Instead of making it a profit center for some one, why do we not include the option of continuing therapy to get at the roots of the problem, and FIX it?
There are two reasons, in my view. First, the success rate of attempts to "fix it" are horrendous. AA, therapy, peaceful rehab center in Malibu, they all have low rates of success. Some would say that no one knows what will work for a particular individual, ruling out a universal fix.
Second, "SOMEONE" is still going to make a lot of money, the revenue stream has simply been shifted to the abuse recovery industry.
Of course, I suspect that these solutions probably would not be nearly as profitable as the technology answer
And you would most likely be wrong. Abuse therapy and rehab is a huge industry. I would not be at all surprised if the revenues far exceeded those of the technological options. Go do a search sometime for alcohol rehab centers along the California coast. I'll get you started with Malibu: "alcohol rehab malibu". Look at the number of pins on the Google map. Think it's all Hollywood stars? Go check if your insurance will pay for all, most, or some of it. Insurance I had at the time I was looking would pay for 90 days, all US$20-30K of it.
As a recovering alcoholic myself, I'll say that I don't care about getting help for those convicted of DUI, I care about getting them off the road. Prison, interlocks, whatever works toward that goal. In the mean time, the individual can figure out on their own what works best to unfsck their life.
What property got trespassed? The network that is owned by Verizon? The router that Verizon owns (OP doesn't own it, despite what he may think)? I'd go easy slinging the insults if I were you until you figure out who owns what in this scenario.
I've got Verizon FioS (well, Frontier now). I don't own my 9100, I seriously doubt you own the Verizon-supplied Actiontec. I'm on my third provider (fourth you count Frontier now that they've taken over FioS), and every single one of them wants the modem back when I disconnect.
I've got fresh new mod points, but unfortunately not enough to +1 everyone who said, "you're an idiot". But I think it's the first time I've ever seen almost unanimous agreement on/.
When my stuff starts refusing to output video through my component cables (granted, that's down to my first-gen Xbox 360 these days), I'll concede that you have a point. But while you've been checking the sizing of tin foil hats, I've enjoyed watching my Panny plasma for the last three or four years, unencumbered by the restrictions you worry about. Now if you were speaking specifically of Blu-Ray, we might have a starting point for discussion.
Not sure where you'd have to live in Washington to get 11 megabits
Not Seattle, thank the city government for the sweetheart deals that keep FioS out of that city. Here in Redmond I've got 20mbps that is always that speed every time I check (as opposed to Comcast that never got the 12mbps they advertised, not once). That's on the "one up from the cheapest" tier, one can pay more for more bandwidth (up to 50 megabits, I think?)
How prevalent is FioS and the like throughout WA? No idea, but it's not crappy Comcast and slow DSL everywhere.
Why should I have to pay more because I'm a larger person than you?
Easy: because it costs more to fly you than it does to fly me over the same distance. Why should I subsidize the cost of flying your big bones? Answer: because life, for fatties and string beans alike, is rarely fair.
saying "books in our hands for hundreds of years" is just plain wrong AND not to mention completely meaningless
Citation needed. Clarification needed. Is English plain wrong AND completely meaningless?
It's/., not a research paper, so enough with the request for citations. Besides, he's not the one making the claim that "we've always done it that way" is a justification for a form factor. He's also arguably correct in that the statement is wrong. Collectively, we may have held books in our hands for hundreds of years, but that doesn't mean jack on the individual level. I've held books in my hands for around 42 years, and the collective experience has not made me any more or less adept holding books.
How inconsistent. You complain about Microsoft's prices,
No, I didn't. Microsoft can charge what they like for VS, it will make zero difference to me.
Then again, this is Slashdot, where Microsoft bashing takes precedence over facts.
Pay attention, because this is an important point: I wasn't bashing Microsoft, I was bashing the suggestion that the Express editions of VS are a viable alternative to other development environments. Express editions are barely suitable for hobbyist programming, and it would be laughable to recommend them for professional use. If you want to argue, argue how the VS Express editions are actually quite handy.
Brilliant marketing on Microsoft's part, I'll admit. Release free, crippled versions of the dev environment, and now supporters can shout, "but...but...free!" Not that any serious work get done in those free versions, but it makes a convenient arguing point.
This comes up on every Slashdot article even vaguely related to Microsoft, Express Editions are free, dumbass.
And every time it comes up, some "dumbass" is there to parrot the "VS Express is free!" line. Express editions are so crippled as to be useless for professional work (no add-ins? Really?). The minimum SKU that allows me to get anything useful done is Pro, which is something like US$750 last I looked. Whereas Xcode, a full-blown dev environment with all the tools you need for professional work, comes on the OS installation disk with every Mac.
You need an Apple computer for the iPhone SDK. How much is the cheapest new Apple computer?
My first iPhone app was released to the app store from a US$350 MSI Wind netbook that I hackintoshed. Not my top recommendation for a dev machine, but it got the job done as Xcode seems to go easy on resources. You're not going to be running VS2010 on a netbook.
You may also note that you'll need a computer to run Visual Studio. I'm not sure what point you're driving at here.
I seriously don't think we anything to discuss at this point if you think small business is gone. Either that, or this owner of a small corporation didn't get the memo. We're on such obviously different pages I don't know where to begin a civil discussion.
Okay, I lied; we do have something to discuss:
that way they don't have to worry about making customers happy because customers have no other choice (I work for an airline--believe me, I know!).
Funny you should mention airlines. I do have a choice: don't fly. I haven't flown anything but Southwest for the last three or so years. If SWA doesn't go where I want to go, I simply don't go. I'm a pretty good consumer, too, in that I may bitch and moan but I'll all too often still give my money (I'm on AT&T Wireless, believe me, I know). But the other airlines have nickeled-and-dimed to the point that I'll just do without. I'm just one guy, but in the case of airlines it would seem free-market capitalism is working as I would expect.
They're one and only job is to make money for their shareholders.
How do you propose they make that money? By consistently pissing off customers? By making sure that their employees are never gruntled? A company's purpose is often to make money, and it doesn't do well at that with dissatisfied customers and employees. If it does manage to make a profit with unhappy customers (which are often tied to disgruntled workers) in the long term, then it's the fault of the consumer for continuing to reward the company with their money.
You run off the flawed assumption that profits, happy customers, and giddy employees are all mutually exclusive. Either that, or you make the blanket statement for companies of all sizes. Maybe AT&T Wireless can get away with it for a while, but your local Mom-and-Pop is going to be out of business before the quarter ends.
Yes there is (http://usptocareers.gov/Pages/PEPositions/fitcheck.aspx), and it says: "... all the basic qualifications for this position which include:
U.S. Citizenship A 4-year degree in Engineering or Physics by June 2009 The willingness to relocate to the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area"
Even if by "screen" you mean the US$900 24" Apple display, you'd still be way off. There's hyperbole to make a point, and then there's just flat-out "shouldn't be participating in the conversation".
"...in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation". Yeah, and that's just your company. My test team still has to support that steaming pile, and so every test pass involves firing up VMs just for the off chance that those that aren't still on WinXP didn't jump to Win7. I don't know how many hours we've wasted on Vista (because like any place else, we're not completely automated), but I'd axe Vista from the matrix tomorrow if I thought I could get away with telling sales and marketing, "we don't support Vista".
When you run the numbers and see that a gallon of gasoline per hour is equal to 39 kilowatts you'll understand why we don't have electric cars.
Umm, we do have electric cars. I've seen a Tesla Roadster (two, actually) on the street, I know they exist. Otherwise, I'm going to be really disappointed come December when Nissan tells me they lied about delivering my Leaf.
You just described the exact scenario that led me to install a torrent client for the first time ever (never had even a legitimate reason to do so prior). "What do you mean _Dexter Season 4_ is not to be had for any amount of money short of installing cable/satellite? I have money, I'll happily give someone some of it." Sure enough there was torrent of the whole season in HD. Overnight on a FiOS connection, and we're catching up on what everyone else has already watched.
I felt a little bad for a little while, but just a little. I'm willing to pay for content (short of having cable installed), or do without it if I'm not. But I made a good-faith effort to hand someone, anyone, my hard-earned in exchange for not having the season spoiled before I was deemed worthy to view it on DVD. No one would take my money in a timely manner. So now they won't get my money at all because I solved the problem on my own.
Showtime should go talk to AMC before they shout, "damned pirates!" AMC (via iTunes) gets a fair bit of my money between three seasons of _Mad Men_ and three (or is it four?) seasons of _Breaking Bad_, and probably other stuff I've forgotten about. I have disposable income, I'll part with it in exchange for your content, don't fuck it up.
Ah, an opportunity to make the tired old claim of "Microsoft doesn't innovate"! Who can turn that down?
Let's see, off the top of my head, a list of MSR products that made it into production: SPOT watches and the like F# Pieces of SQL Server That thing with the little LCD display in the lid of a laptop, pretty sure that was MSR Photosynth (with credit to University of Washington for collaboration)
That's just what I can think of, I'm sure I missed a few. Does MSR crank out a lot of stuff that will never see the light of day? You bet. I used to see the same projects with minor updates at the MSR internal tech fair year after year ("what *did* you do all year?"). A lot of the stuff, though cool, was never going to get picked up by a product team.
On the other hand, one cannot think monolithically where MSR works on X which is then productized into Y. In my made-up example, SQL Server needs something to boost index performance. "Hey, MSR has a little thing they've been working on, let's integrate that into the engine." Now SQL Server has better perf, but you'll never know that MSR was behind some of it.
That's the second time you've referenced Darwin or the gene pool. Are you sure how you have a firm grasp of how "survival of the fittest" works? Mother gorillas throwing their young out into the jungle with a hearty "good luck!"? No, the parents protect their young from the deadly parts of the environment to ensure survival of the species. In the case of school children, it's protection from 4000 lb. vehicles driven by creatures of questionable qualifications to do so.
A six-year old is flighty at best, easily distracted, and certainly not reliably equipped to deal with "do it wrong, and you're dead" situations such as always being on guard against cell-phone talking SUV drivers doing 50mph. So I don't think it's a big deal to make folks slow down for a minute or two at 2:30 when the kiddies get out.
Additionally, the fact that you point out "people around here don't know how to drive" only makes the case for school zone speed limits.
In summary, you're happy to disrupt the flow of traffic for everyone, including those doing the limit, because of some misplaced sense of moral superiority. To add to your self-righteousness, you are not concerned whether your actions are legal in the state of Arizona, only that others are breaking the law.
I'd have written you off as a troll if I didn't already know people with the same attitude.
Then in the case of the parent with a Mac driving the television, there's iTunes (I *suppose* it would work on Windows, never tried). I have the exact same setup as parent (except my TV is smaller), and there seems to be a ton of shows on there for US$30 per season, or US$2/show. When Hulu or Netflix fails us, iTunes usually pulls through.
Or there's bittorrent which seems to have anything you'd want commercial-free, though we're content to pay providers a reasonable fee for the content if they choose to make it available.
Thing is, it is a floppy. It's just encased in a rigid shell. This being/., I wasn't going to RTFA anyway, but this quote certainly gives me no incentive to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of making it a profit center for some one, why do we not include the option of continuing therapy to get at the roots of the problem, and FIX it?
There are two reasons, in my view. First, the success rate of attempts to "fix it" are horrendous. AA, therapy, peaceful rehab center in Malibu, they all have low rates of success. Some would say that no one knows what will work for a particular individual, ruling out a universal fix.
Second, "SOMEONE" is still going to make a lot of money, the revenue stream has simply been shifted to the abuse recovery industry.
Of course, I suspect that these solutions probably would not be nearly as profitable as the technology answer
And you would most likely be wrong. Abuse therapy and rehab is a huge industry. I would not be at all surprised if the revenues far exceeded those of the technological options. Go do a search sometime for alcohol rehab centers along the California coast. I'll get you started with Malibu: "alcohol rehab malibu". Look at the number of pins on the Google map. Think it's all Hollywood stars? Go check if your insurance will pay for all, most, or some of it. Insurance I had at the time I was looking would pay for 90 days, all US$20-30K of it.
As a recovering alcoholic myself, I'll say that I don't care about getting help for those convicted of DUI, I care about getting them off the road. Prison, interlocks, whatever works toward that goal. In the mean time, the individual can figure out on their own what works best to unfsck their life.
What property got trespassed? The network that is owned by Verizon? The router that Verizon owns (OP doesn't own it, despite what he may think)? I'd go easy slinging the insults if I were you until you figure out who owns what in this scenario.
I've got Verizon FioS (well, Frontier now). I don't own my 9100, I seriously doubt you own the Verizon-supplied Actiontec. I'm on my third provider (fourth you count Frontier now that they've taken over FioS), and every single one of them wants the modem back when I disconnect.
I've got fresh new mod points, but unfortunately not enough to +1 everyone who said, "you're an idiot". But I think it's the first time I've ever seen almost unanimous agreement on /.
When my stuff starts refusing to output video through my component cables (granted, that's down to my first-gen Xbox 360 these days), I'll concede that you have a point. But while you've been checking the sizing of tin foil hats, I've enjoyed watching my Panny plasma for the last three or four years, unencumbered by the restrictions you worry about. Now if you were speaking specifically of Blu-Ray, we might have a starting point for discussion.
(Modded "insightful"? WTF?)
Not sure where you'd have to live in Washington to get 11 megabits
Not Seattle, thank the city government for the sweetheart deals that keep FioS out of that city. Here in Redmond I've got 20mbps that is always that speed every time I check (as opposed to Comcast that never got the 12mbps they advertised, not once). That's on the "one up from the cheapest" tier, one can pay more for more bandwidth (up to 50 megabits, I think?)
How prevalent is FioS and the like throughout WA? No idea, but it's not crappy Comcast and slow DSL everywhere.
Why should I have to pay more because I'm a larger person than you?
Easy: because it costs more to fly you than it does to fly me over the same distance. Why should I subsidize the cost of flying your big bones? Answer: because life, for fatties and string beans alike, is rarely fair.
How many people travel with no luggage?
The ones that like "extra screening". Be sure to pay cash for the ticket, too.
saying "books in our hands for hundreds of years" is just plain wrong AND not to mention completely meaningless
Citation needed. Clarification needed. Is English plain wrong AND completely meaningless?
It's /., not a research paper, so enough with the request for citations. Besides, he's not the one making the claim that "we've always done it that way" is a justification for a form factor. He's also arguably correct in that the statement is wrong. Collectively, we may have held books in our hands for hundreds of years, but that doesn't mean jack on the individual level. I've held books in my hands for around 42 years, and the collective experience has not made me any more or less adept holding books.
How inconsistent. You complain about Microsoft's prices,
No, I didn't. Microsoft can charge what they like for VS, it will make zero difference to me.
Then again, this is Slashdot, where Microsoft bashing takes precedence over facts.
Pay attention, because this is an important point: I wasn't bashing Microsoft, I was bashing the suggestion that the Express editions of VS are a viable alternative to other development environments. Express editions are barely suitable for hobbyist programming, and it would be laughable to recommend them for professional use. If you want to argue, argue how the VS Express editions are actually quite handy.
Brilliant marketing on Microsoft's part, I'll admit. Release free, crippled versions of the dev environment, and now supporters can shout, "but...but...free!" Not that any serious work get done in those free versions, but it makes a convenient arguing point.
This comes up on every Slashdot article even vaguely related to Microsoft, Express Editions are free, dumbass.
And every time it comes up, some "dumbass" is there to parrot the "VS Express is free!" line. Express editions are so crippled as to be useless for professional work (no add-ins? Really?). The minimum SKU that allows me to get anything useful done is Pro, which is something like US$750 last I looked. Whereas Xcode, a full-blown dev environment with all the tools you need for professional work, comes on the OS installation disk with every Mac.
You need an Apple computer for the iPhone SDK. How much is the cheapest new Apple computer?
My first iPhone app was released to the app store from a US$350 MSI Wind netbook that I hackintoshed. Not my top recommendation for a dev machine, but it got the job done as Xcode seems to go easy on resources. You're not going to be running VS2010 on a netbook.
You may also note that you'll need a computer to run Visual Studio. I'm not sure what point you're driving at here.
Uh, what world are you living in?
Not yours, I thought I made that clear.
...you are flat-out in denial!
Remember what I said about civil discussion? You've brilliantly made my point.
The mom-and-pops are already out of business.
I seriously don't think we anything to discuss at this point if you think small business is gone. Either that, or this owner of a small corporation didn't get the memo. We're on such obviously different pages I don't know where to begin a civil discussion.
Okay, I lied; we do have something to discuss:
that way they don't have to worry about making customers happy because customers have no other choice (I work for an airline--believe me, I know!).
Funny you should mention airlines. I do have a choice: don't fly. I haven't flown anything but Southwest for the last three or so years. If SWA doesn't go where I want to go, I simply don't go. I'm a pretty good consumer, too, in that I may bitch and moan but I'll all too often still give my money (I'm on AT&T Wireless, believe me, I know). But the other airlines have nickeled-and-dimed to the point that I'll just do without. I'm just one guy, but in the case of airlines it would seem free-market capitalism is working as I would expect.
They're one and only job is to make money for their shareholders.
How do you propose they make that money? By consistently pissing off customers? By making sure that their employees are never gruntled? A company's purpose is often to make money, and it doesn't do well at that with dissatisfied customers and employees. If it does manage to make a profit with unhappy customers (which are often tied to disgruntled workers) in the long term, then it's the fault of the consumer for continuing to reward the company with their money.
You run off the flawed assumption that profits, happy customers, and giddy employees are all mutually exclusive. Either that, or you make the blanket statement for companies of all sizes. Maybe AT&T Wireless can get away with it for a while, but your local Mom-and-Pop is going to be out of business before the quarter ends.
Is there a page on that?
Yes there is (http://usptocareers.gov/Pages/PEPositions/fitcheck.aspx), and it says:
"... all the basic qualifications for this position which include:
U.S. Citizenship
A 4-year degree in Engineering or Physics by June 2009
The willingness to relocate to the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area "
Even if by "screen" you mean the US$900 24" Apple display, you'd still be way off. There's hyperbole to make a point, and then there's just flat-out "shouldn't be participating in the conversation".
You're doing all this over a mobile phone's 3G connection? Context might be important in determining what's staggering and what's not.
It requires cops who can count, tell time, and do simple math.
No, it doesn't. That's what VASCAR is for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VASCAR.
"...in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation". Yeah, and that's just your company. My test team still has to support that steaming pile, and so every test pass involves firing up VMs just for the off chance that those that aren't still on WinXP didn't jump to Win7. I don't know how many hours we've wasted on Vista (because like any place else, we're not completely automated), but I'd axe Vista from the matrix tomorrow if I thought I could get away with telling sales and marketing, "we don't support Vista".
When you run the numbers and see that a gallon of gasoline per hour is equal to 39 kilowatts you'll understand why we don't have electric cars.
Umm, we do have electric cars. I've seen a Tesla Roadster (two, actually) on the street, I know they exist. Otherwise, I'm going to be really disappointed come December when Nissan tells me they lied about delivering my Leaf.
You just described the exact scenario that led me to install a torrent client for the first time ever (never had even a legitimate reason to do so prior). "What do you mean _Dexter Season 4_ is not to be had for any amount of money short of installing cable/satellite? I have money, I'll happily give someone some of it." Sure enough there was torrent of the whole season in HD. Overnight on a FiOS connection, and we're catching up on what everyone else has already watched.
I felt a little bad for a little while, but just a little. I'm willing to pay for content (short of having cable installed), or do without it if I'm not. But I made a good-faith effort to hand someone, anyone, my hard-earned in exchange for not having the season spoiled before I was deemed worthy to view it on DVD. No one would take my money in a timely manner. So now they won't get my money at all because I solved the problem on my own.
Showtime should go talk to AMC before they shout, "damned pirates!" AMC (via iTunes) gets a fair bit of my money between three seasons of _Mad Men_ and three (or is it four?) seasons of _Breaking Bad_, and probably other stuff I've forgotten about. I have disposable income, I'll part with it in exchange for your content, don't fuck it up.
Ah, an opportunity to make the tired old claim of "Microsoft doesn't innovate"! Who can turn that down?
Let's see, off the top of my head, a list of MSR products that made it into production:
SPOT watches and the like
F#
Pieces of SQL Server
That thing with the little LCD display in the lid of a laptop, pretty sure that was MSR
Photosynth (with credit to University of Washington for collaboration)
That's just what I can think of, I'm sure I missed a few. Does MSR crank out a lot of stuff that will never see the light of day? You bet. I used to see the same projects with minor updates at the MSR internal tech fair year after year ("what *did* you do all year?"). A lot of the stuff, though cool, was never going to get picked up by a product team.
On the other hand, one cannot think monolithically where MSR works on X which is then productized into Y. In my made-up example, SQL Server needs something to boost index performance. "Hey, MSR has a little thing they've been working on, let's integrate that into the engine." Now SQL Server has better perf, but you'll never know that MSR was behind some of it.
That's the second time you've referenced Darwin or the gene pool. Are you sure how you have a firm grasp of how "survival of the fittest" works? Mother gorillas throwing their young out into the jungle with a hearty "good luck!"? No, the parents protect their young from the deadly parts of the environment to ensure survival of the species. In the case of school children, it's protection from 4000 lb. vehicles driven by creatures of questionable qualifications to do so.
A six-year old is flighty at best, easily distracted, and certainly not reliably equipped to deal with "do it wrong, and you're dead" situations such as always being on guard against cell-phone talking SUV drivers doing 50mph. So I don't think it's a big deal to make folks slow down for a minute or two at 2:30 when the kiddies get out.
Additionally, the fact that you point out "people around here don't know how to drive" only makes the case for school zone speed limits.
In summary, you're happy to disrupt the flow of traffic for everyone, including those doing the limit, because of some misplaced sense of moral superiority. To add to your self-righteousness, you are not concerned whether your actions are legal in the state of Arizona, only that others are breaking the law.
I'd have written you off as a troll if I didn't already know people with the same attitude.
Then in the case of the parent with a Mac driving the television, there's iTunes (I *suppose* it would work on Windows, never tried). I have the exact same setup as parent (except my TV is smaller), and there seems to be a ton of shows on there for US$30 per season, or US$2/show. When Hulu or Netflix fails us, iTunes usually pulls through.
Or there's bittorrent which seems to have anything you'd want commercial-free, though we're content to pay providers a reasonable fee for the content if they choose to make it available.
Thing is, it is a floppy. It's just encased in a rigid shell. This being /., I wasn't going to RTFA anyway, but this quote certainly gives me no incentive to do so.