The wholesalers won't foot the bill, it'll be passed down the food chain to the consumers.
No, the wholesalers will foot the bill. See my previous post. WalMart has put the squeeze on us, and our vendors are raising their prices. In this case, it's not joe-sixpack footing the bill, it's coming out of our profits and it's affecting my paycheck (fuck-you-very-much-WalMart)!!! If there is less profit in my company, there is less money available for raises and bonuses. WalMart's slack-jawed consumers won't feel this at all.
...They are such a powerhouse that they actually dictate to there suppliers what they are willing to pay for the merchandise...
NO KIDDING! We are a textile distributor and there have been very large increases in the price of cotton. Wal-Mart has told us, "don't pass along a price increase. We won't pay it, and we'll stop buying from you."
Our vendors have raised their prices and we're caught in the middle. We need the buying power WalMart's orders give us, so we can't stop doing business with them.
Go monopoly power!
Wal-mart is one of our bigger customers, and they originally has us slated to be an early adopter of RFID in the case.
We were supposed to be working on this in 2004, however they pushed out implementation out to beyond 2006. As far as I know they didn't say why either.
All I know is that we're not slated to be doing anything with RFID anytime in the near future, and just six months ago we were planning on gearing up to implement across our entire supply chain.
Because its faster strapping on a watch that works already rather than spending a bunch of hours making the linux solution work...
Forget faster, it's much more elegant. I would take a mechnical watch over a digital, PDA-on-my-arm miracle of technology anyday. I enjoy my mechnical watches, the precision that went into their design.
A good watch is a thing that tickles geeks because it's intricate, precise, mathematical and interesting. You deal with gears and springs in the watchworks....
I have a crystal-backed watch, you can see the mechanism running and it's simply beautiful to watch it as it winds down, ticking off the time in the process.
Skid steering?
on
Your Own Mecha
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It looks like it's a skid-steer vehicle in the picture. That's lame, I want two-legged locomotion!
I've driven a lot of Bobcat and Case Loaders and this thing doesn't look 1) as stable and 2) as useful as a skid-steer front loader. It looks like the center of gravity is way to high!
Of course, it has pinchers, so bonus points for looking cool.
I joined the company I'm with not that long ago (~7 months ago) as a system administrator and PeopleSoft person. They were entirely MSFT at the time I joined them, but I learned my supervisor was a "unixey" guy from long ago.
Instead of jumping right in and converting boxes over to Linux and FreeBSD I quietly received permission to build a couple of FreeBSD servers out of PCs slated for the recycle bin.
Reciently I was involved in some meetings to look at network and server monitoring tools which included Deep Metrix's IP Monitor and Ipswitch's What's Up Gold. Both are pretty "entry level" but we only needed to monitor 25 servers for (mostly) non mission-critical reasons.
I took it on my own to install Nagios on one of my "play" servers over a long weekend. The following Monday I pulled the people together from the previous meetings and showed them what Nagios and FreeBSD could do...monitor everything they had defined as being critical to be monitored and send notifications via a TAP gateway to our IT pager.
Everyone was thrilled, the cost was about 8 hours of my time (they gave me a freebie day off!) and there was no MSFT tax paid.
Now that open source solutions have a) proven themselves in our organization and b) reduced some of our IT costs management is much more interested and much more flexible in investigating and implementing alternative solutions.
As long as Microsoft keeps charging us an arm and a leg for the privledge of implementing their systems (and sometimes they do have a better tool, I can admit that) Linux will have a strong ally in cost-concious managers everywhere if we can tone down the rabid fandom that scares a lot of "normal" people away!
Be polite and political about Linux and alternatives in your organization, and just show what it can do and you'll find people are more receptive to the idea!
Sue the faxer and you will most likely win. A company I worked for purchased a fax list from a list broker and tried it's hand at "fax blasting" (this was back in 1998ish).
About two days later we got a call from a guy who said he was going to sue us.. The powers-that-be said, "Hyuck, hyuck, go ahead buddy..." and he did.
He won pretty handily in court too as I recall. The company ended up paying a $500 fine for the fax, a $100ish fine for court costs PLUS $500ish in legal fees to the plainiff.
Needless to say, the-powers-that-be NEVER tried junk-faxing again (never mind it was a stupid idea in the first place).
You must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone has committed a crime
This is true for criminal proceedings. In civil proceedings all you need to do is establish a stronger case than the other side, "beyond a reasonable doubt" doesn't enter in to it!
Yeah it sucks -- deeper pockets win, etc. -- but it's something that more people should know. Don't go into a civil case all smug because you think the standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt."
You'll suddenly feel much less smug when the judge hands a decision to the plainiff consisting of your ass, with your wallet still attached, on a platter.
I mean, wasn't the point of this big ERP trend to make your life easier?
Actually, I thought the big ERP trend was to make consultants rich. According to my users it's not easier for them. I thought the holy-grail of ERP is to be able to get vital information in (near) real-time for the big-wigs. Making life easier for the CFO/CEO/etc to get more broad-reaching reports doesn't necessiarily mean it's easier for the people who have to use the system to enter the data that will eventually make those reports.:-)
My company just went through a PeopleSoft conversion (really, today 11/3 is our live day). And seeing how God-awful complex PeopleSoft is, I can't imagine running a package that can do everything ERP software is supposed to do without a similar level of complexity.
So how about support? We pay a ton for PeopleSoft support, but they are damn responsive and typically we have an answer back via email before a phone call is made.
I can't imagine touching an OSS ERP solution without some kick-ass support (which I would be willing to pay big bucks for). I also would have a difficult time (read, impossible time) convincing the CEO, CFO, COO, etc. that they should choose open source for their entire enterprise. They are not going to bite.
I've never known a boss who didn't work more weekends than the average person working for him.
This is true. I could call our CEO's cell phone and be pretty much safe in assuming he's either 1) working or 2) sleeping.
Hard work does get you ahead, and at a certian point you get to where you work hard, but are rewarded with money and time so you can play hard. I've had the 90+ hour kill-myself weeks and I've worked hard for a long time. Now I'm at a place where 99% of my critical work gets done between 7am and 5pm. If it happens outside of those hours I expect to take care of the problem, but my efforts do not go unrewarded.
As you expand what you do, your responsibilities will grow. And I've found that while my responsibilities have grown, my freedom and happiness has grown as much or more!
And, as a sub-question, what's a good one for us lefties? Fountain pens are sure out
Why are fountain pens out? I'm a lefty and I have a pretty nice collection of fountain pens, I write with them all on a regular basis (some $10, some $500) and I've never had a problem. I don't write with my hand twisted around either, just normal writing.
I use decent paper, never recycled crap. The pens do much better on a nice bonded paper than whatever is $.23 in the school supply isle. Plus not having to put very much pressure to the paper to write helps keep my hand from cramping!
The final suggestion I have is to check out some different ink. I have a friend who produces and distributed his own line of ink (Private Reserve Ink for those of you who use bottled ink) and there is a large variation in inks, even in inks from the same place. For example his "Tanzanite" ink will flow for days in pens that are otherwise scratchy and hard to get the ink to flow. For some reason it is extremely smooth flowing. In pens that have a really good flow I get almost too much ink using Tanzanite. If you're curious you can check out Private Reserve Inks from almost any pen seller (Fountain Pen hospital, etc.) and I'll plug his web site so you can find a dealer if you're interested (http://www.privatereserveink.com/).
Try changing your ink and see if it solves your smudging problems!
The first time we had devices in for service it was assumed that someone had touched the speech rate knob while unpacking the thing - as no living thing possible could make any sense of what the synthesis produced at that rate. I guess that it may help that the voice is always the same, though.
I had a blind guy working for me a few years back who had the rate on his screen-resading software turned up so fast that it was just a buzz of noise. I was unable to pick anything out from the voice, but he was able to hear it all an understand it without problems.
Email was somewhat interesting from him. It contained punctuation, but usually precious little formatting like paragraph breaks (or at times spaces) because his software didn't "read" a paragraph break, he never added them when typing.
And his ability to recall voices was scary. The first day he was in the office our then sysadmin was introduced and said, "Hi." That's it, just "hi". The blind guy said, "Hey, I know you... You're Rob." At some point several years ago he had spoken briefly on the phone to this guy and was able to recall the voice and pin it to a name. Amazing...
Have you ever dropped a salt-water fish into a fresh-water tank?
No, and I'm not sure about the effects. But I do know that a healthy fresh water tank needs a certain amount of salt added. This I never understood and I think it only applies to "tropical" fresh water fish (ie: Oscars, Dempsies, Tetras, etc.) I don't know if salt is added to northen fresh water tanks like pike and bass.
I'm sure the extra percentage of fresh water added to the ocean wouldn't be too detremental. I'm thinking it'd be like adding 2 gallons of fresh water to a 50 gallon salt tank. I have no science to back that statement up. Just taking a wild guess.
Fish that live in salty water sometimes and fresh water at other times (think, tide comes in and flushes a basin with salt water) are called Brackish fish. And those waterways are called...wait for it...brackish water.
Adding fresh water to a salt-water aquarium is a common occurence. The salinity increases as the water evaporates out leaving the salts behind. So you add fresh water to return the salinity to a level where the little critters like it to be (depending on what type of little critters you're keeping). As I recall, I used to add a gallon or two of fresh water to my 55 gallon salt-water aquarium at least once a week or so. The only time I added salt water back in was when performing a water change where you remove a large quantity of water (salt and all) and have to add back salt water to keep the salinity correct for your little critters.
It's always about keeping those little critters happy...
I never understood the concept of inheritance. Why should somebody be entitled to a better start in life simply because of who their parents are?
Umm, because life in general isn't fair? Why shouldn't somebody be entitled to a better start in life? If I scrape and fight my way to the top, you can damn sure believe I will want my family and my friends to be better off because of it. Why? Because I care about them, and because life isn't fair I want to arm them as much as possible to stack the deck in their favor!
Oh yeah, because it's my God given right to earn what I can earn in my life and do what the hell I want to with it! If I want to leave it to my kids to start off well then so be it!
Society should get a cut of the riches that it creates. Bill Gates would have nothing without copyright laws and a police system to enforce them. Bill Gates, being the richest man in the world, has benefited from the rules of American society; why shouldn't he repay a good chunk of that fortune?
Why shouldn't he? There was a guy named Marx who thought the same. As I recall, his motto was From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. which is communism my friend.
Thanks but no thanks, I do not support or believe in redistribution of wealth just because someone else makes more than I do. Hell son, go out and have a milltion-dollar-idea and actually follow through on it. Once make your own fortune you'll most likely change your tune...
Searcy, Tim
8645 Admirals Woods Dr
INDIANAPOLIS, IN 46236
317-823-8462
Oh great - I find out they're in my home town... Well Mr. Searcy makes to damn much money; the sub-division he lives in is in of our higher-income areas where all the quasi-celebs and most of the sports stars (Reggie Miller) live.
There is an interesting piece of fiction by Stephen Baxter titled Voyage (ISBN 0061057088) which potrays a slightly different time-line where man makes it to Mars in 1986.
Worth checking out, not bad brain-candy and an interesting look at what "coulda' been"...
Somewhat on the mark, but methinks he didn't rent Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon" which is actually, without a doubt, the most beautiful made and crushingly boring movies of all time.
Whenever I have an upscale party, I toss Barry Lyndon in the DVD player, randomly skip around for a bit and hit pause. I have a beautiful, suitable-for-framing image I can display on my TV!
It's a running joke that you can pause Barry Lyndon at any random place and have an image that looks like it should be in a museaum. I've yet to disprove this.
Maybe if you're not skilled, or you're in a speciality that's not in demand in your area.
In my town, tech employment is terrible and I left my last job because of management blunders and just bald-faced lies from management. I didn't have a backup plan, and only a little money in the bank. So, no parachute.
In less than two weeks I found a new job and am a) much, much, much happier and b) better compensated.
This economy is only fatal if you're not talented. There is work out there!
It's nice if investment increases as well, but you don't generate wealth unless people spend money and recieve something tangible in return.
You don't generate WEALTH by spending your money on things. You may generate wealth for the company making the widget, but not for yourself.
If you want to generate wealth for yourself, you have to invest and let your money work for you. When you invest, your money doesn't sit in some dark drawer somewhere growing an multiplying; it gets lent out to other companies and people so they can build and buy things. That's where the growth comes from. You don't have to produce anything to stimulate the economy, you just need to induce a flow of money (with your investments).
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No, the wholesalers will foot the bill. See my previous post. WalMart has put the squeeze on us, and our vendors are raising their prices. In this case, it's not joe-sixpack footing the bill, it's coming out of our profits and it's affecting my paycheck (fuck-you-very-much-WalMart)!!! If there is less profit in my company, there is less money available for raises and bonuses. WalMart's slack-jawed consumers won't feel this at all.
NO KIDDING! We are a textile distributor and there have been very large increases in the price of cotton. Wal-Mart has told us, "don't pass along a price increase. We won't pay it, and we'll stop buying from you."
Our vendors have raised their prices and we're caught in the middle. We need the buying power WalMart's orders give us, so we can't stop doing business with them. Go monopoly power!
Wal-mart is one of our bigger customers, and they originally has us slated to be an early adopter of RFID in the case.
We were supposed to be working on this in 2004, however they pushed out implementation out to beyond 2006. As far as I know they didn't say why either.
All I know is that we're not slated to be doing anything with RFID anytime in the near future, and just six months ago we were planning on gearing up to implement across our entire supply chain.
Forget faster, it's much more elegant. I would take a mechnical watch over a digital, PDA-on-my-arm miracle of technology anyday. I enjoy my mechnical watches, the precision that went into their design.
A good watch is a thing that tickles geeks because it's intricate, precise, mathematical and interesting. You deal with gears and springs in the watchworks....
I have a crystal-backed watch, you can see the mechanism running and it's simply beautiful to watch it as it winds down, ticking off the time in the process.
I've driven a lot of Bobcat and Case Loaders and this thing doesn't look 1) as stable and 2) as useful as a skid-steer front loader. It looks like the center of gravity is way to high!
Of course, it has pinchers, so bonus points for looking cool.
Instead of jumping right in and converting boxes over to Linux and FreeBSD I quietly received permission to build a couple of FreeBSD servers out of PCs slated for the recycle bin.
Reciently I was involved in some meetings to look at network and server monitoring tools which included Deep Metrix's IP Monitor and Ipswitch's What's Up Gold. Both are pretty "entry level" but we only needed to monitor 25 servers for (mostly) non mission-critical reasons.
I took it on my own to install Nagios on one of my "play" servers over a long weekend. The following Monday I pulled the people together from the previous meetings and showed them what Nagios and FreeBSD could do...monitor everything they had defined as being critical to be monitored and send notifications via a TAP gateway to our IT pager.
Everyone was thrilled, the cost was about 8 hours of my time (they gave me a freebie day off!) and there was no MSFT tax paid.
Now that open source solutions have a) proven themselves in our organization and b) reduced some of our IT costs management is much more interested and much more flexible in investigating and implementing alternative solutions.
As long as Microsoft keeps charging us an arm and a leg for the privledge of implementing their systems (and sometimes they do have a better tool, I can admit that) Linux will have a strong ally in cost-concious managers everywhere if we can tone down the rabid fandom that scares a lot of "normal" people away!
Be polite and political about Linux and alternatives in your organization, and just show what it can do and you'll find people are more receptive to the idea!
About two days later we got a call from a guy who said he was going to sue us.. The powers-that-be said, "Hyuck, hyuck, go ahead buddy..." and he did.
He won pretty handily in court too as I recall. The company ended up paying a $500 fine for the fax, a $100ish fine for court costs PLUS $500ish in legal fees to the plainiff.
Needless to say, the-powers-that-be NEVER tried junk-faxing again (never mind it was a stupid idea in the first place).
-
You must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone has committed a crime
This is true for criminal proceedings. In civil proceedings all you need to do is establish a stronger case than the other side, "beyond a reasonable doubt" doesn't enter in to it!Yeah it sucks -- deeper pockets win, etc. -- but it's something that more people should know. Don't go into a civil case all smug because you think the standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt."
You'll suddenly feel much less smug when the judge hands a decision to the plainiff consisting of your ass, with your wallet still attached, on a platter.
Actually, I thought the big ERP trend was to make consultants rich. According to my users it's not easier for them. I thought the holy-grail of ERP is to be able to get vital information in (near) real-time for the big-wigs. Making life easier for the CFO/CEO/etc to get more broad-reaching reports doesn't necessiarily mean it's easier for the people who have to use the system to enter the data that will eventually make those reports. :-)
So how about support? We pay a ton for PeopleSoft support, but they are damn responsive and typically we have an answer back via email before a phone call is made.
I can't imagine touching an OSS ERP solution without some kick-ass support (which I would be willing to pay big bucks for). I also would have a difficult time (read, impossible time) convincing the CEO, CFO, COO, etc. that they should choose open source for their entire enterprise. They are not going to bite.
This is true. I could call our CEO's cell phone and be pretty much safe in assuming he's either 1) working or 2) sleeping.
Hard work does get you ahead, and at a certian point you get to where you work hard, but are rewarded with money and time so you can play hard. I've had the 90+ hour kill-myself weeks and I've worked hard for a long time. Now I'm at a place where 99% of my critical work gets done between 7am and 5pm. If it happens outside of those hours I expect to take care of the problem, but my efforts do not go unrewarded.
As you expand what you do, your responsibilities will grow. And I've found that while my responsibilities have grown, my freedom and happiness has grown as much or more!
- And, as a sub-question, what's a good one for us lefties? Fountain pens are sure out
Why are fountain pens out? I'm a lefty and I have a pretty nice collection of fountain pens, I write with them all on a regular basis (some $10, some $500) and I've never had a problem. I don't write with my hand twisted around either, just normal writing.I use decent paper, never recycled crap. The pens do much better on a nice bonded paper than whatever is $.23 in the school supply isle. Plus not having to put very much pressure to the paper to write helps keep my hand from cramping!
The final suggestion I have is to check out some different ink. I have a friend who produces and distributed his own line of ink (Private Reserve Ink for those of you who use bottled ink) and there is a large variation in inks, even in inks from the same place. For example his "Tanzanite" ink will flow for days in pens that are otherwise scratchy and hard to get the ink to flow. For some reason it is extremely smooth flowing. In pens that have a really good flow I get almost too much ink using Tanzanite. If you're curious you can check out Private Reserve Inks from almost any pen seller (Fountain Pen hospital, etc.) and I'll plug his web site so you can find a dealer if you're interested (http://www.privatereserveink.com/).
Try changing your ink and see if it solves your smudging problems!
- The first time we had devices in for service it was assumed that someone had touched the speech rate knob while unpacking the thing - as no living thing possible could make any sense of what the synthesis produced at that rate. I guess that it may help that the voice is always the same, though.
I had a blind guy working for me a few years back who had the rate on his screen-resading software turned up so fast that it was just a buzz of noise. I was unable to pick anything out from the voice, but he was able to hear it all an understand it without problems.Email was somewhat interesting from him. It contained punctuation, but usually precious little formatting like paragraph breaks (or at times spaces) because his software didn't "read" a paragraph break, he never added them when typing.
And his ability to recall voices was scary. The first day he was in the office our then sysadmin was introduced and said, "Hi." That's it, just "hi". The blind guy said, "Hey, I know you... You're Rob." At some point several years ago he had spoken briefly on the phone to this guy and was able to recall the voice and pin it to a name. Amazing...
No, and I'm not sure about the effects. But I do know that a healthy fresh water tank needs a certain amount of salt added. This I never understood and I think it only applies to "tropical" fresh water fish (ie: Oscars, Dempsies, Tetras, etc.) I don't know if salt is added to northen fresh water tanks like pike and bass.
I'm sure the extra percentage of fresh water added to the ocean wouldn't be too detremental. I'm thinking it'd be like adding 2 gallons of fresh water to a 50 gallon salt tank. I have no science to back that statement up. Just taking a wild guess.
Fish that live in salty water sometimes and fresh water at other times (think, tide comes in and flushes a basin with salt water) are called Brackish fish. And those waterways are called...wait for it...brackish water.
Adding fresh water to a salt-water aquarium is a common occurence. The salinity increases as the water evaporates out leaving the salts behind. So you add fresh water to return the salinity to a level where the little critters like it to be (depending on what type of little critters you're keeping). As I recall, I used to add a gallon or two of fresh water to my 55 gallon salt-water aquarium at least once a week or so. The only time I added salt water back in was when performing a water change where you remove a large quantity of water (salt and all) and have to add back salt water to keep the salinity correct for your little critters.
It's always about keeping those little critters happy...
Umm, because life in general isn't fair? Why shouldn't somebody be entitled to a better start in life? If I scrape and fight my way to the top, you can damn sure believe I will want my family and my friends to be better off because of it. Why? Because I care about them, and because life isn't fair I want to arm them as much as possible to stack the deck in their favor!
Oh yeah, because it's my God given right to earn what I can earn in my life and do what the hell I want to with it! If I want to leave it to my kids to start off well then so be it!
Why shouldn't he? There was a guy named Marx who thought the same. As I recall, his motto was From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. which is communism my friend.
Thanks but no thanks, I do not support or believe in redistribution of wealth just because someone else makes more than I do. Hell son, go out and have a milltion-dollar-idea and actually follow through on it. Once make your own fortune you'll most likely change your tune...
8645 Admirals Woods Dr
INDIANAPOLIS, IN 46236
317-823-8462
Oh great - I find out they're in my home town... Well Mr. Searcy makes to damn much money; the sub-division he lives in is in of our higher-income areas where all the quasi-celebs and most of the sports stars (Reggie Miller) live.
I'll take donations to go and TP his house! :-)
- As long as they remember their inanimate carbon rod I think they'll do just fine.
In Rod We Trust...Worth checking out, not bad brain-candy and an interesting look at what "coulda' been"...
Amazon link for the lazy: Voyage
Whenever I have an upscale party, I toss Barry Lyndon in the DVD player, randomly skip around for a bit and hit pause. I have a beautiful, suitable-for-framing image I can display on my TV!
It's a running joke that you can pause Barry Lyndon at any random place and have an image that looks like it should be in a museaum. I've yet to disprove this.
Good googlemoogley! Someone mod the parent up!
I'm still wiping coffee off my monitor.
Maybe if you're not skilled, or you're in a speciality that's not in demand in your area.
In my town, tech employment is terrible and I left my last job because of management blunders and just bald-faced lies from management. I didn't have a backup plan, and only a little money in the bank. So, no parachute.
In less than two weeks I found a new job and am a) much, much, much happier and b) better compensated.
This economy is only fatal if you're not talented. There is work out there!
1) THINK
2) THINK AGAIN
3) POST!
4) ???
5) PROFIT!
You don't generate WEALTH by spending your money on things. You may generate wealth for the company making the widget, but not for yourself.
If you want to generate wealth for yourself, you have to invest and let your money work for you. When you invest, your money doesn't sit in some dark drawer somewhere growing an multiplying; it gets lent out to other companies and people so they can build and buy things. That's where the growth comes from. You don't have to produce anything to stimulate the economy, you just need to induce a flow of money (with your investments).
If I had mod points, you sir would be modded UP!!