I've always wanted to try a variant of your idea... setting up a web-based interactive auction where the five dealers you invite keep trying to pitch a better deal. Give them a full day to undercut each other, the results should be interesting. Make sure to visit them ahead of time so they can inspect your trade-in and understand that you are a real buyer.
The scheme I've used in the past is much simpler: first, pick out a car, then go into a dealership with a story that includes you leaving without buying a car. If you are a young woman say you need to run it by your father, if you are a middle-aged man, say you need to talk it over with your wife - whatever, the specifics don't matter.
Go into the dealership will the full intention to buy the car - just not today. Because your reason isn't that the deal isn't good enough - the sales person won't be able to pressure you into thinking it is. This throws them off and they just keep throwing better deals at you. However, it removes all of the unpleasantness of disagreeing with them - you simply agree that the deal sounds good but tell them you'll be back next week. In my experience, they will hit their rock bottom price before letting you leave.
I've been told that my town will never get FiOS because the locals told Verizon that they couldn't remove the copper when installing fiber. Fortunately, the NY AG office has a reputation for going after business with anti-consumer practices. Unfortunately, it looks like they're only trying to make sure customers are getting advertised speeds, which isn't a problem in my area.
Yea, I said that. His statement is still only correct for a very small percentage of the people that might read it. That makes it a bad generalization.
With the number of source control systems available, many completely free and many requiring no dedicated infrastructure, not having source control is something that happens mostly to those who think source control is worthless.
There are some cases where source control is impractical - like when your code is embedded in something else. However, this is an exception, not the rule. Hussman32's statement was that "all comments need a date and the coder's initials as a minimum, and old comments should not be deleted". The statement was made as a general one - but it's only true in a limited number of edge cases.
Everything you say is correct. The question is whether a written policy will make the people you work with do it right, or will it make them write horrible and/or useless comments to satisfy the policy. In my experience the only way to turn a bad commenting programmer into a good commenting programmer is to regularly review their code and provide feedback.
So, I'm not against comments, I'm against policies that enforce comments. Those policies rarely do more good than they do harm.
I would love to learn about something that I actually needed, but I didn't know existed - or a more economical alternative to something I use regularly. However, I've never seen either in a web ad. Instead, ads are commonly used to try to get people to part with money against their better judgment. That's why advertisers are our enemy, not our friends.
So... should there be gifted programs that are designed to develop natural gifts, or should the programs provide an accelerated learning path for students that earn their way in? The latter is what seems to be happening now, but an argument can certainly be made for the former.
Her point might be that gifted programs are there to develop natural-born talent and the selection process selects for effort instead of talent. Not saying I agree with that viewpoint, but it is logically consistent with calling prepping "cheating".
No environment I've ever been in gives the general users access to install software.
Everywhere I've worked I have been an admin of my computer. At most of the jobs, I could install the OS myself if I chose to do so. No, I'm not on the desktop or server teams. Yes, one of the companies was very big - 100 billion dollars big.
Even if he had proof that the murderer would be caught if they got into the phone, it wouldn't change anything. We could also prove that the murderer would be caught if every human was issued a body-cam and the penalty for not maintaining it properly was death. Just because something catches murderers doesn't mean it should be done.
Yet I currently violate every fad rule out there, but I eat few calories and I'm losing weight at a rate of nearly four pounds per week (sustained for three months). I'm living proof that the most important behavior change necessary for weight loss is calorie intake reduction.
While 1500 calories of cotton candy has the same energy as 1500 calories of tuna, eating the cotton candy will probably wreak havoc with your insulin, blood glucose levels, etc... over the short term but leave you feeling hungry again in short order. The 1500 calories of tuna will be much harder to eat - you'll get tired of the taste quickly - but leave you feeling satiated for much longer. Human beings are not machines, sense of satiation matters.
You are mixing arguments. Eating nothing but 1500 calories of cotton candy will probably result in weight loss. Your other argument, which is valid, is that it would be difficult to stick to a cotton candy diet. If you record what you did eat, then the "can you stick to it" argument is gone and the calories in - calories out math applies. The trick is to keep trying different food combinations until you find a diet that works for you.
I'm not talking out of my ass here, I spent the last three months as an overweight guy eating 800 calories per day and not feeling hungry. Example daily intake:
Breakfast
4 oz baby carrots
Black coffee
Lunch
One slice of pizza
Diet Pepsi
Dinner
6 oz. cod fillet seasoned with pepper
10 oz. steamed broccoli
Diet Pepsi
You can buy reserved instances for 3 year periods, this locks-in the price and guarantees availability.
But that doesn't guarantee that the capacity you reserved will provide the performance you need. See the TeamQuest Model posts above for an example of a tool that can help you predict how much capacity you'll need to scale up from a pilot to a full implementation.
I lost 56 pounds in 15 weeks by eating lots of vegetables and meat - but I didn't avoid carbs. Today I had a peanut butter sandwich for lunch and I'll have a salmon-patty burger (with bun) for dinner. It tastes good and I'm never hungry. I satisfy sweet cravings with a small amount of chocolate or a handful of green grapes. I choose to stay away from engineered foods like sugar substitutes, but I consider that a health choice, not a weight loss choice.
My point is that a lot of people see your post and think "all I have to do is eat fewer carbs and I'll lose weight". But the truth is "Eating a healthy diet that happens to be a low carb diet will cause me to lose weight". However, the operative part of that sentence is "healthy diet", not "low carb".
Alternately, some kind of food additive or supplement that chemically reacted with caloric nutrients in the digestive system and turned them into something the human body can't metabolize, so that, although you "consume" many calories, you don't actually absorb them; they don't become metabolic input, they just pass right through you.
You mean Xenical? Be careful what you ask for. The information packet that comes with Xenical recommends that you carry an extra pair of pants with you.
Often what you want is a projection of the next five year's cost. Sure, AWS is good at making sure you only pay for what you need, but it doesn't help you make the Go/NoGo decision on a project. You can still easily get into a "this thing costs me more in usage that it's saving me" situation.
On most days, I eat 1000 calories and exercise off about 700 (in addition to my normal activities). So, yeah, I'm running at about an 1800 calorie deficit per day. I started off losing about 5 pounds per week - I'm sure some of that was water. Over that past six weeks, I've slowed down to about 3.5 pounds per week. Started with a BMI of about 38 and I'm under 30 now.
You can only lose so much water. I've lost 22% of my original body weight; you can't lose that much water and survive.
"old science" was something along the lines of 3,500 kcal in a pound (2.2 kg) of fat. However, some quick googling seems to indicate that this statement is being viewed as (partially) false nowadays, due to the way that weight-loss tends to taper off as you lose weight; though I cannot really find any specifics as to what the "new science" actually is.
There is no "new science", just new marketing. Reducing calories is still an effective way to lose weight. The benefit of most alternative diets has nothing to do with nutritional science, but with psychology. Diets don't fail due to bad science, they fail when people don't stick to them. The most effective diets are the ones that are easiest to follow, and people hate counting calories.
Personally, I'm the type of person that can tolerate counting calories. Three month ago, I got fed up with my state of health and decided to do something about it. I proceeded with no rules other than "eat fewer calories" and I've lost 56 pounds over the past 15 weeks. Calorie counting works, if you actually do it.
Not surprising, making one good choice (avoiding sugared soft drinks) isn't enough to make a good diet, just like one bad choice doesn't make a bad diet. You could lose weight on the "Coke Diet" by consuming nothing but 10 servings of Coca-Cola every day.
It's simple math - calories in and calories out. There are "good foods" and "bad foods", but the effect of which food you eat makes less of a difference than how much food you eat on weight loss. Effect on overall health is a different story. A person on the "Coke Diet" above would almost certainly lose weight, but they would almost certainly suffer health problems if they stuck to it for too long. A lot of people give "healthy eating" advice as "weight loss" advice and vice-versa.
The real problem is the "Silver Bullet" mentality. The soft drink industry didn't cause this problem all by themselves and telling people to stop drinking Coke isn't going to do any more good than telling people to eat less fat did over the past forty years. If people used the low fat campaign to buy Twizzlers (a low fat snack), then the no soda campaign will produce equally horrible outcomes.
Next step: do what AT&T did - offer financing (not technically the next step since they already offer this). Instead of upgrading your contract every two years and getting a discount on a phone, you finance a new phone every two years. One big difference is that with the finance model, your bill goes down if you keep the phone longer than the finance term. In the old model, if you didn't upgrade, you continued to pay the price that had the subsidy baked in.
This also helps with customer retention - as long as a customer has a phone that's not yet paid off, they will have difficulty changing carriers. To the customer, having to pay off the phone isn't a whole lot different from having to pay a contract termination fee.
Portable Electronic Devices (PEDs) are a huge threat to both security and intellectual property.
But, security is a huge threat to productivity. Is it possible that while the employees were being drilled on security, they were being held accountable for productivity and not given tools that were nearly as productive as their PEDs? For example, everyone likes to yell at the guy who's not paying attention to the meeting because he's texting, but they forget that the same technology allows you to send the on call guy to the meeting and have an 95% chance he will be able to actively participate. The alternatives are to have a second meeting or hire another tech so there is one on call and one available for the meeting.
People immersed in security all day sometimes forget that security is about tradeoffs, not eliminating all sources of "insecurity". A good general rule is that if a security policy is being widely ignored, then it is probably not properly aligned with the organization's goals.
The answer is easy; no one who really cares about security was at the design table.
Also, custom circuits seems to be expensive in the auto industry. I recently had to replace a daytime running light controller on a car - it cost about $130. I opened up the old one and it was nothing but about 20 discrete through-hole components on a custom circuit board, mostly transistors and resistors. If you build everything on a programmable general purpose platform, you only pay the hardware costs once.
Maybe in this case it's feasible. My Mazda3 cannot be customer patched and the dealership hates to do it because it takes two hours to do, but the factory only pays them for an hour of labor. I have zero trust that the auto industry will figure out patch rollouts in the near future. Also, even if they get patching right, it will just put them in the same shape that computers are now - which is sad shape.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always wanted to try a variant of your idea... setting up a web-based interactive auction where the five dealers you invite keep trying to pitch a better deal. Give them a full day to undercut each other, the results should be interesting. Make sure to visit them ahead of time so they can inspect your trade-in and understand that you are a real buyer.
The scheme I've used in the past is much simpler: first, pick out a car, then go into a dealership with a story that includes you leaving without buying a car. If you are a young woman say you need to run it by your father, if you are a middle-aged man, say you need to talk it over with your wife - whatever, the specifics don't matter.
Go into the dealership will the full intention to buy the car - just not today. Because your reason isn't that the deal isn't good enough - the sales person won't be able to pressure you into thinking it is. This throws them off and they just keep throwing better deals at you. However, it removes all of the unpleasantness of disagreeing with them - you simply agree that the deal sounds good but tell them you'll be back next week. In my experience, they will hit their rock bottom price before letting you leave.
I've been told that my town will never get FiOS because the locals told Verizon that they couldn't remove the copper when installing fiber. Fortunately, the NY AG office has a reputation for going after business with anti-consumer practices. Unfortunately, it looks like they're only trying to make sure customers are getting advertised speeds, which isn't a problem in my area.
Yea, I said that. His statement is still only correct for a very small percentage of the people that might read it. That makes it a bad generalization.
With the number of source control systems available, many completely free and many requiring no dedicated infrastructure, not having source control is something that happens mostly to those who think source control is worthless.
There are some cases where source control is impractical - like when your code is embedded in something else. However, this is an exception, not the rule. Hussman32's statement was that "all comments need a date and the coder's initials as a minimum, and old comments should not be deleted". The statement was made as a general one - but it's only true in a limited number of edge cases.
Everything you say is correct. The question is whether a written policy will make the people you work with do it right, or will it make them write horrible and/or useless comments to satisfy the policy. In my experience the only way to turn a bad commenting programmer into a good commenting programmer is to regularly review their code and provide feedback.
So, I'm not against comments, I'm against policies that enforce comments. Those policies rarely do more good than they do harm.
If you need comments to know who wrote what and on what date, then you need to get your code into source control.
I would love to learn about something that I actually needed, but I didn't know existed - or a more economical alternative to something I use regularly. However, I've never seen either in a web ad. Instead, ads are commonly used to try to get people to part with money against their better judgment. That's why advertisers are our enemy, not our friends.
So... should there be gifted programs that are designed to develop natural gifts, or should the programs provide an accelerated learning path for students that earn their way in? The latter is what seems to be happening now, but an argument can certainly be made for the former.
Her point might be that gifted programs are there to develop natural-born talent and the selection process selects for effort instead of talent. Not saying I agree with that viewpoint, but it is logically consistent with calling prepping "cheating".
No environment I've ever been in gives the general users access to install software.
Everywhere I've worked I have been an admin of my computer. At most of the jobs, I could install the OS myself if I chose to do so. No, I'm not on the desktop or server teams. Yes, one of the companies was very big - 100 billion dollars big.
Even if he had proof that the murderer would be caught if they got into the phone, it wouldn't change anything. We could also prove that the murderer would be caught if every human was issued a body-cam and the penalty for not maintaining it properly was death. Just because something catches murderers doesn't mean it should be done.
Yet I currently violate every fad rule out there, but I eat few calories and I'm losing weight at a rate of nearly four pounds per week (sustained for three months). I'm living proof that the most important behavior change necessary for weight loss is calorie intake reduction.
While 1500 calories of cotton candy has the same energy as 1500 calories of tuna, eating the cotton candy will probably wreak havoc with your insulin, blood glucose levels, etc... over the short term but leave you feeling hungry again in short order. The 1500 calories of tuna will be much harder to eat - you'll get tired of the taste quickly - but leave you feeling satiated for much longer. Human beings are not machines, sense of satiation matters.
You are mixing arguments. Eating nothing but 1500 calories of cotton candy will probably result in weight loss. Your other argument, which is valid, is that it would be difficult to stick to a cotton candy diet. If you record what you did eat, then the "can you stick to it" argument is gone and the calories in - calories out math applies. The trick is to keep trying different food combinations until you find a diet that works for you.
I'm not talking out of my ass here, I spent the last three months as an overweight guy eating 800 calories per day and not feeling hungry. Example daily intake:
Breakfast
4 oz baby carrots
Black coffee
Lunch
One slice of pizza
Diet Pepsi
Dinner
6 oz. cod fillet seasoned with pepper
10 oz. steamed broccoli
Diet Pepsi
Snacks
5 strawberries
1 plum
Granola bar
You can buy reserved instances for 3 year periods, this locks-in the price and guarantees availability.
But that doesn't guarantee that the capacity you reserved will provide the performance you need. See the TeamQuest Model posts above for an example of a tool that can help you predict how much capacity you'll need to scale up from a pilot to a full implementation.
I lost 56 pounds in 15 weeks by eating lots of vegetables and meat - but I didn't avoid carbs. Today I had a peanut butter sandwich for lunch and I'll have a salmon-patty burger (with bun) for dinner. It tastes good and I'm never hungry. I satisfy sweet cravings with a small amount of chocolate or a handful of green grapes. I choose to stay away from engineered foods like sugar substitutes, but I consider that a health choice, not a weight loss choice.
My point is that a lot of people see your post and think "all I have to do is eat fewer carbs and I'll lose weight". But the truth is "Eating a healthy diet that happens to be a low carb diet will cause me to lose weight". However, the operative part of that sentence is "healthy diet", not "low carb".
Alternately, some kind of food additive or supplement that chemically reacted with caloric nutrients in the digestive system and turned them into something the human body can't metabolize, so that, although you "consume" many calories, you don't actually absorb them; they don't become metabolic input, they just pass right through you.
You mean Xenical? Be careful what you ask for. The information packet that comes with Xenical recommends that you carry an extra pair of pants with you.
Not a magic bullet.
Often what you want is a projection of the next five year's cost. Sure, AWS is good at making sure you only pay for what you need, but it doesn't help you make the Go/NoGo decision on a project. You can still easily get into a "this thing costs me more in usage that it's saving me" situation.
On most days, I eat 1000 calories and exercise off about 700 (in addition to my normal activities). So, yeah, I'm running at about an 1800 calorie deficit per day. I started off losing about 5 pounds per week - I'm sure some of that was water. Over that past six weeks, I've slowed down to about 3.5 pounds per week. Started with a BMI of about 38 and I'm under 30 now.
You can only lose so much water. I've lost 22% of my original body weight; you can't lose that much water and survive.
"old science" was something along the lines of 3,500 kcal in a pound (2.2 kg) of fat. However, some quick googling seems to indicate that this statement is being viewed as (partially) false nowadays, due to the way that weight-loss tends to taper off as you lose weight; though I cannot really find any specifics as to what the "new science" actually is.
There is no "new science", just new marketing. Reducing calories is still an effective way to lose weight. The benefit of most alternative diets has nothing to do with nutritional science, but with psychology. Diets don't fail due to bad science, they fail when people don't stick to them. The most effective diets are the ones that are easiest to follow, and people hate counting calories.
Personally, I'm the type of person that can tolerate counting calories. Three month ago, I got fed up with my state of health and decided to do something about it. I proceeded with no rules other than "eat fewer calories" and I've lost 56 pounds over the past 15 weeks. Calorie counting works, if you actually do it.
Not surprising, making one good choice (avoiding sugared soft drinks) isn't enough to make a good diet, just like one bad choice doesn't make a bad diet. You could lose weight on the "Coke Diet" by consuming nothing but 10 servings of Coca-Cola every day.
It's simple math - calories in and calories out. There are "good foods" and "bad foods", but the effect of which food you eat makes less of a difference than how much food you eat on weight loss. Effect on overall health is a different story. A person on the "Coke Diet" above would almost certainly lose weight, but they would almost certainly suffer health problems if they stuck to it for too long. A lot of people give "healthy eating" advice as "weight loss" advice and vice-versa.
The real problem is the "Silver Bullet" mentality. The soft drink industry didn't cause this problem all by themselves and telling people to stop drinking Coke isn't going to do any more good than telling people to eat less fat did over the past forty years. If people used the low fat campaign to buy Twizzlers (a low fat snack), then the no soda campaign will produce equally horrible outcomes.
Next step: do what AT&T did - offer financing (not technically the next step since they already offer this). Instead of upgrading your contract every two years and getting a discount on a phone, you finance a new phone every two years. One big difference is that with the finance model, your bill goes down if you keep the phone longer than the finance term. In the old model, if you didn't upgrade, you continued to pay the price that had the subsidy baked in.
This also helps with customer retention - as long as a customer has a phone that's not yet paid off, they will have difficulty changing carriers. To the customer, having to pay off the phone isn't a whole lot different from having to pay a contract termination fee.
In his master plan to steal 14 million dollars, he forgot to tell his accomplice to not blow him in?
Portable Electronic Devices (PEDs) are a huge threat to both security and intellectual property.
But, security is a huge threat to productivity. Is it possible that while the employees were being drilled on security, they were being held accountable for productivity and not given tools that were nearly as productive as their PEDs? For example, everyone likes to yell at the guy who's not paying attention to the meeting because he's texting, but they forget that the same technology allows you to send the on call guy to the meeting and have an 95% chance he will be able to actively participate. The alternatives are to have a second meeting or hire another tech so there is one on call and one available for the meeting.
People immersed in security all day sometimes forget that security is about tradeoffs, not eliminating all sources of "insecurity". A good general rule is that if a security policy is being widely ignored, then it is probably not properly aligned with the organization's goals.
The answer is easy; no one who really cares about security was at the design table.
Also, custom circuits seems to be expensive in the auto industry. I recently had to replace a daytime running light controller on a car - it cost about $130. I opened up the old one and it was nothing but about 20 discrete through-hole components on a custom circuit board, mostly transistors and resistors. If you build everything on a programmable general purpose platform, you only pay the hardware costs once.
Just patch your car
Maybe in this case it's feasible. My Mazda3 cannot be customer patched and the dealership hates to do it because it takes two hours to do, but the factory only pays them for an hour of labor. I have zero trust that the auto industry will figure out patch rollouts in the near future. Also, even if they get patching right, it will just put them in the same shape that computers are now - which is sad shape.