Unpaid Contributors Provide Corporate Tech Support
In other words, they invented "Ask Slashdot"?
McMurry is part of an emerging corps of Web-savvy helpers that large corporations, start-up companies, and venture capitalists are betting will transform the field of customer service.
It will "transform the field" alright! For instance, whenever anybody asks me how to fix their Verizon internet service, I suggest switching to another company that isn't so remotely incompetent...
It would be even worse for cell phone companies... How many people are going to be told that AT&T is vastly overcharging them, and switching can save them 50% of their money?
Companies PAY for support people for what they DON'T SAY, as much as for what they do.
Maybe live sports on the dozens of free, over-the-air, broadcast TV stations? The ones you can get in vastly higher quality with a bent piece of wire and a $15 converter box?
You know, the channels you currently watch through your cable/satellite service, which buy up and broadcast ALL of the remotely popular sporting events. Remember those?
Hell, NBC's Universal-Sports DTV sub-channel broadcast at least here in the greater Los Angeles area is VASTLY better than ESPN/FoxSports/etc.
If the incompetent soldiers at the U.S. Navy can't figure a way to secure their own satellites, why should the citizens of another country on the other side of the planet be prosecuted, fined, or worse, merely for sending out a radio signal that happens to match the same frequency the U.S. military used?
Yes. And when your car is stolen, it's CLEARLY your fault for the vehicle not being immune to every known method for breaking into and stealing it...
In fact that's NOT a fair analogy... you COULD reasonably add lots of security onto your car, while it would be overwhelmingly impractical to do anything to secure a satellite that is extremely restricted in size, weight, power and heat envelope.
If americans lived in Holland, rather than California, Texas, or Florida, then they wouldn't need A/C for 90% of the year.
Actually... heat-pumps (A/C) are very efficient. Cooling down a house in 150F degree temperatures is much easier than heating it up in sub-zero temperatures.
The difference is only that (generally) heating is done locally with fossil fuels, rather than electricity, and electricity is considerably more expensive.
Of course, the above figures only account for electricity, and seem to ignore gas/oil/etc.
My belief is that having so much of the air passenger service in the hands of companies that are at best, barely turning a profit is increasing the risk from aging infrastructure and insufficient maintenance.
Your belief is, once again, utterly baseless. The laws are explicit about what maintenance must be performed on aircraft, and how often. I don't have any reason to believe any airline isn't doing more than the manufacturer recommends on all their planes. Indeed, even in the distant past, when rules were more lax, the corner-cutting was very, very minor.
And besides that, the flight safety of commercial jets is vastly higher, today, than it has ever been (when times were better). It's hard to claim any airline is skimping on maintenance when it's been so long since a large commercial jet has catastrophically failed.
You have to yet to indicate (much less "PROVE") why the hypothetical extra skill is worth the cost.
Pilots, mechanics, flight crew, et al., need to be as skilled as possible, because your life depends upon it. That is not the kind of thing that can be worked out with a simple cost vs. benefit comparison.
First, they suffer from unionization and paying their employees too much.
You're welcome to PROVE that reducing pay substantially would still result in equally skilled and qualified employees. It's simply baseless speculation on your part that employee costs can be cut endlessly.
Third, there simply is too much competition in the airline industry.
Deregulation would cause MORE competition, not less.
The Delta merger has done absolutely nothing to help anyone.
I think that real world performance will eventually put drones so far into the lead that the air force cancels the buy on the F-35.
Good idea... Then the next time we go to war with a country that has an actual airforce, we can just lose quickly and go home.
Stealth technology doesn't work at all if several phased array radars in different locations are coordinating their search patterns.
Let me know when they mount that in the tip of a shoulder-fired rocket...
Stealth fighters are, at this point, just as fast and maneuverable as their conventional counterparts, so it's merely one MORE advantage new aircraft have. The cost is in materials, and even that isn't overwhelming.
I wouldn't bet on a manned aircraft facing down 5 drones armed with good missiles.
I would go exactly the opposite direction. The manned aircraft will fly circles around the drones, and can trivially chose where and when to pick each one off... one by one.
Drones are just like B-52s... They make good workhorses when you've already got total air supremacy, and substantial control over ground forces, but are USELESS in a real, active battle zone.
Well, sure. Most younger companies aren't unionized.
It hardly matters what percentage are/aren't union.
The fact remains, several of the younger airlines, even with unionized employees, continue to do far better than their older rivals. Stability is clearly an economic liability in the industry.
This could as well be fixed by a collective pay cut for all employees
The idea that employees will accept endless pay cuts is ludicrous. Salaries are where they are because you need certain amounts of incentive for people to go through the pain of taking up the job as a career, and attracting people with a reasonable level of skill and talent.
Airlines with low pay can be seen as a company that employs nothing but interns... They're cashing in on the prisioner's dilemma, but it only works so long as a majority of other companies in the industry do the opposite (RESPONSIBLE) thing...
and/or selling off the assets of the business to more efficient competitors.
In other words, exactly as I said... Endless churn in the airline industry, killing it off in no time. Guaranteed unsustainability.
So everyone who makes over $250k is responsible for this mess?
Those making $250k won't pay a fraction as much of a percentage of their income in taxes, as those billionaires at the head of US banks.
I personally fall into neither the very rich nor very poor category, and I'm more inclined to follow the flat percentage tax approach.
The "fair" or "flat" tax approach is code for REGRESSIVE TAXATION. And you are clearly a shill simply astroturfing for the super-rich trying to escape their tax responsibilities.
Wealth, however, is in reality, progressive. Those who are making millions will barely be affected by 40% taxation. Meanwhile, those who make $20k would be completely unable to survive. The same is true, just to a less obvious extent, at the low six-figures levels.
It certainly stings when I see 1/3rd of my pay check going to taxes, but I can't say it's had a serious negative affect on my life. My house might be slightly larger, but I'm still perfectly able to live well on what's left.
The point is that there is a great deal of inefficiency in the airline industry due to poorly run companies that have been that way for decades. This is just not true. All evidence suggests that there are just inherent advantages to being a much younger company... You can't have thousands of employees at the high-end of the pay scale until your airline been around for decades.
Free-market pressure on airlines would involve either flagrant discrimination (firing all employees that are imminently due a raise, rather than paying up and keeping them on), or every airline failing after a decade, only to be replaced by another with an even shorter life.
and for longer journeys a single-hop plane transfer is faster.
People saying planes are "faster" just about never include the HOURS and HOURS extra added on to getting to the airport (yes, it's VASTLY faster and easier to get to a major train station) checking-in, getting there 3 hours before takeoff for all the nonsense, and a schedule with a lot of flexibility that will adapt to multi-hour delays.
How about having a train seat that is 4X larger than an airline seat, with electrical outlets, and all the overhead storage you could possibly want? And where it's perfectly safe and to walk around at will, much more resembling spending a day in the park?
And did I mention that trains still run, even with ice on the ground, in high wind-shear, and zero visibility?
Elected officials no longer see themselves as being responsible to the electorate but to the corporations that fund their campaigns and posh trips.
Ranting and raving is always nice, but tell me this: When in history has this NOT been the case?
Politicians, have always had their big-money and big-influence supporters they try hard to please. In fact today is nothing compared to the early 20th century, when all the Rockefellers and Carnegies came around.
I don't see any basis to expect low-six figure worker to bear more tax burden. Obama has been insistent that those making less than 250K will pay less taxes.
The idea that the national debt must hit the middle-class "sooner-or-later" isn't based on anything, either. With the top 2% of the population posessing 50% of all the wealth, it would be entirely practical to require them to fully bear the debt... Not to mention morally appropriate, since we are talking about all the same people who caused this mess in the first place, and are getting trillions of those dollars in government aid. So why shouldn't they (eventually) have to pay it back, plus interest, and then some to zero things out, and put us in a better position the next time government intervention is needed due to corporate greed?
California commercial airports, and some major malls (eg. Ontario Mills) all have a couple parking lots reserved for electric cars, with a charger available.
the Linux community is hostile and unhelpful toward non-techies. [...] Usability issues never get addressed, no one wants to touch them. "My app is fine, go fuck yourself" is the general attitude I see among app developers/maintainers.
The problem with Linux is that everyone who can figure out how to install it themselves automatically thinks they're geniuses...
So, when each one of them, one by one, finds some part of a program that doesn't work exactly like they think it should, they type-up some (usually barely comprehensible) complaint to the mailing list, stating IT SHOULD WORK THIS WAY. Never mind that there are 500 different differing opinions on how it should work, from similar "geniuses". But clearly, since each one is a genius, the volunteer developers are committing a heinous crime when they decide against changing it...
Now, those 500 people, who actually utterly disagree with each other, go out and whine loudly to anyone that will listen, about how horrible Linux is... Never mind that the way the proprietary equivalent does things is actually almost always worse, and they have infinitely less chance of convincing the company of making a change.
The openness of Linux communities is both a great advantage and a great distraction... Some people just can't stand to see how sausage is made. It is for these people that the content-free standard form letters were created in the first place.
The same is true for newbies getting help. Sure, they got their question more than answered in a couple days by someone. But HORROR OF HORRORS, in the mean time, 2 people told them to RTFM! Clearly, the commercial world, where you get NO RESPONSE, is much better.
My Honda Civic refuels in about a minute and a half,
Park your Civic in the garage tonight, and hit the button that tells it to drive itself to the gas station, fill-up, and return before you wake up in the morning...
The Xvid rip is much more faithful to the original than any of the H.264 rips. ALL the H.264 encoders are simply heavily blurring the picture, so you lose substantial detail. If you want that, you can do that before your Xvid encodes and get the same "feature".
And I'm not a fan of Xvid, it's actually pretty over-hyped (but less so than H.264 these days). Libavcodec's MPEG-4 encoder is much, much better.
BitTorrent. Its probably faster and definitely easier.
If you know the slightest thing about video encoding, you can do VASTLY better than the hordes of drag-n-drop encoding kiddies keeping P2P networks supplied with new releases. Think: movies half the size, that look vastly better.
And encoding yourself is also very likely much faster, unless you insist on using the oldest machines, in combination with the newest video codecs. Frankly, H.264 provides minimal quality improvements, and simply isn't worth the order-of-magnitude performance hit on both encoding AND playback... but I digress.
This is mencoder making its way through the access restrictions on the disk, but encountering a lot of resistance.
If you compiled MPlayer with Dvdnav support, you can specify the title number with dvdnav:// instead of dvd:// and you won't have to wait for your drive to time-out reading endless bad sectors.
And BTW, this almost exclusively occurs on DVDs produced by Sony companies.
a great deal of the engineering of these cars will move into the mainstream - and sooner than you think.
What new engineering is needed for a normal car?
Electric motors have been 99%+ efficient for a very long time.
Low rolling resistance merely means a STIFF tire. You'll never see lower rolling resistance than solid steel train wheels, which have been around forever. For road traction, a thin layer of a gripping material, like tire rubber, is all that is required for performance and safety (if you don't mind the horrible ride).
Top speed, as quoted in the article, is nearly complete nonsense. Ignoring air resistance, there is NOTHING to limit your top speed. Any amount of power will eventually accelerate you to any speed.
Aerodynamics is the important part of electric cars, and these rolling-wing designs aren't suitable for adaptation into consumer vehicles without complete redesign.
No, it wasn't. It took a tiny chunk of the Alpha hardware market, and most importantly, practically nobody ever developed Alpha binaries for NT. Alpha users were emulating x86, and running the x86 binaries. At that point, you'd be better of with WINE on Linux. And you might be better off emulating x86 Windows (XP) as well.
Yeah, and it was a RESOUNDING failure. This despite the substantial popularity of non-x86 architectures like Alpha. No such luck these days, so it's likely not to work at all.
Windows on ARM (or any other non-x86 platform) would be no better than a Linux desktop using a Windows theme, with WINE installed and configured...
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, they invented "Ask Slashdot"?
It will "transform the field" alright! For instance, whenever anybody asks me how to fix their Verizon internet service, I suggest switching to another company that isn't so remotely incompetent...
It would be even worse for cell phone companies... How many people are going to be told that AT&T is vastly overcharging them, and switching can save them 50% of their money?
Companies PAY for support people for what they DON'T SAY, as much as for what they do.
Maybe live sports on the dozens of free, over-the-air, broadcast TV stations? The ones you can get in vastly higher quality with a bent piece of wire and a $15 converter box?
You know, the channels you currently watch through your cable/satellite service, which buy up and broadcast ALL of the remotely popular sporting events. Remember those?
Hell, NBC's Universal-Sports DTV sub-channel broadcast at least here in the greater Los Angeles area is VASTLY better than ESPN/FoxSports/etc.
Arnold was rich and famous years before he acted in The Terminator.
Conan the Barbarian was a decidedly non-android role.
And after Terminator, he had many very successful human roles. "Predator", "The Running Man", "Commando", "True Lies", "Total Recall"... anyone?
Yes. And when your car is stolen, it's CLEARLY your fault for the vehicle not being immune to every known method for breaking into and stealing it...
In fact that's NOT a fair analogy... you COULD reasonably add lots of security onto your car, while it would be overwhelmingly impractical to do anything to secure a satellite that is extremely restricted in size, weight, power and heat envelope.
Actually... heat-pumps (A/C) are very efficient. Cooling down a house in 150F degree temperatures is much easier than heating it up in sub-zero temperatures.
The difference is only that (generally) heating is done locally with fossil fuels, rather than electricity, and electricity is considerably more expensive.
Of course, the above figures only account for electricity, and seem to ignore gas/oil/etc.
Your belief is, once again, utterly baseless. The laws are explicit about what maintenance must be performed on aircraft, and how often. I don't have any reason to believe any airline isn't doing more than the manufacturer recommends on all their planes. Indeed, even in the distant past, when rules were more lax, the corner-cutting was very, very minor.
And besides that, the flight safety of commercial jets is vastly higher, today, than it has ever been (when times were better). It's hard to claim any airline is skimping on maintenance when it's been so long since a large commercial jet has catastrophically failed.
Pilots, mechanics, flight crew, et al., need to be as skilled as possible, because your life depends upon it. That is not the kind of thing that can be worked out with a simple cost vs. benefit comparison.
You're welcome to PROVE that reducing pay substantially would still result in equally skilled and qualified employees. It's simply baseless speculation on your part that employee costs can be cut endlessly.
Deregulation would cause MORE competition, not less.
The Delta merger has done absolutely nothing to help anyone.
Good idea... Then the next time we go to war with a country that has an actual airforce, we can just lose quickly and go home.
Let me know when they mount that in the tip of a shoulder-fired rocket...
Stealth fighters are, at this point, just as fast and maneuverable as their conventional counterparts, so it's merely one MORE advantage new aircraft have. The cost is in materials, and even that isn't overwhelming.
I would go exactly the opposite direction. The manned aircraft will fly circles around the drones, and can trivially chose where and when to pick each one off... one by one.
Drones are just like B-52s... They make good workhorses when you've already got total air supremacy, and substantial control over ground forces, but are USELESS in a real, active battle zone.
It hardly matters what percentage are/aren't union.
The fact remains, several of the younger airlines, even with unionized employees, continue to do far better than their older rivals. Stability is clearly an economic liability in the industry.
The idea that employees will accept endless pay cuts is ludicrous. Salaries are where they are because you need certain amounts of incentive for people to go through the pain of taking up the job as a career, and attracting people with a reasonable level of skill and talent.
Airlines with low pay can be seen as a company that employs nothing but interns... They're cashing in on the prisioner's dilemma, but it only works so long as a majority of other companies in the industry do the opposite (RESPONSIBLE) thing...
In other words, exactly as I said... Endless churn in the airline industry, killing it off in no time. Guaranteed unsustainability.
Those making $250k won't pay a fraction as much of a percentage of their income in taxes, as those billionaires at the head of US banks.
The "fair" or "flat" tax approach is code for REGRESSIVE TAXATION. And you are clearly a shill simply astroturfing for the super-rich trying to escape their tax responsibilities.
Wealth, however, is in reality, progressive. Those who are making millions will barely be affected by 40% taxation. Meanwhile, those who make $20k would be completely unable to survive. The same is true, just to a less obvious extent, at the low six-figures levels.
It certainly stings when I see 1/3rd of my pay check going to taxes, but I can't say it's had a serious negative affect on my life. My house might be slightly larger, but I'm still perfectly able to live well on what's left.
People saying planes are "faster" just about never include the HOURS and HOURS extra added on to getting to the airport (yes, it's VASTLY faster and easier to get to a major train station) checking-in, getting there 3 hours before takeoff for all the nonsense, and a schedule with a lot of flexibility that will adapt to multi-hour delays.
How about having a train seat that is 4X larger than an airline seat, with electrical outlets, and all the overhead storage you could possibly want? And where it's perfectly safe and to walk around at will, much more resembling spending a day in the park?
And did I mention that trains still run, even with ice on the ground, in high wind-shear, and zero visibility?
Ranting and raving is always nice, but tell me this: When in history has this NOT been the case?
Politicians, have always had their big-money and big-influence supporters they try hard to please. In fact today is nothing compared to the early 20th century, when all the Rockefellers and Carnegies came around.
I don't see any basis to expect low-six figure worker to bear more tax burden. Obama has been insistent that those making less than 250K will pay less taxes.
The idea that the national debt must hit the middle-class "sooner-or-later" isn't based on anything, either. With the top 2% of the population posessing 50% of all the wealth, it would be entirely practical to require them to fully bear the debt... Not to mention morally appropriate, since we are talking about all the same people who caused this mess in the first place, and are getting trillions of those dollars in government aid. So why shouldn't they (eventually) have to pay it back, plus interest, and then some to zero things out, and put us in a better position the next time government intervention is needed due to corporate greed?
California commercial airports, and some major malls (eg. Ontario Mills) all have a couple parking lots reserved for electric cars, with a charger available.
The problem with Linux is that everyone who can figure out how to install it themselves automatically thinks they're geniuses...
So, when each one of them, one by one, finds some part of a program that doesn't work exactly like they think it should, they type-up some (usually barely comprehensible) complaint to the mailing list, stating IT SHOULD WORK THIS WAY. Never mind that there are 500 different differing opinions on how it should work, from similar "geniuses". But clearly, since each one is a genius, the volunteer developers are committing a heinous crime when they decide against changing it...
Now, those 500 people, who actually utterly disagree with each other, go out and whine loudly to anyone that will listen, about how horrible Linux is... Never mind that the way the proprietary equivalent does things is actually almost always worse, and they have infinitely less chance of convincing the company of making a change.
The openness of Linux communities is both a great advantage and a great distraction... Some people just can't stand to see how sausage is made. It is for these people that the content-free standard form letters were created in the first place.
The same is true for newbies getting help. Sure, they got their question more than answered in a couple days by someone. But HORROR OF HORRORS, in the mean time, 2 people told them to RTFM! Clearly, the commercial world, where you get NO RESPONSE, is much better.
Park your Civic in the garage tonight, and hit the button that tells it to drive itself to the gas station, fill-up, and return before you wake up in the morning...
It does indeed.
See 300.
The Xvid rip is much more faithful to the original than any of the H.264 rips. ALL the H.264 encoders are simply heavily blurring the picture, so you lose substantial detail. If you want that, you can do that before your Xvid encodes and get the same "feature".
And I'm not a fan of Xvid, it's actually pretty over-hyped (but less so than H.264 these days). Libavcodec's MPEG-4 encoder is much, much better.
If you know the slightest thing about video encoding, you can do VASTLY better than the hordes of drag-n-drop encoding kiddies keeping P2P networks supplied with new releases. Think: movies half the size, that look vastly better.
And encoding yourself is also very likely much faster, unless you insist on using the oldest machines, in combination with the newest video codecs. Frankly, H.264 provides minimal quality improvements, and simply isn't worth the order-of-magnitude performance hit on both encoding AND playback... but I digress.
If you compiled MPlayer with Dvdnav support, you can specify the title number with dvdnav:// instead of dvd:// and you won't have to wait for your drive to time-out reading endless bad sectors.
And BTW, this almost exclusively occurs on DVDs produced by Sony companies.
Okay, so list the systems which are "B" Posix compliant. ie. ps ax shows all processes, while ps -ax only shows processes from user "x"
OpenBSD ps supports that just fine, in fact.
What new engineering is needed for a normal car?
Electric motors have been 99%+ efficient for a very long time.
Low rolling resistance merely means a STIFF tire. You'll never see lower rolling resistance than solid steel train wheels, which have been around forever. For road traction, a thin layer of a gripping material, like tire rubber, is all that is required for performance and safety (if you don't mind the horrible ride).
Top speed, as quoted in the article, is nearly complete nonsense. Ignoring air resistance, there is NOTHING to limit your top speed. Any amount of power will eventually accelerate you to any speed.
Aerodynamics is the important part of electric cars, and these rolling-wing designs aren't suitable for adaptation into consumer vehicles without complete redesign.
No, it wasn't. It took a tiny chunk of the Alpha hardware market, and most importantly, practically nobody ever developed Alpha binaries for NT. Alpha users were emulating x86, and running the x86 binaries. At that point, you'd be better of with WINE on Linux. And you might be better off emulating x86 Windows (XP) as well.
Yeah, and it was a RESOUNDING failure. This despite the substantial popularity of non-x86 architectures like Alpha. No such luck these days, so it's likely not to work at all.
Windows on ARM (or any other non-x86 platform) would be no better than a Linux desktop using a Windows theme, with WINE installed and configured...