A parking space in Seattle can easily run you 100 dollars a month (which is actually cheap by major city standards). Conversely, items will stay on your credit report for 7 years. As such, that $1,000 in parking tickets represents up to 7 years of parking.
Over the course of those 7 years, a legitimate parking space would have cost 8,400 dollars. By getting lots of parking tickets, grandparent poster actually saved 89% of the total costs associated with parking. Even if the parking tickets represented just a single year of vehicle storage, he's still saving 17%.
Of course, the other major benefit of illegally parking is that you're not tied to a specific space in the city. Most jobs require traveling from client to client, assessing their needs on-site or just reassuring them that they're in good hands. A specific parking space is not a flexible enough arrangement to meet those needs. So while parking tickets may only save you 17% over a fixed spot, their general utility within a city environment is much, much higher.
I think it is fair to say that not getting a job due to parking tickets is an unforseen circumstance and should not be held against the GP.
I'd consider myself a pretty fiscally responsible guy who tries far more than the average person to keep on top of these things. I try to check my report every year or so.
I still can't see one of the 3 bloody bureaus. To access my information, they want to know financial information details on a bank account that I closed in college. And the hoops to jump through to get in without that are a lot more effort than I have been able to put out for this.
Most people don't spend all of their time wondering if their library in their hometown accidentally reported them as having lost a book 4 years ago. How can people with kids and jobs manage to stay on top of it all?
If that's what you're trying to manage, then I daresay you should find direct evidence in support of people's ability to manage regular tasks and survive tight situations.
Credit is a false indicator in this regard. I know people who have amazing credit scores, but I wouldn't trust them to manage a paper sack. Similarly, I know a lot of people who have a strangely wreckless approach to their personal lives, but whose professional work is shockingly squeaky-clean. It is perhaps because they are so dilligent about their professional work that their brain takes a vacation at home.
And, of course, credit can / is usually wrecked by things outside of the control of the person. Health issues, job losses, divorce, moving, and identity theft all ruin credit, and can frequently do so without the end user knowing about it. Personally, my credit was ruined for YEARS without my knowing it, simply because my college roommate had failed to pay the last bill on electricity before moving out. The bill was for 16 dollars, which was too small to actually notify me that anything was still owed, but not too small that it wasn't listed as a default in my credit score. Now that I'm of more firm financial footing, my credit is still terrible. Why? Because I belive borrowing is a symptom of a failure to properly financially plan, which has the side effect that my available credit is low and my credit repayment history is thin.
Credit Score is a tool specifically for financial companies to decide if they want to loan you money. You'll notice that paying your bill in full each month is actually counted as a negative against your credit score, as does shopping around for loans (generating lots of inquiries), consolidating debt, closing unused credit cards, and other things which I personally consider highly fiscally responsible. Again, this is because your FICO is not a measurement of your financial accumen, but rather your potential profitability to moneylenders. Let's keep it as a tool for that, shall we?
Any other company could have provided support and maintenence for windows desktops. I assure you, unless they are a three-initial-company, they would probably do it much cheaper and better, too.
A: The size of alaska is larger than most modern container ships. The largest supertanker is about half a kilometer long, and less than a tenth of a kilometer wide. Alaska has just under 2 million square kilometers of surface area. Sure, the garbage can't be that Deep, but straining it like that would be like trying to clean a pool one eyedropper at a time.
B: Dumping things into volcanoes doesn't make them go away. The first thing it would do is become a huge, noxious chlorine chimney, converting plastic into deadly and generally unpleasant gasses. Then the volume of plastic and latent seawater would probably cap the volcanoes, causing pressure to build up elsewhere and new volcanic activity to emerge.
I'd wager dollars to doughnuts that thousands of people have tried to take this beast over in the past few years. If it hasn't happened yet, I can't see the floodgates suddenly opening.
"Since music sales peaked in 1999, the value of those sales, after adjusting for inflation, has dropped by more than half. At that rate, the industry could be decimated before Madonna's 60th birthday.
[pedantic brat] Actually, if it were decimated, it would only be dropped by 10%. It's a special Roman punishment for one's own armies whereby the general killed one out of every ten men (or 10%). This can be highly motivating, and was a much feared punishment, generally reserved for Mutiny.
No, you should have to pay whatever the contract, which you signed voluntarily, in good health and sound mind, stipulates.
This is America! If you have a greivence against a company, you have rights, you know. Your rights are protected by federal, state, and local laws.
1. You have the right to binding arbitration by some bought-off company in Northern Virginia. 2. You have the right to... well, that last one's it, really.
I don't mean to be too flippant, but laws are definitely there to protect the consumer, and that trumps contracts. This is similar to how California finds most non-compete agreements invalid: a hungry person will definitely agree to one during an economic downturn, but it would unfairly prevent them from getting another job later. In this case, all cellphone companies have similar stupid rules, like binding arbitration.
The law is your tool to protect you from that. Don't give up your rights too easily.
WRT to free markets and contracts: I'll believe that *these* contracts fall under free market provisions of binding legal exchange of promises between two equal parties when *they* acknowledge the changes that I had written into the contract before sending it in, or even what the base contract was. Oh look, they've update the terms again. How quaint.
I have several sites I use regularly which are permanently on self-signed certificates. Why? Because the cost of getting a real, properly signed certificate is f$&@ing highway robbery. It's one entry in a lookup table, yet it costs more per year than my last car. Sure, BankOfAmerica.com can afford that, but can your small business's intranet? Can a small hobby out of someone's basement?
We're trained every day that legitimate sites self-sign. And that the warnings can safely be ignored. This isn't a failure of people's intelligence, this is a symptom of the signers pricing their "security" into irrelevance.
Make it negligably cheap and it will be important again. Keep it out stupidly luxury priced, and everybody knows what a crock the system is.
I remember in elementary school thinking that cursive probably ought to be simplified out of existence. Writing was always painful for me for some reason, and cursive didn't seem to help that hand fatigue. It just seemed redundant.
Your average slashdotter really ought to have five or six usable motherboards, chipsets, and cases sitting around in their work room. Maybe a dual-chip P4 server, a couple of old laptops with broken CD drives and dead batteries, a project motherboard from when Micro ITX was hot, and that one computer that you were "definitely going to fix some day." Add into that spare, perfectly geometrically distributed, and completely questionable 160, 80, 40, 20, 8, and 4 GB hard drives.
Really, if we're talking about an idealized slashdot user who doesn't already have a spare server sitting around, you're still looking at building from scratch. A $60 motherboard + chip combo, a $20 PSU, $200 in hard drives, a $15 metal case, a $5 novelty case badge, and BSD = a perfectly serviceable $300 file dump.
I wouldn't be surprised if the average Slashdotter has a slower computer than the average Joe. The average Joe doesn't know when to upgrade his computer, and thinks he needs to do it every two years to get the latest version of Word and Outlook. Your run-of-the-mill computer professional, on the other hand, sees their computer as a tool to get certain things done. Tools have weight, especially when they're still working fine. And as such, it might take a lot longer to switch out that working component... especially once you know it by heart.
And, finally, the fact that they are protesting the publication of these images means that they assume that the images work... but they don't know how. That's the same as the DMV forbidding the publication of Eye-Charts to prevent blind people from getting their driver's license. As if we know those specific eye-charts work for testing eye-sight, but we don't know how they work and cannot, therefore, make new or better eye-charts.
I run playtesting on a regular basis. Nothing will invalidate the results of a playtest faster than a test subject who has seen the game before, or comes in with other advance foreknowledge. If someone gets the questionnaire ahead of time, they're going to solidify their impressions and opinions (to a large degree) ahead of time. And it will no longer give a good impression of what the person really feels in the moment. If suddenly a questionnaire that I was running had leaked onto the internet, I'd need to re-write it completely, and it would take quite a few tests to re-formulate a basis for comparison and understanding.
I would assume the Rorschach is similar. Other random blobs are definitely possible, but you'd have to get a baseline for how people generally interpret each of the individual other random blobs. Does one have spikier bits than others? Is this one normal to see as a pitbull, or is that really uncommon? It's probably not a question of magic, but just a lot of extra work that they don't want to do.
Minimally does not mean "not at all." You still need to use the mouse to interact with your desktop environment, open PDF's from your clients, and test your application. Mice also can provide programmable buttons, which can be helpful if you need to run series of events off of one button and perhaps need something between system calls and an Auto Hot Keys script. And, just in general, not everyone remembers every shortcut key command all the friggin' time.
Personally I use a Mogo Mouse because it stores convieniently inside of the laptop, and contains a handy laser for scorching the eyes of your enemies. Also I'm lazy and forget to bring other mice with me.
And Elite programmers don't call themselves Elite programmers.
If you go with the normal route, and the normal route gets hacked, you won't be blamed.
If you setup a server on a system that your boss hasn't heard of, and you get hacked, you're fired.
The chances of the former are much greater in a lot of ways. But the risk to your job is basically zero. Whereas in the second way, you're fired because you decided to use that silly deamon thing instead of proper, professional, Enterprise-Ready (tm) Windows 7.
Step 1: Come up with a new idea for making money that nobody has ever thought of. Step 2: Make as much money as you can, while other people scramble to get into the market. Step 3: Compete a bit with people, staying in the game as long as you can still make money at it. Step 4: Move on to something more profitable.
Somehow people have confused getting as big as possible for making as much money as you can. Without making money, big = bad.
There seems to be a weird thing in "the new economy" where the product frequently is the business. Facebook, Livejournal, etc all identify by their product rather than by their model.
Imagine if HP identified as HP Largescale Business Dot Matrix, and sold just one model of Printer. No matter how good that one dot-matrix printer was, they'd be out of business the moment inkjets hit.
You can always use TrueCrypt for free if you're worried about encrypting your Windows drives.
Full system-wide encryption is a good idea, except that: 1. Most Windows home installations don't have a password and 2. When it does have one, that password gets forgotten all the time. I can't tell you the number of desktops I'd have to re-install if they were actually properly secured.
Unless you're on a multi-year project (and you might be, considering the anonymous posting), coding does take a long time. I'd guess that an average project these days takes minimum 50 people over the course of a year and a half, with some on yearly cycles and others on that 5+ year "when it's ready" burn. And, of course, some developers get to have 200+ people on a title simultaneously. So yes, 20 million budgets are pretty common these days for a mainstream release, with 100 million budgets probably not far away.
That having been said, the one thing that Valve has over a lot of other people is online distribution. When you sell into Target, they have some pretty fixed costs with retail, store workers, distribution, manufacturing, etc. Assuming a total fixed cost for them of 40 dollars per title, the difference in profit from a 45 dollar or a 55 dollar title is quite staggering. After Sony experimentally dropped the price on Crash 1 by 10 dollars one Christmas ten years ago, and it outsold Crash 2, every manufacturer has had a greatest hits / cheapey / etc line. Sony even had a line at 10 dollars before returning back to 20.
The pressures of retail keeps an interesting balance there. As I mentioned, sony found the 10 dollar price point too low to be worth using. This could be because of perception of value, this could be because those games were terrible, this could be because retailers simply didn't want to stock cheap games, or that the margins were so small at 10$ that it just wasn't worth it. But everyone is experimenting with multiple pricepoints at retail, and what the optimal one is. And, unfortunately, the optimum ones aren't necessarily the ones that you would like or think.
As we make the switch to online distribution of games, I think we'll see more of a downward pressure on the overall pricing scheme. Games *can* be cheaper, shorter, and more intense, because the style of distribution permits it. Also, everyone who logs into steam can see a sale, whereas a 75% off sale at Target will only net the people who wandered into Target that day.
Sony (PSP Go), Nintendo (DSi), and Microsoft (360 downloads of retail games) are all working on download services for their AAA titles. Considering the margins they make on downloaded titles, I'd be surprised if they weren't about stopping all retail game sales.
I've heard the main problem is that the phone companies don't have moment-to-moment access to international billing. So either they A: have explicit opt-in to international data (like the iPhone now has), B: let anyone run up whatever bill, and charge accordingly, C: pressure remote telcos to put hard limits on usage. A only happened on the iPhone due to the highly public nature of that case, C hasn't happened so far. Guess which option they have been going for?
It gets worse. Cell phone users used to get charged extra to *recieve* long distance calls. Of course, landlines were paying the full cost of getting that call across the country to wherever you were. But you were being charged for... something... somewhere... too.
There may be legitimate reasons why certain parts of cellular plans are the way they are. But a lot of the other parts are simply abuse. The companies have burned through all of the goodwill they might have at one point had.
The physical pieces of paper don't go away, but the effort and value represented by it does get consumed. The 400k dollars are going to probably a year of two or three researcher's lives, plus equpiment rental, travel, etc. That's clearly 400k dollars worth of "value" that is being applied to this endeavor that isn't being, say, researching a cure for male pattern baldness.
The same is true of the 600k per patient. The doctor's assessment times, hospital space times, the drug manufacturing costs, etc, is all value that isn't going back into the system. It's consumed.
So yes, in a strict literal sense, physical money cycles. But the value that money represents is getting consumed.
The average aids patient in the US will spend $600k on treatment throughout their lifetime. Assuming the aids infection rate in the US is 50k people per year, that's $30 billion dollars per year being lost to HIV related medical expenses. If this study comes up with some general guidelines that encourage a mere tenth of a percent more people to wear condoms, that's still preventing 50 cases of aids in the US each year. That's a potential savings of 30 million dollars per year on a one-time fixed cost one mid-sized mining truck. That's a 75x ROI in the first year alone.
Heck, if ONE PERSON avoids getting aids due to wearing a condom after reading this slashdot article, the program has recouped. And that's just in raw drugs cost alone, let alone lost work hours / family troubles, giving it to other people, etc. HIV is so hugely expensive that anything we can do to reduce infection rate is basically worth it against our bottom line.
Also, I bristle at the idea that we owe it to the people working for mismanaged companies to shield them from the pain that results from that mismanagement. Like it or not, they are the point of contact representing that company and that's why they get paid. If they can't provide assistance, then either they're incompetent or the organization is going to lose a sale. I'd say that he did them a favor by talking them into escalating so he could continue purchasing. If he went to the shop next door instead, that doesn't do them any favors either.
If they got paid well, sure. If they had that job by choice, sure. If they're just stuck in a bad system that they have no control over, why put them through that?
Most people who work retail don't exactly have great other prospects around. Retail is pretty much a job of last resort for most people. Either they can't find other work, they're going to college, they had to pick up a job for the first time in years when their spouse got laid off / etc. There is a pretty big difference between being a 120k dollar a year PR veteran for Starbucks and making 7 dollars an hour flipping Lattes while trying to get published.
And people get little to no real training: I remember that after 1 year at my last retail job, I was the second longest veteran there. A solid grasp of the credit fiduciary system, or even an understanding of company heirchy besides (do what your manager says), are quite rare. Some people barely stayed around at my shop long enough to know when the clearance rack items went on sale or how to add a customer to our e-mail list. Competence at a retail job means following the system as best you can.
The pain here is not resulting from mismanaged companis. The pain here is resulting from the intersection of an unhappy customer who wants to vent at whoever is nearby and a company that is managed in basically the best way that we know how to manage gigantic companies with untrained / unpaid labor... I.E. great for 90% of cases, bad for 9% of cases, and awful for 1% of cases.
I guess what I'm saying, is those poor suckers on the floor have as much responsibility for company policy as jail inmates do for the direction of the road that they are building. So please try to be pleasant with them, OK? It sounds like grandparent poster, from other posts, was actually more congenial than he let on originally, which is appreciated. But manipulating the system to work for you does not consist of being angry and unpleasant to the nearest person irrespective of their inability to do anything about it. Heck, they have problems getting higher-ups to buy enough toilet paper.
Slashdot Mirror
A parking space in Seattle can easily run you 100 dollars a month (which is actually cheap by major city standards). Conversely, items will stay on your credit report for 7 years. As such, that $1,000 in parking tickets represents up to 7 years of parking.
Over the course of those 7 years, a legitimate parking space would have cost 8,400 dollars. By getting lots of parking tickets, grandparent poster actually saved 89% of the total costs associated with parking. Even if the parking tickets represented just a single year of vehicle storage, he's still saving 17%.
Of course, the other major benefit of illegally parking is that you're not tied to a specific space in the city. Most jobs require traveling from client to client, assessing their needs on-site or just reassuring them that they're in good hands. A specific parking space is not a flexible enough arrangement to meet those needs. So while parking tickets may only save you 17% over a fixed spot, their general utility within a city environment is much, much higher.
I think it is fair to say that not getting a job due to parking tickets is an unforseen circumstance and should not be held against the GP.
I'd consider myself a pretty fiscally responsible guy who tries far more than the average person to keep on top of these things. I try to check my report every year or so.
I still can't see one of the 3 bloody bureaus. To access my information, they want to know financial information details on a bank account that I closed in college. And the hoops to jump through to get in without that are a lot more effort than I have been able to put out for this.
Most people don't spend all of their time wondering if their library in their hometown accidentally reported them as having lost a book 4 years ago. How can people with kids and jobs manage to stay on top of it all?
If that's what you're trying to manage, then I daresay you should find direct evidence in support of people's ability to manage regular tasks and survive tight situations.
Credit is a false indicator in this regard. I know people who have amazing credit scores, but I wouldn't trust them to manage a paper sack. Similarly, I know a lot of people who have a strangely wreckless approach to their personal lives, but whose professional work is shockingly squeaky-clean. It is perhaps because they are so dilligent about their professional work that their brain takes a vacation at home.
And, of course, credit can / is usually wrecked by things outside of the control of the person. Health issues, job losses, divorce, moving, and identity theft all ruin credit, and can frequently do so without the end user knowing about it. Personally, my credit was ruined for YEARS without my knowing it, simply because my college roommate had failed to pay the last bill on electricity before moving out. The bill was for 16 dollars, which was too small to actually notify me that anything was still owed, but not too small that it wasn't listed as a default in my credit score. Now that I'm of more firm financial footing, my credit is still terrible. Why? Because I belive borrowing is a symptom of a failure to properly financially plan, which has the side effect that my available credit is low and my credit repayment history is thin.
Credit Score is a tool specifically for financial companies to decide if they want to loan you money. You'll notice that paying your bill in full each month is actually counted as a negative against your credit score, as does shopping around for loans (generating lots of inquiries), consolidating debt, closing unused credit cards, and other things which I personally consider highly fiscally responsible. Again, this is because your FICO is not a measurement of your financial accumen, but rather your potential profitability to moneylenders. Let's keep it as a tool for that, shall we?
We still have vegitation down here? Someone better tell Captain McCrea.
Any other company could have provided support and maintenence for windows desktops. I assure you, unless they are a three-initial-company, they would probably do it much cheaper and better, too.
A: The size of alaska is larger than most modern container ships. The largest supertanker is about half a kilometer long, and less than a tenth of a kilometer wide. Alaska has just under 2 million square kilometers of surface area. Sure, the garbage can't be that Deep, but straining it like that would be like trying to clean a pool one eyedropper at a time.
B: Dumping things into volcanoes doesn't make them go away. The first thing it would do is become a huge, noxious chlorine chimney, converting plastic into deadly and generally unpleasant gasses. Then the volume of plastic and latent seawater would probably cap the volcanoes, causing pressure to build up elsewhere and new volcanic activity to emerge.
I'd wager dollars to doughnuts that thousands of people have tried to take this beast over in the past few years. If it hasn't happened yet, I can't see the floodgates suddenly opening.
"Since music sales peaked in 1999, the value of those sales, after adjusting for inflation, has dropped by more than half. At that rate, the industry could be decimated before Madonna's 60th birthday.
[pedantic brat] Actually, if it were decimated, it would only be dropped by 10%. It's a special Roman punishment for one's own armies whereby the general killed one out of every ten men (or 10%). This can be highly motivating, and was a much feared punishment, generally reserved for Mutiny.
[/pedantic brat]
No, you should have to pay whatever the contract, which you signed voluntarily, in good health and sound mind, stipulates.
This is America! If you have a greivence against a company, you have rights, you know. Your rights are protected by federal, state, and local laws.
1. You have the right to binding arbitration by some bought-off company in Northern Virginia.
2. You have the right to... well, that last one's it, really.
I don't mean to be too flippant, but laws are definitely there to protect the consumer, and that trumps contracts. This is similar to how California finds most non-compete agreements invalid: a hungry person will definitely agree to one during an economic downturn, but it would unfairly prevent them from getting another job later. In this case, all cellphone companies have similar stupid rules, like binding arbitration.
The law is your tool to protect you from that. Don't give up your rights too easily.
WRT to free markets and contracts: I'll believe that *these* contracts fall under free market provisions of binding legal exchange of promises between two equal parties when *they* acknowledge the changes that I had written into the contract before sending it in, or even what the base contract was. Oh look, they've update the terms again. How quaint.
I have several sites I use regularly which are permanently on self-signed certificates. Why? Because the cost of getting a real, properly signed certificate is f$&@ing highway robbery. It's one entry in a lookup table, yet it costs more per year than my last car. Sure, BankOfAmerica.com can afford that, but can your small business's intranet? Can a small hobby out of someone's basement?
We're trained every day that legitimate sites self-sign. And that the warnings can safely be ignored. This isn't a failure of people's intelligence, this is a symptom of the signers pricing their "security" into irrelevance.
Make it negligably cheap and it will be important again. Keep it out stupidly luxury priced, and everybody knows what a crock the system is.
I remember in elementary school thinking that cursive probably ought to be simplified out of existence. Writing was always painful for me for some reason, and cursive didn't seem to help that hand fatigue. It just seemed redundant.
Your average slashdotter really ought to have five or six usable motherboards, chipsets, and cases sitting around in their work room. Maybe a dual-chip P4 server, a couple of old laptops with broken CD drives and dead batteries, a project motherboard from when Micro ITX was hot, and that one computer that you were "definitely going to fix some day." Add into that spare, perfectly geometrically distributed, and completely questionable 160, 80, 40, 20, 8, and 4 GB hard drives.
Really, if we're talking about an idealized slashdot user who doesn't already have a spare server sitting around, you're still looking at building from scratch. A $60 motherboard + chip combo, a $20 PSU, $200 in hard drives, a $15 metal case, a $5 novelty case badge, and BSD = a perfectly serviceable $300 file dump.
I wouldn't be surprised if the average Slashdotter has a slower computer than the average Joe. The average Joe doesn't know when to upgrade his computer, and thinks he needs to do it every two years to get the latest version of Word and Outlook. Your run-of-the-mill computer professional, on the other hand, sees their computer as a tool to get certain things done. Tools have weight, especially when they're still working fine. And as such, it might take a lot longer to switch out that working component... especially once you know it by heart.
And, finally, the fact that they are protesting the publication of these images means that they assume that the images work... but they don't know how. That's the same as the DMV forbidding the publication of Eye-Charts to prevent blind people from getting their driver's license. As if we know those specific eye-charts work for testing eye-sight, but we don't know how they work and cannot, therefore, make new or better eye-charts.
I run playtesting on a regular basis. Nothing will invalidate the results of a playtest faster than a test subject who has seen the game before, or comes in with other advance foreknowledge. If someone gets the questionnaire ahead of time, they're going to solidify their impressions and opinions (to a large degree) ahead of time. And it will no longer give a good impression of what the person really feels in the moment. If suddenly a questionnaire that I was running had leaked onto the internet, I'd need to re-write it completely, and it would take quite a few tests to re-formulate a basis for comparison and understanding.
I would assume the Rorschach is similar. Other random blobs are definitely possible, but you'd have to get a baseline for how people generally interpret each of the individual other random blobs. Does one have spikier bits than others? Is this one normal to see as a pitbull, or is that really uncommon? It's probably not a question of magic, but just a lot of extra work that they don't want to do.
Minimally does not mean "not at all." You still need to use the mouse to interact with your desktop environment, open PDF's from your clients, and test your application. Mice also can provide programmable buttons, which can be helpful if you need to run series of events off of one button and perhaps need something between system calls and an Auto Hot Keys script. And, just in general, not everyone remembers every shortcut key command all the friggin' time.
Personally I use a Mogo Mouse because it stores convieniently inside of the laptop, and contains a handy laser for scorching the eyes of your enemies. Also I'm lazy and forget to bring other mice with me.
And Elite programmers don't call themselves Elite programmers.
If you go with the normal route, and the normal route gets hacked, you won't be blamed.
If you setup a server on a system that your boss hasn't heard of, and you get hacked, you're fired.
The chances of the former are much greater in a lot of ways. But the risk to your job is basically zero. Whereas in the second way, you're fired because you decided to use that silly deamon thing instead of proper, professional, Enterprise-Ready (tm) Windows 7.
Step 1: Come up with a new idea for making money that nobody has ever thought of.
Step 2: Make as much money as you can, while other people scramble to get into the market.
Step 3: Compete a bit with people, staying in the game as long as you can still make money at it.
Step 4: Move on to something more profitable.
Somehow people have confused getting as big as possible for making as much money as you can. Without making money, big = bad.
There seems to be a weird thing in "the new economy" where the product frequently is the business. Facebook, Livejournal, etc all identify by their product rather than by their model.
Imagine if HP identified as HP Largescale Business Dot Matrix, and sold just one model of Printer. No matter how good that one dot-matrix printer was, they'd be out of business the moment inkjets hit.
You can always use TrueCrypt for free if you're worried about encrypting your Windows drives.
Full system-wide encryption is a good idea, except that: 1. Most Windows home installations don't have a password and 2. When it does have one, that password gets forgotten all the time. I can't tell you the number of desktops I'd have to re-install if they were actually properly secured.
Unless you're on a multi-year project (and you might be, considering the anonymous posting), coding does take a long time. I'd guess that an average project these days takes minimum 50 people over the course of a year and a half, with some on yearly cycles and others on that 5+ year "when it's ready" burn. And, of course, some developers get to have 200+ people on a title simultaneously. So yes, 20 million budgets are pretty common these days for a mainstream release, with 100 million budgets probably not far away.
That having been said, the one thing that Valve has over a lot of other people is online distribution. When you sell into Target, they have some pretty fixed costs with retail, store workers, distribution, manufacturing, etc. Assuming a total fixed cost for them of 40 dollars per title, the difference in profit from a 45 dollar or a 55 dollar title is quite staggering. After Sony experimentally dropped the price on Crash 1 by 10 dollars one Christmas ten years ago, and it outsold Crash 2, every manufacturer has had a greatest hits / cheapey / etc line. Sony even had a line at 10 dollars before returning back to 20.
The pressures of retail keeps an interesting balance there. As I mentioned, sony found the 10 dollar price point too low to be worth using. This could be because of perception of value, this could be because those games were terrible, this could be because retailers simply didn't want to stock cheap games, or that the margins were so small at 10$ that it just wasn't worth it. But everyone is experimenting with multiple pricepoints at retail, and what the optimal one is. And, unfortunately, the optimum ones aren't necessarily the ones that you would like or think.
As we make the switch to online distribution of games, I think we'll see more of a downward pressure on the overall pricing scheme. Games *can* be cheaper, shorter, and more intense, because the style of distribution permits it. Also, everyone who logs into steam can see a sale, whereas a 75% off sale at Target will only net the people who wandered into Target that day.
Sony (PSP Go), Nintendo (DSi), and Microsoft (360 downloads of retail games) are all working on download services for their AAA titles. Considering the margins they make on downloaded titles, I'd be surprised if they weren't about stopping all retail game sales.
I've heard the main problem is that the phone companies don't have moment-to-moment access to international billing. So either they A: have explicit opt-in to international data (like the iPhone now has), B: let anyone run up whatever bill, and charge accordingly, C: pressure remote telcos to put hard limits on usage. A only happened on the iPhone due to the highly public nature of that case, C hasn't happened so far. Guess which option they have been going for?
It gets worse. Cell phone users used to get charged extra to *recieve* long distance calls. Of course, landlines were paying the full cost of getting that call across the country to wherever you were. But you were being charged for... something... somewhere... too.
There may be legitimate reasons why certain parts of cellular plans are the way they are. But a lot of the other parts are simply abuse. The companies have burned through all of the goodwill they might have at one point had.
The physical pieces of paper don't go away, but the effort and value represented by it does get consumed. The 400k dollars are going to probably a year of two or three researcher's lives, plus equpiment rental, travel, etc. That's clearly 400k dollars worth of "value" that is being applied to this endeavor that isn't being, say, researching a cure for male pattern baldness.
The same is true of the 600k per patient. The doctor's assessment times, hospital space times, the drug manufacturing costs, etc, is all value that isn't going back into the system. It's consumed.
So yes, in a strict literal sense, physical money cycles. But the value that money represents is getting consumed.
The average aids patient in the US will spend $600k on treatment throughout their lifetime. Assuming the aids infection rate in the US is 50k people per year, that's $30 billion dollars per year being lost to HIV related medical expenses. If this study comes up with some general guidelines that encourage a mere tenth of a percent more people to wear condoms, that's still preventing 50 cases of aids in the US each year. That's a potential savings of 30 million dollars per year on a one-time fixed cost one mid-sized mining truck. That's a 75x ROI in the first year alone.
Heck, if ONE PERSON avoids getting aids due to wearing a condom after reading this slashdot article, the program has recouped. And that's just in raw drugs cost alone, let alone lost work hours / family troubles, giving it to other people, etc. HIV is so hugely expensive that anything we can do to reduce infection rate is basically worth it against our bottom line.
Also, I bristle at the idea that we owe it to the people working for mismanaged companies to shield them from the pain that results from that mismanagement. Like it or not, they are the point of contact representing that company and that's why they get paid. If they can't provide assistance, then either they're incompetent or the organization is going to lose a sale. I'd say that he did them a favor by talking them into escalating so he could continue purchasing. If he went to the shop next door instead, that doesn't do them any favors either.
If they got paid well, sure. If they had that job by choice, sure. If they're just stuck in a bad system that they have no control over, why put them through that?
Most people who work retail don't exactly have great other prospects around. Retail is pretty much a job of last resort for most people. Either they can't find other work, they're going to college, they had to pick up a job for the first time in years when their spouse got laid off / etc. There is a pretty big difference between being a 120k dollar a year PR veteran for Starbucks and making 7 dollars an hour flipping Lattes while trying to get published.
And people get little to no real training: I remember that after 1 year at my last retail job, I was the second longest veteran there. A solid grasp of the credit fiduciary system, or even an understanding of company heirchy besides (do what your manager says), are quite rare. Some people barely stayed around at my shop long enough to know when the clearance rack items went on sale or how to add a customer to our e-mail list. Competence at a retail job means following the system as best you can.
The pain here is not resulting from mismanaged companis. The pain here is resulting from the intersection of an unhappy customer who wants to vent at whoever is nearby and a company that is managed in basically the best way that we know how to manage gigantic companies with untrained / unpaid labor... I.E. great for 90% of cases, bad for 9% of cases, and awful for 1% of cases.
I guess what I'm saying, is those poor suckers on the floor have as much responsibility for company policy as jail inmates do for the direction of the road that they are building. So please try to be pleasant with them, OK? It sounds like grandparent poster, from other posts, was actually more congenial than he let on originally, which is appreciated. But manipulating the system to work for you does not consist of being angry and unpleasant to the nearest person irrespective of their inability to do anything about it. Heck, they have problems getting higher-ups to buy enough toilet paper.