Repair jobs are only good if you are repairing expensive, durable goods. Washing machines last 10-15 years, so spending $200 to fix one makes sense. Cars cost $20,000-30,000 and you have a loan that needs to be paid off in most situations, so you have to fix it.
Computers are cheap and need to be replaced every 3-4 years anyway! To make it worse for a repairman, the people who need computers in their day to day life are either clueful enough to fix it themselves or have access to IT workers who can.
Not quite true. Inflation was a problem before paper money was a factor. Government printing presses are a big part of inflation, but market based factors like debt and labor costs are big contributors as well.
If I take my computer to Geek Squad (I wouldn't, but speaking hypothetically) I don't want to be paying $150 just so they can take it to someone else whom they pay $75 to fix the problem. I'd rather take my computer straight to the guy who only charges $75.
Geek Squad exists because it helps Best Buy sell more computers. Competent computer technicians are hard to find and expensive to retain.... which drives up the cost of running a large repair business. Also, because computer repair is a dead-end job, good people move on to bigger and better things.
The real purpose of Geek Squad is to generate sales leads. 80% of people will spend $900 on a new computer rather than $450 to repair an older computer. Since Best Buy sells computers, and the salemen are about 25 feet from the Best Buy counter, the Geek Squad guys generate more hardware sales while breaking even or making a modest profit by hosing the people who pay for repairs.
Most companies operate with a similar model today. Operate a service or sell a product at low or negative margin, in order to drive the sale of high-margin service contracts or accessories.
There's always the edge-cases, and you always have people who are temporarily homeless when transitioning between schools or jobs.
I just get pissed off when self-righteous people go on about "saving" people with stupid shit like email or voice mailboxes, spare change or free cell phones. Especially when the people whom they are helping are in the state that they are in because they need care that their family can't or won't help provide.
I used to volunteer at a local homeless shelter -- nobody was contemplating getting hooked up to the internet or starting a career. Most of the people in these places are mentally unstable folks who were kicked out of institutions starting in the 80's when funding was slashed or drug/alcohol addicts who simply cannot function in society.
These folks need medical help, not email.
Maybe its different in California... but I doubt it.
You're skewing the effects of infation by picking 1980, which was a high inflation year. 40 1988 dollars is worth about 65 2005 dollars, which seems reasonable.
You also need to consider that the size of the video game market has grown substantially into a mass market. I believe there are 70 million home computers out there, and who knows how many playstations, xboxes, etc. Also consider that the costs of other media like music and video have actually dropped during that same timeframe.
The market doesn't produce games efficiently, and measures that the major game developers have taken to cut costs (homogenized games, sequels, etc) has made games less appealing compared to other forms of entertainment.
In the late 80's and early 90's, PC games were in the $30-40 range, most in the $30 range. They'd drop to $19.99 after a year and then on to the CompUSA bargain bin. Now you see games going for $60-70, and dropping down to about $30. Good games seem stay at $30 for a few years... Half-Life 1 was $24.99 at Target a few months ago!
That's alot of money... at that price point, video games are going either going to turn into a niche market or you'll have a 1984 scenario again where everything crashes.
I'm not sure what "audio processing" means, but when I try to listen to music in my office, on the porch or in the courtyard next to my office building, the sound is way too low.
I don't expect dolby surround sound, but my beat-up thinkpad plays reasonably good sound at an acceptable volume.
Actually this makes alot of sense. If a parking valet gave your car to some random guy off the street who didn't have a ticket stub, who is responsible for the theft?
The answer... both the theif and the negligent party who enpowered the thief.
That's possible, but much harder than it sounds at first glance. School districts generally procure their own equipment, from vehicles to textbooks to computers. Most states keep procurement power at the local level, since districts dole out alot of political patronage (particularly via construction projects), and school boards are usually fiercely independent.
In general, whomever buys something controls it. The state can mandate how you interact with the state, but would have a tough time forcing local employees to stop using excel or whatever.
A CIO trying to exert that kind of control without backing would hit all sorts of political problems that would make it very expensive. That's why Microsoft is giving stuff away -- a free alternative to Office isn't better than MS Office for free!
The other reason to target public schools is that they are essentially a second layer of local government and have the ability to act on certain things without much oversight. Specifically, I doubt that local school districts are accountable in any way to the state CIO.
So if you establish Microsoft XML as the "standard" for politically powerful public schools, you've basically done an end-run around the state CIO. And when it comes time to ditch ODF, the teachers unions and school board associations will push hard to adopt whatever Microsoft is pushing.
I strongly disagree. The military & Microsoft have very stringent security policies surrounding the storage of their private keys. They don't maintain their keys internally to save money -- they do so for higher levels of security.
Keeping your private key on a co-located server or on a CD in your CEO's liquor cabinet opens you to a world of potential hurt.
The difference is, you chose the circumstances surrounding your employment and housing situation.
In China, its somewhat different. You're living in a company dormitory, and they basically control every aspect of your life, from where you live to what you eat. The factories are likely exploiting young women from poor rural families who don't have many options... its difficult to marry, since an increasing number of rural Chinese young men are moving to the cities for work. Many of these girls end up in prostitution or virtual slavery.
Most Americans go into debt by choosing cars, colleges and homes that they cannot afford.
I'm also amused by the submitter's "too slow" comment for TrueCrypt. I use it on my 4-year old laptop (a 1.7Ghz Pentium 4 mobile) and find that it's the hard drive that is the bottleneck rather then the CPU.
It crimps the submitters style to have skipping porno. What else are people doing to generate 30GB of data the needs to be encrypted.
Its like the HP version of IBM's AS/400. Solid, reliable minicomputers that were typically sold with pre-packaged custom applications. Alot of municipal utilities bought out-of-the-box billing systems based on HP3000's for AS/400's.
Millions isn't enough -- you need tens of millions of people. Most government activity centers around entitlement programs and the military, both of which have large, vocal & immensely power trade and civic groups rallying on their behalf. Nearly every American benefits in some way from bloated government, and only a miniscule minority are willing to give up granny's free nursing home or overfunded local schools & police.
For some reason, Ralph Nader, who was only on the ballot in 36 states, got far more coverage than Badnarik, who was on the ballot in (I believe) 49 states. Why? Because Nader couldn't have won, so the media could safely involve him.
What are you smoking? Other than middle age people who can't give up pot and folks who want to own machine guns, libertarians do not have a significant base of support.
Getting on the ballot is easy.... In New York, which has some of the most complex election laws in the country, you routinely see fringe parties like the "Social Workers Party", "Right to Life" and the "Natural Rights Party" on the ballot.
So you're overwhelmed by the C++ workload, so you're porting the whole kit and kaboodle to Java? Your management is either retarded or getting ready to offshore everything.
Most people live paycheck to paycheck in the US... expecting parents to dole out $1,000+ so they can shell out $70 for their kid to play videogames is a little absurd.
HDTV is a solution looking for a problem. TV was fine the way it is.
Slashdot Mirror
99.9999% of online transactions are done via credit cards, which typically have higher fees that what Google is charging.
So stop beating the dead horse, he's dead already!
Repair jobs are only good if you are repairing expensive, durable goods. Washing machines last 10-15 years, so spending $200 to fix one makes sense. Cars cost $20,000-30,000 and you have a loan that needs to be paid off in most situations, so you have to fix it.
Computers are cheap and need to be replaced every 3-4 years anyway! To make it worse for a repairman, the people who need computers in their day to day life are either clueful enough to fix it themselves or have access to IT workers who can.
Not quite true. Inflation was a problem before paper money was a factor. Government printing presses are a big part of inflation, but market based factors like debt and labor costs are big contributors as well.
Geek Squad exists because it helps Best Buy sell more computers. Competent computer technicians are hard to find and expensive to retain.... which drives up the cost of running a large repair business. Also, because computer repair is a dead-end job, good people move on to bigger and better things.
The real purpose of Geek Squad is to generate sales leads. 80% of people will spend $900 on a new computer rather than $450 to repair an older computer. Since Best Buy sells computers, and the salemen are about 25 feet from the Best Buy counter, the Geek Squad guys generate more hardware sales while breaking even or making a modest profit by hosing the people who pay for repairs.
Most companies operate with a similar model today. Operate a service or sell a product at low or negative margin, in order to drive the sale of high-margin service contracts or accessories.
They are paying you, right? Who gives a leap about what they do and don't do.
There's always the edge-cases, and you always have people who are temporarily homeless when transitioning between schools or jobs.
I just get pissed off when self-righteous people go on about "saving" people with stupid shit like email or voice mailboxes, spare change or free cell phones. Especially when the people whom they are helping are in the state that they are in because they need care that their family can't or won't help provide.
I used to volunteer at a local homeless shelter -- nobody was contemplating getting hooked up to the internet or starting a career. Most of the people in these places are mentally unstable folks who were kicked out of institutions starting in the 80's when funding was slashed or drug/alcohol addicts who simply cannot function in society.
These folks need medical help, not email.
Maybe its different in California... but I doubt it.
You're skewing the effects of infation by picking 1980, which was a high inflation year. 40 1988 dollars is worth about 65 2005 dollars, which seems reasonable.
You also need to consider that the size of the video game market has grown substantially into a mass market. I believe there are 70 million home computers out there, and who knows how many playstations, xboxes, etc. Also consider that the costs of other media like music and video have actually dropped during that same timeframe.
The market doesn't produce games efficiently, and measures that the major game developers have taken to cut costs (homogenized games, sequels, etc) has made games less appealing compared to other forms of entertainment.
In the late 80's and early 90's, PC games were in the $30-40 range, most in the $30 range. They'd drop to $19.99 after a year and then on to the CompUSA bargain bin. Now you see games going for $60-70, and dropping down to about $30. Good games seem stay at $30 for a few years... Half-Life 1 was $24.99 at Target a few months ago!
That's alot of money... at that price point, video games are going either going to turn into a niche market or you'll have a 1984 scenario again where everything crashes.
I'm not sure what "audio processing" means, but when I try to listen to music in my office, on the porch or in the courtyard next to my office building, the sound is way too low.
I don't expect dolby surround sound, but my beat-up thinkpad plays reasonably good sound at an acceptable volume.
Actually this makes alot of sense. If a parking valet gave your car to some random guy off the street who didn't have a ticket stub, who is responsible for the theft?
The answer... both the theif and the negligent party who enpowered the thief.
Perception rules. All people making decisions care about it MS Office versus whatever else.
That's possible, but much harder than it sounds at first glance. School districts generally procure their own equipment, from vehicles to textbooks to computers. Most states keep procurement power at the local level, since districts dole out alot of political patronage (particularly via construction projects), and school boards are usually fiercely independent.
In general, whomever buys something controls it. The state can mandate how you interact with the state, but would have a tough time forcing local employees to stop using excel or whatever.
A CIO trying to exert that kind of control without backing would hit all sorts of political problems that would make it very expensive. That's why Microsoft is giving stuff away -- a free alternative to Office isn't better than MS Office for free!
You be correct. You gotta be real.
The other reason to target public schools is that they are essentially a second layer of local government and have the ability to act on certain things without much oversight. Specifically, I doubt that local school districts are accountable in any way to the state CIO.
So if you establish Microsoft XML as the "standard" for politically powerful public schools, you've basically done an end-run around the state CIO. And when it comes time to ditch ODF, the teachers unions and school board associations will push hard to adopt whatever Microsoft is pushing.
I strongly disagree. The military & Microsoft have very stringent security policies surrounding the storage of their private keys. They don't maintain their keys internally to save money -- they do so for higher levels of security.
Keeping your private key on a co-located server or on a CD in your CEO's liquor cabinet opens you to a world of potential hurt.
The difference is, you chose the circumstances surrounding your employment and housing situation.
In China, its somewhat different. You're living in a company dormitory, and they basically control every aspect of your life, from where you live to what you eat. The factories are likely exploiting young women from poor rural families who don't have many options... its difficult to marry, since an increasing number of rural Chinese young men are moving to the cities for work. Many of these girls end up in prostitution or virtual slavery.
Most Americans go into debt by choosing cars, colleges and homes that they cannot afford.
It crimps the submitters style to have skipping porno. What else are people doing to generate 30GB of data the needs to be encrypted.
Its like the HP version of IBM's AS/400. Solid, reliable minicomputers that were typically sold with pre-packaged custom applications. Alot of municipal utilities bought out-of-the-box billing systems based on HP3000's for AS/400's.
Millions isn't enough -- you need tens of millions of people. Most government activity centers around entitlement programs and the military, both of which have large, vocal & immensely power trade and civic groups rallying on their behalf. Nearly every American benefits in some way from bloated government, and only a miniscule minority are willing to give up granny's free nursing home or overfunded local schools & police.
MediaWiki is one of those apps that just piss me off!
On the one hand, its fast, easy to edit with and scalable. On the other hand, you need a web/php guru to do so much as change a font.
"use PDF"
PDF is a display/publishing format.... its useless for collaboration.
So you're overwhelmed by the C++ workload, so you're porting the whole kit and kaboodle to Java? Your management is either retarded or getting ready to offshore everything.
Most people live paycheck to paycheck in the US... expecting parents to dole out $1,000+ so they can shell out $70 for their kid to play videogames is a little absurd.
HDTV is a solution looking for a problem. TV was fine the way it is.