In my 30 years of buying computers, a HP Pavillion laptop is the only thing I've ever happily paid a restocking fee to return, rather than lose all the money by keeping it. It's easy to do better when the comparison point are the worst laptops you can get. It's not really a fair comparison though; HP's EliteBook models are the ones they claim are reasonable quality.
My just over 3 year old Thinkpad T500 just died recently. Meanwhile the entire fleet of 6 year old T60s at my last startup are still chugging along. I hope you have better luck with the newer models than I did, I've been surprised at how fast the quality has been declining on them the last few years.
You mean they were great products. Take a look at a T530. That they are very obviously trying to emulate Apple, to the detriment of the product, is a past tense event already.
Except that Thinkpads have a chiclet keyboard now. That's kind of the point here; they've changed to where they're homogenous and unrecognizable as classic Thinkpads from a quality perspective. There is no reason left to pay extra for a Thinkpad over $GENERIC_CRAP now. (They're still better than, say, HP, but I can assemble a computer out of cardboard that is more rugged than a HP laptop)
The Retina MacBook Pro handles 16GB of RAM and has a video resolution that makes the ThinkPads cry. Lenovo has slowly been trimming back from having the best displays you can get in a laptop over the last few years. If you want a touch screen, the ThinkPad is your system. In just about every other case they're hard pressed to compete with Apple's best stuff in anything but price.
The new Thinkpad T530 comes with a crummy keyboard and the top resolution is 1900 x 1080. It's a step backward in many ways from the 1600x1200 T60 with great keyboard I bought in 2006. And the build quality...Lenovo is not even close nowadays. Sad, really, that I find myself giving up on the brand after a solid 10 year run where they were the only reasonable choice.
With lack of Pringles, the Hostess products going away, and limits on soda, the corner stores in Manhattan are going out of business. Think of the fat children!
You can secretly believe that getting naked, painting yourself with fresh cow's blood while running in circles and barking at the moon will keep you disease-free, that's your right.
It turns out to be pretty hard to keep that secret.
The core of this coin idea is to commit financial statement fraud. Specifically it will be exceeding the limit on one column through a not necessarily legal offset against another item. The exact method uses some imagined powers of the treasury to create expensive currency outside of the regular, regulated money supply process. They might as well be using Monopoly money as an IOU.
Yes, the materials value of the Monopoly dollars themselves have nothing to do with the value of the minted currency, since it's not backed by any metal standard. Congratulations for working out that unrelated part! I know it's hard to decipher what these longer phrases mean when you have to use a dictionary to look up single words, but you're getting there.
I'm very flattered you paused from writing flamebait aimed at [stupid|idiot] fucking [republicans|conservatives] long enough to respond to me. Keep practicing those five words, you're definitely getting the knack of them!
The article I linked to pointed out that a trillion dollars worth of platinum is far more than exists in the world. I thought that was plenty to show how silly the idea of the coin being worth its value in metal was.
The true value of a coin isn't the point. The discussion is around bullion coins whose value is unrelated to the metal in them. This plan shuffles a trillion dollars from one place on a balance sheet to another, for the sole purpose of exceeding the legal limits on the original number. That's the accounting fraud.
If I decide not to pay my taxes because I've converted my income into McDollars, and therefore it doesn't count as taxable US dollars of income anymore, I'd land in jail for it. Yet it's being described as a completely legal plan here because the Treasury Secretary--who is not normally involved in minting coins (Treasurer of the United States != Secretary of the Treasury)--can do it under some circumstances. As far as I can tell the idea is based on an obscure law allowing him to mint platinum bullion coins for collectors. It's creating money through a loophole that shouldn't exist.
"The 'trillion dollar coin' would not contain a trillion dollars worth of platinum". That's the upthread statement I said "right" about. wanted to point out how silly the idea was. Does it make you feel smarter to call people dumb? I guess that's one way to get there.
"Printing money" as implemented in the US involves things like selling bonds to increase the money supply. The owners of existing debt know that possibility was there, which makes it a legal strategy, albeit one with consequences. That ultimately devalues the currency, risks inflation to negate its value, and is already resulting in actions by the debt holders (which include foreign investors) as you push that idea forward. It's self-limiting to some extent as it becomes less effective.
The first major downside has been terms of the debt repayment getting worse as US debt is downgraded. And I believe the only reason there's been enough buyers to balance the printing out so far is people fleeing the even less stable Euro into US dollars. The printing trick may not even work for much longer.
Regardless, looking at how the debt and the ceiling are defined, I don't see any way to accurately describe this coin thing except as an accounting trick. There's no checks and balances on that game like the money supply changes introduces, and it's changing the terms for existing debt holders in a way they didn't think was legal. If the US is getting downgraded just for the money printing, what do you think will happen if it becomes clear to all the foreign investors making this work that the US will pick "exploit a loophole" over any real ceiling resolution?
Right, infographic on all the platinum ever. There isn't even close to a trillion dollars of it in the world. The coin trick is very simply accounting fraud, on the largest scale it's ever been proposed. You could also add up every con man in history, and that wouldn't add up to the size of this scam.
Was your goal to show that no patents should be granted? That's the only place to go from the "everything in the universe can be reduced to math" line of thinking. I'm fine with that outcome, too. Just stay out of software innovation please.
I didn't take that as a description of fact. I thought it was a suggestion: that people should be granted a patent only if the source code to any software related claims is released. This idea that the UPTO has, that UML or pseudo-code is sufficient, it's garbage in every direction. Useful non-obvious inventions are not produced from a general algorithm. If that's where your secrets are at, then you haven't done anything that should be patentable yet. You've just manipulated some bits, same as moving some numbers around. Correspondingly, if you release the bits, the patent should still be granted and valuable, or not, based on its other merits.
If you suddenly want to ban practical implementations of otherwise unpatentable theories and concepts, then where do we draw the line?
At the point it crossed into software. The test is simple. If it is possible to code it, that is math, and therefore not patentable. Release the source code to any software you're claiming as part of the patent. If the patent isn't interesting anymore when that's done...you have failed the obviousness test and shouldn't get a patent anyway.
Getting an Amazon AWS key requires providing a credit card and accepting some unknown future charges for what your programs do. It's not a risk I would advise anyone to do just to make shopping easier. The key I use is owned by a LLC for example, and I was uncomfortable personally signing that agreement. Accordingly, there is some value to a software developer taking on the risk there, which you get to eat along with the expectation of profit. If the code was distributed without the matching server-side, and you had to substitute your own key to make it work, that wouldn't have been nearly as useful.
If you want Amazon search to be "seemless" (a word which I wouldn't think even belongs for a tack on UI element like this), you just remove the "a" prefix. There could be a better UI to this concept; the important advance is that there's a UI to limit it at all, while still being useful.
If you don't like the intermediary, it's stated to be "about 5 lines of code" to build your own. The only interesting part is that it needs an Amazon services ID to unlock the search API of their site. If you have your own Amazon services capable account instead, you can host it. If you don't, this guy is offering the connector to make things easier for you, specifically disclaimed with how he'll benefit from that.
A bit evil out of the box, accurately described as being so, and with easy workarounds to the biggest concerns. That solves this problem as well as I'd like to be. As for what we know about the service hosting so far, it's the personal site of someone who works at a Canonical partner. It looks to me like he's trying to get someone else to pick up the intermediary role by providing an example.
This is a useful overview, but it doesn't cover the details of the confusing part.
My take is that the whole DOJ angle is part of HP looking for a scapegoat to cover both their own mismanagement and lack of ability to due anything useful with Autonomy's IP. It's a fishing expedition to find one, but they have no hard evidence yet of who's to blame. Autonomy itself used aggressive accounting measures to inflate its sale price, as all companies being acquired will try to do. What HP really wants is to ignore the whole thing and write off the loss, since catching any accounting mess should have happened before the purchase. But they can't just do that due to class action lawsuits saying it's HP who is at fault. So they're going through the motions of prosecuting other people to shift the blame, but so far they don't have any hard evidence of that fraud. If they did, they'd be leading with that.
Here's how I sequenced all the events here to sort out what happened:
August 22, 2012: earnings are terrible, and we're going to blame the Enterprise Services division.
November 20, 2012: The scapegoat picked for the bad performance of Enterprise Services is the Autonomy aquisition. HP wants to write off a 8.8B loss right now for that. They can't admit "we fucked up", so they blame accounting issues at Autonomy.
November 21, 2012: The U.S. Department of Justice is called in to help push blame toward Autonomy, along with the U.K. Serious Fraud Office (Autonomy was originally a British company) and the SEC.
November 26, 2012: a class action lawsuit is filed by HP stockholders. That claims this is all bullshit, and HP itself is the source of fraud here. Similar class action lawsuits are filed against the accounting firms involved.
December 28, 2012: Former Autonomy head Mike Lynch points out that HP hasn't actually given out any detailed accounting for where that 8.8B figure comes from. And the US Justice department hasn't actually gotten him involved in things yet.
It may be the case that HP's forensic accounting here finds something lawsuit worthy. It's telling that so far, all they've done is contact the DOJ. If they had a smoking gun, they'd have sued the responsible partly directly instead. That's why I suspect this is just fishing without solid evidence so far.
They've decorated and lit an old tree that no one else cared about. Probably by standing around it waving their arms, like in the Charlie Brown Christmas special.
Of course they claim it works with SSD. Snake oil sales are always driven by "it worked for me!" testimonial claims. That doesn't mean the product was the cause of the change.
Spinrite touches every sector on the drive in a way that gets the drive firmware to re-allocate bad ones. This does something that can be useful for all drives, SSD or not. But the program is not necessary to do so. You can use SMART tests to do the same thing, faster, and without paying for the software. And the claim that it's doing some low-level magic is even more obviously crap when you're running against SSD. It can't possibly know how to communicate with such a drive below the firmware level, yet it still suggests it can.
Supporting C++ requires more complexity out of the compiler and the runtime libraries you're linking with. Since bugs are proportional to complexity, you're suffering from those even if you only use the C features. Using a more complex language should come with some payback, an improvement in productivity that is greater than what you're paying in overhead. Whether C++ really has such a net gain in productivity is obviously controversial.
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In my 30 years of buying computers, a HP Pavillion laptop is the only thing I've ever happily paid a restocking fee to return, rather than lose all the money by keeping it. It's easy to do better when the comparison point are the worst laptops you can get. It's not really a fair comparison though; HP's EliteBook models are the ones they claim are reasonable quality.
My just over 3 year old Thinkpad T500 just died recently. Meanwhile the entire fleet of 6 year old T60s at my last startup are still chugging along. I hope you have better luck with the newer models than I did, I've been surprised at how fast the quality has been declining on them the last few years.
Meanwhile, the reality of Lenovo on customer design feedback is suck it up, we'll tell you what you want It's all the arrogance of Apple without any taste!
You mean they were great products. Take a look at a T530. That they are very obviously trying to emulate Apple, to the detriment of the product, is a past tense event already.
Except that Thinkpads have a chiclet keyboard now. That's kind of the point here; they've changed to where they're homogenous and unrecognizable as classic Thinkpads from a quality perspective. There is no reason left to pay extra for a Thinkpad over $GENERIC_CRAP now. (They're still better than, say, HP, but I can assemble a computer out of cardboard that is more rugged than a HP laptop)
The Retina MacBook Pro handles 16GB of RAM and has a video resolution that makes the ThinkPads cry. Lenovo has slowly been trimming back from having the best displays you can get in a laptop over the last few years. If you want a touch screen, the ThinkPad is your system. In just about every other case they're hard pressed to compete with Apple's best stuff in anything but price.
The new Thinkpad T530 comes with a crummy keyboard and the top resolution is 1900 x 1080. It's a step backward in many ways from the 1600x1200 T60 with great keyboard I bought in 2006. And the build quality...Lenovo is not even close nowadays. Sad, really, that I find myself giving up on the brand after a solid 10 year run where they were the only reasonable choice.
If you want a crackhouse filled with Little Debbie cakes--and, really who doesn't--you have to go further uptown.
With lack of Pringles, the Hostess products going away, and limits on soda, the corner stores in Manhattan are going out of business. Think of the fat children!
You can secretly believe that getting naked, painting yourself with fresh cow's blood while running in circles and barking at the moon will keep you disease-free, that's your right.
It turns out to be pretty hard to keep that secret.
The core of this coin idea is to commit financial statement fraud. Specifically it will be exceeding the limit on one column through a not necessarily legal offset against another item. The exact method uses some imagined powers of the treasury to create expensive currency outside of the regular, regulated money supply process. They might as well be using Monopoly money as an IOU.
Yes, the materials value of the Monopoly dollars themselves have nothing to do with the value of the minted currency, since it's not backed by any metal standard. Congratulations for working out that unrelated part! I know it's hard to decipher what these longer phrases mean when you have to use a dictionary to look up single words, but you're getting there.
I'm very flattered you paused from writing flamebait aimed at [stupid|idiot] fucking [republicans|conservatives] long enough to respond to me. Keep practicing those five words, you're definitely getting the knack of them!
The article I linked to pointed out that a trillion dollars worth of platinum is far more than exists in the world. I thought that was plenty to show how silly the idea of the coin being worth its value in metal was.
The true value of a coin isn't the point. The discussion is around bullion coins whose value is unrelated to the metal in them. This plan shuffles a trillion dollars from one place on a balance sheet to another, for the sole purpose of exceeding the legal limits on the original number. That's the accounting fraud.
If I decide not to pay my taxes because I've converted my income into McDollars, and therefore it doesn't count as taxable US dollars of income anymore, I'd land in jail for it. Yet it's being described as a completely legal plan here because the Treasury Secretary--who is not normally involved in minting coins (Treasurer of the United States != Secretary of the Treasury)--can do it under some circumstances. As far as I can tell the idea is based on an obscure law allowing him to mint platinum bullion coins for collectors. It's creating money through a loophole that shouldn't exist.
"The 'trillion dollar coin' would not contain a trillion dollars worth of platinum". That's the upthread statement I said "right" about. wanted to point out how silly the idea was. Does it make you feel smarter to call people dumb? I guess that's one way to get there.
"Printing money" as implemented in the US involves things like selling bonds to increase the money supply. The owners of existing debt know that possibility was there, which makes it a legal strategy, albeit one with consequences. That ultimately devalues the currency, risks inflation to negate its value, and is already resulting in actions by the debt holders (which include foreign investors) as you push that idea forward. It's self-limiting to some extent as it becomes less effective.
The first major downside has been terms of the debt repayment getting worse as US debt is downgraded. And I believe the only reason there's been enough buyers to balance the printing out so far is people fleeing the even less stable Euro into US dollars. The printing trick may not even work for much longer.
Regardless, looking at how the debt and the ceiling are defined, I don't see any way to accurately describe this coin thing except as an accounting trick. There's no checks and balances on that game like the money supply changes introduces, and it's changing the terms for existing debt holders in a way they didn't think was legal. If the US is getting downgraded just for the money printing, what do you think will happen if it becomes clear to all the foreign investors making this work that the US will pick "exploit a loophole" over any real ceiling resolution?
Right, infographic on all the platinum ever. There isn't even close to a trillion dollars of it in the world. The coin trick is very simply accounting fraud, on the largest scale it's ever been proposed. You could also add up every con man in history, and that wouldn't add up to the size of this scam.
Was your goal to show that no patents should be granted? That's the only place to go from the "everything in the universe can be reduced to math" line of thinking. I'm fine with that outcome, too. Just stay out of software innovation please.
Congress has said software patents are legal.
[citation needed]. When I read "Software or computer programs are not explicitly mentioned in United States patent law on Wikipedia itself, I can't figure out just what you're claiming here. If software was clearly protected or not we wouldn't have Bliski bouncing around in both directions in the courts.
I didn't take that as a description of fact. I thought it was a suggestion: that people should be granted a patent only if the source code to any software related claims is released. This idea that the UPTO has, that UML or pseudo-code is sufficient, it's garbage in every direction. Useful non-obvious inventions are not produced from a general algorithm. If that's where your secrets are at, then you haven't done anything that should be patentable yet. You've just manipulated some bits, same as moving some numbers around. Correspondingly, if you release the bits, the patent should still be granted and valuable, or not, based on its other merits.
The latest paper uses anti-lock braking as an example. You can't get much more car analogy than that.
If you suddenly want to ban practical implementations of otherwise unpatentable theories and concepts, then where do we draw the line?
At the point it crossed into software. The test is simple. If it is possible to code it, that is math, and therefore not patentable. Release the source code to any software you're claiming as part of the patent. If the patent isn't interesting anymore when that's done...you have failed the obviousness test and shouldn't get a patent anyway.
"Runaway" is a free video on Amazon Prime--for good reasons.
Getting an Amazon AWS key requires providing a credit card and accepting some unknown future charges for what your programs do. It's not a risk I would advise anyone to do just to make shopping easier. The key I use is owned by a LLC for example, and I was uncomfortable personally signing that agreement. Accordingly, there is some value to a software developer taking on the risk there, which you get to eat along with the expectation of profit. If the code was distributed without the matching server-side, and you had to substitute your own key to make it work, that wouldn't have been nearly as useful.
If you want Amazon search to be "seemless" (a word which I wouldn't think even belongs for a tack on UI element like this), you just remove the "a" prefix. There could be a better UI to this concept; the important advance is that there's a UI to limit it at all, while still being useful.
If you don't like the intermediary, it's stated to be "about 5 lines of code" to build your own. The only interesting part is that it needs an Amazon services ID to unlock the search API of their site. If you have your own Amazon services capable account instead, you can host it. If you don't, this guy is offering the connector to make things easier for you, specifically disclaimed with how he'll benefit from that.
A bit evil out of the box, accurately described as being so, and with easy workarounds to the biggest concerns. That solves this problem as well as I'd like to be. As for what we know about the service hosting so far, it's the personal site of someone who works at a Canonical partner. It looks to me like he's trying to get someone else to pick up the intermediary role by providing an example.
This is a useful overview, but it doesn't cover the details of the confusing part.
My take is that the whole DOJ angle is part of HP looking for a scapegoat to cover both their own mismanagement and lack of ability to due anything useful with Autonomy's IP. It's a fishing expedition to find one, but they have no hard evidence yet of who's to blame. Autonomy itself used aggressive accounting measures to inflate its sale price, as all companies being acquired will try to do. What HP really wants is to ignore the whole thing and write off the loss, since catching any accounting mess should have happened before the purchase. But they can't just do that due to class action lawsuits saying it's HP who is at fault. So they're going through the motions of prosecuting other people to shift the blame, but so far they don't have any hard evidence of that fraud. If they did, they'd be leading with that.
Here's how I sequenced all the events here to sort out what happened:
It may be the case that HP's forensic accounting here finds something lawsuit worthy. It's telling that so far, all they've done is contact the DOJ. If they had a smoking gun, they'd have sued the responsible partly directly instead. That's why I suspect this is just fishing without solid evidence so far.
They've decorated and lit an old tree that no one else cared about. Probably by standing around it waving their arms, like in the Charlie Brown Christmas special.
Of course they claim it works with SSD. Snake oil sales are always driven by "it worked for me!" testimonial claims. That doesn't mean the product was the cause of the change.
Spinrite touches every sector on the drive in a way that gets the drive firmware to re-allocate bad ones. This does something that can be useful for all drives, SSD or not. But the program is not necessary to do so. You can use SMART tests to do the same thing, faster, and without paying for the software. And the claim that it's doing some low-level magic is even more obviously crap when you're running against SSD. It can't possibly know how to communicate with such a drive below the firmware level, yet it still suggests it can.
Supporting C++ requires more complexity out of the compiler and the runtime libraries you're linking with. Since bugs are proportional to complexity, you're suffering from those even if you only use the C features. Using a more complex language should come with some payback, an improvement in productivity that is greater than what you're paying in overhead. Whether C++ really has such a net gain in productivity is obviously controversial.