After taking into account square footage and the asking price of other homes in the area along with public tax records and other public records that i was able to find I decided on a house and a price. I offered 15k less than the asking price and they excepted with in 45 minutes.
They were probably just delighted you didn't notice that they had an idiotic floor plan and the carpets all were all covered in shit. I mean, square footage and tax records are great. Two houses can be the same size, same age, and assessed the same taxes and still be easily worth $20,000 or more apart.
But I'm sure you did actually base your decision on the relative merits of the actual house you were buying rather than just the demographic real estate data.
It also doesn't take into account the sellers finances. In my experience that's the biggest factor on price. Do they need to move or do they need the money? Divorcing - they probably just want out... job transfer they want out quick... already put an offer on a new place they want out before the deal closes and the double mortgage payments they can't possibly afford start... do they just want a bigger yard for the kids and pets? they can afford to ignore the low ball offers, ditto if they are looking to downsize and retire; unless there are health issues or expenses motivating the sale they too can afford to wait.
I sold my last place 15k above asking. First offer we got came in 5k below and we turned it down. Two weeks later we had 2 offers to choose from.
The place we bought, the owners moved all of $500 bucks. They weren't in a rush to sell. We could have gotten the place 3 doors down across the street for $10k less, but this one was better. End unit, next to a creek, great floor plan... the owners knew they'd get their asking, if not from us then someone else.
Oh, and Apple is hardly alone in sacrificing user-installable parts in favor of making things thinner and lighter. Lenovo's X1 Carbon, which is the closest thing that the traditional Windows vendors have to a MacBook Air, doesn't have upgradeable RAM or storage either.
Difference is that Apple price structure runs across their whole product line. Its not just the Air.
Lenovo's X1 Carbon, which is the closest thing that the traditional Windows vendors have to a MacBook Air, doesn't have upgradeable RAM or storage either.
Perhaps not, but there are 20 different Windows vendors each with a line up of ultrabooks. So the odds of finding the pre-configured option you want is a lot higher; and thanks to 20 different vendors they compete on features and price.
Apple has 2 13" macbook airs. The one with the bigger SSD and the one with the smaller SSD. And they cost X, and will still cost X right up until the day they are discontinued. Take it or leave it.
I consider not releasing several updates to the same computer line in a year to be an advantage
I don't really disagree, and there's no question that Dell's budget consumer stuff that's constantly changing is often crap.
But theres two extremes, and neither is good. I'm not asking for new models weekly, but as the price of ram and hard drives and cpus come down, then the price of the laptop should come down with it. Or they should just start including larger hard drives and more ram and cpu upgrades at the base model price.
Seriously, you do realize *all* vendors do this, right?
Generally not to quite the same blatant extent. Especially as other vendors typically have a much wider selection of pre-configured options to choose from with various bundles of upgrades added at reasonable prices.
Yes it costs more to go 'a la carte' with customization, but I don't usually need to. Apple doesn't offer much choice. There are all of 2 MacBook airs at 13", and both of them are specc'd identically except for the SSD.
If was on the Dell site, there'd probably be like 8 to choose from in each of 3 product lines. Not that Dell's overabundance of options is necessarily better, but odds are a lot better you can get a per-configured option that meets your needs. Dell also has a variety of sales and promotions, so there are deals to be had if you watch.
You could turn off flashblock for a couple minutes.
In any case I didn't watch the whole thing, but its saying essentially that in several of the designs the bulk of the mass has been elevated to 4 feet or so off the ground, presumably to make it convenient for a standing human to access.
Coincidentally this means that its about windshield height, and if a car runs into one.... well its not a good design for that.
Note that the Airs have their DDR3L memory soldered directly onto the motherboard to save space.
The upgrade pricing applies to the entire line not just airs. And its definitely true that macs have become steadily less user-upgradable, meaning they just have you even more over the barrel when it comes to pricing the upgrades.
Al-awlaki was promoting terrorism, and associated with Al Qaeda
So if, hypothetically the government pronounces "evilviper" a terrorist associated with Al Qaeda, you'd be ok dodging drone strikes for the rest of your probably short life?
See, the problem with Al-awlaki is fundamentally that there was no trial. No defense. You and Obama even I might all be pretty convinced of his doubt, but that's beside the point. I don't care if the police catch a guy committing a crime red handed having witnessed the criminal act from start to finish. You don't skip due process and jump straight over to sentencing without a trial.
Snowden was never in the military, so it can't get that kind of treatment.
Sorry, you don't get to tell us to put our faith in the integrity of a system that's just been exposed demonstrating it has no integrity.
Assange, Snowden, whether we approve of what they did or not, they are right to attempt to refuse to be subject to a trial in America. America by its actions now lacks the credibility that it would conduct a fair trial for these people, and there is no moral reason any one should willingly participate in an unfair trial.
Every time a competitor produces an Air apparent in a similar form factor the price comes in about the same.
For the base model. Just don't select any upgrades.
Especially don't select RAM upgrades. Apple charges $100 to upgrade from 4GB to 8GB of RAM... so effectively $100 for 4GB. You can get 8GB of brand name (Corsair, G.Skill, Crucial...) laptop ram at RETAIL for less than $70.
So... you can buy twice the amount of ram at -retail- for 30% less than Apple will charge you just to upgrade.
THAT is the 'mac premium'.
The other big piece of the mac premium is the comparative slowness with which apple refreshes specs combined with the complete lack of price updates. So today, at launch, the MacBook Air is a decent value. Six months from now it will be the same specs and the same price, while everything from everyone else has either gotten cheaper or better or both.
Where you can see on average many products go for over a year without an update, while the price doesn't change a penny. People buying a mac pro in May 2012 were buying the same specs for the same money as they were paying for a mac pro in July 2010. At launch the Mac Pro was reasonable value. By the time it got a refresh the Mac Pro was laughably expensive for a laughably out of date product. It wouldn't be so bad if the price drifted down, or if the specs got regular bumps... but they don't.
When a major new chipset is released everyone releases their new products based on it, and blows out stock on any old stuff. Not apple. Haswell is out, great. But the macbook pro doesn't have it yet, you still get last years chipset, and at last years prices.
Moral seems to be buy a mac product shortly after launch and its good value for the money; but pay attention to the upgrades. Hard drive capacity bumps, RAM bumps, and any adapters tend to be just stupid expensive from apple.
A real hero would gladly go to jail to prove his point.
What point would that prove exactly?
A politically radicalized scumbag would just run away.
No. The politically radicalized scumbag are the ones who are willing to be martyred to make a point.
Normal people value their lives and their freedom, and aren't willing to throw it away just to make a point to other people who apparently just want to throw them in prison.
And screens have gotten a lot bigger since then. And you can minimize it when you just want to type...
It also makes it harder when you're trying to do phone support for a relative novice.
Fair enough. but
a) optimizing the user interface for remote-support phone support of novices is up there among the most ridiculous things I've ever heard. b) who is doing even semi-regular remote support without a remote assistance tool at this point?
Trying to describe the appearance and location of a particular icon (assuming they're even on the right tab) takes longer than telling them to select this from this menu.
Home tab, respond section, forward... Folder tab, cleanup section, run rules now. everything is labelled with text.
Yes, ok, it looks like the ribbon is only ever so slightly larger. I imagine you were expecting something more. But its not 1995 and 800x600 is a distant memory. I'm running 1980x1200 now. And the ribbon takes up a smaller fraction of my screen than the toolbars+menu did in the mid 90s.
No to mention the ribbon is easily minimized (that little caret, next to the help icon on the right, minimizes the ribbon).
requires more clicks
You are going to need to cite some hard data to back that claim. The ribbon is shallower with much more functionality at the surface than the old system. That was one of the primary design objectives.
Bottom line, if you have N digital copies then what is the benefit of keeping the original DVD over one N+1 digital copies of the DVD?
Near as I can tell. Zero benefit. And massively increased storage requirements. So make one extra digital archive and discard them. Better still donate them! to public libraries? independent / private archivists? You don't have to "destroy" them -- which is surely about as counter-instinctual as it gets for an archivist.:)
eventually you will not be able to read them anymore
Odds are that if there were errors reading from it today, you won't get a better copy from that disc 50 years from now. Better to make copies from 2 different discs or exchange back ups from another center. 2 different rips of the same disc is better than 2 copies of a rip from the same disc in terms of ever being able to restore missing information from a rip.
The mafia must be kicking themselves they wasted their time with protection rackets, which were illegal, when they could have been doing this.
Allegedly, the mafia started casinos as a way to launder money from their other activities. Turned out the casinos were profitable enough on their own to make the illegal activities not worth the additional risk.
Who are the morons spreading "software-defined" bullshit when there already is a common, well-understood word that perfectly describes the feature?
Well, I can have a "software phone" which is a phone-as-app that runs on my desktop. Or I have have a "programmable phone" which describes pretty much any non-trivial office phone one can buy.
But what I find is worse is the stupid ribbon interface for office, it's like poorly organized game of find the hidden object.
I'm really not sure how its inherently any worse than the old menu structure plus toolbars. Its more consistent and easier to manage than a bunch of disconnected toolbars, and a deep menu hierarchy.
I think its only real disadvantage is that its "different" and people tend to reject change unless there is an overwhelming and obvious immediate benefit to it.
Took me a while to get used to, but I don't dislike it now. And would not prefer to go back.
if B is truly the best option, then how is it rational for people who really *DO* prefer B to vote for anyone but B?
My example presumed that those people did vote B.
The people who voted A and C with B as a second choice were voting their consciences, which is what you say should happen. A voting system where they can rank candidates lets them make the political statement about who has their support, knowing that it can't hand the election to their least favorite candidate. Their least favorite candidate might still win, but not in any part because of how THEY voted.
Being all "noble" and voting for somebody you don't like for some greater good is bullshit, plain and simple... and at best is a self-delusion that enables a person to live with themselves more easily afterward.
Being able to rank candidates instead of just picking one, acheives precisely what you are asking for. People can vote for who they like most.
They don't have to even consider the strategic angle that maybe their preferred hasn't got a chance of winning and they are effectively giving their least favorite candidate a better shot of winning.
And again... if an independent actually achieved 25% of the popular vote nationwide, that would be *HUGE* news.... and, as I said, could probably even be the precursor to electoral reform, which would result in the changing of the rules that are so desperately needed.
That example was just to show how spectacularly badly the current voting system can fail. In reality a candidate who pulls even a few percent away from a tight race can swing the balance between the two front running candidates. That shouldn't be possible.
Lets try explaining this another way:
Suppose we hold an election between A and B, and B wins. Then the majority wants B. And B should be elected.
The population has said that given a choice between A and B the majority want B more than A. There's no complexity, no voting strategically. Everyone just votes for A or B. Winner takes it, and the winner is B.
So if after that election we immediately hold another one the next day, with A, B, and C. C happens to be similar to B and some of the voters that like B more than A, decide they like C even more than B, and much more than A, and switch their vote to C.
Potentially this draw enough votes from B that A ends up winning. That's idiotic.
The fact that some of them want C even more than B doesn't change the fact that the majority of the population already said they want B more than A.
Slashdot Mirror
After taking into account square footage and the asking price of other homes in the area along with public tax records and other public records that i was able to find I decided on a house and a price. I offered 15k less than the asking price and they excepted with in 45 minutes.
They were probably just delighted you didn't notice that they had an idiotic floor plan and the carpets all were all covered in shit. I mean, square footage and tax records are great. Two houses can be the same size, same age, and assessed the same taxes and still be easily worth $20,000 or more apart.
But I'm sure you did actually base your decision on the relative merits of the actual house you were buying rather than just the demographic real estate data.
It also doesn't take into account the sellers finances. In my experience that's the biggest factor on price. Do they need to move or do they need the money? Divorcing - they probably just want out... job transfer they want out quick... already put an offer on a new place they want out before the deal closes and the double mortgage payments they can't possibly afford start... do they just want a bigger yard for the kids and pets? they can afford to ignore the low ball offers, ditto if they are looking to downsize and retire; unless there are health issues or expenses motivating the sale they too can afford to wait.
I sold my last place 15k above asking. First offer we got came in 5k below and we turned it down. Two weeks later we had 2 offers to choose from.
The place we bought, the owners moved all of $500 bucks. They weren't in a rush to sell. We could have gotten the place 3 doors down across the street for $10k less, but this one was better. End unit, next to a creek, great floor plan... the owners knew they'd get their asking, if not from us then someone else.
I wouldn't read much into it its an uncommon last name with that exact spelling, but its not that uncommon.
Oh, and Apple is hardly alone in sacrificing user-installable parts in favor of making things thinner and lighter. Lenovo's X1 Carbon, which is the closest thing that the traditional Windows vendors have to a MacBook Air, doesn't have upgradeable RAM or storage either.
Difference is that Apple price structure runs across their whole product line. Its not just the Air.
Lenovo's X1 Carbon, which is the closest thing that the traditional Windows vendors have to a MacBook Air, doesn't have upgradeable RAM or storage either.
Perhaps not, but there are 20 different Windows vendors each with a line up of ultrabooks. So the odds of finding the pre-configured option you want is a lot higher; and thanks to 20 different vendors they compete on features and price.
Apple has 2 13" macbook airs. The one with the bigger SSD and the one with the smaller SSD. And they cost X, and will still cost X right up until the day they are discontinued. Take it or leave it.
I consider not releasing several updates to the same computer line in a year to be an advantage
I don't really disagree, and there's no question that Dell's budget consumer stuff that's constantly changing is often crap.
But theres two extremes, and neither is good. I'm not asking for new models weekly, but as the price of ram and hard drives and cpus come down, then the price of the laptop should come down with it. Or they should just start including larger hard drives and more ram and cpu upgrades at the base model price.
No new firmware, or big redesigns are required.
Seriously, you do realize *all* vendors do this, right?
Generally not to quite the same blatant extent. Especially as other vendors typically have a much wider selection of pre-configured options to choose from with various bundles of upgrades added at reasonable prices.
Yes it costs more to go 'a la carte' with customization, but I don't usually need to. Apple doesn't offer much choice. There are all of 2 MacBook airs at 13", and both of them are specc'd identically except for the SSD.
If was on the Dell site, there'd probably be like 8 to choose from in each of 3 product lines. Not that Dell's overabundance of options is necessarily better, but odds are a lot better you can get a per-configured option that meets your needs. Dell also has a variety of sales and promotions, so there are deals to be had if you watch.
You could turn off flashblock for a couple minutes.
In any case I didn't watch the whole thing, but its saying essentially that in several of the designs the bulk of the mass has been elevated to 4 feet or so off the ground, presumably to make it convenient for a standing human to access.
Coincidentally this means that its about windshield height, and if a car runs into one .... well its not a good design for that.
I'm just pointing out that Snowden isn't Al-awlaki, nor Manning
While that's tautologically true, in the eyes of the law they are equal... or should be, until proven otherwise.
and it's pure paranoid psychotic ramblings to claim he'd be treated like either one.
Right. I'm sure they'd find some new way to be miserable douchebags to Snowden. That seems to be the trend so far.
Yes, I can tell that it's Canada. (I lived there for a few years.) There is no damage.
Well that, and the Canada Post written on the mailbox, and the newspaper box next to it for the Saskatoon Sun. :)
Note that the Airs have their DDR3L memory soldered directly onto the motherboard to save space.
The upgrade pricing applies to the entire line not just airs. And its definitely true that macs have become steadily less user-upgradable, meaning they just have you even more over the barrel when it comes to pricing the upgrades.
However where I live the distance between residences is about 0.5 mile, and if they create a mailbox cluster it would be about 3 miles away.
You mean like these...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Canadian_rural_mailboxes.jpg
Canada's had them for decades. Although those are from the 70s... new ones look more like this:
http://www.rcmpveteransvancouver.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/IMG_0206_edited-1.jpg
I'm having a really hard time working up the level of apparent outrage you have over this.
erm "convinced of his doubt" --> convinced of his guilt.
Al-awlaki was promoting terrorism, and associated with Al Qaeda
So if, hypothetically the government pronounces "evilviper" a terrorist associated with Al Qaeda, you'd be ok dodging drone strikes for the rest of your probably short life?
See, the problem with Al-awlaki is fundamentally that there was no trial. No defense. You and Obama even I might all be pretty convinced of his doubt, but that's beside the point. I don't care if the police catch a guy committing a crime red handed having witnessed the criminal act from start to finish. You don't skip due process and jump straight over to sentencing without a trial.
Snowden was never in the military, so it can't get that kind of treatment.
Sorry, you don't get to tell us to put our faith in the integrity of a system that's just been exposed demonstrating it has no integrity.
Assange, Snowden, whether we approve of what they did or not, they are right to attempt to refuse to be subject to a trial in America. America by its actions now lacks the credibility that it would conduct a fair trial for these people, and there is no moral reason any one should willingly participate in an unfair trial.
Every time a competitor produces an Air apparent in a similar form factor the price comes in about the same.
For the base model. Just don't select any upgrades.
Especially don't select RAM upgrades. Apple charges $100 to upgrade from 4GB to 8GB of RAM... so effectively $100 for 4GB. You can get 8GB of brand name (Corsair, G.Skill, Crucial...) laptop ram at RETAIL for less than $70.
So... you can buy twice the amount of ram at -retail- for 30% less than Apple will charge you just to upgrade.
THAT is the 'mac premium'.
The other big piece of the mac premium is the comparative slowness with which apple refreshes specs combined with the complete lack of price updates. So today, at launch, the MacBook Air is a decent value. Six months from now it will be the same specs and the same price, while everything from everyone else has either gotten cheaper or better or both.
A year from now, its even worse. This is a decent site for tracking things.
http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/
Where you can see on average many products go for over a year without an update, while the price doesn't change a penny. People buying a mac pro in May 2012 were buying the same specs for the same money as they were paying for a mac pro in July 2010. At launch the Mac Pro was reasonable value. By the time it got a refresh the Mac Pro was laughably expensive for a laughably out of date product. It wouldn't be so bad if the price drifted down, or if the specs got regular bumps... but they don't.
When a major new chipset is released everyone releases their new products based on it, and blows out stock on any old stuff. Not apple. Haswell is out, great. But the macbook pro doesn't have it yet, you still get last years chipset, and at last years prices.
Moral seems to be buy a mac product shortly after launch and its good value for the money; but pay attention to the upgrades. Hard drive capacity bumps, RAM bumps, and any adapters tend to be just stupid expensive from apple.
A real hero would gladly go to jail to prove his point.
What point would that prove exactly?
A politically radicalized scumbag would just run away.
No. The politically radicalized scumbag are the ones who are willing to be martyred to make a point.
Normal people value their lives and their freedom, and aren't willing to throw it away just to make a point to other people who apparently just want to throw them in prison.
It is inherently worse, in my opinion, because it takes up a great chunk of screen real estate
Very nearly the same actually.
Office 95, 800x600
http://softpick2.com/uploads/posts/2011-08/1314566684_word-2010-screenshot-1.jpg
Office 2010, 800x600
http://kkcdn-static.kaskus.co.id/images/2013/03/04/5230853_20130304074203.png
And screens have gotten a lot bigger since then. And you can minimize it when you just want to type...
It also makes it harder when you're trying to do phone support for a relative novice.
Fair enough. but
a) optimizing the user interface for remote-support phone support of novices is up there among the most ridiculous things I've ever heard.
b) who is doing even semi-regular remote support without a remote assistance tool at this point?
Trying to describe the appearance and location of a particular icon (assuming they're even on the right tab) takes longer than telling them to select this from this menu.
Home tab, respond section, forward ... Folder tab, cleanup section, run rules now. everything is labelled with text.
The ribbon takes up more space
Does it now?
Office 95, 800x600
http://softpick2.com/uploads/posts/2011-08/1314566684_word-2010-screenshot-1.jpg
Office 2010, 800x600
http://kkcdn-static.kaskus.co.id/images/2013/03/04/5230853_20130304074203.png
Yes, ok, it looks like the ribbon is only ever so slightly larger. I imagine you were expecting something more. But its not 1995 and 800x600 is a distant memory. I'm running 1980x1200 now. And the ribbon takes up a smaller fraction of my screen than the toolbars+menu did in the mid 90s.
No to mention the ribbon is easily minimized (that little caret, next to the help icon on the right, minimizes the ribbon).
requires more clicks
You are going to need to cite some hard data to back that claim.
The ribbon is shallower with much more functionality at the surface than the old system. That was one of the primary design objectives.
and is less customizable.
Erm...what? The ribbon is fully customizable.
> people tend to reject change
> Took me a while to get used to, but I don't dislike it now. And would not prefer to go back.
Nice example.
I admit I'm a person. :)
er... "2 different rips of the same disc"
I actually meant rips of the same title from different discs.
You should keep the DVDs as long as possible
Bottom line, if you have N digital copies then what is the benefit of keeping the original DVD over one N+1 digital copies of the DVD?
Near as I can tell. Zero benefit. And massively increased storage requirements. So make one extra digital archive and discard them. Better still donate them! to public libraries? independent / private archivists? You don't have to "destroy" them -- which is surely about as counter-instinctual as it gets for an archivist. :)
eventually you will not be able to read them anymore
Odds are that if there were errors reading from it today, you won't get a better copy from that disc 50 years from now. Better to make copies from 2 different discs or exchange back ups from another center. 2 different rips of the same disc is better than 2 copies of a rip from the same disc in terms of ever being able to restore missing information from a rip.
The mafia must be kicking themselves they wasted their time with protection rackets, which were illegal, when they could have been doing this.
Allegedly, the mafia started casinos as a way to launder money from their other activities. Turned out the casinos were profitable enough on their own to make the illegal activities not worth the additional risk.
Who are the morons spreading "software-defined" bullshit when there already is a common, well-understood word that perfectly describes the feature?
Well, I can have a "software phone" which is a phone-as-app that runs on my desktop. Or I have have a "programmable phone" which describes pretty much any non-trivial office phone one can buy.
I think there is a difference there, don't you?
Strange how no-one "rejected change" in any other office version.
What change? Seriously, what was the big UI change between Office 95, 98, 2000, and 2003 that people would have objected to?
But what I find is worse is the stupid ribbon interface for office, it's like poorly organized game of find the hidden object.
I'm really not sure how its inherently any worse than the old menu structure plus toolbars. Its more consistent and easier to manage than a bunch of disconnected toolbars, and a deep menu hierarchy.
I think its only real disadvantage is that its "different" and people tend to reject change unless there is an overwhelming and obvious immediate benefit to it.
Took me a while to get used to, but I don't dislike it now. And would not prefer to go back.
if B is truly the best option, then how is it rational for people who really *DO* prefer B to vote for anyone but B?
My example presumed that those people did vote B.
The people who voted A and C with B as a second choice were voting their consciences, which is what you say should happen. A voting system where they can rank candidates lets them make the political statement about who has their support, knowing that it can't hand the election to their least favorite candidate. Their least favorite candidate might still win, but not in any part because of how THEY voted.
Being all "noble" and voting for somebody you don't like for some greater good is bullshit, plain and simple... and at best is a self-delusion that enables a person to live with themselves more easily afterward.
Being able to rank candidates instead of just picking one, acheives precisely what you are asking for. People can vote for who they like most.
They don't have to even consider the strategic angle that maybe their preferred hasn't got a chance of winning and they are effectively giving their least favorite candidate a better shot of winning.
And again... if an independent actually achieved 25% of the popular vote nationwide, that would be *HUGE* news.... and, as I said, could probably even be the precursor to electoral reform, which would result in the changing of the rules that are so desperately needed.
That example was just to show how spectacularly badly the current voting system can fail. In reality a candidate who pulls even a few percent away from a tight race can swing the balance between the two front running candidates. That shouldn't be possible.
Lets try explaining this another way:
Suppose we hold an election between A and B, and B wins. Then the majority wants B. And B should be elected.
The population has said that given a choice between A and B the majority want B more than A. There's no complexity, no voting strategically. Everyone just votes for A or B. Winner takes it, and the winner is B.
So if after that election we immediately hold another one the next day, with A, B, and C. C happens to be similar to B and some of the voters that like B more than A, decide they like C even more than B, and much more than A, and switch their vote to C.
Potentially this draw enough votes from B that A ends up winning. That's idiotic.
The fact that some of them want C even more than B doesn't change the fact that the majority of the population already said they want B more than A.
They only look at the mechanic's involvement with other people that are within 3 hops of the suspect.
Cite?
If they pull the mechanics records, they have the fact that he talked to me. That may not be what they are "interested in" but they have it.
I'm HIGHLY skeptical they request just the subset of the mechanics records that intersect with other people within 3 hops of the suspect.