Wow, you are like the Ty Cobb or Ted Williams of dot-comming!
Oh well, there go my mod points...Nice to see a baseball metaphor over here, though. I would think a fellow by the name of DiMaggio might have been more appropriate. (56-game hitting streak in '51). Heheh. Joltin' Joe was amazing. Cobb had a 40 game streak in 1911 and another 35 game streak in 6 years later.
DiMaggio was stopped at 56 games, and one game later tossed off another 16 game streak. What a guy. Joe's brother, Dom, (with the Red Sox) had a 34-game streak that ended with a flyout... to... brother Joe.
Anyway, something besides car metaphors. And Ted Williams. Wow. Nobody can say enough about that guy. He once said that when he was 'on the ball' he could see the stitching on the baseball from the moment it left the pitcher's hand, as if the ball were 'spinning in slow motion', until he made contact. No steroids, no bullshit, just an un-Earthly amount of 'game.'
If you want to utilize AP stories you have to pay for their service, period. There's nothing wrong or nefarious about this practice whatsoever.
I agree with your wiewpoint, completely, but there is an alternative to 'paying' for the AP, and that is: to 'contribute.'
Even a small-town paper can take advantage of AP's wide web (oops, bad word, sort of) of correspondents, by submitting their own stories of local news. When AP sees there is quality in the writing, or any bonafide utility to the stories, the small town paper can then run AP wire items.
Google could easily take submissions from the masses and perhaps work out a 'barter' with AP. No doubt there's been consideration of that alternative, and it must be, for the time being, either a no-go issue, or on the 'back burner.' The AP terms of service, after all, are not exactly a secret.
My very uneducated guess is that Google is simply 'eating its own cooking', via the pay-per-click mechanism (if that's the actual 'deal' with the AP). The quid pro quo being the reinforcement of the Google brand, and exposure, of other Google ads (etc), to the click-through traffic to AP. (Google wouldn't consider paying AP if there wasn't a clear shot at profiting on the deal, one almost has to assume).
Al Davis may or may not be a genius, but I'll bet any amount of money on this: He does a shitload of better fact-checking than you do.
Who's Al Davis?
KFG
Ha ha ha. You are really a Raiders expert over there, eh? Nice, you blow it out your mouthhole, talking about the Raiders with zero understanding of any of their history, and for what? To make some sarcastic, unsupportable witticism (only in your own mind, of course), then you turn around and prove you have no clue about what you think your misinformed opinion supposedly referred to.
Use Google, I'm not your fucking encyclopedia. And check your facts a little before you try to come off like you have any idea what the fuck you think you're talking about.
Mmhmm, another swing and a miss...0 and 2 to you, pal.
Pittsburgh Steelers: Commercial entertainment venture
Oakland Raiders: Money blown on a joke
Ok, we've achieved equivilence.
KFG
When Al Davis took over the Raiders in 1963, they were coming off three terrible seasons in a row (9-33-0), from their inception. They went 10-4 in '63, and over the next 30 years became tyhe winningest (in terms of games won/games played in ANY pro sport, ever. That sound like a 'joke' to you?
They are the only team to play in the Super Bowl in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Pretty funny joke, eh?
Al Davis may or may not be a genius, but I'll bet any amount of money on this: He does a shitload of better fact-checking than you do. Ha ha ha, now I get it.. the 'joke' I mean. Over to you, clueless...
The system crashed due to a hardware problem, costing me over 12 hours worth of lost billable hours with the loss of the one open file with which I was working.
It didn't cross your mind to do a little Command-S, anywhere during that 12 hours? Jesus. Tell me you aren't a pilot or a doctor.
Pays no dividends? How then do you have stocks? Please provide proof.
Proof???
Most companies don't pay dividends. If you want to make cash back on a regular basis, you loan them money, that's the Bond Market.
Shit, Google, if they went off their rockers, could do a ten-for-one stock split. Dilute the shares like mad, and then you'd have a whole world of n00bs buying them at far lower prices, and jacking the value of the shares back up, in the process.
As it stands, though, their shares are expensive, which makes it real easy for huge institutional investors to park Big Cash in Google, without 'taking a position', as far as wielding anything like shareholder clout. And believe me, the big funds (Fidelity, and all the others) hold a ton of Google. Why? Because they want to run Google? No, because they want o participate in Google.
There's a school of thought [we'll call it "Old School"] that says: "If you like a company, and the way it is run, enough to invest in it, then why get in there and start telling it how to run it's business?". In other words, if you don't like XYZ's management, or the direction of XYZ, then don't buy into XYZ. Pretty friggin' simple, if you think about it. If you want 'dividends', bu power companies (Utilities), and Banks and Bonds. Simple stuff.
Besides, how many stock traders do you know that got rich sitting on a basket of stocks and watching the dividends trickle in?
Warren Buffet, for one. He's held a ton of shares for ages now.
And, if you look at real 'old' wealth, you will find tons of 'value' investors, with blue chips, a spread of indexes, and bonds, piling up money, retaining value during the down movements in the markets, and, in the long run, doing way better than the 'genius' market timers, and that whole 'new economy', 'this time it's different' crowd.
Everyone is talking about GoogleFS. But no one is talking about how they manage structured data. How do they do it?
Everyone??? Oh, I get it, you mean everyone who didn't bother to RTFA. Makes sense now. You and that other guy taking his wild guesses at building a file system (with zero background) ought to compare notes. Ha ha ha. I mean, why have half an unsubstantiated 'conversation' when you could have the real, unsubstantiated, deal?
I know, I know, nobody is supposed to read the article. But, in this case, it was a real gas.
Big thank you, by the way, to the guy who posted the link to the 'printer friendly' version. Good show.
The ludicrous notion that ethical business practices can be enforced by government fiat.
Sure, as long as there are laws there will be law-breakers. So, your 'logic' [term used loosely in extremis] dictates that law is ineffective and, therefore, pointless? Nice try.
Now try this: Law can't ensure compliance, (with morals, ethics, etc) but transgression, (followed by apprehension, and adjudication) can ensure loss of freedom, forfeiture of ill-gotten gains, etc, not to mention little 'kickers' like treble damages, civil suit vulnerabilities, etc.
A few formerly-rich, Republican white guys, doing time, kissing their golden years 'goodbye' (and some caged-heat weiners, "Hello"), will give the chicken shit (greedy, usurious, larcenous, etc) opportunists... pause.
You lackey 'mouthpieces' for the laissez-faire, special-interest corporate-welfare assholes never give up, do you? Just consider taking it up the ass in the joint )against your will, for a change) before putting your so-called libertarian bullshit into practice.
That's a pretty conceited view, and one that doesn't seem to be uncommon among macphiles. *Should* you care about something like that? Should the average computer user care? I'd answer 'probably not' to both, but that hardly invalidates his point.
The school of thought he probably follows is one that believes DRMed technology like that chip is overall a bad thing for computing in general. Thankfully, you're not someone who will have any say in the future of technology; the attitude you carry would be terribly detrimental to any sort of progression.
Oh I get it, you can see the guy's point that maybe he, like others, and even you, shouldn't 'care', but, because he said he didn't care, he has some imagined 'Mac' disease? Interesting.I hate to break this to you, bud, but 90% of the computer users of the world don't care about these issues any more than they care to take up automotive mechanics in order to drive back and forth to their fucking jobs, okay?
And what's more, the 'not caring/not knowing', overwhelming majority of people DO shape the tech world, more than you think. Why? Because they're the buyers, get it, and the companies give them what they want. It's not a pretty thought, sure.
And one more thing
detrimental to any sort of progression
WTF was that supposed to mean? Heheh, bad for I-VI-II-V jazz progressions, bad for anything anywhere evolving or moving on? If "progress" was the word you were after, maybe you'd make progress by keeping a lid on your half-baked theories, generalizations, and assumptions, and, instead, idling away a few hours in front of some of these things called "books"; specifically, dictionaries, and grade school grammar texts. It would be like advancing progress, one know-it-all at a time.
The anthrax research is for a vaccine. In order to make a vaccine, you have to make some anthrax. To say the US 'stockpiles bioweapons' in an abuse of both words.
I worked on military stuff... manuals, theory of operations, and operations/troubleshooting stuff, and believe me, pal, you have no idea what you're talking about, as in: All the Way Misinformed.
Imagine an excell spreadsheet with a million fields on it. Do you really think tiny mistakes are all that uncommon?
No they probably aren't, if you think of millions of 'facts' and Excel 'cells.' But the SEC has only recently decided to maybe change the rules of compensation disclosure (which includes the valuation of stock options, the 'window' in which a grant can be dated, etc). And they're only looking at the top 5 execs in a company, so, the million Excel cells aren't exactly on the table.
The SEC is always 'behind the curve' when it comes to rule changes. Why? Not because they are stupid, but because they are reacting to events, rather than being proactive.
For one thing, they aren't concerned with fully-detailed reporting of ALL of a company's employee remuneration, insurance, options, disclosure agreements, partial ownership of company IP, etc. They are concerned with... since 1934... the big guys. The insiders. So, they first wrote rules to prevent execs from trading in and out of a company's own shares in a 6-month timeframe. This was a popular activity at one time. The 1934 law was written to 'prevent' the recurrence of another 1929-1933 disaster.
They have been playing 'catch-up' ever since. In '87-88, they instituted rules to suspend program trading, in the event of a precipitous drop in the index, to 'prevent'another scenario such as October '87, when people couldn't get in and out of a trade, unless it was made 'at the market' (disastrous when prices are falling faster than one's broker can get a confirmed execution). It worked fine... as long as there was no precipitious drop. A 100 or 200 point drop would happen, the rule would 'kick in', and things settled down in the trading of affected stocks...
BUT, it didn't do any good when, in the late 90s, mutual fund guys just turned around and sold off huge blocks of 'healthy' stocks, in order to cash out all those clients who were riding the tech sector into the basement, and could simply call an 800-number and say, "Move me into Money Markets." The fund managers lookked at the Bloombergs, saw Yahoo, and all the tech things tanking, and sold GE, Banks, etc... At which point everyone headed for the exits. The 'rule', itself, contributed to the tech sector's woes spreading to all the other sectors. It was pretty ugly.
Meanwhile, back to execs... they had passed insider trading rules, and company's came back with a sort of 'programmed' trade setup for execs: A guy could say, in writing, that he was going to unload certain numbers, or percentages of holdings at a certain date in the future, and that absolved them of any hint of insider trading, BUT, after the SEC signed-on to the program, the guys in the companies decided they could set trades in advance that 'just happened' to coincide with earnings reports and whatnot, and then cancel their sales... result, the stocks themselves would get a double-boost from a good earnings report AND the news that x-number of guys at XYZ Corp decided to 'hold' their stock instead of taking profits on options. What really happened was the guys saw a huge increase in the paper value of their holdings, their equity was up, their lines of credit were better, with more collateralized equity behind them, etc.
So, the SEC is proposing to tighten up, again. It's a game. Apple, like the other 50 or 60 companies, probably got tipped by the SEC, themselves, that 'either you look at your pricing/dating, or we will.' Nobody, on either side of the game, wants to monkey with things, like, say, tightening up too much, negatively influencing the 'little guy' investors that really are the bread and butter of the whole Game, itself...
so you have this little drama, to avoid the uncertainty that immediately follows a close call or a minor disaster. If there was no human greed, no 'rocket scientists' coming out of the schools to show accounting and counsel, a 'new way' to do the 'old same thing', we wouldn't heed regulation, but, on the othe
The mechanism is a mat of fiber-optic cables which are illuminated by just two leds, which also cannot be independantly controlled.
Okay. I'll bite. I admit I have no theoretical knowledge of the lighting system in the backlit keyboards... but, if they can't be independently-controlled, then why can they independently malfunction, as mine did on my 1.25 Aluminum?
Apple wants $220 to restore 'one channel' of the backlighting. []which governs most of the numeric keys along the top, Shift, Fn, Control, etc, on the left and the arrow, Enter, etc on the lower right of the keyboard.
That 'quote' was in the little store in Syracuse, whereas, in Minneapolis, they took into consideration thatmy SuperDrive was dead, and the Firewire (400) port was very loose, and offered a $319, one-week trurnaround to fix everything, with the advice to backup the drive, because if it, or anything else was even marginally off-spec, it would also be replaced.
An example of Apple 'largesse'? Nope; more like a bit of guilt over having a brand new Powerbook, returned unsold from S.America, and dumping it to a re-seller with the proviso that the reseller not offer it online until exactly one day after the original one-year Standard Apple warranty had expired. [To avoid having to 'sell' an AppleCare contract, 'within' the one-year timeframe...] can you believe that? I'll pick up a Pismo, for the week-long hiatus, and call them on the offer.
Nice touch: The kid, at the Apple Store here, got a contract/PO number from Apple HQ, so the terms of the repair package are good, indefinitely, barrring unforseen stuff like Mountain Dew in the keyboard, etc. Still, my pedestrian 'grasp' of logic dictates that if the 'channels' can fail independently, that's evidence of the possibility of independent control. [Not on the 'key' level, but certainly in terms of 'areas.']
Meanwhile, guys were using Virtual Reality 'gloves', in combination with MIDI controls, to 'arrange' not only audio, but multimedia environments, nearly 20 years ago. Old hat.
However, a quick search and I found a couple of places that will ship them out to me.
Back in the 80s, living in San Diego at the time, safely 'before' the wacky.com thing, two buddies [one from Detroit, other from NYC] and myself, used to have a big old shipment of 'belly bombs', oops, I mean rat burgers, air-frieghted in, frozen, from a White Castle in, I believe it was, Astoria. That was livin' large, lemme tell ya...
Three or four years ago, in Boca Raton, Publix Stores had a delivery service, and that was awesome. Order online in the evening and they'd have it at the door inside a tight timeframe the next afternoon. They ended it, unfortunately.
We have services similar to the one mentioned, in Chicago, here in Minneapolis, but I'm in a barn, basically, downtown, and the companies want building mgr's permission to have some sort of 'community' drop-off inside the bldg... PITA. What I'd like to see is more cheese and 'real' oil, there's not enough Italians here. An honest-to-God Italian deli/market could make a killing here, and a delivery thing on top of that... somebody'd end up a zillionaire.
all the thief has to do is forge your signature or use it somewhere that the signature isn't even checked
I don't think the signature on the back has anything to do with ID, anyway. It's only there to show that the bearer of the card (whomever that might be), has agreed to the contract between themself and the issuer of the card, itself. It's got nothing to do with ID.
Merchants are actually required [although you'd never know it] to verify that there is 'a' signature on the card, not that it is 'your' signature. Again, because an unsigned card, technically, has no evidence that a contract exists between the issuer, and the bearer, of the card. Clerks aren't handwriting analysts, anyway, and they aren't expected to be.
Most of the stores contracts with their transaction handlers require them to look at a 'real' ID in case of anything 'suspicious.' It's a leaky, and vague, system, no matter how you look at it.
It is really helping me out right now. I'm having to move far away to a place I've never been.
I used it for the exact same purpose, before moving to the Twin Cities from upstate New York. And I use it way more now that I am here. It is just so much handier than the web-based 'maps'.
Once I got into it a bit, I never looked back. It seems to have almost unlimited applications. locating anything, dividing community meeting locations up by date, getting the real 'lay of the land' regarding the walking involved between mass transit connections, it just goes on and on. Address location works better than Metro Transit's custom-built 'from here, to there' thing. Amazing stuff. When Google gets one right, it is really right.
If I was on the Gtalk team I'd be having serious feelings of "less than" right about now.
For finally making a Linux version. Downloading it right now...
Although I am happy to see the Linux version also [albeit, from a distance, since I have somehow lost the ability to get a ubuntu install recognized in OpenFirmware, on a re-install, after nearly two years of dual-boot on a Mac:( ], I am also thankful to see that they released the v 4.0 beta for the Mac at the same time as the other two versions. That's very nice,too. Yay Google!!
Personally, I wish CSS just let me define my own tags.
Heheh, it will, but you have to ditch the crippled HTML and even XHTML, to really do it right.
Store all your content in your own, personally-defined XML tags, and use whatever stylesheet system you want when you have your content all written out. [XSL, CSS, etc]. Your 'much rather' is exactly what makes XML [or SGML] so powerful; it is flexible, user-defined, and can be formatted any way you want, with the content's tags only beholden to your own DTD.
I've been learning CSS, too, and, as an amateur, I appreciate the thoughts and opinions of the 'real' web developers in this discussion, a lot.
The troubles I have seem to center around the polarized nature of the tips and tutorials out there, for CSS: Either they are something along the lines of the "Photoshop: Every Tool Explained", or they dwell on the other end of the scale, i.e., cutting edge CSS2/CSS3 stuff that doesn't actually work in any user agents, yet.
So, for me, taking templates and altering them radically with CSS-a trial and error deal-helps a lot, as does reading the different web-based treatises, and, as a side benefit, learning how to alter php and js stuff, too. I'm also an advocate of down;oading old sites and redoing them in CSS. It's time-consuming, for me, but well worth the learning experience.
But, as an old XML guy, I have to weigh in on the side of the separation of content from form, and CSS looks like the way to go, as long as html or xhtml is the code being used. Do I think people tossing together blogs or basic, ISP-style 'freebie' home pages ought to learn xml and start delving into DTDs or schemas? Nope. But for the bigger projects and bigger databases, and web apps, it looks like the boss to me.
The fact that none of you 'vote counters' can differentiate between the roll call on the Bill, as opposed to the vote on the actual Net Neutality "Amendment" to the Bill, doesn't make any of you look like geniuses, either.
The AK's durability, and less requirement for keeping it clean and dry won out overall. It had some kick but, it would shoot trough trees.
Actually, the biggest difference between the AK and the M, was the engineering 'approach.'
The AK was built 'loosely', and the M-16 was designed along very exacting specs. The result: The M-16 jammed easily under inclement conditions, but not the AK. And, you could take apart 100 AKs and toss the pieces in a big, mixed-up pile, and reassemble 100 working rifles, but there was no way you could do anything even remotely close to that with the M-16.
Any vets out there, who've used both rifles will tell you the M-16 had that tight feel, and the AK was, well, loose, almost rattly. Heheh, as far as the M-16 goes, it's actually a clear case of something being 'better' in principle, than in practice.
Is the AK a 'better' weapon? Very subjective, and the advances in the design of the M make it hard to belittle the effectiveness of the weapon, but at different times in their histories, the lack of 'tolerance' in machining, and the rapid accumulation of waste [stemming from the M-16's gas-powering mechanism] causing jamming, made the AK the choice in 'dirty' environments requiring heavier rounds, that were less likely to be thrown off course by twigs, brush, or jungle stuff, on their way to the target.
If you saw the movie Heat, then you might remember a little old gun battle in the downtown LA streets after the bank job. Here you see the evolution of the M-16 in all its glory: Short barrels, armor-piercing rounds [the fat 7.62 NATOs, I think], extremely rapid reloaders [one tap, empty out, clip in, no cocking], no jamming in the urban landscape. Formidable.
But, getting the altered CSS to 'stick' in Firefox seems pretty tricky, so far. A quick look through about:config didn't seem to show a setting to auto-load a user-CSS. We'll see, I suppose.
On a Macintosh. I'm in the middle of my 5th consecutive crash trying to load the "Pirates Bay" article from 03-June. It hangs in between the initial page draw and the Slashdotter kicking in. All the less-populated pages on the Slashdot open in FF, but not the P-Bay article. Meanwhile, the Slashdotter Extension works fine for the "Reply to selected text", and even has my user-chosen color scheme for the "reply-to' page, but the main page is a stiff, no color. Lousy stuff.
If the guys wrote three or four of the Extensions (Slashdotter, Developer Tools, AdBlock, and a couple others) for any other app out there, I would toss FF in a second. What a dog.. If the 'community' (har har) can't write for the Mac, then then they ought to admit they're a windows/Explorer thing, and get out of the pool. what a waste.
Safari, Camino, and OmniWeb rip through the same page like it isn't even there. What's FF's excuse? I ask you...Shabby bullshit..and Safari is way faster and they have a clue about CSS, what gives? It's like 1998 over in FF-land, jesus, wake the fuck up, or roll over and find a new gig.
whoa, yeah, right again. You see what I mean? It's been a while. I traded my own account in a strict diet of selling naked calls, so my view is warped by the up/downtick rule, associated with the sell side. Thanks for pointing that out.
yeah, he might have had to roll 90-day contracts, or go for LEAPs, who knows? The technicals of it are, well, technical, and yeah I was off on the 'cost.' But the movement in the stock justified the deal, from my point of view.
I did plenty of uncovered calls stuff, and would take nasty 'hits' if I failed to roll the contracts further out when the movement in the index (OEX at the time) bumped up against my then-current trendlines for volatility. I'd cash out the trade going against me and 'roll' the same number (about) of contracts out another month, usually. It was nerve-wracking.
Like I said, I'm not a trader, just someone who did a lot of trades, and gave very profitable advice to a few guys, over the years (in the 80s and 90s, mostly).
My points were that, one, you don't necessarily have to be licensed to have some idea what's going on, and, two, that a company can 'bet against' the future value of its own stock for legitimate reasons. It wasn't a treatise on the subject, and was far from 'exhaustive.'
Slashdot Mirror
Oh well, there go my mod points...Nice to see a baseball metaphor over here, though. I would think a fellow by the name of DiMaggio might have been more appropriate. (56-game hitting streak in '51). Heheh. Joltin' Joe was amazing. Cobb had a 40 game streak in 1911 and another 35 game streak in 6 years later.
DiMaggio was stopped at 56 games, and one game later tossed off another 16 game streak. What a guy. Joe's brother, Dom, (with the Red Sox) had a 34-game streak that ended with a flyout... to... brother Joe.
Anyway, something besides car metaphors. And Ted Williams. Wow. Nobody can say enough about that guy. He once said that when he was 'on the ball' he could see the stitching on the baseball from the moment it left the pitcher's hand, as if the ball were 'spinning in slow motion', until he made contact. No steroids, no bullshit, just an un-Earthly amount of 'game.'See ya, don't trip on the way out :=)
And what's the MAC? You mean an ethernet addy, or a cancer-of-the-colon-Burger?
I agree with your wiewpoint, completely, but there is an alternative to 'paying' for the AP, and that is: to 'contribute.'
Even a small-town paper can take advantage of AP's wide web (oops, bad word, sort of) of correspondents, by submitting their own stories of local news. When AP sees there is quality in the writing, or any bonafide utility to the stories, the small town paper can then run AP wire items.
Google could easily take submissions from the masses and perhaps work out a 'barter' with AP. No doubt there's been consideration of that alternative, and it must be, for the time being, either a no-go issue, or on the 'back burner.' The AP terms of service, after all, are not exactly a secret.
My very uneducated guess is that Google is simply 'eating its own cooking', via the pay-per-click mechanism (if that's the actual 'deal' with the AP). The quid pro quo being the reinforcement of the Google brand, and exposure, of other Google ads (etc), to the click-through traffic to AP. (Google wouldn't consider paying AP if there wasn't a clear shot at profiting on the deal, one almost has to assume).
He does a shitload of better fact-checking than you do.
Who's Al Davis?
KFG
Ha ha ha. You are really a Raiders expert over there, eh? Nice, you blow it out your mouthhole, talking about the Raiders with zero understanding of any of their history, and for what? To make some sarcastic, unsupportable witticism (only in your own mind, of course), then you turn around and prove you have no clue about what you think your misinformed opinion supposedly referred to.
Use Google, I'm not your fucking encyclopedia. And check your facts a little before you try to come off like you have any idea what the fuck you think you're talking about.
Mmhmm, another swing and a miss...0 and 2 to you, pal.
Oakland Raiders: Money blown on a joke
Ok, we've achieved equivilence.
KFG
When Al Davis took over the Raiders in 1963, they were coming off three terrible seasons in a row (9-33-0), from their inception. They went 10-4 in '63, and over the next 30 years became tyhe winningest (in terms of games won/games played in ANY pro sport, ever. That sound like a 'joke' to you?
They are the only team to play in the Super Bowl in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Pretty funny joke, eh?
Al Davis may or may not be a genius, but I'll bet any amount of money on this:
He does a shitload of better fact-checking than you do. Ha ha ha, now I get it.. the 'joke' I mean. Over to you, clueless...
It didn't cross your mind to do a little Command-S, anywhere during that 12 hours? Jesus. Tell me you aren't a pilot or a doctor.
Proof???
Most companies don't pay dividends. If you want to make cash back on a regular basis, you loan them money, that's the Bond Market.
Shit, Google, if they went off their rockers, could do a ten-for-one stock split. Dilute the shares like mad, and then you'd have a whole world of n00bs buying them at far lower prices, and jacking the value of the shares back up, in the process.
As it stands, though, their shares are expensive, which makes it real easy for huge institutional investors to park Big Cash in Google, without 'taking a position', as far as wielding anything like shareholder clout. And believe me, the big funds (Fidelity, and all the others) hold a ton of Google. Why? Because they want to run Google? No, because they want o participate in Google.
There's a school of thought [we'll call it "Old School"] that says: "If you like a company, and the way it is run, enough to invest in it, then why get in there and start telling it how to run it's business?". In other words, if you don't like XYZ's management, or the direction of XYZ, then don't buy into XYZ. Pretty friggin' simple, if you think about it. If you want 'dividends', bu power companies (Utilities), and Banks and Bonds. Simple stuff.
Warren Buffet, for one. He's held a ton of shares for ages now.
And, if you look at real 'old' wealth, you will find tons of 'value' investors, with blue chips, a spread of indexes, and bonds, piling up money, retaining value during the down movements in the markets, and, in the long run, doing way better than the 'genius' market timers, and that whole 'new economy', 'this time it's different' crowd.
Everyone??? Oh, I get it, you mean everyone who didn't bother to RTFA. Makes sense now. You and that other guy taking his wild guesses at building a file system (with zero background) ought to compare notes. Ha ha ha. I mean, why have half an unsubstantiated 'conversation' when you could have the real, unsubstantiated, deal?
I know, I know, nobody is supposed to read the article. But, in this case, it was a real gas.
Big thank you, by the way, to the guy who posted the link to the 'printer friendly' version. Good show.
Sure, as long as there are laws there will be law-breakers. So, your 'logic' [term used loosely in extremis] dictates that law is ineffective and, therefore, pointless? Nice try.
Now try this: Law can't ensure compliance, (with morals, ethics, etc) but transgression, (followed by apprehension, and adjudication) can ensure loss of freedom, forfeiture of ill-gotten gains, etc, not to mention little 'kickers' like treble damages, civil suit vulnerabilities, etc.
A few formerly-rich, Republican white guys, doing time, kissing their golden years 'goodbye' (and some caged-heat weiners, "Hello"), will give the chicken shit (greedy, usurious, larcenous, etc) opportunists... pause.
You lackey 'mouthpieces' for the laissez-faire, special-interest corporate-welfare assholes never give up, do you? Just consider taking it up the ass in the joint )against your will, for a change) before putting your so-called libertarian bullshit into practice.
Have a nice compliant day. :=)
Oh I get it, you can see the guy's point that maybe he, like others, and even you, shouldn't 'care', but, because he said he didn't care, he has some imagined 'Mac' disease? Interesting.I hate to break this to you, bud, but 90% of the computer users of the world don't care about these issues any more than they care to take up automotive mechanics in order to drive back and forth to their fucking jobs, okay?
And what's more, the 'not caring/not knowing', overwhelming majority of people DO shape the tech world, more than you think. Why? Because they're the buyers, get it, and the companies give them what they want. It's not a pretty thought, sure.
And one more thing
WTF was that supposed to mean? Heheh, bad for I-VI-II-V jazz progressions, bad for anything anywhere evolving or moving on? If "progress" was the word you were after, maybe you'd make progress by keeping a lid on your half-baked theories, generalizations, and assumptions, and, instead, idling away a few hours in front of some of these things called "books"; specifically, dictionaries, and grade school grammar texts. It would be like advancing progress, one know-it-all at a time.
I worked on military stuff... manuals, theory of operations, and operations/troubleshooting stuff, and believe me, pal, you have no idea what you're talking about, as in: All the Way Misinformed.
No they probably aren't, if you think of millions of 'facts' and Excel 'cells.' But the SEC has only recently decided to maybe change the rules of compensation disclosure (which includes the valuation of stock options, the 'window' in which a grant can be dated, etc). And they're only looking at the top 5 execs in a company, so, the million Excel cells aren't exactly on the table.
The SEC is always 'behind the curve' when it comes to rule changes. Why? Not because they are stupid, but because they are reacting to events, rather than being proactive.
For one thing, they aren't concerned with fully-detailed reporting of ALL of a company's employee remuneration, insurance, options, disclosure agreements, partial ownership of company IP, etc. They are concerned with... since 1934... the big guys. The insiders. So, they first wrote rules to prevent execs from trading in and out of a company's own shares in a 6-month timeframe. This was a popular activity at one time. The 1934 law was written to 'prevent' the recurrence of another 1929-1933 disaster.
They have been playing 'catch-up' ever since. In '87-88, they instituted rules to suspend program trading, in the event of a precipitous drop in the index, to 'prevent'another scenario such as October '87, when people couldn't get in and out of a trade, unless it was made 'at the market' (disastrous when prices are falling faster than one's broker can get a confirmed execution). It worked fine... as long as there was no precipitious drop. A 100 or 200 point drop would happen, the rule would 'kick in', and things settled down in the trading of affected stocks...
BUT, it didn't do any good when, in the late 90s, mutual fund guys just turned around and sold off huge blocks of 'healthy' stocks, in order to cash out all those clients who were riding the tech sector into the basement, and could simply call an 800-number and say, "Move me into Money Markets." The fund managers lookked at the Bloombergs, saw Yahoo, and all the tech things tanking, and sold GE, Banks, etc... At which point everyone headed for the exits. The 'rule', itself, contributed to the tech sector's woes spreading to all the other sectors. It was pretty ugly.
Meanwhile, back to execs... they had passed insider trading rules, and company's came back with a sort of 'programmed' trade setup for execs: A guy could say, in writing, that he was going to unload certain numbers, or percentages of holdings at a certain date in the future, and that absolved them of any hint of insider trading, BUT, after the SEC signed-on to the program, the guys in the companies decided they could set trades in advance that 'just happened' to coincide with earnings reports and whatnot, and then cancel their sales... result, the stocks themselves would get a double-boost from a good earnings report AND the news that x-number of guys at XYZ Corp decided to 'hold' their stock instead of taking profits on options. What really happened was the guys saw a huge increase in the paper value of their holdings, their equity was up, their lines of credit were better, with more collateralized equity behind them, etc.
So, the SEC is proposing to tighten up, again. It's a game. Apple, like the other 50 or 60 companies, probably got tipped by the SEC, themselves, that 'either you look at your pricing/dating, or we will.' Nobody, on either side of the game, wants to monkey with things, like, say, tightening up too much, negatively influencing the 'little guy' investors that really are the bread and butter of the whole Game, itself...
so you have this little drama, to avoid the uncertainty that immediately follows a close call or a minor disaster. If there was no human greed, no 'rocket scientists' coming out of the schools to show accounting and counsel, a 'new way' to do the 'old same thing', we wouldn't heed regulation, but, on the othe
Okay. I'll bite. I admit I have no theoretical knowledge of the lighting system in the backlit keyboards... but, if they can't be independently-controlled, then why can they independently malfunction, as mine did on my 1.25 Aluminum?
Apple wants $220 to restore 'one channel' of the backlighting. []which governs most of the numeric keys along the top, Shift, Fn, Control, etc, on the left and the arrow, Enter, etc on the lower right of the keyboard.
That 'quote' was in the little store in Syracuse, whereas, in Minneapolis, they took into consideration thatmy SuperDrive was dead, and the Firewire (400) port was very loose, and offered a $319, one-week trurnaround to fix everything, with the advice to backup the drive, because if it, or anything else was even marginally off-spec, it would also be replaced.
An example of Apple 'largesse'? Nope; more like a bit of guilt over having a brand new Powerbook, returned unsold from S.America, and dumping it to a re-seller with the proviso that the reseller not offer it online until exactly one day after the original one-year Standard Apple warranty had expired. [To avoid having to 'sell' an AppleCare contract, 'within' the one-year timeframe...] can you believe that? I'll pick up a Pismo, for the week-long hiatus, and call them on the offer.
Nice touch: The kid, at the Apple Store here, got a contract/PO number from Apple HQ, so the terms of the repair package are good, indefinitely, barrring unforseen stuff like Mountain Dew in the keyboard, etc. Still, my pedestrian 'grasp' of logic dictates that if the 'channels' can fail independently, that's evidence of the possibility of independent control. [Not on the 'key' level, but certainly in terms of 'areas.']
Meanwhile, guys were using Virtual Reality 'gloves', in combination with MIDI controls, to 'arrange' not only audio, but multimedia environments, nearly 20 years ago. Old hat.
Back in the 80s, living in San Diego at the time, safely 'before' the wacky.com thing, two buddies [one from Detroit, other from NYC] and myself, used to have a big old shipment of 'belly bombs', oops, I mean rat burgers, air-frieghted in, frozen, from a White Castle in, I believe it was, Astoria. That was livin' large, lemme tell ya...
Three or four years ago, in Boca Raton, Publix Stores had a delivery service, and that was awesome. Order online in the evening and they'd have it at the door inside a tight timeframe the next afternoon. They ended it, unfortunately.
We have services similar to the one mentioned, in Chicago, here in Minneapolis, but I'm in a barn, basically, downtown, and the companies want building mgr's permission to have some sort of 'community' drop-off inside the bldg... PITA. What I'd like to see is more cheese and 'real' oil, there's not enough Italians here. An honest-to-God Italian deli/market could make a killing here, and a delivery thing on top of that... somebody'd end up a zillionaire.
I don't think the signature on the back has anything to do with ID, anyway. It's only there to show that the bearer of the card (whomever that might be), has agreed to the contract between themself and the issuer of the card, itself. It's got nothing to do with ID.
Merchants are actually required [although you'd never know it] to verify that there is 'a' signature on the card, not that it is 'your' signature. Again, because an unsigned card, technically, has no evidence that a contract exists between the issuer, and the bearer, of the card. Clerks aren't handwriting analysts, anyway, and they aren't expected to be.
Most of the stores contracts with their transaction handlers require them to look at a 'real' ID in case of anything 'suspicious.' It's a leaky, and vague, system, no matter how you look at it.
I used it for the exact same purpose, before moving to the Twin Cities from upstate New York. And I use it way more now that I am here. It is just so much handier than the web-based 'maps'.
Once I got into it a bit, I never looked back. It seems to have almost unlimited applications. locating anything, dividing community meeting locations up by date, getting the real 'lay of the land' regarding the walking involved between mass transit connections, it just goes on and on. Address location works better than Metro Transit's custom-built 'from here, to there' thing. Amazing stuff. When Google gets one right, it is really right.
If I was on the Gtalk team I'd be having serious feelings of "less than" right about now.
Although I am happy to see the Linux version also [albeit, from a distance, since I have somehow lost the ability to get a ubuntu install recognized in OpenFirmware, on a re-install, after nearly two years of dual-boot on a Mac :( ], I am also thankful to see that they released the v 4.0 beta for the Mac at the same time as the other two versions. That's very nice,too. Yay Google!!
Heheh, it will, but you have to ditch the crippled HTML and even XHTML, to really do it right.
Store all your content in your own, personally-defined XML tags, and use whatever stylesheet system you want when you have your content all written out. [XSL, CSS, etc]. Your 'much rather' is exactly what makes XML [or SGML] so powerful; it is flexible, user-defined, and can be formatted any way you want, with the content's tags only beholden to your own DTD.
I've been learning CSS, too, and, as an amateur, I appreciate the thoughts and opinions of the 'real' web developers in this discussion, a lot.
The troubles I have seem to center around the polarized nature of the tips and tutorials out there, for CSS: Either they are something along the lines of the "Photoshop: Every Tool Explained", or they dwell on the other end of the scale, i.e., cutting edge CSS2/CSS3 stuff that doesn't actually work in any user agents, yet.
So, for me, taking templates and altering them radically with CSS-a trial and error deal-helps a lot, as does reading the different web-based treatises, and, as a side benefit, learning how to alter php and js stuff, too. I'm also an advocate of down;oading old sites and redoing them in CSS. It's time-consuming, for me, but well worth the learning experience.
But, as an old XML guy, I have to weigh in on the side of the separation of content from form, and CSS looks like the way to go, as long as html or xhtml is the code being used. Do I think people tossing together blogs or basic, ISP-style 'freebie' home pages ought to learn xml and start delving into DTDs or schemas? Nope. But for the bigger projects and bigger databases, and web apps, it looks like the boss to me.
The fact that none of you 'vote counters' can differentiate between the roll call on the Bill, as opposed to the vote on the actual Net Neutality "Amendment" to the Bill, doesn't make any of you look like geniuses, either.
Actually, the biggest difference between the AK and the M, was the engineering 'approach.'
The AK was built 'loosely', and the M-16 was designed along very exacting specs. The result:
The M-16 jammed easily under inclement conditions, but not the AK. And, you could take apart 100 AKs and toss the pieces in a big, mixed-up pile, and reassemble 100 working rifles, but there was no way you could do anything even remotely close to that with the M-16.
Any vets out there, who've used both rifles will tell you the M-16 had that tight feel, and the AK was, well, loose, almost rattly. Heheh, as far as the M-16 goes, it's actually a clear case of something being 'better' in principle, than in practice.
Is the AK a 'better' weapon? Very subjective, and the advances in the design of the M make it hard to belittle the effectiveness of the weapon, but at different times in their histories, the lack of 'tolerance' in machining, and the rapid accumulation of waste [stemming from the M-16's gas-powering mechanism] causing jamming, made the AK the choice in 'dirty' environments requiring heavier rounds, that were less likely to be thrown off course by twigs, brush, or jungle stuff, on their way to the target.
If you saw the movie Heat, then you might remember a little old gun battle in the downtown LA streets after the bank job. Here you see the evolution of the M-16 in all its glory: Short barrels, armor-piercing rounds [the fat 7.62 NATOs, I think], extremely rapid reloaders [one tap, empty out, clip in, no cocking], no jamming in the urban landscape. Formidable .
no kidding. They have a line-height:150%, which is way out of line, crazy. I set it for 1.1em and got rid of the bold, blurry, a:link jazz, too.
I like the text to be tighter than most, so set it for 1.1em, but regular users would most likely go with:
But, getting the altered CSS to 'stick' in Firefox seems pretty tricky, so far. A quick look through about:config didn't seem to show a setting to auto-load a user-CSS. We'll see, I suppose.
On a Macintosh. I'm in the middle of my 5th consecutive crash trying to load the "Pirates Bay" article from 03-June. It hangs in between the initial page draw and the Slashdotter kicking in. All the less-populated pages on the Slashdot open in FF, but not the P-Bay article. Meanwhile, the Slashdotter Extension works fine for the "Reply to selected text", and even has my user-chosen color scheme for the "reply-to' page, but the main page is a stiff, no color. Lousy stuff.
If the guys wrote three or four of the Extensions (Slashdotter, Developer Tools, AdBlock, and a couple others) for any other app out there, I would toss FF in a second. What a dog.. If the 'community' (har har) can't write for the Mac, then then they ought to admit they're a windows/Explorer thing, and get out of the pool. what a waste.
Safari, Camino, and OmniWeb rip through the same page like it isn't even there. What's FF's excuse? I ask you...Shabby bullshit..and Safari is way faster and they have a clue about CSS, what gives? It's like 1998 over in FF-land, jesus, wake the fuck up, or roll over and find a new gig.whoa, yeah, right again. You see what I mean? It's been a while. I traded my own account in a strict diet of selling naked calls, so my view is warped by the up/downtick rule, associated with the sell side. Thanks for pointing that out.
yeah, he might have had to roll 90-day contracts, or go for LEAPs, who knows? The technicals of it are, well, technical, and yeah I was off on the 'cost.' But the movement in the stock justified the deal, from my point of view.
I did plenty of uncovered calls stuff, and would take nasty 'hits' if I failed to roll the contracts further out when the movement in the index (OEX at the time) bumped up against my then-current trendlines for volatility. I'd cash out the trade going against me and 'roll' the same number (about) of contracts out another month, usually. It was nerve-wracking.
Like I said, I'm not a trader, just someone who did a lot of trades, and gave very profitable advice to a few guys, over the years (in the 80s and 90s, mostly).
My points were that, one, you don't necessarily have to be licensed to have some idea what's going on, and, two, that a company can 'bet against' the future value of its own stock for legitimate reasons. It wasn't a treatise on the subject, and was far from 'exhaustive.'