or the record, two have ended up Catholic, one agnostic, one athiest - the jury's still out on the youngest two, but they're leaning toward agnostic and Jewish
Well, of course. If there isn't a dress code at all (basics will do, it doesn't mean suits) that indicates that the company really has no idea of what they're doing.
Gee, I'd better go tell Jeff and Bill that they're doing it all wrong.
Seriously, predict a specific disaster, request resources, get denied, then watch that disaster unfold. You will be free of blame, and you will get your resources.
What planet do you live on? Do something like that and you'll be seen as the cause of whatever disaster you predicted, evidence or no.
It's the same situation at my work -- they put my department (RND) under incredible stress because incredible stress is *CHEAP*. Doing the right thing is expensive. This is why engineering and management are always at eachothers throats.
Incredible stress is bloody expensive when you burn out your employees and suddenly nobody knows how the system works.
PCs are an immature technology driven by technical considerations. Also, their sales volume has increased tremendously in the past 30 years. Soda has changed from a special treat to the choice of the diabetes generation. It should come as no surprise that the costs have dropped, especially with so much direct competition.
Cars are different - the volume of sales hasn't exploded in the past 30 years, more things that were optional or not even available are now standard (remote door locks? CD player? Electric windows?). Regardless of all that, cars haven't really gotten much more expensive in 30 years. The brands may move upscale, but the price point for low and middle grade product hasn't moved all that much.
In the clothing world, we have few regulations (some tariffs on cotton and other materials). I can buy a nice, quality hoodie for US$10 at H&M. A few years back they were over US$50 at the mall.
Hoodies are frequently fashion items - their prices have nothing to do with actual costs. You could've gotten a hoddie for $10 a few years back too, just not at the mall.
Tell me again how regulations help and anarchy hurts?
When you have 2 choices for getting a product and sometimes only one, how are you going to tell the ISP to pound sand?
The difference between burger chains and the telco is that the telco needs public right of ways to get to your house and, once that's done, the local government has no reason to give a competitor access. A more apt analogy would be utilities, which are for the most part regulated monopolies. Only difference is that telcos deal in data, not water, gas, or electricity, which are sold by the ton - one gallon of water is pretty much like another. That means that allowing competitors on the supply side is easier for utilities, as it's straight accounting.
Oh yeah, and if you hadn't noticed, fast food is consolidating. Ever wonder why so many kfc/pizza hut/taco bells have popped up?
The 1984 computer games crash was, in part, due to the massive flow of low-quality software being pumped out primarily for the Atari 2600
According to this comment, it was Atari's litigation that was responsible. Once they won, a bunch of games that were in the pipeline were suddenly under the same cloud. Ironic, yes?
Do you know why the filler songs are there? Because people wouldn't pay that same price for a cd that only contains the 2 hit songs. Obviously, they have value.
Hence the name filler. People will pay more than $1/per for a good song, but the filler stuff is actively avoided.
Second, I have issues with your candy bag arguments. If the 10 piece bag cost $10, you're not suddenly buying a candy bar for $1...because the candy bar *was* in the mix bag of candy. I mean, the hit song is in the cd, right?
Yeah, so the 10 piece bag probably cost $5. What's your objection?
Third, you're not considering the money the industry is saving by not having to press the cd's, print the covers, and ship them to stores everywhere.
Okay, that's $1.50, somewhat offset by the cost of maintaining servers and downloading tracks.
Most private companies don't have that luxury- they have to answer to their stockholders every three months, and would have to explain that all over again to the stockholders- most of whom will NOT understand the long view.
That's crap. Stockholders don't sue because company A is paying for quality, they sue for gross malfeasance, like with Enron. Mostly, they look for growth and don't really vote too much.
Also, conventional nuclear fission plants still have the problem of creating highly radioactive waste products with very long half-lifes, so the infrastructure must be very expensive for safety reasons, and there is still the disposal problem
Some of the designs covered inthe latest SciAm improve efficiency by a factor of 20 and reduce the waste to a 500 year problem (with less hazard in the interim). This is what I base my claims on. It has the advantage that it can easily break down Pu from weapons, while using about 96% of the fissionable material.
But if you're looking at $1,500 stereos, then TCO probably isn't high on your priority list,
Betcha it is - if you're spending $1500 on a stereo, you want to minimize headaches and maximize your return. Just because it costs more than $1000 doesn't make value decisions go away.
Put another way, I would be completely unsurprised to find that they'd ranked a Kia coupe over a BMW sedan because it got 30MPG instead of the Beemer's 28. People in the market for the latter have no interest in the former, and vice versa.
I would be shocked - Kias cost under $10k new, and have an iffy reliability history. Beemers aren't tops in reliability, but they do well, and they've got a fair bit more in the road feel department (useful if you want to know when to slow down). Kias, from all reports, feel dead. I dunno why you'd even compare them, though, as they're completely different categories.
Consumer Reports is written FOR consumers. It is not written for servicers, repairers, experts, or resellers. Readers who have such skills should be reading an industry-specific magazine, or better yet, a trade journal or a techinical specification.
So, in the given example, what the hell good are they? Generally, consumers are interested in more than the FM tuner on a $500 receiver. I never use mine, so it's useless to me. Seriously, if a stereo review isn't supposed to address the concerns of experts (in stereo usage, I suppose) and it doesn't do much in the way of quantifying performance, then who exactly is this consumer? Are they the one who says "CR gave brand X a gold star, so I'll take that one?", because that's sort of circular.
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The desktop computer I have today has evolved over the last 30+ years.
You mean designed, right? Or did you really mean that some pdp-11s had sex and gave birth to a pdp-12?
What one might consider a computer 100 years ago most certainly bears no resembelence to what we have today.
That's right. 100 years ago, computer was a job title.
My wife is Catholic;
or the record, two have ended up Catholic, one agnostic, one athiest - the jury's still out on the youngest two, but they're leaning toward agnostic and Jewish
Well, of course. If there isn't a dress code at all (basics will do, it doesn't mean suits) that indicates that the company really has no idea of what they're doing.
Gee, I'd better go tell Jeff and Bill that they're doing it all wrong.
Besides, what would I sue for? A half day's wages?
Make a complaint with the labor board for 1/2 days wages and get treble damages. Duh...
The crash came about because people didn't buy anymore.
And they didn't buy because a lot of games that had been developed weren't made available for sale.
And if you don't like it you can decide to switch ISPs. That's how the market works.
Where TF am I going to go? If you haven't noticed, broadband is not a free market - I have exactly one valid option.
Seriously, predict a specific disaster, request resources, get denied, then watch that disaster unfold. You will be free of blame, and you will get your resources.
What planet do you live on? Do something like that and you'll be seen as the cause of whatever disaster you predicted, evidence or no.
It's the same situation at my work -- they put my department (RND) under incredible stress because incredible stress is *CHEAP*. Doing the right thing is expensive. This is why engineering and management are always at eachothers throats.
Incredible stress is bloody expensive when you burn out your employees and suddenly nobody knows how the system works.
PCs are an immature technology driven by technical considerations. Also, their sales volume has increased tremendously in the past 30 years. Soda has changed from a special treat to the choice of the diabetes generation. It should come as no surprise that the costs have dropped, especially with so much direct competition.
Cars are different - the volume of sales hasn't exploded in the past 30 years, more things that were optional or not even available are now standard (remote door locks? CD player? Electric windows?). Regardless of all that, cars haven't really gotten much more expensive in 30 years. The brands may move upscale, but the price point for low and middle grade product hasn't moved all that much.
In the clothing world, we have few regulations (some tariffs on cotton and other materials). I can buy a nice, quality hoodie for US$10 at H&M. A few years back they were over US$50 at the mall.
Hoodies are frequently fashion items - their prices have nothing to do with actual costs. You could've gotten a hoddie for $10 a few years back too, just not at the mall.
Tell me again how regulations help and anarchy hurts?
When you have 2 choices for getting a product and sometimes only one, how are you going to tell the ISP to pound sand?
Exactly. It's not like everyone has a constitutional right to unlimited-bandwidth free internet access.
Not everything comes down to constitutional rights.
But you pay extra for the ports used by Skype, IRC, or BitTorrent.
The difference is that the cable company has costs assocaited with additional channels. Not so with opening ports.
The difference between burger chains and the telco is that the telco needs public right of ways to get to your house and, once that's done, the local government has no reason to give a competitor access. A more apt analogy would be utilities, which are for the most part regulated monopolies. Only difference is that telcos deal in data, not water, gas, or electricity, which are sold by the ton - one gallon of water is pretty much like another. That means that allowing competitors on the supply side is easier for utilities, as it's straight accounting.
Oh yeah, and if you hadn't noticed, fast food is consolidating. Ever wonder why so many kfc/pizza hut/taco bells have popped up?
Isn't longevity something the game publishers, for the most part, do not want?
Is that relevant? Patches are already allowed, so mods may be also, under the same argument.
The 1984 computer games crash was, in part, due to the massive flow of low-quality software being pumped out primarily for the Atari 2600
According to this comment, it was Atari's litigation that was responsible. Once they won, a bunch of games that were in the pipeline were suddenly under the same cloud. Ironic, yes?
Ironically, you misspelled 'grammar' here.
Wow, you're the first person to say that, ever!
Any company that is paying for quality isn't going to grow over a three month period.
Microdsoft in the 90s paid for talent and grew 50-100% each year. Google is doing the same now.
Do you know why the filler songs are there? Because people wouldn't pay that same price for a cd that only contains the 2 hit songs. Obviously, they have value.
Hence the name filler. People will pay more than $1/per for a good song, but the filler stuff is actively avoided.
Second, I have issues with your candy bag arguments. If the 10 piece bag cost $10, you're not suddenly buying a candy bar for $1...because the candy bar *was* in the mix bag of candy. I mean, the hit song is in the cd, right?
Yeah, so the 10 piece bag probably cost $5. What's your objection?
Third, you're not considering the money the industry is saving by not having to press the cd's, print the covers, and ship them to stores everywhere.
Okay, that's $1.50, somewhat offset by the cost of maintaining servers and downloading tracks.
Is anyone familiar with the terms for indie artists to get published on iTunes?
Why don't you go apply? The link's on their main page.
Most private companies don't have that luxury- they have to answer to their stockholders every three months, and would have to explain that all over again to the stockholders- most of whom will NOT understand the long view.
That's crap. Stockholders don't sue because company A is paying for quality, they sue for gross malfeasance, like with Enron. Mostly, they look for growth and don't really vote too much.
Also, conventional nuclear fission plants still have the problem of creating highly radioactive waste products with very long half-lifes, so the infrastructure must be very expensive for safety reasons, and there is still the disposal problem
Some of the designs covered inthe latest SciAm improve efficiency by a factor of 20 and reduce the waste to a 500 year problem (with less hazard in the interim). This is what I base my claims on. It has the advantage that it can easily break down Pu from weapons, while using about 96% of the fissionable material.
Another alternative that may currently be feasible is to detonate small H-bombs in deep cavities to replenish the heat.
Why not just run some nuke plants? The newer generation of plant could probably run for 1000 years on the available uranium reserves.
Younger IT workers are cheaper, and more familiar with newer technologies at the same time!
As a bonus, they can make the same old mistakes all over again!
What would be an example of an idea that perpetuated itself into law as the result of it's proponents remaining anonymous?
The constitution. Google on the federalist papaers.
Would it be too gratuitous to mention that at least some percntage of the fault lies with the unethical idiots actually doing the theft?
No, it isn't their fault that it was easy, it was their fault that they did it.
But if you're looking at $1,500 stereos, then TCO probably isn't high on your priority list,
Betcha it is - if you're spending $1500 on a stereo, you want to minimize headaches and maximize your return. Just because it costs more than $1000 doesn't make value decisions go away.
Put another way, I would be completely unsurprised to find that they'd ranked a Kia coupe over a BMW sedan because it got 30MPG instead of the Beemer's 28. People in the market for the latter have no interest in the former, and vice versa.
I would be shocked - Kias cost under $10k new, and have an iffy reliability history. Beemers aren't tops in reliability, but they do well, and they've got a fair bit more in the road feel department (useful if you want to know when to slow down). Kias, from all reports, feel dead. I dunno why you'd even compare them, though, as they're completely different categories.
/belaboring a tangential point, sorry.
Consumer Reports is written FOR consumers. It is not written for servicers, repairers, experts, or resellers. Readers who have such skills should be reading an industry-specific magazine, or better yet, a trade journal or a techinical specification.
So, in the given example, what the hell good are they? Generally, consumers are interested in more than the FM tuner on a $500 receiver. I never use mine, so it's useless to me. Seriously, if a stereo review isn't supposed to address the concerns of experts (in stereo usage, I suppose) and it doesn't do much in the way of quantifying performance, then who exactly is this consumer? Are they the one who says "CR gave brand X a gold star, so I'll take that one?", because that's sort of circular.