Here are just a few more of the many abuses by banks:
The Federal Reserve Bank is not federal. There is nothing in reserve. It is not a bank. Three lies in the title! "The Fed" is controlled by the big banks.
Someone associated with the big banks, acting for "The Fed", determines the interest rate that will be paid on savings. There are often news stories saying how brilliant he is for lowering the interest rate, which allows the banks higher income, and means that those who save money get less interest.
Retirement savings accounts (IRAs): 1) IRAs are given a lower interest rate. 2) When IRA CDs are renewed automatically, it is always at a lower interest rate, taking advantage of people who are extremely busy before the renewal date, and don't have time to research a better rate at a different bank.
Credit Cards: 1) Credit card rules are changed any time the bank wants, with little prior notice. 2) Changes in the rules are hidden in complicated language.
Savings accounts: 1) Banks advertise a high rate, then lower the rate later, with very little or no notice. 2) Accounts don't show the interest rate. 3) Banks advertise phrases like "Great Rate" and then give an especially poor rate, depending on the lack of ability of most people to do research.
Bank Representatives: 1) Banks hire support people who have no power other than to waste time. 2) Online email support people press a button and give pre-recorded answers that have no relevance to the issue raised.
This will cause a major Streisand Effect for Goldman Sachs. Now everyone will know what they want hidden.
It seems to me the banks are largely in control of the country, not the government or the people.
We need to transfer money to and from Europe and Brazil. We discovered that the banks: 1) Determine the exchange rate themselves; some banks won't even tell you their exchange rate in advance. 2) Charge a large fixed fee. 3) Charge a percentage of the money transferred.
We've done considerable research on the problem of scanning documents, also,
and came to the same conclusion: The new Fujitsu fi-6130 seems excellent, although we haven't
tried it. That model and the 6230 are new, and there is some evidence that
waiting for the second version of those models would be a good idea.
The big attraction of the fi-6130 is its speed: 40 pages per minute.
If you are interested, I suggest you download the manual. (PDF)
The manual talks about a connection for an "imprinter", which sounds
as though it is a printer that works only with that particular Fujitsu
scanner. That causes me to doubt whether buying from Fujitsu would be a good
idea; we don't want to get involved with corporate marketing drone
foolishness. Everything else, however, looks quite good.
The scanner comes with OCR software. I suppose and hope that Fujitsu
did a lot of work and found the best OCR software.
The scanner software makes a PDF. The OCR software tries to recognize
the words, so that the software can make a searchable PDF. Even if the OCR
recognition isn't perfect, it can be very useful.
It seems to me that the Fujitsu fi-6230, suggested in the parent
comment, is a poor design. It combines an automatic sheetfed scanner with a
flatbed scanner for a lot more money. That doesn't make sense, since the
attractive feature of the sheetfed scanner is its speed. Speed is important
with a flatbed scanner, but not as important, since the operation will always
be manual. It seems to me that it would be better to have a flatbed scanner
that is a separate piece of equipment, rather than two pieces seemingly glued
together, without any logical connection, since apparently the 6250 has two
imaging elements.
Be careful about using Windows Search, as suggested in the parent
comment. The Windows XP version is buggy, and sometimes won't look into files
that are there. We use VCOM's PowerDesk pdfind.exe program, a older version of
which is free. We also use Funduc Software's Search and Replace program.
Most scanners are quite slow, don't have automatic document feeders
that allow scanning of papers of widely different sizes, and don't build OCR'd
indexes inside the PDF files.
The Slashdot story is excessively pro-Microsoft, in my opinion. Quoting the Slashdot story: "... over seven years after the OS originally shipped..." That gives a much more positive impression than is warranted, in my opinion.
Windows XP had very serious problems until the release of Service Pack 2. So Windows XP release version is only 4 1/2 years old.
Service Pack 3 fixed many, many, many bugs that Microsoft itself called "critical". So the final, fully usable version of Windows XP has been available less than a year. A year of good use is not much in return for 6 years of numerous cases of grief and hassles and huge maintenance expense.
Vista was an attempt to get people to abandon Windows XP. Vista was first released about two years ago.
So, one version of the Windows product, Windows XP, was not fully finished until more than a year after the next version, Windows Vista, was first sold, although Windows Vista was so unfinished that it was rejected in the marketplace.
When the version of Windows called Windows 7 is released, many people will be buying their third version of the Windows OS in only two years, even though one of the versions, Vista, was never finished.
That's product churning.
Sooner or later the average buyer will realize that they don't need Microsoft's pushy "upgrades", which all must use much more CPU power, because Microsoft's real customers, the big computer hardware manufacturers, want everyone to buy new hardware. Microsoft is trying to continue creating an artificial market, and the average buyer is becoming more aware of that.
You said, "I suspect the only social failure in this case was MS's inability to hype silverlight..." That isn't sufficiently logical.
You seem to say that Microsoft's only social failure was that the company was not sufficiently dishonest enough to get people to believe they should accept the problems with Silverlight. But dishonesty is social failure.
Amazingly bad commercial. What were the people at Dell thinking? Isn't there any review of new commercials? Didn't they show the commercial to a few people before releasing it?
"You'd think that... they [Microsoft] would have spent a little more effort making sure everything worked just right..."
I agree with everything you said.
It's interesting that the failures of technological companies are often social failures, not fundamentally technological failures.
What theories do you have about why Microsoft allowed the failure to happen? Has Microsoft become unable to function? Or, is Microsoft accustomed to its virtual monopoly causing people to accept Microsoft software no matter how buggy? Or, what?
Yes, but for it to be that little, the babies have to pay the same amount.
The answer: Put the babies to work. When you call to talk to someone at your bank, you will hear, "Goo-goo". The bank didn't want to talk to you anyway.
It was always obvious that if Microsoft delivered one good operating system, most users would not feel a need to have another. Windows XP SP3 is fine for most private users and businesses.
Run limited user accounts and use the latest version of Firefox available in 2015, and that should be sufficiently secure.
There are 21,262,641 people in Australia. Forty-three billion is 2,022 Australian dollars for every man, woman, and child in the country.
It's difficult to believe that the government could spend that much money, particularly since I understand that Australia does not have sufficiently fast internet connections with the rest of the world.
"... why would anyone want to read a review of a movie that isn't finished?"
The fact that an un-released movie is available on the internet immediately is something that everyone should know, not just Slashdot readers. Unless there is government corruption, voters help determine the laws that are passed. Voters can't help guide the country if they don't know what is happening.
In a country that is democratic, reporters must be allowed to report anything that is true.
You can read the fired reporter's article courtesy of a link posted below. If the reporter did anything wrong, it was not being sufficiently negative about the fact that he could see an un-released movie online. But he was negative: "I found a work in progress print of it, 95 percent completed, on the internet last night. Let's hope by now it's gone." And, "But obviously someone who had access to a print uploaded it onto this website. This begs several questions about security. Time to round up the usual suspects."
What will be the effect of his posting a story about an un-finished print of the movie, and Slashdot covering it? In this case, it will definitely sell more movie tickets. He gave the unfinished movie a very positive review: "This may be the big blockbuster film of 2009,..." Sure, people could watch the unfinished print online. But those who like movies usually don't want to spoil the fun by watching something that is not finished.
The story was posted exactly where it should be, in the entertainment section. Quoting: "I don't know what the really big headline is here: the fact that "Wolverine" is so good, or that I also found the current top 10 movies in theaters [online],..." This is something those who watch movies should know.
Many people who watch movies don't read books or read serious articles in newspapers, or think about serious issues facing the country, or even have an internet connection. The only way they will get this news is by having the news in an entertainment section of some publication. For example, a hairdresser might mention the movie and the piracy while her customer's hair is drying.
Because I'm interested in serious issues, I already knew about the piracy problem. But I'm not the necessary target audience. I don't watch movies because there are too many typical Hollywood lies in every movie, such as: "An attractive woman should be able to break any moral rule." I've found that movies made in "Bollywood", in India, are even worse: "A woman should be able to avoid responsibility for anything by doing a little crying. If she cries, then men have to find a way to solve the problem." Obviously, being a man, I'm not going to subscribe to a lie that says that women are superior to men. I don't like any lie, and usually in a movie there are several lies every few minutes.
Also, here are two stories. You can decide which is more believable:
1) It's a big budget movie, and there have been piracy problems in the past, but the movie studio didn't have enough security. Even though thousands of people are losing their jobs every day, someone risked losing a good movie-making job to post a stolen un-finished copy of the film so anyone can see it without paying. That person risked his job without any way of making money from the theft.
Or:
2) Someone at the movie studio decided that having an un-finished, rough copy of the movie available on the internet would be a good marketing scheme.
"... suffer from being shared between a large number of people (several hundred or even a thousand, IIRC)."
Yes, that's obvious. They are trying to make use too little equipment for too many customers. The cell phone companies do that too; there is no regulation about quality of service, as there is for land line telephones.
There's an easy solution. Just install more of the latest design of central office equipment, so that there are fewer customers per hardware installation.
Apparently cable companies don't do that because, if they want more money, they can raise prices any time they like, even if service is poor.
The article is badly written, it's true. However, the issue the article is trying to make clear is that there is a cheap way of providing much faster service: by upgrading cable service. Upgrading cable service doesn't require new cable, or work in the streets; it just requires new equipment at the central office and new modems for the customer.
The reason that the cable companies don't do that, apparently, is because in the U.S. they were granted poorly regulated monopolies. Therefore they can 1) lie to customers, 2) give poor service, and 3) give slow service, and still raise prices.
Wireless access from a 3G phone allows a cafe owner to provide internet access to anyone in the cafe, and to anyone near the cafe. That's not what those who provide 3G phone service envisioned. I'm not sure it matters, but it is certainly different than just "phone service".
Slashdot Mirror
Here are just a few more of the many abuses by banks:
The Federal Reserve Bank is not federal. There is nothing in reserve. It is not a bank. Three lies in the title! "The Fed" is controlled by the big banks.
Someone associated with the big banks, acting for "The Fed", determines the interest rate that will be paid on savings. There are often news stories saying how brilliant he is for lowering the interest rate, which allows the banks higher income, and means that those who save money get less interest.
Retirement savings accounts (IRAs): 1) IRAs are given a lower interest rate. 2) When IRA CDs are renewed automatically, it is always at a lower interest rate, taking advantage of people who are extremely busy before the renewal date, and don't have time to research a better rate at a different bank.
Credit Cards: 1) Credit card rules are changed any time the bank wants, with little prior notice. 2) Changes in the rules are hidden in complicated language.
Savings accounts: 1) Banks advertise a high rate, then lower the rate later, with very little or no notice. 2) Accounts don't show the interest rate. 3) Banks advertise phrases like "Great Rate" and then give an especially poor rate, depending on the lack of ability of most people to do research.
Bank Representatives: 1) Banks hire support people who have no power other than to waste time. 2) Online email support people press a button and give pre-recorded answers that have no relevance to the issue raised.
This will cause a major Streisand Effect for Goldman Sachs. Now everyone will know what they want hidden.
It seems to me the banks are largely in control of the country, not the government or the people.
We need to transfer money to and from Europe and Brazil. We discovered that the banks: 1) Determine the exchange rate themselves; some banks won't even tell you their exchange rate in advance. 2) Charge a large fixed fee. 3) Charge a percentage of the money transferred.
COBOL: Completely Obsolete Business Oriented Language
COBOL in the future
Why not translate? COBOL to C++ translators.
Adamo commercial
"... men dressed in gay-looking butterfly costumes on TV commercials..."
Thanks for the clarification. I had forgotten how bad those Microsoft commercials were. Definitely, "systemic incompetence", as you said.
We've done considerable research on the problem of scanning documents, also, and came to the same conclusion: The new Fujitsu fi-6130 seems excellent, although we haven't tried it. That model and the 6230 are new, and there is some evidence that waiting for the second version of those models would be a good idea.
The big attraction of the fi-6130 is its speed: 40 pages per minute.
If you are interested, I suggest you download the manual. (PDF)
The manual talks about a connection for an "imprinter", which sounds as though it is a printer that works only with that particular Fujitsu scanner. That causes me to doubt whether buying from Fujitsu would be a good idea; we don't want to get involved with corporate marketing drone foolishness. Everything else, however, looks quite good.
The scanner comes with OCR software. I suppose and hope that Fujitsu did a lot of work and found the best OCR software.
The scanner software makes a PDF. The OCR software tries to recognize the words, so that the software can make a searchable PDF. Even if the OCR recognition isn't perfect, it can be very useful.
It seems to me that the Fujitsu fi-6230, suggested in the parent comment, is a poor design. It combines an automatic sheetfed scanner with a flatbed scanner for a lot more money. That doesn't make sense, since the attractive feature of the sheetfed scanner is its speed. Speed is important with a flatbed scanner, but not as important, since the operation will always be manual. It seems to me that it would be better to have a flatbed scanner that is a separate piece of equipment, rather than two pieces seemingly glued together, without any logical connection, since apparently the 6250 has two imaging elements.
Be careful about using Windows Search, as suggested in the parent comment. The Windows XP version is buggy, and sometimes won't look into files that are there. We use VCOM's PowerDesk pdfind.exe program, a older version of which is free. We also use Funduc Software's Search and Replace program.
Most scanners are quite slow, don't have automatic document feeders that allow scanning of papers of widely different sizes, and don't build OCR'd indexes inside the PDF files.
As you know, it's worse than you say.
The Slashdot story is excessively pro-Microsoft, in my opinion. Quoting the Slashdot story: "... over seven years after the OS originally shipped..." That gives a much more positive impression than is warranted, in my opinion.
Windows XP had very serious problems until the release of Service Pack 2. So Windows XP release version is only 4 1/2 years old.
Service Pack 3 fixed many, many, many bugs that Microsoft itself called "critical". So the final, fully usable version of Windows XP has been available less than a year. A year of good use is not much in return for 6 years of numerous cases of grief and hassles and huge maintenance expense.
Vista was an attempt to get people to abandon Windows XP. Vista was first released about two years ago.
So, one version of the Windows product, Windows XP, was not fully finished until more than a year after the next version, Windows Vista, was first sold, although Windows Vista was so unfinished that it was rejected in the marketplace.
When the version of Windows called Windows 7 is released, many people will be buying their third version of the Windows OS in only two years, even though one of the versions, Vista, was never finished.
That's product churning.
Sooner or later the average buyer will realize that they don't need Microsoft's pushy "upgrades", which all must use much more CPU power, because Microsoft's real customers, the big computer hardware manufacturers, want everyone to buy new hardware. Microsoft is trying to continue creating an artificial market, and the average buyer is becoming more aware of that.
I respectfully disagree.
You said, "I suspect the only social failure in this case was MS's inability to hype silverlight..." That isn't sufficiently logical.
You seem to say that Microsoft's only social failure was that the company was not sufficiently dishonest enough to get people to believe they should accept the problems with Silverlight. But dishonesty is social failure.
Amazingly bad commercial. What were the people at Dell thinking? Isn't there any review of new commercials? Didn't they show the commercial to a few people before releasing it?
Note who posted the parent message: Miguel de Icaza. He should know. Here's an interesting interview: Talking Mono with Miguel de Icaza
Del Adamo video? This one? It certainly isn't attractive to me, but what didn't you like about it?
"I understand [my puppy] someday might grow up to bite me."
Bad analogy. This is the correct analogy:
"My puppy has bitten me severely several times and I understand when he is larger the bites may be even worse."
Haven't you heard of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"? Here are 6,780 links.
"You'd think that ... they [Microsoft] would have spent a little more effort making sure everything worked just right..."
I agree with everything you said.
It's interesting that the failures of technological companies are often social failures, not fundamentally technological failures.
What theories do you have about why Microsoft allowed the failure to happen? Has Microsoft become unable to function? Or, is Microsoft accustomed to its virtual monopoly causing people to accept Microsoft software no matter how buggy? Or, what?
If you spent all day reading Slashdot, you would know this already: --grin-- Free Flex Builder for Unemployed Developers.
Yes, but for it to be that little, the babies have to pay the same amount.
The answer: Put the babies to work. When you call to talk to someone at your bank, you will hear, "Goo-goo". The bank didn't want to talk to you anyway.
"I agree with you on this."
If you agree, then no one should be able to make policies that prevent reporters from doing their jobs.
10 Cars That Sank Detroit
Don't worry, other people will support XP.
It was always obvious that if Microsoft delivered one good operating system, most users would not feel a need to have another. Windows XP SP3 is fine for most private users and businesses.
Run limited user accounts and use the latest version of Firefox available in 2015, and that should be sufficiently secure.
There are 21,262,641 people in Australia. Forty-three billion is 2,022 Australian dollars for every man, woman, and child in the country. It's difficult to believe that the government could spend that much money, particularly since I understand that Australia does not have sufficiently fast internet connections with the rest of the world.
Read the Australian government announcement.
LOL: "... if you're in Tasmania (and who isn't?)"
Not "Down with women". Down with women being self-destructive.
"... why would anyone want to read a review of a movie that isn't finished?"
..." Sure, people could watch the unfinished print online. But those who like movies usually don't want to spoil the fun by watching something that is not finished.
..." This is something those who watch movies should know.
The fact that an un-released movie is available on the internet immediately is something that everyone should know, not just Slashdot readers. Unless there is government corruption, voters help determine the laws that are passed. Voters can't help guide the country if they don't know what is happening.
In a country that is democratic, reporters must be allowed to report anything that is true.
You can read the fired reporter's article courtesy of a link posted below. If the reporter did anything wrong, it was not being sufficiently negative about the fact that he could see an un-released movie online. But he was negative: "I found a work in progress print of it, 95 percent completed, on the internet last night. Let's hope by now it's gone." And, "But obviously someone who had access to a print uploaded it onto this website. This begs several questions about security. Time to round up the usual suspects."
The book, The Irony of Democracy: An Uncommon Introduction to American Politics discussses the fact that only a very small percentage of citizens understand democratic principles. (Get the book from the library. Don't pay Amazon $66.95 for a paperback.)
What will be the effect of his posting a story about an un-finished print of the movie, and Slashdot covering it? In this case, it will definitely sell more movie tickets. He gave the unfinished movie a very positive review: "This may be the big blockbuster film of 2009,
The story was posted exactly where it should be, in the entertainment section. Quoting: "I don't know what the really big headline is here: the fact that "Wolverine" is so good, or that I also found the current top 10 movies in theaters [online],
Many people who watch movies don't read books or read serious articles in newspapers, or think about serious issues facing the country, or even have an internet connection. The only way they will get this news is by having the news in an entertainment section of some publication. For example, a hairdresser might mention the movie and the piracy while her customer's hair is drying.
Because I'm interested in serious issues, I already knew about the piracy problem. But I'm not the necessary target audience. I don't watch movies because there are too many typical Hollywood lies in every movie, such as: "An attractive woman should be able to break any moral rule." I've found that movies made in "Bollywood", in India, are even worse: "A woman should be able to avoid responsibility for anything by doing a little crying. If she cries, then men have to find a way to solve the problem." Obviously, being a man, I'm not going to subscribe to a lie that says that women are superior to men. I don't like any lie, and usually in a movie there are several lies every few minutes.
Also, here are two stories. You can decide which is more believable:
1) It's a big budget movie, and there have been piracy problems in the past, but the movie studio didn't have enough security. Even though thousands of people are losing their jobs every day, someone risked losing a good movie-making job to post a stolen un-finished copy of the film so anyone can see it without paying. That person risked his job without any way of making money from the theft.
Or:
2) Someone at the movie studio decided that having an un-finished, rough copy of the movie available on the internet would be a good marketing scheme.
Many people understand
"... suffer from being shared between a large number of people (several hundred or even a thousand, IIRC)."
Yes, that's obvious. They are trying to make use too little equipment for too many customers. The cell phone companies do that too; there is no regulation about quality of service, as there is for land line telephones.
There's an easy solution. Just install more of the latest design of central office equipment, so that there are fewer customers per hardware installation.
Apparently cable companies don't do that because, if they want more money, they can raise prices any time they like, even if service is poor.
The article is badly written, it's true. However, the issue the article is trying to make clear is that there is a cheap way of providing much faster service: by upgrading cable service. Upgrading cable service doesn't require new cable, or work in the streets; it just requires new equipment at the central office and new modems for the customer.
The reason that the cable companies don't do that, apparently, is because in the U.S. they were granted poorly regulated monopolies. Therefore they can 1) lie to customers, 2) give poor service, and 3) give slow service, and still raise prices.
Wireless access from a 3G phone allows a cafe owner to provide internet access to anyone in the cafe, and to anyone near the cafe. That's not what those who provide 3G phone service envisioned. I'm not sure it matters, but it is certainly different than just "phone service".
I checked the facts, and discovered the error. That's what editors are supposed to do.