or would you feel guilty and buy it at Sears for a higher price just because you have some misguided loyalty directed to Sears?
Okay, granted, you're not going to put either Best Buy or Sears out of business by attending the other guy's clearance sale. But if it was jut a local electronics shop that had the higher price, I'd strongly consider going with them. Why? Because they're not a huge megacorporation at all - you can make a serious difference with the purchase of one item at a little local store. Furthermore, the likelihood of you getting decent, personal service at a locally owned place is better.
Why don't these people get a job in another industry, or simply move to one of the locations that the company they used to work for moved to?
Why not move: what if you have children in school locally? What if you have a lot of family in the area and would rather not move out of the area? Getting a job in another industry: easier said than done. I think many of us in the computer industry as time goes on and it actually becomes difficult for us to get jobs. Even with the "dot com die off," I don't think most of us are hurting for job offers. But it's not like that in every industry, and certainly not across all age categories. Fact is that a lot of corporations are very hesitant to train older employees, who have family committments and would probably end up costing more anyway, when they can get freewheelin' kids to do the work cheaper. Sure, we'd all like to think we could juts hop industries whenever it becomes convenient. And I admire anyone with the dedication to retrain after a job loss. It's just that there are forces larger than your own dedication which might make that extremely difficult.
Second, if you're building a "low end" processor why the hell are you throwing SCSI at it? If it's low end SCSI doesn't/shouldn't even cross your mind...
Okay, okay, the thing is I do a lot of CD burning so transfer from the harddrive to the cd writer is the most important step, not raw processing power. I got a scsi drive basically free so instead of spending the extra 70+ whatever dollars on duron, I went celeron and put those 70 bucks into a controller. That's all.
Jon! Of course mobility around America doesn't seem like a big deal, but why don't you think about this in broader terms. I don't blame "The Net" entirely for this, but increasingly rapid digital communication coupled with stronger "free trade" policies are increasing corporate mobility. Not just within the country, though - throughout the world.
For instance, a major car company just moved their proving ground from here in southern Arizona to northern Sonora, Mexico. They said the desert here just "isn't hot enough" to really put their cars to the test. And I'm sure it's just coincidence that the Mexican labor is cheaper.
Now, of course the internet isn't to blame for that. NAFTA is, if you even want to place blame anywhere. BUT, the increasing use of the net to communicate has the potential to allow this kind of work relocation for ALL kinds of work - including the kind that you and I love. Conceptually, what's to stop your favorite consulting company from setting up a VPN on a dedicated T3 to Bangalore and hiring people there for WAY less than they pay you?
So, maybe this book isn't well written. But I think it does raise legit concerns which we should all think about. NOT panic, NOT point fingers and accuse of conspiracies, but seriously think about.
Hrmph. I don't know what I think about AMD succeeding because they "executed their roadmap." Most of that stuff was milestone junk that's actually trivial in the long run ("hey! we were the first to 1GHz! It's SO much faster than 900MHz!").
What I think's impressive is that they're actually meeting their demand. That was always AMD's biggest problem (besides the fact that every product was a direct Intel knockoff;) - they could never turn out enough chips. Seems like they finally turned that around with the Athlon.
However, the article did raise at least one important point - for a "low end" processor, the duron's just not cheap enough! I'm assembling my own computer right now, and I chose to go with a celeron because the Duron chips and compatible motherboards were just more, and I preferred to put the extra money into some things that really enhance performance for me, like a SCSI card and more RAM.
Of course, as soon as DDR is budget priced, I see myself putting together a different system altogether...
Oh, man! Yeah, it "only works on the coasts," but do you know what percent of the population (and therefore power consumption) lies along the coasts here? Okay, I don't know the percentage either, but it's alot. If, say, 10% of coastal power consumption could be replaced with this kind of technology, that would still save a LOT of carbon-based fuel and therefore pollution.
I like this kind of technology because it seems to be taking advantage of apparently perpetual motion. Of course the oceans aren't literally in perpetual motion, but it's as close as we come.
Good freaking point. MAYBE my harddrive can keep 2Mbaud coming over the IDE/ATA bus for long enough, but not if I'm doing anything else at the time. I guess I'll just write my dvds overnight and hope no processes tried to swap in or out before morning...
Right on. 16-19K is between 3 and 5 percent, big enough to be significant in many elections. But I wonder what the rates are in other counties and in other states? Does everyone end up throwing out up to 5% of their votes, or is PBC unique?
Except mp3.com already tried that, and got slapped. I bought some discs from Cheap-cds.com on the premise that I would be able to listen to them immediately on my.mp3.com, even before they arrived. And I could, for a couple of weeks; it was neat. And of course I'd already payed for the music. Of course, the RIAA paid no mind to this really neat, non-money-losing idea when they had all the major-label content shut off.
Oh, man! Just think how easy it would be to fake a demo of this thing! Because, I mean, who's going to verify that it actually has 140G of *anything* on it? That's enough space to store many libraries' books, many galleries full of visual art, weeks and weeks worth of music, or several days of high-res video. The simplest thing that comes to mind is an uber-DVD with 20+ movies on it. But you couldn't watch more than a few clips of each at a convention; it could be easily faked with a custom made DVD.
(Please note, this isn't an accusation of fraud or conspiracy; I'm just curious what an adequately convincing demo would be like)
Re:voting from the comfort of your own home -bad
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 2
Okay, but we already have this: absentee voting. In fact, I consider it a wonderful thing. It enabled me to vote at all because I'd just moved to Arizona and couldn't transfer my residency in time for the election. But I had time to send off for my absentee ballot!
Now, I don't think absentee voting should be the only way to vote. I think we should keep the local polling locations for just the reasons you mentioned. But I think using the internet or some digital replacement for paper absentee ballots would be great. A lot faster, more effecient, and no worries about lining up the booklet with your voting card:) In fact, you could even include a confirmation screen to make SURE you meant what you said.
There is absolutely no excuse for blinding poking holes in a ballot card without
carefully reading and verifying what you're doing.
Similarly, there's no excuse for you to blindly punch keys without carefully reading your console output and verifying that you'd typed an adverb. Now that you made that simple mistake once, you are to be held to it for all time to come, and you must henceforth be regarded as a person to thinks "blinding" is an adverb.
Good thing the consequences of your mistake aren't being held to national scrutiny. I wonder how you'd feel?
Ha! Tell the BSA that if they keep trying this kind of thing, we will post their URL on slashdot again, and no one will ever be able to access their website!
Slashdot: not quite a DDoS, but the next best thing.
There's a simpler explanation for the difference between the exit polls and the final vote count: absentee voters don't get exit-polled. I guess that most of the absentees in Florida are military, which could mean more republican votes for them (although caveats are scattered throughout slashdot stories today). Also, the exit poll only had 1770 people, and even though that's a decent sample size, it still doesn't predict the population with greater than 96% or 97% accuracy, and the final difference came down to something like.1% or less. So, I don't think fraud is really the thing to watch for here, although those "missing" ballot boxes that keep turning up are a bit strange.
So, either the Founding Fathers, who managed to get a couple other things right, were elitist snobs...
Bingo! I don't think there's a whole lot of other ways to analyze them from a contemporary perspective. The founding fathers were the landed gentry of the new US; they weren't exactly "royalty," since we don't have such a thing, but about the closest thing to it: rich white male land owners. NO ONE ELSE had a say in the construction of the constitution! We're fortunate they were as idealistic as they were, but there's a bunch of shabby parts of the constitution (like they wouldn't even abolish slavery immediately).
So, sure there are some benefits to the electoral college, depending on which side you're coming from. But don't think for a second that the founding fathers were men "of the people."
Okay. I agree that it's irresponsible to call Florida a Gore state before the polls are closed. But, at that point, anything goes. I can't quite understand why the popular vote shows Bush up about 9%, and they're calling it Gore. Oh, wait, exit polls. But those ignore the absentee votes! I'm not at all sure Florida is going to Gore.
Ah... I'm pretty sure Oregon has no sales taxes, since they disproportionately tax the poor, and the difference is made up in increased income and property taxes.
But nader traders are so hard to find! There's no forums on the nader trader site or anything... I'm voting in michigan, most of my friends live in michigan. I'll vote for Gore; anyone in a Bush state want to swap for a Nader vote? Email me!
Oh well, Indiana University cut off my access to Napster here at work anyways and had to go the
OpenNap route. Maybe I'll just do the same at home as well.
Precisely. Or if that doesn't float your boat, Mojo, Scour, or Gnutella. P2P isn't dead; one company without a business model is getting sued by an entire industry and - surprise! - they're selling out. It kind of had to happen. Now let's focus on some of these open services who have no central server operator to get sued. That will be a much more interesting legal precedent, I think.
And regardless which way it goes, free music swapping for a long time to come for all the valid purposes you've mentioned.
[ Insert the name of your favorite candidate, chosen from the two vastly different choices, below: ]
(Bush|Gore): I am firmly opposed to drug use, and I feel that we must increase penalties for drug dealers, users, and manufacturers (Bush: unless they're pharmaceutical manufacturers; they are the closest thing to God in this country. I love God.) Let's be honest, folks. My "youthful indiscretions" taught me that drugs just aren't something to mess around with. I wish there had been super harsh sentencing laws then like there are now, so that I could have had the piss scared out of me when I was caught (smoking|snorting), for all of about 15 minutes until daddy brought in the lawyers and the judge, being a reasonable man, agreed that I was not black and of course didn't deserve to go to jail. Furthermore, I'm sure it would have taught my college roommate, er I mean vicious drug dealer, a lesson or two if he was sentenced to life in prison and raped weekly. Instead he's gone on to become a wealthy lawyer (boy, what those drug dealers won't do for a buck). In conclusion, we all messed around with drugs when we were kids, but today's kids are different, dammit, and I don't trust them farther than I can throw them and so let's toss everybody in jail. Thank you.
Slashdot Mirror
From the letter: The KDE League has a budget of around US$120.000 for the first year. Should we assume that means $120K ?
Okay, granted, you're not going to put either Best Buy or Sears out of business by attending the other guy's clearance sale. But if it was jut a local electronics shop that had the higher price, I'd strongly consider going with them. Why? Because they're not a huge megacorporation at all - you can make a serious difference with the purchase of one item at a little local store. Furthermore, the likelihood of you getting decent, personal service at a locally owned place is better.
Why don't these people get a job in another industry, or simply move to one of the locations that the company they used to work for moved to?
Why not move: what if you have children in school locally? What if you have a lot of family in the area and would rather not move out of the area? Getting a job in another industry: easier said than done. I think many of us in the computer industry as time goes on and it actually becomes difficult for us to get jobs. Even with the "dot com die off," I don't think most of us are hurting for job offers. But it's not like that in every industry, and certainly not across all age categories. Fact is that a lot of corporations are very hesitant to train older employees, who have family committments and would probably end up costing more anyway, when they can get freewheelin' kids to do the work cheaper. Sure, we'd all like to think we could juts hop industries whenever it becomes convenient. And I admire anyone with the dedication to retrain after a job loss. It's just that there are forces larger than your own dedication which might make that extremely difficult.
Okay, okay, the thing is I do a lot of CD burning so transfer from the harddrive to the cd writer is the most important step, not raw processing power. I got a scsi drive basically free so instead of spending the extra 70+ whatever dollars on duron, I went celeron and put those 70 bucks into a controller. That's all.
For instance, a major car company just moved their proving ground from here in southern Arizona to northern Sonora, Mexico. They said the desert here just "isn't hot enough" to really put their cars to the test. And I'm sure it's just coincidence that the Mexican labor is cheaper.
Now, of course the internet isn't to blame for that. NAFTA is, if you even want to place blame anywhere. BUT, the increasing use of the net to communicate has the potential to allow this kind of work relocation for ALL kinds of work - including the kind that you and I love. Conceptually, what's to stop your favorite consulting company from setting up a VPN on a dedicated T3 to Bangalore and hiring people there for WAY less than they pay you?
So, maybe this book isn't well written. But I think it does raise legit concerns which we should all think about. NOT panic, NOT point fingers and accuse of conspiracies, but seriously think about.
What I think's impressive is that they're actually meeting their demand. That was always AMD's biggest problem (besides the fact that every product was a direct Intel knockoff ;) - they could never turn out enough chips. Seems like they finally turned that around with the Athlon.
However, the article did raise at least one important point - for a "low end" processor, the duron's just not cheap enough! I'm assembling my own computer right now, and I chose to go with a celeron because the Duron chips and compatible motherboards were just more, and I preferred to put the extra money into some things that really enhance performance for me, like a SCSI card and more RAM.
Of course, as soon as DDR is budget priced, I see myself putting together a different system altogether...
I like this kind of technology because it seems to be taking advantage of apparently perpetual motion. Of course the oceans aren't literally in perpetual motion, but it's as close as we come.
Good freaking point. MAYBE my harddrive can keep 2Mbaud coming over the IDE/ATA bus for long enough, but not if I'm doing anything else at the time. I guess I'll just write my dvds overnight and hope no processes tried to swap in or out before morning...
Er, I think it's 2.5% anyway. It's been a long time since I've sold anything on ebay.
And they don't even charge $30; only 2.5% of the item's value ;)
Right on. 16-19K is between 3 and 5 percent, big enough to be significant in many elections. But I wonder what the rates are in other counties and in other states? Does everyone end up throwing out up to 5% of their votes, or is PBC unique?
Alrighty. Now if there was anything worth listening to on the radio, I'd be ready to go!
Except mp3.com already tried that, and got slapped. I bought some discs from Cheap-cds.com on the premise that I would be able to listen to them immediately on my.mp3.com, even before they arrived. And I could, for a couple of weeks; it was neat. And of course I'd already payed for the music. Of course, the RIAA paid no mind to this really neat, non-money-losing idea when they had all the major-label content shut off.
(Please note, this isn't an accusation of fraud or conspiracy; I'm just curious what an adequately convincing demo would be like)
Now, I don't think absentee voting should be the only way to vote. I think we should keep the local polling locations for just the reasons you mentioned. But I think using the internet or some digital replacement for paper absentee ballots would be great. A lot faster, more effecient, and no worries about lining up the booklet with your voting card :) In fact, you could even include a confirmation screen to make SURE you meant what you said.
Similarly, there's no excuse for you to blindly punch keys without carefully reading your console output and verifying that you'd typed an adverb. Now that you made that simple mistake once, you are to be held to it for all time to come, and you must henceforth be regarded as a person to thinks "blinding" is an adverb.
Good thing the consequences of your mistake aren't being held to national scrutiny. I wonder how you'd feel?
Slashdot: not quite a DDoS, but the next best thing.
There's a simpler explanation for the difference between the exit polls and the final vote count: absentee voters don't get exit-polled. I guess that most of the absentees in Florida are military, which could mean more republican votes for them (although caveats are scattered throughout slashdot stories today). Also, the exit poll only had 1770 people, and even though that's a decent sample size, it still doesn't predict the population with greater than 96% or 97% accuracy, and the final difference came down to something like .1% or less. So, I don't think fraud is really the thing to watch for here, although those "missing" ballot boxes that keep turning up are a bit strange.
Bingo! I don't think there's a whole lot of other ways to analyze them from a contemporary perspective. The founding fathers were the landed gentry of the new US; they weren't exactly "royalty," since we don't have such a thing, but about the closest thing to it: rich white male land owners. NO ONE ELSE had a say in the construction of the constitution! We're fortunate they were as idealistic as they were, but there's a bunch of shabby parts of the constitution (like they wouldn't even abolish slavery immediately).
So, sure there are some benefits to the electoral college, depending on which side you're coming from. But don't think for a second that the founding fathers were men "of the people."
Okay. I agree that it's irresponsible to call Florida a Gore state before the polls are closed. But, at that point, anything goes. I can't quite understand why the popular vote shows Bush up about 9%, and they're calling it Gore. Oh, wait, exit polls. But those ignore the absentee votes! I'm not at all sure Florida is going to Gore.
Ah... I'm pretty sure Oregon has no sales taxes, since they disproportionately tax the poor, and the difference is made up in increased income and property taxes.
Oregon residents care to comment?
"Yeah man. I mean, you're supposed to wait until you're in college to try drugs. Doing it in high school is totally not cool."
But nader traders are so hard to find! There's no forums on the nader trader site or anything... I'm voting in michigan, most of my friends live in michigan. I'll vote for Gore; anyone in a Bush state want to swap for a Nader vote? Email me!
the M. Moore story is here (unless my cookie timed out or something, which might have been the problem with the original post).
Precisely. Or if that doesn't float your boat, Mojo, Scour, or Gnutella. P2P isn't dead; one company without a business model is getting sued by an entire industry and - surprise! - they're selling out. It kind of had to happen. Now let's focus on some of these open services who have no central server operator to get sued. That will be a much more interesting legal precedent, I think. And regardless which way it goes, free music swapping for a long time to come for all the valid purposes you've mentioned.
(Bush|Gore): I am firmly opposed to drug use, and I feel that we must increase penalties for drug dealers, users, and manufacturers (Bush: unless they're pharmaceutical manufacturers; they are the closest thing to God in this country. I love God.) Let's be honest, folks. My "youthful indiscretions" taught me that drugs just aren't something to mess around with. I wish there had been super harsh sentencing laws then like there are now, so that I could have had the piss scared out of me when I was caught (smoking|snorting), for all of about 15 minutes until daddy brought in the lawyers and the judge, being a reasonable man, agreed that I was not black and of course didn't deserve to go to jail. Furthermore, I'm sure it would have taught my college roommate, er I mean vicious drug dealer, a lesson or two if he was sentenced to life in prison and raped weekly. Instead he's gone on to become a wealthy lawyer (boy, what those drug dealers won't do for a buck). In conclusion, we all messed around with drugs when we were kids, but today's kids are different, dammit, and I don't trust them farther than I can throw them and so let's toss everybody in jail. Thank you.