A lot of cable companies reset your connection every three hours anyway, so some kind of reliable auto-reboot system (like a lamp timer) might make things easier. At least you won't have to get up from your chair!
Maybe your engineers would rather live in the Bay Area, despite the cost of living* -- to enjoy the world-class cosmopolitan atmosphere and cultural amenities, recreational opportunities, natural beauty, and freewheeling cultural vibe that embraces freethinkers and innovators.
Frankly, I can't think of any place more boring, stifling, and backward than the suburban sprawl of North Carolina.
*There's a reason the Bay Area cost of living is so high -- it's called supply and demand.
Actually, Verizon _does_ offer DSL without a landline. I don't know about any price differentials for those who have a landline, but I don't recall having seen one. On the other hand, Comcast will let you have Internet access only. (Remember, the cable line goes from the wall outlet to either the set-top box, the modem/router/gateway, or even both. It's why they include a line splitter in their start-up packages.) The difference is about $15-20 per month.
So, the cable company penalizes you for not buying other services from them, while the phone companies do not. (At least in my area. As always, YMMV.)
YMMV indeed. I know Verizon offers DSL-only in some places, but not here.
Our cable company is Adelphia-now-Comcast. They're so awful you'd have to be crazy to deal with them. Maybe the Comcast takeover will improve things, but it's been awhile already and I see no evidence of it. Unfortunately here in the red states there's no consumer protection. Whatever laws we do have are not enforced.
That's the civilized land of California for you! On the east coast, a landline costs anywhere from $20-35/month minimum. With mine I get only 50 "free" local calls, then it switches to major ripoff rates, even for local calls.
It's the same with me. I pay ~$30 for DSL, but to get it I have to pay an additional $22 for a landline I don't need or want. Add the BS taxes and fees, and the total is around $60. Local cable internet is also around $30, but you can get it without cable tv or anything else. Cable service sucks though, so I'm happy to pay the extra for DSL.
Bummer -- Thinkpads were always Linux-friendly
on
Lenovo To Shun Linux
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· Score: 1
I'm disappointed by this, because Thinkpads have always been some of the most Linux-friendly laptops available. Otherwise Thinkpads are great too, with the best keyboards by far, etc. I'll have a hard time giving up mine.
BTW, I almost ordered a brand-new T42 this morning. I changed my mind for other reasons, but even though I know the T42 works with Linux, I doubt I'll be buying Lenovo products in the future. I've heard the newest models are noticeably junkier already.
While real estate may or may not be the main force driving boomtowns, the propect of making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in real estate appreciation is a major attraction to workers.
In places like Silicon Valley, many people have made more money on their homes than at their jobs. Plenty of people who got there 10 years have turned $500k into $1M or $1.5M, but people who got there in the 60s or 70s have turned $30-50k homes into $3M+, *just by being there.* How many people, even with high salaries, are able to wind up with that much from savings and other investments, in their whole lifetimes? Sure, tech stocks may have offered that opportunity, but most people don't have the knowledge for that. Any idiot can buy a house. For most Americans who can afford it, it's automatic.
So anyone who has been able to squeak by and make a mortgage payment in Silicon Valley for few years has made a fortune, *just by being there.* If this isn't an attraction, I don't know what is.
One reason corporate types wind up so much better off than the rest of us is, early in their careers they get transferred around to various cities every 2-3 years. Most of these places are boomtowns with rapidly appreciating real estate -- business hotspots where the manpower is needed. Each time they move they make a couple hundred grand or more on their house. I know one guy who has hit "the OC," Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Chicago all at the right times. Though his salary is excellent, he still made a lot more on the houses he bought and sold. These were just primary residences too, not really "investments." Remember that just $1k doubled 10 times is $1M. Take (a borrowed!) $200k and double it just 4 times, and you have...
PDF is a display/publishing format.... its useless for collaboration.
Yup. And so are word processor formats. Use plain text, content management systems, or web apps for collaboration, then print them out in the paper format of your choice.
...for the petroleum industry. They're basically paid to discredit biofuels. Look at where their funding comes from. No one in the scientific community takes them seriously, just the sensational popular press.
Focusing on sales is misleading. How much money is really being made? CD sales are higher because of higher prices for CDs, but what about the costs of producing, shipping, storing, and selling them? How much is left as profit? It seems to me digital distribution would be more profitable, because of lower costs. The main problem with it is there are still more retail consumers than online ones.
...say there is. Food, utilities, property taxes, and almost anything you buy in a store is cheaper on the West Coast. But figure 3-4 times the cost for housing in the Bay Area compared to Pittsburgh, and driving at least 20k miles a year. No salary calculator I've seen even comes close to this reality. In fact most of them are a joke.
OTOH, if the housing bubble hasn't burst, you can do what most Californians have been doing for the last several years -- buying any property they can, with an interest-only mortgage if necessary, and making more in real estate appreciation than they do at their jobs. CA is still the land of opportunity...
...the country. How could anyone think they could save money doing this? Just the truck rental, mileage, and gas would be more than paying a mover, let alone hotel bills, food, and doing all that work yourself.
Renting a U-haul trailer would make more sense.
But...
The best solution is to get rid of all your stuff, especially the big stuff. If it still won't fit in your car, rent a minivan. Or buy a cheap van or pickup, and sell it when you reach your destination.
...to people in the East. You just don't deviate from normal patterns and expect to get away with it. There's a cultural freedom in CA that we take for granted until we go elsewhere. The rest of the world is not like that. Dare I say it, it's a big reason CA has been such a font of innovation. People feel free to try anything, without a bunch of naysaying from the peanut gallery. In CA, doing new things, or old things a new way, is encouraged, rather than disparaged.
There's a finished product based on OpenACS called dotLRN -- an intranet-in-a-box for educational use. Email, message boards, calendars, and file sharing are all very well integrated. Try http://www.openacs.org/
Cobasys is a joint venture between Chevron (not Texaco) and ECD Ovonics.
Indeed it is Chevron, my mistake.
But "joint venture" my ass. It's a submarine patent entity, period. Look into who Ovonics really is too, and tell me they don't have similar interests.
Cobasys, a Texaco subsidiary, holds a patent for NiMH batteries. One of the reasons for the hybrid itself is that it carefully skirts this patent by having the internal combustion engine as the prime mover. A battery-only or battery-mostly vehicle might be subject to prohibitive license fees. This is why pluggable hybrids have not been commercially produced either.
...everyone thought it was so cool, In fact this aspect of Napster, where you could see other people's music collections, was what set it apart from other services. Its usefulness hasn't been matched since.
Amazon does exactly the same thing as iTunes, tracking your preferences to make recommendations to other users. No one complains about that.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of cable companies reset your connection every three hours anyway, so some kind of reliable auto-reboot system (like a lamp timer) might make things easier. At least you won't have to get up from your chair!
I sure hope MS doesn't win, because then we'll all be stuck using products and services that suck -- cluttered, cumbersome, and ugly.
Maybe your engineers would rather live in the Bay Area, despite the cost of living* -- to enjoy the world-class cosmopolitan atmosphere and cultural amenities, recreational opportunities, natural beauty, and freewheeling cultural vibe that embraces freethinkers and innovators.
Frankly, I can't think of any place more boring, stifling, and backward than the suburban sprawl of North Carolina.
*There's a reason the Bay Area cost of living is so high -- it's called supply and demand.
Actually, Verizon _does_ offer DSL without a landline. I don't know about any price differentials for those who have a landline, but I don't recall having seen one. On the other hand, Comcast will let you have Internet access only. (Remember, the cable line goes from the wall outlet to either the set-top box, the modem/router/gateway, or even both. It's why they include a line splitter in their start-up packages.) The difference is about $15-20 per month.
So, the cable company penalizes you for not buying other services from them, while the phone companies do not. (At least in my area. As always, YMMV.)
YMMV indeed. I know Verizon offers DSL-only in some places, but not here.
Our cable company is Adelphia-now-Comcast. They're so awful you'd have to be crazy to deal with them. Maybe the Comcast takeover will improve things, but it's been awhile already and I see no evidence of it. Unfortunately here in the red states there's no consumer protection. Whatever laws we do have are not enforced.
That's the civilized land of California for you! On the east coast, a landline costs anywhere from $20-35/month minimum. With mine I get only 50 "free" local calls, then it switches to major ripoff rates, even for local calls.
It's the same with me. I pay ~$30 for DSL, but to get it I have to pay an additional $22 for a landline I don't need or want. Add the BS taxes and fees, and the total is around $60. Local cable internet is also around $30, but you can get it without cable tv or anything else. Cable service sucks though, so I'm happy to pay the extra for DSL.
I'm disappointed by this, because Thinkpads have always been some of the most Linux-friendly laptops available. Otherwise Thinkpads are great too, with the best keyboards by far, etc. I'll have a hard time giving up mine.
BTW, I almost ordered a brand-new T42 this morning. I changed my mind for other reasons, but even though I know the T42 works with Linux, I doubt I'll be buying Lenovo products in the future. I've heard the newest models are noticeably junkier already.
While real estate may or may not be the main force driving boomtowns, the propect of making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in real estate appreciation is a major attraction to workers.
In places like Silicon Valley, many people have made more money on their homes than at their jobs. Plenty of people who got there 10 years have turned $500k into $1M or $1.5M, but people who got there in the 60s or 70s have turned $30-50k homes into $3M+, *just by being there.* How many people, even with high salaries, are able to wind up with that much from savings and other investments, in their whole lifetimes? Sure, tech stocks may have offered that opportunity, but most people don't have the knowledge for that. Any idiot can buy a house. For most Americans who can afford it, it's automatic.
So anyone who has been able to squeak by and make a mortgage payment in Silicon Valley for few years has made a fortune, *just by being there.* If this isn't an attraction, I don't know what is.
One reason corporate types wind up so much better off than the rest of us is, early in their careers they get transferred around to various cities every 2-3 years. Most of these places are boomtowns with rapidly appreciating real estate -- business hotspots where the manpower is needed. Each time they move they make a couple hundred grand or more on their house. I know one guy who has hit "the OC," Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Chicago all at the right times. Though his salary is excellent, he still made a lot more on the houses he bought and sold. These were just primary residences too, not really "investments." Remember that just $1k doubled 10 times is $1M. Take (a borrowed!) $200k and double it just 4 times, and you have...
PDF is a display/publishing format.... its useless for collaboration.
Yup. And so are word processor formats. Use plain text, content management systems, or web apps for collaboration, then print them out in the paper format of your choice.
...for the petroleum industry. They're basically paid to discredit biofuels. Look at where their funding comes from. No one in the scientific community takes them seriously, just the sensational popular press.
http://www.abisource.com/
Focusing on sales is misleading. How much money is really being made? CD sales are higher because of higher prices for CDs, but what about the costs of producing, shipping, storing, and selling them? How much is left as profit? It seems to me digital distribution would be more profitable, because of lower costs. The main problem with it is there are still more retail consumers than online ones.
...say there is. Food, utilities, property taxes, and almost anything you buy in a store is cheaper on the West Coast. But figure 3-4 times the cost for housing in the Bay Area compared to Pittsburgh, and driving at least 20k miles a year. No salary calculator I've seen even comes close to this reality. In fact most of them are a joke.
OTOH, if the housing bubble hasn't burst, you can do what most Californians have been doing for the last several years -- buying any property they can, with an interest-only mortgage if necessary, and making more in real estate appreciation than they do at their jobs. CA is still the land of opportunity...
...the country. How could anyone think they could save money doing this? Just the truck rental, mileage, and gas would be more than paying a mover, let alone hotel bills, food, and doing all that work yourself.
Renting a U-haul trailer would make more sense.
But...
The best solution is to get rid of all your stuff, especially the big stuff. If it still won't fit in your car, rent a minivan. Or buy a cheap van or pickup, and sell it when you reach your destination.
...to people in the East. You just don't deviate from normal patterns and expect to get away with it. There's a cultural freedom in CA that we take for granted until we go elsewhere. The rest of the world is not like that. Dare I say it, it's a big reason CA has been such a font of innovation. People feel free to try anything, without a bunch of naysaying from the peanut gallery. In CA, doing new things, or old things a new way, is encouraged, rather than disparaged.
Ah, the degeneration of our language, by supposedly educated people...
...is very poorly written!
...have lots of real-world experience with VC. Yeah, right.
...where it's a lot cheaper to live, and you can make more money.
There's a finished product based on OpenACS called dotLRN -- an intranet-in-a-box for educational use. Email, message boards, calendars, and file sharing are all very well integrated. Try http://www.openacs.org/
I switched to a laptop, and I'm never going back. Thinkpads have the best keyboards ever.
Cobasys is a joint venture between Chevron (not Texaco) and ECD Ovonics.
Indeed it is Chevron, my mistake.
But "joint venture" my ass. It's a submarine patent entity, period. Look into who Ovonics really is too, and tell me they don't have similar interests.
Cobasys, a Texaco subsidiary, holds a patent for NiMH batteries. One of the reasons for the hybrid itself is that it carefully skirts this patent by having the internal combustion engine as the prime mover. A battery-only or battery-mostly vehicle might be subject to prohibitive license fees. This is why pluggable hybrids have not been commercially produced either.
Oil company conspiracy? You decide...
...everyone thought it was so cool, In fact this aspect of Napster, where you could see other people's music collections, was what set it apart from other services. Its usefulness hasn't been matched since.
Amazon does exactly the same thing as iTunes, tracking your preferences to make recommendations to other users. No one complains about that.
Grow up.