I dunno, because they have the identical model cheaper than elsewhere?
I helped my mother-in-law get a laptop from Office Depot, and I got one a few months later from Best Buy. In both cases, they were far cheaper than I could have gotten them straight from HP, by a few hundred dollars if I recall. In that case, why the hell wouldn't you get it wherever it's cheapest - the computer's the same either way.
For what it's worth, I didn't experience the behavior discussed in the article. I'm sure they pushed the warranty, I said no, done.
I never understood this argument. Fraud aside, you shouldn't be able to jack the stock price without increasing profitability long-term or the promise of liquidation at a higher price in the near term.
I agree you shouldn't be able to, but you absolutely can. It's way too easy to put lipstick on quarterly reports to make them look better than they are. It's hard to tell if cost cutting is good, or something that will hurt the company long-term. Problem is, shareholders don't have the insight into a company's operations like insiders do, so it's easy to play games.
So a company can do things like cutting any costs that won't provide immediate impact on this quarter. Example: easiest way to pit short term vs. long term is to cut R&D funding. Your next couple of quarters - even years - will look fantastic. After that? Not so much.
Dumb investors that cause the temporary rise in price by short-sightedness should eventually go broke.
That's not necessarily fair if the investors were duped, which is easy to do. I agree the day-traders deserve to lose it, but they also tend to bring down 'buy-n-hold' investors who didn't know that they way that management increased profitability was by bleeding the company dry. It's not easy to always tell from quarterly reports.
It does sound better, but from a shareholder perspective, those raiders are a benefit. Unfortunately, corporate management very rarely works in the best interests of the stockholder and trying to get them fired is pretty much impossible without buying the company outright. Even the mutual fund that may have millions of shares in a particular company will have maybe a one percent of voting power. The stockholder almost always loses when management gets their way.
That depends strongly on what time horizon you evaluate the shareholder perspective. Your average shareholder would like nothing more than for management to operate the company like a big pump-n-dump machine, jacking up the stock price for the next two quarters at the expense of long-term profitability. If management's doing its job correctly, it won't listen to the day-traders, instead building a solid company over a span of years.
And if the shareholders don't like that, then they should invest in lottery tickets, not companies who actually make useful things.
Well, I think fewer people have 10Mb/s now than had 56k in 1999 (of those who had computers, of course).
Still, your point is well taken. Looking back a bit further, in 1992 I had a computer that had a 2400bps modem and a floppy drive at 1.44MB. This was at a time when storage was about to make a jump to CDs. Today, I have an internet connection of about 4Mb/s and a DVD drive of 4GB. This is also at a time when storage is about to make a jump to blu-ray or similar. The relative increases are pretty close.
Of course, discarding observations because the error margin was then considered too big makes a lot of sense. That is what happened.
The theory that was used to reject the observations was the same one being tested. That's circular. God forbid anyone actually inject reality into that feedback loop of the purely theoretical.
I can't tell you how many times truly new knowledge about the universe was ignored because the scientific orthodoxy claimed "that *can't* be right" based on nothing but assertion.
Why is it whenever some apologist trots out Napolean's quote to "prove" that incompetence should always be assumed instead of malice, they always leave off the very important qualifier, "adequately"?
First, I'm not an apologist for anybody, jackass. I'm a cynic. I've just known enough morons to realize that stupidity truly has no bounds. See below.
Can all the gigantic, mind blowing holes in Diebold's software be ADEQUATELY explained by incompetence?
Absolutely. Right now, I'm part of a multi-company team on a government contract. One of the performers (over which I have no control) is creating a disastrously mangled codebase that does nothing but pull data from a database and make it available over a network. This has taken these morons about 8 months, cost a fortune, and currently requires 1.3GB of memory (!) to run. It has no more capability than about 100 lines of C++ code interfacing with MySQL, and requires a stack of about 10 different products that are constantly breaking. Compared to these fuckwits, Diebold is a bunch of geniuses. And this is just a minor example that I'm personally familiar with.
Anybody who says this couldn't possibly happen by accident hasn't worked in government contracting. Trust me, buddy...this is nothing. Go look up SAIC's bungled attempt to provide the FBI with modern software, which was scrapped after $200M because it would have been cheaper to start from scratch than make it work. I could go on for days with colossal disasters in government acquisition.
Not in my opinion. YMMV.
Then you're lucky to have never been party to such a disaster. Because I've personally seen and can cite examples of far worse. It usually involves government. If you ever want to see fuckups that are well beyond what normal people would think are conceivable, get into government contracting. Not to say that all government work is bad (I work for a contractor), but sometimes big contracts go to companies that can't execute them, and there's just not much oversight.
So can this be explained without nefarious conspiracy theories? Yeah. It can. Incompetence is more than sufficient to explain this exact behavior. Which is why proof of the malice is required, because stupidity is so utterly ubiquitous that it effectively forms the cynic's version of Occam's Razor, which is the quotation I originally cited.
Even if he didn't provide relicensing rights, companies and assets can change ownership through restructuring, M+A, court settlements, etc. in ways which may not be limitable through commercial license agreements.
All of which would be extremely easy to document. Certainly "we acquired your client" should quickly end the conversation.
Or he bought them from your client who resold them.
That's where the "comparing physical objects to copyright" thing breaks down. In this case, I'm guessing he didn't provide relicensing rights to his customers. Certainly if he did, that would be a defense.
Your argument is wrong in that it tries to place a burden of proof on every amateur website out there, something that is silly. Cliparts from the Eighties have changed hands many, many times; disks sold at garage sales and copy/paste make it impossible for a hobby webmaster to keep records.
That's not a real solid defense. I would say not to use discs sold at garage sales if you're running a professional operation. Using an image when you have no idea who the rightholder is would be a bad idea.
No, I have to disagree with you there, Mister Former Riddick Employee. If someone is actually selling cliparts, well, OK. That's worthy of legal action. But merely using a picture and not remembering if you bought it or not? Please. You may as well accuse me of shoplifting because I can't produce the receipt for the jeans on me arse.
That mixes the notion of copyright (where images can be duplicated) with actual objects that can't. But, just for fun let's say I can prove only I make/sell those jeans. Well, if I know I'm the only one who sells the jeans, and I didn't sell you the jeans, and you're wearing the jeans...
...Then yeah, you either stole the jeans or are in receipt of stolen property. Just like in the current scenario.
Now, if it were me I'd send a C&D to people who are using the stuff before actually pursuing litigation, because it is kind of a d*ck move to demand money. But from a legal standpoint, I do believe he has the right to do what he's doing, though I'm most certainly not a lawyer.
News organizations need to differentiate themselves and then people will be willing to pay. The Wall Street Journal web site has thrived a a for pay site. But it provides value to people. So much free news isn't particularly well written or investigative. An article about this was just posted at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123534987719744781.html which sums up the argument for paying for quality information.
You get 75 irony points for linking to a non-pay WSJ article.
We had a guy who worked in the inventory department send out a part notification. The part number was his employee ID, the description was his name, and the status was "Out of stock - Discontinued". He sent it out in the same format as the usual notification.
I thought that was pretty clever for a farewell done in good humor.
Quill doesn't prohibit that kind of taxation, it just requires that the seller have a nexus in that state. Apple could easily be taxed, as they have Apple stores in Wisconsin. I think, but am not sure, that Amazon might have some brick-and-mortar presence in Milwaukee.
If that's the case, then Apple and Amazon should be collecting sales tax now, no new legislation required.
(Disclaimer: in my view Atlantis-hunting is silly and has no historical foundation whatsoever. I find the "humor" and "idle" tags on this story entirely appropriate.)
I believe they said the same of Troy at one time.
While I have no doubt that the legend of Atlantis as it has been perpetuated is fictitious, many times oral traditions of that sort are based in fact. Consider the possibility of a reasonably sophisticated civilization (which may or may not have been Minoan) being wiped out by a natural disaster, then taking the facts of the story as reported by survivors, and retelling the story for 1000 years. Certainly the result is embellished, but it could be based in historical fact. Or it could be entirely fictitious - but typically completely fictitious stories tend to be to support religious myths.
Seriously, what's the issue with having an anti-trust chief who is aware of and intends to keep an eye on potential future problems? If regulators had been keeping a closer eye on Microsoft, then maybe U.S. vs Microsoft would have happened early enough to actually make a difference.
Well, I doubt this was just idle curiosity and speculation. People in positions of power don't generally conjure meaningless hypotheticals for no particular purpose.
If the Anti-Trust chief starts poking around and saying, "Gee, I bet someone's gonna bring an anti-trust suit against you someday", that's grounds for serious concern.
As you alluded to, I found the predictive tone of her claims to be a bit troubling as well. Seems like she's already decided what she's looking for.
Ok... how abut a cleaning fan or a blower mechanism of some sort? If you can prolong a mission for as long as this one has been perhaps such equipment would be worth the effort? Especially since the Mars winds seem to have proven the concept.
They may have discovered that an effective fan would require more power than was available. Then there's the complexity and all. Not to mention which, it's a fairly reasonable approach to simply evaluate how frequently such winds occur and decide to rely upon them.
Subs always use SONAR. However, they use passive SONAR.
Right, and that's where I think people are getting the misconception, because they see SONAR as the active type - which you don't want to use when you don't want to be found. As you point out, stealth technology defeats sensors underwater these days.
So, this is not a surprise they were not able to hear each other. What is surprising is with all that deep, deep ocean out there, two of them just happened right into each other.
Methinks I detect some sarcasm?;) A different way of looking at that might be to ask what the interesting thing is that both of them were looking for. The article mentions that they happen to frequent the same sea lanes, but even still that seems a tad improbable.
Unless one of these two subs has swapped out the nuclear propulsion for Douglas Adams' Infinite Improbability Drive, something smells a tad fishy.
Despite being equipped with sonar, it seems neither vessel spotted the other, the BBC's Caroline Wyatt said."
That's not surprising. All that stealthy sub technology doesn't work well when you're pinging with active SONAR. When subs don't want to be found, they go quiet and depend on their sensors to pick up noise from other vessels. Of course, if you have two subs each of whicf has stealth technology that is better than the other sub's sensors, then you have a situation where two subs can't see each other. Which could lead to a collision.
This same basic story keeps getting submitted from the same group of people who are generally trying to sell non-relational-DB stuff. This is an ad. Move along.
so it's only a matter of time before chipset and mobo manufacturers push the limits of more and more of their consumer-grade commodity stuff beyond the previous '4GB barrier'.
Yep, but for now multiple active VM's are a non-starter when Windows itself needs 4GB. The only way I can see it is if one had a very lightweight version of Linux that did nothing but host the VMs, and then a VM of Windows and a VM of Linux to alternate between.
Wow. Sometimes I wonder who the hell falls for infomercials and Nigerian scams. Then I see responses to an obvious hoax like the previous, and it all makes sense.
Please tell me that the previous responses to this were trying to be ironic, I'd feel a lot better about the human race.
One man's pork is another man's infrastructure spending.
Sometimes. But it's really, really hard to see money for things like Planned Parenthood as "infrastructure". There was waaaaay too much of that kind of crap.
What Republicans want is 100% tax cuts.
by and large, I don't think so. To be sure, the Reps want more tax cuts than the Dems, but the majority see the need for real stimulus right now.
The current stimulus bill is utterly misguided. 100% of it should have gone to infrastructure spending (the stuff you like to call pork)
Nice try, but the Reps were absolutely screaming for the addition of real infrastructure like roads and fewer social programs.
with an explicit buy American clause (otherwise any stimulus would again flow to China).
That fails for the same reason that such ideas have failed for centuries (not that anyone seems to learn): economic protectionism screws everyone. First, such provisions violate treaties we've signed; second, all it will do is further crush our exports when the other countries retaliate, which isn't something we can afford to do.
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Why would you buy a computer at office depot?
I dunno, because they have the identical model cheaper than elsewhere?
I helped my mother-in-law get a laptop from Office Depot, and I got one a few months later from Best Buy. In both cases, they were far cheaper than I could have gotten them straight from HP, by a few hundred dollars if I recall. In that case, why the hell wouldn't you get it wherever it's cheapest - the computer's the same either way.
For what it's worth, I didn't experience the behavior discussed in the article. I'm sure they pushed the warranty, I said no, done.
I never understood this argument. Fraud aside, you shouldn't be able to jack the stock price without increasing profitability long-term or the promise of liquidation at a higher price in the near term.
I agree you shouldn't be able to, but you absolutely can. It's way too easy to put lipstick on quarterly reports to make them look better than they are. It's hard to tell if cost cutting is good, or something that will hurt the company long-term. Problem is, shareholders don't have the insight into a company's operations like insiders do, so it's easy to play games.
So a company can do things like cutting any costs that won't provide immediate impact on this quarter. Example: easiest way to pit short term vs. long term is to cut R&D funding. Your next couple of quarters - even years - will look fantastic. After that? Not so much.
Dumb investors that cause the temporary rise in price by short-sightedness should eventually go broke.
That's not necessarily fair if the investors were duped, which is easy to do. I agree the day-traders deserve to lose it, but they also tend to bring down 'buy-n-hold' investors who didn't know that they way that management increased profitability was by bleeding the company dry. It's not easy to always tell from quarterly reports.
It does sound better, but from a shareholder perspective, those raiders are a benefit. Unfortunately, corporate management very rarely works in the best interests of the stockholder and trying to get them fired is pretty much impossible without buying the company outright. Even the mutual fund that may have millions of shares in a particular company will have maybe a one percent of voting power. The stockholder almost always loses when management gets their way.
That depends strongly on what time horizon you evaluate the shareholder perspective. Your average shareholder would like nothing more than for management to operate the company like a big pump-n-dump machine, jacking up the stock price for the next two quarters at the expense of long-term profitability. If management's doing its job correctly, it won't listen to the day-traders, instead building a solid company over a span of years.
And if the shareholders don't like that, then they should invest in lottery tickets, not companies who actually make useful things.
Well, I think fewer people have 10Mb/s now than had 56k in 1999 (of those who had computers, of course).
Still, your point is well taken. Looking back a bit further, in 1992 I had a computer that had a 2400bps modem and a floppy drive at 1.44MB. This was at a time when storage was about to make a jump to CDs. Today, I have an internet connection of about 4Mb/s and a DVD drive of 4GB. This is also at a time when storage is about to make a jump to blu-ray or similar. The relative increases are pretty close.
Of course, discarding observations because the error margin was then considered too big makes a lot of sense. That is what happened.
The theory that was used to reject the observations was the same one being tested. That's circular. God forbid anyone actually inject reality into that feedback loop of the purely theoretical.
I can't tell you how many times truly new knowledge about the universe was ignored because the scientific orthodoxy claimed "that *can't* be right" based on nothing but assertion.
Why is it whenever some apologist trots out Napolean's quote to "prove" that incompetence should always be assumed instead of malice, they always leave off the very important qualifier, "adequately"?
First, I'm not an apologist for anybody, jackass. I'm a cynic. I've just known enough morons to realize that stupidity truly has no bounds. See below.
Can all the gigantic, mind blowing holes in Diebold's software be ADEQUATELY explained by incompetence?
Absolutely. Right now, I'm part of a multi-company team on a government contract. One of the performers (over which I have no control) is creating a disastrously mangled codebase that does nothing but pull data from a database and make it available over a network. This has taken these morons about 8 months, cost a fortune, and currently requires 1.3GB of memory (!) to run. It has no more capability than about 100 lines of C++ code interfacing with MySQL, and requires a stack of about 10 different products that are constantly breaking. Compared to these fuckwits, Diebold is a bunch of geniuses. And this is just a minor example that I'm personally familiar with.
Anybody who says this couldn't possibly happen by accident hasn't worked in government contracting. Trust me, buddy...this is nothing. Go look up SAIC's bungled attempt to provide the FBI with modern software, which was scrapped after $200M because it would have been cheaper to start from scratch than make it work. I could go on for days with colossal disasters in government acquisition.
Not in my opinion. YMMV.
Then you're lucky to have never been party to such a disaster. Because I've personally seen and can cite examples of far worse. It usually involves government. If you ever want to see fuckups that are well beyond what normal people would think are conceivable, get into government contracting. Not to say that all government work is bad (I work for a contractor), but sometimes big contracts go to companies that can't execute them, and there's just not much oversight.
So can this be explained without nefarious conspiracy theories? Yeah. It can. Incompetence is more than sufficient to explain this exact behavior. Which is why proof of the malice is required, because stupidity is so utterly ubiquitous that it effectively forms the cynic's version of Occam's Razor, which is the quotation I originally cited.
Even if he didn't provide relicensing rights, companies and assets can change ownership through restructuring, M+A, court settlements, etc. in ways which may not be limitable through commercial license agreements.
All of which would be extremely easy to document. Certainly "we acquired your client" should quickly end the conversation.
Ok, so when do we get to throw Diebold exec in jail for election tampering already?
When you can prove intent.
Or, put another way, "Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence." --N. Bonaparte
Or he bought them from your client who resold them.
That's where the "comparing physical objects to copyright" thing breaks down. In this case, I'm guessing he didn't provide relicensing rights to his customers. Certainly if he did, that would be a defense.
Your argument is wrong in that it tries to place a burden of proof on every amateur website out there, something that is silly. Cliparts from the Eighties have changed hands many, many times; disks sold at garage sales and copy/paste make it impossible for a hobby webmaster to keep records.
That's not a real solid defense. I would say not to use discs sold at garage sales if you're running a professional operation. Using an image when you have no idea who the rightholder is would be a bad idea.
No, I have to disagree with you there, Mister Former Riddick Employee. If someone is actually selling cliparts, well, OK. That's worthy of legal action. But merely using a picture and not remembering if you bought it or not? Please. You may as well accuse me of shoplifting because I can't produce the receipt for the jeans on me arse.
That mixes the notion of copyright (where images can be duplicated) with actual objects that can't. But, just for fun let's say I can prove only I make/sell those jeans. Well, if I know I'm the only one who sells the jeans, and I didn't sell you the jeans, and you're wearing the jeans...
...Then yeah, you either stole the jeans or are in receipt of stolen property. Just like in the current scenario.
Now, if it were me I'd send a C&D to people who are using the stuff before actually pursuing litigation, because it is kind of a d*ck move to demand money. But from a legal standpoint, I do believe he has the right to do what he's doing, though I'm most certainly not a lawyer.
That is why you hide the recorder - just make sure you are in a one party consent state first.
Hey boss? Can we have my exit interview in Oregon? Thanks.
So who wants to buy two $2100 email machines in 3 years? Sounds fun to me!
News organizations need to differentiate themselves and then people will be willing to pay. The Wall Street Journal web site has thrived a a for pay site. But it provides value to people. So much free news isn't particularly well written or investigative. An article about this was just posted at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123534987719744781.html which sums up the argument for paying for quality information.
You get 75 irony points for linking to a non-pay WSJ article.
I thought that was pretty clever for a farewell done in good humor.
That would explain why they're asking for it, rather than sending legal demands.
Sounds like it. Their threat basically went like "give us the money back or we'll have to report it to the IRS."
What, you mean like income usually is reported? OK guys, report away. I'll keep the cash.
The cute thing is they basically expect a gift from employees they just fired. Screw that.
Quill doesn't prohibit that kind of taxation, it just requires that the seller have a nexus in that state. Apple could easily be taxed, as they have Apple stores in Wisconsin. I think, but am not sure, that Amazon might have some brick-and-mortar presence in Milwaukee.
If that's the case, then Apple and Amazon should be collecting sales tax now, no new legislation required.
(Disclaimer: in my view Atlantis-hunting is silly and has no historical foundation whatsoever. I find the "humor" and "idle" tags on this story entirely appropriate.)
I believe they said the same of Troy at one time.
While I have no doubt that the legend of Atlantis as it has been perpetuated is fictitious, many times oral traditions of that sort are based in fact. Consider the possibility of a reasonably sophisticated civilization (which may or may not have been Minoan) being wiped out by a natural disaster, then taking the facts of the story as reported by survivors, and retelling the story for 1000 years. Certainly the result is embellished, but it could be based in historical fact. Or it could be entirely fictitious - but typically completely fictitious stories tend to be to support religious myths.
Seriously, what's the issue with having an anti-trust chief who is aware of and intends to keep an eye on potential future problems? If regulators had been keeping a closer eye on Microsoft, then maybe U.S. vs Microsoft would have happened early enough to actually make a difference.
Well, I doubt this was just idle curiosity and speculation. People in positions of power don't generally conjure meaningless hypotheticals for no particular purpose.
If the Anti-Trust chief starts poking around and saying, "Gee, I bet someone's gonna bring an anti-trust suit against you someday", that's grounds for serious concern.
As you alluded to, I found the predictive tone of her claims to be a bit troubling as well. Seems like she's already decided what she's looking for.
Ok... how abut a cleaning fan or a blower mechanism of some sort? If you can prolong a mission for as long as this one has been perhaps such equipment would be worth the effort? Especially since the Mars winds seem to have proven the concept.
They may have discovered that an effective fan would require more power than was available. Then there's the complexity and all. Not to mention which, it's a fairly reasonable approach to simply evaluate how frequently such winds occur and decide to rely upon them.
Subs always use SONAR. However, they use passive SONAR.
Right, and that's where I think people are getting the misconception, because they see SONAR as the active type - which you don't want to use when you don't want to be found. As you point out, stealth technology defeats sensors underwater these days.
So, this is not a surprise they were not able to hear each other. What is surprising is with all that deep, deep ocean out there, two of them just happened right into each other.
Methinks I detect some sarcasm? ;) A different way of looking at that might be to ask what the interesting thing is that both of them were looking for. The article mentions that they happen to frequent the same sea lanes, but even still that seems a tad improbable.
Unless one of these two subs has swapped out the nuclear propulsion for Douglas Adams' Infinite Improbability Drive, something smells a tad fishy.
Despite being equipped with sonar, it seems neither vessel spotted the other, the BBC's Caroline Wyatt said."
That's not surprising. All that stealthy sub technology doesn't work well when you're pinging with active SONAR. When subs don't want to be found, they go quiet and depend on their sensors to pick up noise from other vessels. Of course, if you have two subs each of whicf has stealth technology that is better than the other sub's sensors, then you have a situation where two subs can't see each other. Which could lead to a collision.
This same basic story keeps getting submitted from the same group of people who are generally trying to sell non-relational-DB stuff. This is an ad. Move along.
so it's only a matter of time before chipset and mobo manufacturers push the limits of more and more of their consumer-grade commodity stuff beyond the previous '4GB barrier'.
Yep, but for now multiple active VM's are a non-starter when Windows itself needs 4GB. The only way I can see it is if one had a very lightweight version of Linux that did nothing but host the VMs, and then a VM of Windows and a VM of Linux to alternate between.
Wow. Sometimes I wonder who the hell falls for infomercials and Nigerian scams. Then I see responses to an obvious hoax like the previous, and it all makes sense.
Please tell me that the previous responses to this were trying to be ironic, I'd feel a lot better about the human race.
One man's pork is another man's infrastructure spending.
Sometimes. But it's really, really hard to see money for things like Planned Parenthood as "infrastructure". There was waaaaay too much of that kind of crap.
What Republicans want is 100% tax cuts.
by and large, I don't think so. To be sure, the Reps want more tax cuts than the Dems, but the majority see the need for real stimulus right now.
The current stimulus bill is utterly misguided. 100% of it should have gone to infrastructure spending (the stuff you like to call pork)
Nice try, but the Reps were absolutely screaming for the addition of real infrastructure like roads and fewer social programs.
with an explicit buy American clause (otherwise any stimulus would again flow to China).
That fails for the same reason that such ideas have failed for centuries (not that anyone seems to learn): economic protectionism screws everyone. First, such provisions violate treaties we've signed; second, all it will do is further crush our exports when the other countries retaliate, which isn't something we can afford to do.