How is semiconductors not a core business for a company that still makes huge profits off mainframes and midranges?
Probably because the biggest part of the value added by them is in the design, not the manufacturing. IBM does not appear to have any competitive advantage in semiconductor manufacturing plus their core business now is in services. Their mainframe business really is to some extent really just a hook for their services. It remains significantly profitable but some of the components in those mainframes have become commodities which means low margins.
Sure, keep design in house, but you'll lose the flexibility you have. Imagine your research division came up with an amazing new chip design they wanted to work on right away, but were told "Nope, it'll take 6 months to ramp up GlobalFoundries, TSMC, or whatever.
Why do you presume IBM could ramp up any faster? Just because they can do it themselves doesn't mean they automatically can do it any quicker or better. IBM has some pretty smart financial, strategy and manufacturing people working for them. I've met quite a few of them myself. I assure you that they have done the math on this and while it's possible they are making a mistake, they're pretty good at this sort of calculation.
The thing I really don't get (in general) is the way businesses feel like they can have no assets on their books and just run everything with a massive tower of multi-layer outsourcing
Because the only reason to keep something in house is if it provides you an economic advantage. You outsource when someone else can do it as well or better for less money. My company makes wire harnesses. Many of our customers are capable of making the products we supply them but because of the structure of our company and the assets we have we can produce a better product for less money. We specialize in wire harnesses and we're enough better at it that we can save them money AND make a profit doing it. If we couldn't do it better and cheaper then they should (and often do) produce the item in house.
I guess I'll never be an MBA, because I don't get the accounting tricks that make a company appear profitable when they're wasting money on things they could do cheaper and better themselves.
Nobody "is" a MBA. Some people have a MBA degree. You might accurately call someone an accountant or a manager or an engineer but calling someone "a MBA" is exactly equivalent to calling someone a Master of Mechanical Engineering. It's stupid if you actually think about it.
Look, I have degrees in both engineering and business. I'm a certified accountant and my day job is running a manufacturing company. There are cases where it makes sense to outsource something and cases where it makes sense to keep it in house. You are making a faulty assumption that it is always better to keep things in house and I can prove to you that that is frequently not true. Specialist companies can often make a component of a larger product better, faster and cheaper than a vertically integrated company. Not always but very often. Virtually all of manufacturing is based on this fact. The cost of vertical integration has to be offset by the ability to command larger margins due to that integration. \
Ford once tried doing a complete vertical integration in their River Rouge plant. They brought iron ore in one end and produced automobiles out the other end. Thing was that it failed because they didn't have sufficient economies of scale nor the domain expertise to realize the cost advantages needed to make it work. A company that specializes in making steel is probably going to be able to make steel cheaper and better than an assembly company like Ford.
I'll give you an example from my company. We make wire harnesses and one of the products our customer buys from us are sealed leads which
Manufacturing left America because China et al are cheaper
Completely off topic and completely wrong. Manufacturing is very strong in America to the tune of about $2 Trillion per year and for every dollar spend in US manufacturing it results in an additional $1.32 to the economy. The US manufacturing sector by itself would be one of the ten largest economies in the world - approximately the same size as the entire GDP of Russia even without considering the multiplier effects. The US presently has about 1/5 of global manufacturing activity. Some products are not manufactured in the US anymore (mostly high labor content low margin products) but any claim that "manufacturing left America" is completely false.
The only way you're bringing manufacturing back...
Manufacturing never left. If you think it did then you have no idea what you are talking about.
It's nice to finally hear that they hear us, folks.
Just because they say they hear us doesn't mean they really grok the situation. All we know for sure is that they are aware that a lot of slashdot users are very vocally angry and protesting their redesign. Whether this will result in any tangible positive action is quite a separate issue. We need actions, now words. They've been warned and now they need to show (not tell) us that they Get It.
Although this hasn't been handled very well, it sounds like they're trying to improve. So, let's think positive and give 'em another chance
Saying it hasn't been handled well grossly understates things. They screwed up BAD. It's pretty rare that you see any topic on slashdot get everyone on a single side of an issue. The fact that this redesign has managed to get pretty much everyone pissed off is a clear indication of how badly they screwed up. Furthermore slashdot doesn't exactly have a sterling history of giving a shit about user feedback. There are loads of technical and editorial flaws that have been ignored for well over a decade. With that sort of history in mind I see little reason to extend any benefit of the doubt. The mere fact that we haven't already left should be about as much as they should expect to get.
Further cynicism isn't helpful at this point and can only lead to the demise of something that we've enjoyed for a long time.
Heaping piles of cynicism and critique along with threats to leave seems to be the only way to actually get their attention. They are taking care of the demise part quite adequately themselves. People come to slashdot for (mostly) intelligent debate about (mostly) technical topics. Nobody gives a shit about "achievements" or friends or silly graphics or eyecandy. They're treating information density like it is something to be feared when in fact their "audience" (a condescending term if there ever was one) actually prefers it that dense. Worse, they have completely missed the fact that THE most important thing about slashdot is the comments. The fact that the beta handles this so badly speaks louder than any PR statement they could possibly issue.
In short they screwed up bad and are getting spanked for it. They need to own it, pull up their pants and get on with the job of fixing the problem. More weasel word "we hear you" statements are a waste of everyone's time.
This post indicates that our concerns have been heard. Give them a chance.
Their actions indicate that the concerns have been roundly ignored. The fact that people continue to bother to post indicates they are being given a change but also a stern warning. Users of slashdot have been telling them for YEARS what needs fixing and most of that has been ignored too. Why on earth should we take it on faith that they are suddenly going to give a shit now? I'm sure they do care at some level but their actions are either incompetent or arrogant or both.
Whether those changes will be acceptable to the community can only be judged after we have seen them; but in view of this post it is most unfair to say that our concerns have not been heard
Until there are concrete actions supporting their assertion that we have been heard then it is not unfair at all.
Why do you suppose they used the megaphone graphic?
They could do away with the graphics altogether and few here would mourn the loss.
When does one use a performance vehicle as a performance vehicle on a public road?
Mostly when accelerating between stoplights.
Most people don't buy a performance vehicle because they are ever going to see the limits of what it can do. Most buy it for image, both self image and to show off. I see corvettes literally every day and I doubt more than a single digit percentage of the drivers can really actually come close to handling what that car can do. Even if they could handle it, virtually nowhere can you take the vehicle anywhere near its top speed. The only reason anyone cares if a car can go 200mph is for bragging rights. They're never going to actually do it and when you see someone try the story seems to usually end in a fatal crash.
Same thing happens with trucks. People buy trucks that can haul 20,000lbs and do amazing things off road and then never tow anything or take it off the pavement. What they really are buying is a product that supports their self image. They want to think of themselves as a rugged guys who do manly work even if they really just drive to an office and work at a computer all day. I can't count the number of people I see driving an F250 diesel which gets single digit gas mileage who never haul anything and never get the pickup bed dirty.
I do think all websites, even sites like Slashdot, need to evolve. You may disagree on the particulars -- and clearly, a lot of people do -- but I'm surprised so many attribute that to malice.
It's not about malice and never was. (a few idiots think everything is a plot but they self-identify and are easy to ignore) It's about fundamentally and badly misunderstanding what makes this site work. It took me about 15 seconds on the beta site to realize it was alpha quality at best. Virtually everything that makes slashdot worth visiting was missing. Commenting and (just as important) the ability to read comments and see what others thought of them on the beta is broken badly and at the end of the day that was job #1. This was not a project that was even remotely close to ready for public consumption.
Slashdot is a tough crowd. No, you are never going to please everyone and no matter what you do there will be a lot of complaining about it. But this redesign does not appear to provide any benefits to the slashdot community. It provides us NOTHING that we did not already have and breaks a lot of things we did have. If this redesign is of any benefit to people like me it is a well kept secret. With this crowd you need to explain what you are doing, why you are doing it and how it will benefit them. Just saying it "needs to evolve" tells us nothing. It does NOT need to evolve just because. If it needs to evolve there has to be an evolutionary pressure. Just understand that with this crowd your bottom line is not important. That's your problem and it provides no benefits to us aside from the continued existence of slashdot. You need to take a page from Apple and start with the benefits to us and work backward from there. You want eyeballs for advertisers (your customers) then give us something we actually care about in exchange. We don't give a crap about whether it looks like every other site out there.
Even the mea culpa that is the article in this thread seems to still miss the point. You say you are listening and maybe you really are but actions speak much louder than words. The communication about what is going on here has been horrible. What is most worrisome is that the developers appear to virtually everyone to be completely clueless about what what people actually want from slashdot and why they keep coming here. This site has been here a long time and you would think someone would have actually wrapped their head around why it works somewhere along the way. If you want to redo the back end stuff to make it more manageable for you, then fine but we don't care about that as long as it works the way we expect. If you are going to change the site in some way visible to the users you need to do it in a way that benefits us somehow. Forcing 25% of your users to some half baked alpha quality redesign that takes away or breaks a bunch of important and expected features is pretty much the definition of dumb. This is a group that gives Microsoft never ending shit for using their user-base to beta test products. Do you seriously think we will cut slashdot any slack for doing the same thing?
The F designation does not make it a fighter. The air force has inconsistently used the F- designation on several aircraft that were actually attack aircraft including the F-111 and the F-105. The F-117 was strictly a ground attack aircraft and as far as we know was never used for any other role.
Hundreds of people in California are driving around in Honda hydrogen powered cars and loving it.
A few hundred people in a highly localized controlled test is not remotely the same thing as scaling up to worldwide scale. That's like saying my backyard garden can be trivially scaled up to feed the entire USA. The comparison is absurd.
There isn't for electricity either. You have to build high-amp charging stations and in many places change the electricity infrastructure to handle them.
Yes there is distribution for electricity through the existing grid in the majority of the populated US. There will be adapting and investment no matter where you go but running substantial amounts of high voltage power to a location currently served is a problem than has long ago been solved. The power company can rather easily deliver a lot of power if you are willing to pay for it and the business case for a recharging station when lots of electric cars are on the road is easy to make. The problem isn't building the refilling stations, the problem is getting the power (whatever the form) to the refilling stations. THAT problem has already been more or less solved with our existing grid. It can easily be adapted to deal with the added burden. There is no equivalent for distribution of hydrogen unless you are pulling it out of oil products or electrolyzing water on site, both of which are unlikely to be economically sensible. There is limited mass processing of hydrogen, essentially no transport containers, no pipelines, etc.
That rural gas station most likely does not have a megawatt of power lines going to it.
An electric charging station does not have to be where a gasoline station is currently (again no pun intended). And even small towns have an awful lot of power going to or through them. More than you'd probably guess. It is not a particularly difficult task to route power to most locations which are already electrified. Hell, I have a line not 100 feet from my house that carries enough juice to power a charging station and the downtown area of my town (pop 6000) has 4 electric car charging stations.
Tesla is already running up against battery availability issues. That's one little company selling a relatively small number of cars.
Tesla is a small company with limited negotiating power. They have nowhere near the buying power of GM, Ford or Toyota. Get enough money behind it and the supply issues can be solved.
Ironically, only a few hundred million years ago, my house would have been at the bottom of a shallow sea. Apparently there used to be more water than there is now.
You're assuming your elevation and/or geography is the same as it was millions of years ago. I live near the Great Lakes which are inland freshwater seas, roughly 500-600 feet above sea level. Lake Erie is actually quite shallow, particularly on the western third. Just because it was a shallow sea doesn't mean it was part of the world ocean necessarily.
Come on, there have been a ton of advances around storing hydrogen, and building fuel cells generally - also around extracting Hydrogen.
Not enough to base our infrastructure on those advances. Hydrogen powered cars face three obstacles - one technological and two economic. The teachnological one is developing a functioning technology. There are hurdles to overcome but there is reason to believe they could be overcome. After all, fuel cells and the like are already in existence and prototype vehicles have been made. The much bigger problem is economic. The first economic problem is that hydrogen powered cars are expensive because there is no manufacturing economies of scale, supporting industries and a limited manufacturing base. Absent some sort of subsidy they cannot be produced for a price in the near term that is competitive with existing vehicles. The second economic problem and the real killer is that there is no fuel infrastructure in place and developing one would be hugely expensive. We have infrastructure in place for natural gas, petroleum/diesel products and electricity. Anything that doesn't use one of those three things is essentially starting from scratch.
The truth is that if you want every person to own an electric car, Hydrogen is the only way you get there.
Not even remotely. Hybrids are the path of least resistance (no pun intended) towards electric vehicles. Electric vehicles based on batteries become practical once you solve the charging time problem. Basically you have to get charging time down below about 10 minutes for at least 200 miles of range. We're almost there technologically already.
You cannot manufacture a literal ton of batteries per person across the globe
Actually you probably can. Every vehicle made already has at least one battery in it and it wouldn't be all that complicated to scale up production unless there is some sort of raw material limitation.
These days, better support and customer service will earn more business than trying to nickel and dime everyone.
I wish that were largely true but there is a fair bit of research indicating that providing great customer support very often doesn't result in improvements to the bottom line. There are exceptions to this of course but in a lot of industries customers are not willing to pay for support. My industry happens to be one of them. At the end of the day if they aren't willing to pay for it then there is no point in offering good support. People don't shop at Walmart because of the great customer service - they go there because the price is cheap and that is at the end of the day what matters to them.
Speaking for my industry (wire harness manufacturing), our customers don't give a damn about support. They only care about price. Period. Product quality, on time delivery and customer service are expected but they won't (knowingly) pay a fraction of a penny extra for them and if someone undercuts us by a penny or two then we lose the business. This isn't hypothetical - I see it every day. Our customers WILL NOT PAY for good customer service. They might appreciate it but it wins us no loyalty whatsoever.
So I put it to you, do I spend a lot of money developing great customer service knowing full well that it probably will end up losing me money at the end of the day?
But he's just made it a lot harder on himself by volunteering to attach the boat anchor of Bill Gates around his ankle before starting the race.
I wouldn't read too much in the public politics. My guess is that he's just playing nice. No reason to burn bridges needlessly. With Gates leaving as chairman, Satya will (probably) have a relatively free hand. If Gates is off the board then he can be publicly nice but ignore him behind the scenes.
Chairman is a mostly ceremonial role so the only reason I can see for him stepping down is that he can see the cliff coming and wants to get off before the company goes over
If the person holding the position of Chairman of the Board is acting as a figurehead then they are Doing It Wrong. Chairman of any public company is FAR from a ceremonial role.
Because storing your private/confidential information in a cloud is a stupid idea, because you don't really have control over your data.
I think your tinfoil hat is on too tight. There are plenty of cases where the data isn't all that confidential. It's not really all that hard to store confidential things locally or offline while using cloud storage for less sensitive items. We use Google Drive in our company to store work instructions and forms. If someone at NSA want's to look at those then they can go right ahead. It's nothing that requires deep levels of secrecy but it does require efficient controlled distribution and multiple person access.
I know, but it is one of the nicest looking fighter.
Despite the name it wasn't a fighter. It was a bomber. And personally I think it isn't a great looking plane. Interesting but not pretty. My personal favorite was the YF-23 which I think is just a badass looking plane.
Actually you really can't - its a policing fallacy. People count the costs of welfare, but don't count the costs of their police force.
Speaking as an accountant I can pretty much assure you that the people watching the money are watching the cost of management too. You absolutely can get productivity (amount of work per $ spent) out of people by force. It's pretty evil to do but it does work. The entire concept of slavery is built around this principle. Slavery didn't go away because it was economically unviable. It was just deemed to be evil and rightly so.
Similarly, a part of that "force people to be productive" is paying a whole bunch of managers to stand around and bear over them.
That's not as hard as you might think, particularly in locations with cheap labor.
Isn't that self-defeating? The whole point is that the vehicle is all electric, otherwise it's just another hybrid
Not really. The nice thing is that you can detach the gas engine when you don't need it whereas you cannot with a regular hybrid. It's similar to having a pickup tow a trailer instead of having an RV. When you get to your destination you can detach the trailer and drive around in your regular car which is a nice situation.
If I'm doing a cross country trip it's probably no big deal to tow along a compact trailer with a generator on it. Eventually this will not be necessary but since battery charging technology still has a ways to go then it makes sense. Alternatively you could populate the trailer with more batteries too I suppose. Kind of a range extender like external batteries for a cell phone.
I have a hard time believing someone can be so ignorant of history. Do you think slaves were happy? What about feudal serfs? Or pre-unionized steel workers? Or the children working in textile factories?
He said "happy workers are productive workers". He did NOT say "all productive workers are happy workers". See the difference? What he probably meant was "companies that use policies that keep their workers happy are more likely to have workers that are productive". Sure you can force someone to be productive under miserable conditions but you can get terrific productivity as well by treating your employees nicely.
Capital has never, and will never, care about the happiness of their workers unless those workers force them to care
True and there has been tremendous progress on that front. Working conditions in the US are FAR better in most cases than they were 100 years ago, sometimes to a fault.
The scale between left and right is a continuum, and anyone who sees it as binary needs to stay the fuck away from me.
See the problem with that idea is the notion that it is a one dimensional continuum where everyone's opinions (on average) can be measured in terms of left/right. The collections of ideas that make up "left" and "right" are unbelievably arbitrary and frequently unrelated. My opinions on abortion or gun control or environment really have nothing to do with "left" or "right" and frankly it is a pointless exercise to try to pin my location on that spectrum down.
Basically I feel like you do but even more so. Anyone who thinks everyone falls somewhere on a left/right spectrum is making an unjustified over-simplification of reality.
I'm sorry but I don't subscribe to the right to be anonymous in public
Then you are an idiot who doesn't understand what you are saying. Being "anonymous" is about a lot more than whether your neighbor recognizes you. Anonymity is about keeping what is private, private. It's about being able to live your life without having to explain your every action, without having to justify every choice you make, without having to worry about perceptions of meaningless actions and personal opinions and/or things beyond your control like your appearance. If I go down to the store to buy some food and I'm not causing anyone any trouble along the way, then there is no reason for me to expect to be tracked or harassed. There is no reasonable argument you can make that would justify such an intrusion into someone else's life.
I know this is a cliché but if you behave normally and have nothing to hide, why fear being recognized?
Because even people with (theoretically) nothing to hide have plenty to fear and in reality we ALL have something to hide. Nobody wants their entire life to be an open book. Opinions and actions which are perfectly appropriate, legal and justifiable can be used against you in ways you might not expect. There are people who will hate you simply for existing or for holding an opinion they disagree with. Even simply being in public can be cause for you to fear. I don't know a single black man who doesn't have at least one story about being hassled by the police for no reason whatsoever aside from the color of their skin. Even our president has stories like that. There are crazy, mean, cruel and malicious people out there. There are criminals who will take advantage of you given the opportunity - some of which are in duly elected/appointed positions of legal authority. In some places anonymity can save your life. There are public places in this world where some (crazy) people would kill me for having the skin color I do, the religious opinions I hold, the country I'm from, the clothing I wear, and the politicians I support. There are times when the only thing protecting you is your anonymity. Don't be quick to throw it away.
They'll also notice that non-Prime items are typically cheaper.
Not once you factor in the cost of shipping in a lot of cases. I'm typically looking for the best price including cost of delivery and the cost difference between Prime and non-Prime is often minimal to non-existent.
What I don't get though is that Amazon provides basically no incentive to use slower shipping methods. I use Prime and there are times when I don't really need the product in a hurry but the cost is the same for 2 day shipping or regular ground. If Amazon would throw me a bone (discount, bonus merch, whatever) I'd be willing to order some things without the 2 day shipping.
but increased parcel volume should reduce the cost per parcel (smaller distances between drops).
It does to some extent but there are limits. It cannot go below the variable cost of delivering the product. In reality you can only amortize the fixed costs down so much as well since volume is never infinite.
Or it may well be that the quality control on the counterfeit merchandise is HIGHER than the QC for the official NFL. Just because the counterfeit is cheaper in price doesn't mean it is lower in quality. 90% of the price of the merchandise is the logo.
Two problems with that. First is that if you haven't addressed the free rider problem. There are lots of costs besides simply the cost of manufacturing the good. Advertising, distribution, brand building, R&D, marketing, etc. These are very significant and the counterfeiters do not have to pay them but still reap the benefits of them. That is a HUGE problem and is 100% of the reason we have patents and copyright.
The second is that the reason the logo has value is because of the relationship between the customer and the seller. Counterfeit goods often damage that relationship. If I buy something I want to be sure it is exactly what I thought it was. I want to be sure of who made it, where they made it, how they made it and what they will do to stand behind it. Sometimes those things are important to me and if I cannot be sure of those things then the person selling them is committing a fraud. Maybe sometimes we are ok with knowing that something is a knockoff but most of the time there is a lot more to be lost by condoning counterfeit goods than there is by allowing them.
Think of it this way. If someone who looked kind of similar to you (maybe eerily similar) showed up at your place of work tomorrow and started working your job and collecting your paycheck despite never having had to pay for your education, would you be ok with that? Same situation here. Someone has invested a lot of time and money and resources into developing and making that product and then someone else simply copies their work without having to do the hard and expensive bits and claims it as their own. If you cannot figure out why that is a bad thing then I'm not sure you'll ever understand economics.
Slashdot Mirror
How is semiconductors not a core business for a company that still makes huge profits off mainframes and midranges?
Probably because the biggest part of the value added by them is in the design, not the manufacturing. IBM does not appear to have any competitive advantage in semiconductor manufacturing plus their core business now is in services. Their mainframe business really is to some extent really just a hook for their services. It remains significantly profitable but some of the components in those mainframes have become commodities which means low margins.
Sure, keep design in house, but you'll lose the flexibility you have. Imagine your research division came up with an amazing new chip design they wanted to work on right away, but were told "Nope, it'll take 6 months to ramp up GlobalFoundries, TSMC, or whatever.
Why do you presume IBM could ramp up any faster? Just because they can do it themselves doesn't mean they automatically can do it any quicker or better. IBM has some pretty smart financial, strategy and manufacturing people working for them. I've met quite a few of them myself. I assure you that they have done the math on this and while it's possible they are making a mistake, they're pretty good at this sort of calculation.
The thing I really don't get (in general) is the way businesses feel like they can have no assets on their books and just run everything with a massive tower of multi-layer outsourcing
Because the only reason to keep something in house is if it provides you an economic advantage. You outsource when someone else can do it as well or better for less money. My company makes wire harnesses. Many of our customers are capable of making the products we supply them but because of the structure of our company and the assets we have we can produce a better product for less money. We specialize in wire harnesses and we're enough better at it that we can save them money AND make a profit doing it. If we couldn't do it better and cheaper then they should (and often do) produce the item in house.
I guess I'll never be an MBA, because I don't get the accounting tricks that make a company appear profitable when they're wasting money on things they could do cheaper and better themselves.
Nobody "is" a MBA. Some people have a MBA degree. You might accurately call someone an accountant or a manager or an engineer but calling someone "a MBA" is exactly equivalent to calling someone a Master of Mechanical Engineering. It's stupid if you actually think about it.
Look, I have degrees in both engineering and business. I'm a certified accountant and my day job is running a manufacturing company. There are cases where it makes sense to outsource something and cases where it makes sense to keep it in house. You are making a faulty assumption that it is always better to keep things in house and I can prove to you that that is frequently not true. Specialist companies can often make a component of a larger product better, faster and cheaper than a vertically integrated company. Not always but very often. Virtually all of manufacturing is based on this fact. The cost of vertical integration has to be offset by the ability to command larger margins due to that integration. \
Ford once tried doing a complete vertical integration in their River Rouge plant. They brought iron ore in one end and produced automobiles out the other end. Thing was that it failed because they didn't have sufficient economies of scale nor the domain expertise to realize the cost advantages needed to make it work. A company that specializes in making steel is probably going to be able to make steel cheaper and better than an assembly company like Ford.
I'll give you an example from my company. We make wire harnesses and one of the products our customer buys from us are sealed leads which
Manufacturing left America because China et al are cheaper
Completely off topic and completely wrong. Manufacturing is very strong in America to the tune of about $2 Trillion per year and for every dollar spend in US manufacturing it results in an additional $1.32 to the economy. The US manufacturing sector by itself would be one of the ten largest economies in the world - approximately the same size as the entire GDP of Russia even without considering the multiplier effects. The US presently has about 1/5 of global manufacturing activity. Some products are not manufactured in the US anymore (mostly high labor content low margin products) but any claim that "manufacturing left America" is completely false.
The only way you're bringing manufacturing back...
Manufacturing never left. If you think it did then you have no idea what you are talking about.
It's nice to finally hear that they hear us, folks.
Just because they say they hear us doesn't mean they really grok the situation. All we know for sure is that they are aware that a lot of slashdot users are very vocally angry and protesting their redesign. Whether this will result in any tangible positive action is quite a separate issue. We need actions, now words. They've been warned and now they need to show (not tell) us that they Get It.
Although this hasn't been handled very well, it sounds like they're trying to improve. So, let's think positive and give 'em another chance
Saying it hasn't been handled well grossly understates things. They screwed up BAD. It's pretty rare that you see any topic on slashdot get everyone on a single side of an issue. The fact that this redesign has managed to get pretty much everyone pissed off is a clear indication of how badly they screwed up. Furthermore slashdot doesn't exactly have a sterling history of giving a shit about user feedback. There are loads of technical and editorial flaws that have been ignored for well over a decade. With that sort of history in mind I see little reason to extend any benefit of the doubt. The mere fact that we haven't already left should be about as much as they should expect to get.
Further cynicism isn't helpful at this point and can only lead to the demise of something that we've enjoyed for a long time.
Heaping piles of cynicism and critique along with threats to leave seems to be the only way to actually get their attention. They are taking care of the demise part quite adequately themselves. People come to slashdot for (mostly) intelligent debate about (mostly) technical topics. Nobody gives a shit about "achievements" or friends or silly graphics or eyecandy. They're treating information density like it is something to be feared when in fact their "audience" (a condescending term if there ever was one) actually prefers it that dense. Worse, they have completely missed the fact that THE most important thing about slashdot is the comments. The fact that the beta handles this so badly speaks louder than any PR statement they could possibly issue.
In short they screwed up bad and are getting spanked for it. They need to own it, pull up their pants and get on with the job of fixing the problem. More weasel word "we hear you" statements are a waste of everyone's time.
This post indicates that our concerns have been heard. Give them a chance.
Their actions indicate that the concerns have been roundly ignored. The fact that people continue to bother to post indicates they are being given a change but also a stern warning. Users of slashdot have been telling them for YEARS what needs fixing and most of that has been ignored too. Why on earth should we take it on faith that they are suddenly going to give a shit now? I'm sure they do care at some level but their actions are either incompetent or arrogant or both.
Whether those changes will be acceptable to the community can only be judged after we have seen them; but in view of this post it is most unfair to say that our concerns have not been heard
Until there are concrete actions supporting their assertion that we have been heard then it is not unfair at all.
Why do you suppose they used the megaphone graphic?
They could do away with the graphics altogether and few here would mourn the loss.
When does one use a performance vehicle as a performance vehicle on a public road?
Mostly when accelerating between stoplights.
Most people don't buy a performance vehicle because they are ever going to see the limits of what it can do. Most buy it for image, both self image and to show off. I see corvettes literally every day and I doubt more than a single digit percentage of the drivers can really actually come close to handling what that car can do. Even if they could handle it, virtually nowhere can you take the vehicle anywhere near its top speed. The only reason anyone cares if a car can go 200mph is for bragging rights. They're never going to actually do it and when you see someone try the story seems to usually end in a fatal crash.
Same thing happens with trucks. People buy trucks that can haul 20,000lbs and do amazing things off road and then never tow anything or take it off the pavement. What they really are buying is a product that supports their self image. They want to think of themselves as a rugged guys who do manly work even if they really just drive to an office and work at a computer all day. I can't count the number of people I see driving an F250 diesel which gets single digit gas mileage who never haul anything and never get the pickup bed dirty.
I do think all websites, even sites like Slashdot, need to evolve. You may disagree on the particulars -- and clearly, a lot of people do -- but I'm surprised so many attribute that to malice.
It's not about malice and never was. (a few idiots think everything is a plot but they self-identify and are easy to ignore) It's about fundamentally and badly misunderstanding what makes this site work. It took me about 15 seconds on the beta site to realize it was alpha quality at best. Virtually everything that makes slashdot worth visiting was missing. Commenting and (just as important) the ability to read comments and see what others thought of them on the beta is broken badly and at the end of the day that was job #1. This was not a project that was even remotely close to ready for public consumption.
Slashdot is a tough crowd. No, you are never going to please everyone and no matter what you do there will be a lot of complaining about it. But this redesign does not appear to provide any benefits to the slashdot community. It provides us NOTHING that we did not already have and breaks a lot of things we did have. If this redesign is of any benefit to people like me it is a well kept secret. With this crowd you need to explain what you are doing, why you are doing it and how it will benefit them. Just saying it "needs to evolve" tells us nothing. It does NOT need to evolve just because. If it needs to evolve there has to be an evolutionary pressure. Just understand that with this crowd your bottom line is not important. That's your problem and it provides no benefits to us aside from the continued existence of slashdot. You need to take a page from Apple and start with the benefits to us and work backward from there. You want eyeballs for advertisers (your customers) then give us something we actually care about in exchange. We don't give a crap about whether it looks like every other site out there.
Even the mea culpa that is the article in this thread seems to still miss the point. You say you are listening and maybe you really are but actions speak much louder than words. The communication about what is going on here has been horrible. What is most worrisome is that the developers appear to virtually everyone to be completely clueless about what what people actually want from slashdot and why they keep coming here. This site has been here a long time and you would think someone would have actually wrapped their head around why it works somewhere along the way. If you want to redo the back end stuff to make it more manageable for you, then fine but we don't care about that as long as it works the way we expect. If you are going to change the site in some way visible to the users you need to do it in a way that benefits us somehow. Forcing 25% of your users to some half baked alpha quality redesign that takes away or breaks a bunch of important and expected features is pretty much the definition of dumb. This is a group that gives Microsoft never ending shit for using their user-base to beta test products. Do you seriously think we will cut slashdot any slack for doing the same thing?
Actually... it was a F-series fighter-bomber
The F designation does not make it a fighter. The air force has inconsistently used the F- designation on several aircraft that were actually attack aircraft including the F-111 and the F-105. The F-117 was strictly a ground attack aircraft and as far as we know was never used for any other role.
Hundreds of people in California are driving around in Honda hydrogen powered cars and loving it.
A few hundred people in a highly localized controlled test is not remotely the same thing as scaling up to worldwide scale. That's like saying my backyard garden can be trivially scaled up to feed the entire USA. The comparison is absurd.
There isn't for electricity either. You have to build high-amp charging stations and in many places change the electricity infrastructure to handle them.
Yes there is distribution for electricity through the existing grid in the majority of the populated US. There will be adapting and investment no matter where you go but running substantial amounts of high voltage power to a location currently served is a problem than has long ago been solved. The power company can rather easily deliver a lot of power if you are willing to pay for it and the business case for a recharging station when lots of electric cars are on the road is easy to make. The problem isn't building the refilling stations, the problem is getting the power (whatever the form) to the refilling stations. THAT problem has already been more or less solved with our existing grid. It can easily be adapted to deal with the added burden. There is no equivalent for distribution of hydrogen unless you are pulling it out of oil products or electrolyzing water on site, both of which are unlikely to be economically sensible. There is limited mass processing of hydrogen, essentially no transport containers, no pipelines, etc.
That rural gas station most likely does not have a megawatt of power lines going to it.
An electric charging station does not have to be where a gasoline station is currently (again no pun intended). And even small towns have an awful lot of power going to or through them. More than you'd probably guess. It is not a particularly difficult task to route power to most locations which are already electrified. Hell, I have a line not 100 feet from my house that carries enough juice to power a charging station and the downtown area of my town (pop 6000) has 4 electric car charging stations.
Tesla is already running up against battery availability issues. That's one little company selling a relatively small number of cars.
Tesla is a small company with limited negotiating power. They have nowhere near the buying power of GM, Ford or Toyota. Get enough money behind it and the supply issues can be solved.
Ironically, only a few hundred million years ago, my house would have been at the bottom of a shallow sea. Apparently there used to be more water than there is now.
You're assuming your elevation and/or geography is the same as it was millions of years ago. I live near the Great Lakes which are inland freshwater seas, roughly 500-600 feet above sea level. Lake Erie is actually quite shallow, particularly on the western third. Just because it was a shallow sea doesn't mean it was part of the world ocean necessarily.
Come on, there have been a ton of advances around storing hydrogen, and building fuel cells generally - also around extracting Hydrogen.
Not enough to base our infrastructure on those advances. Hydrogen powered cars face three obstacles - one technological and two economic. The teachnological one is developing a functioning technology. There are hurdles to overcome but there is reason to believe they could be overcome. After all, fuel cells and the like are already in existence and prototype vehicles have been made. The much bigger problem is economic. The first economic problem is that hydrogen powered cars are expensive because there is no manufacturing economies of scale, supporting industries and a limited manufacturing base. Absent some sort of subsidy they cannot be produced for a price in the near term that is competitive with existing vehicles. The second economic problem and the real killer is that there is no fuel infrastructure in place and developing one would be hugely expensive. We have infrastructure in place for natural gas, petroleum/diesel products and electricity. Anything that doesn't use one of those three things is essentially starting from scratch.
The truth is that if you want every person to own an electric car, Hydrogen is the only way you get there.
Not even remotely. Hybrids are the path of least resistance (no pun intended) towards electric vehicles. Electric vehicles based on batteries become practical once you solve the charging time problem. Basically you have to get charging time down below about 10 minutes for at least 200 miles of range. We're almost there technologically already.
You cannot manufacture a literal ton of batteries per person across the globe
Actually you probably can. Every vehicle made already has at least one battery in it and it wouldn't be all that complicated to scale up production unless there is some sort of raw material limitation.
These days, better support and customer service will earn more business than trying to nickel and dime everyone.
I wish that were largely true but there is a fair bit of research indicating that providing great customer support very often doesn't result in improvements to the bottom line. There are exceptions to this of course but in a lot of industries customers are not willing to pay for support. My industry happens to be one of them. At the end of the day if they aren't willing to pay for it then there is no point in offering good support. People don't shop at Walmart because of the great customer service - they go there because the price is cheap and that is at the end of the day what matters to them.
Speaking for my industry (wire harness manufacturing), our customers don't give a damn about support. They only care about price. Period. Product quality, on time delivery and customer service are expected but they won't (knowingly) pay a fraction of a penny extra for them and if someone undercuts us by a penny or two then we lose the business. This isn't hypothetical - I see it every day. Our customers WILL NOT PAY for good customer service. They might appreciate it but it wins us no loyalty whatsoever.
So I put it to you, do I spend a lot of money developing great customer service knowing full well that it probably will end up losing me money at the end of the day?
If there's anything a performance vehicle is crying out for, it's a trailer.
If you are driving cross country you aren't using it as a performance vehicle.
But he's just made it a lot harder on himself by volunteering to attach the boat anchor of Bill Gates around his ankle before starting the race.
I wouldn't read too much in the public politics. My guess is that he's just playing nice. No reason to burn bridges needlessly. With Gates leaving as chairman, Satya will (probably) have a relatively free hand. If Gates is off the board then he can be publicly nice but ignore him behind the scenes.
Chairman is a mostly ceremonial role so the only reason I can see for him stepping down is that he can see the cliff coming and wants to get off before the company goes over
If the person holding the position of Chairman of the Board is acting as a figurehead then they are Doing It Wrong. Chairman of any public company is FAR from a ceremonial role.
Because storing your private/confidential information in a cloud is a stupid idea, because you don't really have control over your data.
I think your tinfoil hat is on too tight. There are plenty of cases where the data isn't all that confidential. It's not really all that hard to store confidential things locally or offline while using cloud storage for less sensitive items. We use Google Drive in our company to store work instructions and forms. If someone at NSA want's to look at those then they can go right ahead. It's nothing that requires deep levels of secrecy but it does require efficient controlled distribution and multiple person access.
I know, but it is one of the nicest looking fighter.
Despite the name it wasn't a fighter. It was a bomber. And personally I think it isn't a great looking plane. Interesting but not pretty. My personal favorite was the YF-23 which I think is just a badass looking plane.
Actually you really can't - its a policing fallacy. People count the costs of welfare, but don't count the costs of their police force.
Speaking as an accountant I can pretty much assure you that the people watching the money are watching the cost of management too. You absolutely can get productivity (amount of work per $ spent) out of people by force. It's pretty evil to do but it does work. The entire concept of slavery is built around this principle. Slavery didn't go away because it was economically unviable. It was just deemed to be evil and rightly so.
Similarly, a part of that "force people to be productive" is paying a whole bunch of managers to stand around and bear over them.
That's not as hard as you might think, particularly in locations with cheap labor.
Isn't that self-defeating? The whole point is that the vehicle is all electric, otherwise it's just another hybrid
Not really. The nice thing is that you can detach the gas engine when you don't need it whereas you cannot with a regular hybrid. It's similar to having a pickup tow a trailer instead of having an RV. When you get to your destination you can detach the trailer and drive around in your regular car which is a nice situation.
If I'm doing a cross country trip it's probably no big deal to tow along a compact trailer with a generator on it. Eventually this will not be necessary but since battery charging technology still has a ways to go then it makes sense. Alternatively you could populate the trailer with more batteries too I suppose. Kind of a range extender like external batteries for a cell phone.
I have a hard time believing someone can be so ignorant of history. Do you think slaves were happy? What about feudal serfs? Or pre-unionized steel workers? Or the children working in textile factories?
He said "happy workers are productive workers". He did NOT say "all productive workers are happy workers". See the difference? What he probably meant was "companies that use policies that keep their workers happy are more likely to have workers that are productive". Sure you can force someone to be productive under miserable conditions but you can get terrific productivity as well by treating your employees nicely.
Capital has never, and will never, care about the happiness of their workers unless those workers force them to care
True and there has been tremendous progress on that front. Working conditions in the US are FAR better in most cases than they were 100 years ago, sometimes to a fault.
The scale between left and right is a continuum, and anyone who sees it as binary needs to stay the fuck away from me.
See the problem with that idea is the notion that it is a one dimensional continuum where everyone's opinions (on average) can be measured in terms of left/right. The collections of ideas that make up "left" and "right" are unbelievably arbitrary and frequently unrelated. My opinions on abortion or gun control or environment really have nothing to do with "left" or "right" and frankly it is a pointless exercise to try to pin my location on that spectrum down.
Basically I feel like you do but even more so. Anyone who thinks everyone falls somewhere on a left/right spectrum is making an unjustified over-simplification of reality.
I'm sorry but I don't subscribe to the right to be anonymous in public
Then you are an idiot who doesn't understand what you are saying. Being "anonymous" is about a lot more than whether your neighbor recognizes you. Anonymity is about keeping what is private, private. It's about being able to live your life without having to explain your every action, without having to justify every choice you make, without having to worry about perceptions of meaningless actions and personal opinions and/or things beyond your control like your appearance. If I go down to the store to buy some food and I'm not causing anyone any trouble along the way, then there is no reason for me to expect to be tracked or harassed. There is no reasonable argument you can make that would justify such an intrusion into someone else's life.
I know this is a cliché but if you behave normally and have nothing to hide, why fear being recognized?
Because even people with (theoretically) nothing to hide have plenty to fear and in reality we ALL have something to hide. Nobody wants their entire life to be an open book. Opinions and actions which are perfectly appropriate, legal and justifiable can be used against you in ways you might not expect. There are people who will hate you simply for existing or for holding an opinion they disagree with. Even simply being in public can be cause for you to fear. I don't know a single black man who doesn't have at least one story about being hassled by the police for no reason whatsoever aside from the color of their skin. Even our president has stories like that. There are crazy, mean, cruel and malicious people out there. There are criminals who will take advantage of you given the opportunity - some of which are in duly elected/appointed positions of legal authority. In some places anonymity can save your life. There are public places in this world where some (crazy) people would kill me for having the skin color I do, the religious opinions I hold, the country I'm from, the clothing I wear, and the politicians I support. There are times when the only thing protecting you is your anonymity. Don't be quick to throw it away.
They'll also notice that non-Prime items are typically cheaper.
Not once you factor in the cost of shipping in a lot of cases. I'm typically looking for the best price including cost of delivery and the cost difference between Prime and non-Prime is often minimal to non-existent.
What I don't get though is that Amazon provides basically no incentive to use slower shipping methods. I use Prime and there are times when I don't really need the product in a hurry but the cost is the same for 2 day shipping or regular ground. If Amazon would throw me a bone (discount, bonus merch, whatever) I'd be willing to order some things without the 2 day shipping.
but increased parcel volume should reduce the cost per parcel (smaller distances between drops).
It does to some extent but there are limits. It cannot go below the variable cost of delivering the product. In reality you can only amortize the fixed costs down so much as well since volume is never infinite.
Thank you for your (invalid) point and the straw man arguments I see you have seeded through this discussion.
As opposed to your content free non-rebuttal?
I'll have to tag this as one of Commissioner Goodell's accounts.
Right. I'm sure Roger Goodell spends a lot of time on slashdot worried about what a bunch of nerds think of the NFL.
Or it may well be that the quality control on the counterfeit merchandise is HIGHER than the QC for the official NFL. Just because the counterfeit is cheaper in price doesn't mean it is lower in quality. 90% of the price of the merchandise is the logo.
Two problems with that. First is that if you haven't addressed the free rider problem. There are lots of costs besides simply the cost of manufacturing the good. Advertising, distribution, brand building, R&D, marketing, etc. These are very significant and the counterfeiters do not have to pay them but still reap the benefits of them. That is a HUGE problem and is 100% of the reason we have patents and copyright.
The second is that the reason the logo has value is because of the relationship between the customer and the seller. Counterfeit goods often damage that relationship. If I buy something I want to be sure it is exactly what I thought it was. I want to be sure of who made it, where they made it, how they made it and what they will do to stand behind it. Sometimes those things are important to me and if I cannot be sure of those things then the person selling them is committing a fraud. Maybe sometimes we are ok with knowing that something is a knockoff but most of the time there is a lot more to be lost by condoning counterfeit goods than there is by allowing them.
Think of it this way. If someone who looked kind of similar to you (maybe eerily similar) showed up at your place of work tomorrow and started working your job and collecting your paycheck despite never having had to pay for your education, would you be ok with that? Same situation here. Someone has invested a lot of time and money and resources into developing and making that product and then someone else simply copies their work without having to do the hard and expensive bits and claims it as their own. If you cannot figure out why that is a bad thing then I'm not sure you'll ever understand economics.