> 'Notice that you have not been asked to switch off anything really inconvenient, like your heating or air-conditioning, television, computer, mobile phone, or any of the myriad technologies that depend on affordable, plentiful energy electricity and make modern life possible.
I can't address all of these, but computer? I read back in the late nineties that computers dissipate a power level less than a 75 watt bulb, probably less now with power conservation and "green" designs. And cell phones? Miniscule, compared to generating light or heat. Televisions? Maybe old tube type, or really humongous sets now, but in general, I'm under the impression that they don't use that much power. He has a point about air conditioning (in most cases) and heat, but those, plus light, are gross uses of power.
I'm not convinced that a given individual's electronics would be a substantial percentage of their personal, total power footprint. (There are probably alpha nerds out there who heat their rooms with i-products and only use them in the dark, but I'm thinking not many.)
The contention seems to be that what you should switch off is measured by convenience rather than actual power usage. This seems an conceptual error.
I'm very sorry to say that in the late 90's a 100W power supply was generally pretty sufficient, but these days you'll find no shortage of 600W or 1KW power supplies. I don't know how much my current system pulls, but the preceding one idled at about 115 Watts, and I kept it longer than I "should" have because it was relatively efficient for its time.
Cell phones have also tended to demand more and more power in order to get that full multi-media smartphone edge.
On the other hand, replacing CRTs with solid-state monitors was a big jump in the other direction, and if you want to really feel all hippy greenie eco-friendly, you can do a lot with a Raspberry Pi and it only pulls about 5 watts. It's no gamer machine, but it still outperforms the desktops of the 90's.
The grid is not well-equipped to handle rapid transients in load. You can't change the heat output of a coal or nuclear-fired furnace instantly, and if you try, bad things happen.
If everyone on the grid suddenly opened their breakers at the same time, the resulting backlash would probably cause thousands of steam turbines to overspin and their emergency pressure valves to open, at which point the turbine has to spin down and resynchronize before it can begin producing power again. I guess that would be okay since there is no load, but it would take a long time to get things back in order.
A steam turbine generation system cannot respond instantly to enormous changes in load over a short time interval.
Oh come ON, now. Ever heard of the "toilet-flush" effect? Where everybody makes a pit stop at the same time during commercials of a major televised event? Unlike your average office, where everyone has to constantly "give 110%", utilities run with reserve capacity and mechanisms that allow them to respond rapidly to sudden fluctuations in demand.
Let's run that in reverse. A small increase in energy usage, like my one, 100 watt, bulb, won't increase the amount of energy pumped into the grid, so I shouldn't have to pay for it. (It's only 100 watts)
Let's get everyone to do that! Free energy!! Perpetual Motion!!!
Has anyone ever explained the difference between "almost zero" and "zero" to you?
I don't know what current local rates are, but several years back, it was 17 cents a KWh in these parts. A 100-watt bulb is 1/10th of 1 kilowatt. Turning if off during Earth Hour would save you 1.7 cents at that rate. It may not be much, but it's still something.
Turning off the A/C for one hour is only a net loss if the temperature shifts more than the amount it takes to recover an hour's outage. Otherwise, no post-Earth-Hour surge. Your MIleage May Vary, depending on climate and insulation.
Turning off motors costs an additional amount of initial power surge when you turn them back on. How much, if any, that you save depends on the amount of power otherwise consumed during that hour less the surge.
Turning off incandescent and fluorescent lights has relatively little surge turning them back on compared to what they'd eat for an hour. LEDs have effectively none. Then again, quite a few of my LED lights are solar-charged, so turning them off would be pure symbolism.
Earth Hour is all symbolism anyway. Its prime function is to focus attention on what we're doing and what we might be doing. To THINK, not merely be a passive animal. We don't have to turn the world upside-down (yet, anyway). But we shouldn't just live in the here and now, we should consider where we want to be.
MCM seems a little screwed up. From what I can tell, they have 2 or 3 different divisions that deal in Raspberry Pi's. One is perennially out of stock, but slated to ship about 7500 orders on almost any given day. Finally I hit the other site, listing them in stock, 2-day delivery. Allowing for the weekend, I'm supposed to get one either today or tomorrow.
Allied lost my order. It was held so long the credit card expired and someone managed to cancel the order in the process of getting my new card info.
In my younger days, I was cheap and would have just ordered the $35 board. Now I've got no patience and I ordered a case and USB power with the board. I've probably got a suitable-sized box in my general electronic junk collection and odds are that my phone charger can deliver the power, but we're talking less than $20 extra here for not having to find out otherwise.
I am recycling the SD card and HDMI from other places though. No sense in overdoing it.
I'm saying there is no way of knowing if hunter gatherers had devised a way of making beer like beverages because they would have left no trace.
Beer requires more work than wine or bread. Wine could be done with no lasting trace, but beer would be *impossible*. Why? Because there'd be some trace of tools or brewing. You "could" do it and leave no trace, but you'd have to go out of your way to do so, and unless you can come up with a plausible reason why a pottery-making society would use pottery for everything *except* brewing beer, then I'll invoke Occam and move on.
The original version of the cauldron was a skin draped on sticks over a fire. It operates the same way as the more modern "boil water in a paper cup" trick. In fact, possibly the first pottery was an attempt to improve this idea by smearing clay on the skin.
All sorts of nasty things have been cooked up at one time or another in a skin vessel, so why should beer be any different? But since skins usually rot, the odds of finding a "smoking gun" left behind by a group of wandering hunter-gatherers is pretty low.
It's called "hellbanning", and it's done in more places than you might think. You can even have the hellbanned trolls see the other hellbanned troll posts, giving them all a nice padded room to go nuts with Nerf.
So THAT's what those commentary sections on online news sites are for! Wait... What?
... Which leads to topics like this where so many people post lulz-troll comments that you can't tell the difference between actual trolls and people just trying to be funny.
Thanks for posting through slashdot. We will now trace and destroy you.
Unfortunately, this is no longer funny. Thanks to such freedom-loving devices as the Patriot Act and that lovely little thing known as FISA, "interested" organizations can march up to Slashdot, demand all sorts of records under total secrecy (at least until yesterday's court ruling), use them as a basis for back-tracking, and apply pressure to foreign entities that would allow them to repeat the process all the way down to drawing cross-hairs on a drone-strike map.
Don't forget that post-9/11, your American citizenship effectively ends when you leave the boundaries of the USA. And, for the most part enter a US airport. You can also effectively lose your citizenship if someone chooses to label you an "enemy combatant". We no longer cling to the 200-year old archaisms that Once an American, Always an American, Innocent Until Proven Guilty, or other such quaint and silly "self evident truths". We may have been able to hold onto them while the Godless Communists of the Evil Empire were howling at the door, but mention the word "terrorist" and we soil our underwear.
We are not yet at the point where it is unsafe even to mention such things, or I wouldn't. But we're close enough that it's possible to receive a visit from certain people who might strongly advise keeping silent - and to more than advise keeping silent about the visit itself.
The true enemies of freedom and democracy are not the foreigners without, it's the Guardians within, The people who feel it necessary to destroy freedom in the name of saving freedom. The so-called Liberal "nanny state" might want to take away your Big Gulps, but the nanny state that you should really worry about is the one with the flags and the eagles. And offshore prisons.
This would never happen with an open-source protocol.
Why not? If a protocol was open source, writing backdoors into it would be even easier. I mean, how many people know how to inspect code and remove the parts that are malicious?
Not many, I'm sure. But even one is sufficient. And unlike closed-source, that one person may pop up any time, anywhere in the world, including places where it's not possible for interested governments to muzzle him in time to raise the alert.
One of the reasons WHY open-source is so popular is that things like that can occur, hence open-source people are more likely to pay attention to how secure the stuff they're using is. And conversely, paranoid people will prefer open-source.
The best time to worry about security is before you need to. Afterwards, it may be too late.
Russia still remains. The KGB is now the FSB. Russia is more open, but it's still not the USA.
And speaking of the USA, you do realize that Project Echelon and similar efforts have been busily tapping into communications in the Land of the Free for longer than there was a Skype?
RSS is the button at the top of Firefox, it shows when the page has an rss fee, you click it, it subscribes and the entry in the bookmark menu looks like title menu with a popout list of articles.... I do a quick access, it pulls the list and I see what's new. I don't get what Google reader was, or why I would care.
Seriously, I'm missing the problem here, why do you need something special for that?
I can't imagine visiting a special site for it, when my RSS feeds are right there on the bookmarks menu.
Can someone explain what the real problem is here??
Different strokes.
I use the Firefox RSS too and love it. On my desktop. On my mobile devices, I prefer Pulse, though. Even though their latest UI "improvement" for selecting sets of feeds is really annoying, I love the way I can see all those headlines and thumbnails at a glance.
I don't know that I'd call this a "cold" war. The Cold War was a conflict of bluff and counter-bluff, accompanied by skirmish-by-proxy, backing little wars between alleged allies.
What we have now is a real, direct - if mostly unacknowledged - conflict between principals. It's roughly at the stage where the opposing forces disguise themselves in animal skins, charge, and pummel the opposition because they haven't yet learned how to do much in the way of actual destruction of lives and property, but there's nothing really "cold" about it.
I don't scoff at religion. To create religion you need to have a vivid imagination. Neanderthals didn't bury trinkets in their graves like Homo Sapiens did, which suggests they didn't have anything like a religion because they didn't have a very good imagination.
Actually, I believe just last week a news article indicated that they did bury trinkets.
I'm no Apple fanboi, but the Newton's (old jokes aside and it was tightened up immediately and in ensuing OS updates) implementation was a miracle to behold back then in '97 or so. Palm had that mess "graffiti" which I always resented because it made me learn to write all over again. I liked a machine that comformed to me, not the other way around.
I had the same attitude. Until I learned Grafitti and found it to be easy and productive. Plus, the Palm's battery life beat the Newton 8 ways from Sunday. Whoever thought that a couple of AAA batteries were adequate for the Newton, anyway? I couldn't really use it until I got it a wallet with external battery pack.
And yet, some of us have so atrocious handwriting that even Palm's Graffiti wasn't recognized with sufficient accuracy. I ended up giving my PalmOS device to my wife, whose handwriting was sufficiently tidy, and going back to paper and pen. So much promise... But it never worked for me.
I think it's more than just atrocious handwriting. My handwriting, script or plain, is virtually unreadable to even me. The Palm was much better, as long as I kept drawing the letters large enough. I can Grafitti faster than I can type on a mobile device.
I miss Grafitti.
The other thing I liked about the Palm was how the search function spanned the entire device. Android supports that, but not all other mobile OS's did.
Sure you can tax into prosperity... Tax pays for services needed for prosperity, like security (police, defense), libraries, transport and communication infrastructure, education, a legal system etc at a minimum. This obviously doesn't mean that "more tax is always better", but some level of tax is needed. Providing care for the elderly and children increases the workforce and thus prosperity, but also requires funding.
One of the clearest indications that political thought is an oxymoron is the idea that everything must come in only 2 flavors and nothing between, and that all lines must be straight lines.
Reality isn't that tidy. There is a point where too little taxes fail society and a point where too much tax crushes. There's also a spot in between. Or actually, more of a blob, since there are a lot of variables in the equation. The blob can be larger or smaller or even inside-out depending on whether your demands exceed supply.
We are the most spoiled generation in all human history. We have all - even the eldest - spent all, or nearly all of our lives expecting things to become cheaper every day. Sure, we howl about inflation, but the truth is, anything electronic has been chasing Moore's law for decades, and almost everything we do any more ties into something electronic, even if it's just just sitting down at the PC and figuring out when to plant the South 40.
Matters only got worse when offshoring became economically viable. We've come to expect that Lower Prices Every Day is a right, and not simply being in the right place at the right time. No 16th-century farmer expected next year to require less effort or money to survive than last year.
So we do foolish things like lower taxes right before a recession is due when we should have been saving the money for when the rains came and lowering taxes afterwards. And compound it, by fighting to keep the taxes low even as we embark on expensive campaigns.
There's almost always something that isn't really necessary in any budget, whether it's personal, corporate, or government. And tough times help provide incentive for getting rid of it. Still, historically, we are used to being able to prosper while paying far more tax than we have for the last 10 years. And, frankly, the last 10 years have mostly been pretty miserable, so I don't buy the whole "lower taxes = more prosperity" line. If it can't work in a period that long, I'll likely die before it works at all - if it ever does. Ergo, it's useless for my purposes.
The one thing that more government money can do that no one else can, is spend money when no one else dares to. Governments don't have to show a profit (and shouldn't!), nor do they have to be concerned over-much about daily expenses. They can keep on cranking regardless, and if it isn't very efficient, nonetheless, it keeps money in circulation instead of being hoarded. Hoarded money doesn't really do anyone any good. Not even the hoarders. Until you spend it, money is just potential.
Perigee and apogee? For a solar object, it's perihelion and aphelion. And you get one of each every solar year, by definition. Unless you know something Kepler didn't.
So go pay full price and dont sign up for this site specifically..Its not that hard..That's what happened to America..Instead of working for shit, people think everything should be free
Who said I was thinking specifically about freebies? I've avoided a lot of services after the 6-month fight it took to get out of IBM's ISP service. It was good while it lasted, but the time came when something better came along and it was sheer murder switching off. They kept switching it back on, trying to push me into special trial periods, etc., etc., etc. ENOUGH already!
Not at all. The key word is ultimately. If I am unproductive, it is the manager's job to determine that I am unproductive and what steps to take to ensure productivity. If the manager doesn't do those things then the manager is unproductive.
Conversely, if the manager has taken all reasonable steps to ensure my ability to be productive and and likewise instructed me on what I must do to be productive, then it becomes my fault if I'm not productive and the manager has the right to discipline or terminate me. It would be my fault for being unproductive, but the manager's fault if that was allowed to continue.
Better stated: you need to know the context in which the metrics are stated.
That's only a small part of the problem. Factories in the 1960s were quite aware that they were spewing sulfuric acid. Their metrics failed to consider just how outraged people could become. You can fail because you didn't measure something critical or you can fail because you gave the wrong weight to something you did measure. And you can fail because you attempted to extrapolate a metric using the wrong functions.
If we ever actually managed to obtain truly accurate and meaningful metrics that actually mapped reality accurately, management would be something that you could replace with software. But just as software design has consistently failed to be something that can be reduced to a mindless rote process, so too has good decision-making.
Metrics are no more a "silver bullet" than 4GLs, OOP, CORBA, AJAX or countless other one-size-fits-all solutions. They are a tool. When they become disproportionately valued, the management process suffers.
Likewise, we're hearing from people close to Yahoo executives and employees that she made the right decision banning work from home.
"The employees at Yahoo are thrilled," says one source close to the company.
"There isn't massive uprising. The truth is, they've all been pissed off that people haven't been working."
If it works for the employees, then our opinions here don't mean much in the debate.
Well, our opinions don't mean jack in the debate, actually. The main reason for arguing the matter is more out of concern that the disease may spread. Because businesses operate according to the stampede model. They all tend to run in the same direction, regardless of whether it's the smart direction for them or not.
I'm cynical about "the employees", however. If "the employees" are 95% of the company, but don't include a 5% who were, in fact major productivity people and who get bent enough over the change to leave, then the net effect is a loss, regardless.
In any event, if people weren't being productive remotely, a more reasoned approach would be to yank them all in and not let them back out until they had proven themselves. An outright ban is a ham-fisted approach for a company that really cannot afford ham-fisted "solutions" right now.
Slashdot Mirror
> 'Notice that you have not been asked to switch off anything really inconvenient, like your heating or air-conditioning, television, computer, mobile phone, or any of the myriad technologies that depend on affordable, plentiful energy electricity and make modern life possible.
I can't address all of these, but computer? I read back in the late nineties that computers dissipate a power level less than a 75 watt bulb, probably less now with power conservation and "green" designs. And cell phones? Miniscule, compared to generating light or heat. Televisions? Maybe old tube type, or really humongous sets now, but in general, I'm under the impression that they don't use that much power. He has a point about air conditioning (in most cases) and heat, but those, plus light, are gross uses of power.
I'm not convinced that a given individual's electronics would be a substantial percentage of their personal, total power footprint. (There are probably alpha nerds out there who heat their rooms with i-products and only use them in the dark, but I'm thinking not many.)
The contention seems to be that what you should switch off is measured by convenience rather than actual power usage. This seems an conceptual error.
I'm very sorry to say that in the late 90's a 100W power supply was generally pretty sufficient, but these days you'll find no shortage of 600W or 1KW power supplies. I don't know how much my current system pulls, but the preceding one idled at about 115 Watts, and I kept it longer than I "should" have because it was relatively efficient for its time.
Cell phones have also tended to demand more and more power in order to get that full multi-media smartphone edge.
On the other hand, replacing CRTs with solid-state monitors was a big jump in the other direction, and if you want to really feel all hippy greenie eco-friendly, you can do a lot with a Raspberry Pi and it only pulls about 5 watts. It's no gamer machine, but it still outperforms the desktops of the 90's.
The grid is not well-equipped to handle rapid transients in load. You can't change the heat output of a coal or nuclear-fired furnace instantly, and if you try, bad things happen.
If everyone on the grid suddenly opened their breakers at the same time, the resulting backlash would probably cause thousands of steam turbines to overspin and their emergency pressure valves to open, at which point the turbine has to spin down and resynchronize before it can begin producing power again. I guess that would be okay since there is no load, but it would take a long time to get things back in order.
A steam turbine generation system cannot respond instantly to enormous changes in load over a short time interval.
Oh come ON, now. Ever heard of the "toilet-flush" effect? Where everybody makes a pit stop at the same time during commercials of a major televised event? Unlike your average office, where everyone has to constantly "give 110%", utilities run with reserve capacity and mechanisms that allow them to respond rapidly to sudden fluctuations in demand.
Let's run that in reverse. A small increase in energy usage, like my one, 100 watt, bulb, won't increase the amount of energy pumped into the grid, so I shouldn't have to pay for it. (It's only 100 watts)
Let's get everyone to do that! Free energy!! Perpetual Motion!!!
Has anyone ever explained the difference between "almost zero" and "zero" to you?
I don't know what current local rates are, but several years back, it was 17 cents a KWh in these parts. A 100-watt bulb is 1/10th of 1 kilowatt. Turning if off during Earth Hour would save you 1.7 cents at that rate. It may not be much, but it's still something.
Turning off the A/C for one hour is only a net loss if the temperature shifts more than the amount it takes to recover an hour's outage. Otherwise, no post-Earth-Hour surge. Your MIleage May Vary, depending on climate and insulation.
Turning off motors costs an additional amount of initial power surge when you turn them back on. How much, if any, that you save depends on the amount of power otherwise consumed during that hour less the surge.
Turning off incandescent and fluorescent lights has relatively little surge turning them back on compared to what they'd eat for an hour. LEDs have effectively none. Then again, quite a few of my LED lights are solar-charged, so turning them off would be pure symbolism.
Earth Hour is all symbolism anyway. Its prime function is to focus attention on what we're doing and what we might be doing. To THINK, not merely be a passive animal. We don't have to turn the world upside-down (yet, anyway). But we shouldn't just live in the here and now, we should consider where we want to be.
I know this will never get modded up to be seen but I'll say it again anyway: I got mine from MCM Electronics in a week or so.
They sell both kits and just the board by itself for $35 + shipping. In fact, they show IN STOCK right now.
http://www.mcmelectronics.com/content/en-US/raspberry-pi
MCM seems a little screwed up. From what I can tell, they have 2 or 3 different divisions that deal in Raspberry Pi's. One is perennially out of stock, but slated to ship about 7500 orders on almost any given day. Finally I hit the other site, listing them in stock, 2-day delivery. Allowing for the weekend, I'm supposed to get one either today or tomorrow.
Allied lost my order. It was held so long the credit card expired and someone managed to cancel the order in the process of getting my new card info.
In my younger days, I was cheap and would have just ordered the $35 board. Now I've got no patience and I ordered a case and USB power with the board. I've probably got a suitable-sized box in my general electronic junk collection and odds are that my phone charger can deliver the power, but we're talking less than $20 extra here for not having to find out otherwise.
I am recycling the SD card and HDMI from other places though. No sense in overdoing it.
I'm saying there is no way of knowing if hunter gatherers had devised a way of making beer like beverages because they would have left no trace.
Beer requires more work than wine or bread. Wine could be done with no lasting trace, but beer would be *impossible*. Why? Because there'd be some trace of tools or brewing. You "could" do it and leave no trace, but you'd have to go out of your way to do so, and unless you can come up with a plausible reason why a pottery-making society would use pottery for everything *except* brewing beer, then I'll invoke Occam and move on.
The original version of the cauldron was a skin draped on sticks over a fire. It operates the same way as the more modern "boil water in a paper cup" trick. In fact, possibly the first pottery was an attempt to improve this idea by smearing clay on the skin.
All sorts of nasty things have been cooked up at one time or another in a skin vessel, so why should beer be any different? But since skins usually rot, the odds of finding a "smoking gun" left behind by a group of wandering hunter-gatherers is pretty low.
It's called "hellbanning", and it's done in more places than you might think. You can even have the hellbanned trolls see the other hellbanned troll posts, giving them all a nice padded room to go nuts with Nerf.
So THAT's what those commentary sections on online news sites are for! Wait... What?
... Which leads to topics like this where so many people post lulz-troll comments that you can't tell the difference between actual trolls and people just trying to be funny.
Aw, screw you guys!
Thanks for posting through slashdot. We will now trace and destroy you.
Unfortunately, this is no longer funny. Thanks to such freedom-loving devices as the Patriot Act and that lovely little thing known as FISA, "interested" organizations can march up to Slashdot, demand all sorts of records under total secrecy (at least until yesterday's court ruling), use them as a basis for back-tracking, and apply pressure to foreign entities that would allow them to repeat the process all the way down to drawing cross-hairs on a drone-strike map.
Don't forget that post-9/11, your American citizenship effectively ends when you leave the boundaries of the USA. And, for the most part enter a US airport. You can also effectively lose your citizenship if someone chooses to label you an "enemy combatant". We no longer cling to the 200-year old archaisms that Once an American, Always an American, Innocent Until Proven Guilty, or other such quaint and silly "self evident truths". We may have been able to hold onto them while the Godless Communists of the Evil Empire were howling at the door, but mention the word "terrorist" and we soil our underwear.
We are not yet at the point where it is unsafe even to mention such things, or I wouldn't. But we're close enough that it's possible to receive a visit from certain people who might strongly advise keeping silent - and to more than advise keeping silent about the visit itself.
The true enemies of freedom and democracy are not the foreigners without, it's the Guardians within, The people who feel it necessary to destroy freedom in the name of saving freedom. The so-called Liberal "nanny state" might want to take away your Big Gulps, but the nanny state that you should really worry about is the one with the flags and the eagles. And offshore prisons.
This would never happen with an open-source protocol.
Why not? If a protocol was open source, writing backdoors into it would be even easier. I mean, how many people know how to inspect code and remove the parts that are malicious?
Not many, I'm sure. But even one is sufficient. And unlike closed-source, that one person may pop up any time, anywhere in the world, including places where it's not possible for interested governments to muzzle him in time to raise the alert.
One of the reasons WHY open-source is so popular is that things like that can occur, hence open-source people are more likely to pay attention to how secure the stuff they're using is. And conversely, paranoid people will prefer open-source.
The best time to worry about security is before you need to. Afterwards, it may be too late.
Soviet Union was disbanded in the 90's
And????
Russia still remains. The KGB is now the FSB. Russia is more open, but it's still not the USA.
And speaking of the USA, you do realize that Project Echelon and similar efforts have been busily tapping into communications in the Land of the Free for longer than there was a Skype?
RSS is the button at the top of Firefox, it shows when the page has an rss fee, you click it, it subscribes and the entry in the bookmark menu looks like title menu with a popout list of articles.... I do a quick access, it pulls the list and I see what's new. I don't get what Google reader was, or why I would care.
Seriously, I'm missing the problem here, why do you need something special for that?
I can't imagine visiting a special site for it, when my RSS feeds are right there on the bookmarks menu.
Can someone explain what the real problem is here??
Different strokes.
I use the Firefox RSS too and love it. On my desktop. On my mobile devices, I prefer Pulse, though. Even though their latest UI "improvement" for selecting sets of feeds is really annoying, I love the way I can see all those headlines and thumbnails at a glance.
I don't know that I'd call this a "cold" war. The Cold War was a conflict of bluff and counter-bluff, accompanied by skirmish-by-proxy, backing little wars between alleged allies.
What we have now is a real, direct - if mostly unacknowledged - conflict between principals. It's roughly at the stage where the opposing forces disguise themselves in animal skins, charge, and pummel the opposition because they haven't yet learned how to do much in the way of actual destruction of lives and property, but there's nothing really "cold" about it.
I don't scoff at religion. To create religion you need to have a vivid imagination. Neanderthals didn't bury trinkets in their graves like Homo Sapiens did, which suggests they didn't have anything like a religion because they didn't have a very good imagination.
Actually, I believe just last week a news article indicated that they did bury trinkets.
Or just cut links to China and keep talking to the rest of the world.
But then how would Wal-mart get their orders filled?
I'm no Apple fanboi, but the Newton's (old jokes aside and it was tightened up immediately and in ensuing OS updates) implementation was a miracle to behold back then in '97 or so. Palm had that mess "graffiti" which I always resented because it made me learn to write all over again. I liked a machine that comformed to me, not the other way around.
I had the same attitude. Until I learned Grafitti and found it to be easy and productive. Plus, the Palm's battery life beat the Newton 8 ways from Sunday. Whoever thought that a couple of AAA batteries were adequate for the Newton, anyway? I couldn't really use it until I got it a wallet with external battery pack.
And yet, some of us have so atrocious handwriting that even Palm's Graffiti wasn't recognized with sufficient accuracy. I ended up giving my PalmOS device to my wife, whose handwriting was sufficiently tidy, and going back to paper and pen. So much promise... But it never worked for me.
I think it's more than just atrocious handwriting. My handwriting, script or plain, is virtually unreadable to even me. The Palm was much better, as long as I kept drawing the letters large enough. I can Grafitti faster than I can type on a mobile device.
I miss Grafitti.
The other thing I liked about the Palm was how the search function spanned the entire device. Android supports that, but not all other mobile OS's did.
Sure you can tax into prosperity... Tax pays for services needed for prosperity, like security (police, defense), libraries, transport and communication infrastructure,
education, a legal system etc at a minimum. This obviously doesn't mean that "more tax is always better", but some level of tax is needed. Providing care for the elderly and children increases the workforce and thus prosperity, but also requires funding.
One of the clearest indications that political thought is an oxymoron is the idea that everything must come in only 2 flavors and nothing between, and that all lines must be straight lines.
Reality isn't that tidy. There is a point where too little taxes fail society and a point where too much tax crushes. There's also a spot in between. Or actually, more of a blob, since there are a lot of variables in the equation. The blob can be larger or smaller or even inside-out depending on whether your demands exceed supply.
We are the most spoiled generation in all human history. We have all - even the eldest - spent all, or nearly all of our lives expecting things to become cheaper every day. Sure, we howl about inflation, but the truth is, anything electronic has been chasing Moore's law for decades, and almost everything we do any more ties into something electronic, even if it's just just sitting down at the PC and figuring out when to plant the South 40.
Matters only got worse when offshoring became economically viable. We've come to expect that Lower Prices Every Day is a right, and not simply being in the right place at the right time. No 16th-century farmer expected next year to require less effort or money to survive than last year.
So we do foolish things like lower taxes right before a recession is due when we should have been saving the money for when the rains came and lowering taxes afterwards. And compound it, by fighting to keep the taxes low even as we embark on expensive campaigns.
There's almost always something that isn't really necessary in any budget, whether it's personal, corporate, or government. And tough times help provide incentive for getting rid of it. Still, historically, we are used to being able to prosper while paying far more tax than we have for the last 10 years. And, frankly, the last 10 years have mostly been pretty miserable, so I don't buy the whole "lower taxes = more prosperity" line. If it can't work in a period that long, I'll likely die before it works at all - if it ever does. Ergo, it's useless for my purposes.
The one thing that more government money can do that no one else can, is spend money when no one else dares to. Governments don't have to show a profit (and shouldn't!), nor do they have to be concerned over-much about daily expenses. They can keep on cranking regardless, and if it isn't very efficient, nonetheless, it keeps money in circulation instead of being hoarded. Hoarded money doesn't really do anyone any good. Not even the hoarders. Until you spend it, money is just potential.
I don't know...maybe it's just me, but teeth growing out of my kidney sounds like something gone horribly, horribly wrong...
Kidney stones. With a vengeance!
Poor mousey.
Perigee and apogee? For a solar object, it's perihelion and aphelion. And you get one of each every solar year, by definition. Unless you know something Kepler didn't.
So go pay full price and dont sign up for this site specifically..Its not that hard..That's what happened to America..Instead of working for shit, people think everything should be free
Who said I was thinking specifically about freebies? I've avoided a lot of services after the 6-month fight it took to get out of IBM's ISP service. It was good while it lasted, but the time came when something better came along and it was sheer murder switching off. They kept switching it back on, trying to push me into special trial periods, etc., etc., etc. ENOUGH already!
So..Life is difficult.Jobs are hard...should the FCC investigate them?
All I did was call the #, tell them to cancel.Said no 4 times, Reiterated to cancel it, received confirmation #..not that bad.
Life is too short to waste going round and round with "Retention Services".
These days, I'd rather not opt in to begin with.
Not at all. The key word is ultimately. If I am unproductive, it is the manager's job to determine that I am unproductive and what steps to take to ensure productivity. If the manager doesn't do those things then the manager is unproductive.
Conversely, if the manager has taken all reasonable steps to ensure my ability to be productive and and likewise instructed me on what I must do to be productive, then it becomes my fault if I'm not productive and the manager has the right to discipline or terminate me. It would be my fault for being unproductive, but the manager's fault if that was allowed to continue.
Better stated: you need to know the context in which the metrics are stated.
That's only a small part of the problem. Factories in the 1960s were quite aware that they were spewing sulfuric acid. Their metrics failed to consider just how outraged people could become. You can fail because you didn't measure something critical or you can fail because you gave the wrong weight to something you did measure. And you can fail because you attempted to extrapolate a metric using the wrong functions.
If we ever actually managed to obtain truly accurate and meaningful metrics that actually mapped reality accurately, management would be something that you could replace with software. But just as software design has consistently failed to be something that can be reduced to a mindless rote process, so too has good decision-making.
Metrics are no more a "silver bullet" than 4GLs, OOP, CORBA, AJAX or countless other one-size-fits-all solutions. They are a tool. When they become disproportionately valued, the management process suffers.
Likewise, we're hearing from people close to Yahoo executives and employees that she made the right decision banning work from home.
"The employees at Yahoo are thrilled," says one source close to the company.
"There isn't massive uprising. The truth is, they've all been pissed off that people haven't been working."
If it works for the employees, then our opinions here don't mean much in the debate.
Well, our opinions don't mean jack in the debate, actually. The main reason for arguing the matter is more out of concern that the disease may spread. Because businesses operate according to the stampede model. They all tend to run in the same direction, regardless of whether it's the smart direction for them or not.
I'm cynical about "the employees", however. If "the employees" are 95% of the company, but don't include a 5% who were, in fact major productivity people and who get bent enough over the change to leave, then the net effect is a loss, regardless.
In any event, if people weren't being productive remotely, a more reasoned approach would be to yank them all in and not let them back out until they had proven themselves. An outright ban is a ham-fisted approach for a company that really cannot afford ham-fisted "solutions" right now.