Of course, that's all assuming "the cost of settling these doctors'claims has fallen 23 percent" is referring to average cost, as opposed to total cost (in the latter case, the GP is absolutely correct).
This suggests to me that although the incidence of lawsuits was substantially reduced, the cost per lawsuit rose quite a bit.
As an average, sure.
but it doesn't help you very much if you get the asshole patient who uses your apology to ream you in court.
But the numbers don't necessarily imply this. It could just meant the 50% decrease in suits occurred primarily among the low-cost suits. Put more simply, if you effect a reduction in low-cost suits, the average cost will go up, even if the total number of suits has gone down.
Well sure, but who would do that?:) In a corporate setting, you're far more likely to see either 1) businesses demanding XP preloaded on new hardware they purchase (we're already seeing companies like Dell backing away from their plans to remove XP from their preload options), or 2) a very gradual migration to Vista as hardware is cycled.
1) That cost is paid upfront, minus a bit of ongoing maintenance, as opposed to an ongoing cost for every single unit sold. 2) Because I didn't have any DVR-Rs on-hand, and I had a stack of spare CD-Rs lying around.:)
It's been awhile since I bought any computer equipment from a big box store, so excuse any ignorance, but don't the manufacturers include recovery CDs in the packaging?
Not necessarily. The T61 I bought from Lenovo came with a tool to create recovery disks which, I assume, are based off the recovery partition present on the hard disk. 6 CDs later, and I had a freshly minted set of disks which are now safely stored with the rest of the documentation for the laptop.
The problem is, if you're building winforms-based database-backed applications, you're pretty much stuck with ADO and all of it's warts, unless you want to manually do all the heavy lifting to populate controls and propagate changes back to the DB (unless NHibernate addresses this issue? I must admit, I haven't looked.)
Sorry, but I just don't buy it. People don't switch to Vista because of:
1) hardware compatibility issues, 2) software compatibility issues, and 3) annoyances such as UAC, which negatively impact hinder the user experience (though, I do understand their utility).
In a corporate setting, the first two are, without question, show stoppers, and the last is a burden for support staff. Further, XP *works* for most people, so there's little reason to switch. A service pack for Vista does nothing to address these issues (nor could it).
Yeah, I know everyone I talk to has been saying the only reason they don't switch to Vista is because there's no service pack out for it. Yup, it definitely has nothing to do with shoddy driver support from 3rd party manufacturers, or things like UAC. It's definitely been the lack of a service pack.
Honestly, is this seriously what passes of journalism these days??
I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately, both you and the AC who responded, are completely missing my point. I never said 47 million uninsured was a-okay. I'm saying that, if you want to begin a debate on the subject, you have to put away the hyperbole, otherwise you'll just get ignored as an extremist. And yes, saying "most" Americans don't have healthcare *is* hyperbole.
Hey, now, let's be fair, the number of Americans without health insurance is currently around 47 million, or 16% of the total population (though this doesn't account for this with insurance who are denied coverage). Hardly "most people".
I point this out only because a useful dialog about things like healthcare reform can't begin if people persist in exaggerating or outright lying in order to support their position (and that applies to either side).
Re:The more I learn about JavaScript...
on
GWT in Action
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· Score: 1
Well those are hardly major complaints. Overloaded +, yeah, I agree that's a bad idea, particularly in the face of weak typing, but it's a minor wart. Numbers always being floats? Plenty of languages have automatic type promotion, so it's not *that* much worse than, say, Python (though, I agree, it does make this a little more cumbersome).
But again, I see nothing here that suggests Javascript is any worse than Ruby, Python, Perl, or any other scripting language out there, unless you simply object to dynamic, weakly typed languages (and it's interesting that the OP has yet to respond to my original question). Heck, I'd claim that, as far as dynamic, weak languages go, Javascript is pretty nice... clean, simple syntax. Consistent, powerful object model. A nice mix of OO and functional paradigms. IMHO, it's biggest wart is lack of namespaces (though that can be hacked around with some object trickery).
No, it's an unauthorized derivative work - they own NOTHING. 17 USC 103(a).
Unless the clip was used for scholarship, criticism, parody, or a number of other exceptions which fall under the fair use doctrine. And given the usage included commentary, fair use may very well apply.
like the Java Date API as superior just because MS didn't write it
Are you a fucking idiot, or just blind? I repeat, I never said Java was better. I said the.NET API is *broken*. Worse, if they'd just learn from Sun's mistakes, it wouldn't be... but, of course, NIH and all that. Christ, get MS's cock out of your fucking mouth, read, and try to *comprehend*.
Ugh, as I have said *repeatedly*, I'm not, nor have I ever said Java is better. I'm saying.NET *isn't*, and therefore the argument that.NET's "clean" API is the cause of it's success is pure bunk.
Re:The more I learn about JavaScript...
on
GWT in Action
·
· Score: 1
First, Javascript is a horrendous language. It is full of unexpected quirks, and compared to other dynamic languages such as Python or Ruby it is hell to work with.
Would you care to explain? I've used all of these languages to some degree, and Javascript seems no better or worse than the others (well, depending on your preferences... Python and Ruby are both dynamically, strongly typed, and Javascript is dynamically, weakly typed. If you're prejudiced against the latter, then of course you'll prefer the former).
Re:The more I learn about JavaScript...
on
GWT in Action
·
· Score: 1
I realized that Javascript has just about every one of those features
Funny thing is, so does, say, Perl (probably to an even greater degree... how do you do macros in Javascript? I know Perl allows script pre-processing modules). However, both language suffer from a flaw that I think makes it difficult to write large scale applications: weak typing. Dynamic typing, that kicks ass, absolutely. But *weak* typing creates a whole class of errors easily avoided with a strong type system, just so the programmer can be a little more lazy. But, IMHO, the benefits don't outweigh the risks.
Personally, I much prefer something like Smalltalk (no, not Ruby... Ruby is just a weak attempt to replicate Smalltalk, and they did a crappy job of it). And transforming Smalltalk into a scripting language would be pretty easy, I think...
convincing someone that the best platform for their needs is "Hardy Heron" in a professional environment is difficult
Then don't bother. Jebus, Ubuntu seems pretty damned successful on the desktop. They're being used increasingly in the server space. Do you *really* think they give a damn if a couple idiot IT folks rule it out because of the name?
I understand your point is that the.NET API is inferior to J2EE, is this the case?
Uhh, I don't recall making that point, nor would I, since I don't have a lot of experience with either stack (most of my.NET and Java experience is in building desktop and server applications). I have made disparaging comments about ADO.NET, but that's simply a database access layer, not a complete, soup-to-nuts application stack. And in the Java world, there really isn't an equivalent, as most people work with ORMs built on top of JDBC, rather than something like ADO.NET (which is really just a thin object model over the underlying database tables... and a crappy one, at that).
I ran "make && make install" as the command, following the instructions of the guide I followed. That looked like it would execute both for me. I can try running "make install" by itself tonight.
Well, the question is, *what* did it install? Check/usr/local/bin. Look for a file called 'mythtv-setup' or 'mythtvsetup' (yeah, without the hyphen). One of those should be present, in addition to 'mythbackend' and 'mythfrontend'.
The format of ld.so.conf was a bit confusing when I looked at it last night. There was only one line, which said "include/.../*.conf". I added a second line per the MythTV.org howto, but my line just has the path "/usr/local/lib". Should I have added the "include" at the start of the line?
Well, if you want to do it the "right" way, you should create a new file in/etc/ld.so.conf.d/ (assuming that's what followed the include line in ld.so.conf) called, I dunno, local.conf, which would contain the single line "/usr/local/lib". But I believe either way will work.
To check, run 'ldconfig -v', pipe that to a pager, and see if any of the libraries in/usr/local/lib appear (eg, libmyth, libmythui, etc)..
Why don't I just let this article do the talking for me, since you seem to persist in believing that DateTime in.NET is just perfect (here's a hint, they're planning to *write a replacement* because of the limitations in the current implementation, and why? Because the *underlying representation was insufficient*).
After it compiled, you did a 'make install', right? And made sure to have/usr/local/bin in your path? And also made sure/usr/local was in your/etc/ld.so.conf or the distro equivalent?
1. Transactions (of all things) in ADO.NET are an absolute nightmare. I have to *manually* save and restore a DataSet if I do a rollback? Hell, that's ignoring the fact that I have to manually set up a command list for a transaction object in the first place (who came up with that, honestly?).
2. DBNull? WTF is DBNull? Just give me friggin' null, FFS.
3. DateTime isn't represented as UTC, internally, which makes dealing with, among other things, multiple time zones, an absolute pain in the ass.
4. The winforms checkbox control operates inconsistently from the rest of the system (it doesn't even trigger a focus event when it's clicked, IIRC).
5. The winforms validation framework is, frankly, idiotic. Why can't I move focus out of a textbox just because the value doesn't validate??
6. The installer framework, at least in VS2005, is *terrible*. It's really unbelievable anyone would release such a monstrosity (hard coded dialogs with 4 text fields? Passing data from the installer to custom install actions as *command-line arguments*??)
Pity, looks like that's all I've got off the top of my head. I'm sure others can contribute their own, though.
As far as date handling goes, when I used Java 4-5 years ago, the date handling was truly pathetic requiring instantiaion of multiple classes to achieve very simple things
The date handling in Java is complex because handling dates is a complex task. The.NET developers clearly didn't understand that, hence the half-assed implementation. It appears you don't, either.
You provide one example of API inconsistency and no further evidence to support your judgment. Have you shipped applications built in both platforms?
Yes, I have. Fairly large ones, too (not huge... the 100K+ range).
Array.Lenth and List.Count are not near the top 10 pains
Yes, because I selected that because it's at the top of the list, and not simply because it's a) patently stupid, and b) easy to illustrate.
Besides, are you trying to defend.NET or not? Your suggestion that you can easily think of 10 other design decisions more idiotic than the one I supplied suggests the answer is "no", which leaves me rather confused...
Besides there are comparable inconsistencies in the Java libraries.
Yeah. Umm... so? Again, I never said Java was better. I'm simply saying the idea that.NET is/will be successful because the class library is somehow superior is, frankly, rather stupid.
but if you're not averse to downloading TV shows who cares about PVR functionality?
Fuck, I hate it when people say this. Yeah, sure, if all you watch is mainstream, popular television, particularly if you track new series, downloading might just work for you. But for anyone who watches even slightly off-the-beaten-track stuff (say, re-runs of America's Test Kitchen), good luck finding a well seeded torrent, or be prepared to wait for weeks while your downloads trickle in.
I tried setting up MythTV a year or so ago. I've maintained Gentoo, Debian, and FreeBSD boxes. I can program. I know databases. But IIRC, the very first page of the setup--not sure if it was MythTV or KnoppMyth's fault--was asking about which sockets I wanted to use, or some such nonsense.
Yeah, and it picks a default. So if you don't care, why didn't you just ignore it? Honestly, if that's the extent of your complaints, you obviously gave up too easily.
Incidentally, if what you say of your experience is true, you should've been able to have a Myth system set up in an afternoon. My own backend install took more time to install the OS than the actual Myth setup, and that includes configuring lirc to drive a DSTB, too. That's from zero to full recording capability in a matter of hours, having never installed Myth before. Anyone with a decent HOWTO and the kind of experience you claim to have should be able to do the same. But, of course, if you freak out at the first sign of a port number, I can see how you wouldn't get very far (and also makes me question the experience you claim to have).
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Of course, that's all assuming "the cost of settling these doctors'claims has fallen 23 percent" is referring to average cost, as opposed to total cost (in the latter case, the GP is absolutely correct).
This suggests to me that although the incidence of lawsuits was substantially reduced, the cost per lawsuit rose quite a bit.
As an average, sure.
but it doesn't help you very much if you get the asshole patient who uses your apology to ream you in court.
But the numbers don't necessarily imply this. It could just meant the 50% decrease in suits occurred primarily among the low-cost suits. Put more simply, if you effect a reduction in low-cost suits, the average cost will go up, even if the total number of suits has gone down.
Well sure, but who would do that? :) In a corporate setting, you're far more likely to see either 1) businesses demanding XP preloaded on new hardware they purchase (we're already seeing companies like Dell backing away from their plans to remove XP from their preload options), or 2) a very gradual migration to Vista as hardware is cycled.
1) That cost is paid upfront, minus a bit of ongoing maintenance, as opposed to an ongoing cost for every single unit sold. :)
2) Because I didn't have any DVR-Rs on-hand, and I had a stack of spare CD-Rs lying around.
It's been awhile since I bought any computer equipment from a big box store, so excuse any ignorance, but don't the manufacturers include recovery CDs in the packaging?
Not necessarily. The T61 I bought from Lenovo came with a tool to create recovery disks which, I assume, are based off the recovery partition present on the hard disk. 6 CDs later, and I had a freshly minted set of disks which are now safely stored with the rest of the documentation for the laptop.
The problem is, if you're building winforms-based database-backed applications, you're pretty much stuck with ADO and all of it's warts, unless you want to manually do all the heavy lifting to populate controls and propagate changes back to the DB (unless NHibernate addresses this issue? I must admit, I haven't looked.)
Sorry, but I just don't buy it. People don't switch to Vista because of:
1) hardware compatibility issues,
2) software compatibility issues, and
3) annoyances such as UAC, which negatively impact hinder the user experience (though, I do understand their utility).
In a corporate setting, the first two are, without question, show stoppers, and the last is a burden for support staff. Further, XP *works* for most people, so there's little reason to switch. A service pack for Vista does nothing to address these issues (nor could it).
Yeah, I know everyone I talk to has been saying the only reason they don't switch to Vista is because there's no service pack out for it. Yup, it definitely has nothing to do with shoddy driver support from 3rd party manufacturers, or things like UAC. It's definitely been the lack of a service pack.
Honestly, is this seriously what passes of journalism these days??
I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately, both you and the AC who responded, are completely missing my point. I never said 47 million uninsured was a-okay. I'm saying that, if you want to begin a debate on the subject, you have to put away the hyperbole, otherwise you'll just get ignored as an extremist. And yes, saying "most" Americans don't have healthcare *is* hyperbole.
the lack of health insurance for most people
Hey, now, let's be fair, the number of Americans without health insurance is currently around 47 million, or 16% of the total population (though this doesn't account for this with insurance who are denied coverage). Hardly "most people".
I point this out only because a useful dialog about things like healthcare reform can't begin if people persist in exaggerating or outright lying in order to support their position (and that applies to either side).
Well those are hardly major complaints. Overloaded +, yeah, I agree that's a bad idea, particularly in the face of weak typing, but it's a minor wart. Numbers always being floats? Plenty of languages have automatic type promotion, so it's not *that* much worse than, say, Python (though, I agree, it does make this a little more cumbersome).
But again, I see nothing here that suggests Javascript is any worse than Ruby, Python, Perl, or any other scripting language out there, unless you simply object to dynamic, weakly typed languages (and it's interesting that the OP has yet to respond to my original question). Heck, I'd claim that, as far as dynamic, weak languages go, Javascript is pretty nice... clean, simple syntax. Consistent, powerful object model. A nice mix of OO and functional paradigms. IMHO, it's biggest wart is lack of namespaces (though that can be hacked around with some object trickery).
No, it's an unauthorized derivative work - they own NOTHING. 17 USC 103(a).
Unless the clip was used for scholarship, criticism, parody, or a number of other exceptions which fall under the fair use doctrine. And given the usage included commentary, fair use may very well apply.
like the Java Date API as superior just because MS didn't write it
.NET API is *broken*. Worse, if they'd just learn from Sun's mistakes, it wouldn't be... but, of course, NIH and all that. Christ, get MS's cock out of your fucking mouth, read, and try to *comprehend*.
Are you a fucking idiot, or just blind? I repeat, I never said Java was better. I said the
Ugh, as I have said *repeatedly*, I'm not, nor have I ever said Java is better. I'm saying .NET *isn't*, and therefore the argument that .NET's "clean" API is the cause of it's success is pure bunk.
First, Javascript is a horrendous language. It is full of unexpected quirks, and compared to other dynamic languages such as Python or Ruby it is hell to work with.
Would you care to explain? I've used all of these languages to some degree, and Javascript seems no better or worse than the others (well, depending on your preferences... Python and Ruby are both dynamically, strongly typed, and Javascript is dynamically, weakly typed. If you're prejudiced against the latter, then of course you'll prefer the former).
I realized that Javascript has just about every one of those features
Funny thing is, so does, say, Perl (probably to an even greater degree... how do you do macros in Javascript? I know Perl allows script pre-processing modules). However, both language suffer from a flaw that I think makes it difficult to write large scale applications: weak typing. Dynamic typing, that kicks ass, absolutely. But *weak* typing creates a whole class of errors easily avoided with a strong type system, just so the programmer can be a little more lazy. But, IMHO, the benefits don't outweigh the risks.
Personally, I much prefer something like Smalltalk (no, not Ruby... Ruby is just a weak attempt to replicate Smalltalk, and they did a crappy job of it). And transforming Smalltalk into a scripting language would be pretty easy, I think...
convincing someone that the best platform for their needs is "Hardy Heron" in a professional environment is difficult
Then don't bother. Jebus, Ubuntu seems pretty damned successful on the desktop. They're being used increasingly in the server space. Do you *really* think they give a damn if a couple idiot IT folks rule it out because of the name?
I understand your point is that the .NET API is inferior to J2EE, is this the case?
.NET and Java experience is in building desktop and server applications). I have made disparaging comments about ADO.NET, but that's simply a database access layer, not a complete, soup-to-nuts application stack. And in the Java world, there really isn't an equivalent, as most people work with ORMs built on top of JDBC, rather than something like ADO.NET (which is really just a thin object model over the underlying database tables... and a crappy one, at that).
Uhh, I don't recall making that point, nor would I, since I don't have a lot of experience with either stack (most of my
Thank you for the reply! It is appreciated.
:)
/usr/local/bin. Look for a file called 'mythtv-setup' or 'mythtvsetup' (yeah, without the hyphen). One of those should be present, in addition to 'mythbackend' and 'mythfrontend'.
/.../*.conf". I added a second line per the MythTV.org howto, but my line just has the path "/usr/local/lib". Should I have added the "include" at the start of the line?
/etc/ld.so.conf.d/ (assuming that's what followed the include line in ld.so.conf) called, I dunno, local.conf, which would contain the single line "/usr/local/lib". But I believe either way will work.
/usr/local/lib appear (eg, libmyth, libmythui, etc)..
My pleasure.
I ran "make && make install" as the command, following the instructions of the guide I followed. That looked like it would execute both for me. I can try running "make install" by itself tonight.
Well, the question is, *what* did it install? Check
The format of ld.so.conf was a bit confusing when I looked at it last night. There was only one line, which said "include
Well, if you want to do it the "right" way, you should create a new file in
To check, run 'ldconfig -v', pipe that to a pager, and see if any of the libraries in
Why don't I just let this article do the talking for me, since you seem to persist in believing that DateTime in .NET is just perfect (here's a hint, they're planning to *write a replacement* because of the limitations in the current implementation, and why? Because the *underlying representation was insufficient*).
After it compiled, you did a 'make install', right? And made sure to have /usr/local/bin in your path? And also made sure /usr/local was in your /etc/ld.so.conf or the distro equivalent?
Why don't you come up with 10 more
.NET developers clearly didn't understand that, hence the half-assed implementation. It appears you don't, either.
Alright then:
1. Transactions (of all things) in ADO.NET are an absolute nightmare. I have to *manually* save and restore a DataSet if I do a rollback? Hell, that's ignoring the fact that I have to manually set up a command list for a transaction object in the first place (who came up with that, honestly?).
2. DBNull? WTF is DBNull? Just give me friggin' null, FFS.
3. DateTime isn't represented as UTC, internally, which makes dealing with, among other things, multiple time zones, an absolute pain in the ass.
4. The winforms checkbox control operates inconsistently from the rest of the system (it doesn't even trigger a focus event when it's clicked, IIRC).
5. The winforms validation framework is, frankly, idiotic. Why can't I move focus out of a textbox just because the value doesn't validate??
6. The installer framework, at least in VS2005, is *terrible*. It's really unbelievable anyone would release such a monstrosity (hard coded dialogs with 4 text fields? Passing data from the installer to custom install actions as *command-line arguments*??)
Pity, looks like that's all I've got off the top of my head. I'm sure others can contribute their own, though.
As far as date handling goes, when I used Java 4-5 years ago, the date handling was truly pathetic requiring instantiaion of multiple classes to achieve very simple things
The date handling in Java is complex because handling dates is a complex task. The
You provide one example of API inconsistency and no further evidence to support your judgment. Have you shipped applications built in both platforms?
.NET or not? Your suggestion that you can easily think of 10 other design decisions more idiotic than the one I supplied suggests the answer is "no", which leaves me rather confused...
.NET is/will be successful because the class library is somehow superior is, frankly, rather stupid.
Yes, I have. Fairly large ones, too (not huge... the 100K+ range).
Array.Lenth and List.Count are not near the top 10 pains
Yes, because I selected that because it's at the top of the list, and not simply because it's a) patently stupid, and b) easy to illustrate.
Besides, are you trying to defend
Besides there are comparable inconsistencies in the Java libraries.
Yeah. Umm... so? Again, I never said Java was better. I'm simply saying the idea that
but if you're not averse to downloading TV shows who cares about PVR functionality?
Fuck, I hate it when people say this. Yeah, sure, if all you watch is mainstream, popular television, particularly if you track new series, downloading might just work for you. But for anyone who watches even slightly off-the-beaten-track stuff (say, re-runs of America's Test Kitchen), good luck finding a well seeded torrent, or be prepared to wait for weeks while your downloads trickle in.
I tried setting up MythTV a year or so ago. I've maintained Gentoo, Debian, and FreeBSD boxes. I can program. I know databases. But IIRC, the very first page of the setup--not sure if it was MythTV or KnoppMyth's fault--was asking about which sockets I wanted to use, or some such nonsense.
Yeah, and it picks a default. So if you don't care, why didn't you just ignore it? Honestly, if that's the extent of your complaints, you obviously gave up too easily.
Incidentally, if what you say of your experience is true, you should've been able to have a Myth system set up in an afternoon. My own backend install took more time to install the OS than the actual Myth setup, and that includes configuring lirc to drive a DSTB, too. That's from zero to full recording capability in a matter of hours, having never installed Myth before. Anyone with a decent HOWTO and the kind of experience you claim to have should be able to do the same. But, of course, if you freak out at the first sign of a port number, I can see how you wouldn't get very far (and also makes me question the experience you claim to have).