LOL, out in farm country a two-hour drive is "close"!:)
No I just meant that they picked a regional distribution center that seems to be roughly in the middle of where they are likely to ship. They are probably far more concerned about where the trucks have to go than where the people have to come from. I suspect their shipping fees far outstrip their wages, considering that the article said that a worker is expected to pack 150 X-Boxes an hour! Only 1 of those X-Boxes probably costs more to ship than the worker packing them made in an hour.
Also, if they located the center in a city, you'd have to fight traffic both out and in. UPS probably loves them - no traffic at all... much easier logistics that way.
But again, I'm just guessing. Could have been a tax break or a political favor or any number of other things.
Nonsense. This isn't China, where people are forbidden from moving to more prosperous areas. They plopped down in a practically uninhabited hinterland. If cheap labor was their goal, then a city would have been much more appealing to them. You can still find minimum wage workers - and plenty of them. Minimum wage in the US ranges from a low of $5 to as high as $8, depending on state - so they aren't exactly bottom-dragging.
My guess is, given the economic conditions, THEY CAN'T FIND BETTER JOBS.
And this is where we have different world views. I see this statement and think, "Wow, Amazon is providing the best jobs in the whole area." You look at it and say, "How dare Amazon exploit these desperate people?" Realistically, if you come down on Amazon too hard, they will just move elsewhere or automate the jobs away.
10 hour days with 2 bathroom breaks?
You read that wrong. It is a 15-minute break, a 20-minute break, and no stated limit on bathroom breaks - but you do have to notify your supervisor so they know what happened to you. The article also states that there were longer breaks in the past, but the workers asked for shorter breaks to make the shift shorter.
Have you even ever made 11 an hour in your life?
Yes... I made $3.35/hour ($5.75 in today's dollars) in high-school and considered myself rich when I was raised to $5.50/hour ($8.59 in today's dollars). That was living at home, however - I wouldn't want to live on it. While in college I made $9.50 in two jobs, and then later got a pretty cush co-op job that paid $13. I made enough in that one to live on for the whole year even though I only worked 6 months. Of course, I didn't have to worry about health care, I was living with 2 other guys, and I didn't have any kids.
Try to remember that $10 is the base rate. They get $15/hour after 8 hours, and probably $20/hour on Sunday. It sounds like they are getting 60 hour weeks, with 5 of those on a Sunday - which by my calculation is about $3000 for the month of seasonal work... you could do far worse.
Fuck that shit.
Yeah, that's why I went to college and got a useful degree. Living in the middle of farm country with no education isn't exactly a place to get picky about wages.
I did. I often read the Huff Post... it's good to keep up to date on perspectives of other people, even when it's not always in agreement with your own. People are hardly ever evil or crazy - they just don't see the world in the same way.
But when you're talking about 10 hour days, with ludicrous packing quotas, limited breaks, low pay, and grueling intensive labor, we're talking about abuse.
Oh, please. I'm afraid I'll disappoint you now and just fall back on a Libertarian yarn... if it is such a bad job, then why were people driving to it 4 hours a day? Why are people camping out in their RVs for a month to take this horrible, temporary job? They aren't abusing some captive source of local poor workers - people are actually coming in from pretty far away. These people are making several times an hour what the people who assembled your computer make in a whole day. Are there better jobs? Sure. But you can do a lot worse, and I won't agree that this one crosses some line of acceptable work conditions - especially given the temporary nature of the work.
but useless when even the most basic decision-making is required.
So don't let them make any decisions. Stick a bar code on everything as it comes in and weigh it. Let the robots do the multi-mile treks around the factory, and all they have to be smart enough to do is scan a bar code and double-check the weight.
Robots are used at Newegg, for instance. It's just that sizing the costly capital equipment for the peaks probably would increase the payback period by quite a bit! Better to use seasonal workers.
I have to wonder what Amazon was thinking, building such a labor-intensive operation four hours from the nearest major labor pool.
It looks like they took over a former Golden Books warehouse. I have no insight, but a glance at the map shows that it is smack in the middle of a bunch of area population centers - kind of the center of mass of Wichita, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and Springfield.
What else do you want from a Huff Post article? That's where you go for this sort of thing. Complaining about the Huff Post being whiny is like pointing out factual errors in a Michael Moore movie or pointing out that rushlimbaugh.com seems to have a bias.
Robots might make sense to handle their routine volume, but the holiday rush is probably cheaper to handle with humans which don't require the large capital expense.
Hybrid makers would like to use the lightest, most energy-dense batteries they can to increase range, and if they're not using lithium-ions I'm sure there's a pretty good reason.
I'm a mechanical engineer, so batteries are a little out of my range - but cars are not so I have some familiarity here. There are several reasons that Lithium-based batteries are not in cars. First is current draw - lithium batteries do not perform well with high current loads. Another is cost - lithium batteries are really expensive.
Stability is probably one of them. In any event, if you crush a large battery (say, in an accident) what do you think is going to happen, regardless of the chemical system?
Stability is probably a concern - but consider that you are sitting on a huge tank with far more energy density in a gasoline car. The chemical system used in the battery is very important - lithium batteries are not flammable because of their energy density - it's because they are made of lithium!
For the audio, mp3's , like jpg's are lossy formats. They are named this because they lose quality/data with every copy. By their very nature of compression they discard most/over 80% of the data upon creating a lossy file.
Yes, they discard data upon creation - but not during subsequent copies. Copying an mp3 is no different than making a dmg of a DVD... the DVD is compressed with a lossy format - just like an MP3. 80% or so of the original film data is lost in the creation of the DVD, but the subsequent copies are loss-free pure digital copies... just like mp3. I can copy an mp3 a billion times, and there will be no further data loss.
Do you really have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of DVDs? Wow... impressive.
Using something like Xvid or H264 won't save you 10x the number of drives... depending on the content, you might get 3x compression versus the MPEG2 format found in DVDs. So in your case, you'd still need 30 1 TB drives... but if you have the money for 10,000+ DVDs, surely you can spare $10,000 for 100 drives to back them all up? You'd be paying $3,000 plus untold hours of lossy re-compression anyway.
That's true, but a 2-stroke marine engine isn't very picky about fuel. They run on kerosene right out of the box. Kerosene has been refined on a small scale for 1200 years, so setting up something on a oil tanker seems reasonable.
Or at least not in the western world... It is humans that devine culture.
I wasn't referring to pop culture so much... we select mates in ways that might surprise you. If you are a reader, you might enjoy "The Third Chimpanzee" by Jared Diamond... it has a whole section on mate selection.
There is. Sure there is. It's just that we make our own...
But some of us are better at "the game" than others, and this does change our genome.
That is the best solution to read from, but he says that he's going to primarily be using this from Linux - so NTFS might still be a bit risky.
I would also recommend that you get an open source program and compress the dvd's to approx. 700MB for up to 90 minutes and 1.4GB over 90 mins. H264/ac3 or Xvid are good codecs to use.
A couple of points here. First, why would he specify a file size unless he was going to put the movies on CDs? He'd be far better off simply using a constant-quality encoder, which would have the additional benefit of not requiring a second or third pass for optimal quality. Second, why recompress in this day and age? A 1TB drive can hold over 100 double-layer DVD movies... and if he has more DVDs than that, then the cost of a bigger/additional drive is minor compared to the cost of the collection...
mp3 files are like.jpg image files such that they lose a little quality/data each time they are copied
This is simply not true. Neither mp3s nor jpegs lose quality or data when copied. They only lose quality when they are re-encoded - just as you are proposing he do with his DVDs. DVDs are heavily compressed using MPEG2. Converting to MPEG4 or H264 is exactly the same as taking an MP3 and converting it to AAC or OGG - there will be quality loss no matter how well the encode is done.
I think that you might need to rethink this. Every time someone selects a mate and reproduces, they are reacting to their environment and, well, evolving! It's hard for me to fathom how you could successfully argue that there is no selection pressure on humans. Sure, the "death before reproduction" aspect may be all but gone in the developed world, but there's still quite a bit of mating going on - and plenty of selection. And in the developing world, well, you still have plenty of good old fashioned death going on.
"The software on this computer is subject to an EULA that limits your rights. Ask a sales associate for a copy of the EULA prior to purchase."
I'd go a step further - I should not be able to complete the purchase without explicitly agreeing to the contract. If they sell me something without me first agreeing to additional terms, then I should just be constrained by the statutory license.
The death of quality speciality devices is a bit premature at this point.
Yeah, my phone makes a terrible watch. It's in my pocket and you need to hit a button or open it to see the time. The battery lasts a few days at best, rather than years. It may be with me all of the time, but I still wear a watch.
This is also true of good cameras and mp3/media players.
Again you are right. I just bought a Canon S90, which is not even comparable to the cameras on phones. I can't really speak for MP3 players, but it's hard for me to imagine that a user of a iPod shuffle would be happy using a phone.
They're a symbol of status and of self-expression.
So are phones.
I was in New York City two weekends ago, and a guy that I was hanging out with was getting ready to go have a big business meeting. He was very concerned about getting a "Droid" in time for the meeting, because that is the phone with all the buzz right now... he could care less about what the phone actually does. We actually suggested that he buy a Rolex instead, and he kind of scoffed at us like we were dinosaurs or something.
So while I'm sure you are right, and that rich guys will always have wrist watches - don't think that they aren't also concerned about what phone they are carrying. Designers have caught on, too, which is why you can buy abominations like this.
Remember to halve any sales figures that Microsoft releases due to how they constantly misrepresent and mis-measure their actual sales.
I don't think they need to here. Vista was a relative flop, and XP was released in 2001... the PC market has increased enormously in size since then. The success of Windows 7 isn't really in doubt anyway - people have clung to XP, so there is pent up demand for anything even remotely as usable.
Will git handle files on the Mac? I mean things like "resource forks" and the like. When I last looked into it, they were discarded - which limited what you could use it for. I ended up using Unison, even though it lacks version control. I still use Unison, though now far less as I keep my active work in Dropbox.
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LOL, out in farm country a two-hour drive is "close"! :)
No I just meant that they picked a regional distribution center that seems to be roughly in the middle of where they are likely to ship. They are probably far more concerned about where the trucks have to go than where the people have to come from. I suspect their shipping fees far outstrip their wages, considering that the article said that a worker is expected to pack 150 X-Boxes an hour! Only 1 of those X-Boxes probably costs more to ship than the worker packing them made in an hour.
Also, if they located the center in a city, you'd have to fight traffic both out and in. UPS probably loves them - no traffic at all... much easier logistics that way.
But again, I'm just guessing. Could have been a tax break or a political favor or any number of other things.
Listen you heartless Paulite
Heartless? No. I fancy myself pragmatic, though.
they are abusing captive sources of labour
Nonsense. This isn't China, where people are forbidden from moving to more prosperous areas. They plopped down in a practically uninhabited hinterland. If cheap labor was their goal, then a city would have been much more appealing to them. You can still find minimum wage workers - and plenty of them. Minimum wage in the US ranges from a low of $5 to as high as $8, depending on state - so they aren't exactly bottom-dragging.
My guess is, given the economic conditions, THEY CAN'T FIND BETTER JOBS.
And this is where we have different world views. I see this statement and think, "Wow, Amazon is providing the best jobs in the whole area." You look at it and say, "How dare Amazon exploit these desperate people?" Realistically, if you come down on Amazon too hard, they will just move elsewhere or automate the jobs away.
10 hour days with 2 bathroom breaks?
You read that wrong. It is a 15-minute break, a 20-minute break, and no stated limit on bathroom breaks - but you do have to notify your supervisor so they know what happened to you. The article also states that there were longer breaks in the past, but the workers asked for shorter breaks to make the shift shorter.
Have you even ever made 11 an hour in your life?
Yes... I made $3.35/hour ($5.75 in today's dollars) in high-school and considered myself rich when I was raised to $5.50/hour ($8.59 in today's dollars). That was living at home, however - I wouldn't want to live on it. While in college I made $9.50 in two jobs, and then later got a pretty cush co-op job that paid $13. I made enough in that one to live on for the whole year even though I only worked 6 months. Of course, I didn't have to worry about health care, I was living with 2 other guys, and I didn't have any kids.
Try to remember that $10 is the base rate. They get $15/hour after 8 hours, and probably $20/hour on Sunday. It sounds like they are getting 60 hour weeks, with 5 of those on a Sunday - which by my calculation is about $3000 for the month of seasonal work... you could do far worse.
Fuck that shit.
Yeah, that's why I went to college and got a useful degree. Living in the middle of farm country with no education isn't exactly a place to get picky about wages.
How about reading it?
I did. I often read the Huff Post... it's good to keep up to date on perspectives of other people, even when it's not always in agreement with your own. People are hardly ever evil or crazy - they just don't see the world in the same way.
But when you're talking about 10 hour days, with ludicrous packing quotas, limited breaks, low pay, and grueling intensive labor, we're talking about abuse.
Oh, please. I'm afraid I'll disappoint you now and just fall back on a Libertarian yarn... if it is such a bad job, then why were people driving to it 4 hours a day? Why are people camping out in their RVs for a month to take this horrible, temporary job? They aren't abusing some captive source of local poor workers - people are actually coming in from pretty far away. These people are making several times an hour what the people who assembled your computer make in a whole day. Are there better jobs? Sure. But you can do a lot worse, and I won't agree that this one crosses some line of acceptable work conditions - especially given the temporary nature of the work.
but useless when even the most basic decision-making is required.
So don't let them make any decisions. Stick a bar code on everything as it comes in and weigh it. Let the robots do the multi-mile treks around the factory, and all they have to be smart enough to do is scan a bar code and double-check the weight.
Robots are used at Newegg, for instance. It's just that sizing the costly capital equipment for the peaks probably would increase the payback period by quite a bit! Better to use seasonal workers.
I have to wonder what Amazon was thinking, building such a labor-intensive operation four hours from the nearest major labor pool.
It looks like they took over a former Golden Books warehouse. I have no insight, but a glance at the map shows that it is smack in the middle of a bunch of area population centers - kind of the center of mass of Wichita, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and Springfield.
What else do you want from a Huff Post article? That's where you go for this sort of thing. Complaining about the Huff Post being whiny is like pointing out factual errors in a Michael Moore movie or pointing out that rushlimbaugh.com seems to have a bias.
Robots might make sense to handle their routine volume, but the holiday rush is probably cheaper to handle with humans which don't require the large capital expense.
A Dutchman visiting Detroit on vacation is even more hardcore than an American living there.
Hybrid makers would like to use the lightest, most energy-dense batteries they can to increase range, and if they're not using lithium-ions I'm sure there's a pretty good reason.
I'm a mechanical engineer, so batteries are a little out of my range - but cars are not so I have some familiarity here. There are several reasons that Lithium-based batteries are not in cars. First is current draw - lithium batteries do not perform well with high current loads. Another is cost - lithium batteries are really expensive.
Stability is probably one of them. In any event, if you crush a large battery (say, in an accident) what do you think is going to happen, regardless of the chemical system?
Stability is probably a concern - but consider that you are sitting on a huge tank with far more energy density in a gasoline car. The chemical system used in the battery is very important - lithium batteries are not flammable because of their energy density - it's because they are made of lithium!
For the audio, mp3's , like jpg's are lossy formats. They are named this because they lose quality/data with every copy. By their very nature of compression they discard most/over 80% of the data upon creating a lossy file.
Yes, they discard data upon creation - but not during subsequent copies. Copying an mp3 is no different than making a dmg of a DVD... the DVD is compressed with a lossy format - just like an MP3. 80% or so of the original film data is lost in the creation of the DVD, but the subsequent copies are loss-free pure digital copies... just like mp3. I can copy an mp3 a billion times, and there will be no further data loss.
Do you really have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of DVDs? Wow... impressive.
Using something like Xvid or H264 won't save you 10x the number of drives... depending on the content, you might get 3x compression versus the MPEG2 format found in DVDs. So in your case, you'd still need 30 1 TB drives... but if you have the money for 10,000+ DVDs, surely you can spare $10,000 for 100 drives to back them all up? You'd be paying $3,000 plus untold hours of lossy re-compression anyway.
That's true, but a 2-stroke marine engine isn't very picky about fuel. They run on kerosene right out of the box. Kerosene has been refined on a small scale for 1200 years, so setting up something on a oil tanker seems reasonable.
Or at least not in the western world... It is humans that devine culture.
I wasn't referring to pop culture so much... we select mates in ways that might surprise you. If you are a reader, you might enjoy "The Third Chimpanzee" by Jared Diamond... it has a whole section on mate selection.
There is. Sure there is. It's just that we make our own...
But some of us are better at "the game" than others, and this does change our genome.
I would recommend NTFS.
That is the best solution to read from, but he says that he's going to primarily be using this from Linux - so NTFS might still be a bit risky.
I would also recommend that you get an open source program and compress the dvd's to approx. 700MB for up to 90 minutes and 1.4GB over 90 mins. H264/ac3 or Xvid are good codecs to use.
A couple of points here. First, why would he specify a file size unless he was going to put the movies on CDs? He'd be far better off simply using a constant-quality encoder, which would have the additional benefit of not requiring a second or third pass for optimal quality. Second, why recompress in this day and age? A 1TB drive can hold over 100 double-layer DVD movies... and if he has more DVDs than that, then the cost of a bigger/additional drive is minor compared to the cost of the collection...
mp3 files are like .jpg image files such that they lose a little quality/data each time they are copied
This is simply not true. Neither mp3s nor jpegs lose quality or data when copied. They only lose quality when they are re-encoded - just as you are proposing he do with his DVDs. DVDs are heavily compressed using MPEG2. Converting to MPEG4 or H264 is exactly the same as taking an MP3 and converting it to AAC or OGG - there will be quality loss no matter how well the encode is done.
You are, of course, correct. Irregardless is a word, and it is commonly used.
So is ain't.
But you sure won't impress people with your edumacation using words like irregardless or ain't, no matter how much they are used at NASCAR events.
Irregardlessly, it is funny.
To top it: evolution is no longer pressent.
I think that you might need to rethink this. Every time someone selects a mate and reproduces, they are reacting to their environment and, well, evolving! It's hard for me to fathom how you could successfully argue that there is no selection pressure on humans. Sure, the "death before reproduction" aspect may be all but gone in the developed world, but there's still quite a bit of mating going on - and plenty of selection. And in the developing world, well, you still have plenty of good old fashioned death going on.
"The software on this computer is subject to an EULA that limits your rights. Ask a sales associate for a copy of the EULA prior to purchase."
I'd go a step further - I should not be able to complete the purchase without explicitly agreeing to the contract. If they sell me something without me first agreeing to additional terms, then I should just be constrained by the statutory license.
It's a preference in Firefox :)
You should tell your Aspergers side to feel privileged as you actually get to witness language change real-time.
Canon (and others) do an amazing job, but all of those ultra compacts are still awful in low-light. You have to forever use the flash.
The death of quality speciality devices is a bit premature at this point.
Yeah, my phone makes a terrible watch. It's in my pocket and you need to hit a button or open it to see the time. The battery lasts a few days at best, rather than years. It may be with me all of the time, but I still wear a watch.
This is also true of good cameras and mp3/media players.
Again you are right. I just bought a Canon S90, which is not even comparable to the cameras on phones. I can't really speak for MP3 players, but it's hard for me to imagine that a user of a iPod shuffle would be happy using a phone.
They're a symbol of status and of self-expression.
So are phones.
I was in New York City two weekends ago, and a guy that I was hanging out with was getting ready to go have a big business meeting. He was very concerned about getting a "Droid" in time for the meeting, because that is the phone with all the buzz right now... he could care less about what the phone actually does. We actually suggested that he buy a Rolex instead, and he kind of scoffed at us like we were dinosaurs or something.
So while I'm sure you are right, and that rich guys will always have wrist watches - don't think that they aren't also concerned about what phone they are carrying. Designers have caught on, too, which is why you can buy abominations like this.
Remember to halve any sales figures that Microsoft releases due to how they constantly misrepresent and mis-measure their actual sales.
I don't think they need to here. Vista was a relative flop, and XP was released in 2001... the PC market has increased enormously in size since then. The success of Windows 7 isn't really in doubt anyway - people have clung to XP, so there is pent up demand for anything even remotely as usable.
It also counts your quota against the size of your data once it has been "deduplicated" rather than before (Dropbox does it before).
I think this has a downside, though. SpiderOak includes your version history against your quota and Dropbox does not IIRC.
Will git handle files on the Mac? I mean things like "resource forks" and the like. When I last looked into it, they were discarded - which limited what you could use it for. I ended up using Unison, even though it lacks version control. I still use Unison, though now far less as I keep my active work in Dropbox.
It could keep you stuck to the train unless you acknowledge the disengage warning.
Where's my patent?