SAABRE and the other booking systems are a bit too smart these days to actually make tickets available at some sort of pre-determined price.
Jet fuel costs four times what it did ten years ago. Fleets are getting replaced. You really think they're going to let the system release any $300 seats unless the load factor for that flight is low and converging with the flight day?
Still, it only costs about 30% more in actual dollars than it did in 1999 to fly cross country. That little fact doesn't exactly make me confident that the broken remains of what was once a diverse domestic air travel market are very concerned with the self-loading freight, if you get my drift.
Do no evil was never the operative motto for the company.
See also: aggressively pushing prescription drug ad sales Google knew were illegal years ago. Hood winking the folks at Ames research center into becoming "Larry and Sergey and Eric's Private Airport". Etc.
This is why Google's efforts lately have been received relatively poorly. People know that Google sees them as marks. There is no free lunch, and Google's products lately show a distinct lack of polish and execution needed to make it a one-stop-shop for "categorizing the world's information". People know Google is looking over their shoulders constantly, and their products aren't getting better fast enough to keep ahead of the free/utility versus 'leave me alone' curve for some.
When you are getting something useful for free, that's great. But the value for Google doesn't extend to actually creating consumer-driven, best-in-class products. It's obvious to a growing umber of people that Google's products for consumers exist solely to create value for the company by gathering, manipulating, and selling their behavioral habits
See G+(is that an echo in here?) or Google TV, which last I heard, might have shipped a few hundred thlusand units. See anything they've done in the consumer space over the past few years - it sucks and no one is using it.
Android - a product Google has to pay other companies for because if all the IP conflicts and agreements - is successful but looks to have some pretty big and increasingly worrisome problems with forking. Google could lose control of it. And more Android users I talk to are pissed - I mean pissed - that Apple supports a three-year old phone with the latest iOs, but Google doesn't give a ahit enough to work with carriers to make that experience more valuable - to the customer.
Read the article about Stanford's coziness with Valley companies to get some ideas why this brain rot is pissing actual customers off. Hint: MBAs and lots of smart kids who are pretty cocky have a lot to do with it.
Thank you for echoing what this silicon valley transplant has seen and felt during nearly 20 years here.
Stanford University is pretty much a "free hire" pass at many companies here. Based on many of the project and product managers I've met who graduated from there, that tendency has cost valley companies a lot of money, but at least the BMW dealerships and Coach stores are happy.
Exactly. Consensus hiring is Stanford voodoo clubhouse bullshit too - "we all thought you were awesome, but Arnie here wants to hire the girl with big tits who is almost as good as you, so...see you later!"
I live in Silicon Valley and most of the recent Stanford grads I meet are like West Coast Romneys: legacy kids, well-heeled by their own rich parents and friends, and already assured of that new 5-series or a spot at the VC table, no matter how stupid the idea is (paying 1 billion for Instagram...).
Yeah - I resent the hell out of the culture here. It's gone from what you know to who you know in 20 years. Now, instead of building things in Silicon Valley, we just reinvent the same scams to fleece money from consumers - thanks in part to your Stanford MBAs.
Apple is easier to target for malware writters anyway because their users typically do not run anti virus software and feel safe clicking on shit anyway because the genius at the Apple Store said they are secure.
Credibility fail troll. You meant trojan, right? Because zero Mac viruses (self-spreading and replicating) exist. There's one widespread Mac trojan which masqueraded as a Flash installer with an Adobe logo - because, you know, Mac users are all stupid and clicking on shit like installers from major software vendors.
Malware "writters" must be busy doing something else, eh?
It is more like someone picked got a piece of mail addressed to nobody with no forwarding address and it is in a pile of junk in a drawer. Unless someone gets it out of the drawer and sends it to someone else, there is not really a problem.
That's exactly the right analogy. The vast majority of Windows malware found on Macs is in filed e-mails from Windows users. Seriously. If you never do anything with the mail again, it's not even comparable to a dormant bacillus like anthrax because there is literally zero chance of infection of the host being infected, and a zero chance of infecting others unless direct action is taken by the "host".
But consider Apple's source is unlikely in most cases to be original mastering materials (who in their right mind would turn over digital originals to Apple?)
Your values are not the same as those looking to make money by reselling audio content. I can assure you that various music distributors would have no problem at all working in the studio with their own or third-party engineers to produce "Mastered for iTunes" versions of a catalog if that's what they think will lure more buyers. Whether or not "Mastered for iTunes" involves a substantively changed version (for example, engineered toward smaller drivers with more bass cutover, increasingly popular these days).
Regardless of your opinion about how something should work, this kind of collaboration is an every day occurrence in the industry and never relies on "turning over" anything to Apple.
Half the US population will pretend that scientific consensus does not exist as they drive automobiles created with the fruits of science, the Chinese will fudge their numbers, and nothing will change.
They've been getting low on coal every now and then
Probably because their disregard for human life and sloppy, fast and loose mining practices inevitably leads to huge accidents with hundreds killed...just last month. You should see the totals since 2005.
No biggie though! Yay China! More cheap electronics, please!
China is the largest investor in renewable energy of any country in the world.
China is also the largest provider of toxic adulterants in exports. They build factories where people are given 15-minute breaks twice a day to urinate and defecate, and four hours to sleep. Western companies make a show of trying to police these factories, but when it comes down to brass tacks, there are simply too many factories, too many bodies, and not enough oversight for any of it to make a lot of difference. The solution to factory suicides in China? Bars on the windows.
Because we're apparently now a nation that simply consumes things made elsewhere - mostly China, it seems at times - it's easiest to just trust them when it comes to things like baby formula (melamine), pet food (more melamine), drywall (formaldehyde and H2S), paint on toys (lead)....and when your relatives get sick because they can't breathe due to the toxic wallboard, well, there's no one to sue for recovery of lost money, time, and health. Oh, well!
The Chinese culture does not define trust the same way Western societies do. Most of their factories are owned by former military generals. The standards being developed will come with lots of access to LBNL's own methodologies, networks, people, and other trusted entities, which China will be happy to use for their own benefit.
I'm sorry, but "Regulation is necessary" seems false to me. In a slightly longer view, it costs money to assume that you'll continue to have paying customers if you kill/ill them with faulty beef. I think the GoDaddy situation illustrates that.
Yes, and well, too bad for all the tainted-beef-eating dead people's families. They can, however, rest easy knowing that the ShitBeefCo will go out of business and its employees will be destitute as soon as ShitBeefCo's CEO's golden parachute inflates over the Caymans, where his bonuses for improving profitbility at SBC are protected from lawsuits.
See? The market corrected itself; it killed the stupid little people, and rewarded the superior Randian Overlords who worked so hard to get through an MBA program while playing rugby and fucking Muffy in the BMW convertible!
Thank god for the invisible hand pimp-slapping us all...again. Because the market will automagically correct itself...SUCKERS.
I have friends who tell me Randroids like you seem to be are sociopaths. I'm starting to think they're right.
Oh - and I just moved my domains off of GoDaddy AND I wrote to my congresscritters. Have you?
Luckily I am friends with some people who worked there (2/3 have left since) and I'm thankful I didn't pursue the job.
Anything constructive to add? I maintain that they're wildly self-entitled based on their own 'cultural' guidelines, which led to bad decisions like Qwikster. They're just like Apple in the 90s.
If anyone has ever seen the asinine PowerPoint on the "Netflix culture" (follow their careers link), you'd understand why this company has been screwed for a while.
A more self-entitled group of assholes is hard to find south of Menlo Park.
For the ten-thousandth time, it's not because your Funtendo or SmartFone will cause the airplane to suddenly explode on the runway. It's because the FAs want the smartphone addicts and social callers to _shut up and pay attention_ to the safety briefing.
Go on and on about how you've seen it before. I'd still wager that 80% of people on every flight in the US have no idea where the nearest exit is if they aren't allowed to turn their head.
In Denver a couple of years ago, people were jamming the asles with the airplane ON FIRE, off of a snowy runway in order to...get their laptops.
Given the ridiculous state of air travel and attention spans today, I'd say getting people to shut up and pay attention might be one of the toughest jobs in the world.
I fail to understand your comment about LH2/LOX versus JP7/LOX. What is the point you're trying to make. Then again, you seem to be under the impression that the Russians are making Atlas V now.
Might want to take advantage of proofing before you hit submit.
When you buy an Air you get a USB restore stick with OS and factory-fill apps, but Lion removes the need for a separate physical boot device for reinstalls, so chances are that Apple will use the cloud/app store more and more for reinstalls, banishing physical media forever.
PC vendors don't restrict your ability to install an alternative OS.
Nor do they subsidize the purchase of your PC by signing you up for a monthly service contract. There's no ETF when you sell your PC after six months to but a better one.
The carrier can do what it wants with its equipment.
Wow. For the vast majority of people who are affected by the difference in these platforms, this means exactly squat.
Glad you're impressed. Now you see why Steve Jobs is CEO of the second-largest company in the US, and Andy Rubin is a geek at Google.
I certainly don't hold material gain above all else, but Rubin's reply shows exactly the kind of hubris that Google is getting a bad reputation for here in the valley; it's a bunch of geeks on a power trip in many cases, hence the arcane and off-topic interview question highlighted in today's Mercury News. Google makes engineers feel special, Apple engineers look at the numbers and balance sheets and say: "Our products rock". They don't need to be told how special they are simply because they can decipher a piece of code. They can see it in customers' faces.
Slashdot Mirror
SAABRE and the other booking systems are a bit too smart these days to actually make tickets available at some sort of pre-determined price.
Jet fuel costs four times what it did ten years ago. Fleets are getting replaced. You really think they're going to let the system release any $300 seats unless the load factor for that flight is low and converging with the flight day?
Still, it only costs about 30% more in actual dollars than it did in 1999 to fly cross country. That little fact doesn't exactly make me confident that the broken remains of what was once a diverse domestic air travel market are very concerned with the self-loading freight, if you get my drift.
Do no evil was never the operative motto for the company.
See also: aggressively pushing prescription drug ad sales Google knew were illegal years ago. Hood winking the folks at Ames research center into becoming "Larry and Sergey and Eric's Private Airport". Etc.
This is why Google's efforts lately have been received relatively poorly. People know that Google sees them as marks. There is no free lunch, and Google's products lately show a distinct lack of polish and execution needed to make it a one-stop-shop for "categorizing the world's information". People know Google is looking over their shoulders constantly, and their products aren't getting better fast enough to keep ahead of the free/utility versus 'leave me alone' curve for some.
When you are getting something useful for free, that's great. But the value for Google doesn't extend to actually creating consumer-driven, best-in-class products. It's obvious to a growing umber of people that Google's products for consumers exist solely to create value for the company by gathering, manipulating, and selling their behavioral habits
See G+(is that an echo in here?) or Google TV, which last I heard, might have shipped a few hundred thlusand units. See anything they've done in the consumer space over the past few years - it sucks and no one is using it.
Android - a product Google has to pay other companies for because if all the IP conflicts and agreements - is successful but looks to have some pretty big and increasingly worrisome problems with forking. Google could lose control of it. And more Android users I talk to are pissed - I mean pissed - that Apple supports a three-year old phone with the latest iOs, but Google doesn't give a ahit enough to work with carriers to make that experience more valuable - to the customer.
Read the article about Stanford's coziness with Valley companies to get some ideas why this brain rot is pissing actual customers off. Hint: MBAs and lots of smart kids who are pretty cocky have a lot to do with it.
Thank you for echoing what this silicon valley transplant has seen and felt during nearly 20 years here.
Stanford University is pretty much a "free hire" pass at many companies here. Based on many of the project and product managers I've met who graduated from there, that tendency has cost valley companies a lot of money, but at least the BMW dealerships and Coach stores are happy.
Exactly. Consensus hiring is Stanford voodoo clubhouse bullshit too - "we all thought you were awesome, but Arnie here wants to hire the girl with big tits who is almost as good as you, so...see you later!"
I live in Silicon Valley and most of the recent Stanford grads I meet are like West Coast Romneys: legacy kids, well-heeled by their own rich parents and friends, and already assured of that new 5-series or a spot at the VC table, no matter how stupid the idea is (paying 1 billion for Instagram...).
Yeah - I resent the hell out of the culture here. It's gone from what you know to who you know in 20 years. Now, instead of building things in Silicon Valley, we just reinvent the same scams to fleece money from consumers - thanks in part to your Stanford MBAs.
Apple is easier to target for malware writters anyway because their users typically do not run anti virus software and feel safe clicking on shit anyway because the genius at the Apple Store said they are secure.
Credibility fail troll. You meant trojan, right? Because zero Mac viruses (self-spreading and replicating) exist. There's one widespread Mac trojan which masqueraded as a Flash installer with an Adobe logo - because, you know, Mac users are all stupid and clicking on shit like installers from major software vendors.
Malware "writters" must be busy doing something else, eh?
It is more like someone picked got a piece of mail addressed to nobody with no forwarding address and it is in a pile of junk in a drawer. Unless someone gets it out of the drawer and sends it to someone else, there is not really a problem.
That's exactly the right analogy. The vast majority of Windows malware found on Macs is in filed e-mails from Windows users. Seriously. If you never do anything with the mail again, it's not even comparable to a dormant bacillus like anthrax because there is literally zero chance of infection of the host being infected, and a zero chance of infecting others unless direct action is taken by the "host".
But consider Apple's source is unlikely in most cases to be original mastering materials (who in their right mind would turn over digital originals to Apple?)
Your values are not the same as those looking to make money by reselling audio content. I can assure you that various music distributors would have no problem at all working in the studio with their own or third-party engineers to produce "Mastered for iTunes" versions of a catalog if that's what they think will lure more buyers. Whether or not "Mastered for iTunes" involves a substantively changed version (for example, engineered toward smaller drivers with more bass cutover, increasingly popular these days).
Regardless of your opinion about how something should work, this kind of collaboration is an every day occurrence in the industry and never relies on "turning over" anything to Apple.
Half the US population will pretend that scientific consensus does not exist as they drive automobiles created with the fruits of science, the Chinese will fudge their numbers, and nothing will change.
God forbid we raise revenue to even 1999 rates. The poor little rich people might cry. And we might cut the deficit, too.
They've been getting low on coal every now and then
Probably because their disregard for human life and sloppy, fast and loose mining practices inevitably leads to huge accidents with hundreds killed...just last month. You should see the totals since 2005.
No biggie though! Yay China! More cheap electronics, please!
China is the largest investor in renewable energy of any country in the world.
China is also the largest provider of toxic adulterants in exports. They build factories where people are given 15-minute breaks twice a day to urinate and defecate, and four hours to sleep. Western companies make a show of trying to police these factories, but when it comes down to brass tacks, there are simply too many factories, too many bodies, and not enough oversight for any of it to make a lot of difference. The solution to factory suicides in China? Bars on the windows.
Because we're apparently now a nation that simply consumes things made elsewhere - mostly China, it seems at times - it's easiest to just trust them when it comes to things like baby formula (melamine), pet food (more melamine), drywall (formaldehyde and H2S), paint on toys (lead)....and when your relatives get sick because they can't breathe due to the toxic wallboard, well, there's no one to sue for recovery of lost money, time, and health. Oh, well!
The Chinese culture does not define trust the same way Western societies do. Most of their factories are owned by former military generals. The standards being developed will come with lots of access to LBNL's own methodologies, networks, people, and other trusted entities, which China will be happy to use for their own benefit.
Trust me on this.
I'm sorry, but "Regulation is necessary" seems false to me.
In a slightly longer view, it costs money to assume that you'll continue to have paying customers if you kill/ill them with faulty beef. I think the GoDaddy situation illustrates that.
Yes, and well, too bad for all the tainted-beef-eating dead people's families. They can, however, rest easy knowing that the ShitBeefCo will go out of business and its employees will be destitute as soon as ShitBeefCo's CEO's golden parachute inflates over the Caymans, where his bonuses for improving profitbility at SBC are protected from lawsuits.
See? The market corrected itself; it killed the stupid little people, and rewarded the superior Randian Overlords who worked so hard to get through an MBA program while playing rugby and fucking Muffy in the BMW convertible!
Thank god for the invisible hand pimp-slapping us all...again. Because the market will automagically correct itself...SUCKERS.
I have friends who tell me Randroids like you seem to be are sociopaths. I'm starting to think they're right.
Oh - and I just moved my domains off of GoDaddy AND I wrote to my congresscritters. Have you?
Luckily I am friends with some people who worked there (2/3 have left since) and I'm thankful I didn't pursue the job.
Anything constructive to add? I maintain that they're wildly self-entitled based on their own 'cultural' guidelines, which led to bad decisions like Qwikster. They're just like Apple in the 90s.
If anyone has ever seen the asinine PowerPoint on the "Netflix culture" (follow their careers link), you'd understand why this company has been screwed for a while.
A more self-entitled group of assholes is hard to find south of Menlo Park.
Dude, who *talks* on their cellphone?
Women. Of course, this is slashdot, so a lack of familiarity with their habits is not surprising.
For the ten-thousandth time, it's not because your Funtendo or SmartFone will cause the airplane to suddenly explode on the runway. It's because the FAs want the smartphone addicts and social callers to _shut up and pay attention_ to the safety briefing.
Go on and on about how you've seen it before. I'd still wager that 80% of people on every flight in the US have no idea where the nearest exit is if they aren't allowed to turn their head.
In Denver a couple of years ago, people were jamming the asles with the airplane ON FIRE, off of a snowy runway in order to...get their laptops.
Given the ridiculous state of air travel and attention spans today, I'd say getting people to shut up and pay attention might be one of the toughest jobs in the world.
Good god, first post, and we're already in a Boeing/Airbus pissing war.
This article is about the Boeing. Can we discuss that aircraft's unique capabilities, or does EVERYTHING have to end up like the old Mac/DOS Warz?
Ares Five is alive! Or is it?
I fail to understand your comment about LH2/LOX versus JP7/LOX. What is the point you're trying to make. Then again, you seem to be under the impression that the Russians are making Atlas V now.
Might want to take advantage of proofing before you hit submit.
"Also, if Apple were to have pressed the discs and boxed and shipped them, Lion's release date would have been later than today"
Bull. Design and printing of packaging never gates schedule like that. You could have stacks of boxes ready a week before GM.
When you buy an Air you get a USB restore stick with OS and factory-fill apps, but Lion removes the need for a separate physical boot device for reinstalls, so chances are that Apple will use the cloud/app store more and more for reinstalls, banishing physical media forever.
Hopefully our ISPs can keep up....
Really?
What overseas airline are you flying that's so janky there are no power outlets at the seats?
Even cheapo American Airlines installed seat power on it's 20+ year old domestic service MD-80s years ago.
PC vendors don't restrict your ability to install an alternative OS.
Nor do they subsidize the purchase of your PC by signing you up for a monthly service contract. There's no ETF when you sell your PC after six months to but a better one.
The carrier can do what it wants with its equipment.
Wow. For the vast majority of people who are affected by the difference in these platforms, this means exactly squat.
Glad you're impressed. Now you see why Steve Jobs is CEO of the second-largest company in the US, and Andy Rubin is a geek at Google.
I certainly don't hold material gain above all else, but Rubin's reply shows exactly the kind of hubris that Google is getting a bad reputation for here in the valley; it's a bunch of geeks on a power trip in many cases, hence the arcane and off-topic interview question highlighted in today's Mercury News. Google makes engineers feel special, Apple engineers look at the numbers and balance sheets and say: "Our products rock". They don't need to be told how special they are simply because they can decipher a piece of code. They can see it in customers' faces.