I'm going to have to disagree with that one. A bunch of old mainframe guys I know worked for Control Data Corporation in the 80s. One of their big customers was the LDS for their massive genealogy project. Most of them spent a good deal of time at LDS offices in SLC, where they clearly recall having to sneak caffeinated coke from the local 7-11 inside a thermos.
I'm not an expert on what their holy book says or doesn't say, I can only say that LDS managers back then got bent out of shape over caffeine.
The Russians are quite good at iterative design and have been for decades. They'll built a jet, make improvements, build another, make more improvements, and so on. The end result is they tend to have programs that operate at a fraction of the cost of the US analog. But what they have at 2020 won't be anywhere close to what the US has. It may never be anywhere close to the US as they have always had trouble with collecting the intellectual capital to compete with high paying US Defense contractors. In the past there wasn't enough incentive. Time will as they have had more privatization in the last decade.
You people are under the misguided impression that the hospital is required to treat your cancer. They aren't. They have to stabilize you, but they aren't under any obligation to run you through the treatment program. Need a replacement organ? You're F'd. Nobody is going to do squat for you with out cash up front.
There's a reason why medical financing is a growing business in the US. The luck ones are the very very poor that qualify for medicaid or the very old that have medicare. The rest of us better hope we keep our insurance plans.
The UK and Canada have their issues. But there are a lot of countries that came after them and got it right.
Moreover, people have a very rose colored view of the current US system when it comes to wait times. It's not unusual to see the exact same wait issues in the US. In particular since insurance companies and HMO have specific plan networks that limit choice of who, when and where one can see a doctor.
The classic example I see is hip and knee replacement. You hear stories about Canadians coming to the US and paying cash and getting right in. In the US system Cash talks. If you have insurance it's not unusual to have mandated second opinions and referrals (which can take weeks or more). There can also be limits on who/when/where it can take place. A doctor can serve multiple hospitals in a metropolitan area, but a care network may only credential him for a specific hospital. At the very least a major surgery is going to require a pre-claim to be submitted to the insurance company. A lot of the time that means your patient records will be sent off to India or Eastern Europe where a "doctor" will review them and determine if you really need that surgery or not.
You get all sorts of red tape. And unlike single payer systems, there are dozens of different red tape. That means a billing department is dozens of people unlike everywhere else where it's a handful. Who pays for that? You do. The consultants the providers hire to optimize their claims to get the most out of the insurance company. You pay for that too. The consultants the insurance companies hire to optimization their claims process to pay the least amount of money. You get to pay for them as well.
I think emulating the Swiss would be fantastic. There are incredibly capitalistic. Almost all the insurance companies are private, but they can't make a profit on health insurance. To level the playing field the gov't sets the price list and claims policy.
What I find most interesting is while the companies actually ended up fine in the end. They can't make money on core health insurance, but they can sell other insurance products to the customers at a profit. In the end studies show the insurance companies ended up making more money because they had a semi-captive customer base to market and bundle other products too.
We pay way too much for services here in the US. MRI in the US is $1500-2500. MRI in Japan is under $200. A Cardiac Surgeon in the US makes a seven figure salary. That level of salary would be a scandal in other parts of the world.
Nothing is clear about this. When there is an acquisition there are assets and liabilities. You can't just transfer the assets to another company and then walk away from the liabilities. Without assets the TextDrive shell would have been required to go straight into bankruptcy court. And BK courts take a rather dim view of trying to get out of paying bills by playing a shell game with the assets. What we can say for sure is that kind of drama didn't seem to happen.
Given the acquisition was in 2005 and they were supporting the lifetime folks until recently, I would say that's a pretty good argument can be made that Joyent assumed the liability of the lifetime customers. I would speculate they may be taking a calculated risk that that there aren't enough people to warrant a class action and the worst case they'll cut some checks with a NDA. The problem will quietly go away.
A good example of "Lifetime" agreements can be found with airlines. Delta Airlines has acquired several competitors over the years, almost all of them had a small subset of lifetime Lounge/Club memberships.
For Northwest airlines, which was a merger, the lifetime memberships were honored, and continue to be honored.
For TWA, Delta acquired specific TWA assets in bankruptcy court. Because Delta was one of many buyers of assets they did not assume the liability of the lifetime agreements. TWA folks were SOL.
So, in general, unless they have done something to distance themselves from the liability of the Lifetime memberships I just don't see them getting out of the obligation.
I think Apple is the only computer maker out there that actually gives a crap about audio. My load the onboard audio from most PC makers is horrible. You also get TOS out on all modern Macs (The headphone plus is also a Micro TOS out.). Still, in this day and age you shouldn't have to buy an external sound card. The audio should ben engineered from the start not to be crap.
Like many technology items, the Navy contracts them out. HP got a sweet no-bid contract extention (HP bought EDS which originally bid it). Since then they have been charging the tax payer over $2000 a year to provide network connectivity... for EACH WORKSTATION.
In theory the Navy is supposed to start rolling their own stuff, but my guess is since this is on slashdot HP is going to make a big stink about it and shut it down.
I haven't owned a Gameboy since the GBA but the I keep hearing this assertion that the sales of the 3DS are weak. Out of the gate the Nintendo DS (which is thought to be extremely popular) had 14 Million sales year one. The 3DS did 17 million in sales the first year. Now I only went to public school, but I was taught 17 million is greater than 14 million.
You have a lot more overhead for a network show. Starting at the top with studio management and producers. Add to that the various guilds and unions that actors, writers, directors and other creative staff might belong to and it can really balloon. Even at minium scale the labor costs for a two week production would hit about $400K for 70 people @ 2 weeks.
These productions trim costs because they don't have studio overheads, and have much cheaper costs for creative staff. In particular if the creative staff if willing to do something like Dr. Horrible, where they are looking for a paycheck based on DVD royalties, not upfront costs. It's a different market and I think the creative community is willing to trade the guaranteed paid check for more creative control and a stake in the final production.
I don't think Echostar really wants to skip commercials. They've been larding up the UI with ads the last few years (though not nearly as bas as the cable company's DVRs). I think what they want to do is use this as a bargaining chip.
FOX and ABC in particular have been sticking it to service providers. Sure, they'll renew a contract for the local affiliate... after you pay more money for some other channels.
I concur, fly by wire-by-wire had nothing to do with it. Side sticks are here to stay and popular with more than just Airbus. A linked or back-driven yoke may have helped, but there's a far more compelling argument to be made for having Angle of Attack sensors and feedback.
If there was an Angle of Attack readout on the dash board that likely would have created a cross-check opportunity. The technology has been around for decade, but really hasn't caught on (or been required) commercially.
That assumes a linier upgrade path. Companies just don't work that way. A lot of them went from Office XP to Office 2007. Office 2003 only worked with XP plus and it came out during a time when a lot of companies were doing OS upgrades. They don't like to deploy office suites until they have a year or two of service packs and fixes out.
I will note I did make one mistake. The file -> Save As was an issue with Office 2007 that was corrected with Office 2010. The problem is you didn't see Office 2010 really start getting deployed until mid 2011. So that's a number of years of irritation with the Office 2007 product. I'm quite sure Office 2007 would have made more sense if people went to Vista, but that obviously didn't happen.
As far as why more companies don't go with Open Office, well, first off, until recently Oracle really clouded the waters on what the future of the product would be (fall out from the Sun acquisition.) Secondly, the folks making the decision are most likely Microsoft Certified Professionals. I think there is some baias, but I also think it's a much safer career move NOT to rock boat. Finally, there are bound to be folks that *shudder* use MS Access.
Office 2010 sold licenses because Office XP went EoL.
Sit someone down who's been using office since the 90's with Office 2010 while still being saddled with Windows XP (extremely common in the corporate environment even today). Tell them to find Save As. Watch even the most mild mannered person get physically angry because it's not in an obvious place. The UI components when first released assumed that people would be using Vista (which obviously didn't happen for most companies).
Oddly enough I don't mind the ribbon UI on Office 2011 Mac, but that's because it still have a standard menu bar up top that gives me a choice between ribbon or traditional menu UI. Though I would be hard pressed to actually buy Office Mac on my own because LibreOffice really does 99.9999% of what I do and is free.
If I was AC I'd be more concerned about the fact they flew a TATL flight with only 95 passengers on a 200 passenger plane. They were already lossing tens of thousands of dollars on the flight as is.
The problem isn't that they aren't commissioned, it's that you can't fire anyone. A buddy of mine was a "turn-around" guy for another retailer. He got hired by BB a couple years ago. Problem is you can't turn around the stores because you're not allowed to fire the weak and the lame from the store. If anything the number of poor sales people actually inflates because those who are good at sales eventually move on with their career. All management can do is move the chairs around on the titanic.
True, but GM hasn't historically likes to have homogeny in their brand line ups. The Toyota Prius looked different. Which is why I think it ran circles around the insight. When I look at the volt it looks like every other car in the Chevy line up. Outside of the Camaro they all have the same bland front ends.
It's not that cops are assholes. It just there's no good that comes from cooperating with the police. Ever. That's a reflection of a series of badly formed laws that started during the war on drugs and continued through the patriot act.
The crux of the problem is even if you didn't do anything, making false statements to the police is a crime. Often with a bigger penalty than whatever Johnny Law came accusing you about. So now your freedom depends on the recollection of you versus the recollection of an officer. There doesn't even have to be any malice involved. It could be a simple mistake that will land you into jail. You like your freedom and you don't have the political juice to keep the law out of your business, then the best defense is to not say anything. Ever. They can submit questions to your lawyer.
The Opel is a much nicer looking car too. The volt was nice when it came out, but it took so long to get to market the style doesn't really have much impact.
It's based on the Opel Delta II platform. I personally think the Opel Ampera is a much nicer design. The volt is too conventional looking by todays standards. It's also far better equipped than the old Cavalier. The problem with the car is the interior was designed by GM. Lot's of features and buttons, but kind'a cheap feeling in my opinion. And I share that opinion on all GMs, from Chevy to Cadillac.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to have to disagree with that one. A bunch of old mainframe guys I know worked for Control Data Corporation in the 80s. One of their big customers was the LDS for their massive genealogy project. Most of them spent a good deal of time at LDS offices in SLC, where they clearly recall having to sneak caffeinated coke from the local 7-11 inside a thermos.
I'm not an expert on what their holy book says or doesn't say, I can only say that LDS managers back then got bent out of shape over caffeine.
The Russians are quite good at iterative design and have been for decades. They'll built a jet, make improvements, build another, make more improvements, and so on. The end result is they tend to have programs that operate at a fraction of the cost of the US analog. But what they have at 2020 won't be anywhere close to what the US has. It may never be anywhere close to the US as they have always had trouble with collecting the intellectual capital to compete with high paying US Defense contractors. In the past there wasn't enough incentive. Time will as they have had more privatization in the last decade.
That's cheap if you're young and healthy. But just as expensive as any other kind of insurance if you're middle aged or are in a risk group.
You people are under the misguided impression that the hospital is required to treat your cancer. They aren't. They have to stabilize you, but they aren't under any obligation to run you through the treatment program. Need a replacement organ? You're F'd. Nobody is going to do squat for you with out cash up front.
There's a reason why medical financing is a growing business in the US. The luck ones are the very very poor that qualify for medicaid or the very old that have medicare. The rest of us better hope we keep our insurance plans.
The UK and Canada have their issues. But there are a lot of countries that came after them and got it right.
Moreover, people have a very rose colored view of the current US system when it comes to wait times. It's not unusual to see the exact same wait issues in the US. In particular since insurance companies and HMO have specific plan networks that limit choice of who, when and where one can see a doctor.
The classic example I see is hip and knee replacement. You hear stories about Canadians coming to the US and paying cash and getting right in. In the US system Cash talks. If you have insurance it's not unusual to have mandated second opinions and referrals (which can take weeks or more). There can also be limits on who/when/where it can take place. A doctor can serve multiple hospitals in a metropolitan area, but a care network may only credential him for a specific hospital. At the very least a major surgery is going to require a pre-claim to be submitted to the insurance company. A lot of the time that means your patient records will be sent off to India or Eastern Europe where a "doctor" will review them and determine if you really need that surgery or not.
You get all sorts of red tape. And unlike single payer systems, there are dozens of different red tape. That means a billing department is dozens of people unlike everywhere else where it's a handful. Who pays for that? You do. The consultants the providers hire to optimize their claims to get the most out of the insurance company. You pay for that too. The consultants the insurance companies hire to optimization their claims process to pay the least amount of money. You get to pay for them as well.
I think emulating the Swiss would be fantastic. There are incredibly capitalistic. Almost all the insurance companies are private, but they can't make a profit on health insurance. To level the playing field the gov't sets the price list and claims policy.
What I find most interesting is while the companies actually ended up fine in the end. They can't make money on core health insurance, but they can sell other insurance products to the customers at a profit. In the end studies show the insurance companies ended up making more money because they had a semi-captive customer base to market and bundle other products too.
We pay way too much for services here in the US. MRI in the US is $1500-2500. MRI in Japan is under $200. A Cardiac Surgeon in the US makes a seven figure salary. That level of salary would be a scandal in other parts of the world.
Nothing is clear about this. When there is an acquisition there are assets and liabilities. You can't just transfer the assets to another company and then walk away from the liabilities. Without assets the TextDrive shell would have been required to go straight into bankruptcy court. And BK courts take a rather dim view of trying to get out of paying bills by playing a shell game with the assets. What we can say for sure is that kind of drama didn't seem to happen.
Given the acquisition was in 2005 and they were supporting the lifetime folks until recently, I would say that's a pretty good argument can be made that Joyent assumed the liability of the lifetime customers. I would speculate they may be taking a calculated risk that that there aren't enough people to warrant a class action and the worst case they'll cut some checks with a NDA. The problem will quietly go away.
I'm not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice.
A good example of "Lifetime" agreements can be found with airlines. Delta Airlines has acquired several competitors over the years, almost all of them had a small subset of lifetime Lounge/Club memberships.
For Northwest airlines, which was a merger, the lifetime memberships were honored, and continue to be honored.
For TWA, Delta acquired specific TWA assets in bankruptcy court. Because Delta was one of many buyers of assets they did not assume the liability of the lifetime agreements. TWA folks were SOL.
So, in general, unless they have done something to distance themselves from the liability of the Lifetime memberships I just don't see them getting out of the obligation.
I think Apple is the only computer maker out there that actually gives a crap about audio. My load the onboard audio from most PC makers is horrible. You also get TOS out on all modern Macs (The headphone plus is also a Micro TOS out.). Still, in this day and age you shouldn't have to buy an external sound card. The audio should ben engineered from the start not to be crap.
Like many technology items, the Navy contracts them out. HP got a sweet no-bid contract extention (HP bought EDS which originally bid it). Since then they have been charging the tax payer over $2000 a year to provide network connectivity... for EACH WORKSTATION.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/hp-holds-navy-network-hostage/
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/02/navy-internet/
In theory the Navy is supposed to start rolling their own stuff, but my guess is since this is on slashdot HP is going to make a big stink about it and shut it down.
I haven't owned a Gameboy since the GBA but the I keep hearing this assertion that the sales of the 3DS are weak. Out of the gate the Nintendo DS (which is thought to be extremely popular) had 14 Million sales year one. The 3DS did 17 million in sales the first year. Now I only went to public school, but I was taught 17 million is greater than 14 million.
You have a lot more overhead for a network show. Starting at the top with studio management and producers. Add to that the various guilds and unions that actors, writers, directors and other creative staff might belong to and it can really balloon. Even at minium scale the labor costs for a two week production would hit about $400K for 70 people @ 2 weeks.
These productions trim costs because they don't have studio overheads, and have much cheaper costs for creative staff. In particular if the creative staff if willing to do something like Dr. Horrible, where they are looking for a paycheck based on DVD royalties, not upfront costs. It's a different market and I think the creative community is willing to trade the guaranteed paid check for more creative control and a stake in the final production.
I don't think Echostar really wants to skip commercials. They've been larding up the UI with ads the last few years (though not nearly as bas as the cable company's DVRs). I think what they want to do is use this as a bargaining chip.
FOX and ABC in particular have been sticking it to service providers. Sure, they'll renew a contract for the local affiliate... after you pay more money for some other channels.
Hey GM, I'll maintain your profile for $2 Million a year. By Grabthar's Hammer, oh what a bargain!
I concur, fly by wire-by-wire had nothing to do with it. Side sticks are here to stay and popular with more than just Airbus. A linked or back-driven yoke may have helped, but there's a far more compelling argument to be made for having Angle of Attack sensors and feedback.
If there was an Angle of Attack readout on the dash board that likely would have created a cross-check opportunity. The technology has been around for decade, but really hasn't caught on (or been required) commercially.
That assumes a linier upgrade path. Companies just don't work that way. A lot of them went from Office XP to Office 2007. Office 2003 only worked with XP plus and it came out during a time when a lot of companies were doing OS upgrades. They don't like to deploy office suites until they have a year or two of service packs and fixes out.
I will note I did make one mistake. The file -> Save As was an issue with Office 2007 that was corrected with Office 2010. The problem is you didn't see Office 2010 really start getting deployed until mid 2011. So that's a number of years of irritation with the Office 2007 product. I'm quite sure Office 2007 would have made more sense if people went to Vista, but that obviously didn't happen.
As far as why more companies don't go with Open Office, well, first off, until recently Oracle really clouded the waters on what the future of the product would be (fall out from the Sun acquisition.) Secondly, the folks making the decision are most likely Microsoft Certified Professionals. I think there is some baias, but I also think it's a much safer career move NOT to rock boat. Finally, there are bound to be folks that *shudder* use MS Access.
Office 2010 sold licenses because Office XP went EoL.
Sit someone down who's been using office since the 90's with Office 2010 while still being saddled with Windows XP (extremely common in the corporate environment even today). Tell them to find Save As. Watch even the most mild mannered person get physically angry because it's not in an obvious place. The UI components when first released assumed that people would be using Vista (which obviously didn't happen for most companies).
Oddly enough I don't mind the ribbon UI on Office 2011 Mac, but that's because it still have a standard menu bar up top that gives me a choice between ribbon or traditional menu UI. Though I would be hard pressed to actually buy Office Mac on my own because LibreOffice really does 99.9999% of what I do and is free.
It doesn't have that stupid Ribbon UI interface!
If I was AC I'd be more concerned about the fact they flew a TATL flight with only 95 passengers on a 200 passenger plane. They were already lossing tens of thousands of dollars on the flight as is.
The problem isn't that they aren't commissioned, it's that you can't fire anyone. A buddy of mine was a "turn-around" guy for another retailer. He got hired by BB a couple years ago. Problem is you can't turn around the stores because you're not allowed to fire the weak and the lame from the store. If anything the number of poor sales people actually inflates because those who are good at sales eventually move on with their career. All management can do is move the chairs around on the titanic.
True, but GM hasn't historically likes to have homogeny in their brand line ups. The Toyota Prius looked different. Which is why I think it ran circles around the insight. When I look at the volt it looks like every other car in the Chevy line up. Outside of the Camaro they all have the same bland front ends.
It's not that cops are assholes. It just there's no good that comes from cooperating with the police. Ever. That's a reflection of a series of badly formed laws that started during the war on drugs and continued through the patriot act.
The crux of the problem is even if you didn't do anything, making false statements to the police is a crime. Often with a bigger penalty than whatever Johnny Law came accusing you about. So now your freedom depends on the recollection of you versus the recollection of an officer. There doesn't even have to be any malice involved. It could be a simple mistake that will land you into jail. You like your freedom and you don't have the political juice to keep the law out of your business, then the best defense is to not say anything. Ever. They can submit questions to your lawyer.
The video break down (Presented by a law professor and a police detective): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
The Opel is a much nicer looking car too. The volt was nice when it came out, but it took so long to get to market the style doesn't really have much impact.
Accord to forbes:
"Only 160 of the March sales total of 2,289 were fleet orders."
It's based on the Opel Delta II platform. I personally think the Opel Ampera is a much nicer design. The volt is too conventional looking by todays standards. It's also far better equipped than the old Cavalier. The problem with the car is the interior was designed by GM. Lot's of features and buttons, but kind'a cheap feeling in my opinion. And I share that opinion on all GMs, from Chevy to Cadillac.