Hence the reason that I don't bother to do much programming at work (even if I can). I much prefer to focus on work that *requires* on-site work, because while today I may get that job over some Indian programmer, in two, five, or ten years I won't be getting that work.
Anything that I can do remotely, someone from India or rural Indiana can do cheaper.
I know from experience that there are certain guarantees that Dell will apply to small/large business sales that they won't apply to home purchases. I run IT for several affiliated non-profits, so I tend to buy computers (XP Home) and wipe them, reinstalling XP with our non-profit license. Several times I've been warned by our rep (who knows better now) that the machine I'm buying isn't "guaranteed" for business networking, whatever that means.
You won't find any of that rhetoric when you purchase from the Home division.
actually, this doesn't involve the marriage of technology. it involves getting VOIP and Skype-type services to work over wireless connections. actually, this technology has been around for a while, but it's been very expensive. if the cost comes down and the quality increases, you'll see companies start to move to wireless VOIP implementations. there is also software VOIP that could try to make good connections over public wifi networks.
cell phones aren't involved in this, except that in some areas this could be a threat to their market (if, say you live and work in downtown Long Beach, CA, where there's a free muni wifi network).
you asked: "what exactly is non-scientific insight?"
I think that this is a non-scientific insights that could be gleaned from this poll. No matter what the exact numbers are, one can still speculate (and that's all this is, speculation) on the motivations behind such a large group of time-wasting respondents...
You're right, of course. I'm truly liberal in my beliefs about taxation - I believe that the wealthier you are, the more you should be taxed. And not just more money, but a higher percentage of your money. And I have no problem with my tax money going to help those who live in states that don't have the same opportunities that are all around me in California.
A more interesting statistic would compare a state's federal tax burden to the state's gdp (or whatever it's called).
If you really want to start a business, you have to think it through ahead of time. No, you don't have to settle for working for Google. You also don't have to settle for competing against Google. And if you are going to start a business where Google might be your competitor, then you had better be good. That's all. Quit bitching about Google, and come up with a better idea.
Look, I'm not trying to be pedantic. I'm working on starting up several companies right now. One of them was going to be a web application, but then we realized there was a larger offline market, so we changed our focus. Will our idea work? Who knows - but our competition won't be as fierce, which gives us an advantage.
All I'm saying is that if you want to be in business, you'll do a lot better focusing on making a better product or coming up with a good idea and spending less time complaining about your competition.
Look, if you're trying to start a business where your competition is good and fast and huge, it better be a damn good idea, the kind of idea that only you could possibly think up. A good entrepreneur doesn't sit around complaining about competition - he or she will try to look for opportunities in more lucrative markets.
You might as well get used to it - competition happens.
I agree that most executives don't deserve their salaries. But it's very hard to develop good, talented executives and managers. Hiring them from outside can be a crap shoot.
Still, a good executive (which is rare) is more than worth their salary, and probably is also going to be aware of the need to pay the people who matter well.
Why is Windows any different to any other product designed under the umbrella of capitalism ?
It's not different from all other products designed under the umbrella of capitalism, just the ones that aren't monopolies (or holding a virtual monopoly in the market, but you get my drift).
Of course, people will continue to become more tech savvy and start to put more digital photographs and eventually videos on their computers. 40 GB can hold a lot of pictures, but 120 GB is better suited for having a lot of video content stored on your hard drive.
You're missing the market for these. One hour of recording high-definition television is approximately 10 GB of data. A 300 GB drive only gets you 30 hours of recorded television. I really believe that we're going to be moving towards a stronger split in computer systems, with some marketed as entertainment hubs (in whatever form) and others marketed for utility. In that world, 100 hours of high-def home videos consumes a TB.
2- Drag and dropping an incoming email to another account (I do that to archive important maisl to an IMAP server)
I just moved an email from a POP3 account to an IMAP account and back in Thunderbird. This functionality has been around since I've been using Thunderbird, which was the 0.3 release. I assume this means the functionality is available on Mozilla Mail as well, but I haven't used that in over a year.
True of course, but the movie is merely a physical reproduction of other information - a screenplay, an idea in the director's head, etc. Just because it cost a lot of money to make that movie doesn't mean it had to do so.
Of course, "Information wants to be free" originally was about gratis
I'm glad this was modded interesting and not insightful, because while interesting, it only kind of adds insight to the debate. We're still left with a language duality that doesn't capture the true essence of the issue.
Information doesn't "want" to be free in an economic sense. Too cheap to meter isn't free. Economics is an issue that comes in *after the fact* - and that's the whole problem with this debate. We're trying to think economically about an entity that doesn't fit into economic systems.
Information "wants" to be free means that information does not "want" to be controlled. Information becomes expensive when controls are placed upon it. But even then, it is impossible to have a monopoly on certain information. If one person thinks of something, another person can do the same thing. At a very basic level, it is impossible to truly control information (hence the problem with DRM).
No matter how expensive the controls placed on information, there are other expensive methods to extract that information. That's the problem we're having in our discussions of this: we think information should behave in ways that make sense economically. That's just not the way it works.
actually, the US isn't that different. our government just use "proxies", otherwise known as "inmates", who "accidentally" drop the "soap" in the shower. the problem is that if you let one "go down" on you, you may find his boyfriend ready to "kill"/"rape" you.
I'm actually okay with non-complete clauses, provided they come with some sort of an expiary date.
I have no idea what an expiary date is, but I think non-complete clauses are terrible, especially in everyday use, and I also think this should be addressed immediately at our nation's grammar schools.
As far as the cost of hiring a secretary, that's what it would require for me to create the documents that I'm able to create in Word, Excel, and Powerpoint and to continue to do my work.
You're being pedantic. $10 says you could buy Wordperfect Office and get the same stuff done. I watched how Microsoft took over the market at two different colleges. It wasn't talent, it was pure brute force.
So let's see. You obviously aren't too busy, or you'd already have a secretary. Assuming you weren't born into money, if you were really successful you wouldn't be doing this stuff yourself. So...
Option #1: Microsoft Office: $600
Option #2: Secretary: $30k per year (YMMV)
Option #3: Wordperfect Office: $10
Option #4: OpenOffice: $0
So knock off that crap about Microsoft opening up the market (in this case, it was Lotus and Wordperfect that did that). MS Office is way over-priced - and what's worse is that it's completely undersupported. Want to learn how to use it? Go buy a book. Need help with it? Pay us to talk down to you on the phone.
Please. Just because you let Microsoft walk all over your sorry ass (and can't help thinking about the high-class secretaries you won't be taking home with you) doesn't mean there aren't prettier girls on the block to be had for an awful lot less.
Get your head out of the sand. Cookies work like that in today's web, where you're getting cookies from all sorts of sites that have nothing to do with the one you're visiting. Read the rest of the thread, Sherlock.
Grocery store cards are much, much easier to avoid than cookies. I get a new one every time I go to the grocery store. You don't get grocery store cards by default - you have to sign up. Boy is that a terrible analogy for cookies.
Because we're not paranoid nutjobs and we grasp the concept that corporations are groups of people? What else would they be? Dogs? Squirrels? Atonomous kill-bots?
Sometimes, the simplest definition will leave out too much information. Like liability, for instance.
In case you need it spelled out...
In general, management of publicly traded corporations are thought to have a fiduciary duty to always increase the amount of profit made. This is because the owners of the corporation, the stockholders, are interested in "buying low and selling high", and the main driver in the long term of a rising stock price is increasing profits (and the perception that the profits will continue to increase). Most corporations have set their entire focus and pay of all management to this focus, via things like stock options and other bonuses. Thus neither stockholders nor management are primarily concerned about how large or profitable a corporation currently is, but how much more profitable it can become. Critics of corporations say that this drive for increasing profitability puts pressure on corporations to break the bounds of morality and do things like harm the environment.
Cookies can provide useful information to the site developer. You like visiting well designed websites right? Getting information that will help you streamline the site is a good reason to track those statistics.
I'm going to keep posting this link, despite posting it in other places in this thread. I don't think I'm being paranoid in any way, shape, or form. Just realistic.
And yes, I think you have your head in the sand.
For the record, I develop and design websites (hopefully they're done well). If a login is required, I set session cookies. Otherwise, I don't use cookies. Ever. If you need to login to a site for security reasons, then you will have to login every time. Otherwise, security is being compromised.
Yes, I realize not everyone does this. I wish they did.
1. We live in a world where it is not an option not to buy things.
2. We live in a world where corporations exist only to make as much money as possible, regardless of how that happens (and no matter how much they try to tell you otherwise).
Slashdot Mirror
Hence the reason that I don't bother to do much programming at work (even if I can). I much prefer to focus on work that *requires* on-site work, because while today I may get that job over some Indian programmer, in two, five, or ten years I won't be getting that work.
Anything that I can do remotely, someone from India or rural Indiana can do cheaper.
I know from experience that there are certain guarantees that Dell will apply to small/large business sales that they won't apply to home purchases. I run IT for several affiliated non-profits, so I tend to buy computers (XP Home) and wipe them, reinstalling XP with our non-profit license. Several times I've been warned by our rep (who knows better now) that the machine I'm buying isn't "guaranteed" for business networking, whatever that means.
You won't find any of that rhetoric when you purchase from the Home division.
actually, this doesn't involve the marriage of technology. it involves getting VOIP and Skype-type services to work over wireless connections. actually, this technology has been around for a while, but it's been very expensive. if the cost comes down and the quality increases, you'll see companies start to move to wireless VOIP implementations. there is also software VOIP that could try to make good connections over public wifi networks.
cell phones aren't involved in this, except that in some areas this could be a threat to their market (if, say you live and work in downtown Long Beach, CA, where there's a free muni wifi network).
you asked: "what exactly is non-scientific insight?"
I think that this is a non-scientific insights that could be gleaned from this poll. No matter what the exact numbers are, one can still speculate (and that's all this is, speculation) on the motivations behind such a large group of time-wasting respondents...
You're right, of course. I'm truly liberal in my beliefs about taxation - I believe that the wealthier you are, the more you should be taxed. And not just more money, but a higher percentage of your money. And I have no problem with my tax money going to help those who live in states that don't have the same opportunities that are all around me in California.
A more interesting statistic would compare a state's federal tax burden to the state's gdp (or whatever it's called).
If you really want to start a business, you have to think it through ahead of time. No, you don't have to settle for working for Google. You also don't have to settle for competing against Google. And if you are going to start a business where Google might be your competitor, then you had better be good. That's all. Quit bitching about Google, and come up with a better idea.
Look, I'm not trying to be pedantic. I'm working on starting up several companies right now. One of them was going to be a web application, but then we realized there was a larger offline market, so we changed our focus. Will our idea work? Who knows - but our competition won't be as fierce, which gives us an advantage.
All I'm saying is that if you want to be in business, you'll do a lot better focusing on making a better product or coming up with a good idea and spending less time complaining about your competition.
Look, if you're trying to start a business where your competition is good and fast and huge, it better be a damn good idea, the kind of idea that only you could possibly think up. A good entrepreneur doesn't sit around complaining about competition - he or she will try to look for opportunities in more lucrative markets.
You might as well get used to it - competition happens.
I agree that most executives don't deserve their salaries. But it's very hard to develop good, talented executives and managers. Hiring them from outside can be a crap shoot.
Still, a good executive (which is rare) is more than worth their salary, and probably is also going to be aware of the need to pay the people who matter well.
Why is Windows any different to any other product designed under the umbrella of capitalism ?
It's not different from all other products designed under the umbrella of capitalism, just the ones that aren't monopolies (or holding a virtual monopoly in the market, but you get my drift).
only if the plane gets high first. they should have a pothead section right next to the wings, with headphones.
Of course, people will continue to become more tech savvy and start to put more digital photographs and eventually videos on their computers. 40 GB can hold a lot of pictures, but 120 GB is better suited for having a lot of video content stored on your hard drive.
You're missing the market for these. One hour of recording high-definition television is approximately 10 GB of data. A 300 GB drive only gets you 30 hours of recorded television. I really believe that we're going to be moving towards a stronger split in computer systems, with some marketed as entertainment hubs (in whatever form) and others marketed for utility. In that world, 100 hours of high-def home videos consumes a TB.
We'll want bigger hard drives.
2- Drag and dropping an incoming email to another account (I do that to archive important maisl to an IMAP server)
I just moved an email from a POP3 account to an IMAP account and back in Thunderbird. This functionality has been around since I've been using Thunderbird, which was the 0.3 release. I assume this means the functionality is available on Mozilla Mail as well, but I haven't used that in over a year.
What do you mean, you >already
True of course, but the movie is merely a physical reproduction of other information - a screenplay, an idea in the director's head, etc. Just because it cost a lot of money to make that movie doesn't mean it had to do so.
Of course, "Information wants to be free" originally was about gratis
I'm glad this was modded interesting and not insightful, because while interesting, it only kind of adds insight to the debate. We're still left with a language duality that doesn't capture the true essence of the issue.
Information doesn't "want" to be free in an economic sense. Too cheap to meter isn't free. Economics is an issue that comes in *after the fact* - and that's the whole problem with this debate. We're trying to think economically about an entity that doesn't fit into economic systems.
Information "wants" to be free means that information does not "want" to be controlled. Information becomes expensive when controls are placed upon it. But even then, it is impossible to have a monopoly on certain information. If one person thinks of something, another person can do the same thing. At a very basic level, it is impossible to truly control information (hence the problem with DRM).
No matter how expensive the controls placed on information, there are other expensive methods to extract that information. That's the problem we're having in our discussions of this: we think information should behave in ways that make sense economically. That's just not the way it works.
actually, the US isn't that different. our government just use "proxies", otherwise known as "inmates", who "accidentally" drop the "soap" in the shower. the problem is that if you let one "go down" on you, you may find his boyfriend ready to "kill"/"rape" you.
uh, as long as it's Sectond Edition, that is. why take them from one section of hell to another?
I'm actually okay with non-complete clauses, provided they come with some sort of an expiary date.
I have no idea what an expiary date is, but I think non-complete clauses are terrible, especially in everyday use, and I also think this should be addressed immediately at our nation's grammar schools.
Nothing like being right and funny at the same time. I love my life.
Toodles.
As far as the cost of hiring a secretary, that's what it would require for me to create the documents that I'm able to create in Word, Excel, and Powerpoint and to continue to do my work.
You're being pedantic. $10 says you could buy Wordperfect Office and get the same stuff done. I watched how Microsoft took over the market at two different colleges. It wasn't talent, it was pure brute force.
So let's see. You obviously aren't too busy, or you'd already have a secretary. Assuming you weren't born into money, if you were really successful you wouldn't be doing this stuff yourself. So...
Option #1: Microsoft Office: $600
Option #2: Secretary: $30k per year (YMMV)
Option #3: Wordperfect Office: $10
Option #4: OpenOffice: $0
So knock off that crap about Microsoft opening up the market (in this case, it was Lotus and Wordperfect that did that). MS Office is way over-priced - and what's worse is that it's completely undersupported. Want to learn how to use it? Go buy a book. Need help with it? Pay us to talk down to you on the phone.
Please. Just because you let Microsoft walk all over your sorry ass (and can't help thinking about the high-class secretaries you won't be taking home with you) doesn't mean there aren't prettier girls on the block to be had for an awful lot less.
Get your head out of the sand. Cookies work like that in today's web, where you're getting cookies from all sorts of sites that have nothing to do with the one you're visiting. Read the rest of the thread, Sherlock.
Grocery store cards are much, much easier to avoid than cookies. I get a new one every time I go to the grocery store. You don't get grocery store cards by default - you have to sign up. Boy is that a terrible analogy for cookies.
Because we're not paranoid nutjobs and we grasp the concept that corporations are groups of people? What else would they be? Dogs? Squirrels? Atonomous kill-bots?
Sometimes, the simplest definition will leave out too much information. Like liability, for instance.
In case you need it spelled out... In general, management of publicly traded corporations are thought to have a fiduciary duty to always increase the amount of profit made. This is because the owners of the corporation, the stockholders, are interested in "buying low and selling high", and the main driver in the long term of a rising stock price is increasing profits (and the perception that the profits will continue to increase). Most corporations have set their entire focus and pay of all management to this focus, via things like stock options and other bonuses. Thus neither stockholders nor management are primarily concerned about how large or profitable a corporation currently is, but how much more profitable it can become. Critics of corporations say that this drive for increasing profitability puts pressure on corporations to break the bounds of morality and do things like harm the environment.
He *was* talking about CGI. I mean...
Cookies can provide useful information to the site developer. You like visiting well designed websites right? Getting information that will help you streamline the site is a good reason to track those statistics.
I'm going to keep posting this link, despite posting it in other places in this thread. I don't think I'm being paranoid in any way, shape, or form. Just realistic.
And yes, I think you have your head in the sand.
For the record, I develop and design websites (hopefully they're done well). If a login is required, I set session cookies. Otherwise, I don't use cookies. Ever. If you need to login to a site for security reasons, then you will have to login every time. Otherwise, security is being compromised.
Yes, I realize not everyone does this. I wish they did.
1. We live in a world where it is not an option not to buy things.
2. We live in a world where corporations exist only to make as much money as possible, regardless of how that happens (and no matter how much they try to tell you otherwise).
3. We live in a world where companies will use knowledge they have gained from tracking me to make me pay more money than I have to pay. Online and offline.