For anyone who is an expert: What has six sigma added to this paradigm?
A very misleading Wikipedia entry. That's about it. Six Sigma is just an arbitrary defect rate that was chosen by Motorola as they were implementing Demming's ideas.
In the real world there's no software out there does everything your suggesting.
Yet again, more FUD from the OSS camp...
Of course there is. I can run right down to any office supply store and buy a copy of it. Come on troll. You didn't even try.
Maybe you are intentionally lying so that your customers don't decide to save themselves a metric assload of money and buy this or something like it off of the shelf...?
Here's another one.. Do you sell your product for less than $525?
For what you could spend to buy a few licenses of your average commercial app you could have the opensource equivilant customized to your needs.
Ok. How about some real world examples, instead of hyperbole? Anybody willing to make or modify an OSS point of sale system that is 100% graphical, accepts credit cards, debit cards, and gift cards via at least one major merchant bank via either a modem or online, transfers all sales, customer, vendor, and inventory information to Quickbooks automatically, handles all inventory, including purchase orders, invoices, returns, reorder points, and suggested PO's, handles all ad-hoc reporting, prints all inventory tags, purchase orders, vouchers, etc. in multiple formats, with customizeable print templates, works with all standard point of sale software, including cash drawers, receipt printers, barcode scanners, credit card swipes, display poles, and touchscreens, and is scalable via a client-server setup for at least 20 registers for less than $1600?
Yeah, thought so.
...Because people keep buying them
on
Why Do Gadgets Break?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's very simple. People are idiots. That's why gadgets break. Not because people break them, but because when people see things like the iPod that have a battery that you can't replace yourself, they buy them, anyway! What kind of idiot buys a gadget with a battery sealed in it? I know that I certainly wouldn't, but millions upon millions of people continue to throw their dollars at these pieces of crap, and when they die, they buy ANOTHER one, often from the same company.
The companies are laughing all of the way to the bank. They have mindless drones buying everything that they release, no matter how shitty, and the people come back and buy more! With so many stupid people buying these pieces of crap over and over, the only incentive that the manufacturers have is to make cheaper crap that breaks even quicker, because they know that no matter what, people will buy them again, and again, and again...
Oh yeah. This was typed on a IMB XT keyboard that I bought at a thrift store for one dollar. It was manufactured in 1993.
Has anybody actually counted the number of pro-Nintendo/anti-PS3 articles that Zonk has posted here on Slashdot? I find it very hard to believe that Zonk and/or Slashdot is NOT getting paid by Nintendo for this obscenely obvious and constant product promotion combined with anti-PS3 FUD. Personally, I've counted at least 120 pro-Wii/Nintendo articles over the past six months, with at least that many anti-PS3/Sony articles over the same time period.
I think that it's high time that Slashdot come clean and publicize how much they're being paid. As a publicly traded company, I'm pretty sure that there's some kind of SEC regulation concerning this. Any geek attorneys here who can verify (on an informal basis) if Slashdot is violating some SEC laws? It's most definitely unethical. I'm just curious as to how much Slashdot is getting paid.
Another thing that I think that the TV industry is ignoring are the rapidly growing number of -zero- TV households. I didn't know anybody without a TV 10 years ago. Now, I don't know anybody who watches TV (broadcast, cable, or otherwise) except my parents. I know that that may be pretty unusual right now, but it was completely unheard of not too long ago. The slow uptake of HDTV in the US may have something to do with a silent but growing number of people who simply won't buy another TV again... ever.
So, Microsoft has finally adopted the Linux development model?
Close. If they did that completely, then they would have a new OS release every 4 weeks, with each previous one being "supported" only if you can afford to hire a full time staff of programmers.
Galileo and Newton were pure scientists. When Newton came out with his papers about gravity, nobody said, "Gravity, huh? Wow! I had no idea that if I dropped something, it would fall towards the center of the Earth!".
You have to understand, that academia, while great with pure sciences, isn't about applying that science to create a new thing.
Sure, there are going to be anomolies of people creating things out of pure altruism, but those are just outliers. Most human beings want to be compensated in some way for their work.
Your example of weapons is a good one. Sure, many were invented before IP. But even then, those were FIERCELY guarded secrets. Spies have always been interested in new weapons plans. Weapons is about profit AND not getting killed by your own lethal weapon. In fact, weapons are probably some of the most guarded innovations even in today's culture.
could, in principle, copy a phone, say the motorola RAZR, call it something else, and sell it. There should be nothing wrong with this.
Where did you get your morals? Church? You seriously see nothing wrong with letting somebody else do all of the hard work inventing something, and you just copying it? That's one of the most morally bankrupt statement I've read in a long time. When was the last time YOU invented something useful and let somebody else profit off of it? (I'm guessing never)
1400's... let's see... did companies spend billions of dollars in the 1400's developing new butter churns and buggy whips? Did they have instant global communications with which to spread the inventions? Did they have CNC milling machines that could create virtually any simple object that you can imagine, with just a few buttons?
And in the absence of copyright law you may very well see R&D spending shift away from the easiest products to copy and toward the harder ones to copy.
That's the whole point of this article. Virtually nothing is hard to copy, any more. Hell, cell phones? That's not a simple device, by any means, but it's being done. I get emails from China on a daily basis offering to manufacture short runs of just about any product I can imagine, and all it takes is an email.
So believe that without copyright law there would be no companies in any markets?
No, but there would not be any big new products. No big breakthroughs or advances. Even the companies run by the most dim-witted of CEO's would only have to lose their shirt on R&D once or twice before they learned that it's futile to spend any R&D money.
Companies have existed longer than copyright law
Before there was copyright laws, companies were making buggy whips and butter churns. A. Those things didn't take billions of dollars in R&D to invent a new butter churn and B. Global communication wasn't instant.
But, since you say there's no argument, can you come up with a single example of a company innovating something, and knowing full well that it was going to be pirated? Hell, I can't even imagine of a situation in which that would happen.
Because let's face reality. All of the gear, clothing, designer shoes and everything else are ALL coming out of the SAME factories whether the product is legit or pirated. Louis Vuitton makes handbags in the same Malaysian factories that the knockoffs come from. Samsung contracts phones to the same lines that copy them. The only difference being that the brand name charges more.
You willing to stake your life on that? Instead of buying those pricey Bridgestone tires for your car that your wife and kids use, how about buying some very cheap "Ridgestone" tires. They're made in the same plant after all... aren't they? How about hypodermic needles? How about a smoke detector in your house? You want to bet that they're all made in the same plant, now?
It's one thing if you're talking about designer handbags. It's quite another if you're talking about something that has the possiblity to kill you. Personally, I'll stick with the real "Bridgestone" tires, myself. I'm not willing to risk a blowout at 80 mph in order to save a few bucks.
This is not going to go away, and you are not going to stop it or slow it down with silly little notions like copy protection or WTO/WIPO trade agreements. You need to change your thinking. You need to prepare for this. Otherwise... Well, let's just say the social chaos of today's Iraq will look like a parlor game in comparison.
You're right. What do you suggest? If you're saying that lawsuits don't work, then the only obvious answer is to simply stop spending on R&D, because you know that you'll never recoup those costs.
While you can debate whether IP is an absolute right, human rights violation, or somewhere in between. Your statement that innovation will not happen without "value in IP" is verifiably false. Just look at the vast majority of human history.
Care to give an example? It certainly doesn't make any sense to me why somebody would spend time and money inventing something, just so that other people can profit off of it.
Sure there is. Without innovation a company has no advantage over its competitors. To make a profit you have to either sell something different or produce the same thing more efficiently. Both of these require innovation.
You're conveniently leaving off the important part of the logic in his argument. Sure, innovation is important to compete. That's what makes or breaks most companies. But if a company is going to innovate, only to see their competition copy their products, but without spending one red cent in R&D, than the original company is already in the hole, and that company will either A. no longer innovate in that market or B. get out of that market altogether. Only an idiot would spend time and money to create something, knowing that it'll be copied soon thereafter, thus eliminating any profit motive for the inventor.
To me, neither browser is "Great". FF is nice because of all of the extensions. I use one for the game I play (See my sig), and I used a very handy one the other day for reporting a *lot* of form post fields. It didn't work quite right, but it was still helpful.
IE is nice because for me, I don't ever see the terrible memory leaks that FF has. If I leave FF open for more than an hour or so, it starts to get really big and nasty. Also, FF seems to browse much slower than IE, and hangs a lot of regular pages. In fact, the other day, I caught myself automatically hitting "reload" on a page when browsing with FF because it happens so often, and I thought, "why do I have to reload pages so often when browsing with FF"?
He is asking them to join the community, not to join a sweatshop.
Yeah, he is. A "community" in which the workers get nothing, and the top executives get paid well. Yeah, real nice "community". I own a retail store. Should I recruit people to volunteer in my "community", too? Is it just a matter of using the correct doublespeak?
By your user ID, I can tell that you certainly should, by now, realize that posting a well-written, objective review of a Microsoft product will gets your (-1 Troll) here! Were you drunk, perhaps, when you posted this? Did you think that you were posting to a site with some more level-headed people?
I thought it was a good article. Thanks for posting. Sssshhh! Don't tell anybody!
No big deal. I mean really, they're not trying to hire them. They're trying to convince these guys to work for them for free instead of the other guys. The "invitation" is an invitation to go to some classes so people can learn how to get accepted to work for free. I can't believe people do this.
There might be. But it won't be in our lifetime, unless something absolutely catastrophic happens (ie: Enron). Barring that, organizations of that magnitude simply do not collapse.
I think that this is a good example of market segmentation. Lots of little kids are gonna LOVE the Nintendo. And why shouldn't they? There are lots of little kid games (Mario*, etc.) and kids would love to pretend they're swinging a sword or some such stuff, jumping around the room for hours on end.
But, you gotta realize that there's another side to the coin. There are many, many, many people who work a long day and want to come home and drink/get high and sit down to relax with a video game. I can think of tons of people (myself included) who get plenty of exercise every day, and certainly don't want to do any more when they get home. I, for one, look forward to vegging out in front of a PS3 (once they add back in the "rumble" effect, which I'm sure they will after the inevitable outcry from current PS2 owners).
There is one cathegory that can cheerfully think "it's only business": the sociopaths. They live in a strange world in which the others are NPCs: the others don't matter, they're not the same, "it could be me in his shoes" doesn't apply, etc. They can lie, cheat, murder, torture, whatever, and be perfectly able to look themselves in the mirror after it. Because the other guy didn't matter.
Now granted, in most cases, these people are as dumb as doorknobs. But, if you think about it (REALLY think about it... not just dismiss it as "evil" or some such nonsense), people like that have a point. It's the ultimate reality check. Think about this:
1. We're all going to die.
2. We're all going to die, probably sooner than most of us would like.
3. There is no evidence of any kind of "afterlife" of any kind. The only thing that we have evidence for after death is that of your body rotting (pretty quickly, actually).
4. None of us have any proof that there are other "minds" outside of our own. All that we can possibly know about reality is through our own point of view, whatever that may be. (Think Kant).
With these facts in place, it actually makes sense to maximize one's own pleasure in this short life, with total disregard for others' pleasure.
Of course, that's not "nice", but in reality, none of us know if, other than the reciprocal impact on ourselves, if being "nice" really matters at all.
So, I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that these people are all "sociopaths". Perhaps some of them have just thought things out more than most people have, and the nasty, ugly reality that most people can't handle (hence religion), is that nothing matters, outside of your own happiness.
As soon as I read this in a Slashdot post, I automatically assume that the author is a complete and total moron for trying to predict the end of the world's largest and most successful software company.
Slashdot Mirror
For anyone who is an expert: What has six sigma added to this paradigm?
A very misleading Wikipedia entry. That's about it. Six Sigma is just an arbitrary defect rate that was chosen by Motorola as they were implementing Demming's ideas.
In the real world there's no software out there does everything your suggesting.
Yet again, more FUD from the OSS camp...
Of course there is. I can run right down to any office supply store and buy a copy of it. Come on troll. You didn't even try.
Maybe you are intentionally lying so that your customers don't decide to save themselves a metric assload of money and buy this or something like it off of the shelf...?
Here's another one.. Do you sell your product for less than $525?
Asshole.
For what you could spend to buy a few licenses of your average commercial app you could have the opensource equivilant customized to your needs.
Ok. How about some real world examples, instead of hyperbole? Anybody willing to make or modify an OSS point of sale system that is 100% graphical, accepts credit cards, debit cards, and gift cards via at least one major merchant bank via either a modem or online, transfers all sales, customer, vendor, and inventory information to Quickbooks automatically, handles all inventory, including purchase orders, invoices, returns, reorder points, and suggested PO's, handles all ad-hoc reporting, prints all inventory tags, purchase orders, vouchers, etc. in multiple formats, with customizeable print templates, works with all standard point of sale software, including cash drawers, receipt printers, barcode scanners, credit card swipes, display poles, and touchscreens, and is scalable via a client-server setup for at least 20 registers for less than $1600?
Yeah, thought so.
It's very simple. People are idiots. That's why gadgets break. Not because people break them, but because when people see things like the iPod that have a battery that you can't replace yourself, they buy them, anyway! What kind of idiot buys a gadget with a battery sealed in it? I know that I certainly wouldn't, but millions upon millions of people continue to throw their dollars at these pieces of crap, and when they die, they buy ANOTHER one, often from the same company.
The companies are laughing all of the way to the bank. They have mindless drones buying everything that they release, no matter how shitty, and the people come back and buy more! With so many stupid people buying these pieces of crap over and over, the only incentive that the manufacturers have is to make cheaper crap that breaks even quicker, because they know that no matter what, people will buy them again, and again, and again...
Oh yeah. This was typed on a IMB XT keyboard that I bought at a thrift store for one dollar. It was manufactured in 1993.
Has anybody actually counted the number of pro-Nintendo/anti-PS3 articles that Zonk has posted here on Slashdot? I find it very hard to believe that Zonk and/or Slashdot is NOT getting paid by Nintendo for this obscenely obvious and constant product promotion combined with anti-PS3 FUD. Personally, I've counted at least 120 pro-Wii/Nintendo articles over the past six months, with at least that many anti-PS3/Sony articles over the same time period.
I think that it's high time that Slashdot come clean and publicize how much they're being paid. As a publicly traded company, I'm pretty sure that there's some kind of SEC regulation concerning this. Any geek attorneys here who can verify (on an informal basis) if Slashdot is violating some SEC laws? It's most definitely unethical. I'm just curious as to how much Slashdot is getting paid.
Come on, Slashdot. show me the money!
Another thing that I think that the TV industry is ignoring are the rapidly growing number of -zero- TV households. I didn't know anybody without a TV 10 years ago. Now, I don't know anybody who watches TV (broadcast, cable, or otherwise) except my parents. I know that that may be pretty unusual right now, but it was completely unheard of not too long ago. The slow uptake of HDTV in the US may have something to do with a silent but growing number of people who simply won't buy another TV again... ever.
Oh sure. Everybody has time to completely update their OS every year or so. Good idea.
So, Microsoft has finally adopted the Linux development model?
Close. If they did that completely, then they would have a new OS release every 4 weeks, with each previous one being "supported" only if you can afford to hire a full time staff of programmers.
Galileo and Newton were pure scientists. When Newton came out with his papers about gravity, nobody said, "Gravity, huh? Wow! I had no idea that if I dropped something, it would fall towards the center of the Earth!".
You have to understand, that academia, while great with pure sciences, isn't about applying that science to create a new thing.
Sure, there are going to be anomolies of people creating things out of pure altruism, but those are just outliers. Most human beings want to be compensated in some way for their work.
Your example of weapons is a good one. Sure, many were invented before IP. But even then, those were FIERCELY guarded secrets. Spies have always been interested in new weapons plans. Weapons is about profit AND not getting killed by your own lethal weapon. In fact, weapons are probably some of the most guarded innovations even in today's culture.
could, in principle, copy a phone, say the motorola RAZR, call it something else, and sell it. There should be nothing wrong with this.
Where did you get your morals? Church? You seriously see nothing wrong with letting somebody else do all of the hard work inventing something, and you just copying it? That's one of the most morally bankrupt statement I've read in a long time. When was the last time YOU invented something useful and let somebody else profit off of it? (I'm guessing never)
1400's... let's see... did companies spend billions of dollars in the 1400's developing new butter churns and buggy whips? Did they have instant global communications with which to spread the inventions? Did they have CNC milling machines that could create virtually any simple object that you can imagine, with just a few buttons?
And in the absence of copyright law you may very well see R&D spending shift away from the easiest products to copy and toward the harder ones to copy.
That's the whole point of this article. Virtually nothing is hard to copy, any more. Hell, cell phones? That's not a simple device, by any means, but it's being done. I get emails from China on a daily basis offering to manufacture short runs of just about any product I can imagine, and all it takes is an email.
So believe that without copyright law there would be no companies in any markets?
No, but there would not be any big new products. No big breakthroughs or advances. Even the companies run by the most dim-witted of CEO's would only have to lose their shirt on R&D once or twice before they learned that it's futile to spend any R&D money.
Companies have existed longer than copyright law
Before there was copyright laws, companies were making buggy whips and butter churns. A. Those things didn't take billions of dollars in R&D to invent a new butter churn and B. Global communication wasn't instant.
But, since you say there's no argument, can you come up with a single example of a company innovating something, and knowing full well that it was going to be pirated? Hell, I can't even imagine of a situation in which that would happen.
Because let's face reality. All of the gear, clothing, designer shoes and everything else are ALL coming out of the SAME factories whether the product is legit or pirated. Louis Vuitton makes handbags in the same Malaysian factories that the knockoffs come from. Samsung contracts phones to the same lines that copy them. The only difference being that the brand name charges more.
You willing to stake your life on that? Instead of buying those pricey Bridgestone tires for your car that your wife and kids use, how about buying some very cheap "Ridgestone" tires. They're made in the same plant after all... aren't they? How about hypodermic needles? How about a smoke detector in your house? You want to bet that they're all made in the same plant, now?
It's one thing if you're talking about designer handbags. It's quite another if you're talking about something that has the possiblity to kill you. Personally, I'll stick with the real "Bridgestone" tires, myself. I'm not willing to risk a blowout at 80 mph in order to save a few bucks.
This is not going to go away, and you are not going to stop it or slow it down with silly little notions like copy protection or WTO/WIPO trade agreements. You need to change your thinking. You need to prepare for this. Otherwise... Well, let's just say the social chaos of today's Iraq will look like a parlor game in comparison.
You're right. What do you suggest? If you're saying that lawsuits don't work, then the only obvious answer is to simply stop spending on R&D, because you know that you'll never recoup those costs.
While you can debate whether IP is an absolute right, human rights violation, or somewhere in between. Your statement that innovation will not happen without "value in IP" is verifiably false. Just look at the vast majority of human history.
Care to give an example? It certainly doesn't make any sense to me why somebody would spend time and money inventing something, just so that other people can profit off of it.
Sure there is. Without innovation a company has no advantage over its competitors. To make a profit you have to either sell something different or produce the same thing more efficiently. Both of these require innovation.
You're conveniently leaving off the important part of the logic in his argument. Sure, innovation is important to compete. That's what makes or breaks most companies. But if a company is going to innovate, only to see their competition copy their products, but without spending one red cent in R&D, than the original company is already in the hole, and that company will either A. no longer innovate in that market or B. get out of that market altogether. Only an idiot would spend time and money to create something, knowing that it'll be copied soon thereafter, thus eliminating any profit motive for the inventor.
Competing in price is never a good business decision. That's business 101. If the only thing you're competing on is price, then you will fail.
The manufacturers of the "genuine" products will need to compete based on price.
But if you really believe that, would you find anything wrong with me selling a bulk spammer with the "Red Hat" name on it?
To me, neither browser is "Great". FF is nice because of all of the extensions. I use one for the game I play (See my sig), and I used a very handy one the other day for reporting a *lot* of form post fields. It didn't work quite right, but it was still helpful.
IE is nice because for me, I don't ever see the terrible memory leaks that FF has. If I leave FF open for more than an hour or so, it starts to get really big and nasty. Also, FF seems to browse much slower than IE, and hangs a lot of regular pages. In fact, the other day, I caught myself automatically hitting "reload" on a page when browsing with FF because it happens so often, and I thought, "why do I have to reload pages so often when browsing with FF"?
He is asking them to join the community, not to join a sweatshop.
Yeah, he is. A "community" in which the workers get nothing, and the top executives get paid well. Yeah, real nice "community". I own a retail store. Should I recruit people to volunteer in my "community", too? Is it just a matter of using the correct doublespeak?
By your user ID, I can tell that you certainly should, by now, realize that posting a well-written, objective review of a Microsoft product will gets your (-1 Troll) here! Were you drunk, perhaps, when you posted this? Did you think that you were posting to a site with some more level-headed people?
I thought it was a good article. Thanks for posting. Sssshhh! Don't tell anybody!
No big deal. I mean really, they're not trying to hire them. They're trying to convince these guys to work for them for free instead of the other guys. The "invitation" is an invitation to go to some classes so people can learn how to get accepted to work for free. I can't believe people do this.
there will be a time after Microsoft.
There might be. But it won't be in our lifetime, unless something absolutely catastrophic happens (ie: Enron). Barring that, organizations of that magnitude simply do not collapse.
I think that this is a good example of market segmentation. Lots of little kids are gonna LOVE the Nintendo. And why shouldn't they? There are lots of little kid games (Mario*, etc.) and kids would love to pretend they're swinging a sword or some such stuff, jumping around the room for hours on end.
But, you gotta realize that there's another side to the coin. There are many, many, many people who work a long day and want to come home and drink/get high and sit down to relax with a video game. I can think of tons of people (myself included) who get plenty of exercise every day, and certainly don't want to do any more when they get home. I, for one, look forward to vegging out in front of a PS3 (once they add back in the "rumble" effect, which I'm sure they will after the inevitable outcry from current PS2 owners).
There is one cathegory that can cheerfully think "it's only business": the sociopaths. They live in a strange world in which the others are NPCs: the others don't matter, they're not the same, "it could be me in his shoes" doesn't apply, etc. They can lie, cheat, murder, torture, whatever, and be perfectly able to look themselves in the mirror after it. Because the other guy didn't matter.
Now granted, in most cases, these people are as dumb as doorknobs. But, if you think about it (REALLY think about it... not just dismiss it as "evil" or some such nonsense), people like that have a point. It's the ultimate reality check. Think about this:
1. We're all going to die.
2. We're all going to die, probably sooner than most of us would like.
3. There is no evidence of any kind of "afterlife" of any kind. The only thing that we have evidence for after death is that of your body rotting (pretty quickly, actually).
4. None of us have any proof that there are other "minds" outside of our own. All that we can possibly know about reality is through our own point of view, whatever that may be. (Think Kant).
With these facts in place, it actually makes sense to maximize one's own pleasure in this short life, with total disregard for others' pleasure.
Of course, that's not "nice", but in reality, none of us know if, other than the reciprocal impact on ourselves, if being "nice" really matters at all.
So, I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that these people are all "sociopaths". Perhaps some of them have just thought things out more than most people have, and the nasty, ugly reality that most people can't handle (hence religion), is that nothing matters, outside of your own happiness.
This really is Microsoft's last gasp.
As soon as I read this in a Slashdot post, I automatically assume that the author is a complete and total moron for trying to predict the end of the world's largest and most successful software company.