Aside from surveys given to captive audiences (e.g., student surveys or evaluations of faculty done in classrooms), surveys are generally voluntary.
A good "scientific" survey has a carefully designed target audience & would likely use a stratified sampling design as well to ensure that relevant subgroups were appropriately represented. Of course, respondents themselves become the actual survey population & properly presented survey results emphasize that the results represent "X percent of survey respondents." In a scientific survey, "return rate" or "response rate" is an important measure of the effectiveness of the survey & should be used to examine how well the intended sample panned out.
I think what you might mean is an open survey that anyone may take. About all that can be done in an open survey is to set up some system whereby folks don't "stuff the ballot box" & if the survey is anonymous, the technologies used for that (IP tracking, cookies, etc.) can be circumvented by anyone who is determined to stuff said ballot box. Read the disclaimers on any Slashdot poll...
Looks like a detachable pseudo-tablet unit about double the size of a Clie' with a docking station & keyboard. While there is a "fin shaped" stylus, it looks like the tablet unit is more designed for viewing than for interactivity. In other words, moving from "read only" to "read-write" on this thing probably is a lot easier if you have a desktop handy to put all the pieces on.
Not quite the useability of a laptop or a desktop.
The price is a little off-putting for a 900 MHz Celeron (U50), especially if one is basically after entertainment on the bullet train...
These days you could just use a second disk. It would be faster, too.
OK. So we have two approaches that both will ultimately take enough time that most folks will schedule them to occur overnight. I can't see the functional advantage to an approach that is running when you leave & finished when you return vs an approach that is running when you leave & finished when you return.
What good is 7 tuners if I have digital cable or sattelite?
Excellent point. Judging from the photo, I don't think the top of the set is big enough for 7 set-top boxes, either!
But try something even more basic. Go ask your friendly salesguy at Circuit City why you should buy a deluxe big screen 16x9 HDTV-capable TV when your cable doesn't support 16x9 HDTV or provides only a few 16x9 channels. Ask to see an analog broadcast blown up, distorted & blurred to 16x9 big screen. Then ask yourself if it really looks better than that 1982 RCA 25" console you got from grandma.
Another question: My cable company provides over 100 channels. At any given time, I'm likely not to be able to find anything to watch, much less 7 channels I need to record simultaneously. What's the point here?
They didn't get to where they are now through stupidity.
Now, they got to where they are now largely because IBM didn't require an "exclusive" on MS-DOS when it put it on the first PC-XTs. Whether this was because Microsoft was "smart" or just "lucky" is open to debate.
Luck, augmented by a hefty disregard for antitrust legislation, is what put Microsoft where it is today. It certainly wasn't by providing the features that end users wanted or by developing a bulletproof operating system.
Let's take one case in point: Microsoft Word. Anybody who really remembers using WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS remembers a word processor that was feature driven. They also remember that the contemporaneous versions of Word were flimsy & had a cheesy UI. But Microsoft managed to get Word bundled with lots of new PCs & after a while, businesses were thinking "Why pay for WordPerfect 6.1 when I have Word already installed for free?"
But if we use the increasingly popular definition of "smart" (i.e., "rich"), Microsoft is indeed "smart." So it doesn't surprise me that in order to collect a rebate, the person had better have retained UPCs from products purchased a decade ago & have a spare afternoon to fill out the application. This isn't an accident; it is a "smart" settlement.
Do I use Microsoft products? Of course. Some of them are swell. And some of them are just halfway solutions that I use because that's what my employer says I have to use.
All this sitting in a sunless little dungeon room staring at a CRT all day is for the birds.
Well, now you get to stand all day in a pretty grimy environment with only a nod to heating & cooling, staring at a CRT on the diagnostics bench, wiping greasy hands on your coveralls;-)
OTOH, you will get to hang a nice "auto parts store calendar" next to your tool box & the political correctness police aren't likely to stop you.
"You hand in your ticket,
And go watch the geek,
Who immediately comes up to you,
When he hears you speak,
And says, 'How does it feel to be such a freak?'
Maybe someone should start making key caps with little Tux logos on them, for when you install linux and don't want that damned Windows logo to be on your nice machine.
Now there's a great idea! I don't think anyone would get rich selling $0.50 Tux logo key caps, but who knows? I'll buy at least 5:-)
... we are overjoyed. The governor's been telling us that we had to be "globally competitive" & all the recent efforts to have us classified as a 3rd world country are finally paying off.
P.S. No hyphen in Hickory Flat.
Secessionistically,
Joe Bob Bubba Earl
Senior VP for Information Technology
... if it's legal to use a keyboard with a "Windows logo" button on a machine running Linux.
Do I have to remove the "Designed for Windows XP" badge from my PC case before installing Linux?
Semi-seriously: What about an OEM that provides Linux as an alternative OS on their products? Do they have to use a keyboard that doesn't feature the Windows logo button? Do they have to remove the case badges?
Re:Why bother with chip mods?
on
Hack Your Ride
·
· Score: 1
More HP per dollar.
Being an old time SS/MX fan, I think front drive drag cars are a lot of fun. But if rear drive is so much more efficent, one wonders why the front drive top fuel dragster has not yet appeared. (Actually, rear drive is also favored because when a 3,000 hp engine blows, the driver usually prefers for that event to happen behind the driver's seat;-)
Re:Why bother with chip mods?
on
Hack Your Ride
·
· Score: 1
Ah, but chip mod that GTO & put a turbo on it & what do you have?
Truth is, Hemi Cudas in general either get a full show treatment (not driven much) or they end up as SS/AA super stockers. Although the rules limit the modifications for SS/AA hemi cars, we're still talking about steel bodied cars doing 1/4 mi passes well below the 9.90 index.
Of course, if we put equal mods on the hemi (supercharger, fuel injection, nitromethane fuel), we are talking about the engine in a Top Funny Car. And a Civic is going to be no match for a car that can make a 1/4 pass at 330 mph in under 4 seconds...:-D
... that will make my Accord coupe rear wheel drive?
Burning rubber off the front tires is soooooo wimpy... And putting a line lock on the rear brakes just doesn't work the same for a burn out...
Re:Not as bad as it really seems
on
Hack Your Ride
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
chipping a car is really not that crazy or extreme.
Nope. But it's like overclocking without attending to CPU cooling.
I'm going to show my age, but "back in the day," one didn't do serious cam or intake mods to a 2-bolt main small block Chevy. One sought out the tougher 4-bolt main blocks.
Same applies to a Civic or Eclipse. You can get them to pump out horsepower far beyond what their little crankshafts & main bearings were intended to support. Throw a nitrous bottle in the back & you're talking serious lack of reliability.
Heck, for optimum performance, you still have to get greasy, modify the cooling system, change cams, install close ratio gearing, etc. It ain't all "pull the chip" & bolt-on a K&N intake.
Serious hot-rod mods are not compatible with reliability or longevity, especially if the mods aren't supported by yet other mods. High school parking lots are littered with proof of this.
Why bother with chip mods?
on
Hack Your Ride
·
· Score: 1
When Detroit has finally decided to revive serious muscle cars?
A chip-modded turbo Civic on nitrous might hold up against 350 hp @ 5200 rpm for one pass at the dragstrip. (Sorry for the Flash animation, but it's pretty inspiring.)
Of course, if money is unlimited, I saw one of these auctioned for around $150K on the "Speed" channel a couple weeks ago...
The worst thing about hot-rodding front wheel drive cars is that no matter how hard you try, they simply won't pop a wheelstand. But those old 'Cudas would, right off the dealer's lot.
Slashdot Mirror
... outlaw the use of the "star codes" that block caller ID (*67).
A good "scientific" survey has a carefully designed target audience & would likely use a stratified sampling design as well to ensure that relevant subgroups were appropriately represented. Of course, respondents themselves become the actual survey population & properly presented survey results emphasize that the results represent "X percent of survey respondents." In a scientific survey, "return rate" or "response rate" is an important measure of the effectiveness of the survey & should be used to examine how well the intended sample panned out.
I think what you might mean is an open survey that anyone may take. About all that can be done in an open survey is to set up some system whereby folks don't "stuff the ballot box" & if the survey is anonymous, the technologies used for that (IP tracking, cookies, etc.) can be circumvented by anyone who is determined to stuff said ballot box. Read the disclaimers on any Slashdot poll...
Excellent point.
there's more than one way to do it
Didn't Larry Wall say that? :-D
Looks like a detachable pseudo-tablet unit about double the size of a Clie' with a docking station & keyboard. While there is a "fin shaped" stylus, it looks like the tablet unit is more designed for viewing than for interactivity. In other words, moving from "read only" to "read-write" on this thing probably is a lot easier if you have a desktop handy to put all the pieces on.
Not quite the useability of a laptop or a desktop.
The price is a little off-putting for a 900 MHz Celeron (U50), especially if one is basically after entertainment on the bullet train...
OK. So we have two approaches that both will ultimately take enough time that most folks will schedule them to occur overnight. I can't see the functional advantage to an approach that is running when you leave & finished when you return vs an approach that is running when you leave & finished when you return.
What good is 7 tuners if I have digital cable or sattelite? Excellent point. Judging from the photo, I don't think the top of the set is big enough for 7 set-top boxes, either! But try something even more basic. Go ask your friendly salesguy at Circuit City why you should buy a deluxe big screen 16x9 HDTV-capable TV when your cable doesn't support 16x9 HDTV or provides only a few 16x9 channels. Ask to see an analog broadcast blown up, distorted & blurred to 16x9 big screen. Then ask yourself if it really looks better than that 1982 RCA 25" console you got from grandma. Another question: My cable company provides over 100 channels. At any given time, I'm likely not to be able to find anything to watch, much less 7 channels I need to record simultaneously. What's the point here?
Go check an organic chemistry textbook. They generally start with part twenty-six...
And what is wi-fi? Radio, maybe?
The real question is whether you want to spend less than $10 on an AM/FM radio or you want to spend considerably more to do the same thing.
Well, to each his (or her) own, I guess...
Now, they got to where they are now largely because IBM didn't require an "exclusive" on MS-DOS when it put it on the first PC-XTs. Whether this was because Microsoft was "smart" or just "lucky" is open to debate.
Luck, augmented by a hefty disregard for antitrust legislation, is what put Microsoft where it is today. It certainly wasn't by providing the features that end users wanted or by developing a bulletproof operating system.
Let's take one case in point: Microsoft Word. Anybody who really remembers using WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS remembers a word processor that was feature driven. They also remember that the contemporaneous versions of Word were flimsy & had a cheesy UI. But Microsoft managed to get Word bundled with lots of new PCs & after a while, businesses were thinking "Why pay for WordPerfect 6.1 when I have Word already installed for free?"
But if we use the increasingly popular definition of "smart" (i.e., "rich"), Microsoft is indeed "smart." So it doesn't surprise me that in order to collect a rebate, the person had better have retained UPCs from products purchased a decade ago & have a spare afternoon to fill out the application. This isn't an accident; it is a "smart" settlement.
Do I use Microsoft products? Of course. Some of them are swell. And some of them are just halfway solutions that I use because that's what my employer says I have to use.
Unfortunately, my old laptop attempted this & the result was not pretty.
DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME, KIDS!
Well, now you get to stand all day in a pretty grimy environment with only a nod to heating & cooling, staring at a CRT on the diagnostics bench, wiping greasy hands on your coveralls ;-)
OTOH, you will get to hang a nice "auto parts store calendar" next to your tool box & the political correctness police aren't likely to stop you.
Well, as we see in the very next post (or the one right above this one), it stands for "Rupert."
"You hand in your ticket,
And go watch the geek,
Who immediately comes up to you,
When he hears you speak,
And says, 'How does it feel to be such a freak?'
Shhhhh! More likely dozens of suspicious spouses are about to start looking VERY carefully at incoming spam. Thanks a load for blowing our cover! ;-)
Now there's a great idea! I don't think anyone would get rich selling $0.50 Tux logo key caps, but who knows? I'll buy at least 5 :-)
Not so fast. Things are going so great here, that the rednecks are outsourcing their meth labs to Mobile County ;-)
P.S. No hyphen in Hickory Flat.
Secessionistically, Joe Bob Bubba Earl Senior VP for Information Technology
Why not? It's what the Japanese did to the U.S. ;-)
Do I have to remove the "Designed for Windows XP" badge from my PC case before installing Linux?
Semi-seriously: What about an OEM that provides Linux as an alternative OS on their products? Do they have to use a keyboard that doesn't feature the Windows logo button? Do they have to remove the case badges?
Being an old time SS/MX fan, I think front drive drag cars are a lot of fun. But if rear drive is so much more efficent, one wonders why the front drive top fuel dragster has not yet appeared. (Actually, rear drive is also favored because when a 3,000 hp engine blows, the driver usually prefers for that event to happen behind the driver's seat ;-)
Truth is, Hemi Cudas in general either get a full show treatment (not driven much) or they end up as SS/AA super stockers. Although the rules limit the modifications for SS/AA hemi cars, we're still talking about steel bodied cars doing 1/4 mi passes well below the 9.90 index.
Of course, if we put equal mods on the hemi (supercharger, fuel injection, nitromethane fuel), we are talking about the engine in a Top Funny Car. And a Civic is going to be no match for a car that can make a 1/4 pass at 330 mph in under 4 seconds... :-D
Burning rubber off the front tires is soooooo wimpy... And putting a line lock on the rear brakes just doesn't work the same for a burn out...
Nope. But it's like overclocking without attending to CPU cooling.
I'm going to show my age, but "back in the day," one didn't do serious cam or intake mods to a 2-bolt main small block Chevy. One sought out the tougher 4-bolt main blocks.
Same applies to a Civic or Eclipse. You can get them to pump out horsepower far beyond what their little crankshafts & main bearings were intended to support. Throw a nitrous bottle in the back & you're talking serious lack of reliability.
Heck, for optimum performance, you still have to get greasy, modify the cooling system, change cams, install close ratio gearing, etc. It ain't all "pull the chip" & bolt-on a K&N intake.
Serious hot-rod mods are not compatible with reliability or longevity, especially if the mods aren't supported by yet other mods. High school parking lots are littered with proof of this.
A chip-modded turbo Civic on nitrous might hold up against 350 hp @ 5200 rpm for one pass at the dragstrip. (Sorry for the Flash animation, but it's pretty inspiring.)
Of course, if money is unlimited, I saw one of these auctioned for around $150K on the "Speed" channel a couple weeks ago...
The worst thing about hot-rodding front wheel drive cars is that no matter how hard you try, they simply won't pop a wheelstand. But those old 'Cudas would, right off the dealer's lot.
And yes, they're much more ferocious than wood chippers...