When a government makes a choice about what device it will be adopted for mass distribution, the market logic doesn't necessary applies.
For how many years the device will be in production? For how many years will be possible to fix broken ones? For how many years new software will be available to them?
On the consumer market, this cycle is just too small. No honest and competent govern will invest a ton of money on a device that will be deprecated and abandoned by the manufacturer in the next year.
There's also a political bonus: since the devices are semi-obsolete (as you stated), the manufacturers doesn't have to worry about competition. There'll be no lobby against it. Better, will be lobbies pro it - it's a nice opportunity to make yet some more bucks more using already paid off installations and machinery.
It's fun to settle in with a nicely illustrated classic sometimes, but when I'm standing in line at the Post Office, I want to read a few paragraphs of the latest romance or fantasy or science fiction or literature that I'm reading. I know the book might not be a keeper. I know the book might not be something my descendants want to read. I'm good with that. Not every little brain leaving of mine needs to be advertised on my shelves or left to my future grandkids.
Yep. For this kind of reading, there's that cheap, newspaper printed, pocket books. With a bonus: I can trade two, already read, pocket books for another one on the used books store near my home.:-)
Funny thing is... I also have a Nook, brought one to carry my technical reference material with me while commuting to work. Since it's very hard to look forward to choose what book will be needed in the day, it happened that my Nook Classic is the best tool available to me to read these technical readings.
But honestly, I could not managed to use it for anything else unless, well, to read one or two downloaded e-books, which printed version were too expensive to me to import from Amazon... =]
Those days are coming. Dont you think an ancient Egyptian would look at modern newspaper as astonishing but hardly practical considering all the industrial-age tools needed, compared to hand-made papyrus.
I bet you're right.
I'm not a luddite. It happens that I value quality over convenience. Using again my example of this edition of the Divine Comedy, the day I can have the same reading pleasure this paper book gives to me, it will be the day I'll really jump into eBooks - but it's unlikely that this will happens in a cheap, affordable way, in less than 5 or, God forbid, 10 years.
Flexible e-ink displays do exist, but this technology is really far from giving me the experience a printed book is giving me since my childhood. And I'm ignoring the pricing problem (and where in hell they will cram that God damned batteries!).
As a matter of fact, I still have a lot of vinyls on my parent's home.
I don't care about the medium, I care about the content, and some of the albums I love sounds like crap after being remastered into a CD. Not the technology fault, it was these shitty sound engineers of nowadays that think it's a good idea to filter crunch everything.
It's for this reason that I prefer Ogg Vorbis over MP3 when I have the choice.
But you are right: I always bring my iPod (hacked, using RockBox) when walking in the park. Together with my hard, dead tree version of my favorite book.:-)
Sounds like one of these people who never had listened to a good vinyl.:-)
Ahhh, the pleasure to read a graphic novel without caring about screen size, color depth or resolution. Or perhaps, just to open a book you already had read on any random page in the bathroom to kill some time.
The convenience to simply spend 2 buck buying the newspaper to read it in some park, without caring about battery life, sun light or wifi to download the darn thing. The freedom to wander where I may want without caring about energy sockets or battery chargers.
Or the confort to be able to find some classic comic of my childhood on a used books store, buy it and be confident that no motherfscker of a copyright holder will be able to "delete" the thing from my hands.
My 2 cents? eBooks are fantastic tools to consume discardable content (as technical books, since it's almost sure that I'll have to buy another one about the same thing in the next few months) or, for the ethically versatile consumers, pirated ones.
But for pleasure reading (did you ever read Dante's Inferno on a eBook? it's appalling! The printed version is so richly illustrated...), the old and faithful dead tree medium is, still, the best choice for me.
Exactly the same thing I did, 20 years ago, when I realized that I was far, but a lot far from being the best coder in the world and thought it could be a good idea take a look on more experienced coders's work and see what (and, mainly, *why*) they were coding that way.
My code is not perfect (far from it), but it's a lot better (and useful) than my ego when I was 25.
A crashing rocket can fall over the entire America, not only New Mexico.
I'm sure I'm far from 100% right, but as far as I know, rockets commonly explodes on lauchpad, or are emergency destroyed a few kilometers high, when the debris fall out over a relatively small (and manageable) area.
There're exceptions, as the two Space Shuttle accidents. But IMHO, people living near an prosaic airport are far more endangered than the guys at New Mexico.
However, crashing rockets are not the only problem a spaceport (and its neighborhood) can suffer.
In Brazil, when things gone the way you described, they didn't ditch the Cent, but they reduced the bill's face value by 10.
So, something that used to cost Cr$ 16,45, was "relabeled" as NC$ 1,64 or NC$ 1,65 (the rounding was done as the seller's discretion).
This is a little expensive decision, as the current currency must be rebranded until new bills and coins are made - but if this happens just once or twice a century, can be a better solution.
(for the sake of completeness: in Brazil, they did this a dozen times just in the last half of the last century! Man, that was messy!)
I *WAS* my job to try to introduce better practices, but since I was given no authority (i.e.: I can not fire anyone), I just got burnt.
People that was willing to learn better ways didn't need my criticizing, they just looked at my code and adopted the ideas they liked. Eventually almost all of that ideas come to production (and the few that didn't, oh hell, it appears that being a freaking paranoid doesn't necessary makes your code always better, uh? =P)
People that was not willing to learn nothing new just ignored me and, even worst, started to undermine me on the company. Things escalate to a level that I decided that the money wasn't paying the headache.
So, *DON'T DO IT* unless you have the power to lay off bad coders.
I don't get it. I sell things. You sell things. Everyone rounds to nickels unless the transaction isn't using hard currency. Who is losing money?
You sell something for [insert-your-favorite-currnecy-here]1.996. Customer pays 2.00, you can't give 0.004 back. Customer decides it's ok.
Now repeat it a thousand times per day.
This is 0.004 * 1000 * 30 * 12 = 1440.00 per year.
Since you declared in the invoice 1.996, you pay the tax for 1.996. That 1440.00/year incoming is not taxed, and when correctly masked by a good accountant, it's plain, untaxable profit.
The potential loss for the society (caused by the rounding) is far more expensive that the cost of producing the pennies.
Large stores will get a non taxable "profit" from raising to the nearest nickel, small ones probably will get some loss from raising to the lowest nickel. This kind of white "washing cash" is common here at Brazil, as the people is already used to this rounding (to up) thing - stores commonly doesn't have the change.
It would be a wiser move simply eradicate the penny from current currency. This will leverage the problem to everybody, and the taxes would not be evaded.
You have every right to disagree with me, however you should avoid the immature response of both assuming you know who you're talking to on the Internet and what their experience is compared to your own, and the erroneous assumption that your experience translates into anything relevant in the real world.
The same comes from me to you.:-)
I'm happy we could agree with something!;-)
And, to my original point, unless you think you know software engineering management better than the people who do so very successfully in the largest software companies in the world, your point that he original poster couldn't possibly be a senior level engineer is just plain wrong.
The largest software companies in the world are doing their best with what they have on their hands. There's a lot of shitty people around us, and the management principle of the "head count" are one way to dealing with that.
(and no, I don't know better that them - it happens that I just know as good as them. And you?)
"Seniority" is a tag we place on some people that we expect to be able to cope with less experienced (and, in some companies, less competent too!) people. Putting aside the few (very few) people that appears to "born already knowing how to lead", I stand my ground. No one under 30 or 35 years old can reasonably be a senior "anything" - at least, using the original (and honest) concept of seniority.
The guy just didn't lived long enough.
(and, again, exceptions do exist - you appears to ignore this part of my argument).
Maybe you don't see it in the circles you run in, but claiming something can't happen because you believe it can't -- even when all the evidence says the exact opposite -- is just ignorant.
You are right. I don't see on the circles I run in.
Please advise me about the circles YOU run in. I need to update my black list.;-)
If the aggressor and the intended victim both have guns, then the winner is whoever shoots first. All the aggressor needs to do is start off by shooting the victim, and they've won: it doesn't matter if the victim is armed or not, because they never had a chance to go for their gun.
You logic is flawed. It's not the victim's gun that the agressor fears. It's the next guy's gun, that can or cannot be watching the agression, the one to be feared.
It's not the gun that prevents the assault. It's the lack os acknowledge of who has a gun that prevents the assault.
You know, criminals are not suicidal. They have fear too.
Slashdot Mirror
If they want protection and patents then they can accept the down side, liability.
+2 Really Insightful
Perhaps not.
When a government makes a choice about what device it will be adopted for mass distribution, the market logic doesn't necessary applies.
For how many years the device will be in production? For how many years will be possible to fix broken ones? For how many years new software will be available to them?
On the consumer market, this cycle is just too small. No honest and competent govern will invest a ton of money on a device that will be deprecated and abandoned by the manufacturer in the next year.
There's also a political bonus: since the devices are semi-obsolete (as you stated), the manufacturers doesn't have to worry about competition. There'll be no lobby against it. Better, will be lobbies pro it - it's a nice opportunity to make yet some more bucks more using already paid off installations and machinery.
Wallmart is bigger than (I'm guessing) half the third-world countries.
Females are unsafe?
Let me guess : you are virgin? =P
It's fun to settle in with a nicely illustrated classic sometimes, but when I'm standing in line at the Post Office, I want to read a few paragraphs of the latest romance or fantasy or science fiction or literature that I'm reading. I know the book might not be a keeper. I know the book might not be something my descendants want to read. I'm good with that. Not every little brain leaving of mine needs to be advertised on my shelves or left to my future grandkids.
Yep. For this kind of reading, there's that cheap, newspaper printed, pocket books. With a bonus: I can trade two, already read, pocket books for another one on the used books store near my home. :-)
Funny thing is... I also have a Nook, brought one to carry my technical reference material with me while commuting to work. Since it's very hard to look forward to choose what book will be needed in the day, it happened that my Nook Classic is the best tool available to me to read these technical readings.
But honestly, I could not managed to use it for anything else unless, well, to read one or two downloaded e-books, which printed version were too expensive to me to import from Amazon ... =]
Those days are coming. Dont you think an ancient Egyptian would look at modern newspaper as astonishing but hardly practical considering all the industrial-age tools needed, compared to hand-made papyrus.
I bet you're right.
I'm not a luddite. It happens that I value quality over convenience. Using again my example of this edition of the Divine Comedy, the day I can have the same reading pleasure this paper book gives to me, it will be the day I'll really jump into eBooks - but it's unlikely that this will happens in a cheap, affordable way, in less than 5 or, God forbid, 10 years.
Flexible e-ink displays do exist, but this technology is really far from giving me the experience a printed book is giving me since my childhood. And I'm ignoring the pricing problem (and where in hell they will cram that God damned batteries!).
This one.
I read Portuguese, and I love the work of Gustave Doré.
Disclaimer: I'm not the seller of this book. It happened that I just found good pictures of this book on a auctions site.
As a matter of fact, I still have a lot of vinyls on my parent's home.
I don't care about the medium, I care about the content, and some of the albums I love sounds like crap after being remastered into a CD. Not the technology fault, it was these shitty sound engineers of nowadays that think it's a good idea to filter crunch everything.
It's for this reason that I prefer Ogg Vorbis over MP3 when I have the choice.
But you are right: I always bring my iPod (hacked, using RockBox) when walking in the park. Together with my hard, dead tree version of my favorite book. :-)
Sounds like one of these people who never had listened to a good vinyl. :-)
Ahhh, the pleasure to read a graphic novel without caring about screen size, color depth or resolution. Or perhaps, just to open a book you already had read on any random page in the bathroom to kill some time.
The convenience to simply spend 2 buck buying the newspaper to read it in some park, without caring about battery life, sun light or wifi to download the darn thing. The freedom to wander where I may want without caring about energy sockets or battery chargers.
Or the confort to be able to find some classic comic of my childhood on a used books store, buy it and be confident that no motherfscker of a copyright holder will be able to "delete" the thing from my hands.
My 2 cents? eBooks are fantastic tools to consume discardable content (as technical books, since it's almost sure that I'll have to buy another one about the same thing in the next few months) or, for the ethically versatile consumers, pirated ones.
But for pleasure reading (did you ever read Dante's Inferno on a eBook? it's appalling! The printed version is so richly illustrated...), the old and faithful dead tree medium is, still, the best choice for me.
the lack of a self destruct mechanism could be considered negligence, hardening the punitive damages.
No matter how big a shark you are. Given enough mobster over you, you will be the one being eaten.
Been there, done that! That bites are still hurting! :-)
Yep.
Exactly the same thing I did, 20 years ago, when I realized that I was far, but a lot far from being the best coder in the world and thought it could be a good idea take a look on more experienced coders's work and see what (and, mainly, *why*) they were coding that way.
My code is not perfect (far from it), but it's a lot better (and useful) than my ego when I was 25.
A crashing rocket can fall over the entire America, not only New Mexico.
I'm sure I'm far from 100% right, but as far as I know, rockets commonly explodes on lauchpad, or are emergency destroyed a few kilometers high, when the debris fall out over a relatively small (and manageable) area.
There're exceptions, as the two Space Shuttle accidents. But IMHO, people living near an prosaic airport are far more endangered than the guys at New Mexico.
However, crashing rockets are not the only problem a spaceport (and its neighborhood) can suffer.
In Brazil, when things gone the way you described, they didn't ditch the Cent, but they reduced the bill's face value by 10.
So, something that used to cost Cr$ 16,45, was "relabeled" as NC$ 1,64 or NC$ 1,65 (the rounding was done as the seller's discretion).
This is a little expensive decision, as the current currency must be rebranded until new bills and coins are made - but if this happens just once or twice a century, can be a better solution.
(for the sake of completeness: in Brazil, they did this a dozen times just in the last half of the last century! Man, that was messy!)
You can declare on the invoice that it was 1.996, but on the receipt, after the sale, the amount will still say 2.00, as long as cash is being used.
The sales tax is issued over the invoice, or over the receipt?
As far as I know, the receipt proves the value paid, to be used in the event of a refund. The taxes are figured out over the invoices...
(of course, this can vary from country to country - could be a good idea reducing our scope to Canada)
Corrupt politicians are promoting corruption for decades and the society didn't collapsed neither. Problem solved?
Tax evasion is tax evasion. It should be prevented, if only for principle. The law should be for everyone, or I wrong?
Feel free to write using proper grammar.
The ones willing to learn the correct ways will follow you. =]
Parent is pretty right. Been there, done that.
I *WAS* my job to try to introduce better practices, but since I was given no authority (i.e.: I can not fire anyone), I just got burnt.
People that was willing to learn better ways didn't need my criticizing, they just looked at my code and adopted the ideas they liked. Eventually almost all of that ideas come to production (and the few that didn't, oh hell, it appears that being a freaking paranoid doesn't necessary makes your code always better, uh? =P)
People that was not willing to learn nothing new just ignored me and, even worst, started to undermine me on the company. Things escalate to a level that I decided that the money wasn't paying the headache.
So, *DON'T DO IT* unless you have the power to lay off bad coders.
I don't get it. I sell things. You sell things. Everyone rounds to nickels unless the transaction isn't using hard currency. Who is losing money?
You sell something for [insert-your-favorite-currnecy-here]1.996. Customer pays 2.00, you can't give 0.004 back. Customer decides it's ok.
Now repeat it a thousand times per day.
This is 0.004 * 1000 * 30 * 12 = 1440.00 per year.
Since you declared in the invoice 1.996, you pay the tax for 1.996. That 1440.00/year incoming is not taxed, and when correctly masked by a good accountant, it's plain, untaxable profit.
The potential loss for the society (caused by the rounding) is far more expensive that the cost of producing the pennies.
Large stores will get a non taxable "profit" from raising to the nearest nickel, small ones probably will get some loss from raising to the lowest nickel. This kind of white "washing cash" is common here at Brazil, as the people is already used to this rounding (to up) thing - stores commonly doesn't have the change.
It would be a wiser move simply eradicate the penny from current currency. This will leverage the problem to everybody, and the taxes would not be evaded.
You have every right to disagree with me, however you should avoid the immature response of both assuming you know who you're talking to on the Internet and what their experience is compared to your own, and the erroneous assumption that your experience translates into anything relevant in the real world.
The same comes from me to you. :-)
I'm happy we could agree with something! ;-)
And, to my original point, unless you think you know software engineering management better than the people who do so very successfully in the largest software companies in the world, your point that he original poster couldn't possibly be a senior level engineer is just plain wrong.
The largest software companies in the world are doing their best with what they have on their hands. There's a lot of shitty people around us, and the management principle of the "head count" are one way to dealing with that.
(and no, I don't know better that them - it happens that I just know as good as them. And you?)
"Seniority" is a tag we place on some people that we expect to be able to cope with less experienced (and, in some companies, less competent too!) people. Putting aside the few (very few) people that appears to "born already knowing how to lead", I stand my ground. No one under 30 or 35 years old can reasonably be a senior "anything" - at least, using the original (and honest) concept of seniority.
The guy just didn't lived long enough.
(and, again, exceptions do exist - you appears to ignore this part of my argument).
Maybe you don't see it in the circles you run in, but claiming something can't happen because you believe it can't -- even when all the evidence says the exact opposite -- is just ignorant.
You are right. I don't see on the circles I run in.
Please advise me about the circles YOU run in. I need to update my black list. ;-)
As someone above already stated above, "I'm enjoying the show".
If the aggressor and the intended victim both have guns, then the winner is whoever shoots first. All the aggressor needs to do is start off by shooting the victim, and they've won: it doesn't matter if the victim is armed or not, because they never had a chance to go for their gun.
You logic is flawed. It's not the victim's gun that the agressor fears. It's the next guy's gun, that can or cannot be watching the agression, the one to be feared.
It's not the gun that prevents the assault. It's the lack os acknowledge of who has a gun that prevents the assault.
You know, criminals are not suicidal. They have fear too.
> Criminals do not care about laws so outlawing guns will not take the guns from the criminals.
I would be interested to see if that is true. How does that statment work with countries other than the U.S.?
Brazil has a very restrictive gun ownership policy.
Samsung is working with Microsoft in search software for its phones. They're going to call it:
<puts on sunglasses>
Bada Bing!
Beakman? It's you? :-)