Yes, but if you have spent any time at all around a typical "horse person", you would find this method completely and utterly insane.
Ask any horse person exactly what "colic" or "foundering" is, and how to treat it. Hell, even the vets aren't too sure, either, but they're happy to extract $$$ from horse owners to try and treat them...
Take, for example, "colic". For the uninitiated, "colic" is basically an overly broad syndrome characterization, that has a plethora of causes, mechanisms, appropriate treatments, etc. And the horse lover world just continues to hold onto archaic terms like this, rather than learn/educate more specific descriptions. Go into a farm supply store, and look at some of the witches' brews that are marketed as treatments for "colic", and probably have been for at least 100 years.
The only "energy sources" we have really are fission and fusion (i.e., sun) nuclear reactions. Fossil fuels are simply stored energy. There is lots of stored solar and geologic energy stored in fossil fuels. It just so happens that most of the fossil fuels we use now are relatively "efficient" to extract compared to converting corn silage into corn oil.
The arguments against biomass fuel sources, etc., make sense in this small context, but not in a larger context. So what if it costs 10x less to refine petroleum into gasoline (and all the raw chemicals for the plastics and fertilizer industries...)? Since the supply of petroleum products (oil, coal) is diminishing every day, at some point biomass products will be more economical (i.e., when cost of raw petroleum/coal exceeds that of getting corn biomass into digester for same BTU potential).
If the hours spent on getting the job done were the only metric, then just about everyone at a corporation these days should get CxO salaries.
CEOs probably need to worry if morale is going in the shitters.
In the military, good leaders have a feel for how their E-2s and E-3's are doing. They don't go "into the trenches" every day, but they also realize that they sometimes need to see the world with their own eyes, instead of through the beer glasses of the people below them. These are the same leaders that seem to engender a sense of wanting to go the extra mile in their subordinates, instead of needing to do it out of basic fear and survival.
Some leaders you will willingly eat glass for. Others you do it for simply out of fear, if you cannot avoid having to do it.
Dirty? About as dirty as any restaurant that only sells Coke or Pepsi products.
Apple got Hitachi to sole-source the HDs it used in the iPod. Big woop. Not necessarily dirty. Others had their chances at a slice of the 1.8" drive, too.
And Apple agreed to buy a big-ass load of NAND chips for the Nano to very favorable terms. Again, big woop.
If you are selling a commodity product, and someone comes along and says, "Hey, I'll buy all of your production for the next 18 months," and you still make money on it, you tend to bite on it.
Since we don't know what pricing level the KTC is looking into, it could be that Apple just committed to a magnitude larger memory buy than other buyers had done up until that point. Instead of selling several lots of 1 million SKUs, maybe, at varying price points over time, Apple says, "Hey, we'll buy 10 million SKUs over the next year at $5.00/10000 (when "the market price" tends to be $5.5/1000, or whatever) with half of the total up-front, and the rest delivered monthly upon delivery...", which is guaranteed money for Samsung (and pissing off AMD, Intel, Xylinx et al).
Again, not a big deal.
Want to buy a couple of animals from a farmer, but it'll take a week or two? OK. But if someone comes along and offers to buy everything he has for sale a couple of days after you talk to him, too bad!
No, this would be like Proctor & Gamble wanting a cut of the ad revenue that NBC, CBS and ABC get whenever they show a P&G commercial.
Yahoo, Google, et al., are running the adverts to help pimp RIAA stuff, which the RIAA members are providing in order to help drive sales of RIAA product. Yahoo & Google get $$$ based on the clickthroughs for the ads. And now the RIAA wants some of that $$$ going to Yahoo & Google?
Yeah, right.
Most business relationships are supposed to be symbiotic to some degree. You scratch my back, I'll suck your dick, or something like that.
The RIAA thinks that the whole world is wearing gimp suits, and that they can just get their depraved kicks from all the gimps at their whim and pleasure.
Does one still have to pay the TV Tax in Britain (to support the BBC), where inspectors drive around with their super-het detectors to track down rogue TV receivers?
...but what if they like chasing down and eating Red Kangaroos?
Even some of the native species kind of run amok in Australia.
If it's a large, top-level predator with a relatively slow birthrate, it'll be a bit easier to take care of than, say, dingos, if it starts going after too many sheep or koalas instead.
But, then again, Aussie is having problems with camels and donkeys, too...
But China and India aren't part of the Kyoto Protocol. It's a flawed model, actually, trying to address the future while only looking at the past. China and India will far surpass the US in eco-spewing in the next 20 or so years.
Well, Citrix sued MS when Terminal Services came out, partially because MS at that point quickly reneged on or didn't advance past NT 4.0 Citrix' almost unique source code license it had at the time. Eventually they sued, and default Terminal Services is limited to 2 connections to the server. If you want more, you need to buy Citrix.
MS has done this before. Remember all the people who were making pretty big money on selling various DOS defragmentation tools, etc., who bitched when MS essentially licensed one of those products to include with MS-DOS 6.x and/or Windows 95?
At least MS had the verity to actually buy out Visio, probably one of the only 3rd-party products that has actually successfully embraced MS software technology to the point where it made more sense to buy Visio than build their own competitor into Office.
Actually, it was a reverse merger. The guy who bought KMart seems to be a pretty sharp financing guy. He got KMart profitable and through bankruptcy, and the smaller KMart (but probably financially more healthy) bought out the bigger, but wheezing, Sears. So now there is kind of a joint financing company that technically owns both KMart and Sears' stores, if my recollection of the fawning articles over the guy who runs all of them now is correct.
...not unless you can be convicted of fraudulently running the company into the ground for your own personal gain. Just ask Bernie Ebbers and others about that. I'm guessing the reason that any of the Enron cases haven't been brought to trial yet is they gave too much money to the RNC and GWB committees in 2000.
However, China *DOES* 'own' its market. It can, and probably will relatively soon, be able to dictate the terms that the Western multi-nationals have to follow to sell their media in China.
It already gets Cisco and other network infrastructure providers to put in the spying and wiretapping hooks into their hardware to sell to China that make the FBI's demands look pedestrian.
CF made buying a digital camera easy. Sony's cameras were nice. But the Nikon Coolpix I bought was nice, too (at the 2 Megapixel, $500 range, that is, about 3 yrs ago). That a 128MB CF card cost half what the 128MB MemoryStick cost at the time iced the deal for getting the Nikon. Oh, and relatively available Li-Ion batteries not sold by Sony, either.
Wrong. I have about 400GB of HD space that I would seriously like to backup at least once, but I'm not burning it onto CDs. If I'm serious about it, I'll wait and blow about $400 and get a couple new 400GB SATA drives and card, and back everything up onto them periodically (just do full backups some night). I don't have the $$$$ to get a tape drive to back it up, don't have 64-bit PCI slots to drive the SCSI-3 card (or the $$$ for the card), nor do I want to spend $100/cartridge for the media.
It's my home computer and server, fer chrissakes, not a historical archive.
With the introduction of the next generation of consoles both sony and MS seem to want to introduce a multifunction entertainment device into each and every household. Can you say PC replacement? No of course not a pc replacement for the typical/. reader BUT again lets be honest, we are a tiny portion of the total populace.
Well, Nick Petreley predicted this in InfoWorld in 1998 or so. But I'm still not too worried (yet), unless Microsoft decides to integrate WebTV into the XBox360. But the XBox and XBox360 are the embodiment of Nick's "WinPC" platform...
My PS2 gawked badly on "Tron", and either the Matrix2 or Matrix3 movie, which all play fine in a regular DVD player.
Also, the audio gets out of synch with the lips more and more as a movie is played, but this might also be an artifact from my TV (Wega XBR400, which is pumping the video through the DRC engine to do the 3:2 pulldown via the composite HD inputs).
Not that big of a deal, especially now when a very decent DVD player can be had for $70 or less (I don't need to buy one with progressive scan...).
And next up to rule the market: MP3 and its compressed audio cousins--a net DECREASE in audio fidelity
So? How many places do you listen to your audio that isn't on audiophile equipment in an isolated space, has so much ambient noise with it (i.e., car), or you're listening to it at volumes where things like stereo separation, etc., are just completely lost?
MP3 works just fine. There is something to be said for having about 6 hours of MP3 on one CDR, and you don't want/need the hassle of swapping CD's all the time. Or, better, you have a couple of thousand MP3 tunes in various playlists, and you just get WinAmp to shuffle the songs in the list. Hey, it's your own radio station that plays your music 24/7, without interruption.
inferior to DVD in quality and come with ZERO special features
Now, be honest. How many times do you partake in the "special features" on the DVD? About once?
Too bad the forced ads and trailers can't be negated. Nothing like having to watch 10 minutes of trailers for movies that were released 3 or more years ago, and you can't just go to the main menu screen ("that feature has been disabled...")...
Nah, in my experience, as a contractor, you are definitely pigeon-holed. You do your task, fill out your timecard, and go home. But I've worked at a couple of cheap-ass companies as a contractor, too, so my perspective is clouded by that.
Not all companies are interested in outside perspective. They've hired a contractor to do a specific job, so do it.
But it's also nice knowing that you're getting paid by the hour to do your work, instead of slaving away for some illusionary golden carrot. It can give you far more time to do other things, if you don't mind having to go to a job 350 days a year.
If your life is too dependent on that steady paycheck, then stay salaried.
At my last nebulous contracting gig, it was the salaried employees who could not work less than 40 hrs/wk, could not go home w/o having to think about what else is going to go wrong, at least in the group I worked in. It was seriously mismanaged and under a period of empire-building by the two or three managers.
Me? I like being a contractor for a contracting company or two. Yes, I don't want do beat the birds from the bushes, as it may be, nor do I want to deal with the bookkeeping. So it's a fair tradeoff for me.
My goal is to do what I said I was going to implement, and the challenge is to do it in a shorter timeframe than I proposed (of course, I did give myself some slack, too. You've got to add a pretty good fudge factor when you're an "outsider" dependent on so many others to get your job done).
the Courts can compell it...yes, generally in the context of a grand jury. It's called "contempt".
American politics would be even more insidious and nasty if we did NOT allow anonymous speech. Anonymous speech includes things like "unnamed sources", "off the record", "officials who want to remain nameless", etc. It is a very important component of American politics.
If it were not allowed, think of all the nasty political shit the offices of the President, and Senate and House Majority leaders, could pull off... (this isn't related to the current regime. GWB has obviously learned a lot from LBJ, either directly or through his dad).
Well, legislatures passing laws that ban anonymous postings, etc., are one way to infringe on the 1st Amendment.
There is nowhere in "freedom of speech" that requires proper identification and attribution to an actual human being. American history and past court precidents support that notion, and this state's Supreme Court supports that notion as well.
Public officials are held to different standards than the rest of us. They cannot be sued for slander or libel, for example (it's just easier to vote them out of office or find something related to their elections to bounce them out).
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Yes, but if you have spent any time at all around a typical "horse person", you would find this method completely and utterly insane.
Ask any horse person exactly what "colic" or "foundering" is, and how to treat it. Hell, even the vets aren't too sure, either, but they're happy to extract $$$ from horse owners to try and treat them...
Take, for example, "colic". For the uninitiated, "colic" is basically an overly broad syndrome characterization, that has a plethora of causes, mechanisms, appropriate treatments, etc. And the horse lover world just continues to hold onto archaic terms like this, rather than learn/educate more specific descriptions. Go into a farm supply store, and look at some of the witches' brews that are marketed as treatments for "colic", and probably have been for at least 100 years.
"Wankes shear in here." Baaah.
The only "energy sources" we have really are fission and fusion (i.e., sun) nuclear reactions. Fossil fuels are simply stored energy. There is lots of stored solar and geologic energy stored in fossil fuels. It just so happens that most of the fossil fuels we use now are relatively "efficient" to extract compared to converting corn silage into corn oil.
The arguments against biomass fuel sources, etc., make sense in this small context, but not in a larger context. So what if it costs 10x less to refine petroleum into gasoline (and all the raw chemicals for the plastics and fertilizer industries...)? Since the supply of petroleum products (oil, coal) is diminishing every day, at some point biomass products will be more economical (i.e., when cost of raw petroleum/coal exceeds that of getting corn biomass into digester for same BTU potential).
If the hours spent on getting the job done were the only metric, then just about everyone at a corporation these days should get CxO salaries.
CEOs probably need to worry if morale is going in the shitters.
In the military, good leaders have a feel for how their E-2s and E-3's are doing. They don't go "into the trenches" every day, but they also realize that they sometimes need to see the world with their own eyes, instead of through the beer glasses of the people below them. These are the same leaders that seem to engender a sense of wanting to go the extra mile in their subordinates, instead of needing to do it out of basic fear and survival.
Some leaders you will willingly eat glass for. Others you do it for simply out of fear, if you cannot avoid having to do it.
Dirty? About as dirty as any restaurant that only sells Coke or Pepsi products.
Apple got Hitachi to sole-source the HDs it used in the iPod. Big woop. Not necessarily dirty. Others had their chances at a slice of the 1.8" drive, too.
And Apple agreed to buy a big-ass load of NAND chips for the Nano to very favorable terms. Again, big woop.
If you are selling a commodity product, and someone comes along and says, "Hey, I'll buy all of your production for the next 18 months," and you still make money on it, you tend to bite on it.
Since we don't know what pricing level the KTC is looking into, it could be that Apple just committed to a magnitude larger memory buy than other buyers had done up until that point. Instead of selling several lots of 1 million SKUs, maybe, at varying price points over time, Apple says, "Hey, we'll buy 10 million SKUs over the next year at $5.00/10000 (when "the market price" tends to be $5.5/1000, or whatever) with half of the total up-front, and the rest delivered monthly upon delivery...", which is guaranteed money for Samsung (and pissing off AMD, Intel, Xylinx et al).
Again, not a big deal.
Want to buy a couple of animals from a farmer, but it'll take a week or two? OK. But if someone comes along and offers to buy everything he has for sale a couple of days after you talk to him, too bad!
No, this would be like Proctor & Gamble wanting a cut of the ad revenue that NBC, CBS and ABC get whenever they show a P&G commercial.
Yahoo, Google, et al., are running the adverts to help pimp RIAA stuff, which the RIAA members are providing in order to help drive sales of RIAA product. Yahoo & Google get $$$ based on the clickthroughs for the ads. And now the RIAA wants some of that $$$ going to Yahoo & Google?
Yeah, right.
Most business relationships are supposed to be symbiotic to some degree. You scratch my back, I'll suck your dick, or something like that.
The RIAA thinks that the whole world is wearing gimp suits, and that they can just get their depraved kicks from all the gimps at their whim and pleasure.
Oh well.
Does one still have to pay the TV Tax in Britain (to support the BBC), where inspectors drive around with their super-het detectors to track down rogue TV receivers?
...but what if they like chasing down and eating Red Kangaroos?
Even some of the native species kind of run amok in Australia.
If it's a large, top-level predator with a relatively slow birthrate, it'll be a bit easier to take care of than, say, dingos, if it starts going after too many sheep or koalas instead.
But, then again, Aussie is having problems with camels and donkeys, too...
But China and India aren't part of the Kyoto Protocol. It's a flawed model, actually, trying to address the future while only looking at the past. China and India will far surpass the US in eco-spewing in the next 20 or so years.
worked well for US. Titan-series. Atlas series. Redstone and Juno, too.
Well, Citrix sued MS when Terminal Services came out, partially because MS at that point quickly reneged on or didn't advance past NT 4.0 Citrix' almost unique source code license it had at the time. Eventually they sued, and default Terminal Services is limited to 2 connections to the server. If you want more, you need to buy Citrix.
MS has done this before. Remember all the people who were making pretty big money on selling various DOS defragmentation tools, etc., who bitched when MS essentially licensed one of those products to include with MS-DOS 6.x and/or Windows 95?
At least MS had the verity to actually buy out Visio, probably one of the only 3rd-party products that has actually successfully embraced MS software technology to the point where it made more sense to buy Visio than build their own competitor into Office.
Actually, it was a reverse merger. The guy who bought KMart seems to be a pretty sharp financing guy. He got KMart profitable and through bankruptcy, and the smaller KMart (but probably financially more healthy) bought out the bigger, but wheezing, Sears. So now there is kind of a joint financing company that technically owns both KMart and Sears' stores, if my recollection of the fawning articles over the guy who runs all of them now is correct.
...not unless you can be convicted of fraudulently running the company into the ground for your own personal gain. Just ask Bernie Ebbers and others about that. I'm guessing the reason that any of the Enron cases haven't been brought to trial yet is they gave too much money to the RNC and GWB committees in 2000.
However, China *DOES* 'own' its market. It can, and probably will relatively soon, be able to dictate the terms that the Western multi-nationals have to follow to sell their media in China.
It already gets Cisco and other network infrastructure providers to put in the spying and wiretapping hooks into their hardware to sell to China that make the FBI's demands look pedestrian.
CF made buying a digital camera easy. Sony's cameras were nice. But the Nikon Coolpix I bought was nice, too (at the 2 Megapixel, $500 range, that is, about 3 yrs ago). That a 128MB CF card cost half what the 128MB MemoryStick cost at the time iced the deal for getting the Nikon. Oh, and relatively available Li-Ion batteries not sold by Sony, either.
Wrong. I have about 400GB of HD space that I would seriously like to backup at least once, but I'm not burning it onto CDs. If I'm serious about it, I'll wait and blow about $400 and get a couple new 400GB SATA drives and card, and back everything up onto them periodically (just do full backups some night). I don't have the $$$$ to get a tape drive to back it up, don't have 64-bit PCI slots to drive the SCSI-3 card (or the $$$ for the card), nor do I want to spend $100/cartridge for the media.
It's my home computer and server, fer chrissakes, not a historical archive.
With the introduction of the next generation of consoles both sony and MS seem to want to introduce a multifunction entertainment device into each and every household. Can you say PC replacement? No of course not a pc replacement for the typical /. reader BUT again lets be honest, we are a tiny portion of the total populace.
Well, Nick Petreley predicted this in InfoWorld in 1998 or so. But I'm still not too worried (yet), unless Microsoft decides to integrate WebTV into the XBox360. But the XBox and XBox360 are the embodiment of Nick's "WinPC" platform...
My PS2 gawked badly on "Tron", and either the Matrix2 or Matrix3 movie, which all play fine in a regular DVD player.
Also, the audio gets out of synch with the lips more and more as a movie is played, but this might also be an artifact from my TV (Wega XBR400, which is pumping the video through the DRC engine to do the 3:2 pulldown via the composite HD inputs).
Not that big of a deal, especially now when a very decent DVD player can be had for $70 or less (I don't need to buy one with progressive scan...).
And next up to rule the market: MP3 and its compressed audio cousins--a net DECREASE in audio fidelity
So? How many places do you listen to your audio that isn't on audiophile equipment in an isolated space, has so much ambient noise with it (i.e., car), or you're listening to it at volumes where things like stereo separation, etc., are just completely lost?
MP3 works just fine. There is something to be said for having about 6 hours of MP3 on one CDR, and you don't want/need the hassle of swapping CD's all the time. Or, better, you have a couple of thousand MP3 tunes in various playlists, and you just get WinAmp to shuffle the songs in the list. Hey, it's your own radio station that plays your music 24/7, without interruption.
Some tradeoffs are definitely worth it.
inferior to DVD in quality and come with ZERO special features
Now, be honest. How many times do you partake in the "special features" on the DVD? About once?
Too bad the forced ads and trailers can't be negated. Nothing like having to watch 10 minutes of trailers for movies that were released 3 or more years ago, and you can't just go to the main menu screen ("that feature has been disabled...")...
except that the red lasers in current DVD players can't read HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs.
Nah, in my experience, as a contractor, you are definitely pigeon-holed. You do your task, fill out your timecard, and go home. But I've worked at a couple of cheap-ass companies as a contractor, too, so my perspective is clouded by that.
Not all companies are interested in outside perspective. They've hired a contractor to do a specific job, so do it.
But it's also nice knowing that you're getting paid by the hour to do your work, instead of slaving away for some illusionary golden carrot.
It can give you far more time to do other things, if you don't mind having to go to a job 350 days a year.
If your life is too dependent on that steady paycheck, then stay salaried.
At my last nebulous contracting gig, it was the salaried employees who could not work less than 40 hrs/wk, could not go home w/o having to think about what else is going to go wrong, at least in the group I worked in. It was seriously mismanaged and under a period of empire-building by the two or three managers.
Me? I like being a contractor for a contracting company or two. Yes, I don't want do beat the birds from the bushes, as it may be, nor do I want to deal with the bookkeeping. So it's a fair tradeoff for me.
My goal is to do what I said I was going to implement, and the challenge is to do it in a shorter timeframe than I proposed (of course, I did give myself some slack, too. You've got to add a pretty good fudge factor when you're an "outsider" dependent on so many others to get your job done).
the Courts can compell it ...yes, generally in the context of a grand jury. It's called "contempt".
American politics would be even more insidious and nasty if we did NOT allow anonymous speech. Anonymous speech includes things like "unnamed sources", "off the record", "officials who want to remain nameless", etc. It is a very important component of American politics.
If it were not allowed, think of all the nasty political shit the offices of the President, and Senate and House Majority leaders, could pull off... (this isn't related to the current regime. GWB has obviously learned a lot from LBJ, either directly or through his dad).
Well, legislatures passing laws that ban anonymous postings, etc., are one way to infringe on the 1st Amendment.
There is nowhere in "freedom of speech" that requires proper identification and attribution to an actual human being. American history and past court precidents support that notion, and this state's Supreme Court supports that notion as well.
Public officials are held to different standards than the rest of us. They cannot be sued for slander or libel, for example (it's just easier to vote them out of office or find something related to their elections to bounce them out).
replace "Postgres" in the parent post, and you make more sense.
It is FAR easier to migrate an Oracle DB to Postgres than to MySQL. You don't have to redo stored procs in an application layer, etc. is a big one.
You mean I won't be able to get my Ashlee Simpson CDs any more?! Or videos of my boyband du jour?!! Or my soap operas? Or Inside Edition?!?!
**gasp!!!!**
Don't you mean...
**SCREEEEAAAAMMMM!!!