The reason many school districts pass on this option is the same reason why a lot of kids are ignorant, disrespectful, destructive and violent jerks:
The kids' crazy parents.
Kick a kid out of school and you will face the wrath of one (usually not two) irate, belligerent, sometimes violent adult who will curse, cajole, and downright threaten you into reinstating the student. And often there will be, waiting in the wings, a lawyer who's willing to take on the case.
The American legal system has effectively bullied school districts into a very clear set of principles:
You cannot lay a finger on a student for any reason, ever, even to restrain them from assaulting another student.
You cannot kick a student out of school. They have a right to an education.
You cannot hold a kid back in school for poor performance. See above.
It takes two people to have a fight. When punishing the participants, you cannot be unilateral or biased against any of the participants.
I had a friend who was a substitute teacher in the Oakland, California school district. He was usually called in to sub for teachers who were not sick, but who just needed time away from the school. He himself did not last more than a couple months -- which means no more than about eight class sessions. His case was not unusual.
The worst of American public schools are really, really bad -- and those places are nothing about education.
P.S. Ironically, my family moved to California in the 1970s for the good schools. California's schools are now something like 42nd in the nation.
I'm sorry, but this pissed me off. It implies that ethics is something we young and inexperienced folks lack, and must learn from our elders.
Not at all! If there's one thing any idiot knows, it's that young people aren't going to pay attention to their elders. Ipso facto, ethics aren't learned from the elders, because nothing is. Unfortunately, a well developed sense of society, and of one's relationship to it, comes from life experience. I'm not going to bother to explain more than that, because one other thing that experience has taught me is that when you are inexperienced, it's virtually impossible to conceive of the idea that you'll see things differently when you have more experience.
Employees often suck. In retail, they rip you off more than your "customers". (I can't call a shoplifter a customer:)
I had a girlfriend who had a (very brief) job working at the Disney Store. She said that at the Disney Store, if a patron was referred to as a "customer," that meant someone suspected them of shoplifting. Everyone else was a "guest."
If you're in a situation where you really have to worry that much about your own people, doesn't that just show that management has failed to provide a good working environment and create loyalty?
It's a fair question, and yet loyalty is not always something that is so easy to just "create." Loyalty is not something that's handed down from management. It is a personal choice on behalf of each individual employee. Every employee has his or her own agenda and set of beliefs. Particularly among IT people, you may encounter a number of difficult types:
The smug techie who thinks he knows more than anybody and is therefore tempted by the idea that he can get away with whatever he wants because nobody knows what he does anyway.
The person with poor interpersonal skills which have held him back in terms of career advancement, and who thus feels he is undercompensated (and doesn't know how to ask for a raise).
The individual who styles himself as a "Bad Boy hacker," who isn't going to be loyal to any company no matter how you compensate him.
The individual who was hired right out of college and is simply too young and inexperienced to have a well-developed sense of personal ethics.
There are all sorts of other examples that could apply to anyone; for example, an employee who feels bored or unchallenged at work, or is otherwise just lazy, might spend too much time engaging in compromising activities (whether they be playing games or using P2P networks). And some people just don't know any better than to disclose information they shouldn't -- I personally have worked for a company that hired a private detective to try and get a job at a rival company and pick up information from other employees while he was there.
The point is that you can't entirely point the finger at management. Yes, it's in management's best interest to create an engaging and enjoyable work environment for everyone, but the most they can really do is try. Whether or not they succeed, that's still no reason to skimp on internal security measures.
an expansion slot (like the GameBoy) to upload new ebooks and play otherwise interactive (inter-ractive?;)) media
A screen optimized for reading (flickerfree, highcontrast)
Long battery time
Reasonably cheap
Light in weight
Wireless (802.11 and/or GPRM) connection
Reconfigurable software
No DRM
Your interpretation of your requirements may vary from mine, but it sounds like the Nokia 770 may be what you're looking for. It has internal storage and can take RS-MMC cards. In addition, you can add new content to the cards via USB if you don't have an MMC slot on your computer. It has a flicker-free LCD screen with 225dpi (yes!) resolution. It's $350; cheaper than most PDAs. It weighs half a pound. It has 802.11 and can associate with mobile phones via Bluetooth. As far as reconfigurable and DRM-free goes, it's based on Linux and doesn't even arrive from the factory with an e-book reader. (I use a free one called FBReader.)
The device is far from perfect -- I've criticized it a lot elsewhere. But for reading e-books I've had no complaints with it. The one strike against it, based on your list, is the battery life -- which sucks. They don't seem to have gotten the low-power mode right, and if you don't make a habit of regularly charging it (like a cell phone) you're liable to lift it off the nightstand one morning and find that the battery has suddenly gone completely dead. But at least the battery is replaceable and is a standard Nokia part.
there is *NOTHING* wrong with a book, which are just *PERFECT*.
I like books too, but this is an overstatement. I just finished The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas. Depending which edition you read, that book might run to around 1,500 pages. I don't want to lug that back and forth from the office every day. One of the things that made it possible for me to complete it painlessly in a timely manner was the fact that I read it on my Nokia 770.
I also read The Da Vinci Code on my 770. Unlike Dumas, that book is still in copyright. I read an illegal copy of it. But then, as it turns out, it really does suck; and so I have few qualms about not helping to line Dan Brown's talentless pockets (except maybe that I'm not contributing to the fortune that would allow him to retire from fiction). European Slashdotters may not be aware, however, that there is no softcover edition of The Da Vinci Code in the United States. The publisher planned one, but when it saw how briskly the hardcover edition was selling, it cancelled the paperback. In this case, I am borrowing from the popular "Slashdot MP3 defense": The publisher is not providing me the format I prefer, therefore I took the initiative into my own hands. Don't bother arguing with me about the ethical fine points of this decision -- I've already thought it through myself and I've decided I just don't care. I pirated it; come and get me.
In the 1950s, comic books were the great evil corrupting our youth. One glance at the covers was enough to tell you that these things were leading to the downfall of Western civilization. They actually held Congressional hearings to decide what to do about the "comic book problem."
The result was that all the comic book publishers banded together and formed a voluntary rating system. In effect, they censored themselves. The new rules said that, since comic books were for kids, no comic books were allowed to include words like "teror," "horror," or "crime" in their titles; comics could not feature werewolves, vampires, or other elements of the supernatural; if any crime was depicted in a comic book, the criminals would have to come to justice for their crimes by the end of the story; and so on. The net effect was that an entire genre of horror and crime comic books went out of business. You know some of those comic books -- for example, Tales from the Crypt. There were many others, however. In its heyday, a comic book called Crime Does Not Pay outsold not just Tales from the Crypt but the entire output of that book's publisher (E.C. Comics) combined. It too went out of business, just months after Tales from the Crypt and the other E.C. horror comics, once the Comics Code took effect.
And so the world was safe. Kids stopped being juvenile delinquents, at least the ones who were able to stay away from that awful rock 'n roll music. It was a halcyon age, a veritable paradise, for the next 30 years or so.
But then in the 1980s, rap music came along, and heavy metal, and they were even worse than rock 'n roll. This aural poison proved to be all but irresistable to kids. So a brave group of moral citizens, led by the wife of future Democratic presidential hopeful Al Gore, banded together to slap labels on rap albums, warning parents about the horrors inside. Again we were safe.
But now the evil rears its ugly head again -- video games! We tried using a ratings system on them, but nobody went out of business (unlike the comic book publishers in the 50s). How long can we as citizens stand for this?? Clearly something must be done if this cycle of moral depravity is ever going to end!
The fact that they have been able to turn Linux into a business for them at all is a good thing.
And where's the evidence of that? You're being a little premature, don't you think? No offense to Novell, but last I heard they bought somebody else's Linux business. Since acquiring Suse, they've seen its share of the Linux market shrink compared to Red Hat's. Meanwhile, their transitional product for past (and future) Netware customers, Open Enterprise Server, is critical to their success and yet is included in that 11 percent decline in sales.
Novell has an existing customer base and a whole boatload of cash. Both are depletable resources.
Fortunately, the German government recently closed this same tax loophole that has fueled Uwe Boll's abysmal career.
Poor old Uwe. It's not fair to knock him so much. Sure, his movies suck ass and seem to be getting worse all the time. But at least he's not trying to pretend they're something more than they really are.
I attended a premiere screening of "House of the Dead" in San Francisco before it had even gotten a distribution deal in the U.S. There was a guy at the door with a German accent padding everybody down. Unfortunately my friend and I hadn't foreseen this and had arrived at the theater with our pockets fully loaded.
"Vat iss zat, zere? Vat iss zat in your pocket?"
My friend produced a pint bottle of Jim Beam from his back pocket.
"Ah," the German guy said. "No cameras!" he announced. "Booze iss fine." And he waved us past.
In the Q&A session after the screening, we learned that this German guy who had been padding everybody down was the director, Uwe Boll.
(Incidentally, before the Q&A Uwe pointed out a representative from Sega who was in attendance. A Japanese guy stood up and waved to everybody. I noticed that the Japanese guy was sitting next to my friend Keith. Later Keith told me that the Japanese guy had helped him polish off an entire fifth of Seagram's 7 during the screening. All in good fun at Uwe Boll movies.)
I was flying with Lufthansa, but when the surly customs agent requests the customs form declaring what you're bringing back, and also such things as "have you been in contact with livestock", it most certainly is the governments fault.
Sure. In this case, it's the fault of the Department of Agriculture and/or the Centers for Disease Control.
Come on, you're not seriously advocating that the U.S. abolish customs are you?
I travel by air pretty often and I can assure you I don't tell anybody my next of kin, my salary or anything else. I guess YMMV but it sounds like people are getting a leetle bit paranoid here.
When I was flying back from Europe, I had to fill out a form with who I was, and my home address, and an emergency contact (if I so wished).
If I understand you correctly, and you are an American citizen and a permanent U.S. resident, then you shouldn't need to fill out any form. I know there is a form for non-immigrant foreign nationals who visit the United States, but U.S. citizens have all the documentation they need: their passports. If you were flying a foreign airline then that airline may have wanted you to fill out a form, but you can hardly blame the government for that.
Rather, the food and consumer products they sold were merely a way to gain a cash-flow, which was then used to generate profit through the same manner as a bank - interest and gains. Managing their cash-flow correctly (encouraging high volume of shopping, negotiating lengthy payment terms with larger suppliers) allowed them the time needed to hold money long enough for this to be viable. This same fellow claimed that in their corporate charter, Kroger was identified as a banking institution, not a retailer.
I bet your friend with the stock in Kroger was right. I just received a spam from some stock analyst guy this morning saying he had downgraded Novell stock to "underperform." Among the trivia in the message, though, was the claim that Novell is actually holding so much cash that fully half of its revenue comes from interest earnings.
I'm not in favor of NTP or anything, but the people who point out that NTP had no product are missing the point of patents.
Suppose you invented the Blackberry. You. Right now. You have the idea. Now what? Do you have the financial backing to manufacture a million Blackberrys? Do you have the industry connections to go around and make deals with all the mobile carriers to get your service into people's hands? No. But it's still a good idea, so you want to go forward with it. That means finding potential partners and investors. But just talking to those people about it is spreading the idea around. Suppose you go to the mobile company and say, "I have these plans for this service, I'm going to call it Blackberry." What's stopping them from just making the service themselves and cutting you out of the picture completely?
Your patent is.
In an ideal world, that's what patents are for: protecting the little guy inventor from big business.
From my point of view, a system should not require extensive tuning to run well in typical environments. I can't stand the idea that having lots of tunable settings makes something good.
I pray you never get a job managing a factory, then.
Everything you say is true, however the judge in this case didn't rule based on a personal judgment of the merits of Amazon's corporate culture.
Instead, she said that Amazon seemed to have worded communications and agreements in such a way that they allowed Amazon to "play their way." The principle that seems to be at work here is the idea that, whatever a contract may actually say to the letter, contracts should always be negotiated in good faith. That is, if I arrange a deal with you for some consideration, I shouldn't then try to play games with the language of the deal to my own advantage. That's not having better business sense than the other guy. That's just being sort of shifty. It smacks of bad faith.
Toys'R'Us didn't win any monetary damages in this case because it couldn't show any documents that supported its claim that it was buying an exclusive arrangement with Amazon. What it did get, however, was out of the 10-year deal. The judge ruled that the deal, which was ostensibly signed in good faith to the advantage of both Toys'R'Us and Amazon, was now working against Toys'R'Us's interests in favor of Amazon. Contrary to what the previous poster said, that's not laudable business practice on Amazon's behalf and it's good that Toys'R'Us got released from that contract.
I agree with others, however, that there's absolutely no evidence that Toys'R'Us knows the first thing about running a Web site. The severing of this relationship is probably Toys'R'Us's final death knell.
I will add to your comment about farmer's markets and talk about small local grocers, because over the last year or so I have stumbled across a fact that surprised me quite a lot.
Down the street from my house here in the city of San Francisco I have a little corner produce store. You can get pretty much any fresh food that you can get from Safeway: vegetables, fruit, dried goods, eggs, milk, etc.
First I started shopping there because it was just as convenient to get to as Safeway, and buying local seemed like a good thing. Then I noticed that the quality of the produce was much, much better than Safeway's. Safeway is buying in massive volume and they are buying vegetables that have been grown, treated and/or engineered to have long shelf lives. The stuff at this corner store is coming from the farmers to my street corner. It looks and tastes better in every way.
But, as I said, over the last year I noticed something even more surprising. You might think, based on what I've said, that I'm paying a little more to support my convictions and/or get nice produce. That's usually how it works: Buy from the big vendor, get the deep volume discounts. Buy from the little guy and pay more. BUT NO! The fact of the matter is that just about every single thing I buy at the corner store is cheaper than the same thing at Safeway.
There are some exceptions; mostly packaged foods like salad dressings or mayo. But mushrooms that cost $2.49/lb at Safeway cost $1.89 at the corner store. A container of milk that's $2.19 at Safeway is $1.79 at the corner store. Even something like a sack of flour or a packet of yeast costs less.
The lesson is that Safeway's business model does not necessarily work the way you think big retailers' business models work. I expect what they do is negotiate deep discounts with the packaged, prepared food vendors: Hot Pockets, Lean Cuisine, etc., and they sell them to the consumer at a minimal profit margin. They make up the difference on produce, fresh fruits and vegetables, and dry household goods.
Your average Joe Consumer is used to comparing prices on individual branded items. If a 12-pack of Coke normally costs $3.50, he'll notice when it's on sale for $1.99 and that will get him into Safeway. That same consumer, however, has fallen out of the habit of comparing pricess on piecemeal, by-the-pound items like fruits and vegetables -- and so that's where Safeway jacks up its prices.
Try it sometime. If you have access to a local green grocer, shop there a few times and make a note of what you pay for things. Then see what happens when you try to buy the same items the next week at your local Safeway or Albertson's. I bet you'll be surprised. Shop at the green grocer and you support local business, get better quality food, and pay less.
(Oh, and you should be eating more fruits and vegetables anyway.)
On a related note - I checked ebay recently. Steve Purcell's comics have become surprisingly valuable - found out my copy of "Sam & Max: Surfing the Highway" is worth hundreds. I'm keeping it though - it's the one comic I own, and it's worth the humor.
I wouldn't put too much stock in that. Like any collectible, a comic book is only "worth" what people will pay for it. I was in a local comic book store here in San Francisco once and overheard a phone conversation with the owner: "Buy your comic books? Sure. That's easy. How much do they weigh? What? It's a simple question. Well go to the scale and weigh them and I'll tell you what I'll pay you for them."
FBreader, the e-book reading application available on the Nokia 770, supports a format called FictionBook 2 (.fb2) that is apparently very popular in Russia.
There is also a beta CHM viewer available for the 770 that seems to work.
Nice! It starts out like an insightful comment about Radio Shack but by the end of the first paragraph you realize it's really a troll about Sun.;-) j/k
Radio Shack went downhill when they made Cellphone and Satellite TV service their primary sales vehicles.
I only have one experience with cell phones and Radio Shack. I had a Sprint PCS phone manufactured by Samsung that had really shitty battery life. I wanted to get a higher-capacity battery... so I walked into Radio Shack (an authorized Sprint dealer) and bought one.
It worked for about a month before it crapped out and completely failed to keep a charge. So I tracked down a Sprint store, took a number, waited around for half an hour, and spoke to a Sprint rep. "What the hell is the matter with this phone?"
The guy took the phone from me, flipped it over in his hand, and said, "Well for starters, where did you get this nasty battery?"
"Radio Shack."
"It's totally nonstandard. Some kind of knock off." He shrugs, tosses it into a drawer. "Hold on." A minute later he returns with an official, Sprint-authorized replacement high capacity battery for my model phone. "There you go."
And that was it. The Sprint guy gave me an authentic battery for free to replace the crappy gray market on I bought at Radio Shack.
Guess what lesson I learned about shopping for cell phones at Rad Shack?
Actually, MySQL is not "better" than SAP DB. If it were, then MySQL wouldn't have bought SAP DB. (That's right, SAP sold SAP DB to MySQL and it's now marketed as a product called MaxDB.)
There is more to the relationship between SAP the company and MySQL the company than SAP wanting its customers to run MySQL -- in fact that idea, on its face, seems a little absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
The kids' crazy parents.
Kick a kid out of school and you will face the wrath of one (usually not two) irate, belligerent, sometimes violent adult who will curse, cajole, and downright threaten you into reinstating the student. And often there will be, waiting in the wings, a lawyer who's willing to take on the case.
The American legal system has effectively bullied school districts into a very clear set of principles:
I had a friend who was a substitute teacher in the Oakland, California school district. He was usually called in to sub for teachers who were not sick, but who just needed time away from the school. He himself did not last more than a couple months -- which means no more than about eight class sessions. His case was not unusual.
The worst of American public schools are really, really bad -- and those places are nothing about education.
P.S. Ironically, my family moved to California in the 1970s for the good schools. California's schools are now something like 42nd in the nation.
There are all sorts of other examples that could apply to anyone; for example, an employee who feels bored or unchallenged at work, or is otherwise just lazy, might spend too much time engaging in compromising activities (whether they be playing games or using P2P networks). And some people just don't know any better than to disclose information they shouldn't -- I personally have worked for a company that hired a private detective to try and get a job at a rival company and pick up information from other employees while he was there.
The point is that you can't entirely point the finger at management. Yes, it's in management's best interest to create an engaging and enjoyable work environment for everyone, but the most they can really do is try. Whether or not they succeed, that's still no reason to skimp on internal security measures.
The device is far from perfect -- I've criticized it a lot elsewhere. But for reading e-books I've had no complaints with it. The one strike against it, based on your list, is the battery life -- which sucks. They don't seem to have gotten the low-power mode right, and if you don't make a habit of regularly charging it (like a cell phone) you're liable to lift it off the nightstand one morning and find that the battery has suddenly gone completely dead. But at least the battery is replaceable and is a standard Nokia part.
I also read The Da Vinci Code on my 770. Unlike Dumas, that book is still in copyright. I read an illegal copy of it. But then, as it turns out, it really does suck; and so I have few qualms about not helping to line Dan Brown's talentless pockets (except maybe that I'm not contributing to the fortune that would allow him to retire from fiction). European Slashdotters may not be aware, however, that there is no softcover edition of The Da Vinci Code in the United States. The publisher planned one, but when it saw how briskly the hardcover edition was selling, it cancelled the paperback. In this case, I am borrowing from the popular "Slashdot MP3 defense": The publisher is not providing me the format I prefer, therefore I took the initiative into my own hands. Don't bother arguing with me about the ethical fine points of this decision -- I've already thought it through myself and I've decided I just don't care. I pirated it; come and get me.
It's been reported numerous places, including CNet News.com. I'll take an industry analyst's estimates over your anecdotes.
The result was that all the comic book publishers banded together and formed a voluntary rating system. In effect, they censored themselves. The new rules said that, since comic books were for kids, no comic books were allowed to include words like "teror," "horror," or "crime" in their titles; comics could not feature werewolves, vampires, or other elements of the supernatural; if any crime was depicted in a comic book, the criminals would have to come to justice for their crimes by the end of the story; and so on. The net effect was that an entire genre of horror and crime comic books went out of business. You know some of those comic books -- for example, Tales from the Crypt. There were many others, however. In its heyday, a comic book called Crime Does Not Pay outsold not just Tales from the Crypt but the entire output of that book's publisher (E.C. Comics) combined. It too went out of business, just months after Tales from the Crypt and the other E.C. horror comics, once the Comics Code took effect.
And so the world was safe. Kids stopped being juvenile delinquents, at least the ones who were able to stay away from that awful rock 'n roll music. It was a halcyon age, a veritable paradise, for the next 30 years or so.
But then in the 1980s, rap music came along, and heavy metal, and they were even worse than rock 'n roll. This aural poison proved to be all but irresistable to kids. So a brave group of moral citizens, led by the wife of future Democratic presidential hopeful Al Gore, banded together to slap labels on rap albums, warning parents about the horrors inside. Again we were safe.
But now the evil rears its ugly head again -- video games! We tried using a ratings system on them, but nobody went out of business (unlike the comic book publishers in the 50s). How long can we as citizens stand for this?? Clearly something must be done if this cycle of moral depravity is ever going to end!
Novell has an existing customer base and a whole boatload of cash. Both are depletable resources.
I attended a premiere screening of "House of the Dead" in San Francisco before it had even gotten a distribution deal in the U.S. There was a guy at the door with a German accent padding everybody down. Unfortunately my friend and I hadn't foreseen this and had arrived at the theater with our pockets fully loaded.
"Vat iss zat, zere? Vat iss zat in your pocket?"
My friend produced a pint bottle of Jim Beam from his back pocket.
"Ah," the German guy said. "No cameras!" he announced. "Booze iss fine." And he waved us past.
In the Q&A session after the screening, we learned that this German guy who had been padding everybody down was the director, Uwe Boll.
(Incidentally, before the Q&A Uwe pointed out a representative from Sega who was in attendance. A Japanese guy stood up and waved to everybody. I noticed that the Japanese guy was sitting next to my friend Keith. Later Keith told me that the Japanese guy had helped him polish off an entire fifth of Seagram's 7 during the screening. All in good fun at Uwe Boll movies.)
Come on, you're not seriously advocating that the U.S. abolish customs are you?
I travel by air pretty often and I can assure you I don't tell anybody my next of kin, my salary or anything else. I guess YMMV but it sounds like people are getting a leetle bit paranoid here.
I'm not in favor of NTP or anything, but the people who point out that NTP had no product are missing the point of patents.
Suppose you invented the Blackberry. You. Right now. You have the idea. Now what? Do you have the financial backing to manufacture a million Blackberrys? Do you have the industry connections to go around and make deals with all the mobile carriers to get your service into people's hands? No. But it's still a good idea, so you want to go forward with it. That means finding potential partners and investors. But just talking to those people about it is spreading the idea around. Suppose you go to the mobile company and say, "I have these plans for this service, I'm going to call it Blackberry." What's stopping them from just making the service themselves and cutting you out of the picture completely?
Your patent is.
In an ideal world, that's what patents are for: protecting the little guy inventor from big business.
Everything you say is true, however the judge in this case didn't rule based on a personal judgment of the merits of Amazon's corporate culture.
Instead, she said that Amazon seemed to have worded communications and agreements in such a way that they allowed Amazon to "play their way." The principle that seems to be at work here is the idea that, whatever a contract may actually say to the letter, contracts should always be negotiated in good faith. That is, if I arrange a deal with you for some consideration, I shouldn't then try to play games with the language of the deal to my own advantage. That's not having better business sense than the other guy. That's just being sort of shifty. It smacks of bad faith.
Toys'R'Us didn't win any monetary damages in this case because it couldn't show any documents that supported its claim that it was buying an exclusive arrangement with Amazon. What it did get, however, was out of the 10-year deal. The judge ruled that the deal, which was ostensibly signed in good faith to the advantage of both Toys'R'Us and Amazon, was now working against Toys'R'Us's interests in favor of Amazon. Contrary to what the previous poster said, that's not laudable business practice on Amazon's behalf and it's good that Toys'R'Us got released from that contract.
I agree with others, however, that there's absolutely no evidence that Toys'R'Us knows the first thing about running a Web site. The severing of this relationship is probably Toys'R'Us's final death knell.
I will add to your comment about farmer's markets and talk about small local grocers, because over the last year or so I have stumbled across a fact that surprised me quite a lot.
Down the street from my house here in the city of San Francisco I have a little corner produce store. You can get pretty much any fresh food that you can get from Safeway: vegetables, fruit, dried goods, eggs, milk, etc.
First I started shopping there because it was just as convenient to get to as Safeway, and buying local seemed like a good thing. Then I noticed that the quality of the produce was much, much better than Safeway's. Safeway is buying in massive volume and they are buying vegetables that have been grown, treated and/or engineered to have long shelf lives. The stuff at this corner store is coming from the farmers to my street corner. It looks and tastes better in every way.
But, as I said, over the last year I noticed something even more surprising. You might think, based on what I've said, that I'm paying a little more to support my convictions and/or get nice produce. That's usually how it works: Buy from the big vendor, get the deep volume discounts. Buy from the little guy and pay more. BUT NO! The fact of the matter is that just about every single thing I buy at the corner store is cheaper than the same thing at Safeway.
There are some exceptions; mostly packaged foods like salad dressings or mayo. But mushrooms that cost $2.49/lb at Safeway cost $1.89 at the corner store. A container of milk that's $2.19 at Safeway is $1.79 at the corner store. Even something like a sack of flour or a packet of yeast costs less.
The lesson is that Safeway's business model does not necessarily work the way you think big retailers' business models work. I expect what they do is negotiate deep discounts with the packaged, prepared food vendors: Hot Pockets, Lean Cuisine, etc., and they sell them to the consumer at a minimal profit margin. They make up the difference on produce, fresh fruits and vegetables, and dry household goods.
Your average Joe Consumer is used to comparing prices on individual branded items. If a 12-pack of Coke normally costs $3.50, he'll notice when it's on sale for $1.99 and that will get him into Safeway. That same consumer, however, has fallen out of the habit of comparing pricess on piecemeal, by-the-pound items like fruits and vegetables -- and so that's where Safeway jacks up its prices.
Try it sometime. If you have access to a local green grocer, shop there a few times and make a note of what you pay for things. Then see what happens when you try to buy the same items the next week at your local Safeway or Albertson's. I bet you'll be surprised. Shop at the green grocer and you support local business, get better quality food, and pay less.
(Oh, and you should be eating more fruits and vegetables anyway.)
Even better: Quantum computing will allow us to troll Slashdot before subscribers see the story.
P.S. In other news, in Post-Soviet Russia our quantum overlords have already welcomed you!
FBreader, the e-book reading application available on the Nokia 770, supports a format called FictionBook 2 (.fb2) that is apparently very popular in Russia.
There is also a beta CHM viewer available for the 770 that seems to work.
Nice! It starts out like an insightful comment about Radio Shack but by the end of the first paragraph you realize it's really a troll about Sun. ;-) j/k
It worked for about a month before it crapped out and completely failed to keep a charge. So I tracked down a Sprint store, took a number, waited around for half an hour, and spoke to a Sprint rep. "What the hell is the matter with this phone?"
The guy took the phone from me, flipped it over in his hand, and said, "Well for starters, where did you get this nasty battery?"
"Radio Shack."
"It's totally nonstandard. Some kind of knock off." He shrugs, tosses it into a drawer. "Hold on." A minute later he returns with an official, Sprint-authorized replacement high capacity battery for my model phone. "There you go."
And that was it. The Sprint guy gave me an authentic battery for free to replace the crappy gray market on I bought at Radio Shack.
Guess what lesson I learned about shopping for cell phones at Rad Shack?
Actually, MySQL is not "better" than SAP DB. If it were, then MySQL wouldn't have bought SAP DB. (That's right, SAP sold SAP DB to MySQL and it's now marketed as a product called MaxDB.)
There is more to the relationship between SAP the company and MySQL the company than SAP wanting its customers to run MySQL -- in fact that idea, on its face, seems a little absurd.