What you call a 'choking hazard' the manufacturer calls 'uses less materials and is therefore cheaper to produce and thus less expensive for the consumer'.
Materials costs usually represent the smallest part of the cost of making an item, especially in anything as small as a card. In fact, smaller form factors can increase production costs, due to the greater precision needed to make it.
What the manufacturer really calls it is: 'inventing another incompatible form-factor so people can't use their old kit, forcing them to buy replacements for their otherwise perfectly good hardware.'
Not too surprising, I went through the same thing with the cable modem. Initially, it was the smartest thing I'd done to rent it. The technology was immature, and had not yet stabilized. In the first 18 months, they must have replaced the modem a half-dozen times due to either hardware failure or changing standards. After things stabilized, I decided to purchase the modem. Sure enough, the cable company wants me to pay full price for a used modem. Though they did offer to swap it for a new one.
And speaking as someone who lives with a person who is in pain 24/7 from degenerative arthritis, I'm glad they're out there.
Although I don't know whether your condition falls into the mindbody/psychosomatic category, it certainly can have a psychosomatic element.
Um, the pain is caused by the fact that the cartilage between the joints has been destroyed, leaving the bones to grate on each other. It's a *very* physical cause.
There is no "one true way" in medicine. The patient must be dealt with as a whole, and that includes treating the mind and the body, not just one or the other.
Sarno has valid points, but to look at things entirely from one viewpoint is foolish to an unbelievable degree. You know, kind of like someone telling you that Microsoft's is the only software anyone needs.
The issue with placebos in clinical trials is hardly new. It's been a source for ethical and philosophical debate for decades.
Truth is, many trials are cut short if the drug being tested is shown to be highly effective, with that drug then being offered to the entire test group.
And, in all tests, the subjects must give a fully informed consent, which means they *know* they might only be getting the placebo.
Are there issues? Yup, sure are. It's a subject that will continue to be debated for as long as we need to test drugs on human subjects. But is it in any way unique or special this year? Hardly.
Ah yes, read one article, and suddenly an expert is born. And some other person, who probably didn't read the article, modded it as interesting.
Yes, in many cases, pain relievers are not necessary, the pain can be relieved through other means. However, this does not make the drug "useless", nor does it actually have any bearing on whether it works or not. Remember that in trials, these drugs are most often compared against placebos, and had better results. So the truth is, they do work.
And speaking as someone who lives with a person who is in pain 24/7 from degenerative arthritis, I'm glad they're out there. The problems with Vioxx are very unfortunate. It filled a need for a non-narcotic painkiller that was not so harsh on the GI tract. Hopefully, someone will figure out how to develop a version without the cardiac effects.
This little iMac is running a standard OS X license (not server) and hosts upwards of 45,000 hits per day from all over the world. Not huge traffic, but pretty impressive for a desktop OS and a 400 Mhz G3.
Good lord I'd hope it could handle that piddling bit of traffic. I admined systems a few years back that were nothing better than simple desktops with P3 600 processors that could handle into the million + hits per day, all dynamic. I'd suspect your G3 could deal with it as well.
A true slashdotting would turn your G3 into a smoking hole. It's not that there's anything wrong with your system, it's just a fact of life. Those boxes I was running on would have crumpled as well.
Half of my greyhounds wouldn't react to the laser dot at all, the other two thought it was pretty entertaining for a few minutes, and have completely ignored it ever since.
Now let a cat or rabbit loose in the backyard, well, that's a whole different story.
My problem is with the priorities they're working on
The mandate of Lightning, headed by longtime Mozilla volunteer and current Oracle technical staffer Mike Shaver, will be to integrate Sunbird features into Thunderbird so that users can do things like search across e-mail documents and calendar entries, and click a button to turn an e-mail message into a calendar task or reminder.
These are things I do, but rarely.
The one thing I do *every day* is to synch my handheld with my calendar and address book. Until Sunbird/Thunderbird can do that, I cannot completely switch. In fact, Sunbird is completely useless until then.
Until the Mozilla folks take handhelds seriously, Thunderbird and Sunbird are not going to be competitive IMO.
Y'know, on the one hand, what these guys did is as impressive as hell.
On the other hand, they've got to be two of the dumbest people on the face of the earth.
I have done, and still, do a *lot* of unpaid work, but I have never done it for a corporate entity, and can't imagine the slightest possibility of doing it for one that just fired me.
Now we know how Apple survived all these years. By making staff they just laid off think they were getting one over on them by doing free work for them.
Oh really? I guess Linux was a joke for the longest time, then, considering its lack of hardware support. In fact, I guess it's still a joke compared to windows, if driver support is all that (apparently) matters. Why is Linus ripping on the new kind on the block for the exact problem his OS has had since its inception? This is disgusting hypocrisy.
*New* kid on the block?
I would hardly call Sun or Solaris new. And considering their core traditional market and reputation, one really does expect better from them. Add to this the fact that if *Sun* goes to a hardware vendor and says "give us the specs", they're likely to get a very quick "yessir", rather than the pleading, begging and reverse-engineering that many open-source developers have to do to write device drivers.
Linus may or may not not be justified in bashing Sun, but it's not because they're newbies.
I've worked a couple of jobs where long days and nights were the norm. Even to the point of 32-36 hours straight now and again. I did it because I liked the job, when I stopped liking it, I left. The only time I didn't have a choice was when I was in the military. We got short-staffed for a bit and had to stand port and starboard watches, 32 hours on, 16 hours off, for a month.
The folks over at EA could leave any time they want to. I sympathize a little, but I don't feel terribly sorry for them.
Actually, ten hour shifts are very common in the medical field. My wife currently works four ten-hour shifts per week.
Several years back, she worked three twelve hour shifts per work week, six days on, eight days off. It was really cool to have a week off every other week, but that's a shift schedule for the young. At the end of those six days, she was truly thrashed.
This is exactly why it's foolish to use a so-called "database" (*cough* mysql *cough*) which does not support stored procedures. Stored procedures are a vital means of defense against SQL injection attacks, and any RDBMS which is used as a back-end to a publicly-accessable application must use them to be safe. ... More rambling about stored procedures...
OK, yes, SPs are very valuable. And, yes, they can be a big help to security. However, it's not the *only* way.
See, there's this magical thing called "bind variables/parameters". Oracle's had them a long time and ancient versions of PHP support it. MySQL has them in v4.1, and PHP 5 supports them. When using bind variables, you prepare your SQL statement *before* the data is passed, with placeholders for the actual data. Then, you "bind" your data to those placeholders. Since the DB already has the execution path mapped, and the placeholders are treated as pure data, it's *not possible* to have an sql injection attack. No escaping needed, go ahead and pass that nasty bit of sql code into the variable, it won't matter.
The major advantage? The syntax is nearly identical to what you've been doing all along. No need to write SPs for every two-line query.
Another neat side effect is a huge performance improvement when repeating the same query, since the preparation/execution path mapping only have to be done once. Just change the data in your bound variables, and execute the query again.
I've been using bind variables with Oracle at $DAYJOB for over four years now. I never have to think about sql injections there.
Yeah, no kidding. A junior manager in a company I worked as IT manager for got all pissed off because I required minimum 8-char passwords, so he set it to FFFFFFFF.
Imagine his surprise when he found himself locked out of the system the next morning. Seems he didn't know I ran a password cracker against the password database every morning. 'course, he also didn't know I had caller-id. It took him until mid-afternoon to finally get hold of me, and only then because he got off his fat butt to physically track me down.
He tried to threaten me by saying he'd report me to the company owner. Seems he also didn't know that the company web proxy kept logs of all activity.:) Funny part was, he also didn't know that the company owner had a much better catalog of porn links than he did...
In Europe they decided exactly the opposite. And look at how much better their health care system is than ours.
No, it's not, and yes, I have first-hand knowledge of it. Regardless of the problems our health care system has, you are far more likely to survive a hospital stay in the US than you are in any other country. My wife, a registered nurse for 19 years, was hospitalized in London, in a well-respected facility. In spite of that, she almost died from internal bleeding, because nobody present at the time was quilified to *start an IV*. Seems only doctors can do that there, and at night, it can take quite a while until you see one (4 hours).
Yeah, you don't have to pay a bill for it, but frankly, that's *exactly* what it's worth.
Canadians with money come to the US for health care all the time, and pay for it in cash. (Again, first-hand experience.) If their "free" health care is so good, why would they do that?
I'm not even going to get into the economic benefits to the city/state of having professional sports. It makes everyone's lives better because it's more money flowing through the area.
Doesn't exist. When you finally get an *unbiased* evaluation, you find that it's break-even at best. Convention centers, etc are a far better investment.
Yup. I run a small hosting business, and register new domains all the time. It generally takes 3-7 days for the first spam to show up to a new domain, to generic accounts like info, webmaster, sales, etc.
Japan, whose entire government and economy had to be "rebooted" earlier in this century, has a huge advantage over us in that respect. They know an awful lot about moving consistently forward.
Have you looked at the Japanese economy over the past 5 years? Saying it's in the toilet would be an understatement. It's showing signs of recovering, but our little mini-recession looked like a major bubble compared to Japan's economy.
Why are American cars still dependent on oil?
Because like it or not, it's still the most efficient/economic method of powering vehicles in a country where average travel distances are large. I-C engines also have extreme longevity when compared to many other methods. I've owned three vehicles that passed 75K miles, and one with over 100K miles, all maintained in good condition and running strong. Electrics just aren't economical to maintain for that kind of usage. On the plus side for the future, we finally are seeing some technologies with the possibility of changing this, and one interim method, biodiesel.
Why, for crap's sake, is it not okay for the government to provide free wirless broadband access in Philadelphia?
Because that's not their job. Their job is to provide essential emergency services, maintain the transportation infrastructure and provide defense. They should no more be building wireless ISPs than they should be building multi-billion dollar playgrounds for spoiled millionares (stadiums). Besides, inspite of how cool it sounds, have you ever seen the government do any long-term project right? Most Pennsylvania governments have a hard time keeping the potholes down to non-fatal sizes, and you want them to run your ISP? I grew up near Philly, I wouldn't trust them with tin cans and string.
I'm pretty sure there are not many people in Philly who would not like to have free wireless internet,
It's not "free", the government raises taxes to pay for it, which means a lot of folks who don't want or need it still have to pay for it, and that's not fair.
Kill Dr Lucky is definitely one of the better ones. We've played it a few times and had a blast.
"Bitin off hedz" is pretty funny, but the gameplay wasn't quite as good. But hey, any game where you play a dinosaur who's sole goal is to race other dinosaurs to see who can throw themselves into an active volcano first has got to have some amusement value.
Also last I checked, Exchange servers had two modes: POP3 and "only let Outlook talk to me," with the latter being a proprietary protocol (IMAP plus some other stuff, I'm told, but I have no interest in learning more).
Exchange server also speaks straight IMAP pretty well. I've been connecting to an exchange server with Thunderbird using IMAP for six months now without any trouble.
Apple's doing well with it because they didn't have to *pay* to have it developed. I'm not saying that's wrong, but you certainly have to agree that taking something someone else wrote and modifying it is a whole load cheaper than paying umpteen developers to write the whole thing from scratch.
Note that the parts of OSX they *did* write from scratch, they didn't open the source on.
Apple's a good example of how a company can succeed by taking advantage of other people's generosity. But they are *not* a good example of how a company can succeed by *being* generous.
Slashdot Mirror
What you call a 'choking hazard' the manufacturer calls 'uses less materials and is therefore cheaper to produce and thus less expensive for the consumer'.
Materials costs usually represent the smallest part of the cost of making an item, especially in anything as small as a card. In fact, smaller form factors can increase production costs, due to the greater precision needed to make it.
What the manufacturer really calls it is: 'inventing another incompatible form-factor so people can't use their old kit, forcing them to buy replacements for their otherwise perfectly good hardware.'
discourage people from firing their lawyers off willy nilly.
Hmm, reminds me of a tune....
"... we filled his head with cannonballs and powdered his behind, and when we touched the powder off..."
I fully encourage people to fire their lawyers off. Off of cliffs, buildings, radio masts...
Also, I doubt there is any business model that can support a fire department.
Um, actually, there are commercial fire companies, they contract out to municipalities who for various reasons don't want to run their own.
This was a clever hack but I'm sure Palm sells stuff with WiFi for a little more than the Treo 650 goes for.
Actually, PalmOne doesn't *make* anything more expensive than the Treo 650. It lists at a full $200 more than the next cheaper model.
Frankly, this has nothing to do with what PalmOne does or does not want, it has to do with what the *carriers* want PalmOne to do.
Not too surprising, I went through the same thing with the cable modem. Initially, it was the smartest thing I'd done to rent it. The technology was immature, and had not yet stabilized. In the first 18 months, they must have replaced the modem a half-dozen times due to either hardware failure or changing standards. After things stabilized, I decided to purchase the modem. Sure enough, the cable company wants me to pay full price for a used modem. Though they did offer to swap it for a new one.
Although I don't know whether your condition falls into the mindbody/psychosomatic category, it certainly can have a psychosomatic element.
Um, the pain is caused by the fact that the cartilage between the joints has been destroyed, leaving the bones to grate on each other. It's a *very* physical cause.
There is no "one true way" in medicine. The patient must be dealt with as a whole, and that includes treating the mind and the body, not just one or the other.
Sarno has valid points, but to look at things entirely from one viewpoint is foolish to an unbelievable degree. You know, kind of like someone telling you that Microsoft's is the only software anyone needs.
I read that and wondered to myself...
It runs in notepad?
The issue with placebos in clinical trials is hardly new. It's been a source for ethical and philosophical debate for decades.
Truth is, many trials are cut short if the drug being tested is shown to be highly effective, with that drug then being offered to the entire test group.
And, in all tests, the subjects must give a fully informed consent, which means they *know* they might only be getting the placebo.
Are there issues? Yup, sure are. It's a subject that will continue to be debated for as long as we need to test drugs on human subjects. But is it in any way unique or special this year? Hardly.
Ah yes, read one article, and suddenly an expert is born. And some other person, who probably didn't read the article, modded it as interesting.
Yes, in many cases, pain relievers are not necessary, the pain can be relieved through other means. However, this does not make the drug "useless", nor does it actually have any bearing on whether it works or not. Remember that in trials, these drugs are most often compared against placebos, and had better results. So the truth is, they do work.
And speaking as someone who lives with a person who is in pain 24/7 from degenerative arthritis, I'm glad they're out there. The problems with Vioxx are very unfortunate. It filled a need for a non-narcotic painkiller that was not so harsh on the GI tract. Hopefully, someone will figure out how to develop a version without the cardiac effects.
This little iMac is running a standard OS X license (not server) and hosts upwards of 45,000 hits per day from all over the world. Not huge traffic, but pretty impressive for a desktop OS and a 400 Mhz G3.
Good lord I'd hope it could handle that piddling bit of traffic. I admined systems a few years back that were nothing better than simple desktops with P3 600 processors that could handle into the million + hits per day, all dynamic. I'd suspect your G3 could deal with it as well.
A true slashdotting would turn your G3 into a smoking hole. It's not that there's anything wrong with your system, it's just a fact of life. Those boxes I was running on would have crumpled as well.
Strange dog you've got there.
Half of my greyhounds wouldn't react to the laser dot at all, the other two thought it was pretty entertaining for a few minutes, and have completely ignored it ever since.
Now let a cat or rabbit loose in the backyard, well, that's a whole different story.
My problem is with the priorities they're working on
The mandate of Lightning, headed by longtime Mozilla volunteer and current Oracle technical staffer Mike Shaver, will be to integrate Sunbird features into Thunderbird so that users can do things like search across e-mail documents and calendar entries, and click a button to turn an e-mail message into a calendar task or reminder.
These are things I do, but rarely.
The one thing I do *every day* is to synch my handheld with my calendar and address book. Until Sunbird/Thunderbird can do that, I cannot completely switch. In fact, Sunbird is completely useless until then.
Until the Mozilla folks take handhelds seriously, Thunderbird and Sunbird are not going to be competitive IMO.
Y'know, on the one hand, what these guys did is as impressive as hell.
On the other hand, they've got to be two of the dumbest people on the face of the earth.
I have done, and still, do a *lot* of unpaid work, but I have never done it for a corporate entity, and can't imagine the slightest possibility of doing it for one that just fired me.
Now we know how Apple survived all these years. By making staff they just laid off think they were getting one over on them by doing free work for them.
Brilliant!!!
Oh really? I guess Linux was a joke for the longest time, then, considering its lack of hardware support. In fact, I guess it's still a joke compared to windows, if driver support is all that (apparently) matters. Why is Linus ripping on the new kind on the block for the exact problem his OS has had since its inception? This is disgusting hypocrisy.
*New* kid on the block?
I would hardly call Sun or Solaris new. And considering their core traditional market and reputation, one really does expect better from them. Add to this the fact that if *Sun* goes to a hardware vendor and says "give us the specs", they're likely to get a very quick "yessir", rather than the pleading, begging and reverse-engineering that many open-source developers have to do to write device drivers.
Linus may or may not not be justified in bashing Sun, but it's not because they're newbies.
Eh, big deal.
I've worked a couple of jobs where long days and nights were the norm. Even to the point of 32-36 hours straight now and again. I did it because I liked the job, when I stopped liking it, I left. The only time I didn't have a choice was when I was in the military. We got short-staffed for a bit and had to stand port and starboard watches, 32 hours on, 16 hours off, for a month.
The folks over at EA could leave any time they want to. I sympathize a little, but I don't feel terribly sorry for them.
Actually, ten hour shifts are very common in the medical field. My wife currently works four ten-hour shifts per week.
Several years back, she worked three twelve hour shifts per work week, six days on, eight days off. It was really cool to have a week off every other week, but that's a shift schedule for the young. At the end of those six days, she was truly thrashed.
Actually, the one thing that's keeping her from raking in the really big bucks is also what's protecting her.
She's doing the design as a contractor.
It's the companies who are making and selling them that will have to take the big risk of lawsuit. By legal standards, she's just a hired gun.
This is exactly why it's foolish to use a so-called "database" (*cough* mysql *cough*) which does not support stored procedures. Stored procedures are a vital means of defense against SQL injection attacks, and any RDBMS which is used as a back-end to a publicly-accessable application must use them to be safe.
... More rambling about stored procedures...
OK, yes, SPs are very valuable. And, yes, they can be a big help to security. However, it's not the *only* way.
See, there's this magical thing called "bind variables/parameters". Oracle's had them a long time and ancient versions of PHP support it. MySQL has them in v4.1, and PHP 5 supports them. When using bind variables, you prepare your SQL statement *before* the data is passed, with placeholders for the actual data. Then, you "bind" your data to those placeholders. Since the DB already has the execution path mapped, and the placeholders are treated as pure data, it's *not possible* to have an sql injection attack. No escaping needed, go ahead and pass that nasty bit of sql code into the variable, it won't matter.
The major advantage? The syntax is nearly identical to what you've been doing all along. No need to write SPs for every two-line query.
Another neat side effect is a huge performance improvement when repeating the same query, since the preparation/execution path mapping only have to be done once. Just change the data in your bound variables, and execute the query again.
I've been using bind variables with Oracle at $DAYJOB for over four years now. I never have to think about sql injections there.
Yeah, no kidding. A junior manager in a company I worked as IT manager for got all pissed off because I required minimum 8-char passwords, so he set it to FFFFFFFF.
:) Funny part was, he also didn't know that the company owner had a much better catalog of porn links than he did...
Imagine his surprise when he found himself locked out of the system the next morning. Seems he didn't know I ran a password cracker against the password database every morning. 'course, he also didn't know I had caller-id. It took him until mid-afternoon to finally get hold of me, and only then because he got off his fat butt to physically track me down.
He tried to threaten me by saying he'd report me to the company owner. Seems he also didn't know that the company web proxy kept logs of all activity.
I kinda miss that job.
In Europe they decided exactly the opposite. And look at how much better their health care system is than ours.
No, it's not, and yes, I have first-hand knowledge of it. Regardless of the problems our health care system has, you are far more likely to survive a hospital stay in the US than you are in any other country. My wife, a registered nurse for 19 years, was hospitalized in London, in a well-respected facility. In spite of that, she almost died from internal bleeding, because nobody present at the time was quilified to *start an IV*. Seems only doctors can do that there, and at night, it can take quite a while until you see one (4 hours).
Yeah, you don't have to pay a bill for it, but frankly, that's *exactly* what it's worth.
Canadians with money come to the US for health care all the time, and pay for it in cash. (Again, first-hand experience.) If their "free" health care is so good, why would they do that?
I'm not even going to get into the economic benefits to the city/state of having professional sports. It makes everyone's lives better because it's more money flowing through the area.
Doesn't exist. When you finally get an *unbiased* evaluation, you find that it's break-even at best. Convention centers, etc are a far better investment.
Yup. I run a small hosting business, and register new domains all the time. It generally takes 3-7 days for the first spam to show up to a new domain, to generic accounts like info, webmaster, sales, etc.
Japan, whose entire government and economy had to be "rebooted" earlier in this century, has a huge advantage over us in that respect. They know an awful lot about moving consistently forward.
Have you looked at the Japanese economy over the past 5 years? Saying it's in the toilet would be an understatement. It's showing signs of recovering, but our little mini-recession looked like a major bubble compared to Japan's economy.
Why are American cars still dependent on oil?
Because like it or not, it's still the most efficient/economic method of powering vehicles in a country where average travel distances are large. I-C engines also have extreme longevity when compared to many other methods. I've owned three vehicles that passed 75K miles, and one with over 100K miles, all maintained in good condition and running strong. Electrics just aren't economical to maintain for that kind of usage. On the plus side for the future, we finally are seeing some technologies with the possibility of changing this, and one interim method, biodiesel.
Why, for crap's sake, is it not okay for the government to provide free wirless broadband access in Philadelphia?
Because that's not their job. Their job is to provide essential emergency services, maintain the transportation infrastructure and provide defense. They should no more be building wireless ISPs than they should be building multi-billion dollar playgrounds for spoiled millionares (stadiums). Besides, inspite of how cool it sounds, have you ever seen the government do any long-term project right? Most Pennsylvania governments have a hard time keeping the potholes down to non-fatal sizes, and you want them to run your ISP? I grew up near Philly, I wouldn't trust them with tin cans and string.
I'm pretty sure there are not many people in Philly who would not like to have free wireless internet,
It's not "free", the government raises taxes to pay for it, which means a lot of folks who don't want or need it still have to pay for it, and that's not fair.
Kill Dr Lucky is definitely one of the better ones. We've played it a few times and had a blast.
"Bitin off hedz" is pretty funny, but the gameplay wasn't quite as good. But hey, any game where you play a dinosaur who's sole goal is to race other dinosaurs to see who can throw themselves into an active volcano first has got to have some amusement value.
Also last I checked, Exchange servers had two modes: POP3 and "only let Outlook talk to me," with the latter being a proprietary protocol (IMAP plus some other stuff, I'm told, but I have no interest in learning more).
Exchange server also speaks straight IMAP pretty well. I've been connecting to an exchange server with Thunderbird using IMAP for six months now without any trouble.
Apple's doing well with it because they didn't have to *pay* to have it developed. I'm not saying that's wrong, but you certainly have to agree that taking something someone else wrote and modifying it is a whole load cheaper than paying umpteen developers to write the whole thing from scratch.
Note that the parts of OSX they *did* write from scratch, they didn't open the source on.
Apple's a good example of how a company can succeed by taking advantage of other people's generosity. But they are *not* a good example of how a company can succeed by *being* generous.