Additionally, FSBOs are having a much better time using online services.
I'd hope FSBOs are becoming more popular because people are realizing that Realtors are a cartel who use their very high commisions to force appreciation in many real estate markets. Last time I sold a house, I figured that my realtor was making a solid $150/hour based on the commision and the relatively little effort required to sell my house.
Look at a microwave - a true appliance. I'll bet most people only know how to use a microwave to 1/10 of its designed capability. And even then I suspect people don't use the features correctly.
The other 90% of those features are not worth using. My microwave has auto reheat settings that require inputting quantities of units of food. However, the names of the units are printed only in the user's manual and not on the LCD, meaning I can't remember if "0.5" means "cups" or "pounds" or "servings" or "ounces" of oatmeal.
Another much fancier microwave I used recently has a knob on the front for selecting modes of operation. There must be a dozen modes of operation. Just getting to "run this damn thing on high for 30 seconds" requires pushing a button and rotating the knob clockwise through a half dozen modes, then pushing the knob, then rotating it for the amount of time, then pushing it again. It literally takes 30 seconds of effort to get the thing to run for 30 seconds.
Personal computers take these problems, multiply them by 10, and then add a percentage chance of failure. The best computers for productivity were those green-screen dumb terminals for data entry or even perhaps DOS text-based programs, but now those all got replaced by full-blown desktops complete with Internet access and Windows Media Player and presentation time-sink software. Sometimes I really hate "progress".
Even someone in the "boonies". That means there are a ton of small to mid-sized telecom companys sprinkled throughout the "boonies".
It depends on how rural. Rural in the Southeast USA is being 30 minutes from the nearest real city (e.g. over 20,000 people and/or has a Wal-Mart). In this area, there really are not small to mid-sized telecom companies, unless you would consider the craptastic behemoth BellSouth to be small to mid-sized. Local ISPs do exist but they charge enough per month for many people to justify getting expanded calling to allow using a bigger/cheaper ISP in the nearest real city.
The link you provide is exactly the accident I was referring to. You substantiated my statement for me. The fact that it happened in 1960 is irrelevant, because the post I originally replied to was trying to say that the Russians were somehow safer through simplicity, when it is easy to show statistics that show that big rockets are just plain dangerous. Instead of counting from 1971, if the whole history of manned space flight were counted, that one incident in 1960 makes up for all Space Shuttle and Apollo accidents easily.
Art and science haven't had a form of property protection for most of mankind for most of our history, and knowledge production didn't stop.
That's because religion was perfectly happy to make sure there was no knowledge production to stop.
The Church stood unchallenged for hundreds of years before a long persistent trickle of resistence eventually led to the Renaissance.
Hundreds of years is nothing to laugh at. No medicine. No science. Nothing. Art didn't even exist outside of the narrow likes of monarchs and popes. For more time than the USA has even existed.
The reason the USA boomed so dramatically is largely due to the Constitution, which grants explicit property and expression rights. In the USA there are no monarchs, no popes, and no gallows for critics, scientists, and artists who defy tradition in the interest of innovation who can do their work without great fear of oppression or unmitigated theft.
Microsoft is trying to destroy you as a software developer?
Probably you are not a software developer then.
Windows is a programmer's nightmare, if that programmer understands the underpinnings of making good reliable software. Give me UNIX and sections 2 and 3 of the man pages over Windows any day. There are so many more opportunities for finding the cause of obscure bugs in UNIX than there are in Windows that it is sickening. I'm talking everything from kernel debuggers to system call tracing to kick-ass program debuggers like dbx on top of access to thorough documentation and standards-based implementations.
And whatever happened to SCSI devices. 95% of the drives are IDE and it eats up your processor.
I love my SCSI CD-RW drive. Its never let me down, works like a champ, and has a great MTBF stat. I also paid $120 for it just about a year ago via mail-order.
For another computer I built, I got an IDE CD-RW drive. It was $20. Best Buy had a whole big pile of them at the front of the store.
SCSI is better, but most people want cheap crap. End of story.
People don't give as much of their income to the poor anymore.
I think this is a psychological consequence of the higher taxes caused by Social Security, Medicare, Food Stamps, Earned Income Credit, Public Schools, etc. "Why should I give to charity, when 10+% of my income goes to the poor already via Unca Sam?!?"
So, just how much of my money will the poor accept before they stop asking for my money?
from playground bully to slashdot-reading nerd? Sounds a bit unlikely to me...
He would bully people by taunting them with the names of all the known radioactive isotopes and chasing them while reciting all the stepping numbers of Intel CPUs. Not all bullies use fists, you know.
Don't use "instant check" crap (frankly, don't use checks at all if you can help it) and don't use fake VISA/MC cards (the check cards, which are tied directly to your banking account).
Well, hand-written checks do provide a hard copy signed piece of evidence that can be produced in court if necessary. However, the electronic automatic checking withdrawal stuff is a disaster waiting to happen.
For example, my cell phone company took months to stop billing me after I cancelled my service. If I had been so retarded to have signed up for "convienient" automatic check payments, I would have been minus a couple hundred dollars and in a much much weaker position with the cell phone company about who owes what. By sending in a old-fashioned bill each month, I--not they--have more power in this whole provider-customer "relationship".
Customers who fall for the "convenient billing" carney trick deserve what they get in the end.
I agree with the distinction between "enabling" and "creating." The main underlying point is that people who live on credit are living a lie, where so many people are trying to "keep up with the Jonses" yet don't realize the Jonses themselves are about to file for bankruptcy. It is just so terribly sad just how insecure and envious so many people are. This could also be taken as proof that people don't pay attention to history or religion, because all of these problems have been faced and dealt with before.
For most rich people, charities are large part of a good tax strategy. This is why good financial planners know a bit about how income tax works. From Mr. Gates' business practices, I'd say he cares more about his tax liability than the people helped by charity.
I just think the current credit card system it totally stupid from a security point of view.
True, but the credit card companies know something you dont: educating a billion people about a new technology is nearly impossible to do in reasonable amounts of time. Credit cards took years--decades--to reach the social penetration that they have.
And still even today, decades later, people do not understand the very non-technical simple notion of what credit really is leading to an entire industry of bankruptcy lawyers and credit consolodaters. Just recently, I heard a story of a person who is 90,000 dollars in credit card debt. This isn't some chain mail fantasy, either, it is a person a person in my family knows. I wonder how people can become so deluded and so deep in denial that they will ruin their own life and their family's life just to live in a fake un-earned lifestyle created by a little magic plastic card. These problems go so far beyond security issues that security issues are really very very trivial by comparison.
These problems run so deep with people charging dozens of things they don't need from cell phones to shitty-looking wheels for their car that I believe a second great depression will be seen in our lifetimes.
Even when things do go wrong like it did with the ballistic descent of the Soyuz coming back from the ISS, it only resulted in minor injury for the capsule crew.
A lot of the deaths in the Soviet space program were not publicised. I saw a documentary that mentioned a rocket blowing up during a PR event that killed over 100 people, many civilian. Just because you don't see it on the front page of USA Today doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Hyper-intelligent 2-year-olds posting their ASCII-art goatse.cx trolls to Slashdot is pretty darn scary. Before we know it, they'll run to their parents and say "look at me!" and pour a bowl of grits down their pants.
The 'future' setting in television shows is always just a plot device to handle controversial modern issues without getting shot down by the network censors (the 'standards and practices' department).
Thus, Star Trek TOS, perhaps TNG and DSN, but hardly Voyager or Enterprise. Hmmm...the shows that have a three letter abbreviation are good...the shows that don't suck...very interesting.
They simply have run out of things to show.
I am looking forward to Survivor: All Stars All Stars, thank you very much.
With Windows 2000 and IIS 5, the tools exist to optimize the performance and truly understand exactly what the code is doing at all times. (emphasis mine)
You mean I can attach a debugger to a running Windows kernel just like I can with UNIX kernels and look at header files and documentation to understand the data structures and run-time parameters?
Vendor-paid case studies. Lame 2001 reference: "My god, it's full of lies!"
Any IT professional that relies on a vendor-provided case study for decision making is incompetent.
It took until college to know otherwise. Until then, I had to rely on teachers to provide an education that was never delivered.
Anyone who needs a degree in "Education" before they feel they are qualified to teach is someone who is typically not fit to become a teacher. Most teachers cannot give good advice about being a well-adjusted and successful adult, because they never were one!
Public schools are good for educating a minimum-wage workforce but no better than that. People who go on to do interesting things with their lives recieve their educations from all sources but their schools.
Slashdot Mirror
Additionally, FSBOs are having a much better time using online services.
I'd hope FSBOs are becoming more popular because people are realizing that Realtors are a cartel who use their very high commisions to force appreciation in many real estate markets. Last time I sold a house, I figured that my realtor was making a solid $150/hour based on the commision and the relatively little effort required to sell my house.
But then again, no IT guys have to work in feces in a sweaty, humid, tiny room. STFU you little baby.
You make the false assumption that co-workers aren't retarded steaming piles of shit.
Look at a microwave - a true appliance. I'll bet most people only know how to use a microwave to 1/10 of its designed capability. And even then I suspect people don't use the features correctly.
The other 90% of those features are not worth using. My microwave has auto reheat settings that require inputting quantities of units of food. However, the names of the units are printed only in the user's manual and not on the LCD, meaning I can't remember if "0.5" means "cups" or "pounds" or "servings" or "ounces" of oatmeal.
Another much fancier microwave I used recently has a knob on the front for selecting modes of operation. There must be a dozen modes of operation. Just getting to "run this damn thing on high for 30 seconds" requires pushing a button and rotating the knob clockwise through a half dozen modes, then pushing the knob, then rotating it for the amount of time, then pushing it again. It literally takes 30 seconds of effort to get the thing to run for 30 seconds.
Personal computers take these problems, multiply them by 10, and then add a percentage chance of failure. The best computers for productivity were those green-screen dumb terminals for data entry or even perhaps DOS text-based programs, but now those all got replaced by full-blown desktops complete with Internet access and Windows Media Player and presentation time-sink software. Sometimes I really hate "progress".
Even someone in the "boonies". That means there are a ton of small to mid-sized telecom companys sprinkled throughout the "boonies".
It depends on how rural. Rural in the Southeast USA is being 30 minutes from the nearest real city (e.g. over 20,000 people and/or has a Wal-Mart). In this area, there really are not small to mid-sized telecom companies, unless you would consider the craptastic behemoth BellSouth to be small to mid-sized. Local ISPs do exist but they charge enough per month for many people to justify getting expanded calling to allow using a bigger/cheaper ISP in the nearest real city.
The link you provide is exactly the accident I was referring to. You substantiated my statement for me. The fact that it happened in 1960 is irrelevant, because the post I originally replied to was trying to say that the Russians were somehow safer through simplicity, when it is easy to show statistics that show that big rockets are just plain dangerous. Instead of counting from 1971, if the whole history of manned space flight were counted, that one incident in 1960 makes up for all Space Shuttle and Apollo accidents easily.
Art and science haven't had a form of property protection for most of mankind for most of our history, and knowledge production didn't stop.
That's because religion was perfectly happy to make sure there was no knowledge production to stop.
The Church stood unchallenged for hundreds of years before a long persistent trickle of resistence eventually led to the Renaissance.
Hundreds of years is nothing to laugh at. No medicine. No science. Nothing. Art didn't even exist outside of the narrow likes of monarchs and popes. For more time than the USA has even existed.
The reason the USA boomed so dramatically is largely due to the Constitution, which grants explicit property and expression rights. In the USA there are no monarchs, no popes, and no gallows for critics, scientists, and artists who defy tradition in the interest of innovation who can do their work without great fear of oppression or unmitigated theft.
Microsoft is trying to destroy you as a software developer?
Probably you are not a software developer then.
Windows is a programmer's nightmare, if that programmer understands the underpinnings of making good reliable software. Give me UNIX and sections 2 and 3 of the man pages over Windows any day. There are so many more opportunities for finding the cause of obscure bugs in UNIX than there are in Windows that it is sickening. I'm talking everything from kernel debuggers to system call tracing to kick-ass program debuggers like dbx on top of access to thorough documentation and standards-based implementations.
And whatever happened to SCSI devices. 95% of the drives are IDE and it eats up your processor.
I love my SCSI CD-RW drive. Its never let me down, works like a champ, and has a great MTBF stat. I also paid $120 for it just about a year ago via mail-order.
For another computer I built, I got an IDE CD-RW drive. It was $20. Best Buy had a whole big pile of them at the front of the store.
SCSI is better, but most people want cheap crap. End of story.
but does this hurt MicroSoft's ability (and willingness) to do the same behaviour again and again?
No, because they are getting away with it from their point of view. $500 million...sheesh.
People don't give as much of their income to the poor anymore.
I think this is a psychological consequence of the higher taxes caused by Social Security, Medicare, Food Stamps, Earned Income Credit, Public Schools, etc. "Why should I give to charity, when 10+% of my income goes to the poor already via Unca Sam?!?"
So, just how much of my money will the poor accept before they stop asking for my money?
The first president Bush makes an attempt to rejuvenate NASA by setting Mars as a goal.
Iraq, and, now, Mars. Does Bush II have any original thoughts?
from playground bully to slashdot-reading nerd? Sounds a bit unlikely to me...
He would bully people by taunting them with the names of all the known radioactive isotopes and chasing them while reciting all the stepping numbers of Intel CPUs. Not all bullies use fists, you know.
Don't use "instant check" crap (frankly, don't use checks at all if you can help it) and don't use fake VISA/MC cards (the check cards, which are tied directly to your banking account).
Well, hand-written checks do provide a hard copy signed piece of evidence that can be produced in court if necessary. However, the electronic automatic checking withdrawal stuff is a disaster waiting to happen.
For example, my cell phone company took months to stop billing me after I cancelled my service. If I had been so retarded to have signed up for "convienient" automatic check payments, I would have been minus a couple hundred dollars and in a much much weaker position with the cell phone company about who owes what. By sending in a old-fashioned bill each month, I--not they--have more power in this whole provider-customer "relationship".
Customers who fall for the "convenient billing" carney trick deserve what they get in the end.
Consider it to be an "enabling" technology.
I agree with the distinction between "enabling" and "creating." The main underlying point is that people who live on credit are living a lie, where so many people are trying to "keep up with the Jonses" yet don't realize the Jonses themselves are about to file for bankruptcy. It is just so terribly sad just how insecure and envious so many people are. This could also be taken as proof that people don't pay attention to history or religion, because all of these problems have been faced and dealt with before.
For most rich people, charities are large part of a good tax strategy. This is why good financial planners know a bit about how income tax works. From Mr. Gates' business practices, I'd say he cares more about his tax liability than the people helped by charity.
I just think the current credit card system it totally stupid from a security point of view.
True, but the credit card companies know something you dont: educating a billion people about a new technology is nearly impossible to do in reasonable amounts of time. Credit cards took years--decades--to reach the social penetration that they have.
And still even today, decades later, people do not understand the very non-technical simple notion of what credit really is leading to an entire industry of bankruptcy lawyers and credit consolodaters. Just recently, I heard a story of a person who is 90,000 dollars in credit card debt. This isn't some chain mail fantasy, either, it is a person a person in my family knows. I wonder how people can become so deluded and so deep in denial that they will ruin their own life and their family's life just to live in a fake un-earned lifestyle created by a little magic plastic card. These problems go so far beyond security issues that security issues are really very very trivial by comparison.
These problems run so deep with people charging dozens of things they don't need from cell phones to shitty-looking wheels for their car that I believe a second great depression will be seen in our lifetimes.
Even when things do go wrong like it did with the ballistic descent of the Soyuz coming back from the ISS, it only resulted in minor injury for the capsule crew.
A lot of the deaths in the Soviet space program were not publicised. I saw a documentary that mentioned a rocket blowing up during a PR event that killed over 100 people, many civilian. Just because you don't see it on the front page of USA Today doesn't mean it didn't happen.
It isn't ironic, because it is a known fact women don't care about love triangles between Natalie Portman, a Beowulf cluster, and Yoda.
Hyper-intelligent 2-year-olds posting their ASCII-art goatse.cx trolls to Slashdot is pretty darn scary. Before we know it, they'll run to their parents and say "look at me!" and pour a bowl of grits down their pants.
Is Slashdot really a good thing?
Proprietary
The 'future' setting in television shows is always just a plot device to handle controversial modern issues without getting shot down by the network censors (the 'standards and practices' department).
Thus, Star Trek TOS, perhaps TNG and DSN, but hardly Voyager or Enterprise. Hmmm...the shows that have a three letter abbreviation are good...the shows that don't suck...very interesting.
They simply have run out of things to show.
I am looking forward to Survivor: All Stars All Stars, thank you very much.
proprietary standard
I really really wish people would stop saying this.
With Windows 2000 and IIS 5, the tools exist to optimize the performance and truly understand exactly what the code is doing at all times. (emphasis mine)
You mean I can attach a debugger to a running Windows kernel just like I can with UNIX kernels and look at header files and documentation to understand the data structures and run-time parameters?
Vendor-paid case studies. Lame 2001 reference: "My god, it's full of lies!"
Any IT professional that relies on a vendor-provided case study for decision making is incompetent.
If people continue gaining weight, then there are millions of new objects about to get added to the astrological databases.
It took until college to know otherwise. Until then, I had to rely on teachers to provide an education that was never delivered.
Anyone who needs a degree in "Education" before they feel they are qualified to teach is someone who is typically not fit to become a teacher. Most teachers cannot give good advice about being a well-adjusted and successful adult, because they never were one!
Public schools are good for educating a minimum-wage workforce but no better than that. People who go on to do interesting things with their lives recieve their educations from all sources but their schools.