Posts by Armando 123

If you chip a tooth and need surgery, would you rather have it happen in, say, London or New York, or would you rather have that happen in Zaire?

It's always about money

A friend works for a charity that says they feed needy children, but I think they really raise money. That seems to be what they do most, with spreading guilt a distant second.

I suppose

Collecting crash data (such as the high spike in Gs, like they have in open wheel racing) would be a good thing, so the engineers can make things safer. I get that. And on our old Envoy, we got diagnostic reports on component wear, performance, etc, which was darn nice to have. But yeah, a lot of it doesn't need to be recorded.

It's the water container on the back of the loo

And as lawyers write, pass, and interpret the law, that ain't happenin'

Eaten by a polar bear, perhaps

Uh ...

Until you've worked in an empty chicken house on a humid 100F day I don't want to hear about programming. And I'm a programmer.

I'd like to see .om for a spiritualist network.

Well, maybe, but let's not write off Apple yet. They've still got a LOT of great people there, and I've never bought that it was all Jobs.

Oh come on. For one thing, they don't get their brakes from Toyota.

GM has made some pretty good cars in recent years. The Cadillac CTS is darn good, the Saturn Sky/Pontiac Solstice was a fun little car, the Pontiac G6 was a darn good car for its class, and Buick has had the highest customer satisfaction rating in Consumer Reports. And when I test-drove a Volt at an event, even my wife (whom I've nicknamed "Parnelli" and who hates American cars) was impressed. They still make some that aren't good, but at least they aren't as hateful as the Prius or as ugly as the Nissan Cube.

Evil dinosaur

Eddie Izzard has done significant research into this, though he mainly focused on giraffes.

@turnip handler

"The advantage that Microsoft is that they don't create the hardware so they should be able to work with the high, mid and low end hardware producers to complete in all markets, personal and enterprise. "

Ah, but that's been MS' approach to everything, and the only thing it's won them is the PC market. Everything else has been a fiscal drain or has "won" due to their spending ghastly amounts of money.

The tight integration has been Apple's secret sauce. Because they make (or rather design and control the manufacturing) of the hardware, they can make tighter integration of HW and SW, which helps debloat the SW. (Notice I said "helps", not "prevents".) That didn't win them the PC market (and we know a lot of the factors in that), but it's been a boon to them in portable music players, phones, tablets, ...

And even then, their reliability/return numbers in PCs is high, their PCs tend to be higher quality (in terms of lifetime, time of usefulness, first in class with X technology, etc), and the satisfaction ratings are pretty good.

Not here

Seriously? I live in one of the few Midwest cities that's been doing okay during the recent economic blahs, and I am getting people constantly calling me for Oracle, Java, PHP, RoR, Perl, etc. I'm getting calls from national recruiters. Hell, I even get questions about Objective C, which I haven't programmed in years. The .NET and C# guys I know and network with are looking over their shoulders and asking me to pass anything on to them; apparently more than a little enterprise work is moving from their technologies.

And this is in traditional, older companies in a somewhat conservative city in the Midwest. Anecdote <> global truth, but it's something that's caught my attention.

*ahem*

Sir, we couldn't get the sharks. They're protected.

I don't think think you humans are descended from dinosaurs; however, I have seen some who aren't too far down the road from fish. I have also met a couple who conform to Wodehouse's description of "looks like a parrot dragged backwards through a privet hedge".

Or rather

"on Merkin worker's wages"

That should be "on Merkin worker's taxes". Did you know Connecticut is the most expensive place in the world to do business in terms of business taxes?

Huh?

Fugly never stopped people from buying Windows or NASCAR shirts.