Sucks to be the victim of a thief who returned garbage and got you stuck with it. It's like the thief gets away with it and the store doesn't get burned for accepting it.
It could be worse -- and was for me, last year. My house was broken into and a box of checks (among other things) was stolen. After filing a police report and changing my routing numbers, the theives cashed them at stores, which came after ME for "checks written on a closed account". Had they checked ID they would have seen they were forged. Despite the fact that they negligently cashed these forged checks and were informed of the forgeries, they turned it in to the State's Attorney anywey -- who then proceeded to harrass ME, calling me at work daily. I finally "snapped" on one of the idiot phone monkeys (who probably had a law degree) and told him "fuck the whole goddamed buch of you, I've had enough of this goddamned shit, take me to court and see the fucking judge laugh you out of court because THE'RE FORGED CHECKS YOU GODDAMNED IDIOTS!!!"
That seems to have ended it, six months after the nightmare begain. But I was victimized THREE TIMES -- first by the burglars, then by the forgery victims (who fucking ASKED for it by not checking ID), then by the goddamned incompetent Sangamon County States Attorney who should have prosecuted the store owners for filing a false complaint. But it appears business owners are above the law in Illinois, while they will gladly prosecute people they know to be innocent.
The law does NOT protect you in the US in any way unless you own a business. It seems government "of the people, for the people and by the people" has perished from the earth.
Yes, I'm getting a little cranky in my old age. Shit didn't used to be like this.
What high lever exec hasn't been? I mean, you have banks the US government bailinmg out giving million dollar bonuses to the CEOs that ran them into the ground to begin with. Not just banks -- look at Hewlett Packard, and how much Fiona was paid.
You are correct, and the GP is not. I've seen cables pulled like he described, but as you say there is already a pipe for the cable to be pulled through. My dad, a now-retired lineman, laid power cables thirty years ago, and they had to dig a trench for the cable, at least initially (replacing old ones was fairly easy). Digging the trench was actually not that hard, they have very good powered digging equipment that does the job fast.
As to copper, hell, I have DSL and even the wifi from my router is fast enough for video... unless you're into FPS games how much speed do you need?
The record industry's problem was indeed similar to kodak's. The record industry used to sell physical objects that had actual value. Now they call themselves the "music industry" instead of the "record industry" and guess what? They're selling the wrong product. Their mistake was attacking Napster -- they should have used it as a conduit for selling CDs, but instead equated CDs with MP3s. Had they embraced "piracy" rather than fighting it, they would still be selling shiny disks. Nobody want to pay for something intangible. people want stuff.
I'll be 60 this year, I've had free music all my life. Why the change now, just because it's digital? I'd far prefer to pick up a CD at the store and rip it than to log on to iTunes or somewhere and buy intangible bits that can disappear without warning or any trace they ever existed.
In my own experience, the only people I see using Yahoo are computer illiterate users with old email accounts there who refuse to switch to Gmail
I was on Gmail before I was on Yahoo's mail... switched to Yahoo when Google closed my email account with no explanation after about six months of use. Been on Yahoo's for over 5 years now with no trouble whatever. Switching email services is a huge pain in the ass, why would anyone dump their Yahoo account for an Gmail account, especially since with Google you're in constant danger of being instantly cut off from your email with no apparent reason or explanation? Just because "google is cool and yahoo sux0Rz?"
Far from being computer illiterate, I had an email account in 1983 with Compuserve, I've written games in assembly and hand-assembled the machine code, I build my own computers. I have a copy of the TTL cookbook that I read maybe a dozen times before it went in the basement, as well as a few hundred other books I checked out of the library, and had my on web sites in 1997.
I ask natural language questions at slashdot all the time, and almost always get good answers... from real humans. Which was how AltaVista worked. They didn't use web crawlers, they had humans picking sites. I had a hell of a time getting my site listed with them, although I finally did.
Who prints anything at home these days, anyway? Especially photos....
Elderly people... I had this same conversation with my 84 year old mom, who wanted to know if Walgreen's would print pictures from her new digital camera. "Why," I asked her, "would you want to print them when you can see them on your computer monitor, much larger and sharper?"
"Well," she said, "I like hardcopies. And what if I want to mail them to somebody?"
"You have email."
"But what of I want to mail it through the post office?"
I just sighed and told her "yes, Walgreens can print them for you."
I was on gMail first, went to Yahoo mail when google closed my account without explanation. I got another gMail account, but I only use it for G+ related stuff.
However, I much prefer google's email interface. When I open my mail I want the inbox there, but Yahoo insists on first asking me to re-enter my ID and password even though I checked the box that says "save it" and sometimes does it on a completely different password page that FireFox doesn't have the password to, and I have to look the damned thing up (the trouble with strong passwords). Then it takes me to the "everything" email page that doesn't show new mail, but does show their news stories (as bad as newspapers' HTML is, Yahoo's is the very worst).
But at least they didn't yank my account like google did. That happened years ago, and I'm still pissed at Google for it, the bastards.
Like everything else in the race to the bottom, you get what you pay for - and the 7 cent print is the equivalent of a Big Mac. Cheap, satisfying in the short term, but utter crap.
Everyone gets it backwards. "You get what you pay for" is sales talk, and often incorrect. You do, however, usually pay for what you get... but not often do you get what you think you're paying for. Take that big mac. Cheap? Not compared to a hamburger you cook at home. A nickle for the meat, a penny for the cheese and bread, fraction of a penny for the stove's gas, five minutes of your time. Not cheap in the least; you're paying for convinience, for laziness, not a hamburger. And if you eat lunch at lunchtime, it isn't even convinient unless you think spending fifteen minutes idling your engine at the drive through is "convinient."
No, but if someone got the work as public domain (with a public domain notice attached)
Um, what? Public domain works need no notice, and until recently anything without a copyright mark and date was considered public domain (I wish they would reinstate that requirement).
I doubt that. What will really happen is some giant corporation with a lot of patent lawyers will buy the "intellectual property" of synthetic spider silk and it will remain expensive
For twenty years when the patent runs out. Inventors are much better off than artists, who have to wait 95 years to use any artistic innovations (innovations like Howlin wolf's "uh how how how" which he sucessfully sued ZZ Top for).
Twenty years isn't that long (inless you're 25), 95 years is literally FOREVER. I'll be 60 this year, and no music or movies made in my PARENTS' lifetimes have entered the public domain, but I've lived through plenty of outdated patents. The problem with patents isn't that they grant a limited time monopoly, but that they are extremely expensive but if you have the money they're trivial to get patents on the most obvious of "innovations".
I would never consider "resale value" whan buying a house. I buy a house to live in. I buy it for ME. I've never once bought or even rented a house I ever planned on moving out of. You buy a house usually with a 20 or 30 year mortgage, that's quite a while in the future for your crystal ball to tell what will and won't sell in twenty years.
That's one reason the housing market crashed -- too damned many people buying houses not to live in or rent out, but to hold for a couple of years until the price rose. Pretty stupid, considering that whatever you make from the price inflation when you sell it, you will have lost when you replace it.
"Starter home" is marketspeak from realitors, whose jobs are to sell houses, and as many as possible. Buy the best house you can afford and stay there!
I'm surprised Yahoo is even still in business. Their sites are the worst on the internet. Hell, on the old computer at work, three tabs with Yahoo news stories use 100% of the CPU. Five tabs lock the PC up. Where did they find the idiots who make their sites? Awful. Simply awful.
I don't see the connection with Apple. Kodak's demise came from the fact that even though they invented the hand hald camera, their film was what made them great, not their cameras. No professional photographer ever used a Kodak camera. You say "were heavily used by the creative classes", I say "citation needed" unless you're referring to the use of their film, which was unequaled. Kodak cameras were cheap consumer products. When film all but became obsolete all they had were patents, they lost the money making part of the business. Heck, consumer-grade cameras themselves are becoming obsolete, since nearly every phone has a megapixel camera built in.
If Kodak works on making the best photo printers, and making them affordable, they have a chance of not dying... now, any way. Everything dies, even companies.
You hit the nail square on the head. I didn't use DreamWeaver myself, but I did examine the code in almost any site I visited, and never saw anything but a clusterfuck on any of them, but the way you're doing it sounds like exactly the way to do it. You are correct, just because you own a hammer and saw doesn't make you a carpenter. It takes training and practice.
Sadly, it seems there are very few like you. It seems that most places are like "a coder costs WHAT? Look, just buy a copy of DreamWeaver and let the intern make the damned site!"
To tell the truth I haven't done any HTML or javascript for maybe 5 years, and aside from not having slashdot-like forums my "Springfield Fragfest" site was as sophisticated as anything out there (my other sies were simple as dirt). As it was a gaming site, yes I did have things following the cursor, I had animated graphic mouseovers in the navigation buttons, and little fun things like a danceing strogg that if you moused over it, Sonic the Hedgehog would zip past, the Strogg got annoyed, and Sonic ran past again and got bloodily stomped on (it was my own animations). I had user-controllable music (play/stop/volume), falling snow in December, etc. I didn't find it hard at all. I might today, like I said I haven't coded in a while.
As to IE6, I feel your pain. I let my sites lapse about the same time it came around; they just got rid of that clusterfuck of a browser where I work a few months ago. Somebody should have been boiled in oil for releasing IE6!
Odd, the javascript and HTML I was using on my sites worked in either browser. You only got the "best viewed in..." at your site if you sucked at writing web pages, didn't follow WC3 standards (both browsers had "extras" that weren't part of the standard), and especially if you used MS's proprietary HTML "standards" (like their "mouseover" tag; I used javascript for mouseovers, mine worked in both) and j-Script instead of javascript... and especially if you didn't know how to code at all and used MS's Front Page.
Then as now, if you suck at HTML you suck at making web sites. If you use an HTML generator rather than learning HTML, your site will suck as bad as 90% of them out there. Want your site to stand out? Hire a good coder.
They focus on looks. That's their job. The last time I saw a web page built by a designer, it took 30 seconds just to load the page because they added so many wordpress plugins to make their site look "just so".
And it's hilarious, because its isn't going to look "just so" unless the user is using the exact same monitor/screen, same resolution, same aspect ratio, same orientation, and maybe even same browser.
I can wield a hammer. Does that make me a carpenter?
Yes, but it doesn't make you a competent carpenter. That takes training and practice, like everything else.
No. I don't want to think of it like writing source code. I want to think of it like placing objects on a blank page. I want to be able to manipulate the elements directly, and think of shapes and locations and colors as shapes and locations and colors, not hex code.
The trouble is, you still wind up with HTML and CSS, except that it won't render well on but half the screens and browsers, you will have no idea how screwed it is on any screen you haven't tried it on. You want to place objects on a blank page. What's the aspect ratio of your blank page? What's the orientation of your blank page? How big is your blank page? Is your blank page a six foot wide mural, or a phone screen? Design for one and it will suck on the other. Design for portrait and it will suck in landscape. That's why HTML is a markup language; no two screens are going to render the same, and the more you try to force it, the worse it will render.
These tools all produce crappy code. How good is your phone at understanding voice commands? Well, that's about how good these tools are at writing code.
As in "fast, cheap, or good -- pick two?" I I've notices that ten years ago before these types of programs became widespread, pretty much any page would render well on pretty much any browser or monitor. Now, I go to Yahoo News using FF on IE7 and the goddamned video window covers the text. I go to most sites with my phone and it won't render at all.
Fast and lazy produces junk that kinda sorta works sometimes under some circumstances. Write your code by hand and stick to standards, and it will render well anywhere. Whether or not to use a tool like Dreamweaver depends on whether or not you want quality, and whether or not you know how to code. And IMO if you don't know HTML and CSS you shouldn't be producing web pages in the first place.
We're getting to the point "don't assume ignorance when the answer might involve malice instead".
Don't confuse Hanlon's Razor with mcgrew's razor. Hanlon (which I believe is a misspelling of Heinlein) "Never assume malice what incompetence explains". mcgrew: "never assume incompetence what greedy self-interest explains".
If I "screw up" and benefit from the "screwup", you should assume the "mistake" wasn't really mistaken. If I screw up and you're harmed but I'm not helped, Hanlon should come into play.
IIRC, most US corn production is not dry land, but irregated
You don't RC or your original source is faulty. There is very little irrigated cropland in the midwest where almost all the corn is grown. We get lots of rain -- this isn't southern California.
Slashdot Mirror
Sucks to be the victim of a thief who returned garbage and got you stuck with it. It's like the thief gets away with it and the store doesn't get burned for accepting it.
It could be worse -- and was for me, last year. My house was broken into and a box of checks (among other things) was stolen. After filing a police report and changing my routing numbers, the theives cashed them at stores, which came after ME for "checks written on a closed account". Had they checked ID they would have seen they were forged. Despite the fact that they negligently cashed these forged checks and were informed of the forgeries, they turned it in to the State's Attorney anywey -- who then proceeded to harrass ME, calling me at work daily. I finally "snapped" on one of the idiot phone monkeys (who probably had a law degree) and told him "fuck the whole goddamed buch of you, I've had enough of this goddamned shit, take me to court and see the fucking judge laugh you out of court because THE'RE FORGED CHECKS YOU GODDAMNED IDIOTS!!!"
That seems to have ended it, six months after the nightmare begain. But I was victimized THREE TIMES -- first by the burglars, then by the forgery victims (who fucking ASKED for it by not checking ID), then by the goddamned incompetent Sangamon County States Attorney who should have prosecuted the store owners for filing a false complaint. But it appears business owners are above the law in Illinois, while they will gladly prosecute people they know to be innocent.
The law does NOT protect you in the US in any way unless you own a business. It seems government "of the people, for the people and by the people" has perished from the earth.
Yes, I'm getting a little cranky in my old age. Shit didn't used to be like this.
What high lever exec hasn't been? I mean, you have banks the US government bailinmg out giving million dollar bonuses to the CEOs that ran them into the ground to begin with. Not just banks -- look at Hewlett Packard, and how much Fiona was paid.
You are correct, and the GP is not. I've seen cables pulled like he described, but as you say there is already a pipe for the cable to be pulled through. My dad, a now-retired lineman, laid power cables thirty years ago, and they had to dig a trench for the cable, at least initially (replacing old ones was fairly easy). Digging the trench was actually not that hard, they have very good powered digging equipment that does the job fast.
As to copper, hell, I have DSL and even the wifi from my router is fast enough for video... unless you're into FPS games how much speed do you need?
The record industry's problem was indeed similar to kodak's. The record industry used to sell physical objects that had actual value. Now they call themselves the "music industry" instead of the "record industry" and guess what? They're selling the wrong product. Their mistake was attacking Napster -- they should have used it as a conduit for selling CDs, but instead equated CDs with MP3s. Had they embraced "piracy" rather than fighting it, they would still be selling shiny disks. Nobody want to pay for something intangible. people want stuff.
I'll be 60 this year, I've had free music all my life. Why the change now, just because it's digital? I'd far prefer to pick up a CD at the store and rip it than to log on to iTunes or somewhere and buy intangible bits that can disappear without warning or any trace they ever existed.
In my own experience, the only people I see using Yahoo are computer illiterate users with old email accounts there who refuse to switch to Gmail
I was on Gmail before I was on Yahoo's mail... switched to Yahoo when Google closed my email account with no explanation after about six months of use. Been on Yahoo's for over 5 years now with no trouble whatever. Switching email services is a huge pain in the ass, why would anyone dump their Yahoo account for an Gmail account, especially since with Google you're in constant danger of being instantly cut off from your email with no apparent reason or explanation? Just because "google is cool and yahoo sux0Rz?"
Far from being computer illiterate, I had an email account in 1983 with Compuserve, I've written games in assembly and hand-assembled the machine code, I build my own computers. I have a copy of the TTL cookbook that I read maybe a dozen times before it went in the basement, as well as a few hundred other books I checked out of the library, and had my on web sites in 1997.
I ask natural language questions at slashdot all the time, and almost always get good answers... from real humans. Which was how AltaVista worked. They didn't use web crawlers, they had humans picking sites. I had a hell of a time getting my site listed with them, although I finally did.
Infoseek was far better, but still not a Google.
Who prints anything at home these days, anyway? Especially photos....
Elderly people... I had this same conversation with my 84 year old mom, who wanted to know if Walgreen's would print pictures from her new digital camera. "Why," I asked her, "would you want to print them when you can see them on your computer monitor, much larger and sharper?"
"Well," she said, "I like hardcopies. And what if I want to mail them to somebody?"
"You have email."
"But what of I want to mail it through the post office?"
I just sighed and told her "yes, Walgreens can print them for you."
I was on gMail first, went to Yahoo mail when google closed my account without explanation. I got another gMail account, but I only use it for G+ related stuff.
However, I much prefer google's email interface. When I open my mail I want the inbox there, but Yahoo insists on first asking me to re-enter my ID and password even though I checked the box that says "save it" and sometimes does it on a completely different password page that FireFox doesn't have the password to, and I have to look the damned thing up (the trouble with strong passwords). Then it takes me to the "everything" email page that doesn't show new mail, but does show their news stories (as bad as newspapers' HTML is, Yahoo's is the very worst).
But at least they didn't yank my account like google did. That happened years ago, and I'm still pissed at Google for it, the bastards.
Like everything else in the race to the bottom, you get what you pay for - and the 7 cent print is the equivalent of a Big Mac. Cheap, satisfying in the short term, but utter crap.
Everyone gets it backwards. "You get what you pay for" is sales talk, and often incorrect. You do, however, usually pay for what you get... but not often do you get what you think you're paying for. Take that big mac. Cheap? Not compared to a hamburger you cook at home. A nickle for the meat, a penny for the cheese and bread, fraction of a penny for the stove's gas, five minutes of your time. Not cheap in the least; you're paying for convinience, for laziness, not a hamburger. And if you eat lunch at lunchtime, it isn't even convinient unless you think spending fifteen minutes idling your engine at the drive through is "convinient."
No, but if someone got the work as public domain (with a public domain notice attached)
Um, what? Public domain works need no notice, and until recently anything without a copyright mark and date was considered public domain (I wish they would reinstate that requirement).
I doubt that. What will really happen is some giant corporation with a lot of patent lawyers will buy the "intellectual property" of synthetic spider silk and it will remain expensive
For twenty years when the patent runs out. Inventors are much better off than artists, who have to wait 95 years to use any artistic innovations (innovations like Howlin wolf's "uh how how how" which he sucessfully sued ZZ Top for).
Twenty years isn't that long (inless you're 25), 95 years is literally FOREVER. I'll be 60 this year, and no music or movies made in my PARENTS' lifetimes have entered the public domain, but I've lived through plenty of outdated patents. The problem with patents isn't that they grant a limited time monopoly, but that they are extremely expensive but if you have the money they're trivial to get patents on the most obvious of "innovations".
I would never consider "resale value" whan buying a house. I buy a house to live in. I buy it for ME. I've never once bought or even rented a house I ever planned on moving out of. You buy a house usually with a 20 or 30 year mortgage, that's quite a while in the future for your crystal ball to tell what will and won't sell in twenty years.
That's one reason the housing market crashed -- too damned many people buying houses not to live in or rent out, but to hold for a couple of years until the price rose. Pretty stupid, considering that whatever you make from the price inflation when you sell it, you will have lost when you replace it.
"Starter home" is marketspeak from realitors, whose jobs are to sell houses, and as many as possible. Buy the best house you can afford and stay there!
I'm surprised Yahoo is even still in business. Their sites are the worst on the internet. Hell, on the old computer at work, three tabs with Yahoo news stories use 100% of the CPU. Five tabs lock the PC up. Where did they find the idiots who make their sites? Awful. Simply awful.
I don't see the connection with Apple. Kodak's demise came from the fact that even though they invented the hand hald camera, their film was what made them great, not their cameras. No professional photographer ever used a Kodak camera. You say "were heavily used by the creative classes", I say "citation needed" unless you're referring to the use of their film, which was unequaled. Kodak cameras were cheap consumer products. When film all but became obsolete all they had were patents, they lost the money making part of the business. Heck, consumer-grade cameras themselves are becoming obsolete, since nearly every phone has a megapixel camera built in.
If Kodak works on making the best photo printers, and making them affordable, they have a chance of not dying... now, any way. Everything dies, even companies.
Exactly. How does someone pirating a copy of PhotoShop that they can't afford harm Adobe in any way?
You hit the nail square on the head. I didn't use DreamWeaver myself, but I did examine the code in almost any site I visited, and never saw anything but a clusterfuck on any of them, but the way you're doing it sounds like exactly the way to do it. You are correct, just because you own a hammer and saw doesn't make you a carpenter. It takes training and practice.
Sadly, it seems there are very few like you. It seems that most places are like "a coder costs WHAT? Look, just buy a copy of DreamWeaver and let the intern make the damned site!"
To tell the truth I haven't done any HTML or javascript for maybe 5 years, and aside from not having slashdot-like forums my "Springfield Fragfest" site was as sophisticated as anything out there (my other sies were simple as dirt). As it was a gaming site, yes I did have things following the cursor, I had animated graphic mouseovers in the navigation buttons, and little fun things like a danceing strogg that if you moused over it, Sonic the Hedgehog would zip past, the Strogg got annoyed, and Sonic ran past again and got bloodily stomped on (it was my own animations). I had user-controllable music (play/stop/volume), falling snow in December, etc. I didn't find it hard at all. I might today, like I said I haven't coded in a while.
As to IE6, I feel your pain. I let my sites lapse about the same time it came around; they just got rid of that clusterfuck of a browser where I work a few months ago. Somebody should have been boiled in oil for releasing IE6!
Odd, the javascript and HTML I was using on my sites worked in either browser. You only got the "best viewed in..." at your site if you sucked at writing web pages, didn't follow WC3 standards (both browsers had "extras" that weren't part of the standard), and especially if you used MS's proprietary HTML "standards" (like their "mouseover" tag; I used javascript for mouseovers, mine worked in both) and j-Script instead of javascript... and especially if you didn't know how to code at all and used MS's Front Page.
Then as now, if you suck at HTML you suck at making web sites. If you use an HTML generator rather than learning HTML, your site will suck as bad as 90% of them out there. Want your site to stand out? Hire a good coder.
They focus on looks. That's their job. The last time I saw a web page built by a designer, it took 30 seconds just to load the page because they added so many wordpress plugins to make their site look "just so".
And it's hilarious, because its isn't going to look "just so" unless the user is using the exact same monitor/screen, same resolution, same aspect ratio, same orientation, and maybe even same browser.
I can wield a hammer. Does that make me a carpenter?
Yes, but it doesn't make you a competent carpenter. That takes training and practice, like everything else.
Dude, don't feed the goddamned trolls! Especially since that lame pun is way too old to even start to begin to attempt to try to be funny.
No. I don't want to think of it like writing source code. I want to think of it like placing objects on a blank page. I want to be able to manipulate the elements directly, and think of shapes and locations and colors as shapes and locations and colors, not hex code.
The trouble is, you still wind up with HTML and CSS, except that it won't render well on but half the screens and browsers, you will have no idea how screwed it is on any screen you haven't tried it on. You want to place objects on a blank page. What's the aspect ratio of your blank page? What's the orientation of your blank page? How big is your blank page? Is your blank page a six foot wide mural, or a phone screen? Design for one and it will suck on the other. Design for portrait and it will suck in landscape. That's why HTML is a markup language; no two screens are going to render the same, and the more you try to force it, the worse it will render.
These tools all produce crappy code. How good is your phone at understanding voice commands? Well, that's about how good these tools are at writing code.
Sometimes fast beats hand codeing everything.
As in "fast, cheap, or good -- pick two?" I
I've notices that ten years ago before these types of programs became widespread, pretty much any page would render well on pretty much any browser or monitor. Now, I go to Yahoo News using FF on IE7 and the goddamned video window covers the text. I go to most sites with my phone and it won't render at all.
Fast and lazy produces junk that kinda sorta works sometimes under some circumstances. Write your code by hand and stick to standards, and it will render well anywhere. Whether or not to use a tool like Dreamweaver depends on whether or not you want quality, and whether or not you know how to code. And IMO if you don't know HTML and CSS you shouldn't be producing web pages in the first place.
We're getting to the point "don't assume ignorance when the answer might involve malice instead".
Don't confuse Hanlon's Razor with mcgrew's razor. Hanlon (which I believe is a misspelling of Heinlein) "Never assume malice what incompetence explains". mcgrew: "never assume incompetence what greedy self-interest explains".
If I "screw up" and benefit from the "screwup", you should assume the "mistake" wasn't really mistaken. If I screw up and you're harmed but I'm not helped, Hanlon should come into play.
You are talented enough at soldiering that you can do the work for the CPU, SD card, and hdmi port? Damn your good.
Sheesh, you kids today... it ain't hard. And why do you want to damn my good?
IIRC, most US corn production is not dry land, but irregated
You don't RC or your original source is faulty. There is very little irrigated cropland in the midwest where almost all the corn is grown. We get lots of rain -- this isn't southern California.