These days, my wife and I have a policy of always putting thermal paper receipts in a baggy that we keep in the freezer. The thermal paper printing does not seem to ever fade as long as the paper is kept cool.
I smell business opportunity in the form of a line of refrigerated file cabinets. Who's with me?
So when you move, you'll need to take all your $60 lightbulbs with you, or, you can charge the buyer a few thousand dollars more for all the lightbulbs. BTW with a bulb that expensive I want a warranty.
I had some fancy cold cathode fluorescent chandelier lamps that I moved with me. I didn't even have a candelabra base fixture for them in the new place, but I sure wasn't gonna give them to the next guy at what I paid.
A guarantee would be nice. But I've got some CFLs with an 8 year guarantee. It's right there on the package:
*Limted Warranty: Guaranteed to last 8 years based on rated life at 4 hours consumer use per day at 120V. If this bulb (sic) does not last 8 years, return UPC and register receipt [to GE]
I can think of at least 2 problems in pursuing that claim. I might be more diligent keeping the receipt and packaging with a $20 lamp, but probably not.
As someone who used to "sneak in" when I was out past curfew. I can tell you it is possible to turn off a car and coast into your driveway while making a turn without power steering and power brakes. It is much more difficult, but doable if you know to expect it. The part about some steering wheels locking up is true, but if you leave the key in the accessory position it should still work. In any event as a driver I much prefer manual (more fun and safer in this case). Save the Manuals!
Well, I love the manuals as much as you. And I'd have done the same if it weren't for the fact that the garage door would have given me away anyway. ("Rob, how did the car get outside? Coulda sworn it was in the garage when you went to bed.")
But manhandling a vehicle with the power assist dead is sure a lot easier when you are a: prepared for it, and b: young enough to have a curfew.
I never understood why this option was so difficult for people.
Perhaps I will never understand the conceit that multiple, possibly redundant, safety mechanisms are an indication of incompetence or weakness. Why should the tendency to panic in unforeseen, unpredictable life or death situations be a death sentence? The guy in question was a highway patrolman, someone with presumably more training in driving in extreme conditions than the average driver.
I saw this attitude yesterday in the story about Audi making electric vehicles noisier. Commenters were suggesting that anyone who can't see a car coming deserves what they get. Isn't it possible that a car that can't be seen could be heard? And if heard, avoided? I hear a car start in front of me just yesterday in a parking lot. I couldn't see it, my view was blocked by an SUV. The driver couldn't see me for the same reason. Since I heard it, I stopped just before it backed out right in front of me.
And who among you has never, ever been distracted by something? Should that necessarily be the last moment of our lives?
Safety doesn't have to be one layer deep.
And as others have mentioned, turning off the car in question wasn't as simple or quick as switching the ignition to "off but not locked".
Bingo. Divide that heart disease number by 3000, and you've got two hundred 9/11s each year from just that one cause.
More Native American and Alaskan Native women died in land motor vehicle accidents in 2001 than total terror deaths for the entire population. More female Americans died of "pelvic inflammation" than terror in the worst year for terror ever.
Yet when we try to provide health care for all Americans to cut these deaths, it's "socialism". The reason we can spend an infinite amount of treasure, lives, reputation and liberty fighting the concept of "terrorism" isn't the loss of life on 9/11 and potential future loss of life from terror. It's the vandalism of private property that really riles the population.
He didn't say pulling their weight, he said profitable. It's not profitable to have the procedures manual at every TSA station. It's also not profitable to actually train the employees. "Jennifer" was being unprofitable by going to her congressman to ensure the TSA did these things.
As a side note, I do not agree with this outlook, just can understand it from a business perspective.
*CAPTCHA: untested
Ya. The TSA's "profit" is their funding from Congress. The employee was questioning the effectiveness of the organization, and thus jeopardizing its profits.
Congress wants the TSA to make Americans feel safe-ish without spending too much, that's their motivation, to look like they're doing a good enough job to get re-elected.
The US people might profit the most from the TSA if the organization protected life and property at a reasonable cost, but most people wouldn't understand this concept, so they settle for the illusion of "safety".
So that brings us right back to the problem of someone who breaks the illusion. The solution, as seen by the parties involved, is to get rid of the person pulling away the curtain.
Indivuduals that are profitable to retain are retained . ..
Perhaps. But in general, individuals that would be missed the soonest and affect the current manager positively in the timeframe of his or her anticipated tenure in that management position are retained. Those who make a manager's life harder are dismissed, including those that would be profitable for the organization as a whole, just not for the guy with hiring and firing power. Business is more of an ecosystem than a single-minded profit machine.
I started to write a longer top level about how refusal to support Clear QAM and forcing cables boxes on people with QAM capable TV's and forcing people to use cable company provided DVR's instead of - well Clear QAM was a major contributing factor but the comment started to get too long and lose focus.
We hadn't had cable TV service until just recently when we got a roommate. She had to have it, so we factored that into her share.
What I didn't factor in was the set top box tech support cost. The cable tech connected up the box to the cable and the TV to the box through the A/V jacks. The box came with a "universal" remote. Whenever the roommate got the remote in the wrong mode and changed TV channel instead of changing set top box channel, I had to fix it or else hear that she could only get "like 5 channels". (These were unencrypted ones the TV could tune itself.)
If set top boxes are too difficult and inconvenient for a physician to operate, then grandmas don't have a chance.
As this is slashdot, I assume many will write that my (now former) roommate is an idiot despite her degree, but "shut up and pay us, moron" isn't making people flock to cable.
OK it's somewhat sensitive information, but why was it confidential for so long?
From TFNPRA:
There is a reason that all of this up-close-and-personal information from 1940 is being released all these years later. "In 1952, the director of the Census Bureau and the National Archivist agreed that keeping census records private for 72 years balanced public release of federal records with the tradition of confidentiality," explains the Census Bureau's Glasier. In other words, 72 years was considered at the time to be longer than most lifespans.
America has a god given right to demand a bigger piece of the pie, even if that means destroying some of it in the process, because were exceptional and gods chosen people. Which is essentially our 19th and early 20th century intellectual rhetoric, we found what was essentially virgin land that we exploited, in order to create our version of order in the world.
Now I know that you're stating this in an ironic sense, but I actually got a letter -- this year -- from my US Senator stating that he still believes in American Exceptionalism, actually using that phrase or a slight variation thereof.
Micro Channel. I really liked it. Easy to install and setup. I remember those days fondly.
From a hardware standpoint -- I mean the literal nuts and bolts -- I really liked the fact with Microchannel machines (PS/2s), you could open the case and swap cards and components without tools, just thumbscrews and finger-friendly fasteners for most part.
So government employees do something wrong and the court punishes the taxpayers? How about paying that $160k out of the cops retirement fund?
This is like when a Priest gets caught molesting a kid and the Church pays the victim with the congregations money.
The cops were working for the city. They authority they abused was derived from the city. The city -- and thus the citizenry -- is responsible for their actions.
Now if the city thinks that it is not at fault for the actions of these employees -- that it wasn't bad management or poor training, etc., but rather something completely out of their control -- then perhaps the city should sue the officers to recover the money.
At any rate, it is important for all employers -- cities, churches, banks, etc. -- to ensure that they hire, manage, and train the employees acting in their name to obey all relevant laws and regulations in the course of their duties. To do any less is to expose the organization to unnecessary liability. This is especially important if you issue the aforementioned employees badges, guns, foreclosure forms, or the ability to invoke eternal damnation.
Was america ever worthy of that title? Slavery for the first part of the countries history, women didn't get sufferage until 1919. Blacks were still segregated until the 60's and by then there was the paranoia over the cold war with people getting accused of being a communist (so what if you are?). Perhaps after the wall came down for that 10 years or so people were fine and then 9/11 happened and the US went to a police state. Also when your country has one of the highest incarceration rates you can't really claim to be very free.
But to look at what you wrote a different way, we were making slow progress in the right direction. We weren't perfect, but we used to be striving to be increasingly free both in depth and breadth. That's what I miss, and I guess I'm not brave enough on my own to reclaim.
The problem was not the job, it was you. (yes, the job had problems, but you should never have implemented that junk like that)
There's probably one o them there named internet rules about this, but i'm old, so i ferget thangs.
That's a little harsh. A boss (or more likely a company culture) that puts a prototype into production and balks at the idea of documenting it isn't going to fancy the idea of documenting the q&d project they had to do up real quick-like in the first place. It was probably built to use as a demo to get a sale or internal approval or whatever.
That sort of scenario isn't good when a deadline rolls around, and you have half the system done and half the documentation done. You try explaining the importance of maintainability and you're gonna get something in between a "talkin' to" and a "you're fired" for your trouble.
I agree that your approach would be best when possible, I always tried to do it that way. But far too often it isn't. The world, of which work is a subset, is a far from perfect place.
But never, never put your own phone number in any code. Especially an error message. That honor goes to the first manager who tells you something along the lines of: "The perfect is the enemy of the good."
I'm not sure why people think that it wasn't a right and proper thing for Kodak to die.
Kodak's strenght was film photography. There turned out to be plenty of other companies with strengths in digital, why should Kodak have colonized that market? Let them produce the stuff they're good at as long as people want it, then quietly go away. There's no reason corporations need to be immortal.
I don't see "people thinking" Kodak should or shouldn't die in TFA . . . more of a postmortem analysis.
Anyway, I understand that there's no reason for corps to be immortal, but most people working at a given firm would just as soon it didn't go belly up right now while they're working there. Even if you're looking to quit a place, you'd rather do it on your schedule than the liquidator's.
A sibling of this comment mentions Xerox missing the boat with the GUI, but they seem to have re-invented themselves nowadays doing OCR and image recognition and document and photo management and analysis. Probably too soon to know if this will work, but they did hang on when their market changed.
Likewise with Kodak, you'd think they could have found other things to do in the photography arena. You've got websites like Flickr that store and share photos, Shutterfly and Snapfish that provide hard copies in formats that an ordinary home or office printer can't produce. Kodak probably should have gotten into those areas, among others. But as TFA mentions, they had such an emotional and physical investment in film they didn't want to let go of it.
And what about Fuji? They do plenty of digital stuff, but you can still buy their film. TFA doesn't mention what they did differently.
The first five I found on the market all required full access to my address book. WTF? I skipped installing them, but I'm sure that they'd have worked without this capability. The other big UI problem is that the apps don't say WHY they need these privileges.
I'm not certain, but I think that some people are now putting QR codes onto their business cards that have their contact information embedded.
I have seen an actual instance of this: a local magazine publisher here prints his business card in the mags he publishes and it contains a QR code with his contact info. If an app could write to the contact list, it could add that information automatically.
But on the other hand, QR codes can be used for other data, too, so an app should be installable with or without this privilege.
But on the third hand, if an app can't to something that it promises, or it gives the user an error message stating that it doesn't have permission to do something, then the publisher is looking at a possible tech support request. A user could have forgotten that he denied access to contact list for this app, and then try to get help. The publisher is going to want to keep this to a minimum, since tech support requests eat up resources. So just not installing the application is a simple way to statistically reduce this cost. So while I don't like it, I can see at least one thing that motivates a publisher to take this route.
Why does it take a representative to be affected before they represent the people?
Aren't they supposed to be listening to us complaining and take action? Instead it seems like they only act on what is affecting them.
Pretty much the same reason you get the crosswalk light installed only after some kid or old lady gets killed. People, including legislators, do what's easiest for them. When it's easier to do nothing, do nothing. When doing nothing gets to be more trouble than doing something, only then you do something.
Slashdot Mirror
These days, my wife and I have a policy of always putting thermal paper receipts in a baggy that we keep in the freezer. The thermal paper printing does not seem to ever fade as long as the paper is kept cool.
I smell business opportunity in the form of a line of refrigerated file cabinets. Who's with me?
So when you move, you'll need to take all your $60 lightbulbs with you, or, you can charge the buyer a few thousand dollars more for all the lightbulbs. BTW with a bulb that expensive I want a warranty.
I had some fancy cold cathode fluorescent chandelier lamps that I moved with me. I didn't even have a candelabra base fixture for them in the new place, but I sure wasn't gonna give them to the next guy at what I paid.
(Who wants to save the box and receipts for 20 years)
If the receipt's the thermal paper type, you needn't bother trying.
*Limted Warranty: Guaranteed to last 8 years based on rated life at 4 hours consumer use per day at 120V. If this bulb (sic) does not last 8 years, return UPC and register receipt [to GE]
I can think of at least 2 problems in pursuing that claim. I might be more diligent keeping the receipt and packaging with a $20 lamp, but probably not.
As someone who used to "sneak in" when I was out past curfew. I can tell you it is possible to turn off a car and coast into your driveway while making a turn without power steering and power brakes. It is much more difficult, but doable if you know to expect it. The part about some steering wheels locking up is true, but if you leave the key in the accessory position it should still work. In any event as a driver I much prefer manual (more fun and safer in this case). Save the Manuals!
Well, I love the manuals as much as you. And I'd have done the same if it weren't for the fact that the garage door would have given me away anyway. ("Rob, how did the car get outside? Coulda sworn it was in the garage when you went to bed.")
But manhandling a vehicle with the power assist dead is sure a lot easier when you are a: prepared for it, and b: young enough to have a curfew.
I never understood why this option was so difficult for people.
Perhaps I will never understand the conceit that multiple, possibly redundant, safety mechanisms are an indication of incompetence or weakness. Why should the tendency to panic in unforeseen, unpredictable life or death situations be a death sentence? The guy in question was a highway patrolman, someone with presumably more training in driving in extreme conditions than the average driver.
I saw this attitude yesterday in the story about Audi making electric vehicles noisier. Commenters were suggesting that anyone who can't see a car coming deserves what they get. Isn't it possible that a car that can't be seen could be heard? And if heard, avoided? I hear a car start in front of me just yesterday in a parking lot. I couldn't see it, my view was blocked by an SUV. The driver couldn't see me for the same reason. Since I heard it, I stopped just before it backed out right in front of me.
And who among you has never, ever been distracted by something? Should that necessarily be the last moment of our lives?
Safety doesn't have to be one layer deep.
And as others have mentioned, turning off the car in question wasn't as simple or quick as switching the ignition to "off but not locked".
you need to be a child riding a schoolbus to be smart enough to turn the keys to "off"
Unless it's a Lexus schoolbus with keyless ignition.
It is all theatre.
The threat theatre cast by the politicos creates the market for the TSA theatre.
You are not likely to die by terrorist act. You are more likely to die by automobile accident, heart attack, stroke ......
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm * Heart disease: 599,413
Bingo. Divide that heart disease number by 3000, and you've got two hundred 9/11s each year from just that one cause.
More Native American and Alaskan Native women died in land motor vehicle accidents in 2001 than total terror deaths for the entire population. More female Americans died of "pelvic inflammation" than terror in the worst year for terror ever.
Yet when we try to provide health care for all Americans to cut these deaths, it's "socialism". The reason we can spend an infinite amount of treasure, lives, reputation and liberty fighting the concept of "terrorism" isn't the loss of life on 9/11 and potential future loss of life from terror. It's the vandalism of private property that really riles the population.
He didn't say pulling their weight, he said profitable. It's not profitable to have the procedures manual at every TSA station. It's also not profitable to actually train the employees. "Jennifer" was being unprofitable by going to her congressman to ensure the TSA did these things.
As a side note, I do not agree with this outlook, just can understand it from a business perspective.
*CAPTCHA: untested
Ya. The TSA's "profit" is their funding from Congress. The employee was questioning the effectiveness of the organization, and thus jeopardizing its profits.
Congress wants the TSA to make Americans feel safe-ish without spending too much, that's their motivation, to look like they're doing a good enough job to get re-elected.
The US people might profit the most from the TSA if the organization protected life and property at a reasonable cost, but most people wouldn't understand this concept, so they settle for the illusion of "safety".
So that brings us right back to the problem of someone who breaks the illusion. The solution, as seen by the parties involved, is to get rid of the person pulling away the curtain.
Indivuduals that are profitable to retain are retained . . .
Perhaps. But in general, individuals that would be missed the soonest and affect the current manager positively in the timeframe of his or her anticipated tenure in that management position are retained. Those who make a manager's life harder are dismissed, including those that would be profitable for the organization as a whole, just not for the guy with hiring and firing power. Business is more of an ecosystem than a single-minded profit machine.
I would be in group 3. Where is the mention of QLink?
It's sort of in the summary:
Here's a tour of some of these services, including Prodigy, Compuserve, and of course AOL.
Well, to the protesters, I simply say, "Fuck you".
"...but, of course, only in a monogamous heterosexual relationship, because otherwise that would clearly be indecent."
Don't forget "Missionary position only."
Couldn't care less. "Could care less" doesn't make sense, because it implies that they actually care about it.
Use whichever you like, I could care less.
I started to write a longer top level about how refusal to support Clear QAM and forcing cables boxes on people with QAM capable TV's and forcing people to use cable company provided DVR's instead of - well Clear QAM was a major contributing factor but the comment started to get too long and lose focus.
We hadn't had cable TV service until just recently when we got a roommate. She had to have it, so we factored that into her share.
What I didn't factor in was the set top box tech support cost. The cable tech connected up the box to the cable and the TV to the box through the A/V jacks. The box came with a "universal" remote. Whenever the roommate got the remote in the wrong mode and changed TV channel instead of changing set top box channel, I had to fix it or else hear that she could only get "like 5 channels". (These were unencrypted ones the TV could tune itself.)
If set top boxes are too difficult and inconvenient for a physician to operate, then grandmas don't have a chance.
As this is slashdot, I assume many will write that my (now former) roommate is an idiot despite her degree, but "shut up and pay us, moron" isn't making people flock to cable.
OK it's somewhat sensitive information, but why was it confidential for so long?
From TFNPRA:
There is a reason that all of this up-close-and-personal information from 1940 is being released all these years later. "In 1952, the director of the Census Bureau and the National Archivist agreed that keeping census records private for 72 years balanced public release of federal records with the tradition of confidentiality," explains the Census Bureau's Glasier. In other words, 72 years was considered at the time to be longer than most lifespans.
America has a god given right to demand a bigger piece of the pie, even if that means destroying some of it in the process, because were exceptional and gods chosen people. Which is essentially our 19th and early 20th century intellectual rhetoric, we found what was essentially virgin land that we exploited, in order to create our version of order in the world.
Now I know that you're stating this in an ironic sense, but I actually got a letter -- this year -- from my US Senator stating that he still believes in American Exceptionalism, actually using that phrase or a slight variation thereof.
Micro Channel. I really liked it. Easy to install and setup. I remember those days fondly.
From a hardware standpoint -- I mean the literal nuts and bolts -- I really liked the fact with Microchannel machines (PS/2s), you could open the case and swap cards and components without tools, just thumbscrews and finger-friendly fasteners for most part.
So government employees do something wrong and the court punishes the taxpayers? How about paying that $160k out of the cops retirement fund?
This is like when a Priest gets caught molesting a kid and the Church pays the victim with the congregations money.
The cops were working for the city. They authority they abused was derived from the city. The city -- and thus the citizenry -- is responsible for their actions.
Now if the city thinks that it is not at fault for the actions of these employees -- that it wasn't bad management or poor training, etc., but rather something completely out of their control -- then perhaps the city should sue the officers to recover the money.
At any rate, it is important for all employers -- cities, churches, banks, etc. -- to ensure that they hire, manage, and train the employees acting in their name to obey all relevant laws and regulations in the course of their duties. To do any less is to expose the organization to unnecessary liability. This is especially important if you issue the aforementioned employees badges, guns, foreclosure forms, or the ability to invoke eternal damnation.
Was america ever worthy of that title? Slavery for the first part of the countries history, women didn't get sufferage until 1919. Blacks were still segregated until the 60's and by then there was the paranoia over the cold war with people getting accused of being a communist (so what if you are?). Perhaps after the wall came down for that 10 years or so people were fine and then 9/11 happened and the US went to a police state. Also when your country has one of the highest incarceration rates you can't really claim to be very free.
But to look at what you wrote a different way, we were making slow progress in the right direction. We weren't perfect, but we used to be striving to be increasingly free both in depth and breadth. That's what I miss, and I guess I'm not brave enough on my own to reclaim.
The problem was not the job, it was you. (yes, the job had problems, but you should never have implemented that junk like that) There's probably one o them there named internet rules about this, but i'm old, so i ferget thangs.
That's a little harsh. A boss (or more likely a company culture) that puts a prototype into production and balks at the idea of documenting it isn't going to fancy the idea of documenting the q&d project they had to do up real quick-like in the first place. It was probably built to use as a demo to get a sale or internal approval or whatever.
That sort of scenario isn't good when a deadline rolls around, and you have half the system done and half the documentation done. You try explaining the importance of maintainability and you're gonna get something in between a "talkin' to" and a "you're fired" for your trouble.
I agree that your approach would be best when possible, I always tried to do it that way. But far too often it isn't. The world, of which work is a subset, is a far from perfect place.
But never, never put your own phone number in any code. Especially an error message. That honor goes to the first manager who tells you something along the lines of: "The perfect is the enemy of the good."
They forgot a few, C64, IBM, NES, SNES, N64, PSX, PS2, PS3, XBOX, WII, XBOX360, DC, GB, GBA, NDS, 7800, CVS, Mac, NEO-GEO, etc.
Different 2600
.
I'm not sure why people think that it wasn't a right and proper thing for Kodak to die.
Kodak's strenght was film photography. There turned out to be plenty of other companies with strengths in digital, why should Kodak have colonized that market? Let them produce the stuff they're good at as long as people want it, then quietly go away. There's no reason corporations need to be immortal.
I don't see "people thinking" Kodak should or shouldn't die in TFA . . . more of a postmortem analysis.
Anyway, I understand that there's no reason for corps to be immortal, but most people working at a given firm would just as soon it didn't go belly up right now while they're working there. Even if you're looking to quit a place, you'd rather do it on your schedule than the liquidator's.
A sibling of this comment mentions Xerox missing the boat with the GUI, but they seem to have re-invented themselves nowadays doing OCR and image recognition and document and photo management and analysis. Probably too soon to know if this will work, but they did hang on when their market changed.
Likewise with Kodak, you'd think they could have found other things to do in the photography arena. You've got websites like Flickr that store and share photos, Shutterfly and Snapfish that provide hard copies in formats that an ordinary home or office printer can't produce. Kodak probably should have gotten into those areas, among others. But as TFA mentions, they had such an emotional and physical investment in film they didn't want to let go of it.
And what about Fuji? They do plenty of digital stuff, but you can still buy their film. TFA doesn't mention what they did differently.
Facebook is a free service. Facebook users and their data are the commodity being sold to advertisers. The business model isn't a secret.
It's not really free. It's just harder to quantify what value you've exchanged for the service. Facebook certainly turns data into money.
The first five I found on the market all required full access to my address book. WTF? I skipped installing them, but I'm sure that they'd have worked without this capability. The other big UI problem is that the apps don't say WHY they need these privileges.
I'm not certain, but I think that some people are now putting QR codes onto their business cards that have their contact information embedded.
I have seen an actual instance of this: a local magazine publisher here prints his business card in the mags he publishes and it contains a QR code with his contact info. If an app could write to the contact list, it could add that information automatically.
But on the other hand, QR codes can be used for other data, too, so an app should be installable with or without this privilege.
But on the third hand, if an app can't to something that it promises, or it gives the user an error message stating that it doesn't have permission to do something, then the publisher is looking at a possible tech support request. A user could have forgotten that he denied access to contact list for this app, and then try to get help. The publisher is going to want to keep this to a minimum, since tech support requests eat up resources. So just not installing the application is a simple way to statistically reduce this cost. So while I don't like it, I can see at least one thing that motivates a publisher to take this route.
Why does it take a representative to be affected before they represent the people? Aren't they supposed to be listening to us complaining and take action? Instead it seems like they only act on what is affecting them.
Pretty much the same reason you get the crosswalk light installed only after some kid or old lady gets killed. People, including legislators, do what's easiest for them. When it's easier to do nothing, do nothing. When doing nothing gets to be more trouble than doing something, only then you do something.