Now maybe I can get some sleep. Have you ever heard the howling these things make. Thankfully, they didn't run the wind tunnels nearly as often as the P-3s rattled my house.
Just round prices and don't penalize debit cards
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 1
I've often posited the strategy of rounding prices to the nearest 5 or 10 cent (or even dollar). Most people assume merchants would always rount up, but I argue that any pennies lost rounding down would be more than offset by pennies gained rounding up and labor costs saved by not counting pennies on every transaction. Of course the sales-tax strategy in most states makes the practice exceeding difficult to implement.
I also question the practice of penalizing customers for using debit cards. These charges often range from 25 cents to 2 dollars. My local video store charges a $1 surcharge when renting a $3 video with an ATM card. Until banks and merchants realize that electronic transactions save labor costs, consumers will avoid paying for small purchased with debit cards and my pants will still be weighed down with a pocket full of change.
Agreed. We would spend hours and days immersed in Infocom games competing to see who solved them first. "Deadline" was my favorite, probably because it was modelled on physical reality (no magic potions, spells, etc). It relied on deduction, logic, problem solving and interpreting the evidence.
You are standing at the side of an east-west road. A footpath to the north disappears into a wooded area. There is a mailbox here.
Future shuttle missions may only carry "safe" species to avoid the possibility of introduced species habitat contamination in the event of a vehicle crash.
Dang! My cane toad and kudzu ISS experiment has just been scrapped.
It is a far stretch to label these as massage robots. A more appropriate term would be TickleBots. They apply no real therapeutic muscle stimulation. Their sensations are described as "light tickling" and "fondling".
Although, mapping the contours of the body is interesting. Combine that with an expert system and a robotic head that can apply friction, point pressure, rolling and spreading motions with various degrees of pressure and you have a real massage robot. Add head, cold, and therapeutic EMS and you could put me out of business. (Wait, I'm already out of business...)
Although IANAL, would it be possible to file an injunction blocking the sale of Win 2K and WinXP, Linux, Mac OS X, all Firewall and VPN software, and all hardware routers and firewalls that use NAT? Given the preposterousness of halting the sale and ownership of most computing resources within the state, the legislature might consider revoking Super-DCMA.
Re:Why does Fox have to cancel all its good shows?
on
Firefly Coming to DVD
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Maybe Fox will release Andy Richter Controls the Universe on DVD, so we can finally see all of the unaired episodes. There were 3 or 4 episodes from last year that never aired, as well as 6 or so from this year that were judged too smart and funny for public consumption.
Actually, a local sporting goods chain has been advertising for programmers that are "experts" in Cobol, SQL Server, VB, and IIS to move a legacy system from mainframe to Windows. I taped a 10 foot pole to another 10 foot pole, but still wouldn't touch it.
Building 19 (and all its fractional branches scattered throughout the Boston area) would sell the most bizaar stuff - mostly insurance salvage. When the windows started popping out of the John Hancock tower in Boston and crashing to the street below, they would be replaced with 4x8 sheets of plywood. After a while, the Hancock tower looked like it had some kind of plywood pox. Eventually it was found that the windows were not up to spec and all needed to be replaced. Shortly thereafter, Bldg 19 advertised 4x8 glass table tops. They weren't allowed to say where they got the plate glass, but they did say it would look much better as your dining room table than a sheet of plywood. That was 12 or 15 years ago, but I still laugh my ass off when I think about it.
Films portray the lives of IT personel as accurately as they portray the lives of cops, spies, and soldiers. After 20 years writing software, I know very few techno geeks with $200,000 worth of hardware in their living room, infinite broadband, email/chat clients that "type" out messages at 110 baud, and the ability to crack secure government sites in 15 seconds.
I laughed my ass off watching Sanda Bullock pretend to be a geek in "The Net". I also laughed my ass off watching "Office Space", then I cried because it too accuately described my life - right down to smashing a fax machine from hell with 25 pounds worth of Microsoft developer documentation.
The article complains that burning CD-Rs on-demand is labor intensive. I don't think it needs to be, given a small amount of capital investment. The company I work for shipped its own software on CD-R (got tired of shredding pallets of CDs every time we made a dot release). At first, we used a typical Young Minds burner which was quite labor intensive. Currently we have a much more automated machine that takes spools of 100 CD-Rs, burns them and automatically prints a label on the disk using ink-jet technology.
I can imagine easily setting up a system that takes web orders, burns a CD-R with printed label-side, concurrently prints liner notes (rather than photocopy), sleeve graphics,
and a mailing label. The labor consists of assembling the liner notes, sleeve, disc and packaging for shipment.
This model faces many of the same hurdles and benefits that the on-demand print model does for book publishing. No book need be out of print and revisions would be [relatively] painless. Unfortunately, most of the on-demand print companies have gone bust in the last couple of years before the consumer even had a chance to sample the product.
On-demand reproduction technologies tend to shift the costs and responsibility for replication away from the publisher and closer to the consumer. The article gives the example of reproduction at retail-outlets (failed). The extreme case puts reproduction completely in the hands of the consumer. The publishers are lured be the desire to sell something without actually having to manufacture material goods, but horrified with the thought that the consumer may then reproduce the material in whatever manner/media the consumer sees fit: computer, CD player, portable music player, digital home music library, car audio, home video soundtrack, Braille, eBook,... OMG!
> Cocoa is Objective-C which (unlike C++) relies on a
> runtime environment for things such as message passing
> and polymorphism. Also note that Objective-C winds up
> getting preprocessed into plain C code before it ever gets
> compiled. It is no more or less native than C.
Objective-C is no longer translated into C [by gcc], so many of its concepts, including polymorphism, are determined at compile time. I have found that Objective-C provides a happy balance between all of the dynamic binding benefits of Java and most of the speed of compiled C++ apps. I also feel that the Cocoa Frameworks (originally designed by NeXT) are cleaner, more consistent, and more well though-out designs than Sun's Java classes, Microsoft's random mutations, or Apple's original toolbox.
Slashdot Mirror
Now maybe I can get some sleep. Have you ever heard the howling these things make. Thankfully, they didn't run the wind tunnels nearly as often as the P-3s rattled my house.
I've often posited the strategy of rounding prices to the nearest 5 or 10 cent (or even dollar). Most people assume merchants would always rount up, but I argue that any pennies lost rounding down would be more than offset by pennies gained rounding up and labor costs saved by not counting pennies on every transaction. Of course the sales-tax strategy in most states makes the practice exceeding difficult to implement.
I also question the practice of penalizing customers for using debit cards. These charges often range from 25 cents to 2 dollars. My local video store charges a $1 surcharge when renting a $3 video with an ATM card. Until banks and merchants realize that electronic transactions save labor costs, consumers will avoid paying for small purchased with debit cards and my pants will still be weighed down with a pocket full of change.
Agreed. We would spend hours and days immersed in Infocom games competing to see who solved them first. "Deadline" was my favorite, probably because it was modelled on physical reality (no magic potions, spells, etc). It relied on deduction, logic, problem solving and interpreting the evidence.
You are standing at the side of an east-west road. A footpath to the north disappears into a wooded area. There is a mailbox here.
"Space Worms Invade Texas - Killer Bees Concerned"
Future shuttle missions may only carry "safe" species to avoid the possibility of introduced species habitat contamination in the event of a vehicle crash.
Dang! My cane toad and kudzu ISS experiment has just been scrapped.
Actually, you want RsyncX. It has a nice GUI front end, understands MacOS resource forks, and still uses rsync on the back end.
It is a far stretch to label these as massage robots. A more appropriate term would be TickleBots. They apply no real therapeutic muscle stimulation. Their sensations are described as "light tickling" and "fondling".
Although, mapping the contours of the body is interesting. Combine that with an expert system and a robotic head that can apply friction, point pressure, rolling and spreading motions with various degrees of pressure and you have a real massage robot. Add head, cold, and therapeutic EMS and you could put me out of business. (Wait, I'm already out of business...)
Brett Johnson CMT
Although IANAL, would it be possible to file an injunction blocking the sale of Win 2K and WinXP, Linux, Mac OS X, all Firewall and VPN software, and all hardware routers and firewalls that use NAT? Given the preposterousness of halting the sale and ownership of most computing resources within the state, the legislature might consider revoking Super-DCMA.
Maybe Fox will release Andy Richter Controls the Universe on DVD, so we can finally see all of the unaired episodes. There were 3 or 4 episodes from last year that never aired, as well as 6 or so from this year that were judged too smart and funny for public consumption.
Actually, a local sporting goods chain has been advertising for programmers that are "experts" in Cobol, SQL Server, VB, and IIS to move a legacy system from mainframe to Windows. I taped a 10 foot pole to another 10 foot pole, but still wouldn't touch it.
Building 19 (and all its fractional branches scattered throughout the Boston area) would sell the most bizaar stuff - mostly insurance salvage. When the windows started popping out of the John Hancock tower in Boston and crashing to the street below, they would be replaced with 4x8 sheets of plywood. After a while, the Hancock tower looked like it had some kind of plywood pox. Eventually it was found that the windows were not up to spec and all needed to be replaced. Shortly thereafter, Bldg 19 advertised 4x8 glass table tops. They weren't allowed to say where they got the plate glass, but they did say it would look much better as your dining room table than a sheet of plywood. That was 12 or 15 years ago, but I still laugh my ass off when I think about it.
Films portray the lives of IT personel as accurately as they portray the lives of cops, spies, and soldiers. After 20 years writing software, I know very few techno geeks with $200,000 worth of hardware in their living room, infinite broadband, email/chat clients that "type" out messages at 110 baud, and the ability to crack secure government sites in 15 seconds.
I laughed my ass off watching Sanda Bullock pretend to be a geek in "The Net". I also laughed my ass off watching "Office Space", then I cried because it too accuately described my life - right down to smashing a fax machine from hell with 25 pounds worth of Microsoft developer documentation.
The article complains that burning CD-Rs on-demand is labor intensive. I don't think it needs to be, given a small amount of capital investment. The company I work for shipped its own software on CD-R (got tired of shredding pallets of CDs every time we made a dot release). At first, we used a typical Young Minds burner which was quite labor intensive. Currently we have a much more automated machine that takes spools of 100 CD-Rs, burns them and automatically prints a label on the disk using ink-jet technology.
... OMG!
I can imagine easily setting up a system that takes web orders, burns a CD-R with printed label-side, concurrently prints liner notes (rather than photocopy), sleeve graphics, and a mailing label. The labor consists of assembling the liner notes, sleeve, disc and packaging for shipment.
This model faces many of the same hurdles and benefits that the on-demand print model does for book publishing. No book need be out of print and revisions would be [relatively] painless. Unfortunately, most of the on-demand print companies have gone bust in the last couple of years before the consumer even had a chance to sample the product.
On-demand reproduction technologies tend to shift the costs and responsibility for replication away from the publisher and closer to the consumer. The article gives the example of reproduction at retail-outlets (failed). The extreme case puts reproduction completely in the hands of the consumer. The publishers are lured be the desire to sell something without actually having to manufacture material goods, but horrified with the thought that the consumer may then reproduce the material in whatever manner/media the consumer sees fit: computer, CD player, portable music player, digital home music library, car audio, home video soundtrack, Braille, eBook,
> Cocoa is Objective-C which (unlike C++) relies on a
> runtime environment for things such as message passing
> and polymorphism. Also note that Objective-C winds up
> getting preprocessed into plain C code before it ever gets
> compiled. It is no more or less native than C.
Objective-C is no longer translated into C [by gcc], so many of its concepts, including polymorphism, are determined at compile time. I have found that Objective-C provides a happy balance between all of the dynamic binding benefits of Java and most of the speed of compiled C++ apps. I also feel that the Cocoa Frameworks (originally designed by NeXT) are cleaner, more consistent, and more well though-out designs than Sun's Java classes, Microsoft's random mutations, or Apple's original toolbox.