Your second mistake was thinking that a Wal-Mart drone could ever have anything approaching useful information.
Your third mistake was shopping at Wal-Mart.
Sensing a pattern?
Wal-Mart is killing the American dream in slow motion. Every dime you spend there furthers their goals of complete marketplace and labor relations supremacy. (In other words, they want ALL the money and they want to pay you NOTHING.)
It was people like you who pushed for the vast expansion of federal power into the realm of private commerce.
To:
I haven't bombed anything, and am opposed to war in general, but sometimes dropping bombs is necessary to prevent slugs like you from further tyrannizing and murdering innocents.
*blink*
That's an awful big jump. You're equating advocating an expansion of federal authority with terrorist acts and genocide? Oh, wait, nevermind, it's an ad hominem attack. For those of you in red states, here's a definition:
Main Entry: 1ad hominem Pronunciation: (')ad-'hä-m&-"nem, -n&m Function: adjective Etymology: New Latin, literally, to the person 1 : appealing to feelings or prejudices rather than intellect 2 : marked by an attack on an opponent's character rather than by an answer to the contentions made
Also, you may be interested to know that opposing "the myriads of laws, regulations and petty tyrannies we are forced to live under today" is in fact a Libertarian view. Harry Browne asked me to let you know he can't make your lunch date next week, but your support is valued.
And those petty tyrannies keep the highways maintained, our truck drivers drug-free, and the Department of Homeland Security funded. Why do you hate America?
Don't you think there is a reason Apple sends out a $179 OSX update every single year?
You must mean AU$ or CDN$. I see a price of $129 on store.apple.com right now.
Look how infrequently Microsoft releases paid OS updates.
That's part of the problem. I bet most windows users would pay for an OS that's updated more often than every 4 years or so (excluding security patches). (Anyone seen Longhorn?)
I'd be willing to bet that the majority of the current Apple supporters would still buy Apple hardware.
And I'd be willing to bet that many people who buy Apple hardware now resent the premium pricing, especially in the enterprise. If a cheaper alternative were available Apple would see a serious dent in their hardware sales.
While a poster above pointed out that the software model has fixed costs, and the increase in sales of the OS software would be nearly pure profit after development costs are covered (this isn't the end of the costs associated with developing and selling an operating system, you still have to pay people to create updates, patches, and answer the support phones after the OS ships), even if Apple were to make $100 on each copy of OS X sold, they'd lose the >$100 amount of profit by not selling the Mac hardware to go with it. (Some Mac models' selling prices were 50% profit. I don't know if that's still the case [thinking of the Mac Plus days, I'm old] but I have to imagine that they still get more than $100 profit on each Mac sold.)
There's the caveat that any solution that allows OS X to run on commodity x86 hardware would involve a software/hardware hack of some kind. You might think that that would give the enterprise users some pause. But in a lot of cases, you'd be wrong. Given the choice between saving $1000 a seat by circumventing some DRM or paying the Mac premium, many companies will choose to save the money, which is a sure thing, versus the risk of being prosecuted under the DCMA (I'm guessing here, IANAL) for the hacks.
Owning a MAC will not make you better at Graphic design! The machine doesnt make the artist!
What does an ethernet address have to do with graphic design?
(Before you flame, note that the parent poster used the correct version, "Mac", in his third sentence, so clearly he must have been referring to an ethernet address in his second.)
What about the revenue from millions of OS X installations?
Apple makes next to nothing on its software sales. In fact, some of its products are sold at a loss. The lion's share of Apple's revenue comes from hardware sales.
And you people just take this kind of shit from the employers, up the ass, unlubed. Have you lazy fucks lost your mind? FIGHT BACK, or it's going to get worse.
"You're fired." So much for fighting back. Bear in mind that in most states there need not be a reason provided for a termination, and even in the ones that do, "Refusing to comply with corporate policy" will work nicely.
To Anonymous Luddite, please let us know which company you work for, so we can avoid it. Thanks!
Too much of an obstacle to the (American) general market. Most drivers in this country don't know what a clutch *is*, let alone how to work one. Add that to the average American's irrational prejudice against electric cars in general, and you've got a non-starter (if you'll pardon the slight pun.)
Ever try to sell a second-hand car with a manual transmission? Inevitably the prospective buyer comes by to see the car, says "Oh, it's a manual! I can't drive one of those!" or, more depressingly, "Why does the shifter have all those numbers on it? Where's 'Drive'?" and you have to explain what a manual transmission is.
My understanding is this is less of a hurdle in the European market.
Companies have IT personal who fix their computers.
"personnel" is the word you're meaning, I think.
Now that my spelling fascism has worked itself out, not every company has IT staff, either because a) they can't afford them, b) they can't be bothered to hire anyone, c) they can't hire anyone for cheap enough, d) they don't understand what IT staff do, so therefore they can't be important, or e) all of the above.
If you think every company from the mom-and-pops to Fortune 500 companies have compentent and/or sufficient IT staffing to manage their systems, you're the dumb one here. Even huge financial services companies like Fidelity, with ginormous amounts of liquid cash, are guilty of paying as little as possible for IT staff, because they are perceived as a cost center only; they produce no direct revenue on the balance sheet. (Case in point; at one of their regional offices recently, the entire IT staff was told that they were fired, and if they wanted to continue working there they would have to sign on with a consulting company, at reduced wages and no benefits. The fact that that's the shortest path to an IT department that completely doesn't give a shit about anything but showing up for 8 hours and collecting a paycheck never crossed the bean counters' minds.)
A good, compentent IT staff is invisible, and while that arguably is what the position strives for, it makes it extremely vulnerable to short-sighted job cuts and stupid HR/accounting tricks.
I wonder how long it'll be before nVidia decides to pull a Lexmark and start suing people who distribute this information/software under the DMCA.
After all, if you can buy a cheaper card and turn it into the equivalent of the more expensive card, you're hurting nVidia financially. And while the clause in the DMCA I'm thinking of refers to defeating copy protection, one could argue (provided one threw enough lawyers/money at the situation) that unlocking the extra pipelines that nVidia locked constitutes defeating a software protection.
If your only ambitions are to get married and live in the burbs then nothing is going to help you.
WTF? Is an ambition to live a "normal, quiet life" something to be derided now? Many people want nothing more than to be comfortable, be secure financially, and raise a family. They do that by developing their skills and experience in such a way as to make that possible, just like people who have different ambitions; the motivation is irrelevant. Sure, lots of people want to be CEOs and millionaires, and lots of people want to drop off the grid and live whatever lifestyle they choose. None of these choices are any less "correct" than the other.
The fears you highlight are not uncommon, but they are unfounded. Companies from India are not developing very good software.
This presumes that the driving factor in software development is building a quality product. More often than not in the business world these days, the only important factor in generating product is how cheaply it can be made. This means paying your employees as little as possible.
And the cultural and distance barriers are make it very unlikely management's 'vision' for a project are translated correctly.
More often than not the 'vision' for a product doesn't extend much past the dollars and cents. Granted, the primary function of a business is to generate profits. But lately it's the *only* function.
The only thing the offshoring option has done is hold wages down a bit for the last three years
Then it's a success. Nevermind that the product created is often a steaming pile of binary manure; that just means they can sell more highly lucrative service contracts. (The fact that a poorly created product generates higher costs after the sale, in terms of support, is not a factor in the equation. They're making money NOW, and NOW is all that matters. Next quarter isn't important.) Even the extra work involved in generating feature requirements, etc. can be done by lower paid workers on US soil instead of US developers, and since you can still pay an Indian developer a quarter of what you have to pay a US developer, there is a savings.
but prices in India are going up too.
But not enough to take away the savings, not yet anyway. And you have to remember that wages are only one factor in compensation, more so here than in India. Over here we have silly things like Social Security, Medicare, OSHA, unemployment insurance, liability insurance, etc., all of which cost an employer money that doesn't necessarily show up on a pay stub. Lots of companies resent having to pay these costs, and will avoid paying them even if it's a break-even situation.
SACD and DVD-A are not failing to catch on because of a platform war. They are failing to catch on because nobody cares.
I care. Lots of other people do, too. It'd be more accurate to say the majority of the music-consuming public doesn't care (or even know) about these formats.
but rather a naked attempt by the label to sell you a slightly more flashy second copy of an album you already bought
They said the same thing with cassette tapes and CDs. The world didn't come to an end, because the formats were improvements over what was available (in the areas of portability and sound quality, respectively.) That being said, there is some truth to what you're saying. (There were albums that I hadn't bought before that I got on SACD because of the improvement in quality.)
Who in the hell is going to buy an alternate player just to support a format which offers pretty much no real advantage to the consumer?
Here's where you lose me. You can get a player that plays SACD, DVD-Audio, any recordable/rewritable disk you can name, DVD movies, and CDs for under $150. I've got one of those. I can easily tell the difference between CDs and high resolution formats. My wife (who isn't nearly the "audiophile" (champagne taste and a beer budget) that I am, can also tell the difference. Anyone who tells you there's no improvement in sound quality has crappy equipment, lousy hearing, or an overdeveloped apathy gland; possibly all three.
neither SACD or DVD-A is inherently portable in the way that CD's are.
The one difference here is that SACDs have a "legacy" CD layer so your SACD will play in any CD player, at CD quality. The DualDisc format has attempted to address that (DVD-Audio/Video on one side, CD on the other).
Unfortunately I think high resolution/surround music formats will remain niche players for at least the immediate future; your average listener doesn't have the setup to take advantage of the extra channels/improved sound quality, and any attempt at education of the average consumer is doomed to fail unless it results in a cheaper product (thanks, Wal-Mart). And even if they do have a 5.1 setup, chances are they've put all the speakers in a corner, defeating the purpose. (One high point, they still press vinyl records. NIN's With Teeth even has a bonus track only available on the 12" vinyl. Almost enough to make me start to look at turntables. But where the hell do you put a turntable these days? No spot in my entertainment center has the top-down access necessary.)
'You only have to speak to anyone involved in getting it out there. There are a lot of us out there who both do and do not work for Sun.'
Both do and do not work for Sun? I wasn't aware the Heisinger Uncertainty Principle applied to employment. If I called to verify employment, would that change his status?
Slashdot Mirror
Your first mistake was shopping at Wal-Mart.
Your second mistake was thinking that a Wal-Mart drone could ever have anything approaching useful information.
Your third mistake was shopping at Wal-Mart.
Sensing a pattern?
Wal-Mart is killing the American dream in slow motion. Every dime you spend there furthers their goals of complete marketplace and labor relations supremacy. (In other words, they want ALL the money and they want to pay you NOTHING.)
From:
It was people like you who pushed for the vast expansion of federal power into the realm of private commerce.
To:
I haven't bombed anything, and am opposed to war in general, but sometimes dropping bombs is necessary to prevent slugs like you from further tyrannizing and murdering innocents.
*blink*
That's an awful big jump. You're equating advocating an expansion of federal authority with terrorist acts and genocide?
Oh, wait, nevermind, it's an ad hominem attack. For those of you in red states, here's a definition:
Main Entry: 1ad hominem
Pronunciation: (')ad-'hä-m&-"nem, -n&m
Function: adjective
Etymology: New Latin, literally, to the person
1 : appealing to feelings or prejudices rather than intellect
2 : marked by an attack on an opponent's character rather than by an answer to the contentions made
Also, you may be interested to know that opposing "the myriads of laws, regulations and petty tyrannies we are forced to live under today" is in fact a Libertarian view. Harry Browne asked me to let you know he can't make your lunch date next week, but your support is valued.
And those petty tyrannies keep the highways maintained, our truck drivers drug-free, and the Department of Homeland Security funded. Why do you hate America?
Damn, you sound like Tony Robbins on Quaaludes.
Don't you think there is a reason Apple sends out a $179 OSX update every single year?
You must mean AU$ or CDN$. I see a price of $129 on store.apple.com right now.
Look how infrequently Microsoft releases paid OS updates.
That's part of the problem. I bet most windows users would pay for an OS that's updated more often than every 4 years or so (excluding security patches). (Anyone seen Longhorn?)
I didn't post that as an AC.
I'd be willing to bet that the majority of the current Apple supporters would still buy Apple hardware.
And I'd be willing to bet that many people who buy Apple hardware now resent the premium pricing, especially in the enterprise. If a cheaper alternative were available Apple would see a serious dent in their hardware sales.
While a poster above pointed out that the software model has fixed costs, and the increase in sales of the OS software would be nearly pure profit after development costs are covered (this isn't the end of the costs associated with developing and selling an operating system, you still have to pay people to create updates, patches, and answer the support phones after the OS ships), even if Apple were to make $100 on each copy of OS X sold, they'd lose the >$100 amount of profit by not selling the Mac hardware to go with it. (Some Mac models' selling prices were 50% profit. I don't know if that's still the case [thinking of the Mac Plus days, I'm old] but I have to imagine that they still get more than $100 profit on each Mac sold.)
There's the caveat that any solution that allows OS X to run on commodity x86 hardware would involve a software/hardware hack of some kind. You might think that that would give the enterprise users some pause. But in a lot of cases, you'd be wrong. Given the choice between saving $1000 a seat by circumventing some DRM or paying the Mac premium, many companies will choose to save the money, which is a sure thing, versus the risk of being prosecuted under the DCMA (I'm guessing here, IANAL) for the hacks.
Owning a MAC will not make you better at Graphic design! The machine doesnt make the artist!
What does an ethernet address have to do with graphic design?
(Before you flame, note that the parent poster used the correct version, "Mac", in his third sentence, so clearly he must have been referring to an ethernet address in his second.)
What about the revenue from millions of OS X installations?
Apple makes next to nothing on its software sales. In fact, some of its products are sold at a loss. The lion's share of Apple's revenue comes from hardware sales.
And you people just take this kind of shit from the employers, up the ass, unlubed. Have you lazy fucks lost your mind? FIGHT BACK, or it's going to get worse.
"You're fired." So much for fighting back. Bear in mind that in most states there need not be a reason provided for a termination, and even in the ones that do, "Refusing to comply with corporate policy" will work nicely.
To Anonymous Luddite, please let us know which company you work for, so we can avoid it. Thanks!
That would be all of them.
There's that irrational prejudice I was talking about above.
Too much of an obstacle to the (American) general market. Most drivers in this country don't know what a clutch *is*, let alone how to work one. Add that to the average American's irrational prejudice against electric cars in general, and you've got a non-starter (if you'll pardon the slight pun.)
Ever try to sell a second-hand car with a manual transmission? Inevitably the prospective buyer comes by to see the car, says "Oh, it's a manual! I can't drive one of those!" or, more depressingly, "Why does the shifter have all those numbers on it? Where's 'Drive'?" and you have to explain what a manual transmission is.
My understanding is this is less of a hurdle in the European market.
Have you seen most of the junk Hollywood puts out? They seem to think that all consumers are second class.
They are. What's your point?
Hey, at least they're not HPs or eMachines. Dell has at least a passing familiarity with standard components.
Companies have IT personal who fix their computers.
"personnel" is the word you're meaning, I think.
Now that my spelling fascism has worked itself out, not every company has IT staff, either because a) they can't afford them, b) they can't be bothered to hire anyone, c) they can't hire anyone for cheap enough, d) they don't understand what IT staff do, so therefore they can't be important, or e) all of the above.
If you think every company from the mom-and-pops to Fortune 500 companies have compentent and/or sufficient IT staffing to manage their systems, you're the dumb one here. Even huge financial services companies like Fidelity, with ginormous amounts of liquid cash, are guilty of paying as little as possible for IT staff, because they are perceived as a cost center only; they produce no direct revenue on the balance sheet. (Case in point; at one of their regional offices recently, the entire IT staff was told that they were fired, and if they wanted to continue working there they would have to sign on with a consulting company, at reduced wages and no benefits. The fact that that's the shortest path to an IT department that completely doesn't give a shit about anything but showing up for 8 hours and collecting a paycheck never crossed the bean counters' minds.)
A good, compentent IT staff is invisible, and while that arguably is what the position strives for, it makes it extremely vulnerable to short-sighted job cuts and stupid HR/accounting tricks.
I wonder how long it'll be before nVidia decides to pull a Lexmark and start suing people who distribute this information/software under the DMCA.
After all, if you can buy a cheaper card and turn it into the equivalent of the more expensive card, you're hurting nVidia financially. And while the clause in the DMCA I'm thinking of refers to defeating copy protection, one could argue (provided one threw enough lawyers/money at the situation) that unlocking the extra pipelines that nVidia locked constitutes defeating a software protection.
IANAL.
Disney's lawyers can beat up anyone else's lawyers.
You only get as many rights as you can pay for.
Jeez, I thought I was cynical :)
Oh wait, I am.
If your only ambitions are to get married and live in the burbs then nothing is going to help you.
WTF? Is an ambition to live a "normal, quiet life" something to be derided now? Many people want nothing more than to be comfortable, be secure financially, and raise a family. They do that by developing their skills and experience in such a way as to make that possible, just like people who have different ambitions; the motivation is irrelevant. Sure, lots of people want to be CEOs and millionaires, and lots of people want to drop off the grid and live whatever lifestyle they choose. None of these choices are any less "correct" than the other.
What's your problem, anyway?
The fears you highlight are not uncommon, but they are unfounded. Companies from India are not developing very good software.
This presumes that the driving factor in software development is building a quality product. More often than not in the business world these days, the only important factor in generating product is how cheaply it can be made. This means paying your employees as little as possible.
And the cultural and distance barriers are make it very unlikely management's 'vision' for a project are translated correctly.
More often than not the 'vision' for a product doesn't extend much past the dollars and cents. Granted, the primary function of a business is to generate profits. But lately it's the *only* function.
The only thing the offshoring option has done is hold wages down a bit for the last three years
Then it's a success. Nevermind that the product created is often a steaming pile of binary manure; that just means they can sell more highly lucrative service contracts. (The fact that a poorly created product generates higher costs after the sale, in terms of support, is not a factor in the equation. They're making money NOW, and NOW is all that matters. Next quarter isn't important.) Even the extra work involved in generating feature requirements, etc. can be done by lower paid workers on US soil instead of US developers, and since you can still pay an Indian developer a quarter of what you have to pay a US developer, there is a savings.
but prices in India are going up too.
But not enough to take away the savings, not yet anyway. And you have to remember that wages are only one factor in compensation, more so here than in India. Over here we have silly things like Social Security, Medicare, OSHA, unemployment insurance, liability insurance, etc., all of which cost an employer money that doesn't necessarily show up on a pay stub. Lots of companies resent having to pay these costs, and will avoid paying them even if it's a break-even situation.
SACD and DVD-A are not failing to catch on because of a platform war. They are failing to catch on because nobody cares.
I care. Lots of other people do, too. It'd be more accurate to say the majority of the music-consuming public doesn't care (or even know) about these formats.
but rather a naked attempt by the label to sell you a slightly more flashy second copy of an album you already bought
They said the same thing with cassette tapes and CDs. The world didn't come to an end, because the formats were improvements over what was available (in the areas of portability and sound quality, respectively.) That being said, there is some truth to what you're saying. (There were albums that I hadn't bought before that I got on SACD because of the improvement in quality.)
Who in the hell is going to buy an alternate player just to support a format which offers pretty much no real advantage to the consumer?
Here's where you lose me. You can get a player that plays SACD, DVD-Audio, any recordable/rewritable disk you can name, DVD movies, and CDs for under $150. I've got one of those. I can easily tell the difference between CDs and high resolution formats. My wife (who isn't nearly the "audiophile" (champagne taste and a beer budget) that I am, can also tell the difference. Anyone who tells you there's no improvement in sound quality has crappy equipment, lousy hearing, or an overdeveloped apathy gland; possibly all three.
neither SACD or DVD-A is inherently portable in the way that CD's are.
The one difference here is that SACDs have a "legacy" CD layer so your SACD will play in any CD player, at CD quality. The DualDisc format has attempted to address that (DVD-Audio/Video on one side, CD on the other).
Unfortunately I think high resolution/surround music formats will remain niche players for at least the immediate future; your average listener doesn't have the setup to take advantage of the extra channels/improved sound quality, and any attempt at education of the average consumer is doomed to fail unless it results in a cheaper product (thanks, Wal-Mart). And even if they do have a 5.1 setup, chances are they've put all the speakers in a corner, defeating the purpose. (One high point, they still press vinyl records. NIN's With Teeth even has a bonus track only available on the 12" vinyl. Almost enough to make me start to look at turntables. But where the hell do you put a turntable these days? No spot in my entertainment center has the top-down access necessary.)
'You only have to speak to anyone involved in getting it out there. There are a lot of us out there who both do and do not work for Sun.'
Both do and do not work for Sun? I wasn't aware the Heisinger Uncertainty Principle applied to employment. If I called to verify employment, would that change his status?
Coherence surrenders.
What? this isn't Fark?
And because you read it on /., it MUST be true >:)
There's a D&D "ultravision" joke there somewhere, but I'm not awake enough to find it.