The markup isn't anywhere near that high. We bought 20 Mac mini's from them for about 30 bucks a pop more than it would have cost us to buy 'em from Apple...That's not even 10%.
It's just that the interim weenie was out for profit at all costs. Profit at all costs makes you a lot of money, initially, but one of the costs is your customer base.
It's going to take them a long time to win back the people who they alienated.
If all I cared about was price, I'd buy from HP. And we have a big honkin corporate contract with CDW, so the prices are actually pretty nice.
We still buy some Dell stuff...Just bought a pair of Poweredge 2950's I'm pretty pleased with, though god help us if we ever need support.
By and large though, I'd rather buy a more expensive machine with better service and support than a cheaper machine with crappy service and support. We got a shipment of optiplexes not that long ago with a batch of bad capacitors on their motherboards, and for the amount of time we wasted on the phone with dell support getting them to send replacement parts for a fricking known problem...They should have looked at the service tag said, "Is it not booting?" and sent us a new motherboard with no further questions....Not made us jump through the goddamn hoops every single time. We got a guy who's Dell certified on staff, which usually means they'll take your word for it, but noooooo.
I'm just sick of 'em. It's beyond the pale. We bought 70 new pcs this year at my location, and I think 5 were Dell, and the rest were Macs and HPs.
Mediocre quality, slow delivery, piss poor service and support...What's not to like?
If you buy a lot of computers and deal with multiple retailers, the contrast can't help but leap out at you. HP, from being craptacular last decade, has done a much better job of "reinventing" themselves than Dell has. Middleman retailers like CDW are fricking lightning fast, and they're really easy to deal with, especially when buying volume.
Contrast this with Dell...I work for a national corporation that does millions of dollars a year in business with Dell...Or used to. We had representatives in corporate who were in direct contact with high-powered Dell salespeople. Did it expedite anything? No. We have top tier support, does it stop them from sending out techs who know less than non-experts on our local staff? I had to help some dumbass fix a printer once, and my printer repair technique is normally limited to bft.
I was a big Dell fan...once. I've yet to see any sign that they've done anything but continue their slide toward the low end of the market.
Well, the reality of it is, gasoline won't burn without a ready source of air, so the danger of a spark inside a tank of gas is minimal until the tank itself is ruptured. And if you can keep the bulk of the components outside the tank anyway, then it doesn't matter if they're more prone to failure.
Other than that, I tend to agree. Stick with the reliable, proven method, until the alternative offers enough benefits to make the risks worthwhile.
Wow. It really blows my mind that you think evolution works that way. Different thumbs? Extra ribs? A wholly different digestive track? Damn near every omnivore on the planet has the same digestive track! Do you think species swap that stuff every few generations? What would be the possible point?
If species were capable of having viable mutations with that level of morphological change, there would be no such thing as a species. The world would be a chaos of wildly different creatures with completely unrelated characteristics.
In reality it takes hundreds and hundreds of generations for things like fruit flies to learn to prefer other types of fricking fruit! I suggest you read some more modern books before you start citing Plato as a counterargument in evolutionary biology.
But that's just breeding for disease resistance...Or luck. Don't we want to select for things like, intelligence, athletic ability, physical attractiveness? If someone who is hugely intelligent but prone to disease is allowed to die without passing that on, then that's probably a bad decision. Breed them to some really disease resistant dumb people, and you'll increase everyone. Or you may cause some huge problem down the road. Who knows? That's why eugenics is a bad idea.
Anyway, if you wait till after 40 as a woman, you're going to have a much higher risk of birth defects, and that's not anything to be encouraged.
Wow. That's Victorian-style evolution, where we must be getting "better" as we evolve. That absolutely doesn't follow. Some evolutionary biologists view high intelligence as disruptive to society, and suggest that intelligence past a certain level may actually be selected against.
Even simple demographics show that people who have higher levels of education tend to have fewer children.
Just because you don't have superpowers doesn't mean we're identical as a species to humanity circa ~300BC...Not that we're all that different either. 2,300 years is relatively low on the evolutionary timescale. And 2,300 years conveniently ignores the fact that most branches of humanity went through a gigantic intellectual trough between then and now.
The drag of atmosphere will doom any LEO below ~300km...You'll come right back down. The highest flights (for air-breathing planes) to date were done by the X-15 rocket planes, and they made it to about 100km.
They didn't make it to the theoretical scramjet velocity of Mach 15, but they did break Mach 6. I think it's pretty doubtful that a scramjet could cross that additional 200km where the atmosphere is so thin as to be useless for the engines...Remember the X-15 was powered by a liquid-fuel rocket engine...The scramjet might not even be able to beat its performance.
If you really think evolution is limited to gross physical changes, you've got a really poor understanding. We may not be evolving hooves or fur, but resistance to diseases, resistance to certain types of chemicals that are now more abundant in our environments, ability to withstand a lifestyle that would have been utterly alien to our cave-dwelling ancestors...All these things represent tremendous environmental pressures.
Couple that with a vastly increased species population, representing a staggering amount of genetic diversity, I have no problem believing that we're still evolving, and indeed, that the rate may very well have increased.
I'd call into question whether or not it works...Far as I know we've had no solid scientific trials among human-type animals.
The root of the problem is that someone really has to know what traits are going to be best for the entire species, otherwise they're just extinguishing genetic diversity in pursuit of a goal which may turn out to be a stupid goal.
There is an economic equivalent to eugenics; communism. The idea there is that the government is smart enough to be able to decide what everyone should be producing and what everything should cost. It's an utter disaster...Whenever you add free market reforms to a communist country you can watch their economies go nuts.
The reason for this is simple. Having a few thousand people making decisions about what will benefit millions doesn't work as well as all those millions making those decisions about what will benefit themselves...No matter how smart or well informed that minority is, they can't be reliably informed about the minutiae of every member of the majorities' positive and negative qualities.
What is dating but a process by which you weed out people whom you believe to be inferior to share your genes with? It's a long term research project carried out by literally billions of people, and you really think that a few people with an idea of what the "perfect" person will be like can do it better? That's some serious arrogance.
In this case, the only way they're catching the light is effectively locking it up in a jar. If they open the jar to try and put more in, they lose the light they already captured.
Assuming they do find some way of adding more photons without losing what they've already got, the two options are:
1) The container fills up. 2) The container breaks.
Either way, nothing catastrophic would occur, unless they managed to contain a lot more energy. Just a flash of light. You can see from the photos in tfa, that the photons don't exhibit the same pattern that they did when the laser was firing (indicating some internal diffraction), so there wouldn't be a danger of having the equivalent of a more powerful laser shooting out in the same direction as the original beam. Then comes thermodynamics...It unlikely that they'd be able to contain energy in excess of the energy they're putting into containment (understatement), and entropy usually makes it so you have to spend a lot more energy, just to break even.
Of course they do. I'd go so far to say that most predators should show similar tendencies. We use our sight for a lot of things that the average mutt wouldn't use it's sight for, but at the most basic level, it has the exact same function for both of us. Predator/Prey identification, basic navigation, threat recognition and response.
The examples in the article are all "A dog can tell the difference between a landscape and a dog, even if the dog is on a landscape" which just shows that, like us, their eyes are drawn to the animal before the scenery. Classic response for an animal concerned with predator/prey responses. The mountains are nice, but you have to make sure of the animal first.
The main differences in visual perception would be dealing with stuff like ranging, depth perception, night-vision, day-vision, etc...All stuff to do with the actual hardware of the eye, not in the basic ability to distinguish between two similar objects.
This should be obvious from a dog's ability to tell one person from another. I've witnessed similar behavior in herbivores as well, so I'd not be surprised to find that they had the same sort of abilities, though it would be difficult to test.
Yea. This really isn't all that Turing-worthy due to the targeting...This is a group of people who really wants the person on the other end to be attractive, female, horny, and above all else, real. Even if it's not perfect, they'll be more willing to believe.
On top of that, there is the whole chat medium. Anyone who has ever done a lot of IM/IRC/whatever knows that it's not uncommon to type the wrong thing in the wrong window/channel, so the occasional out of nowhere sentence that would never pass in a one-on-one environment, will pass there because the signal to noise ratio is lower.
Still, I'd be interested to see the code, and see how well it deals with non sequiturs.
It took it as you saying, "You just want to be like the Nazis" which still seems reasonable, since you're still being pretty hostile.
Absolute ruler != narrowminded or uninformed. It just doesn't follow, though you're trying to suggest it does. I would also suggest that you're less likely to get a broadminded approach simply by asking a lot of narrowminded people to offer their opinions (e.g. Congress).
Yes, I know a lot of people were inconvenienced by having to sort their trash, just as I know a lot of people would be inconvenienced by riding the bus. I submit, however, that the good of future generations should have say, since they're the ones who will be cleaning up the garbage, and they're the ones that will have to deal with the problems stemming from our car-centric culture.
Your economics jibe shows you're still not following me. You persist on thinking hitler. Would an intelligent person who has a broad understanding of commerce disrupt the commerce of the whole nation for no reason, or listen to no opinion but their own? On the other hand, you could quickly divert resources to stem a disaster, without worrying about morons throwing pork for themselves on the bill. It is not an advantage to change your mind every day. It is, however, and advantage to be able to change without a massive effort wasting years with fruitless bickering among people who can't be bothered to truly understand the issues.
I think the biggest benefit of an oligarch/monarch is that they have the capacity for intelligent long range planning, of the sort that everyone goddamn HATES, but which really does good things for the world.
As an example, I think we should have a higher tax on gasoline to drive down consumption, and increase public transportation and help fund alternative fuel research. Is this possible in our democracy? Not really. Everybody votes against anyone who would even suggest it. During World War II, there was mandatory recycling in a number of cities, and that has benefits, but people hated it, and it got repealed as soon as the war ended.
An absolute ruler has the ability to switch policy overnight. Democracies are unwieldy and take years to come to a new policy, and often they contain so many exceptions that they're practically useless.
If you could insure the whole "philosopher king" thing, make sure you have a person as absolute ruler who is both capable and worthy of it, then that would be by far the best system. Since you can't, we go with democracy, not because it's in any way better, but because it limits the possible harm that can come out of government toward the people. However democracy can't save the people from their own shortsightedness, and it's just damn inefficient.
The problem is that their idea of merit is far better described as "prolific". If someone does a lot of decent edits, that makes them prolific. If someone creates a small number of extremely high quality original articles, they have merit. It's the second class that really adds value to WP, and they vastly outnumber the first class. But the second class isn't well represented in the admin group, and the first is.
Without the guys who only write one or two articles, WP would be tiny. But those people have no say. And worse, if they move against the groupthink, then they can be banned.
Well I'm actually in favor of oligarchy over democracy in that special case where you can get an oligarch who knows what the hell he's doing. If there was a way to always pick the best person to rule, I'd be a die-hard royalist, or fascist, or whatever.
Democratic rule basically depends on inefficiency to keep people from doing anything unless most people agree it is the correct thing to do.
They definitely need more transparency. I think what people are most angry about is the lack thereof. Their formalized processes suck. Their reporting of their bannings, etc, suck.
There is this thing called "Grammar" which tells me that the above sentence completely lacks meaning, as it has no subject. I'll assume you're talking about WP.
Let's explore this idea of "human execution." What type of execution are you saying would be better? Not many projects of this sort that aren't executed by humans, at least in our experience, and it turns out that a number of human executed projects (including WP) have turned out pretty well, so human influence is not obviously all-corrupting. Also, it turns out that corruption isn't exactly a slippery slope...Even if you become corrupt, you don't have to stay that way.
So basically you wrote a sentence fragment that paraphrases a fatuous truism. That's fine. The problem is when you then turn around and complain because someone "stole your idea" when they actually write something that's not so non-specific as to be meaningless. That's pretty lame.
Slashdot Mirror
The markup isn't anywhere near that high. We bought 20 Mac mini's from them for about 30 bucks a pop more than it would have cost us to buy 'em from Apple...That's not even 10%.
It's just that the interim weenie was out for profit at all costs. Profit at all costs makes you a lot of money, initially, but one of the costs is your customer base.
It's going to take them a long time to win back the people who they alienated.
If all I cared about was price, I'd buy from HP. And we have a big honkin corporate contract with CDW, so the prices are actually pretty nice.
We still buy some Dell stuff...Just bought a pair of Poweredge 2950's I'm pretty pleased with, though god help us if we ever need support.
By and large though, I'd rather buy a more expensive machine with better service and support than a cheaper machine with crappy service and support. We got a shipment of optiplexes not that long ago with a batch of bad capacitors on their motherboards, and for the amount of time we wasted on the phone with dell support getting them to send replacement parts for a fricking known problem...They should have looked at the service tag said, "Is it not booting?" and sent us a new motherboard with no further questions....Not made us jump through the goddamn hoops every single time. We got a guy who's Dell certified on staff, which usually means they'll take your word for it, but noooooo.
I'm just sick of 'em. It's beyond the pale. We bought 70 new pcs this year at my location, and I think 5 were Dell, and the rest were Macs and HPs.
Mediocre quality, slow delivery, piss poor service and support...What's not to like?
If you buy a lot of computers and deal with multiple retailers, the contrast can't help but leap out at you. HP, from being craptacular last decade, has done a much better job of "reinventing" themselves than Dell has. Middleman retailers like CDW are fricking lightning fast, and they're really easy to deal with, especially when buying volume.
Contrast this with Dell...I work for a national corporation that does millions of dollars a year in business with Dell...Or used to. We had representatives in corporate who were in direct contact with high-powered Dell salespeople. Did it expedite anything? No. We have top tier support, does it stop them from sending out techs who know less than non-experts on our local staff? I had to help some dumbass fix a printer once, and my printer repair technique is normally limited to bft.
I was a big Dell fan...once. I've yet to see any sign that they've done anything but continue their slide toward the low end of the market.
Well, the reality of it is, gasoline won't burn without a ready source of air, so the danger of a spark inside a tank of gas is minimal until the tank itself is ruptured. And if you can keep the bulk of the components outside the tank anyway, then it doesn't matter if they're more prone to failure.
Other than that, I tend to agree. Stick with the reliable, proven method, until the alternative offers enough benefits to make the risks worthwhile.
Wow. It really blows my mind that you think evolution works that way. Different thumbs? Extra ribs? A wholly different digestive track? Damn near every omnivore on the planet has the same digestive track! Do you think species swap that stuff every few generations? What would be the possible point?
If species were capable of having viable mutations with that level of morphological change, there would be no such thing as a species. The world would be a chaos of wildly different creatures with completely unrelated characteristics.
In reality it takes hundreds and hundreds of generations for things like fruit flies to learn to prefer other types of fricking fruit! I suggest you read some more modern books before you start citing Plato as a counterargument in evolutionary biology.
But that's just breeding for disease resistance...Or luck. Don't we want to select for things like, intelligence, athletic ability, physical attractiveness? If someone who is hugely intelligent but prone to disease is allowed to die without passing that on, then that's probably a bad decision. Breed them to some really disease resistant dumb people, and you'll increase everyone. Or you may cause some huge problem down the road. Who knows? That's why eugenics is a bad idea.
Anyway, if you wait till after 40 as a woman, you're going to have a much higher risk of birth defects, and that's not anything to be encouraged.
Wow. That's Victorian-style evolution, where we must be getting "better" as we evolve. That absolutely doesn't follow. Some evolutionary biologists view high intelligence as disruptive to society, and suggest that intelligence past a certain level may actually be selected against.
Even simple demographics show that people who have higher levels of education tend to have fewer children.
Just because you don't have superpowers doesn't mean we're identical as a species to humanity circa ~300BC...Not that we're all that different either. 2,300 years is relatively low on the evolutionary timescale. And 2,300 years conveniently ignores the fact that most branches of humanity went through a gigantic intellectual trough between then and now.
The drag of atmosphere will doom any LEO below ~300km...You'll come right back down. The highest flights (for air-breathing planes) to date were done by the X-15 rocket planes, and they made it to about 100km.
They didn't make it to the theoretical scramjet velocity of Mach 15, but they did break Mach 6. I think it's pretty doubtful that a scramjet could cross that additional 200km where the atmosphere is so thin as to be useless for the engines...Remember the X-15 was powered by a liquid-fuel rocket engine...The scramjet might not even be able to beat its performance.
If you really think evolution is limited to gross physical changes, you've got a really poor understanding. We may not be evolving hooves or fur, but resistance to diseases, resistance to certain types of chemicals that are now more abundant in our environments, ability to withstand a lifestyle that would have been utterly alien to our cave-dwelling ancestors...All these things represent tremendous environmental pressures.
Couple that with a vastly increased species population, representing a staggering amount of genetic diversity, I have no problem believing that we're still evolving, and indeed, that the rate may very well have increased.
I'd call into question whether or not it works...Far as I know we've had no solid scientific trials among human-type animals.
The root of the problem is that someone really has to know what traits are going to be best for the entire species, otherwise they're just extinguishing genetic diversity in pursuit of a goal which may turn out to be a stupid goal.
There is an economic equivalent to eugenics; communism. The idea there is that the government is smart enough to be able to decide what everyone should be producing and what everything should cost. It's an utter disaster...Whenever you add free market reforms to a communist country you can watch their economies go nuts.
The reason for this is simple. Having a few thousand people making decisions about what will benefit millions doesn't work as well as all those millions making those decisions about what will benefit themselves...No matter how smart or well informed that minority is, they can't be reliably informed about the minutiae of every member of the majorities' positive and negative qualities.
What is dating but a process by which you weed out people whom you believe to be inferior to share your genes with? It's a long term research project carried out by literally billions of people, and you really think that a few people with an idea of what the "perfect" person will be like can do it better? That's some serious arrogance.
In this case, the only way they're catching the light is effectively locking it up in a jar. If they open the jar to try and put more in, they lose the light they already captured.
Assuming they do find some way of adding more photons without losing what they've already got, the two options are:
1) The container fills up.
2) The container breaks.
Either way, nothing catastrophic would occur, unless they managed to contain a lot more energy. Just a flash of light. You can see from the photos in tfa, that the photons don't exhibit the same pattern that they did when the laser was firing (indicating some internal diffraction), so there wouldn't be a danger of having the equivalent of a more powerful laser shooting out in the same direction as the original beam. Then comes thermodynamics...It unlikely that they'd be able to contain energy in excess of the energy they're putting into containment (understatement), and entropy usually makes it so you have to spend a lot more energy, just to break even.
Dead Beat
It's definitely on the decline in nerd culture. I guess the rest of the world is picking through our discards.
Read 2 and 3 and pretend like the ending to 3 is the ending, and you won't miss much.
Sorry 'bout that. Every now and then a professional troll gets a rise out of me.
Of course they do. I'd go so far to say that most predators should show similar tendencies. We use our sight for a lot of things that the average mutt wouldn't use it's sight for, but at the most basic level, it has the exact same function for both of us. Predator/Prey identification, basic navigation, threat recognition and response.
The examples in the article are all "A dog can tell the difference between a landscape and a dog, even if the dog is on a landscape" which just shows that, like us, their eyes are drawn to the animal before the scenery. Classic response for an animal concerned with predator/prey responses. The mountains are nice, but you have to make sure of the animal first.
The main differences in visual perception would be dealing with stuff like ranging, depth perception, night-vision, day-vision, etc...All stuff to do with the actual hardware of the eye, not in the basic ability to distinguish between two similar objects.
This should be obvious from a dog's ability to tell one person from another. I've witnessed similar behavior in herbivores as well, so I'd not be surprised to find that they had the same sort of abilities, though it would be difficult to test.
Yea. This really isn't all that Turing-worthy due to the targeting...This is a group of people who really wants the person on the other end to be attractive, female, horny, and above all else, real. Even if it's not perfect, they'll be more willing to believe.
On top of that, there is the whole chat medium. Anyone who has ever done a lot of IM/IRC/whatever knows that it's not uncommon to type the wrong thing in the wrong window/channel, so the occasional out of nowhere sentence that would never pass in a one-on-one environment, will pass there because the signal to noise ratio is lower.
Still, I'd be interested to see the code, and see how well it deals with non sequiturs.
Yes, I know. All through the thread I have said over and over again, "If we could find the right person, Monarchy would be the best system."
It took it as you saying, "You just want to be like the Nazis" which still seems reasonable, since you're still being pretty hostile.
Absolute ruler != narrowminded or uninformed. It just doesn't follow, though you're trying to suggest it does. I would also suggest that you're less likely to get a broadminded approach simply by asking a lot of narrowminded people to offer their opinions (e.g. Congress).
Yes, I know a lot of people were inconvenienced by having to sort their trash, just as I know a lot of people would be inconvenienced by riding the bus. I submit, however, that the good of future generations should have say, since they're the ones who will be cleaning up the garbage, and they're the ones that will have to deal with the problems stemming from our car-centric culture.
Your economics jibe shows you're still not following me. You persist on thinking hitler. Would an intelligent person who has a broad understanding of commerce disrupt the commerce of the whole nation for no reason, or listen to no opinion but their own? On the other hand, you could quickly divert resources to stem a disaster, without worrying about morons throwing pork for themselves on the bill. It is not an advantage to change your mind every day. It is, however, and advantage to be able to change without a massive effort wasting years with fruitless bickering among people who can't be bothered to truly understand the issues.
Actually, no.
I think the biggest benefit of an oligarch/monarch is that they have the capacity for intelligent long range planning, of the sort that everyone goddamn HATES, but which really does good things for the world.
As an example, I think we should have a higher tax on gasoline to drive down consumption, and increase public transportation and help fund alternative fuel research. Is this possible in our democracy? Not really. Everybody votes against anyone who would even suggest it. During World War II, there was mandatory recycling in a number of cities, and that has benefits, but people hated it, and it got repealed as soon as the war ended.
An absolute ruler has the ability to switch policy overnight. Democracies are unwieldy and take years to come to a new policy, and often they contain so many exceptions that they're practically useless.
If you could insure the whole "philosopher king" thing, make sure you have a person as absolute ruler who is both capable and worthy of it, then that would be by far the best system. Since you can't, we go with democracy, not because it's in any way better, but because it limits the possible harm that can come out of government toward the people. However democracy can't save the people from their own shortsightedness, and it's just damn inefficient.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. But it rocks absolutely, too.
They certainly like to think so.
The problem is that their idea of merit is far better described as "prolific". If someone does a lot of decent edits, that makes them prolific. If someone creates a small number of extremely high quality original articles, they have merit. It's the second class that really adds value to WP, and they vastly outnumber the first class. But the second class isn't well represented in the admin group, and the first is.
Without the guys who only write one or two articles, WP would be tiny. But those people have no say. And worse, if they move against the groupthink, then they can be banned.
Well I'm actually in favor of oligarchy over democracy in that special case where you can get an oligarch who knows what the hell he's doing. If there was a way to always pick the best person to rule, I'd be a die-hard royalist, or fascist, or whatever.
Democratic rule basically depends on inefficiency to keep people from doing anything unless most people agree it is the correct thing to do.
They definitely need more transparency. I think what people are most angry about is the lack thereof. Their formalized processes suck. Their reporting of their bannings, etc, suck.
A good idea corrupted by human execution.
There is this thing called "Grammar" which tells me that the above sentence completely lacks meaning, as it has no subject. I'll assume you're talking about WP.
Let's explore this idea of "human execution." What type of execution are you saying would be better? Not many projects of this sort that aren't executed by humans, at least in our experience, and it turns out that a number of human executed projects (including WP) have turned out pretty well, so human influence is not obviously all-corrupting. Also, it turns out that corruption isn't exactly a slippery slope...Even if you become corrupt, you don't have to stay that way.
So basically you wrote a sentence fragment that paraphrases a fatuous truism. That's fine. The problem is when you then turn around and complain because someone "stole your idea" when they actually write something that's not so non-specific as to be meaningless. That's pretty lame.