I noticed this in early 90's when I went to college. No delivery where I grew up, so the only time you saw a pizza was at Pizza Hut. And a large was ginormous. 16".
So I go away to school. They have delivery, I have no car (stupid rule if ever there was one. Talk about encouraging alcoholism) so order a pizza. Well, dumb me knows that a large is too much, so order a medium. And what arrives, but a small.
Now Pizza Hut advertises "The Big New Yorker". A full 16" pizza.
Yeah. Like the ones you used to sell, before decided that a 14" pizza was a large. BTW, thank you ever so much for not dropping the price when you dropped the sizes.
No, you sir (madam, celestial body, whatever) are not alone in your observation. As a matter of fact, my parents have an official Pizza Hut large pizza pan from the early-mid 80's. One of my father's patients has a couple dozen. For whatever reason, he gave my father a pizza pan. Guess what? It was an old large. The new large pizzas don't fill the pan.
Can't comment on the American idea of supersized drinks, but had an observation:
Aren't humans supposed to drink ~2 gallons of water per day? How many dixie cups does that take? I imagine your urine would be almost as dilute as that of a cat. (No, Americans are no better. The soft drinks we imbibe won't help set a reasonable osmotic balance in the system. That's why it should be water)
And rehashed an old Dennis Miller routine. It didn't start with coffee cups. First I remembered was resizing of McDonald's cold cups in the mid to late 80's. That was fine then, but now, when I want a small, it means I really want what is called the 'child size'. Ironically, when you get a happy meal, you don't get a 'child size', you get something even smaller.
The reason they don't put it on the menu board? It costs ten cents more for the 'small', but only has about 1 cent more cost involved. They 'lose money' (in the same way that pirates cause MPAA and RIAA companies to 'lose' money) by selling this size. That's why they push the barrel basket of popcorn at the movie theatre for 'only 25 cents more': because it only costs them 5 cents more, so they make an additional 20 cents.
"Do you want to supersize that?"
"No, moron. If I wanted to supersize it, I would have said 'Number 3, supersize', not 'Number 3, medium'" But I usually don't, as it is the owner/manager who will fire the drone if they forget to pimp supersize fries.
(BTW, call me in to testify against that fat bastard suing the fast food companies. Listen lard-ass, just order a medium! I'm fat, so fuck you, I'll call you lard ass if I want. I'm fat because *I* shovelled garbage down my gullet, not Mayor McCheese.)
Oh, and to those who say "the market will prevail": bullshit. McDonald's used to have an "All-American meal". Cheesburger (not 1/4 lb), fries (modern medium, traditional large), and a coke (modern medium, traditional large). It's exactly what I wanted. Doesn't exist anymore. Yes, the items are available separately, but have you ever ordered separate items at McDonald's? What a joke. Definately a roll of the dice as to whether those people get anything right. (I do this frequently. I'll get a medium two cheeseburger meal with an extra drink, sometimes extra fries for my wife and I to split. Then throw in a hamburger for junior.)
Blah. Gimme a gun, a knife, and an open fire. I'll get your supersized meal as soon as a buffalo comes walking by.
(Not even 30, and I'm becoming a 'bitter old man', ranting about 'the good old days')
Are there fatal flaws with NVidia and ATI's offerings? Why else the resurrection of these other companies? Is it because NVidia and ATI are getting monopoly rents?
a) it's possible for Apple to make fat binaries so that same proggy runs on ia32 and PPC macs?
b) gcc can already do this more or less?
If so, I must say that's cool as hell. Wish I knew a little more about such matters. It also seems that that would mean a switch would be much easier on developers.
Although, IMHO, still somewhat pointless from Apple's POV.
This guy lives in Hawaii, spent the money for solar, and is nickle and diming on computers?? What a screwball. I. Just. Don't. Get. It. And, FWIW, did he look for a desktop computer with non-commodity/low-power parts?
Why not just hook a car alternator up to an excercise bike, and pedal for that extra power. Yeah!
Ignore time value of money? Okay, giant leap of faith that is utterly bizarre and wholy unrealistic. Are you sure your wife's stock options are worth anything? Toilet paper is remarkably cheap.
I've looked at two issues. And there seem to be lots of articles like "Look at this product from this manufacturer. Buy it from this installer. Tabulate 'savings' based only on buying raw parts at wholesale." I was a bit disappointed, but it did seem that wind power might be doable/useful at my parents place.
It's doable, but as others have replied, not easy. Plenty of info on the internet (Google is your friend, Google is your friend). Suffice it to say that most state governments don't want to be bothered, and the electric company DEFINATELY doesn't want to be bothered.
Re:'Ask Slashdot' has taught me something.
on
Cheap KVM Over IP?
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· Score: 2
Wakko *has* taken a turn of late (past year). Much less patience with this sort of crufty 'engineering'. I think he just wants to use his Signal11 alias again:)
Re:Yes... but when he's done he'll have a clue...
on
Cheap KVM Over IP?
·
· Score: 1
While I too would like to see the tinkerers and thinkers, I also need it documented and repeatable in a corp. environment.
Okay, he's a staff writer for 'news.com.com'. What journalistic credit does this guy have? "Hi, I own shares of Dell and Intel. Can I write a 'story' that would pimp their stock prices?" Gimme a break. Perhaps the 50 page report has more info in it, but this is incredibly lame.
Apple has historically gone to great lengths to be compatible. First they could read PC floppies. Then fat binaries let 68k machines last for a long time after they were no longer sold. There is the compatibility layer in OSX. The idea is simply absurd.
I know next to nothing about compilers, but doesn't it stand to reason that Apple would have to redevelop most/all of their libraries, to say nothing of the compilers themselves? Particularly if they go off for some 'pseudo-x86' architecture like some are suggesting.
At that point, what will be the difference between Mac and Windows? Would companies even bother with MacOS ports, or would they just make some bit of middleware, so that the same binary could use the ABI of either system? (I'm talking way beyond my knowledge, so if it sounds like I don't know what I'm talking about, I don't.)
What would be gained by this? Go from 5% market share to 6%? Not worth the effort. Having access/drivers to PCI/AGP slots, USB, IDE, etc. makes sense. Not for the main architecture.
Hell, even Transmeta makes more sense than this sort of malarky. Get it to emulate PPC for old apps, ia64 for new stuff, or something like that. But straight Intel hardware? I think not.
Remember, even though they don't say it, the Mac is the 'computer for the rest of us'. While it's no longer the company line, don't doubt for a minute that Steve likes being a member of the elite. He likes it that cool Hollywood types use iMacs for computer scenes. He likes it that the kids of yuppie hipsters carry iPods.
Steve is not a commodity guy. Ask the owners of StarMax machines.
This article (and the one 'proving' the existence of super-duper-top-secret military aircraft) prove that in the eyes of the editors, today was a slow news day. Not slow enough to answer the question "what happens when VA is delisted" but slow, nonetheless.
Unfortunately, everything we *didn't* put in contracts is also costing us money (lost productivity, lack of some flexibility in reporting, etc.) The only question is which costs more.
Thanks for the info. I'm about 99% sure the client is written in VB (which I naturally don't have the source for:)
Wound up looking at and playing with rdesktop today. With that tool, I might be able to remove winNT from my workstation. Do the fun bits in Linux, and the painful bits in a term-services session.
We have a Cache DB for our medical billing system. I don't know if it is the front end or the back, but it sucks balls. Slow and funky.
Based on your positive impressions, perhaps I'll see if our vendor just doesn't know what they're doing. (I suspect it's whoever wrote the lousy client. It's... Well, perhaps it's not bad, but I've learned my lesson about what should and shouldn't go into software contracts.)
And as I, too, peer through my rose colored glasses, the flames were well intenioned jabs at friends, and you would all have the proverbial drink afterwards.
But, I must admit that my days were shortly after the days of the acoustic coupler.
It's the chicken and the egg: AT&T won't make bandwidth available because people don't use it
In seeing this, I think we see eye to eye. Probably just a matter of phrasing.
The problem is that AT&T has no incentive to offer broadband beyond revenue made on the connection. However, AOL-TW cable would have the incentive. They get money both on content and access. They can make one cheap to encourage adoption of the other. (But, it goes without saying that vertical monopolies have other problems).
I don't know what licensing (if any) was like up until the mid 70's. But a warrant of merchantibility probably didn't matter. Why? Because reputations were on the line. This shit was supposed to work. Welcome to 2002, where we, as consumers, expect crashes, lock-ups, lost documents, incomplete features, etc.
If the adolesence you speak of lasts too long, people will ask for these things even less than they do today.
I find it interesting that MicroSoft and others say "the reason we have feature XYZ in Word is because a few customers asked for it. We are a customer oriented company". Why interesting? When I talk to most people, stability is what they want. That, and ease of use/comprehension, without condescension (the latter is where Clippy fails).
Ironically, I see the market at work. Replace 'easier' with 'cheaper' in your argument, and it still makes sense. And to companies like AT&T and Disney, 'cheaper' always trumps 'easier'. Everybody on slashdot (myself included) is a free-marketer. Until the free-market comes crashing in on the slashdotter's domain. (Hmm, that works both figuratively and literally.)
Slashdot Mirror
Was your post at '0' because of stupid moderators on this, or are you stuck at '0' in general? That quote led to a fun Google search.
I actually did this for a while. Good call.
I noticed this in early 90's when I went to college. No delivery where I grew up, so the only time you saw a pizza was at Pizza Hut. And a large was ginormous. 16".
So I go away to school. They have delivery, I have no car (stupid rule if ever there was one. Talk about encouraging alcoholism) so order a pizza. Well, dumb me knows that a large is too much, so order a medium. And what arrives, but a small.
Now Pizza Hut advertises "The Big New Yorker". A full 16" pizza.
Yeah. Like the ones you used to sell, before decided that a 14" pizza was a large. BTW, thank you ever so much for not dropping the price when you dropped the sizes.
No, you sir (madam, celestial body, whatever) are not alone in your observation. As a matter of fact, my parents have an official Pizza Hut large pizza pan from the early-mid 80's. One of my father's patients has a couple dozen. For whatever reason, he gave my father a pizza pan. Guess what? It was an old large. The new large pizzas don't fill the pan.
Can't comment on the American idea of supersized drinks, but had an observation:
Aren't humans supposed to drink ~2 gallons of water per day? How many dixie cups does that take? I imagine your urine would be almost as dilute as that of a cat. (No, Americans are no better. The soft drinks we imbibe won't help set a reasonable osmotic balance in the system. That's why it should be water)
And rehashed an old Dennis Miller routine. It didn't start with coffee cups. First I remembered was resizing of McDonald's cold cups in the mid to late 80's. That was fine then, but now, when I want a small, it means I really want what is called the 'child size'. Ironically, when you get a happy meal, you don't get a 'child size', you get something even smaller.
The reason they don't put it on the menu board? It costs ten cents more for the 'small', but only has about 1 cent more cost involved. They 'lose money' (in the same way that pirates cause MPAA and RIAA companies to 'lose' money) by selling this size. That's why they push the barrel basket of popcorn at the movie theatre for 'only 25 cents more': because it only costs them 5 cents more, so they make an additional 20 cents.
"Do you want to supersize that?"
"No, moron. If I wanted to supersize it, I would have said 'Number 3, supersize', not 'Number 3, medium'" But I usually don't, as it is the owner/manager who will fire the drone if they forget to pimp supersize fries.
(BTW, call me in to testify against that fat bastard suing the fast food companies. Listen lard-ass, just order a medium! I'm fat, so fuck you, I'll call you lard ass if I want. I'm fat because *I* shovelled garbage down my gullet, not Mayor McCheese.)
Oh, and to those who say "the market will prevail": bullshit. McDonald's used to have an "All-American meal". Cheesburger (not 1/4 lb), fries (modern medium, traditional large), and a coke (modern medium, traditional large). It's exactly what I wanted. Doesn't exist anymore. Yes, the items are available separately, but have you ever ordered separate items at McDonald's? What a joke. Definately a roll of the dice as to whether those people get anything right. (I do this frequently. I'll get a medium two cheeseburger meal with an extra drink, sometimes extra fries for my wife and I to split. Then throw in a hamburger for junior.)
Blah. Gimme a gun, a knife, and an open fire. I'll get your supersized meal as soon as a buffalo comes walking by.
(Not even 30, and I'm becoming a 'bitter old man', ranting about 'the good old days')
Are there fatal flaws with NVidia and ATI's offerings? Why else the resurrection of these other companies? Is it because NVidia and ATI are getting monopoly rents?
Except:
Time: Priceless
Quicken + Crossover Office
Adjusted Total: $114.90
GNU Cash
Adjusted Total: $->infinity
Ummm... Everything with a BSD license?
So you are saying that:
a) it's possible for Apple to make fat binaries so that same proggy runs on ia32 and PPC macs?
b) gcc can already do this more or less?
If so, I must say that's cool as hell. Wish I knew a little more about such matters. It also seems that that would mean a switch would be much easier on developers.
Although, IMHO, still somewhat pointless from Apple's POV.
This guy lives in Hawaii, spent the money for solar, and is nickle and diming on computers?? What a screwball. I. Just. Don't. Get. It. And, FWIW, did he look for a desktop computer with non-commodity/low-power parts?
Why not just hook a car alternator up to an excercise bike, and pedal for that extra power. Yeah!
Screwball.
Ignore time value of money? Okay, giant leap of faith that is utterly bizarre and wholy unrealistic. Are you sure your wife's stock options are worth anything? Toilet paper is remarkably cheap.
I've looked at two issues. And there seem to be lots of articles like "Look at this product from this manufacturer. Buy it from this installer. Tabulate 'savings' based only on buying raw parts at wholesale." I was a bit disappointed, but it did seem that wind power might be doable/useful at my parents place.
It's doable, but as others have replied, not easy. Plenty of info on the internet (Google is your friend, Google is your friend). Suffice it to say that most state governments don't want to be bothered, and the electric company DEFINATELY doesn't want to be bothered.
Wakko *has* taken a turn of late (past year). Much less patience with this sort of crufty 'engineering'. I think he just wants to use his Signal11 alias again:)
While I too would like to see the tinkerers and thinkers, I also need it documented and repeatable in a corp. environment.
Redhat? What about VA? Wouldn't it be nice if they at least had some goodwill left to write off?
Okay, he's a staff writer for 'news.com.com'. What journalistic credit does this guy have? "Hi, I own shares of Dell and Intel. Can I write a 'story' that would pimp their stock prices?" Gimme a break. Perhaps the 50 page report has more info in it, but this is incredibly lame.
Apple has historically gone to great lengths to be compatible. First they could read PC floppies. Then fat binaries let 68k machines last for a long time after they were no longer sold. There is the compatibility layer in OSX. The idea is simply absurd.
I know next to nothing about compilers, but doesn't it stand to reason that Apple would have to redevelop most/all of their libraries, to say nothing of the compilers themselves? Particularly if they go off for some 'pseudo-x86' architecture like some are suggesting.
At that point, what will be the difference between Mac and Windows? Would companies even bother with MacOS ports, or would they just make some bit of middleware, so that the same binary could use the ABI of either system? (I'm talking way beyond my knowledge, so if it sounds like I don't know what I'm talking about, I don't.)
What would be gained by this? Go from 5% market share to 6%? Not worth the effort. Having access/drivers to PCI/AGP slots, USB, IDE, etc. makes sense. Not for the main architecture.
Hell, even Transmeta makes more sense than this sort of malarky. Get it to emulate PPC for old apps, ia64 for new stuff, or something like that. But straight Intel hardware? I think not.
Remember, even though they don't say it, the Mac is the 'computer for the rest of us'. While it's no longer the company line, don't doubt for a minute that Steve likes being a member of the elite. He likes it that cool Hollywood types use iMacs for computer scenes. He likes it that the kids of yuppie hipsters carry iPods.
Steve is not a commodity guy. Ask the owners of StarMax machines.
This article (and the one 'proving' the existence of super-duper-top-secret military aircraft) prove that in the eyes of the editors, today was a slow news day. Not slow enough to answer the question "what happens when VA is delisted" but slow, nonetheless.
Unfortunately, everything we *didn't* put in contracts is also costing us money (lost productivity, lack of some flexibility in reporting, etc.) The only question is which costs more.
Thanks for the info. I'm about 99% sure the client is written in VB (which I naturally don't have the source for:)
Wound up looking at and playing with rdesktop today. With that tool, I might be able to remove winNT from my workstation. Do the fun bits in Linux, and the painful bits in a term-services session.
Perhaps if you substitute 'database' with 'RDBMS' it makes more sense?
We have a Cache DB for our medical billing system. I don't know if it is the front end or the back, but it sucks balls. Slow and funky.
Based on your positive impressions, perhaps I'll see if our vendor just doesn't know what they're doing. (I suspect it's whoever wrote the lousy client. It's... Well, perhaps it's not bad, but I've learned my lesson about what should and shouldn't go into software contracts.)
And as I, too, peer through my rose colored glasses, the flames were well intenioned jabs at friends, and you would all have the proverbial drink afterwards.
But, I must admit that my days were shortly after the days of the acoustic coupler.
It's the chicken and the egg: AT&T won't make bandwidth available because people don't use it
In seeing this, I think we see eye to eye. Probably just a matter of phrasing.
The problem is that AT&T has no incentive to offer broadband beyond revenue made on the connection. However, AOL-TW cable would have the incentive. They get money both on content and access. They can make one cheap to encourage adoption of the other. (But, it goes without saying that vertical monopolies have other problems).
I don't know what licensing (if any) was like up until the mid 70's. But a warrant of merchantibility probably didn't matter. Why? Because reputations were on the line. This shit was supposed to work. Welcome to 2002, where we, as consumers, expect crashes, lock-ups, lost documents, incomplete features, etc.
If the adolesence you speak of lasts too long, people will ask for these things even less than they do today.
I find it interesting that MicroSoft and others say "the reason we have feature XYZ in Word is because a few customers asked for it. We are a customer oriented company". Why interesting? When I talk to most people, stability is what they want. That, and ease of use/comprehension, without condescension (the latter is where Clippy fails).
Go here and see all the 12v tv's you could want. I'm sure they have DVD players as well, or will soon. Or just get an inverter or diesel generator.
With the fish plant.... Why do you have computers there? It's just more stuff for me to blow up when I return from 8-ball's shop with the garbage truck. Seriously, that's what offices are for. If you must have something, look at medical enclosures.
Ironically, I see the market at work. Replace 'easier' with 'cheaper' in your argument, and it still makes sense. And to companies like AT&T and Disney, 'cheaper' always trumps 'easier'. Everybody on slashdot (myself included) is a free-marketer. Until the free-market comes crashing in on the slashdotter's domain. (Hmm, that works both figuratively and literally.)