Me (dismissively amused): Diebold? That cute upstart little company that stole the election and sent this country into an economic and moral state not unlike a dark, urine-soaked hellhole?
Cheney: We object to the term "urine-soaked hellhole" when you could have used the term "torture-free patriotic heckhole".
Me: Cheerfully withdrawn.
Lawyer: But what about that tattoo on your chest? Doesn't it say, "Diebold die"?
Why is AllOfMP3 seen as a legitimate alternative? Legal ot not, none of that money goes to the deserving parties. Perhaps you feel good that you're paying -someone- for the download, but you're better off using P2P and donating the money to a charity -- perhaps a local school's music department?
(Assuming you're asking non-rhetorically.) At least one perspective is that whether the money goes to "deserving parties" or not is beside the point, said point being that AllOfMp3's prices beat Itunes' prices. Another perspective would be that given how little of the money goes to bands after the RIAA takes their cut, it's actually better to speed the decline of the RIAA so that bands can get paid legitimately someday in some world different from that which exists now. Yet another perspective would be that even bands shouldn't be making money from distributing music.
Another important specification for inkjet printers is ink drop size, typically measured in picoliters. The smaller the number, the more ink per square inch can be placed on the paper. The more ink, the more accurate and lifelike the color of the print.
The above makes no sense to me.
The smaller the drop size, the more ink can be placed on the paper? So I can make a floor wetter with a small bucket than with a big one?
And the more ink, the better the print? So presumably I could make any given print better by re-running the same paper through twice?
While apparently intended to be illuminating, I find the article's statements above (assuming they're true) to be like explaining digestion by saying "the act of chewing food causes the absorption of nutrients into the bloodstream"... true, but too many steps left out for comprehension. No explanation would have been better than their non-sensical one. They should have either given a better explanation, or just left it at "the smaller the number, the better the print."
Taking a none digital medium and transcoding it to digital
Very minor and (hopefully) humorous nitpick: when the original medium is reality and the end result is digital, I believe the appropriate word would be "digitizing" rather than "transcoding"... but that said, I might be open to the idea of expanding the use of "transcoding" for non-digital material. "Hey Bubba, I just transcoded Minnie May into hamburger by using dynamite!"
SGI put out some increadibly cool technologies [including] The Standard Template Library
As far as I know, Alexander Stepanov was the party responsible for STL, and (as noted here) he worked by turns at General Electric, AT&T Bell Labs, and HP. What is the relationship between STL and SGI?
O.K. But just between us, Mr. Duffy, how did they find out about it?
"Despite the seriousness of the Bush White House, more than one Bush staffer reads The Onion and enjoys it thoroughly," he said. "We do have a sense of humor, believe it or not."
Um, no you don't. You're hassling the f'ing ONION about using the logo. SenseOfHumor Meter reading: zero.
Execs and board members often grossly overcompensate themselves, often to degrees which put the average contributor comparatively in the position of sharecropper, and often completely without regard to the performance of the company stock. A friend of mine who invests in the stock market says he has a policy of favoring stocks where the ceo caps their total pay (salary plus bonuses + stock) at some reasonable multiple of the lowest-paid company contributors, where "reasonable" is something like 15x. He has had good results with this policy, e.g. several stocks up x2 since last year. He likes this investment policy both because it quells his outrage at exhorbitant exec salaries, and because of a point made in the above article:
When you have a breakdown in the executive compensation process in which CEOs are receiving undeserved pay, it is an indication that there is a power imbalance in the boardroom... [and] when you have a weak board of directors, that is where you have broader corporate governance breakdowns which can include accounting fraud.
I ditched Verizon because of this crippled bluetooth business. Approximately the same week that the hack contest announced failure, TMobile published the first ever street-level map of their coverage. That was all I needed. I switched to TMobile, got a much more fully featured phone than Verizon had available, and have been a happy camper ever since.
[one] shouldn't let economics get in the way of the truth.
Unless one is running a publicly owned company, where the shareholders can file a lawsuit against company execs for failing to maximize profitability. And China is a large untapped market.
Reminds me of that Dilbert from early 2004. Just replace "quality" with "do no evil":
PHB (PointyHairedBoss): Remember, quality is our top priority.
Dilbert: Question: is it more important than safety?
PHB: Ooh... I forgot about that one.
Wally: Question: Is quality more important than obeying the law?
PHB: Well, probably not.
Alice: If we could maximize shareholder value by selling lower quality items, wouldn't we have a fiduciary responsibility to do it?
PHB: Hmmm... (looking at a whiteboard with "QUALITY" on it) well, I'm sure it's in the top four.
Someone: What if we had to lie to achieve quality?
As for a "more reasonable dev board", they're using a Gumstix, which is an off-the-shelf component. It should be pretty obvious to anyone with half a brain that the majority of the costs here are either in the display or the R&D.
If so, note that they'd be unwise to try to recoup R&D costs from dev channels. Display costs, yes, but R&D costs get distributed over the (eventual) user base, which they want to have be as large as possible, which means they want to sell to devs just at materials cost (if that high).
Individual with neither passion nor aptitude for engineering attempts engineering degree, finds it tough, fails, and blames the system.
I think there's more to it than that. He also - rightly, IMO - skewers the professors distracted by their research, the TAs who have no aptitude to explain and inspire, and the abysmally low class averages on tests which raise legitimate questions regarding how well engineering is being taught.
Some people envision finding a profession as a process of discovering that extended exposure to a given field has a motivating and pleasing effect on them. By contrast, my engineering experience consisted of getting terrible scores on tests that happened to be less terrible than average, and enduring many people who couldn't teach (and I attended one of the top 5 engineering schools in the country; it was not a question of the school's resources nor the quality of their student body). If I hadn't had so much romanticism about engineering during my highschool years, I would never have survived the college gauntlet and managed to actually become an engineer. And that is precisely this guy's point; he's not focused primarily on griping about his own experience, he's laying it out as an example of why more students aren't being drawn to engineering, which he feels is becoming an increasing problem for the US.
The only way to know the real margins of a product, is to see how good salaries are in that company (as long as it is profitable)
Your overall point is well taken, I just have a small twist to offer on the sentence above. I assumed (maybe falsely) that you referred to the salaries of individual contributors, i.e. non-execs, at the company. I'd propose that such salaries could be a more reliable measure of profit if it wasn't increasingly habitual for executives and board members to grossly overcompensate themselves, often to degrees which put the average contributor comparatively in the position of sharecropper, and often completely without regard to the performance of the company stock.
As a bit of a digression: I recently had a conversation with a friend who invests in the stock market, and he said that he has a policy of favoring stocks where the ceo caps their total pay (salary plus bonuses + stock) at some reasonable multiple of the lowest-paid company contributors. He has had good results with this policy, e.g. several stocks up x2 since last year. He likes this investment policy both because it quells his outrage at exhorbitant exec salaries, and because of a point made in the above article:
"When you have a breakdown in the executive compensation process in which CEOs are receiving undeserved pay, it is an indication that there is a power imbalance in the boardroom," says Brandon Rees, a research analyst with the AFL-CIO Office of Investment, which keeps a close eye on executive pay. "When you have a weak board of directors, that is where you have broader corporate governance breakdowns which can include accounting fraud," says Rees.
I see other replies asserting that this point needn't be made, either because people already understand it or because the group it applies to is small, but:
I don't believe it's prudent to cede that people already understand the issue, because (a) some don't, even if that's a minority, and (b) maintaining vigilance on the issue prevents the hijacking of terminology, the way "stealing" is (understandably but wrongly in significant ways) used to describe copyright infringement.
I have no idea how many or few people trade material for which they own the copyrights, but the point is that P2P networks have legitimate uses... and this is an equally important point, and while it's probably understood by some folks, I'd bet money that more than half of the population, if asked, would claim that P2P networks have only illegal uses. This should not stand, as it is tremendously dangerous to free speech.
Infoweek is reporting that the plan to eliminate the use of Office by the Massachusetts state government (previously covered on Slashdot) has not gone over well with Microsoft.
Upon hearing that Microsoft was being expunged by a state government, Ballmer said, "Just tell me it's not Massachussetts." When told that it was indeed Massachussetts, Ballmer became redfaced and apoplectic. Reaching for something to hurl, his hand grabbed empty air where his chair used to be. "You, um, you threw that when you heard the Google news, sir, we're still getting it replaced", said his meek assistant. "God D*MN IT!!", Ballmer reportedly remarked, then picked up a nearby box of unsold Windows2000 disks and hurled it through the plate glass of his huge office window. "I will f*cking BURY Massachussetts!!"
Slashdot Mirror
And, history will be a foot-note in American NewSpeak Propaganda.
(lifted from The Simpsons episode "Cape Fear".)
Lawyer: Isn't it true that you hate Diebold?
Me (dismissively amused): Diebold? That cute upstart little company that stole the election and sent this country into an economic and moral state not unlike a dark, urine-soaked hellhole?
Cheney: We object to the term "urine-soaked hellhole" when you could have used the term "torture-free patriotic heckhole".
Me: Cheerfully withdrawn.
Lawyer: But what about that tattoo on your chest? Doesn't it say, "Diebold die"?
Me: NO! That's German for "The bold, the".
I'm not entering a debate on the topic. I only replied to the previous post on the presumption that a question was being asked.
(Assuming you're asking non-rhetorically.) At least one perspective is that whether the money goes to "deserving parties" or not is beside the point, said point being that AllOfMp3's prices beat Itunes' prices. Another perspective would be that given how little of the money goes to bands after the RIAA takes their cut, it's actually better to speed the decline of the RIAA so that bands can get paid legitimately someday in some world different from that which exists now. Yet another perspective would be that even bands shouldn't be making money from distributing music.
The above makes no sense to me.
The smaller the drop size, the more ink can be placed on the paper? So I can make a floor wetter with a small bucket than with a big one?
And the more ink, the better the print? So presumably I could make any given print better by re-running the same paper through twice?
While apparently intended to be illuminating, I find the article's statements above (assuming they're true) to be like explaining digestion by saying "the act of chewing food causes the absorption of nutrients into the bloodstream"... true, but too many steps left out for comprehension. No explanation would have been better than their non-sensical one. They should have either given a better explanation, or just left it at "the smaller the number, the better the print."
But if there are quote marks around "democracy" because of Diebold voting machines, votes don't matter.
Very minor and (hopefully) humorous nitpick: when the original medium is reality and the end result is digital, I believe the appropriate word would be "digitizing" rather than "transcoding"... but that said, I might be open to the idea of expanding the use of "transcoding" for non-digital material. "Hey Bubba, I just transcoded Minnie May into hamburger by using dynamite!"
As far as I know, Alexander Stepanov was the party responsible for STL, and (as noted here) he worked by turns at General Electric, AT&T Bell Labs, and HP. What is the relationship between STL and SGI?
Already there from at least one vendor.
I ditched Verizon because of this crippled bluetooth business. Approximately the same week that the hack contest announced failure, TMobile published the first ever street-level map of their coverage. That was all I needed. I switched to TMobile, got a much more fully featured phone than Verizon had available, and have been a happy camper ever since.
Unless one is running a publicly owned company, where the shareholders can file a lawsuit against company execs for failing to maximize profitability. And China is a large untapped market.
Reminds me of that Dilbert from early 2004. Just replace "quality" with "do no evil":
If so, note that they'd be unwise to try to recoup R&D costs from dev channels. Display costs, yes, but R&D costs get distributed over the (eventual) user base, which they want to have be as large as possible, which means they want to sell to devs just at materials cost (if that high).
I think there's more to it than that. He also - rightly, IMO - skewers the professors distracted by their research, the TAs who have no aptitude to explain and inspire, and the abysmally low class averages on tests which raise legitimate questions regarding how well engineering is being taught.
Some people envision finding a profession as a process of discovering that extended exposure to a given field has a motivating and pleasing effect on them. By contrast, my engineering experience consisted of getting terrible scores on tests that happened to be less terrible than average, and enduring many people who couldn't teach (and I attended one of the top 5 engineering schools in the country; it was not a question of the school's resources nor the quality of their student body). If I hadn't had so much romanticism about engineering during my highschool years, I would never have survived the college gauntlet and managed to actually become an engineer. And that is precisely this guy's point; he's not focused primarily on griping about his own experience, he's laying it out as an example of why more students aren't being drawn to engineering, which he feels is becoming an increasing problem for the US.
I for one agree.
... it'll be an xbox game simulating a virtual Segway.
If a child makes a photocopy of a book he/she can't afford, then I think the described leniency should apply.
Your overall point is well taken, I just have a small twist to offer on the sentence above. I assumed (maybe falsely) that you referred to the salaries of individual contributors, i.e. non-execs, at the company. I'd propose that such salaries could be a more reliable measure of profit if it wasn't increasingly habitual for executives and board members to grossly overcompensate themselves, often to degrees which put the average contributor comparatively in the position of sharecropper, and often completely without regard to the performance of the company stock. As a bit of a digression: I recently had a conversation with a friend who invests in the stock market, and he said that he has a policy of favoring stocks where the ceo caps their total pay (salary plus bonuses + stock) at some reasonable multiple of the lowest-paid company contributors. He has had good results with this policy, e.g. several stocks up x2 since last year. He likes this investment policy both because it quells his outrage at exhorbitant exec salaries, and because of a point made in the above article:
All we need is a few more viruses that download songs from p2p networks, and these lawsuits would disappear completely.
Upon hearing that Microsoft was being expunged by a state government, Ballmer said, "Just tell me it's not Massachussetts." When told that it was indeed Massachussetts, Ballmer became redfaced and apoplectic. Reaching for something to hurl, his hand grabbed empty air where his chair used to be. "You, um, you threw that when you heard the Google news, sir, we're still getting it replaced", said his meek assistant. "God D*MN IT!!", Ballmer reportedly remarked, then picked up a nearby box of unsold Windows2000 disks and hurled it through the plate glass of his huge office window. "I will f*cking BURY Massachussetts!!"
Not that it matters, but Riven was released in 1997.
Whew, that's a relief! :) I used to worry that Guantanamo somehow reflected on the US.
Except now we've got Guantanamo. And that's just the one we know about...
You ain't never seen th'
likes of March 17th