Fortunately, it looks like Science and Logic are about to take the stage again. Sadly, here in America, we have upwards of around 20% that believes in creationism of some form. So far, nearly all that I have meet that believe in it, are real whack jobs. When I asked one of my past students about it, he said that James Dobson showed conclusively that Carbon dating does not work. Dobson tested a metal knife blade. When I pointed out that it only works on items that were living before, he said that dobson said otherwise. Sad, sad, sad.
I always get confused when "Creationism" is brought up here. If you're talking about a Young Earth type of system, that clearly has the burden of evidence against it. But if you're talking about the metaphysical necessity for a creator, I don't see how that is so preposterous.
Without a creator, aren't we left with the following possibilites?:
1. What exists has always existed, or
2. What exists simply came into existence out of nothing, for no reason.
Since both scenarios involve all of existence being an effect with no cause, haven't the underpinnings of logic--being based upon cause and effect--been shaken? Does this mean that I think that any of the particular "Creationist" beliefs are logically sound or even seemingly plausible? Absolutely not, but just because one argument is somewhat less ridiculous than another doesn't make it a good argument.
So vote if you'd like, but don't fool yourself into thinking you're morally superior because you did, or that you really had an effect. In Wyoming, your vote is about 1 in 150,000 of a share in electing 3 electors, who are a 3 in 538 share of electing the president. And that's the best you can do. Every other state is worse.
You're right when you say that the effect is nearly nonexistent, but voting is something that one does for our fellow citizens, to ensure that we get a result that most accurately (Electoral College not withstanding) reflects the desires of the people.
There's nothing in it for me if I flush after I take a shit in a public toilet, yet the world's a better place if I do.
If every intelligent person voted, these elections would never be too close to call.
Intelligent != ability to make good choices. There are plenty of folks of average intelligence who excel at making good decisions and plenty of brilliant ones who continually fuck up their decisions. Intelligent people are subject to irrationality, self-interest and bias, just like everyone else.
I'm sure that this isn't the popular opinion among the alpha dorks who worship on the altar of IQ, but so be it.
Why can't they just cut wasteful, federal spending....and let ALL tax payers keep more of their own money?
Because that is how you reward your cronies and sycophants for their support. Until elections can't be bought, you will never cut the unnecessary spending. That sounds skeptical but name one recent president who didn't "throw some business" their friends' way.
While I'll aggree with your main point, actually, it doesn't sound to me like he was having a lecture kind of meeting. A lecture at least involves someone, essentially, telling you, "I know how it's done, I decided it's done this way, I'll tell you in detail how." YMMV, but that's the basic idea. The meetings he's talking about, if I understood him right, are more the kind where someone doesn't want to be personally responsible for taking any decision. Quite the opposite. If he can't back out in dumbly applying some semi-irrelevant regulation or rule, he'll back out into, basically, "we all talked about it until everyone was too bored to give a shit any more, therefore we _all_ took that decision, therefore _I_ am not to blame." That is, if a decision is taken at all. Some end without anything being achieved whatsoever.
I'm not sure that Fried's philosophy will continue to hold up if 37signals
grows much more, but I like his point-of-view about meetings and work flow.
I have found meetings to be an extraordinary waste of time in most cases, and
often the result of lack of leadership and/or organizational ability on the part
of those in charge. I was recently on the board of a very small
non-for-profit charity that had weekly two-hour meetings. The "leader" of
the organization claimed that he needed the two hours every week to
"vision-cast," but--being a typical political flack--what he really wanted
to do was hear himself talk and also to run every little matter past the board
so that he could cover his ass instead of just making the decisions he was paid to make.
I quit after about ten months of that. The organization folded soon
thereafter when donors stopped giving due to a ridiculous administrative
overhead.
Before the grammar Nazis get here... It'd read better if I said "the type of classes I wasn't particularly interested in."
If you wanted to really be a stickler, you wouldn't end your sentence with a preposition. As unwieldy and pedantic as it sounds to the ear, the preferred syntax would be "...the type of class in which I wasn't particularly interested."
Jeebus. Never hit 'Submit' until you know you have a handle on the situation! If you don't read all the necessary information properly and then mouth off at someone for being an asshat, you'll actually end up making yourself look silly. I almost did it earlier:)
The part that's cracking me up is that he was modded "insightful."
All of that is well and good, but it's so much more enlightened crack on the U.S.
while excusing other countries.
There has to be a huge disconnect from reality to think that our environmental policy is equivalent to the total disregard that the Chinese government shows.
<sarcasm>I'm sure that you can walk into any Chinese factory and see their MSDSs, I'm sure that if 5 gallons of fuel is spilled at a Chinese gas station they have to go through the same remediation steps as in the U.S., and I'm sure that there are toys and everyfuckingthing else made with lead in the States.</sarcasm>
I been all over the world and, aside from Western Europe, Canada, Australia and the U.S., the disregard for pollution in the rest of the world is so bad that when you get home your fucking clothes smell like diesel or sulphur. The people who posted that shit above have obviously never been to China or any other developing nation.
It's hokum based on hokum. It's the equivalent to finding a second edition of a Harry Potter book in a thousand years. Big friggin' deal.
Right, cause there are so many 2000-year-old manuscripts lying around. Why just last week, I found a few of them under a tarp in our barn.
The subject of the Dead Sea Scrolls is most certainly religion, which makes them useful solely from an academic theological standpoint.
You know, I think that you have convinced me--they're just a bunch of old scraps of paper blathering on about some crap that nobody's interested in anyway. They couldn't possibly be of any interest to linguists, historians or anthropologists. I'm hungry, what do you say that we to use them to start up the barbecue grill?
Did you really say that? Christianity is ENTIRELY based on the testimony recorded in early Christian texts and the teachings of early Church fathers. If you invalidate early Christian texts, you invalidate Christianity. Much the same is true of Judaism.
That would seem to me to be more of a reason that it is historically significant, rather than less. And more of a reason that it should be available.
Christians tend to attribute psychotic hatred and irrationality to anyone who says "Christianity is nonsense" because it clashes so strongly with their point of view.
Atheists are not talking about smashing the Sistine Chapel, burning the books of William Blake, or killing modern "Christian rock" stars. Find me some quotes or news accounts. You will find people who attack religious art (like Michelangelo's David). They're all religious nuts, who find any depiction of religious figures sinful.
While you're using a mighty broad brush, these things that you say are all at least partially true but I just don't see how they pertain to the importance or historicity of the Dead Sea Scrolls or, for that matter, to what I wrote.
I never said that atheists were doing anything of the kind, I was merely following the logical out-workings of the original post's line of reasoning, which placed the DSSs in the category of worthlessness due to their religious nature.
So what? You're talking about a religion that has had its primary texts re-written countless times over the centuries, already. Nobody today can point at any kind of original "Bible". Whether or not these are "accurate" is pretty irrelevant, even if you're somebody who is Christian/Jewish.
Did you really say that? Since when does the validity of a particular religious belief have anything to do with the relevance of a 2000-year-old document? You don't have to share the beliefs of the writers of it to understand that this is an immensely important piece of history.
While you're at it, why don't you take a ball peen hammer to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel since it contains religious thought. Or perhaps make it your life's work to erase any remnant of the works of William Blake since he was apparently a Christian.
It think that this is why many look at hostile agnostics and atheists and see people who are just as irrational as the religious folks that they seem to hate so much.
Also, I don't know if inviting nerds into your campaign is all that good idea, Republican or Democrat. They're the most likely to know about and understand Rand, Julian Simon, and so on, i.e. the flaws with big government and their intervention in the economy.
Did you mean Rush the radio host or Rush the musicians?
Just because Red Hat made one high-profile mistake, doesn't mean their support service is without value.
Perhaps not, but I know that they will never get another dime of my money.
For years, I always purchased Red Hat even though I never had occasion to use the
support that came with it. I was (and still am) bought into the FOSS concept and wanted to make it work for me and my business. But I stopped sending RH my money sometime about
8.0, when I called their support to try and get some help with a
printer issue. I would have been satisfied if they had been able to get either
one of my printers (HP LaserJet 1100 or LaserJet 4L) to work with RH. A
surly woman with almost unrecognizable English--obviously reading off of a
cue card--tried for a few minutes and then dismissed my support case with the comment that "RedHat
doesn't work with all printers." When I mentioned that I had paid for the
RedHat just so that I could have support, she hung up on me. I called back
to get another support person with an equally incompetent and rude tech.
Eventually, someone at experts-exchange.com gave me the answer to my problem. Now I
just download Centos and if I need support, I pay someone on a case-by-case basis.
Being a brisk-and-mortar business who has to compete at disadvantage
(primarily due to the sales tax issue) with internet retailers, I would
definitely have a lot to gain if Amazon were to lose, but I can't seem to find
it within me to view banner ads on a site that is owned by an affiliate in New
York as the "substantial physical presence" required by
Quill v. North
Dakota.
I certainly understand the State of New York's point that it is trying to
create a level playing field for the businesses there, and it certainly seems
that large internet retailers go through strange gyrations to keep their
advantage. For instance, I live in a rather populous state that is
bordered on one side by a state with far fewer folks. So where did Amazon
put their distribution hub? Right across the border in the low-population
state, which is an obvious attempt to reduce their burden of collecting sales
tax and to maintain their price advantage to as many customers as possible.
While this is clearly unfair, the law is the law, and I view New York's
position as an attempt to circumvent the nearly impossibly high bar of getting
an amendment to the Constitution.
As an aside, I read/. every day and I have always enjoyed your comments
here. You seem reasonable and impartial--your thoughtful and informed
reply on this subject is no different. I'm not trying to be argumentative,
I think that I just see it differently.
The state's basic argument is that by paying agents in New York for sales referrals, Amazon has created a presence in the state.
That's up for the courts to decide.
...Unfortunately, this particular
issue is quite a bit more subtle than you'd like it to be.
Anyone can make any argument that they wish to, but the fact that the State
of New York takes a position that is spurious and tries to enforce it to gain
revenue does not make it any less unconstitutional. US legal history is
replete with instances where states have made other Constitution-trampling
pronouncements, only to be smacked down by one court or another.
New York is grasping at straws in a strictly logical sense, however, with
judicial activism on both sides gradually eroding our rights and the big money
at stake, I wouldn't be surprised to see New York win out in the cash grab.
The only hope is that there are also moneyed interests fighting it.
By law, states have the authority to force retailers to collect sales taxes only if the retailer has a physical presence in the state. So if Company X has its headquarters in, say, Texas, it has to collect tax from customers in Texas. However, since it has no presence in Florida, Florida does not have the authority to force it to collect sales tax.
I'm surprised that so many have difficulty understanding this. It really
goes back to one of the most basic premises that fueled the American Revolution:
no taxation without representation. In this case, if the company has no
presence in a particular state, it does not derive any benefit from being
represented by any governing body of that state, therefore that state has no
right to tax said company.
It's actually quite simple. The good thing about it is that it will
take a Constitutional Amendment to change it. That is, if we actually have any
rights left.
"Sure, the odds are 1000:1 against that I'll be hit by a bus, but there are a lot of ways disaster can strike, and they add up. You willing to ignore 5:1 odds? How about 10:1, or 15:1?"
This is why technical people need to strive to learn to have relationships
with supervisors of a non-technical bent. From reading the article, it
seems that Childs' demeanor meant that he could easily be dismissed as the
brilliant-but-whacked-out-network-curmudgeon. Fair or not, that means that
all of his concerns could be waved off as paranoia (for instance, him trying to
get an information security policy in place). Unfortunately, the wisdom of
our caution only becomes evident when a disaster occurs or is narrowly averted
(e.g. "Thank God we backed that data up!").
On the other hand, non-technical managers should learn to not instantly
dismiss the concerns of technical people as unlikely or unrealistic.
I suppose I'm risking an off-topic mod here but this question DOES relate to whether I'd consider switching to Mac.
What is the cost/benefit ratio like these days if you build your own rig? For a long time it just made no sense to build your own box because the big retailers were offering systems that could not be beat on a cost/benefit basis.
I looked at the arstechnica guide for the budget box and I believe I can beat the price just going to the local BestBuy and get MORE system...not less. When you throw in the shipping for all the individual parts you need to get to build your own system it still seems like a blowout that the retailers own the PC market.
But since you've been doing it can you share some insights on whether it really makes sense to build it yourself from cost/benefit perspective?
Having been a value-added reseller since 2001, I can tell you that you
usually will get more for your money with a prebuilt system from a big retailer.
There have often been times when I have done a quote for a customer only to find
that it would be cheaper to by a pre-built machine and put all of the guts in my
own case. This is especially true on lower priced units, with the
advantage often turning to a build-your-own computer if you are going for a more
performance-oriented machine with more memory or greater storage.
There are, however, plenty of downsides to prebuilt systems. In no
particular order:
Preinstalled crapware that will take you hours to remove
May have NLX Form Factor (Gateway esp) motherboard that will be
impossible or extremely expensive to replace
Low quality fans and power supplies that are noisy and/or prone to
failure
No choice in components
There could be some advantages as well:
Warranty
Standardized hardware
Usually ready to go
There are many choices when you want a new computer, with advantages and
disadvantages. Personally, I would rather have one that I know has quality
components, particularly the power supply, MOBO, memory and hard drive. My $.02.
...is how you guys want to play. Fine whatever. Except you better be looking over your shoulders constantly. This is not the end. It is only the beginning.
I'm sure they're quaking with fear.
You're right though when you say that it's "only the beginning"--I imagine that every corporation will be more emboldened to do whatever they please since they obviously have the pols in their pockets.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno. I'm not promoting the idea of a creator, merely pointing out that the alternative is not that much better.
Fortunately, it looks like Science and Logic are about to take the stage again. Sadly, here in America, we have upwards of around 20% that believes in creationism of some form. So far, nearly all that I have meet that believe in it, are real whack jobs. When I asked one of my past students about it, he said that James Dobson showed conclusively that Carbon dating does not work. Dobson tested a metal knife blade. When I pointed out that it only works on items that were living before, he said that dobson said otherwise. Sad, sad, sad.
I always get confused when "Creationism" is brought up here. If you're talking about a Young Earth type of system, that clearly has the burden of evidence against it. But if you're talking about the metaphysical necessity for a creator, I don't see how that is so preposterous.
Without a creator, aren't we left with the following possibilites?:
1. What exists has always existed, or
2. What exists simply came into existence out of nothing, for no reason.
Since both scenarios involve all of existence being an effect with no cause, haven't the underpinnings of logic--being based upon cause and effect--been shaken? Does this mean that I think that any of the particular "Creationist" beliefs are logically sound or even seemingly plausible? Absolutely not, but just because one argument is somewhat less ridiculous than another doesn't make it a good argument.
So vote if you'd like, but don't fool yourself into thinking you're morally superior because you did, or that you really had an effect. In Wyoming, your vote is about 1 in 150,000 of a share in electing 3 electors, who are a 3 in 538 share of electing the president. And that's the best you can do. Every other state is worse.
You're right when you say that the effect is nearly nonexistent, but voting is something that one does for our fellow citizens, to ensure that we get a result that most accurately (Electoral College not withstanding) reflects the desires of the people.
There's nothing in it for me if I flush after I take a shit in a public toilet, yet the world's a better place if I do.
If every intelligent person voted, these elections would never be too close to call.
Intelligent != ability to make good choices. There are plenty of folks of average intelligence who excel at making good decisions and plenty of brilliant ones who continually fuck up their decisions. Intelligent people are subject to irrationality, self-interest and bias, just like everyone else.
I'm sure that this isn't the popular opinion among the alpha dorks who worship on the altar of IQ, but so be it.
Why can't they just cut wasteful, federal spending....and let ALL tax payers keep more of their own money?
Because that is how you reward your cronies and sycophants for their support. Until elections can't be bought, you will never cut the unnecessary spending. That sounds skeptical but name one recent president who didn't "throw some business" their friends' way.
While I'll aggree with your main point, actually, it doesn't sound to me like he was having a lecture kind of meeting. A lecture at least involves someone, essentially, telling you, "I know how it's done, I decided it's done this way, I'll tell you in detail how." YMMV, but that's the basic idea. The meetings he's talking about, if I understood him right, are more the kind where someone doesn't want to be personally responsible for taking any decision. Quite the opposite. If he can't back out in dumbly applying some semi-irrelevant regulation or rule, he'll back out into, basically, "we all talked about it until everyone was too bored to give a shit any more, therefore we _all_ took that decision, therefore _I_ am not to blame." That is, if a decision is taken at all. Some end without anything being achieved whatsoever.
Bingo! Damn, you said it better than I did.
I'm not sure that Fried's philosophy will continue to hold up if 37signals grows much more, but I like his point-of-view about meetings and work flow.
I have found meetings to be an extraordinary waste of time in most cases, and often the result of lack of leadership and/or organizational ability on the part of those in charge. I was recently on the board of a very small non-for-profit charity that had weekly two-hour meetings. The "leader" of the organization claimed that he needed the two hours every week to "vision-cast," but--being a typical political flack--what he really wanted to do was hear himself talk and also to run every little matter past the board so that he could cover his ass instead of just making the decisions he was paid to make.
I quit after about ten months of that. The organization folded soon thereafter when donors stopped giving due to a ridiculous administrative overhead.
Before the grammar Nazis get here... It'd read better if I said "the type of classes I wasn't particularly interested in."
If you wanted to really be a stickler, you wouldn't end your sentence with a preposition. As unwieldy and pedantic as it sounds to the ear, the preferred syntax would be "...the type of class in which I wasn't particularly interested."
In any event, we all understood what you meant.
It was a light-hearted joke...relax.
Jeebus. Never hit 'Submit' until you know you have a handle on the situation! If you don't read all the necessary information properly and then mouth off at someone for being an asshat, you'll actually end up making yourself look silly. I almost did it earlier :)
The part that's cracking me up is that he was modded "insightful."
All of that is well and good, but it's so much more enlightened crack on the U.S. while excusing other countries.
There has to be a huge disconnect from reality to think that our environmental policy is equivalent to the total disregard that the Chinese government shows. <sarcasm>I'm sure that you can walk into any Chinese factory and see their MSDSs, I'm sure that if 5 gallons of fuel is spilled at a Chinese gas station they have to go through the same remediation steps as in the U.S., and I'm sure that there are toys and everyfuckingthing else made with lead in the States.</sarcasm>
I been all over the world and, aside from Western Europe, Canada, Australia and the U.S., the disregard for pollution in the rest of the world is so bad that when you get home your fucking clothes smell like diesel or sulphur. The people who posted that shit above have obviously never been to China or any other developing nation.
It's hokum based on hokum. It's the equivalent to finding a second edition of a Harry Potter book in a thousand years. Big friggin' deal.
Right, cause there are so many 2000-year-old manuscripts lying around. Why just last week, I found a few of them under a tarp in our barn.
The subject of the Dead Sea Scrolls is most certainly religion, which makes them useful solely from an academic theological standpoint.
You know, I think that you have convinced me--they're just a bunch of old scraps of paper blathering on about some crap that nobody's interested in anyway. They couldn't possibly be of any interest to linguists, historians or anthropologists. I'm hungry, what do you say that we to use them to start up the barbecue grill?
Easy on the passive-aggressive straw man arguments - you might get hurt.
It may have been a straw man, but it is hardly passive-aggressive. It's usually best to know terms before you use them.
Did you really say that? Christianity is ENTIRELY based on the testimony recorded in early Christian texts and the teachings of early Church fathers. If you invalidate early Christian texts, you invalidate Christianity. Much the same is true of Judaism.
That would seem to me to be more of a reason that it is historically significant, rather than less. And more of a reason that it should be available.
Christians tend to attribute psychotic hatred and irrationality to anyone who says "Christianity is nonsense" because it clashes so strongly with their point of view.
Atheists are not talking about smashing the Sistine Chapel, burning the books of William Blake, or killing modern "Christian rock" stars. Find me some quotes or news accounts. You will find people who attack religious art (like Michelangelo's David). They're all religious nuts, who find any depiction of religious figures sinful.
While you're using a mighty broad brush, these things that you say are all at least partially true but I just don't see how they pertain to the importance or historicity of the Dead Sea Scrolls or, for that matter, to what I wrote.
I never said that atheists were doing anything of the kind, I was merely following the logical out-workings of the original post's line of reasoning, which placed the DSSs in the category of worthlessness due to their religious nature.
So what? You're talking about a religion that has had its primary texts re-written countless times over the centuries, already. Nobody today can point at any kind of original "Bible". Whether or not these are "accurate" is pretty irrelevant, even if you're somebody who is Christian/Jewish.
Did you really say that? Since when does the validity of a particular religious belief have anything to do with the relevance of a 2000-year-old document? You don't have to share the beliefs of the writers of it to understand that this is an immensely important piece of history.
While you're at it, why don't you take a ball peen hammer to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel since it contains religious thought. Or perhaps make it your life's work to erase any remnant of the works of William Blake since he was apparently a Christian.
It think that this is why many look at hostile agnostics and atheists and see people who are just as irrational as the religious folks that they seem to hate so much.
Also, I don't know if inviting nerds into your campaign is all that good idea, Republican or Democrat. They're the most likely to know about and understand Rand, Julian Simon, and so on, i.e. the flaws with big government and their intervention in the economy.
Did you mean Rush the radio host or Rush the musicians?
Just because Red Hat made one high-profile mistake, doesn't mean their support service is without value.
Perhaps not, but I know that they will never get another dime of my money.
For years, I always purchased Red Hat even though I never had occasion to use the support that came with it. I was (and still am) bought into the FOSS concept and wanted to make it work for me and my business. But I stopped sending RH my money sometime about 8.0, when I called their support to try and get some help with a printer issue. I would have been satisfied if they had been able to get either one of my printers (HP LaserJet 1100 or LaserJet 4L) to work with RH. A surly woman with almost unrecognizable English--obviously reading off of a cue card--tried for a few minutes and then dismissed my support case with the comment that "RedHat doesn't work with all printers." When I mentioned that I had paid for the RedHat just so that I could have support, she hung up on me. I called back to get another support person with an equally incompetent and rude tech.
Eventually, someone at experts-exchange.com gave me the answer to my problem. Now I just download Centos and if I need support, I pay someone on a case-by-case basis.
Being a brisk-and-mortar business who has to compete at disadvantage (primarily due to the sales tax issue) with internet retailers, I would definitely have a lot to gain if Amazon were to lose, but I can't seem to find it within me to view banner ads on a site that is owned by an affiliate in New York as the "substantial physical presence" required by Quill v. North Dakota.
I certainly understand the State of New York's point that it is trying to create a level playing field for the businesses there, and it certainly seems that large internet retailers go through strange gyrations to keep their advantage. For instance, I live in a rather populous state that is bordered on one side by a state with far fewer folks. So where did Amazon put their distribution hub? Right across the border in the low-population state, which is an obvious attempt to reduce their burden of collecting sales tax and to maintain their price advantage to as many customers as possible.
While this is clearly unfair, the law is the law, and I view New York's position as an attempt to circumvent the nearly impossibly high bar of getting an amendment to the Constitution.
As an aside, I read /. every day and I have always enjoyed your comments
here. You seem reasonable and impartial--your thoughtful and informed
reply on this subject is no different. I'm not trying to be argumentative,
I think that I just see it differently.
Anyone can make any argument that they wish to, but the fact that the State of New York takes a position that is spurious and tries to enforce it to gain revenue does not make it any less unconstitutional. US legal history is replete with instances where states have made other Constitution-trampling pronouncements, only to be smacked down by one court or another.
New York is grasping at straws in a strictly logical sense, however, with judicial activism on both sides gradually eroding our rights and the big money at stake, I wouldn't be surprised to see New York win out in the cash grab. The only hope is that there are also moneyed interests fighting it.
By law, states have the authority to force retailers to collect sales taxes only if the retailer has a physical presence in the state. So if Company X has its headquarters in, say, Texas, it has to collect tax from customers in Texas. However, since it has no presence in Florida, Florida does not have the authority to force it to collect sales tax.
I'm surprised that so many have difficulty understanding this. It really goes back to one of the most basic premises that fueled the American Revolution: no taxation without representation. In this case, if the company has no presence in a particular state, it does not derive any benefit from being represented by any governing body of that state, therefore that state has no right to tax said company.
It's actually quite simple. The good thing about it is that it will take a Constitutional Amendment to change it. That is, if we actually have any rights left.
"Faith" must be a bush evangelical...because she is just that STUPID.
Or maybe she is just that stupid because she was a Clinton nominee.
"Sure, the odds are 1000:1 against that I'll be hit by a bus, but there are a lot of ways disaster can strike, and they add up. You willing to ignore 5:1 odds? How about 10:1, or 15:1?"
This is why technical people need to strive to learn to have relationships with supervisors of a non-technical bent. From reading the article, it seems that Childs' demeanor meant that he could easily be dismissed as the brilliant-but-whacked-out-network-curmudgeon. Fair or not, that means that all of his concerns could be waved off as paranoia (for instance, him trying to get an information security policy in place). Unfortunately, the wisdom of our caution only becomes evident when a disaster occurs or is narrowly averted (e.g. "Thank God we backed that data up!").
On the other hand, non-technical managers should learn to not instantly dismiss the concerns of technical people as unlikely or unrealistic.
I suppose I'm risking an off-topic mod here but this question DOES relate to whether I'd consider switching to Mac. What is the cost/benefit ratio like these days if you build your own rig? For a long time it just made no sense to build your own box because the big retailers were offering systems that could not be beat on a cost/benefit basis. I looked at the arstechnica guide for the budget box and I believe I can beat the price just going to the local BestBuy and get MORE system...not less. When you throw in the shipping for all the individual parts you need to get to build your own system it still seems like a blowout that the retailers own the PC market. But since you've been doing it can you share some insights on whether it really makes sense to build it yourself from cost/benefit perspective?
Having been a value-added reseller since 2001, I can tell you that you usually will get more for your money with a prebuilt system from a big retailer. There have often been times when I have done a quote for a customer only to find that it would be cheaper to by a pre-built machine and put all of the guts in my own case. This is especially true on lower priced units, with the advantage often turning to a build-your-own computer if you are going for a more performance-oriented machine with more memory or greater storage.
There are, however, plenty of downsides to prebuilt systems. In no particular order:
There could be some advantages as well:
There are many choices when you want a new computer, with advantages and disadvantages. Personally, I would rather have one that I know has quality components, particularly the power supply, MOBO, memory and hard drive. My $.02.
...is how you guys want to play. Fine whatever. Except you better be looking over your shoulders constantly. This is not the end. It is only the beginning.
I'm sure they're quaking with fear.
You're right though when you say that it's "only the beginning"--I imagine that every corporation will be more emboldened to do whatever they please since they obviously have the pols in their pockets.