On this kind of economy we have right now, pathetic losers like you have just one use: become fat live targets for the 70 bullets on my AK47's holder. [etc, snip]
I find your ideas interesting and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
The average person does not exist. No matter which person you look at, that person will be far from the average in several aspects.
Thank you, Captain Obvious. Perhaps it would be too much like commonsense to assume that I knew that and meant "broadly average in the area of [whatever specific thing was under discussion]" but didn't want to waste time spelling it out?
There are language-specific variants of QWERTY too; QWERTZ for German, AZERTY for French, etc.
Is that like saying "bat" is a variant of the word "cat"?
No.
Is this a typical Slashdot-type attempt to make a point and win an argument by bad analogy?! Answering that question properly would probably require more in-depth consideration of linguistics, word origins, meanings, etc. than you intended.
And it would still be a misleading and pointless analogy, so why bother?:)
I'd say those layouts aren't QWERTY; they're QWERTZ and AZERTY, respectively.
Say that if you want.:) Can't say I feel like getting into a long, pedantic and pointless argument about how one wants to classify them.
I consider them variants because (a) they're near-identical to QWERTY (compared to something like DVORAK) and (b) they're very obviously derived from it.
If that similarity was pure coincidence, I would be more inclined to agree with you, but I doubt that's the case.
I teach at a school district where YouTube is blocked. If I want to look up something to show on the fly, Google video is an option; YouTube is not. Discontinuing uploads to Google Video means I use your services less, not more.
The probable reason Google Video isn't blocked when YouTube is that few people use it. And also- as others have mentioned- that your school either forget to block or couldn't care about Google Video.
BTW, you're a typical example of the Slashdotter tendency to say "I need this..." or "I'd buy something if (yadda yadda) therefore (whoever) should offer that service". You do realise that even if you mean what you say, this translates to a potential market of *one* person. Or on a good day a handful of students at Random High School, Buttfuck, Illinois?
A similar but equally blinkered mistake Slashdotters make is assuming that their personal circumstances, obsessions and/or needs should hold more sway than they do in the market because they represent those of the population in general. Either because it hadn't occurred otherwise to them or because they think they *are* average when they're far from it.
And why should we help them? They REFUSE to bring in efficient cars, choosing, instead, to market them in the UK.
Probably because their North American factories are set up to produce the gas guzzlers they decided on a few years back and they can't change overnight. The cars sold in the UK- and the rest of Europe- are mainly made in the EU, so importing them would effectively waste their North American capacity (and put lots of you guys out of work).
Also, EU-made cars would face an economic hurdle since they came from outside NAFTA (the opposite is also true, which is one reason why there are comparatively few North American sold within the EU; South-East Asian produced models are- I suspect- cheap enough to overcome that hurdle).
The third issue is that Americans generally have their own, different taste in cars with European models doing less well. (Even when a European model does decently in the US, it's usually in a lower class, e.g. what would be considered a medium-sized family car in Europe would be considered a small car in the US). Although the desire for increased energy efficiency brings them closer together, I still think they'd need changes.
Part of the difference is taste, but it's also motivated by driving conditions; e.g. US travel generally involves longer distances, and your roads are much wider and straighter than most of those in Europe.
I will say that Digg.com has declined. I have had to bury a slew of articles that were purely fluff, and moreso of late.
WTF... "lately"?! I stopped using Digg *over two years ago* because it had become a worthless POS full of sensationalist-attention-getting-vacuous-submissions, a partisan, pack-modding, friend-promoting, adolescent-mentality, moronic, herd-driven mouth-breathing circle jerk.
(There was a really good critique of it on Kuro5hin, but it seems to have disappeared).
Considering it had been hyped as the poster boy of Web 2.0 and an improvement on Slashdot, it was never that great- but I swear it declined noticably even over the few months that I used it. Though I doubt it was *ever* as good as its fanboys implied, even in the beginning.
If you expect *any* hard drive to be so reliable that you don't have to back it up, then you're an idiot. Manufacturers go through phases of being statistically more or less reliable. If there's a systemic problem with a particular product, then it deserves attention and if that manufacturer is noticably less reliable over all their products then it may make sense to avoid them.
OTOH, one single anecdotal case tells us nothing in itself except that you were stupid enough to rely on an inherently imperfect storage medium and not do any backups.
(Analogy; attempting to measure the half-life of a radioactive element by watching a single atom).
Seagate made the first hard disk I owned. It was 40MB, and lasted for well over a decade of daily use. It was still working when I got rid of the machine it was in, an Amstrad PC1640
Kind of ironic that- according to Alan Sugar- it was the bad publicity resulting from a batch of faulty hard drives during the late-80s/early-90s that permanently damaged Amstrad's position in the PC market.
And in fact, when I looked into this via Wikipedia, it turns out that the manufacturer of the faulty driveswas Seagate. Notably, this would have been around the same period that this post claims that "Seagate was the dross of the HDD world"...
That's perfectly true, of course. However, it doesn't change the short to medium term problem as I've mentioned in previous posts.
Specifically, unless Seagate had made a clear promise to keep the two operations' products separate for some time after the takeover (they didn't) or unless they somehow got the Maxtor operation up to Seagate's pre-takeover standards exceptionally quickly (unclear, but unlikely), then one can't buy a Seagate-branded drive knowing whether it's a "genuine" Seagate drive or one produced by a former Maxtor facility.
There may be ways to tell them (country of manufacture, model, etc.), but the last time I asked this question I didn't get anything useful on that count.
Of course, as time goes on and the operations become more merged and less distinguishable, such a distinction becomes meaningless. And it's theoretically possible that Seagate's (supposedly) higher standards could have ultimately improved the ex-Maxtor products; but it's also possible that the Maxtor takeover is what led to this perceived decline in standards- and in that case, it doesn't matter who took over who.
Why should these concerns apply only to the unix guy?
Who said anything about UNIX? You were the one that assumed UNIX == hacker, Windows == Stuffed shirt.
Which is true to some extent, but I'm sure a 9-5 shirt guy would be quite happy to use UNIX if necessary.
Anyway, that's beside the point:-
It's not like the non-unix guy is going to continue to work from beyond the grave, or if you don't pay them.
It was in the context of the discussion; this guy originally responded "Great. And now my company reliese on some garbage unreadable perl script that no one else will be able to maintain. No thanks." and the OP replied "The alternative is to rely on the work of some overpaid guy in a polo with a bachelor's degree in marketing and to pay him $40,000 a year." then- more importantly- "If you continue to employ said hackers, this is not a problem.".
In other words, he implicitly agreed that the hacker would produce less maintainable code than the shirt, but attempted to justify it in a stupid way- and also implied agreement that the shirt would produce more maintainable code. That is, code that someone else could maintain if the shirt died and/or buggered off to a better-paying job.
You might disagree with this, but I was extrapolating from blhack and plague3106's logic and assertions.
Hello, capitalists of the world, can you hear us? This is your wake-up call; you get at least one of these every century, in the form, of deep recessions or depressions.
Every century is effectively a once in a lifetime event.
Even once a century never seems to be enough to make the lesson stick, does it?
You make it sound like a regular occurrence! It's quite silly to spout self-righteous phrases like "making the lesson stick" when anyone who *did* go through it is almost certain to be dead by the next time, regardless of whether they'd learned from experience.
What you're seeing now is economic proof of your miscalculation of how much injury you can cause us without dealing a mortal blow.
You're making the mistake of viewing the capitalist world as a single mass with a single collective intelligence. With the exception of certain areas (such as oil cartels), it's the collective actions of a bunch of people behaving in an individualistic, self-serving manner.
This is why, as Lenin said "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." Or more likely IMHO, they'll hang themselves because the individuals behave in a manner detrimental to the long-term collective interest. This is why I'm opposed to entirely free markets.
Also, the capitalists selling you computers aren't necessarily the same capitalists in a position to overcharge you for your electricity or natural gas.
We tried REALLY hard to ignore what was happening and keep spending like there was no tomorrow, but you just had to keep trying to raise margins, didn't you?
Yeah, because the margins on generic computer equipment are massive, aren't they? Seriously, say what you like about computers, but with some exceptions like Apple, it's not generally a large margin business.
Another point; the "umbrella" corporation uses the same name to associate all these subsidiaries. They want to enjoy the benefits of associating them with each other and trade off that goodwill. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
The alternative is to rely on the work of some overpaid guy in a polo with a bachelor's degree in marketing and to pay him $40,000 a year.
$40,000 (US) a year isn't that much if that's his only job. And besides, if the software is maintainably written, they shouldn't need to *keep* paying him $40,000 a year. (They might, but they wouldn't be being held to ransom).
If you continue to employ said hackers, this is not a problem.
What if the hackers leave for another company that interests them more? What if they fall out with their bosses? (The "herding cats" analogy comes to mind when managing hackers) What if they die? What if they can't pay them any more?
You're potentially putting an essential aspect of the company at the mercy of the goodwill etc. of one person in this situation. This is why companies generally *will* pay some stuffed shirt $40,000 a year.
It's also why overpriced off-the-shelf software is often a more popular (and more sensible) choice than a custom-written system in the long run. Even if it's custom-designed, the latter won't be able to have as much effort put into it (economies of scale > 1 give off-the-shelf systems an advantage here) and won't have the mass of support required to tailor/maintain it.
And customised systems *will* need to be adapted- which, incidentally, is why excessively tailoring a system to a company's *current* needs is a bad idea, and why an off-the-shelf package designed with a general growth pattern of companies in mind, may be a better choice.
I'm going to play devil's advocate here. What you say is true, and there's no doubt that the geek/hacker type can be very valuable and creative.
At the same time- as you basically imply- they like to do things that stimulate them. What if a company needs something done a certain way? What if the way that the geek is interested in doing something isn't the way it needs done?
And even accounting for the unnecessary banality of some corporate cultures, there are times when it's necessary to do boring work that doesn't stimulate, or when it's necessary to do things a different way to how you'd like. Or when it's necessary to represent the company and look presentable and socially competent.
I ENJOY geeking, I love it. I do it for *fun* and I would probably do it for you free in exchange for letting me "play" with your servers.
See, a lot of companies wouldn't like the idea of people "playing" with their servers, even if they were technically competent.
As I said, devil's advocacy to some extent, but not entirely. There's a place for geeks, but there's also a necessity for boring but professional gits.
Are computer manufacturers, or consumers for that matter, really concerned about an additional $1.00? So a laptop computer costs $500 instead of $499. The additional cost incurred from a patent hardly seems to be an issue.
Doesn't that apply to any port, whether on a computer or on a peripheral?
Bear in mind that $1 is the *cost* price to the manufacturer; to sell a device with the same (slim) profit margin they'd have to charge a bit more to the consumer.
And while it doesn't sound a lot, such decisions are probably one of many cases where you could say "oh, it's only a tiny difference in cost for a big improvement", but when you go for that in every case it mounts up to a $10, $20 or $30 difference. Ever shopped for food and realised that the deceptively small differences in price that seem so harmless when choosing individual items are the ones that mount up?
And the great unwashed frequently *do* buy on price, even when it seems like a false economy to more informed people. If a manufacturer is building to a price-point and selling at razor-thin margins, the consumer probably isn't that bothered, but that $1 is a significant difference to the manufacturer's profit.
Also, the fact that USB is universally accepted probably brings in more economies of scale, both in terms of buying the controller chips *and* in terms of selling X units of that peripheral. USB's small advantage at the start probably spiralled, as these things tend to do, so that this is the position we're in now.
Except that it isn't a free-market health care system -- at least not 50% of it. About half the money spent in health care is Federal/State money.
And that's what drives up prices. You have the private sector competing with the public sector for finite health care resources.
Although healthcare is primarily socialised in the UK, we also have a private sector. The situation overall is very far from problem-free, but it doesn't seem to suffer from the one that you describe. Perhaps you need *more* socialised healthcare?
No, I'm not sure how seriously I meant that, but it does suggest that either the problem is with the private:public balance or that that wasn't the specific problem at all.
At any rate, this is an interesting take on the situation explaining why adverse selection in relatively unregulated private insurance may be driving prices up and why the US seems to suffer most badly from this.
Which, by the way, is a succinct explanation of why socialized medicine sucks.
That's the theory. Kind of strange that it's the US's supposedly free-market healthcare system that has the reputation of being horrendously expensive, poor value for money and for tying people to jobs with large corporations- via their health plans- if they want anything like decent insurance at acceptable prices. (Either that or take the risk of bankrupting themselves if they get ill.)
(I suppose you're going to blame medicare for dragging down a system that would otherwise be free-market sweetness and perfection?)
Socialised healthcare is far from perfect, and undoubtedly has some problems. I'm also sure that the US system has some better corner cases, and saves you a bit on your taxes. Even so, I'm pretty certain which one I'd rather take my chances with overall.
Disclaimer: I don't live in the US, and haven't got any plans to, so I'm quite happy for you to have whatever healthcare system you want. It just doesn't look like much of a poster boy to me right now.
But shame on you for not doing your research and ponying up for a Commodore or Apple. Those really did have good keyboards. The smiling people were Commodore users.
I haven't used a C64 that much (Spectrum was much more popular in the UK and I personally had a real-keyboard Atari 800XL). But from the few times that I did use it, I have to say that it was one of my least favourite "real" keyboards. Way too "deep" and "spongy/springy" if I remember correctly.
Yeah, still better than the Speccy's rubber keys, but then no-one expected too much from that keyboard.
Sorry you couldn't afford the $200.
Perhaps he got his computer in the early days, when the C64 was much more expensive. Or perhaps he lived in another country (like I do) where the C64 was never sold as cheaply as it was in the US.
Programs are available for download every night, for free, over the air with a compatible teletext input interface.
Mmm... I suspect that they *aren't* any more. Though that would have been so cool at the time.:'-(
Funny anecdote: I remember reading a news story about a burglary at a school which had recently upgraded to the new, shiny Archimedes, replacing their old BBCs. The theives broke in and stole all the keyboards, not realising that the computer was now in a separate box.
Speaking of that Arch incident, I read that the Master Compact variant of the original BBC had a separate "base unit" and keyboard like those newfangled PCs... except that most of that computer *was* in the "keyboard" unit!
Kind of ironic that the BBC micro most resembling an expandable PC supposedly flopped (I've never seen one in the flesh) because it was less expandable and lacked half the interfaces that made the other versions so popular.
Which hard drive? I have gone nearly 100% SSD and flash.
You've been using SSD for so long that your *previous* generation of hard drives (the ones that you'd be getting rid of, hence the motivation of this article) are SSD as well?
Slashdot Mirror
On this kind of economy we have right now, pathetic losers like you have just one use: become fat live targets for the 70 bullets on my AK47's holder. [etc, snip]
I find your ideas interesting and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
The average person does not exist. No matter which person you look at, that person will be far from the average in several aspects.
Thank you, Captain Obvious. Perhaps it would be too much like commonsense to assume that I knew that and meant "broadly average in the area of [whatever specific thing was under discussion]" but didn't want to waste time spelling it out?
There are language-specific variants of QWERTY too; QWERTZ for German, AZERTY for French, etc.
Is that like saying "bat" is a variant of the word "cat"?
No.
:)
Is this a typical Slashdot-type attempt to make a point and win an argument by bad analogy?! Answering that question properly would probably require more in-depth consideration of linguistics, word origins, meanings, etc. than you intended.
And it would still be a misleading and pointless analogy, so why bother?
I'd say those layouts aren't QWERTY; they're QWERTZ and AZERTY, respectively.
Say that if you want. :) Can't say I feel like getting into a long, pedantic and pointless argument about how one wants to classify them.
I consider them variants because (a) they're near-identical to QWERTY (compared to something like DVORAK) and (b) they're very obviously derived from it.
If that similarity was pure coincidence, I would be more inclined to agree with you, but I doubt that's the case.
hy all the semicolon hate? Some of us like it on the home row. ;)
Probably some office bitch and not a programmer, that's for sure.
WTF? I think you just outed yourself as a Visual Basic hack! I bet you wonder what those weird curly bracket characters are for as well :)
Dvorak ain't language agnostic, so for non-english languages it's worse.
There are language-specific variants of QWERTY too; QWERTZ for German, AZERTY for French, etc.
I teach at a school district where YouTube is blocked. If I want to look up something to show on the fly, Google video is an option; YouTube is not. Discontinuing uploads to Google Video means I use your services less, not more.
The probable reason Google Video isn't blocked when YouTube is that few people use it. And also- as others have mentioned- that your school either forget to block or couldn't care about Google Video.
BTW, you're a typical example of the Slashdotter tendency to say "I need this..." or "I'd buy something if (yadda yadda) therefore (whoever) should offer that service". You do realise that even if you mean what you say, this translates to a potential market of *one* person. Or on a good day a handful of students at Random High School, Buttfuck, Illinois?
A similar but equally blinkered mistake Slashdotters make is assuming that their personal circumstances, obsessions and/or needs should hold more sway than they do in the market because they represent those of the population in general. Either because it hadn't occurred otherwise to them or because they think they *are* average when they're far from it.
And why should we help them? They REFUSE to bring in efficient cars, choosing, instead, to market them in the UK.
Probably because their North American factories are set up to produce the gas guzzlers they decided on a few years back and they can't change overnight. The cars sold in the UK- and the rest of Europe- are mainly made in the EU, so importing them would effectively waste their North American capacity (and put lots of you guys out of work).
Also, EU-made cars would face an economic hurdle since they came from outside NAFTA (the opposite is also true, which is one reason why there are comparatively few North American sold within the EU; South-East Asian produced models are- I suspect- cheap enough to overcome that hurdle).
The third issue is that Americans generally have their own, different taste in cars with European models doing less well. (Even when a European model does decently in the US, it's usually in a lower class, e.g. what would be considered a medium-sized family car in Europe would be considered a small car in the US). Although the desire for increased energy efficiency brings them closer together, I still think they'd need changes.
Part of the difference is taste, but it's also motivated by driving conditions; e.g. US travel generally involves longer distances, and your roads are much wider and straighter than most of those in Europe.
I will say that Digg.com has declined. I have had to bury a slew of articles that were purely fluff, and moreso of late.
WTF... "lately"?! I stopped using Digg *over two years ago* because it had become a worthless POS full of sensationalist-attention-getting-vacuous-submissions, a partisan, pack-modding, friend-promoting, adolescent-mentality, moronic, herd-driven mouth-breathing circle jerk.
(There was a really good critique of it on Kuro5hin, but it seems to have disappeared).
Considering it had been hyped as the poster boy of Web 2.0 and an improvement on Slashdot, it was never that great- but I swear it declined noticably even over the few months that I used it. Though I doubt it was *ever* as good as its fanboys implied, even in the beginning.
If you expect *any* hard drive to be so reliable that you don't have to back it up, then you're an idiot. Manufacturers go through phases of being statistically more or less reliable. If there's a systemic problem with a particular product, then it deserves attention and if that manufacturer is noticably less reliable over all their products then it may make sense to avoid them.
OTOH, one single anecdotal case tells us nothing in itself except that you were stupid enough to rely on an inherently imperfect storage medium and not do any backups.
(Analogy; attempting to measure the half-life of a radioactive element by watching a single atom).
Seagate made the first hard disk I owned. It was 40MB, and lasted for well over a decade of daily use. It was still working when I got rid of the machine it was in, an Amstrad PC1640
Kind of ironic that- according to Alan Sugar- it was the bad publicity resulting from a batch of faulty hard drives during the late-80s/early-90s that permanently damaged Amstrad's position in the PC market.
And in fact, when I looked into this via Wikipedia, it turns out that the manufacturer of the faulty drives was Seagate . Notably, this would have been around the same period that this post claims that "Seagate was the dross of the HDD world"...
Seagate bought Maxtor, not the other way around.
That's perfectly true, of course. However, it doesn't change the short to medium term problem as I've mentioned in previous posts.
Specifically, unless Seagate had made a clear promise to keep the two operations' products separate for some time after the takeover (they didn't) or unless they somehow got the Maxtor operation up to Seagate's pre-takeover standards exceptionally quickly (unclear, but unlikely), then one can't buy a Seagate-branded drive knowing whether it's a "genuine" Seagate drive or one produced by a former Maxtor facility.
There may be ways to tell them (country of manufacture, model, etc.), but the last time I asked this question I didn't get anything useful on that count.
Of course, as time goes on and the operations become more merged and less distinguishable, such a distinction becomes meaningless. And it's theoretically possible that Seagate's (supposedly) higher standards could have ultimately improved the ex-Maxtor products; but it's also possible that the Maxtor takeover is what led to this perceived decline in standards- and in that case, it doesn't matter who took over who.
Why should these concerns apply only to the unix guy?
Who said anything about UNIX? You were the one that assumed UNIX == hacker, Windows == Stuffed shirt.
Which is true to some extent, but I'm sure a 9-5 shirt guy would be quite happy to use UNIX if necessary.
Anyway, that's beside the point:-
It's not like the non-unix guy is going to continue to work from beyond the grave, or if you don't pay them.
It was in the context of the discussion; this guy originally responded "Great. And now my company reliese on some garbage unreadable perl script that no one else will be able to maintain. No thanks." and the OP replied "The alternative is to rely on the work of some overpaid guy in a polo with a bachelor's degree in marketing and to pay him $40,000 a year." then- more importantly- " If you continue to employ said hackers, this is not a problem. ".
In other words, he implicitly agreed that the hacker would produce less maintainable code than the shirt, but attempted to justify it in a stupid way- and also implied agreement that the shirt would produce more maintainable code. That is, code that someone else could maintain if the shirt died and/or buggered off to a better-paying job.
You might disagree with this, but I was extrapolating from blhack and plague3106's logic and assertions.
I think the reason people criticize Keanu Reeves' acting is because they judge him based on the Matrix
No, Reeves was actually a very good fit for the first Matrix film; it's the other stuff he hasn't been so good in.
Hello, capitalists of the world, can you hear us? This is your wake-up call; you get at least one of these every century, in the form, of deep recessions or depressions.
Every century is effectively a once in a lifetime event.
Even once a century never seems to be enough to make the lesson stick, does it?
You make it sound like a regular occurrence! It's quite silly to spout self-righteous phrases like "making the lesson stick" when anyone who *did* go through it is almost certain to be dead by the next time, regardless of whether they'd learned from experience.
What you're seeing now is economic proof of your miscalculation of how much injury you can cause us without dealing a mortal blow.
You're making the mistake of viewing the capitalist world as a single mass with a single collective intelligence. With the exception of certain areas (such as oil cartels), it's the collective actions of a bunch of people behaving in an individualistic, self-serving manner.
This is why, as Lenin said "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." Or more likely IMHO, they'll hang themselves because the individuals behave in a manner detrimental to the long-term collective interest. This is why I'm opposed to entirely free markets.
Also, the capitalists selling you computers aren't necessarily the same capitalists in a position to overcharge you for your electricity or natural gas.
We tried REALLY hard to ignore what was happening and keep spending like there was no tomorrow, but you just had to keep trying to raise margins, didn't you?
Yeah, because the margins on generic computer equipment are massive, aren't they? Seriously, say what you like about computers, but with some exceptions like Apple, it's not generally a large margin business.
Another point; the "umbrella" corporation uses the same name to associate all these subsidiaries. They want to enjoy the benefits of associating them with each other and trade off that goodwill. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
The alternative is to rely on the work of some overpaid guy in a polo with a bachelor's degree in marketing and to pay him $40,000 a year.
$40,000 (US) a year isn't that much if that's his only job. And besides, if the software is maintainably written, they shouldn't need to *keep* paying him $40,000 a year. (They might, but they wouldn't be being held to ransom).
If you continue to employ said hackers, this is not a problem.
What if the hackers leave for another company that interests them more? What if they fall out with their bosses? (The "herding cats" analogy comes to mind when managing hackers) What if they die? What if they can't pay them any more?
You're potentially putting an essential aspect of the company at the mercy of the goodwill etc. of one person in this situation. This is why companies generally *will* pay some stuffed shirt $40,000 a year.
It's also why overpriced off-the-shelf software is often a more popular (and more sensible) choice than a custom-written system in the long run. Even if it's custom-designed, the latter won't be able to have as much effort put into it (economies of scale > 1 give off-the-shelf systems an advantage here) and won't have the mass of support required to tailor/maintain it.
And customised systems *will* need to be adapted- which, incidentally, is why excessively tailoring a system to a company's *current* needs is a bad idea, and why an off-the-shelf package designed with a general growth pattern of companies in mind, may be a better choice.
At the same time- as you basically imply- they like to do things that stimulate them. What if a company needs something done a certain way? What if the way that the geek is interested in doing something isn't the way it needs done?
And even accounting for the unnecessary banality of some corporate cultures, there are times when it's necessary to do boring work that doesn't stimulate, or when it's necessary to do things a different way to how you'd like. Or when it's necessary to represent the company and look presentable and socially competent.
I ENJOY geeking, I love it. I do it for *fun* and I would probably do it for you free in exchange for letting me "play" with your servers.
See, a lot of companies wouldn't like the idea of people "playing" with their servers, even if they were technically competent.
As I said, devil's advocacy to some extent, but not entirely. There's a place for geeks, but there's also a necessity for boring but professional gits.
Are computer manufacturers, or consumers for that matter, really concerned about an additional $1.00? So a laptop computer costs $500 instead of $499. The additional cost incurred from a patent hardly seems to be an issue.
Doesn't that apply to any port, whether on a computer or on a peripheral?
Bear in mind that $1 is the *cost* price to the manufacturer; to sell a device with the same (slim) profit margin they'd have to charge a bit more to the consumer.
And while it doesn't sound a lot, such decisions are probably one of many cases where you could say "oh, it's only a tiny difference in cost for a big improvement", but when you go for that in every case it mounts up to a $10, $20 or $30 difference. Ever shopped for food and realised that the deceptively small differences in price that seem so harmless when choosing individual items are the ones that mount up?
And the great unwashed frequently *do* buy on price, even when it seems like a false economy to more informed people. If a manufacturer is building to a price-point and selling at razor-thin margins, the consumer probably isn't that bothered, but that $1 is a significant difference to the manufacturer's profit.
Also, the fact that USB is universally accepted probably brings in more economies of scale, both in terms of buying the controller chips *and* in terms of selling X units of that peripheral. USB's small advantage at the start probably spiralled, as these things tend to do, so that this is the position we're in now.
Except that it isn't a free-market health care system -- at least not 50% of it. About half the money spent in health care is Federal/State money. And that's what drives up prices. You have the private sector competing with the public sector for finite health care resources.
Although healthcare is primarily socialised in the UK, we also have a private sector. The situation overall is very far from problem-free, but it doesn't seem to suffer from the one that you describe. Perhaps you need *more* socialised healthcare?
No, I'm not sure how seriously I meant that, but it does suggest that either the problem is with the private:public balance or that that wasn't the specific problem at all.
At any rate, this is an interesting take on the situation explaining why adverse selection in relatively unregulated private insurance may be driving prices up and why the US seems to suffer most badly from this.
Which, by the way, is a succinct explanation of why socialized medicine sucks.
That's the theory. Kind of strange that it's the US's supposedly free-market healthcare system that has the reputation of being horrendously expensive, poor value for money and for tying people to jobs with large corporations- via their health plans- if they want anything like decent insurance at acceptable prices. (Either that or take the risk of bankrupting themselves if they get ill.)
(I suppose you're going to blame medicare for dragging down a system that would otherwise be free-market sweetness and perfection?)
Socialised healthcare is far from perfect, and undoubtedly has some problems. I'm also sure that the US system has some better corner cases, and saves you a bit on your taxes. Even so, I'm pretty certain which one I'd rather take my chances with overall.
Disclaimer: I don't live in the US, and haven't got any plans to, so I'm quite happy for you to have whatever healthcare system you want. It just doesn't look like much of a poster boy to me right now.
But shame on you for not doing your research and ponying up for a Commodore or Apple. Those really did have good keyboards. The smiling people were Commodore users.
I haven't used a C64 that much (Spectrum was much more popular in the UK and I personally had a real-keyboard Atari 800XL). But from the few times that I did use it, I have to say that it was one of my least favourite "real" keyboards. Way too "deep" and "spongy/springy" if I remember correctly.
Yeah, still better than the Speccy's rubber keys, but then no-one expected too much from that keyboard.
Sorry you couldn't afford the $200.
Perhaps he got his computer in the early days, when the C64 was much more expensive. Or perhaps he lived in another country (like I do) where the C64 was never sold as cheaply as it was in the US.
Programs are available for download every night, for free, over the air with a compatible teletext input interface.
Mmm... I suspect that they *aren't* any more. Though that would have been so cool at the time. :'-(
Funny anecdote: I remember reading a news story about a burglary at a school which had recently upgraded to the new, shiny Archimedes, replacing their old BBCs. The theives broke in and stole all the keyboards, not realising that the computer was now in a separate box.
Speaking of that Arch incident, I read that the Master Compact variant of the original BBC had a separate "base unit" and keyboard like those newfangled PCs... except that most of that computer *was* in the "keyboard" unit!
Kind of ironic that the BBC micro most resembling an expandable PC supposedly flopped (I've never seen one in the flesh) because it was less expandable and lacked half the interfaces that made the other versions so popular.
Which hard drive? I have gone nearly 100% SSD and flash.
You've been using SSD for so long that your *previous* generation of hard drives (the ones that you'd be getting rid of, hence the motivation of this article) are SSD as well?
It's a sort of a seti-at-home kind of thing when you look at it that way...
You mean someone's trying to find out if there's intelligent life in the Middle East?
Of all the religions in the World, Buddhism and Taoism, for that matter, are the only ones I know of that do not have policy of converting people.
I was under the impression that Judaism did not seek to convert.