There are no "good" companies out there; that's the thing you don't seem to understand. There aren't any companies which are going to give you a generous raise each year (at least enough to match what you'd make at another job elsewhere, i.e., keeping up with the "market rate"); that's just not the way companies work any more. Companies treat workers like dirt because they're shortsighted, and because a fair number of employees (like you, it seems) put up with it because they're afraid of losing their jobs, and are willing to work 60-hour weeks for years on end just so they can be seen as "loyal", even though company management doesn't give a shit and will sack you as soon as it helps them make this quarter's financials look better.
A killer stereo and huge TV don't cost anything, BTW. You can get a huge TV now for under $1000; to someone making 6 figures, that's really not a lot of money. Nice stereos cost quite a bit less than that these days. And it's not like you're going to buy a new one of these every year. If you want to point at things which Americans usually waste a lot of money on, it's 1) car (with giant car payments), 2) cable/satellite TV (worse if you get the stupid sports packages), 3) alcohol (not really expensive from a store, but at bars and restaurants it's insanely overpriced). Living in a "ritzy" area is not a waste of money, because the alternative is living in a ghetto and getting shot at or robbed on a regular basis. Thanks to the housing boom, a decent house still costs $250k-500k in many cities, even after the housing bust (prices went down, but not that much) (yes, decent houses are much cheaper in other places, but these are generally non-tech cities where Slashdotters are not going to have an abundance of jobs to choose from, and consequently salaries are far, far less, even less than half as much).
As for your cousin, what was his field and his specialty, and where did he live? He was doing something seriously wrong if it took him 10 years to find steady work again. Was he one of those people who became a "web developer" in the dot-com days, with no degree or credentials whatsoever? If so, well no wonder he couldn't find any work after the bubble popped. People with degrees and real credentials and experience haven't had that problem. Moreover, was he one of those people who absolutely refused to move from whatever little city they (and their extended family) have lived in their whole lives? That's a career-killer too. You can't be a professional and be unwilling to move to where the work is, and do well. If you're dead-set on living in a certain place, then you need to forgo education altogether, and just get a job out of high school doing something that's in high demand in your local area (like working as a grocery cashier for minimum wage), or perhaps get an education in something that there's plenty of jobs in your area for (like medical technicians; every little city has several hospitals and lots of medical clinics). Don't bother getting a college degree if you don't want to move to where the work is.
Anyway, sorry about the asides, but the point is, if you have a good education and experience in the software field, and you're willing to move to where the work is, there's plenty of jobs open for software developers, regardless of the economy. I got laid off in 2009 when the economy sucked (along with my entire team; company decided to toss out the whole department because it didn't think its profit margin was high enough, even though it had customers lined up with guaranteed high volumes for years), and I had another job in a month at a 20% increase in salary. Combined with the 4-month-equivalent severance package, it was a pretty sweet deal. And I'm no rock-star performer either. All that stuff you read about high unemployment and no jobs doesn't apply to software people.
If you don't more or less have the employer by the short and curlies they wouldn't have counter offered.
If you're a skilled employees, chances are you do have the employer "by the short and curlies", in a way: they have a schedule they're working towards, and if one employee up and leaves, that's going to screw up their schedule, and make the boss look bad. They don't have extra employees sitting around ready to take your place at a moment's notice (and most likely they're chronically "understaffed" anyway), and there's little chance they're going to find someone qualified within 2 weeks (assuming you give them that much time, rather than just walking out; they might also have a dumb policy of kicking you out as soon as you resign).
So, it's entirely to their advantage to go ahead and give you a raise to keep you around for a little while longer, until they can find your replacement. Then they'll get rid of you, when it's convenient for them.
This is why you should never accept a counteroffer. If it were a good company, they would have given you a raise already. The sad truth is, you can't stay at any company too long, because (with rare exceptions) they'll always keep your salary at whatever it was when you first joined, plus perhaps some very meager inflationary raises. Within a few years, you'll always find that you can make more money by jumping over to a different company and doing the same job.
My list, if I still lived in Arizona, would include all my neighbors who have dogs and let them bark for hours on end every day. And all my neighbors who have pit bulls that "get loose" every few days and attack people.
Luckily, I moved out of Arizona to the northeast, and no one here seems to have out-of-control barking dogs or pit bulls. In fact, for the first time in about 2 decades, I actually like all my neighbors. It's sorta like Mayberry up here, completely unlike the total ghetto that was Arizona.
I'm not disagreeing, as it sounds like you're referring to an actual incident where kettling was tried and failed, but given a sufficient number of police to contain the rioters, and given the police have sufficient gear (riot shields, pepper spray, batons, etc.), I don't understand quite why kettling wouldn't work. Any violent protesters who try to leave the kettle-zone will just get sprayed or beaten down, right?
Don't forget House of Sand and Fog. What a horrible movie. The acting was good by everyone involved, but what a horrible, pointless plot. I'd rather watch Species any day; at least Species has a super-hot chick and some good alien scenes in it.
The problem I see with paintballs is that I don't believe that kind of paint is permanent (or else it wouldn't wash out of paintball players' clothes). So all the authorities have to do is spray off the camera housing with a hose. It'd be an irritant to them, for sure, but using real spray paint would require a lot more work on their part to get the camera operational again.
Is there any way to get paintballs filled with regular oil-based permanent paint (like typical Krylon spray-can paint)?
If the tools you have get the job done well enough for you, there is no reason to change.
However, it can be beneficial, if you have a little spare time, to occasionally check out what's new to see if it's better than what you're using now. This doesn't mean you need to adopt it, but if you don't look at new stuff now and then, how will you know if there's something better around or not?
1. Because it is a race to the bottom: if you're getting companies in there because of your 'near zero' corporate tax, don't be surprised if they move to another country with 'nearer zero' corporate tax, and lower payroll tax as well, and maybe poorer working conditions.
They're going to go where the talent is. If you're trying to set up a software shop, you're not going to have much success finding skilled employees in Zimbabwe or Kazakhstan; but there's tons of skilled employees in the US. Skilled employees rarely leave their country for crappier countries just for work, unless they're being offered a huge salary (like with the Americans who go to work in Dubai or Saudi Arabia). Having a lower corporate tax is good when you're (you=national government) trying to compete against other countries with similar standards and costs of living.
2. Because if a company isn't paying corporate tax, then it is much harder for it to be worth having them in the country (the cost of servicing their existence may exceed their return to society/government)
Did you forget that the company is hiring employees, who all pay income and other taxes themselves? The more high-paying jobs you can attract to your country, the more your workers (and imported workers) will pay in taxes. It doesn't cost anything to "service the existence" of a company, unless that company is creating a lot of pollution or causing some other negative side-effect. But in that case, you can deal with that problem specifically, such as by taxing pollution or pollution-generating industries. Software companies don't produce any significant pollution, and what they do, such as electricity consumption, can be dealt with with taxes on electricity generation (with different taxes for different types of generation: wind,solar = low tax, coal = high tax, etc.) to make electric power cost reflect its true cost to society.
In simple terms, when you tax something, it means you really want less of it. For most things, when you add a tax, you create a dis-incentive for people to consume that thing. Sales taxes discourage sales and commerce and consumption; property taxes discourage the purchase of property, even income taxes reduce the incentive to make more money unless you can do so with no more work. So if you tax companies, you're reducing the incentive to have and operate a business. Since economies depend on businesses operating and generating profit and employing workers, why on earth would you want to discourage people from doing that, by having taxes on it? There really shouldn't be any taxes on business, logically; instead, you should just tax income (since not many people want to make less money). All that profit that business makes eventually becomes someone's income, so there's no reason to tax it as a profit; that amounts to double-taxation. Of course, you do need to have some protections to make sure people don't just move the money offshore somewhere to avoid paying their income tax on iot, and it would help a lot if capital gains were taxed at the same rate (or maybe higher) than wage income.
Those cameras are pretty rugged, with metal cases, and are mounted high up on steel poles. Your bat isn't going to do anything to the steel poles, and you'll probably need a ladder to get access to the camera housing (and then, swinging a bat while standing on a ladder isn't a good idea).
There's two things that are effective against these cameras: rifle rounds, and gas-powered portable cutoff saws. Of course, using either of these in an urban area is likely to attract police attention, and leave witnesses.
If you just want to disable them, a can of spray paint is probably your best bet. But you'll still need a ladder and some time. Maybe if you had some way of mounting a spray can on the end of a 3-foot pole; then you could quickly walk by and cover the lens with paint.
Sorry, but that idea would only keep politics restricted to rich, well-connected people, no different than it is now. Otherwise, how are you going to determine which candidates qualify for being part of this pool? What's to keep 100 million regular Joes and Janes from deciding they want to run for President, and thus should be entitled to a share of this campaign money pool? Are we going to have a government agency which approves political candidates? That's not very democratic, in fact it sounds a whole lot like China's system.
Besides, don't most of the "exotic" small-hand-build car lines sell directly?
I'm pretty sure they do. You can't go to some local dealership and buy a Panoz.
Especially seeing as Tesla has to send out technicians to do any repairs, or have the vehicle shipped back to the factory for repairs.
Yes, but when does that ever happen? These are electric cars; there's not much to fail in them, unlike cars with incredibly complex gasoline engines. Go to a Tesla showroom sometime; many of them have the stripped-down chassis so you can see everything inside: the suspension, motors, steering, etc. Most of the parts are pretty standard: R&P steering rack (with electric assist), ABS modulator, etc. The only things that are going to go wrong on these cars are the typical things that fail after 100,000 or more miles: brake master cylinders, wheel bearings, etc. Those things can be fixed by any regular mechanic. The only thing the regular mechanic can't handle (yet) is the battery and electric motor part, and that's probably the most reliable part of the whole car. The only other thing likely to fail early is parts of the interior (i.e., rattles and squeaks).
I wonder whether Tesla negotiates on a per-unit basis like a local dealer does, or whether they follow the old Saturn model of one price for everybody. If the latter, what does the middle man really add to the bargain?
I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure after what Tesla representatives have said to me at the mall showrooms is their pricing is standard (the "old" Saturn model, strange how you call a single price for a product, rather than requiring everyone to haggle, "old"). Nothing about Tesla, from a business perspective, resembles the traditional ("old") way of selling cars, I'm sure their pricing isn't either. As for middle men, they don't add squat to the bargain. They just add more cost, so some slimy dirtbag salesman can get a giant unearned commission for doing no work at all, and instead telling you lies about the product he's selling (such as that the car's air conditioning uses "compressed CO2"--a salesman really told me that once).
It seems like Bill has his hands full with his foundation and trying to make a name for himself with it (which is fine, really; curing malaria and other diseases is something really beneficial to humanity, unlike trying to make MS relevant again). I seriously doubt he's going to jump back to trying to save MS.
Well hopefully, whoever wrote the DOS driver actually kept the source code and archived it somewhere safe. If not, that's a serious management failure.
You don't need the original driver author, you just need the source code so someone else can see how it works. Other written documentation would be nice too.
I think I addressed that earlier: you put all the relays and stuff in a separate weatherproof box, keeping as much of your custom circuitry inside that box as possible. Then you connect to it using a custom PCI card, with a defined interface between the two. Later, when PCI is obsolete, you make some new card/module to interface to computers of the day, using whatever new interface makes sense (USB3? PCIe? ExpressCard?). So, yes, you'll have to spend some engineering time on this new PCIe card, but most of your circuitry will be contained in that box, which you can just reuse, so you don't have to re-engineer the whole project.
Also, the parent AC said this was some IBM computer, possibly a PS/1. I wonder if it used an MCA card rather than a PCI card.
Now of course, what I said here is just in theory and principle, and without actually looking at the thing's schematics and hardware I can't really say how feasible it is or if it'd be just as easy to re-engineer the relay card altogether than to try to split it up like I proposed. But relays (I'm assuming he's talking about the electromechanical variety) are not high-speed devices at all (compared to a PCI bus, or even an old MCA one), so it seems to me it shouldn't be that hard to split it up so the relays are in a separate box, and that the additional cable length should not cause any performance problems. In fact, relays are so slow that it seems to me that, if I were to design such a project now, I'd probably just use USB because then you don't have to mess around with custom cards at all, or even require the customer to open a PC case; you'd just put everything in a separate box and use a standard USB A-B cable to plug it in. Of course, USB does carry some latency penalties, so maybe this is an issue.
Why would that be a problem? If you've built a custom PCI card in-house, then surely you've put the effort into writing your own device driver for it too, or else it wouldn't work. So if you've written your own driver, you obviously also have the source code for that driver, so you can update it for newer OS releases as necessary.
Upgrades are NOT being released too fast. If web app developers (and Microsoft) had stuck with standards all along, we wouldn't be having these conversations about IE6 now. The problem was that MS decided to push their own proprietary "standards" (namely ActiveX), and then later changed them, and finally abandoned them. As a counterexample, look at PDF. If some company produced a bunch of documentation with PDF in 1995, you can still view those files with a modern PDF viewer and they render perfectly, because it's a standard.
- Staying stable for more than a day or two. Or an hour or two in a lot of cases. Windows XP was the first introduction the consumer and small business user had to a (mostly) stable operating system. Its not perfect sure, but its an enormous step forward from 98 or ME in terms of stability.
This doesn't apply to a late 80s copy of WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3 on DOS as the OP asked. These were DOS programs, and DOS was extremely stable. The only time DOS ever "crashed" was when an application program hung; DOS was little more than a program loader, so everything was up to the application (except for some I/O routines and the like which DOS provided); good applications worked fine and were stable, crappy applications froze or reset the computer. It's not that much different from now, except that by running applications under an operating system, good applications work fine, and crappy applications crap out but don't affect other applications currently running.
Computers took a giant backwards leap in stability when we moved from DOS to Windows, because it did such a poor job of isolating applications from each other (and seemed to have other stability problems too), until they finally got to WinXP. Of course, the other side of the coin is that, with multitasking OSes, we were able to run multiple applications at once. I still remember, in the DOS days, of constantly having to save my work, quit an application, then go open a different application, to do something else, then save and quit, and switch back to the previous application. Now if I'm designing a PC board, for instance, I can have a web browser open to multiple web pages so I can cross-check information (prices, etc.) from multiple sources/vendors, a PDF viewer open to view reference data, an on-screen calculator, a PCB design program, its accompanying schematic design program, etc. all at once. And I can run a music playing program in the background too. I couldn't do this back in the DOS days.
Worse, once you got the worker over the hump of learning all the hot keys, the old dos versions of various software packages actually worked BETTER than the modern 'web based' implementations of what the old green screens did.
That's the way it is with most CLI software: it's usually more powerful and more efficient than any GUI-based equivalent. But it's a double-edged sword: that power and efficiency comes at the cost of a steeper learning curve. If an application is something you use day in and day out on the job, then with a CLI-based version where you're forced to learn the options or hotkeys, after you get past the learning curve you're going to be very efficient, and given a choice between a more "modern" "easy to use" version and the CLI version, it'd make more sense to learn the CLI version. However, many times we use software on an occasional basis, and for that it's more efficient to use a GUI version because the learning curve is so shallow, even if it isn't as efficient or powerful. For instance, once in a while I'll burn a DVD disc; for that, there's no way I'd want to bother with learning cdrecord or whatever the current CLI Linux tools are; it's much faster to just open K3B, select some files, and click "burn".
Have you tried more recently? WINE has been advancing steadily over the years; maybe some of the issues have been fixed since you last tried. Just a thought.
Actually, Ferrari hasn't exactly been the picture of success, nor has Lamborghini. Both have been bought out or sold several times; Ferrari is now owned by Fiat IIRC, and there was a big flap at the time because Ford was trying to buy them, and Italians were extremely offended by that idea. A truly healthy company would stand on its own, rather than being bought out by foreign competitors. So I wouldn't point to Ferraris as an analogy for Apple. Same goes for most other luxury makes, such as Jaguar (owned by Ford for some time).
Apple is really rather unique I think, in being as successful as it is while branding (and pricing) itself as a high-end product.
and becoming irrelevant as everyone switches to a sane OS.
Which is what, exactly?
It's not Ubuntu, with its Unity UI. It's not Fedora/Red Hat, with its GNOME3 UI that's even worse than Win8. It might be MacOSX, but that's going to cost a fortune in new hardware (most people, and especially companies, are not going to do Hackintoshes).
For corporations, if they did pick one of the above, they'd still be faced with enormous switchover costs and user retraining costs, since none of the above UIs resemble Windows (8 or pre-8) much at all. Of course, they could switch to a Linux distro that runs KDE, and even pick a KDE theme that looks and works almost exactly like Win7, but for some reason everyone ignores KDE.
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There are no "good" companies out there; that's the thing you don't seem to understand. There aren't any companies which are going to give you a generous raise each year (at least enough to match what you'd make at another job elsewhere, i.e., keeping up with the "market rate"); that's just not the way companies work any more. Companies treat workers like dirt because they're shortsighted, and because a fair number of employees (like you, it seems) put up with it because they're afraid of losing their jobs, and are willing to work 60-hour weeks for years on end just so they can be seen as "loyal", even though company management doesn't give a shit and will sack you as soon as it helps them make this quarter's financials look better.
A killer stereo and huge TV don't cost anything, BTW. You can get a huge TV now for under $1000; to someone making 6 figures, that's really not a lot of money. Nice stereos cost quite a bit less than that these days. And it's not like you're going to buy a new one of these every year. If you want to point at things which Americans usually waste a lot of money on, it's 1) car (with giant car payments), 2) cable/satellite TV (worse if you get the stupid sports packages), 3) alcohol (not really expensive from a store, but at bars and restaurants it's insanely overpriced). Living in a "ritzy" area is not a waste of money, because the alternative is living in a ghetto and getting shot at or robbed on a regular basis. Thanks to the housing boom, a decent house still costs $250k-500k in many cities, even after the housing bust (prices went down, but not that much) (yes, decent houses are much cheaper in other places, but these are generally non-tech cities where Slashdotters are not going to have an abundance of jobs to choose from, and consequently salaries are far, far less, even less than half as much).
As for your cousin, what was his field and his specialty, and where did he live? He was doing something seriously wrong if it took him 10 years to find steady work again. Was he one of those people who became a "web developer" in the dot-com days, with no degree or credentials whatsoever? If so, well no wonder he couldn't find any work after the bubble popped. People with degrees and real credentials and experience haven't had that problem. Moreover, was he one of those people who absolutely refused to move from whatever little city they (and their extended family) have lived in their whole lives? That's a career-killer too. You can't be a professional and be unwilling to move to where the work is, and do well. If you're dead-set on living in a certain place, then you need to forgo education altogether, and just get a job out of high school doing something that's in high demand in your local area (like working as a grocery cashier for minimum wage), or perhaps get an education in something that there's plenty of jobs in your area for (like medical technicians; every little city has several hospitals and lots of medical clinics). Don't bother getting a college degree if you don't want to move to where the work is.
Anyway, sorry about the asides, but the point is, if you have a good education and experience in the software field, and you're willing to move to where the work is, there's plenty of jobs open for software developers, regardless of the economy. I got laid off in 2009 when the economy sucked (along with my entire team; company decided to toss out the whole department because it didn't think its profit margin was high enough, even though it had customers lined up with guaranteed high volumes for years), and I had another job in a month at a 20% increase in salary. Combined with the 4-month-equivalent severance package, it was a pretty sweet deal. And I'm no rock-star performer either. All that stuff you read about high unemployment and no jobs doesn't apply to software people.
That guy probably needs to move to a different city. That's the only way to break that cycle.
But yes, this is a good illustration about why you should always avoid changing your mind after formally accepting an offer.
If you don't more or less have the employer by the short and curlies they wouldn't have counter offered.
If you're a skilled employees, chances are you do have the employer "by the short and curlies", in a way: they have a schedule they're working towards, and if one employee up and leaves, that's going to screw up their schedule, and make the boss look bad. They don't have extra employees sitting around ready to take your place at a moment's notice (and most likely they're chronically "understaffed" anyway), and there's little chance they're going to find someone qualified within 2 weeks (assuming you give them that much time, rather than just walking out; they might also have a dumb policy of kicking you out as soon as you resign).
So, it's entirely to their advantage to go ahead and give you a raise to keep you around for a little while longer, until they can find your replacement. Then they'll get rid of you, when it's convenient for them.
This is why you should never accept a counteroffer. If it were a good company, they would have given you a raise already. The sad truth is, you can't stay at any company too long, because (with rare exceptions) they'll always keep your salary at whatever it was when you first joined, plus perhaps some very meager inflationary raises. Within a few years, you'll always find that you can make more money by jumping over to a different company and doing the same job.
My list, if I still lived in Arizona, would include all my neighbors who have dogs and let them bark for hours on end every day. And all my neighbors who have pit bulls that "get loose" every few days and attack people.
Luckily, I moved out of Arizona to the northeast, and no one here seems to have out-of-control barking dogs or pit bulls. In fact, for the first time in about 2 decades, I actually like all my neighbors. It's sorta like Mayberry up here, completely unlike the total ghetto that was Arizona.
If Florida is anything like Arizona, no.
Holy shit, that's hilarious. In addition, this is the first really good use for Twitter I have ever seen in my life.
I'm not disagreeing, as it sounds like you're referring to an actual incident where kettling was tried and failed, but given a sufficient number of police to contain the rioters, and given the police have sufficient gear (riot shields, pepper spray, batons, etc.), I don't understand quite why kettling wouldn't work. Any violent protesters who try to leave the kettle-zone will just get sprayed or beaten down, right?
Don't forget House of Sand and Fog. What a horrible movie. The acting was good by everyone involved, but what a horrible, pointless plot. I'd rather watch Species any day; at least Species has a super-hot chick and some good alien scenes in it.
The problem I see with paintballs is that I don't believe that kind of paint is permanent (or else it wouldn't wash out of paintball players' clothes). So all the authorities have to do is spray off the camera housing with a hose. It'd be an irritant to them, for sure, but using real spray paint would require a lot more work on their part to get the camera operational again.
Is there any way to get paintballs filled with regular oil-based permanent paint (like typical Krylon spray-can paint)?
Oh sorry, I misread his post. In that case, no problem. Swing away.
If the tools you have get the job done well enough for you, there is no reason to change.
However, it can be beneficial, if you have a little spare time, to occasionally check out what's new to see if it's better than what you're using now. This doesn't mean you need to adopt it, but if you don't look at new stuff now and then, how will you know if there's something better around or not?
1. Because it is a race to the bottom: if you're getting companies in there because of your 'near zero' corporate tax, don't be surprised if they move to another country with 'nearer zero' corporate tax, and lower payroll tax as well, and maybe poorer working conditions.
They're going to go where the talent is. If you're trying to set up a software shop, you're not going to have much success finding skilled employees in Zimbabwe or Kazakhstan; but there's tons of skilled employees in the US. Skilled employees rarely leave their country for crappier countries just for work, unless they're being offered a huge salary (like with the Americans who go to work in Dubai or Saudi Arabia). Having a lower corporate tax is good when you're (you=national government) trying to compete against other countries with similar standards and costs of living.
2. Because if a company isn't paying corporate tax, then it is much harder for it to be worth having them in the country (the cost of servicing their existence may exceed their return to society/government)
Did you forget that the company is hiring employees, who all pay income and other taxes themselves? The more high-paying jobs you can attract to your country, the more your workers (and imported workers) will pay in taxes. It doesn't cost anything to "service the existence" of a company, unless that company is creating a lot of pollution or causing some other negative side-effect. But in that case, you can deal with that problem specifically, such as by taxing pollution or pollution-generating industries. Software companies don't produce any significant pollution, and what they do, such as electricity consumption, can be dealt with with taxes on electricity generation (with different taxes for different types of generation: wind,solar = low tax, coal = high tax, etc.) to make electric power cost reflect its true cost to society.
In simple terms, when you tax something, it means you really want less of it. For most things, when you add a tax, you create a dis-incentive for people to consume that thing. Sales taxes discourage sales and commerce and consumption; property taxes discourage the purchase of property, even income taxes reduce the incentive to make more money unless you can do so with no more work. So if you tax companies, you're reducing the incentive to have and operate a business. Since economies depend on businesses operating and generating profit and employing workers, why on earth would you want to discourage people from doing that, by having taxes on it? There really shouldn't be any taxes on business, logically; instead, you should just tax income (since not many people want to make less money). All that profit that business makes eventually becomes someone's income, so there's no reason to tax it as a profit; that amounts to double-taxation. Of course, you do need to have some protections to make sure people don't just move the money offshore somewhere to avoid paying their income tax on iot, and it would help a lot if capital gains were taxed at the same rate (or maybe higher) than wage income.
Those cameras are pretty rugged, with metal cases, and are mounted high up on steel poles. Your bat isn't going to do anything to the steel poles, and you'll probably need a ladder to get access to the camera housing (and then, swinging a bat while standing on a ladder isn't a good idea).
There's two things that are effective against these cameras: rifle rounds, and gas-powered portable cutoff saws. Of course, using either of these in an urban area is likely to attract police attention, and leave witnesses.
If you just want to disable them, a can of spray paint is probably your best bet. But you'll still need a ladder and some time. Maybe if you had some way of mounting a spray can on the end of a 3-foot pole; then you could quickly walk by and cover the lens with paint.
Sorry, but that idea would only keep politics restricted to rich, well-connected people, no different than it is now. Otherwise, how are you going to determine which candidates qualify for being part of this pool? What's to keep 100 million regular Joes and Janes from deciding they want to run for President, and thus should be entitled to a share of this campaign money pool? Are we going to have a government agency which approves political candidates? That's not very democratic, in fact it sounds a whole lot like China's system.
Besides, don't most of the "exotic" small-hand-build car lines sell directly?
I'm pretty sure they do. You can't go to some local dealership and buy a Panoz.
Especially seeing as Tesla has to send out technicians to do any repairs, or have the vehicle shipped back to the factory for repairs.
Yes, but when does that ever happen? These are electric cars; there's not much to fail in them, unlike cars with incredibly complex gasoline engines. Go to a Tesla showroom sometime; many of them have the stripped-down chassis so you can see everything inside: the suspension, motors, steering, etc. Most of the parts are pretty standard: R&P steering rack (with electric assist), ABS modulator, etc. The only things that are going to go wrong on these cars are the typical things that fail after 100,000 or more miles: brake master cylinders, wheel bearings, etc. Those things can be fixed by any regular mechanic. The only thing the regular mechanic can't handle (yet) is the battery and electric motor part, and that's probably the most reliable part of the whole car. The only other thing likely to fail early is parts of the interior (i.e., rattles and squeaks).
I wonder whether Tesla negotiates on a per-unit basis like a local dealer does, or whether they follow the old Saturn model of one price for everybody. If the latter, what does the middle man really add to the bargain?
I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure after what Tesla representatives have said to me at the mall showrooms is their pricing is standard (the "old" Saturn model, strange how you call a single price for a product, rather than requiring everyone to haggle, "old"). Nothing about Tesla, from a business perspective, resembles the traditional ("old") way of selling cars, I'm sure their pricing isn't either. As for middle men, they don't add squat to the bargain. They just add more cost, so some slimy dirtbag salesman can get a giant unearned commission for doing no work at all, and instead telling you lies about the product he's selling (such as that the car's air conditioning uses "compressed CO2"--a salesman really told me that once).
It seems like Bill has his hands full with his foundation and trying to make a name for himself with it (which is fine, really; curing malaria and other diseases is something really beneficial to humanity, unlike trying to make MS relevant again). I seriously doubt he's going to jump back to trying to save MS.
Well hopefully, whoever wrote the DOS driver actually kept the source code and archived it somewhere safe. If not, that's a serious management failure.
You don't need the original driver author, you just need the source code so someone else can see how it works. Other written documentation would be nice too.
I think I addressed that earlier: you put all the relays and stuff in a separate weatherproof box, keeping as much of your custom circuitry inside that box as possible. Then you connect to it using a custom PCI card, with a defined interface between the two. Later, when PCI is obsolete, you make some new card/module to interface to computers of the day, using whatever new interface makes sense (USB3? PCIe? ExpressCard?). So, yes, you'll have to spend some engineering time on this new PCIe card, but most of your circuitry will be contained in that box, which you can just reuse, so you don't have to re-engineer the whole project.
Also, the parent AC said this was some IBM computer, possibly a PS/1. I wonder if it used an MCA card rather than a PCI card.
Now of course, what I said here is just in theory and principle, and without actually looking at the thing's schematics and hardware I can't really say how feasible it is or if it'd be just as easy to re-engineer the relay card altogether than to try to split it up like I proposed. But relays (I'm assuming he's talking about the electromechanical variety) are not high-speed devices at all (compared to a PCI bus, or even an old MCA one), so it seems to me it shouldn't be that hard to split it up so the relays are in a separate box, and that the additional cable length should not cause any performance problems. In fact, relays are so slow that it seems to me that, if I were to design such a project now, I'd probably just use USB because then you don't have to mess around with custom cards at all, or even require the customer to open a PC case; you'd just put everything in a separate box and use a standard USB A-B cable to plug it in. Of course, USB does carry some latency penalties, so maybe this is an issue.
Why would that be a problem? If you've built a custom PCI card in-house, then surely you've put the effort into writing your own device driver for it too, or else it wouldn't work. So if you've written your own driver, you obviously also have the source code for that driver, so you can update it for newer OS releases as necessary.
Upgrades are NOT being released too fast. If web app developers (and Microsoft) had stuck with standards all along, we wouldn't be having these conversations about IE6 now. The problem was that MS decided to push their own proprietary "standards" (namely ActiveX), and then later changed them, and finally abandoned them. As a counterexample, look at PDF. If some company produced a bunch of documentation with PDF in 1995, you can still view those files with a modern PDF viewer and they render perfectly, because it's a standard.
- Staying stable for more than a day or two. Or an hour or two in a lot of cases. Windows XP was the first introduction the consumer and small business user had to a (mostly) stable operating system. Its not perfect sure, but its an enormous step forward from 98 or ME in terms of stability.
This doesn't apply to a late 80s copy of WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3 on DOS as the OP asked. These were DOS programs, and DOS was extremely stable. The only time DOS ever "crashed" was when an application program hung; DOS was little more than a program loader, so everything was up to the application (except for some I/O routines and the like which DOS provided); good applications worked fine and were stable, crappy applications froze or reset the computer. It's not that much different from now, except that by running applications under an operating system, good applications work fine, and crappy applications crap out but don't affect other applications currently running.
Computers took a giant backwards leap in stability when we moved from DOS to Windows, because it did such a poor job of isolating applications from each other (and seemed to have other stability problems too), until they finally got to WinXP. Of course, the other side of the coin is that, with multitasking OSes, we were able to run multiple applications at once. I still remember, in the DOS days, of constantly having to save my work, quit an application, then go open a different application, to do something else, then save and quit, and switch back to the previous application. Now if I'm designing a PC board, for instance, I can have a web browser open to multiple web pages so I can cross-check information (prices, etc.) from multiple sources/vendors, a PDF viewer open to view reference data, an on-screen calculator, a PCB design program, its accompanying schematic design program, etc. all at once. And I can run a music playing program in the background too. I couldn't do this back in the DOS days.
Worse, once you got the worker over the hump of learning all the hot keys, the old dos versions of various software packages actually worked BETTER than the modern 'web based' implementations of what the old green screens did.
That's the way it is with most CLI software: it's usually more powerful and more efficient than any GUI-based equivalent. But it's a double-edged sword: that power and efficiency comes at the cost of a steeper learning curve. If an application is something you use day in and day out on the job, then with a CLI-based version where you're forced to learn the options or hotkeys, after you get past the learning curve you're going to be very efficient, and given a choice between a more "modern" "easy to use" version and the CLI version, it'd make more sense to learn the CLI version. However, many times we use software on an occasional basis, and for that it's more efficient to use a GUI version because the learning curve is so shallow, even if it isn't as efficient or powerful. For instance, once in a while I'll burn a DVD disc; for that, there's no way I'd want to bother with learning cdrecord or whatever the current CLI Linux tools are; it's much faster to just open K3B, select some files, and click "burn".
Have you tried more recently? WINE has been advancing steadily over the years; maybe some of the issues have been fixed since you last tried. Just a thought.
Actually, Ferrari hasn't exactly been the picture of success, nor has Lamborghini. Both have been bought out or sold several times; Ferrari is now owned by Fiat IIRC, and there was a big flap at the time because Ford was trying to buy them, and Italians were extremely offended by that idea. A truly healthy company would stand on its own, rather than being bought out by foreign competitors. So I wouldn't point to Ferraris as an analogy for Apple. Same goes for most other luxury makes, such as Jaguar (owned by Ford for some time).
Apple is really rather unique I think, in being as successful as it is while branding (and pricing) itself as a high-end product.
and becoming irrelevant as everyone switches to a sane OS.
Which is what, exactly?
It's not Ubuntu, with its Unity UI.
It's not Fedora/Red Hat, with its GNOME3 UI that's even worse than Win8.
It might be MacOSX, but that's going to cost a fortune in new hardware (most people, and especially companies, are not going to do Hackintoshes).
For corporations, if they did pick one of the above, they'd still be faced with enormous switchover costs and user retraining costs, since none of the above UIs resemble Windows (8 or pre-8) much at all. Of course, they could switch to a Linux distro that runs KDE, and even pick a KDE theme that looks and works almost exactly like Win7, but for some reason everyone ignores KDE.