Heck, in some regions of the company, away from big cities, it's hard to find contractors to repair houses because the people who know how to do the relevant work find it both easier and more lucrative just to build new ones.
Although I live in a big city, I think I have a relevant comment on the house repair issue.
I recently shut down a handman service I was running for the past five years - because of the customers (mostly).
Why? People don't want to pay for quality service and work. People would complain about my prices (25-35 an hour) by saying that the day laborers in the Home Depot parking lot are cheaper.
Yes, you can get one cheaper, however (at least in LA) they: 1) Don't have tools 2) Don't generally speak English 3) May claim skills they don't have 4) Don't have transportation 5) Can't be found again if there's a problem
So, you can pay $10-$15 for a guy you can't communicate with, who you have to pick up and return *and* buy/rent tools for them.
So for about twice the price, you get a card with my name and phone number (and I answer it). I drive to the job. I can pick up things at Home Depot on the way. I bring tools to the job (and the cost of the tools is usually more then the cost of the job). I speak fluent English and passible Spanish. I'll tell you if part of the job isn't in my skill set.
And people still ask for big (25%) discounts.
Sometimes good customer service simply costs "too much" for some people.
Amazon's "Blockview" The most powerful technology A9.com invented for Yellow Pages is "Block View," which brings the Yellow Pages to life by showing a street view of millions of businesses and their surroundings. Using trucks equipped with digital cameras, global positioning system (GPS) receivers, and proprietary software and hardware, A9.com drove tens of thousands of miles capturing images and matching them with businesses and the way they look from the street.
So I just did a search with Block View - I guess they named it correctly, because a UPS truck was parked in front of the store I looked for.
How about this for a standard of "adult" content. For starters, any site that requires a paid subscription or any other form of payment, should go on the.xxx domain.
Like the Wall Street Journal?
To put it another way, how comfortable would you be with a huge billboard of that pic mounted to the roof of your house so the whole neighborhood and passers-by could easily see it? You have it in just as public, and just as easily accessible location, only in digital format.
BULLSHIT!!!!! 100,000 people a day drive right past my house (I live next to I-5 in downtown L.A.) Those people have no choice but to see my warehouse.
People come to my website, not by driving past it, but by looking for it. What do you have against supervising your children?
Do we all agree that the wor "fuck" is an "adult content" word?
I guess slashdot.org will need to become slashdot.xxx
Me:Who decides what defines "adult content". You: This is already being accomplished in broadcast television.
Do you understand that there are a handful of TV networks, and they have no more than 24 hours of programming a day? A staff of 20 could easily deal with all broadcast TV in the USA.
How could it be possible to find every site with "adult content" on the Internet with a staff of less than hundreds? Assuming that there's a common definition of adult content.
Me: You choose to have kids; you be their moral guide.
You: Translation: Pre-occupy yourself with the invasiveness of the internet so you can't be proactive elsewhere in your child's life. Or cancel the internet so you can.
Or just buy some filtering software. Or sit on your ass and complain that the government isn't doing it for you.
Me:If your kids can't surf the net without finding porn, don't let them surf the net without supervision.
You: I can't surf the net without finding porn (Yahoo, Google, etc.)
Neither Google nor Yahoo are porn sites.
I can surf all day and not find porn (unless I'm looking for it). In an hour this morning, I located the nearest Target, found the Trader Joe's (grocery store) nearest to my local Target, looked up info on a set of tires for my car, looked up prices for some motorcycle parts, read two online discussion groups dedicated to motorcycles, read slashdot and ARStechnica.
Guess what - NO PORN.
You: No way am I even presenting the internet as an option for my child. LOTS and LOTS of parents around me are beginning to make the same decision; there are many more options other than the internet to gain information and many alternate responsible news sources.
Good point. Don't let them use the library either. Some of those books have bad words in them.
You: As a father of 4 children, I have cut the cable, cut the internet (I'm at work currently), and cut irresponsible newspapers (LA Times for instance, so my kids won't see Bras) out of my home.
You're seriously afraid of your children seeing a picture of a bra in a newspaper?
A person can't live in this society (US - Los Angeles) without looking at porn on some level and its as a result of orginzations like the ACLU.
OK, now I understand where you're coming from. You think that an ad for a bra is porn. I bet I can find a picture of a bra at Target's website. Do you really think that your ISP is going to consider Target to be porn? They won't.
You:.xxx Domain: Why is it bad to have porn companies all living on one domain that could be easily censored by a parent and easily found by people looking for it? Don't porn companies want their users to be responsible with their content? I would think they'd like to have their own domain so they could be easily located.
It wouldn't be a bad idea to have an new TLD of xxx. In fact, ICAAN recently announced that they were adding a new TLD for porn. I have no problem with that. However, we aren't talking about porn. Remember that you think a bra add is porn, and I think it's just an add. Do you think that Target is going to change from target.com to target.xxx because thay sell bras? My website has a few thousand images, and one of those has a naked woman (and it isn't pornographic, or very graphic at all). Should I be forced to give up my domain name just for you? No.
If I owned a porn site, I would be interested in owning mypornsite.com as well as mypornsite.xxx (and I'd give up mypornsite.com if all the others did). But again, we can't agree on what defines adult content.
You:The argument that parents can buy software to filter the garbage out is really just a redirection of who pays.
Yes. If you want filtering, you pay. If you don't want it, you don't pay. Simple. Also, as a parent you can add or delete sites that have content you don't like, su
Which is the point of this law, an OPT-IN system to allow parents to have the ISP block adult content for their connection.
Sure, it's opt in. However, it still means that somebody else is responsable for deciding what's "adult content". Will ISPs be liable if they fail to block a site you find objectionable?
Yes. For example, he suggests that Jobs would step down as CEO of Apple for the Pixar gig.
He is the biggest control freak in the history of computing (AFAIK); he's not going to leave Apple at the beginning of a transition (or any time in the forseable future).
Damn it, you beat me to it. Seriously, I paid $900 for a major brand camcorder and a year and 3 months later it's kaput - repair price exceeds replacement price. The problem - a manufacturing defect in the processor. The warranty - 1 year. That's the last time I buy expensive crap from Sony.
I know many, many, many people with the same story - expensive Sony toy dies just after the warranty. They have all sworn off of Sony.
And they're not as much of a boon as bicycles. In LA it is usually sunny and pleasantly warm; and the last time I looked up the statistics 90% of the population lived within 5 miles of work.
I would be shocked if that were true. I Live in LA, and almost nobody I know lives that close to work. This is not a bicycle friendly city; in many parts of town, you'd be in seriuos danger by biking 5 miles due to lack of bike lanes, etc.
I'd love to see that change, as well as having businesses put in bike racks and showers.
LA is just built on the fact that we all drive, and when the gas riots hit, LA is going to be first up against the wall.
Think about how much banks contribute to society; some fat bastard sits there in a fancy building, waiting for someone who doesn't need money, to come in and deposit their riches that they stole off the working class stiffs. Then mr. piggy-banker gives the rich man more money so they start another (legal) scam called a *corporation*.
Sure am glad I borrowed money to go to college and borrow more to buy a house before you decided to kill the banking system.
Banks may have some bad parts, but without one, I'd be renting and paying money to The Man rather than owning the place I live in.
No, they just have better things to do than hang about on geek websites each day, and working in a geeky job I'm glad to have friends who don't care about IT/gadgets. They saw the adverts and wanted some of that. You're just jealous because you probably don't have many friends outside of online games involving dragons and other such nonsense.
Wrong again.
I don't work IT. Most of my friends don't work IT. Most of my friends don't bother with/.
They are, however, smart enough to know that you van put MP3s on an iPod.
They are using the default settings. I know, because all of my friends aren't geeky in any way, and all of them are running on defaults. The plug and play generation. These are who the iPod is aimed at.
Tell that to the 95% of iPod users who don't even know what DRM is and ripped with the default settings. They are locked into Apple for life, or until they re-encode all of their music. Which is not likely to happen.
95% Whose ass did you pull that statistic out of?
Of the people I know with iPods, most don't use iTMS (that's the store) and just put MP3s on it. A few buy a song now and then, but mostly just put MP#s on it.
I don't know a single iPod user who uses iTMS more than 10% of the time.
What? You can't even install the free Quicktime Player without getting iTunes forced on you.
Read my comment again. I said "Just because you have an iPod doesn't mean you have to use iTMS".
iTMS is iTunesMusicStore. Again, you do not need iTMS to use an iPod. You need iTunes. I'm sure you know the difference.
If the DRM of the iPod bugs you that much, don't buy one. But at the same time, don't be so lame as to think that you must use DRM'd files to use an iPod.
This is simplicity in exactly the same way as "just us Internet Explorer and you wont have rendering or interoperability issues." If I don't give MS a pass on their version of "simplicity", why should I say it's ok for Apple?
Apple make the iPod and makes the software to run it.
I plan on getting one of the speaker docks to put in the nursery for our new baby and have a playlist of just children's music.
Children's music. shudder
Uh, you better throw a quarter in the Therapy Jar for every hour of crappy, simplistic music.
I had a steady musical diet of the same rock and roll my parents listened to, and I came out just fine. All those fucking Raffi kids still wet the bed 20 years later.
Now, however, the sex offenders list is being used all over the place. Hell, you can't even get into Six Flags anymore if you are on that list. It's a classic case of a piece of legislation being taken to more and more extremes..
Um, not exactly. Six Flags has simply stated that sex offenders may be removed (or denied entry) to the park. They aren't checking your ID vs a sex offender list.
All amusment parks have rules about who can come in, and who can't. For example, a stereotypical "punk rocker" (leather jacket with studs, orange mohawk...) will not be allowed into Disneyland because of a "no costumes" policy.
Six Flags is just trying to cover their ass (and I think they're being silly too), but they aren't denying entry to sex offenders.
This doesn't seem to accomplish much in the way of providing anonymity if everyone in the swarm still had to go through the same starting node somewhere.
I don't think the idea was to make an anonymous torrent; I think it was to make it easier for bloggers and websire owners to post a.torrent file without having to connect to a tracker (which you may not hae access to).
Joe Six Pack wih webhosting can now post a.torrent without needing a tracker.
Ironically, bars and restaurants are for some reason still legal to server alcohol even though you are not allowed to leave the place nor stay there.
Actually, you are allowed to leave the bar - just get a ride.
But I agree with you that 0.06 is too low. However, a DOT approved breathalizer is about $100 these days. Cheap insurance.
I was considering getting a commercial driver's license for employment possibilities, but found that in California, if you have a CDL your legal limit is 0.04 all the time (even if you are driving a regular car for non-work purposes). Ouch!
Slashdot Mirror
Heck, in some regions of the company, away from big cities, it's hard to find contractors to repair houses because the people who know how to do the relevant work find it both easier and more lucrative just to build new ones.
Although I live in a big city, I think I have a relevant comment on the house repair issue.
I recently shut down a handman service I was running for the past five years - because of the customers (mostly).
Why? People don't want to pay for quality service and work. People would complain about my prices (25-35 an hour) by saying that the day laborers in the Home Depot parking lot are cheaper.
Yes, you can get one cheaper, however (at least in LA) they:
1) Don't have tools
2) Don't generally speak English
3) May claim skills they don't have
4) Don't have transportation
5) Can't be found again if there's a problem
So, you can pay $10-$15 for a guy you can't communicate with, who you have to pick up and return *and* buy/rent tools for them.
So for about twice the price, you get a card with my name and phone number (and I answer it). I drive to the job. I can pick up things at Home Depot on the way. I bring tools to the job (and the cost of the tools is usually more then the cost of the job). I speak fluent English and passible Spanish. I'll tell you if part of the job isn't in my skill set.
And people still ask for big (25%) discounts.
Sometimes good customer service simply costs "too much" for some people.
They remove auctions all of the time. If you report one, there's a better than 50% chance it'll be gone within 24 hours.
I have reported many, many auctions with keyword spamming (mostly automotive) and not a single one has ever been removed (I check).
Amazon's "Blockview"
9 -7804056
The most powerful technology A9.com invented for Yellow Pages is "Block View," which brings the Yellow Pages to life by showing a street view of millions of businesses and their surroundings. Using trucks equipped with digital cameras, global positioning system (GPS) receivers, and proprietary software and hardware, A9.com drove tens of thousands of miles capturing images and matching them with businesses and the way they look from the street.
So I just did a search with Block View - I guess they named it correctly, because a UPS truck was parked in front of the store I looked for.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/yp/B00060YYBA/002-337386
How about this for a standard of "adult" content. For starters, any site that requires a paid subscription or any other form of payment, should go on the .xxx domain.
Like the Wall Street Journal?
To put it another way, how comfortable would you be with a huge billboard of that pic mounted to the roof of your house so the whole neighborhood and passers-by could easily see it? You have it in just as public, and just as easily accessible location, only in digital format.
BULLSHIT!!!!!
100,000 people a day drive right past my house (I live next to I-5 in downtown L.A.)
Those people have no choice but to see my warehouse.
People come to my website, not by driving past it, but by looking for it. What do you have against supervising your children?
Do we all agree that the wor "fuck" is an "adult content" word?
I guess slashdot.org will need to become slashdot.xxx
I think if the picture includes a pussy, vagina or penis and is a photograph of a living woman and it's not medical, then it's porn.
.xxx domain and have my entire website filtered out by Utah because there is this one picture out of 1,000?
t Device.jpg
OK, should I be forced to have a
DO NOT open at work, if you live in Utah, or are eaily offended.
http://liberalredneck.org/albums/album04/AntiThef
Me:Who decides what defines "adult content".
You: This is already being accomplished in broadcast television.
Do you understand that there are a handful of TV networks, and they have no more than 24 hours of programming a day? A staff of 20 could easily deal with all broadcast TV in the USA.
How could it be possible to find every site with "adult content" on the Internet with a staff of less than hundreds? Assuming that there's a common definition of adult content.
Me: You choose to have kids; you be their moral guide.
You: Translation: Pre-occupy yourself with the invasiveness of the internet so you can't be proactive elsewhere in your child's life. Or cancel the internet so you can.
Or just buy some filtering software.
Or sit on your ass and complain that the government isn't doing it for you.
Me:If your kids can't surf the net without finding porn, don't let them surf the net without supervision.
You: I can't surf the net without finding porn (Yahoo, Google, etc.)
Neither Google nor Yahoo are porn sites.
I can surf all day and not find porn (unless I'm looking for it).
In an hour this morning, I located the nearest Target, found the Trader Joe's (grocery store) nearest to my local Target, looked up info on a set of tires for my car, looked up prices for some motorcycle parts, read two online discussion groups dedicated to motorcycles, read slashdot and ARStechnica.
Guess what - NO PORN.
You: No way am I even presenting the internet as an option for my child. LOTS and LOTS of parents around me are beginning to make the same decision; there are many more options other than the internet to gain information and many alternate responsible news sources.
Good point. Don't let them use the library either. Some of those books have bad words in them.
You: As a father of 4 children, I have cut the cable, cut the internet (I'm at work currently), and cut irresponsible newspapers (LA Times for instance, so my kids won't see Bras) out of my home.
You're seriously afraid of your children seeing a picture of a bra in a newspaper?
A person can't live in this society (US - Los Angeles) without looking at porn on some level and its as a result of orginzations like the ACLU.
OK, now I understand where you're coming from.
You think that an ad for a bra is porn.
I bet I can find a picture of a bra at Target's website. Do you really think that your ISP is going to consider Target to be porn?
They won't.
You:.xxx Domain: Why is it bad to have porn companies all living on one domain that could be easily censored by a parent and easily found by people looking for it? Don't porn companies want their users to be responsible with their content? I would think they'd like to have their own domain so they could be easily located.
It wouldn't be a bad idea to have an new TLD of xxx. In fact, ICAAN recently announced that they were adding a new TLD for porn.
I have no problem with that. However, we aren't talking about porn. Remember that you think a bra add is porn, and I think it's just an add. Do you think that Target is going to change from target.com to target.xxx because thay sell bras?
My website has a few thousand images, and one of those has a naked woman (and it isn't pornographic, or very graphic at all). Should I be forced to give up my domain name just for you? No.
If I owned a porn site, I would be interested in owning mypornsite.com as well as mypornsite.xxx (and I'd give up mypornsite.com if all the others did). But again, we can't agree on what defines adult content.
You:The argument that parents can buy software to filter the garbage out is really just a redirection of who pays.
Yes. If you want filtering, you pay. If you don't want it, you don't pay. Simple.
Also, as a parent you can add or delete sites that have content you don't like, su
Which is the point of this law, an OPT-IN system to allow parents to have the ISP block adult content for their connection.
Sure, it's opt in.
However, it still means that somebody else is responsable for deciding what's "adult content". Will ISPs be liable if they fail to block a site you find objectionable?
Personally, I'd like to see a law that makes it illegal for adult context to appear on a URL unless is has a special extension, something like ".xxx".
Who decides what defines "adult content". Pictures of people smoking? Women in bras (I can see that in the newspaper).
You choose to have kids; you be their moral guide.
If your kids can't surf the net without finding porn, don't let them surf the net without supervision. Or just don't have kids.
I don't want your standards imposed on my kids, as they may be to strict or too open for my tastes.
Is Cringley always this batshit insane?
Yes. For example, he suggests that Jobs would step down as CEO of Apple for the Pixar gig.
He is the biggest control freak in the history of computing (AFAIK); he's not going to leave Apple at the beginning of a transition (or any time in the forseable future).
Damn it, you beat me to it. Seriously, I paid $900 for a major brand camcorder and a year and 3 months later it's kaput - repair price exceeds replacement price. The problem - a manufacturing defect in the processor. The warranty - 1 year. That's the last time I buy expensive crap from Sony.
I know many, many, many people with the same story - expensive Sony toy dies just after the warranty. They have all sworn off of Sony.
I'm amazed at haw many times I've heard that.
And they're not as much of a boon as bicycles. In LA it is usually sunny and pleasantly warm; and the last time I looked up the statistics 90% of the population lived within 5 miles of work.
I would be shocked if that were true. I Live in LA, and almost nobody I know lives that close to work. This is not a bicycle friendly city; in many parts of town, you'd be in seriuos danger by biking 5 miles due to lack of bike lanes, etc.
I'd love to see that change, as well as having businesses put in bike racks and showers.
LA is just built on the fact that we all drive, and when the gas riots hit, LA is going to be first up against the wall.
So, just how much sooner do /. subscribers see the article before the rest of us?
That was one hell of a first post.
Think about how much banks contribute to society; some fat bastard sits there in a fancy building, waiting for someone who doesn't need money, to come in and deposit their riches that they stole off the working class stiffs. Then mr. piggy-banker gives the rich man more money so they start another (legal) scam called a *corporation*.
Sure am glad I borrowed money to go to college and borrow more to buy a house before you decided to kill the banking system.
Banks may have some bad parts, but without one, I'd be renting and paying money to The Man rather than owning the place I live in.
- Working Stiff
No, they just have better things to do than hang about on geek websites each day, and working in a geeky job I'm glad to have friends who don't care about IT/gadgets. They saw the adverts and wanted some of that. You're just jealous because you probably don't have many friends outside of online games involving dragons and other such nonsense.
/.
Wrong again.
I don't work IT. Most of my friends don't work IT. Most of my friends don't bother with
They are, however, smart enough to know that you van put MP3s on an iPod.
They are using the default settings. I know, because all of my friends aren't geeky in any way, and all of them are running on defaults. The plug and play generation. These are who the iPod is aimed at.
Sorry to hear that your friends are uninformed.
Tell that to the 95% of iPod users who don't even know what DRM is and ripped with the default settings. They are locked into Apple for life, or until they re-encode all of their music. Which is not likely to happen.
.
95% Whose ass did you pull that statistic out of?
Of the people I know with iPods, most don't use iTMS (that's the store) and just put MP3s on it. A few buy a song now and then, but mostly just put MP#s on it.
I don't know a single iPod user who uses iTMS more than 10% of the time.
What? You can't even install the free Quicktime Player without getting iTunes forced on you.
Read my comment again.
I said "Just because you have an iPod doesn't mean you have to use iTMS".
iTMS is iTunes MusicStore
Again, you do not need iTMS to use an iPod. You need iTunes. I'm sure you know the difference.
If the DRM of the iPod bugs you that much, don't buy one. But at the same time, don't be so lame as to think that you must use DRM'd files to use an iPod.
This is simplicity in exactly the same way as "just us Internet Explorer and you wont have rendering or interoperability issues." If I don't give MS a pass on their version of "simplicity", why should I say it's ok for Apple?
Apple make the iPod and makes the software to run it.
MS doesn't own or make the Internet.
I plan on getting one of the speaker docks to put in the nursery for our new baby and have a playlist of just children's music.
Children's music. shudder
Uh, you better throw a quarter in the Therapy Jar for every hour of crappy, simplistic music.
I had a steady musical diet of the same rock and roll my parents listened to, and I came out just fine. All those fucking Raffi kids still wet the bed 20 years later.
Ipod wasn't really meant for those who understand DRM...
WTF?
You understand it can play MP3s, right?
You know, those things you can rip from CDs and have no freaking DRM at all.
Just because you have an iPod doesn't mean you have to use iTMS.
Now, however, the sex offenders list is being used all over the place. Hell, you can't even get into Six Flags anymore if you are on that list. It's a classic case of a piece of legislation being taken to more and more extremes..
Um, not exactly. Six Flags has simply stated that sex offenders may be removed (or denied entry) to the park. They aren't checking your ID vs a sex offender list.
All amusment parks have rules about who can come in, and who can't. For example, a stereotypical "punk rocker" (leather jacket with studs, orange mohawk...) will not be allowed into Disneyland because of a "no costumes" policy.
Six Flags is just trying to cover their ass (and I think they're being silly too), but they aren't denying entry to sex offenders.
Isn't Northern Telecom US-based?
What about General Electric?
Intel?
Microsoft is definitely US-based (and they do make some hardware even)
Micron makes RAM here (at least I think it's RAM) at a fab in Boise, ID.
demonstrate some US-designed and built products (that don't suck), and I'll happily buy
I find few imported beers worth drinking, and some of the best from the Pacific Northwest.
Anyway, YOU STILL HAVE TO RUN A TRACKER. It's just built in to the client instead of being the program right next to it.
I understand that, because I read the fucking article.
My assumption is that you no longer need a middleman like suprnova.org - you can just run your own tracker automatically.
This doesn't seem to accomplish much in the way of providing anonymity if everyone in the swarm still had to go through the same starting node somewhere.
.torrent file without having to connect to a tracker (which you may not hae access to).
.torrent without needing a tracker.
I don't think the idea was to make an anonymous torrent; I think it was to make it easier for bloggers and websire owners to post a
Joe Six Pack wih webhosting can now post a
Ironically, bars and restaurants are for some reason still legal to server alcohol even though you are not allowed to leave the place nor stay there.
Actually, you are allowed to leave the bar - just get a ride.
But I agree with you that 0.06 is too low. However, a DOT approved breathalizer is about $100 these days. Cheap insurance.
I was considering getting a commercial driver's license for employment possibilities, but found that in California, if you have a CDL your legal limit is 0.04 all the time (even if you are driving a regular car for non-work purposes). Ouch!