She paid all the bills she was sent, so yeah, it is unreasonable for them to cut off the service.
Then they discovered their mistake and contacted her, saying "We fucked up, you owe us another $214". She complained about what is essentially a surprise balloon payment (and rightfully so), and the ISP agreed to reduce the amount she had to pay them by half. Let me emphasize that this was the arrangement agreed to by both parties! This is the only part of the whole thing that is reasonable.
But then the ISP changed their minds about that, and decided she had to pay the full amount. This is obviously unreasonable, since they had already agreed that she only owed them half the charge for their screw-up! She, rightfully, responds with "Fuck you guys, cancel my account." But they don't, and they subsequently hold her email hostage for payment they have already agreed that they are not owed.
Had they actually canceled her account, as they said they would, the email would have bounced and Discover would likely have tried to contact her another way.
So, yeah, it is totally reasonable that she sue the ISP, who, through it's dishonest and unreasonable behavior, has cost her a large amount of money. In fact, it would be unreasonable for her not to sue.
You are correct, but florescent lights agravate the effect to the point where it is noticable by most people. Most people are not as sensative to it as you or me (I can tolerate refresh as low as 70Hz under optimal conditions).
I have to agree that this is really Dell's strength. I would never buy one for myself, but I wouldn't hesitate to recomend Dell to a business.
Of the other major brands I've had any experience with, Compaqs are nearly impossible to deal with if you need to upgrade, reconfigure, or otherwise deviate from the default system in any way, and Gateways seem to have stability issues.
The support is, however, provided by a secondary chip on the motherboard and is not integrated into the South bridge or whatever yet.
So basically it's through a controller card, which I already dealt with in my origional post. The fact that it doesn't take up a PCI slot is irrelevant to me.
What it comes down to is that I need to be able to boot my primary hard drive from whatever OS I happen to be running, and non-integrated controllers simply can't be trusted in that situation. Yeah, most of them are supported in Linux now, but what about, say, QNX?
Also, the main reason SATA interests me at all (currently) is the increased airflow from getting rid of all those ribbon cables. Drive performance is honestly not an issue for me, buit it would be nice if I could put the side panel back on my case without sacrificing stability.
Everyone else just assumes 2.8 GHz and 3.0 GHz respectively - which is wrong.
Performance-wise, the assumption is accurate, and in many cases conservative, so while it's technically incorrect, I wouldn't really say that it's wrong. That's just playing at semantics, though.
I wouldn't really say that AMD's PR strategy has been that successful either, though. Certainly it has kept them in the game, which is a significant success in its own right, but it doesn't seem to have gained them anything.
I think paper launches are the biggest part of the problem. I don't think it really has anything to do with lean times, but rather the continued expectation on the part of the public that tech should be advancing quickly. That's a really hard expectation to live up to, especially when there is so much more emphasis on getting the design done fast than on getting the design done right. I've done enough design work to know that mentality will always catch up with you and bite you on the ass, but I also have enough experience to know that it's quite difficult to get even clueful management to understand that. But I digress...
With SATA, I think the problem is motherboards. I would love to go SATA in my next machine, but where are the SATA motherboards? I haven't seen any, and to my knowledge none of the current chipsets have SATA pin-outs. I've had bad experiences in the past with controller cards, so I refuse to go that route. I'm fairly certain I'm not alone in this, and that's probably why Seagate is delaying the release of SATA drives. There's just no infrastructure to support them.
AMD has been suckered by Intel, IMHO. Intel made a huge sacrifice in IPC for clock-speed, knowing that's all most people know about computers (If they even know that much; "Hey, how fast is your new PC?" "40 Megabytes!") Intel has defined the contest as one it can't lose, at the moment, and unfortunately AMD doesn't seem to be aware of the hook in its mouth. Hopefully this will change when Hammer is released, but I'm not going to bet on it. Anyway, I don't think the new Athlons are lagging at all, it's just that AMD marketing was a little over-zealous in making the announcement. Intel released something, so they had to release something too, even if it wasn't going to actually ship for a couple of months.
Had he offered the Linux based solution you wanted, you would have bought it.
Anything else depends on his attitude. If he's acting like a jerk, tell him to piss off, and if you can return everything and get it a lot cheaper at Wal-Mart. If he's just asking questions, answer them. Who knows, maybe Dell will figure out that some people actually want Linux and are willing to pay for it.
"Engineering principles" can be used while designing for user experience, if they are not the end result is an OS that crashes when a program errors out (remember Commodore 64?).
Remember Windows? You know, there are a lot of slashdotters that simply aren't old enough to remember the C-64. Around here you might as well say "Remember the PDP-7?" I mean, geez, you could at least use an example people can relate to!
(FWIW, I am old enough to remember the C-64, but I never used one. I was too busy hacking Basic on my TRS-80 (the cartridge slot didn't work, so there was nothing else I could do with it!). In fact, the only Commodores I ever used were the PET in my 4th grade classroom and my friend's Amiga 1000 (now that was a sweet machine!))
I couldn't agree more, and in fact I've never installed an IRC client on any of my own machines for exactly that reason.
There's an additional benefit, though. Now that the elitist assholes and the complete idiots are segregating themselves onto "cooler" channels (IRC and IM, respectively), usenet is actually becoming useful again.
then the scary "faculty advisor" decides the set needs to be redone like a week before opening night.
That's exactly why I was there. A friend of mine was in charge of it, and everything got changed roughly one week before opening night. He called me because he needed someone with some carpentry experience to get the stuff built fast and right.
I once worked 54 hours straight building sets for a play at my old high school. I went home, got 4 hours of sleep, cooked "breakfast" for all the people sleeping on the floor of my apartment, and went back for another 30+ hours to finish it (things got a little hazy towards the end there).
I didn't do caffeine at the time, either (I was one of those wacky straight-edge punks). Regular physical activity keeps the blood flowing and the limbs from cramping up or going to sleep. We also had a hot chick that brought us pizza every 6-12 hours, which is key;-)
Target has one thing K-Mart has never had, though: helpful employees. I don't know if that's true across the country, but it certainly is in central CA.
That's generally offset by the fact that the closest K-Mart is about 30 minutes closer to my house than the closest Target, though...
Undoubtably there are more Enrons out there, and we have heard about a few, though nothing of that magnitude, certainly. But I still disagree that the strategy of the Enron execs was successful (I'm ignoring the "getting caught" part, since the White House seems to be making sure they get away with it).
I'm coming to this conclusion based on these assumptions: (1) The goal of Capitalism is to amass Capital, (2) The one who amasses the most Capital wins. Based on these assumptions, we can define a winning strategy as the one that amasses the most capital.
Donald Trump is a fine example of modern, misguided (IMHO) Capitalism. There is no doubt that his slash-and-burn strategy amassed a great deal of capital.
An excellent counter-example is Bill Gates, who, though I loathe him personally, I consider to be a true Capitalist. He has stuck with his company, building it up to what it is today.
Trump exemplifies short-term strategy; Gates, long-term. Whose strategy has been more successful? I think that's pretty obvious.
Now, looking at Enron, I strongly believe that they would have made much more money, likely at least an order of magnitude more, by choosing a more long-term strategy. It's not as if Americans are going to suddenly stop using electricity, or even start using less overall, so I hardly think my belief is unfounded.
"It's not my place" is kind of disingenious
I don't think that's the case at all. Fist of all, I was presenting a highly generalized, hypothetical situation. It should be quite clear that when speaking to a Capitalist "save these magnificent creatures" is much a less effective arguement than "You can make more money by not destroying the environment". That was my entire point, and I never pretended that it was anything more.
Indeed, it would have been far more disingenuous to try and present specific examples, since, as I have already stated, IANAES. However, I do know that there are environmental scientists who are doing the studies and proving that it is more profitable for certain industries to behave in a manner which also happens to have less environmental impact, and that many of these strategies revolve around reducing waste.
I even pointed you towards a specific example. What more do you want?
Petroleum distilation, or aluminum production, for example, both produce wastes that have no value.
It's only a matter of time until a use is found for those wastes. In the mean time, though, it still makes sense to reduce the amount of waste produced. Waste still represents cost, especially if the waste has no value. Any way you look at it, that waste represents raw materials which can no longer be used. Waste doesn't just magically appear from nowhere, and the raw materials/catalysts/whatever that are now unusable waste cost something to obtain. Additionally, disposal costs money, even if you're just dumping it in the creek.
Suggesting that we just need to look closer at the environmentalism issue without actually being able to address the problems it raises is so much handwaving.
I may be waving my hands, but I'm at least trying to wave them in the direction of people who are actually finding solutions that are both effective and profitable. Don't take my word for it, check it out for yourself. It is being done!
As far as how flawed your outsource example is - when the best route to personal gain is increase in stock price, spending 50% more on tech support to make yoour stockholders happy is an excellent decision, in the context it appears to have been made.
I'm not so sure. The stockholders are still bearing that 50% extra cost, it's just hidden under the blanket of "Expenses". As a stockholder I would be much more impressed if they chose the strategy that costs less, since they would be demonstrating that they are being mindful of my money.
I'm not sure why reducing headcount is so attractive to investors, anyway. Layoffs and outsourcing have always seemed like the thrashing of incompetent management trying to dig themselves out of the hole they dug, at least judging from the evidence of the 10-15 years I've been aware of such things. To me, that seems like a signal to sell, not to buy.
Oh well, those who can, do. Those who can't major in Business.
One learns more than just jargon at a University. One also learns to communicate coherently, for example. Trying to read your post was so incredibly painful that I was forced to respond.
I would discriminate against a potential employee simply because of a lack of formal education, but I would definately not hire someone with such abysmal communication skills as you have demonstrated in this post! I sincerely hope that English is not your native language.
There is another important thing that a degree demonstrates, though: the ability to overcome obstacles, deal with frustration, and accomplish long term goals; all qualities which, based on your post, you clearly lack.
They were in the field because they saw the pot of gold at the end of it
That's pretty much the whole problem right there. Whenever you have people going into a field just for the money you will get a high level of cluelessness. Add to that the University-as-trade-school "teaching for the real world" BS you find at a lot of colleges (You know, the "everyone uses Microsoft so we have to teach only Microsoft" mentality) and it's no wonder so many CS students are one trick ponies.
One has to wonder how many of these kids saw an add somewhere about how they could earn $50-80k per year with an MCSE, and figured they could spend 4 years getting one while partying on their parents dime.
Here's a scary thought: the guy I just described is someday going to be my manager... *shudder*
the successful strategies do tend to be short-sighted - maximize your profit and get out.
Enron is an excellent example of why that is false. I would hardly call that a successful strategy, considering how much more money could have been made in the long term by operating in a sane manner, with the added bonus of avoiding the angry mobs.
And as far as environmentalism being profitible, "Conducting your business in an environmentally responsible way could be worth big money to you, here's how..." How? "Here's how..." without a follow up is a pretty weak argument, in my opinion.
Obviously there is a follow-up, that's why I put in the ellipses. However, it's different for every business. If you really want an example, check out the article on fish farms in one of the recent Discover issues. I'm not an environmental scientist, and I have no desire to be one, so it's not my place to make the actual detailed arguements. There are people who are doing it, though, and they are able to make compelling arguements without having to resort to fines or other penalties.
If you think about it, though, it makes sense. Producing waste costs money. Waste represents inefficiency, which increases overhead, which reduces margins. A big part of being environmentally responsible, for many industries, is simply producing less waste.
I think it's likely that as we examine things more closely we will find that the idea that it is more profitable to ignore the environment is just as flawed as the outsourcing example I gave in my earlier post.
Capitalism isn't short-sighted, Capitalists are. Capitalism is no worse than any other system, and certainly better than most.
I think the problem is basic human greed, which is only reinforced by modern business schools, whose teachings seem to boil down to "Remember, always pillage before you burn, but rape is more romantic by firelight!" The focus on making things look attractive to people who essentially know nothing about the actual business (aka "stockholders") pretty much covers the rest of the problems.
Here's my personal example: The company I currently work at is in the process of outsourcing customer service repair for some of our products. The outsourced work has a burden rate of around $120/hour and a 1 week average turn-around time. The internal customer service repair center has a burden rate of $82/hour and a 1 day average turn-around time. Clearly internal customer service repair is a lot cheaper and more efficient, and any true Capitalist would see that this is clearly the better solution. So, why is customer service repair being outsourced? Because reduced headcount looks better to stockholders, even though it carries a 50 percent price premium and dramatically reduces customer satisfaction.
I hope that illustrates my point that what we Americans commonly mistake for Capitalism doesn't really put profits before people, but actually puts stock price before anything else.
As for dollars before the environment, I think that is largely due to a failure on the part of the envirnmentalists. Clearly, there is value in preserving the environment, and the environmental movement has completely failed to present that value in anyhting other than esoteric terms. What is a more compelling arguement? "We must work to preserve these magnificent creatures", or "Conducting your business in an environmentally responsible way could be worth big money to you, here's how..."? Some of the most interesting work in environmental science is focusing on the later, but that's a very recent change.
I'm no Capitalism cheerleader, nor am I even a Capitalism appologist, as I think my.sig clearly demonstrates. I do think, though, that it is much more useful to look at the details and determine the underlying cause and effect relationships than to simply spout anti-Capitalism rhetoric.
I'm a big fan of social ethics and justice, but it's pretty useless if you can't present it as something that is of value to someone who doesn't believe in it.
I'm currently working in a Customer Service Repair Center for a small company that is in the process of being swallowed by a big company. My previous job was doing design and documentation (and IT, and assembly, and apprentice machinist...) at a very small company. Here are the things I've learned in the last few years:
First of all, good documentation is absolutely essential, but also the hardest thing to get. Getting good documentation to the customers is a good and noble goal, but more importantly your department needs to have complete documentation for every product you deal with. Without it you'll have a very hard time troubleshooting costomer problems. Complete documentation can be obtained in 2 ways: you steal an employee from another department who really knows the product and make him write everything down, or you visit engineering. The former method is easier, but either will likely require the liberal application of a 2-foot length of rubber hose.
Second, you need a database, and it needs to be easily searchable (that includes the notes field). You could put all your documentation in the database, but I've found that simply having it in HTML form with sensable crosslinks and homepage(s) is sufficient in that area. It's your call, really. What I really recommend the database for is tracking problems and resolutions. This will be really helpful down the road, especially if you expect the department to grow. A coworker and I had the idea of setting up a newsgroup for each product, but we haven't been able to actually implement it.
He isn't recording directly to VCD, he's recording to hard drive and then transfering it later to VCD so he can watch it using his DVD player (presumably on a TV not hooked up to his TiVo clone). Time shift is already taken care of.
It's really not that difficult or time consuming to edit out the commercials before you burn it to disk, and he may even be able to automate it at record-time. Many broadcasters insert a tone signal so that their automated broadcast systems know when to cue their next event (commercial, content, whatever). It's inaudible, so there's no real incentive for the broadcaster to remove it, and depending on the hardware available on the users end it's entirely possible to use those tones to simply pause recording during commercial segments.
That's not an accurate viewpoint, though, because the analog artifacts you get from a TV signal translate into even worse artifacts in the VCD.
You missed my point: The OP's complaint was that you don't get nice video on a VCD, and my response to that was that you aren't starting with nice video from the start. Urine served in a crystal champagne fluke is still urine.
Further, I think it is entirely possible to fit a commercial-edited TV show on a VCD without significant loss of quality.
Notice my exception for movies, as they are simply to big for the media. However, I do have a CD that has both "pi" and "Akira" on it. They look like shit; that audio has artifacts, and the word artifact doesn't even begin to describe the video, but they are watchable at TV viewing distance, and I find the digital compression artifacts much less annoying than the artifacts on, for example, the quality issues of the VHS tapes of "The Tick" which I recently borrowed from a friend. That's subjective, obviously, but I fully expect to be able to fit 2 "half hour" episodes on a single VCD without noticable loss of quality.
Therefore, I consider VCD a perfectly reasonable replacement for VHS, which is what this whole thread is about. Yeah, DVD is better, but it's still too expensive to be a reasonable replacement.
You can tell the difference by comparing DirectTV, Cable and Dish Network side by side.
I can tell the difference without comparing them side by side, because, as I already stated, I am a trained professional. Specifically, I'm repair technician at a company which produces some of the highest-end professional video production equipment there is. A large part of my job is running that equipment at its maximum capabilities, and fixing anything that can't handle that without introducing artifacts.
If you think that any broadcast video signal is "good", then you would be absolutely floored by what good equipment can do, and I'm not even talking about HD. You're welcome to try and imagine it, though. Think 60Mbps after MPEG conversion...
I don't care if your refresh rate is 160Hz (which my Hitachi CRT will do at some resolutions), an LCD is still easier on your eyes.
A CRT redraws the entire screen with each refresh, and that creates a full-screen flicker. It's really noticable if you're running your refresh at 60Hz in a room lit by florescent lights, but regardless of whether you are consciously aware of it or not, it still causes eye strain. LCDs, on the other hand, only have to redraw the pixels that actually change, leaving the rest lit continuously, and eliminating flicker-induced eye strain.
The constant backlighting on an LCD helps considerably as well.
Well, my 21" CRT will do 120Hz at 1024x768, which is my prefered gaming resolution. I can definately notice the difference at refresh rates below 100Hz while gaming, so basically I have the same price break as you, but with the added requirement that it has to be able to match the performance of my CRT with no ghosting or tearing.
If I weren't a gamer I'd probably be waiting for my current monitor to burn out so I could replace it with a 17" LCD, which I expect will be under $400 by the time that happens. No sense throwing out perfectly good hardware just because it's big!
I totally agree, for anyone who isn't in the high-performance gaming market, LCD is the way to go. They're way easier on the eyes, and you get more viewable area (15" LCD is 15" viewable). Plus, they just don't make desks big enough for a 21" CRT! (Not that I'll give mine up any time soon, mind you)
LCDs are getting a lot better, though. A friend of mine got a Dell laptop with a GF2Go about 1-1.5 year ago, and I couldn't see any ghosting at all in RtCW, Allied Assault, or UT, though it does have a limited viewable angle. The el-cheapo 15" LCD I got for my dad doesn't have any viewable angle problems, though I haven't done any gaming on it, so I can't say if it suffers any ghosting problems or not.
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She paid all the bills she was sent, so yeah, it is unreasonable for them to cut off the service.
Then they discovered their mistake and contacted her, saying "We fucked up, you owe us another $214". She complained about what is essentially a surprise balloon payment (and rightfully so), and the ISP agreed to reduce the amount she had to pay them by half. Let me emphasize that this was the arrangement agreed to by both parties! This is the only part of the whole thing that is reasonable.
But then the ISP changed their minds about that, and decided she had to pay the full amount. This is obviously unreasonable, since they had already agreed that she only owed them half the charge for their screw-up! She, rightfully, responds with "Fuck you guys, cancel my account." But they don't, and they subsequently hold her email hostage for payment they have already agreed that they are not owed.
Had they actually canceled her account, as they said they would, the email would have bounced and Discover would likely have tried to contact her another way.
So, yeah, it is totally reasonable that she sue the ISP, who, through it's dishonest and unreasonable behavior, has cost her a large amount of money. In fact, it would be unreasonable for her not to sue.
You are correct, but florescent lights agravate the effect to the point where it is noticable by most people. Most people are not as sensative to it as you or me (I can tolerate refresh as low as 70Hz under optimal conditions).
I have to agree that this is really Dell's strength. I would never buy one for myself, but I wouldn't hesitate to recomend Dell to a business.
Of the other major brands I've had any experience with, Compaqs are nearly impossible to deal with if you need to upgrade, reconfigure, or otherwise deviate from the default system in any way, and Gateways seem to have stability issues.
The support is, however, provided by a secondary chip on the motherboard and is not integrated into the South bridge or whatever yet.
So basically it's through a controller card, which I already dealt with in my origional post. The fact that it doesn't take up a PCI slot is irrelevant to me.
What it comes down to is that I need to be able to boot my primary hard drive from whatever OS I happen to be running, and non-integrated controllers simply can't be trusted in that situation. Yeah, most of them are supported in Linux now, but what about, say, QNX?
Also, the main reason SATA interests me at all (currently) is the increased airflow from getting rid of all those ribbon cables. Drive performance is honestly not an issue for me, buit it would be nice if I could put the side panel back on my case without sacrificing stability.
Everyone else just assumes 2.8 GHz and 3.0 GHz respectively - which is wrong.
Performance-wise, the assumption is accurate, and in many cases conservative, so while it's technically incorrect, I wouldn't really say that it's wrong. That's just playing at semantics, though.
I wouldn't really say that AMD's PR strategy has been that successful either, though. Certainly it has kept them in the game, which is a significant success in its own right, but it doesn't seem to have gained them anything.
I think paper launches are the biggest part of the problem. I don't think it really has anything to do with lean times, but rather the continued expectation on the part of the public that tech should be advancing quickly. That's a really hard expectation to live up to, especially when there is so much more emphasis on getting the design done fast than on getting the design done right. I've done enough design work to know that mentality will always catch up with you and bite you on the ass, but I also have enough experience to know that it's quite difficult to get even clueful management to understand that. But I digress...
With SATA, I think the problem is motherboards. I would love to go SATA in my next machine, but where are the SATA motherboards? I haven't seen any, and to my knowledge none of the current chipsets have SATA pin-outs. I've had bad experiences in the past with controller cards, so I refuse to go that route. I'm fairly certain I'm not alone in this, and that's probably why Seagate is delaying the release of SATA drives. There's just no infrastructure to support them.
AMD has been suckered by Intel, IMHO. Intel made a huge sacrifice in IPC for clock-speed, knowing that's all most people know about computers (If they even know that much; "Hey, how fast is your new PC?" "40 Megabytes!") Intel has defined the contest as one it can't lose, at the moment, and unfortunately AMD doesn't seem to be aware of the hook in its mouth. Hopefully this will change when Hammer is released, but I'm not going to bet on it. Anyway, I don't think the new Athlons are lagging at all, it's just that AMD marketing was a little over-zealous in making the announcement. Intel released something, so they had to release something too, even if it wasn't going to actually ship for a couple of months.
Had he offered the Linux based solution you wanted, you would have bought it.
Anything else depends on his attitude. If he's acting like a jerk, tell him to piss off, and if you can return everything and get it a lot cheaper at Wal-Mart. If he's just asking questions, answer them. Who knows, maybe Dell will figure out that some people actually want Linux and are willing to pay for it.
You had a floppy drive for your Atari 600XL? All I had was a cassette drive with a bad interface cable!
"Engineering principles" can be used while designing for user experience, if they are not the end result is an OS that crashes when a program errors out (remember Commodore 64?).
Remember Windows? You know, there are a lot of slashdotters that simply aren't old enough to remember the C-64. Around here you might as well say "Remember the PDP-7?" I mean, geez, you could at least use an example people can relate to!
(FWIW, I am old enough to remember the C-64, but I never used one. I was too busy hacking Basic on my TRS-80 (the cartridge slot didn't work, so there was nothing else I could do with it!). In fact, the only Commodores I ever used were the PET in my 4th grade classroom and my friend's Amiga 1000 (now that was a sweet machine!))
You have no idea what you're talking about. I don't mean to be insulting, but it's pretty obvious that you have no idea what the real world is like.
Maybe you'll get lucky and find this fantastic perfect job you're dreaming of, but in my experience it doesn't exist.
I couldn't agree more, and in fact I've never installed an IRC client on any of my own machines for exactly that reason.
There's an additional benefit, though. Now that the elitist assholes and the complete idiots are segregating themselves onto "cooler" channels (IRC and IM, respectively), usenet is actually becoming useful again.
then the scary "faculty advisor" decides the set needs to be redone like a week before opening night.
That's exactly why I was there. A friend of mine was in charge of it, and everything got changed roughly one week before opening night. He called me because he needed someone with some carpentry experience to get the stuff built fast and right.
I once worked 54 hours straight building sets for a play at my old high school. I went home, got 4 hours of sleep, cooked "breakfast" for all the people sleeping on the floor of my apartment, and went back for another 30+ hours to finish it (things got a little hazy towards the end there).
;-)
I didn't do caffeine at the time, either (I was one of those wacky straight-edge punks). Regular physical activity keeps the blood flowing and the limbs from cramping up or going to sleep. We also had a hot chick that brought us pizza every 6-12 hours, which is key
Target has one thing K-Mart has never had, though: helpful employees. I don't know if that's true across the country, but it certainly is in central CA.
That's generally offset by the fact that the closest K-Mart is about 30 minutes closer to my house than the closest Target, though...
Undoubtably there are more Enrons out there, and we have heard about a few, though nothing of that magnitude, certainly. But I still disagree that the strategy of the Enron execs was successful (I'm ignoring the "getting caught" part, since the White House seems to be making sure they get away with it).
I'm coming to this conclusion based on these assumptions: (1) The goal of Capitalism is to amass Capital, (2) The one who amasses the most Capital wins. Based on these assumptions, we can define a winning strategy as the one that amasses the most capital.
Donald Trump is a fine example of modern, misguided (IMHO) Capitalism. There is no doubt that his slash-and-burn strategy amassed a great deal of capital.
An excellent counter-example is Bill Gates, who, though I loathe him personally, I consider to be a true Capitalist. He has stuck with his company, building it up to what it is today.
Trump exemplifies short-term strategy; Gates, long-term. Whose strategy has been more successful? I think that's pretty obvious.
Now, looking at Enron, I strongly believe that they would have made much more money, likely at least an order of magnitude more, by choosing a more long-term strategy. It's not as if Americans are going to suddenly stop using electricity, or even start using less overall, so I hardly think my belief is unfounded.
"It's not my place" is kind of disingenious
I don't think that's the case at all. Fist of all, I was presenting a highly generalized, hypothetical situation. It should be quite clear that when speaking to a Capitalist "save these magnificent creatures" is much a less effective arguement than "You can make more money by not destroying the environment". That was my entire point, and I never pretended that it was anything more.
Indeed, it would have been far more disingenuous to try and present specific examples, since, as I have already stated, IANAES. However, I do know that there are environmental scientists who are doing the studies and proving that it is more profitable for certain industries to behave in a manner which also happens to have less environmental impact, and that many of these strategies revolve around reducing waste.
I even pointed you towards a specific example. What more do you want?
Petroleum distilation, or aluminum production, for example, both produce wastes that have no value.
It's only a matter of time until a use is found for those wastes. In the mean time, though, it still makes sense to reduce the amount of waste produced. Waste still represents cost, especially if the waste has no value. Any way you look at it, that waste represents raw materials which can no longer be used. Waste doesn't just magically appear from nowhere, and the raw materials/catalysts/whatever that are now unusable waste cost something to obtain. Additionally, disposal costs money, even if you're just dumping it in the creek.
Suggesting that we just need to look closer at the environmentalism issue without actually being able to address the problems it raises is so much handwaving.
I may be waving my hands, but I'm at least trying to wave them in the direction of people who are actually finding solutions that are both effective and profitable. Don't take my word for it, check it out for yourself. It is being done!
As far as how flawed your outsource example is - when the best route to personal gain is increase in stock price, spending 50% more on tech support to make yoour stockholders happy is an excellent decision, in the context it appears to have been made.
I'm not so sure. The stockholders are still bearing that 50% extra cost, it's just hidden under the blanket of "Expenses". As a stockholder I would be much more impressed if they chose the strategy that costs less, since they would be demonstrating that they are being mindful of my money.
I'm not sure why reducing headcount is so attractive to investors, anyway. Layoffs and outsourcing have always seemed like the thrashing of incompetent management trying to dig themselves out of the hole they dug, at least judging from the evidence of the 10-15 years I've been aware of such things. To me, that seems like a signal to sell, not to buy.
Oh well, those who can, do. Those who can't major in Business.
One learns more than just jargon at a University. One also learns to communicate coherently, for example. Trying to read your post was so incredibly painful that I was forced to respond.
I would discriminate against a potential employee simply because of a lack of formal education, but I would definately not hire someone with such abysmal communication skills as you have demonstrated in this post! I sincerely hope that English is not your native language.
There is another important thing that a degree demonstrates, though: the ability to overcome obstacles, deal with frustration, and accomplish long term goals; all qualities which, based on your post, you clearly lack.
They were in the field because they saw the pot of gold at the end of it
That's pretty much the whole problem right there. Whenever you have people going into a field just for the money you will get a high level of cluelessness. Add to that the University-as-trade-school "teaching for the real world" BS you find at a lot of colleges (You know, the "everyone uses Microsoft so we have to teach only Microsoft" mentality) and it's no wonder so many CS students are one trick ponies.
One has to wonder how many of these kids saw an add somewhere about how they could earn $50-80k per year with an MCSE, and figured they could spend 4 years getting one while partying on their parents dime.
Here's a scary thought: the guy I just described is someday going to be my manager... *shudder*
the successful strategies do tend to be short-sighted - maximize your profit and get out.
Enron is an excellent example of why that is false. I would hardly call that a successful strategy, considering how much more money could have been made in the long term by operating in a sane manner, with the added bonus of avoiding the angry mobs.
And as far as environmentalism being profitible, "Conducting your business in an environmentally responsible way could be worth big money to you, here's how..." How? "Here's how..." without a follow up is a pretty weak argument, in my opinion.
Obviously there is a follow-up, that's why I put in the ellipses. However, it's different for every business. If you really want an example, check out the article on fish farms in one of the recent Discover issues. I'm not an environmental scientist, and I have no desire to be one, so it's not my place to make the actual detailed arguements. There are people who are doing it, though, and they are able to make compelling arguements without having to resort to fines or other penalties.
If you think about it, though, it makes sense. Producing waste costs money. Waste represents inefficiency, which increases overhead, which reduces margins. A big part of being environmentally responsible, for many industries, is simply producing less waste.
I think it's likely that as we examine things more closely we will find that the idea that it is more profitable to ignore the environment is just as flawed as the outsourcing example I gave in my earlier post.
Capitalism isn't short-sighted, Capitalists are. Capitalism is no worse than any other system, and certainly better than most.
.sig clearly demonstrates. I do think, though, that it is much more useful to look at the details and determine the underlying cause and effect relationships than to simply spout anti-Capitalism rhetoric.
I think the problem is basic human greed, which is only reinforced by modern business schools, whose teachings seem to boil down to "Remember, always pillage before you burn, but rape is more romantic by firelight!" The focus on making things look attractive to people who essentially know nothing about the actual business (aka "stockholders") pretty much covers the rest of the problems.
Here's my personal example: The company I currently work at is in the process of outsourcing customer service repair for some of our products. The outsourced work has a burden rate of around $120/hour and a 1 week average turn-around time. The internal customer service repair center has a burden rate of $82/hour and a 1 day average turn-around time. Clearly internal customer service repair is a lot cheaper and more efficient, and any true Capitalist would see that this is clearly the better solution. So, why is customer service repair being outsourced? Because reduced headcount looks better to stockholders, even though it carries a 50 percent price premium and dramatically reduces customer satisfaction.
I hope that illustrates my point that what we Americans commonly mistake for Capitalism doesn't really put profits before people, but actually puts stock price before anything else.
As for dollars before the environment, I think that is largely due to a failure on the part of the envirnmentalists. Clearly, there is value in preserving the environment, and the environmental movement has completely failed to present that value in anyhting other than esoteric terms. What is a more compelling arguement? "We must work to preserve these magnificent creatures", or "Conducting your business in an environmentally responsible way could be worth big money to you, here's how..."? Some of the most interesting work in environmental science is focusing on the later, but that's a very recent change.
I'm no Capitalism cheerleader, nor am I even a Capitalism appologist, as I think my
I'm a big fan of social ethics and justice, but it's pretty useless if you can't present it as something that is of value to someone who doesn't believe in it.
I'm currently working in a Customer Service Repair Center for a small company that is in the process of being swallowed by a big company. My previous job was doing design and documentation (and IT, and assembly, and apprentice machinist...) at a very small company. Here are the things I've learned in the last few years:
First of all, good documentation is absolutely essential, but also the hardest thing to get. Getting good documentation to the customers is a good and noble goal, but more importantly your department needs to have complete documentation for every product you deal with. Without it you'll have a very hard time troubleshooting costomer problems. Complete documentation can be obtained in 2 ways: you steal an employee from another department who really knows the product and make him write everything down, or you visit engineering. The former method is easier, but either will likely require the liberal application of a 2-foot length of rubber hose.
Second, you need a database, and it needs to be easily searchable (that includes the notes field). You could put all your documentation in the database, but I've found that simply having it in HTML form with sensable crosslinks and homepage(s) is sufficient in that area. It's your call, really. What I really recommend the database for is tracking problems and resolutions. This will be really helpful down the road, especially if you expect the department to grow. A coworker and I had the idea of setting up a newsgroup for each product, but we haven't been able to actually implement it.
Anyway, hope that helps. Good luck!
SBC/Yahoo DSL is advertised on TV for $29.99/month. I don't know about restrictions or availability, though.
Of course, SBC is still charging me $49.99/month for my DSL.
He isn't recording directly to VCD, he's recording to hard drive and then transfering it later to VCD so he can watch it using his DVD player (presumably on a TV not hooked up to his TiVo clone). Time shift is already taken care of.
It's really not that difficult or time consuming to edit out the commercials before you burn it to disk, and he may even be able to automate it at record-time. Many broadcasters insert a tone signal so that their automated broadcast systems know when to cue their next event (commercial, content, whatever). It's inaudible, so there's no real incentive for the broadcaster to remove it, and depending on the hardware available on the users end it's entirely possible to use those tones to simply pause recording during commercial segments.
That's not an accurate viewpoint, though, because the analog artifacts you get from a TV signal translate into even worse artifacts in the VCD.
You missed my point: The OP's complaint was that you don't get nice video on a VCD, and my response to that was that you aren't starting with nice video from the start. Urine served in a crystal champagne fluke is still urine.
Further, I think it is entirely possible to fit a commercial-edited TV show on a VCD without significant loss of quality.
Notice my exception for movies, as they are simply to big for the media. However, I do have a CD that has both "pi" and "Akira" on it. They look like shit; that audio has artifacts, and the word artifact doesn't even begin to describe the video, but they are watchable at TV viewing distance, and I find the digital compression artifacts much less annoying than the artifacts on, for example, the quality issues of the VHS tapes of "The Tick" which I recently borrowed from a friend. That's subjective, obviously, but I fully expect to be able to fit 2 "half hour" episodes on a single VCD without noticable loss of quality.
Therefore, I consider VCD a perfectly reasonable replacement for VHS, which is what this whole thread is about. Yeah, DVD is better, but it's still too expensive to be a reasonable replacement.
You can tell the difference by comparing DirectTV, Cable and Dish Network side by side.
I can tell the difference without comparing them side by side, because, as I already stated, I am a trained professional. Specifically, I'm repair technician at a company which produces some of the highest-end professional video production equipment there is. A large part of my job is running that equipment at its maximum capabilities, and fixing anything that can't handle that without introducing artifacts.
If you think that any broadcast video signal is "good", then you would be absolutely floored by what good equipment can do, and I'm not even talking about HD. You're welcome to try and imagine it, though. Think 60Mbps after MPEG conversion...
I don't care if your refresh rate is 160Hz (which my Hitachi CRT will do at some resolutions), an LCD is still easier on your eyes.
A CRT redraws the entire screen with each refresh, and that creates a full-screen flicker. It's really noticable if you're running your refresh at 60Hz in a room lit by florescent lights, but regardless of whether you are consciously aware of it or not, it still causes eye strain. LCDs, on the other hand, only have to redraw the pixels that actually change, leaving the rest lit continuously, and eliminating flicker-induced eye strain.
The constant backlighting on an LCD helps considerably as well.
Well, my 21" CRT will do 120Hz at 1024x768, which is my prefered gaming resolution. I can definately notice the difference at refresh rates below 100Hz while gaming, so basically I have the same price break as you, but with the added requirement that it has to be able to match the performance of my CRT with no ghosting or tearing.
If I weren't a gamer I'd probably be waiting for my current monitor to burn out so I could replace it with a 17" LCD, which I expect will be under $400 by the time that happens. No sense throwing out perfectly good hardware just because it's big!
I totally agree, for anyone who isn't in the high-performance gaming market, LCD is the way to go. They're way easier on the eyes, and you get more viewable area (15" LCD is 15" viewable). Plus, they just don't make desks big enough for a 21" CRT! (Not that I'll give mine up any time soon, mind you)
LCDs are getting a lot better, though. A friend of mine got a Dell laptop with a GF2Go about 1-1.5 year ago, and I couldn't see any ghosting at all in RtCW, Allied Assault, or UT, though it does have a limited viewable angle. The el-cheapo 15" LCD I got for my dad doesn't have any viewable angle problems, though I haven't done any gaming on it, so I can't say if it suffers any ghosting problems or not.