I am extremely pleased with my One For All AV Producer 8. It packs alot of features, like the ROM upgradability to support future products, macros, IR learning, etc. Definitely worth checking out, IMO.
Granted, discounts are usually 50-75% off for Herman Miller products. Purchases made by employees are somewhat limited, and are for themselves only (they watch closely for attempted resale).
I should also add most of the discounts are very close to wholesale cost -- a true employee benefit moreless. Same thing with employees of General Motors - their discounts are very generous on new vehicles.
Also, remember that buying in quantity will reflect your price as well. When we would get orders from companies who would buy 200+ identical chairs, production went much faster and smoother. If every chair was different, it would cost more.
As a former Herman Miller employee up until recently, I have worked on the Aeron and Equa II (most customizable and my personal fav.) line. You would be surprised to know how much workmanship and hard work is put into these chairs. Every single chair is assembled, customized, and inspected by a person. No robots, no automation.
You would be surprised how much attention is given to a perfect chair. Not one chair leaves the plant unless it's absolutely perfect. Not even the tiniest scratch or ripple in fabric is acceptable. They don't "touch up" their chairs if something is found, it's totally disassembled and the effected part is disposed of. No touch-up paint, no stain removers.
My point is, you pay for the quality, workmanship, and sweat put into making the chairs absolutely perfect. Herman Miller isn't a company that screws around when it comes to doing it right. And believe me, it drove me nuts the first few weeks working there at their high standards of workmanship; but now I truly understand why.
From CNN: ... The service, which allows users to send and receive short text messages in real time, was taken down by what the Microsoft spokesman called "a rare set of hardware failures."
The software giant is looking at adding another backup system to ensure that a similar outage is not repeated, he said.
I remember hearing something on TV that there was some corruption caused by the disk controllers, which corrupted their primary and backup drives. While that seems possible (and rare), it's more fun to assume it's due to poor OS development/stability;)
Cloning as a advancement in science seems to have it's benefits. However, my concern comes with Corporate America's exploitation and ruining of such technology.
Imagine companies designing and marketing
"proprietary" genetic races of human beings.
One forseable advantage is the test of medical drugs, being able to have a true "pure-bred" human as a consistent test variable. But then again, is it fair to subject a human to a life of potential anguish, disease and being born into bondage? Hell, we do it to rats..
I find the exponential uniqueness of the human race fascinating. It's truly an artform within itself, and really I see cloning is painting the same picture over and over again. If the factors of greed and selfishness didn't exist in this world like it does, i'd be for it. - Slash
What students really need are hidden cameras in the schools...... Is it an invasion of privacy? Yes, but so are metal detectors, drug tests and searching lockers. Why not have video cameras?
I agree with you, however cameras ARE an invasion of privacy if incorrectly used.
Schools should have them and use them like a 7-11. I think they should be facilited after an event occurs (someone gets bullied in the hallway, someone breaks into the school, etc.) and be used as evidence; NOT to have the principal watch the view monitors to catch students who are late for class, etc.
If I were a bully and I knew I was on camera, I would think twice before pushing a kid into some lockers.
If cameras are used correctly, they can be an effective and non-intrusive tool of catching some of these bully fucks.
The plague of experts reached new virulence this morning when some guy showed up on The Today Show to tell us how kids can dodge bullets in school. Kids should run when they hear gunfire, he said, but they shouldn't run in a straight line. They should zig and zag.
Funny, I learned that a long time ago after playing first person shooters.
For about $5/month my local phone company will provide me with an ansering machine that will take a message when I'm on the phone with someone else. I can get these messages from any room in my house. (I think I can get them from elsewhere too, but now use a cell phone for all my voice calls so I'm not sure, byond what I see others doing)
I had voice mail through Ameritech and was not too impressed. Something to keep in mind is limitations on outgoing calls. If you check your voice mail (by dialing a number) that's one call. Checking voice mail 2 or 3 times a day * 30 days can rack up a nice chunk of your available outgoing calls before getting surcharged.
I personally wanted a very powerful voice mail system with tons of options. Ureach, which up until recently would give you a personal free 800 number and 60 minutes of call-time (the idea was to get you to use more than 60 mins and buy time). Now you have to pay for the service, but still for what you get it's dirt cheap, and the customization and features is by far the most impressive I have ever seen.
What you could do is setup call forwarding with voicemail (which usually is a small fee per month) and have it forward on busy. This in essence is the same as the telco's voicemail, but instead you forward unanswered calls to your ureach number, instead of the telco's answering service. The nice thing is I usually setup ureach to notify me via email or IM that I have new messages, I log in, and play them back over the web..
IMHO, this is the best, powerful call management provider i've seen. Monthly rates are incredibly cheap for what you can get (the most expensive plan is like $10/mo).
I guess I should better explain myself, I was thinking more along the lines of something similar to Diamond's HomeFree networking, being able to simultaneously transfer voice/data over a single RJ-11 line. Definitely would make implementation a snap, that is, if there's a standard...
You're right -- However that does bring a feasible solution to mind without having to rewire 300 rooms.. There are RJ11 networking solutions that could seamlessly allow a hotel to implement a decent network connection.
The negative side, correct me if i'm wrong, there is no industry standard for RJ-11 networking, not to mention the expense of buying a RJ-11 NIC. Surely would be cool if they could implement ethernet over RJ11 and then have RJ-45 to RJ-11 converters;)
I think if anything should be regulated, it's the movie theaters and major retailers, such as Walmart, who currently can, and do, refuse to sell an "M" rated game or a ticket to an "R" rated movie to a person who doesn't present proper identification to prove they are over 18.
There is no law (that I am aware of) that requires age identification for merchandise (besides tobacco and liquor).
Refusing to sell clearly legal items/services by age, IMO, is no different than refusing to sell items to a person of a different race,
religion or gender.
These rating systems are in place to help clueless parents get an IDEA of the appropriate age group, not to impose further restrictions.
The only restrictions i'm for is preventing age discriminate practices.
"And the recent security problems with Linux, coupled with the lack of key enterprise elements in the new kernel, really call into question whether Linux should be used at all," Miller added. "
I find it quite amusing that Miller is citing examples based on 3rd party applications, commonly bundled with the Linux kernel.
Microsoft should be eating it's own words -- I have no doubts that the security advisories for ActiveX, IIS, etc... definitely exceed those of the Linux kernel itself.. It's funny how MS really has no choice but to point the finger at Linus Torvalds, when third party applications make up the popularity of Linux (distributions), while Win2K, IIS, Exchange, etc. flaws all point back to MS.
Other strange things that have come through the system include an unwrapped matress, a freshly severed bear's head, LOTS of tires with no wrapping, a car bumper that looked like it had been ripped off the car, complete with the license plate, boxes of live crickets which usually break open so you have crickets loose all over the place, individual car parts with no wrapping. Rank food is quite common on return items.
Not to criticize your findings of strange items, but according to UPS's shipping guidlines, tires and bare metal parts are quite acceptable if common sense is used, however some of the items you mentioned would have never left my store they way you described.
Nonetheless, I agree with UPS's reliability. For a retail shipping outlet I actually *see* what goes into these brown boxes (yes, I did a severed bear head too for a taxidermist).
IMHO, I think USPS should get out of larger parcels altogether (12x12x12 max). Their tracking systems, claims process and customer service is horrible. They need to be deregulated like NSI was over internet domains and start making shipping/mailing a open market.
This article here does a great job explaining how EAS (Electronic Article Surveillence) works. This article pretty much seems to cover an advanced, optimistic use for the item besides busting shoplifters.
I found GW Bush's commentary to be rather hypocritical. (pardon taking these out of context, view the whole commentary here.) First Bush is saying:
"We can have filters on Internets where public money is spent. There ought to be filters in public libraries, and filters in public schools, so that if kids get on the Internet, there's not going to be pornography or violence coming in."
Later on, in the same response, he then says:
"I just, ours is a great land. And one of the reasons why, is because we're free. And so, I don't support censorship. But I do believe that we ought to talk plainly to the Hollywood moguls and people who produce this stuff, and explain the consequences. I think we need to have rating systems that are clear. And I happen to like the idea of having technology for the TV, easy for parents to use, so you can tune out these programs that you don't want in your house.
But I'm going to remind mothers and dads: The best weapon is the off-on button, and paying attention to your children and eating dinner with them."
I can't see how one can support public-funded internet filters and be anti-censorship and promoting the "on-off" switch at the same time. In my opinion, this is just one example of the many responses of George Bush which seem to be double-standardized simply to get votes.
I'd rather have the potential "privacy nightmare" (which by the way, many client-side monitors do exist that do not submit information) than pay for filters at the taxpayers expense, which do a terrible job to begin with; and even worse, let corporations decide what is and isn't appropriate for people's kids.
That is just one reason why I would prefer Gore over Bush (and no, Gore is not perfect either, but I think the best out of the 2).
Indianapolis recently passed a law which restricts children to video games (Slashdot archived here). Local governments seem to have too much power and can get away with much on a local level (and in cases like this, getting an unconstitutional ordinance voted through). Even if this were to be challenged, the legal system's wheels turn slowly.
Local government ordinances, which are passed or voted in in which the legality is questionable, should be able to be petitioned by citizens for an appeals court in such a case. In a nutshell, this whole radical religious censorship crusade makes me sick.
It appears that the new ICQ 2000b uses a tactic similar to Microsoft's, where users on your contact list are by default are sent an e-mail from you to log back on to ICQ after 30 days of not being online. While this isn't nearly as intrusive as MSN's browser's feature, it still is sending messages by default without the user's knowledge (unless they look at their preferences).
Yet more useless and annoying "features" added to ICQ's new releases after AOL's purchase of Mirabilis...
It seems that AOL has made itself known by it's "easy to use" client software for accessing the internet, giving computer-illiterate users confidence in being able to actually use that "3000 dollar machine they only know how to turn on". I'd like to see a poll. How many linux OS users currently use AOL, or would like to. As for the factor of speed and reliability, other ISP's have been rated over AOL by many review zines. Even local ISP's can offer a just-as-good if not better dialup connection as AOL's.
How can the biggest ISP user-base, which I am assuming 99.9% of it's userbase is either using Windows or MacOS make any benefit over a Linux client? While Linux *does* rock, it is definitely not ready as a desktop replacement for AOL user-types. Perhaps the only use of this software would be for script kiddies and carders to spoof through AOL accounts using linux instead of windows. Doesn't seem like a big move for AOL in my opinion, however releasing it's messenger client (and netscape for that matter) for the linux platform was a smart move, but is totally irrelevant to compare it's client software to.
Slashdot Mirror
I am extremely pleased with my One For All AV Producer 8. It packs alot of features, like the ROM upgradability to support future products, macros, IR learning, etc. Definitely worth checking out, IMO.
It seems to me this article seemed to illustrate many keypoints of what Citrix Metaframe can do, minus the fault tolerance.
Granted, discounts are usually 50-75% off for Herman Miller products. Purchases made by employees are somewhat limited, and are for themselves only (they watch closely for attempted resale).
I should also add most of the discounts are very close to wholesale cost -- a true employee benefit moreless. Same thing with employees of General Motors - their discounts are very generous on new vehicles.
Also, remember that buying in quantity will reflect your price as well. When we would get orders from companies who would buy 200+ identical chairs, production went much faster and smoother. If every chair was different, it would cost more.
As a former Herman Miller employee up until recently, I have worked on the Aeron and Equa II (most customizable and my personal fav.) line. You would be surprised to know how much workmanship and hard work is put into these chairs. Every single chair is assembled, customized, and inspected by a person. No robots, no automation.
You would be surprised how much attention is given to a perfect chair. Not one chair leaves the plant unless it's absolutely perfect. Not even the tiniest scratch or ripple in fabric is acceptable. They don't "touch up" their chairs if something is found, it's totally disassembled and the effected part is disposed of. No touch-up paint, no stain removers.
My point is, you pay for the quality, workmanship, and sweat put into making the chairs absolutely perfect. Herman Miller isn't a company that screws around when it comes to doing it right. And believe me, it drove me nuts the first few weeks working there at their high standards of workmanship; but now I truly understand why.
- DanI remember hearing something on TV that there was some corruption caused by the disk controllers, which corrupted their primary and backup drives. While that seems possible (and rare), it's more fun to assume it's due to poor OS development/stability ;)
Damn - If this takes off, does that mean I can throw out my cisco firewall and use my surge protector?
I know this is mean, but hey -- you shouldn't have a problem with getting in line early for Star Wars Episode II...
The top three enemies of the facial identification era:
Mary Kate & Ashley Olsen
Michael Jackson
Robin Williams (Mrs. Doubtfire)
- Slash
Cloning as a advancement in science seems to have it's benefits. However, my concern comes with Corporate America's exploitation and ruining of such technology.
Imagine companies designing and marketing
"proprietary" genetic races of human beings.
One forseable advantage is the test of medical drugs, being able to have a true "pure-bred" human as a consistent test variable. But then again, is it fair to subject a human to a life of potential anguish, disease and being born into bondage? Hell, we do it to rats..
I find the exponential uniqueness of the human race fascinating. It's truly an artform within itself, and really I see cloning is painting the same picture over and over again. If the factors of greed and selfishness didn't exist in this world like it does, i'd be for it.
- Slash
What students really need are hidden cameras in the schools ...... Is it an invasion of privacy? Yes, but so are metal detectors, drug tests and searching lockers. Why not have video cameras?
I agree with you, however cameras ARE an invasion of privacy if incorrectly used.
Schools should have them and use them like a 7-11. I think they should be facilited after an event occurs (someone gets bullied in the hallway, someone breaks into the school, etc.) and be used as evidence; NOT to have the principal watch the view monitors to catch students who are late for class, etc.
If I were a bully and I knew I was on camera, I would think twice before pushing a kid into some lockers.
If cameras are used correctly, they can be an effective and non-intrusive tool of catching some of these bully fucks.
- Slash
For people who hate digging through the ISD site,
here's the McKinney High School Page here.
- Slash
In that case, you wouldn't have to worry about "kick me" signs :)
- Slash
Funny, I learned that a long time ago after playing first person shooters.
- Slash
I had voice mail through Ameritech and was not too impressed. Something to keep in mind is limitations on outgoing calls. If you check your voice mail (by dialing a number) that's one call. Checking voice mail 2 or 3 times a day * 30 days can rack up a nice chunk of your available outgoing calls before getting surcharged.
I personally wanted a very powerful voice mail system with tons of options. Ureach, which up until recently would give you a personal free 800 number and 60 minutes of call-time (the idea was to get you to use more than 60 mins and buy time). Now you have to pay for the service, but still for what you get it's dirt cheap, and the customization and features is by far the most impressive I have ever seen.
What you could do is setup call forwarding with voicemail (which usually is a small fee per month) and have it forward on busy. This in essence is the same as the telco's voicemail, but instead you forward unanswered calls to your ureach number, instead of the telco's answering service. The nice thing is I usually setup ureach to notify me via email or IM that I have new messages, I log in, and play them back over the web..
IMHO, this is the best, powerful call management provider i've seen. Monthly rates are incredibly cheap for what you can get (the most expensive plan is like $10/mo).
- Slash
I guess I should better explain myself, I was thinking more along the lines of something similar to Diamond's HomeFree networking, being able to simultaneously transfer voice/data over a single RJ-11 line. Definitely would make implementation a snap, that is, if there's a standard...
- Slash
You're right -- However that does bring a feasible solution to mind without having to rewire 300 rooms.. There are RJ11 networking solutions that could seamlessly allow a hotel to implement a decent network connection. ;)
The negative side, correct me if i'm wrong, there is no industry standard for RJ-11 networking, not to mention the expense of buying a RJ-11 NIC. Surely would be cool if they could implement ethernet over RJ11 and then have RJ-45 to RJ-11 converters
- Slash
I think if anything should be regulated, it's the movie theaters and major retailers, such as Walmart, who currently can, and do, refuse to sell an "M" rated game or a ticket to an "R" rated movie to a person who doesn't present proper identification to prove they are over 18.
There is no law (that I am aware of) that requires age identification for merchandise (besides tobacco and liquor).
Refusing to sell clearly legal items/services by age, IMO, is no different than refusing to sell items to a person of a different race,
religion or gender.
These rating systems are in place to help clueless parents get an IDEA of the appropriate age group, not to impose further restrictions.
The only restrictions i'm for is preventing age discriminate practices.
- Slash
"And the recent security problems with Linux, coupled with the lack of key enterprise elements in the new kernel, really call into question whether Linux should be used at all," Miller added. "
I find it quite amusing that Miller is citing examples based on 3rd party applications, commonly bundled with the Linux kernel. Microsoft should be eating it's own words -- I have no doubts that the security advisories for ActiveX, IIS, etc... definitely exceed those of the Linux kernel itself.. It's funny how MS really has no choice but to point the finger at Linus Torvalds, when third party applications make up the popularity of Linux (distributions), while Win2K, IIS, Exchange, etc. flaws all point back to MS.
- Slash
Other strange things that have come through the system include an unwrapped matress, a freshly severed bear's head, LOTS of tires with no wrapping, a car bumper that looked like it had been ripped off the car, complete with the license plate, boxes of live crickets which usually break open so you have crickets loose all over the place, individual car parts with no wrapping. Rank food is quite common on return items.
Not to criticize your findings of strange items, but according to UPS's shipping guidlines, tires and bare metal parts are quite acceptable if common sense is used, however some of the items you mentioned would have never left my store they way you described.
Nonetheless, I agree with UPS's reliability. For a retail shipping outlet I actually *see* what goes into these brown boxes (yes, I did a severed bear head too for a taxidermist).
IMHO, I think USPS should get out of larger parcels altogether (12x12x12 max). Their tracking systems, claims process and customer service is horrible. They need to be deregulated like NSI was over internet domains and start making shipping/mailing a open market.
- Slash
I have had great luck with 000domains.com. Haven't had a problem yet with registering a domain name with "explicit 4 letter words".
- Slash
This article here does a great job explaining how EAS (Electronic Article Surveillence) works. This article pretty much seems to cover an advanced, optimistic use for the item besides busting shoplifters.
- Slash
I found GW Bush's commentary to be rather hypocritical. (pardon taking these out of context, view the whole commentary here.) First Bush is saying:
"We can have filters on Internets where public money is spent. There ought to be filters in public libraries, and filters in public schools, so that if kids get on the Internet, there's not going to be pornography or violence coming in."
Later on, in the same response, he then says:
"I just, ours is a great land. And one of the reasons why, is because we're free. And so, I don't support censorship. But I do believe that we ought to talk plainly to the Hollywood moguls and people who produce this stuff, and explain the consequences. I think we need to have rating systems that are clear. And I happen to like the idea of having technology for the TV, easy for parents to use, so you can tune out these programs that you don't want in your house.
But I'm going to remind mothers and dads: The best weapon is the off-on button, and paying attention to your children and eating dinner with them."
I can't see how one can support public-funded internet filters and be anti-censorship and promoting the "on-off" switch at the same time. In my opinion, this is just one example of the many responses of George Bush which seem to be double-standardized simply to get votes.
I'd rather have the potential "privacy nightmare" (which by the way, many client-side monitors do exist that do not submit information) than pay for filters at the taxpayers expense, which do a terrible job to begin with; and even worse, let corporations decide what is and isn't appropriate for people's kids.
That is just one reason why I would prefer Gore over Bush (and no, Gore is not perfect either, but I think the best out of the 2).
- Slash
Indianapolis recently passed a law which restricts children to video games (Slashdot archived here). Local governments seem to have too much power and can get away with much on a local level (and in cases like this, getting an unconstitutional ordinance voted through). Even if this were to be challenged, the legal system's wheels turn slowly.
Local government ordinances, which are passed or voted in in which the legality is questionable, should be able to be petitioned by citizens for an appeals court in such a case. In a nutshell, this whole radical religious censorship crusade makes me sick.
- Slash
It appears that the new ICQ 2000b uses a tactic similar to Microsoft's, where users on your contact list are by default are sent an e-mail from you to log back on to ICQ after 30 days of not being online. While this isn't nearly as intrusive as MSN's browser's feature, it still is sending messages by default without the user's knowledge (unless they look at their preferences).
Yet more useless and annoying "features" added to ICQ's new releases after AOL's purchase of Mirabilis...
- Slash
It seems that AOL has made itself known by it's "easy to use" client software for accessing the internet, giving computer-illiterate users confidence in being able to actually use that "3000 dollar machine they only know how to turn on". I'd like to see a poll. How many linux OS users currently use AOL, or would like to. As for the factor of speed and reliability, other ISP's have been rated over AOL by many review zines. Even local ISP's can offer a just-as-good if not better dialup connection as AOL's.
How can the biggest ISP user-base, which I am assuming 99.9% of it's userbase is either using Windows or MacOS make any benefit over a Linux client? While Linux *does* rock, it is definitely not ready as a desktop replacement for AOL user-types. Perhaps the only use of this software would be for script kiddies and carders to spoof through AOL accounts using linux instead of windows. Doesn't seem like a big move for AOL in my opinion, however releasing it's messenger client (and netscape for that matter) for the linux platform was a smart move, but is totally irrelevant to compare it's client software to.
- Slash