I've always had the attitude that if one is to break the law, break only one law at a time.
Your drug runners example, with the money involved in the illegal drug trade there's no excuse to use a moron with a poorly-maintained car to transport the drugs, unless there's a specific reason to do so. Makes one wonder if there was an ulterior motive for a choice so stupid and blatant as someone that's going to get high while driving a car that has a legitimate excuse for being pulled over while carrying possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of drugs. Wouldn't it just be safer concoct a reason to be in the destination city, then rent a car for the trip? Makes me wonder if there was a problem with the deal and one party needed it to fall through, or if party-C needed party-B (the runner) who normally works for party-A to get busted to help put more heat on party-A.
The point in patent-trolling is to make money without doing any real work, to support one's self in a luxury lifestyle.
East Texas does not sound like the kind of place that patent trolls would want to live in. They use that particular federal jurisdiction only because it's convenient to their goals.
There was a gorean fellow a few years ago who had a tendency to leave bodies in sealed drums in storage lockers... apparently un-willing participants
Sometimes it is best to leave things in the closet and not chat it up in the workplace
Uh, I'm not quite sure how to parse your post.
On the one hand it sounds like you think that it's a good idea for people's sex-lives to remain private. On the other hand it almost seems like you're implying that the bodies sealed in drums thing just should remain undisclosed.
TV has changed though. TV seemed to have mostly avoided the serialized nature of shows from the movie houses and radio programs ending on a cliff-hanger, "Tune in next time to find out what happens!" to an episodic format where each individual program told a whole story that was reasonably self-contained. One could enjoy the show without having to know too much about what happened previously, so the threshold for new viewers was low. Unfortunately for the studio this also meant that it was easy for viewers to stop watching the show if the quality took a dip, as there was no need to find out where the plot or arc was going. Obviously not all TV followed this model (thinking of soap operas in particular) but if you look at shows like M*A*S*H or The Honeymooners or Star Trek or The Odd Couple you find most episodes are self-contained, and that it's fairly rare for most stories to directly span more than one episode. Even if characters change out it doesn't affect the ability to start watching.
Sometime in the nineties this shifted, and TV became serialized like those old radio shows and old movie house pre-movie filler shows. There were some elements introduced and resolved in a single episode but a lot more of the plot, if not most of the plot, directly tied into a long-term direction that the season or the whole show was building toward. It's a lot harder to just pick up a show like this, but if the studio manages to attract an audience then that audience might stick around for more episodes even if some are subpar along the way because they want that conclusion that appears to be coming. PVRs and streaming the existing episodes helps make it easier for the viewer to get into the show in the first place.
I prefer the episodic model, as I don't feel compelled to watch if I don't want to, and I don't worry if I miss an episode or if I watch them out of original order. Unfortunately this model is increasingly relegated to half-hour sitcoms, and anything with dramatic content is now serialized whether it needs to be or not.
Of course. No one ever likes to do the long-term math.
I'm contending with a group wanting to move our main server facility and ISP connection to an offsite hosting location and to just make us one of the links on the private WAN like any other facility, even though we have the generator and environmental already paid-for. They were really gung-ho until a final tally on the costs came back from the provider and somehow some price doubled or was otherwise misinterpreted from the initial talks, and it appears that these plans are being reconsidered. I'm hopeful since it's much easier to walk down to the server farm to fix a broken device and if I missed a tool I can walk back to my office to get it, as opposed to having to drive across town and hope that I grabbed everything that I needed.
I thought it was for penis grabbing, at least that's what I saw on this long-running documentary about the initial formation of the Universe that's been on TV every week.
The science on this documentary is very weak, they seem to go for several episodes between discussing actual science and even then they only hint at it.
Well, this is a photocopier that I'm talking about so obviously the quality of the OCR is not going to be as good as it could be in a dedicated machine, but what we get out of scanning documents that were entirely printed is arguably shit. When we process inventory to move it from place to place we have to do asset tracking paperwork and that means logging the asset tag as issued by the property control department, the serial number as issued by the manufacturer of the device, a description of the item, and status info, plus source facility, source room or location, destination facility, destination room or location, who moved it, when they moved it, who signed to release it, when they signed, who signed to receive, and when they received it.
The scanned PDFs of these forms are convenient for perusing them by-date to find out what was moved when, but they're not useful for actually searching for any of the data that I just described because even plain Arial font doesn't scan well. We get "8" interpreted as "g", "1" interpreted as "I", "0" and "O", and vice-versa, etc. We get spaces or discontinuous text despite the characters being run up against each other as words. This is from first-gen paperwork, manually aligned on the scanner glass on the Canon copier, with the highest resolution black and white chosen. It's worse when we use the input hopper that can do multi-page scanning as the pages end up ever so slightly rotated and the discontinuous words are much worse and the interpretation errors spread to characters that shouldn't be misinterpreted.
It depends on if you can retrieve your content and store it locally and stop paying a per-month charge.
The idea that someone can do the grunt work cheaply appeals. As GP said though, the idea that it's stored on someone else's server very much does not appeal.
There also may be problems with a failure to have the actual original in some cases. I could see that being an issue in contracts if there's a dispute, the other party can produce a paper copy that appears entirely genuine but all you have is an electronic copy, and if for some reason the two don't match, you might have to argue that your electronically scanned and then reproduced copy is just as authentic as the real thing.
With the 15 year rule for some things it might just make more sense to push to go as close to paperless as possible from here forward, and to require electronic scanning of those documents that cannot be paperless from here forward, and with the existing records to just do what one has always done, which is to warehouse them until they've reached their legitimate destruction dates. After all, if one can't go 100% paperless because of things like contracts anyway, then there may still be a need for some document warehousing not matter what.
If it's any consolation I think I could still install a supported sound card through the MCI control panel in Windows 3.1. I had to do that with my Sound Blaster Discover CD 16 kit, along with the MKE-Panasonic TSR for CD drive access.
Come to think of it, my CD drive had more capacity than my hard disk drive did at the time.
I think it may be due to most of the tech jobs centered around long time established companies with older employees, who are married and have children, and are less invested in looking at the opposite sex as something relieve their primal instincts.
This does not agree with what I've seen. I've been to training classes and to conferences in addition to my own workplace, and the vast majority of men in tech are married, and they act like thirteen year old boys fictionally bragging about fictional exploits and talking about various women and what they would like to do to or with them in their own fantasy worlds. They do not generally do this in front of women, but they do it plenty when women aren't around, and it's much worse in the conference setting once everyone has had a few.
The vast majority of these men are harmless, they literally do resemble 13 year old boys entering puberty ranting about girls while having no experience with them, but that doesn't mean that there aren't a couple in the crowd that might justify some concern.
The average end user knows nothing about security, has never had to configure the sound card manually, cares about graphics only when actually trying to move backward makes it noticeable. Caching and indexing have never been end-user terms that they understand, and arguably those are only necessary because the bloat has made real-time searches almost impossibly long.
Notifications are nothing new, and if anything has really changed it's just that the software isn't user-loaded third-party anymore. Palm Desktop could notify one of calendar stuff and task list items coming due, and if one's email client was open it would notify when new email was received.
Auto-mounting might be the one thing that's well and truly new in what you've brought up. That feature appeared in Windows 95.
A 2017 Ram 1500 base truck is about $26,500 MSRP, which probably means it can be had for $25,000 at the dealer if buying off the lot. If you want the base as a 4x4 it's about $31,500 MSRP, which can probably still be had for under $30,000 out the door.
A Ram Promaster 1500 (based on the large Fiat van chassis) is around $30,000 MSRP. The 2500 model is $33,000 MSRP and the 3500 is about $36,000 MSRP, all as cargo configurations. The passenger variants, only availabe as a 2500 chassis and a 3500 chassis are $34,500 MSRP and $38,500 MSRP respectively, and given that there are a lot more parts on the passenger versions this $1500-$2500 markup isn't unreasonable.
Now, if you want the Laramie package, or you want all leather, or you want the megacab with the 8' bed and the Longhorn custom interior with the Katzin seats, yeah, you're going to be spending quite a bit more. Thing is, you don't really need that stuff. You might need a stronger engine in the base model truck, but those modern V6 engines that all three domestic automakers use are quite good, better than their entry-level V8s were only a generation ago. You probably don't need that upgraded configuration.
If your numbers are coming in $60,000 for a cargo van and $45,000 for a pickup truck, it's because of standards that you set.
Unfortunately this has been proven time and again to be wrong, at least as far as the smart use of credit is concerned. If you want to own a home you're almost always going to have to finance it. If you want to own a car that will give you more than a decade of service with few issues you're probably going to need to finance it. Hell, if you have a skill in a profession that requires materiel or tools that can make you a good income, you might have to finance some business expenses for those tools or for that materiel in order to get the ball rolling. The trick is to set a reasonable debt limit for yourself and to stick to it- don't take all the financing that they'll offer, be reasonable about what you can afford and take only what you need. This has even worked among poor populations like in India, where poor people, offered small loans by our standards, have been able to establish what they need to start businesses to provide services to those in the same situation, become profitable, pay back the loan, and slowly move themselves up to a better standard of living.
The stupid use of credit, whether it's to buy items far beyond one's means (keeping up with the Joneses), or to finance means to then make money without work and without having something to serve as collateral (speculation on the stock market with borrowed money) is obviously another matter. If the bank is willing to loan you $400,000 for a house, you shoul probably look for a house in the $250,000 range. If you regularly have to carry a balance on your credit cards then you need to evaluate your spending patterns; that $100 pair of shoes shouldn't really cost you $200. And you definitely shouldn't buy things like stocks that cannot serve as their own collateral on credit, that's the fastest way of having literally nothing but debt to show for it.
What bothers me about that is in the BSD universe, "make world" could recompile the whole damn thing without having to do something like pull code that may or may not still be available...
I hear you on the scripting. I keep thinking I may need to teach myself Expect, but on the other hand I've managed to brute-force my way though well enough with Bash that so far it hasn't actually been necessary.
We constantly have to fight with the property control folks that miss our devices and try to claim we must've pulled 'em. It took a couple of hours to write something that could scan the IP ranges for the switches and build lists, then SSH into the devices to get hostname, model, and serial number. It's not completely perfect yet as I have to go through with sed and clean it up, but I managed to get an organization-wide inventory in about eight hours that I couldn't get Solarwinds Orion to generate for me come hell or high water.
This isn't supposed to be that hard, but it seems like everyone wants to make it hard and then claim that's their value-add part.
For a farmer a tractor is a very big investment and much of their success as a farmer is riding on it (sorry for the pun). So I don't think a sane farmer will want to do anything to it that would ruin it.
Sure you allways will find some counter examples, like some people that first by a Mercedes S class and then run into all kind of issues with it because they are too cheap to have it properly maintained.
BTW one could make the same reasoning for normal cars: "Gee I'm fed up with all those cars comming in for repairs under waranty. From now on if you as much as change the oil yourself: that's it. Your on your own".
Farmers are used to being somewhat self-reliant in the physical sense. Farmers are used to doing a fair amount of physical work. The very notion of of being required to play this kind of money for something intangible offends the senses, especially when the machine itself already cost a half a million dollars to purchase.
I agree with the farmers. It is stupid to require software activation to use hardware that one owns, especially when the software activation is required to use features that one has already paid for.
And yet from an end-user point of view, Windows 8 and subsequent basically headed right back to Program Manager.
When I think back to my Windows 3.1 experience, I had a launcher in the form of Program Manager, a file tree browser called File Manager, I had the ability to run several programs at the same time, I had the ability to play video and sound including playing music from file and from CD, I could access network storage and map resources to use as if they were local, and I could even use a web browser to access the fledgling Internet. Hell, the local college was part of the Internet so I had 10BaseT connectivity to what was available at the time.
My point is that while the back-end of 16-bit Windows 3.1 is essentially gone, the way that people use Windows operating systems is substantially similar to the way it was almost 25 years ago. Obviously particulars have changed, but when you fundamentally look at the end-user experience versus the increase in hardware requirements and the sheer size of the install base you must wonder where all that effort really went, because from the end-user point of view it's not really all that obvious.
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I've always had the attitude that if one is to break the law, break only one law at a time.
Your drug runners example, with the money involved in the illegal drug trade there's no excuse to use a moron with a poorly-maintained car to transport the drugs, unless there's a specific reason to do so. Makes one wonder if there was an ulterior motive for a choice so stupid and blatant as someone that's going to get high while driving a car that has a legitimate excuse for being pulled over while carrying possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of drugs. Wouldn't it just be safer concoct a reason to be in the destination city, then rent a car for the trip? Makes me wonder if there was a problem with the deal and one party needed it to fall through, or if party-C needed party-B (the runner) who normally works for party-A to get busted to help put more heat on party-A.
Point to examples of this happening with DVD or Blu-Ray.
The point in patent-trolling is to make money without doing any real work, to support one's self in a luxury lifestyle.
East Texas does not sound like the kind of place that patent trolls would want to live in. They use that particular federal jurisdiction only because it's convenient to their goals.
There was a gorean fellow a few years ago who had a tendency to leave bodies in sealed drums in storage lockers... apparently un-willing participants
Sometimes it is best to leave things in the closet and not chat it up in the workplace
Uh, I'm not quite sure how to parse your post.
On the one hand it sounds like you think that it's a good idea for people's sex-lives to remain private. On the other hand it almost seems like you're implying that the bodies sealed in drums thing just should remain undisclosed.
Okay, I actually laughed at that one.
You could always buy physical media if you want to be able to watch them at any time without being encumbered by some company's decisions.
TV has changed though. TV seemed to have mostly avoided the serialized nature of shows from the movie houses and radio programs ending on a cliff-hanger, "Tune in next time to find out what happens!" to an episodic format where each individual program told a whole story that was reasonably self-contained. One could enjoy the show without having to know too much about what happened previously, so the threshold for new viewers was low. Unfortunately for the studio this also meant that it was easy for viewers to stop watching the show if the quality took a dip, as there was no need to find out where the plot or arc was going. Obviously not all TV followed this model (thinking of soap operas in particular) but if you look at shows like M*A*S*H or The Honeymooners or Star Trek or The Odd Couple you find most episodes are self-contained, and that it's fairly rare for most stories to directly span more than one episode. Even if characters change out it doesn't affect the ability to start watching.
Sometime in the nineties this shifted, and TV became serialized like those old radio shows and old movie house pre-movie filler shows. There were some elements introduced and resolved in a single episode but a lot more of the plot, if not most of the plot, directly tied into a long-term direction that the season or the whole show was building toward. It's a lot harder to just pick up a show like this, but if the studio manages to attract an audience then that audience might stick around for more episodes even if some are subpar along the way because they want that conclusion that appears to be coming. PVRs and streaming the existing episodes helps make it easier for the viewer to get into the show in the first place.
I prefer the episodic model, as I don't feel compelled to watch if I don't want to, and I don't worry if I miss an episode or if I watch them out of original order. Unfortunately this model is increasingly relegated to half-hour sitcoms, and anything with dramatic content is now serialized whether it needs to be or not.
Of course. No one ever likes to do the long-term math.
I'm contending with a group wanting to move our main server facility and ISP connection to an offsite hosting location and to just make us one of the links on the private WAN like any other facility, even though we have the generator and environmental already paid-for. They were really gung-ho until a final tally on the costs came back from the provider and somehow some price doubled or was otherwise misinterpreted from the initial talks, and it appears that these plans are being reconsidered. I'm hopeful since it's much easier to walk down to the server farm to fix a broken device and if I missed a tool I can walk back to my office to get it, as opposed to having to drive across town and hope that I grabbed everything that I needed.
I thought it was for penis grabbing, at least that's what I saw on this long-running documentary about the initial formation of the Universe that's been on TV every week.
The science on this documentary is very weak, they seem to go for several episodes between discussing actual science and even then they only hint at it.
Well, this is a photocopier that I'm talking about so obviously the quality of the OCR is not going to be as good as it could be in a dedicated machine, but what we get out of scanning documents that were entirely printed is arguably shit. When we process inventory to move it from place to place we have to do asset tracking paperwork and that means logging the asset tag as issued by the property control department, the serial number as issued by the manufacturer of the device, a description of the item, and status info, plus source facility, source room or location, destination facility, destination room or location, who moved it, when they moved it, who signed to release it, when they signed, who signed to receive, and when they received it.
The scanned PDFs of these forms are convenient for perusing them by-date to find out what was moved when, but they're not useful for actually searching for any of the data that I just described because even plain Arial font doesn't scan well. We get "8" interpreted as "g", "1" interpreted as "I", "0" and "O", and vice-versa, etc. We get spaces or discontinuous text despite the characters being run up against each other as words. This is from first-gen paperwork, manually aligned on the scanner glass on the Canon copier, with the highest resolution black and white chosen. It's worse when we use the input hopper that can do multi-page scanning as the pages end up ever so slightly rotated and the discontinuous words are much worse and the interpretation errors spread to characters that shouldn't be misinterpreted.
It depends on if you can retrieve your content and store it locally and stop paying a per-month charge.
The idea that someone can do the grunt work cheaply appeals. As GP said though, the idea that it's stored on someone else's server very much does not appeal.
There also may be problems with a failure to have the actual original in some cases. I could see that being an issue in contracts if there's a dispute, the other party can produce a paper copy that appears entirely genuine but all you have is an electronic copy, and if for some reason the two don't match, you might have to argue that your electronically scanned and then reproduced copy is just as authentic as the real thing.
With the 15 year rule for some things it might just make more sense to push to go as close to paperless as possible from here forward, and to require electronic scanning of those documents that cannot be paperless from here forward, and with the existing records to just do what one has always done, which is to warehouse them until they've reached their legitimate destruction dates. After all, if one can't go 100% paperless because of things like contracts anyway, then there may still be a need for some document warehousing not matter what.
If it's any consolation I think I could still install a supported sound card through the MCI control panel in Windows 3.1. I had to do that with my Sound Blaster Discover CD 16 kit, along with the MKE-Panasonic TSR for CD drive access.
Come to think of it, my CD drive had more capacity than my hard disk drive did at the time.
I think it may be due to most of the tech jobs centered around long time established companies with older employees, who are married and have children, and are less invested in looking at the opposite sex as something relieve their primal instincts.
This does not agree with what I've seen. I've been to training classes and to conferences in addition to my own workplace, and the vast majority of men in tech are married, and they act like thirteen year old boys fictionally bragging about fictional exploits and talking about various women and what they would like to do to or with them in their own fantasy worlds. They do not generally do this in front of women, but they do it plenty when women aren't around, and it's much worse in the conference setting once everyone has had a few.
The vast majority of these men are harmless, they literally do resemble 13 year old boys entering puberty ranting about girls while having no experience with them, but that doesn't mean that there aren't a couple in the crowd that might justify some concern.
The average end user knows nothing about security, has never had to configure the sound card manually, cares about graphics only when actually trying to move backward makes it noticeable. Caching and indexing have never been end-user terms that they understand, and arguably those are only necessary because the bloat has made real-time searches almost impossibly long.
Notifications are nothing new, and if anything has really changed it's just that the software isn't user-loaded third-party anymore. Palm Desktop could notify one of calendar stuff and task list items coming due, and if one's email client was open it would notify when new email was received.
Auto-mounting might be the one thing that's well and truly new in what you've brought up. That feature appeared in Windows 95.
How can you not see that you are agreeing?
How is, "When you don't owe anybody anything, it's amazing how rich you really are; having 'fuck you' money is really just being debt free," agreeing?
Your vehicle numbers are way off.
A 2017 Ram 1500 base truck is about $26,500 MSRP, which probably means it can be had for $25,000 at the dealer if buying off the lot. If you want the base as a 4x4 it's about $31,500 MSRP, which can probably still be had for under $30,000 out the door.
A Ram Promaster 1500 (based on the large Fiat van chassis) is around $30,000 MSRP. The 2500 model is $33,000 MSRP and the 3500 is about $36,000 MSRP, all as cargo configurations. The passenger variants, only availabe as a 2500 chassis and a 3500 chassis are $34,500 MSRP and $38,500 MSRP respectively, and given that there are a lot more parts on the passenger versions this $1500-$2500 markup isn't unreasonable.
Now, if you want the Laramie package, or you want all leather, or you want the megacab with the 8' bed and the Longhorn custom interior with the Katzin seats, yeah, you're going to be spending quite a bit more. Thing is, you don't really need that stuff. You might need a stronger engine in the base model truck, but those modern V6 engines that all three domestic automakers use are quite good, better than their entry-level V8s were only a generation ago. You probably don't need that upgraded configuration.
If your numbers are coming in $60,000 for a cargo van and $45,000 for a pickup truck, it's because of standards that you set.
Unfortunately this has been proven time and again to be wrong, at least as far as the smart use of credit is concerned. If you want to own a home you're almost always going to have to finance it. If you want to own a car that will give you more than a decade of service with few issues you're probably going to need to finance it. Hell, if you have a skill in a profession that requires materiel or tools that can make you a good income, you might have to finance some business expenses for those tools or for that materiel in order to get the ball rolling. The trick is to set a reasonable debt limit for yourself and to stick to it- don't take all the financing that they'll offer, be reasonable about what you can afford and take only what you need. This has even worked among poor populations like in India, where poor people, offered small loans by our standards, have been able to establish what they need to start businesses to provide services to those in the same situation, become profitable, pay back the loan, and slowly move themselves up to a better standard of living.
The stupid use of credit, whether it's to buy items far beyond one's means (keeping up with the Joneses), or to finance means to then make money without work and without having something to serve as collateral (speculation on the stock market with borrowed money) is obviously another matter. If the bank is willing to loan you $400,000 for a house, you shoul probably look for a house in the $250,000 range. If you regularly have to carry a balance on your credit cards then you need to evaluate your spending patterns; that $100 pair of shoes shouldn't really cost you $200. And you definitely shouldn't buy things like stocks that cannot serve as their own collateral on credit, that's the fastest way of having literally nothing but debt to show for it.
What bothers me about that is in the BSD universe, "make world" could recompile the whole damn thing without having to do something like pull code that may or may not still be available...
I hear you on the scripting. I keep thinking I may need to teach myself Expect, but on the other hand I've managed to brute-force my way though well enough with Bash that so far it hasn't actually been necessary.
We constantly have to fight with the property control folks that miss our devices and try to claim we must've pulled 'em. It took a couple of hours to write something that could scan the IP ranges for the switches and build lists, then SSH into the devices to get hostname, model, and serial number. It's not completely perfect yet as I have to go through with sed and clean it up, but I managed to get an organization-wide inventory in about eight hours that I couldn't get Solarwinds Orion to generate for me come hell or high water.
This isn't supposed to be that hard, but it seems like everyone wants to make it hard and then claim that's their value-add part.
Heh. All my plans are up in the air already...
I think for what they'll need the batteries will come out a a really huge factory. A Megafactory if you will.
For a farmer a tractor is a very big investment and much of their success as a farmer is riding on it (sorry for the pun).
So I don't think a sane farmer will want to do anything to it that would ruin it.
Sure you allways will find some counter examples, like some people that first by a Mercedes S class and then run into all kind of issues with it because they are too cheap to have it properly maintained.
BTW one could make the same reasoning for normal cars: "Gee I'm fed up with all those cars comming in for repairs under waranty. From now on if you as much as change the oil yourself: that's it. Your on your own".
Farmers are used to being somewhat self-reliant in the physical sense. Farmers are used to doing a fair amount of physical work. The very notion of of being required to play this kind of money for something intangible offends the senses, especially when the machine itself already cost a half a million dollars to purchase.
I agree with the farmers. It is stupid to require software activation to use hardware that one owns, especially when the software activation is required to use features that one has already paid for.
Pshaw. Call me when it works on my Palm TX.
How about never. Does never work for you?
And yet from an end-user point of view, Windows 8 and subsequent basically headed right back to Program Manager.
When I think back to my Windows 3.1 experience, I had a launcher in the form of Program Manager, a file tree browser called File Manager, I had the ability to run several programs at the same time, I had the ability to play video and sound including playing music from file and from CD, I could access network storage and map resources to use as if they were local, and I could even use a web browser to access the fledgling Internet. Hell, the local college was part of the Internet so I had 10BaseT connectivity to what was available at the time.
My point is that while the back-end of 16-bit Windows 3.1 is essentially gone, the way that people use Windows operating systems is substantially similar to the way it was almost 25 years ago. Obviously particulars have changed, but when you fundamentally look at the end-user experience versus the increase in hardware requirements and the sheer size of the install base you must wonder where all that effort really went, because from the end-user point of view it's not really all that obvious.