And had you been buying directly from the manufacturer you would have paid less, significantly less. No matter how good of a deal you think you got the dealer still make that non-negotiable markup on top of the manufacturers wholesale price. What price concession you negotiated against was the cream profit on top of all that, and that isn't real price competition. That's the pretend circus on top of the purchasing that allows you to think you got a good deal, when in fact you didn't.
Yes, there's a lot of smoke and mirrors, but they do buy wholesale - meaning in bulk, so the manufacturer may offer some sort of quantity discount relative to the price presented to other, smaller dealers who don't buy as many vehicles at a time. And why they hate people like me who do custom orders, where there's no bulk to discount.
The price competition is between dealers, and it's real. It may not be $3000-6000, but I did manage to shave off a couple of hundred even on a custom order of a specific vehicle by hitting every dealer in town and playing them against each other. One almost got the sale, but tried to cheat on features and thus not only lost the sale, but was then underbid by $600 by a dealer who provided the supposedly "unavailable" features.
Middlemen do have their uses sometimes. It's just that auto dealers are scum.
In the case of Tesla, you *are* buying from the manufacturer. Without dealer overhead (and profit), all other things being equal (which they never are, but bear with me), wouldn't this result in cheaper prices to consumers? I chose to call it "buying wholesale", but I suppose the terminology depends on your point of view.
No, the elimination of the middleman wouldn't automatically result in cheaper prices to consumers. The price presented to consumers is whatever price the seller wishes to present. Case in point: the price of an old-time IBM mainframe had virtually no relationship to its manufacturing cost. It was simply whatever price IBM thought they could extort from the buyer. Oracle still does this, and I'm sure so do many others.
Commodities have price competition, but even in the case of a commodity such as an automobile, if I have a way to shave $5000 off a vehicle's price relative to other sellers, I may or may not pass those savings on to the customer. I may just pocket the difference.
p>Wouldn't we all be buying the same wholesale price?
No, we'd be buying at retail, so the price is by definition the retail price.
As to whether it's the same price for everyone depends on whether the manufacturer wants to haggle like dealers do or go with a fixed price a la Saturn. A fixed price is more likely though. Otherwise you'd end up paying for what amounts to an in-house dealership employing the people who did the haggling.
I was under the impression that the POWER chipset was specifically designed as a chip realization of the iSeries CPU, actually dating back to when it was still the AS/400, possibly even the System/38.
IBM fielded a desktop mainframe (the Model 9000) that contained a pair of Motorola MC68000 chips, one with a special mask for the System/360 instruction set. The instruction architecture of the MC68000 was a lot like the System/360 instruction architecture, so it was a good fit.
Unfortunately, the Model 9000 was a commercial failure.
Irony upon irony. We're getting this list from a Communist nation
A Communist country where people can own companies and trade stocks and shares?
A Communist country where at any time it wants to, the Party/government can nationalize companies and hold all the shares and properties as common assets of the People.
Capitalism exists in China only to the extent that it is convenient for the Party. They've already demonstrated that at heart they're still a command economy by the fact that they maintain rigid control on the monetary exchange rate.
The whole concept of a secret patent doesn't make sense, since the word itself means open or visible, as in "patently obvious".
Irony upon irony. We're getting this list from a Communist nation - and such places are supposed to be tight with information, thus making them inferior to the open society upon which freedom supposedly thrives. With a little help from the NSA.
don't think that a good education is ever likely to make me a sociable person, and a lot of careers require being sociable.
Nor does it need to. If you can learn one language, you can learn another one at least to some degree.
IF.
Although language skills and sociability are not the same thing. Actually, I'm competent in several languages. Doesn't mean I use them to meet and greet. I'm equally introverted in any language.
Conversely, I have no reason to believe that everyone who's socially adept is a linguist.
It stands for "Advanced Placement." It supposed to represent a more challenging level of work. However, from what I've seen of my sister-in-law's work, it's just a tremendous amount of busy-work wrapped around what I learned in "regular" classes. However, that might be a Texas thing. Our standards are lower, because we're just sittin' around waitin' fer the Rapture. At least, it feels that way.
Well the least you could do is keep your guns polished! Remember, the Devil finds work for idle hands!
Have you considered that your education was poor, and that it's not very efficient to learn a foreign language by just sitting in a classroom and simply doing what they tell you?
I don't think that a good education is ever likely to make me a sociable person, and a lot of careers require being sociable. I actually even got fired once for not being sociable enough in a job that's infamous for being non-sociable.
I'm great at intuitive leaps in thinking. I'm utterly horrible in line-by-line "bookkeeper" tasks, and am eternally grateful that other people are not just like me so that they can do the essential bookkeeping and allow me to do the intuitive stuff. No, not for being surly and hateful. Simply for not schmoozing enough.
People are not interchangeable cogs where anybody can do anything well if they simply try hard enough. Even CEOs know that. Else why would they deserve so much money while hiring and firing identical-cog workers en masse? Obviously, it's because they're special and not identical cogs that can be bulk-purchased at a discount.
The original vote was done in an atmosphere of "If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists". When merely forgetting to wear your flag lapel pin could get you branded as a freedom-hating traitor. And, as we all know Liberals=spineless wimps anyway. So of course they rubberstamped it.
The problem is, they continue to keep it alive now that the initial panic is over.
Dealers are required to ask for identification, such as a driver license, from buyers who are purchasing a car for more than $10,000 in cash. They also must get a Social Security number or Tax ID Number.
Pretty much anything that involves more than $10,000 has to be reported to the Feds. Whether it's cash or not.
but they can't share it with you. I'm not sure how much they can even disclose about the abilities of the satellites they have, but you need to bear in mind that companies like Google actually own imaging satellites of their own. They've been able to do much higher resolutions for a very very long time already...they just haven't been allowed share it with us.
The resolution limitations have been political in nature...most if not all of the hardware already up there has been able to provide higher resolution for years. I think some providers were getting around that by providing arial photography in some areas instead...the 50cm limitations are for satellites. Photography from airplanes doesn't have that limitation.
If you do a lot of zooming in Google Maps Aerial View, you'll notice that at certain levels they switch image sources. They don't use satellite all the way down. In a lot of places, the lower view is definitely low-altitude aircraft. In fact, in my state, they simply used the state's own aerial survey images, which are available to anyone for a minimal copying fee.
So then use a COW image. You Docker zealots are annoying. You constantly resort to lies to justify that useless piece of crap. There's a reason no one uses it.
Docker does. However, it also contains load-balancing and isolation services. Also, if "no one uses it" (I do), it's because A), running multiple containers is something that's not generally necessary - or even very useful - for ordinary desktop use (but is very valuable when you're running lots of virtual servers) and B), because this announcement was for Docker 1.0, alleged to be the first fully ready-for-prime-time release. Docker is only about 2 years old, and a lot of Linux distros don't yet have subsystem support for it.
Sigh, more Docker fanboi liars. The adults in the room were talking about disk space.
Us kids also meant RAM, though. CentOS 6 needs about 512MB of RAM per instance. So 10 CentOS VMs would need about 5GB RAM plus hypervisor. 10 Docker instances might use 10MB or less, depending on what they're running.
Which won't be for a long while because of all the old computers out there that have either no or insufficient IPv6 support.
Just how old are you estimating those old computers are? Windows XP has support for IPv6, as do the first 2.6 Linux kernel. I doubt there's a single smartphone without support for it.
The only reason we are not using IPv6 all along is because ISPs decided to save some 5% (probably less) of the cost on their last upgrades, or because they actively don't want to supply it.
Actually, all my systems have IPV6, even the antiques.
"Linux containers are a way of packaging up applications and related software for movement over the network or Internet."
Rewritten not to be shitty:
"Linux containers are a way of packaging up applications and related software."
For movement over the network or Internet.
One of the key attributes of a Docker image is that's it's a commodity. Their logo resembles a container freight vessel for a very good reason.
We've had the ability to package applications for years. That's what things like debs and RPMs are all about. A Docker instance isn't merely a package, it's a complete ready-to-run filesystem image with resource mapping that allows it to be shipped and/or replicated over a wide number of container hosts, then launched without further ado. And destroyed when you don't need it any more.
That's already pretty easy to do with libvirt. I run three commands like this to copy my image, setup the vm on the new host, and start it: rsync -avz main_server:/var/lib/libvirt/images/bitcoin.qcow2/var/lib/libvirt/images/bitcoin5.qcow2
Except that your stand-alone virtual machines are going to consume about 3GB of disk space and 500MB of RAM per instance.
Docker allows a differential-style "Virtual Machine", so you have 1 base image and the actual containers are only the differences between images. Often no more than 100MB or so. And only consume the RAM and CPU needed for stuff that isn't done in the base instance. And can be defined with service levels to keep them from getting greedy.
I went to the web site to learn more. I still don't know what it is. I suspect it's a venture capital extraction method.
Nothing wrong with that. I'd like to extract some myself.
However, the short of it is that Docker containers are a lot like Solaris Zones. They give much the same freedom as having lots of VMs, but without the overhead that a normal VM requires in terms of memory or filesystem space. Plus they allow resource load-balancing. So it's a fairly trivial thing using Docker to run 25 Apache servers on the same box without them interfering with each other.
print pamphlets, create a video, or publish a book about politics is free speech
Is it not free speech to do these things? Or you're just opposed to people doing these things for a cause you do not support? You are part of the problem because you think the problem is free speech for causes you don't support. I'll be dollars to doughnuts that you support your side (I don't know if you're (D) or (R)) having the right to "print pamphlets, create a video, or publish a book about politics". My guess, is you're a liberal though because liberals are well known for their hypocrisy regarding free speech.
It's not a matter of what you want to say, it's how loud you shout.
Money buys a bigger megaphone. And unfortunately, we tend to elect whoever shouts the loudest.
Slashdot Mirror
And had you been buying directly from the manufacturer you would have paid less, significantly less. No matter how good of a deal you think you got the dealer still make that non-negotiable markup on top of the manufacturers wholesale price. What price concession you negotiated against was the cream profit on top of all that, and that isn't real price competition. That's the pretend circus on top of the purchasing that allows you to think you got a good deal, when in fact you didn't.
Only if the manufacturer wants you to.
Yes, there's a lot of smoke and mirrors, but they do buy wholesale - meaning in bulk, so the manufacturer may offer some sort of quantity discount relative to the price presented to other, smaller dealers who don't buy as many vehicles at a time. And why they hate people like me who do custom orders, where there's no bulk to discount.
The price competition is between dealers, and it's real. It may not be $3000-6000, but I did manage to shave off a couple of hundred even on a custom order of a specific vehicle by hitting every dealer in town and playing them against each other. One almost got the sale, but tried to cheat on features and thus not only lost the sale, but was then underbid by $600 by a dealer who provided the supposedly "unavailable" features.
Middlemen do have their uses sometimes. It's just that auto dealers are scum.
In the case of Tesla, you *are* buying from the manufacturer. Without dealer overhead (and profit), all other things being equal (which they never are, but bear with me), wouldn't this result in cheaper prices to consumers? I chose to call it "buying wholesale", but I suppose the terminology depends on your point of view.
No, the elimination of the middleman wouldn't automatically result in cheaper prices to consumers. The price presented to consumers is whatever price the seller wishes to present. Case in point: the price of an old-time IBM mainframe had virtually no relationship to its manufacturing cost. It was simply whatever price IBM thought they could extort from the buyer. Oracle still does this, and I'm sure so do many others.
Commodities have price competition, but even in the case of a commodity such as an automobile, if I have a way to shave $5000 off a vehicle's price relative to other sellers, I may or may not pass those savings on to the customer. I may just pocket the difference.
p>Wouldn't we all be buying the same wholesale price?
No, we'd be buying at retail, so the price is by definition the retail price.
As to whether it's the same price for everyone depends on whether the manufacturer wants to haggle like dealers do or go with a fixed price a la Saturn. A fixed price is more likely though. Otherwise you'd end up paying for what amounts to an in-house dealership employing the people who did the haggling.
IBM Z-series mainframes still use a customized CPU, although the i-Series did indeed move to POWER some time ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
I was under the impression that the POWER chipset was specifically designed as a chip realization of the iSeries CPU, actually dating back to when it was still the AS/400, possibly even the System/38.
IBM fielded a desktop mainframe (the Model 9000) that contained a pair of Motorola MC68000 chips, one with a special mask for the System/360 instruction set. The instruction architecture of the MC68000 was a lot like the System/360 instruction architecture, so it was a good fit.
Unfortunately, the Model 9000 was a commercial failure.
Irony upon irony. We're getting this list from a Communist nation
A Communist country where people can own companies and trade stocks and shares?
A Communist country where at any time it wants to, the Party/government can nationalize companies and hold all the shares and properties as common assets of the People.
Capitalism exists in China only to the extent that it is convenient for the Party. They've already demonstrated that at heart they're still a command economy by the fact that they maintain rigid control on the monetary exchange rate.
That is the perennial danger of living in an open society.
We used to think it was worth the price.
The whole concept of a secret patent doesn't make sense, since the word itself means open or visible, as in "patently obvious".
Irony upon irony. We're getting this list from a Communist nation - and such places are supposed to be tight with information, thus making them inferior to the open society upon which freedom supposedly thrives. With a little help from the NSA.
don't think that a good education is ever likely to make me a sociable person, and a lot of careers require being sociable.
Nor does it need to. If you can learn one language, you can learn another one at least to some degree.
IF.
Although language skills and sociability are not the same thing. Actually, I'm competent in several languages. Doesn't mean I use them to meet and greet. I'm equally introverted in any language.
Conversely, I have no reason to believe that everyone who's socially adept is a linguist.
All those jobs will be going to H-1B visa owners.
Not all of them. Many will leave the North American Continent entirely.
It stands for "Advanced Placement." It supposed to represent a more challenging level of work. However, from what I've seen of my sister-in-law's work, it's just a tremendous amount of busy-work wrapped around what I learned in "regular" classes. However, that might be a Texas thing. Our standards are lower, because we're just sittin' around waitin' fer the Rapture. At least, it feels that way.
Well the least you could do is keep your guns polished! Remember, the Devil finds work for idle hands!
Have you considered that your education was poor, and that it's not very efficient to learn a foreign language by just sitting in a classroom and simply doing what they tell you?
I don't think that a good education is ever likely to make me a sociable person, and a lot of careers require being sociable. I actually even got fired once for not being sociable enough in a job that's infamous for being non-sociable.
I'm great at intuitive leaps in thinking. I'm utterly horrible in line-by-line "bookkeeper" tasks, and am eternally grateful that other people are not just like me so that they can do the essential bookkeeping and allow me to do the intuitive stuff. No, not for being surly and hateful. Simply for not schmoozing enough.
People are not interchangeable cogs where anybody can do anything well if they simply try hard enough. Even CEOs know that. Else why would they deserve so much money while hiring and firing identical-cog workers en masse? Obviously, it's because they're special and not identical cogs that can be bulk-purchased at a discount.
The original vote was done in an atmosphere of "If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists". When merely forgetting to wear your flag lapel pin could get you branded as a freedom-hating traitor. And, as we all know Liberals=spineless wimps anyway. So of course they rubberstamped it.
The problem is, they continue to keep it alive now that the initial panic is over.
Cantor's case shows that you still have to get people to vote for you, you can't simply buy a seat.
Nor is Cantor an isolated case. A lot Republican money-raisers were foaming at the mouth after some recent defeats in the last major elections.
But that doesn't mean money doesn't matter. Massively outspending the other guy still pays off often enough that they continue doing it.
Funny,. the article you linked to says this:
Dealers are required to ask for identification, such as a driver license, from buyers who are purchasing a car for more than $10,000 in cash. They also must get a Social Security number or Tax ID Number.
Pretty much anything that involves more than $10,000 has to be reported to the Feds. Whether it's cash or not.
The next generation of satellites has a high enough resolution to use facial detection algorithms on the images
No matter how good your resolution that's not gonna happen from a vertical angle.
They'll just work back from reflections on automobile windshields.
but they can't share it with you. I'm not sure how much they can even disclose about the abilities of the satellites they have, but you need to bear in mind that companies like Google actually own imaging satellites of their own. They've been able to do much higher resolutions for a very very long time already...they just haven't been allowed share it with us.
The resolution limitations have been political in nature...most if not all of the hardware already up there has been able to provide higher resolution for years. I think some providers were getting around that by providing arial photography in some areas instead...the 50cm limitations are for satellites. Photography from airplanes doesn't have that limitation.
If you do a lot of zooming in Google Maps Aerial View, you'll notice that at certain levels they switch image sources. They don't use satellite all the way down. In a lot of places, the lower view is definitely low-altitude aircraft. In fact, in my state, they simply used the state's own aerial survey images, which are available to anyone for a minimal copying fee.
So then use a COW image. You Docker zealots are annoying. You constantly resort to lies to justify that useless piece of crap. There's a reason no one uses it.
Docker does. However, it also contains load-balancing and isolation services. Also, if "no one uses it" (I do), it's because A), running multiple containers is something that's not generally necessary - or even very useful - for ordinary desktop use (but is very valuable when you're running lots of virtual servers) and B), because this announcement was for Docker 1.0, alleged to be the first fully ready-for-prime-time release. Docker is only about 2 years old, and a lot of Linux distros don't yet have subsystem support for it.
Sigh, more Docker fanboi liars. The adults in the room were talking about disk space.
Us kids also meant RAM, though. CentOS 6 needs about 512MB of RAM per instance. So 10 CentOS VMs would need about 5GB RAM plus hypervisor. 10 Docker instances might use 10MB or less, depending on what they're running.
From the description, it sounds like a mainframe. Maybe it'll run zOS!
Just how old are you estimating those old computers are? Windows XP has support for IPv6, as do the first 2.6 Linux kernel. I doubt there's a single smartphone without support for it.
The only reason we are not using IPv6 all along is because ISPs decided to save some 5% (probably less) of the cost on their last upgrades, or because they actively don't want to supply it.
Actually, all my systems have IPV6, even the antiques.
It's the routers that lack it.
"Linux containers are a way of packaging up applications and related software for movement over the network or Internet."
Rewritten not to be shitty:
"Linux containers are a way of packaging up applications and related software."
For movement over the network or Internet.
One of the key attributes of a Docker image is that's it's a commodity. Their logo resembles a container freight vessel for a very good reason.
We've had the ability to package applications for years. That's what things like debs and RPMs are all about. A Docker instance isn't merely a package, it's a complete ready-to-run filesystem image with resource mapping that allows it to be shipped and/or replicated over a wide number of container hosts, then launched without further ado. And destroyed when you don't need it any more.
That's already pretty easy to do with libvirt. I run three commands like this to copy my image, setup the vm on the new host, and start it:
/var/lib/libvirt/images/bitcoin5.qcow2
rsync -avz main_server:/var/lib/libvirt/images/bitcoin.qcow2
virt-install --name=bitcoin5 --arch=x86_64 --vcpus=4 --ram=4096 --os-type=linux --os-variant=rhel6 --hvm --connect=qemu:///system --network bridge:br0 --cdrom=/var/lib/libvirt/images/CentOS-6.5-x86_64-minimal.iso --disk path=/var/lib/libvirt/images/bitcoin5.qcow2 --accelerate --graphics none
...
Except that your stand-alone virtual machines are going to consume about 3GB of disk space and 500MB of RAM per instance.
Docker allows a differential-style "Virtual Machine", so you have 1 base image and the actual containers are only the differences between images. Often no more than 100MB or so. And only consume the RAM and CPU needed for stuff that isn't done in the base instance. And can be defined with service levels to keep them from getting greedy.
I went to the web site to learn more. I still don't know what it is. I suspect it's a venture capital extraction method.
Nothing wrong with that. I'd like to extract some myself.
However, the short of it is that Docker containers are a lot like Solaris Zones. They give much the same freedom as having lots of VMs, but without the overhead that a normal VM requires in terms of memory or filesystem space. Plus they allow resource load-balancing. So it's a fairly trivial thing using Docker to run 25 Apache servers on the same box without them interfering with each other.
Yeah my first question was whether or not it would be strong enough to repel the Romulan's attacks.
Look. Polarizing the hull plating was good enough for grandad. It's good enoug
print pamphlets, create a video, or publish a book about politics is free speech
Is it not free speech to do these things? Or you're just opposed to people doing these things for a cause you do not support? You are part of the problem because you think the problem is free speech for causes you don't support. I'll be dollars to doughnuts that you support your side (I don't know if you're (D) or (R)) having the right to "print pamphlets, create a video, or publish a book about politics". My guess, is you're a liberal though because liberals are well known for their hypocrisy regarding free speech.
It's not a matter of what you want to say, it's how loud you shout.
Money buys a bigger megaphone. And unfortunately, we tend to elect whoever shouts the loudest.