I agree with you. The dollar is weak right now so I would take any literal currency translations with a grain of salt. In January 2003, the exchange rate was 120 Yen to 1 Dollar. May 1st it was 105 Yen to the dollar. Using the 2003 conversion rate, the PS3 would be about $400.
How this works into the PS3's US based pricing strategy is anyone's guess, but I wouldn't just take a price in Yen, convert it, and assume that will be the price in dollars.
I'm not a usability expert, but looking at the basic print dialogue, I see a number of things that could be done differently. Ok, there's three main control areas on the page. The top one is labelled "Printer", the middle section can have different contents depending on which tab you are in, and the bottom area consists mostly of buttons.
In the top area, there is a preview checkbox. Presumably this means print preview. But why is it in the printer control group? Is it previewing the printer? Why is it a checkbox? Presumably when it is checked, it changes the functionality of the "Print" button to "Print Preview". Wouldn't it be more sensible to have a "Print Preview" button instead?
In the form, there are multiple greyed out options and blank fields. Why is the type of the printer blank? Why is the location blank? What do I have to do to enable the output file control? Why can I specify to print all, print a range of pages, but not print the current page.
Grouping could also be improved. Why not put the "Print System currently used" under the "System Options" button? Why are the copies, html settings and advanced options all treated as tabs while the System Options is separated as a button? If the tabs are document options while the System Options are more global, then this could be made more obvious. For that matter, why exactly is HTML Settings a category of printing options.
Terminology can also be improved. What does collapse do? What do the funnel and magic wand icons next to the printer drop down signify? What information is supposed to be conveyed by the "Comment"? How is "Advanced Options" different from "System Options"?
In that case you'd better stop using those other high-level languages which are written in C++!
That's like saying there aren't any security advantages to coding in C++ over machine code. Higher level languages provide fewer opportunities for people to create random craziness at the level at which most code is written.
perl is eminently readable if you keep to good programming practice;
Most any language is eminently readable if you keep to good programming practice. Most code is not eminently readable, but this time it will be different.
The point wasn't that people wouldn't pay to see/own a movie, it was that if the copyright holders had a cap on their profits, there would be significantly less insentive to make a certain class of copyright works. Here's a more specific example.
Let's say a movie like Titanic costs $100 million to produce, that the copyright holder is allowed to make at most $50 million dollars in profit before his work goes into the public domain, and that a movie typically grosses twice what is costs to make.
If someone made Titanic, they would expect the movie to gross $200 million, of which $100 million would be profit, of which they would only be guaranteed $50 million. The moment the studio earned it's $50 million dollars, no one would be obligated to give them another cent. The movie could still be showing in the theatres and people could still be paying to go see it, but there's nothing to say the theatres have to give anything back to the studio. Similarly, people could just download it off the net for free legally if it's gone into the public domain.
So if you're a movie studio, why invest $100 million into Titanic for $50 million profit when you can invest $50 million twice into two different Adam Sandler movies and come out with $100 million in profit.
Big Risk, Big Reward. If you put limitations on the reward, companies will reduce their risk correspondingly.
If you put a cap on profits there is no insentive to make something that is good enough to make more money than the cap allows. For example, why would anyone make, or fund if you prefer, a movie like Star Wars, Spiderman, or Titanic.
Some people may say, good riddance to all that main stream crap, but it's not their decision to make, and certainly not under the guise of copyright laws,.
There is a valid complaint here, but you've got to understand that some of the subjects you mention like Math and Literary Analysis are some of the only places where critical thinking is actually taught in high schools. In Math, you have to understand a collection of rules or methods and follow them to reach various conclusions. This teaches you critical thinking skills for the concrete world. In literary analysis you have to form an opinion about something and then either support or defend it. This gives you critical thinking skills in a more abstract world. Both sides of the equation don't have to balance out in the real world, but you have to convince a reader that they do or at least that they could.
The problem with subjects like Civics or Science is that they are almost always taught as a collection of facts. This is wrong, but it's what happens. It is more difficult to screw up literary analysis and higher mathematics because both subjects are much more about the process of derriving conclusions than about the actual conclusions themselves. Memorization versus Critical Thinking.
Exactly, and this, combined with low cost and a firm knowledge of what you're buying, is why people make impulse buys on sites like itunes all of the time.
That was created by Paul Graham wasn't it? Given that he is the author of the definitive LISP text and one of the languages strongest proponents and an extremely smart guy, I don't know that his success with LISP translates to the rest of the world.
It's pretty clear that Blockbuster has the size, relationahsips, channel, and most importantly, money to crush Netflix.
They are both media distribution companies, only Block Buster has nearly all of its business locked up in brick and mortar stores which are in complete opposition to the "no store" business model. Why did it take BB so long to get a service similar to Netflix? Why weren't RIAA companies able to lead the way in offering digital downloads? Why did the MPAA try to get VCRs banned? Historically, companies are exceptionally bad at embracing radical innovations that destabilize their primary business.
What's going to be really interesting is who's going to come out on top when we all start downloading movies. It could be netflix, it could be blockbuster, but more likely it's going to be someone else entirely (Apple?).
This seems to be a book about practical tasks in lisp but not necessarily practical lisp. For example, why would it be practical to do web programming in LISP instead of a platform like PHP, JSP, ASP.NET, or even Perl? All of these platforms have enormous community support for web development in terms of libraries and resources.
Am I wrong here? If not, for what tasks is LISP a practical aka appropriate, tool? From what I've seen, it's popular and presumably good for some AI work (although most of the younger AI guys I've known seem to use other tools) and it's also good for teaching students about functional programming and language theory. What else?
Bah, maybe it's more like 10% bullshit. I've known plenty of disinterested 9-5ers that sucked, but I'm not sure I've ever met someone with a passion for IT that sucked at it relative to their peers. It's not a hard rule that you can't be good at something you don't like, but generally speaking, the more you like something, the more likely it is you'll be good at it.
Sure, a high wage might make you like doing something more. And this might motivate you to perform better. But the person who already likes what they are doing requires less motivation and less pay. Similarly, a person who likes what they are doing is going to be more motivated given the same pay.
Basically, in field like computer whatever that requires perpetual learning, the person who spends time learning in their spare time is going to be much better than the person who never turns on their computer at home. The only way this will not be true is if the disinterested person is, in some way, a lot smarter than the other person.
I think there is some truth to this argument. Working at a university career services office, I've seen Microsoft recruit here and offer BS graduates salaries that are very much off the map. They don't always do this, but there are obviously times when they are looking for very particular things, and having to pay a very high price.
In the article, Bill mentioned in particular that they were looking for good security personnel. Maybe there truly is a shortage of very good developers / system designers with very strong backgrounds in security. This is not at all hard for me to believe since most developers I've met have a just-get-it-working attitude which is in opposition to the a traditional security mindset.
Of course, if they increased the quota again, then no doubt MS would use it for any worker they felt like regardless of american supply for that particular position.
Or, if you know, say Java, C, Pascal and a few otehr langauges...and they are looking for C++, chances are, you can pick it up in a few weeks.
Unless your normal speed is very slow, it really can take many months to a year to get up to speed in a new language depending on how much time you have to devote to the learning process. The hard part isn't learning the basic syntax/quirks of the language so much as it is learning how to appropriately use all of the libraries.
For example, I've been programming in PHP for a year and this is something like my 10 billionth language yet I'm still spending a decent chunk of time building up my knowledge with tools that have been around for a while (QuickForms, DB, DB_DataObject, Smarty, etc). If I'd already been programming in PHP for a few years, I would have been significantly more productive in that respect over the past year.
In your example, you site portability as a benefit of Excel. I would think that the cost of deploying perl/python/whatever on desktops would be trivial compared to the cost of a business setting that supported the long term creation, maintenance, and use off Excel applications. If new development was done as part of a web application, there woudn't even need to be desktop software roll out.
As a side, if you can do something in a normal programming language as opposed to excel in roughly the same amount of time, aren't you much better off doing it in the programming language. For example, if you use a programming language like PHP or Perl, the knowledge you acquire in accomplishing your task can be applied to a much larger problem domain. In other words, it is more valuable to understand arrays in PHP than it is to understand arrays in excel's VBA because you can do more with PHP than you can with Excel. Similarly, the solutions you create can also be applied in a larger solution space. You can't really reference excel business logic when your company needs to put everything on the web.
Other than when you don't have a choice, ie forbidden from or lacking the know-how to pursue alternatives, under what circumstances does it make sense to develop applications in Excel? I can kind of see doing it if you have a lot of Excel knowledge and know beyond a shadow of a doubt that something is a cradle to grave application...
Which consumers are we talking about? I could be wrong, but I would think the OS upgrade market was miniscule. The only copy of windows most end users buy is the one that comes with their computer. Many businesses (like my employer) are locked into renewable contracts with MS so we effectively have to rebuy our (very discounted) licenses every three years anyway. It's not really a question of whether or not we'll make the purchase so much as whether or not we'll install the upgrades. Even if most businesses dont have a similar contract (probably true), I would think that IT dpartments considering upgrading would do so based largely on the technical merits of the OS. In fact, many organizations might consider an interface upgrade to be a pain in the ass... if I had a dime for everytime I had to help someone change the XP start menu to classic.
Sure, there might be a PHB that likes the idea of upgrading because of the new desktop theme and fade effects, but he was probably going to upgrade anyway. I guess along those same lines, you could have a bunch of end users who are disappointed that everything looks the same, wondering what exactly they payed for.
Complete centralized management of a large university's IT resources is not only impossible, but it is also undesirable. There are too many things that are needed by specific departments (library systems, career services systems, meal plan systems, course registration systems). These kinds of things all have to be developed and managed by people who are very close to the housing department. Besides, many universities, like mine, offer only basic service centrally managed. Sure we could use central IT's free email system, but we'd frequently experience long delivery delays and we'd have a 15 MB quota.
What's really needed at universities is not centralized management for everything, but institutionalized oversite and forced interdepartmental communication. Instead of having one fulltime administrator managing a department's assets by himself for 20 years, you should have two administrators spending half their time working at central IT and half their time working in their primary department. It improves security by adding an extra set of eyes and slightly different set of expertise while forcing exposure to the practices being used centrally and amonst other operating units. Of course, this will never happen and there's probably some scalability issues in terms of # people per departments and office resources.
Php solved this problem a long time ago with HTML_QuickForms. Setting a field to be required is trivial and you can choose to have it check server side or client side depending on your needs. You can enforce other rules like regular expression pattern matching just as easily and there's also a bunch of canned rules like "must be a valid email address". Of course, there are undoubtedly a lot of php coders that have never heard of pear... so I guess the point stands. And of course, there's still that crazy old hermit coding up CGI's in C.
Perhaps one of the reasons I like clippy is that I make intelligent use of him. Asking the office assistant "How do I format this" makes about as much sense as using a hammer to brush your teeth.
In Outlook 2003, if you give the assistant your query, you get a bunch of gibberish. However, if you just type in "format text", you get several relevant results (changing font, changing to plain text/rtf/html, etc). I guess what I'm saying is that the knowledge base behind clippy is incomplete but useful and that I don't mind having an avatar interface.
I agree but for different reasons. Government supplied broadband is not necessarily cheaper. You just don't have a choice as to whether or not you pay for it.
Besides, cities do not have the economies of scale to be competitive broadband providers in this day and age. Tehir expertise is already spread too thin, and frankly, cities do not even manage their present obligations particularly well. Part of the problem is a systemic resistance to change.
For example, on my street there is street sweeping on the second Tuesday of May, August, and November. There are year round signs that indicate these dates. When it is street sweeping day, there is nothing special to let you know you need to move your car. To you, street sweeping day looks just like any other day. However, if you don't move your car, it is ticketed and towed downtown at your expense to the tune of $100 or so. There is no explanation or notification, you just come home to a missing car and a slightly cleaner street.
If only one or two cars were towed, this may be an acceptable solution. However, the static year round signs are only about 70% effective. This means that on any given street sweeping day, it's not unusual for 3 out of 10 cars normally parked there to be towed.
Taking into account both sides of the street, it would not be unusual for there to be 10 cars towed per street sweeping. This is a direct monetary cost of $1,000. But it doesn't end there. To get your car back you'll probably have to take at least two hours off from work and take a bus downtown. Let's be generous and call that another $33. Presumably one also pays taxes for street sweeping.
So now it costs residents what $1330 + taxes per block of street cleaning? Is that efficient? Probably not. Where could it be improved? In our calculation the costs are all coming from people not remembering to move their cars. So maybe if the city invested in improved notification services (signs that light up, email reminders, snail mail flyers, honking a loud horn before ticketing), they could reduce the number of cars towed by 80% dropping costs from $1330 to $266. Since most of the money goes into a tow driver's pocket, it's not like missing this revenue is going to bankrupt the city either.
But the city will never pursue any of these possibilities. Why? Because they don't have to. There is no competition driving them to innovate, to improve services. Citizens have no way of expressing their dissatisfaction other than by voting once a year for politicians who have non existant platforms and who probably don't deal with these kind of operational issues anyway.
I don't want these people charging me for broadband because they are inept. They won't keep the service functionally competitive, but it will cost a lot of money.
I'm the one person on earth that actually likes clippy. It would be really neat if they tied him directly into google groups too. Type in a few search terms in clippy Outlook, get MS help answers and matching results from outlook newsgroups.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you. The dollar is weak right now so I would take any literal currency translations with a grain of salt. In January 2003, the exchange rate was 120 Yen to 1 Dollar. May 1st it was 105 Yen to the dollar. Using the 2003 conversion rate, the PS3 would be about $400.
How this works into the PS3's US based pricing strategy is anyone's guess, but I wouldn't just take a price in Yen, convert it, and assume that will be the price in dollars.
I'm not a usability expert, but looking at the basic print dialogue, I see a number of things that could be done differently. Ok, there's three main control areas on the page. The top one is labelled "Printer", the middle section can have different contents depending on which tab you are in, and the bottom area consists mostly of buttons.
In the top area, there is a preview checkbox. Presumably this means print preview. But why is it in the printer control group? Is it previewing the printer? Why is it a checkbox? Presumably when it is checked, it changes the functionality of the "Print" button to "Print Preview". Wouldn't it be more sensible to have a "Print Preview" button instead?
In the form, there are multiple greyed out options and blank fields. Why is the type of the printer blank? Why is the location blank? What do I have to do to enable the output file control? Why can I specify to print all, print a range of pages, but not print the current page.
Grouping could also be improved. Why not put the "Print System currently used" under the "System Options" button? Why are the copies, html settings and advanced options all treated as tabs while the System Options is separated as a button? If the tabs are document options while the System Options are more global, then this could be made more obvious. For that matter, why exactly is HTML Settings a category of printing options.
Terminology can also be improved. What does collapse do? What do the funnel and magic wand icons next to the printer drop down signify? What information is supposed to be conveyed by the "Comment"? How is "Advanced Options" different from "System Options"?
Star Wars Sickout
I haven't felt this bad since we saw that Ronald Reagan movie.
In that case you'd better stop using those other high-level languages which are written in C++!
That's like saying there aren't any security advantages to coding in C++ over machine code. Higher level languages provide fewer opportunities for people to create random craziness at the level at which most code is written.
perl is eminently readable if you keep to good programming practice;
Most any language is eminently readable if you keep to good programming practice. Most code is not eminently readable, but this time it will be different.
The point wasn't that people wouldn't pay to see/own a movie, it was that if the copyright holders had a cap on their profits, there would be significantly less insentive to make a certain class of copyright works. Here's a more specific example.
Let's say a movie like Titanic costs $100 million to produce, that the copyright holder is allowed to make at most $50 million dollars in profit before his work goes into the public domain, and that a movie typically grosses twice what is costs to make.
If someone made Titanic, they would expect the movie to gross $200 million, of which $100 million would be profit, of which they would only be guaranteed $50 million. The moment the studio earned it's $50 million dollars, no one would be obligated to give them another cent. The movie could still be showing in the theatres and people could still be paying to go see it, but there's nothing to say the theatres have to give anything back to the studio. Similarly, people could just download it off the net for free legally if it's gone into the public domain.
So if you're a movie studio, why invest $100 million into Titanic for $50 million profit when you can invest $50 million twice into two different Adam Sandler movies and come out with $100 million in profit.
Big Risk, Big Reward. If you put limitations on the reward, companies will reduce their risk correspondingly.
or X millions of dollars profits
If you put a cap on profits there is no insentive to make something that is good enough to make more money than the cap allows. For example, why would anyone make, or fund if you prefer, a movie like Star Wars, Spiderman, or Titanic.
Some people may say, good riddance to all that main stream crap, but it's not their decision to make, and certainly not under the guise of copyright laws,.
If kids were taught theology in school, then they might have a shot at learning theology in a less biased environment.
I don't agree that we should teach creationism in the schools
If we don't teach creationism in schools, where are kids going to learn about it?
There is a valid complaint here, but you've got to understand that some of the subjects you mention like Math and Literary Analysis are some of the only places where critical thinking is actually taught in high schools. In Math, you have to understand a collection of rules or methods and follow them to reach various conclusions. This teaches you critical thinking skills for the concrete world. In literary analysis you have to form an opinion about something and then either support or defend it. This gives you critical thinking skills in a more abstract world. Both sides of the equation don't have to balance out in the real world, but you have to convince a reader that they do or at least that they could.
The problem with subjects like Civics or Science is that they are almost always taught as a collection of facts. This is wrong, but it's what happens. It is more difficult to screw up literary analysis and higher mathematics because both subjects are much more about the process of derriving conclusions than about the actual conclusions themselves. Memorization versus Critical Thinking.
Exactly, and this, combined with low cost and a firm knowledge of what you're buying, is why people make impulse buys on sites like itunes all of the time.
Heh, I once wrote a generic query caching system in .net and garbage collection was indeed a serious problem.
That was created by Paul Graham wasn't it? Given that he is the author of the definitive LISP text and one of the languages strongest proponents and an extremely smart guy, I don't know that his success with LISP translates to the rest of the world.
It's pretty clear that Blockbuster has the size, relationahsips, channel, and most importantly, money to crush Netflix.
They are both media distribution companies, only Block Buster has nearly all of its business locked up in brick and mortar stores which are in complete opposition to the "no store" business model. Why did it take BB so long to get a service similar to Netflix? Why weren't RIAA companies able to lead the way in offering digital downloads? Why did the MPAA try to get VCRs banned? Historically, companies are exceptionally bad at embracing radical innovations that destabilize their primary business.
What's going to be really interesting is who's going to come out on top when we all start downloading movies. It could be netflix, it could be blockbuster, but more likely it's going to be someone else entirely (Apple?).
This seems to be a book about practical tasks in lisp but not necessarily practical lisp. For example, why would it be practical to do web programming in LISP instead of a platform like PHP, JSP, ASP.NET, or even Perl? All of these platforms have enormous community support for web development in terms of libraries and resources.
Am I wrong here? If not, for what tasks is LISP a practical aka appropriate, tool? From what I've seen, it's popular and presumably good for some AI work (although most of the younger AI guys I've known seem to use other tools) and it's also good for teaching students about functional programming and language theory. What else?
That's total bullshit.
Bah, maybe it's more like 10% bullshit. I've known plenty of disinterested 9-5ers that sucked, but I'm not sure I've ever met someone with a passion for IT that sucked at it relative to their peers. It's not a hard rule that you can't be good at something you don't like, but generally speaking, the more you like something, the more likely it is you'll be good at it.
Sure, a high wage might make you like doing something more. And this might motivate you to perform better. But the person who already likes what they are doing requires less motivation and less pay. Similarly, a person who likes what they are doing is going to be more motivated given the same pay.
Basically, in field like computer whatever that requires perpetual learning, the person who spends time learning in their spare time is going to be much better than the person who never turns on their computer at home. The only way this will not be true is if the disinterested person is, in some way, a lot smarter than the other person.
I think there is some truth to this argument. Working at a university career services office, I've seen Microsoft recruit here and offer BS graduates salaries that are very much off the map. They don't always do this, but there are obviously times when they are looking for very particular things, and having to pay a very high price.
In the article, Bill mentioned in particular that they were looking for good security personnel. Maybe there truly is a shortage of very good developers / system designers with very strong backgrounds in security. This is not at all hard for me to believe since most developers I've met have a just-get-it-working attitude which is in opposition to the a traditional security mindset.
Of course, if they increased the quota again, then no doubt MS would use it for any worker they felt like regardless of american supply for that particular position.
Or, if you know, say Java, C, Pascal and a few otehr langauges...and they are looking for C++, chances are, you can pick it up in a few weeks.
Unless your normal speed is very slow, it really can take many months to a year to get up to speed in a new language depending on how much time you have to devote to the learning process. The hard part isn't learning the basic syntax/quirks of the language so much as it is learning how to appropriately use all of the libraries.
For example, I've been programming in PHP for a year and this is something like my 10 billionth language yet I'm still spending a decent chunk of time building up my knowledge with tools that have been around for a while (QuickForms, DB, DB_DataObject, Smarty, etc). If I'd already been programming in PHP for a few years, I would have been significantly more productive in that respect over the past year.
In your example, you site portability as a benefit of Excel. I would think that the cost of deploying perl/python/whatever on desktops would be trivial compared to the cost of a business setting that supported the long term creation, maintenance, and use off Excel applications. If new development was done as part of a web application, there woudn't even need to be desktop software roll out.
As a side, if you can do something in a normal programming language as opposed to excel in roughly the same amount of time, aren't you much better off doing it in the programming language. For example, if you use a programming language like PHP or Perl, the knowledge you acquire in accomplishing your task can be applied to a much larger problem domain. In other words, it is more valuable to understand arrays in PHP than it is to understand arrays in excel's VBA because you can do more with PHP than you can with Excel. Similarly, the solutions you create can also be applied in a larger solution space. You can't really reference excel business logic when your company needs to put everything on the web.
Other than when you don't have a choice, ie forbidden from or lacking the know-how to pursue alternatives, under what circumstances does it make sense to develop applications in Excel? I can kind of see doing it if you have a lot of Excel knowledge and know beyond a shadow of a doubt that something is a cradle to grave application...
Which consumers are we talking about? I could be wrong, but I would think the OS upgrade market was miniscule. The only copy of windows most end users buy is the one that comes with their computer. Many businesses (like my employer) are locked into renewable contracts with MS so we effectively have to rebuy our (very discounted) licenses every three years anyway. It's not really a question of whether or not we'll make the purchase so much as whether or not we'll install the upgrades. Even if most businesses dont have a similar contract (probably true), I would think that IT dpartments considering upgrading would do so based largely on the technical merits of the OS. In fact, many organizations might consider an interface upgrade to be a pain in the ass... if I had a dime for everytime I had to help someone change the XP start menu to classic.
Sure, there might be a PHB that likes the idea of upgrading because of the new desktop theme and fade effects, but he was probably going to upgrade anyway. I guess along those same lines, you could have a bunch of end users who are disappointed that everything looks the same, wondering what exactly they payed for.
Complete centralized management of a large university's IT resources is not only impossible, but it is also undesirable. There are too many things that are needed by specific departments (library systems, career services systems, meal plan systems, course registration systems). These kinds of things all have to be developed and managed by people who are very close to the housing department. Besides, many universities, like mine, offer only basic service centrally managed. Sure we could use central IT's free email system, but we'd frequently experience long delivery delays and we'd have a 15 MB quota.
What's really needed at universities is not centralized management for everything, but institutionalized oversite and forced interdepartmental communication. Instead of having one fulltime administrator managing a department's assets by himself for 20 years, you should have two administrators spending half their time working at central IT and half their time working in their primary department. It improves security by adding an extra set of eyes and slightly different set of expertise while forcing exposure to the practices being used centrally and amonst other operating units. Of course, this will never happen and there's probably some scalability issues in terms of # people per departments and office resources.
Php solved this problem a long time ago with HTML_QuickForms. Setting a field to be required is trivial and you can choose to have it check server side or client side depending on your needs. You can enforce other rules like regular expression pattern matching just as easily and there's also a bunch of canned rules like "must be a valid email address". Of course, there are undoubtedly a lot of php coders that have never heard of pear... so I guess the point stands. And of course, there's still that crazy old hermit coding up CGI's in C.
Perhaps one of the reasons I like clippy is that I make intelligent use of him. Asking the office assistant "How do I format this" makes about as much sense as using a hammer to brush your teeth.
In Outlook 2003, if you give the assistant your query, you get a bunch of gibberish. However, if you just type in "format text", you get several relevant results (changing font, changing to plain text/rtf/html, etc). I guess what I'm saying is that the knowledge base behind clippy is incomplete but useful and that I don't mind having an avatar interface.
I agree but for different reasons. Government supplied broadband is not necessarily cheaper. You just don't have a choice as to whether or not you pay for it.
Besides, cities do not have the economies of scale to be competitive broadband providers in this day and age. Tehir expertise is already spread too thin, and frankly, cities do not even manage their present obligations particularly well. Part of the problem is a systemic resistance to change.
For example, on my street there is street sweeping on the second Tuesday of May, August, and November. There are year round signs that indicate these dates. When it is street sweeping day, there is nothing special to let you know you need to move your car. To you, street sweeping day looks just like any other day. However, if you don't move your car, it is ticketed and towed downtown at your expense to the tune of $100 or so. There is no explanation or notification, you just come home to a missing car and a slightly cleaner street.
If only one or two cars were towed, this may be an acceptable solution. However, the static year round signs are only about 70% effective. This means that on any given street sweeping day, it's not unusual for 3 out of 10 cars normally parked there to be towed.
Taking into account both sides of the street, it would not be unusual for there to be 10 cars towed per street sweeping. This is a direct monetary cost of $1,000. But it doesn't end there. To get your car back you'll probably have to take at least two hours off from work and take a bus downtown. Let's be generous and call that another $33. Presumably one also pays taxes for street sweeping.
So now it costs residents what $1330 + taxes per block of street cleaning? Is that efficient? Probably not. Where could it be improved? In our calculation the costs are all coming from people not remembering to move their cars. So maybe if the city invested in improved notification services (signs that light up, email reminders, snail mail flyers, honking a loud horn before ticketing), they could reduce the number of cars towed by 80% dropping costs from $1330 to $266. Since most of the money goes into a tow driver's pocket, it's not like missing this revenue is going to bankrupt the city either.
But the city will never pursue any of these possibilities. Why? Because they don't have to. There is no competition driving them to innovate, to improve services. Citizens have no way of expressing their dissatisfaction other than by voting once a year for politicians who have non existant platforms and who probably don't deal with these kind of operational issues anyway.
I don't want these people charging me for broadband because they are inept. They won't keep the service functionally competitive, but it will cost a lot of money.
I'm the one person on earth that actually likes clippy. It would be really neat if they tied him directly into google groups too. Type in a few search terms in clippy Outlook, get MS help answers and matching results from outlook newsgroups.