Well, I pointedly said that the loser had almost 2/3 of the population against him -- that "almost" is the 35.31% that you cite. I didn't say that Calderon had a real mandate; almost 2/3 of the population voted against him, too. I'm guilty of deception by omision, on the surface. But knowing Mexican politics, I'm not really deceptive. The other, multiple parties gained their combined share of about 1/3 of the vote, too. The PRI -- the monopolistic, semi-dictatorship that ruled the country for 71 years gained over 20%. They're a "moderate" party by Mexican standards, and although they're evil, their certainly not populist-leftist evil, and if they had to do it over again, the vast majority would choose the slight-right than the extreme, populist left. No cite, just anecdotal evidence, and no one who thinks likes a populist, anywhere in the world (that's a fair statement, right?). The other roughly 8% went to the various "wacko" parties that no one really takes seriously, although it somewhat concerns me that 8% of the voting populace would throw their votes away.
For the record, I'm going to repeat this just because I got reamed for being lazy: You shouldn't say just "Obrador," because that's the matronymic. It's "Lopez Obrador," or simply "Lopez." Because he wants to appeal to the poor, non-modern, uneducated people of Mexico, he uses the traditional patronymic-matronymic construction. The modern people, like Fox and Calderon, publicly stick to just the patronymic surname, although you'll often see the press identify them with both.
When I got my Quicksilver a few years ago, it came with the Apple Pro Mouse. It was a single-click, press-the-whole-damn-mouse-body-down-to-click mouse. I never really gave it a chance, because I'd always used two-button mice with my Macs -- well, ever since 8.0 or 8.1 when Ctrl-Click was introduced, and after-market mice provided a driver to make the right-button work. As a Windows user even then, I recognized the usefulness of a right-clickable mouse. So the Mighty Mouse was replaced with a generic Windows mouse; probably a Logitech that was *also* sold as a Mac version for $20 extra back in the day...
My non-Bluetooth Mighty Mouse that came with my Intel iMac was destined for the same fate, but I gave it a chance. It's got a scroll ball, and even though I don't have need for much horizontal scrolling personally, it really is an ingenious feature. Clicking anywhere results in the whole mouse being depressed, but it's incredibly good at *knowing* where I press. Left-click, middle-click, and even right click, although Apple's novice philosophy means they don't work by default and you've got to activate them in the Control Panel.
One slight complaint just to show I'm not a little fan-boy: I'm left handed, and for me the right-click isn't quite sensitive enough, meaning that I have to click further right than I would on a mouse with physical buttons. I'm getting used to it, but I have to stretch compared to my other Mac and Windows mice.
The thing is, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the goverment works and is *supposed* to work. Your vote is designed NOT to vote for the president. Even now you don't have a 1:280000000 voice for the choice; it's an illusion, and one that's not serving you well. That's not meant as a flame; way too much of our population suffers the same illusion.
YOU DON'T VOTE FOR PRESIDENT. That's not screaming; I'm just too lazy to use em tags. States determine how electors are assigned, and it's as simple as that. Your involvement is only indirect.
As said in way too many other posts here, the level of abstraction helps prevent stupid, flavor-of-day ideas from pervading our federal government. All we need is Hugo Chavez to appeal to misguided people at the last minute.
I was in Mexico on election day. I was espousing the idea to my inlaws there that none of their current political mess would have happened if only their federal system were *truly* federal and they had a well-working electoral college system similar to our own.
There's STILL no declared presidential winner there, and the losing idiot is still calling for marches, making unsubstantiated accusations, and not giving the legitimate government there a chance to function and do its job. He claims "the will of the people will be heard," forgetting the fact that almost 2/3 of the population were intelligent enough to vote *against* him.
(This is an election that was declared clean by European observes, lest anyone accuse the USA of interefence.)
Hell, I'm from a crappy, wrong colored state that I want to be the other color. As a constant loser, I wish we had a Maine type system. Were I a constant winner, I'd probably be more than happy. It's easy to criticize when you're the loser. The easy, most fair, non-partisan answer is to keep everything local or as local as you can. Hence states can do whatever the hell they want to, and even though I'm not happy with how my state does it while I'm losing, it beats a centralized system.
I used eBay when I want bargains. Why the hell should I pay retail plus inflated shipping and handling when I can get my next MacBook right from the Apple store?
But because everyone treats eBay as a regular marketplace, it's getting a lot tougher for the bargain hunter. People don't know how to effectively use their max bid price. Or people are content paying retail or over even though the reserve price was very, very nice discount!
Now I snipe using an online sniping service to ensure that I get a bargain. That way I'm *not* increasing the attraction to other potential bidders, and I'm not driving up the price over the amount I want to pay for it -- and notice the subtle difference between "what it's worth" and "what I'm willing to pay in this environment." If we all end up sniping, then we're simply turning eBay into a closed auction (silent auction?) -- you know, the other legitimate type of auction where you put in a sealed bid and whoever wins it wins it. Gosh, I wish there were an auction style for that on eBay!!!
Oh, I used to not snipe, and I would set my maximum price the "proper" way. It usually provoke a bidding war amongst the others, or just plain stupid bidding, such as the moron whose name is in the bid history six times in a row as he increases his maximum until he just beats my bid. This brings up another advantage to sniping...
If I end up beating such moron by $1, then I've overspent what I really *needed* to spend, just as bad as if it were a real shill bid. If the jerk were serious, why the hell did he drive everything up $1 at a time? Granted, I was willing to pay as much, but I didn't HAVE to. Sniping helps alleviate that, too.
Isn't that a public service? Wouldn't the coffee shop have to complain to the dude first? I've driven into coffee shops' parking lots while on the road *specifically* to use their WiFi. It's an open network. Not just an unsecured network because granny doesn't know how to program her Linksys, but an intentionally open network. Sure, it's not "cool" to be a leech, but it's not specifically prohibited.
And what does being a sex offender have to do with anything?
There's a huge injustice in robotics by equating industrial machinery with autonomous, intelligent "beings" (for lack of a better word) that we've dreamt about since childhood.
Industrial robots are just industrial machines. Yeah, they're exceptionally complicated machines, but in the end the only thing they do is a lot of math in order to put their tool at position XYZ at a certail roll, pitch, and yaw. There's a LOT of associated controls hardware, but this is the same technology that any other industrial equipment uses. There's nothing fundamentally different about a spot welding gun that's mounted on a robot end effector versus one mounted on a pedastal, for example. There's no awareness for a robot; any type of sensing uses already-existing controls hardware. The robot is a PLC that does math. Okay, admittedly there's one useful, built-in safety feature of most robots -- collision detection. It works by sensing current rampup on the drive system that will happen if there's unexpected resistance to movement. It saves lives, but in the end, it's still just standard industrial controls.
In 100% of cases (in my company) people are injured and/or die due to not following the safety rules. We follow OSHA requirements, and pay OSHA fines, and fix the problem. What about exporting jobs to Mexico so we don't have to follow the rules? You know what? We still follow OSHA rules, and we end up with safer plants -- you can fire repetitive rule breakers without a committeeman making stupid justifications for dangerous behavior.
If you apply the laws of robotics to a thinking robot in an industrial setting, you'll just end up with robots that want to go on strike!
I have several, legal licenses to XP. Yet, I *always* use a borrowed, corporate serial number. Why? No activation. Why do I care? Aside from the principals involved, my XPs always run in virtual environments -- VirtualPC, VMWare Workstation, and of late Parallels Workstation. I've not tried Bochs, etc.
I'm not trying to debate the licensing (I know I'm supposed to use my own numbers; I don't care, though) or the multiple machine issues (I've got all the licenses I need legally; convenience is the issue). Instead I bring questions:
How does activation work in a virtual environment on multiple, physical machines? Sure, the virtual machine "footprint" is going to change between using VMWare, VPC, and Parallels. But what bearing does the host machine have on it? If I take my legally activated product (the non-corporate version) disk image from physical machine to physical machine, is there a tie to the real, physiscal hardware? As far as I know, processor ID, MAC address, and so on are all virtualized, but is there something else in the activation checksum that these commercial VM solutions tie to the physical hardware?
I don't know enough about the license (who really does?); to me the "machine" is the disk image, so I have no moral qualms about moving it from physical machine to physical machine as long as they're not used at the same time (etc. etc.).
Oh, so why don't I try it? I just don't want to "burn up" any of my serial numbers. Meaning, invalidate them because now I look like I've pirated the number because I'm installing onto too many machine. VMWare for Windows and Linux, VPC for Mac and Windows, Parellels for Mac/Linux/Windows... I'm a big time pirate trying to install a single serial on *seven* computers, ya know?
"Real life Dilbert" certainly exists, but remember that Dilbert is an exaggerated comic strip. You'll see EVERYTHING in the civilian workplace, but certainly not in the concentration that appears in a cartoon. I work for a "failing" Fortune 10 (or so) company; if we conducted ourselves like Dilbert every day and in every aspect of our business, we'd already be non-existant.
Well... any time I get a locked spreadsheet, I hit Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-N, Ctrl-V, and work from there. Not a whole lot of protection.
Granted, the problem is that most of people that portend to develop "applications" with Excel don't know which cells to protect and not protect, causing my irritation with their stupid lock policies. This kind of harkens back to the RTFA wherein users break these so-called applications. I'm sorry -- write your application in Delphi or Cocoa; a spreadsheet is a document and maleable.
I'm non-IT, and I'm the only person that understands the Virtues of Access (oh how I wish there were a Mac version). Spreadsheets are spreadsheets, damn it -- not an application rapid development system. If you need an application, build an application. I have the same lack of respect for Excel "applications" as I do VB applications (or in my case, "RealBasic" applications).
The only program that I use F1 for! There are more formulae than a real programming language. I really do credit Microsoft for Excel, despite the fact that I'm a Mac user.;-)
You're right in that respect. I'll just comment that some of the absolute worst traffic congestion I've ever experienced on a regular, predictible basis was in the same place where one of the best public transit systems exists: the Hanau-Frankfurt-Wiessbaden area in Germany! (Yeah, yeah, imagine if the public transport *didn't* exist.)
In places where public transportation exists, businesses are planned with that in mind. Hence once the basic infrastructure is in place, you find yourself NOT having to run trunk-lines and extension-lines to every imaginable part of the city and suburban area. Business sticks to routes of communication. To add a rail system AFTER the fact is a much more intensive proposition, because business has grown around the existing, omnipresent network of universal roads. Lack of advanced, early planning has pretty much made practical, useful, social implementation impossible in the present time, at least until money grows on trees or gasoline hits $15/gallon.
You could add a half-assed system, though. And then people like me (i.e., *willing* to use clean, safe, public transport) still have end terminal problems. Would I drive to the train station in Mt. Clemens, and then keep a second car at the train station in Dearborn to drive to work? Because we don't have the initial infrastructure work locations weren't planned around potential train routes. It's one thing to expect to walk 200 meters, but 1.5km is too much to ask in a Detroit winter.
Worse, as a social program such an endeavor would probably be set up for the middle class who commutes from (say) Farmington Hills (out there a ways) to Detroit with terminals at important locations and thus avoid the end terminal transportation problems. I work for a big company, so I'd probably have a good chance of having a station close to work. But what about the poor to lower middle class? There's not a whole lot of social equity and this actually pushes cheaper, older, less fuel efficient cars onto the roads.
For people that live in big cities, this isn't "just" a city problem; SE Michigan is an entire friggin' region - think of a relatively low 5.5 million population spread out across nine entire counties. Transportation management is significantly different than 10 million people on a tiny, little island;-)
We don't believe in HOV lanes because we all pay the same amount of taxes! I pity those states that have HOV lanes -- they're completely empty and unused (relatively speaking) whereas the congestion would be relieved by adding the extra lane. Not smart traffic engineering, but then again the point isn't traffic engineering but social engineering. Also we in Michigan don't have those stupid toll roads. Granted, our road conditions are worse than average. All in all, I've driven all over the country, and Detroit really does have one of the most intelligently designed freeway systems. Gridlock isn't as bad as in a lot of other places. Additionally the major surface streets have "Michigan lefts" that ease a lot of congestion, and Oakland and Macomb counties have been great at pioneering modern roundabouts (not those finicky old traffic circles that cause congestions).
I try to work 6 am to 2:30 pm, and there's no traffic to speak of from Mt. Clemens to Dearborn through the city. When someone schedules a later afternoon meeting, though, that kind of stings.
Moreso, does it matter if global warming is happening or not? We can't just arrogantly try to keep the world exactly as it is today. [i]That's[/i] what's unnatural.
Climatic change is a fact of this planet, and it's been happening for millions and millions of years.
Economically, it's better to prepare for the change (whatever it ends up being) than to foolishly try to prevent change or even steer change to some "ideal" that's really quite impossible to define. Nature will do what nature's always done as well. Species will go extinct. New species will replace them. Ecology will change. Geography can change.
This is all mother nature or God's will or the result of atoms bouncing off other atoms or whatever you believe.
Now before I'm flamed, I'll offer this: sure, that's not a justification to be wasteful. But then if you accuse me of being wasteful or hurting the third world or whatnot, then what's your real beef?
Fair enough. As I said in another post, I should have said "is better for me."
For me, here's why:
o 3 ea. XBox (used) costs the same as a single Mini (yeah, used)-- bedroom, living room, rec room. o Dedicated media program that plays every format. Basically anything MPlayer will touch. FrontRow will only play what QT can play. On the plus side, for a lot of people that means their iTunes store purchases probably, but no concern for me, even though I can't play them. o My backend is more expensive than a single el Gato whatever, but if you consider my DVB and 2 ea. DV 500's, that's a total of 5 El Gatos and I'm sure that my Knoppmyth backend is then competetive. o It links well to iTunes on my Quicksilver when it's running, or just via SMB even when it's not. Okay, I guess FrontRow does the same. o Ditto for iPhoto. o Does FrontRow open and play DVD images? I honestly don't know. XBMC does. I've copied all of my DVD's to the server now. I don't count that as setup time;-) o FrontRow will have an advantage when it comes to DRM. But I'll find ways around DRM. o It plays XBox games! o It plays all of the emulators, too -- even though, yeah, the Mini will, but as big a Mac fan as I am, I've never played a Mac game without a mouse and keyboard. Are there bona fide joysticks for a Mac that would work for a media center playing games?
I'm on a Quicksilver now -- it's my 7th Mac since 1990. I'm not out to hurt the Mini. But for a media center and for me, the XBox is much more elegant solution (paired with my backend). In truth, it comes down to SOFTWARE much more than the HARDWARE; well, that and price. As a computer, the Mini wins. But feature for feature, we're really comparing FrontRow with XBMC, I think.
Well.... XBMC by itself really needs something to provide the media. Apparently the Mini does too - it's only got a 120GB drive as a BTO option, and is 80GB standard. My "monster media" server just happens to feed my XBMC, the same as my Quicksilver Mac with its massive internal storage would feed my Mini if I though that that were the better route.
Here's the deal on modding the XBox: you burn a DVD in Toast, boot it on the XBox, and you're modded. Of course, I'm not "in the scene" so there was a learning curve to this. I bought a mod chip, installed it successfully, ignored the XBox as an XBox, played with Xebian for a while, and then reflashed the mod chip and restored the XBox when I learned about XBMC. As it is now, I could buy the latest version non-360 XBox off the shelf at Best Buy, and soft-mod it in five minutes. There's no leet hacking there; the leet hacker's the guy that did all the work; I'm just a leech.
The difference for the non-geek, of course, is that a Mini doesn't need all this silliness to work. In that it's a Mac, it "just works." Hell, I'm a geek, and it was still a big learning curve to figure out that I can easily soft mod an Xbox (although in "the scene" a softmodder is apparently a lamer [do they still say "lamer"?]).
In the subject line, I should have appended more carefully: "for me."
Yeah, but it also compared with XP Media Center edition. I'm steering away from the "rest of the world" and the story. This is/.; XBMC's probably a better choice for everyone here. There are things that we want to do (in general) that the Mini or Tivo don't offer.
FWIW, my "leet" hacking skills consisted of burning the softmod hack ISO using Toast on my non-Mini Mac and booting from said disk. Having done this for THREE refurbished XBoxes, there's another advantage -- they cost the same as a single, used PPC Mini.
I'm not trying to say they're better all purpose computers than a Mini; I am a Mac guy after all. I'm just saying that for sheer elegance the XBox is more capable than the Mini. Obviously this is all software, so it's not even really an XBox vs Mac Mini argument but an XBMC versus FrontRow (or Tivo) argument.
I didn't say I was in the United States, now, did I?
Oh, wait . I am! Damn it to hell!
Actually it would only be a violation of the DMCA if I broke the technological measure to get around copyright. Hell, you can download Xbox ISO's that'll work on virgin Xboxes without needing a hacked box. I think I'm okay as far as the DMCA for hacking my box, since it's not for that purpose. *But* I could probably get in trouble if anyone thought that maybe I was using an Xbox development kit for compiling XBMC that may not be completely legal...
My hacked, Xbox that is. I'm a Mac owner, and a proud one at at. I tell most people I know that ask for advice to get a Mac (they're not computer geeks, or they'd not be asking me for advice, you see). I was seriously consider an Intel Mini core duo to replace my QuickSilver, but I think I'll wait and see what the new PowerMac replacement has to offer first.
So despite all of that, my hacked Xbox with XBMC is bounds and bound beyond what the Mini can do. *Maybe* the only advantage I can see for the Mini is a local PVR connection. Poor me is relegated to using a five-tuner Knoppmyth box on the backend and using xbmcmythtv on the Xbox. Okay, maybe the Mini can do HD; that's not a concern for me (yet).
We've got 20 MB of email storage space. If I carefully clean my mailbox, move my sent items, and then go on vacation more than a couple of days, I'm blocked out; I'll miss lots of important stuff when I get back. Sometimes it's full over the course of a weekend -- our vendors just assume that this is the 21st century and 8MB PowerPoint presentations (as a container for photographs, of course) are no big deal. It's a shame I have to give out my gmail address to get some things, especially when my areas of responsibility are Latin America and I can't just drive there to take a look at a problem.
So the details you were looking for:
Windows XP (for most of us, some legacy Win2K boxes out there). Outlook -- I just got the corporate Office 2003 load today, but there's still a lot of XP and 2000 loads out there. Exchange server (of course) -- don't know the version. Industry -- automobiles (not the "auto biz"; we build and sell automobiles; we're big). Employees -- Many, many, many, many thousands.
Aside from the mailbox size limit (that's 20MB of server space including calendaring and contacts) there's no expiry or anything of messages. You can leave them there forever as long as your NT ID is active in the company. We use the PST feature on our local hard drives, and *I* run a backup script everyone night against company policy to make sure it (and all of my documents) are backed up on our private network drives. That's not the non-policy part; we're supposedly forbidden from having PST's on our personal network drives (and MP3 and photos and installers and non-business stuff). We get email warnings all the time warning that our server is low on space and to please clean up.
My PST (yeah, I only keep one) is about a gig, and I clean it regularly, especially for old attachments. There's *way* to much to do a thorough cleaning of non-important stuff (I trash it as I come across it), but there's way too much stuff that I'll need to reference in the future just to trash it all. I would be unmanageable if it weren't for Google Desktop Search (and the fact that I got an exception to have an unpolicied machine to install it).
Aside from needing to send and receive large attachments (this is the car biz), I have lots and lots of business contacts, and I don't have time to transcribe them all perfectly into Outlooks contacts, so I like to scan them in and store the business card with the contact. Of course since I want universal access to my contacts, I can't store these in my PST. Additionally I want to store certain attachments in my calendar appointments. I'm smart enough to delete them later, but a lot of my colleagues wonder why empty inboxes and sent items still have them at 18MB of mailbox usage.
If I had gigs and gigs of space, I might be tempted to use it all, and I can see that being a problem, especially in a company our size. The current 20MB just plain sucks, though, and I don't see why a happy medium of maybe 1/2 a gig couldn't be accomodated. Hell, I'd be 400% happier with just a 100% increase in space.
This isn't a jammer. Jammers jam, meaning that they transmit or broadcast competing radio signals that effectively wash out the signal of interest. Blocking a signal is NOT jamming, and there are no prohibitions in any US law that I've ever seen (I've looked) that govern the blocking of signals.
Subitles are very important to my application. I've never gotten it to work with as diverse a format of subtitles as does mplayer or VNC. What's really cool about either of those is they'll work with ISO DVD images. Hence my XBMC/MythTV combination will continue to rule the roost. Yeah, it means that I have to use an icky Microsoft Xbox, but (1) they were bought used so I only miniscually affect their resale value; (2) the integration is supurb -- XBMC is almost commercial quality; (3) It works decently enough with MythTV backend, and I keep meaning to get involved with that project to make it even better; (4) Emulation is actually pretty cool as far as playing old video game systems (and yes, I'm aware of the legal implications of doing so).
I'd love a Mac solution, but the cost is still prohibitive and I don't think the integration is there yet. I'd love to see a dedicated, OPEN, EXTENSIBLE DVR from Apple, though.
All the same, this may be the machine I get to replace my Quicksilver. It'll kind of suck using an external hard drive, but the price is right.
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Well, I pointedly said that the loser had almost 2/3 of the population against him -- that "almost" is the 35.31% that you cite. I didn't say that Calderon had a real mandate; almost 2/3 of the population voted against him, too. I'm guilty of deception by omision, on the surface. But knowing Mexican politics, I'm not really deceptive. The other, multiple parties gained their combined share of about 1/3 of the vote, too. The PRI -- the monopolistic, semi-dictatorship that ruled the country for 71 years gained over 20%. They're a "moderate" party by Mexican standards, and although they're evil, their certainly not populist-leftist evil, and if they had to do it over again, the vast majority would choose the slight-right than the extreme, populist left. No cite, just anecdotal evidence, and no one who thinks likes a populist, anywhere in the world (that's a fair statement, right?). The other roughly 8% went to the various "wacko" parties that no one really takes seriously, although it somewhat concerns me that 8% of the voting populace would throw their votes away.
For the record, I'm going to repeat this just because I got reamed for being lazy: You shouldn't say just "Obrador," because that's the matronymic. It's "Lopez Obrador," or simply "Lopez." Because he wants to appeal to the poor, non-modern, uneducated people of Mexico, he uses the traditional patronymic-matronymic construction. The modern people, like Fox and Calderon, publicly stick to just the patronymic surname, although you'll often see the press identify them with both.
When I got my Quicksilver a few years ago, it came with the Apple Pro Mouse. It was a single-click, press-the-whole-damn-mouse-body-down-to-click mouse. I never really gave it a chance, because I'd always used two-button mice with my Macs -- well, ever since 8.0 or 8.1 when Ctrl-Click was introduced, and after-market mice provided a driver to make the right-button work. As a Windows user even then, I recognized the usefulness of a right-clickable mouse. So the Mighty Mouse was replaced with a generic Windows mouse; probably a Logitech that was *also* sold as a Mac version for $20 extra back in the day...
My non-Bluetooth Mighty Mouse that came with my Intel iMac was destined for the same fate, but I gave it a chance. It's got a scroll ball, and even though I don't have need for much horizontal scrolling personally, it really is an ingenious feature. Clicking anywhere results in the whole mouse being depressed, but it's incredibly good at *knowing* where I press. Left-click, middle-click, and even right click, although Apple's novice philosophy means they don't work by default and you've got to activate them in the Control Panel.
One slight complaint just to show I'm not a little fan-boy: I'm left handed, and for me the right-click isn't quite sensitive enough, meaning that I have to click further right than I would on a mouse with physical buttons. I'm getting used to it, but I have to stretch compared to my other Mac and Windows mice.
The thing is, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the goverment works and is *supposed* to work. Your vote is designed NOT to vote for the president. Even now you don't have a 1:280000000 voice for the choice; it's an illusion, and one that's not serving you well. That's not meant as a flame; way too much of our population suffers the same illusion.
YOU DON'T VOTE FOR PRESIDENT. That's not screaming; I'm just too lazy to use em tags. States determine how electors are assigned, and it's as simple as that. Your involvement is only indirect.
As said in way too many other posts here, the level of abstraction helps prevent stupid, flavor-of-day ideas from pervading our federal government. All we need is Hugo Chavez to appeal to misguided people at the last minute.
I was in Mexico on election day. I was espousing the idea to my inlaws there that none of their current political mess would have happened if only their federal system were *truly* federal and they had a well-working electoral college system similar to our own.
There's STILL no declared presidential winner there, and the losing idiot is still calling for marches, making unsubstantiated accusations, and not giving the legitimate government there a chance to function and do its job. He claims "the will of the people will be heard," forgetting the fact that almost 2/3 of the population were intelligent enough to vote *against* him.
(This is an election that was declared clean by European observes, lest anyone accuse the USA of interefence.)
Hell, I'm from a crappy, wrong colored state that I want to be the other color. As a constant loser, I wish we had a Maine type system. Were I a constant winner, I'd probably be more than happy. It's easy to criticize when you're the loser. The easy, most fair, non-partisan answer is to keep everything local or as local as you can. Hence states can do whatever the hell they want to, and even though I'm not happy with how my state does it while I'm losing, it beats a centralized system.
I used eBay when I want bargains. Why the hell should I pay retail plus inflated shipping and handling when I can get my next MacBook right from the Apple store?
But because everyone treats eBay as a regular marketplace, it's getting a lot tougher for the bargain hunter. People don't know how to effectively use their max bid price. Or people are content paying retail or over even though the reserve price was very, very nice discount!
Now I snipe using an online sniping service to ensure that I get a bargain. That way I'm *not* increasing the attraction to other potential bidders, and I'm not driving up the price over the amount I want to pay for it -- and notice the subtle difference between "what it's worth" and "what I'm willing to pay in this environment." If we all end up sniping, then we're simply turning eBay into a closed auction (silent auction?) -- you know, the other legitimate type of auction where you put in a sealed bid and whoever wins it wins it. Gosh, I wish there were an auction style for that on eBay!!!
Oh, I used to not snipe, and I would set my maximum price the "proper" way. It usually provoke a bidding war amongst the others, or just plain stupid bidding, such as the moron whose name is in the bid history six times in a row as he increases his maximum until he just beats my bid. This brings up another advantage to sniping...
If I end up beating such moron by $1, then I've overspent what I really *needed* to spend, just as bad as if it were a real shill bid. If the jerk were serious, why the hell did he drive everything up $1 at a time? Granted, I was willing to pay as much, but I didn't HAVE to. Sniping helps alleviate that, too.
Citibank, and it's all online. No need for a friggin Windoze-only program. No wonder I don't use my MBNA accounts.
Isn't that a public service? Wouldn't the coffee shop have to complain to the dude first? I've driven into coffee shops' parking lots while on the road *specifically* to use their WiFi. It's an open network. Not just an unsecured network because granny doesn't know how to program her Linksys, but an intentionally open network. Sure, it's not "cool" to be a leech, but it's not specifically prohibited.
And what does being a sex offender have to do with anything?
There's a huge injustice in robotics by equating industrial machinery with autonomous, intelligent "beings" (for lack of a better word) that we've dreamt about since childhood.
Industrial robots are just industrial machines. Yeah, they're exceptionally complicated machines, but in the end the only thing they do is a lot of math in order to put their tool at position XYZ at a certail roll, pitch, and yaw. There's a LOT of associated controls hardware, but this is the same technology that any other industrial equipment uses. There's nothing fundamentally different about a spot welding gun that's mounted on a robot end effector versus one mounted on a pedastal, for example. There's no awareness for a robot; any type of sensing uses already-existing controls hardware. The robot is a PLC that does math. Okay, admittedly there's one useful, built-in safety feature of most robots -- collision detection. It works by sensing current rampup on the drive system that will happen if there's unexpected resistance to movement. It saves lives, but in the end, it's still just standard industrial controls.
In 100% of cases (in my company) people are injured and/or die due to not following the safety rules. We follow OSHA requirements, and pay OSHA fines, and fix the problem. What about exporting jobs to Mexico so we don't have to follow the rules? You know what? We still follow OSHA rules, and we end up with safer plants -- you can fire repetitive rule breakers without a committeeman making stupid justifications for dangerous behavior.
If you apply the laws of robotics to a thinking robot in an industrial setting, you'll just end up with robots that want to go on strike!
I have several, legal licenses to XP. Yet, I *always* use a borrowed, corporate serial number. Why? No activation. Why do I care? Aside from the principals involved, my XPs always run in virtual environments -- VirtualPC, VMWare Workstation, and of late Parallels Workstation. I've not tried Bochs, etc.
I'm not trying to debate the licensing (I know I'm supposed to use my own numbers; I don't care, though) or the multiple machine issues (I've got all the licenses I need legally; convenience is the issue). Instead I bring questions:
How does activation work in a virtual environment on multiple, physical machines? Sure, the virtual machine "footprint" is going to change between using VMWare, VPC, and Parallels. But what bearing does the host machine have on it? If I take my legally activated product (the non-corporate version) disk image from physical machine to physical machine, is there a tie to the real, physiscal hardware? As far as I know, processor ID, MAC address, and so on are all virtualized, but is there something else in the activation checksum that these commercial VM solutions tie to the physical hardware?
I don't know enough about the license (who really does?); to me the "machine" is the disk image, so I have no moral qualms about moving it from physical machine to physical machine as long as they're not used at the same time (etc. etc.).
Oh, so why don't I try it? I just don't want to "burn up" any of my serial numbers. Meaning, invalidate them because now I look like I've pirated the number because I'm installing onto too many machine. VMWare for Windows and Linux, VPC for Mac and Windows, Parellels for Mac/Linux/Windows... I'm a big time pirate trying to install a single serial on *seven* computers, ya know?
"Real life Dilbert" certainly exists, but remember that Dilbert is an exaggerated comic strip. You'll see EVERYTHING in the civilian workplace, but certainly not in the concentration that appears in a cartoon. I work for a "failing" Fortune 10 (or so) company; if we conducted ourselves like Dilbert every day and in every aspect of our business, we'd already be non-existant.
Well... any time I get a locked spreadsheet, I hit Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-N, Ctrl-V, and work from there. Not a whole lot of protection.
Granted, the problem is that most of people that portend to develop "applications" with Excel don't know which cells to protect and not protect, causing my irritation with their stupid lock policies. This kind of harkens back to the RTFA wherein users break these so-called applications. I'm sorry -- write your application in Delphi or Cocoa; a spreadsheet is a document and maleable.
I'm non-IT, and I'm the only person that understands the Virtues of Access (oh how I wish there were a Mac version). Spreadsheets are spreadsheets, damn it -- not an application rapid development system. If you need an application, build an application. I have the same lack of respect for Excel "applications" as I do VB applications (or in my case, "RealBasic" applications).
The only program that I use F1 for! There are more formulae than a real programming language. I really do credit Microsoft for Excel, despite the fact that I'm a Mac user. ;-)
Yeah, but, you took marketing course at some point, right? Surely you know that what most people buy isn't always the most profitable.
You're right in that respect. I'll just comment that some of the absolute worst traffic congestion I've ever experienced on a regular, predictible basis was in the same place where one of the best public transit systems exists: the Hanau-Frankfurt-Wiessbaden area in Germany! (Yeah, yeah, imagine if the public transport *didn't* exist.)
;-)
In places where public transportation exists, businesses are planned with that in mind. Hence once the basic infrastructure is in place, you find yourself NOT having to run trunk-lines and extension-lines to every imaginable part of the city and suburban area. Business sticks to routes of communication. To add a rail system AFTER the fact is a much more intensive proposition, because business has grown around the existing, omnipresent network of universal roads. Lack of advanced, early planning has pretty much made practical, useful, social implementation impossible in the present time, at least until money grows on trees or gasoline hits $15/gallon.
You could add a half-assed system, though. And then people like me (i.e., *willing* to use clean, safe, public transport) still have end terminal problems. Would I drive to the train station in Mt. Clemens, and then keep a second car at the train station in Dearborn to drive to work? Because we don't have the initial infrastructure work locations weren't planned around potential train routes. It's one thing to expect to walk 200 meters, but 1.5km is too much to ask in a Detroit winter.
Worse, as a social program such an endeavor would probably be set up for the middle class who commutes from (say) Farmington Hills (out there a ways) to Detroit with terminals at important locations and thus avoid the end terminal transportation problems. I work for a big company, so I'd probably have a good chance of having a station close to work. But what about the poor to lower middle class? There's not a whole lot of social equity and this actually pushes cheaper, older, less fuel efficient cars onto the roads.
For people that live in big cities, this isn't "just" a city problem; SE Michigan is an entire friggin' region - think of a relatively low 5.5 million population spread out across nine entire counties. Transportation management is significantly different than 10 million people on a tiny, little island
We don't believe in HOV lanes because we all pay the same amount of taxes! I pity those states that have HOV lanes -- they're completely empty and unused (relatively speaking) whereas the congestion would be relieved by adding the extra lane. Not smart traffic engineering, but then again the point isn't traffic engineering but social engineering. Also we in Michigan don't have those stupid toll roads. Granted, our road conditions are worse than average. All in all, I've driven all over the country, and Detroit really does have one of the most intelligently designed freeway systems. Gridlock isn't as bad as in a lot of other places. Additionally the major surface streets have "Michigan lefts" that ease a lot of congestion, and Oakland and Macomb counties have been great at pioneering modern roundabouts (not those finicky old traffic circles that cause congestions).
I try to work 6 am to 2:30 pm, and there's no traffic to speak of from Mt. Clemens to Dearborn through the city. When someone schedules a later afternoon meeting, though, that kind of stings.
Moreso, does it matter if global warming is happening or not? We can't just arrogantly try to keep the world exactly as it is today. [i]That's[/i] what's unnatural.
Climatic change is a fact of this planet, and it's been happening for millions and millions of years.
Economically, it's better to prepare for the change (whatever it ends up being) than to foolishly try to prevent change or even steer change to some "ideal" that's really quite impossible to define. Nature will do what nature's always done as well. Species will go extinct. New species will replace them. Ecology will change. Geography can change.
This is all mother nature or God's will or the result of atoms bouncing off other atoms or whatever you believe.
Now before I'm flamed, I'll offer this: sure, that's not a justification to be wasteful. But then if you accuse me of being wasteful or hurting the third world or whatnot, then what's your real beef?
Fair enough. As I said in another post, I should have said "is better for me."
;-)
For me, here's why:
o 3 ea. XBox (used) costs the same as a single Mini (yeah, used)-- bedroom, living room, rec room.
o Dedicated media program that plays every format. Basically anything MPlayer will touch. FrontRow will only play what QT can play. On the plus side, for a lot of people that means their iTunes store purchases probably, but no concern for me, even though I can't play them.
o My backend is more expensive than a single el Gato whatever, but if you consider my DVB and 2 ea. DV 500's, that's a total of 5 El Gatos and I'm sure that my Knoppmyth backend is then competetive.
o It links well to iTunes on my Quicksilver when it's running, or just via SMB even when it's not. Okay, I guess FrontRow does the same.
o Ditto for iPhoto.
o Does FrontRow open and play DVD images? I honestly don't know. XBMC does. I've copied all of my DVD's to the server now. I don't count that as setup time
o FrontRow will have an advantage when it comes to DRM. But I'll find ways around DRM.
o It plays XBox games!
o It plays all of the emulators, too -- even though, yeah, the Mini will, but as big a Mac fan as I am, I've never played a Mac game without a mouse and keyboard. Are there bona fide joysticks for a Mac that would work for a media center playing games?
I'm on a Quicksilver now -- it's my 7th Mac since 1990. I'm not out to hurt the Mini. But for a media center and for me, the XBox is much more elegant solution (paired with my backend). In truth, it comes down to SOFTWARE much more than the HARDWARE; well, that and price. As a computer, the Mini wins. But feature for feature, we're really comparing FrontRow with XBMC, I think.
Well.... XBMC by itself really needs something to provide the media. Apparently the Mini does too - it's only got a 120GB drive as a BTO option, and is 80GB standard. My "monster media" server just happens to feed my XBMC, the same as my Quicksilver Mac with its massive internal storage would feed my Mini if I though that that were the better route.
Here's the deal on modding the XBox: you burn a DVD in Toast, boot it on the XBox, and you're modded. Of course, I'm not "in the scene" so there was a learning curve to this. I bought a mod chip, installed it successfully, ignored the XBox as an XBox, played with Xebian for a while, and then reflashed the mod chip and restored the XBox when I learned about XBMC. As it is now, I could buy the latest version non-360 XBox off the shelf at Best Buy, and soft-mod it in five minutes. There's no leet hacking there; the leet hacker's the guy that did all the work; I'm just a leech.
The difference for the non-geek, of course, is that a Mini doesn't need all this silliness to work. In that it's a Mac, it "just works." Hell, I'm a geek, and it was still a big learning curve to figure out that I can easily soft mod an Xbox (although in "the scene" a softmodder is apparently a lamer [do they still say "lamer"?]).
In the subject line, I should have appended more carefully: "for me."
Yeah, but it also compared with XP Media Center edition. I'm steering away from the "rest of the world" and the story. This is /.; XBMC's probably a better choice for everyone here. There are things that we want to do (in general) that the Mini or Tivo don't offer.
FWIW, my "leet" hacking skills consisted of burning the softmod hack ISO using Toast on my non-Mini Mac and booting from said disk. Having done this for THREE refurbished XBoxes, there's another advantage -- they cost the same as a single, used PPC Mini.
I'm not trying to say they're better all purpose computers than a Mini; I am a Mac guy after all. I'm just saying that for sheer elegance the XBox is more capable than the Mini. Obviously this is all software, so it's not even really an XBox vs Mac Mini argument but an XBMC versus FrontRow (or Tivo) argument.
I didn't say I was in the United States, now, did I?
Oh, wait . I am! Damn it to hell!
Actually it would only be a violation of the DMCA if I broke the technological measure to get around copyright. Hell, you can download Xbox ISO's that'll work on virgin Xboxes without needing a hacked box. I think I'm okay as far as the DMCA for hacking my box, since it's not for that purpose. *But* I could probably get in trouble if anyone thought that maybe I was using an Xbox development kit for compiling XBMC that may not be completely legal...
My hacked, Xbox that is. I'm a Mac owner, and a proud one at at. I tell most people I know that ask for advice to get a Mac (they're not computer geeks, or they'd not be asking me for advice, you see). I was seriously consider an Intel Mini core duo to replace my QuickSilver, but I think I'll wait and see what the new PowerMac replacement has to offer first.
So despite all of that, my hacked Xbox with XBMC is bounds and bound beyond what the Mini can do. *Maybe* the only advantage I can see for the Mini is a local PVR connection. Poor me is relegated to using a five-tuner Knoppmyth box on the backend and using xbmcmythtv on the Xbox. Okay, maybe the Mini can do HD; that's not a concern for me (yet).
We've got 20 MB of email storage space. If I carefully clean my mailbox, move my sent items, and then go on vacation more than a couple of days, I'm blocked out; I'll miss lots of important stuff when I get back. Sometimes it's full over the course of a weekend -- our vendors just assume that this is the 21st century and 8MB PowerPoint presentations (as a container for photographs, of course) are no big deal. It's a shame I have to give out my gmail address to get some things, especially when my areas of responsibility are Latin America and I can't just drive there to take a look at a problem.
So the details you were looking for:
Windows XP (for most of us, some legacy Win2K boxes out there).
Outlook -- I just got the corporate Office 2003 load today, but there's still a lot of XP and 2000 loads out there.
Exchange server (of course) -- don't know the version.
Industry -- automobiles (not the "auto biz"; we build and sell automobiles; we're big).
Employees -- Many, many, many, many thousands.
Aside from the mailbox size limit (that's 20MB of server space including calendaring and contacts) there's no expiry or anything of messages. You can leave them there forever as long as your NT ID is active in the company. We use the PST feature on our local hard drives, and *I* run a backup script everyone night against company policy to make sure it (and all of my documents) are backed up on our private network drives. That's not the non-policy part; we're supposedly forbidden from having PST's on our personal network drives (and MP3 and photos and installers and non-business stuff). We get email warnings all the time warning that our server is low on space and to please clean up.
My PST (yeah, I only keep one) is about a gig, and I clean it regularly, especially for old attachments. There's *way* to much to do a thorough cleaning of non-important stuff (I trash it as I come across it), but there's way too much stuff that I'll need to reference in the future just to trash it all. I would be unmanageable if it weren't for Google Desktop Search (and the fact that I got an exception to have an unpolicied machine to install it).
Aside from needing to send and receive large attachments (this is the car biz), I have lots and lots of business contacts, and I don't have time to transcribe them all perfectly into Outlooks contacts, so I like to scan them in and store the business card with the contact. Of course since I want universal access to my contacts, I can't store these in my PST. Additionally I want to store certain attachments in my calendar appointments. I'm smart enough to delete them later, but a lot of my colleagues wonder why empty inboxes and sent items still have them at 18MB of mailbox usage.
If I had gigs and gigs of space, I might be tempted to use it all, and I can see that being a problem, especially in a company our size. The current 20MB just plain sucks, though, and I don't see why a happy medium of maybe 1/2 a gig couldn't be accomodated. Hell, I'd be 400% happier with just a 100% increase in space.
This isn't a jammer. Jammers jam, meaning that they transmit or broadcast competing radio signals that effectively wash out the signal of interest. Blocking a signal is NOT jamming, and there are no prohibitions in any US law that I've ever seen (I've looked) that govern the blocking of signals.
So, this is a painted-on Faraday cage, then?
Subitles are very important to my application. I've never gotten it to work with as diverse a format of subtitles as does mplayer or VNC. What's really cool about either of those is they'll work with ISO DVD images. Hence my XBMC/MythTV combination will continue to rule the roost. Yeah, it means that I have to use an icky Microsoft Xbox, but (1) they were bought used so I only miniscually affect their resale value; (2) the integration is supurb -- XBMC is almost commercial quality; (3) It works decently enough with MythTV backend, and I keep meaning to get involved with that project to make it even better; (4) Emulation is actually pretty cool as far as playing old video game systems (and yes, I'm aware of the legal implications of doing so).
I'd love a Mac solution, but the cost is still prohibitive and I don't think the integration is there yet. I'd love to see a dedicated, OPEN, EXTENSIBLE DVR from Apple, though.
All the same, this may be the machine I get to replace my Quicksilver. It'll kind of suck using an external hard drive, but the price is right.