HP decided to go the route of making money on their printer ink, and sell their printers sometimes below cost -- that's kind of the disposable razor idea -- not necessarily a bad idea, but if it comes at the sacrifice of making reliable printers, I'm out.
HP's obsession with cost cutting, chasing down patent cheaters, etc., these are not the signatures of a class technology company.
Well, thank that bitch Carly Fiorina. She destroyed a once great, truly innovative, and minimally evil tech company. HP used to be something special, you know, the "HP way" and all. Now they're just another goddamn corporation. Although they do share some of the blame for hiring her after she ran Lucent into the ground. I think it's because they wanted a chick CEO so as to appear "progressive."
You know how HP encourages you to "recycle" your print/toner cartridges? As if they give a toss about the environment. They want the cartridge back so they can refill it with a tenth of a cent worth of toner and sell it for $80. As far as I'm concerned, they can have it back. I dutifully return the old cartridge to them with their pre-paid UPS label . . . after taking a 12ga shotgun to it. "Here, refill THIS, assholes!"
You are right, Harper was in a precarious position to start. The only reason the Tories came to power was the sponsorship scandal. Now, he has made his "settlement" of the softwood lumber dispute with the U.S. a confidence issue. If enough MPs realize that Harbush folded a winning hand against the U.S. ("Bushie, you're doin' a heckuva job, and you only hafta give back 1/3 of what you stole, eh?"), his government could very easily fall. Plus, the Canadian involvement in Afganistan is unpopular. For these and other reasons, he's on very thin ice (pun intended) and the Liberals and NDP are looking for the first opportunity to take him down. Anyone who doubts this needs only realize that his campaign-promised revisit of gay marriage is now off the table.
Fucking pigs won't do anything about a stolen car for fuck's sake. Wait a minute, I forgot, they'll tell you to "call your insurance company." What the hell makes you think they're going to bust down a door to retrieve your damn laptop?
It's all about money, you see. If the person inside the house where the laptop was "phoning home" from had a half-dozen or so cannabis plants, then they could seize the property through civil forfeiture, so they would go balls to the wall. They'd roll up in their armored personnel carriers wearing their jackboots and Nazi bucket helmets and armed to the teeth with machine guns. "We gets to bust us a grow ahp! We ah'll gits bigger gunz! SIEG HEIL MEIN BUSH!!!"
But your laptop, the one that contains all of your data and that you worked so hard to get? Gone. Forget it. "Sorry, we just don't have the manpower." Well, they have the goddamn manpower to line the street with cops after every professional sporting event. Oh, and to have "emphasis patrols" out there to pull over anyone who's had a drink or two or might be going two miles an hour over the limit. But for something that will actually help someone? No way.
Don't post these private to social networking sites for the whole world to see! "Look how wonderful I am and how great my life is! Don't you wish you were just like me?" Bullshit. I really don't get how these narcissistic bastards think we give two shits about their pathetic lives.
The only people who are really hurt by this are the huge corporations. Sure, the individual consumer victims face a great deal of aggravation, but they get their money back in the end. The banks, though, end up eating it. For all of their crowing about the losses, it probably amounts to about what the CEO routinely spends on lunch and nose candy.
What's left to look at are those who are in a position of power and influence, and either aren't religious or believe that God is on their side - i.e. people who have either absolutely no concern with the consequences of their actions (in this world or the next) or believe those consequences will be positive in nature. People like Josef Stalin, Jim Jones, and Saddam Hussein.
"He became convinced that God was calling him to engage the forces of evil in battle, and this one time baseball-team owner from Texas did not shrink from the task."
That's what they're doing in China. I remember reading some Microsoft exec saying, "If they're going to steal software, I'd rather it be our software."
I learned in history class all about Carnegie hiring Pinkerton thugs^W strikebreakers^W security agents when his employees did disloyal and terroristic things like, say, demand safe working conditions. I think history will remember that Gates set computing back at least 20 years. Hell, up until quite recently, we were still running the same old DOS-over-Windows on a slightly juiced up 386 and it was called "innovative."
There are some local areas where tech wages have started a rapid runup again - apparently this is happening in Seattle now.
Ooh, I hope so. It'd be nice to work somewhere for 2 years and pay my house off.
Not in Seattle. We're in a full-on housing bubble. Wages may be going up, but housing prices are going up twice as fast. The American Dream is just that.
My wife has a prescription of something close to -6.5 and -7.5. To be honest, i really dont know what this means, but I can assure you she is almost as blind as a bat when she isnt wearing her glasses/contacts.
OP is right on the money. Without her glasses, my mom, who is a certified flight instructor (CFII for fellow aviation geeks) is legally blind. She has a SODA for her vision, but is otherwise good to go. That's not a typo - without her glasses, she is legally blind yet she is a certificated flight instructor.
You can blame Melinda Gates for Bob. She was the one in charge of that project. In fact, it was, I believe, the only thing she was ever in charge of there.
In normal circumstances, she would have been summarily shown the door very shortly thereafter. But she married the CEO and kept her job on her back, so to speak.
Investors depend on stock analysts and we know how bright they are.
That's just it - the stock market is all smoke and mirrors. It's based on what somebody else thinks something is worth. Look at Google, for example. This piece of shit is trading at almost $400 a share. What does it produce? Text ads that nobody reads. "It's the new hot stock on that new internet thing!" People learned nothing, absolutely nothing, from the dot-com days. And this is but one example.
My philosophy with respect to the stock market? Go to Vegas, you'll have more fun.
Just my $0.02 worth. Not meant as a troll, just me calling it as I see it.
Oklahoma's Spyware Bill dies a quiet death.
What do you expect from a bunch of dumb Okies? I'll look on the bright side: When their computers are so infected with malware as to be unusable, they won't be able to go to Republican hate sites.
Lenovo denies ditching Linux . . . 'Customers of the recently introduced Lenovo 3000 units still won't have a preloaded option, however, because the small and midsize business customers that are the targets for those units have many different requirements, he said.'"
More like, "because Lenovo would rather not pay full retail for XP."
Mars rover escapes again. Isn't it interesting how the lion's share of the cool space-related stuff is unmanned? Even more reason to kill the Shuttle program.
RIM CEO speaks out against unlimited wireless . . . "unlimited bandwidth use in the wireless world is needed because access to the network is what spurs innovation."'" Access to the network is what spurs people's Crackberry habits. I'd really like a toke off of whatever he's smoking.
Microsoft LiveMail gets ads. . . . Similar to Google's Gmail Next, they'll lobby Congress to make it illegal to use anything but LiveMail. Don't forget, Google hates America and Linux supports terrorism.
FSF anti-DRM campaign expands. I'm sure it will be least as successful, if not timely, as the GNU HURD project.
Nope. Linux is far from having all the functionality of Windows. Sure, if you use it for work, or for school, then you can find programs that can do most things, but you will not find Quake 4 or World of Warcraft on Linux. Gimp is no paintshop killer, and WINE is nowhere near as robust as a real Windows system.
The mods must be dabbling in the crack again. The above was modded flamebait. The truth hurts, doesn't it?
The truth is, the software may be out there, but getting it to actually work on Linux is a different problem altogether. Did you check to see if your video card has open-source drivers? It doesn't (and most of them don't)? Tough. Even if it does, you'll spend hours upon hours editing config files, installing packages, and generally mucking about trying to get it to work before it actually does. If you post to any of the online forums, you'll likely be met with a loud chorus of "RTFM!!!" Of course, all of this will involve recompiling your kernel multiple times, etc. These are things that are difficult for techie people. My mom could never get it going in a million years and nor would she want to spend the time trying.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-Linux by any means, although I do think there exist far superior FOSS operating systems. I just think many Linux people don't appreciate the amount of dinking with it that is required to get it to effing work. "I just want it to work, I just want to watch my stupid DVD!" was a common laement of mine.
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Oh - and switching to Intel does not mean Apple had to stop innovating. Have you seen MagSafe?
I have seen MagSafe, yes. And it's not as good as the competition when used on failed hardware. Plus, it's a lot more expensive.
HP decided to go the route of making money on their printer ink, and sell their printers sometimes below cost -- that's kind of the disposable razor idea -- not necessarily a bad idea, but if it comes at the sacrifice of making reliable printers, I'm out.
HP's obsession with cost cutting, chasing down patent cheaters, etc., these are not the signatures of a class technology company.
Well, thank that bitch Carly Fiorina. She destroyed a once great, truly innovative, and minimally evil tech company. HP used to be something special, you know, the "HP way" and all. Now they're just another goddamn corporation. Although they do share some of the blame for hiring her after she ran Lucent into the ground. I think it's because they wanted a chick CEO so as to appear "progressive."
You know how HP encourages you to "recycle" your print/toner cartridges? As if they give a toss about the environment. They want the cartridge back so they can refill it with a tenth of a cent worth of toner and sell it for $80. As far as I'm concerned, they can have it back. I dutifully return the old cartridge to them with their pre-paid UPS label . . . after taking a 12ga shotgun to it. "Here, refill THIS, assholes!"
The Conservative government is in a very precarious position. The wrong move and the victory they let the Liberals screw up so badly for is gone.
Here's how I, an American would-be Canadian and regular CBC Radio One listener sees it:
You are right, Harper was in a precarious position to start. The only reason the Tories came to power was the sponsorship scandal. Now, he has made his "settlement" of the softwood lumber dispute with the U.S. a confidence issue. If enough MPs realize that Harbush folded a winning hand against the U.S. ("Bushie, you're doin' a heckuva job, and you only hafta give back 1/3 of what you stole, eh?"), his government could very easily fall. Plus, the Canadian involvement in Afganistan is unpopular. For these and other reasons, he's on very thin ice (pun intended) and the Liberals and NDP are looking for the first opportunity to take him down. Anyone who doubts this needs only realize that his campaign-promised revisit of gay marriage is now off the table.
Fucking pigs won't do anything about a stolen car for fuck's sake. Wait a minute, I forgot, they'll tell you to "call your insurance company." What the hell makes you think they're going to bust down a door to retrieve your damn laptop?
It's all about money, you see. If the person inside the house where the laptop was "phoning home" from had a half-dozen or so cannabis plants, then they could seize the property through civil forfeiture, so they would go balls to the wall. They'd roll up in their armored personnel carriers wearing their jackboots and Nazi bucket helmets and armed to the teeth with machine guns. "We gets to bust us a grow ahp! We ah'll gits bigger gunz! SIEG HEIL MEIN BUSH!!!"
But your laptop, the one that contains all of your data and that you worked so hard to get? Gone. Forget it. "Sorry, we just don't have the manpower." Well, they have the goddamn manpower to line the street with cops after every professional sporting event. Oh, and to have "emphasis patrols" out there to pull over anyone who's had a drink or two or might be going two miles an hour over the limit. But for something that will actually help someone? No way.
/etc/pf.conf
rdr pass from [untrusted net] to any -> goatse.cx
The process reduces capital costs by 70% and product cost by 40%.
And the consumer price will be increased by 20%.
Don't post these private to social networking sites for the whole world to see! "Look how wonderful I am and how great my life is! Don't you wish you were just like me?" Bullshit. I really don't get how these narcissistic bastards think we give two shits about their pathetic lives.
If I want an MP3 player I'll get a much cheaper generic one that is less likely to be stolen and doesn't involve brand name price inflation.
And that will break after you've had it for a week. By the time you've bought your fourth replacement, tell me again how you will have saved money?
The only people who are really hurt by this are the huge corporations. Sure, the individual consumer victims face a great deal of aggravation, but they get their money back in the end. The banks, though, end up eating it. For all of their crowing about the losses, it probably amounts to about what the CEO routinely spends on lunch and nose candy.
What's left to look at are those who are in a position of power and influence, and either aren't religious or believe that God is on their side - i.e. people who have either absolutely no concern with the consequences of their actions (in this world or the next) or believe those consequences will be positive in nature. People like Josef Stalin, Jim Jones, and Saddam Hussein.
You forgot George Walker Bush in that list.
"He became convinced that God was calling him to engage the forces of evil in battle, and this one time baseball-team owner from Texas did not shrink from the task."
1260 divided by the weight of the problem equals the length of the solution.
That's what they're doing in China. I remember reading some Microsoft exec saying, "If they're going to steal software, I'd rather it be our software."
getting your HMO to pay for one.
You mean like Andrew Carnegie?
I learned in history class all about Carnegie hiring Pinkerton thugs^W strikebreakers^W security agents when his employees did disloyal and terroristic things like, say, demand safe working conditions. I think history will remember that Gates set computing back at least 20 years. Hell, up until quite recently, we were still running the same old DOS-over-Windows on a slightly juiced up 386 and it was called "innovative."
There are some local areas where tech wages have started a rapid runup again - apparently this is happening in Seattle now.
Ooh, I hope so. It'd be nice to work somewhere for 2 years and pay my house off.
Not in Seattle. We're in a full-on housing bubble. Wages may be going up, but housing prices are going up twice as fast. The American Dream is just that.
OS X and Firefox with AdBlock and NoScript included for good measure == no worries here.
Still think Windows is [cheaper|easier|better|stronger|faster]?
My wife has a prescription of something close to -6.5 and -7.5. To be honest, i really dont know what this means, but I can assure you she is almost as blind as a bat when she isnt wearing her glasses/contacts.
OP is right on the money. Without her glasses, my mom, who is a certified flight instructor (CFII for fellow aviation geeks) is legally blind. She has a SODA for her vision, but is otherwise good to go. That's not a typo - without her glasses, she is legally blind yet she is a certificated flight instructor.
You can blame Melinda Gates for Bob. She was the one in charge of that project. In fact, it was, I believe, the only thing she was ever in charge of there.
In normal circumstances, she would have been summarily shown the door very shortly thereafter. But she married the CEO and kept her job on her back, so to speak.
. . . how whacked out on oxycontin the day traders that day are . . .
Not oxy, that's Hillbilly Heroin and Rush Limbaugh's drug of choice. You're thinking nose candy.
Investors depend on stock analysts and we know how bright they are.
That's just it - the stock market is all smoke and mirrors. It's based on what somebody else thinks something is worth. Look at Google, for example. This piece of shit is trading at almost $400 a share. What does it produce? Text ads that nobody reads. "It's the new hot stock on that new internet thing!" People learned nothing, absolutely nothing, from the dot-com days. And this is but one example.
My philosophy with respect to the stock market? Go to Vegas, you'll have more fun.
This guy wants to quit his day to day responsibilities to give away his money to the less fortunate and all you guys want to do is bash him.
If he would pay his fair share of taxes, rather than laundering all of those copies of Windows through a Nevada shell corporation, then maybe, just maybe, there wouldn't be as many "less fortunate" people.
Don't forget, for every Bill Gates, there have to be many "less fortunate" to be exploited^W marketed to.
Just my $0.02 worth. Not meant as a troll, just me calling it as I see it.
Oklahoma's Spyware Bill dies a quiet death.
What do you expect from a bunch of dumb Okies? I'll look on the bright side: When their computers are so infected with malware as to be unusable, they won't be able to go to Republican hate sites.
Lenovo denies ditching Linux . . . 'Customers of the recently introduced Lenovo 3000 units still won't have a preloaded option, however, because the small and midsize business customers that are the targets for those units have many different requirements, he said.'"
More like, "because Lenovo would rather not pay full retail for XP."
Mars rover escapes again.
Isn't it interesting how the lion's share of the cool space-related stuff is unmanned? Even more reason to kill the Shuttle program.
RIM CEO speaks out against unlimited wireless . . . "unlimited bandwidth use in the wireless world is needed because access to the network is what spurs innovation."'"
Access to the network is what spurs people's Crackberry habits. I'd really like a toke off of whatever he's smoking.
Microsoft LiveMail gets ads. . . . Similar to Google's Gmail
Next, they'll lobby Congress to make it illegal to use anything but LiveMail. Don't forget, Google hates America and Linux supports terrorism.
FSF anti-DRM campaign expands.
I'm sure it will be least as successful, if not timely, as the GNU HURD project.
Nope. Linux is far from having all the functionality of Windows. Sure, if you use it for work, or for school, then you can find programs that can do most things, but you will not find Quake 4 or World of Warcraft on Linux. Gimp is no paintshop killer, and WINE is nowhere near as robust as a real Windows system.
The mods must be dabbling in the crack again. The above was modded flamebait. The truth hurts, doesn't it?
The truth is, the software may be out there, but getting it to actually work on Linux is a different problem altogether. Did you check to see if your video card has open-source drivers? It doesn't (and most of them don't)? Tough. Even if it does, you'll spend hours upon hours editing config files, installing packages, and generally mucking about trying to get it to work before it actually does. If you post to any of the online forums, you'll likely be met with a loud chorus of "RTFM!!!" Of course, all of this will involve recompiling your kernel multiple times, etc. These are things that are difficult for techie people. My mom could never get it going in a million years and nor would she want to spend the time trying.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-Linux by any means, although I do think there exist far superior FOSS operating systems. I just think many Linux people don't appreciate the amount of dinking with it that is required to get it to effing work. "I just want it to work, I just want to watch my stupid DVD!" was a common laement of mine.
However, that was back in ~1998, so a lot has changed since then.
Wrong. It still isn't despite the masturbation fantasies of the Linux fanboys. It's not even close.
Funny, 25 years ago, all the geeks were bitching about IBM's monopoly and clamoring to get on board with a young, nimble startup called Microsoft.