Annoyingly enough, this is the first time I've heard anything about the "director's cut" version of American Gods. Twelve thousand extra words? Sigh... And the "reader's" version with even more new stuff? Are books the new DVDs?
Not that I have anything against Niel - AG was a really great book (and I already have an autographed copy of the "cinema release" version (from his appearance at Exoticon in New Orleans)), and all of his work is brilliant (and so different from all of his other work, that's his real strength in my opinion), but... I don't want to get to the point where I wait 2-3 years before buying books in case a better version comes out. That will just guarantee that fewer good books come out due to lack of interest.
"...pretty popular in the low-end market (1-8 CPUs, up to 64GB of memory..."
Yup. Its refreshing to actually see opinions like this acknoledged on/., if even in a linked-to article, where for the longest time a 4 way box was considered xtR3m3 (or whatever the l33t spelling would be these days).
And no, there's not really much of a need for a beowolf cluster of those things. Imagine a life instead. Mmm... isn't that nicer?
What I'd really like to see, especially in some of the larger form-factor notebooks, are two- or more way SMP machines. A dual 1.2ghz 753 taking a mere 10 watts would be a pretty impressive machine for a lot of tasks... Of course, I don't even know if the 7xx line is multi-capable.
On my parent post - while I appreciate the Karma, "+2 Insightful"? WTF? It was a pretty trivial question, just seeking some clarification and attribution.
Ah, the perfect neoliberal solution--make the people work longer!
Er, people are also going to be drawing benefits for longer. Don't you think some kind of adjustment is reasonable in this case? After all, fair's fair. I will admit that's the first time I've seen that attitude described as "neoliberal" though - its much more commonly seen as a centrist approach.
This makes my point PERFECTLY! I really hope you see the difference between MY suggested solutions and the one he gives here! My solution is to raise or eliminate the cap on the SS payroll. For those of you who have not been paying attention, the first $87K of income is taxed at about 8%, which he explains above. What he is suggesting is that instead of 0% on income above 87K, it goes to 1%. My suggestion was that all income above 67K be taxed at the same rate as income BELOW 87K, i.e., at about 8%.
Yes, and his point was that your point would be both overkill and a deal-killer. But that by making even a small gesture towards this, we could fix the current problem. This rate can always be increased in the future if it has to be.
All of the above is quite irrelevant to the question of Social Security!
Not at all. The SSA is one of the nation's largest investors. Should it - through privatization or any other reason - suddenly become less interested in investing in US instruments, the economy in general will be in a world of hurt. You can't change major economic policy in a vaccum and expect that there aren't any follow-on effects.
How about we take it from the rich people?
His point was that this is a much more complex issue than many people are treating it as. And he is - for the most part - agreeing with what you say. The comment that inspired your last response was where he was pointing out that the privatization scheme would not work because you'd end up with an even larger excess of unfundable public debt. He's consistently argued against the recent levels of upper-income tax cuts.
If you calm down a touch, you might find that more people are agreeing with your principles than you seem to realize. Attacking their positions is no way to build consensus, though.
When the mass media and the Dems and GOP are trying to steer us away from are ideas like the following:
--raising the cap on the SS payroll tax (currently at $86K) and using the substantial monies from that to pay into a general SS fund
--taxing the substantial wealth of the plutocrats, and using that to pay for SS, and many other items. Just a small 1% tax on wealth of the rich would pay for SS, universal healthcare and college tuition for all.
That's an interesting statement, especially about the "Dems". I invite you to stop by and take a look at Andrew Tobias (the DNC tresurer and the creator of the MYM personal finance app, among other things) personal website.
You might be interested in reading this recent column, one of many where he talks about options around Social Security.
Please don't take this as criticism - its an honest suggestion. The linked column also talks about another major issue with SS privatization - if the SSA stops buying treasuries, our economy is going to get pretty screwed pretty quickly.
They didn't write it from scratch however, they reversed engineered the DCE RPC. MS RPC is based upon, and with a little hacking, will work with DCE RPC. They did this to avoid paying the full licence from OSF. "Stealing," may be a bit of hyperbole, but it wasn't exactly innovative, either.
They reverse engineered the spec, I think you mean. Kinda like what the SAMBA group did when you think about it, and they get a ton of props around here...
For those who think the issues with the Dept. of Education paying off a journalist are new, it was actually more common under the Clinton administration, and equally bad.
I hadn't heard this before - do you have any news links about it? That's not intended as disbelief or criticism, I seriously would like to read more about it.
No, its not rocket science for me. But for most Neophytes it is.
But maybe thats no who apple is targeting...
Actually, it is. They're just targeting them with the iMac, not the miniMac. For an all in one system for people on a moderate income, the 17" iMac is pretty sweet.
I don't know how well it was done, but I remember many demonstrations and other interesting presentations from Informix (now owned by IBM) covering this as - IIRC - a blade plugin to their 9.x series Universal Server. You could submit a picture of, say, a wheel and it would figure out what index picture it was matching and then, of course, retrieve other related information. Pretty cool, but I don't know of anyone who came up with a production case for it.
One of the big goals of this kind of technology was to be able to help small-town doctors get more access to fully indexed medical texts. Imagine if you track down some odd bacteria in a patient, grab a picture of it from your microscope, and immediately have it linked to information from all of the various public health agencies, CDC warnings, et cetera. Pretty damn cool, IMO. Even if you could do a set of probable matches, with the system saying that its one of the following, that would cut down a ton of time in a potentially life-saving way.
Ah, nostalgia. I still miss Informix - yet another part of the proof that a solid marketing department will outdo solid technology any day of the week. Still being used a bunch too, but its a bit like having some embarrasing disease like Herpes, or using COBOL - nobody ever wants to admit it in public.
1)Usually it is only new computers that will have a usb keyboard and mouse. If I already have a new computer why buy another?
USB-PS2 adapter, Fry's, something like $2. Seriously. Basic USB keyboards/mice aren't much more if you feel like an upgrade.
2)If I had an old computer I would have to by all new input and output devices to hook up to this thing because older computers are less likely to have usb mouse keyboards and VGA/DVI monitors.
It comes with a VGA-DVI adapter in the box. Moot point - oh, and RTFA.
3)I went to the apple site to "buy" one and I don't even see monitor as an option to add to this computer. Sure I can buy a 20inch LCD from apple but then its not "just" $499 anymore is it?
If you add extra parts it gets more expensive? Er, yeah, you're right there - although I don't really see what your surprised about. If you want a monitor, add one to your cart. If you don't, don't. If you want the whole package, spend more and get an eMac or an iMac. Or don't. Is this really rocket science?
Alternately, take the UK price (339 GBP) and convert directly into US dollars (638 USD). Divide 638/599 to reveal a 6.5% difference, which is probably typical of US sales tax rates. Texas is a little higher than most because we don't have a state income tax (just the Federal ones).
And in the USA, state and local sales taxes aren't included in any published prices. And yes, speaking as a British ex-pat, that seems weird.
However - here in Austin, TX we pay 8.25% sales tax on all purchases above and beyond the listed price. Now you're down to, what, a 2% price difference? Seems pretty reasonable for me, and well within the bounds of "rounding."
Additionally, I remember seeing some of the GB people posting that theirs was working out cheaper (GBP) than the US pricing was. Go figure.
I did a year working the databases for a large telemarketing company down in Texas. A couple of their outbound accounts were dealing with new credit cards, just as you described. Every call was taped, and some of them were listened in on. However, every single one of the succesful calls (and a 2.5% conversionrate was considered good) was reviewed, start to finish, by a QA manager. This was for the AT&T Universal card in particular, but it seemed to be pretty standard practice. Any hint of pressure, deviation from the (rigid and fact-checked) script, etc, resulted in a call back to the customer for clarification and confirmation.
Once you go over 20 employees in a company the processes and procedures to be followed are as complex as a company woth 5000 employees, what changes is the liability the company incours if they screw up.
Not really. In a company of 20 people (and I know something about this, being a principal of a small company myself), everybody knows everybody else. You can do payroll by filling out a web form on ADP.com in 15 minutes. Employee files all fit inside a single file cabinet drawer, and you probably only have 1-2 offices and very little staff overlap. With 5,000 people things get a lot more complicated.
People for whom $1500 is a lot of money don't need Peoplesoft. Seriously. Sure, a modern ERP is expensive. Same holds true for specialized manufacturing software, WMS applications, et cetera. But you know what? Its mission critical - more important to a large company than any other software product, and a damn site more critical a choice than an OS platform.
Can you imagine the financial fallout if, say, everyone working for Coca Cola didn't get paid one week? Or if Amazon stopped shipping orders because their systems went down? As an example, Addidas screwed up (or got screwed) on a WMS (Warehouse Management System - just part of a total ERP package) implementation and it damn near put them out of business as a multi-national corporation.
This is the big leagues here. Nobody in their right mind would take even a small productivity gamble to save $1500 on their backend database licenses.
Ah, yes. I have a couple of those old Kayaks sitting next to me (turned off) right now. Dual PII-300s in my case. Those things were just plain built Right.
For times like this, you're much better off going over to the Jargon File and reading about it - for example, check out their entry for biff and, once there, follow the link to the amusing B1FF.
It looks like the Wiki uses this source data, by the way.
Anyway, enjoy the file. At some point you'll probably just read it all. At least, I know that I have. I believe that its available as a single HTML file for your browsing convenience, but I'm too lazy to look for it right now.
I don't know where this false sense of entitlement within the community arose, but I really hope it goes away soon. You aren't entitled to anything. You aren't entitled to the sweat of my brow, the labor of my hands, the product of my mind--but when I release something under a free license, I give you those things. I say "here, have something; I made this. I want to give it to you."
That's fine. But that goes against the predominant OSS wisdom that Linux (and hey, OSS in general) makes for a usable production system - which was, I believe, the parent poster's point.
This is why many companies, to this day, prefer to buy their software. Unfortunately, the distributions are stuck dealing with the state of the Kernel out there - which is why its sometimes easier to buy AIX, or Solaris, or even (shudder) HP-UX than it is to deal with Linux.
Especially when the OS license fees are insignificant compared to the overall cost of the project, or the cost of potential downtime.
Slashdot Mirror
Annoyingly enough, this is the first time I've heard anything about the "director's cut" version of American Gods. Twelve thousand extra words? Sigh... And the "reader's" version with even more new stuff? Are books the new DVDs?
... I don't want to get to the point where I wait 2-3 years before buying books in case a better version comes out. That will just guarantee that fewer good books come out due to lack of interest.
Not that I have anything against Niel - AG was a really great book (and I already have an autographed copy of the "cinema release" version (from his appearance at Exoticon in New Orleans)), and all of his work is brilliant (and so different from all of his other work, that's his real strength in my opinion), but
Ah, the trials of progress.
"...pretty popular in the low-end market (1-8 CPUs, up to 64GB of memory..."
/., if even in a linked-to article, where for the longest time a 4 way box was considered xtR3m3 (or whatever the l33t spelling would be these days).
Yup. Its refreshing to actually see opinions like this acknoledged on
And no, there's not really much of a need for a beowolf cluster of those things. Imagine a life instead. Mmm... isn't that nicer?
Yeah, yeah, flamebait...
Yup. Interestingly enough, there's another PPC system out there for $1375 - the new iMac:
1.6ghz G5
512mb RAM
80gb SATA drive
DVD/CDRW drive
Keyboard, mouse, 10/100, etc,
Oh - and an integrated monitor, TOSlink out, etc, etc.
Its funny, in a sad way, that they've been able to beat Apple at the expensive proprietary hardware game...
What I'd really like to see, especially in some of the larger form-factor notebooks, are two- or more way SMP machines. A dual 1.2ghz 753 taking a mere 10 watts would be a pretty impressive machine for a lot of tasks... Of course, I don't even know if the 7xx line is multi-capable.
On my parent post - while I appreciate the Karma, "+2 Insightful"? WTF? It was a pretty trivial question, just seeking some clarification and attribution.
Anyway, thanks, I guess...
Ah, the perfect neoliberal solution--make the people work longer!
Er, people are also going to be drawing benefits for longer. Don't you think some kind of adjustment is reasonable in this case? After all, fair's fair. I will admit that's the first time I've seen that attitude described as "neoliberal" though - its much more commonly seen as a centrist approach.
This makes my point PERFECTLY! I really hope you see the difference between MY suggested solutions and the one he gives here! My solution is to raise or eliminate the cap on the SS payroll. For those of you who have not been paying attention, the first $87K of income is taxed at about 8%, which he explains above. What he is suggesting is that instead of 0% on income above 87K, it goes to 1%. My suggestion was that all income above 67K be taxed at the same rate as income BELOW 87K, i.e., at about 8%.
Yes, and his point was that your point would be both overkill and a deal-killer. But that by making even a small gesture towards this, we could fix the current problem. This rate can always be increased in the future if it has to be.
All of the above is quite irrelevant to the question of Social Security!
Not at all. The SSA is one of the nation's largest investors. Should it - through privatization or any other reason - suddenly become less interested in investing in US instruments, the economy in general will be in a world of hurt. You can't change major economic policy in a vaccum and expect that there aren't any follow-on effects.
How about we take it from the rich people?
His point was that this is a much more complex issue than many people are treating it as. And he is - for the most part - agreeing with what you say. The comment that inspired your last response was where he was pointing out that the privatization scheme would not work because you'd end up with an even larger excess of unfundable public debt. He's consistently argued against the recent levels of upper-income tax cuts.
If you calm down a touch, you might find that more people are agreeing with your principles than you seem to realize. Attacking their positions is no way to build consensus, though.
That was a surprisingly well-written summary.
When the mass media and the Dems and GOP are trying to steer us away from are ideas like the following:
--raising the cap on the SS payroll tax (currently at $86K) and using the substantial monies from that to pay into a general SS fund
--taxing the substantial wealth of the plutocrats, and using that to pay for SS, and many other items. Just a small 1% tax on wealth of the rich would pay for SS, universal healthcare and college tuition for all.
That's an interesting statement, especially about the "Dems". I invite you to stop by and take a look at Andrew Tobias (the DNC tresurer and the creator of the MYM personal finance app, among other things) personal website.
You might be interested in reading this recent column, one of many where he talks about options around Social Security.
Please don't take this as criticism - its an honest suggestion. The linked column also talks about another major issue with SS privatization - if the SSA stops buying treasuries, our economy is going to get pretty screwed pretty quickly.
They didn't write it from scratch however, they reversed engineered the DCE RPC. MS RPC is based upon, and with a little hacking, will work with DCE RPC. They did this to avoid paying the full licence from OSF. "Stealing," may be a bit of hyperbole, but it wasn't exactly innovative, either.
They reverse engineered the spec, I think you mean. Kinda like what the SAMBA group did when you think about it, and they get a ton of props around here...
For those who think the issues with the Dept. of Education paying off a journalist are new, it was actually more common under the Clinton administration, and equally bad.
I hadn't heard this before - do you have any news links about it? That's not intended as disbelief or criticism, I seriously would like to read more about it.
This was covered pretty well I think by one of Simpson's political cartoons: http://idrewthis.org/2004/bothsides.html. Its sadly accurate.
Rowr...
No, its not rocket science for me. But for most Neophytes it is.
But maybe thats no who apple is targeting...
Actually, it is. They're just targeting them with the iMac, not the miniMac. For an all in one system for people on a moderate income, the 17" iMac is pretty sweet.
I don't know how well it was done, but I remember many demonstrations and other interesting presentations from Informix (now owned by IBM) covering this as - IIRC - a blade plugin to their 9.x series Universal Server. You could submit a picture of, say, a wheel and it would figure out what index picture it was matching and then, of course, retrieve other related information. Pretty cool, but I don't know of anyone who came up with a production case for it.
One of the big goals of this kind of technology was to be able to help small-town doctors get more access to fully indexed medical texts. Imagine if you track down some odd bacteria in a patient, grab a picture of it from your microscope, and immediately have it linked to information from all of the various public health agencies, CDC warnings, et cetera. Pretty damn cool, IMO. Even if you could do a set of probable matches, with the system saying that its one of the following, that would cut down a ton of time in a potentially life-saving way.
Ah, nostalgia. I still miss Informix - yet another part of the proof that a solid marketing department will outdo solid technology any day of the week. Still being used a bunch too, but its a bit like having some embarrasing disease like Herpes, or using COBOL - nobody ever wants to admit it in public.
1)Usually it is only new computers that will have a usb keyboard and mouse. If I already have a new computer why buy another?
USB-PS2 adapter, Fry's, something like $2. Seriously. Basic USB keyboards/mice aren't much more if you feel like an upgrade.
2)If I had an old computer I would have to by all new input and output devices to hook up to this thing because older computers are less likely to have usb mouse keyboards and VGA/DVI monitors.
It comes with a VGA-DVI adapter in the box. Moot point - oh, and RTFA.
3)I went to the apple site to "buy" one and I don't even see monitor as an option to add to this computer. Sure I can buy a 20inch LCD from apple but then its not "just" $499 anymore is it?
If you add extra parts it gets more expensive? Er, yeah, you're right there - although I don't really see what your surprised about. If you want a monitor, add one to your cart. If you don't, don't. If you want the whole package, spend more and get an eMac or an iMac. Or don't. Is this really rocket science?
Alternately, take the UK price (339 GBP) and convert directly into US dollars (638 USD). Divide 638/599 to reveal a 6.5% difference, which is probably typical of US sales tax rates. Texas is a little higher than most because we don't have a state income tax (just the Federal ones).
And in the USA, state and local sales taxes aren't included in any published prices. And yes, speaking as a British ex-pat, that seems weird.
However - here in Austin, TX we pay 8.25% sales tax on all purchases above and beyond the listed price. Now you're down to, what, a 2% price difference? Seems pretty reasonable for me, and well within the bounds of "rounding."
Additionally, I remember seeing some of the GB people posting that theirs was working out cheaper (GBP) than the US pricing was. Go figure.
Considering that hotcake ~= pancake, I'd guess that more than a few slashfiends mow 'em down.
I did a year working the databases for a large telemarketing company down in Texas. A couple of their outbound accounts were dealing with new credit cards, just as you described. Every call was taped, and some of them were listened in on. However, every single one of the succesful calls (and a 2.5% conversionrate was considered good) was reviewed, start to finish, by a QA manager. This was for the AT&T Universal card in particular, but it seemed to be pretty standard practice. Any hint of pressure, deviation from the (rigid and fact-checked) script, etc, resulted in a call back to the customer for clarification and confirmation.
Once you go over 20 employees in a company the processes and procedures to be followed are as complex as a company woth 5000 employees, what changes is the liability the company incours if they screw up.
Not really. In a company of 20 people (and I know something about this, being a principal of a small company myself), everybody knows everybody else. You can do payroll by filling out a web form on ADP.com in 15 minutes. Employee files all fit inside a single file cabinet drawer, and you probably only have 1-2 offices and very little staff overlap. With 5,000 people things get a lot more complicated.
$1500 is a lot of money for little people
People for whom $1500 is a lot of money don't need Peoplesoft. Seriously. Sure, a modern ERP is expensive. Same holds true for specialized manufacturing software, WMS applications, et cetera. But you know what? Its mission critical - more important to a large company than any other software product, and a damn site more critical a choice than an OS platform.
Can you imagine the financial fallout if, say, everyone working for Coca Cola didn't get paid one week? Or if Amazon stopped shipping orders because their systems went down? As an example, Addidas screwed up (or got screwed) on a WMS (Warehouse Management System - just part of a total ERP package) implementation and it damn near put them out of business as a multi-national corporation.
This is the big leagues here. Nobody in their right mind would take even a small productivity gamble to save $1500 on their backend database licenses.
Ah, yes. I have a couple of those old Kayaks sitting next to me (turned off) right now. Dual PII-300s in my case. Those things were just plain built Right.
For times like this, you're much better off going over to the Jargon File and reading about it - for example, check out their entry for biff and, once there, follow the link to the amusing B1FF.
It looks like the Wiki uses this source data, by the way.
Anyway, enjoy the file. At some point you'll probably just read it all. At least, I know that I have. I believe that its available as a single HTML file for your browsing convenience, but I'm too lazy to look for it right now.
I don't know where this false sense of entitlement within the community arose, but I really hope it goes away soon. You aren't entitled to anything. You aren't entitled to the sweat of my brow, the labor of my hands, the product of my mind--but when I release something under a free license, I give you those things. I say "here, have something; I made this. I want to give it to you."
That's fine. But that goes against the predominant OSS wisdom that Linux (and hey, OSS in general) makes for a usable production system - which was, I believe, the parent poster's point.
This is why many companies, to this day, prefer to buy their software. Unfortunately, the distributions are stuck dealing with the state of the Kernel out there - which is why its sometimes easier to buy AIX, or Solaris, or even (shudder) HP-UX than it is to deal with Linux.
Especially when the OS license fees are insignificant compared to the overall cost of the project, or the cost of potential downtime.