Yeah, people don't understand ebay. You can usually make more money starting an item off at $1.00 with no reserve.
Smarter still to start off a penny cheaper at 99 cents. The listing fee is $0.20 for items under a dollar, at $1.00 it goes up to $0.35. As to the overall strategy of starting low with no reserve, I agree -- asuming that there is an active market for what you are selling.
What about the Data entry people that have to type things in all caps?
At this point you have to ask, why do the people who designed the data entry system hate us? Cause if your system requires all caps, wouldn't it make sense to automatically convert any letter typed into caps? Or did they think: "He typed a lower case 't'. He could have meant 'T', but how can we be sure?" Were they afraid of capital numbers creeping in? We have machines to do the tedious and repetive stuff, right? Like converting characters to ALL CAPS or, from a post here long ago, watching soccer games.
OK, this field has to be all caps, great. Convert any input to caps. Done. Or, make every user hit CAPS LOCK every time he types data into this field. If he fails to, give him an error and make him repeat it, ALL CAPS this time. Rather a no-brainer.
From TFA: "The great implementation of the spreadsheet was not VisiCalc or even Lotus 1-2-3 but Microsoft Excel, which extended the spreadsheet's power and gave businesspeople a variety of calculating tools."
So, both the article and the submitter are obviously trolls!
M$ did manage to convince a generation of secretaries -- I mean Administrative Assistants -- that a spreadsheet is a tabular editing tool for typing up phone lists. I remember nearly choking when I saw an "Admin" actually doing accounting in Excel . . . she typed in a column of figures on the computer, then added them up on her desk calculator and typed the sum into the "spreadsheet".
They listed the Amiga 1000, which was the first generation of Amiga, and was truly a novel machine. . . . The 500, while still a cool box, wasn't a great technological leap forward.
I agree, but they list the Mac Plus instead of the original Mac. It, too was an evolution. And like the Amiga 500 over the 1000 before, it got just enough things right that weren't quite there on the first try. For consistency, I would think the list should contain the A1000 and original Mac.
Wow. Just thinking of my beloved C=64 and A3000 still makes me mad to this day -- damn Commodore corporate morons! We could have all been using Amiga 9000s now, with neural input and 4-D, no 5-D!, graphcis! Sigh.
Those IBM PCs in the 80s (pre PS/2) were heavy duty. Well, at least heavy. In 1990, I became the user of a way-outdated IBM PC/AT, ca. 1984 or so. Just for fun, I hauled that thing to the shipping department (on a pallet jack) to weigh it on the freight scale. The CPU case was about 60 lbs. The PGA (!) monitor was 40 lbs, and the keyboard was almost 10#! Crap perhaps, but it would take a bullet for you.
The PGA graphcis "card" was actually a multi-card assembly. It took up two 16-bit PC/AT slots, on two full-length cards and one half-length card all joined with headers, standoffs and some ribbon cable. That's 2.5 full-length cards. It had graphics roughly equivalent to what would become EGA, but it was not EGA compatible. For most programs, it defaulted to the CGA mode for graphics. I found only one program (Generic CADD) that supported the "high-res" color. I assume that it was intended for that sort of work.
And it had ROM BASIC. I found this out the day the hard drive died, and it booted to ROM!
I guess the moral of the story is: pound for pound, IBM made the heaviest business personal computers of the era.
Only middle/uppermiddle class and above bought a "computer" back then, but it was the IBM-PC (and later, the "100% compatibles") that truly brought PCs to every household...
The IBM-PC and PC/XT just weren't designed to be home machines. In the US, Commodore, Atari and Apple computers were all more affordable than the PC. IBMs were equipped more for business use. Monochrome graphics were standard on the IBMs, and they often had HDDs in the 10-30 MB range, not really needed in home apps then. You could get CGA color for IBMs, but it really wasn't worth it -- the home computer world is more than green, puple, black and white. 16 color C=64s and Ataris were far better for home applications where more colors was more important than higher resolution.
Even an XT clone like a "Leading Edge" was very pricey at $2000 or so in the middle of the decade. A Commodore 64 around the same time could be had for $300, another $300 or so for the floppy. A TV would do for a color monitor if you didn't want to spend another $200 for a dedicated S-Video monitor. If you bought a C=64 or an Atari for home use instead of an IBM PC, you'd have money left over to get a printer and modem and a subscription to compuserve or Q-Link. And your non-IBM comptuers had sound!
IBM tried to crack the home market with the PCJr in the 2nd half of the decade, but this annoyed and insulted home users more than anything. The keyboard, in particular, was a huge failure with the wireless interface and chicklet keys.
I'm not knocking IBM PCs. They were great business (personal) computers, and the clones made possible by the "openness" of the bus design did greatly influence home computing later. They just weren't a good choice for most homes (in the 1980s) where computers might be used to play games, run education software, some word-processing and maybe a little finance, in that order -- sort of upside-down version of what the IBMs were good for.
Using their service gives them the right to log your search... it's in their business model.
What's with the "Pffff"? Pshaw right back atcha!
Anyway, the topic really isn't Google's right (or desire) to log your searches. It's about anonymizing your Google searches. They've still logged it, just not tied back to you in any way. If they're logging for purposes of statistical analysis, it's no problem for them, is it? Where's the agreement that I have to search under my own identity?
People buy Dells because they are cheap, and they work.
I think it's more accurate to say that the low-end Dells are disposable computers. They'll be ok for about 18 months or so, and then you buy a new one.
I have a number of non-technical friends who buy low-end Dells and are shocked, shocked, to find that they don't work with a printer they purchase a year down the road. The USB ports and the system bus are always years behind the curve, so you're starting out in the hole -- kind of like buying new-old-stock PCs from 3 or 4 years ago. And you're certainly not upgrading the OS -- all those Dell drivers for the oddball hardware won't be supported in any version of OS except the one that came with the machine. Even an OS re-install is a tricky thing. After enough stuff breaks, you throw it out and get a new one.
The RIAA may be stupid, but that doesn't mean it is entirely wrong, and not all of its lawsuits are misdirected. Copyrights put paycheques in peoples' pockets, including software designers, game designers, graphic designers, and countless others.
This is not really how things work in a "capitalist" system. It might the the way we wish it would work, but it is not set up to benefit us . ..
Software designers, game designers, graphic designers, etc., are paid for their labor. They create work-for-hire. Their labor is what puts the paychecks in their pockets. RIAA members and other corporations who hire these individuals pay them to create stuff. The corporations are obligated to pay these people for their work, whether or not the products of their work sell. Likewise, the corporation is under no obligation to pay these folks anything extra if the product is a success.
Copyrights protect those who own the content, i.e. the corporations who hired the aforementioned individuals. Money earned by those corporations is owed to their investors as "value". This is a legal obligation of the corporation. Investors expect stuff like dividends or rising stock price to realize this value.
I don't completely agree with the way this works. I think that capitalism needs to be tweaked to recognize that there are more stakeholders than just shareholders. But as it stands now, copyright is not there to protect the creative individuals.
I know that one could argue that without copyright, the corp. wouldn't make money and would layoff the employees. But they could lay off the employees at any time in an "at will" employment system.
I give every organization its own email address (I realize this isn't unique, but I'm surprised at how few people do it). If the address gets out and I start getting spam, it's a simple matter to redirect that mail to/dev/null.
I give each organization its own email address, and sometimes I actually create the accounts.
There's absolutely nothing imaginary about deleting emails being criminal.
You're generalizing a specific case to the population as a whole. This logic error is sort of the cops' version of FUD. Those people whose official email communications have mandated retention know who they are. They don't need you to tell them.
The fact is and has always been the same. Radical Islam wants to destroy the West.
All religious fundamentalism shares this goal: the destruction of democratic, pluralistic civilization. Radical Islam would like to see the world converted to their faith, theocratic goverments installed, other religions marginalized, and women reduced to second-class citizens. I think you'll find that other radicalized faiths generally share this goal. Considerable progress has been made already in the U.S. Radical faiths of all kinds have more reasons to cooperate today than not -- and it's not for the betterment of the world, at least not for women and male members of less militant faiths.
One, shouldn't I be a freakin' gazillionaire by now?
Don't feel too bad. I know the guy that builds most of those Sonic systems. He's not a gazillionaire. He's doing ok, but you're probably in the same tax bracket as he is. And you wouldn't want to be him (or his staff), either. The naysayers were right about the kitchen environment: repairs that come in require degreasing and debugging -- in a literal sense.
Just google for "plastic polish" or "acrylic polish" and pick one with your favorite color of bottle. Most are available in various grits, from clean to polish to obliterate, so start off gently.
Then, since you "own" a "license" to the disks that are already scratched all the way through, download both tracks that you really like and burn 'em on a new cd.
And that acrylic polish will also clean up your non-sahpire watch crystal.
Dammit, 1 AM my time is no time to be fighting the Communist Propaganda!
You're absolutely right, dude. Please resume watching television. I'm sure there will be plenty of "Communist Propaganda" to fight when you're good and rested.
As for check ID items, it's up to the store how far they go. . . . The most extreme case I saw was at a Frys which is near the university and a couple of high schools, thus lots of underage purchaes. They check your ID, record it, and make you sign the book they recorded it in.
This is a serious question. I've never been in a Fry's, don't live anywhre near one. But my understanding is they sell electronics and computer stuff, right? So what the heck is age-restricted that one might purchase there?
you're creating a new copy of someone else's thing, not your own, and it's not fair use because you do not know the person.
1. If one copies data from medium A (which one bought) and medium B (which someone else bought), and creates two identical copies, C and D, which copy are you saying is illegal? How do you know which is which?
2. Where are you coming up with the "you don't know the person" angle w.r.t. fair use? I think you must be thinking something more along the lines of "it's not fair for you to use the mix tape I made for Billy, that expresses our undying love!"
God, just how DUMB are those national security morons? . ..
Is that what you want to accomplish, NSA? . . . [T]urn the rest of the world into your enemy so you can have perpetual war?
Perpetual war means we can keep claiming that "We're at war!" If we can claim we're at war, certain rights can be suspended. If war were to "end" then it wouldn't be war anymore, and people might want their rights (and government) back.
So perhaps they're not so dumb after all. Perhaps this is an actual case of malice, not incompetence.
Plus humans suck at fighting. . . . [W]e can't run fast, we can't climb trees quickly, our sense of smell sucks.
As the old joke goes, "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you." Slow as we are, though, can actually run pretty fast compared to a snake. So if you can spot an angry snake outside of its striking distance with your super camouflage-piercing vision, you've got an advantage.
I'm still waiting for the first review that says a particular card gives warmer colors or cleaner pictures.
That's actually determined more by the USB cable you use. Thinner cables are gonna give you better color rendering. Of course if you work in black and white, it doesn't matter. Go ahead and use the cheap stuff. But with color, you don't want multipath blurring your color signals together. And this gets even more important as you shoot multiple frames per second.
And the same thing goes with your storage media. If you work in high resolution color, you need a RAID. That way, you can spread the put the color streams on different physical media to prevent color-bleed. This is even more critical with digital photography, just a one-bit bleed from one pixel to another can ruin a great photo.
So, by all means, get a cheap card if you are going analog black-and-white. But you get what you pay for if you are shooting high-res digital color.
She's lucky they didn't arrest her. Dammit, "I don't like this" is not a sufficient reason for violating classification.
Wow. What, if anything, would someone have to do to rise to your threshold of what is unacceptable? Aparently torture is not bad enough. At least not waterboarding -- most victims don't actually die when being "interrogated" by a skilled torturer. Murder? Genocide?
To me, that's enough reason to "violate classification", whatever that means. It's reason enough to do a lot more than that. Can you believe that there are people around the world who act out of conscience? Do these folks strike you as starry-eyed dreamers, living in a fantasy world?
Count me in with the dreamers and the idealists. The CIA is someplace I'd be proud to have been fired from.
Slashdot Mirror
Smarter still to start off a penny cheaper at 99 cents. The listing fee is $0.20 for items under a dollar, at $1.00 it goes up to $0.35. As to the overall strategy of starting low with no reserve, I agree -- asuming that there is an active market for what you are selling.
Verbing weirds language.
At this point you have to ask, why do the people who designed the data entry system hate us? Cause if your system requires all caps, wouldn't it make sense to automatically convert any letter typed into caps? Or did they think: "He typed a lower case 't'. He could have meant 'T', but how can we be sure?" Were they afraid of capital numbers creeping in? We have machines to do the tedious and repetive stuff, right? Like converting characters to ALL CAPS or, from a post here long ago, watching soccer games.
OK, this field has to be all caps, great. Convert any input to caps. Done. Or, make every user hit CAPS LOCK every time he types data into this field. If he fails to, give him an error and make him repeat it, ALL CAPS this time. Rather a no-brainer.
M$ did manage to convince a generation of secretaries -- I mean Administrative Assistants -- that a spreadsheet is a tabular editing tool for typing up phone lists. I remember nearly choking when I saw an "Admin" actually doing accounting in Excel . . . she typed in a column of figures on the computer, then added them up on her desk calculator and typed the sum into the "spreadsheet".
I agree, but they list the Mac Plus instead of the original Mac. It, too was an evolution. And like the Amiga 500 over the 1000 before, it got just enough things right that weren't quite there on the first try. For consistency, I would think the list should contain the A1000 and original Mac.
Wow. Just thinking of my beloved C=64 and A3000 still makes me mad to this day -- damn Commodore corporate morons! We could have all been using Amiga 9000s now, with neural input and 4-D, no 5-D!, graphcis! Sigh.
The PGA graphcis "card" was actually a multi-card assembly. It took up two 16-bit PC/AT slots, on two full-length cards and one half-length card all joined with headers, standoffs and some ribbon cable. That's 2.5 full-length cards. It had graphics roughly equivalent to what would become EGA, but it was not EGA compatible. For most programs, it defaulted to the CGA mode for graphics. I found only one program (Generic CADD) that supported the "high-res" color. I assume that it was intended for that sort of work.
And it had ROM BASIC. I found this out the day the hard drive died, and it booted to ROM!
I guess the moral of the story is: pound for pound, IBM made the heaviest business personal computers of the era.
The IBM-PC and PC/XT just weren't designed to be home machines. In the US, Commodore, Atari and Apple computers were all more affordable than the PC. IBMs were equipped more for business use. Monochrome graphics were standard on the IBMs, and they often had HDDs in the 10-30 MB range, not really needed in home apps then. You could get CGA color for IBMs, but it really wasn't worth it -- the home computer world is more than green, puple, black and white. 16 color C=64s and Ataris were far better for home applications where more colors was more important than higher resolution.
Even an XT clone like a "Leading Edge" was very pricey at $2000 or so in the middle of the decade. A Commodore 64 around the same time could be had for $300, another $300 or so for the floppy. A TV would do for a color monitor if you didn't want to spend another $200 for a dedicated S-Video monitor. If you bought a C=64 or an Atari for home use instead of an IBM PC, you'd have money left over to get a printer and modem and a subscription to compuserve or Q-Link. And your non-IBM comptuers had sound!
IBM tried to crack the home market with the PCJr in the 2nd half of the decade, but this annoyed and insulted home users more than anything. The keyboard, in particular, was a huge failure with the wireless interface and chicklet keys.
I'm not knocking IBM PCs. They were great business (personal) computers, and the clones made possible by the "openness" of the bus design did greatly influence home computing later. They just weren't a good choice for most homes (in the 1980s) where computers might be used to play games, run education software, some word-processing and maybe a little finance, in that order -- sort of upside-down version of what the IBMs were good for.
What's with the "Pffff"? Pshaw right back atcha!
Anyway, the topic really isn't Google's right (or desire) to log your searches. It's about anonymizing your Google searches. They've still logged it, just not tied back to you in any way. If they're logging for purposes of statistical analysis, it's no problem for them, is it? Where's the agreement that I have to search under my own identity?
I would hope so . . . that's definately the kind of shopping info that I'd want to keep to myself!
I have a number of non-technical friends who buy low-end Dells and are shocked, shocked, to find that they don't work with a printer they purchase a year down the road. The USB ports and the system bus are always years behind the curve, so you're starting out in the hole -- kind of like buying new-old-stock PCs from 3 or 4 years ago. And you're certainly not upgrading the OS -- all those Dell drivers for the oddball hardware won't be supported in any version of OS except the one that came with the machine. Even an OS re-install is a tricky thing. After enough stuff breaks, you throw it out and get a new one.
This is not really how things work in a "capitalist" system. It might the the way we wish it would work, but it is not set up to benefit us . . .
Software designers, game designers, graphic designers, etc., are paid for their labor. They create work-for-hire. Their labor is what puts the paychecks in their pockets. RIAA members and other corporations who hire these individuals pay them to create stuff. The corporations are obligated to pay these people for their work, whether or not the products of their work sell. Likewise, the corporation is under no obligation to pay these folks anything extra if the product is a success.
Copyrights protect those who own the content, i.e. the corporations who hired the aforementioned individuals. Money earned by those corporations is owed to their investors as "value". This is a legal obligation of the corporation. Investors expect stuff like dividends or rising stock price to realize this value.
I don't completely agree with the way this works. I think that capitalism needs to be tweaked to recognize that there are more stakeholders than just shareholders. But as it stands now, copyright is not there to protect the creative individuals.
I know that one could argue that without copyright, the corp. wouldn't make money and would layoff the employees. But they could lay off the employees at any time in an "at will" employment system.
I don't know. All of my music-related legal matters are handled by the premier firm in this area: Hambert, Rendricks and Loss.
I give each organization its own email address, and sometimes I actually create the accounts.
You're generalizing a specific case to the population as a whole. This logic error is sort of the cops' version of FUD. Those people whose official email communications have mandated retention know who they are. They don't need you to tell them.
All religious fundamentalism shares this goal: the destruction of democratic, pluralistic civilization. Radical Islam would like to see the world converted to their faith, theocratic goverments installed, other religions marginalized, and women reduced to second-class citizens. I think you'll find that other radicalized faiths generally share this goal. Considerable progress has been made already in the U.S. Radical faiths of all kinds have more reasons to cooperate today than not -- and it's not for the betterment of the world, at least not for women and male members of less militant faiths.
I've known quite a few managers who could have used the wisdom in this poster: http://despair.com/motivation.html
Don't feel too bad. I know the guy that builds most of those Sonic systems. He's not a gazillionaire. He's doing ok, but you're probably in the same tax bracket as he is. And you wouldn't want to be him (or his staff), either. The naysayers were right about the kitchen environment: repairs that come in require degreasing and debugging -- in a literal sense.
Then, since you "own" a "license" to the disks that are already scratched all the way through, download both tracks that you really like and burn 'em on a new cd.
And that acrylic polish will also clean up your non-sahpire watch crystal.
You're absolutely right, dude. Please resume watching television. I'm sure there will be plenty of "Communist Propaganda" to fight when you're good and rested.
This is a serious question. I've never been in a Fry's, don't live anywhre near one. But my understanding is they sell electronics and computer stuff, right? So what the heck is age-restricted that one might purchase there?
1. If one copies data from medium A (which one bought) and medium B (which someone else bought), and creates two identical copies, C and D, which copy are you saying is illegal? How do you know which is which?
2. Where are you coming up with the "you don't know the person" angle w.r.t. fair use? I think you must be thinking something more along the lines of "it's not fair for you to use the mix tape I made for Billy, that expresses our undying love!"
Perpetual war means we can keep claiming that "We're at war!" If we can claim we're at war, certain rights can be suspended. If war were to "end" then it wouldn't be war anymore, and people might want their rights (and government) back.
So perhaps they're not so dumb after all. Perhaps this is an actual case of malice, not incompetence.
As the old joke goes, "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you." Slow as we are, though, can actually run pretty fast compared to a snake. So if you can spot an angry snake outside of its striking distance with your super camouflage-piercing vision, you've got an advantage.
That's actually determined more by the USB cable you use. Thinner cables are gonna give you better color rendering. Of course if you work in black and white, it doesn't matter. Go ahead and use the cheap stuff. But with color, you don't want multipath blurring your color signals together. And this gets even more important as you shoot multiple frames per second.
And the same thing goes with your storage media. If you work in high resolution color, you need a RAID. That way, you can spread the put the color streams on different physical media to prevent color-bleed. This is even more critical with digital photography, just a one-bit bleed from one pixel to another can ruin a great photo.
So, by all means, get a cheap card if you are going analog black-and-white. But you get what you pay for if you are shooting high-res digital color.
Wow. What, if anything, would someone have to do to rise to your threshold of what is unacceptable? Aparently torture is not bad enough. At least not waterboarding -- most victims don't actually die when being "interrogated" by a skilled torturer. Murder? Genocide?
To me, that's enough reason to "violate classification", whatever that means. It's reason enough to do a lot more than that. Can you believe that there are people around the world who act out of conscience? Do these folks strike you as starry-eyed dreamers, living in a fantasy world?
Count me in with the dreamers and the idealists. The CIA is someplace I'd be proud to have been fired from.