The people who own the company (the stockholders) aperantly think that the salary of these people is a resonable price to pay given how much more money they are going to be making because they are there.
More likely the boardmembers who set the CEO's compensation are part of the old boy's club that permeates corporate America and boosts that compensation so high that analysts see it as the norm. Check who's on the various boards, watch as the CEO's option prices get restruck after a company's poor performance. It's fundamentally a scam, but they control so much between them it's nigh-impossible to invest in anything else.
Do any TVs actually have 1080 horizontal lines? Even the high-end plasmas I've seen top out at 768. Unless maybe you're using an Apple LCD cinema display as a TV...
You need a Beefy PC to play the latest games like Neverwinter Nights. Just TRY to play that game on a 1000 dollar pc.
It won't run on the P4/2.4, 512 MB RAM, GeForce4 4200 I got for under $900 without monitor from Dell a couple of months ago? And that's with a sound card upgrade and firewire card.
I love the ease of setup of the consoles, but the PCs still look better on the best games due to the higher monitor resolution. Consoles also are better for multiplayer. (But they stink for posting to/....)
Why are you so damn worried about people getting their eyes measured?
Because they're being gauged out, as in "out of the socket." I don't know about you, but I'd be hesitant to pop someone's eye out so I could measure the eyeball, leaving it dangling from the optic nerve and all that...
Re:Local and state governments
on
Largo Loving Linux
·
· Score: 2, Informative
First of all, if you don't allow your employees to d/l and install garbage software from the net, and don't give them access to tweak and mess with drivers, you usually don't have trouble with 'tech support headaches'.
A problem I keep running into, however, is that a lot of Windows apps are written expecting the user to have administrator priviledges. So it can be hard to limit people in this way without creating giant headaches for yourself.
Also, don't forget the time and hassle simply making sure you have the licenses to survive a BSA audit.
Re:If only it weren't in Florida
on
Largo Loving Linux
·
· Score: 3, Funny
hey! florida rulz! its 75 degrees outside in december, anyone else have it better?
Well yeah, but do you really want to live in God's Waiting Room?
What bothers me more is Gary Lauder's assumption that the privilege of watching television comes with the responsibility of viewing every single banal advertisement on television ("I suggested that consumers pay 1 cent per commercial skipped...").
I dunno, would you pay 15-20 cents for a commercial-free half-hour show, on demand? That sounds pretty reasonable to me, since I don't even have to lift a finger to do the commercial skip I would with a TiVo.
And then, at the bottom: "The act says that Web site with a kids.us address cannot post hyperlinks to locations outside of the kids.us domain....which seems unnecessary. If you have a browser that only lets you start in kids.us domains, it should be possible to restrict it to follow only links to other kids.us sites. Those without restricted browsers would be able to follow non-kids links on those sites normally.
I mean if you're in a restaruant and you are going to pay $100+ for the meal and someone's baby is crying, or they are talking too loud
Bad analogy. This is like being in a restaurant and someone (dressed as a restaurant employee) comes up and gives you a bill, you pay it, and then your actual waiter comes with the bill for your meal. It's not the annoyance, it's the fraud.
If Best Buy put the price of their loss leader at $5 and publishes it at 10 pm on thursday, Walmart can jump in and publish theirs at $4
But that's unrelated to the original claim that knowing the prices would alter the customers' behavior. Also, if Wal-Mart can update their ad that late in the cycle, why is Best Buy submitting theirs so early? I could see that other advertising forms might have faster turnaround (not to mention, say, their website), but people tend to compare the Sunday ads with each other.
why would corporations be uptight about their sales info getting pushed out to a wider audience?
A couple of possibilities.
One, you see something will be on sale? Either buy a copy now and demand price-matching at the sale time, or hide a copy now somewhere in the store. Since the store is required by law to have a certain number of copies of a given sale item, they thus end up selling more than that number at the lower price -- and end up either having to spend employee time on price-match issues, or deal with misplaced inventory that the person didn't come back for.
Second, I've seen a link or two recently for "Sunday flyer info today", so it can be sellable info.
Having prices posted everywhere in advance defeats this entire scheme. Now customers will just already know what is on sale before entering the store and just get what they want and get out.
This makes no sense to me. On Sunday morning, I have the prices "in advance", and can choose to run in and get the loss leaders. Having it at 10 pm Thursday isn't much of a difference than having it at 8 am Sunday.
If something like this isn't implemented then where will these people get their money from?
Most people want to sit down and chill come TV time. (Even TiVo owners often don't bother skipping the commercials.) They don't want to hassle with P2P transfers, especially since doing real-time downloads of full-quality HDTV is well beyond any internet link I know of, and such speed is rarely necessary for anything but full-time HDTV, so no one would be willing to pay the extra. So people will still watch TV, buy DVDs, etc.
How many of these services is it possible to opt out of--can you not use the highway system if you don't like how much it costs, or if you can't afford it this month?
If you don't drive, you don't buy gas, and there are federal taxes on gasoline, justified as paying for road construction. So that's one case where you can avoid paying in a sense.
Windows NT is a poor implementation (in some ways) of some fantastically good ideas.
That's funny. I'd say exactly the opposite: that it is an incredible implementation of some half-assed ideas. Consider, as you mentioned, installers. Installing on a Mac often means dragging the program directory onto your hard drive, and you can move an app just as easily. Consider that despite their active attempts to hide them from you (the virtual "My Documents" directory, for example), they can't really make drive letters disappear in Windows. (And not just for administrators. Check any shortcut, for example. Or try to get to the CD-ROM.)
Ever move an application menu by accident? Why on God's green earth would you want to move it anyway? Lots of clever, hard coding devoted to an inane concept.
Security is also a mess, partially for historical reasons (although that historical failure was not necessary), and because there's no equivalent of setuid. I can't run half the programs I buy except in administrator mode, and I have to start them for the kids or else give them the administrator password.
The release hasn't really been pulled and is still available at ftp but we'd rather spare our users a large download that would probably be repeated in a couple of days
Note that if you're running an older version, the "please download a newer version" screen will come up with a download button. Selecting that will download 1.2. I only found out about the 1.2.1 problem because I went to the download page instead.
If a woman can win a case against McDonalds for making coffee too hot and not warning her properly
Gotta love this continuing evidence of how effectively corporations can mold public opinion. Hundreds of people have been received severe burns from McDonalds' coffee, yet they continue (continued?) to serve it through the drive-through at unnecessarily high temperatures in flimsy containers.
Slashdot Mirror
The people who own the company (the stockholders) aperantly think that the salary of these people is a resonable price to pay given how much more money they are going to be making because they are there.
More likely the boardmembers who set the CEO's compensation are part of the old boy's club that permeates corporate America and boosts that compensation so high that analysts see it as the norm. Check who's on the various boards, watch as the CEO's option prices get restruck after a company's poor performance. It's fundamentally a scam, but they control so much between them it's nigh-impossible to invest in anything else.
Personally, I was boggled they wouldn't expect most of them to be used as targets... Pull!
Some TVs have 1080i (high-resolution).
Do any TVs actually have 1080 horizontal lines? Even the high-end plasmas I've seen top out at 768. Unless maybe you're using an Apple LCD cinema display as a TV...
You need a Beefy PC to play the latest games like Neverwinter Nights. Just TRY to play that game on a 1000 dollar pc.
/. ...)
It won't run on the P4/2.4, 512 MB RAM, GeForce4 4200 I got for under $900 without monitor from Dell a couple of months ago? And that's with a sound card upgrade and firewire card.
I love the ease of setup of the consoles, but the PCs still look better on the best games due to the higher monitor resolution. Consoles also are better for multiplayer. (But they stink for posting to
This is not to say that Americans should not learn more foreign languages
We Americans all know a foreign language. It's English, after all.
Why are you so damn worried about people getting their eyes measured?
Because they're being gauged out, as in "out of the socket." I don't know about you, but I'd be hesitant to pop someone's eye out so I could measure the eyeball, leaving it dangling from the optic nerve and all that...
>What is the next law which proves to be obsolete in our world?
Libel, d[e]famation, etc.
Tell that to Dow Jones, Inc., being sued in Australia by someone who downloaded their stuff in Australia...
First of all, if you don't allow your employees to d/l and install garbage software from the net, and don't give them access to tweak and mess with drivers, you usually don't have trouble with 'tech support headaches'.
A problem I keep running into, however, is that a lot of Windows apps are written expecting the user to have administrator priviledges. So it can be hard to limit people in this way without creating giant headaches for yourself.
Also, don't forget the time and hassle simply making sure you have the licenses to survive a BSA audit.
hey! florida rulz! its 75 degrees outside in december, anyone else have it better?
Well yeah, but do you really want to live in God's Waiting Room?
What bothers me more is Gary Lauder's assumption that the privilege of watching television comes with the responsibility of viewing every single banal advertisement on television ("I suggested that consumers pay 1 cent per commercial skipped...").
I dunno, would you pay 15-20 cents for a commercial-free half-hour show, on demand? That sounds pretty reasonable to me, since I don't even have to lift a finger to do the commercial skip I would with a TiVo.
And then, at the bottom: "The act says that Web site with a kids.us address cannot post hyperlinks to locations outside of the kids.us domain. ...which seems unnecessary. If you have a browser that only lets you start in kids.us domains, it should be possible to restrict it to follow only links to other kids.us sites. Those without restricted browsers would be able to follow non-kids links on those sites normally.
I mean if you're in a restaruant and you are going to pay $100+ for the meal and someone's baby is crying, or they are talking too loud
Bad analogy. This is like being in a restaurant and someone (dressed as a restaurant employee) comes up and gives you a bill, you pay it, and then your actual waiter comes with the bill for your meal. It's not the annoyance, it's the fraud.
If Best Buy put the price of their loss leader at $5 and publishes it at 10 pm on thursday, Walmart can jump in and publish theirs at $4
But that's unrelated to the original claim that knowing the prices would alter the customers' behavior. Also, if Wal-Mart can update their ad that late in the cycle, why is Best Buy submitting theirs so early? I could see that other advertising forms might have faster turnaround (not to mention, say, their website), but people tend to compare the Sunday ads with each other.
why would corporations be uptight about their sales info getting pushed out to a wider audience?
A couple of possibilities.
One, you see something will be on sale? Either buy a copy now and demand price-matching at the sale time, or hide a copy now somewhere in the store. Since the store is required by law to have a certain number of copies of a given sale item, they thus end up selling more than that number at the lower price -- and end up either having to spend employee time on price-match issues, or deal with misplaced inventory that the person didn't come back for.
Second, I've seen a link or two recently for "Sunday flyer info today", so it can be sellable info.
Having prices posted everywhere in advance defeats this entire scheme. Now customers will just already know what is on sale before entering the store and just get what they want and get out.
This makes no sense to me. On Sunday morning, I have the prices "in advance", and can choose to run in and get the loss leaders. Having it at 10 pm Thursday isn't much of a difference than having it at 8 am Sunday.
If something like this isn't implemented then where will these people get their money from?
Most people want to sit down and chill come TV time. (Even TiVo owners often don't bother skipping the commercials.) They don't want to hassle with P2P transfers, especially since doing real-time downloads of full-quality HDTV is well beyond any internet link I know of, and such speed is rarely necessary for anything but full-time HDTV, so no one would be willing to pay the extra. So people will still watch TV, buy DVDs, etc.
You're not even paying for it, so you have no rights to it except what the broadcasters permit you.
I didn't force 'em to beam energy at me. Once they do that, it's mine to do with as I wish.
Cable shows, on the other hand...
How many of these services is it possible to opt out of--can you not use the highway system if you don't like how much it costs, or if you can't afford it this month?
If you don't drive, you don't buy gas, and there are federal taxes on gasoline, justified as paying for road construction. So that's one case where you can avoid paying in a sense.
What would happen if something as culturally significant as the Bible or other work of a similar level were created and controlled by a DRM system.
Actually, back in the Dark Ages, the DRM system for the Bible was Latin, which only the clergy could read.
Need to be a little more vague than those ones though
Yeah, I can guess some of them for movies I haven't even seen... (Unbreakable, Crying Game, Sixth Sense)
Something like "she and the cat are the only survivors"
Alien.
Windows NT is a poor implementation (in some ways) of some fantastically good ideas.
That's funny. I'd say exactly the opposite: that it is an incredible implementation of some half-assed ideas. Consider, as you mentioned, installers. Installing on a Mac often means dragging the program directory onto your hard drive, and you can move an app just as easily. Consider that despite their active attempts to hide them from you (the virtual "My Documents" directory, for example), they can't really make drive letters disappear in Windows. (And not just for administrators. Check any shortcut, for example. Or try to get to the CD-ROM.)
Ever move an application menu by accident? Why on God's green earth would you want to move it anyway? Lots of clever, hard coding devoted to an inane concept.
Security is also a mess, partially for historical reasons (although that historical failure was not necessary), and because there's no equivalent of setuid. I can't run half the programs I buy except in administrator mode, and I have to start them for the kids or else give them the administrator password.
The release hasn't really been pulled and is still available at ftp but we'd rather spare our users a large download that would probably be repeated in a couple of days
Note that if you're running an older version, the "please download a newer version" screen will come up with a download button. Selecting that will download 1.2. I only found out about the 1.2.1 problem because I went to the download page instead.
If a woman can win a case against McDonalds for making coffee too hot and not warning her properly
Gotta love this continuing evidence of how effectively corporations can mold public opinion. Hundreds of people have been received severe burns from McDonalds' coffee, yet they continue (continued?) to serve it through the drive-through at unnecessarily high temperatures in flimsy containers.
I think the ideal project would be to create an open source web filter [...]
6. Geeks would get to seek out porn (to find new URLs to blacklist) in the name of creating an open source project...
A DVD/CD-RW? That's sooooooooooooooooo 2001!
Except this one is a DVD player, as well, with the appropriate video outs. You can use your computer as a computer and still play a DVD for the kids.
Mind you, standalone players are cheap enough that it doesn't seem particularly worth buying for that -- but it is more than just a combo drive.