The screen thing could be chalked up to your fault for not looking at the specs. What I'm trying to figure out is why you paid a restocking fee in light of all the other issues that were going on with the computer.
My first call would've been to Alienware to let them attempt to rectify the situation, and my next call would've been to my CC company stopping any charges.
Try to realize that nothing is free. If someone is offering 'free' broadband it is getting paid for it somehow. Either through gov. subsidies (which I alluded to in my first post) or some other method. Bandwidth is a resource that costs money to distribute. So, if it's not the gov. who's paying for it, then who is?
What's the tax rate in France again? And, the unemployment rate for that matter? It's definitely not free. The argument could probably be made that it's more expensive than anything we have here in the states.
Well if you're spending all day on the internet then you aren't doing your job. The problem isn't the internet, but the fact you aren't doing your job and the employer should deal with that issue accordingly.
Mainly because the people who do this are are super secret. They don't want anyone to know how or what they are doing because the field is so competitive. It's the equivalent of an algorithm arms race.
These guys are supposed to be really good, but notice how little information you can find on their site. The company was started by one of the guys who mathmatically beat roulette (something else everyone thought was impossible at the time).
Actually a lot of patterns are showing themselves in the extreme short term (think seconds here). There are so many automated trader/AI types of software exploiting already these patterns, as soon as one is found it doesn't last long since others jump in. I don't have a link handy, but I read a good article awhile back about econophysicists looking for and finding short term patterns in the market.
I also know of a company nearby doing exactly that and doing well and have an acquaintance who retired at the age 35 or so after running his companies dept. who found (using algorithms) and exploited these patterns that don't exist.
Well said. I still have friends who wonder why I go out and buy CDs when I like the music instead of downloading it 'for free.' IMHO, the argument that music nowadays sucks so that we should download it for free doesn't fly with me. If the music sucks and you hate it so much then why download it?
I bought a couple of one off songs on ITMS and it works for me since I have an ipod and can use it anywhere I happen to be, but I agree with you. If someone were to offer me high quality tracks (at least CD quality) that I could download and play on any device, that would be my perfect solution.
Interesting article. I wonder how much of this has been brought on by the insurance companies themselves. Things like denying all your claims or making it a PITA to get your money eventually start to leave a sour taste with people. Eventually even honest people start to think that the insurance companies deserve to get get screwed once in awhile sine they are usually the ones being the PITA. Now of course all this just leads to higher premiums, but if the insurance companies at least acted like they were on your side rather than against you, it could go along way to changing the public opinion.
I've wondered that too, but eventually prices reach a level that people just can't afford. I would say that prices for the most part have been way over that level for a long time. Creative financing (IO/negam/ARMs to a lesser extent) and free money (my dog could get a $500k loan) are the only things that have kept the Cali market afloat.
Not to slam Mexican immigrants, but how many are coming over who are professionals earning enough money to pay $500K+ for a house? Housing prices are so far out of whack compared to salaries that anyone who wasn't caught up in the mania could see that this thing wasn't going to last.
Your house is only worth what someone will pay. Given the quickly rising inventory numbers and shrinking pool of buyers (bye bye sub prime financing and free money) I bet your house isn't worth near what you think it is right now. This bubble will end by a couple of ways. One is real price decline. As the credit bubble (this is what really drove up housing) comes to end b/c of rising interest rates, ARM resets, and crazy amounts of personal debt real house prices will have to come down for anyone to be able to buy with a traditional type of loan. The other method is inflation. If your house price stays flat for 5 years, but inflation ticks up to 5%+/year you're losing real value. Those are the only 2 ways I currently see to bring housing back in line with what normal people can pay with regular financing.
Ah, gotcha. I live ~10 minutes from the beach. This particular beach's zip code is in the 60s as the most expensive zip code in the U.S. No house there sells for less than $1M. Meanwhile, where I'm at you can get a SFH of about 1100 sqft for ~$275k, or you can rent for ~800/month for a 2bed/1 bath apt. My area was a little late to the RE boom, but it has stopped going up like everywhere else.
With 2 acres of land and a barn it sounds like you're comparing living in the country to living in the city. Could you have made the same deal buying a house closer to town? If not, then you're not comparing apples to apples.
The largest population decline in the US isn't going to be from some disease, unless you count old age. As the baby boomers get older and start dieing there will be a real population drop in the US. Tie this with more and more families chosing not to have kids for whatever reason and you have the stage set for a real decline here. The only question is if immigration will balance off the decline.
BofA is the absolute worst bank ever. If you have cash lying around your best bet is to open a high yield savings in with someone like ING and then ladder some CDs through them. That way your money keeps up with inflation, it's insured and liquid.
Why pay rent when your morgtage and tax money are close to the same amount, except in the end you own the house and can sell it for at least a decent down payment on a better one.
Except in many areas this isn't the case right now unless you go for an ARM or worse yet an IO or negam loan. The cost of housing is so far above rent in many areas it currently makes better sense to rent than buy. Keep in mind that even the RE people are starting to have to admit that the housing party is over.
I loved the original dragon warriors for Nintendo. I remember how mad I was as a kid when my Dragon Warrior 3 battery died and I lost all my progress. I was so bummed I quit RPGs until I played FF7 for the PS2.
Bloody sponges shouldn't be hard either. They use things like the shoe holders that go on the back of doors. Each sponge gets it's own pocket and you count them that way. The few times I've observed surgeries everyone was meticulous about counting and recounting all the instruments and guass that were used.
Watching the video makes it look like if you have a new BMW with navigation and the new interface it would work pretty well. W/o navigation it would still suck though.
Wow, that sucks. My alpine allows me to search for songs on my ipod by playlist/artist/album and then drill in from there. Plus it has 3 lines of text so searching is pretty easy. The tech is out there and not that expensive (my alpine cost ~$300), so why doesn't a company like BMW use it...
While it's not a general interface, I have this in my car. My ipod stays in my center console where I ran the plug to and made a little docking interface. Browsing music is quite nice and it works just like a CD changer would, except you have more information and more songs available. Plus it avoids the FM modulator which sounds like crap.
Off the top of my head, I'm thinking that the fact that the company has gotten to the point that it has to do layoffs means that upper management has basically failed, and things are now so screwed up that layoffs are the only way to possibly survive. If they had done things properly to begin with, they never would be in this spot.
You hit the nail on the head. The purpose of layoffs isn't to purge the company of the worst performers (although it would be nice if that was possible). The purpose is to get rid of resources the company cannot make use of. Intel is basically saying that they have all these resourses that they can't make use of for whatever reason, and you're right in saying that it's the fault is completely upper managements.
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That bummed me out too. When I first saw Warhammer I thought 40000 and was stoked. Then I found out it's just another fantasy based game /yawn...
WTB a good scfi-ish mmorpg...
The screen thing could be chalked up to your fault for not looking at the specs. What I'm trying to figure out is why you paid a restocking fee in light of all the other issues that were going on with the computer.
My first call would've been to Alienware to let them attempt to rectify the situation, and my next call would've been to my CC company stopping any charges.
Try to realize that nothing is free. If someone is offering 'free' broadband it is getting paid for it somehow. Either through gov. subsidies (which I alluded to in my first post) or some other method. Bandwidth is a resource that costs money to distribute. So, if it's not the gov. who's paying for it, then who is?
What's the tax rate in France again? And, the unemployment rate for that matter? It's definitely not free. The argument could probably be made that it's more expensive than anything we have here in the states.
Well if you're spending all day on the internet then you aren't doing your job. The problem isn't the internet, but the fact you aren't doing your job and the employer should deal with that issue accordingly.
Exactly. What you described is a more technically up to date version of what Norman Packard and his friends did originally.
Any casino I've ever played in including those LV and on cruise ships. Only when the ball falls out of it's spin do they stop the betting.
Mainly because the people who do this are are super secret. They don't want anyone to know how or what they are doing because the field is so competitive. It's the equivalent of an algorithm arms race.
These guys are supposed to be really good, but notice how little information you can find on their site. The company was started by one of the guys who mathmatically beat roulette (something else everyone thought was impossible at the time).
Actually a lot of patterns are showing themselves in the extreme short term (think seconds here). There are so many automated trader/AI types of software exploiting already these patterns, as soon as one is found it doesn't last long since others jump in. I don't have a link handy, but I read a good article awhile back about econophysicists looking for and finding short term patterns in the market.
I also know of a company nearby doing exactly that and doing well and have an acquaintance who retired at the age 35 or so after running his companies dept. who found (using algorithms) and exploited these patterns that don't exist.
Well said. I still have friends who wonder why I go out and buy CDs when I like the music instead of downloading it 'for free.' IMHO, the argument that music nowadays sucks so that we should download it for free doesn't fly with me. If the music sucks and you hate it so much then why download it?
I bought a couple of one off songs on ITMS and it works for me since I have an ipod and can use it anywhere I happen to be, but I agree with you. If someone were to offer me high quality tracks (at least CD quality) that I could download and play on any device, that would be my perfect solution.
The casual gaming market (as represented by the sims, etc) is quite a bit smaller than the "hardcore" gaming market.
Isn't The Sims one of the best selling games of all time? If it's a casual game, then the casual gaming market seems to be quite large.
Interesting article. I wonder how much of this has been brought on by the insurance companies themselves. Things like denying all your claims or making it a PITA to get your money eventually start to leave a sour taste with people. Eventually even honest people start to think that the insurance companies deserve to get get screwed once in awhile sine they are usually the ones being the PITA. Now of course all this just leads to higher premiums, but if the insurance companies at least acted like they were on your side rather than against you, it could go along way to changing the public opinion.
It's also the smart criminals you don't hear about too much b/c they don't get caught nearly as frequently as the dumb ones.
I've wondered that too, but eventually prices reach a level that people just can't afford. I would say that prices for the most part have been way over that level for a long time. Creative financing (IO/negam/ARMs to a lesser extent) and free money (my dog could get a $500k loan) are the only things that have kept the Cali market afloat.
Not to slam Mexican immigrants, but how many are coming over who are professionals earning enough money to pay $500K+ for a house? Housing prices are so far out of whack compared to salaries that anyone who wasn't caught up in the mania could see that this thing wasn't going to last.
Your house is only worth what someone will pay. Given the quickly rising inventory numbers and shrinking pool of buyers (bye bye sub prime financing and free money) I bet your house isn't worth near what you think it is right now. This bubble will end by a couple of ways. One is real price decline. As the credit bubble (this is what really drove up housing) comes to end b/c of rising interest rates, ARM resets, and crazy amounts of personal debt real house prices will have to come down for anyone to be able to buy with a traditional type of loan. The other method is inflation. If your house price stays flat for 5 years, but inflation ticks up to 5%+/year you're losing real value. Those are the only 2 ways I currently see to bring housing back in line with what normal people can pay with regular financing.
Ah, gotcha. I live ~10 minutes from the beach. This particular beach's zip code is in the 60s as the most expensive zip code in the U.S. No house there sells for less than $1M. Meanwhile, where I'm at you can get a SFH of about 1100 sqft for ~$275k, or you can rent for ~800/month for a 2bed/1 bath apt. My area was a little late to the RE boom, but it has stopped going up like everywhere else.
With 2 acres of land and a barn it sounds like you're comparing living in the country to living in the city. Could you have made the same deal buying a house closer to town? If not, then you're not comparing apples to apples.
The largest population decline in the US isn't going to be from some disease, unless you count old age. As the baby boomers get older and start dieing there will be a real population drop in the US. Tie this with more and more families chosing not to have kids for whatever reason and you have the stage set for a real decline here. The only question is if immigration will balance off the decline.
BofA is the absolute worst bank ever. If you have cash lying around your best bet is to open a high yield savings in with someone like ING and then ladder some CDs through them. That way your money keeps up with inflation, it's insured and liquid.
Except in many areas this isn't the case right now unless you go for an ARM or worse yet an IO or negam loan. The cost of housing is so far above rent in many areas it currently makes better sense to rent than buy. Keep in mind that even the RE people are starting to have to admit that the housing party is over.
I loved the original dragon warriors for Nintendo. I remember how mad I was as a kid when my Dragon Warrior 3 battery died and I lost all my progress. I was so bummed I quit RPGs until I played FF7 for the PS2.
Bloody sponges shouldn't be hard either. They use things like the shoe holders that go on the back of doors. Each sponge gets it's own pocket and you count them that way. The few times I've observed surgeries everyone was meticulous about counting and recounting all the instruments and guass that were used.
Watching the video makes it look like if you have a new BMW with navigation and the new interface it would work pretty well. W/o navigation it would still suck though.
Wow, that sucks. My alpine allows me to search for songs on my ipod by playlist/artist/album and then drill in from there. Plus it has 3 lines of text so searching is pretty easy. The tech is out there and not that expensive (my alpine cost ~$300), so why doesn't a company like BMW use it...
While it's not a general interface, I have this in my car. My ipod stays in my center console where I ran the plug to and made a little docking interface. Browsing music is quite nice and it works just like a CD changer would, except you have more information and more songs available. Plus it avoids the FM modulator which sounds like crap.
Off the top of my head, I'm thinking that the fact that the company has gotten to the point that it has to do layoffs means that upper management has basically failed, and things are now so screwed up that layoffs are the only way to possibly survive. If they had done things properly to begin with, they never would be in this spot.
You hit the nail on the head. The purpose of layoffs isn't to purge the company of the worst performers (although it would be nice if that was possible). The purpose is to get rid of resources the company cannot make use of. Intel is basically saying that they have all these resourses that they can't make use of for whatever reason, and you're right in saying that it's the fault is completely upper managements.