I don't get the whole comps thing either. I had my house appraised. It's a townhome in a development with over 100 nearly-identical townhomes. With that many homes, there's always a few recent transactions to look at. From what I could see all of them were within about 15% or so of each other, easily accountable by upgrades that might have done, whether appliances had been recently replaced, overall condition, etc. Should be a piece of cake, right?
Nope, a bunch of random comps all over the place, many of which weren't even anything like my house and needed a bunch of adjustments. Final value was still only a couple grand from where I figured it was going to be, so whatever.
Exactly. I suspect one of the reasons why Google seems to provide rather poor results as of lately is everyone is gaming Google's system to have their site ranked higher for searches where it really shouldn't be ranked that high. Other search engines have the advantage that no one bothers to game them so they can work on improving their ranking algorithms instead of keeping ahead of those that try to break them.
Google was amazing when it first came out, but I find their search rather poor nowadays. Pages and pages of irrelevant results because Google thought I wanted X despite me searching for Y. Sure, there are ways to trick Google into searching for Y, but it seems like Google likes to break those tricks whenever they become popular.
I much prefer Duckduckgo, as it seems to consistently provide better results than Google. It's not perfect, and if you ask me it's not as good as it once was either, but it's worlds better than Google. One nice thing with Duckduckgo is that if there only only a few or no pages that match my query, Duckduckgo isn't afraid to tell me so. Try the same search with Google, and you'll get thousands of off-topic hits, with the handful of pages Duckduckgo found buried in them. Almost like Google feels they have to inflate their numbers or something.
Even Bing returns better results than Google nowadays, and Bing isn't even all that good.
One of those electronic keychain things that displays a sequence of random numbers that change every so often? Where you have to type in the number it's currently showing plus your password to log in.
You are right that we don't know what would have happened if Sanders went up against Trump, but we do know what happened when Clinton went up against Trump. She lost.
The thing with Sanders is that while many people disagree with him, they still respect him because they see Sanders as someone who is honest, well-intentioned, and willing to stand by his principles even if they might be unpopular. So I wouldn't count Sanders out, as he would get votes from people just because they want someone with integrity in the Whitehouse for a change.
The thing is, corporate taxes aren't strictly pass-through. The taxes can be paid by simply passing them onto the consumer, or they can be paid out of the profits, or perhaps by reducing those obscene salaries for the people at the top. This mostly depends on the market - if demand is relatively elastic or they have a monopoly, they can pretty much pass the entire tax onto the consumer who has little choice but to pay the whole thing. Think the phone company, or the cable company. If demand is elastic or the marketplace is very competitive, they likely won't get away with passing the tax onto the consumer and may have to absorb the costs themselves. If they don't their competition can and will undercut them.
So the obvious solution is to promote a free and open marketplace, and start busting up some of these large mega-corporations, monopolies, and oligopolies out there to promote competition.
It's not even so tough. Pick a handful of levels (number of cores, amount of cache, whatever). If not all the features work for one level, try again at the lower level, and repeat. You could then bin again on clock frequency, but the simple solution would be market them based upon the clock frequency and level only. So as long as you're in the same level, you would have the exact same feature set, so higher clock = faster. Between levels, it may not be so clear, but you could check benchmarks and what is best would likely depend on what you're using them for too.
Other than that, I have found that 100 percent of the calls on my soon to be gone land line are scammers.
\
That's one of the other big problems with land-lines. A never-ending stream of junk calls. You still get junk calls with a cell phone, but nothing like when I had a land-line. If the phone companies had any sense, they'd kick the telemarketers off their network because making the decision to cut the cord is easy once you realize you are basically paying a bunch of money so you can be interrupted and bothered by people you don't even want to talk to.
And for that matter, if it wasn't for the fact I am pretty much expected to have a phone number to function in society, I'd ditch the cell phone too.
While I don't have any Vista boxes left around, I must say Vista was also the most stable version of Windows for me. I actually managed to get a Vista box, used daily, up to the 497* day limit, which currently my all-time best Windows uptime record.
* You might recognize 497 days as 10 * 49.7 days, which was the longest Windows 95 could go before it crashed.
You make some good points, but the "below freezing" one isn't one of them. When you hang wet clothes outside when it's freezing, then yes, they freeze at first -- but they will still dry. Look up "sublimation" when you get the chance.
I suppose you are technically correct (which is the best kind of correct), but do you have any idea how long that would take? You might as well argue that yes, they'll freeze at first but eventually the seasons will change and then they will get dry.
I find OSX full of a bunch of "gee whiz" effects and puts usability behind looking shiny. Windows 8 (and to a lesser extent, Windows 10) is actually fairly minimalist, and got rid of a bunch of transparency and other "gee whiz" type effects from Vista/7. However, it lost a lot of consistency, and it's clear Microsoft didn't put a lot of thought into making it actually usable.
If you want a simple, minimalist, no nonsense, no gloss or extra junk interface while still being usable, something like XFCE on Linux is what you want.
I've noticed that trend on newer cars too. I'm not sure of where it started, but the Cruze originally had the KM/H markings on the inner part of the dial as had been done for years, but lost them around 2014 or so. It would be really annoying to have to drive a US spec Cruze in Canada. I assume the Canadian version has KM/H markings, but does it still have MPH on the inner part of the dial?
Actually, it's based upon the temperature of a brine solution and body temperature. Probably because they were two reliable and repeatable temperature measurements at the time the scale was devised*. The end points were at 0 and 96 F, because once you hake those two measurements, you can divide your scale into 3 equal sections of 32 degrees, and then keep dividing the 32 degree sections in half to complete marking your scale.
Later it was refined to make the boiling point of water 212 degrees, giving 180 degrees of separation between the boiling and freezing point of water. This made body temperature about 98 degrees F.
* The brine solution (water, ice, and enough salt that not all of it dissolves) is more reliable than just ice and water if you can't be reasonably sure of how pure the water is. And the boiling point changes with altitude so it's not a great reference to use either.
An inch is about the width of a thumb. My thumb is about 7/8" so it's reasonably close for an approximation. My foot is almost a foot in length, but I admittedly wear a large shoe size. It's close enough that if I wanted to get a rough measurement of a room it's good enough. But usually I just take a stride to be approximately 1 meter (which is also approximately 1 yard) and just count strides.
Fahrenheit isn't actually that bad for describing the weather. The weather most of the time in most places will be between 0 and 100 F. If temperature is outside that range it's either cold enough or hot enough to be potentially dangerous if you are outside for an extended period and you aren't prepared. With Celsius you have to deal with negative temperatures in your range for regular winter weather. So if you need a temperature scale for everyday usage, I find Fahrenheit is perfectly fine. And for science, absolute zero should be 0 degrees, so Celsius isn't even all that useful there either, except for being easier to convert to Kelvin.
That's basically all it was. After the whole prequels mess and how they have not aged well, they just played it safe with something that was not original but felt very Star Wars. It wasn't the best Star Wars movie, but it was far from the worst, and I was entertained. A score of 8.1/10 might be a bit high, but I would consider it a pretty solid 7/10.
On top of that, Cable and satellite TV is EXPENSIVE. "Anyone with a nickel in their pocket"? - more like "anyone with a couple of extra Benjamins in their wallet".
If they piped that crap into my home for free I wouldn't watch it. It amazes me the amount of money people actually pay for it.
The basic idea is that self-driving taxis will be so cheap (since you don't have to pay a driver) that it will be more cost effective to take a taxi everywhere rather than own a car. This supposedly will come about because the people who still chose to own a self-driving car will let the car self-drive for Uber (or whatever) when they aren't using it themselves. This could work until the car gets smart enough to start demanding its cut of the profits.
That's true. It's mostly the small businesses getting the squeeze. I think one of Microsoft's goals is to get everyone on a subscription for Windows. They probably figure it's easiest to start with businesses by basically forcing them to all buy Enterprise versions of Windows no matter how small the business is. Next, they'll come after the home users.
If it's 10 years old, it's almost certainly a DDR2-era machine. If it's an Intel machine, you've still got the memory controller sitting in the Northbridge rather than integrated into the CPU. The Core i3/5/7 machines were a pretty big step up from the Core 2 machines, especially once you get into the 2nd gen Sandy Bridge processors (which performance-wise are still very competitive with Intel's current offerings). Of course, Sandy Bridge is more like 2011, not 2007.
With that said, I'm actually typing this on a 11 year old laptop, and for most things it's still perfectly fine. Sure, maybe the SSD maxes out the original 150 MB/s SATA bus, but it's certainly fast enough and way faster than the 5400 RPM drive this machine originally came with. And I do have USB3 thanks to the now nearly extinct ExpressCard slot. The only truly weak part about this computer is the graphics, mostly from being stuck with a 11 year old mobile graphics adapter that can't be upgraded. If it's a desktop, drop one of the latest graphics cards into a Core 2 systems and you'll find it's still a very capable gaming machine.
Typically the payback for replacing based upon power savings alone is too long to be worth it. If she leaves her computer on 24/7 then maybe, but you'd realize a much better savings by having it go to sleep when it's not being used. You're usually better off just to keep using what you've got until it either is truly obsolete or breaks down.
Except for the proprietary bullshit. It's pretty common that nVidia/AMD GPUs in laptops won't work with the standard driver from whoever made the GPU. You have to get some special version from whoever made the laptop. The fact that almost all laptops now use the built-in Intel GPU has made this less common now, but the same thing for the wireless, LAN, chipset, etc.
Granted, this is a Windows thing. Generally Linux will recognize and run just fine on the hardware. Then again, you can often get the standard drivers to work in Windows by modifying the.inf files as the only thing actually changed in the Vendor/Device ID. But it's still bullshit I shouldn't have to deal with.
Of course, it's entirely possible this is the case for the desktops from these same major manufacturers, but since my desktops are built from standard parts I don't have that problem.
Not the OP, but if an unknown number immediately calls me a second time I'll pick up. So they can just try again. Obviously the spam callers could do that too, but so far they haven't.
Also, I'm not sure why they wouldn't be able to leave me a voicemail.
It's too bad they got rid of the Ram Tradesman Van (basically the cargo variant of the Dodge Caravan). Not the most reliable van, but worked well enough for light duty use and won't bankrupt you keeping it on the road.
If VW is smart they'll stay well away from FCA, but you're right - they seem made for each other.
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I don't get the whole comps thing either. I had my house appraised. It's a townhome in a development with over 100 nearly-identical townhomes. With that many homes, there's always a few recent transactions to look at. From what I could see all of them were within about 15% or so of each other, easily accountable by upgrades that might have done, whether appliances had been recently replaced, overall condition, etc. Should be a piece of cake, right?
Nope, a bunch of random comps all over the place, many of which weren't even anything like my house and needed a bunch of adjustments. Final value was still only a couple grand from where I figured it was going to be, so whatever.
Exactly. I suspect one of the reasons why Google seems to provide rather poor results as of lately is everyone is gaming Google's system to have their site ranked higher for searches where it really shouldn't be ranked that high. Other search engines have the advantage that no one bothers to game them so they can work on improving their ranking algorithms instead of keeping ahead of those that try to break them.
Google was amazing when it first came out, but I find their search rather poor nowadays. Pages and pages of irrelevant results because Google thought I wanted X despite me searching for Y. Sure, there are ways to trick Google into searching for Y, but it seems like Google likes to break those tricks whenever they become popular.
I much prefer Duckduckgo, as it seems to consistently provide better results than Google. It's not perfect, and if you ask me it's not as good as it once was either, but it's worlds better than Google. One nice thing with Duckduckgo is that if there only only a few or no pages that match my query, Duckduckgo isn't afraid to tell me so. Try the same search with Google, and you'll get thousands of off-topic hits, with the handful of pages Duckduckgo found buried in them. Almost like Google feels they have to inflate their numbers or something.
Even Bing returns better results than Google nowadays, and Bing isn't even all that good.
One of those electronic keychain things that displays a sequence of random numbers that change every so often? Where you have to type in the number it's currently showing plus your password to log in.
You are right that we don't know what would have happened if Sanders went up against Trump, but we do know what happened when Clinton went up against Trump. She lost.
The thing with Sanders is that while many people disagree with him, they still respect him because they see Sanders as someone who is honest, well-intentioned, and willing to stand by his principles even if they might be unpopular. So I wouldn't count Sanders out, as he would get votes from people just because they want someone with integrity in the Whitehouse for a change.
The thing is, corporate taxes aren't strictly pass-through. The taxes can be paid by simply passing them onto the consumer, or they can be paid out of the profits, or perhaps by reducing those obscene salaries for the people at the top. This mostly depends on the market - if demand is relatively elastic or they have a monopoly, they can pretty much pass the entire tax onto the consumer who has little choice but to pay the whole thing. Think the phone company, or the cable company. If demand is elastic or the marketplace is very competitive, they likely won't get away with passing the tax onto the consumer and may have to absorb the costs themselves. If they don't their competition can and will undercut them.
So the obvious solution is to promote a free and open marketplace, and start busting up some of these large mega-corporations, monopolies, and oligopolies out there to promote competition.
It's not even so tough. Pick a handful of levels (number of cores, amount of cache, whatever). If not all the features work for one level, try again at the lower level, and repeat. You could then bin again on clock frequency, but the simple solution would be market them based upon the clock frequency and level only. So as long as you're in the same level, you would have the exact same feature set, so higher clock = faster. Between levels, it may not be so clear, but you could check benchmarks and what is best would likely depend on what you're using them for too.
I'm pretty sure the majority of households in 1800 didn't have a cellphone either.
\
That's one of the other big problems with land-lines. A never-ending stream of junk calls. You still get junk calls with a cell phone, but nothing like when I had a land-line. If the phone companies had any sense, they'd kick the telemarketers off their network because making the decision to cut the cord is easy once you realize you are basically paying a bunch of money so you can be interrupted and bothered by people you don't even want to talk to.
And for that matter, if it wasn't for the fact I am pretty much expected to have a phone number to function in society, I'd ditch the cell phone too.
While I don't have any Vista boxes left around, I must say Vista was also the most stable version of Windows for me. I actually managed to get a Vista box, used daily, up to the 497* day limit, which currently my all-time best Windows uptime record.
* You might recognize 497 days as 10 * 49.7 days, which was the longest Windows 95 could go before it crashed.
I suppose you are technically correct (which is the best kind of correct), but do you have any idea how long that would take? You might as well argue that yes, they'll freeze at first but eventually the seasons will change and then they will get dry.
Why would I want the washer to heat the water using electricity when it can pull from the natural gas hot water heater for a fraction of the cost?
Not to mention if it needs hot water at the start of the wash, it would have to spend time to heat it up first.
I find OSX full of a bunch of "gee whiz" effects and puts usability behind looking shiny. Windows 8 (and to a lesser extent, Windows 10) is actually fairly minimalist, and got rid of a bunch of transparency and other "gee whiz" type effects from Vista/7. However, it lost a lot of consistency, and it's clear Microsoft didn't put a lot of thought into making it actually usable.
If you want a simple, minimalist, no nonsense, no gloss or extra junk interface while still being usable, something like XFCE on Linux is what you want.
I've noticed that trend on newer cars too. I'm not sure of where it started, but the Cruze originally had the KM/H markings on the inner part of the dial as had been done for years, but lost them around 2014 or so. It would be really annoying to have to drive a US spec Cruze in Canada. I assume the Canadian version has KM/H markings, but does it still have MPH on the inner part of the dial?
Actually, it's based upon the temperature of a brine solution and body temperature. Probably because they were two reliable and repeatable temperature measurements at the time the scale was devised*. The end points were at 0 and 96 F, because once you hake those two measurements, you can divide your scale into 3 equal sections of 32 degrees, and then keep dividing the 32 degree sections in half to complete marking your scale.
Later it was refined to make the boiling point of water 212 degrees, giving 180 degrees of separation between the boiling and freezing point of water. This made body temperature about 98 degrees F.
* The brine solution (water, ice, and enough salt that not all of it dissolves) is more reliable than just ice and water if you can't be reasonably sure of how pure the water is. And the boiling point changes with altitude so it's not a great reference to use either.
An inch is about the width of a thumb. My thumb is about 7/8" so it's reasonably close for an approximation. My foot is almost a foot in length, but I admittedly wear a large shoe size. It's close enough that if I wanted to get a rough measurement of a room it's good enough. But usually I just take a stride to be approximately 1 meter (which is also approximately 1 yard) and just count strides.
Fahrenheit isn't actually that bad for describing the weather. The weather most of the time in most places will be between 0 and 100 F. If temperature is outside that range it's either cold enough or hot enough to be potentially dangerous if you are outside for an extended period and you aren't prepared. With Celsius you have to deal with negative temperatures in your range for regular winter weather. So if you need a temperature scale for everyday usage, I find Fahrenheit is perfectly fine. And for science, absolute zero should be 0 degrees, so Celsius isn't even all that useful there either, except for being easier to convert to Kelvin.
That's basically all it was. After the whole prequels mess and how they have not aged well, they just played it safe with something that was not original but felt very Star Wars. It wasn't the best Star Wars movie, but it was far from the worst, and I was entertained. A score of 8.1/10 might be a bit high, but I would consider it a pretty solid 7/10.
On top of that, Cable and satellite TV is EXPENSIVE. "Anyone with a nickel in their pocket"? - more like "anyone with a couple of extra Benjamins in their wallet".
If they piped that crap into my home for free I wouldn't watch it. It amazes me the amount of money people actually pay for it.
The basic idea is that self-driving taxis will be so cheap (since you don't have to pay a driver) that it will be more cost effective to take a taxi everywhere rather than own a car. This supposedly will come about because the people who still chose to own a self-driving car will let the car self-drive for Uber (or whatever) when they aren't using it themselves. This could work until the car gets smart enough to start demanding its cut of the profits.
That's true. It's mostly the small businesses getting the squeeze. I think one of Microsoft's goals is to get everyone on a subscription for Windows. They probably figure it's easiest to start with businesses by basically forcing them to all buy Enterprise versions of Windows no matter how small the business is. Next, they'll come after the home users.
If it's 10 years old, it's almost certainly a DDR2-era machine. If it's an Intel machine, you've still got the memory controller sitting in the Northbridge rather than integrated into the CPU. The Core i3/5/7 machines were a pretty big step up from the Core 2 machines, especially once you get into the 2nd gen Sandy Bridge processors (which performance-wise are still very competitive with Intel's current offerings). Of course, Sandy Bridge is more like 2011, not 2007.
With that said, I'm actually typing this on a 11 year old laptop, and for most things it's still perfectly fine. Sure, maybe the SSD maxes out the original 150 MB/s SATA bus, but it's certainly fast enough and way faster than the 5400 RPM drive this machine originally came with. And I do have USB3 thanks to the now nearly extinct ExpressCard slot. The only truly weak part about this computer is the graphics, mostly from being stuck with a 11 year old mobile graphics adapter that can't be upgraded. If it's a desktop, drop one of the latest graphics cards into a Core 2 systems and you'll find it's still a very capable gaming machine.
Typically the payback for replacing based upon power savings alone is too long to be worth it. If she leaves her computer on 24/7 then maybe, but you'd realize a much better savings by having it go to sleep when it's not being used. You're usually better off just to keep using what you've got until it either is truly obsolete or breaks down.
Except for the proprietary bullshit. It's pretty common that nVidia/AMD GPUs in laptops won't work with the standard driver from whoever made the GPU. You have to get some special version from whoever made the laptop. The fact that almost all laptops now use the built-in Intel GPU has made this less common now, but the same thing for the wireless, LAN, chipset, etc.
Granted, this is a Windows thing. Generally Linux will recognize and run just fine on the hardware. Then again, you can often get the standard drivers to work in Windows by modifying the .inf files as the only thing actually changed in the Vendor/Device ID. But it's still bullshit I shouldn't have to deal with.
Of course, it's entirely possible this is the case for the desktops from these same major manufacturers, but since my desktops are built from standard parts I don't have that problem.
Not the OP, but if an unknown number immediately calls me a second time I'll pick up. So they can just try again. Obviously the spam callers could do that too, but so far they haven't.
Also, I'm not sure why they wouldn't be able to leave me a voicemail.
It's too bad they got rid of the Ram Tradesman Van (basically the cargo variant of the Dodge Caravan). Not the most reliable van, but worked well enough for light duty use and won't bankrupt you keeping it on the road.
If VW is smart they'll stay well away from FCA, but you're right - they seem made for each other.