The reason the companies are full of duds and still in business is because you don't understand how government contracting works.
The people who run companies that get government contracts are regulation wonks who know how to dot all the Is and cross all the Ts and fill the correct campaign donation boxes. It's got nothing to do with performance. Look at basic Defense contracting where companies are building billion dollar airplanes and ships that the the Joint Chiefs of Staff don't even want, but that are being built in Congressional districts by companies owned by congressional donors.
While the difference between $75K and $250K looks significant to many people, it actually isn't.
If you have $75G to waste on a vacation trip, then chances are you have $250G to waste also.
It's just simple statistics given that the bottom end of the top 10% of _wage_ earners is $107,000 and we all know that is far below the one percenters who don't even work for wages.
Where the market is is for older people with the money to burn but not a body that can suffer multiple Gs on take-off.
Dealerships are car retailers, they purchase the car form the manufacturer and resell to you. Tesla is eliminating the middleman and operating it's own stores, so purchasing a Tesla is always direct from the manufacturer purchase.
And for some unfathomable reason, the Republicans want to prevent consumers from having more choices. Maybe they are just trying to save us from ourselves (something they jump all over the Democrats for). Too bad there aren't any real Libertarians any more. Or even free market Republicans.
Are you talking about the actual article where the founder of Blackwater spent over a million dollars 'lobbying" the Texas legislature to prevent a free market for car buyers in Texas?
Seems to me it doesn't matter who the person is that lobbied, they AND the Texas legislature have removed a basic part of the free market in order to protect a segment of rich businessmen. Same old same old. Republicans say they are against big government but they act otherwise.
I think there are ignorant people screaming on this discussion and you sir are one of them. (I know you aren't screaming but you are certainly jumping to conclusions).
I'm enough of a 'classic' Libertarian (not the Ron Paul fundamentalist version) to know what a free market actually is.
I've run into a few people who always brag about only needing a few hours sleep every night.
I've always sort of thought they were full of waste products.
Exactly. Laziness is not the Sony way. Lying and taking as much money as possible from first adopters is the Sony (capitalist) way.
Remember their DRM ROOTKIT for crying out loud?
Or how about the playstation that let you load Linux? (The US military built a cheap supercomputer out of hundreds of playstations).
The only reason Sony is still in the game business is because their only real competitor is Microsoft (The wii is for families, not gamers).
Sony is in business because they are like the teams in the NFL's NFC East division.
The division leader isn't a winning team; it's just like Sony--the most competent loser in that marketplace.
Most people have ideological blinders on. In politics, it is easy to see. The conservatives rail against the high cost of government (perhaps true although talking only about cost without considering benefit seems stoopid) yet spend their time complaining about the NIH or some silly program that is.000001% of the budget.
Same with energy solutions and climate change. Some folks think batteries are going to save us because apparently their thinking about energy generation stops at the electric plug.
One reason the cost of solar has yet to catch up to the cost of oil is because every time the price of oil goes up, there is more oil available. When the cost goes up, it is profitable to drill deeper and to keep marginal wells and refineries open longer. Basic economics.
We need affordable energy today. I think giving the poor people who need energy today a cheap and hopefully sustainable solution is addressing the issue (instead of increasing it by giving them oil wells and SUVs) but it doesn't address the big sunk costs of dams which are silting up or transmission wires which are growing old or energy generating plants which last for 40 or 60 years.
Same old same old. Most of the folks who present solutions can't even accurately describe the problem and the current situation.
I suspect porn icon would violate some kind of googol TOS.
But I like the idea.
Maybe we ought to have a slashdot contest for icons and pix that protesters could use as their profile pic, items that say "Google Is Evil" or "Don't Believe this Crap" or photoshopped images of Sergey Brin with a Hitler mustache.
Interestingly enough, while many literary typse laud the New York Times or the Washington Post, the most popular 'news' paper in America is the National Enquirer. With most folks reading that, no wonder there is a lack of empathy (or thought or insight) in American politics today.
Or is this just another story about how reading comments on the internet just dumbs us down even more (assuming empathy is a good thing)?
imo, the entire discussion and investigation comes down to one question: How do you define information?
IF DNA is encoded information and keeping a similar DNA 'alive' for billions of years is considered success (a Species is kind of a generalized unknowable DNA), then slime mold is successful. The randomization of sexual reproduction where all the stuff gets shuffled all the time (between generations), is one method of 'predicting' the randomness of the future. Or atl elast dealing with enough to get a good chance to try a second, then third, then fourth prediciton.
What exactly does being informed thru information mean?
Why does anybody on slashdot care what Gartner says?
They are the National Enquirer of IT, mainly trying to sell useless advice to people who cannot think for themselves.
Newflash: Motor vehicles put buggy whip manufacturers out of business. And they also created a huge number of jobs in drilling for oil, refining gasoline, building roads and they even require mechanics.
Maybe we won't need store clerks any more but we will need somebody doing something new and unanticipated at this time. Gartner Group can never sell that to its customers (which is completely different from saying they don't understand the future). It's easier to sell fear than hope mostly because fearful people will buy anything that looks like a solution whereas hopeful people aren't in the market for solutions. (Be very clear about what sorts of folks Obama was selling his Hope message to in 2008).
IBM still makes mainframes. No matter how many tablets and smartphones are sold, Dell or Lenovo or somebody will still be able to make money selling laptops. Oh, and I can still buy both buggies and buggy whips at my local equestrian store, both of them made lovingly by hand.
I can hardly wait for the full science to come out.
I anticipate having a gigundamous brain orgasm when I process the data.
It's what I live for; it's what I write e-mails for; it's what I read comments for but then feel ashamed and disgusted.
I agree we shouldn't waste time whining about gender "discrimination" (at least until it is provably discriminatory).
There are two pertinent facts here:
Social fact: There is a severe gender discrimination in the US prison population--it is mostly men--but we don't see anyone clamoring to solve that problem.
Biological fact: Genes make people different and the more different a gene is, the more differences there will be. PERIOD.
Go look at at the differences between the X and Y chromosomes. They aren't even similar sizes.
Males have more genetic variability than females. That is why you tend to see more males than females at the ends of the bell curve.
There will be more men with ultra hi IQ than women. two-thirds to one-third is about as ideal as you're going to get.
There will also be more men with ultra lo IQ than women for exactly the same reason.
If you want to talk about 'discrimination' in schools, don't just count the number of grrrlz and boys in AP STEM classes. Also count the number in the lowest level classes. Those tend to be filled with males in pretty much the same ratio as the advanced math classes.
The reason this is news is because the journalist just now realizes he himself has been disintermediated.
Who needs a news site if the people in the news are directly communicating with the reader?
The basic unit of direct democracy is the lynch mob.
I really don't know how execs get placed who have no knowledge of what their product is, or what makes it good or bad.
I've seen executives saying and believing something along these lines: that their job is to be executives, that what they need to know is how to execute, and that the specifics of the business they're executing (pun intended) doesn't matter since you can replace one business for another and at their level it all boils down to the same thing, so why bother? Sure, some experience in the area is a bonus, but by no means a requirement.
That sort of gets back to why they have to do market research. It's like that Tom Hanks movie Big where he's trying to play with some transformer-like toy and says it's not playable. If you actually play video games and like to play them, you'll know yourself whether it's working for you or not. I think the real secret of success is that everybody likes something uber-specific but what certain folks like is liked by more people than other ideas. Think Minecraft or Sims, both written originally so the authors could enjoy the game. Rockstar developers play their own games and it shows. Other lesser-known and less profitable companies do the same thing. They aren't hits because they aren't hits; not because the people aren't paying attention. A game that appeals only to Star Wars geeks has less possibility of market penetration than a game for anyone who has been shat upon by a bird.
But then you have the companies run by managers and accountants who hire market researchers and play by the numbers like an insurance company. That's actually workable for awhile, but only in a growing market.
Market research is over-rated. One part of the proof is all those researchers who don't produce hit products.
Another part is all those professional book editors being paid to find the next great hit novel and passing on Gone With the Wind 39 times or other countless examples
Another part is the surprise music hits such as Oh Brother Where Art Thou? vs the heavily invested records or movies which end up duds, despite market research.
I read one study where the best music is 50% familiar and 50% unfamiliar. Too much familiarity is boring. Not enough means it isn't music to your ears.
Kickstarter _is_ market research all by itself. It's going to 'fail' (succeed) at about the same rate as all those professional market researchers.
End users often don't know what they want. Working directly for them isn't a panacea.
Sorry bub. Folks still like genres. Those aren't pure inventions of evil salespeople. Consumers like categorization.
Management is the 'entity' that designs (to be generous) the bureaucracy of the company.
That is the tool and it most definitely should be blamed when poorly designed.
Lazy workers are the result of stupid bureaucratic rulz; they are not the cause
When you cannot load an OS onto a machine because it's missing a cd-rom, well you can't do much else with it. If I actually have to explain that to management, we're in trouble. And it is not due to my laziness
I design the management software we use. More than half of my answers to their requests are "No." Most of the time, you don't want stuff implemented, even if it sounds like a good idea. Let's talk it through a lot. If you're still not convinced, then I'll lay out all the questions you or some committee will _have_ to answer because if there is a process, then there is a flow chart and inputs and outputs and decisions.
The problem in most companies is that the developers aren't allowed to say No. And in companies that contract out everything, there is an incentive to say "Sure, we can do anything you ask for." Writing software is easy. Writing software that actually solves a problem is hard because defining the problem and deciding how to measure and address it is hard.
It is the job of the leadership at the company to think it through and only ask for useful things.
So I guess you can say that even John Galt believes in climate change. But not publicly,...
We had a local county commissioner write The Code of the West 20 years ago explaining how if you were buying your 35-acre ranchette in the mountains of Colorado, don't expect city-living amenities.
He just wrote a letter to the editor (Fort Collins Coloradoan) a few days ago saying the current commissioners wanted him to update it. He read through and thought it was all still valid. They wanted him to take out the sentence where he said city taxes support the rural lifestyle.
He said that was still true.Then he pointed to the cost of replacing all the stuff in Larimer county that was wiped out by the floods. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build those roads. Those are tax dollars we either collect and invest in ourselves and our society or else they are roads we do not have. It's called real life.
If you belong to an actual road association, you quickly come to the realization that infrastructure costs more than one would think. The infrastructure of a good government is about as invisible and important as water is to a fish.
You cannot get rich if there is no market. Yin yang.
At best the types of data that insurance companies would collect would be measurements of effects not proof of a cause.
Exactly. That is ALL they ever collect.
Sheesh. They know a bad credit rating doesn't _cause_ traffic accidents, but the population of bad credit risks has a higher accident rate than the other populations.
It's called Statistics. It's the essence of the insurance industry. Reinsurers--the groups that insure the insurance companies you and me buy from--are the ones who first paid for the researchers who discovered that global warming means we get 5 disastrous hurricanes per decade instead of 3. Cause-effect on a storm level scale is too hard to pick out. But measuring the effect of a single volcano's emission of CO2 is easy. Extrapolating that to what humanity puts out which is about the same amount every three days means you take some guesses.
And it you're smart, or have money on the line, you try to take educated guesses. The best guess is called statistics. In fact, a standard regression over almost any set of data points will beat the expert opinion.
Expecting "none at all naturally" is not realistic. OTOH, having lots more of the chemicals, whether combined or not, in the streams and lakes is a problem iof they are endocrine disruptors.
It's like global warming. We need carbon dioxide. But too much of a good thing is too much.
I find it interesting that the default assumption of everyone looking at chemicals is that they break down and then never recombine.
Unlike trees in a forest, chemicals apparently combine whether anyone is watching or not. (It's too hard to see at night;-)
Absolutely. If you don't try to protect your trademark, you lose it.
And I could definitely see the confusion with the general public.
Most hackers are boys.
And the general public imagines them as boys down in the basement of their house and never getting out except when going camping in the scary woods with the scoutmaster who snuggles them tightly inside his tent all night long to protect them from lions and tigers and bears and Oh My! And then they figure that's probably why all those lonely hacker boys in basements have those sexual p-p-p-p-p-p-problems.
You can see why the Boy Scouts have to protect their trademark.
That's true but irrelevant.
Are you talking about drivers or are you talking about Apple? That's why there are lawsuits, to determine how to portion the stupidity properly.
Slashdot Mirror
We do get a little peeved when the Iranians or the Chinese do it to us. But that's okay because we're real Americans and Europeans aren't, n'est pas?
So they listen in on phone conversations of world leaders and find little intelligence there ;-)
Should we be shocked? I don't find that odd at all.
The reason the companies are full of duds and still in business is because you don't understand how government contracting works.
The people who run companies that get government contracts are regulation wonks who know how to dot all the Is and cross all the Ts and fill the correct campaign donation boxes. It's got nothing to do with performance. Look at basic Defense contracting where companies are building billion dollar airplanes and ships that the the Joint Chiefs of Staff don't even want, but that are being built in Congressional districts by companies owned by congressional donors.
While the difference between $75K and $250K looks significant to many people, it actually isn't.
If you have $75G to waste on a vacation trip, then chances are you have $250G to waste also.
It's just simple statistics given that the bottom end of the top 10% of _wage_ earners is $107,000 and we all know that is far below the one percenters who don't even work for wages.
Where the market is is for older people with the money to burn but not a body that can suffer multiple Gs on take-off.
Dealerships are car retailers, they purchase the car form the manufacturer and resell to you. Tesla is eliminating the middleman and operating it's own stores, so purchasing a Tesla is always direct from the manufacturer purchase.
And for some unfathomable reason, the Republicans want to prevent consumers from having more choices. Maybe they are just trying to save us from ourselves (something they jump all over the Democrats for). Too bad there aren't any real Libertarians any more. Or even free market Republicans.
Are you talking about the actual article where the founder of Blackwater spent over a million dollars 'lobbying" the Texas legislature to prevent a free market for car buyers in Texas?
Seems to me it doesn't matter who the person is that lobbied, they AND the Texas legislature have removed a basic part of the free market in order to protect a segment of rich businessmen. Same old same old. Republicans say they are against big government but they act otherwise.
I think there are ignorant people screaming on this discussion and you sir are one of them. (I know you aren't screaming but you are certainly jumping to conclusions).
I'm enough of a 'classic' Libertarian (not the Ron Paul fundamentalist version) to know what a free market actually is.
I've run into a few people who always brag about only needing a few hours sleep every night.
I've always sort of thought they were full of waste products.
Exactly. Laziness is not the Sony way. Lying and taking as much money as possible from first adopters is the Sony (capitalist) way.
Remember their DRM ROOTKIT for crying out loud?
Or how about the playstation that let you load Linux? (The US military built a cheap supercomputer out of hundreds of playstations).
The only reason Sony is still in the game business is because their only real competitor is Microsoft (The wii is for families, not gamers).
Sony is in business because they are like the teams in the NFL's NFC East division.
The division leader isn't a winning team; it's just like Sony--the most competent loser in that marketplace.
Most people have ideological blinders on. In politics, it is easy to see. The conservatives rail against the high cost of government (perhaps true although talking only about cost without considering benefit seems stoopid) yet spend their time complaining about the NIH or some silly program that is .000001% of the budget.
Same with energy solutions and climate change. Some folks think batteries are going to save us because apparently their thinking about energy generation stops at the electric plug.
One reason the cost of solar has yet to catch up to the cost of oil is because every time the price of oil goes up, there is more oil available. When the cost goes up, it is profitable to drill deeper and to keep marginal wells and refineries open longer. Basic economics.
We need affordable energy today. I think giving the poor people who need energy today a cheap and hopefully sustainable solution is addressing the issue (instead of increasing it by giving them oil wells and SUVs) but it doesn't address the big sunk costs of dams which are silting up or transmission wires which are growing old or energy generating plants which last for 40 or 60 years.
Same old same old. Most of the folks who present solutions can't even accurately describe the problem and the current situation.
I suspect porn icon would violate some kind of googol TOS.
But I like the idea.
Maybe we ought to have a slashdot contest for icons and pix that protesters could use as their profile pic, items that say "Google Is Evil" or "Don't Believe this Crap" or photoshopped images of Sergey Brin with a Hitler mustache.
Interestingly enough, while many literary typse laud the New York Times or the Washington Post, the most popular 'news' paper in America is the National Enquirer. With most folks reading that, no wonder there is a lack of empathy (or thought or insight) in American politics today.
Or is this just another story about how reading comments on the internet just dumbs us down even more (assuming empathy is a good thing)?
imo, the entire discussion and investigation comes down to one question: How do you define information?
IF DNA is encoded information and keeping a similar DNA 'alive' for billions of years is considered success (a Species is kind of a generalized unknowable DNA), then slime mold is successful. The randomization of sexual reproduction where all the stuff gets shuffled all the time (between generations), is one method of 'predicting' the randomness of the future. Or atl elast dealing with enough to get a good chance to try a second, then third, then fourth prediciton.
What exactly does being informed thru information mean?
Why does anybody on slashdot care what Gartner says?
They are the National Enquirer of IT, mainly trying to sell useless advice to people who cannot think for themselves.
Newflash: Motor vehicles put buggy whip manufacturers out of business. And they also created a huge number of jobs in drilling for oil, refining gasoline, building roads and they even require mechanics.
Maybe we won't need store clerks any more but we will need somebody doing something new and unanticipated at this time. Gartner Group can never sell that to its customers (which is completely different from saying they don't understand the future). It's easier to sell fear than hope mostly because fearful people will buy anything that looks like a solution whereas hopeful people aren't in the market for solutions. (Be very clear about what sorts of folks Obama was selling his Hope message to in 2008).
IBM still makes mainframes. No matter how many tablets and smartphones are sold, Dell or Lenovo or somebody will still be able to make money selling laptops. Oh, and I can still buy both buggies and buggy whips at my local equestrian store, both of them made lovingly by hand.
I can hardly wait for the full science to come out.
I anticipate having a gigundamous brain orgasm when I process the data.
It's what I live for; it's what I write e-mails for; it's what I read comments for but then feel ashamed and disgusted.
I agree we shouldn't waste time whining about gender "discrimination" (at least until it is provably discriminatory).
There are two pertinent facts here:
Social fact: There is a severe gender discrimination in the US prison population--it is mostly men--but we don't see anyone clamoring to solve that problem.
Biological fact: Genes make people different and the more different a gene is, the more differences there will be. PERIOD.
Go look at at the differences between the X and Y chromosomes. They aren't even similar sizes.
Males have more genetic variability than females. That is why you tend to see more males than females at the ends of the bell curve.
There will be more men with ultra hi IQ than women. two-thirds to one-third is about as ideal as you're going to get.
There will also be more men with ultra lo IQ than women for exactly the same reason.
If you want to talk about 'discrimination' in schools, don't just count the number of grrrlz and boys in AP STEM classes. Also count the number in the lowest level classes. Those tend to be filled with males in pretty much the same ratio as the advanced math classes.
The reason this is news is because the journalist just now realizes he himself has been disintermediated.
Who needs a news site if the people in the news are directly communicating with the reader?
The basic unit of direct democracy is the lynch mob.
I really don't know how execs get placed who have no knowledge of what their product is, or what makes it good or bad.
I've seen executives saying and believing something along these lines: that their job is to be executives, that what they need to know is how to execute, and that the specifics of the business they're executing (pun intended) doesn't matter since you can replace one business for another and at their level it all boils down to the same thing, so why bother? Sure, some experience in the area is a bonus, but by no means a requirement.
That sort of gets back to why they have to do market research. It's like that Tom Hanks movie Big where he's trying to play with some transformer-like toy and says it's not playable. If you actually play video games and like to play them, you'll know yourself whether it's working for you or not. I think the real secret of success is that everybody likes something uber-specific but what certain folks like is liked by more people than other ideas. Think Minecraft or Sims, both written originally so the authors could enjoy the game. Rockstar developers play their own games and it shows. Other lesser-known and less profitable companies do the same thing. They aren't hits because they aren't hits; not because the people aren't paying attention. A game that appeals only to Star Wars geeks has less possibility of market penetration than a game for anyone who has been shat upon by a bird.
But then you have the companies run by managers and accountants who hire market researchers and play by the numbers like an insurance company. That's actually workable for awhile, but only in a growing market.
Market research is over-rated. One part of the proof is all those researchers who don't produce hit products.
Another part is all those professional book editors being paid to find the next great hit novel and passing on Gone With the Wind 39 times or other countless examples
Another part is the surprise music hits such as Oh Brother Where Art Thou? vs the heavily invested records or movies which end up duds, despite market research.
I read one study where the best music is 50% familiar and 50% unfamiliar. Too much familiarity is boring. Not enough means it isn't music to your ears.
Kickstarter _is_ market research all by itself. It's going to 'fail' (succeed) at about the same rate as all those professional market researchers.
End users often don't know what they want. Working directly for them isn't a panacea.
Sorry bub. Folks still like genres. Those aren't pure inventions of evil salespeople. Consumers like categorization.
Management is the 'entity' that designs (to be generous) the bureaucracy of the company.
That is the tool and it most definitely should be blamed when poorly designed.
Lazy workers are the result of stupid bureaucratic rulz; they are not the cause
When you cannot load an OS onto a machine because it's missing a cd-rom, well you can't do much else with it. If I actually have to explain that to management, we're in trouble. And it is not due to my laziness
I design the management software we use. More than half of my answers to their requests are "No." Most of the time, you don't want stuff implemented, even if it sounds like a good idea. Let's talk it through a lot. If you're still not convinced, then I'll lay out all the questions you or some committee will _have_ to answer because if there is a process, then there is a flow chart and inputs and outputs and decisions.
The problem in most companies is that the developers aren't allowed to say No. And in companies that contract out everything, there is an incentive to say "Sure, we can do anything you ask for." Writing software is easy. Writing software that actually solves a problem is hard because defining the problem and deciding how to measure and address it is hard.
It is the job of the leadership at the company to think it through and only ask for useful things.
warnings haven't killed off sex because you have to have sex, even if only by yourself, but you don't have to use java.
So I guess you can say that even John Galt believes in climate change. But not publicly, ...
We had a local county commissioner write The Code of the West 20 years ago explaining how if you were buying your 35-acre ranchette in the mountains of Colorado, don't expect city-living amenities.
He just wrote a letter to the editor (Fort Collins Coloradoan) a few days ago saying the current commissioners wanted him to update it. He read through and thought it was all still valid. They wanted him to take out the sentence where he said city taxes support the rural lifestyle.
He said that was still true.Then he pointed to the cost of replacing all the stuff in Larimer county that was wiped out by the floods. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build those roads. Those are tax dollars we either collect and invest in ourselves and our society or else they are roads we do not have. It's called real life.
If you belong to an actual road association, you quickly come to the realization that infrastructure costs more than one would think. The infrastructure of a good government is about as invisible and important as water is to a fish.
You cannot get rich if there is no market. Yin yang.
At best the types of data that insurance companies would collect would be measurements of effects not proof of a cause.
Exactly. That is ALL they ever collect.
Sheesh. They know a bad credit rating doesn't _cause_ traffic accidents, but the population of bad credit risks has a higher accident rate than the other populations.
It's called Statistics. It's the essence of the insurance industry. Reinsurers--the groups that insure the insurance companies you and me buy from--are the ones who first paid for the researchers who discovered that global warming means we get 5 disastrous hurricanes per decade instead of 3. Cause-effect on a storm level scale is too hard to pick out. But measuring the effect of a single volcano's emission of CO2 is easy. Extrapolating that to what humanity puts out which is about the same amount every three days means you take some guesses.
And it you're smart, or have money on the line, you try to take educated guesses. The best guess is called statistics. In fact, a standard regression over almost any set of data points will beat the expert opinion.
Expecting "none at all naturally" is not realistic. OTOH, having lots more of the chemicals, whether combined or not, in the streams and lakes is a problem iof they are endocrine disruptors.
;-)
It's like global warming. We need carbon dioxide. But too much of a good thing is too much.
I find it interesting that the default assumption of everyone looking at chemicals is that they break down and then never recombine.
Unlike trees in a forest, chemicals apparently combine whether anyone is watching or not. (It's too hard to see at night
Absolutely. If you don't try to protect your trademark, you lose it.
And I could definitely see the confusion with the general public.
Most hackers are boys.
And the general public imagines them as boys down in the basement of their house and never getting out except when going camping in the scary woods with the scoutmaster who snuggles them tightly inside his tent all night long to protect them from lions and tigers and bears and Oh My! And then they figure that's probably why all those lonely hacker boys in basements have those sexual p-p-p-p-p-p-problems.
You can see why the Boy Scouts have to protect their trademark.
you still can't fix stupid
That's true but irrelevant.
Are you talking about drivers or are you talking about Apple? That's why there are lawsuits, to determine how to portion the stupidity properly.