As with most things, the correct approach is a balanced one. Going to extremes on either side of the issue with invariably result in negative consequences.
Having an in-depth knowledge of html, css and javascript is crucial to effective web development and design. Having design/graphical tools let's you step back from the code and see things in a "big-picture" light, allowing you to create innovative designs that you probably wouldn't have considered otherwise.
I generally use both approaches. I like to use Artisteer to generate random designs to get concept ideas (I'm not a graphic designer). When I find a concept I like, I take the generated results and convert them into the final code I want. Here's an example of that approach: Master Iron Company
Sometime I take the hand-coded approach if I'm just playing around and experimenting. Here's an example of that: MotorTap (a product I developed, and make the web site for).
Great post, though I'm not sure I agree with your point about 3D printers. I foresee local community and neighborhood 3D printers installed and serviced by that you can just send your 3D model to, and walk over to pick it up in a couple hours. Costs will be automatically charged to your CC. A large part of retail cost is in shipping/fuel costs. Consider the enormous amount of fuel/labor required to get a $.50 plastic widget transported across the world to your local Walmart, plus the fuel cost of you driving to the local store to buy it.
Next time I need a couple wall hangers, instead of getting in my V8 Chevy, spending $5 on gas to drive to walmart, I could just pick from "top reviewed" models on the internet, select one, send it to my local printer, and walk/ride by bike over to pick it up, saying hi to my neighbors on the way, and my total cost isn't much higher than the raw cost of plastic feed. This seem pretty Utopian to me, and I don't think we're too far away from it, honestly.
This will cause a massive reduction in the low-price widget sales of the big box stores, which will then need to focus on larger more complex items that can't be easily fabricated, which is a good thing.
As to all the folks on here who are screaming that the sky is falling and the middle class will be destroyed along with all those precious manufacturing jobs - pfft. Nonsense. People cry tearfully and dramatically about this same old thing every time a disruptive technology emerges. Strangely, it never happens, and the end result is a dramatically increased standard of living.
Just as the guys who worked on the assembly line of the buggy-whip manufacturers could have never conceived of the current job pool (Imagine trying to explain job reqs for a social media analyst to this person) we're equally limited in our ability to conceive of what the future will look like.
This, I think, it my primary problem with (for lack of a better term) "liberal" thought. I don't fault the motivation, I think that these sorts of ideas come from people who have a strong sense of justice and compassion. My problem is that it seems like "liberals" tend to take an extremely simplistic view of possible solutions, and have little comprehension for the unintended consequences of their proposals.
For example, we have rich people, and we have poor people. The "liberal" sense of justice is very simple: let's take stuff from the rich folks and give it to the poor folks. That solves the problem, right? What could possibly go wrong?
In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand took the (for lack of better terms) "collectivist" (liberal, etc...) and "individualist" (libertarian, fiscal conservative, Austrian school, etc...) schools of thought to their logical extremes. Liberalism, of course failed miserably in her example, but it is also quite telling that in order for her fictitious libertarian paradise to succeed it required technological/science fiction props (free energy, projected holograms, infinite broadcast power, etc...).
Ayn Rand demonstrated a clear assumption that intellectual property rights would be respected by both "sides" of the conflict. This is demonstrated with the subplot of the government using dirty tricks and manipulation to force Hank Reardon to sign over rights to Reardon Metal to the government. This was considered a fundamental attribute of the United States, as compared with other countries (note the nationalization of Francisco D'Antonio's assets). So, she clearly demonstrates that she believes in IP protections. John Galt, the character, would also share in these beliefs, since he's represented as the embodiment of her highest ideals.
As to the internal consistency of this, I agree that on the surface there is some conflict. Especially given Rand's discussion of force as being the antithesis of reason, but to rely on force to protect that which reason creates could be considered inconsistent. There is an exception to Rand's disavowal of force, however. She absolutely recognizes force as necessary to protect one's self and property. She also recognizes the military as one of the few legitimate functions of the government. This is made clear by the following excerpt from The Virtue of Selfishness:
"The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. But a government that initiates the employment of force against men who had forced no one, the employment of armed compulsion against disarmed victims, is a nightmare infernal machine designed to annihilate morality"
Ayn Rand makes it clear that she supports the court systems and police force as a legitimate function of government to protect property and, by extension, ideas (patents/copyright).
I'm frequently surprised at comments I see that conflate Ayn Rand/objectivism/libertarianism with anarchy. It is simply not true, and is mostly only done by those who have little education or understanding of those philosophies.
There's no evidence, that I'm aware of, that Ayn Rand ever considered government to be "evil". What she considered "evil" or immoral, was a government that exceeded it's bounds and participated in activities outside of which those that she considered to be legitimate functions.
Which is quite logical and consistent. There may be parts of the legislation that are worthy and legitimate, and if you poll people on those parts, they will respond positively. But will that same person support a law that's over two thousand pages long, that no one in congress has actually read, that no one is quite certain what it will do? Well, it's pretty reasonable to say "Umm, no - I don't think I can get behind that."
But please, don't let a little rational, critical thinking stop your party bashing. It's great for mod points, after all.
I'm not sure what the point of this "article" is. It is light on actual information or anything useful, it's basically just a few paragraphs that say "a NoSQL database called Mongo stored data in JSON format. This may or may not work for you".
If we're going to have "BI" articles, they should be informative, containing useful information that we couldn't have gathered ourselves in 10 secs of googling.
How about some comparisons between various NoSQL solutions? How about binary access API v/s RESTful approach ala Couch? How about clustering, replication and scalability? How about stability concerns (with Couch, for example). Real world use cases? Examples of companies using them for specific solutions? Performance comparisons with RDBMS's? Problem domains that NoSQL/schema less DB is more suited to than a RDMBS?
I'm not trying to be pointlessly critical here, I'm trying to provide some constructive feedback on the new slashdot BI format. This article wasn't useful to me at all. I'll probably not spend time reading these articles in the future if the content is as light as this article.
It's not that we're missing out. It's that some of us have put up with statically typed languages for 15 years, and have had enough of that crap.
If you don't like dynamic languages, fine, but implying that folks who choose to embrace FP and dynamic languages are "hobbyists" serves no purpose other than to expose your lack of depth as a developer.
My understanding (extremely rudimentary) was that Tesla's idea for wireless transmission of power was based on the notion that he could use the entire planet as a giant capacitor, with the earth and ionosphere acting as conducting plates and the air as the insulator.
His notion was that you could pump a bunch of energy into this giant capacitor, and then tap it anywhere else on the planet.
Whether this is crackpot or not, I can't say - I'm no EE. But FWIW - Tesla wasn't just trying to beam power with radio waves.
I agree with this completely, I just implemented a project that uses an XML data store.
It's an interesting architecture, each instance gets a 20ish meg XML file, loaded into memory. This is then queried with e4x for the UI. It's blazing fast, and doesn't need any round trips to a database server, and it's quick to develop.
Of course, the only reason I can get away with this is because it's read-only, so technically it isn't a data store, but a data transmission methodology. Still, in most traditional apps I've seen, this would have had an n-tier kind of thing, where the UI queries middleware, which talks to a DB. Using a big ole XML doc as a read-only data source has been pretty cool, and worked great. It's also massively decreased points of failure and opportunities for bugs.
I went back and forth quite a bit on XML v/s JSON for this, but I ended up going with XML because e4x is pretty nice for querying data. I fully expect to redo all this in a few years if/when I migrate to HTML5 for the UI, because other than Mozilla no browser vendor will support e4x.
I assume that you're comment is limited to just cars, not trucks.
I just bought a Silverado 1500, and it was a fantastic purchase, and easily the best option out there. Compared spec to spec with Toyota or others? For the price, Silverado was so far ahead it wasn't even a competition. The closest 2nd choice was the F-150, but I've owned one of those before and prefer the Chevy.
I don't know anything about the cars, but the trucks are amazing.
I'm one of the few who actually owned one of these, so I'll share the good and bad points from my experience. Please note, this is in regards to the SUR40 manufactured by Samsung, Microsoft's Surface SDK is broadly applicable to a wide range of touch devices. It's based on WPF, so if you like.Net and WPF you'll be right at home.
First, the good: - The SDK is decent, and well thought out. It's designed in classic OOP fashion, so folks who are familiar with WPF and.Net will feel right at home. The touch and gesture interfaces are straight forward. For folks who prefer ECMA Script/functional style coding, the SDK might be frustrating. I ended up using Flex for the UI because the development time in WPF was just taking too long. I also tried HTML5 but multitouch just isn't there yet for desktop browsers. The only one who's doing it is Mozilla, and the W3C spec isn't nearly complete, so Mozilla has their own implementation, but it's already deprecated. Flash player has excellent multitouch support, so I went with that. - Pixel Sense. The way that the SUR40 recognizes input is unique in the market. Instead of one of the standard implementations like SAW, IR, Projective Capacitance, Camera, etc... the SUR40 uses what they sub "Pixel Sense" technology. Essentially this is a distributed grid of tiny IR cameras. The resolution is amazing, you can actually use this thing as a scanner by placing a piece of paper on it and capturing the raw image. Of course, with OCR, this opens up all sorts of interesting applications. - Solidly built. The whole unit was solid and well presented. It looks very nice and would be appropriate in any sort of showroom setting. - Price. While it seems expensive (and is!) it is actually very fairly priced in the market. Other competing offerings are significantly more expensive and have fewer capabilities. This is not a consumer device, this is a business device, and competes well with similar offerings from other companies for example: these are typical. Unless you're going to develop your own hardware platform with integrated CPU (which I ended up doing), the price is actually not bad.
The bad: - Lighting. I can't stress this point enough. If you're not running this thing in a dark cave, it won't work. Not "decreased performance" like the marketing material says, it simply will not function. Even in a room with curtains closed and blinds drawn, this unit was completely non-functional during the day. This ruled it out as an option for my application, but if you're going to be in very tightly controlled lighting environments, then this still might be a decent option for you. - Integrated computer. The specs on the integrated computer are frankly embarrassing for Samsung and Microsoft. The unit is terribly underpowered. For a table that's designed to be graphics heavy, this is a severe limitation. A $500 mini-ITX Core i5 based solution (which I ended up going with) is about 3-4 times faster and more powerful than the crappy CPU in this thing, and as far as I know there's no way to upgrade it. This is a huge disappointment, and there's really no reason for it. Microsoft could have thrown intel's i5 based mini-ITX in this and blown the doors down with performance. For the price you're paying for this table, there's no excuse for the underpowered hardware. - Weight. Be aware, this is not light. Two strong people will be required to move it around. This makes it difficult to use for travelling tradeshows. - The legs. This annoyed me quite a bit. The legs (which are NOT included with the table) cost over $800 and must be ordered separately. And no, there's no reason for them to be that expensive, there's nothing magical about them. They are just basic metal legs. This aggravated me to no end.
At the end of the day, the unit cost me over 9k (with shipping and tax) and it ended up going back. The marketing material is misleading when it talks about lighting conditions, there should be a
The people you'll see champing at the bit for 'free markets' are often the same people that defend the government transferring billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to megacorporations
Where to even start? The thing that baffles me about a post like this, is how you and I, presumably, are two fairly intelligent, thoughtful people. How is it possible that our entire view of reality can be so divergent, and that we can both clearly be so passionate about our worldview?
I respect rich people, I want to be one. I work very, very hard to make that happen. I take risks, save every penny and scrap together enough so that I can launch a product I'm developing for my business. I work 12 to 16 hours a day, and if it pays off, if my product is a success, I'll be able to hire people to build and grow my business.
If it fails, I'll take my lumps, then start over scrimping and saving, and try again. I will continue to do this until I succeed.
But if I do succeed - if my hard work pays off, then to you, I'm a leech?
And then went on to make it one of the finest languages the world has ever seen, without being held back by the Java standards folks.
I, for one, am quite glad this happened. It allowed Microsoft to do some wild things with a statically typed language which have never been seen before (linq, etc...) and they're the ones really pushing the limits and blurring the lines between static and dynamic languages.
Meanwhile, Java still doesn't have anonymous functions or closures. Java 7 came out last year and the biggest language enhancement? You can use strings in a switch.
Microsoft is worthy of criticism on several fronts, but what they've done with C# deserves respect.
The problems with this are so enormous and obvious, I'm surprised you're in business at all.
I'm a business owner too - and I understand a simple concept: my business is only as good as the people in it. I would rather close my doors than pay a person one penny less than what they are worth - this is basic common sense on so many levels, that it is difficult for me to understand how anyone can fail to see it, but I'll try to explain:
1) My success depends on the success of those who work for me, whether contractor, employee or vendor. If they fail, I fail. Short changing them doesn't help anyone.
2) Good developers know what they are worth. If they are getting short changed, they'll leave. Do the basic math! How much does it cost to go through the hiring process? How much to you have to pay headhunters, or time spent scraping resumes on Dice? How much do you have to pay in salary before the new guy comes up to speed (assuming you can even find a decent person, which is hard, hard)? How much have your project timelines been impacted by losing a key person? What you've described is business insanity, and pretty much a recipe for "how to fail in business".
3) If you treat people like a commodity, they'll act like a commodity. Why would someone give you their best work when you're treating them like a replaceable cog? Now start to factor in the costs of mediocre/shoddy development, bugs, customer dissatisfaction...
You say "Welcome to profitable business" but it is clear to me that you're just guessing, from what you've said I'm pretty sure you've never actually run a business, if you had, you'd know that you just can't treat people like that, or you would have been driven out of business long ago.
I wish that every person who supports these sorts of arguments (I hesitantly label "liberal") would read this and really learn from it: The Broken Window Parable
Slashdot Mirror
*sigh* my kingdom for an EDIT button on slashdot. How many typos and errors can a person make in a single post? Sorry.
As with most things, the correct approach is a balanced one. Going to extremes on either side of the issue with invariably result in negative consequences.
Having an in-depth knowledge of html, css and javascript is crucial to effective web development and design. Having design/graphical tools let's you step back from the code and see things in a "big-picture" light, allowing you to create innovative designs that you probably wouldn't have considered otherwise.
I generally use both approaches. I like to use Artisteer to generate random designs to get concept ideas (I'm not a graphic designer). When I find a concept I like, I take the generated results and convert them into the final code I want. Here's an example of that approach: Master Iron Company
Sometime I take the hand-coded approach if I'm just playing around and experimenting. Here's an example of that: MotorTap (a product I developed, and make the web site for).
Great post, though I'm not sure I agree with your point about 3D printers. I foresee local community and neighborhood 3D printers installed and serviced by that you can just send your 3D model to, and walk over to pick it up in a couple hours. Costs will be automatically charged to your CC. A large part of retail cost is in shipping/fuel costs. Consider the enormous amount of fuel/labor required to get a $.50 plastic widget transported across the world to your local Walmart, plus the fuel cost of you driving to the local store to buy it.
Next time I need a couple wall hangers, instead of getting in my V8 Chevy, spending $5 on gas to drive to walmart, I could just pick from "top reviewed" models on the internet, select one, send it to my local printer, and walk/ride by bike over to pick it up, saying hi to my neighbors on the way, and my total cost isn't much higher than the raw cost of plastic feed. This seem pretty Utopian to me, and I don't think we're too far away from it, honestly.
This will cause a massive reduction in the low-price widget sales of the big box stores, which will then need to focus on larger more complex items that can't be easily fabricated, which is a good thing.
As to all the folks on here who are screaming that the sky is falling and the middle class will be destroyed along with all those precious manufacturing jobs - pfft. Nonsense. People cry tearfully and dramatically about this same old thing every time a disruptive technology emerges. Strangely, it never happens, and the end result is a dramatically increased standard of living.
Just as the guys who worked on the assembly line of the buggy-whip manufacturers could have never conceived of the current job pool (Imagine trying to explain job reqs for a social media analyst to this person) we're equally limited in our ability to conceive of what the future will look like.
This, I think, it my primary problem with (for lack of a better term) "liberal" thought. I don't fault the motivation, I think that these sorts of ideas come from people who have a strong sense of justice and compassion. My problem is that it seems like "liberals" tend to take an extremely simplistic view of possible solutions, and have little comprehension for the unintended consequences of their proposals.
For example, we have rich people, and we have poor people. The "liberal" sense of justice is very simple: let's take stuff from the rich folks and give it to the poor folks. That solves the problem, right? What could possibly go wrong?
I'll take a rough stab at answering this.
In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand took the (for lack of better terms) "collectivist" (liberal, etc...) and "individualist" (libertarian, fiscal conservative, Austrian school, etc...) schools of thought to their logical extremes. Liberalism, of course failed miserably in her example, but it is also quite telling that in order for her fictitious libertarian paradise to succeed it required technological/science fiction props (free energy, projected holograms, infinite broadcast power, etc...).
Ayn Rand demonstrated a clear assumption that intellectual property rights would be respected by both "sides" of the conflict. This is demonstrated with the subplot of the government using dirty tricks and manipulation to force Hank Reardon to sign over rights to Reardon Metal to the government. This was considered a fundamental attribute of the United States, as compared with other countries (note the nationalization of Francisco D'Antonio's assets). So, she clearly demonstrates that she believes in IP protections. John Galt, the character, would also share in these beliefs, since he's represented as the embodiment of her highest ideals.
As to the internal consistency of this, I agree that on the surface there is some conflict. Especially given Rand's discussion of force as being the antithesis of reason, but to rely on force to protect that which reason creates could be considered inconsistent. There is an exception to Rand's disavowal of force, however. She absolutely recognizes force as necessary to protect one's self and property. She also recognizes the military as one of the few legitimate functions of the government. This is made clear by the following excerpt from The Virtue of Selfishness:
"The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. But a government that initiates the employment of force against men who had forced no one, the employment of armed compulsion against disarmed victims, is a nightmare infernal machine designed to annihilate morality"
Ayn Rand makes it clear that she supports the court systems and police force as a legitimate function of government to protect property and, by extension, ideas (patents/copyright).
I'm frequently surprised at comments I see that conflate Ayn Rand/objectivism/libertarianism with anarchy. It is simply not true, and is mostly only done by those who have little education or understanding of those philosophies.
There's no evidence, that I'm aware of, that Ayn Rand ever considered government to be "evil". What she considered "evil" or immoral, was a government that exceeded it's bounds and participated in activities outside of which those that she considered to be legitimate functions.
Which is quite logical and consistent. There may be parts of the legislation that are worthy and legitimate, and if you poll people on those parts, they will respond positively. But will that same person support a law that's over two thousand pages long, that no one in congress has actually read, that no one is quite certain what it will do? Well, it's pretty reasonable to say "Umm, no - I don't think I can get behind that."
But please, don't let a little rational, critical thinking stop your party bashing. It's great for mod points, after all.
Agreed.
Way to avoid the actual subject, evidence, math and science and just reply with sarcasm with a sprinkle of xenophobia mixed in.
You sir, win the most worthless post of the day award.
Wrong. over population is a myth.
This seems more reasonable to me than all the hysteria: Over Population is a Myth
I was planning to book a skiing vacation in Colorado, but it looks at if all the sweet powder will be on the mountains in hell.
I'm not sure what the point of this "article" is. It is light on actual information or anything useful, it's basically just a few paragraphs that say "a NoSQL database called Mongo stored data in JSON format. This may or may not work for you".
If we're going to have "BI" articles, they should be informative, containing useful information that we couldn't have gathered ourselves in 10 secs of googling.
How about some comparisons between various NoSQL solutions? How about binary access API v/s RESTful approach ala Couch? How about clustering, replication and scalability? How about stability concerns (with Couch, for example). Real world use cases? Examples of companies using them for specific solutions? Performance comparisons with RDBMS's? Problem domains that NoSQL/schema less DB is more suited to than a RDMBS?
I'm not trying to be pointlessly critical here, I'm trying to provide some constructive feedback on the new slashdot BI format. This article wasn't useful to me at all. I'll probably not spend time reading these articles in the future if the content is as light as this article.
It's not that we're missing out. It's that some of us have put up with statically typed languages for 15 years, and have had enough of that crap.
If you don't like dynamic languages, fine, but implying that folks who choose to embrace FP and dynamic languages are "hobbyists" serves no purpose other than to expose your lack of depth as a developer.
Read this and take a long hard look at yourself.
My understanding (extremely rudimentary) was that Tesla's idea for wireless transmission of power was based on the notion that he could use the entire planet as a giant capacitor, with the earth and ionosphere acting as conducting plates and the air as the insulator.
His notion was that you could pump a bunch of energy into this giant capacitor, and then tap it anywhere else on the planet.
Whether this is crackpot or not, I can't say - I'm no EE. But FWIW - Tesla wasn't just trying to beam power with radio waves.
I agree with this completely, I just implemented a project that uses an XML data store.
It's an interesting architecture, each instance gets a 20ish meg XML file, loaded into memory. This is then queried with e4x for the UI. It's blazing fast, and doesn't need any round trips to a database server, and it's quick to develop.
Of course, the only reason I can get away with this is because it's read-only, so technically it isn't a data store, but a data transmission methodology. Still, in most traditional apps I've seen, this would have had an n-tier kind of thing, where the UI queries middleware, which talks to a DB. Using a big ole XML doc as a read-only data source has been pretty cool, and worked great. It's also massively decreased points of failure and opportunities for bugs.
I went back and forth quite a bit on XML v/s JSON for this, but I ended up going with XML because e4x is pretty nice for querying data. I fully expect to redo all this in a few years if/when I migrate to HTML5 for the UI, because other than Mozilla no browser vendor will support e4x.
Sigh, 'your', not 'you're'. *facepalm*
I'm off to self-flagellate .
I assume that you're comment is limited to just cars, not trucks.
I just bought a Silverado 1500, and it was a fantastic purchase, and easily the best option out there. Compared spec to spec with Toyota or others? For the price, Silverado was so far ahead it wasn't even a competition. The closest 2nd choice was the F-150, but I've owned one of those before and prefer the Chevy.
I don't know anything about the cars, but the trucks are amazing.
I'm one of the few who actually owned one of these, so I'll share the good and bad points from my experience. Please note, this is in regards to the SUR40 manufactured by Samsung, Microsoft's Surface SDK is broadly applicable to a wide range of touch devices. It's based on WPF, so if you like .Net and WPF you'll be right at home.
First, the good: .Net will feel right at home. The touch and gesture interfaces are straight forward. For folks who prefer ECMA Script/functional style coding, the SDK might be frustrating. I ended up using Flex for the UI because the development time in WPF was just taking too long. I also tried HTML5 but multitouch just isn't there yet for desktop browsers. The only one who's doing it is Mozilla, and the W3C spec isn't nearly complete, so Mozilla has their own implementation, but it's already deprecated. Flash player has excellent multitouch support, so I went with that.
- The SDK is decent, and well thought out. It's designed in classic OOP fashion, so folks who are familiar with WPF and
- Pixel Sense. The way that the SUR40 recognizes input is unique in the market. Instead of one of the standard implementations like SAW, IR, Projective Capacitance, Camera, etc... the SUR40 uses what they sub "Pixel Sense" technology. Essentially this is a distributed grid of tiny IR cameras. The resolution is amazing, you can actually use this thing as a scanner by placing a piece of paper on it and capturing the raw image. Of course, with OCR, this opens up all sorts of interesting applications.
- Solidly built. The whole unit was solid and well presented. It looks very nice and would be appropriate in any sort of showroom setting.
- Price. While it seems expensive (and is!) it is actually very fairly priced in the market. Other competing offerings are significantly more expensive and have fewer capabilities. This is not a consumer device, this is a business device, and competes well with similar offerings from other companies for example: these are typical. Unless you're going to develop your own hardware platform with integrated CPU (which I ended up doing), the price is actually not bad.
The bad:
- Lighting. I can't stress this point enough. If you're not running this thing in a dark cave, it won't work. Not "decreased performance" like the marketing material says, it simply will not function. Even in a room with curtains closed and blinds drawn, this unit was completely non-functional during the day. This ruled it out as an option for my application, but if you're going to be in very tightly controlled lighting environments, then this still might be a decent option for you.
- Integrated computer. The specs on the integrated computer are frankly embarrassing for Samsung and Microsoft. The unit is terribly underpowered. For a table that's designed to be graphics heavy, this is a severe limitation. A $500 mini-ITX Core i5 based solution (which I ended up going with) is about 3-4 times faster and more powerful than the crappy CPU in this thing, and as far as I know there's no way to upgrade it. This is a huge disappointment, and there's really no reason for it. Microsoft could have thrown intel's i5 based mini-ITX in this and blown the doors down with performance. For the price you're paying for this table, there's no excuse for the underpowered hardware.
- Weight. Be aware, this is not light. Two strong people will be required to move it around. This makes it difficult to use for travelling tradeshows.
- The legs. This annoyed me quite a bit. The legs (which are NOT included with the table) cost over $800 and must be ordered separately. And no, there's no reason for them to be that expensive, there's nothing magical about them. They are just basic metal legs. This aggravated me to no end.
At the end of the day, the unit cost me over 9k (with shipping and tax) and it ended up going back. The marketing material is misleading when it talks about lighting conditions, there should be a
The people you'll see champing at the bit for 'free markets' are often the same people that defend the government transferring billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to megacorporations
Not the libertarians.
Where to even start? The thing that baffles me about a post like this, is how you and I, presumably, are two fairly intelligent, thoughtful people. How is it possible that our entire view of reality can be so divergent, and that we can both clearly be so passionate about our worldview?
I respect rich people, I want to be one. I work very, very hard to make that happen. I take risks, save every penny and scrap together enough so that I can launch a product I'm developing for my business. I work 12 to 16 hours a day, and if it pays off, if my product is a success, I'll be able to hire people to build and grow my business.
If it fails, I'll take my lumps, then start over scrimping and saving, and try again. I will continue to do this until I succeed.
But if I do succeed - if my hard work pays off, then to you, I'm a leech?
Wild.
And by using emotionally charged phrases like "climate change deniers" you feed into it.
Funny, my definition of "superior" would be a language that gets the job done, and is readily and cheaply available.
And then went on to make it one of the finest languages the world has ever seen, without being held back by the Java standards folks.
I, for one, am quite glad this happened. It allowed Microsoft to do some wild things with a statically typed language which have never been seen before (linq, etc...) and they're the ones really pushing the limits and blurring the lines between static and dynamic languages.
Meanwhile, Java still doesn't have anonymous functions or closures. Java 7 came out last year and the biggest language enhancement? You can use strings in a switch.
Microsoft is worthy of criticism on several fronts, but what they've done with C# deserves respect.
The problems with this are so enormous and obvious, I'm surprised you're in business at all.
I'm a business owner too - and I understand a simple concept: my business is only as good as the people in it. I would rather close my doors than pay a person one penny less than what they are worth - this is basic common sense on so many levels, that it is difficult for me to understand how anyone can fail to see it, but I'll try to explain:
1) My success depends on the success of those who work for me, whether contractor, employee or vendor. If they fail, I fail. Short changing them doesn't help anyone.
2) Good developers know what they are worth. If they are getting short changed, they'll leave. Do the basic math! How much does it cost to go through the hiring process? How much to you have to pay headhunters, or time spent scraping resumes on Dice? How much do you have to pay in salary before the new guy comes up to speed (assuming you can even find a decent person, which is hard, hard)? How much have your project timelines been impacted by losing a key person? What you've described is business insanity, and pretty much a recipe for "how to fail in business".
3) If you treat people like a commodity, they'll act like a commodity. Why would someone give you their best work when you're treating them like a replaceable cog? Now start to factor in the costs of mediocre/shoddy development, bugs, customer dissatisfaction...
You say "Welcome to profitable business" but it is clear to me that you're just guessing, from what you've said I'm pretty sure you've never actually run a business, if you had, you'd know that you just can't treat people like that, or you would have been driven out of business long ago.
I wish that every person who supports these sorts of arguments (I hesitantly label "liberal") would read this and really learn from it: The Broken Window Parable
It's especially amusing that you're making the (arrogant) assumption that I'm religious.