I estimate that we will perform zero patches to handle these specific rule changes.
The switch already happens - it'll just happen on different days. And if you recall, these changes have happened before - so it isn't really unexpected for those who have been in the business a while.
The Y2K contracting folks will have you jumping off your seats, but for everyone who runs these systems: no big deal.
I'm sure some home users will be caught off guard, but then again most desktop users have their clock set to the wrong timezone.
I remember a couple scenarios where it was critical to life safety:
First, there was a time when my buddy was captured by enemy soldiers and stuck in front of a TV camera to communicate propaganda. He was able to send a patriotic morse-encoded message to the public by batting his eyelids.
Later, when in a POW camp, I was able to bang morse on the heating pipes to communicate with my buddies and stay sane. That lasted until our captors realized that POWs don't normally get baseboard heat.
Finally, I was out on a multi-year mission when some of our colleagues ran into trouble, and suffered some kind of communications failure where they could no longer transmit by voice. They improvised and started to use some ancient signaling system. Fortunately, the captain was able to recognize it as morse and decoded the message, and we were able to rescue them.
Kids who don't learn morse now will certainly be disadvantaged in the future.
HP doesn't need innovators like Kay. HP is totally into innovating new ways to make money off of printer consumables, and that isn't an expertise that Kay brings to the table.
HP's downfall started to happen as soon as they started selling tons of LaserJet printers.
From there, HP seemed to take a little break and brought nothing new to market. Instead of making great new products, they kept on milking the same printer lines until they got old, crusty, and expensive to operate. They tried to do the same thing with their PC line. They unloaded or failed to focus on their other product lines.
I haven't bought an HP product in years. My ex-girlfriend bought an HP inkjet printer, but it failed quickly and the consumables were ridiculously expensive. It just didn't seem like an HP quality product to me.
So HP fired Alan Kay? That's good for Alan. Because who wants to work for an ink-n-toner company?
Are you a great HP employee? Do you have a history of exceptional service creating great products? Tired of the new HP way, where you don't get to do anything interesting, and where you'll see all of your friends and colleaugues get walked out the door in tears?
Well you can do something about it! You can both fuck HP and get a great new job with good pay and benefits! You can meet new friends, excel at your job, and do something new!
How? Just apply for one of the jobs I have posted right now! That's right, I'm looking for great talent. My organization is stable, and rarely has mass layoffs like your crap company. We work on innovative products that capture the minds of people.
Be a mover. A shaker. Do something innovative for a change!
(1) Oracle was well established with Oracle bought RDB (and in fact, Oracle 7 was well in production)
(2) Oracle paid a pretty penny for RDB. It wasn't given away, and it wasn't cheap (as I recall, well over $1 billion.... but I might be way off base).
I'm sure some of Rdb made it into Oracle, but it would have been nicer for a non-DB company to pick it up and try to run with it as a "complete" product.
they condemn the CEOs and shareholders who created all these jobs for taking profits when the times are good, but would never accept the alternative -- advocating sacrifice from the employees when times are bad.
As a major HP customer, all I have to say is "instability is bad". I don't care about the shareholders - and I have the expectation that HP management and employees will be there to support me. If it wasn't for the customers, HP wouldn't have seen the light of day.
"Coding for all browsers is expensive and increases our development and support costs".
That's the BS I usually hear from people who develop only for one browser - typically the "corporate standard" browser.
Interestingly enough, I have the opposite experience. We reuse our proven code to make sure that our sites work properly with all modern browsers. Pretty standard stuff for all serious software development professionals.
We use a lot of fancy features, support a fancy text editor, calendar widgets, hierarchy controls... basically, everything that people want out of a modern browser interface. And do you know what? Our resulting software works and looks great with IE, FireFox, Opera, Konqueror, and more.
We have tens of thousands of "very active" users per day, and we never get a complaint about our software not working with a less popular browser.
We have a very small software development staff. As the manager of this organization, I can say with confidence that supporting all browsers versus just one costs us zero dollars.
It's all about good design and management practices. If you do some planning for the future by making good, solid, reusable code the first time, you actually end up saving a ton of money. Save time, money, and sanity.
Sadly, most software development organizations just can't handle doing their job right. They don't bother to build good reusable code, resulting in a tedious, unreliable, never-ending tweaking effort whenever the next service pack is released.
No wonder why so many companies have outsourced their development to the 3rd world. Lousy software development practices, such as coding for just the one corporate standard browser, is prohibitively expensive.
It would be great if appliances and lamps summed up their own electricity usage over time. All that electricity comes to us by giving a ton of cash to those people who'd prefer to bomb us or raise our oil prices. Minimizing electricity usage is a good idea.
I've significantly used my electricity costs over the past year just by changing my habits. This guy went a bit further and saved even way more than I did. Impressive.
You have a very limited vantage point of history. Token Ring, like OS/2, had a large install base. Token Ring died because once Ethernet was (finally) standardized with 10baseT and low-cost hubs and NICs, it was cheaper and faster and easier. But token ring had a huge install base which was only eliminated once organizations needed to upgrade their bandwidth to 100 Mbit.
No one is going to work for free. That's the myth of open-source.
My company works a lot on open source software. And we actually pay our developers to do so.
Is this a hippie dream? No, it's just practical. We use this open source software in our business because it is the best product available - and it's much less expensive and more robust than anything else on the market.
We continue to develop the software because we have needs that go beyond the current implementation. We give back to the community because we find it cost effective to have good business relationships with the other developers of the "product". If we have a problem, we can fix it ourselves, or we can ask our partners in the community.
It's a pretty simple concept, and it's all based in the finances of business.
To proclaim that Open Source is a hippie dream or an unworkable business model is simply incorrect. Maybe this guy simply fears that open source alternatives to his software may undercut his business.
Microsoft Innovates like Enron did - with BS.
on
Ballmer on Innovation
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
One innovation that Google came up with is that it learned that it doesn't need a figurehead spokesmodel like Ballmer.
Ballmer does Microsoft a disservice by ranting about innovation but not actually delivering innovation. No wonder why theses Microsoft guys are so uncharismatic - people have a distaste for bullshit-slinging horn tooters.
IBM - the inventor of so many basic industry ideas - is declared a non-innovator.
Apple, who brought so many great ideas from the lab to desktop computing, ideas that Microsoft admittedly embraced after Apple delivered them successfully to market - doesn't get a mention.
And Google, who mostly innovated the idea of not screwing over internet users with ads and pop-ups and cross-marketing crap, is an exciting innovator.
IBM is the innovator of basic technology. Google is the innovator of doing the Internet right. Apple is the PC marketplace innovator.
Microsoft? Um, well they invented something... I just don't know what that is. Truetype? SQL? The mouse? The file system? Does ANYone know?
It costs me over $50/month for a broadband internet connection from Comcast. If someone offered me a reasonably similar connection for $30/month, I'd jump at it.
Why stop with wall hangings? Why limit oneself to 80 GB?
My mom has been taking a bunch of pictures with her old trusty $100 Olympus D-100 digital camera, but the laptop that she keeps in the kitchen was low on space and doesn't have room for another drive. What to do?
Happily, my mother has a cherished Kitchen Aide mixer - and by welding a bracket onto the mixer, I mounted a 160 GB drive to it. Then I added a USB-to-IDE interface, and now she's baking with tasty gigabytes.
It would be nice to know exactly what law was broken here. Remember, "breaking school policy" is not the same as "breaking the law". Only the legislature(s) can make law.
And so to claim a felony, they're claiming that some law was broken. Why can't anyone describe that law?
I heard the kids were reading Slashdot. Waste of time, those poor souls already lost....
Firefox is slowly making inroads. Its share of the browser market grew to 8% in May, up from 5.59% at the beginning of the year, according to US-based analysts NetApplications.
That may be true over all, but in my world (a large site primarily attracting the 18 - 29 year old demographic within the US) we see something different: FireFox (16%) and Safari (5%).
We have a small development shop (5 developers), but we find it extremely easy to build and deploy a sophisticated web user interface that is compatible with IE, Mozilla + varients, Safari, Opera, Konqueor, and more.
The "trick", if you want to call it that, is to reuse good UI code. Such a strategy saves us time and money, and keeps us lean and keeps us (at least usability-wise) well ahead of the competition. Oh, and we also support accessibility standards.
I have a feeling that we do it well because most all of our developers are professionals - they didn't just "stumble into the webmaster job by creating a webpage".
Anyhow, just as well - our competitors' sites look and work like crap.
I remember when a competitor's site crapped out was broken for weeks when a new version of IE was released... they had many versions of their UI code splattered throughout their site - I feel bad for the people that have to deal with all that crap.
[T]his could mean major trouble for distros like Xandros and Linspire which are reliant on the desktop audience
But more likely, Mac-on-Intel will have no impact on Xandros or Linspire. After all, the Mac platform exists today - and you don't see the Linspire folks all panicky about it.
Let's face it - those who use Linspire or Xandros do so because it is either (1) packaged with a bottom-tier PC, or (2) it's fun.
This is does not describe the Mac user. The Mac user wants a smooth, much-better-than-Windows experience... and is willing to pay for a quality PC to do so. The Mac user doesn't care about the chipset, as long as there is a significantly better user experience than that offered by Windows.
In the future, I doubt you're going to see any name-brand quality PCs with proprietary OSs at Walmart. These very low cost products fit the dirt-cheap niche. If they improve, they could compete with the Mac. If not, they can compete with Windows on price and experience, and they can compete with the Mac on price alone.
In a nutshell, the chipset is less important than the price and the user experience.
I've been looking at senior software developer positions, but is that too high up the ladder for someone 'fresh' to cope with?
Of course, each business is different in terms of "titles" and labor grades. A senior position in one place might be easy for the average employee to obtain - while a senior position at a different employer may be next to impossible to land unless you're the world's expert at something.
I have 12 people reporting to me. Two of them are "senior developers", with 4 and 8 years experience post college. One has an MS in CS, the other does not. Both were promoted into their senior position. I fully trust these senior guys with almost anything.
The other ten people are "software developers". They have between 2 and 12 years of full time experience. Two have an MS in CS, the others do not.
It'd be very unusual for me to hire you over these experienced, trusted, and predictable employees. Can you climb the ladder quickly? Yes, if you prove yourself - but you have to EARN a senior developer position by proving yourself in all sorts of circumstances.
Unless you have proven high caliber on-the-job experience, I would not hire you into a senior position. It is important to "aim high", but it's dumb to "aim so high" that you miss the job market.
Jobs, 50, said he attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon but dropped out after only eight months because it was too expensive for his working-class family. He said his real education started when he "dropped in" on whatever classes interested him -- including calligraphy.'
Many poor, uneducated kids end up on the streets, in jail, or working at the local department store for 40 years.
Steve Jobs managed to attend classes that grasped his interest.. with the goal of education. And at the same time he was able to help out his family financially.
Wouldn't it be great if more kids were able to do that? Jobs wasn't a drain, and he had to sacrifice his college education for his family.
Most college kids are a major drain on their family. I know I was.
Oh Proofpoint says! A company that is trying to sell their email monitoring products/services.
I imagine that a company that sells a product might want to convince IT managers that using their product is what everyone is doing within the industry. And to convince IT managers, they might want to tailor their survey to greatly up their numbers, and pump the press to get the word out.
This is not an independent study. This is a press release by a company with a vested interest in the marketplace they're reporting within.
Sure, no one likes email monitoring. Let's talk about how Proofpoint is looking to make millions by providing the mechanisms for snooping into your email.
Definitely return it! Depending on what country you live in, your warranty may be two years, one year, or 90 days. And in some US states there are "fitness of merchantability" laws - if it fails after the warranty expires but well before it should, you may still have the right for free repair, replacement, or refund. (I used these laws when my cell phone failed out of warranty, due to an obvious manufacturing defect.)
Of course if you dropped it from your tree house, you're up the creek without an iPod.
And in order for your free market solution to work, you suggest that the manufacturers should be forced to recycle/dispose themselves? Califohnia's approach seems more free-market than that, after all, consumers would also like to pay as little as possible.
No, the manufacturers can contract with whomever they'd like. Free market means just that. If they don't want to handle it directly, they can take the fees they've collected and spend them on a 3rd party contractor.
The ideal situation would be to place the burden on the market in such that there is an incentive to reduce costs.
Therefore, if manufacturers have the burden, they will have to charge customers indirectly by increasing purchase price (after all, customers pay for everything in the end).
And if manufacturers carry the direct burden, they will also have the desire to lower disposal costs. Instead of a flat $6 for disposal costs, the manufacturer will want to lower it as close to zero as possible.
This becomes a win-win. It costs the consumer in the end (as it always does), but manufacturers have a strong incentive to minimize the disposal costs.
At the end of the day, I'll speculate that this could be a profit center for the manufacturer - the resale of whole components and quality recycled raw materials could wind up making them money.
Slashdot Mirror
I have about 54 Unix servers to care and feed.
I estimate that we will perform zero patches to handle these specific rule changes.
The switch already happens - it'll just happen on different days. And if you recall, these changes have happened before - so it isn't really unexpected for those who have been in the business a while.
The Y2K contracting folks will have you jumping off your seats, but for everyone who runs these systems: no big deal.
I'm sure some home users will be caught off guard, but then again most desktop users have their clock set to the wrong timezone.
It's dumb to see the morse code requirement go.
I remember a couple scenarios where it was critical to life safety:
First, there was a time when my buddy was captured by enemy soldiers and stuck in front of a TV camera to communicate propaganda. He was able to send a patriotic morse-encoded message to the public by batting his eyelids.
Later, when in a POW camp, I was able to bang morse on the heating pipes to communicate with my buddies and stay sane. That lasted until our captors realized that POWs don't normally get baseboard heat.
Finally, I was out on a multi-year mission when some of our colleagues ran into trouble, and suffered some kind of communications failure where they could no longer transmit by voice. They improvised and started to use some ancient signaling system. Fortunately, the captain was able to recognize it as morse and decoded the message, and we were able to rescue them.
Kids who don't learn morse now will certainly be disadvantaged in the future.
HP doesn't need innovators like Kay. HP is totally into innovating new ways to make money off of printer consumables, and that isn't an expertise that Kay brings to the table.
HP's downfall started to happen as soon as they started selling tons of LaserJet printers.
From there, HP seemed to take a little break and brought nothing new to market. Instead of making great new products, they kept on milking the same printer lines until they got old, crusty, and expensive to operate. They tried to do the same thing with their PC line. They unloaded or failed to focus on their other product lines.
I haven't bought an HP product in years. My ex-girlfriend bought an HP inkjet printer, but it failed quickly and the consumables were ridiculously expensive. It just didn't seem like an HP quality product to me.
So HP fired Alan Kay? That's good for Alan. Because who wants to work for an ink-n-toner company?
Are you a great HP employee? Do you have a history of exceptional service creating great products? Tired of the new HP way, where you don't get to do anything interesting, and where you'll see all of your friends and colleaugues get walked out the door in tears?
Well you can do something about it! You can both fuck HP and get a great new job with good pay and benefits! You can meet new friends, excel at your job, and do something new!
How? Just apply for one of the jobs I have posted right now! That's right, I'm looking for great talent. My organization is stable, and rarely has mass layoffs like your crap company. We work on innovative products that capture the minds of people.
Be a mover. A shaker. Do something innovative for a change!
I was a big fan of Digital's RDB product... but
(1) Oracle was well established with Oracle bought RDB (and in fact, Oracle 7 was well in production)
(2) Oracle paid a pretty penny for RDB. It wasn't given away, and it wasn't cheap (as I recall, well over $1 billion.... but I might be way off base).
I'm sure some of Rdb made it into Oracle, but it would have been nicer for a non-DB company to pick it up and try to run with it as a "complete" product.
they condemn the CEOs and shareholders who created all these jobs for taking profits when the times are good, but would never accept the alternative -- advocating sacrifice from the employees when times are bad.
As a major HP customer, all I have to say is "instability is bad". I don't care about the shareholders - and I have the expectation that HP management and employees will be there to support me. If it wasn't for the customers, HP wouldn't have seen the light of day.
"Coding for all browsers is expensive and increases our development and support costs".
That's the BS I usually hear from people who develop only for one browser - typically the "corporate standard" browser.
Interestingly enough, I have the opposite experience. We reuse our proven code to make sure that our sites work properly with all modern browsers. Pretty standard stuff for all serious software development professionals.
We use a lot of fancy features, support a fancy text editor, calendar widgets, hierarchy controls... basically, everything that people want out of a modern browser interface. And do you know what? Our resulting software works and looks great with IE, FireFox, Opera, Konqueror, and more.
We have tens of thousands of "very active" users per day, and we never get a complaint about our software not working with a less popular browser.
We have a very small software development staff. As the manager of this organization, I can say with confidence that supporting all browsers versus just one costs us zero dollars.
It's all about good design and management practices. If you do some planning for the future by making good, solid, reusable code the first time, you actually end up saving a ton of money. Save time, money, and sanity.
Sadly, most software development organizations just can't handle doing their job right. They don't bother to build good reusable code, resulting in a tedious, unreliable, never-ending tweaking effort whenever the next service pack is released.
No wonder why so many companies have outsourced their development to the 3rd world. Lousy software development practices, such as coding for just the one corporate standard browser, is prohibitively expensive.
It would be great if appliances and lamps summed up their own electricity usage over time. All that electricity comes to us by giving a ton of cash to those people who'd prefer to bomb us or raise our oil prices. Minimizing electricity usage is a good idea.
I've significantly used my electricity costs over the past year just by changing my habits. This guy went a bit further and saved even way more than I did. Impressive.
Like Token Ring it [OS/2] was stillborn
You have a very limited vantage point of history. Token Ring, like OS/2, had a large install base. Token Ring died because once Ethernet was (finally) standardized with 10baseT and low-cost hubs and NICs, it was cheaper and faster and easier. But token ring had a huge install base which was only eliminated once organizations needed to upgrade their bandwidth to 100 Mbit.
No one is going to work for free. That's the myth of open-source.
My company works a lot on open source software. And we actually pay our developers to do so.
Is this a hippie dream? No, it's just practical. We use this open source software in our business because it is the best product available - and it's much less expensive and more robust than anything else on the market.
We continue to develop the software because we have needs that go beyond the current implementation. We give back to the community because we find it cost effective to have good business relationships with the other developers of the "product". If we have a problem, we can fix it ourselves, or we can ask our partners in the community.
It's a pretty simple concept, and it's all based in the finances of business.
To proclaim that Open Source is a hippie dream or an unworkable business model is simply incorrect. Maybe this guy simply fears that open source alternatives to his software may undercut his business.
One innovation that Google came up with is that it learned that it doesn't need a figurehead spokesmodel like Ballmer.
Ballmer does Microsoft a disservice by ranting about innovation but not actually delivering innovation. No wonder why theses Microsoft guys are so uncharismatic - people have a distaste for bullshit-slinging horn tooters.
IBM - the inventor of so many basic industry ideas - is declared a non-innovator.
Apple, who brought so many great ideas from the lab to desktop computing, ideas that Microsoft admittedly embraced after Apple delivered them successfully to market - doesn't get a mention.
And Google, who mostly innovated the idea of not screwing over internet users with ads and pop-ups and cross-marketing crap, is an exciting innovator.
IBM is the innovator of basic technology. Google is the innovator of doing the Internet right. Apple is the PC marketplace innovator.
Microsoft? Um, well they invented something... I just don't know what that is. Truetype? SQL? The mouse? The file system? Does ANYone know?
It costs me over $50/month for a broadband internet connection from Comcast. If someone offered me a reasonably similar connection for $30/month, I'd jump at it.
From the patent:
the main body portion contains the FM transmitter and power/charging circuitry
Here's a great way to avoid that patent: relocate the "FM transmitter" and/or the "power/charging circuitry" away from the "main body" of the device.
This "innovative" patent is therefore easily avoided. Fire up the machinery and start shipping!
Why stop with wall hangings? Why limit oneself to 80 GB?
My mom has been taking a bunch of pictures with her old trusty $100 Olympus D-100 digital camera, but the laptop that she keeps in the kitchen was low on space and doesn't have room for another drive. What to do?
Happily, my mother has a cherished Kitchen Aide mixer - and by welding a bracket onto the mixer, I mounted a 160 GB drive to it. Then I added a USB-to-IDE interface, and now she's baking with tasty gigabytes.
Yum, wholesome goodness. Who could ask for more?
It would be nice to know exactly what law was broken here. Remember, "breaking school policy" is not the same as "breaking the law". Only the legislature(s) can make law.
And so to claim a felony, they're claiming that some law was broken. Why can't anyone describe that law?
I heard the kids were reading Slashdot. Waste of time, those poor souls already lost....
Firefox is slowly making inroads. Its share of the browser market grew to 8% in May, up from 5.59% at the beginning of the year, according to US-based analysts NetApplications.
That may be true over all, but in my world (a large site primarily attracting the 18 - 29 year old demographic within the US) we see something different: FireFox (16%) and Safari (5%).
We have a small development shop (5 developers), but we find it extremely easy to build and deploy a sophisticated web user interface that is compatible with IE, Mozilla + varients, Safari, Opera, Konqueor, and more.
The "trick", if you want to call it that, is to reuse good UI code. Such a strategy saves us time and money, and keeps us lean and keeps us (at least usability-wise) well ahead of the competition. Oh, and we also support accessibility standards.
I have a feeling that we do it well because most all of our developers are professionals - they didn't just "stumble into the webmaster job by creating a webpage".
Anyhow, just as well - our competitors' sites look and work like crap.
I remember when a competitor's site crapped out was broken for weeks when a new version of IE was released... they had many versions of their UI code splattered throughout their site - I feel bad for the people that have to deal with all that crap.
[T]his could mean major trouble for distros like Xandros and Linspire which are reliant on the desktop audience
But more likely, Mac-on-Intel will have no impact on Xandros or Linspire. After all, the Mac platform exists today - and you don't see the Linspire folks all panicky about it.
Let's face it - those who use Linspire or Xandros do so because it is either (1) packaged with a bottom-tier PC, or (2) it's fun.
This is does not describe the Mac user. The Mac user wants a smooth, much-better-than-Windows experience... and is willing to pay for a quality PC to do so. The Mac user doesn't care about the chipset, as long as there is a significantly better user experience than that offered by Windows.
In the future, I doubt you're going to see any name-brand quality PCs with proprietary OSs at Walmart. These very low cost products fit the dirt-cheap niche. If they improve, they could compete with the Mac. If not, they can compete with Windows on price and experience, and they can compete with the Mac on price alone.
In a nutshell, the chipset is less important than the price and the user experience.
Congratulations!
I've been looking at senior software developer positions, but is that too high up the ladder for someone 'fresh' to cope with?
Of course, each business is different in terms of "titles" and labor grades. A senior position in one place might be easy for the average employee to obtain - while a senior position at a different employer may be next to impossible to land unless you're the world's expert at something.
I have 12 people reporting to me. Two of them are "senior developers", with 4 and 8 years experience post college. One has an MS in CS, the other does not. Both were promoted into their senior position. I fully trust these senior guys with almost anything.
The other ten people are "software developers". They have between 2 and 12 years of full time experience. Two have an MS in CS, the others do not.
It'd be very unusual for me to hire you over these experienced, trusted, and predictable employees. Can you climb the ladder quickly? Yes, if you prove yourself - but you have to EARN a senior developer position by proving yourself in all sorts of circumstances.
Unless you have proven high caliber on-the-job experience, I would not hire you into a senior position. It is important to "aim high", but it's dumb to "aim so high" that you miss the job market.
Jobs, 50, said he attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon but dropped out after only eight months because it was too expensive for his working-class family. He said his real education started when he "dropped in" on whatever classes interested him -- including calligraphy.'
.. with the goal of education. And at the same time he was able to help out his family financially.
The facts are that a large number of students leave college due to family finance problems.
Many poor, uneducated kids end up on the streets, in jail, or working at the local department store for 40 years.
Steve Jobs managed to attend classes that grasped his interest
Wouldn't it be great if more kids were able to do that? Jobs wasn't a drain, and he had to sacrifice his college education for his family.
Most college kids are a major drain on their family. I know I was.
63%? Who says!
Oh Proofpoint says! A company that is trying to sell their email monitoring products/services.
I imagine that a company that sells a product might want to convince IT managers that using their product is what everyone is doing within the industry. And to convince IT managers, they might want to tailor their survey to greatly up their numbers, and pump the press to get the word out.
This is not an independent study. This is a press release by a company with a vested interest in the marketplace they're reporting within.
Sure, no one likes email monitoring. Let's talk about how Proofpoint is looking to make millions by providing the mechanisms for snooping into your email.
I wish cell phone manufacturers would offer the same service. Man, I'd be rich with all the obsolete cell phones I have.
Heck, HP takes used toner carts back. Even though they might be worth some money, its good to see HP taking back what would otherwise be landfilled.
Definitely return it! Depending on what country you live in, your warranty may be two years, one year, or 90 days. And in some US states there are "fitness of merchantability" laws - if it fails after the warranty expires but well before it should, you may still have the right for free repair, replacement, or refund. (I used these laws when my cell phone failed out of warranty, due to an obvious manufacturing defect.)
Of course if you dropped it from your tree house, you're up the creek without an iPod.
My mom's car ran over my iPod (I left it on her trunk in error... stupid).
In any case, I kept it as a keepsake. It's good to know that I can now get something!
And in order for your free market solution to work, you suggest that the manufacturers should be forced to recycle/dispose themselves? Califohnia's approach seems more free-market than that, after all, consumers would also like to pay as little as possible.
No, the manufacturers can contract with whomever they'd like. Free market means just that. If they don't want to handle it directly, they can take the fees they've collected and spend them on a 3rd party contractor.
The ideal situation would be to place the burden on the market in such that there is an incentive to reduce costs.
Therefore, if manufacturers have the burden, they will have to charge customers indirectly by increasing purchase price (after all, customers pay for everything in the end).
And if manufacturers carry the direct burden, they will also have the desire to lower disposal costs. Instead of a flat $6 for disposal costs, the manufacturer will want to lower it as close to zero as possible.
This becomes a win-win. It costs the consumer in the end (as it always does), but manufacturers have a strong incentive to minimize the disposal costs.
At the end of the day, I'll speculate that this could be a profit center for the manufacturer - the resale of whole components and quality recycled raw materials could wind up making them money.