Just checkout this unassailable logic from pennies.org:
Over three-quarters of Americans (77%) are concerned merchants would raise prices without the penny. And they're probably right. Raymond Lombra, Ph.D., Professor of Economics at Penn State University, told a Congressional committee in 1990 that rounding cash sales up or down to the nearest nickel would cost consumers over $600 million annually.
So that's what, less than $2 for every man, woman and child in the nation each year? I'll gladly pay $2 a year to never have to waste time with pennies. My time is worth that much to me.
This stuff is so humorous... Steve's lucky the writer's strike ended before he gave this interview
InformationWeek: One of the concerns I found that people carry over with them from -- certainly the Vista release and their past experiences with those operating systems, is the concern about application compatibility at the beginning. What kind of things is Microsoft doing today that it hasn't done in the past to assure customers that they can start moving fairly soon to Windows Server 2008?
Ballmer: Well, we've done a lot of work, obviously, even in the Vista context.
Well, that you've done a lot of work "in the Vista context" it isn't so obvious to anyone that has tried to use it. You don't even have a computer at your desk, do you Mr. Ballmer?
Ballmer: Take something like SharePoint alone. It's a big deal. The quality of the databases, that's a big deal. The availability of tools, of Visual Studio and.Net and the ability to build bespoke applications, those are all part of the value and the total cost. And I think we've done a good job.
Monkeyboy, you are no developer. It's questionable that you even own a computer. You've never had to use those tools before. Before you tell anybody that you think you've "done a good job", you should try to use some of your company's software.
InformationWeek: Many of those do so because of perceived "bugginess" of an initial release. Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has said that this version of Windows Server is among the most rigorously tested products that the company's come out with yet. What are some of your proof points there?
Ballmer: It builds off the Vista code base. So all of that testing plus another year.
So that's what, one year of testing?
InformationWeek: The openness pledge you guys made last week, one thing that I didn't really get a better sense of is, do you feel like Microsoft is moving more toward embracing open standards than you have in the past?
Ballmer: We say when we embrace standards, we'll be transparent about how we're embracing standards. We're going to embrace a lot of standards, we're going to be transparent about how we embrace those standards. If we have deviations, we'll be transparent about the deviations.
So, you'll tell us how you're going to screw us before you screw us now? That's considerate of you, if not a bit misguided.
Ballmer: Microsoft has always strived to be at the center of where innovative work is happening.
Yet, despite all of that striving, your company hasn't ever really been there. It must be very frustrating. Though I don't think that I'd ever resort to throwing chairs and cursing at innocent bystanders. But, then again, I use Linux, and therefore do not experience much frustration.
I run a machine with 256 MB ram these days. No reason to buy a new machine when the existing one works just fine.
Irresponsible companies like Microsoft are destroying our environment by forcing users to upgrade perfectly functional machines every few years. The new features they implement which demand these faster machines are superfluous and largely unused by consumers. After all, how many of MS Word's "advanced" features are you even aware of, much less use on a day-to-day basis?
Asking customers to abandon their functional computers so they can have a better experience is expensive, disrespectful, and dangerous.
This is no free-speech issue. This should be regulated in the same way advertisements on TV are.
You can't hire a bunch of actors, give them a script to read, and air it as customer testimonials.
These viral blogs are essentially doing that. Yet it shouldn't require any new legislation to enforce advertisers to put a prominent disclaimer on these blogs that these are paid opinions.
The other funny thing about money and Diebolds in Utah is that because they are so expensive, some precincts have fewer voting machines than ever before.
http://www.kcpw.org/article/1719/
but I've always wondered why I've been given hollow point ammunition
The only possible reason I could think for it is that fully jacketed ammunition would pass through more than one rioter and potentially injure/kill several people: so if you fire three rounds into the crowd you may have injured/killed six people instead of three.
On the other hand, the poor sucker that caught the hollow-point bullet has now absorbed all of the projectile's kinetic energy, with the obvious consequences.
So does this mean that my local radio-station is going to be getting shut down unless they stream their music to me WMA? I don't want to have to install a new radio in my car AGAIN!!!
It seems like the artists already had this debate once... when was that... like, the 30's or something?
You'd think these dinosaur senators would remember stuff from their childhood. Heck, Alzheimer's patients can do that.
I hate to admit it, but from what I've seen of PowerShell I've really liked. I like the idea that the syntax for all commands is consistant, and enforced by the framework. No time spent retrofitting old commands to a new standard. Well, I guess you get that for free because you are now building everything from the ground up anyway.
Some of the object-oriented features are quite nifty, and I don't see any of the standard UNIX shells doing that anytime soon. But I guess I'd really have to get into it before an OO shell became much of a *NEED*. Right now, it feels more like a "gee, that's kinda cool" sort of feature that I really don't much care for when performance is a bigger priority. I don't forsee PowerShell one-upping Bash in speed anytime soon, and that's not saying much to the folks who believe that Bash is already bloatware.
Does anyone besides me revel in the irony that MacOS and Windows now feature modern command-lines?
yeah, seriously. i wonder how long until some lobbyist lines Orrin Hatch's pocket enough to get even him to think this is a great and necessary way to protect their business.
so, when piracy goes up in response to this, who's head will roll?
Since when does Microsoft (or any corporation) get to help states write laws? They can't write reliable computer code; who thought it would be a good idea to let them write legal code?
I mean, I know this sort of thing goes on with lobbyists and big money; but when did it happen that companies could ghost-write law? Who in the OK state house said "Oh golly, we don't know much about that there infoweb. We had better outsource this bill to the experts! And who is more expert than those people who brought us Solitare?"
This is scary on soooo many levels...
There are at least three reasons why we shouldn't trust their dirty, nasty, evil b0xen:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboa rd.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=11874&mesg_ id=19911/ http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/10/1172/9052 / http://avirubin.com/vote.pdf/
Violation of warranty? Sure. I can see that.
Still, nobody is answering the question: "why on earth are computers the best answer to solving the handicaped voter problem?"
I could hire some little old ladies for minimum wage and get them to help disadvantaged people cast their ballots for less than $27 million!
Or, at the very least, if these machines are supposed to be SO easy to use, just get one or two of them for each precinct. You don't need every parking stall to be handicap accessible, and you don't need all of your voting booths to be, either.
In my mind, Bruce Funk is the only sane election official in the whole state.
Why? Oh why are they doing this? They're just a bunch of old crackers who've just barely had touch-tone phones installed in their offices! Why do they take it upon themselves to regulate technologies that they are not only unfamiliar with, but completely ignorant of! I'm sick of my communications being regulated by people who have actually used Morse Code.
Real Linux users don't want a computer that's got anything pre-installed. Who really uses RedHat and SUSE these days anyway? And a computer with Gentoo pre-installed kinda takes all of the fun out of it, no?
The parent didn't mean to pawn his kids off onto the church and trust them to raise his/her kids for free. What he was saying is that it would be nice, for a change, to be surrounded by like-minded people who were dedicated to raising their children responsibly, instead of being immersed in a culture where it is acceptable for parents to be only marginally concerned with and responsible for their children's well-being.
You simply don't find that kind of atmosphere prevailing in your community's swinger's club.
Yeah, your neighbor might be a rapist, so don't dump your kids off at his house to be babysat before you get to know the guy, maybe check out the child molester webpage or something. God forbid we actually go out of our homes to talk to the people next-door. WTF do that, we have the internet! I can talk to people on/., who needs neighbors anyway?
Kind of funny how the comments that are pro-faith ( or at least tolerant to faith ) don't get modded up like the anti-faith comments. I thought the beef was as much about people being bigots as it was about who's "theories" stand up best in a lab... but I digress
To me, the funniest thing about this whole debate is how nobody seems to see that science and religion don't need to be stepping on each other's toes. They provide answers to two completely different questions. Science asks "how" and religion asks "why"? What's the problem with that?
Being a believer myself, I can understand the need some folks feel for having faith in their life. It gives us hope, resilience, and teaches us how to find happiness and peace.
But believing doesn't mean that I can't see the value of science - I know that my life is quantifiably better because of medicine and other technologies, and I'm very thankful for those as well.
I guess the bottom line for me is that science doesn't try to tell me how I should live my life, and relgion doesn't tell me all of the nuts and bolts of how I came to be alive. They both have their own domains, and they are both very important within their own bounds.
Fundies trying to teach religion in a science class is just as shameful as a scientist saying that I'm deluding myself by believing in something that he/she hasn't experienced.
Haven't been to $sys$Wal-Mart now for over two months, and I feel fine.
We had a little "Wal-Mart can go to Hell" rally a few months ago because our small community already has a SuperCenter and a Sam's Club, and yet Bentonville saw fit to inflict yet another Super Center upon us.
I can't speak for most of my poor college student peers, but shopping at the local merchants hasn't zinged my bottom-line any.
Watch the perjoratives, already. For a nation which is just barely emerging from third-world status, that is a very admirable feat.
Moreover, the fact that "we already know how to do it" doesn't mean we don't have to design and build entirely new vehicles. After all, engineering and software are light-years ahead of where they were when we first landed on the moon; are you suggesting we take the old 16-bit Apollo computers out of mothballs and re-use them?
...from the registry. I liked the old days when it was a matter of hacking the [application].ini file if something went wrong with some program. (I even remember getting on my friend's computers, and editing the control.ini file for them. I'd make their marquee screensaver say something like "p0wn3d 8y f4d3-1n", and changing the password on them. Heh heh)
Then at about Win98, it seemed like if I tweaked an application too far and broke it to the point that I couldn't launch it again, I'd basically have to re-install it to fix it. There was no way to change a program's settings without running the program itself. I'd lose any other changes I made. The whole process was ridiculous.
Also, what do they thing they are doing with those ROT13 encoded values in the windows registry?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand these people:
http://pennies.org/
http://www.pennylovers.org/
Just checkout this unassailable logic from pennies.org:
Over three-quarters of Americans (77%) are concerned merchants would raise prices without the penny. And they're probably right. Raymond Lombra, Ph.D., Professor of Economics at Penn State University, told a Congressional committee in 1990 that rounding cash sales up or down to the nearest nickel would cost consumers over $600 million annually.
So that's what, less than $2 for every man, woman and child in the nation each year? I'll gladly pay $2 a year to never have to waste time with pennies. My time is worth that much to me.
Doesn't it strike you as interesting the way these fat white CEOs address piracy the same way the Bush administration addresses terrorism?
Did I say interesting? I meant scary.
I run a machine with 256 MB ram these days. No reason to buy a new machine when the existing one works just fine.
Irresponsible companies like Microsoft are destroying our environment by forcing users to upgrade perfectly functional machines every few years. The new features they implement which demand these faster machines are superfluous and largely unused by consumers. After all, how many of MS Word's "advanced" features are you even aware of, much less use on a day-to-day basis?
Asking customers to abandon their functional computers so they can have a better experience is expensive, disrespectful, and dangerous.
After this change takes place, can I please upgrade my CPU without having to grovel on the phone to some tech support bozo for a new key?
You can't hire a bunch of actors, give them a script to read, and air it as customer testimonials.
These viral blogs are essentially doing that. Yet it shouldn't require any new legislation to enforce advertisers to put a prominent disclaimer on these blogs that these are paid opinions.
I think this is poetic justice. It is very satisfying to see Sony paying way too much for an underperforming product.
The other funny thing about money and Diebolds in Utah is that because they are so expensive, some precincts have fewer voting machines than ever before.
http://www.kcpw.org/article/1719/
On the other hand, the poor sucker that caught the hollow-point bullet has now absorbed all of the projectile's kinetic energy, with the obvious consequences.
So, what does the Astrologer's Union think of all of this?
I don't have any kids... Nor do I plan on ever having them ever.
I have not burdened society with my godforsaken spawn.
You don't see me on the streets screaming "FAT PEOPLE MAKE ME PAY MORE INSURANCE PREMIUMS! SEND THEM BACK!"
You know... I avoided my entire life working at jobs you mentioned and I've been working since I was 15.
</boast>
Congratulations, we are all very proud of you. Your medal will be in the mail.
So does this mean that my local radio-station is going to be getting shut down unless they stream their music to me WMA? I don't want to have to install a new radio in my car AGAIN!!!
It seems like the artists already had this debate once... when was that... like, the 30's or something?
You'd think these dinosaur senators would remember stuff from their childhood. Heck, Alzheimer's patients can do that.
I hate to admit it, but from what I've seen of PowerShell I've really liked. I like the idea that the syntax for all commands is consistant, and enforced by the framework. No time spent retrofitting old commands to a new standard. Well, I guess you get that for free because you are now building everything from the ground up anyway.
Some of the object-oriented features are quite nifty, and I don't see any of the standard UNIX shells doing that anytime soon. But I guess I'd really have to get into it before an OO shell became much of a *NEED*. Right now, it feels more like a "gee, that's kinda cool" sort of feature that I really don't much care for when performance is a bigger priority. I don't forsee PowerShell one-upping Bash in speed anytime soon, and that's not saying much to the folks who believe that Bash is already bloatware.
Does anyone besides me revel in the irony that MacOS and Windows now feature modern command-lines?
yeah, seriously. i wonder how long until some lobbyist lines Orrin Hatch's pocket enough to get even him to think this is a great and necessary way to protect their business.
so, when piracy goes up in response to this, who's head will roll?
Since when does Microsoft (or any corporation) get to help states write laws? They can't write reliable computer code; who thought it would be a good idea to let them write legal code?
I mean, I know this sort of thing goes on with lobbyists and big money; but when did it happen that companies could ghost-write law? Who in the OK state house said "Oh golly, we don't know much about that there infoweb. We had better outsource this bill to the experts! And who is more expert than those people who brought us Solitare?"
This is scary on soooo many levels...
There are at least three reasons why we shouldn't trust their dirty, nasty, evil b0xen:a rd.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=11874&mesg_ id=19911/
2 /
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/dubo
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/10/1172/905
http://avirubin.com/vote.pdf/
Violation of warranty? Sure. I can see that.
Still, nobody is answering the question: "why on earth are computers the best answer to solving the handicaped voter problem?"
I could hire some little old ladies for minimum wage and get them to help disadvantaged people cast their ballots for less than $27 million!
Or, at the very least, if these machines are supposed to be SO easy to use, just get one or two of them for each precinct. You don't need every parking stall to be handicap accessible, and you don't need all of your voting booths to be, either.
In my mind, Bruce Funk is the only sane election official in the whole state.
Why? Oh why are they doing this? They're just a bunch of old crackers who've just barely had touch-tone phones installed in their offices! Why do they take it upon themselves to regulate technologies that they are not only unfamiliar with, but completely ignorant of! I'm sick of my communications being regulated by people who have actually used Morse Code.
Real Linux users don't want a computer that's got anything pre-installed. Who really uses RedHat and SUSE these days anyway? And a computer with Gentoo pre-installed kinda takes all of the fun out of it, no?
You simply don't find that kind of atmosphere prevailing in your community's swinger's club.
Yeah, your neighbor might be a rapist, so don't dump your kids off at his house to be babysat before you get to know the guy, maybe check out the child molester webpage or something. God forbid we actually go out of our homes to talk to the people next-door. WTF do that, we have the internet! I can talk to people on /., who needs neighbors anyway?
To me, the funniest thing about this whole debate is how nobody seems to see that science and religion don't need to be stepping on each other's toes. They provide answers to two completely different questions. Science asks "how" and religion asks "why"? What's the problem with that?
Being a believer myself, I can understand the need some folks feel for having faith in their life. It gives us hope, resilience, and teaches us how to find happiness and peace.
But believing doesn't mean that I can't see the value of science - I know that my life is quantifiably better because of medicine and other technologies, and I'm very thankful for those as well.
I guess the bottom line for me is that science doesn't try to tell me how I should live my life, and relgion doesn't tell me all of the nuts and bolts of how I came to be alive. They both have their own domains, and they are both very important within their own bounds.
Fundies trying to teach religion in a science class is just as shameful as a scientist saying that I'm deluding myself by believing in something that he/she hasn't experienced.
M$ has been playing dirty since the days Bill posed for "Teen Beat" magazine http://blog.monkeymethods.org/2005/01/bill-gates-s trikes-pose-for-teen-beat.html
We had a little "Wal-Mart can go to Hell" rally a few months ago because our small community already
has a SuperCenter and a Sam's Club, and yet Bentonville saw fit to inflict yet another Super Center upon us.
I can't speak for most of my poor college student peers, but shopping at the local merchants hasn't zinged
my bottom-line any.
Moreover, the fact that "we already know how to do it" doesn't mean we don't have to design and build entirely new vehicles. After all, engineering and software are light-years ahead of where they were when we first landed on the moon; are you suggesting we take the old 16-bit Apollo computers out of mothballs and re-use them?
Then at about Win98, it seemed like if I tweaked an application too far and broke it to the point that I couldn't launch it again, I'd basically have to re-install it to fix it. There was no way to change a program's settings without running the program itself. I'd lose any other changes I made. The whole process was ridiculous.
Also, what do they thing they are doing with those ROT13 encoded values in the windows registry?