Re:Sad state of affairs...
on
Stealth Inflation
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Call me insane but there is absolutely no way she had the right to charge $103 for a 2 minute deal.
You have to consider a couple of things here. The "two minute deal" was the time she spent with you. I suspect more time was spent actually "reading" the results of the EKG. Also, you need to realize that many times insurance companies will only reimburse physicians a portion of the total bill and its stuff like this that prevents many (including me) from wanting to practice medicine. I do research instead. Lemme give you an example: For instance, when my mother had her medical practice, there were certain procedures that ended up costing her money. An example is the cost to her of delivering babies. We sat down to run the numbers and found out that based upon her insurance rates, and the reimbursement from the insurance companies, each child she delivered was costing her $250. Furthermore, because physicians can be sued for delivery issues until a child reaches 21 years of age, she still has to maintain an insurance trailer until the last child she delivered reaches 21. Unbelieveable.
It is not the medical system that is out of control, it is the insurance companies and the managed care systems that foisted a con on the American public by saying managed care can do medicine for less. Instead of lowering costs, managed care has created an entirely new middle level of management that simply soaks up more money than ever before. Do a little experiment here. Go to your local HMO and look in the parking lot. The Porsches and BMWs you see do not belong to the physicians as much as they do the management staff of the hospital.
What this comes down to is companies suddenly realizing they are set to lose market share. We are rather successfully using iChat AV to remotely collaborate from N. America to New Zealand, but here is the deal. We are already paying for access to the Internet out of our grant indirect costs to the university. So are others that are paying to have access to the Internet from their homes and businesses. If the major phone companies have not been on the ball enough to see this one coming, perhaps they need new boards of directors or CEO's as voice over IP has not been an overnight phenomenon. Furthermore, the government should not be stepping in to attempt to rescue companies that have not been smart enough to adequately compete. Right? Is this what market consolidation and deregulation done for us?
Whoa. Back when we were playing D&D (20 some years ago), the cool thing was to come up with the coolest looking dice. Some of us made them out of epoxies, some of us bought cool looking clear dice from the local gaming shop and my friend Gary comes up with this six sided die that he claimed was from ancient Rome that he got from his dad. We laughed our asses off, thinking (as 13 year olds are prone to do) that multi sided die were a modern invention but........ Gary, I hope you still have it.
Wouldn't Kim Jong Ill just love to be able to wipe out the capitol of South Korea with a precision guided missle?
Shoot dude. Seoul is what, less than an hours drive by car to the DMZ? It's weird but the Korean peninsula is a pretty small place that can be traversed by plane from one side to the other in about 20 minutes flying at commercial speeds. As to US military desires, absolutely. There is a desire to be able to shut the GPS grid down or decrease it's accuracy significantly when needed. However, the countries we need to worry about with GPS guidance based systems are the big established ones. Smaller 3rd world countries do not typically have access to these munitions.
It seems like adding such a choice couldn't really hurt the game in many situations, except for the FMV-loaded games - though even some of them could probably be done differently to allow that kind of freedom.
FMV-loaded? What's that?
Yes, you are most correct in that most games could easily be created with either gender neutrality or an option to set the sex of the avatar. However, more difficult would be the establishment of story lines that might appeal to both genders equally. Sometimes it does not matter, but other times, women may be more averse to say, Duke Nukem which would appeal to the 13 year old male to a greater degree. Yes?
Now, we have been using iChatAV to do remote collaboration from N. America to New Zealand rather successfully and the video presence is nice, but if I heard my bosses voice coming from a damn fish, I think all order would be lost in the lab. (not to mention respect).:-)
Get them an iMac with a.Mac account. It handles all your needs:)
I second this. I purchased an iBook and a.Mac account for my sister who just had a kid so she could do just this sort of thing for family around the world so we can all see pictures of the baby. She is a complete computer novice, but her digital camera was immediately recognized so she could download pictures and then post them to her.Mac website so we can all see them. Additionally, there is/was a free iBlog program that came with the.Mac account.
She tells me "I had no idea setting up and running a website was this easy. All that time you spent on your computer years ago entering all that HTML code was kinda wasted. Wasn't it?". I responded with something like, "uhhhhh, yeah. But back then....
If the IT geek doesn't have to deal with the end user then the language barrier is virtually nonexistent, at least as far as the masses are concerned.
The real question is whether or not projects can be managed effectively overseas. Of course with IP audio/video (iChat AVis awesome) one can effectively manage many projects remotely. Right now I am collaborating from N. America to New Zealand using iChat and it is wildly successful. However, I can easily see some projects with other folks who need more guidance or even hand-holding than others or simply a more intimate interaction than iChat could provide. In this case, especially with large projects involving more than a dozen or so programmers/subject matter experts/technical writers etc.... Project management could become unwieldy.
How often would you run it on batteries? My laptop lasts a little over an 1.5hr, but I've never really had to run off batteries at all except when relocating while running, or once when I was waiting for a kernel compile to finish.
I routinely need 3 hrs of battery life on cross-country plane flights. I have looked at Wintel laptops and have owned two in the past, but the Apple Powerbooks seem to give me the best possible battery life so far.
Wow! Pretty impressive. This could be the next ultimate LAN gaming machine, but will I ever really be able to run it on batteries for more than 15 minutes? I know they claim 3+ hours, but.....
What about cooling? I thought my 12in Powerbook got pretty warm on occasion, but this might have to come with a warning.
This should exemplify that IT resources and programmers are finite. Jobs dry up in one area only to resurface where costs are lower.
Any industry that becomes a commodity will undergo a similar transformation. This is exactly what made the whole silicon valley experiment so wildly successful in that an entirely new paradigm was created that existed in few other places. When the "resource" became common and the concepts became commodities that could be moved around, traded and bargained for, the result was job movement to where those who had the skills would work for less. So, the trick is to innovate and again create for the world markets and ourselves skill-sets that are unique and in demand for the products or services they provide.
Some of the old cast for sure, but I hear the negotiations with Bill are not going well. He got a raw deal the first time around: he was paid per word, and all he usually said was "Ack!" and "Thppt!" And Berke's trying to bring in some of the mutts from his new book, "Flawed Dogs", but apparently they're in a different union than the meadow animals. I just don't get all of this legal mumbo-gumbo-rambo.
Oh, man! Bill the cat has got to make a return. Aaaaack Thppppt!
.....and about five, nearly identical 'cycle of life' type diagrams showing how one risk management strategy leads to the next and so on, in a never-ending process.
These rankings were a choice for significance to the marketshare rather than significance to history or the contribution of that system to development of personal computings technical advance. True, the Compaq case is an example of revolution in the field of reverse engineering in some ways (legal and technical), but reverse engineering an already "invented" product or concept is not as impressive to me as developing an all new paradigm. For instance, the Altair was certainly the first accessible programmable computing device, (although a significantly valid argument could be made for HP calculators) but it was not until the Apple I design that the masses had a truly accessible computing device with a keyboard and screen for text input. The Apple II was the real revolutionary in the computer industry setting the standard that in many ways was not eclipsed for many years later as it included color and sound support within the computer without the need for ad ons. The Apple Lisa was the first personal computer to bring the concept of a GUI and the mouse to the general public (yeah, yeah, developed at Xerox PARC, but paid for by Apple who had the insight to bring it to market). While the Apple Macintosh was the first truly accessible personal computer to the general public that was GUI driven and also the first personal computer to include built in networking with its Appletalk protocols.
So, I guess my list of the top ten personal computers would take more than marketshare considerations into account and go something like this:
1) Altair 8800 2) Apple I 3) Apple II 4) Apple Lisa 5) Apple Macintosh 6) IBM PC 5150 7) TRS-80 Model I 8) Amiga 1000 9) Compaq Portable PC 10) Apple Newton
Positions 2 and 3 could possibly be consolidated bringing the Osborne model 1 into the list at number 10 and if the Apple Lisa and Macintosh rankings were consolidated into one rank, the Next Cube would then enter the top ten ranks (although that would be more for innovations in the software side of things).
Don't get me wrong. In my experience, it is easier to deal with geeks in a philosophy course than with business students.
Snort,....laugh. Yep. I've had a few business students in one of my intro to biology courses, and in a film class I taught. Not only did they have the most obnoxious personalities, they were demanding and lazy.
But geeks come with their own, well, challenges. This includes their predisposition to believe that the best ideas are the most recent ideas, so why are we studying dead people?
Hmmmm. Part of the not invented here mentality? Yes, the concept of history is often lost on this crowd, so unless one is teaching history in the context of technology, many are not interested.
Also, although this probably doesn't even bear mentioning, given the forum, I am not denying that I'm a geek too.
Oh, most decidedly. My wife tells me she "has married a geek" when she walks into the study and sees me behind an array of three displays. She secretly likes the concept, but it's also quite funny that at the last holiday party, one of the computer science professors here was talking to me and commenting after surveying the scene....."How did a bunch of geeks like us get hooked up with all these beautiful women?"
. Their ad-men need remedial courses in film interpretation and allegory.
It is fairly typical of large "uncool" corporations to come late to the pop culture game and attempt a capitalization of said culture to render a bit of cache to their products.
Aside: I'm still ambivalent about the Matrix. You would be too, if you had taught introductory philosophy courses at Carnegie Mellon. Three-quarters of the geeks in my course had signed up for philosophy because they thought it was just like the Matrix.
It could also simply be that The Matrix is tired. When it initially entered the scene, the Wachowski Bros. genuinely came up with some innovative film making, decent set design and mood and some clever dialogue. Matrix II and III simply rehashed those themes only with "more and bigger".
I don't mind if I never hear another Descartes/Wachowski comparison again.
What do you expect from an undergraduate philosophy course?
Using a digital camera and UV lamp he was able to make dummy fingerprints that fooled the readers - and in less time and less cost than similar experiments 10 years ago. He says: '...now the average do-it-yourselfer is able to achieve perfect results and requires only limited means and skills.'"
This is the whole problem with market driven products as opposed to product driven products. Companies rush to produce a product and get it to market to capture some degree of market share even though their product may suck. We have endured years of this under the Microsoft paradigm in that Microsoft advertises years in advance what products they are going to produce, sets a time-line, and then by-god the products will ship by that date. Never mind the quality. I much prefer Apple's way of doing things in that they do not talk about what they are doing, and they then ship a product when it is done. Meanwhile the rest of the computer industry is busy copying Microsofts strategy and the quality of software for the most part is slipping down the tubes.
Products such as biometrics especially needs to be completely wrung out to determine if it can be faked. They did not, it can be, but what do you bet they take it to market anyway?
We should probably add security reasons, employment reasons, resource reasons, government infrastructure reasons, political reasons, etc....etc...etc...
Although, that said. There is a place for proprietary software and many Microsoft products would meet this need. The problem is that Microsoft spent years being just good enough and out-competing the better alternative in many cases (MacOS) and now it is turning around to bite them in the butt, because Linux based solutions are now in many cases.....good enough.
Of course OS X is still the best solution for most users that I have yet seen, but in the short term, Brazil could likely use their existing CPU hardware infrastructure for Linux as opposed to purchasing new hardware from Apple. Long term costs could most likely be lower with a gradual phasing in of OS X in combination with OSS solutions running on Linux and the use of existing infrastructure on Windows however as a healthy computing ecosystem is diverse.
I'm disappointed to see a lack of any brain research in the list, considering how beneficial applications of neuroscience could be, and how much the field is maturing.
Well, IAANS (I Am A NeuroScientist) and I am all for more funding for neuroscience. However, there is other science out there that does need funding. I would most certainly like to see fusion work as that would decrease our dependance on fossil fuels and radically alter the global geopolitical balance as well as improve the environment. (Not to mention keeping clean power to all the computers that seem to be accumulating around me.)
You know, it would be nice if submitters could write their own summary of the article instead of lifting verbatim the first paragraph of the quoted story. Don't they teach anything in school anymore?
.....it also could boost their speed, because these chips are becoming so fast that the heat they generate limits the speed at which they can operate without overheating and malfunctioning.
Bah, this idea is nothing new. From the two SGI's with two 20in displays, two macs and five displays attached to them, my tiny little first apartment had more than enough heat production to warm things up.:-)
I got my iPod (10 GB) 11 months ago, and the battery life went from 8-10 hours or so to about 2 now
Reset the iPod and (perhaps) update the firmware. This will often take care of problems. Also, discharge it entirely followed by recharging it fully. This also takes care of many problems.
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Call me insane but there is absolutely no way she had the right to charge $103 for a 2 minute deal.
You have to consider a couple of things here. The "two minute deal" was the time she spent with you. I suspect more time was spent actually "reading" the results of the EKG. Also, you need to realize that many times insurance companies will only reimburse physicians a portion of the total bill and its stuff like this that prevents many (including me) from wanting to practice medicine. I do research instead. Lemme give you an example: For instance, when my mother had her medical practice, there were certain procedures that ended up costing her money. An example is the cost to her of delivering babies. We sat down to run the numbers and found out that based upon her insurance rates, and the reimbursement from the insurance companies, each child she delivered was costing her $250. Furthermore, because physicians can be sued for delivery issues until a child reaches 21 years of age, she still has to maintain an insurance trailer until the last child she delivered reaches 21. Unbelieveable.
It is not the medical system that is out of control, it is the insurance companies and the managed care systems that foisted a con on the American public by saying managed care can do medicine for less. Instead of lowering costs, managed care has created an entirely new middle level of management that simply soaks up more money than ever before. Do a little experiment here. Go to your local HMO and look in the parking lot. The Porsches and BMWs you see do not belong to the physicians as much as they do the management staff of the hospital.
What this comes down to is companies suddenly realizing they are set to lose market share. We are rather successfully using iChat AV to remotely collaborate from N. America to New Zealand, but here is the deal. We are already paying for access to the Internet out of our grant indirect costs to the university. So are others that are paying to have access to the Internet from their homes and businesses. If the major phone companies have not been on the ball enough to see this one coming, perhaps they need new boards of directors or CEO's as voice over IP has not been an overnight phenomenon. Furthermore, the government should not be stepping in to attempt to rescue companies that have not been smart enough to adequately compete. Right? Is this what market consolidation and deregulation done for us?
Whoa. Back when we were playing D&D (20 some years ago), the cool thing was to come up with the coolest looking dice. Some of us made them out of epoxies, some of us bought cool looking clear dice from the local gaming shop and my friend Gary comes up with this six sided die that he claimed was from ancient Rome that he got from his dad. We laughed our asses off, thinking (as 13 year olds are prone to do) that multi sided die were a modern invention but........ Gary, I hope you still have it.
Wouldn't Kim Jong Ill just love to be able to wipe out the capitol of South Korea with a precision guided missle?
Shoot dude. Seoul is what, less than an hours drive by car to the DMZ? It's weird but the Korean peninsula is a pretty small place that can be traversed by plane from one side to the other in about 20 minutes flying at commercial speeds. As to US military desires, absolutely. There is a desire to be able to shut the GPS grid down or decrease it's accuracy significantly when needed. However, the countries we need to worry about with GPS guidance based systems are the big established ones. Smaller 3rd world countries do not typically have access to these munitions.
It seems like adding such a choice couldn't really hurt the game in many situations, except for the FMV-loaded games - though even some of them could probably be done differently to allow that kind of freedom.
FMV-loaded? What's that?
Yes, you are most correct in that most games could easily be created with either gender neutrality or an option to set the sex of the avatar. However, more difficult would be the establishment of story lines that might appeal to both genders equally. Sometimes it does not matter, but other times, women may be more averse to say, Duke Nukem which would appeal to the 13 year old male to a greater degree. Yes?
Now, we have been using iChatAV to do remote collaboration from N. America to New Zealand rather successfully and the video presence is nice, but if I heard my bosses voice coming from a damn fish, I think all order would be lost in the lab. (not to mention respect). :-)
Get them an iMac with a .Mac account. It handles all your needs :)
.Mac account for my sister who just had a kid so she could do just this sort of thing for family around the world so we can all see pictures of the baby. She is a complete computer novice, but her digital camera was immediately recognized so she could download pictures and then post them to her .Mac website so we can all see them. Additionally, there is/was a free iBlog program that came with the .Mac account.
I second this. I purchased an iBook and a
She tells me "I had no idea setting up and running a website was this easy. All that time you spent on your computer years ago entering all that HTML code was kinda wasted. Wasn't it?". I responded with something like, "uhhhhh, yeah. But back then....
If the IT geek doesn't have to deal with the end user then the language barrier is virtually nonexistent, at least as far as the masses are concerned.
The real question is whether or not projects can be managed effectively overseas. Of course with IP audio/video (iChat AVis awesome) one can effectively manage many projects remotely. Right now I am collaborating from N. America to New Zealand using iChat and it is wildly successful. However, I can easily see some projects with other folks who need more guidance or even hand-holding than others or simply a more intimate interaction than iChat could provide. In this case, especially with large projects involving more than a dozen or so programmers/subject matter experts/technical writers etc.... Project management could become unwieldy.
How often would you run it on batteries? My laptop lasts a little over an 1.5hr, but I've never really had to run off batteries at all except when relocating while running, or once when I was waiting for a kernel compile to finish.
I routinely need 3 hrs of battery life on cross-country plane flights. I have looked at Wintel laptops and have owned two in the past, but the Apple Powerbooks seem to give me the best possible battery life so far.
I saw the name Voodoo and about shit myself thinking that 3DFX had come back from the dead.
Speaking of 3Dfx, check out this auction on eBay for some truly rare hardware. (disclaimer: I have nothing to do with this auction).
Wow! Pretty impressive. This could be the next ultimate LAN gaming machine, but will I ever really be able to run it on batteries for more than 15 minutes? I know they claim 3+ hours, but.....
What about cooling? I thought my 12in Powerbook got pretty warm on occasion, but this might have to come with a warning.
This should exemplify that IT resources and programmers are finite. Jobs dry up in one area only to resurface where costs are lower.
Any industry that becomes a commodity will undergo a similar transformation. This is exactly what made the whole silicon valley experiment so wildly successful in that an entirely new paradigm was created that existed in few other places. When the "resource" became common and the concepts became commodities that could be moved around, traded and bargained for, the result was job movement to where those who had the skills would work for less. So, the trick is to innovate and again create for the world markets and ourselves skill-sets that are unique and in demand for the products or services they provide.
Some of the old cast for sure, but I hear the negotiations with Bill are not going well. He got a raw deal the first time around: he was paid per word, and all he usually said was "Ack!" and "Thppt!" And Berke's trying to bring in some of the mutts from his new book, "Flawed Dogs", but apparently they're in a different union than the meadow animals. I just don't get all of this legal mumbo-gumbo-rambo.
Oh, man! Bill the cat has got to make a return. Aaaaack Thppppt!
.....and about five, nearly identical 'cycle of life' type diagrams showing how one risk management strategy leads to the next and so on, in a never-ending process.
:-)
Hrmmmm. Kinda like their upgrade cycles.
These rankings were a choice for significance to the marketshare rather than significance to history or the contribution of that system to development of personal computings technical advance. True, the Compaq case is an example of revolution in the field of reverse engineering in some ways (legal and technical), but reverse engineering an already "invented" product or concept is not as impressive to me as developing an all new paradigm. For instance, the Altair was certainly the first accessible programmable computing device, (although a significantly valid argument could be made for HP calculators) but it was not until the Apple I design that the masses had a truly accessible computing device with a keyboard and screen for text input. The Apple II was the real revolutionary in the computer industry setting the standard that in many ways was not eclipsed for many years later as it included color and sound support within the computer without the need for ad ons. The Apple Lisa was the first personal computer to bring the concept of a GUI and the mouse to the general public (yeah, yeah, developed at Xerox PARC, but paid for by Apple who had the insight to bring it to market). While the Apple Macintosh was the first truly accessible personal computer to the general public that was GUI driven and also the first personal computer to include built in networking with its Appletalk protocols.
So, I guess my list of the top ten personal computers would take more than marketshare considerations into account and go something like this:
1) Altair 8800
2) Apple I
3) Apple II
4) Apple Lisa
5) Apple Macintosh
6) IBM PC 5150
7) TRS-80 Model I
8) Amiga 1000
9) Compaq Portable PC
10) Apple Newton
Positions 2 and 3 could possibly be consolidated bringing the Osborne model 1 into the list at number 10 and if the Apple Lisa and Macintosh rankings were consolidated into one rank, the Next Cube would then enter the top ten ranks (although that would be more for innovations in the software side of things).
pretty pathetic you Pro-Saddam eurotrash queers---Bush rules get over it---we don't care what you think lol
:-P
Thanks Karl Rove. You weenie.
(Actually 70,000 are estimated by the British police.)
Don't get me wrong. In my experience, it is easier to deal with geeks in a philosophy course than with business students.
Snort,....laugh. Yep. I've had a few business students in one of my intro to biology courses, and in a film class I taught. Not only did they have the most obnoxious personalities, they were demanding and lazy.
But geeks come with their own, well, challenges. This includes their predisposition to believe that the best ideas are the most recent ideas, so why are we studying dead people?
Hmmmm. Part of the not invented here mentality? Yes, the concept of history is often lost on this crowd, so unless one is teaching history in the context of technology, many are not interested.
Also, although this probably doesn't even bear mentioning, given the forum, I am not denying that I'm a geek too.
Oh, most decidedly. My wife tells me she "has married a geek" when she walks into the study and sees me behind an array of three displays. She secretly likes the concept, but it's also quite funny that at the last holiday party, one of the computer science professors here was talking to me and commenting after surveying the scene....."How did a bunch of geeks like us get hooked up with all these beautiful women?"
. Their ad-men need remedial courses in film interpretation and allegory.
It is fairly typical of large "uncool" corporations to come late to the pop culture game and attempt a capitalization of said culture to render a bit of cache to their products.
Aside: I'm still ambivalent about the Matrix. You would be too, if you had taught introductory philosophy courses at Carnegie Mellon. Three-quarters of the geeks in my course had signed up for philosophy because they thought it was just like the Matrix.
It could also simply be that The Matrix is tired. When it initially entered the scene, the Wachowski Bros. genuinely came up with some innovative film making, decent set design and mood and some clever dialogue. Matrix II and III simply rehashed those themes only with "more and bigger".
I don't mind if I never hear another Descartes/Wachowski comparison again.
What do you expect from an undergraduate philosophy course?
Tear the root off, we're gonna tear the root of, tear the root of this sucka!
O.K. now. I just about blew diet coke all over my new G5. Please mod this up as funny.
Using a digital camera and UV lamp he was able to make dummy fingerprints that fooled the readers - and in less time and less cost than similar experiments 10 years ago. He says: '...now the average do-it-yourselfer is able to achieve perfect results and requires only limited means and skills.'"
This is the whole problem with market driven products as opposed to product driven products. Companies rush to produce a product and get it to market to capture some degree of market share even though their product may suck. We have endured years of this under the Microsoft paradigm in that Microsoft advertises years in advance what products they are going to produce, sets a time-line, and then by-god the products will ship by that date. Never mind the quality. I much prefer Apple's way of doing things in that they do not talk about what they are doing, and they then ship a product when it is done. Meanwhile the rest of the computer industry is busy copying Microsofts strategy and the quality of software for the most part is slipping down the tubes.
Products such as biometrics especially needs to be completely wrung out to determine if it can be faked. They did not, it can be, but what do you bet they take it to market anyway?
Citing economic as well as social reasons
We should probably add security reasons, employment reasons, resource reasons, government infrastructure reasons, political reasons, etc....etc...etc...
Although, that said. There is a place for proprietary software and many Microsoft products would meet this need. The problem is that Microsoft spent years being just good enough and out-competing the better alternative in many cases (MacOS) and now it is turning around to bite them in the butt, because Linux based solutions are now in many cases.....good enough.
Of course OS X is still the best solution for most users that I have yet seen, but in the short term, Brazil could likely use their existing CPU hardware infrastructure for Linux as opposed to purchasing new hardware from Apple. Long term costs could most likely be lower with a gradual phasing in of OS X in combination with OSS solutions running on Linux and the use of existing infrastructure on Windows however as a healthy computing ecosystem is diverse.
I'm disappointed to see a lack of any brain research in the list, considering how beneficial applications of neuroscience could be, and how much the field is maturing.
Well, IAANS (I Am A NeuroScientist) and I am all for more funding for neuroscience. However, there is other science out there that does need funding. I would most certainly like to see fusion work as that would decrease our dependance on fossil fuels and radically alter the global geopolitical balance as well as improve the environment. (Not to mention keeping clean power to all the computers that seem to be accumulating around me.)
You know, it would be nice if submitters could write their own summary of the article instead of lifting verbatim the first paragraph of the quoted story. Don't they teach anything in school anymore?
.....it also could boost their speed, because these chips are becoming so fast that the heat they generate limits the speed at which they can operate without overheating and malfunctioning.
:-)
Bah, this idea is nothing new. From the two SGI's with two 20in displays, two macs and five displays attached to them, my tiny little first apartment had more than enough heat production to warm things up.
I got my iPod (10 GB) 11 months ago, and the battery life went from 8-10 hours or so to about 2 now
Reset the iPod and (perhaps) update the firmware. This will often take care of problems. Also, discharge it entirely followed by recharging it fully. This also takes care of many problems.