Jobs wanted custom CPU's at commodity chip prices. I believe that IBM took one look at what Jobs wanted, what he was willing to pay, and said "no thank you".
Do you recall that little American Revolution way back in the mid 1770's? You know, the one the then-English colonies were LOSING? The U.S. would have been in quite a pickle without the French providing financial and military aid. Sure, it was in their own self-interest, but that makes their aid no less valuable.
Just because a Revolution receives assisstance from the outside makes it no more or less legitimate.
I've read about this company before. However, I'm not sold on it, and at last check (a couple of monhts ago), their website was remarkably bereft of useful technical detail.
My biggest question is how they handle free space tracking? Unless this box has "hooks" into the filesystem, it is not going to have the faintest clue when data has been deleted.
Also, can you say "Holy Fragmentation Batman!"? Again, pretty intense "hooks" into the filesystem are going to be required in order to keep files even remotely together. A tape backup of a large file on this mess is going to take all 'freakin week.
I'll take good-'ol-fashioned file or volume-based HSM, which has been around for a great many years, over this block-based stuff any day of the week. I might change my mind if they published some nice juicy technical papers on how they handled free-space and fragmentation issues.
There are a couple of ways publishers can also loose out: for instance, if a user clicks through but doesn't make a purchase only to return to the advertiser's site the next day or week and make the purchase, will the publisher be compensated appropriately?
This is no different from CPC in this respect. If a user sees an ad for a company, and then vists the site a week (or a page) later, the publisher gets no money then either.
SirWired
Alas, it is hard to find good writing instruments
on
Manual Writing Tools?
·
· Score: 1
My personal favorite is an old Koh-I-Noor 0.5mm Rapidomatic Engineer's Pencil. Nothing beats the knurled Aluminum grip for multi-hour writing sessions. Unfortunately, they shallowed out the knurling some in '97 or '98, which makes it too slippery for multi-hour writing sessions. I've tried a Berol substitute, but the barrel is too heavy, round (instead of hexagonal), and I don't like the rubberized coating.
All true geeks also do work not in some cheap spiral notebook, nor some hoity-toity Moleskine, but in an "Engineer's Computation Pad", available in college bookstores everywhere. Low-eyestrain green tint, high-quality bond, and graph lines on the back that show through enough for easy diagramming, but not so much they show up in a scan or Xerox.
I know that fountain pens are a classic fine writing instrument, but they are tough to use for lefties, and involve using absorbent writing paper (to keep my left hand from smearing the ink), instead of whatever is handy. Plus, I make mistakes.
The reason it is late and buggy is the absurd devotion to backwards compatability. I don't understand it. I could accept software compatability, but the hardware aspect is mystifying.
For a single desktop user, near-perpetual backward compatibility is not much of a value-add, and only adds to costs. For businesses, it is absolutely vital, and something worth paying a LOT of money for. If 20-years worth of records are stored on peripheral X, you better be able to read it on machine Y years later.
Compared to IBM, Microsoft has not even begun to see the merest glimmer of backwards compatibility issues. IBM has maintained backwards software and hardware compatibility for the S/360 series for forty-two years! IIRC you can literally take an operating punch card reader, hook it up to a succession of interface adapters, and actually boot a fresh-from-the-factory CPU from the thing without changing a single line of code. (Unless of course your code depends on the timing of a 1964-era CPU, in which case your code might need to slip your decimal points a few places.)
Not a single instruction has been removed from the instruction set, not a single interface removed from hooks into the O/S.
I'm not sure the ability to play DVD's makes any difference at all anymore. When you can buy an entire player from your local drugstore for $20 (on sale), I really don't think folks are going to avoid the Wii because it doesn't play DVD's right out of the box.
If 99.9% of the homes that will buy a Wii already have a DVD player, isn't it to everybody's advantage to not have to pay the licensing fees for yet another player?
Halogen lamps have the bulb bit made out of quartz, which makes the halogen air inside react with the tungsten that has corroded off, and pushes it back on to the tungsten. So the corroded tungsten is continually put back on.
Close, but not quite. The bulbs are made of quartz because it can withstand the heat much better than a thin glass envelope. The quartz has nothing to do with the tungsten redisposition. The tungsten redisposition is because of the reaction with the halide gas that the bulb is filled with (iodine or bromine). This is natrually where the name "Halogen" comes from.
When I did desktop support in college, I spent many an hour cursing the engineer at Acer (which is where IBM OEM'd the Crap-tiva from), who decided that flathead screws with shallow screw slots had ANY place in a computer case. I got "bit" by my screwdriver several times trying to install network cards in those damn things. (Don't even get me started on what those boxes did once you actually tried to get Novell working on them.)
IBM's (err... Lenovo's) current "business" desktop cases are an intesting study in constrasts. Tool-free design, decent access, and a very sturdy all-metal chassis. However, the two bays intended for hard drives are too far apart to string an ATA cable between them. For newer models that use SATA, this isn't a problem, but it was more than a tad frustrating when I went to install a second drive in my two-year old P4.
I don't know anything about those new Lenovo consumer cases.
Server cases are something else entirely. For all the customer-replacable parts, cases from all three major vendors (IBM, HP, and Dell) are pretty much a piece of cake.
In the uproar over how much more consoles (or electronics in general) cost in the UK and Europe, folks always forget about the VAT. (Value Added Tax)
IIRC, in the UK, Europe, and Canada, the VAT is included in the advertised (and paid) price. In the US, the rough equivalent (Sales Tax) is never included in the advertised price (except for Gasoline for some reason). Of course, not all localities in the US charge sales tax, the amount varies depending on where you live, and the amount is lower than VAT.
A more fair comparison would be to take the VAT out of the price, and THEN compare how much the equipment costs in various countries. That determines how much the manufactuer and retailer actually receives for the console.
First off, Whew! That is a long reply! (Not meant as an insult, just a note of respect for the amount of effort you put into it.) I think we do in fact agree on most points.
Firstly, sorry I used all caps frequently in my post. I am a lazy typist and just use the shift key when I probably should be slapping italics or underline tags around a word or two. I don't use all caps when it is longer than a word or two since that is indeed hard to read. (In this post, I will use plain italics for a direct quote of your most recent post, bold-italics for earlier posts of mine, and underline when I wish to emphasize something in a quote. I'll use italics to emphasize single words or short phrases.) I swear, with my right hand upon my most treasured copy of K&R, ANSI C Edition, that I did not mean to "shout".:-)
And, as you might have expected, my legal background is somewhat limited. It consists of two law classes in college (one in general law, the other in business law), which I took as some of my humanities electives during my engineering degree program at a decent mid-atlantic university. (I did receive an "A" in both and totatally demolished the curve, but admittedly the competition wasn't exactly up to Harvard Law standards.) Those classes were seven years ago, and contract law doesn't come up very often when I am sitting in my cube going blind reading hexidecimal line traces.
First, if we are going to nitpick about who said what, a few corrections:
If you take the time to read what you said, you'll discover that in fact you made no such restraint on who could claim an invalidated sale, allcaps notwithstanding.
If you read the original post I wrote, it's right there (although I didn't use all-caps or any form of emphasis at the time):
there is no obligation for me to actually pay that much money for something clearly[emphasis added] worth much less.
Well, the problem is that you're neglecting issues of sentimentality, collectorship, scarcity, timed availability and so on.
If you read my most recent reply, you will see that I specifically said that: "we will ignore the special case of collector's items, out-of-print albums, etc. " I was trying to present an example of a good with easily determinable open-market value. I am sorry if the Billy Joel CD I purchased last weekend was an unclear example. I suppose matters of clarity are why these sorts of suits even make it to courts in the first place. In my original post, I was dashing off a quick one-paragraph reply, not trying to file a legal brief, so I didn't see any need to emphasize a "clear" error.
The timeline of payment for a contract does not determine whether or not it is valid.
Luckily, I never said that it did.
Actually, you did say that payment for a contract made it final (at least, that is how I read it): If you offer to pay $1000 for a Billy Joel CD, and enter into a binding contract or exchange currency, that's just final, period.
Given that elsewhere in your latest post you mention that most contracts aren't binding (more on that later), I am interpreting that to say you were saying that once a contract is paid for, it cannot be reversed. (Or, if we want to use the legal term, "no longer subject to recission".) I suspect we are talking past each other here, since I am having trouble figuring out what your WotC example is supposed to be illustrating in regards to the timeline of payment. Could you explain what you are getting at? (This is a sincere request, not any indication that I am anything less then impressed of your discussion of value.)
That said, I wasn't aware Linden had a "BTW, everything we are selling you is worthless" clause in the contract". This is probably a standard term for such contracts, since it also protects them against such things as data loss due to a system crash, but I thought it was clever nonetheless.
If it is consistently cured with antibiotics, then it ISN'T a parasite. And bacteria don't create little worms crawling out of your skin. (Note, however, that parasitical infections can go away on their own.)
The woman in the article mentioned she saw spaghetti-like things crawling out of her son's chest. She pulled, but "couldn't pull it out." That is a very convenient excuse for not being able to produce a sample. Has this woman never heard of scissors, or are these things as tough as steel too?
Parisitologists and infectious disease researchers LIVE to discover new interesting afflictions. Believe me, if we had a new genuine disease causing spectacularly impressive crap to crawl out of victims skin, there would be journal articles about it in a minute. Also, wouldn't such obvious symptoms make it pretty damn easy to diagnose?
Lyme disease, yeah, that was a toughie to initially diagnose because the symptoms are so varied and suble. But fiber-like-stuff crawling out of people is pretty unambiguous.
And, "black flecks coming from pimples"? Err... sounds like blackheads to me.
That website is pathetic. Several pages of pictures, most of which look like shredded yarn scraps. It would have been a lot more convincing if there were pictures of the yarn crap actually coming from people. We do have some blurry shots of skin-like-substance with something on them, but nothing in particular to identify. Have these folks ever heard of "macro" mode?
I have heard of nasty parasitical infections indeed causing a crawling sensation inside the skin, and likewise inexperienced doctors thinking it is psychosomatic. However, in none of those cases was the diagnosis difficult once the actual worm/bug was dug out of the skin.
Either this "syndrome" was concocted by a complete nutjob, or this is the job of some "performance artist" trying to get an articles written up in various places.
Oh, and before you bring it up, the repudiation of the contract does not necessarily mean that the party making the error is off the hook entirely. They may still have to pay damages casued by the other party (or parties) relying on the error. How much (if any) in damages are awarded depends on the unique circumstances of the case.
I was going to sign up with Vonage when you could get $50 back in cash after all the rebates were filled out. However, before I went to sign up, I wanted to know if E911 had been implemented for my telephone exchange yet.
Pretty simple question, right? You would think that Vonage would have an interface on their website where you put in a phone number, and they tell you if E911 works yet.
Nope. Nothing.
I called their customer service line twice. The first time I was cut off when the first rep tried to transfer me, the second time, I gave up after it took me 10 minutes to describe what it was I was looking for, and then I was put on hold for 20 more minutes while she looked for the answer. I hung up when I got tired of waiting. In any case, if they couldn't answer that simple question in a reasonable amount of time, my confidence that E911 would actually work was not high.
Each time required 45 minutes on hold to reach somebody.
If their customer service couldn't handle all the new subscribers, they should have paused the ad campaign, period. There is no excuse, when you are running huge ads, for not having the staff to back it up.
However, what you're suggesting amounts to carte blance for buyer's remorse, and that's just not the case. You can't just up and decide "oh, well, I didn't really mean what I told you I meant in writing, and handed over the receipt for."
Um, no. That is NOT what I said. I said that the sale could be invalidated when the offered price was CLEARLY in error. I said NOTHING about offers where the existence of the error was not clear. Certainly, offering $15 or $20 for a CD, where you "meant" to offer $10 would get you nowhere in a court of law.
If you, through an inadvertent error, offer $1000 for a $10 CD (we will ignore the special case of collector's items, out-of-print albums, etc.), you most certainly CAN repudiate the contract. In fact, a missing decimal point is a classic example of a "unilateral mistake of fact". The main criteria for deciding if the contract can be voided is that the party not making the mistake should have known the offer was in error, yet took advantage of the error anyway.
This is a dangerous and misleading reduction of the truth. In order to redact one's claim, one must have evidence that such a claim was unintentional. If you offer to pay $1000 for a Billy Joel CD, and enter into a binding contract or exchange currency, that's just final, period. If you offer $10 in email, then accidentally leave the decimal out in an electronic transfer, then you can fall back on the email, claim that the deal was made in good faith at the lower amount, et cetera.
For a contract to be complete, there MUST be a "meeting of the minds". A "unilateral mistake of fact" makes the contract void if the party not making the error should have known the offer contained a mistake. Offering two orders of magnitude too much money for a good of easily determinable price is a clear mistake that could be easily spotted by the party not making the error.
The exchange of currency has nothing to do with anything. If we used that as our guide, that would mean that including your credit card number with the offer would make the offer final, but obtaining 30-day Net terms for the order would mean it could be repudiated. That makes no sense. The timeline of payment for a contract does not determine whether or not it is valid.
I'm not sure what you mean by a "binding" contract. As opposed to what? A completed contract is by nature binding, so your use of the word seems redundant. However, without a "meeting of the minds", a contract is NOT complete, therefore not binding. (There are several other things that are required for a contract to be considered complete, but they are beyond the scope of this post.)
I'll ignore your snarky "Bursar's office" example, since it does not represent a clear error of any kind.
Tape can only be 'stored longer' if kept in a very tightly controlled enviroment. Even find mold growing on your tape media?
If you store a drive in conditions that produce mold on a tape, it won't work either after a long time either.
Try dropping a tape onto concrete from 20 feet. The plastic housing will shatter and the tape will become useless. Do the same to a LaCie external drive (that has been properly parked) and the aluminum housing may break, but the drive will be fine.
Your analogy is faulty. Yeah, take a hard drive, and pack it in a protective container, it MAY work after such a drop. If you put a tape in the little plastic box it comes in, it should do just fine too. You can't compare a protected drive to a "naked" tape. Tape is also much lighter, and therefore easier to protect during shipment than drives.
Faster? Can you run a database or a enitre server OS or stream video directly from tape now?
BACKUPS go plenty fast with tape. That doesn't mean restores are instant. If you want instant restores, you really need remote disk mirroing anyway (this is VERY expensive), not schlepping cheap hard drives all over creation.
What do you mean, you can't stream video from tape? What exactly do you think video cameras usually record on? A RAID array strapped to a camraman's belt? Tape IS streaming media. Now if you want to stream from DATA tape, you need about a 2 second buffer, that's more than enough, as long as the video doesn't cross tapes.
Compression is done in the software, not on the tape. The tape just takes what it's given.
Um, no. ALL enterprise tape drives do compression on the drive to avoid tying up the CPU on the backup server. Maybe low-end, buy-it-at-CompUSA-crap doesn't do built-in compression, but all tape drives for "real" use do. You will notice that tape drive specs for enterprise tape drives specify "native" speed and then usually "typical" speed. Compression ratios of 3:1 are not uncommon for the data tape drives usually back up. This gives you well north of 2 TB in a single $80 cartridge.
Since they're saying the plots of land have a "for sale" sign posted in game with the lot's ID, it would seem to me to be more like you are having a garage sale. You start writing a sign for the monitor, "For Sale $1" when you are called away by the spouse to kill a spider. You intended to finish writing "$100." And the monitor is sitting in the foyer connecting your garage to the house. You left the door open when you went on the spider job.
Someone comes along, sees the sign (not exactly in the garage), leaves a dollar, and grabs the monitor. The sign is there. It is viewable by the public indirectly. This guy just got in on the sale early. Thoughts?
Interesting idea. However, if we want to stretch this further, we could point out that most garage sales involve handing the person running it money. If the buyer bypassed the person running it, and left $1 in place of the monitor, which wasn't even in the garage, then that is not a valid sale.
In this case, he bypassed the regular listings section and then just bid on an "auction" in which he knew there would be no other bidders.
The difference here is that not only did you offer to pay $1000, you DID pay $1000. It's a lot harder to get your money back after the fact than it is to simply refuse to hand it over in the first place.
I was illustrating the concept of "meeting of the minds". Thst analogy does not exactly map to this situation. Personally, I like my clever drunken Home Depot cashier analogy, which actually maps quite well to this situation.
It takes two to tango, in this case the seller agreed to the selling price. They have a responsibility to refuse transactions that they don't want to accept. Saying that the sale was automated and thus not subjected to sanity checks ought not be a sufficient defense.
Nope. Linden Labs can take the property back, no problem, or at least have the virtual "contract" voided. This is because there was no "meeting of the minds" when the contract was executed. If I, by mistake, offer to pay $1000 for a Billy Joel CD, when really I left out the decimal point and meant to offer $10.00, there is no obligation for me to actually pay that much money for something clearly worth much less.
They go over this in Business Law 101.
In this case, Linden Labs didn't mean to have the land up for sale at all, so no contract to buy it can possibly be valid, even if it was possible to trick Linden's computer systems into thinking it was up for sale. Now, if Linden Labs had taken some affirmative step to place the land up for sale, there might be an argument, since the value of the "land" is so difficult to determine.
If we want to torture the "Home Depot" analogy some more: The guy grabbed $3000 worth of lumber, got a cashier drunk, and then convinced him to ring it all up for $30. That's theft, no matter how you slice it.
With the puny amount of data you want to back up (and with that dirt-slow drive), of COURSE tape is a stupid solution. A middle-of-the-road "real" tape drive can run at 60-80MB/sec with "average" data and put your entire 400GB on half of one tape that weighs half a pound and runs about $80.
What your soluiton utterly lacks is scalability. If you need to increase your long-term storage requirements by 10TB (for archival or versioning purposes, which by the way, can't be done well with just a script), you need to buy only a couple boxes of $80 tapes, not 20 $300 hard drives.
Tape can be stored longer, is easier to ship, is sturdier, in many cases faster, and has built-in compression.
Your idea of swapping out drives daily would like fail in under a year. You are going to kill at least one of those cheap "consumer" drives you are hauling around all tht time, and the electrical contacts in your disk enclosure won't last long either.
I could take your comment (or any of the other "large companies are evil" comments on here and turn them right around...
"Show me a small company, and I'll show you a place to work with few resources, inflexible scheduling, lousy benefits, no hope for advancement, and where nepotism runs rampant."
"Show me a large company, and I'll show you a place with fine benefits, the ability to take vacation whenever you want, and not have to coordinate with the other four employees, only one of which can be out at any one time. You'll see vast oceans of expertise available, solid benefits, a clear advancement path, etc."
Both of those paragraphs are complete bunk, as they are obscene sweeping generalizations.
To look at your specific statements: Show me a large company and I will show you an organisation with huge inbuilt inefficiencies and vast inertia. Show ME a large company, and I will show you an organization with huge economies of scale that enable them to deliver quality products at lower prices (and that does not necessarily involve exploitation of anybody or anything.)
In the long term it is going to die or split up. That's part of the business cycle. IBM & GE might disagree with that assessment.
Now tell me any large scale enterprise that shows real organic growth? Most of them can only try to absorb other companies and save money to pay the huge acquisition fees. They employ a lot of people - and frequently wish they did not and try to get rid of them by outsourcing, Hmmm... Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Target, etc. seem to be showing "real organic growth" just fine without acquisitions, thank you very much. And plenty of "SMEs" outsource all kinds of stuff, just not overseas. Many SMEs outsource accounting, IT, billing, collections, etc. I have no doubt many of the WOULD outsource overseas if it were possible to do so.
They run strange tax avoidance schemes that cause their profits to be relocated far from where their employees and customers are based. SMEs are not exactly as pure as the new-driven snow either. The difference is that most of their tax-avoidance schemes are obvious and mostly stupid. Most of the SME tax fraud is done by the owners directly. SMEs are notorious under-payers of taxes on profits (who's gonna know?), abusers of "business expenses" ("My 3-ton Luxury SUV is a "work truck""), and payroll tax non-payment (payment of workers "under the table") is quite common.
Summary: There are large, global companies that are ethical and great to work for, and there are plenty of evil small companies that are soul-sucking pits of despair. YMMV.
I think that it wasn't that IBM "lost" the Apple contract, instead it is more than likely IBM chose not to design highly-customized low-volume CPU's and chipsets at a price Apple was willing to pay.
Myself and my wife work for IBM. One of my wife's first jobs at IBM was writing Token Ring drivers for early iterations of the NDIS interface. She had to write all the code on a 3270 terminal connected to a mainframe and cross-compile to the PC because the PC's couldn't handle the code. I joined the company two months before the Networking Hardware Division (which made Token Ring cards, ATM switches, Ethernet switches, mainframe communication devices, and Multiprotocol Routers) was paid $2B by Cisco to go out of business.
The Token Ring products were withdrawn from marketing a couple of years ago, so no more MAU's and Concentrators or NICs can be purchased, at least not from IBM. However, the products are still supported, and not uncommon in mainframe installations.
At IBM we finished the Ethernet migration a couple of years ago. The thing that struck me the most about the migration was how converting from 14Mbps TR cable to 100Mbps Ethernet cable involved nothing more than inserting an adapter cube into the connector on each end of the building cabling. One of the primary features of the "IBM Cabling System" was that it could be adapted to many different cable types by just using adapters; coax, twinax, UTP, etc. To accomplish this feat, it was actually shielded, as opposed to unshielded CAT3/5, etc. This made it hideously over-specc'd for the original common use of TR. The cabling was designed so you could run it past just about anything and not have to worry about interference, cross-talk, etc. You could even get cable that had some UTP pairs stuffed between the shielding and the sheath so you could run your phone and data cabling using the same cable run.
The drawback was that the cabling was bulky, expensive, and difficult to work with.
Making cable that will actually work at over six times it's origninal intended speed while being more than a bit difficult to work with is an interesting example of Enterprise-quality engineering philosophy at IBM from the '80s.
If you read through other FTC settlements, this is entirely typical. In return for the "target" company not fighting the FTC action, they give up all their money and promise to go forth and sin no more. It usually allows them to engage in their business, whatever that is, but they must not violate the rules again. This settelment was not unique to spammers. It is the same deal that is usually offered to "guaranteed credit card" rip-offs, rule-violating telemarketers, etc.
Typical language: "Defendants are enjoined from engaging in business practices violating the XYZ act in the future."
Of course, there are those that accept the settlement, and then go right back and do the same damn thing again. When that happens, usually the FTC goes directly to court and obtains an injunction against the whole company, and the offender is completely barred from whatever business they were in. Example: "Defendents are permanently barred from owning, operating, or being employed in any operation that involves the sending of e-mail for marketing purposes."
If they violate this, or try to hide, or the conduct is particularly nasty, they get referred to the justice dept. for prosecution.
Everyone's favorite late-night infomercial moron, Kevin Trudeau (speed reading, memory improvement, etc.) got slapped twice by the FTC, so he wised up and instead deceided to promote a completely bogus book instead. Since it a book containing opinions instead of a worthless physical product, the FTC can't stop him, despite him being as full of B.S. as ever.
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Jobs wanted custom CPU's at commodity chip prices. I believe that IBM took one look at what Jobs wanted, what he was willing to pay, and said "no thank you".
SirWired
Do you recall that little American Revolution way back in the mid 1770's? You know, the one the then-English colonies were LOSING? The U.S. would have been in quite a pickle without the French providing financial and military aid. Sure, it was in their own self-interest, but that makes their aid no less valuable.
Just because a Revolution receives assisstance from the outside makes it no more or less legitimate.
SirWired
I've read about this company before. However, I'm not sold on it, and at last check (a couple of monhts ago), their website was remarkably bereft of useful technical detail.
My biggest question is how they handle free space tracking? Unless this box has "hooks" into the filesystem, it is not going to have the faintest clue when data has been deleted.
Also, can you say "Holy Fragmentation Batman!"? Again, pretty intense "hooks" into the filesystem are going to be required in order to keep files even remotely together. A tape backup of a large file on this mess is going to take all 'freakin week.
I'll take good-'ol-fashioned file or volume-based HSM, which has been around for a great many years, over this block-based stuff any day of the week. I might change my mind if they published some nice juicy technical papers on how they handled free-space and fragmentation issues.
SirWired
There are a couple of ways publishers can also loose out: for instance, if a user clicks through but doesn't make a purchase only to return to the advertiser's site the next day or week and make the purchase, will the publisher be compensated appropriately?
This is no different from CPC in this respect. If a user sees an ad for a company, and then vists the site a week (or a page) later, the publisher gets no money then either.
SirWired
My personal favorite is an old Koh-I-Noor 0.5mm Rapidomatic Engineer's Pencil. Nothing beats the knurled Aluminum grip for multi-hour writing sessions. Unfortunately, they shallowed out the knurling some in '97 or '98, which makes it too slippery for multi-hour writing sessions. I've tried a Berol substitute, but the barrel is too heavy, round (instead of hexagonal), and I don't like the rubberized coating.
All true geeks also do work not in some cheap spiral notebook, nor some hoity-toity Moleskine, but in an "Engineer's Computation Pad", available in college bookstores everywhere. Low-eyestrain green tint, high-quality bond, and graph lines on the back that show through enough for easy diagramming, but not so much they show up in a scan or Xerox.
I know that fountain pens are a classic fine writing instrument, but they are tough to use for lefties, and involve using absorbent writing paper (to keep my left hand from smearing the ink), instead of whatever is handy. Plus, I make mistakes.
SirWired
The reason it is late and buggy is the absurd devotion to backwards compatability. I don't understand it. I could accept software compatability, but the hardware aspect is mystifying.
For a single desktop user, near-perpetual backward compatibility is not much of a value-add, and only adds to costs. For businesses, it is absolutely vital, and something worth paying a LOT of money for. If 20-years worth of records are stored on peripheral X, you better be able to read it on machine Y years later.
Compared to IBM, Microsoft has not even begun to see the merest glimmer of backwards compatibility issues. IBM has maintained backwards software and hardware compatibility for the S/360 series for forty-two years! IIRC you can literally take an operating punch card reader, hook it up to a succession of interface adapters, and actually boot a fresh-from-the-factory CPU from the thing without changing a single line of code. (Unless of course your code depends on the timing of a 1964-era CPU, in which case your code might need to slip your decimal points a few places.)
Not a single instruction has been removed from the instruction set, not a single interface removed from hooks into the O/S.
SirWired
I'm not sure the ability to play DVD's makes any difference at all anymore. When you can buy an entire player from your local drugstore for $20 (on sale), I really don't think folks are going to avoid the Wii because it doesn't play DVD's right out of the box.
If 99.9% of the homes that will buy a Wii already have a DVD player, isn't it to everybody's advantage to not have to pay the licensing fees for yet another player?
SirWired
Halogen lamps have the bulb bit made out of quartz, which makes the halogen air inside react with the tungsten that has corroded off, and pushes it back on to the tungsten. So the corroded tungsten is continually put back on.
o gen_lamp
Close, but not quite. The bulbs are made of quartz because it can withstand the heat much better than a thin glass envelope. The quartz has nothing to do with the tungsten redisposition. The tungsten redisposition is because of the reaction with the halide gas that the bulb is filled with (iodine or bromine). This is natrually where the name "Halogen" comes from.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halogen_lamp#The_hal
SirWired
When I did desktop support in college, I spent many an hour cursing the engineer at Acer (which is where IBM OEM'd the Crap-tiva from), who decided that flathead screws with shallow screw slots had ANY place in a computer case. I got "bit" by my screwdriver several times trying to install network cards in those damn things. (Don't even get me started on what those boxes did once you actually tried to get Novell working on them.)
IBM's (err... Lenovo's) current "business" desktop cases are an intesting study in constrasts. Tool-free design, decent access, and a very sturdy all-metal chassis. However, the two bays intended for hard drives are too far apart to string an ATA cable between them. For newer models that use SATA, this isn't a problem, but it was more than a tad frustrating when I went to install a second drive in my two-year old P4.
I don't know anything about those new Lenovo consumer cases.
Server cases are something else entirely. For all the customer-replacable parts, cases from all three major vendors (IBM, HP, and Dell) are pretty much a piece of cake.
SirWired
I was mistaken about Canada, I thought it was rolled in to the price. Oops.
SirWired
In the uproar over how much more consoles (or electronics in general) cost in the UK and Europe, folks always forget about the VAT. (Value Added Tax)
IIRC, in the UK, Europe, and Canada, the VAT is included in the advertised (and paid) price. In the US, the rough equivalent (Sales Tax) is never included in the advertised price (except for Gasoline for some reason). Of course, not all localities in the US charge sales tax, the amount varies depending on where you live, and the amount is lower than VAT.
A more fair comparison would be to take the VAT out of the price, and THEN compare how much the equipment costs in various countries. That determines how much the manufactuer and retailer actually receives for the console.
SirWired
First off, Whew! That is a long reply! (Not meant as an insult, just a note of respect for the amount of effort you put into it.) I think we do in fact agree on most points.
:-)
Firstly, sorry I used all caps frequently in my post. I am a lazy typist and just use the shift key when I probably should be slapping italics or underline tags around a word or two. I don't use all caps when it is longer than a word or two since that is indeed hard to read. (In this post, I will use plain italics for a direct quote of your most recent post, bold-italics for earlier posts of mine, and underline when I wish to emphasize something in a quote. I'll use italics to emphasize single words or short phrases.) I swear, with my right hand upon my most treasured copy of K&R, ANSI C Edition, that I did not mean to "shout".
And, as you might have expected, my legal background is somewhat limited. It consists of two law classes in college (one in general law, the other in business law), which I took as some of my humanities electives during my engineering degree program at a decent mid-atlantic university. (I did receive an "A" in both and totatally demolished the curve, but admittedly the competition wasn't exactly up to Harvard Law standards.) Those classes were seven years ago, and contract law doesn't come up very often when I am sitting in my cube going blind reading hexidecimal line traces.
First, if we are going to nitpick about who said what, a few corrections:
If you take the time to read what you said, you'll discover that in fact you made no such restraint on who could claim an invalidated sale, allcaps notwithstanding.
If you read the original post I wrote, it's right there (although I didn't use all-caps or any form of emphasis at the time):
there is no obligation for me to actually pay that much money for something clearly[emphasis added] worth much less.
Well, the problem is that you're neglecting issues of sentimentality, collectorship, scarcity, timed availability and so on.
If you read my most recent reply, you will see that I specifically said that: " we will ignore the special case of collector's items, out-of-print albums, etc. " I was trying to present an example of a good with easily determinable open-market value. I am sorry if the Billy Joel CD I purchased last weekend was an unclear example. I suppose matters of clarity are why these sorts of suits even make it to courts in the first place. In my original post, I was dashing off a quick one-paragraph reply, not trying to file a legal brief, so I didn't see any need to emphasize a "clear" error.
The timeline of payment for a contract does not determine whether or not it is valid.
Luckily, I never said that it did.
Actually, you did say that payment for a contract made it final (at least, that is how I read it):
If you offer to pay $1000 for a Billy Joel CD, and enter into a binding contract or exchange currency, that's just final, period.
Given that elsewhere in your latest post you mention that most contracts aren't binding (more on that later), I am interpreting that to say you were saying that once a contract is paid for, it cannot be reversed. (Or, if we want to use the legal term, "no longer subject to recission".) I suspect we are talking past each other here, since I am having trouble figuring out what your WotC example is supposed to be illustrating in regards to the timeline of payment. Could you explain what you are getting at? (This is a sincere request, not any indication that I am anything less then impressed of your discussion of value.)
That said, I wasn't aware Linden had a "BTW, everything we are selling you is worthless" clause in the contract". This is probably a standard term for such contracts, since it also protects them against such things as data loss due to a system crash, but I thought it was clever nonetheless.
What I actually said was
If it is consistently cured with antibiotics, then it ISN'T a parasite. And bacteria don't create little worms crawling out of your skin. (Note, however, that parasitical infections can go away on their own.)
The woman in the article mentioned she saw spaghetti-like things crawling out of her son's chest. She pulled, but "couldn't pull it out." That is a very convenient excuse for not being able to produce a sample. Has this woman never heard of scissors, or are these things as tough as steel too?
Parisitologists and infectious disease researchers LIVE to discover new interesting afflictions. Believe me, if we had a new genuine disease causing spectacularly impressive crap to crawl out of victims skin, there would be journal articles about it in a minute. Also, wouldn't such obvious symptoms make it pretty damn easy to diagnose?
Lyme disease, yeah, that was a toughie to initially diagnose because the symptoms are so varied and suble. But fiber-like-stuff crawling out of people is pretty unambiguous.
And, "black flecks coming from pimples"? Err... sounds like blackheads to me.
That website is pathetic. Several pages of pictures, most of which look like shredded yarn scraps. It would have been a lot more convincing if there were pictures of the yarn crap actually coming from people. We do have some blurry shots of skin-like-substance with something on them, but nothing in particular to identify. Have these folks ever heard of "macro" mode?
I have heard of nasty parasitical infections indeed causing a crawling sensation inside the skin, and likewise inexperienced doctors thinking it is psychosomatic. However, in none of those cases was the diagnosis difficult once the actual worm/bug was dug out of the skin.
Either this "syndrome" was concocted by a complete nutjob, or this is the job of some "performance artist" trying to get an articles written up in various places.
SirWired
Oh, and before you bring it up, the repudiation of the contract does not necessarily mean that the party making the error is off the hook entirely. They may still have to pay damages casued by the other party (or parties) relying on the error. How much (if any) in damages are awarded depends on the unique circumstances of the case.
SirWired
I was going to sign up with Vonage when you could get $50 back in cash after all the rebates were filled out. However, before I went to sign up, I wanted to know if E911 had been implemented for my telephone exchange yet.
Pretty simple question, right? You would think that Vonage would have an interface on their website where you put in a phone number, and they tell you if E911 works yet.
Nope. Nothing.
I called their customer service line twice. The first time I was cut off when the first rep tried to transfer me, the second time, I gave up after it took me 10 minutes to describe what it was I was looking for, and then I was put on hold for 20 more minutes while she looked for the answer. I hung up when I got tired of waiting. In any case, if they couldn't answer that simple question in a reasonable amount of time, my confidence that E911 would actually work was not high.
Each time required 45 minutes on hold to reach somebody.
If their customer service couldn't handle all the new subscribers, they should have paused the ad campaign, period. There is no excuse, when you are running huge ads, for not having the staff to back it up.
SirWired
However, what you're suggesting amounts to carte blance for buyer's remorse, and that's just not the case. You can't just up and decide "oh, well, I didn't really mean what I told you I meant in writing, and handed over the receipt for."
Um, no. That is NOT what I said. I said that the sale could be invalidated when the offered price was CLEARLY in error. I said NOTHING about offers where the existence of the error was not clear. Certainly, offering $15 or $20 for a CD, where you "meant" to offer $10 would get you nowhere in a court of law.
If you, through an inadvertent error, offer $1000 for a $10 CD (we will ignore the special case of collector's items, out-of-print albums, etc.), you most certainly CAN repudiate the contract. In fact, a missing decimal point is a classic example of a "unilateral mistake of fact". The main criteria for deciding if the contract can be voided is that the party not making the mistake should have known the offer was in error, yet took advantage of the error anyway.
This is a dangerous and misleading reduction of the truth. In order to redact one's claim, one must have evidence that such a claim was unintentional. If you offer to pay $1000 for a Billy Joel CD, and enter into a binding contract or exchange currency, that's just final, period. If you offer $10 in email, then accidentally leave the decimal out in an electronic transfer, then you can fall back on the email, claim that the deal was made in good faith at the lower amount, et cetera.
For a contract to be complete, there MUST be a "meeting of the minds". A "unilateral mistake of fact" makes the contract void if the party not making the error should have known the offer contained a mistake. Offering two orders of magnitude too much money for a good of easily determinable price is a clear mistake that could be easily spotted by the party not making the error.
The exchange of currency has nothing to do with anything. If we used that as our guide, that would mean that including your credit card number with the offer would make the offer final, but obtaining 30-day Net terms for the order would mean it could be repudiated. That makes no sense. The timeline of payment for a contract does not determine whether or not it is valid.
I'm not sure what you mean by a "binding" contract. As opposed to what? A completed contract is by nature binding, so your use of the word seems redundant. However, without a "meeting of the minds", a contract is NOT complete, therefore not binding. (There are several other things that are required for a contract to be considered complete, but they are beyond the scope of this post.)
I'll ignore your snarky "Bursar's office" example, since it does not represent a clear error of any kind.
SirWired
Tape can only be 'stored longer' if kept in a very tightly controlled enviroment.
Even find mold growing on your tape media?
If you store a drive in conditions that produce mold on a tape, it won't work either after a long time either.
Try dropping a tape onto concrete from 20 feet. The plastic housing will shatter and the tape will become useless. Do the same to a LaCie external drive (that has been properly parked) and the aluminum housing may break, but the drive will be fine.
Your analogy is faulty. Yeah, take a hard drive, and pack it in a protective container, it MAY work after such a drop. If you put a tape in the little plastic box it comes in, it should do just fine too. You can't compare a protected drive to a "naked" tape. Tape is also much lighter, and therefore easier to protect during shipment than drives.
Faster? Can you run a database or a enitre server OS or stream video directly from tape now?
BACKUPS go plenty fast with tape. That doesn't mean restores are instant. If you want instant restores, you really need remote disk mirroing anyway (this is VERY expensive), not schlepping cheap hard drives all over creation.
What do you mean, you can't stream video from tape? What exactly do you think video cameras usually record on? A RAID array strapped to a camraman's belt? Tape IS streaming media. Now if you want to stream from DATA tape, you need about a 2 second buffer, that's more than enough, as long as the video doesn't cross tapes.
Compression is done in the software, not on the tape. The tape just takes what it's given.
Um, no. ALL enterprise tape drives do compression on the drive to avoid tying up the CPU on the backup server. Maybe low-end, buy-it-at-CompUSA-crap doesn't do built-in compression, but all tape drives for "real" use do. You will notice that tape drive specs for enterprise tape drives specify "native" speed and then usually "typical" speed. Compression ratios of 3:1 are not uncommon for the data tape drives usually back up. This gives you well north of 2 TB in a single $80 cartridge.
SirWired
Since they're saying the plots of land have a "for sale" sign posted in game with the lot's ID, it would seem to me to be more like you are having a garage sale. You start writing a sign for the monitor, "For Sale $1" when you are called away by the spouse to kill a spider. You intended to finish writing "$100." And the monitor is sitting in the foyer connecting your garage to the house. You left the door open when you went on the spider job.
Someone comes along, sees the sign (not exactly in the garage), leaves a dollar, and grabs the monitor. The sign is there. It is viewable by the public indirectly. This guy just got in on the sale early. Thoughts?
Interesting idea. However, if we want to stretch this further, we could point out that most garage sales involve handing the person running it money. If the buyer bypassed the person running it, and left $1 in place of the monitor, which wasn't even in the garage, then that is not a valid sale.
In this case, he bypassed the regular listings section and then just bid on an "auction" in which he knew there would be no other bidders.
SirWired
The difference here is that not only did you offer to pay $1000, you DID pay $1000. It's a lot harder to get your money back after the fact than it is to simply refuse to hand it over in the first place.
I was illustrating the concept of "meeting of the minds". Thst analogy does not exactly map to this situation. Personally, I like my clever drunken Home Depot cashier analogy, which actually maps quite well to this situation.
SirWired
It takes two to tango, in this case the seller agreed to the selling price. They have a responsibility to refuse transactions that they don't want to accept. Saying that the sale was automated and thus not subjected to sanity checks ought not be a sufficient defense.
Nope. Linden Labs can take the property back, no problem, or at least have the virtual "contract" voided. This is because there was no "meeting of the minds" when the contract was executed. If I, by mistake, offer to pay $1000 for a Billy Joel CD, when really I left out the decimal point and meant to offer $10.00, there is no obligation for me to actually pay that much money for something clearly worth much less.
They go over this in Business Law 101.
In this case, Linden Labs didn't mean to have the land up for sale at all, so no contract to buy it can possibly be valid, even if it was possible to trick Linden's computer systems into thinking it was up for sale. Now, if Linden Labs had taken some affirmative step to place the land up for sale, there might be an argument, since the value of the "land" is so difficult to determine.
If we want to torture the "Home Depot" analogy some more: The guy grabbed $3000 worth of lumber, got a cashier drunk, and then convinced him to ring it all up for $30. That's theft, no matter how you slice it.
SirWired
With the puny amount of data you want to back up (and with that dirt-slow drive), of COURSE tape is a stupid solution. A middle-of-the-road "real" tape drive can run at 60-80MB/sec with "average" data and put your entire 400GB on half of one tape that weighs half a pound and runs about $80.
What your soluiton utterly lacks is scalability. If you need to increase your long-term storage requirements by 10TB (for archival or versioning purposes, which by the way, can't be done well with just a script), you need to buy only a couple boxes of $80 tapes, not 20 $300 hard drives.
Tape can be stored longer, is easier to ship, is sturdier, in many cases faster, and has built-in compression.
Your idea of swapping out drives daily would like fail in under a year. You are going to kill at least one of those cheap "consumer" drives you are hauling around all tht time, and the electrical contacts in your disk enclosure won't last long either.
SirWired
I could take your comment (or any of the other "large companies are evil" comments on here and turn them right around...
"Show me a small company, and I'll show you a place to work with few resources, inflexible scheduling, lousy benefits, no hope for advancement, and where nepotism runs rampant."
"Show me a large company, and I'll show you a place with fine benefits, the ability to take vacation whenever you want, and not have to coordinate with the other four employees, only one of which can be out at any one time. You'll see vast oceans of expertise available, solid benefits, a clear advancement path, etc."
Both of those paragraphs are complete bunk, as they are obscene sweeping generalizations.
To look at your specific statements:
Show me a large company and I will show you an organisation with huge inbuilt inefficiencies and vast inertia.
Show ME a large company, and I will show you an organization with huge economies of scale that enable them to deliver quality products at lower prices (and that does not necessarily involve exploitation of anybody or anything.)
In the long term it is going to die or split up. That's part of the business cycle.
IBM & GE might disagree with that assessment.
Now tell me any large scale enterprise that shows real organic growth? Most of them can only try to absorb other companies and save money to pay the huge acquisition fees. They employ a lot of people - and frequently wish they did not and try to get rid of them by outsourcing,
Hmmm... Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Target, etc. seem to be showing "real organic growth" just fine without acquisitions, thank you very much. And plenty of "SMEs" outsource all kinds of stuff, just not overseas. Many SMEs outsource accounting, IT, billing, collections, etc. I have no doubt many of the WOULD outsource overseas if it were possible to do so.
They run strange tax avoidance schemes that cause their profits to be relocated far from where their employees and customers are based.
SMEs are not exactly as pure as the new-driven snow either. The difference is that most of their tax-avoidance schemes are obvious and mostly stupid. Most of the SME tax fraud is done by the owners directly. SMEs are notorious under-payers of taxes on profits (who's gonna know?), abusers of "business expenses" ("My 3-ton Luxury SUV is a "work truck""), and payroll tax non-payment (payment of workers "under the table") is quite common.
Summary: There are large, global companies that are ethical and great to work for, and there are plenty of evil small companies that are soul-sucking pits of despair. YMMV.
SirWired
I think that it wasn't that IBM "lost" the Apple contract, instead it is more than likely IBM chose not to design highly-customized low-volume CPU's and chipsets at a price Apple was willing to pay.
SirWired
Myself and my wife work for IBM. One of my wife's first jobs at IBM was writing Token Ring drivers for early iterations of the NDIS interface. She had to write all the code on a 3270 terminal connected to a mainframe and cross-compile to the PC because the PC's couldn't handle the code. I joined the company two months before the Networking Hardware Division (which made Token Ring cards, ATM switches, Ethernet switches, mainframe communication devices, and Multiprotocol Routers) was paid $2B by Cisco to go out of business.
The Token Ring products were withdrawn from marketing a couple of years ago, so no more MAU's and Concentrators or NICs can be purchased, at least not from IBM. However, the products are still supported, and not uncommon in mainframe installations.
At IBM we finished the Ethernet migration a couple of years ago. The thing that struck me the most about the migration was how converting from 14Mbps TR cable to 100Mbps Ethernet cable involved nothing more than inserting an adapter cube into the connector on each end of the building cabling. One of the primary features of the "IBM Cabling System" was that it could be adapted to many different cable types by just using adapters; coax, twinax, UTP, etc. To accomplish this feat, it was actually shielded, as opposed to unshielded CAT3/5, etc. This made it hideously over-specc'd for the original common use of TR. The cabling was designed so you could run it past just about anything and not have to worry about interference, cross-talk, etc. You could even get cable that had some UTP pairs stuffed between the shielding and the sheath so you could run your phone and data cabling using the same cable run.
The drawback was that the cabling was bulky, expensive, and difficult to work with.
Making cable that will actually work at over six times it's origninal intended speed while being more than a bit difficult to work with is an interesting example of Enterprise-quality engineering philosophy at IBM from the '80s.
SirWired
If you read through other FTC settlements, this is entirely typical. In return for the "target" company not fighting the FTC action, they give up all their money and promise to go forth and sin no more. It usually allows them to engage in their business, whatever that is, but they must not violate the rules again. This settelment was not unique to spammers. It is the same deal that is usually offered to "guaranteed credit card" rip-offs, rule-violating telemarketers, etc.
Typical language: "Defendants are enjoined from engaging in business practices violating the XYZ act in the future."
Of course, there are those that accept the settlement, and then go right back and do the same damn thing again. When that happens, usually the FTC goes directly to court and obtains an injunction against the whole company, and the offender is completely barred from whatever business they were in. Example: "Defendents are permanently barred from owning, operating, or being employed in any operation that involves the sending of e-mail for marketing purposes."
If they violate this, or try to hide, or the conduct is particularly nasty, they get referred to the justice dept. for prosecution.
Everyone's favorite late-night infomercial moron, Kevin Trudeau (speed reading, memory improvement, etc.) got slapped twice by the FTC, so he wised up and instead deceided to promote a completely bogus book instead. Since it a book containing opinions instead of a worthless physical product, the FTC can't stop him, despite him being as full of B.S. as ever.
SirWired