The longer you go, the worse it's going to be. The best thing is to deal with it as soon as possible and get it behind you. If you wait, it makes it look like you're hiding something or biding your time.
You can't get away with it now, but at one time, you probably could have gotten away with giving the flight crew something to stash away with the understanding someone would be on the other end to pick it up.
Again, you can't now [either], but when I worked in computer book publishing and you had a delivery so late it was beyond the "absolutely, positively" and "guaranteed delivery by", you could give it to someone there at the gateway|counter - with the assurance someone would be there to pick it up and it would be stowed for you (no charge). This made it possible to have a book's contents ready inhouse all the way to laid out sent such that an author could get it just a couple of hours again. And when the "blues" came in for inspection - and for those authors who insisted on seeing books in blues, the same arrangement could be done.
This is an understanding.
Two summers ago +/-, the Disney Store put a 3D gold Mickey Mouse on eBay. Reserve price: $750'000. It was guaranteed to have been appraised for $1M
Around the same time: the Minnesota State Fair had a forty-pound, 3D "PDA" (???) built out of butter on display and needed to do something with it when it was done. (I guess these guys never heard of putting it on popcorn instead of the imitation crap used now?) Now, if something has been at the fair for a week, I'm not sure I'd want something available to all of the airborne matter flying around - use your imagination.
There was a reserve price but the highest bidder must not have matched it because once the auction was over, it was restarted and the high bidder from the previous auction made their high auction the opening bid.
We're talking a LOT of trees - not an occasional pile in front of someone's house. We're talking about a piles every hundred yards or so which are probably twenty or thirty feet in diameter and eight or ten feet high. Word's gotten out everywhere there is free mulch.
They're killing trees by the dozens+dozens, hoping they'll only have to build roads one more time - now it's 1x1, it'll be 2x2, eventually 3x3 and stopped.
It's almost as if people go home after work, change their clothes, then hit the mulch piles. The only reason they seem to hit the piles at night during the week is because they're at work. On the weekends, there are no lines, but there are few mulch piles without someone helping themselves. Those at night almost need to put a flare or lighting so no one hits them.
Along the same lines...they're extending one of the most heavily driven roads, from one lane in each direction to at least two [each], several miles' worth. What to do with all of the mulch from buzzing ALL of the tree matter, no matter how big? Leave it unattended. At night & during weekends, people are backing up with cars (trunks open) + trash cans, pickup trucks, rental trucks, etc.
They've made no formal announcement - they're just leaving it alone, watching (and hoping it will) disappear. Prime, Grade A Mulch, freshly ground.... The problem? They aren't getting rid of it fast enough, despite the fact the roadsites are packed at night & weekends.
1) are they trying to get us into the store(s)? (hoping we'll do some business whilst we're there)
2) are they trying to do the public a service (by getting the possible toxic materials out of the dumps?
3) They're hoping (x)% of the materials turned in with have (y%) of redeeming worth, either directly, for sale on eBay, or as a donation to a local school as write-off donation?
The scammee would have gotten more than $80 if it had been a "she" with a painted breast. I'm guessing the reason it was only $80 was because they were looking at a fuzzy picture and were only hoping it was a lady.
it's about f%rking time. There have been plenty of tools which have been developed which permit a global retrieval for nearly all other lookups except for...gosh, NetSol. Who finally held their nuts in a vise and told them to fix it or else? Could it be they've given themselves enough bad press someone said, "Stop, or we're going to whack you for real this time (again)?"
If they're going to chop away a few stars for those things, then they're going to have to knock IE to ** because of security and constant patches. That is, until the Microsoft people send Guido to proofread the newsprint before it's sent and strongarms them into changing it.
Seriously, I'd be interested to see how they'd rate IE is against them, head-to-head-to-head...
The Windows version will be done three months from now. Then Guido, dispatched from the Microsoft office will pay you a "visit" to sell it to them "or else".
As far as Gates' comment goes, it's about like standing waist-deep in a room full of gasoline and pleading for no one to light a match (in a sneaky way - almost claiming it'll ruin anyone who uses it and can't remain compatible with everyone else in the business they communicate with - it'll ruin the business world.
The entire Microsoft legacy is built around selling software (aside from some of the peripheral mouse|keyboards and SideWinder game devices (are they ever going to get around to supporting these again?).
Anyway, Microsoft's biggest fear is not losing money. It's becoming another IBM. Microsoft loves being in the pilot's chair and doing whatever they want to with practically no oversight (except the occasional lawsuit which they make go away). They don't pay dividends on stock (which Ralph Nader has been working on for years) - which provides them with $50B or $60B of ca$h in the bank, let alone the value of outstanding shares. They pretty much can work on whatever they want to, whenever they want to, and for whatever period of time, etc. They have any number of persons (or "IQ Points" as they used to call them, presuming there were "150 IQ Points" for each person (on average); e.g., "We need 3'000 IQ Points for this project." If you follow the common press (and read it tongue-in-cheek), it's obvious they have a lot of things down the road. When you assemble a dozen or two Ph.Ds in an an arcane subject and turn them loose, what could be happening? Certainly nothing now.
Back to Microsoft... IBM. Yes, IBM still has a lot of research, makes a lot of money from selling iron and some of their other OSes, but they don't turn as many people loose with the intentions of wanton freedom for the specific purposes of smothering a market where they have no challenge. If Microsoft were to fall into the same level as IBM, they would still have freedom to a certain degree, but they wouldn't be calling the shots whenever they chose to.
Has Microsoft shown its vulnerability? You betcha. We all know Microsoft almost missed the Internet boat, supposedly striking WHG III during one of his Summer Sabbaticals where he reads and comes up with personal ideas when he returns with great insight as to what should happen next. When the architects of.net were summoned to Mr. Bill's office to explain the purpose of XML and what it could be used for (long-term), guess what? I'll give up what I've one so far and take what's behind "Curtain #2 of Almost Missed Opportunities". Suddenly, things within Micro$soft became "XML is my hammer and the entire world looks nailes to be pounded."
My prediction? This is finally the thing where Microsoft misses the wrong boat and spells the end of Microsoft pounding everyone else as though they were a hammer. They missed the boat because they saw it as a fad which had no chance of passing the real-world chance. "Who (and why) would subscribe to 'free' software? This is ridiculous. In the meantime, we'll continual making software for sale and when they come crawling back to us, we'll be there, passing the hat, and collecting their money."
There's one saving grace: Verizon Suing Ralsky - resolved in October '92 (terms undisclosed, as always - hopefully, it's "do this again, we whack your little pee-pee"):
One of the nation's most prolific purveyors of unsolicited bulk e-mail, or "spam," has been barred from sending messages to Verizon Communications Inc.'s Internet customers under a legal settlement. The settlement, parts of which are secret, means that Verizon's 1.64 million Internet customers in 40 states will no longer receive spam from Alan Ralsky, whose Michigan-based company, Additional Benefits LLC, is considered one of the largest sources of bulk e-mail. It's better than nothing and hopefully can be used as a precedent elsewhere.
I had a lot of material I was going to post, but I pulled it out and will likely send it offline.
One of the things I think people place too much emphasis upon is the "Mine's Bigger!" syndrome. This happens in far too many facets of the workworld: the sweeps for the local news, when they've pulled out all the stops to find the juiciest stories which will make the others envious.
When I wrote most of my initial message, there were a bunch of messages which applied primarly to formatting or things which would be kewl to power users and geeks. That leaves a lot of people out. Send out the best new models for each critic. "This one is really cool and it's got every feature unknown to man, but unless you're Steven Jobs, forget it." Compared with, "You know, the features and options are not quite what the others are, but anyone can use it. Now, which one of those projects would you want to work on? I can guarantee the sales of the latter would be far more than the previous.
Probably one of the biggest things overlooked in the browser et. al market is in the searching mechanism. Unfortunately, far too many services which provide search mechanism have a "mine's bigger" syndrome when it comes to speed. "We serve up 100M requests a day with a minium return of x time.
Who cares? Most of the time a browser or any other search mechanism is involved, the statistics should be on how fast the user is able to find their desired search, not the search they have to enter with an improperly designed interface. Take Google.com with an advanced search. First, that presumes, I'm presenting myself as an advanted user. That means I should be presented with an advanced screen. If that's advanced, there needs to be another level beyond that. Most of the time I have searches, I have to supply dunsel searches, then hack the supplied values in the supplied text box with the results of the text, then rerunning it.
I've got more to say on my soapbox, but I'll send it offlist.
Bottom Line: "Smarter" searching, not only for the occasional searches but for those who are labelled "giants among ants" (which) I am not, by any stretch of the imagination - I just knew I'd have a chance to use that phrase.
I would think there's also the ability to "cook the books" as well.
Everyone likes to cite "Half of all marriages end in divorce." When it's actually, "There are half as many divorces as there are marriages this year."
I'm willing to bet dollars to doughnuts some of the quotes are bent around a bit so they sound better in the press. Book publishers found a way to cook the books rather dramatically within the previous five years ago or so. They found out there were a few key channels used to guesstimate total sales so they started pushing as many shipments through those channels then had them picked back up on the other end and distributed correctly.
All-in-all, I find most of the numbers to fall into the category of this joke:
Two guys were riding a train together and one bet the other he could tell how many sheep were in the field. The settled on the wager and the first guy went, proudly stating his count. The second guy said, "that's incredible! How did you do it?" The first guy said, "I counted all of the legs, then divided by four."
Maybe in speach. I'd say a lot of reasonable people can interpret some German on hardcopy. Not something which would pass for anything difficult, but we could make a decent guess at some things. I'm not disagreeing with Germans having a better advantage over Germans knowning English over vice-versa.
But if you are in a pinch and something appears to be in Finnish or some other distant language, some syntax can be guessed. Again, they'd have the advantage going to English than the inverse, but...
One of the things about the German aspect is English and German are the closest languages [to each other] on most of the language trees I have seen, such as Scientific American.
Kasparov *did* admit to screwing the pooch on his first match vs. the computer: he attempted to determine (or obtain research of) what the "weaknesses" of the software was and attempted to play to that and put too much weight on the analysis instead of playing his own game. Right or wrong, this is what he said in the press.
Tal may not have had as many problems as suggested. One of the issues for the computerized chess is when there are no time limits - grind, grind, grind,...
When they're playing on the clock, it makes a world of difference.
And a very important someone was against the patent system: Ben Franklin. He thought those who discover|model|create things of interest would be sought out by their fans; generally, quality would stand out and things which sucked would be ignored and fall into oblivion.
Slashdot Mirror
...it's going to hurt.
The longer you go, the worse it's going to be. The best thing is to deal with it as soon as possible and get it behind you. If you wait, it makes it look like you're hiding something or biding your time.
That Microsoft slogan is correct!
(It just needs an elliptical clause)
"Do more with less [in your pocket]"
Kind of like:
What's in your wallet?
Nothing. I just bought a PC capable of running Windows XP.
You can't get away with it now, but at one time, you probably could have gotten away with giving the flight crew something to stash away with the understanding someone would be on the other end to pick it up.
Again, you can't now [either], but when I worked in computer book publishing and you had a delivery so late it was beyond the "absolutely, positively" and "guaranteed delivery by", you could give it to someone there at the gateway|counter - with the assurance someone would be there to pick it up and it would be stowed for you (no charge). This made it possible to have a book's contents ready inhouse all the way to laid out sent such that an author could get it just a couple of hours again. And when the "blues" came in for inspection - and for those authors who insisted on seeing books in blues, the same arrangement could be done.
This is an understanding.
Two summers ago +/-, the Disney Store put a 3D gold Mickey Mouse on eBay. Reserve price: $750'000. It was guaranteed to have been appraised for $1M
Around the same time: the Minnesota State Fair had a forty-pound, 3D "PDA" (???) built out of butter on display and needed to do something with it when it was done. (I guess these guys never heard of putting it on popcorn instead of the imitation crap used now?) Now, if something has been at the fair for a week, I'm not sure I'd want something available to all of the airborne matter flying around - use your imagination.
There was a reserve price but the highest bidder must not have matched it because once the auction was over, it was restarted and the high bidder from the previous auction made their high auction the opening bid.
We're talking a LOT of trees - not an occasional pile in front of someone's house. We're talking about a piles every hundred yards or so which are probably twenty or thirty feet in diameter and eight or ten feet high. Word's gotten out everywhere there is free mulch.
They're killing trees by the dozens+dozens, hoping they'll only have to build roads one more time - now it's 1x1, it'll be 2x2, eventually 3x3 and stopped.
It's almost as if people go home after work, change their clothes, then hit the mulch piles. The only reason they seem to hit the piles at night during the week is because they're at work. On the weekends, there are no lines, but there are few mulch piles without someone helping themselves. Those at night almost need to put a flare or lighting so no one hits them.
How long will it be before it's on MAME or on a pinball simulator?
Along the same lines...they're extending one of the most heavily driven roads, from one lane in each direction to at least two [each], several miles' worth. What to do with all of the mulch from buzzing ALL of the tree matter, no matter how big? Leave it unattended. At night & during weekends, people are backing up with cars (trunks open) + trash cans, pickup trucks, rental trucks, etc.
They've made no formal announcement - they're just leaving it alone, watching (and hoping it will) disappear. Prime, Grade A Mulch, freshly ground.... The problem? They aren't getting rid of it fast enough, despite the fact the roadsites are packed at night & weekends.
1) are they trying to get us into the store(s)? (hoping we'll do some business whilst we're there)
2) are they trying to do the public a service (by getting the possible toxic materials out of the dumps?
3) They're hoping (x)% of the materials turned in with have (y%) of redeeming worth, either directly, for sale on eBay, or as a donation to a local school as write-off donation?
"Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do."
-Gallagher
The scammee would have gotten more than $80 if it had been a "she" with a painted breast. I'm guessing the reason it was only $80 was because they were looking at a fuzzy picture and were only hoping it was a lady.
it's about f%rking time. There have been plenty of tools which have been developed which permit a global retrieval for nearly all other lookups except for...gosh, NetSol. Who finally held their nuts in a vise and told them to fix it or else? Could it be they've given themselves enough bad press someone said, "Stop, or we're going to whack you for real this time (again)?"
SP2 Delay?
Bill & Ballmer have seen the light!!!!!
SP2 has been delayed now that Microsoft is going to OpenSource!!!
If they're going to chop away a few stars for those things, then they're going to have to knock IE to ** because of security and constant patches. That is, until the Microsoft people send Guido to proofread the newsprint before it's sent and strongarms them into changing it.
Seriously, I'd be interested to see how they'd rate IE is against them, head-to-head-to-head...
The Windows version will be done three months from now. Then Guido, dispatched from the Microsoft office will pay you a "visit" to sell it to them "or else".
As far as Gates' comment goes, it's about like standing waist-deep in a room full of gasoline and pleading for no one to light a match (in a sneaky way - almost claiming it'll ruin anyone who uses it and can't remain compatible with everyone else in the business they communicate with - it'll ruin the business world.
... IBM. Yes, IBM still has a lot of research, makes a lot of money from selling iron and some of their other OSes, but they don't turn as many people loose with the intentions of wanton freedom for the specific purposes of smothering a market where they have no challenge. If Microsoft were to fall into the same level as IBM, they would still have freedom to a certain degree, but they wouldn't be calling the shots whenever they chose to. .net were summoned to Mr. Bill's office to explain the purpose of XML and what it could be used for (long-term), guess what? I'll give up what I've one so far and take what's behind "Curtain #2 of Almost Missed Opportunities". Suddenly, things within Micro$soft became "XML is my hammer and the entire world looks nailes to be pounded."
The entire Microsoft legacy is built around selling software (aside from some of the peripheral mouse|keyboards and SideWinder game devices (are they ever going to get around to supporting these again?).
Anyway, Microsoft's biggest fear is not losing money. It's becoming another IBM . Microsoft loves being in the pilot's chair and doing whatever they want to with practically no oversight (except the occasional lawsuit which they make go away). They don't pay dividends on stock (which Ralph Nader has been working on for years) - which provides them with $50B or $60B of ca$h in the bank, let alone the value of outstanding shares. They pretty much can work on whatever they want to, whenever they want to, and for whatever period of time, etc. They have any number of persons (or "IQ Points" as they used to call them, presuming there were "150 IQ Points" for each person (on average); e.g., "We need 3'000 IQ Points for this project." If you follow the common press (and read it tongue-in-cheek), it's obvious they have a lot of things down the road. When you assemble a dozen or two Ph.Ds in an an arcane subject and turn them loose, what could be happening? Certainly nothing now.
Back to Microsoft
Has Microsoft shown its vulnerability? You betcha. We all know Microsoft almost missed the Internet boat, supposedly striking WHG III during one of his Summer Sabbaticals where he reads and comes up with personal ideas when he returns with great insight as to what should happen next. When the architects of
My prediction?
This is finally the thing where Microsoft misses the wrong boat and spells the end of Microsoft pounding everyone else as though they were a hammer. They missed the boat because they saw it as a fad which had no chance of passing the real-world chance. "Who (and why) would subscribe to 'free' software? This is ridiculous. In the meantime, we'll continual making software for sale and when they come crawling back to us, we'll be there, passing the hat, and collecting their money."
There's one saving grace: Verizon Suing Ralsky - resolved in October '92 (terms undisclosed, as always - hopefully, it's "do this again, we whack your little pee-pee"):
One of the nation's most prolific purveyors of unsolicited bulk e-mail, or "spam," has been barred from sending messages to Verizon Communications Inc.'s Internet customers under a legal settlement. The settlement, parts of which are secret, means that Verizon's 1.64 million Internet customers in 40 states will no longer receive spam from Alan Ralsky, whose Michigan-based company, Additional Benefits LLC, is considered one of the largest sources of bulk e-mail.
It's better than nothing and hopefully can be used as a precedent elsewhere.
I had a lot of material I was going to post, but I pulled it out and will likely send it offline.
One of the things I think people place too much emphasis upon is the "Mine's Bigger!" syndrome. This happens in far too many facets of the workworld: the sweeps for the local news, when they've pulled out all the stops to find the juiciest stories which will make the others envious.
When I wrote most of my initial message, there were a bunch of messages which applied primarly to formatting or things which would be kewl to power users and geeks. That leaves a lot of people out. Send out the best new models for each critic. "This one is really cool and it's got every feature unknown to man, but unless you're Steven Jobs, forget it." Compared with, "You know, the features and options are not quite what the others are, but anyone can use it. Now, which one of those projects would you want to work on? I can guarantee the sales of the latter would be far more than the previous.
Probably one of the biggest things overlooked in the browser et. al market is in the searching mechanism. Unfortunately, far too many services which provide search mechanism have a "mine's bigger" syndrome when it comes to speed. "We serve up 100M requests a day with a minium return of x time.
Who cares? Most of the time a browser or any other search mechanism is involved, the statistics should be on how fast the user is able to find their desired search, not the search they have to enter with an improperly designed interface. Take Google.com with an advanced search. First, that presumes, I'm presenting myself as an advanted user. That means I should be presented with an advanced screen. If that's advanced, there needs to be another level beyond that. Most of the time I have searches, I have to supply dunsel searches, then hack the supplied values in the supplied text box with the results of the text, then rerunning it.
I've got more to say on my soapbox, but I'll send it offlist.
Bottom Line: "Smarter" searching, not only for the occasional searches but for those who are labelled "giants among ants" (which) I am not, by any stretch of the imagination - I just knew I'd have a chance to use that phrase.
I would think there's also the ability to "cook the books" as well.
Everyone likes to cite "Half of all marriages end in divorce." When it's actually, "There are half as many divorces as there are marriages this year."
I'm willing to bet dollars to doughnuts some of the quotes are bent around a bit so they sound better in the press. Book publishers found a way to cook the books rather dramatically within the previous five years ago or so. They found out there were a few key channels used to guesstimate total sales so they started pushing as many shipments through those channels then had them picked back up on the other end and distributed correctly.
All-in-all, I find most of the numbers to fall into the category of this joke:
Two guys were riding a train together and one bet the other he could tell how many sheep were in the field. The settled on the wager and the first guy went, proudly stating his count. The second guy said, "that's incredible! How did you do it?" The first guy said, "I counted all of the legs, then divided by four."
Maybe in speach. I'd say a lot of reasonable people can interpret some German on hardcopy. Not something which would pass for anything difficult, but we could make a decent guess at some things. I'm not disagreeing with Germans having a better advantage over Germans knowning English over vice-versa.
But if you are in a pinch and something appears to be in Finnish or some other distant language, some syntax can be guessed. Again, they'd have the advantage going to English than the inverse, but...
One of the things about the German aspect is English and German are the closest languages [to each other] on most of the language trees I have seen, such as Scientific American.
c/Profit!/Get Laid/
Kasparov *did* admit to screwing the pooch on his first match vs. the computer: he attempted to determine (or obtain research of) what the "weaknesses" of the software was and attempted to play to that and put too much weight on the analysis instead of playing his own game. Right or wrong, this is what he said in the press.
Tal may not have had as many problems as suggested. One of the issues for the computerized chess is when there are no time limits - grind, grind, grind, ...
When they're playing on the clock, it makes a world of difference.
"One of the competing teams"? Tell the truth. It was Microsoft, announcing their patent of the day.
And a very important someone was against the patent system: Ben Franklin. He thought those who discover|model|create things of interest would be sought out by their fans; generally, quality would stand out and things which sucked would be ignored and fall into oblivion.
look at the patent number...upside down: 666...