That's basically the retailer hopefully having done the risk analysis and saying "losing out on X sometimes because of fraud is better than slowing everything down by requiring signatures".
I've been asked to sign for a latte, and not asked to sign for $50 purchases. That's all up to the retailer.
Have you been to Japan in the past 30 years? Most residences have air conditioning as it's frequently > 35C with tonnes of humidity during the summers.
What's staring me in the face? A fucking TGI Fridays.
You tellin' me they don't have knives in the kitchen?
To be fair, the last time I was in O'Hare in the American Airlines terminal, the Wolfgang Puck restaurant's kitchen knives appeared to have been affixed to the workstation with fairly heavy-duty steel cables.
This is not to say getting knives and explosives into the "secure" areas aren't trivial. Security theater indeed.
I've also seen the most elegant solutions to complicated problems in banks and hedge funds. Trying to predict which way a given security will move given past patterns is a very hard problem, yet I've seen systems that do just that and do it correctly 75% of the time.
Fair enough -- I don't claim AT&T is perfect, and far from it. My friend's Blackberry on AT&T will randomly drop calls or refuse data connections in Manhattan, even though he'd have full signal. I'd be sitting across from him in the same restaurant, and my iPhone would be fully functional.
All that says, though, is that his particular Blackberry model + revision has worse radio implementation compared to my particular iPhone model + revision for that exact situation.
As for AT&T refusing service, back when I lived in St. Louis, before they merged with BellSouth's wireless, Southwestern Bell's wireless refused wireless service to me citing their inability to find my address. Since I lived in St. Louis County but in an unincorporated area between Creve Coeur and Maryland Heights, I was not entirely surprised. We ended up going with Voicestream (now T-Mobile), and their GSM coverage was abysmal too, especially outside town. I'm sure things have changed in the 10 years since I've moved out of the area though.
It's similar in Japan, too, or was in 2003 or thereabouts. The #2 mobile carrier, KDDI's Au, had issues with servicing my grandmother's place in a medium-sized city. DoCoMo had no issues, and everyone in town used DoCoMo. Back in Tokyo, Au had completed their 3G rollout, and had far superiour 3G coverage to DoCoMo, who had coverage on paper but their towers were too far apart to penetrate far into buildings. Again, I hear things are very different now that they have ditched PDC and are releasing W-CDMA phones exclusively.
Outside of cities? Which cities are you generalizing about? I'm regularly in NYC, and my vanilla iPhone 3G doesn't skip a beat. However, in Westchester and Putnam counties, I've had issues where my phone will drop out of 3G and stay on EDGE. Up here in Connecticut, it doesn't skip a beat either.
In Chicago, it was much the same. I'd go out to the exurbs, and things sometimes got a little wonky, but then I'd return the next day, and I'm in solid 3G, with solid signal strength.
The entire world is filled with average people. My point in my original post was that most people, for whatever reason, when writing cursive, tend to come out with seriously illegible scrawl. This has nothing to do with their lack of desire -- I have yet to come across people who pride themselves on illegible penmanship -- but the inherent lack of legibility built into the cursive system they've been taught.
So instead of starting from the illegible scrawl, they propose to the reader they start from something more legible. It's like instead of shoehorning functional programming concepts into Java, they start with ocaml.
I'm not discounting the artistic side of this entire endeavour. As a former professional musician, I do not believe everything should be useful. However, if given a choice between teaching my hypothetical children how to write cursive and print, so they can communicate, I'd much rather they were taught to print legiblly than scrawl. If they wanted to take up calligraphy, more power to them, but I do not believe in shoving art down their throats.
Just posting a clarification -- I do not question the utility of writing longhand. It's a skill that is very useful. I do question the teaching of cursive by grammar schools almost exclusively, because italics that's been mentioned the article I linked to is far more legible by more people.
To be fair, though, I suspect you've never seen beautiful handwriting, or its effect on the addressee.
If average people were able to consistently create beautiful script, I would be inclined to agree. However, as the article I've linked to shows, even decent cursive results in loopy, unreadable mess.
Perhaps my comment, "deserves to die", was too strong, but the point still stands -- there's a difference between teaching for utility and teaching for art, and it appears that the schools have confused the two.
NYTimes recently had an article on penmanship. Cursive deserves to die -- it often results in illegible scrawl. I'd explain why, but the article does it so much better.
- Hard eject with soft disable (e.g. like CD-R/RW drives which physically lock closed while burning). Ensure that it unlocks when the power goes off!
You do realise that the optical drive eject buttons nowadays are soft eject, and therefore largely useless when the power is off, and the mac floppies have had the paperclip emergency eject, like optical drives you're so enamoured of, since pre-PowerPC days, right?
That's okay. I saw a Mandarin Oriental Towers advert in an American Airlines magazine that used "it's" as a possessive. I'd like to think something like that, aimed at high net-worth individuals, would hire better copy writers.
You're correct, except for one thing. Paramount's current public plan is to stick with HD-DVD. That's all they're saying. Their private plan might very well be to switch to Blu-Ray entirely or to begin supporting both, but we, or at least I, don't know that. If you're privy to their private plans, by all means, post it here!:)
IT investments didn't provide companies with strategic advantages because when one company adopted a new technology, its competitors did the same.
So it seems that failing to invest in IT will provide companies with a strategic disadvantage...
Flaws in his arguments go deeper than that.
The replication of tens of thousands of independent data centers, all using similar hardware, running similar software, and employing similar kinds of workers, has imposed severe economic penalties on the economy," he writes. "It has led to the overbuilding of IT assets in every sector of the economy, dampening the productivity gains that can spring from computer automation.
Let's look at this: datacenters are running with:
similar hardware
similar software
similar employees
Similar hardware I'll grant, but the last two points, similar software and the resultant employee tasks are vastly different. One of the challenges we see in my favourite sector (finance) is lowering of latency. We began to see a commodification of Market Data systems in the mid-90s; everyone and their mothers settled on one or two systems. Today, I can think of a dozen Market Data systems off the top of my head, each excelling at different things. Some are great at providing low-latency data, while others are great at providing normalized data. Why did this happen? That's right, business requirements changed, and the traditional "utilities" couldn't keep up, so niches opened up.
This is just one facet of investment banking. Each individual companies make their own choices, and unlike electricity generating, things just aren't simple or easily standardized. It's an oversimplification to think that just about every business function can be met by a utility.
Carr then goes on to provide examples of low-staffed IT orgs. Of course these single-function companies will have relatively tiny numbers of staff. I look around inside any bank's IT functions, and they have a team, ranging in size from 1 to 20 people globally, dedicated to a given subfunction. One might support Market Data systems. Another might support one of multiple Equities trading systems they might use. Another will support Derivatives trading systems. Still more will support algorithmic trading systems, which is filled with proprietary strategies that will not be shared in a "utility" with others.
So now, I've shown how Carr's arguments have been oversimplified to a fault, and this is just one slice of an industry sector; I'm sure others can use my arguments for other industries, be it manufacturing, logistics, etc.
So what about all the reports of people getting their iPods stolen in London?
That's been a problem in NYC too, until they started putting more police presence in subways and on the streets. All cities have their issues; you just have to be smart about avoiding them the best you can.
Not only that, but people who learn it the "wrong" way quite often write it the wrong way throughout their lives. I experience this a lot with my parents -- the stroke order they learned is different from the stroke order I learned, so anytime I watch them write, it looks a bit odd.
Slashdot Mirror
That's basically the retailer hopefully having done the risk analysis and saying "losing out on X sometimes because of fraud is better than slowing everything down by requiring signatures".
I've been asked to sign for a latte, and not asked to sign for $50 purchases. That's all up to the retailer.
it's a small thing, but ITYM covered calls.
That would be awesome, but let's standardize to the 60Hz, not 50 as it's in the eastern part.
Have you been to Japan in the past 30 years? Most residences have air conditioning as it's frequently > 35C with tonnes of humidity during the summers.
To be fair, the last time I was in O'Hare in the American Airlines terminal, the Wolfgang Puck restaurant's kitchen knives appeared to have been affixed to the workstation with fairly heavy-duty steel cables.
This is not to say getting knives and explosives into the "secure" areas aren't trivial. Security theater indeed.
I'm assuming this is for electing Board of Directors of a corporation. Therefore, someone who has invested more into the company has a bigger say.
Sweet, do you know if they ship to the US, or will I have to get a friend in Japan?
I've also seen the most elegant solutions to complicated problems in banks and hedge funds. Trying to predict which way a given security will move given past patterns is a very hard problem, yet I've seen systems that do just that and do it correctly 75% of the time.
Fair enough -- I don't claim AT&T is perfect, and far from it. My friend's Blackberry on AT&T will randomly drop calls or refuse data connections in Manhattan, even though he'd have full signal. I'd be sitting across from him in the same restaurant, and my iPhone would be fully functional.
All that says, though, is that his particular Blackberry model + revision has worse radio implementation compared to my particular iPhone model + revision for that exact situation.
As for AT&T refusing service, back when I lived in St. Louis, before they merged with BellSouth's wireless, Southwestern Bell's wireless refused wireless service to me citing their inability to find my address. Since I lived in St. Louis County but in an unincorporated area between Creve Coeur and Maryland Heights, I was not entirely surprised. We ended up going with Voicestream (now T-Mobile), and their GSM coverage was abysmal too, especially outside town. I'm sure things have changed in the 10 years since I've moved out of the area though.
It's similar in Japan, too, or was in 2003 or thereabouts. The #2 mobile carrier, KDDI's Au, had issues with servicing my grandmother's place in a medium-sized city. DoCoMo had no issues, and everyone in town used DoCoMo. Back in Tokyo, Au had completed their 3G rollout, and had far superiour 3G coverage to DoCoMo, who had coverage on paper but their towers were too far apart to penetrate far into buildings. Again, I hear things are very different now that they have ditched PDC and are releasing W-CDMA phones exclusively.
Outside of cities? Which cities are you generalizing about? I'm regularly in NYC, and my vanilla iPhone 3G doesn't skip a beat. However, in Westchester and Putnam counties, I've had issues where my phone will drop out of 3G and stay on EDGE. Up here in Connecticut, it doesn't skip a beat either.
In Chicago, it was much the same. I'd go out to the exurbs, and things sometimes got a little wonky, but then I'd return the next day, and I'm in solid 3G, with solid signal strength.
The entire world is filled with average people. My point in my original post was that most people, for whatever reason, when writing cursive, tend to come out with seriously illegible scrawl. This has nothing to do with their lack of desire -- I have yet to come across people who pride themselves on illegible penmanship -- but the inherent lack of legibility built into the cursive system they've been taught.
So instead of starting from the illegible scrawl, they propose to the reader they start from something more legible. It's like instead of shoehorning functional programming concepts into Java, they start with ocaml.
I'm not discounting the artistic side of this entire endeavour. As a former professional musician, I do not believe everything should be useful. However, if given a choice between teaching my hypothetical children how to write cursive and print, so they can communicate, I'd much rather they were taught to print legiblly than scrawl. If they wanted to take up calligraphy, more power to them, but I do not believe in shoving art down their throats.
Just posting a clarification -- I do not question the utility of writing longhand. It's a skill that is very useful. I do question the teaching of cursive by grammar schools almost exclusively, because italics that's been mentioned the article I linked to is far more legible by more people.
If average people were able to consistently create beautiful script, I would be inclined to agree. However, as the article I've linked to shows, even decent cursive results in loopy, unreadable mess.
Perhaps my comment, "deserves to die", was too strong, but the point still stands -- there's a difference between teaching for utility and teaching for art, and it appears that the schools have confused the two.
NYTimes recently had an article on penmanship. Cursive deserves to die -- it often results in illegible scrawl. I'd explain why, but the article does it so much better.
Well, while the JSDF does have its roots in the National Police Reserve, as of 2007, they're a totally separate ministry-level organization.
You do realise that the optical drive eject buttons nowadays are soft eject, and therefore largely useless when the power is off, and the mac floppies have had the paperclip emergency eject, like optical drives you're so enamoured of, since pre-PowerPC days, right?
I can see an xkcd strip of it already.
You had me until you mentioned Ikea as "possible exception" to "not going to find anything worthwhile" :P
That's okay. I saw a Mandarin Oriental Towers advert in an American Airlines magazine that used "it's" as a possessive. I'd like to think something like that, aimed at high net-worth individuals, would hire better copy writers.
You're correct, except for one thing. Paramount's current public plan is to stick with HD-DVD. That's all they're saying. Their private plan might very well be to switch to Blu-Ray entirely or to begin supporting both, but we, or at least I, don't know that. If you're privy to their private plans, by all means, post it here! :)
So it seems that failing to invest in IT will provide companies with a strategic disadvantage...
Flaws in his arguments go deeper than that.
The replication of tens of thousands of independent data centers, all using similar hardware, running similar software, and employing similar kinds of workers, has imposed severe economic penalties on the economy," he writes. "It has led to the overbuilding of IT assets in every sector of the economy, dampening the productivity gains that can spring from computer automation.Let's look at this: datacenters are running with:
Similar hardware I'll grant, but the last two points, similar software and the resultant employee tasks are vastly different. One of the challenges we see in my favourite sector (finance) is lowering of latency. We began to see a commodification of Market Data systems in the mid-90s; everyone and their mothers settled on one or two systems. Today, I can think of a dozen Market Data systems off the top of my head, each excelling at different things. Some are great at providing low-latency data, while others are great at providing normalized data. Why did this happen? That's right, business requirements changed, and the traditional "utilities" couldn't keep up, so niches opened up.
This is just one facet of investment banking. Each individual companies make their own choices, and unlike electricity generating, things just aren't simple or easily standardized. It's an oversimplification to think that just about every business function can be met by a utility.
Carr then goes on to provide examples of low-staffed IT orgs. Of course these single-function companies will have relatively tiny numbers of staff. I look around inside any bank's IT functions, and they have a team, ranging in size from 1 to 20 people globally, dedicated to a given subfunction. One might support Market Data systems. Another might support one of multiple Equities trading systems they might use. Another will support Derivatives trading systems. Still more will support algorithmic trading systems, which is filled with proprietary strategies that will not be shared in a "utility" with others.
So now, I've shown how Carr's arguments have been oversimplified to a fault, and this is just one slice of an industry sector; I'm sure others can use my arguments for other industries, be it manufacturing, logistics, etc.
That's been a problem in NYC too, until they started putting more police presence in subways and on the streets. All cities have their issues; you just have to be smart about avoiding them the best you can.
See, that's the thing. Short and clear, not clear because it's short.
Not only that, but people who learn it the "wrong" way quite often write it the wrong way throughout their lives. I experience this a lot with my parents -- the stroke order they learned is different from the stroke order I learned, so anytime I watch them write, it looks a bit odd.
Creationism begat churches, and churches begat music. Duh :)