I really wish that Liberals would pick up and read their economics textbooks before making such silly assertions and suggestions concerning wages, prices, globalization, etc. Are there problems? Yes, but offering solutions which every econ 101 student knows to be flawed doesn't really help either.
I'll thank you not to attribute that to liberalism. I'm very much a liberal, thank you, but I know what you're talking about.
When you start offering higher rates of pay, it becomes less economical. In some industries, particularly service industries such as call center, raising the rate of pay to be in line with what their counterparts would make in Canada or the US isn't as big a hit. It's still cheaper to build a call center in India (and I think Africa will be the next India in that respect. Fine by me, they speak better English in Africa). It's still cheaper to power a call center in India. You don't have to worry about heating bills in that country. Bottom line is that even if people in that country are getting the same rate of pay as we are over here, it's still cheaper to actually *run* the place.**
But when you start dealing with goods, and anything that actually needs to be shipped, the total cost of operation needs to be less than it would be to manufacture things over here. So they get lower rate of pay in order to make it economical.
** this example doesn't take into account attrition rates, both among employees and among customers. It's worth noting, for example, that the attrition rate for Dell's call center in Hyderabad is 100%. That is to say that 100% of their employees leave within a year. That affects the total cost of running the place. Right now, it's cost-effective to run the place. As wage rates rise in that country, it's going to be less and less cost-effective, and they will reach a point where they may as well just shift everything back to North America again. Or where they move everything to Africa or some other region where people are not currently being paid what they're worth.
1KG = 1L of pure (distilled) water = 1 cubic decimeter (1000 cubic centimeters)
When talking about pure DHMO that is. When you start mixing in salts (as is found in our drinking water), it messes up the density of water, which messes up the measurement, if only slightly.
If you're absolutely new to Astronomy, or even if you aren't, you should really start with the right software on your computer before you branch off into something more complicated. Probably the hardest part of Astronomy is knowing where to point your telescope, and that's where having the software comes in. With the right software, you can learn the night sky and from that, know where to point your telescope even without a motorized mount. Just being able to recognize the constellations and asterisms is a skill that some would-be astronomers could benefit hugely from. I'm a big fan of a piece of software called Starry Night, by Imaginova. You can order it online: http://www.starrynightstore.com/stniso.html
For the most part, you can get away with the "Enthusiast" level of the software. (it's what I have) But the Pro and Pro Plus (which cost significantly more) have features that the Enthusiast doesn't have, like the ability to control a motorized mount. *VERY* useful feature, that one... find what you want to look at in the software, tell the software to point your telescope at it, and then go look at it. Starry Night comes with free updates to its stellar database and information, which is one of the main reasons I like it.
As for getting a proper telescope... there's a lot of factors to take into account. If you're in the city or the suburbs, I personally wouldn't spend more than $300-500 on a telescope. For one, increased magnification isn't going to do you any good at all. Heat pockets in the atmosphere will distort the image, and cause anything you see on a telescope to dance around. The more magnification you have, the worse the image dance is. And you'll actually get to a point where it's very difficult to see anything clearly without taking a video of it and then using software to drop the blurry frames. For two, light pollution. It's too bright in the city to do a lot of astronomy. In the suburbs, you can start, but it's still pretty bright. You have to get way out of the city to make having a larger telescope (that's still within your budget) worth it. If you had a budget of, say, $25,000 then you could make a case for wanting a bigger scope to use in the city, but even then, you're going to suffer from light pollution.
I'd go for the good software, a decent telescope, and if you have the money a properly motorized mount that the software can use. If not, save your pennies and upgrade in the future.
I'm actually going to wait to see how it handles my Radeon XPress 200M on my laptop before I say they've gotten their act together. That card has 128MB soldered on. Dedicated 128MB. That the Linux driver simply can't see. I have to use 128MB shared memory, taking away from the rather anemic 1GB of system memory taht I have in the lappy. And even under those conditions, performance is barely better than using the Mesa driver. Completely unusable for games, even though I never had any problem running games such as GuildWars or SW:KOTOR under Windows.
When ATI comes out with a driver that can actually see/use the 128MB dedicated graphics I have on my laptop, *then* I'll say they've gotten their act together. Until then, I'll keep using the open source driver.
See, I thought that until I tried to download the sample file and open it. Then I noticed that the sample was 7.5MB in size, and that there were multiple instances of some viruses. The weird numbers come from having a partial success rate in capturing Virus X. That is... if I send 12 instances of MyDoom.M at a virus scanner, and it only catches 7 of them.
FAT32's upper limit to filesystem size is about 2TB. The problem is that the maximum filesize is a little over 4GB. FAT16, which FAT32 replaced, had a maximum filesystem size of 8GB. and FAT12, which came in the original DOS, had a maximum filesystem size of 512MB.
You can't just say "FAT" when talking about filesystems. You have to specify which version. It'd be like me bitching about problems with the ext filesystem. Do I have a problem with ext2? ext3? the original extended filesystem?
You weren't. You also weren't the only one to guess that Snape was a good guy, or that Ron and Hermione would hook up, or that Harry and Ginny would hook up.
I think the best description I heard of Rowling's writing was that she isn't that good a writer, really. Her characters are one-dimensional, and her stories are predictable. But she moves them around so quickly that you're entertained anyway. She's kind of like the 21st Century Dickens in that respect.
Err... you do know that the Wii is the only current generation game console that's being sold at a profit, right? If you only buy the console and pirate all your games, Sony loses tons of money on your PS3. Microsoft, too.
I have no doubt that Sony is arrogant, and stupid in some ways. But I sincerely doubt they'd be stupid enough to hope that you'd just buy the console and steal all your games.
Canada is Cuba's biggest trading partner. And thanks to NAFTA, US companies can operate in Canada and have their exports governed under Canadian law from the divisions operating in Canada... depending on how it's set up on paper it's entirely possible to have a separate company doing the operations in Canada, and US tax law is actually set up to favour that arrangement. Thanks to NAFTA provisions, it'd be illegal for the US government to penalize a Canadian company for doing business with a country that the US doesn't like.
There's *very* easy ways around trade embargoes that the US government puts up. Especially when countries that the US has free trade with *don't* have the same embargoes.
It does make Vista look good, doesn't it? Until you look at the table, and notice that it only mentions serious security flaws that are fixed, and serious security flaws that have been disclosed but not fixed yet. It doesn't mention serious security flaws that have not yet been disclosed....
I think the quotation marks around 'terrer' made it clear he knew that the word is actually spelled 'terror' and was trying to poke fun at an otherwise ridiculous situation.
It gets closer to 75mpg. At least, the posted mileage on them does. I drive a 2007 Chev Aveo, which claims 6.4L/100km highway, and the Smart claims 3.9L/100km. As to the Aveo, I know from experience that it gets really good mileage: I made a 170km trip in an hour, and burned 10L of gas. In numbers you 'murrikans would understand... I averaged over 100mph over the course of an hour, and used 2.5 gallons, averaging a little over 40mpg at that speed -- with three adults in the car. On average, I'd say I was getting about 45-50mpg out of it. And the Smart boasts better mileage.
Then again... I test drove a Smart ForTwo here in Canada, and the thing simply won't go 170km/h. It'll go no faster than 130... actually has a computer-controlled limiter that will kill the engine if you go over 130km/h. And I know from experience that the Aveo will actually go closer to 190km/h. Did I mention that the Aveo costs half what the Smart does? You can buy a lot of gas for the $10,000 you'd save by buying a subcompact economy car instead of the Smart.
There's a reason my brother and my sister-in-law call them the "Stupid" car.
the whole point of a beta is the "we think we got it working right, seems to work in the lab, but we know we missed something so we're going to let the enthusiasts try it out because we know they'll find it" phase.
Yah, but there probably aren't other contractors out there who'd kill to get their hands on the blueprints for your house so they could plan a break-in and steal your TV. Or worse, to kill you.
It's not a question of hiding the information from you, it's a question of hiding the information from the Bad Guys (tm). If the wrong information comes into the hands of the wrong people, then some of the right people can get killed over it. And the sad reality is that this kind of information, at least when the US was more actively involved in a war of espionage against the Russkies (I'm not naive enough to think that it's stopped, but it is nowhere near as intense as it was 30 years ago), was enough to get an idea of the kind of numbers the US epsionage establishment kept on the roster. And that kind of information could be used to plan a counterstrike.
Never ask that question. You know the answer, I know the answer, and he probably knows the answer... the bitch of it is, if you bring to light just how stupid he really is, somebody's going to take steps to correct it, and somebody's going to be arrogant enough to come up with an "idiot-proof" designation. And of course, you know, the minute something gets described as "idiot-proof" they come out with a better idiot.
Black Widow spiders are tiny. Usually less than 1/2 an inch long with very short legs. Nowhere near large enough for a cat to chew the leg off. The GF is probably talking about some of the larger spiders you see around, like dock spiders. Harmless things, but they grow to as much as 6" long around here, and other species in the family can get bigger.
IIRC, after that tragedy the Canadians amended their constitution to say that only volunteers could be sent overseas.
Canada didn't actually get a constitution until 1982. During WWI, there was talk of implementing conscription to fill the war need, and there actually was some conscription going on in Quebec and parts of the prairies, but there was a huge backlash against that. Thankfully, the war ended before any of those conscripts were sent overseas.
After the war, we didn't update our constitution, because we didn't have a constitution to update. We did, however, pass a law that banned conscription outright.
*sighs* I wish we'd gotten rid of income tax, too. Officially, it's a "temporary war measure", that was supposed to be repealed at the end of WWI, lol. Here we are, almost 90 years later, and they still haven't gotten rid of it.
Oh, I dunno... my cell phone's built-in speech recognition for its commands, voice dial, voice memo, and recognizing names in the phone book works pretty well. Especially since I haven't actually trained it to my voice...
And as somebody who's called Bell Canada and dealt with Amy, the voice-recognizing computer they have answering the phone, I can tell you that it's even got a touch of AI built in, that works perfectly. Why... when Amy asks me to say the name of the department I'd like to speak to and I reply "I think you're a piece of shit Amy and want to talk to a goddamned human for fuck's sake." it transfers me right through to a human.
Stockholders don't care whether those numbers are actual installations, or just licenses sold. If the license is sold, it's money in their pocket just the same.
409 of 259,000 people is a pretty small percentage. How many of those clicks were just accidents where people only read the first sentance? How many were just mac people trying to make windows people look bad?
Accidents, I'll believe. But Mac people trying to make Windows users look bad? Did you even read the summary, let alone the actual article? It said that the majority of the people who clicked the link were Windows users, and I doubt very much it came from having users fill out a survey. "Hey, we just duped you, you mind telling us a little about yourself so we can add it to our files?"
More likely, they were using some kind of server-side metrics. See, your browser sends the server a browser ID every time it requests a page. You can even see exactly what that browser ID is by clicking on Help > About... it's in the same place on Firefox, Opera, and IE (though Opera has an option in the settings where you can tweak it to lie to a server about what it is). Here's what mine looks like:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3
By having Apache log that information, and by running a log analysis, anybody can tell that I'm running Linux, that the kernel is compiled for an i686 architecture, and that I'm running Firefox 2.0.0.3. What's more, PHP is capable of reading those headers without having to check the log, and it's ridiculously easy to have PHP parse them for the required information and dump it straight into an SQL database so that realtime stats can be viewed any time without having to parse the server logs for it.
In order for a Mac user to try to make a Windows user look dumb, the Mac user would have to go out and buy a Windows-based PC, and then hope that they actually see the same ad again while browsing Google on said Windows-based computer, just so they could click it and make Windows look bad. Now, I've known some pretty rabid Mac zealots in my time, but I have never known one who would go to that kind of lengths to make PC look bad.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll thank you not to attribute that to liberalism. I'm very much a liberal, thank you, but I know what you're talking about.
When you start offering higher rates of pay, it becomes less economical. In some industries, particularly service industries such as call center, raising the rate of pay to be in line with what their counterparts would make in Canada or the US isn't as big a hit. It's still cheaper to build a call center in India (and I think Africa will be the next India in that respect. Fine by me, they speak better English in Africa). It's still cheaper to power a call center in India. You don't have to worry about heating bills in that country. Bottom line is that even if people in that country are getting the same rate of pay as we are over here, it's still cheaper to actually *run* the place.**
But when you start dealing with goods, and anything that actually needs to be shipped, the total cost of operation needs to be less than it would be to manufacture things over here. So they get lower rate of pay in order to make it economical.
** this example doesn't take into account attrition rates, both among employees and among customers. It's worth noting, for example, that the attrition rate for Dell's call center in Hyderabad is 100%. That is to say that 100% of their employees leave within a year. That affects the total cost of running the place. Right now, it's cost-effective to run the place. As wage rates rise in that country, it's going to be less and less cost-effective, and they will reach a point where they may as well just shift everything back to North America again. Or where they move everything to Africa or some other region where people are not currently being paid what they're worth.
1KG = 1L of pure (distilled) water = 1 cubic decimeter (1000 cubic centimeters)
When talking about pure DHMO that is. When you start mixing in salts (as is found in our drinking water), it messes up the density of water, which messes up the measurement, if only slightly.
Hey Ritchie... we forgot our frisbee at home again and have nothing to do for lunch break. Can I borrow that disk again?
You laugh. But those 5.25" disks really can fly. It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.
If you're absolutely new to Astronomy, or even if you aren't, you should really start with the right software on your computer before you branch off into something more complicated. Probably the hardest part of Astronomy is knowing where to point your telescope, and that's where having the software comes in. With the right software, you can learn the night sky and from that, know where to point your telescope even without a motorized mount. Just being able to recognize the constellations and asterisms is a skill that some would-be astronomers could benefit hugely from. I'm a big fan of a piece of software called Starry Night, by Imaginova. You can order it online: http://www.starrynightstore.com/stniso.html
For the most part, you can get away with the "Enthusiast" level of the software. (it's what I have) But the Pro and Pro Plus (which cost significantly more) have features that the Enthusiast doesn't have, like the ability to control a motorized mount. *VERY* useful feature, that one... find what you want to look at in the software, tell the software to point your telescope at it, and then go look at it. Starry Night comes with free updates to its stellar database and information, which is one of the main reasons I like it.
As for getting a proper telescope... there's a lot of factors to take into account. If you're in the city or the suburbs, I personally wouldn't spend more than $300-500 on a telescope. For one, increased magnification isn't going to do you any good at all. Heat pockets in the atmosphere will distort the image, and cause anything you see on a telescope to dance around. The more magnification you have, the worse the image dance is. And you'll actually get to a point where it's very difficult to see anything clearly without taking a video of it and then using software to drop the blurry frames. For two, light pollution. It's too bright in the city to do a lot of astronomy. In the suburbs, you can start, but it's still pretty bright. You have to get way out of the city to make having a larger telescope (that's still within your budget) worth it. If you had a budget of, say, $25,000 then you could make a case for wanting a bigger scope to use in the city, but even then, you're going to suffer from light pollution.
I'd go for the good software, a decent telescope, and if you have the money a properly motorized mount that the software can use. If not, save your pennies and upgrade in the future.
I'm actually going to wait to see how it handles my Radeon XPress 200M on my laptop before I say they've gotten their act together. That card has 128MB soldered on. Dedicated 128MB. That the Linux driver simply can't see. I have to use 128MB shared memory, taking away from the rather anemic 1GB of system memory taht I have in the lappy. And even under those conditions, performance is barely better than using the Mesa driver. Completely unusable for games, even though I never had any problem running games such as GuildWars or SW:KOTOR under Windows.
When ATI comes out with a driver that can actually see/use the 128MB dedicated graphics I have on my laptop, *then* I'll say they've gotten their act together. Until then, I'll keep using the open source driver.
See, I thought that until I tried to download the sample file and open it. Then I noticed that the sample was 7.5MB in size, and that there were multiple instances of some viruses. The weird numbers come from having a partial success rate in capturing Virus X. That is... if I send 12 instances of MyDoom.M at a virus scanner, and it only catches 7 of them.
FAT32's upper limit to filesystem size is about 2TB. The problem is that the maximum filesize is a little over 4GB.
FAT16, which FAT32 replaced, had a maximum filesystem size of 8GB.
and FAT12, which came in the original DOS, had a maximum filesystem size of 512MB.
You can't just say "FAT" when talking about filesystems. You have to specify which version. It'd be like me bitching about problems with the ext filesystem. Do I have a problem with ext2? ext3? the original extended filesystem?
So... the parents' jobs is to fuck the children? o.O
You weren't. You also weren't the only one to guess that Snape was a good guy, or that Ron and Hermione would hook up, or that Harry and Ginny would hook up.
I think the best description I heard of Rowling's writing was that she isn't that good a writer, really. Her characters are one-dimensional, and her stories are predictable. But she moves them around so quickly that you're entertained anyway. She's kind of like the 21st Century Dickens in that respect.
Err... you do know that the Wii is the only current generation game console that's being sold at a profit, right? If you only buy the console and pirate all your games, Sony loses tons of money on your PS3. Microsoft, too.
I have no doubt that Sony is arrogant, and stupid in some ways. But I sincerely doubt they'd be stupid enough to hope that you'd just buy the console and steal all your games.
Canada is Cuba's biggest trading partner. And thanks to NAFTA, US companies can operate in Canada and have their exports governed under Canadian law from the divisions operating in Canada... depending on how it's set up on paper it's entirely possible to have a separate company doing the operations in Canada, and US tax law is actually set up to favour that arrangement. Thanks to NAFTA provisions, it'd be illegal for the US government to penalize a Canadian company for doing business with a country that the US doesn't like.
There's *very* easy ways around trade embargoes that the US government puts up. Especially when countries that the US has free trade with *don't* have the same embargoes.
It does make Vista look good, doesn't it? Until you look at the table, and notice that it only mentions serious security flaws that are fixed, and serious security flaws that have been disclosed but not fixed yet. It doesn't mention serious security flaws that have not yet been disclosed....
Reminds me more of the movie War Games...
I think the quotation marks around 'terrer' made it clear he knew that the word is actually spelled 'terror' and was trying to poke fun at an otherwise ridiculous situation.
It gets closer to 75mpg. At least, the posted mileage on them does. I drive a 2007 Chev Aveo, which claims 6.4L/100km highway, and the Smart claims 3.9L/100km. As to the Aveo, I know from experience that it gets really good mileage: I made a 170km trip in an hour, and burned 10L of gas. In numbers you 'murrikans would understand... I averaged over 100mph over the course of an hour, and used 2.5 gallons, averaging a little over 40mpg at that speed -- with three adults in the car. On average, I'd say I was getting about 45-50mpg out of it. And the Smart boasts better mileage.
Then again... I test drove a Smart ForTwo here in Canada, and the thing simply won't go 170km/h. It'll go no faster than 130... actually has a computer-controlled limiter that will kill the engine if you go over 130km/h. And I know from experience that the Aveo will actually go closer to 190km/h. Did I mention that the Aveo costs half what the Smart does? You can buy a lot of gas for the $10,000 you'd save by buying a subcompact economy car instead of the Smart.
There's a reason my brother and my sister-in-law call them the "Stupid" car.
the whole point of a beta is the "we think we got it working right, seems to work in the lab, but we know we missed something so we're going to let the enthusiasts try it out because we know they'll find it" phase.
Yah, but there probably aren't other contractors out there who'd kill to get their hands on the blueprints for your house so they could plan a break-in and steal your TV. Or worse, to kill you.
It's not a question of hiding the information from you, it's a question of hiding the information from the Bad Guys (tm). If the wrong information comes into the hands of the wrong people, then some of the right people can get killed over it. And the sad reality is that this kind of information, at least when the US was more actively involved in a war of espionage against the Russkies (I'm not naive enough to think that it's stopped, but it is nowhere near as intense as it was 30 years ago), was enough to get an idea of the kind of numbers the US epsionage establishment kept on the roster. And that kind of information could be used to plan a counterstrike.
Never ask that question. You know the answer, I know the answer, and he probably knows the answer... the bitch of it is, if you bring to light just how stupid he really is, somebody's going to take steps to correct it, and somebody's going to be arrogant enough to come up with an "idiot-proof" designation. And of course, you know, the minute something gets described as "idiot-proof" they come out with a better idiot.
Black Widow spiders are tiny. Usually less than 1/2 an inch long with very short legs. Nowhere near large enough for a cat to chew the leg off. The GF is probably talking about some of the larger spiders you see around, like dock spiders. Harmless things, but they grow to as much as 6" long around here, and other species in the family can get bigger.
Canada didn't actually get a constitution until 1982. During WWI, there was talk of implementing conscription to fill the war need, and there actually was some conscription going on in Quebec and parts of the prairies, but there was a huge backlash against that. Thankfully, the war ended before any of those conscripts were sent overseas.
After the war, we didn't update our constitution, because we didn't have a constitution to update. We did, however, pass a law that banned conscription outright.
*sighs* I wish we'd gotten rid of income tax, too. Officially, it's a "temporary war measure", that was supposed to be repealed at the end of WWI, lol. Here we are, almost 90 years later, and they still haven't gotten rid of it.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Or to use a verb tense that'll make the GF balk...
2008 will have been the year.
Oh, I dunno... my cell phone's built-in speech recognition for its commands, voice dial, voice memo, and recognizing names in the phone book works pretty well. Especially since I haven't actually trained it to my voice...
And as somebody who's called Bell Canada and dealt with Amy, the voice-recognizing computer they have answering the phone, I can tell you that it's even got a touch of AI built in, that works perfectly. Why... when Amy asks me to say the name of the department I'd like to speak to and I reply "I think you're a piece of shit Amy and want to talk to a goddamned human for fuck's sake." it transfers me right through to a human.
Stockholders don't care whether those numbers are actual installations, or just licenses sold. If the license is sold, it's money in their pocket just the same.
Accidents, I'll believe. But Mac people trying to make Windows users look bad? Did you even read the summary, let alone the actual article? It said that the majority of the people who clicked the link were Windows users, and I doubt very much it came from having users fill out a survey. "Hey, we just duped you, you mind telling us a little about yourself so we can add it to our files?"
More likely, they were using some kind of server-side metrics. See, your browser sends the server a browser ID every time it requests a page. You can even see exactly what that browser ID is by clicking on Help > About... it's in the same place on Firefox, Opera, and IE (though Opera has an option in the settings where you can tweak it to lie to a server about what it is). Here's what mine looks like:
By having Apache log that information, and by running a log analysis, anybody can tell that I'm running Linux, that the kernel is compiled for an i686 architecture, and that I'm running Firefox 2.0.0.3. What's more, PHP is capable of reading those headers without having to check the log, and it's ridiculously easy to have PHP parse them for the required information and dump it straight into an SQL database so that realtime stats can be viewed any time without having to parse the server logs for it.
In order for a Mac user to try to make a Windows user look dumb, the Mac user would have to go out and buy a Windows-based PC, and then hope that they actually see the same ad again while browsing Google on said Windows-based computer, just so they could click it and make Windows look bad. Now, I've known some pretty rabid Mac zealots in my time, but I have never known one who would go to that kind of lengths to make PC look bad.