I always am amazed at you "government is the root of all evil" folks.
Let's say you do away with governments. Do you think that power will disappear? That government is power?
How is it that you can see the evil of governments (and yes, they do exist), but not see the fact that there has to be some entity of the people to counterbalance private power? That at least with public power, there is some sort of ability to limit private power.
Power abhors a vacuum. What you take away from governments, you hand to private entities - corporations, religious entities, whatever - something will fill the void. If you want any sort of control over what happens, you have to make the instrument of public power the tool of the public, and not the tool of the private entities. Therein lies the trick. Simply doing away with government is absolutely handing the deed to the hen house over to those that government is supposed to protect the rest of us from.
It's one of those antiquated things from the time when people had this archaic idea that not quite everything needed to be monetized directly; that there were certain things that a nation should provide as services that would not show a direct and immediate profit from, but which would ensure long term freedom and prosperity.
However, the role of the post office changed from that of conveyor of communication between individuals into an entity that was expected to make money serving corporate interests by delivering pound upon pound of junk mail on a daily basis. Though it struggled valiantly to serve the tier one citizens of the nation (the corporations who generated all this junk mail), it failed, and thus, it will soon not be possible to send a letter or Christmas card.
The problem with Ron Paul (did I get it right? yay!) is that he doesn't recognize that, for better or ill, we've moved to an extremely interdependent society and economy.
Furthermore, he doesn't seem to realize that power abhors a vacuum. Take power away from the Federal Government, the corporations will most certainly fill the vacuum. And while very, very far from perfect, the government still is the only counterbalance out there to unrestrained private power.
Get out of the wars? Absolutely. Scrap education, social security and so forth with nothing in place to pick up the slack, while deregulating everything? All that will do is finish turning us into serfs for the post industrial feudal society the 1% so fiercely dream of.
Since when is it requisite to be nice and polite to people who are bending you over and screwing you without lube, while telling you how nice they are?
Of course, knowing about these techniques allows a customer who's been wronged, if he has control of his own emotions, patience and a certain level of intelligence, to win sometimes.
... you can't help but watch with gleeful fascination.
Especially when the douchbag doing digging himself the mother of all holes is so representative of companies we've all had to deal with, unfulfilled promises, things that don't work, warranties that aren't honored.
The difference between Walmart and say a high end smart phone is expectations.
When you buy a smart phone with a two year contract, you expect the functionality to work throughout the lifespan of the product, and you rather expect that it will be supported by both the telecom and by the hardware manufacturer, including updates, during the period of the standard two year contract. This includes software upgrades.
With Walmart, you know you aren't buying high end. You don't expect the tools to be Snapon quality, nor the boots to last 3++ years, nor the furniture to be handed down to your kids.
But hey - if Samsung wants to market themselves as "Walmart-esque junk that we won't support for more than a year", its their choice. Its also my choice to switch hardware vendors.
I'm suggesting that McDonnalds has its own niche, whereas droids and iPhones are fighting for the same niche.
Different models.
And - honestly - I suspect that for at least some time it will be possible to come out with a sequence of shiney new things that have long term problems, but will work in the short term. But eventually, I think that the stable, sustainable model will work best in this niche.
Negatives stick better than positives in people's minds. Throw in the fact that folks rather just expect that which they pay for to work, and you've got something of a zero sum game scenario. If it works, and works well - it's nominal. If not, it's negative. Really hard to exceed the expectation.
So - how many folks saying, "I love my Samsung hardware" does it take to cancel out someone saying, "I paid $500 bucks for this phone, $200 for the warranty, and they won't replace it even though there's a proven hardware problem"? How many dollars in commercials does it take to cancel out the fact that Samsung is not willing to invest in the engineering time to upgrade their phones OS?
This phone has provided me with no end of frustration. It's a $500 phone that I'm paying another eight bucks a month for warranty for over my two year contract, meaning I'll wind up paying a total of $700 for a phone that doesn't work right. And t-mobile wants to give me a $150 clique in replacement.
But it didn't actually do the upgrade. No, you have to turn off your computer's firewall and virus protection to apply software patches to hardware problems...
Oh, and t-mobile won't honor warranties on those $500 phones. Even when you pay $8 a month, bringing the effective total to $700 over the course of a two year contract. Unless you define the word honor as the offer of a $150 clique as a replacement.
... I'm thinking that you should probably split it off from your development department.
Here's why (from a developer perspective).
It's better for devs to have someone else build a good wall around their sandbox (note: around, not through) then to have us devs make the entire organization's security match our own needs. We're probably competent enough to do things right, just as we are competent to test our own software. And we'll get it right most of the time. Thing is, we'd rather be developing new and cool stuff than doing security and installations for folks most of the time, and thus, get lazy, or miss things that might be obvious to those who aren't so closely involved with the problems that they only see the detail, and not the bigger picture.
And before I get jumped, a good IT department facilitates development, not stifles it, by doing day to day necessary tasks and keeping the decks clear for the developers. And yes, they do exist. True, there are some really bad and draconian ones out there - but it doesn't have to be that way.
Also, it's probably cheaper to hire IT folks than to pay qualified developers to run IT.
... is the sweet, sweet rage it will engender when your future IT techs tell folks that they can't use their iPhones and the editor of their choice for undisclosed security reasons. Ah, I can feel the little bits of evil already spreading, ruining people's days, causing them to hate their neighbor, kick their dog and neglect their children, leading their neighbor to flip off an old lady, the dog to bite the postman, and the kids to grow up to drug addicts.
Bwahahaha! Screwtape, you ain't got not nothin' on IT!
Of course games are more fun - they're designed to be fun.
And unfortunately, you can't make all learning into a game. At some point, there is grind and rote. Be it learning the muscle memory of playing musical scales to get your chops or the process of doing one math problem after another, at some point, you gotta pay your dues.
At some point, one has to crack down and work. And the work ethic is also something that needs to be taught along with reading, writing, math and technology.
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I always am amazed at you "government is the root of all evil" folks.
Let's say you do away with governments. Do you think that power will disappear? That government is power?
How is it that you can see the evil of governments (and yes, they do exist), but not see the fact that there has to be some entity of the people to counterbalance private power? That at least with public power, there is some sort of ability to limit private power.
Power abhors a vacuum. What you take away from governments, you hand to private entities - corporations, religious entities, whatever - something will fill the void. If you want any sort of control over what happens, you have to make the instrument of public power the tool of the public, and not the tool of the private entities. Therein lies the trick. Simply doing away with government is absolutely handing the deed to the hen house over to those that government is supposed to protect the rest of us from.
It's one of those antiquated things from the time when people had this archaic idea that not quite everything needed to be monetized directly; that there were certain things that a nation should provide as services that would not show a direct and immediate profit from, but which would ensure long term freedom and prosperity.
However, the role of the post office changed from that of conveyor of communication between individuals into an entity that was expected to make money serving corporate interests by delivering pound upon pound of junk mail on a daily basis. Though it struggled valiantly to serve the tier one citizens of the nation (the corporations who generated all this junk mail), it failed, and thus, it will soon not be possible to send a letter or Christmas card.
(See also, "Going Postal", by Terry Pratchett)
I'd settle for dual fusion cannons and plasteel armor.
Where can I go and flag all articles about this sort of 1984-esque activity?
The problem with Ron Paul (did I get it right? yay!) is that he doesn't recognize that, for better or ill, we've moved to an extremely interdependent society and economy.
Furthermore, he doesn't seem to realize that power abhors a vacuum. Take power away from the Federal Government, the corporations will most certainly fill the vacuum. And while very, very far from perfect, the government still is the only counterbalance out there to unrestrained private power.
Get out of the wars? Absolutely. Scrap education, social security and so forth with nothing in place to pick up the slack, while deregulating everything? All that will do is finish turning us into serfs for the post industrial feudal society the 1% so fiercely dream of.
at $7.85B, that's $25.87 per person in the US per year.
On the other hand, a family of four might pay $180 per year for HBO, which makes about $45 per year per person.
So, really, Security Theater (tm) really is a better deal than HBO.
Since when is it requisite to be nice and polite to people who are bending you over and screwing you without lube, while telling you how nice they are?
Of course, knowing about these techniques allows a customer who's been wronged, if he has control of his own emotions, patience and a certain level of intelligence, to win sometimes.
... you can't help but watch with gleeful fascination.
Especially when the douchbag doing digging himself the mother of all holes is so representative of companies we've all had to deal with, unfulfilled promises, things that don't work, warranties that aren't honored.
You note that this "convenience fee" doesn't indicate whose convenience you're paying for...
If the electrons hadn't unionized, they wouldn't be able to force poor Verizon to pay them a living wage...
I have Anthropophobia. All pictures of people scare me. My lawyer says I should sue for a million billion trillion dollars.
The difference between Walmart and say a high end smart phone is expectations.
When you buy a smart phone with a two year contract, you expect the functionality to work throughout the lifespan of the product, and you rather expect that it will be supported by both the telecom and by the hardware manufacturer, including updates, during the period of the standard two year contract. This includes software upgrades.
With Walmart, you know you aren't buying high end. You don't expect the tools to be Snapon quality, nor the boots to last 3++ years, nor the furniture to be handed down to your kids.
But hey - if Samsung wants to market themselves as "Walmart-esque junk that we won't support for more than a year", its their choice. Its also my choice to switch hardware vendors.
I'm suggesting that McDonnalds has its own niche, whereas droids and iPhones are fighting for the same niche.
Different models.
And - honestly - I suspect that for at least some time it will be possible to come out with a sequence of shiney new things that have long term problems, but will work in the short term. But eventually, I think that the stable, sustainable model will work best in this niche.
Here's the thing, though.
Negatives stick better than positives in people's minds. Throw in the fact that folks rather just expect that which they pay for to work, and you've got something of a zero sum game scenario. If it works, and works well - it's nominal. If not, it's negative. Really hard to exceed the expectation.
So - how many folks saying, "I love my Samsung hardware" does it take to cancel out someone saying, "I paid $500 bucks for this phone, $200 for the warranty, and they won't replace it even though there's a proven hardware problem"? How many dollars in commercials does it take to cancel out the fact that Samsung is not willing to invest in the engineering time to upgrade their phones OS?
That's short term gain vs long term sustainable gain.
Hard to fix a hardware problem with software.
This phone has provided me with no end of frustration. It's a $500 phone that I'm paying another eight bucks a month for warranty for over my two year contract, meaning I'll wind up paying a total of $700 for a phone that doesn't work right. And t-mobile wants to give me a $150 clique in replacement.
Some links follow.
It's a hardware problem in a number of phones:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=878970
http://pocketnow.com/android/hardware-fix-for-vibrants-gps-problems
T-mobile did push out a patch:
http://pocketnow.com/android/samsung-vibrant-gps-fix-finally-being-pushed-out-by-t-mobile
But it didn't actually do the upgrade. No, you have to turn off your computer's firewall and virus protection to apply software patches to hardware problems...
http://www.samsung.com/us/support/SupportOwnersFAQPopup.do?faq_id=FAQ00026061&fm_seq=26229
for a patch that doesn't work anyway...
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=988076
http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php/1661605-Vibrant-Problems-Please-post-all-here-so-Samsung-Google-Engineers-can-see-them/page4
That was the phone line that had the broken GPS that never really got fixed; it was a hardware issue that they tried to kludge together a patch for that didn't work well never went out over the air, and for which you had to take down all your firewall and virus protection to apply via Kies.
Oh, and t-mobile won't honor warranties on those $500 phones. Even when you pay $8 a month, bringing the effective total to $700 over the course of a two year contract. Unless you define the word honor as the offer of a $150 clique as a replacement.
But - I'm not bitter. Really.
Most folks would agree that security falls well within the prevue of IT.
... I'm thinking that you should probably split it off from your development department.
Here's why (from a developer perspective).
It's better for devs to have someone else build a good wall around their sandbox (note: around, not through) then to have us devs make the entire organization's security match our own needs. We're probably competent enough to do things right, just as we are competent to test our own software. And we'll get it right most of the time. Thing is, we'd rather be developing new and cool stuff than doing security and installations for folks most of the time, and thus, get lazy, or miss things that might be obvious to those who aren't so closely involved with the problems that they only see the detail, and not the bigger picture.
And before I get jumped, a good IT department facilitates development, not stifles it, by doing day to day necessary tasks and keeping the decks clear for the developers. And yes, they do exist. True, there are some really bad and draconian ones out there - but it doesn't have to be that way.
Also, it's probably cheaper to hire IT folks than to pay qualified developers to run IT.
... is the sweet, sweet rage it will engender when your future IT techs tell folks that they can't use their iPhones and the editor of their choice for undisclosed security reasons. Ah, I can feel the little bits of evil already spreading, ruining people's days, causing them to hate their neighbor, kick their dog and neglect their children, leading their neighbor to flip off an old lady, the dog to bite the postman, and the kids to grow up to drug addicts.
Bwahahaha! Screwtape, you ain't got not nothin' on IT!
... used to say, "Well, gee! Melting glaciers will give people more water, not less! So even if it's happening, climate change is a good thing!"
An absolute example of an argument in favor of roasting the golden goose to prevent hunger.
Your attitude sucks, and how you've "exceeded expectations" and acquired the adjective "senior" is beyond me.
Of course games are more fun - they're designed to be fun.
And unfortunately, you can't make all learning into a game. At some point, there is grind and rote. Be it learning the muscle memory of playing musical scales to get your chops or the process of doing one math problem after another, at some point, you gotta pay your dues.
At some point, one has to crack down and work. And the work ethic is also something that needs to be taught along with reading, writing, math and technology.
... wouldn't be a problem is teachers were still allowed to fail students.
Sure, little Johnny can play Skyrim all day - but wait till Mommy and Daddy discover he's flunked the seventh grade....