Socioeconomic times that allowed women to not generate income are the exception, not the norm. Before the Industrial Revolution both genders worked mostly out of the home or on the farm, and often their kids were also roped into work. Once the Industrial Revolution hit, many women continued to work from home while their husbands went to work in factories, if they themselves didn't also transition to factory life. Only the wealthy could afford for one spouse to not work. It is not reasonable to expect one unskilled or only moderately skilled worker to supply the economic resources for multiple people on average.
Etc. This product they're thinking about selling... I can't see anyone outside of some government goofball on expense account buying this thing.
I don't think that you're correct. Food production and the supply chain is the most important part of a society after access to potable water. Places where land is hideously expensive want to maximize the yield per acre, and if they can get the energy production cost along with the equipment cost down below what it costs to do it the old-fashioned way, and can also improve the consistency of the resulting crops, they may well be on to something. Think of places like Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and probably a whole slew of others where this would be economically viable even with the need to build structures from the ground up to do it in, where an interruption to the current food supply chain would have devastating results to the populace.
Don't forget that the sun provides more wavelengths than the plants use. Generating only the wavelengths that the plants use should mean energy efficiency.
IMDB offers a specific service beyond being a forum though. If anything, the forum is IMDB's least important function; the ability to look up credits and resumes is what IMDB is for. I don't even care about IMDB's reviews or rankings, I just want to see who was in what.
At least where I live there are similar problems for both.
If I sell a car private-party, all that I have to do is to send to the motor vehicle department a notice stating that the car has been sold. It doesn't necessarily mean that the title is transferred, but it does notify MVD that I have upheld my end and told them that I don't have the car anymore. It's the buyer's responsibility to register the vehicle. Admittedly, with visible license plates (which the seller is supposed to pull when the transaction is completed) it should be hard for unregistered vehicles to drive around, but it does still happen, either with expired plates/tags or with a stolen front-plate from the same model being applied to the rear of the car.
Similarly, since there's no required registration for firearms, if I sell a firearm that I had purchased new and therefore was registered to me, if the police later come to me I would probably not have to do a lot more than tell them that I sold it for cash. Unfortunately for the investigation that's probably where it would stall. I might find myself under law enforcement scrutiny myself for a bit, but so long as my explanation wasn't contradicted I'd probably be fine.
What method used really isn't the point actually, it's that something else can replace it.
Though for Aether in particular, I have to call BS. Saying that it doesn't use servers is like someone trying to argue that virtual machines don't ultimately have hard disk drives. They may well be abstracted-out, but they're fundamentally still there.
In California at least, there are strict legal protections for people who are fired, their boss cannot necessarily talk about why or how someone is fired in public, not without courting significant legal liability. So I'm not sure what "transparency" or "involving the community" can practically accomplish, without getting everyone tied up in torts.
Then the business needs to either spend the money in-advance to be able to mitigate the problems associated with staff turnover, or needs to be ready to absorb the damage incurred when that staff change occurs.
Reddit is finding out how much damage can be incurred when a popular employee is let-go. I expect that this is far, FAR more damage than they expected, but that just goes to demonstrate the disconnect between those that own/manage the business that is Reddit and those that moderate and use Reddit the website.
Trouble is, owners/management wants to economize. They have been penny-wise and pound-foolish.
The firing doesn't even matter, it's the lack of a plan. If you're going to have one person be such a key piece in arguably one of your most popular subs, you better have a really good plan in place in the event they quit/resign/are hit by a bus. There wasn't
There wasn't...what?
Posting to Slashdot on a cell phone while crossing the street wasn't a good idea...
I don't think in Reddit's case that it really is. The elements of the site that allowed them to expand it to its current size are not conducive to building it any larger, and there's not enough other mainstream usage to offset the loss of those elements when they can continue to disrupt the rest of site for an extended period of time.
This is sort of Slashdot's problem too; there's an upper bound on how much traffic geek news can drive, and rather than being content to have the best geek-news site such that it draws the most traffic from this niche, they keep trying to introduce non-geek elements, which causes userbase angst, drives away newcomers, and drives away existing users who feel that the site is diluted.
Until sites stop trying to be most or all things to most or all people this will continue to be a problem for them.
It is very easy to make words, it is very difficult to back those words up with anything of meaning. These are just platitudes unless they actually follow up with something, and they're probably not going to do that.
The biggest problem is that they are running a web site that caters to ignorant and petulant children who believe they know all there is to know and deserve all there is to have.
No, the biggest problem is attempting to monetize a fairly long-established platform that is highly dependent on volunteers, who do not appreciate being disrespected despite their commitment, coupled with participants that do not like changes in things that they have grown accustomed to. It's further complicated by most companies' desire to grow, but to grow they have to get rid of elements of their businesses or customer base that detract from outside investment. Slashdot has experienced that last aspect, as has Fark, and Digg, and many other aggregation services. Many of these entities do not survive their attempt to morph into the mainstream, yet everyone still tries.
Without even looking at the individual people manage or working for them, Reddit screwed up. They've tried to change too many things too quickly and have taken their moderation staff and user base for-granted. They've also completely failed to consider that just as quickly a one website may rise to prominence, another may equally quickly supplant it. Look at Facebook replacing MySpace for example. Reddit may well find its users going elsewhere if someone else manages to build something that they find familiar without all of the current baggage.
This is admittedly anecdotal, but my work brings me into casual contact with municipal law enforcement relatively often, and several officers have complained that it's now harder to bust gang-bangers with firearms. The lack of registration requirements also means that it's much harder to prosecute straw-purchases; someone can purchase firearms with the intention to resell, hold them for long enough to 'own' them, and resell them with some mark-up private-party to those that cannot buy firearms through legitimate means.
Try not marrying someone whose goal in life is to be a housewife or otherwise taken care of. Marry someone that is accustomed to taking care of themselves. Trouble is, that trait is generally not initially obvious or especially sexy in of itself, and most people don't think with their brains when it comes to objectively evaluating those that they are sexually attracted to. I had plenty of girlfriends that ultimately weren't suitable to marriage before I found the right woman that knew how to manage her own life and its costs.
Probably because most people don't really like that much change in their lives. They have friends and family, they are familiar with the setting, and they may have real property or other financial commitment that would be very costly to leave behind or abandon. It can be hard on people moving between cities within a region, let along picking up everything they can hold on to and changing whole countries where law, language, and acceptance will be entirely different.
It seems to fundamentally come down to people not wanting the government to have records that connect them to their firearms. I live in a state that's gotten somewhat nutty lately; we already did not require any firearms registration for private-party sales, so not only are background checks less effective as second-hand purchase avoids them and registration entirely, but we've also taken away a need for a concealed carry permit, so now anyone can carry a concealed firearm without any need to undergo training or to demonstrate proficiency (which were previous requirements). The need to obtain permits in the past was one tool available to the citizenry and the police to determine who, most likely, was carrying for personal protection (ie, those with permits) versus those who were carrying with bad intent (ie, those who didn't get permits and were carrying illegally).
I didn't think that the burden to obtain a CCW permit was especially high. Demonstrate that you can shoot and actually hit the intended target, and review situations when it is and when it is not appropriate to introduce a firearm. That was basically it. Unfortunately, there were those who felt that this was too much of a burden and they got the law changed.
This seems to be the biggest stumbling-block... Last standing desks I saw in a store selling office furniture were over $1000. I can't justify that at home, and I doubt that my employer would justify that at work.
I'm fortunate that I have both office and field components to my networking job, so I'm not sitting at my desk 40 hours a week for years on end and I get to walk and do some physical stuff to change it up, but for those that just sit, I can see this being a huge problem.
Smoking a brisket the traditional way, while requiring skill, is not something that's so complex that it can't be learned fairly quickly, probably more quickly than implementing a sophisticated control system to attempt to do it otherwise unattended. Besides, to implement one's own system one already needs to have mastered the skill to know what to implement in the first place, or has to learn the skill as one goes.
I've learned that I should not cook on a large scale. My wife and I can only eat so much and if we cook too much we get sick of whatever leftovers are generated too fast. I don't need to learn industrial or commercial processes for cooking as all I'll generate is waste. In a restaurant setting I'd be worried that too much automation would risk a breakdown that could cripple the menu on a busy night too, so even if automation is used to streamline the process there will still be a need to check on the condition of the product as it's cooked.
That's basically where I am now in a sense. My commute is so short that it's actually not economical to go electric at the moment; a good, low-miles used car with a lot of options is more cost effective than the bulk of electrics, but again, there's not really a used all-electric market yet, and those few cars that are all-electric don't really appeal to me.
My wife's commute is longer, and her tastes are different, so an electric might be more appealing to her and make more sense for range and reliability.
As for raw range itself, I want a car that can go 150 miles on a charge. The city I live in is a vast suburbia, and I want to be able to go to the other end of the city without having to charge to come back. 150 miles is basically half the range a single tank of gasoline gives most conventional cars, so I don't think this request is unreasonable.
Part of the reason that some of us take pride in our low-tech solutions is because we can achieve results above and beyond that of others even if we don't have any resources. I'm reminded how when Richard Petty crashed a stock car in the sixties during a big race; the team got the car back into running shape and aligned it with string to compare the geometry and got him back into the race, which he won. No fancy computer alignment or specialized tools, some mechanics hand tools and knowledge got them the solution.
It's great to use fancy tools or to construct a high-end system, but there's something to be said for being able to make it work without anything more than a brain and a few applied steps.
I use Safari on an OSX box from time to time, when I need to deal with work e-mail and I don't want to log-out of personal e-mail on the main browser. Seems to work fine that way.
Pretty much. My only real concern with a preloaded Linux install is that they'll probably pick a distro that I don't use, and if they've done any specific extra work to make their own packages, and there won't be packages for my distro available.
Even still, could be worse, at least there's a chance that more enterprising people than myself will build packages for my distro.
99.9% of customers don't care about an open source BIOS.
The trackpad is useful. The Window and Menu keys can be used with keyboard shortcut combinations. Taking away functionality that users have grown accustomed to and is expected by the OS is not a good business decision.
We just replaced an X301 with a Thinkpad Yoga 12.5" back in December. Honestly, if they would shrink the fairly large bezel around the screen but otherwise keep the feature set the same it would appeal. I can't deny that I like the keyboard on the X301 better than on the Thinkpad Yoga, and I certainly like the more modular nature of the X301 so that memory and storage can be replaced, as compared to how much of the Yoga is soldered-on.
The biggest thing that could help the X301 replacement would be price. They've got experience with Netbook form factors, and with tablet and convertible tablet form factors, so if they can keep the price down along with the weight then it could be a good choice if they can also keep it durable.
Slashdot Mirror
Socioeconomic times that allowed women to not generate income are the exception, not the norm. Before the Industrial Revolution both genders worked mostly out of the home or on the farm, and often their kids were also roped into work. Once the Industrial Revolution hit, many women continued to work from home while their husbands went to work in factories, if they themselves didn't also transition to factory life. Only the wealthy could afford for one spouse to not work. It is not reasonable to expect one unskilled or only moderately skilled worker to supply the economic resources for multiple people on average.
Etc. This product they're thinking about selling... I can't see anyone outside of some government goofball on expense account buying this thing.
I don't think that you're correct. Food production and the supply chain is the most important part of a society after access to potable water. Places where land is hideously expensive want to maximize the yield per acre, and if they can get the energy production cost along with the equipment cost down below what it costs to do it the old-fashioned way, and can also improve the consistency of the resulting crops, they may well be on to something. Think of places like Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and probably a whole slew of others where this would be economically viable even with the need to build structures from the ground up to do it in, where an interruption to the current food supply chain would have devastating results to the populace.
Don't forget that the sun provides more wavelengths than the plants use. Generating only the wavelengths that the plants use should mean energy efficiency.
IMDB offers a specific service beyond being a forum though. If anything, the forum is IMDB's least important function; the ability to look up credits and resumes is what IMDB is for. I don't even care about IMDB's reviews or rankings, I just want to see who was in what.
At least where I live there are similar problems for both.
If I sell a car private-party, all that I have to do is to send to the motor vehicle department a notice stating that the car has been sold. It doesn't necessarily mean that the title is transferred, but it does notify MVD that I have upheld my end and told them that I don't have the car anymore. It's the buyer's responsibility to register the vehicle. Admittedly, with visible license plates (which the seller is supposed to pull when the transaction is completed) it should be hard for unregistered vehicles to drive around, but it does still happen, either with expired plates/tags or with a stolen front-plate from the same model being applied to the rear of the car.
Similarly, since there's no required registration for firearms, if I sell a firearm that I had purchased new and therefore was registered to me, if the police later come to me I would probably not have to do a lot more than tell them that I sold it for cash. Unfortunately for the investigation that's probably where it would stall. I might find myself under law enforcement scrutiny myself for a bit, but so long as my explanation wasn't contradicted I'd probably be fine.
What method used really isn't the point actually, it's that something else can replace it.
Though for Aether in particular, I have to call BS. Saying that it doesn't use servers is like someone trying to argue that virtual machines don't ultimately have hard disk drives. They may well be abstracted-out, but they're fundamentally still there.
In California at least, there are strict legal protections for people who are fired, their boss cannot necessarily talk about why or how someone is fired in public, not without courting significant legal liability. So I'm not sure what "transparency" or "involving the community" can practically accomplish, without getting everyone tied up in torts.
Then the business needs to either spend the money in-advance to be able to mitigate the problems associated with staff turnover, or needs to be ready to absorb the damage incurred when that staff change occurs.
Reddit is finding out how much damage can be incurred when a popular employee is let-go. I expect that this is far, FAR more damage than they expected, but that just goes to demonstrate the disconnect between those that own/manage the business that is Reddit and those that moderate and use Reddit the website.
Trouble is, owners/management wants to economize. They have been penny-wise and pound-foolish.
The firing doesn't even matter, it's the lack of a plan. If you're going to have one person be such a key piece in arguably one of your most popular subs, you better have a really good plan in place in the event they quit/resign/are hit by a bus. There wasn't
There wasn't...what?
Posting to Slashdot on a cell phone while crossing the street wasn't a good idea...
I don't think in Reddit's case that it really is. The elements of the site that allowed them to expand it to its current size are not conducive to building it any larger, and there's not enough other mainstream usage to offset the loss of those elements when they can continue to disrupt the rest of site for an extended period of time.
This is sort of Slashdot's problem too; there's an upper bound on how much traffic geek news can drive, and rather than being content to have the best geek-news site such that it draws the most traffic from this niche, they keep trying to introduce non-geek elements, which causes userbase angst, drives away newcomers, and drives away existing users who feel that the site is diluted.
Until sites stop trying to be most or all things to most or all people this will continue to be a problem for them.
It is very easy to make words, it is very difficult to back those words up with anything of meaning. These are just platitudes unless they actually follow up with something, and they're probably not going to do that.
The biggest problem is that they are running a web site that caters to ignorant and petulant children who believe they know all there is to know and deserve all there is to have.
No, the biggest problem is attempting to monetize a fairly long-established platform that is highly dependent on volunteers, who do not appreciate being disrespected despite their commitment, coupled with participants that do not like changes in things that they have grown accustomed to. It's further complicated by most companies' desire to grow, but to grow they have to get rid of elements of their businesses or customer base that detract from outside investment. Slashdot has experienced that last aspect, as has Fark, and Digg, and many other aggregation services. Many of these entities do not survive their attempt to morph into the mainstream, yet everyone still tries.
Without even looking at the individual people manage or working for them, Reddit screwed up. They've tried to change too many things too quickly and have taken their moderation staff and user base for-granted. They've also completely failed to consider that just as quickly a one website may rise to prominence, another may equally quickly supplant it. Look at Facebook replacing MySpace for example. Reddit may well find its users going elsewhere if someone else manages to build something that they find familiar without all of the current baggage.
This is admittedly anecdotal, but my work brings me into casual contact with municipal law enforcement relatively often, and several officers have complained that it's now harder to bust gang-bangers with firearms. The lack of registration requirements also means that it's much harder to prosecute straw-purchases; someone can purchase firearms with the intention to resell, hold them for long enough to 'own' them, and resell them with some mark-up private-party to those that cannot buy firearms through legitimate means.
be rich, or have a bitch. pick one.
Try not marrying someone whose goal in life is to be a housewife or otherwise taken care of. Marry someone that is accustomed to taking care of themselves. Trouble is, that trait is generally not initially obvious or especially sexy in of itself, and most people don't think with their brains when it comes to objectively evaluating those that they are sexually attracted to. I had plenty of girlfriends that ultimately weren't suitable to marriage before I found the right woman that knew how to manage her own life and its costs.
Probably because most people don't really like that much change in their lives. They have friends and family, they are familiar with the setting, and they may have real property or other financial commitment that would be very costly to leave behind or abandon. It can be hard on people moving between cities within a region, let along picking up everything they can hold on to and changing whole countries where law, language, and acceptance will be entirely different.
It seems to fundamentally come down to people not wanting the government to have records that connect them to their firearms. I live in a state that's gotten somewhat nutty lately; we already did not require any firearms registration for private-party sales, so not only are background checks less effective as second-hand purchase avoids them and registration entirely, but we've also taken away a need for a concealed carry permit, so now anyone can carry a concealed firearm without any need to undergo training or to demonstrate proficiency (which were previous requirements). The need to obtain permits in the past was one tool available to the citizenry and the police to determine who, most likely, was carrying for personal protection (ie, those with permits) versus those who were carrying with bad intent (ie, those who didn't get permits and were carrying illegally).
I didn't think that the burden to obtain a CCW permit was especially high. Demonstrate that you can shoot and actually hit the intended target, and review situations when it is and when it is not appropriate to introduce a firearm. That was basically it. Unfortunately, there were those who felt that this was too much of a burden and they got the law changed.
This seems to be the biggest stumbling-block... Last standing desks I saw in a store selling office furniture were over $1000. I can't justify that at home, and I doubt that my employer would justify that at work.
I'm fortunate that I have both office and field components to my networking job, so I'm not sitting at my desk 40 hours a week for years on end and I get to walk and do some physical stuff to change it up, but for those that just sit, I can see this being a huge problem.
Smoking a brisket the traditional way, while requiring skill, is not something that's so complex that it can't be learned fairly quickly, probably more quickly than implementing a sophisticated control system to attempt to do it otherwise unattended. Besides, to implement one's own system one already needs to have mastered the skill to know what to implement in the first place, or has to learn the skill as one goes.
I've learned that I should not cook on a large scale. My wife and I can only eat so much and if we cook too much we get sick of whatever leftovers are generated too fast. I don't need to learn industrial or commercial processes for cooking as all I'll generate is waste. In a restaurant setting I'd be worried that too much automation would risk a breakdown that could cripple the menu on a busy night too, so even if automation is used to streamline the process there will still be a need to check on the condition of the product as it's cooked.
That's basically where I am now in a sense. My commute is so short that it's actually not economical to go electric at the moment; a good, low-miles used car with a lot of options is more cost effective than the bulk of electrics, but again, there's not really a used all-electric market yet, and those few cars that are all-electric don't really appeal to me.
My wife's commute is longer, and her tastes are different, so an electric might be more appealing to her and make more sense for range and reliability.
As for raw range itself, I want a car that can go 150 miles on a charge. The city I live in is a vast suburbia, and I want to be able to go to the other end of the city without having to charge to come back. 150 miles is basically half the range a single tank of gasoline gives most conventional cars, so I don't think this request is unreasonable.
Heh. I sort of miss the days when CPUs had pins and the sockets were just a pattern of holes. The ZIF socket of the nineties worked quite well.
Part of the reason that some of us take pride in our low-tech solutions is because we can achieve results above and beyond that of others even if we don't have any resources. I'm reminded how when Richard Petty crashed a stock car in the sixties during a big race; the team got the car back into running shape and aligned it with string to compare the geometry and got him back into the race, which he won. No fancy computer alignment or specialized tools, some mechanics hand tools and knowledge got them the solution.
It's great to use fancy tools or to construct a high-end system, but there's something to be said for being able to make it work without anything more than a brain and a few applied steps.
I use Safari on an OSX box from time to time, when I need to deal with work e-mail and I don't want to log-out of personal e-mail on the main browser. Seems to work fine that way.
So, does this legitimize a certain subset of epithets thrown at players by other players in online games or something?
Pretty much. My only real concern with a preloaded Linux install is that they'll probably pick a distro that I don't use, and if they've done any specific extra work to make their own packages, and there won't be packages for my distro available.
Even still, could be worse, at least there's a chance that more enterprising people than myself will build packages for my distro.
99.9% of customers don't care about an open source BIOS.
The trackpad is useful. The Window and Menu keys can be used with keyboard shortcut combinations. Taking away functionality that users have grown accustomed to and is expected by the OS is not a good business decision.
We just replaced an X301 with a Thinkpad Yoga 12.5" back in December. Honestly, if they would shrink the fairly large bezel around the screen but otherwise keep the feature set the same it would appeal. I can't deny that I like the keyboard on the X301 better than on the Thinkpad Yoga, and I certainly like the more modular nature of the X301 so that memory and storage can be replaced, as compared to how much of the Yoga is soldered-on.
The biggest thing that could help the X301 replacement would be price. They've got experience with Netbook form factors, and with tablet and convertible tablet form factors, so if they can keep the price down along with the weight then it could be a good choice if they can also keep it durable.
Thanks. We'll see if that makes the laptop more useful...