On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:39:23 PM UTC-4, J. Clarke wrote:
On Sat, 10 Aug 2019 17:54:26 -0400, ads wrote:

On Fri, 9 Aug 2019 23:14:49 -0700 (PDT), DerbyDad03
wrote:

On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 12:58:22 AM UTC-4, J. Clarke wrote:
Just a heads up--do _not_ register on the Felder site unless you're
seriously interested in buying a saw _now_.

I made the mistake of registering just to see what the blasted things
cost, and I'm being bombarded with email, phone calls, etc. I'd have
expected them to take the hint after a few months, but they just don't
give up.

I once had a subscription to Woodsmith magazine. Almost as soon as I got
my first issue I started getting emails from their "partners" offering me
all sorts of greats deals on books and plans. In order to take advantage of
the deals, all I had to do was *get a subscription to Woodsmith magazine*.

What? I called Woodsmith customer service and all they would tell me was
that I agreed to accept emails from their partners when I started the
subscription and that I could opt-out at any time. They didn't seem to
get the point that their "partners" were requiring me to sign up for a
subscription that I already had in order to take advantage of their offers.
"We don't control the terms of our partner's offers." WTF?

Sounds like the "partners" get kickbacks on the subsriptions they
generate so your current subscription isn't valid because it doesn't
get them anything. Some days I'd like to be so rich I can't count it,
because then I'd buy some of the really annoying companies (and
politicians - many are for sale) and take them out of the marketplace
- some should be permanently removed. Not being able to do that kind
of change, I vote with the $$$ I do have. Some brands I buy; some I
don't (never owned a Crapsler product and never will - vehicles that
won't go into Park or come out of cruise and the fan speed for the
heater buried 2 or 3 pages deep in the 7 inch display?) I don't buy
Apple products either. In the days of the Apple II, they sold
thousands of those $2500 computers to schools. If they bought 5, they
"gave" the school a free one. But those computers only cost them $500
to manufacture. When they made $10,000 off sales for children's
education, they effectively donated $500. Why not just sell the
computers to the schools at helf price? They wouldn't have been seen
as 'donating" and "helping education" - nor would that have made Jobs
and Wozniak as many million$.
Cynical? Yes, and I plan to stay that way.

I am reminded of the time one of my students came to me asking for
advice. Seems he had become aware that the state vocational/technical
schools had run into an issue with their CAD curriculum. The students
coming in couldn't run MS-DOS so much of the first Autocad course was
teaching them DOS. The decision was made to have an MS-DOS course
that was a prerequisite for the first AUTOCAD course. Fine so far.
But the state put the contract out for bids and somehow or other Apple
won. I wrote my state legislator about it and he came back with
assurances from his "expert" that a Mac was a fine machine for
teaching MS-DOS.

So what was the final outcome?

A fine machine as claimed, a miserable failure or a change of hardware
platform from the get-go?