I guess the original article is a year-old Slashdot discussion for this one.... so some of us may *actually* have read it, but surely we don't remember and for the integrity of this discussion I hope nobody goes back and re-reads it.
Well, I would hope HR and management in general try to find an appropriate balance of employee morale, productivity, and budget. When customer demand is high and revenues are bigger than operating expenses this is easy. When revenues drop it's tougher. When companies are asked by shareholders to maintain 10% year-over-year profit growth indefinitely eventually the budget will break unless there are massive firings which lead to (long term) hits in morale and productivity... so don't do that.
So the budget isn't the main source of blame. Year-to-year changes in the budget, though, just need to be carefully managed.
Why is it harder to design a space telescope than a magnifying glass? A space telescope is much more complex. More people + lower population density ==> Higher complexity.
I have an issue with the way "United States healthcare for 300+ Million people" is compared on the same chart as "Norway healthcare for 5+ Million people".
Let's add country population to the analysis of world health rankings and see how USA compares....
WHO "Ranking" from 2000 of countries with Population greater than 100 Million:
10th Japan 127M
37th USA 313M
61th Mexico 112M
88th Bangladesh 142M
92nd Indonesia 237M
112th India 1,210M
122nd Pakistan 180M
125th Brazil 192M
130th Russia 143M
144th China 1,347M
187th Nigeria 166M
And here are the population rankings for the 10 countries mentioned in the chart the parent linked to.
3rd USA 313M
10th Japan 127M
16th Germany 81M
21st France 65M
22nd UK 62M
23rd Italy 60M
35th Canada 34M
52nd Australia 22M
86th Sweden 9M
118th Norway 5M
This small analysis should temper the hatred towards the US for its healthcare system.... the US is a big country with lots of people and relatively low population density. It's *hard* for big countries with lots of people to take care of the health of their citizens. As expensive as it ends up being, the USA does a reasonably good job while comparable countries like China, Brazil, and Indonesia falter.
Girl Scouts spends too much time focused on selling cookies.
Training the saleswoman of tomorrow. Seriously, though, most companies have enough leaders. What good is a company that can't figure out how to effectively sell their products to customers?
The GP makes a point that spreading minor disease builds up a social tolerance of the minor disease. Over time, your body develops natural defenses to things you're constantly exposed to. You pass along that defense to your children.
And for people suffering from constant headaches... the most common cause of headaches is dehydration. Drink water, get better. Relying on advil or aspirin to numb the pain is counter-productive to the unhealthy eating habit of not getting enough fluids.
Part of the problem with OEMs is that they'll just throw their junkware onto Linux PCs. I own a Dell Netbook with Ubuntu. I still cannot for the life of me figure out why they replaced the Firefox logo with a Blue Orb. I was also dismayed that it included Dell Junk Software. I forget if it included other third-party Shovelware, but if Linux chances on for OEMs, the death of the OEM will be selling out to crap vendors who seek to profit from these sorts of nefarious schemes.
Another post pointed out that Microsoft getting away from the Shovelware business would be a boon for Microsoft -- and that's something I agree with.
Now the OEMs actually have an options (Android, Ubuntu and co.) to deliver compeling use experience without MS.
Full disclosure - I use Linux on desktops as much as possible. I've never owned an Apple product more sophisticated than an iPod (because of the cost). I don't particularly like Microsoft b/c of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. I own the non-MS video game consoles b/c of a lack of forced monthly fees for playing online - which I rarely do anyway. I use more Windows software than I'd like at my job, and I dislike it less than I did 8 years ago when I was starting my career.
Android and Ubuntu can't compete with Windows in terms of "Productivity Software for Average People". OSX succeeds because it does. Meanwhile, iOS succeeds because it runs useful "Apps" where "useful" is a spectrum from "mindless entertainment" to "incredibly useful life tools".
Touchscreen Tablets and Netbooks before them are an attempt to bridge the "Apps" to "Productivity" gap. The big bets that major companies are making is that people want portability with enough power to browse the web, play games, correspond via e-mail, and be productive. Just like mainframes became less necessary when PCs came out, so too will PCs be less necessary when the correct formula for a Tablets comes out. I guess Microsoft is hoping that Surface is that formula.
People are lambasting the Surface keyboard... it goes without saying that keyboards that don't consume precious screen real estate are useful for productivity applications. Apple's iTools aren't focused on productivity. Microsoft's bread-and-butter is businesses (and schools) that need to at least pretend to be productive.
What exactly are the drawbacks of advertising networks interest-preference cookies?
Reverse question: What are the benefits? If you show me real benefits (and not some "hand-wave" about them* being able to show me ads that are for things that I want to buy) I will stop caring about my privacy.
To answer your question: I perceive that letting businesses have my private information leads to a sharp increase in junk mail, unwanted telephone calls, and spam e-mail which are three areas where I NEVER want to see advertizing -- accept from the 2 or 3 stores where I already spend significant amounts of money (Crate and Barrel being one of those stores that I enjoy getting their monthly circular in the mail).
* Who is "them" by the way? When reputable businesses and internet sleazebag companies are differentiated, then maybe I'll be happy to let certain reputable businesses (the company that owns Slashdot, the folks at Penny Arcade, maybe Amazon) track me. But yeah... I don't want anybody having any information unless I can trust them... and there isn't a whole lot of trust on most of the businesses operating on the internet.
This is a discussion... maybe the summary was a teaser to get us to click the discussion where our best minds can get together refute the supposed straw man. And besides, deconstructing straw man arguments is popular around here.
$10 for 50GB is completely unreasonable. It's the equivalent of $64 per megabit
50 GB = 50,000 MB (approximately).... $10 per 50 GB = $1 per 5 GB = $0.01 per 50 MB = $0.0002 per 1 MB
And 4 meg is a pretty damned conservative bitrate for IPTV.
4 mbps = 240 mbpm (Megabyte per Minute) = 14,400 mbph ~ 14 GB per hour.
Last I checked, uncompressed 1080p was about 4 GB per hour. Decent compression algorithms knock it down to about 800 MB per hour, but you can bet on HD not being served as 1080p so you're much more likely to be pulling your streaming video at 400-600 kbps (not 4 mbps). Making order of magnitude exaggerations make the rest of your look foolish. And saying $20 for 50-100 GB is reasonable while $10 is "completely unreasonable" doesn't help either.
Well, if I were running a school, text-book costs would be the last place I'd try to be reducing costs. The risk of giving kids inferior text-books to save a few thousand dollars doesn't really make sense from a high-level perspective.
The real money is empowering educators to use their time more effectively. This means increasing classroom sizes without sacrificing quality of education. An overlooked part of this problem is successfully handling disruptive kids while at the same time challenging the ones at the higher end of the learning spectrum. You gotta keep the kids focused. Small class sizes help with this. Low faculty to student ratios help with this. But if 500 students are being taught by a staff of 100 educators its going to be more expensive than if that same group of students were being taught by 90 educators. Ten people times $30k is a lot bigger deal than buying 500 new books at $100/each every year ($300k vs $50k -- though these are admittedly fabricated numbers).
You also gotta deal with parents/guardians. There are districts where kids have absentee parents and districts where parents are involved in the education process to the point that they make teachers' lives harder.
All else being equal, though, the "public school" system seems to succeed because it is one system where disadvantaged children are given opportunities comparable to their wealthier neighbors. Local, state, and federal dollars seem to be able to fund a "better" solution than these children would get from a "private school" system funded by their financially-challenged parents. What I don't like about the over-arching complaint about "Government corruption" is that it government-funded public education system takes the moral high-ground by attempting to give poor kids a fighting chance while the competing "private school" solution is inherently corrupt because its expense excludes children from poor families.
Having said all that... someday I think text-books will be free and "private" educators will be able to interact with many students at a time so that the cost of "public school teachers" will be higher than the cost of a high-quality private education. I'm not sure how this will happen because it's really tough to envision what techniques are needed so 100 students can be successfully managed by a single teacher (without a significant portion of them failing badly). I think having a lot of stay-at-home moms and dads is a key to this. But yeah... complaints about corruption are a distraction from the real issues that funding public education is an extremely complex undertaking.
incentives pushing for quick, bad replies to customers in your tickets and everyone else's
With either set of "points", the game becomes identifying and solving the "easy" problems. To an extent the smarter, more experienced people will be better at this because to them, more of the tickets are problems they've seen before. But this doesn't change the fact that employees have a disincentive to working the "harder" problems (unless the tickets are assigned randomly and people don't get to choose which tickets they work).
So would you have scientists publish fewer original research papers and more papers that attempt to reaffirm or disaffirm research that's been published by their peers? I'd be surprised if there isn't *some* resource that links research publications with a list of secondary papers that "Support the Same Conclusion" and "Refute the Conclusion". Given that scientists are looking to publish (churn out) a lot of papers... it seems low-hanging fruit would be studying and trying to repeat the Research/Conclusion of a peer.
On the other hand, I'm an engineer and not a scientist so I take a practical view of applying what's coming out of the scientific community... and the most practical view truly is ignoring 95% of it and letting the "really good stuff" percolate out.
What's wrong with someone getting a six-figure payout for, as in this one, 5 years of work?
The thing that's wrong is that the company who couldn't keep their damned systems secure could have probably made the whole thing go away and saved a lot of money by settling for $2,000 with each of the 290 original claimants which would have cost only $580,000 instead of fighting for 5 years and ending up with 11 people only getting $200 each.
If the goal for the lawyers is to truly serve their clients... they should be looking to win a quick and fast case. By drawing out the case to 5 years and raking in $600,000 for themselves, the lawyers look like they're working mainly for themselves to further their own goals/careers.
I imagine that hosting an online store that does supply management with integrated order processing and fulfillment isn't something you consider trivial?
My dad purchased his Samsung 55" LCD 3D TV with glasses for $2200.
Your dad got an LCD TV or and LED TV? The latter is the higher-end that I'd expect to see for $2,200. Seems to me that your dad cares more about his time than his pocketbook --- and is willing to buy a more expensive TV when it's not on sale so he doesn't have to worry about something wonky breaking after two years. I used the same logic when I bought a new TV a year ago... except I got a 2009 45" Samsung 8000 for about $1,099. It works fine... supports 3D and "smart features"... I've played with the "smart features" and occasionally let it play Pandora, though I generally find the interface to be terrible. I've never used the 3D features.
I have witnessed way too many "workers" kill hours a week on Slashdot, or other even more inane news sites, or programming stupid microblogs, or yakking with their buddies, to ever think that the majority of jobs involving OT do indeed *require* 50 hours of work a week; it's merely what happens when poor management collides with inefficient workers.
Poor management causes inefficient workers. If people have to spend at least 40-50-60 hours in an office building each week to justify their paychecks, they'll do what it takes to pass that time. If there were actual incentives for workers to be efficient... for example, bonuses for milestones completed according to an "aggressive" schedule... there would be more people signing up to work efficiently. As it stands, most people probably prefer mentally checking out while they're in their office buildings and prefer working projects that have relaxed schedules. Heck... since working relaxed projects pays the same as working aggressive projects there can be no surprise that workers spend time on Slashdot when they should be working.
Don't count on getting it back though, if they don't accept it as payment, if what you send is attached an an e-mail. Unlike payment officers at utility companies, the RIAA knows that sending attachments is piracy and *they* only commit piracy when it benefits them.
I DO want a driverless car. I'd much rather spend my commute reading than driving.
I suppose public transit isn't an option for you? It's not as cool as driverless cars, but it's probably safer right now and definitely cheaper in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess the original article is a year-old Slashdot discussion for this one.... so some of us may *actually* have read it, but surely we don't remember and for the integrity of this discussion I hope nobody goes back and re-reads it.
Well, I would hope HR and management in general try to find an appropriate balance of employee morale, productivity, and budget. When customer demand is high and revenues are bigger than operating expenses this is easy. When revenues drop it's tougher. When companies are asked by shareholders to maintain 10% year-over-year profit growth indefinitely eventually the budget will break unless there are massive firings which lead to (long term) hits in morale and productivity... so don't do that.
So the budget isn't the main source of blame. Year-to-year changes in the budget, though, just need to be carefully managed.
Why is it harder to design a space telescope than a magnifying glass? A space telescope is much more complex. More people + lower population density ==> Higher complexity.
I have an issue with the way "United States healthcare for 300+ Million people" is compared on the same chart as "Norway healthcare for 5+ Million people".
Let's add country population to the analysis of world health rankings and see how USA compares....
WHO "Ranking" from 2000 of countries with Population greater than 100 Million:
10th Japan 127M
37th USA 313M
61th Mexico 112M
88th Bangladesh 142M
92nd Indonesia 237M
112th India 1,210M
122nd Pakistan 180M
125th Brazil 192M
130th Russia 143M
144th China 1,347M
187th Nigeria 166M
And here are the population rankings for the 10 countries mentioned in the chart the parent linked to.
3rd USA 313M
10th Japan 127M
16th Germany 81M
21st France 65M
22nd UK 62M
23rd Italy 60M
35th Canada 34M
52nd Australia 22M
86th Sweden 9M
118th Norway 5M
This small analysis should temper the hatred towards the US for its healthcare system.... the US is a big country with lots of people and relatively low population density. It's *hard* for big countries with lots of people to take care of the health of their citizens. As expensive as it ends up being, the USA does a reasonably good job while comparable countries like China, Brazil, and Indonesia falter.
health ranking and population ranking.
Girl Scouts spends too much time focused on selling cookies.
Training the saleswoman of tomorrow. Seriously, though, most companies have enough leaders. What good is a company that can't figure out how to effectively sell their products to customers?
While a subset of leaders are both narcissistic and psychopathic, I don't think that is a Framework for leadership.
Key traits for being a leader that I've seen in my career are a willingness to volunteer for opportunities.
The GP makes a point that spreading minor disease builds up a social tolerance of the minor disease. Over time, your body develops natural defenses to things you're constantly exposed to. You pass along that defense to your children.
And for people suffering from constant headaches... the most common cause of headaches is dehydration. Drink water, get better. Relying on advil or aspirin to numb the pain is counter-productive to the unhealthy eating habit of not getting enough fluids.
Part of the problem with OEMs is that they'll just throw their junkware onto Linux PCs. I own a Dell Netbook with Ubuntu. I still cannot for the life of me figure out why they replaced the Firefox logo with a Blue Orb. I was also dismayed that it included Dell Junk Software. I forget if it included other third-party Shovelware, but if Linux chances on for OEMs, the death of the OEM will be selling out to crap vendors who seek to profit from these sorts of nefarious schemes.
Another post pointed out that Microsoft getting away from the Shovelware business would be a boon for Microsoft -- and that's something I agree with.
Now the OEMs actually have an options (Android, Ubuntu and co.) to deliver compeling use experience without MS.
Full disclosure - I use Linux on desktops as much as possible. I've never owned an Apple product more sophisticated than an iPod (because of the cost). I don't particularly like Microsoft b/c of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. I own the non-MS video game consoles b/c of a lack of forced monthly fees for playing online - which I rarely do anyway. I use more Windows software than I'd like at my job, and I dislike it less than I did 8 years ago when I was starting my career.
Android and Ubuntu can't compete with Windows in terms of "Productivity Software for Average People". OSX succeeds because it does. Meanwhile, iOS succeeds because it runs useful "Apps" where "useful" is a spectrum from "mindless entertainment" to "incredibly useful life tools".
Touchscreen Tablets and Netbooks before them are an attempt to bridge the "Apps" to "Productivity" gap. The big bets that major companies are making is that people want portability with enough power to browse the web, play games, correspond via e-mail, and be productive. Just like mainframes became less necessary when PCs came out, so too will PCs be less necessary when the correct formula for a Tablets comes out. I guess Microsoft is hoping that Surface is that formula.
People are lambasting the Surface keyboard... it goes without saying that keyboards that don't consume precious screen real estate are useful for productivity applications. Apple's iTools aren't focused on productivity. Microsoft's bread-and-butter is businesses (and schools) that need to at least pretend to be productive.
What exactly are the drawbacks of advertising networks interest-preference cookies?
Reverse question: What are the benefits? If you show me real benefits (and not some "hand-wave" about them* being able to show me ads that are for things that I want to buy) I will stop caring about my privacy.
To answer your question: I perceive that letting businesses have my private information leads to a sharp increase in junk mail, unwanted telephone calls, and spam e-mail which are three areas where I NEVER want to see advertizing -- accept from the 2 or 3 stores where I already spend significant amounts of money (Crate and Barrel being one of those stores that I enjoy getting their monthly circular in the mail).
* Who is "them" by the way? When reputable businesses and internet sleazebag companies are differentiated, then maybe I'll be happy to let certain reputable businesses (the company that owns Slashdot, the folks at Penny Arcade, maybe Amazon) track me. But yeah... I don't want anybody having any information unless I can trust them... and there isn't a whole lot of trust on most of the businesses operating on the internet.
Satan will skate before I start giving out my mobile number!
I do believe they have roller-derby in hell... so I guess zentigger will be sharing his or her mobile number soon!
On a serious note... I thought that was a clever euphemism for "when hell freezes over".
This is a discussion... maybe the summary was a teaser to get us to click the discussion where our best minds can get together refute the supposed straw man. And besides, deconstructing straw man arguments is popular around here.
$10 for 50GB is completely unreasonable. It's the equivalent of $64 per megabit
50 GB = 50,000 MB (approximately)....
$10 per 50 GB
= $1 per 5 GB
= $0.01 per 50 MB
= $0.0002 per 1 MB
And 4 meg is a pretty damned conservative bitrate for IPTV.
4 mbps = 240 mbpm (Megabyte per Minute) = 14,400 mbph ~ 14 GB per hour.
Last I checked, uncompressed 1080p was about 4 GB per hour. Decent compression algorithms knock it down to about 800 MB per hour, but you can bet on HD not being served as 1080p so you're much more likely to be pulling your streaming video at 400-600 kbps (not 4 mbps). Making order of magnitude exaggerations make the rest of your look foolish. And saying $20 for 50-100 GB is reasonable while $10 is "completely unreasonable" doesn't help either.
Well, if I were running a school, text-book costs would be the last place I'd try to be reducing costs. The risk of giving kids inferior text-books to save a few thousand dollars doesn't really make sense from a high-level perspective.
The real money is empowering educators to use their time more effectively. This means increasing classroom sizes without sacrificing quality of education. An overlooked part of this problem is successfully handling disruptive kids while at the same time challenging the ones at the higher end of the learning spectrum. You gotta keep the kids focused. Small class sizes help with this. Low faculty to student ratios help with this. But if 500 students are being taught by a staff of 100 educators its going to be more expensive than if that same group of students were being taught by 90 educators. Ten people times $30k is a lot bigger deal than buying 500 new books at $100/each every year ($300k vs $50k -- though these are admittedly fabricated numbers).
You also gotta deal with parents/guardians. There are districts where kids have absentee parents and districts where parents are involved in the education process to the point that they make teachers' lives harder.
All else being equal, though, the "public school" system seems to succeed because it is one system where disadvantaged children are given opportunities comparable to their wealthier neighbors. Local, state, and federal dollars seem to be able to fund a "better" solution than these children would get from a "private school" system funded by their financially-challenged parents. What I don't like about the over-arching complaint about "Government corruption" is that it government-funded public education system takes the moral high-ground by attempting to give poor kids a fighting chance while the competing "private school" solution is inherently corrupt because its expense excludes children from poor families.
Having said all that... someday I think text-books will be free and "private" educators will be able to interact with many students at a time so that the cost of "public school teachers" will be higher than the cost of a high-quality private education. I'm not sure how this will happen because it's really tough to envision what techniques are needed so 100 students can be successfully managed by a single teacher (without a significant portion of them failing badly). I think having a lot of stay-at-home moms and dads is a key to this. But yeah... complaints about corruption are a distraction from the real issues that funding public education is an extremely complex undertaking.
incentives pushing for quick, bad replies to customers in your tickets and everyone else's
With either set of "points", the game becomes identifying and solving the "easy" problems. To an extent the smarter, more experienced people will be better at this because to them, more of the tickets are problems they've seen before. But this doesn't change the fact that employees have a disincentive to working the "harder" problems (unless the tickets are assigned randomly and people don't get to choose which tickets they work).
So would you have scientists publish fewer original research papers and more papers that attempt to reaffirm or disaffirm research that's been published by their peers? I'd be surprised if there isn't *some* resource that links research publications with a list of secondary papers that "Support the Same Conclusion" and "Refute the Conclusion". Given that scientists are looking to publish (churn out) a lot of papers... it seems low-hanging fruit would be studying and trying to repeat the Research/Conclusion of a peer.
On the other hand, I'm an engineer and not a scientist so I take a practical view of applying what's coming out of the scientific community... and the most practical view truly is ignoring 95% of it and letting the "really good stuff" percolate out.
What's wrong with someone getting a six-figure payout for, as in this one, 5 years of work?
The thing that's wrong is that the company who couldn't keep their damned systems secure could have probably made the whole thing go away and saved a lot of money by settling for $2,000 with each of the 290 original claimants which would have cost only $580,000 instead of fighting for 5 years and ending up with 11 people only getting $200 each.
If the goal for the lawyers is to truly serve their clients... they should be looking to win a quick and fast case. By drawing out the case to 5 years and raking in $600,000 for themselves, the lawyers look like they're working mainly for themselves to further their own goals/careers.
What about an algorithm for detecting if one of the chatters is an adult who's posing as a 12-17 year-old for reasons of entrapment and TV ratings?
I imagine that hosting an online store that does supply management with integrated order processing and fulfillment isn't something you consider trivial?
My dad purchased his Samsung 55" LCD 3D TV with glasses for $2200.
Your dad got an LCD TV or and LED TV? The latter is the higher-end that I'd expect to see for $2,200. Seems to me that your dad cares more about his time than his pocketbook --- and is willing to buy a more expensive TV when it's not on sale so he doesn't have to worry about something wonky breaking after two years. I used the same logic when I bought a new TV a year ago... except I got a 2009 45" Samsung 8000 for about $1,099. It works fine... supports 3D and "smart features"... I've played with the "smart features" and occasionally let it play Pandora, though I generally find the interface to be terrible. I've never used the 3D features.
I have witnessed way too many "workers" kill hours a week on Slashdot, or other even more inane news sites, or programming stupid microblogs, or yakking with their buddies, to ever think that the majority of jobs involving OT do indeed *require* 50 hours of work a week; it's merely what happens when poor management collides with inefficient workers.
Poor management causes inefficient workers. If people have to spend at least 40-50-60 hours in an office building each week to justify their paychecks, they'll do what it takes to pass that time. If there were actual incentives for workers to be efficient... for example, bonuses for milestones completed according to an "aggressive" schedule... there would be more people signing up to work efficiently. As it stands, most people probably prefer mentally checking out while they're in their office buildings and prefer working projects that have relaxed schedules. Heck... since working relaxed projects pays the same as working aggressive projects there can be no surprise that workers spend time on Slashdot when they should be working.
Don't count on getting it back though, if they don't accept it as payment, if what you send is attached an an e-mail. Unlike payment officers at utility companies, the RIAA knows that sending attachments is piracy and *they* only commit piracy when it benefits them.
It's from Good Will Hunting with Matt Damon. The title character is explaining why he shouldn't use his intelligence to benefit the government.
I DO want a driverless car. I'd much rather spend my commute reading than driving.
I suppose public transit isn't an option for you? It's not as cool as driverless cars, but it's probably safer right now and definitely cheaper in the long run.
Ideally, you'd want the department of exacting assholes to be in charge of testing the stuff, and distinct from the officers in charge of using it...
I like the idea of having detail-oriented assholes doing the testing and big-pictures, cheerful people doing the law enforcement.
It's possible that the PD has just been getting this backwards all these years.