible for these various computer devices invented the concept of a concise tabular weather display with informative graphics. Folks had been doing that long, long time before before any of this in both print and on TV.
That the layout persists is more evidence of its perceived usefulness, than it is evidence that it has been flagrantly copied from someone else's creative work.
Slashdot Mirror
It did happen.
I one worked in retail, and part of my job was being "a low-level clerk," ringing up things ranging from digital cameras to groceries to home electronics (including, as it were, TVs).
There were softkeys on the register which would allow me to select various levels of discount: IIRC, 2%, 5%, and 10%. I could also directly adjust the price downward by up to $2, per item.
I could do this all without involving management, through a system termed by the corporate overlords as "Cashier Empowerment." (Accomplishing a greater discount required a phone call and a key.)
The usual reasons for doing this were minor customer complaints or disagreements. It's cheaper and faster to sell a widget for the $12.50 that the customer swears it was marked at, than to send someone over to investigate the physical price tag and sell it at the $13.50 that it rang up as, and the customer is happy because they feel that they're being treated fairly.
It also keeps customers happy when you can instantly knock 10% off of an item whose box has been opened, and increases the odds that they'll come back in the future.
I gave discounts whenever it was the right thing to do, and only time I heard about it from management was when they thanked me for keeping folks happy. And more to the point: If I were still in that line of work, I wouldn't be surprised if I was directed to give a small discount for cash when asked by a customer.
If Best Buy, Scam Central, or some other retailer doesn't do this (or something like this) with relative ease, then it's their own problem. Take your money elsewhere.
Why should anyone buy a new car, ever?
We should just drive old cars. They're demonstrably cheaper.
Just have a look at Cuba's aging fleet and you'll see that regular people just don't ever need new cars.
Fair enough -- I'm certainly not here to tell you what you might be interested in, but I'll gladly take your comment to mean that you concede to my point.
In the beginning was the plan, and then the specification.
And the plan was without form, and the specification was void.
And darkness was upon the faces of the programmers.
And they spake unto their project leader, saying:
"IT IS A CROCK OF SHIT, AND IT STINKETH."
And the project leader went to the manager, and he spake unto him saying:
"IT IS A CONTAINER OF EXCREMENT AND IT IS VERY STRONG,
SUCH THAT NONE MAY ABIDE BEFORE IT."
And the manager went unto the Director, and he spake unto him saying:
"IT IS A VESSEL OF FERTILIZER, AND NONE MAY ABIDE ITS STRENGTH."
And the director went unto the vice president, and he spake unto him saying:
"IT CONTAINS THAT WHICH AIDS PLANT GROWTH AND IT IS VERY STRONG."
And the vice president went unto the president, and he spake unto him saying:
"IT PROMOTETH GROWTH, AND IT IS VERY POWERFUL."
And the president went unto the board of directors,
and he spake unto them saying:
"THIS POWERFUL NEW PRODUCT WILL PROMOTE THE GROWTH OF THE COMPANY."
And the corporate board of directors looked upon the product,
and saw that it was good!
(courtesy of some random *nix fortune file, somewhere, that I remember from long, long ago.)
Right. So, in other words: It's illegal to commit a crime.
I find myself utterly wrecked by this new and profound observation.
Thank you for your insight. You are a gifted and talented person whose grasp of obviousness is unmatched.
Maybe. If a client deletes a copy, the other clients lose their local copy too.
If deleted on the server directly, I don't know what happens (who would except Dropbox?). But Dropbox does atomic(ish) updates in a way not too dissimilar from rsync, to minimize bandwidth. They also say that they do some fancy deduplication to minimize storage requirements on their end.
Combine the two, and I'd guess that an mv (or an rm for that matter) would result in failure (as in brokenness and ceasing to operate, not local loss of data).
It's just a guess, though. And I don't think it should matter if you're doing it right: I use Dropbox for all kinds of stuff that I want shared between my machines (some portable, some not), but also back it up independently just like everyone should be doing anyway for anything that is important at all.
This is the opposite of the problem you described above.
Dropbox keeps copies of things (and revisions of things) for a period of time -- 2 weeks, IIRC. It's really kind of clever in practice. You can go back to a time before you deleted (or otherwise munged up) the file and recover it easily enough if you catch it in time, or see how a file changed over time, or just undo a fuckup, or someone else's fuckup, or whatever. The rest of the time it's transparent.
If 2 weeks (or whatever it is) isn't enough, you can always throw something together that extends that using the same tricks that you'd use on any other datastore.
And, FYI: Syncing is automagic, and happens at an interval probably best defined as "as quickly as possible once something changes."
Sounds good to me. Who do you want to delete first: Your elders, or your children?
And I prefer coming home to a blowjob, but somehow my wife isn't compatible with that function.
It's all tradeoffs. You can't have it all.
Maybe in your US.
Here in in my US (which we usually just call Ohio), automatic fire suppression systems are few and far between at gas stations: There's generally a fire extinguisher prominently mounted nearby, and sometimes a highly-visible EPO on the main building, and that's it.
Is that what you think?
There's "electrical parts" all over a modern car, including around and even inside of the fuel tank.
And any gasoline leaking from a fuel tank tends to flow in a very specific direction, which might introduce it to other possible ignition sources. (I think the direction is called "downhill," and the means of propulsion is called "gravity." Please feel free to correct me if I've got these terms wrong.)
M3? M5?
While BMW might make (mostly) "family cars" by your definition, my definition differs: They were the first to offer a regular production car that could achieve greater than 1 lateral G on a skidpad, and happened to do it in a vehicle that can seat five people.
How slow is "by no means fast"?
Adding a receiver and whatever shit is needed for things to operate differentially != a simple doubling of cost.
It's reading. Do it.
Aha! So you did have good luck, after all. Glad to hear that it worked.
And, yes: An omni-ish antenna with horizontal polarization is a strange thing, indeed. Sounds like a neat design.
I keep an old Laserjet around for printing things that needs printed (occasional forms, instructions, grocery lists) which has cost me nothing but paper in the past 5 years.
Otherwise, I gave up on home color printing a long time ago. I have an HP Photosmart which does produce very nice results when fed decent paper and the correct assortment of ink, but it lives at the top of the closet.
I found that I either used the printer enough that it seemed expensive, or I used the printer infrequently enough that it was also expensive (ink dries in/on print heads requiring a lot of wasted ink during multiple cleaning processes, or new cartridges).
For awhile, I missed printing color maps for driving directions, but the onslaught of cheap available GPS devices has made that a practical non-issue.
But that's all I missed.
I have snapshots printed at Wal-Mart when I want them somewhere other than on a computer. I just upload them, they print them on their wet-process photo printer, and I pick them up later. They've also got a large-format HP inkjet machine there that does well with bigger things which spits stuff out on nice, heavy stock.
And that's just photos. For other print jobs that are either big or special or color (or some variation of these), I just fire off a PDF to the friendly local print shop and they've got it ready for me in an hour or two, packaged in whatever way I want, on whatever kind of paper I ask for.
It's cheap, it's adequately convenient, the output is fine for my non-critical purposes, and I don't have to maintain anything myself.
It's still a valid question -- there's lots of gear using unlicensed frequencies out there. That something operating at 928.8 should be licensed does not mean that it is.
Thanks for answering, though, anyway.
(For what it's worth, I've had decent luck getting around adjacent channel interference. Your mileage apparently varies.)
Right. Didn't I just say that?
I have no idea what you're going on about. I could give a shit less about UPnP and NAT, and I'm really not for or against anything.
Because the view through the window will totally tell me what the weather will be like tomorrow!
If Wikipedia is broken for you at this particular moment, then that is just evidence that you lack sufficient Kung-Fu to make it work anyway and are therefore unsuitable to make a valid comment in this particular discussion.
(In other words, I think that part of my point is that Wikipedia has been working just fine for me, even though it is after 12:00AM EST. YMMV.)
With an open outgoing firewall (IPv4, IPv6, NAT, whatever) without UPnP support, any malicious client can already contact any random remote node and transfer arbitrary data.
With UPnP, this changes as follows:
Any random remote node can connect to a malicious local client (server?), and that client can then serve arbitrary data.
(The common factor here, for those not keeping notes, is maliciousness -- not UPnP.)
So, either you trust your software or you don't, but UPnP in and of itself doesn't actually change the risk profile at all as far as I can see.
Seriously. So many folks are blamed for errors in these days of blogs and chaos, when a simple [ sic ] would be perfectly adequate to exonerate them.
Nah. I don't have an OSX box to play with, but the Windows 7 widget is currently on the right side of my screen, and the screenshots from OP appear accurate: Both Samsung and Apple have widgets that extend beyond the top of a rectangle, while MSFT does not.
So it looks, to me, more like the OSX widiget.
But really, who cares? It's not like whoever is responsible for these various computer devices invented the concept of a concise tabular weather display with informative graphics. Folks had been doing that long, long time before before any of this in both print and on TV.
That the layout persists is more evidence of its perceived usefulness, than it is evidence that it has been flagrantly copied from someone else's creative work.
What's a "good car" worth? Are we talking H1 Hummer, Pagani Zonda, or a Kia Whatever?
They're all "good cars," in that they're all solid and reliable, and are also optimized for their purpose.
So please forget the car analogy, and use a value that people can actually relate to. (Dollars would be adequate.)
There's lots of stuff out there doing really useful things with far less than 8MB.
And my first computer didn't even have a floppy drive, let alone one of those new-fangled hard drives.