Or at worst, transplant all the other body parts into a real computer with a decent motherboard and a non-proprietary PSU (apparently some Dells have a "unique" mobo power connector layout). But unless an upgrade is in order anyway, yeah, building a whole new monkey is somewhere between overkill and dishonest.
Tho I'd also warn the customer that the interchangeable parts from the old Dell may not be so great either (given that the OEMs often use seconds), and that the HD probably has some heat damage, so I couldn't predict its remaining lifespan.
Explain exactly what you mean, please? about the improper caching, I mean.
I use "open in new window" all the time, due to not wanting to reload (or lose) some previous page. Old Netscape didn't seem to need to reload stuff, but Moz/SM is inconsistent about it.
Except when the entire visible area is an image, in which case there IS no "back" on the context menu, thanks to a moronic decision back when Mozilla was new, and that persists today across the entire Moz-based family.
Seems the lead programmer thought there was too much "clutter" on the context menu, so removed "back" when the pointer was over an image. There was a huge outcry in the MozDev newsgroup, and a vote of 701 to 2 (yes, real numbers) to restore it, but his response was essentially "*I* like it this way, so fuck you. Moz isn't meant for end users anyway." (I witnessed this exchange in the newsgroup myself.)
Someone made a patch to address the deficiency, but it was not widely distributed and seems lost to history. Perhaps someone will see fit to recreate it, for those of us who curse this decision on a daily basis (but not being coders, have no way to fix it).
I can't read slashdot in glorious-colour mode so I don't even see that stuff -- normal mode hurts my eyes and makes me crazy waiting forever for stuff to load. I use low-bandwidth mode with no CSS or JS. Comments and modpoints work but nothing else does. Sorry!
I read the article you linked to above (haven't noticed your other submissions, but now will keep an eye out:) -- very good points. Of course this would require changing an entrenched system, pretty tough to do.
I'd add a further incentivizer: let no compensation be given until NN-years later (I'd suggest 10 years) to ensure that decisions are made with longterm company health in mind, and perhaps tie the level of compensation to how stable (not how cancerous, er, growthy) the company is. If the company you helped run goes tits-up due to bad executive decisions, well then, no gold for you, let alone golden parachute!
One big problem is that we've got this generation of MBAs who've never actually BUILT a company, but are being brought in to RUN a company. They know what they learned in business school, and how to play the bottom line, but nothing else. As the HBR article points out, this does not concern them, because they'll have shown their "improved bottom line", collected, and bailed long before their decisions hit the fan.
I agree it's not as simple as it used to be. Cheap prices beget cheap manufacturing, and the market has noted that now the majority of today's "geeks" are not really knowledgeable as they were in the past, but rather are gamer types all too easily seduced by SHINY, and have the yuppie mentality that thinks a high price is a good indicator of high quality. (Which explains Alienware.) So instead of price being fairly well tied to quality as it used to be, now we have a lot of high-priced utter crap.
Still, it's generally better than the namebrand system crap, and at least you got to pick your own crap instead of having it foisted upon you.:)
Personally I've never thought much of Asus, Abit, and a number of other gamer-oriented boards; I've seen too many with odd problems. I'm a Tyan bigot when I can afford it, and I also like my iBase board a lot. But those are server motherboards, and it makes a difference.
I recently had a server-class power supply finally fail at the ripe old age of 15 years (not its fault, it got fried by a major surge that cooked half the house breakers and two layers of surge protection -- tho the rest of the computer is undamaged), and was thrilled to discover that Topower still makes this model -- you can guess what I'm buying to replace it. Yet at $60 it's no more expensive than the shiny crap!
Having voted in countless shareholder BoD elections, I can attest it's not that simple. Generally they're people one knows NOTHING about, except that they're on a bunch of Boards. I can't remember EVER seeing a 'recommended' vote being overturned, and I've held most of my stocks for 30 years.
"Anybody can make a fine case that ever-increasing profits are not possible without hurting the company."
I think that's a good point. Short term betterment too often becomes long-term detriment.
Get a local clone shop to build a system to your specs. Even a low-end clone will outlive a high-end namebrand machine, and will have fewer issues and be quicker to fix even if something does break. See my other posts in this discussion.
Typing this from a clone whose major innards are now 12 years old:)
My experience has been the opposite. As the hardware dude for the local user group, I vet all the donated systems. Dells are nearly always sick or dead; the only brand with a worse track record in our slushpile is Micron (which looked to me like it used a lot of parts from the same sources, only further down the 2nds chain). It's to where I just assume a donated Dell is an unrepairable organ donor until proven otherwise.
HP desktops are much more likely to be alive and not need work, and Gateways/eMachines are usually alive but in need of work. But the Dells have been almost entirely goners.
And the clones are nearly always alive, healthy, and outlive any namebrand PC by 3 to 1.
That's why I loved Western Digital's late in-house support. I'd call and say "this HD is doing this and this" and the tech would ask if I'd run their diags, and I'd say I already tested it some other way and it did this and that, and he's say sounds like it's sick, here's your RMA number -- about that fast. They knew enough *themselves* to peg whether YOU knew what you were talking about, and if you did, they were willing to cut to the chase.
Also, you can't ADMIT to a failure until the lawyers are done vetting it, because doing so sets you up for much greater legal liability... no thanks to today's litigious society.
Yes, exactly -- see my small rant above on how being beholden to shareholders above all else is what really ruins companies. Gotta make the bottom line look good, gotta make it look like there's always "growth" (what on earth is wrong with being merely "stable"??!) or the stock market declares you a failure!
If we really want to end this corporate spiral to hell, we need to change the law so companies are first beholden to customers, then to their own future and employees, and last, to stockholders.
Of course, a lot of investment money would subsequently dry up since shareholders would no longer be first in line for any payouts, but that might be a good thing, as it would discourage companies from growing so fast that they have to cut corners just to keep up with their own success.
And I say this as a shareholder in several core companies. But thinking just in terms of dividends and growth is shortsighted and narrowsighted... frex, if Exxon-Mobil didn't have to pay me a dividend first and foremost, maybe the price of gas wouldn't be so high, cost of many other things that rely on fuel would also not be so high, and we'd all benefit.
They care about this-quarter-now and screw-the-future precisely because publicly-held companies are legally beholden to their shareholders first and foremost, and if they don't do their best to provide a return on shareholders' investment, then they're in legal trouble of a different sort.
This is why I say the stock market is the root of corporate evil -- because if you're a public company, you're obligated to too many shareholders who don't give a damn about your customers or your future, so long as you give them a dividend check TODAY.
The owner of SAS software said flat out he would not go public because of this. He didn't want to be forced to do the wrong thing for his company or his customers, solely because the shareholders (and the laws that protect them as your primary lienholders) demand it.
Heh heh, that's hilarious... sounds like something I would do!!
I don't think the major brands have a "problem" with their stuff dying on schedule, because they figure it just adds sales churn since most people won't know what the PC died of anyway, and most don't brand-hop once they've got started with a given brand.
I say this because my observation is that the namebranders are *designed* to fail at about 3-4 years old, primarily due to chronically running too hot.
I have a high-end Dell sitting here that, as it came from the factory, routinely overheated due to the lack of proper heatsink, and no CPU fan (just the one at the end of the shroud). I replaced the stock cooler with an ordinary HSF, threw out the shroud, and its operating temperature dropped by 40F degrees -- yes, FORTY degrees. (So much for the claims of highly engineered airflow.)
And shortly after that, it died from bad capacitors.
I'd be more annoyed, but the machine was free due to first owner despairing of the cooling issues.
I think patents should be (as I gather was the original intent) restricted to "stuff you can carry away", and should never include "methods" (let alone biological processes).
Software patents all boil down to "a method of making a computer do X, using standard math formulae which are fundamental principles of the universe" so if methods are wholly disallowed, software (including low-level stuff like file formats) would not be patentable at all. So how would anyone make money on software?? Closed-source software fills the bill, by being essentially a "trade secret", no different from any other trade secret. And you can copyright your source code and license it just like you can a book. I think that, were patents out of the picture, would actually create a lot of incentive to innovate (invent stuff, sell it, watch everyone else try to figure out what the heck you DID), and you'd be marketing best quality rather than exclusivity (or the most economical for the level of quality, as the case may be). And if you marketed trash, someone could come along and better you, oh well!
Yeah, it's been a while since I talked to 'em, things have probably changed:) And changed again since last I spoke to someone who was chasing after stat-damages, for that matter! he was filing for damages for stuff that was years or decades old. Dunno if he ever got anywhere but I do know he expected to use it as a get-rich-quick scheme.
PS. The form you linked does not like Acrobat 5:( (which I don't update because it's the full version and I don't want to mess it up)
Well, I don't think the 15-20 year range for patents is too outrageous, given the cost of R&D. Not much different from 14 or 28 years for copyright. What is outrageous are patent trolls. If you haven't done a thing toward using or protecting it until it's about to run out, there should be some penalty attached so you can't gouge the unsuspecting at the last moment.
Kinda like folks shouldn't be able to use a copyright to sit on it and prevent others from using the material forever and ever.
Hmm, aren't we supposed to be arguing or something?:)
A great deal of what we consider the "masterworks" and "classics" were works for hire in their day (before copyright existed in any widespread way). I don't see why work for hire isn't a valid model here, just like it is for everything else.
The problem is that the publishing industry is essentially a giant speculating market, and it wants to be paid whether it guesses right or wrong.
Technically you can't copyright an unpublished work anyway, at least so the Copyright Office told me. So long as you're sitting on it, its copyright duration doesn't start. Publication (ie. making it public) is the key.
However, I think your suggestions are good and should be codified as such, to ensure that unpublished works *can't* fall out of copyright in an untimely fashion (such as with unfinished works), yet once published, they'll only receive a rational protection instead of for all eternity, as the current laws would effectively have it.
Only diff I'd suggest: being unpublished works for hire might be associated with patents, so I'm wondering if that duration shouldn't be the same as for patents, so that internal documentation and suchlike associated with patents won't become a source of contention. Still, that's only 17 years, not infinity.
Which means that ASCAP only has to pay out to performers who are *already* making enough money to hire lawyers to threaten ASCAP if said performer doesn't get paid in a timely manner.
It follows that all the performers who aren't rich exist only to indirectly fund ASCAP.
Slashdot Mirror
Or at worst, transplant all the other body parts into a real computer with a decent motherboard and a non-proprietary PSU (apparently some Dells have a "unique" mobo power connector layout). But unless an upgrade is in order anyway, yeah, building a whole new monkey is somewhere between overkill and dishonest.
Tho I'd also warn the customer that the interchangeable parts from the old Dell may not be so great either (given that the OEMs often use seconds), and that the HD probably has some heat damage, so I couldn't predict its remaining lifespan.
Explain exactly what you mean, please? about the improper caching, I mean.
I use "open in new window" all the time, due to not wanting to reload (or lose) some previous page. Old Netscape didn't seem to need to reload stuff, but Moz/SM is inconsistent about it.
Likewise...
Except when the entire visible area is an image, in which case there IS no "back" on the context menu, thanks to a moronic decision back when Mozilla was new, and that persists today across the entire Moz-based family.
Seems the lead programmer thought there was too much "clutter" on the context menu, so removed "back" when the pointer was over an image. There was a huge outcry in the MozDev newsgroup, and a vote of 701 to 2 (yes, real numbers) to restore it, but his response was essentially "*I* like it this way, so fuck you. Moz isn't meant for end users anyway." (I witnessed this exchange in the newsgroup myself.)
Someone made a patch to address the deficiency, but it was not widely distributed and seems lost to history. Perhaps someone will see fit to recreate it, for those of us who curse this decision on a daily basis (but not being coders, have no way to fix it).
There are some studies about what people actually SEE on web pages at http://www.useit.com/
Don't let the site's plainness and 1996 colours put you off, it's got a LOT of good info.
Yeah, that's essentially what I said -- admitting to a mistake is crumming the waters at best.
I don't know at what point "helping the good people" becomes a legal admission of fault; that may be another can of, uh, shark bait. :(
Or take the Microsoft approach and not issue dividends for... what was it, 30 years??
Unfortunately they are not alone; the gov't runs a great many protection rackets of its own, so thinks this is "normal".
I can't read slashdot in glorious-colour mode so I don't even see that stuff -- normal mode hurts my eyes and makes me crazy waiting forever for stuff to load. I use low-bandwidth mode with no CSS or JS. Comments and modpoints work but nothing else does. Sorry!
But it would sure cure the short-term thinking problem :)
I read the article you linked to above (haven't noticed your other submissions, but now will keep an eye out :) -- very good points. Of course this would require changing an entrenched system, pretty tough to do.
I'd add a further incentivizer: let no compensation be given until NN-years later (I'd suggest 10 years) to ensure that decisions are made with longterm company health in mind, and perhaps tie the level of compensation to how stable (not how cancerous, er, growthy) the company is. If the company you helped run goes tits-up due to bad executive decisions, well then, no gold for you, let alone golden parachute!
One big problem is that we've got this generation of MBAs who've never actually BUILT a company, but are being brought in to RUN a company. They know what they learned in business school, and how to play the bottom line, but nothing else. As the HBR article points out, this does not concern them, because they'll have shown their "improved bottom line", collected, and bailed long before their decisions hit the fan.
I agree it's not as simple as it used to be. Cheap prices beget cheap manufacturing, and the market has noted that now the majority of today's "geeks" are not really knowledgeable as they were in the past, but rather are gamer types all too easily seduced by SHINY, and have the yuppie mentality that thinks a high price is a good indicator of high quality. (Which explains Alienware.) So instead of price being fairly well tied to quality as it used to be, now we have a lot of high-priced utter crap.
Still, it's generally better than the namebrand system crap, and at least you got to pick your own crap instead of having it foisted upon you. :)
Personally I've never thought much of Asus, Abit, and a number of other gamer-oriented boards; I've seen too many with odd problems. I'm a Tyan bigot when I can afford it, and I also like my iBase board a lot. But those are server motherboards, and it makes a difference.
I recently had a server-class power supply finally fail at the ripe old age of 15 years (not its fault, it got fried by a major surge that cooked half the house breakers and two layers of surge protection -- tho the rest of the computer is undamaged), and was thrilled to discover that Topower still makes this model -- you can guess what I'm buying to replace it. Yet at $60 it's no more expensive than the shiny crap!
Having voted in countless shareholder BoD elections, I can attest it's not that simple. Generally they're people one knows NOTHING about, except that they're on a bunch of Boards. I can't remember EVER seeing a 'recommended' vote being overturned, and I've held most of my stocks for 30 years.
"Anybody can make a fine case that ever-increasing profits are not possible without hurting the company."
I think that's a good point. Short term betterment too often becomes long-term detriment.
Get a local clone shop to build a system to your specs. Even a low-end clone will outlive a high-end namebrand machine, and will have fewer issues and be quicker to fix even if something does break. See my other posts in this discussion.
Typing this from a clone whose major innards are now 12 years old :)
My experience has been the opposite. As the hardware dude for the local user group, I vet all the donated systems. Dells are nearly always sick or dead; the only brand with a worse track record in our slushpile is Micron (which looked to me like it used a lot of parts from the same sources, only further down the 2nds chain). It's to where I just assume a donated Dell is an unrepairable organ donor until proven otherwise.
HP desktops are much more likely to be alive and not need work, and Gateways/eMachines are usually alive but in need of work. But the Dells have been almost entirely goners.
And the clones are nearly always alive, healthy, and outlive any namebrand PC by 3 to 1.
That's why I loved Western Digital's late in-house support. I'd call and say "this HD is doing this and this" and the tech would ask if I'd run their diags, and I'd say I already tested it some other way and it did this and that, and he's say sounds like it's sick, here's your RMA number -- about that fast. They knew enough *themselves* to peg whether YOU knew what you were talking about, and if you did, they were willing to cut to the chase.
Also, you can't ADMIT to a failure until the lawyers are done vetting it, because doing so sets you up for much greater legal liability... no thanks to today's litigious society.
Yes, exactly -- see my small rant above on how being beholden to shareholders above all else is what really ruins companies. Gotta make the bottom line look good, gotta make it look like there's always "growth" (what on earth is wrong with being merely "stable"??!) or the stock market declares you a failure!
If we really want to end this corporate spiral to hell, we need to change the law so companies are first beholden to customers, then to their own future and employees, and last, to stockholders.
Of course, a lot of investment money would subsequently dry up since shareholders would no longer be first in line for any payouts, but that might be a good thing, as it would discourage companies from growing so fast that they have to cut corners just to keep up with their own success.
And I say this as a shareholder in several core companies. But thinking just in terms of dividends and growth is shortsighted and narrowsighted... frex, if Exxon-Mobil didn't have to pay me a dividend first and foremost, maybe the price of gas wouldn't be so high, cost of many other things that rely on fuel would also not be so high, and we'd all benefit.
They care about this-quarter-now and screw-the-future precisely because publicly-held companies are legally beholden to their shareholders first and foremost, and if they don't do their best to provide a return on shareholders' investment, then they're in legal trouble of a different sort.
This is why I say the stock market is the root of corporate evil -- because if you're a public company, you're obligated to too many shareholders who don't give a damn about your customers or your future, so long as you give them a dividend check TODAY.
The owner of SAS software said flat out he would not go public because of this. He didn't want to be forced to do the wrong thing for his company or his customers, solely because the shareholders (and the laws that protect them as your primary lienholders) demand it.
Heh heh, that's hilarious... sounds like something I would do!!
I don't think the major brands have a "problem" with their stuff dying on schedule, because they figure it just adds sales churn since most people won't know what the PC died of anyway, and most don't brand-hop once they've got started with a given brand.
I say this because my observation is that the namebranders are *designed* to fail at about 3-4 years old, primarily due to chronically running too hot.
I have a high-end Dell sitting here that, as it came from the factory, routinely overheated due to the lack of proper heatsink, and no CPU fan (just the one at the end of the shroud). I replaced the stock cooler with an ordinary HSF, threw out the shroud, and its operating temperature dropped by 40F degrees -- yes, FORTY degrees. (So much for the claims of highly engineered airflow.)
And shortly after that, it died from bad capacitors.
I'd be more annoyed, but the machine was free due to first owner despairing of the cooling issues.
I think patents should be (as I gather was the original intent) restricted to "stuff you can carry away", and should never include "methods" (let alone biological processes).
Software patents all boil down to "a method of making a computer do X, using standard math formulae which are fundamental principles of the universe" so if methods are wholly disallowed, software (including low-level stuff like file formats) would not be patentable at all. So how would anyone make money on software?? Closed-source software fills the bill, by being essentially a "trade secret", no different from any other trade secret. And you can copyright your source code and license it just like you can a book. I think that, were patents out of the picture, would actually create a lot of incentive to innovate (invent stuff, sell it, watch everyone else try to figure out what the heck you DID), and you'd be marketing best quality rather than exclusivity (or the most economical for the level of quality, as the case may be). And if you marketed trash, someone could come along and better you, oh well!
Yeah, it's been a while since I talked to 'em, things have probably changed :) And changed again since last I spoke to someone who was chasing after stat-damages, for that matter! he was filing for damages for stuff that was years or decades old. Dunno if he ever got anywhere but I do know he expected to use it as a get-rich-quick scheme.
PS. The form you linked does not like Acrobat 5 :( (which I don't update because it's the full version and I don't want to mess it up)
Well, I don't think the 15-20 year range for patents is too outrageous, given the cost of R&D. Not much different from 14 or 28 years for copyright. What is outrageous are patent trolls. If you haven't done a thing toward using or protecting it until it's about to run out, there should be some penalty attached so you can't gouge the unsuspecting at the last moment.
Kinda like folks shouldn't be able to use a copyright to sit on it and prevent others from using the material forever and ever.
Hmm, aren't we supposed to be arguing or something? :)
A great deal of what we consider the "masterworks" and "classics" were works for hire in their day (before copyright existed in any widespread way). I don't see why work for hire isn't a valid model here, just like it is for everything else.
The problem is that the publishing industry is essentially a giant speculating market, and it wants to be paid whether it guesses right or wrong.
Technically you can't copyright an unpublished work anyway, at least so the Copyright Office told me. So long as you're sitting on it, its copyright duration doesn't start. Publication (ie. making it public) is the key.
However, I think your suggestions are good and should be codified as such, to ensure that unpublished works *can't* fall out of copyright in an untimely fashion (such as with unfinished works), yet once published, they'll only receive a rational protection instead of for all eternity, as the current laws would effectively have it.
Only diff I'd suggest: being unpublished works for hire might be associated with patents, so I'm wondering if that duration shouldn't be the same as for patents, so that internal documentation and suchlike associated with patents won't become a source of contention. Still, that's only 17 years, not infinity.
Which means that ASCAP only has to pay out to performers who are *already* making enough money to hire lawyers to threaten ASCAP if said performer doesn't get paid in a timely manner.
It follows that all the performers who aren't rich exist only to indirectly fund ASCAP.