I agree with all of your points. Requiring all police officers to have law degrees goes a little far, but police training could be a lot better.
I have a friend researching this problem for his sociology dissertation. As part of his research he has participated in one and observed additional police academy programs. Most of the academy time is spent learning and practicing aggressive tactics while very little time is spent on problem solving and the community aspect of police work. As a result, recruits are rewarded for aggressiveness which introduces a bias into the final selection of who becomes a cop. Once an officer, very little time is spent using these aggressive tactics (they're still important) and problem solving skills become more important but the academy has selected those with the wrong skills for real police work.
I'm not sure how becoming bigger and adding inter-company politics to the already debilitating (for MSFT) itra-office politics will help them build search and advertising products that are better than Google's. In my completely naive opinion, I think each company would be better off throwing a handfull of their best people in a room and seeing what they can come up with when they can focus on technology.
to give a little empirical support to your argument, two years ago I left my position as a software engineer to pursue my ph.d. in economics and become a professor at a research university.
Re:trust and control
on
Gmail vs Pine
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Google a company and its officers are legally obligated to increase shareholder value, not protect my privacy, or stand for what is right or fair.
I don't want to (and won't) get into an off-topic argument about corporations, but this simply isn't true.
not only that but you have to wait over a second for their "smooth scroll" to stop moving the text so you can read it. terrible usability in my opinion.
In closing, the US needs to sell $3,000,000,000 in bonds everyday to China just to keep running. If they really wished us harm they could just stop buying our debt. Once China no longer relies on exports we will be at their mercy. That will happen in around 10 - 20 years just when the US needs money to fund SS payments to baby-boomers.
statements like this are in the news a lot, but i've never talked to a respectable economist that thinks it's true. what model are you using to come up with this scenario? by "buying our debt" they are investing in US companies. if they are out to get us, why are they giving their savings to US companies to use for capital investment?
additionally, economic growth in china has been enormously beneficial to the united states. it has created jobs and increased growth in our own country because of increased trade. data shows it and nearly any trade model will support this whether it is an old model based on comparative advantage or a "new tade" model based on increased competition.
They should take advantage of the basic economic idea of comparative advantage. In economics, it dictates why trade between two countries is beneficial, even if country A happens to be more efficient at producing everything than country B. What matters is not the absolute level of efficiency, but the ratio of efficiencies. It could also help out distributed computing.
The following numbers are synthetic: I chose them to make the math easy. Let's say there are two distributed computing projects to choose from: OGR and RC5. There are also two different computers you can use to work on the projects, a G5 or a P4.
The G5 can complete 3000 units of OGR in one hour and 1500 units of RC5 The P4 can complete 1500 units of OGR in one hour and 1000 units of RC5.
I have a P4 and like to work on OGR, while my friend Eliza has a G5 and prefers to work on RC5. We each fire up our distributed clients and let them run for two hours, then check our stats:
OGR on P4: 2 hours * 1500 units/hour = 3000 OGR units RC5 on G5: 2 hours * 1500 units/hour = 3000 RC5 units
Now let's see what comparative advantage has to offer. The P4's ratio of efficiencies is 1500 OGR units/hour to 1000 RC5 units/hour, or 3 OGR/2 RC5. The G5's ratio is 2 OGR/1 RC5. In other words, even though the G5 is better at both OGR and RC5, it is relatively better at OGR.
I already know I can crunch 3000 OGR units in two hours. Instead of actually doing this, I ask Eliza to work on OGR for me while I do RC5 for her. Now what happens?
OGR on G5: 2 hours * 3000 units/hour = 6000 OGR units RC5 on P4: 2 hours * 1000 units/hour = 2000 RC5 units
This is great for me, 6000 OGR units were completed. But Eliza's not happy because the RC5 work is falling behind. What happens if she works on each project for an hour while I work on OGR for.2 hours and RC5 in the remaining time? 3300 OGR units and 3300 RC5 units get completed. That's 300 more units for each project than if we each worked on our favorites by ourselves.
This shouldn't be too difficult to implement. With BOINC, instead of choosing which project their computer will actually work on, a user submits their project preferences. Then the client runs a series of benchmarks that determine the computer's ratios of efficiencies. These data are sent to the distributed server which determines the optimal allocation of work between all clients, while guaranteeing each client that as much or more work will be done on the project of their choice as would occur if that client worked solely on its preferred project.
i agree with the spirit of your post, but it is technically incorrect.
i think you are driving towards the idea of price elasticity of demand, where if demand is elastic, revenue will actually increase when price is lowered because the percent drop in price is smaller than the percent increase in sales.
in the special and unlikely case of a linear demand curve, the left half of the curve is elastic (revenue increases with a drop in price) while the right half is inelastic (revenue decreases with a drop in price). i think this may be what you were talking about in your post.
of course this is revenue, not profit. but in a market like itunes with very little and probably constant marginal cost (for the record labels), maximizing revenue is very close to maximizing profit.
ok, this is getting rediculous and i'm not wasting any more of my time after this post.
Corporations are an abomination.
this is so vague i don't even know what it is supposed to mean. regardless, it's your opinion, not something backed by facts.
Artificial entities created to shirk responsibility, with the same rights as a human being, immoral at the core.
artificial? as opposed to what? are there business structures that are not artificial? they grow in the forest?
where do you get the idea that corporations are created to shirk responsibility? they are created to allow firms to raise levels of capital that are not possible to raise with debt and private funding alone and to limit the liability of the stakeholders. same rights as a human? obviously false. i'm curious what your source is for your definition of a corporation. why are corporations immoral at the core? you make all of these bold claims without any evidence or factual content.
They should be gotten rid of and replaced with business structures that emphasize personal responsiblity and moral behavior.
what do you propose?
i'd also like to remind you that this website you seem to be enjoying is run by and owned by an "evil corporation"
Why do you care so much about corporations anyway?
i don't care about corporations in particular. there are very few corporations that i would say i like. i just think it is ridiculous to single out a certain type of legal structure, especially when the organization in question isn't even a corporation.
i'd like to see some rational discussion on the topic that doesn't resort to rhetoric and hyperbole. in your post you lamented the labeling of activists as "communists" because it invokes gut reactions in people, yet you used the same tactic by specifically targeting corporations. greed and malice in the business world extends well beyond corporations, and i would argue that it is more prevalent in private companies where there is less transparency. they just don't make the headlines like enron did.
not always. look at the forbes list of the largest private companies. there are hundreds of privately held companies that are larger than the majority of corporations.
2)Have a power setup where its more likely those in charge are amoral asshats.
simply not true. there are corporate governance issues that mostly arise from principal-agent problems, but by definition corporations give power to the shareholders. if management is not acting in the interest of shareholders, they risk getting kicked out or taken over. sure, there are plenty of asshats in top management and on boards of corporations, but the same goes for other types of companies. corporations are structured in a way that makes this problem easier to correct, not harder.
i'm also confused why the grandparent mentioned corporations in the first place. the riaa is not a corporation and the majority of the member labels are not corporations.
"he has been tought to reflexivey hate zealots and communists even though he probably could not define communist if his life depended on it."
and why is it that you single out corporations in your little rant? is it because all corporations are evil? is it because non-incorporated firms don't advertise and try to get people to buy their products? or is it because the word "corporation" is rhetorically effective and reflexively conjures images of greed in the people you are preaching to?
i'm not trying to defend the riaa here, i despise their business practices just as much as you, but i'm sick of hearing generic "anti-corporate" rants that don't contribute to the discussion.
i don't know why your cousin was so secretive. yahoo bought oddpost over a year ago and immediately announced they would be offering yahoo mail through a dhtml interface derived from oddpost's code. there was even a slashdot article about it.
additionally, the cost quoted is an average per chip cost. i'm assuming this isn't limited to pentium 4 chips, but includes all chips that intel makes.
they contrast this $40 average cost with the consumer price of a p4, which is probably one of the most expensive chips. the average cost of making a p4 is probably much higher than $40.
in game theory language, IT employment is a game of private information. workers know how good they are, but potential employers don't have this information.
for example, suppose there are two types of workers: wh (high productivity worker) wl (low productivity worker) and the distribution of workers is such that there are p wh workers and (1-p) wl workers.
suppose that the benefit employers get from workers is equal to their type. this implies that in a competetive labor market a firm would be willing to pay a high productivity worker wh and a low productivity worker wl.
but firms can't observe the types of workers, so they pay the expected value p*wh+(1-p)wl as the industry wage rate.
so (assuming 0 less than p less than 1) firms not being able to observe worker types benefits the low ability workers and hurts the high ability workers.
now suppose that certification is available. to make it even more stark, suppose that certification does nothing to improve the productivity of a worker, but it does cost the worker something (time and effort). the cost for the high productivity worker (ch) is lower than the cost for a low productivity worker (cl) because the material and exams should be easier of the better worker.
the cost of the certification can be set up so that a separating equilibrium results. employers will pay a person with certification wh, while they will only pay wl to a person without certification.
additionally, wh - ch greater than wl - 0 and wh - cl less than wl - 0
so only high productivity workers will get certification.
this is a very basic view of signalling models, but i think it delivers the main point.
a lot of people have been recommending hard drives, which i think are great for frequently used files and frequent backups. the problem is that they fail to get your data off site.
you probably want to occasionally back up to something that you can store in a lock box away from your house. i guess you could do this with disk drives, but i'd rather use tape. more reliable than optical media and plenty of capacity.
Anyone else find it ironic that the best jobs a bunch of obviously talented phd's can get is WRITING SCRIPTS FOR AN ANIMATED SHOW?
ironic? absolutely not.
besides, i can't think of a much more fun job than working on a show like futurama. my guess is that they were there by choice and could have had a traditional job in each of their respective fields if they chose to. i think its great that they used their comedy talent to deliver mathematically and scientifically savvy jokes to a prime-time audience.
Trademark is generally only relevant for trade done in a specific domain - so usage of Tiger for a football franchise won't disallow another company to use football as a software reseller.
----- this is the line of humor.
o here is your head, far below it.
if a person is trying to get to the tigerdirect homepage and they use "tiger" as a search term, they already know the name of the store they are looking for and they know that they're looking for a computer parts store. they shouldn't have any trouble finding it.
if apple's use of tiger was affecting their search ranking for terms a person would use to find an arbitrary store (like "computer retailer" or "computer parts") they might have a stronger case.
i just ordered a 15" powerbook, which will be my first mac (although i use them quite often away from home). aside from the usual benefits like "it just works", my main reason for switching is bsd.
for the past ten years, i've always used two computers, one with windows for a productive work environment + compatability and another with linux for programming and fun.
now with an apple on the way, i hope to get both of those in one machine.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with all of your points. Requiring all police officers to have law degrees goes a little far, but police training could be a lot better.
I have a friend researching this problem for his sociology dissertation. As part of his research he has participated in one and observed additional police academy programs. Most of the academy time is spent learning and practicing aggressive tactics while very little time is spent on problem solving and the community aspect of police work. As a result, recruits are rewarded for aggressiveness which introduces a bias into the final selection of who becomes a cop. Once an officer, very little time is spent using these aggressive tactics (they're still important) and problem solving skills become more important but the academy has selected those with the wrong skills for real police work.
i guess i should eat crow and stop overestimating the intelligence of my fellow countrymen.
We live in a nation where 45% of eligible voters believe the world is 6000 years old
No, we live in a nation where people can make shit up and get modded insightful.
I'm not sure how becoming bigger and adding inter-company politics to the already debilitating (for MSFT) itra-office politics will help them build search and advertising products that are better than Google's. In my completely naive opinion, I think each company would be better off throwing a handfull of their best people in a room and seeing what they can come up with when they can focus on technology.
to give a little empirical support to your argument, two years ago I left my position as a software engineer to pursue my ph.d. in economics and become a professor at a research university.
Google a company and its officers are legally obligated to increase shareholder value, not protect my privacy, or stand for what is right or fair.
I don't want to (and won't) get into an off-topic argument about corporations, but this simply isn't true.
not only that but you have to wait over a second for their "smooth scroll" to stop moving the text so you can read it. terrible usability in my opinion.
In closing, the US needs to sell $3,000,000,000 in bonds everyday to China just to keep running. If they really wished us harm they could just stop buying our debt. Once China no longer relies on exports we will be at their mercy. That will happen in around 10 - 20 years just when the US needs money to fund SS payments to baby-boomers.
statements like this are in the news a lot, but i've never talked to a respectable economist that thinks it's true. what model are you using to come up with this scenario? by "buying our debt" they are investing in US companies. if they are out to get us, why are they giving their savings to US companies to use for capital investment?
additionally, economic growth in china has been enormously beneficial to the united states. it has created jobs and increased growth in our own country because of increased trade. data shows it and nearly any trade model will support this whether it is an old model based on comparative advantage or a "new tade" model based on increased competition.
They should take advantage of the basic economic idea of comparative advantage. In economics, it dictates why trade between two countries is beneficial, even if country A happens to be more efficient at producing everything than country B. What matters is not the absolute level of efficiency, but the ratio of efficiencies. It could also help out distributed computing.
.2 hours and RC5 in the remaining time? 3300 OGR units and 3300 RC5 units get completed. That's 300 more units for each project than if we each worked on our favorites by ourselves.
The following numbers are synthetic: I chose them to make the math easy. Let's say there are two distributed computing projects to choose from: OGR and RC5. There are also two different computers you can use to work on the projects, a G5 or a P4.
The G5 can complete 3000 units of OGR in one hour and 1500 units of RC5
The P4 can complete 1500 units of OGR in one hour and 1000 units of RC5.
I have a P4 and like to work on OGR, while my friend Eliza has a G5 and prefers to work on RC5. We each fire up our distributed clients and let them run for two hours, then check our stats:
OGR on P4: 2 hours * 1500 units/hour = 3000 OGR units
RC5 on G5: 2 hours * 1500 units/hour = 3000 RC5 units
Now let's see what comparative advantage has to offer. The P4's ratio of efficiencies is 1500 OGR units/hour to 1000 RC5 units/hour, or 3 OGR/2 RC5. The G5's ratio is 2 OGR/1 RC5. In other words, even though the G5 is better at both OGR and RC5, it is relatively better at OGR.
I already know I can crunch 3000 OGR units in two hours. Instead of actually doing this, I ask Eliza to work on OGR for me while I do RC5 for her. Now what happens?
OGR on G5: 2 hours * 3000 units/hour = 6000 OGR units
RC5 on P4: 2 hours * 1000 units/hour = 2000 RC5 units
This is great for me, 6000 OGR units were completed. But Eliza's not happy because the RC5 work is falling behind. What happens if she works on each project for an hour while I work on OGR for
This shouldn't be too difficult to implement. With BOINC, instead of choosing which project their computer will actually work on, a user submits their project preferences. Then the client runs a series of benchmarks that determine the computer's ratios of efficiencies. These data are sent to the distributed server which determines the optimal allocation of work between all clients, while guaranteeing each client that as much or more work will be done on the project of their choice as would occur if that client worked solely on its preferred project.
i agree with the spirit of your post, but it is technically incorrect.
i think you are driving towards the idea of price elasticity of demand, where if demand is elastic, revenue will actually increase when price is lowered because the percent drop in price is smaller than the percent increase in sales.
in the special and unlikely case of a linear demand curve, the left half of the curve is elastic (revenue increases with a drop in price) while the right half is inelastic (revenue decreases with a drop in price). i think this may be what you were talking about in your post.
of course this is revenue, not profit. but in a market like itunes with very little and probably constant marginal cost (for the record labels), maximizing revenue is very close to maximizing profit.
ok, this is getting rediculous and i'm not wasting any more of my time after this post.
Corporations are an abomination.
this is so vague i don't even know what it is supposed to mean. regardless, it's your opinion, not something backed by facts.
Artificial entities created to shirk responsibility, with the same rights as a human being, immoral at the core.
artificial? as opposed to what? are there business structures that are not artificial? they grow in the forest?
where do you get the idea that corporations are created to shirk responsibility? they are created to allow firms to raise levels of capital that are not possible to raise with debt and private funding alone and to limit the liability of the stakeholders. same rights as a human? obviously false. i'm curious what your source is for your definition of a corporation. why are corporations immoral at the core? you make all of these bold claims without any evidence or factual content.
They should be gotten rid of and replaced with business structures that emphasize personal responsiblity and moral behavior.
what do you propose?
i'd also like to remind you that this website you seem to be enjoying is run by and owned by an "evil corporation"
Why do you care so much about corporations anyway?
i don't care about corporations in particular. there are very few corporations that i would say i like. i just think it is ridiculous to single out a certain type of legal structure, especially when the organization in question isn't even a corporation.
i'd like to see some rational discussion on the topic that doesn't resort to rhetoric and hyperbole. in your post you lamented the labeling of activists as "communists" because it invokes gut reactions in people, yet you used the same tactic by specifically targeting corporations. greed and malice in the business world extends well beyond corporations, and i would argue that it is more prevalent in private companies where there is less transparency. they just don't make the headlines like enron did.
1)Have a hell of a lot more money.
not always. look at the forbes list of the largest private companies. there are hundreds of privately held companies that are larger than the majority of corporations.
2)Have a power setup where its more likely those in charge are amoral asshats.
simply not true. there are corporate governance issues that mostly arise from principal-agent problems, but by definition corporations give power to the shareholders. if management is not acting in the interest of shareholders, they risk getting kicked out or taken over. sure, there are plenty of asshats in top management and on boards of corporations, but the same goes for other types of companies. corporations are structured in a way that makes this problem easier to correct, not harder.
i'm also confused why the grandparent mentioned corporations in the first place. the riaa is not a corporation and the majority of the member labels are not corporations.
"he has been tought to reflexivey hate zealots and communists even though he probably could not define communist if his life depended on it."
and why is it that you single out corporations in your little rant? is it because all corporations are evil? is it because non-incorporated firms don't advertise and try to get people to buy their products? or is it because the word "corporation" is rhetorically effective and reflexively conjures images of greed in the people you are preaching to?
i'm not trying to defend the riaa here, i despise their business practices just as much as you, but i'm sick of hearing generic "anti-corporate" rants that don't contribute to the discussion.
i don't know why your cousin was so secretive. yahoo bought oddpost over a year ago and immediately announced they would be offering yahoo mail through a dhtml interface derived from oddpost's code. there was even a slashdot article about it.
additionally, the cost quoted is an average per chip cost. i'm assuming this isn't limited to pentium 4 chips, but includes all chips that intel makes.
they contrast this $40 average cost with the consumer price of a p4, which is probably one of the most expensive chips. the average cost of making a p4 is probably much higher than $40.
in game theory language, IT employment is a game of private information. workers know how good they are, but potential employers don't have this information.
for example, suppose there are two types of workers:
wh (high productivity worker)
wl (low productivity worker)
and the distribution of workers is such that there are p wh workers and (1-p) wl workers.
suppose that the benefit employers get from workers is equal to their type. this implies that in a competetive labor market a firm would be willing to pay a high productivity worker wh and a low productivity worker wl.
but firms can't observe the types of workers, so they pay the expected value p*wh+(1-p)wl as the industry wage rate.
so (assuming 0 less than p less than 1) firms not being able to observe worker types benefits the low ability workers and hurts the high ability workers.
now suppose that certification is available. to make it even more stark, suppose that certification does nothing to improve the productivity of a worker, but it does cost the worker something (time and effort). the cost for the high productivity worker (ch) is lower than the cost for a low productivity worker (cl) because the material and exams should be easier of the better worker.
the cost of the certification can be set up so that a separating equilibrium results. employers will pay a person with certification wh, while they will only pay wl to a person without certification.
additionally,
wh - ch greater than wl - 0
and
wh - cl less than wl - 0
so only high productivity workers will get certification.
this is a very basic view of signalling models, but i think it delivers the main point.
Wired Issue 5.03 (March 1997)
Cover Story
a lot of people have been recommending hard drives, which i think are great for frequently used files and frequent backups. the problem is that they fail to get your data off site.
you probably want to occasionally back up to something that you can store in a lock box away from your house. i guess you could do this with disk drives, but i'd rather use tape. more reliable than optical media and plenty of capacity.
Anyone else find it ironic that the best jobs a bunch of obviously talented phd's can get is WRITING SCRIPTS FOR AN ANIMATED SHOW?
ironic? absolutely not.
besides, i can't think of a much more fun job than working on a show like futurama. my guess is that they were there by choice and could have had a traditional job in each of their respective fields if they chose to. i think its great that they used their comedy talent to deliver mathematically and scientifically savvy jokes to a prime-time audience.
there was actually a slashdot article about this too.
david x cohen - physics at harvard (b)
- computer science at berkeley (masters)
stewart burns - math at harvard (phd)
ken keeler - applied math at harvard (phd)
bill odenkirk - chem at chicago (phd)
jeff westbrook - computer science at princeton (phd)
Trademark is generally only relevant for trade done in a specific domain - so usage of Tiger for a football franchise won't disallow another company to use football as a software reseller.
----- this is the line of humor.
o here is your head, far below it.
if a person is trying to get to the tigerdirect homepage and they use "tiger" as a search term, they already know the name of the store they are looking for and they know that they're looking for a computer parts store. they shouldn't have any trouble finding it.
if apple's use of tiger was affecting their search ranking for terms a person would use to find an arbitrary store (like "computer retailer" or "computer parts") they might have a stronger case.
i just ordered a 15" powerbook, which will be my first mac (although i use them quite often away from home). aside from the usual benefits like "it just works", my main reason for switching is bsd.
for the past ten years, i've always used two computers, one with windows for a productive work environment + compatability and another with linux for programming and fun.
now with an apple on the way, i hope to get both of those in one machine.
hopefully it annoys the site operators. plus, it's not really lying since that is one of my email addresses.