Yikes. A guy tries to bring a little dry wit to the party, and see what happens? I guess you can lead a horse to water, but you can't teach him new tricks.
Now, IANAL, but I am pretty sure that marketing something that is overtly designed in such a way so as to confuse consumers into buying your product, and not your competitors, is illegal. It would be like selling a Linux distro designed to look very similar to Windows XP, and putting it in a green box with a similar font, etc. And then calling it "Mike Rowe Soft Lindows", or some such. I bet M$ would be on you like stink on rice.
What i would like to see is this fake Wii-esque games packaging. I would bet it has Wii fonts and Wii colors, and maybe even a Wii-sounding name ("Whee! Football" maybe)
I think it's important to note that early generation consoles (i.e Atari 2600) cost nearly the same as those made thirty years later - about $300 MSRP (usually discounted). So in 1982 little Jimmy's mom and dad could easily be asked to spend half their mortgage payment on a new console system, plus games. In 2002 a new Xbox/PS2/GameCube was what? Less than five day's pay at minimum wage.
The relatively high price of the 2600 kept the user base pretty small. We all played them, but I bet most of us went to neighbor kids house to do it. Of course, with the video game crash 1983, a massive console glut was created....so maybe everybody's parents bought them after the crash.
Profit is totally fine when a person has alternatives. If I really wanted to, I could produce all my own food/clothing/shelter....people have been doing it fine for 1000's of years. Even today, entire groups of people in the US choose to do that (i.e. Amish). The difference is when someone says 'I have to means to save your life with a simple pill (or procedure, or routine surgery, et al). All you have to do is pay me 30% of your yearly income. No, you can't make payments, and no you can't go to a cheaper competitor, and yes you will need to get this treatment over and over again or you will die'.
Well can't you just share your science with us? We can make our own treatments? 'Oh no,' they say 'we have shareholders to answer to'. The hell?
And regarding unions, they have helped to provide liviable wages and humane working conditions for their members. But once those goals are met, the union basically exists for its own sake. When Boeing (across the street from me) goes on strike because the company wants them to pay $35 a month to cover their $1000/mo in healthcare costs...the whole time crying about how this a 'crime against the American workforce'...it's pretty apparent to me the union(s) have lost their way.
Whoa there. Who said anything about government? Non-profit doesn't mean government funded. They can not be profit driven and still be totally self-funded.
The latest issues of CR (I'm a subscriber) listed carpel tunnel as one of the most over-diagnosed health problems. Something about a for-profit healthcare industry....just sits weird with me. I wonder how many times it would be diagnosed at all if they couldn't get the insurance companies to pony up the dough.
I am a bit wary of 'bandwidth trading' even since Enron: "Enron grew wealthy, it claimed, through its pioneering, marketing and promotion of power and communications bandwidth commodities". What ever came of Enron? I don't remember....
...that sucks. I hadn't heard anything about this. I actually subscribe to this magazine, and find (check that, found) it very helpful. I think if they had developed a way to digitally copy/paste text from the paper to my application, that would have save them. So many times I have said 'this code is really great. I'll just select it all and...oh wait... DAMMIT!'.
I agree that HP makes great servers...my issue is with their support. I provide tier II support for 250 servers in my state. I have to call HP often for hardware support, and it take a freakin' act of Congress to have damn replacement RAM stick sent out.
HP is getting to (or already has arrived) the point where their server support is laughably awful. Pair that with this recent announcement from IBM, and it could be interpreted as death knell for the Proliant line.
That's right, a 'bunch' of the data is sold-to-public numbers. A 'selective sample' of bookstores are used for this information. But the vast majority of the numbers are compiled from wholesaler numbers. The NY Times disputes this, but will not give out there 'selective sample' list to the public, nor disclose the percentage of wholesale numbers used. Just follow the money.
How is Alexa different than any other selective-survey system? The Nielsen ratings are acquired via 'diaries' (or occasionally set-top boxes). Radio 'listener share' is determined similarly by Arbitron. The NY-Times bestseller list is based on books sold to distributors, not books sold to the public (millions of unsold 'bestsellers' get pulped or donated to libraries every ear).
Just come to terms with the fact these organizations are in bed with advertisers and move on with you life.
Well, if it makes you feel any better, I live in Snohomish County in Washington State. They have a pretty high cost-of-living here (the median income is something like $80K/year). So my $68K can only get my a two-bedroom apartment. The cheapest house I can find (that's big enough for my family and not a total dump) is well over $400K. Good times.
My HD satellite box (before I bought the DVR from them) only outputs via HDMI or s-Video. The Series 3 Tivo cannot take HDMI input (at least not in this picture). And of course s-Video cannot display a true HD picture.
I would we willing to pay an extra $300 for a Series 3 that could record HD from my satellite service (Dish Network). Having been a Tivo user for nearly 10 years, I finally had to dump my Tivo and start using the Dish Network ViP622 HD-DVR. It's not bad, but the user interface is no where near as tight as a Tivo. maybe someday Comcast will grace me with cable in my area...
Yeah. All I know is every month I get a check for about $5K. My salary is officially $68K a year. With vacation time and that type of thing figured in there, I think I make something like $40/hour (or less).
...doesn't mean it's cheaper. I am kind of a open-source fanboy myself, but when it came time to either buy Photoshop or spend valuable hours learning to use Gimp, I also opted for the cash-heavy/time-light option.
My employer pays something like $40/hr (I think..I'm salary). So if I spent even 10 hours getting as good with Gimp as I already am with Photoshop, then the closed-source product is cheaper. But I do use all open source at home when time is less important than money.
The people who simply get the spam in their inbox are certainly not the "real victims here", as you said. The actual victims are the people, corporations, and/or non-profits that supply the mails servers and IT personnel around the world. A tremendous amount of their resources are used to manage all this meaningless spam.
For the end user, massive spam is a pain, and could potentially take a measurable amount of time to delete and filter. For the organizations that provide the email to the end user, spam is a direct deficit to their bottom lines. And not all of them are mega-billion-dollar corporations. I work for a non-profit in Washington State than maintains several hundred servers for schools statewide. We have a dedicated FTE who does little else other than manage all the filtering, whitelisting, blacklisting, and mail server configuration & maintenance required to keep the spam under control. That's $50K a year plus benefits - just due to spam.
I don't want to come off as a schvitz here, but why not a Semitic Web? Just replace all the www's with Melvin, or Max, so other Jewish name. Then replace all the.com's with.berg (or maybe.stein in a pinch). Presto! Instant Jeworld Wide Web! Sure it would get a bit megillah, but....meh.
All phone contact must be recorded? What country do you live in exactly? I think that's not really enforceable or even possible in the financial industry, except for maybe at the call-center level. My financial adviser (stocks, bonds, etc.) is available via his cell phone, and I doubt his conversations are "prescribo aliquando". My mortgage broker works in a little office of 6 people, and I've spent many hours there. They certainly don't record phone calls.
In an enterprise level environment, I can see the benefit of tracking corporate email and SMS messages. However, if a corporation uses the ability to 'record a voice conversation' they could find themselves in trouble. I believe (and please correct me if I'm mistaken) the courts had determined that personal email sent via a corporate email system is legally the property of the corporation, but that telephone conversations are still protected as private.
Or at least that's something I read somewhere once (I might have been dreaming).
Slashdot Mirror
Yikes. A guy tries to bring a little dry wit to the party, and see what happens? I guess you can lead a horse to water, but you can't teach him new tricks.
Now, IANAL, but I am pretty sure that marketing something that is overtly designed in such a way so as to confuse consumers into buying your product, and not your competitors, is illegal. It would be like selling a Linux distro designed to look very similar to Windows XP, and putting it in a green box with a similar font, etc. And then calling it "Mike Rowe Soft Lindows", or some such. I bet M$ would be on you like stink on rice.
What i would like to see is this fake Wii-esque games packaging. I would bet it has Wii fonts and Wii colors, and maybe even a Wii-sounding name ("Whee! Football" maybe)
I think it's important to note that early generation consoles (i.e Atari 2600) cost nearly the same as those made thirty years later - about $300 MSRP (usually discounted). So in 1982 little Jimmy's mom and dad could easily be asked to spend half their mortgage payment on a new console system, plus games. In 2002 a new Xbox/PS2/GameCube was what? Less than five day's pay at minimum wage.
The relatively high price of the 2600 kept the user base pretty small. We all played them, but I bet most of us went to neighbor kids house to do it. Of course, with the video game crash 1983, a massive console glut was created....so maybe everybody's parents bought them after the crash.
Oh yeah. I mean wasn't Pong a literal 1-bit game? At that ratio, no other game could stand a chance.
Profit is totally fine when a person has alternatives. If I really wanted to, I could produce all my own food/clothing/shelter....people have been doing it fine for 1000's of years. Even today, entire groups of people in the US choose to do that (i.e. Amish). The difference is when someone says 'I have to means to save your life with a simple pill (or procedure, or routine surgery, et al). All you have to do is pay me 30% of your yearly income. No, you can't make payments, and no you can't go to a cheaper competitor, and yes you will need to get this treatment over and over again or you will die'.
Well can't you just share your science with us? We can make our own treatments? 'Oh no,' they say 'we have shareholders to answer to'. The hell?
And regarding unions, they have helped to provide liviable wages and humane working conditions for their members. But once those goals are met, the union basically exists for its own sake. When Boeing (across the street from me) goes on strike because the company wants them to pay $35 a month to cover their $1000/mo in healthcare costs...the whole time crying about how this a 'crime against the American workforce'...it's pretty apparent to me the union(s) have lost their way.
Whoa there. Who said anything about government? Non-profit doesn't mean government funded. They can not be profit driven and still be totally self-funded.
The latest issues of CR (I'm a subscriber) listed carpel tunnel as one of the most over-diagnosed health problems. Something about a for-profit healthcare industry....just sits weird with me. I wonder how many times it would be diagnosed at all if they couldn't get the insurance companies to pony up the dough.
I nominated myself for the sole purpose of registering for something who's male 'model' is fatter and uglier than I am. Sold!
I am a bit wary of 'bandwidth trading' even since Enron: "Enron grew wealthy, it claimed, through its pioneering, marketing and promotion of power and communications bandwidth commodities". What ever came of Enron? I don't remember....
Don't forget he was in an episode of Family Ties back in the 80's! I bet so totally did Tina Yothers.
...that sucks. I hadn't heard anything about this. I actually subscribe to this magazine, and find (check that, found) it very helpful. I think if they had developed a way to digitally copy/paste text from the paper to my application, that would have save them. So many times I have said 'this code is really great. I'll just select it all and...oh wait... DAMMIT!'.
I agree that HP makes great servers...my issue is with their support. I provide tier II support for 250 servers in my state. I have to call HP often for hardware support, and it take a freakin' act of Congress to have damn replacement RAM stick sent out.
HP is getting to (or already has arrived) the point where their server support is laughably awful. Pair that with this recent announcement from IBM, and it could be interpreted as death knell for the Proliant line.
That's right, a 'bunch' of the data is sold-to-public numbers. A 'selective sample' of bookstores are used for this information. But the vast majority of the numbers are compiled from wholesaler numbers. The NY Times disputes this, but will not give out there 'selective sample' list to the public, nor disclose the percentage of wholesale numbers used. Just follow the money.
How is Alexa different than any other selective-survey system? The Nielsen ratings are acquired via 'diaries' (or occasionally set-top boxes). Radio 'listener share' is determined similarly by Arbitron. The NY-Times bestseller list is based on books sold to distributors, not books sold to the public (millions of unsold 'bestsellers' get pulped or donated to libraries every ear).
Just come to terms with the fact these organizations are in bed with advertisers and move on with you life.
I think they mean the GPS units that are designed to be hard-mounted in boats and cars. I guess they would still be technically portable though....
Well, if it makes you feel any better, I live in Snohomish County in Washington State. They have a pretty high cost-of-living here (the median income is something like $80K/year). So my $68K can only get my a two-bedroom apartment. The cheapest house I can find (that's big enough for my family and not a total dump) is well over $400K. Good times.
My HD satellite box (before I bought the DVR from them) only outputs via HDMI or s-Video. The Series 3 Tivo cannot take HDMI input (at least not in this picture). And of course s-Video cannot display a true HD picture.
I would we willing to pay an extra $300 for a Series 3 that could record HD from my satellite service (Dish Network). Having been a Tivo user for nearly 10 years, I finally had to dump my Tivo and start using the Dish Network ViP622 HD-DVR. It's not bad, but the user interface is no where near as tight as a Tivo. maybe someday Comcast will grace me with cable in my area...
Yeah. All I know is every month I get a check for about $5K. My salary is officially $68K a year. With vacation time and that type of thing figured in there, I think I make something like $40/hour (or less).
...doesn't mean it's cheaper. I am kind of a open-source fanboy myself, but when it came time to either buy Photoshop or spend valuable hours learning to use Gimp, I also opted for the cash-heavy/time-light option.
My employer pays something like $40/hr (I think..I'm salary). So if I spent even 10 hours getting as good with Gimp as I already am with Photoshop, then the closed-source product is cheaper. But I do use all open source at home when time is less important than money.
The people who simply get the spam in their inbox are certainly not the "real victims here", as you said. The actual victims are the people, corporations, and/or non-profits that supply the mails servers and IT personnel around the world. A tremendous amount of their resources are used to manage all this meaningless spam.
For the end user, massive spam is a pain, and could potentially take a measurable amount of time to delete and filter. For the organizations that provide the email to the end user, spam is a direct deficit to their bottom lines. And not all of them are mega-billion-dollar corporations. I work for a non-profit in Washington State than maintains several hundred servers for schools statewide. We have a dedicated FTE who does little else other than manage all the filtering, whitelisting, blacklisting, and mail server configuration & maintenance required to keep the spam under control. That's $50K a year plus benefits - just due to spam.
I don't want to come off as a schvitz here, but why not a Semitic Web? Just replace all the www's with Melvin, or Max, so other Jewish name. Then replace all the .com's with .berg (or maybe .stein in a pinch). Presto! Instant Jeworld Wide Web! Sure it would get a bit megillah, but....meh.
All phone contact must be recorded? What country do you live in exactly? I think that's not really enforceable or even possible in the financial industry, except for maybe at the call-center level. My financial adviser (stocks, bonds, etc.) is available via his cell phone, and I doubt his conversations are "prescribo aliquando". My mortgage broker works in a little office of 6 people, and I've spent many hours there. They certainly don't record phone calls.
In an enterprise level environment, I can see the benefit of tracking corporate email and SMS messages. However, if a corporation uses the ability to 'record a voice conversation' they could find themselves in trouble. I believe (and please correct me if I'm mistaken) the courts had determined that personal email sent via a corporate email system is legally the property of the corporation, but that telephone conversations are still protected as private.
Or at least that's something I read somewhere once (I might have been dreaming).