If I sell mine, that I already own, yes, I expect to get $100 for it in a year, half of the price that it will still likely sell for new. Not only do I buy and sell a great deal of electronics, I have owned two different stores that did the same. Getting 1/2 the price for something useful and still desirable when it is 1 year old is a reasonable estimate. I sell broken laptops for twice that on a weekly basis.
Never been in one, haven't bought an Apple product since the 90s, so your troll is invalid. I do know what it takes to operate a business: profit.
Regardless, there is nothing wrong with making a profit, even an obscene profit, when people are freely buying your products. If I make a widget for $1, and millions will stand in line and pay me $1000 for it, there is no shame. As a matter of fact, most rational people would call it a good thing, generating tons of shareholder income and taxes.
Anyone who thinks that a company in an open and free market should only make $x amount of profit, doesn't believe in an open and free market. If that was the case, the products from Apple wouldn't have ever gotten to market anyway.
I've had the same UI lag. They say they are fixing it. I"m not shocked. I've never bought a computing device that didn't need some updates from time to time, be it BIOS or OS.
I love how you tout an extremely high profit margin as a desirable feature!
It is a desirable feature. You've been to too many Occupy rallies, where (ironically) they use these Apple products. Profit means they can reinvest and create new, desirable products, and that the company that makes the desirable products will continue to exist. It also opens the door for competition. Competition fails when there is no profits. If anything, Amazon's ability to lose money on each Kindle Fire is less desirable, as they can make up the profit with sales of media, but other hardware only companies can't compete.
High profit margins are only undesirable in industries where there is a monopoly, such as public utilities. With Apple products, you always have the option of not owning them, there are plenty of alternatives.
I use my Fire almost every night to watch 40-60 minutes of video and have since it was first delivered. I've never had it stutter, and my wifi connection is not very good. I've had it complain that it can't connect (my wifi issue, not a Fire issue) but the video was still smooth I'm guessing the new update will help who have the problem, or the problem was their internet connection was saturated. A full reboot also helps, to make sure other programs are actually CLOSED, and not just pushed into the background. (actually closing programs on the Fire is sometimes difficult)
I was one of the pre-orderers on the Fire. It has its limitations, to be sure, but I love it. I have a prime account, and love watching movies or tv shows in bed with earbuds while the wife sleeps, or while she is hogging the TV. Or just reading a book, or checking FB or email,/., news, etc. I've never owned a smart phone for many reasons: too much money for bad internet access and too small a screen. But I love my small tablet. Maybe some day a large tablet will make sense, but for now, the Fire fits the bill better than the iPad for my uses. Oh, and costs less than half. I can't possibly be the only one who thinks this way.
I'm also aware that a year from now, I may want something different, and very likely I will be able to get $100 for my Fire. This depreciation is like renting it for $8 a month. I can afford that.
No rational ecommerce site designs for a 1920 wide screen. You always design for the lowest common denominator. Most customers aren't computer geeks, and you want everyone's money, not just the smart peoples. Personal websites (the topic of the story) yes, but never for money making websites. We still design around a maximum width of 900 pixels (menus plus 760px of actual content), and will for some time. This allows for for scroll bars and a little buffer on a 1024x768 screen, or for half of a 1080p screen. It also makes it readable from tablets and phones without having multiple code bases, which is prohibitively expensive for a small to medium sized ecommerce site.
The Kindle Fire will pave the way, not because people will choose it over the iPad, but because it is opening the market on the low price range, and for people (like myself) that use computers to compute, and midsize tablets for light duty tasks. Of course, the Nook is also helping develop this market. They both prove that there is a sub $300 market for basic tablets that can surf, watch movies, be good book readers, and serve in areas where even a laptop is too large, and a netbook is not efficient.
Rest assured, the iPad will still dominate the large tablet market, it is just that the new products aren't trying to compete and are instead focusing on growing the market in places that the iPad never entered.
Well, I don't mind bragging about mine. I was 100k, but now has swollen to 150k this year. As to *real* servers, I try to keep our ecommerce pages below 250k for gateway pages. Until this year, I tried to keep them under 150k. Up until 2008, 100k was the target. Before 2003, 50k. This is kind of light, and a few pages bust this, but very few. Before 2000, I used to spend lots of time just optimizing graphics, now I just use some common sense, PS, and very little time.
What I have found is that the total k of data isn't as important as the number of items and hosts the page calls. I find I can make my pages faster by using image maps, which make larger images size (12 images 1 image of all 12 items) but load faster because it takes less connects. There are a few tools online that can help you figure out total load times. Nowadays, load time is NOT purely a function of the size of the data. If you can cut down on the number of GETS and cross domain GETS (ie: DNS lookups) you can radically cut down load time and reliability.
Also, pages that don't need to be dynamic, shouldn't be. Our gateway (to product categories) pages are generated as we update the site, and stored static. This allows them to be cached. It sounds old fashioned, but the fact is that it greatly increases perceived latency. I am amazed at how many websites are generated via PHP and SQL on the fly, yet aren't updated more than a couple times a day or less. That is a lot of wasted CPU cycles on the server, and a lot of wasted potential for caching, both locally and down the line. And yes, it makes your website load slower, making it seem like your pages are larger than they are.
I wonder what sort of long term side effects you'd be looking at with vastly increased muscle growth.
The kind that Hitler was looking for. Best case scenario, you get parents who try to guarantee their child is the next star quarterback. Just imagine, a world full of quarterbacks. Well, except for the poor people.
The problem with email privacy is that once you send it to me, I can do anything with it I want, and I should be able to. There are two points of "failure" when it comes to email privacy. The only way to truly expect privacy with email is if you only email yourself.
That said, I love the warnings that people put on the ends of their email, how it is a "crime" if you distribute the email. Nothing could be more laughable and unenforceable. If you don't want me distributing something you sent, get me to sign a non-disclosure. Otherwise, if it is in my inbox, it's mine.
I don't get why that point isn't being made more strongly. It isn't Sun disabling, it is Ubuntu. Granted, they say it is a security issue, so disabling, but I think it could be handled better, or at least with more notice.
You raise a good point. I see a pain specialist because of tendon and back problems. Regular doctors are regularly audited, but pain specialists are super audited, and the DEA puts so much pressure on them, that they do NOT like to prescribe pain killers at all if they can help it. (Based on input from 3 different doctors here). They have to keep records beyond the norm, prove that other methods were tried first, etc. I had not had a physical last year, and he wouldn't re-up my prescription until I did. His reasons weren't my health, he flatly said that he could get in trouble. So now our national health policy is party "ruled" by the DEA, a bunch of fucking idiots with a faulty agenda and no real world experience in front line medicine....great.
No perchance, and it was idiotic to even say, since you have easily looked it up and see that its protection was basically stripped from a defeated Germany in 1947. Wikipedia is your friend, laziness is not.
Chrome is pretty much autoupdating anyway, FF (If I remember right) is almost as much. IE isn't that far behind in autoupdating, and on par if you are using Win7. And it really isn't that misleading: either you prefer Chrome, regardless of version, or you prefer IE, or FF, regardless of version. It still provides useful info.
Dell and HP are also Texas corporations, which are two giants in producing end products for the entire globe. Of course, Dell finishes their stuff in Mexico (which is still better than China).
This may say more about the kind of people who buy the Wii in the first place, more casual (and likely older) gamers. They are more likely to use the Wii as a streaming device, and less likely to worry about the feeds not being HD. I'm not as stuck on HD, but then, most of my TV watching is about the story, not the graphics.
$50 per click? Citation please, because my bullshit alert is going off. We sell very high ticket items and have for over 2 decades, and have been a part of Overture (now yahoo), and Google since their inception. $1 a click is pretty high dollar, and we put up to twice that at times, but usually less. I would love to hear who pays fifty bucks a click.
I don't quite get the fuss. I own the Fire. I knew the limitations when I bought it, and expected it to have a few bugs, which it does. I use it all the time, and pretty happy for my 200 bucks worth. I didn't expect it to keep up with a quad core box, or even the iPad, I expected it to display books, show movies, do light surfing, play casual games, all of which it does ok. It *does* need some updates to the software to work the bugs out, but every computer I have ever bought needed both hardware BIOS upgrades and OS upgrades, so the idea that a new to the market tablet has a few bugs shouldn't come to a surprise to anyone.
If anything, people were oversold on what the tablet was. It was exactly what I expected, and I'm guessing it was exactly what most people expected since the majority of owners are happy with it. What I'm finding is several publications talking bad about the tablet, but the owners I know are all happy. Go figure.
First of all there is a BIG difference between stating that "Israel should not exist" and "We are going to destroy Israel."
Do you have any idea how idiotic that sounds? Not commenting on the argument as a whole, but obviously "We are going to destroy Israel" means "Israel should not exist" in this context. What else could it mean?
"We want to kill every Jew in Israel and hand over the land to the Palestinians, but we are not saying Israel should not exist"?
Grow up. No matter what side of the argument you are on, the intentions of Iran are plenty clear, and trying to argue semantics here just makes your argument as weak as Iran's.
So, a system that is designed to be 100% Amazon supported for everyone who wants it to be, but is designed intentionally to be easy to jailbreak for those that don't, is automatically crap? This is idiotic. The fact that it is easy to jailbreak isn't a bug, IT IS A FEATURE.
I own a Kindle Fire, and it kicks ass. I don't expect to jailbreak it for now, as that wouldn't help me do anything that I can't already do, except maybe install an ssh client. But it is great that Amazon is keeping it easy to jailbreak, ON PURPOSE, so when I do, I can quickly and easily. I hope they sell millions of them.
If I choose a long lasting computer now I may miss out on features that are developed later.
From my experience, 75% of computers that are ten years old still work, more or less. Sometimes a power supply or hard drive (or more likely, monitor) will die, and the other 25% have motherboard failures, but most work fine. We just traded out our 7 year old computers at work, 75% of what we bought back in 04 and haven't done anything except add ram and upgrade the monitors to LCD back in 08 (we are still using all the monitors from 08 now, or gave them away to churches/charity/etc). We moved some of them down to the factory to be used to control CNC machines that run DOS (yes, DOS) because we are worried the old machines there (over 15 years old in a dirty factory) *might* fail some time soon, although we have only had one failure out of 4 machines in this time. I still have IBM servers from the 90s that work perfectly fine as well. Dual PPro 200 boxes gathering dust simply because they heat they generate wasn't worth the bits they moved anymore.
Most old computers don't die from being broken, they die from rust in the landfill.
The thing is, the guy who had the job before probably said goodbye to his personal life, thus goodbye to the job as well. Being the "only" IT person in a "thriving ecommerce company" is family (ie: me) and I completely understand all the band-aiding. It would be swell to be an expert at everything, but I'm not. It would be great if I could talk the owner into spending more or hiring more, but I've tried and it won't happen. I will say this, I *HAVE* talking him into paying me tremendously, so all and all, it is a good deal.
There is also a degree of job security if you do your job well enough that stuff doesn't break too often, since there is no underling to take your place, and the next guy will have just as big of a bitch as you are having now. So enjoy the challenge, make sure you are compensated for your time, and be prepared to work a lot and learn a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
If I sell mine, that I already own, yes, I expect to get $100 for it in a year, half of the price that it will still likely sell for new. Not only do I buy and sell a great deal of electronics, I have owned two different stores that did the same. Getting 1/2 the price for something useful and still desirable when it is 1 year old is a reasonable estimate. I sell broken laptops for twice that on a weekly basis.
Never been in one, haven't bought an Apple product since the 90s, so your troll is invalid. I do know what it takes to operate a business: profit.
Regardless, there is nothing wrong with making a profit, even an obscene profit, when people are freely buying your products. If I make a widget for $1, and millions will stand in line and pay me $1000 for it, there is no shame. As a matter of fact, most rational people would call it a good thing, generating tons of shareholder income and taxes.
Anyone who thinks that a company in an open and free market should only make $x amount of profit, doesn't believe in an open and free market. If that was the case, the products from Apple wouldn't have ever gotten to market anyway.
I've had the same UI lag. They say they are fixing it. I"m not shocked. I've never bought a computing device that didn't need some updates from time to time, be it BIOS or OS.
I love how you tout an extremely high profit margin as a desirable feature!
It is a desirable feature. You've been to too many Occupy rallies, where (ironically) they use these Apple products. Profit means they can reinvest and create new, desirable products, and that the company that makes the desirable products will continue to exist. It also opens the door for competition. Competition fails when there is no profits. If anything, Amazon's ability to lose money on each Kindle Fire is less desirable, as they can make up the profit with sales of media, but other hardware only companies can't compete.
High profit margins are only undesirable in industries where there is a monopoly, such as public utilities. With Apple products, you always have the option of not owning them, there are plenty of alternatives.
I use my Fire almost every night to watch 40-60 minutes of video and have since it was first delivered. I've never had it stutter, and my wifi connection is not very good. I've had it complain that it can't connect (my wifi issue, not a Fire issue) but the video was still smooth I'm guessing the new update will help who have the problem, or the problem was their internet connection was saturated. A full reboot also helps, to make sure other programs are actually CLOSED, and not just pushed into the background. (actually closing programs on the Fire is sometimes difficult)
I was one of the pre-orderers on the Fire. It has its limitations, to be sure, but I love it. I have a prime account, and love watching movies or tv shows in bed with earbuds while the wife sleeps, or while she is hogging the TV. Or just reading a book, or checking FB or email, /., news, etc. I've never owned a smart phone for many reasons: too much money for bad internet access and too small a screen. But I love my small tablet. Maybe some day a large tablet will make sense, but for now, the Fire fits the bill better than the iPad for my uses. Oh, and costs less than half. I can't possibly be the only one who thinks this way.
I'm also aware that a year from now, I may want something different, and very likely I will be able to get $100 for my Fire. This depreciation is like renting it for $8 a month. I can afford that.
No rational ecommerce site designs for a 1920 wide screen. You always design for the lowest common denominator. Most customers aren't computer geeks, and you want everyone's money, not just the smart peoples. Personal websites (the topic of the story) yes, but never for money making websites. We still design around a maximum width of 900 pixels (menus plus 760px of actual content), and will for some time. This allows for for scroll bars and a little buffer on a 1024x768 screen, or for half of a 1080p screen. It also makes it readable from tablets and phones without having multiple code bases, which is prohibitively expensive for a small to medium sized ecommerce site.
The Kindle Fire will pave the way, not because people will choose it over the iPad, but because it is opening the market on the low price range, and for people (like myself) that use computers to compute, and midsize tablets for light duty tasks. Of course, the Nook is also helping develop this market. They both prove that there is a sub $300 market for basic tablets that can surf, watch movies, be good book readers, and serve in areas where even a laptop is too large, and a netbook is not efficient.
Rest assured, the iPad will still dominate the large tablet market, it is just that the new products aren't trying to compete and are instead focusing on growing the market in places that the iPad never entered.
Well, I don't mind bragging about mine. I was 100k, but now has swollen to 150k this year. As to *real* servers, I try to keep our ecommerce pages below 250k for gateway pages. Until this year, I tried to keep them under 150k. Up until 2008, 100k was the target. Before 2003, 50k. This is kind of light, and a few pages bust this, but very few. Before 2000, I used to spend lots of time just optimizing graphics, now I just use some common sense, PS, and very little time.
What I have found is that the total k of data isn't as important as the number of items and hosts the page calls. I find I can make my pages faster by using image maps, which make larger images size (12 images 1 image of all 12 items) but load faster because it takes less connects. There are a few tools online that can help you figure out total load times. Nowadays, load time is NOT purely a function of the size of the data. If you can cut down on the number of GETS and cross domain GETS (ie: DNS lookups) you can radically cut down load time and reliability.
Also, pages that don't need to be dynamic, shouldn't be. Our gateway (to product categories) pages are generated as we update the site, and stored static. This allows them to be cached. It sounds old fashioned, but the fact is that it greatly increases perceived latency. I am amazed at how many websites are generated via PHP and SQL on the fly, yet aren't updated more than a couple times a day or less. That is a lot of wasted CPU cycles on the server, and a lot of wasted potential for caching, both locally and down the line. And yes, it makes your website load slower, making it seem like your pages are larger than they are.
I wonder what sort of long term side effects you'd be looking at with vastly increased muscle growth.
The kind that Hitler was looking for. Best case scenario, you get parents who try to guarantee their child is the next star quarterback. Just imagine, a world full of quarterbacks. Well, except for the poor people.
The problem with email privacy is that once you send it to me, I can do anything with it I want, and I should be able to. There are two points of "failure" when it comes to email privacy. The only way to truly expect privacy with email is if you only email yourself.
That said, I love the warnings that people put on the ends of their email, how it is a "crime" if you distribute the email. Nothing could be more laughable and unenforceable. If you don't want me distributing something you sent, get me to sign a non-disclosure. Otherwise, if it is in my inbox, it's mine.
Stop getting drunk. Your brain cells will thank you.
Stop telling others how to live. It isn't your concern.
I don't get why that point isn't being made more strongly. It isn't Sun disabling, it is Ubuntu. Granted, they say it is a security issue, so disabling, but I think it could be handled better, or at least with more notice.
You raise a good point. I see a pain specialist because of tendon and back problems. Regular doctors are regularly audited, but pain specialists are super audited, and the DEA puts so much pressure on them, that they do NOT like to prescribe pain killers at all if they can help it. (Based on input from 3 different doctors here). They have to keep records beyond the norm, prove that other methods were tried first, etc. I had not had a physical last year, and he wouldn't re-up my prescription until I did. His reasons weren't my health, he flatly said that he could get in trouble. So now our national health policy is party "ruled" by the DEA, a bunch of fucking idiots with a faulty agenda and no real world experience in front line medicine....great.
No perchance, and it was idiotic to even say, since you have easily looked it up and see that its protection was basically stripped from a defeated Germany in 1947. Wikipedia is your friend, laziness is not.
Chrome is pretty much autoupdating anyway, FF (If I remember right) is almost as much. IE isn't that far behind in autoupdating, and on par if you are using Win7. And it really isn't that misleading: either you prefer Chrome, regardless of version, or you prefer IE, or FF, regardless of version. It still provides useful info.
Dell and HP are also Texas corporations, which are two giants in producing end products for the entire globe. Of course, Dell finishes their stuff in Mexico (which is still better than China).
This may say more about the kind of people who buy the Wii in the first place, more casual (and likely older) gamers. They are more likely to use the Wii as a streaming device, and less likely to worry about the feeds not being HD. I'm not as stuck on HD, but then, most of my TV watching is about the story, not the graphics.
$50 per click? Citation please, because my bullshit alert is going off. We sell very high ticket items and have for over 2 decades, and have been a part of Overture (now yahoo), and Google since their inception. $1 a click is pretty high dollar, and we put up to twice that at times, but usually less. I would love to hear who pays fifty bucks a click.
So which Kia's use the Genesis, Azera and Equus parts? Just trying to keep up....
I don't quite get the fuss. I own the Fire. I knew the limitations when I bought it, and expected it to have a few bugs, which it does. I use it all the time, and pretty happy for my 200 bucks worth. I didn't expect it to keep up with a quad core box, or even the iPad, I expected it to display books, show movies, do light surfing, play casual games, all of which it does ok. It *does* need some updates to the software to work the bugs out, but every computer I have ever bought needed both hardware BIOS upgrades and OS upgrades, so the idea that a new to the market tablet has a few bugs shouldn't come to a surprise to anyone.
If anything, people were oversold on what the tablet was. It was exactly what I expected, and I'm guessing it was exactly what most people expected since the majority of owners are happy with it. What I'm finding is several publications talking bad about the tablet, but the owners I know are all happy. Go figure.
First of all there is a BIG difference between stating that "Israel should not exist" and "We are going to destroy Israel."
Do you have any idea how idiotic that sounds? Not commenting on the argument as a whole, but obviously "We are going to destroy Israel" means "Israel should not exist" in this context. What else could it mean?
"We want to kill every Jew in Israel and hand over the land to the Palestinians, but we are not saying Israel should not exist"?
Grow up. No matter what side of the argument you are on, the intentions of Iran are plenty clear, and trying to argue semantics here just makes your argument as weak as Iran's.
I can't believe Amazon is shipping this crap.
So, a system that is designed to be 100% Amazon supported for everyone who wants it to be, but is designed intentionally to be easy to jailbreak for those that don't, is automatically crap? This is idiotic. The fact that it is easy to jailbreak isn't a bug, IT IS A FEATURE.
I own a Kindle Fire, and it kicks ass. I don't expect to jailbreak it for now, as that wouldn't help me do anything that I can't already do, except maybe install an ssh client. But it is great that Amazon is keeping it easy to jailbreak, ON PURPOSE, so when I do, I can quickly and easily. I hope they sell millions of them.
If I choose a long lasting computer now I may miss out on features that are developed later.
From my experience, 75% of computers that are ten years old still work, more or less. Sometimes a power supply or hard drive (or more likely, monitor) will die, and the other 25% have motherboard failures, but most work fine. We just traded out our 7 year old computers at work, 75% of what we bought back in 04 and haven't done anything except add ram and upgrade the monitors to LCD back in 08 (we are still using all the monitors from 08 now, or gave them away to churches/charity/etc). We moved some of them down to the factory to be used to control CNC machines that run DOS (yes, DOS) because we are worried the old machines there (over 15 years old in a dirty factory) *might* fail some time soon, although we have only had one failure out of 4 machines in this time. I still have IBM servers from the 90s that work perfectly fine as well. Dual PPro 200 boxes gathering dust simply because they heat they generate wasn't worth the bits they moved anymore.
Most old computers don't die from being broken, they die from rust in the landfill.
The thing is, the guy who had the job before probably said goodbye to his personal life, thus goodbye to the job as well. Being the "only" IT person in a "thriving ecommerce company" is family (ie: me) and I completely understand all the band-aiding. It would be swell to be an expert at everything, but I'm not. It would be great if I could talk the owner into spending more or hiring more, but I've tried and it won't happen. I will say this, I *HAVE* talking him into paying me tremendously, so all and all, it is a good deal.
There is also a degree of job security if you do your job well enough that stuff doesn't break too often, since there is no underling to take your place, and the next guy will have just as big of a bitch as you are having now. So enjoy the challenge, make sure you are compensated for your time, and be prepared to work a lot and learn a lot.