So that's about $1270 difference..... let's say $1000 to keep the math easy. Times 30 office workers (small office) yields $30,000 more money spent on the Macs.
And if the Apples can indeed save you having to employ a $50,000 per year full-time admin, how would that *not* result in significant savings?
That said, I've rarely ever even touch a Mac, and have no idea whether or not what the GP claims is true. But I have enough IT experience to know that if you only look at sticker prices and don't consider implementation costs for your business systems, whether hardware or software, you can be in for a world of unexpected hurt.
And just as an aside, I just had my first appointment with a new doctor today, and was surprised to see all their desktops were Macs. I'd never seen that in a healthcare provider's office before, so maybe Apple is gaining some ground there.
Ya, I saw the title and I thought "Really? That seems a bit long..."
Well, we all know that/. is way too advanced of an audience for this book. Wait for the review of the upcoming SAMS title: "Teach Yourself Writing Self-Aware Device Drivers with Brainfuck in 17 Minutes".
The law needs to be changed. The modified law would allow other drivers to shoot water-soluble paint balls at any vehicle in which the driver is using a cell-phone.
I predict that cell-phone usage while driving would drop precipitously within days.
As entertaining of an idea as that may be...
How long until there's a device like a radar gun that can reliably detect if a cellphone/device is in use? If they were to set those up with cameras and automatically mail summons like red-light cameras? That's the more likely route I see happening. Next up...drunk radar.
shiver... the more I think about it, the more I lean towards vigilante paintball.
Different people can handle different levels of distraction. This is proven.
So, there should be tests. Depending on your score, you get to have (or not have) certain things in your vehicle,
like radios, heaters, people, pets, phones, etc.
Or to quote a Doug Stanhope bit, "There should be a drunk-driving test...where if I can pass my driving at 0.15, then I get a driver's license that says I'm OK to drive up to 0.15."
Actually, their last attempt to construct a pay wall was called TimesSelect, and debuted in Sept. 2005. (see wiki page). They abandoned it after only lasted two years, until Sept. 2007. How much have "things changed" since then?
Oh, I don't deny selective breeding is still going on, I know most certainly there is. (I "know people", too.;-) ) My nit was the "increased THC levels fourfold from pot's heyday in the '70s" clause, where breeders have most certainly not bred the most potent strains of the '70s into 4x more potent strains today, which is how I would interpret that statement. In fact, I would argue that the last 30 years of cannabis breeding has pushed the envelope much more on yield than potency.
The same goes for marijuana, selective breeding has increased THC levels fourfold from pot's heyday in the '70s.
From my research and experience, that is not true. While law enforcement agencies have constantly bandied about statistics that marijuana is much more potent than "the pot you remember from your youth" in order to prop up support for increasingly unpopular laws, the best research suggests that the most potent marijuana of today is no more potent than the most potent marijuana of the '70s. The pot available today may be more potent on average, but that is more due to better access to known strains, better care taken in cultivation, and better storage and transport (i.e., compare the mass harvesting of outdoor fields in Colombia or Mexico vs. the careful handling of indoor grown hydro).
Not to detract from your overall point, which I agree with, but the really significant selective breeding for high potency cannabis likely happened in prehistory, not since the '70s.
The better story would be Hoax Hawking Half-Offs Hunan Hotmailers, where someone impersonating a famous vocally-assisted theoretical physicist bisects Chinese spammers (preferably by broadsword or light-saber) for the good of humanity.
Every arm-chair capatalist knows that everyone else pays for the police who should NEVER stop them from doing anything just everyone else.
Watch Fox-news, you will get the idea soon enough. All drunk-drivers should be stopped, but not if they need their car for business. All illegal immigrants should be kicked out, except their cleaning lady.
Don't forget...draconian drug laws that apply to everyone except the children of the people in power who pushed such laws in the first place.; e.g., John Ashcroft.
Not at all to disagree with your point, but when comes to medical conditions, "embarrassing" is my least concern. Just as one example, consider how such information could weigh against you if accessed by a prospective employer. Sure, it's probably illegal in most jurisdictions, but it's also virtually impossible to prove. Even if you live somewhere where "pre-existing conditions" are not a concern, does anyone want it to be easy to know that you've done a disproportionate number of searches on anything from "lymphatic cancer" to "lice treatment" when competing for a job? I know I don't.
I've been on the fence about Google for some time, neither hater nor fanboy, having my concerns but also perceiving at least a somewhat more open and ethical operation than many other industry players. Schmidt's statement adds some serious weight to the "concern" side of that balance.
I think one issue here is the concept of "dumbing down", which goes back to COBOL at least. PHBs have always had this idea that better tools will make it so that that people who have little talent or interest in programming (or as you say, can express algorithms) can write software. That, I think, will always be a pipe dream.
However, the goal of "simplifying programming" will always be a valid and necessary one, just due to the nature of advancing technology. The trick is to adjust the goal from "helping people with little programming competence to write software" to "create tools that enable competent developers to be more productive and their work less tedious".
If we want to take to the air, we'd need to do it with something more like a flying bus that takes relative large loads of people between a relatively small number of stations.
What a simPLy brilliANt idEa! You should file A patent If theRe's no PriOR arT.
What is with people whining about AdBlock all the time? OH NOES TEH ADZ@!1!One. Is it really that big a deal? Thanks to my Slashdot obsession and excellent karma, I have the option to disable ads on Slashdot natively, but I don't even use the option. Why do people care so much about little images trying to sell things?
In addition to the previous reasons offered, another good reason to block ads is to reduce the number of potential vectors for malware. For instance, when malicious third party ads were served from the New York Times web site less than two months ago, needless to say users of AdBlock were unaffected.
To be attractive to small businesses, Microsoft need to offer Windows 7 pro OEM license packs at reduced rates.
In my experience, it is not the cost of Windows itself which deter small businesses from upgrading; rather it is the much larger costs of implementation, testing, potential hardware/software upgrades, and the risk of business disruption that accompany large scale changes to a business' IT ecosystem that makes upgrading a daunting proposition. (This does not only apply to Windows, nor just to small businesses.) In order to give MS a couple hundred bucks per desktop for their latest OS upgrade, the associated costs to deal with the fallout might be an order of magnitude higher than that.
In the small IT shop where I work, MS could offers Win7 upgrades for free (or for that matter, *pay us* $100 per seat to upgrade) and we still wouldn't be upgrading any time soon, simply because we can't afford to marshall the resources to do the upgrades absent any concrete business case to do so.
I grew up near an even more confusing set of highway directions...in central NJ, I-287 South turns into NJ 440 North, while your compass point due East.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe your doctor charges too much.
That might be valid point, except that I live in Canada.
So that's about $1270 difference..... let's say $1000 to keep the math easy. Times 30 office workers (small office) yields $30,000 more money spent on the Macs.
And if the Apples can indeed save you having to employ a $50,000 per year full-time admin, how would that *not* result in significant savings?
That said, I've rarely ever even touch a Mac, and have no idea whether or not what the GP claims is true. But I have enough IT experience to know that if you only look at sticker prices and don't consider implementation costs for your business systems, whether hardware or software, you can be in for a world of unexpected hurt.
And just as an aside, I just had my first appointment with a new doctor today, and was surprised to see all their desktops were Macs. I'd never seen that in a healthcare provider's office before, so maybe Apple is gaining some ground there.
Ironic that this is passed by the state that STARTED THE CIVIL WAR!
Good point. By the same logic of this law, maybe folks should have to register all those Confederate flags they're so fond of down there.
... or not crash all the F*(king time.
As I've been saying about upcoming predictions about AI for as long as known anything about computers:
"When computers can reliably manage their own device drivers, I'll start taking future predictions about AI seriously."
I'm still waiting.
Ya, I saw the title and I thought "Really? That seems a bit long..."
Well, we all know that /. is way too advanced of an audience for this book. Wait for the review of the upcoming SAMS title: "Teach Yourself Writing Self-Aware Device Drivers with Brainfuck in 17 Minutes".
The law needs to be changed. The modified law would allow other drivers to shoot water-soluble paint balls at any vehicle in which the driver is using a cell-phone.
I predict that cell-phone usage while driving would drop precipitously within days.
As entertaining of an idea as that may be...
How long until there's a device like a radar gun that can reliably detect if a cellphone/device is in use? If they were to set those up with cameras and automatically mail summons like red-light cameras? That's the more likely route I see happening. Next up...drunk radar.
shiver... the more I think about it, the more I lean towards vigilante paintball.
Meh.
Different people can handle different levels of distraction. This is proven.
So, there should be tests. Depending on your score, you get to have (or not have) certain things in your vehicle, like radios, heaters, people, pets, phones, etc.
Or to quote a Doug Stanhope bit, "There should be a drunk-driving test...where if I can pass my driving at 0.15, then I get a driver's license that says I'm OK to drive up to 0.15."
"I sure wish someone had an open sourced lolcats generator"
cat cat | sed 's/Meow/I can haz cheezburger?/g'
They tried to do it...in 1995. Big deal.
Actually, their last attempt to construct a pay wall was called TimesSelect, and debuted in Sept. 2005. (see wiki page). They abandoned it after only lasted two years, until Sept. 2007. How much have "things changed" since then?
Seriously - get overselves
What's an overself? Clothes? Armor? Superego?
Oh, I don't deny selective breeding is still going on, I know most certainly there is. (I "know people", too. ;-) ) My nit was the "increased THC levels fourfold from pot's heyday in the '70s" clause, where breeders have most certainly not bred the most potent strains of the '70s into 4x more potent strains today, which is how I would interpret that statement. In fact, I would argue that the last 30 years of cannabis breeding has pushed the envelope much more on yield than potency.
The same goes for marijuana, selective breeding has increased THC levels fourfold from pot's heyday in the '70s.
From my research and experience, that is not true. While law enforcement agencies have constantly bandied about statistics that marijuana is much more potent than "the pot you remember from your youth" in order to prop up support for increasingly unpopular laws, the best research suggests that the most potent marijuana of today is no more potent than the most potent marijuana of the '70s. The pot available today may be more potent on average, but that is more due to better access to known strains, better care taken in cultivation, and better storage and transport (i.e., compare the mass harvesting of outdoor fields in Colombia or Mexico vs. the careful handling of indoor grown hydro).
Not to detract from your overall point, which I agree with, but the really significant selective breeding for high potency cannabis likely happened in prehistory, not since the '70s.
As a child, I always wondered why Hungary didn't just eat Turkey. ;-)
The better story would be Hoax Hawking Half-Offs Hunan Hotmailers, where someone impersonating a famous vocally-assisted theoretical physicist bisects Chinese spammers (preferably by broadsword or light-saber) for the good of humanity.
"Receiver" might be tough to copyright. He might need something more original, like "Cocksocket" or "Bubbacepticle".
Every arm-chair capatalist knows that everyone else pays for the police who should NEVER stop them from doing anything just everyone else.
Watch Fox-news, you will get the idea soon enough. All drunk-drivers should be stopped, but not if they need their car for business. All illegal immigrants should be kicked out, except their cleaning lady.
Don't forget...draconian drug laws that apply to everyone except the children of the people in power who pushed such laws in the first place.; e.g., John Ashcroft.
- People with embarrassing medical conditions?
Not at all to disagree with your point, but when comes to medical conditions, "embarrassing" is my least concern. Just as one example, consider how such information could weigh against you if accessed by a prospective employer. Sure, it's probably illegal in most jurisdictions, but it's also virtually impossible to prove. Even if you live somewhere where "pre-existing conditions" are not a concern, does anyone want it to be easy to know that you've done a disproportionate number of searches on anything from "lymphatic cancer" to "lice treatment" when competing for a job? I know I don't.
I've been on the fence about Google for some time, neither hater nor fanboy, having my concerns but also perceiving at least a somewhat more open and ethical operation than many other industry players. Schmidt's statement adds some serious weight to the "concern" side of that balance.
I think one issue here is the concept of "dumbing down", which goes back to COBOL at least. PHBs have always had this idea that better tools will make it so that that people who have little talent or interest in programming (or as you say, can express algorithms) can write software. That, I think, will always be a pipe dream.
However, the goal of "simplifying programming" will always be a valid and necessary one, just due to the nature of advancing technology. The trick is to adjust the goal from "helping people with little programming competence to write software" to "create tools that enable competent developers to be more productive and their work less tedious".
If we want to take to the air, we'd need to do it with something more like a flying bus that takes relative large loads of people between a relatively small number of stations.
What a simPLy brilliANt idEa! You should file A patent If theRe's no PriOR arT.
Just another example of how bloated software is getting these days. 147,456 processors and 144 terabytes of memory just to implement "cat"!
There are Spanish Netherlands?
There were Spanish Netherlands.
Maybe you should ask your history prof to paste this into the next Powerpoint lecture.
What is with people whining about AdBlock all the time? OH NOES TEH ADZ@!1!One. Is it really that big a deal? Thanks to my Slashdot obsession and excellent karma, I have the option to disable ads on Slashdot natively, but I don't even use the option. Why do people care so much about little images trying to sell things?
In addition to the previous reasons offered, another good reason to block ads is to reduce the number of potential vectors for malware. For instance, when malicious third party ads were served from the New York Times web site less than two months ago, needless to say users of AdBlock were unaffected.
To be attractive to small businesses, Microsoft need to offer Windows 7 pro OEM license packs at reduced rates.
In my experience, it is not the cost of Windows itself which deter small businesses from upgrading; rather it is the much larger costs of implementation, testing, potential hardware/software upgrades, and the risk of business disruption that accompany large scale changes to a business' IT ecosystem that makes upgrading a daunting proposition. (This does not only apply to Windows, nor just to small businesses.) In order to give MS a couple hundred bucks per desktop for their latest OS upgrade, the associated costs to deal with the fallout might be an order of magnitude higher than that.
In the small IT shop where I work, MS could offers Win7 upgrades for free (or for that matter, *pay us* $100 per seat to upgrade) and we still wouldn't be upgrading any time soon, simply because we can't afford to marshall the resources to do the upgrades absent any concrete business case to do so.
Not only does Al Jaffee do the fold-ins, but the GP seems to have melded the late great Mad artists Don Martin and Dave Berg.
I grew up near an even more confusing set of highway directions...in central NJ, I-287 South turns into NJ 440 North, while your compass point due East.