Articles (and topics) such as these, while nice trollbait and conversation fodder, nonetheless constitute a view that is basically a religious viewpoint...
Using Microsoft products is becoming more and more blatantly counterproductive to the free world as we know it.
We now see whole divisions of the U.S. military and government throwing billions of dollars at hopeless Windows standardization projects and putting them at the mercy of one corporation. We see whole foreign national governments trying to pry themselves loose of years of bad decisions that chained themselves to that same corporation. There are whole companies, who, out of short-sightedness, developed non-portable software tied by the guts to one platform and risk their entire livlihood against the success of that one corporation.
The software industry is more fragile now than it ever has been, and I dare say this isn't a matter of religion, any more. If, one day, my choices are play along with good-ol Microsoft or don't play at all, then it isn't religion but government. Microsoft has no right or priviledge to become that powerful. We can only hope that ESR's Libertarian statements about unstable monopolies are true, and that Microsoft's days are numbered.
Browsers are good for the users precisely because they hobble the developers.
Not enough, IMO. I long for the days when HTML was good and the web pages were usable. Now, we have layers upon layers of browser-side tools, like JavaScript, that have made the WWW much less robust. Just the other day, an otherwise innocent looking website was disallowing my form post--a simple form post--because of something in a JavaScript function. Now, I have to dig up Internet Explorer at work just to finish what should have been a one-minute transaction at home. Narrow-minded web developers suck. Microsoft sucks. And, I hate to say it, most of the WWW sucks, too.
...I dislike *nix simply because to get a desktop system running to my standards of happiness, I have to look all around the web to find the right apps to install.
Funny, I think the exact same thing about Windows. If I were ever forced to work full-time with Windows (thankfully I a free man at the moment), the first thing to get installed would be cygwin or MKS or similar. Windows simply comes with no useful tools. Emacs isn't there. Sed and grep aren't there. Also, I would rather become a sharecropper, literally, than develop software with Visual Studio (I would hope strongly the project is at least Java-based).
The biggest problem, even bigger than the lack of tools in Windows, is the fact that I now take having a choice for granted (for better and worse) making having to work with Windows a painful thought. Windows is inhibitive, Word is stifling, and the people that use them proudly and faithfully are brain-washed servants of Mr. Gates and his hench-people (HR people that accept only Word resumes, even for UNIX jobs, are among the worst).
...Sci-Fi got great ratings (i think) when they brought Star Trek to the network...
This must be the explanation behind the "New TNN". Granted, I don't mind at all being able to watch ST:TNG again, but having it come on right after WWE Smack Down is a bit disorienting.
Shell scripts aren't terribly portable. makefiles aren't either./bin/sh (Bourne shell) and POSIX makefiles should be more portable than Perl. At worst, the portablility is the same, because the platform-dependent paths need variables to configure, for example.
What do you do when XSL can't adequately map the files? What do you do when the transformation gets you only 90% of the way there requiring time-consuming debugging and finish work? Murphy's law applied to nifty ideas like XML means that there will absolutely be unanticipated shortcomings that aren't well understood due to the complexity and immaturity of the tools being used.
Bash? csh? sh? tcsh? bash 2.0? Which shell are you suggesting is usable across them all?/bin/sh. That's it.
Ant is no more compicated than make.
Layering the J2SE runtime onto an application for the sake of compiling is "no more complicated"? This is only true for Java applications.
I didn't realize that Sun still had a use for the MAJC CPU, but I don't know much about it.
It does number crunching on their XVR-1000 and XVR-4000 cards for the Sun Blade 2000 workstation and the Sun Fire V880z "workstation", respectively. Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to use either:(
Performance-wise, I'm not sure how competitive these cards are, but Sun cards do generage very good looking displays (antialiased Pro/ENGINEER on Sun is very nice). I wouldn't mind a demonstration of the V880z, though (four UltraSPARC III CPUs and eight MAJC CPUs on two XVR-4000s...)
Domain knowledge, I think it is called. That's what matters.
They are all right, except for the mathematician, of course (just kidding...well, mostly).
My own personal list of priorities would be (from high to non-existant):
1) Domain knowledge. 2) Solid data modeling ability. 3) Most everything else. 1,000,000) Buzzword compliance and/or magazine-cover conformance.
Unfortunately, most self-proclaimed prophets of the software world work in the exact opposite order, which is why nearly every project is a pain in the ass.
EDS do a lot of systems that don't work...they're not even cheap.
Please replace the string "EDS" above with a variable that can take on the value of most any contractor in the world. Even then, your statement remains true.
I think it is also worth saying that it appears these pork-barrel database projects get the sludge at the bottom of the contractor's talent barrel. Consider that there are a lot of really talented and brilliant engineers doing things like designing aircraft, radar systems, etc. and whose jobs cannot be filled by any "web enabled" wannabe.
How hard is it to write software like this that works?
Harder than you imagine. If you remove the pork-barrel politics, directives of what technology to use coming from the clouds, and the recently potty-trained project team members, there isn't much left to give the project a chance at success. Most of the project's time is probably spent learning the difference between JDBC and EJB or at meetings discussing the differences between JDBC and EJB. The remaining time is spent accomplishing little by discussing the well-presented but vacuous system requirements for the project. Whenever I see a job posting for a database project for a government agency, I pass it and look for projects worth doing. If it mentions.NET or J2EE, I pass it by doubly fast.
I don't like this conclusion, but I've worked on, interviewed for, or heard about enough of these projects to realize they are pretty much all the same and for what seems to be all the wrong reasons.
There's also one benchmark I'de love to see. Power Mac G5 vs Sun UltraSPARC III.
While the UltraSPARC III is an excellent, reliable, and solid-performing CPU, most benchmarks would probably favor the G5. It's probably been a solid year-and-a-half since the UltraSPARC dominated SPEC, for example (before the latest POWER4s and Alphas came out).
Sun's equipment is perfect for business workloads and network infrastructure, but it is becoming harder and harder to argue in favor of Sun for HPC work, I think.
However, the new Sun V210 & V240 systems come with four built-in network adapters (even more can be added via PCI cards), so Sun might still have a go at clustering applications that push bandwidth more than the CPUs. Perhaps databases would like them.
Fucking piece of shit losers who have no respect for humanity nor the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America who waste their minimum-wage income on useless and physically disabilitating garbage sound systems. They are part of the decomposing culture of the United States of America, where, once again, their ape-like mating rituals are more important than civility. I hope they all go deaf, bald, and sterile from their assinine habits.
For anyone who rushes to their defense, realize that loud music is not protected speech, because it clearly disrupts anyone's ability to live their lives in their own fucking homes. Loud music is a physical and psychological assault on everyone nearby. Those people who don't care should be thrown into a canyon to die slowly in a mound of hungry ants.
"We'll just have to have someone do it for a class project."
I swear that Universities get by with the cheapest renewable labor force possible. Class projects, computer programmer summer jobs at $6.50/hour, etc....
Unfortunately, it just ends up creating a pile of square wheels collecting dust somewhere, and the resulting experience graduates and moves out of state.
Recently, for example, the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation advertised that its list of donors, including postal addresses, was for rent.
Charities are often the worst privacy whores. They also have no qualms about hiring mercenaries (i.e., telemarketing firms) to do their dirty work. I have recieve several calls, where some sappy loser tries to make me feel guilty for not supporting the goldfish at Wal-Mart or something, and they quickly blurt out that they are actually some sort of telemarketing company when I tell them to take me off their list and never call back.
I hate to say it, but charities often give charity a bad name.
All in all, we went from having to spend maybe an hour or two a month supporting mail services, to a full-time employee spending several hours a week feeding the damn thing.
Welcome to the world of Microsoft. Eat your gruel and like it, or else!
How about those Exchange clusters? Have you tried those? You might even need a full-time manual-intervention technition on top of that full-time administrator. Why are you frowning? Eat it! Eat it!
measure a product on it's ease of use, stability, security, cost, etc. whether or not it is OSS or not shouldn't be an issue.
It really should be an issue. Fundamental infrastructure applications, like groupware, should be completely open by now. These are commodity functions and should be provided by commodity software. We are getting there on other fronts with OpenOffice.org and Mozilla, for example, but solid groupware still seems to be on the horizon.
The main argument against trusting a closed source application from a commercial entity is that these commercial entities all suffer from a tendency to suck customers into their "platform" complete with non-portable extensions, binary proprietary file formats, and shifty salespeople. Outlook is pretty bad about this (binary file formats, non-standard stuff, etc.). Most of the other commercial groupware offerings are pretty bad, too.
The one thing that really gets me about Outlook is that its files are not greppable. Nor does Outlook have good filters for filing e-mail into folders (e.g., vm in emacs allows full-blown regexp filtering, which is very yummy). Simply put, Outlook really is not the best thing since sliced bread, but it seems to be the last frontier to be adequately replaced (historically there were better options that got shot down by the MS juggernaut, i.e., Lotus). The other threads in this discussion are both encouraging and discouraging, which means we really have a ways to go.
That's easy to fix: Install Firebird and set ther home page to your groupware server. Then rename the Firebird desktop icon to "Groupware XP Professional 2004."
Chances are the'll never catch on...
I know this post was modded funny, but what it says is perfectly valid. Accessing an application via an icon is already 80% of what the user expects (I know people who are completely helpless until there is an icon sitting on the desktop--yes, they are that helpless:(
Much of the time my problems aren't so much with web-based interfaces but the time required to go to a website, log in, futz around, log out, etc. Configuring a desktop icon with the proper URL just short of hard-coding the password would be pretty secure and very convenient.
I remember that until diald came along, you had to log in as root in order to bring up or terminate the dial-up ppp connection.
This reminds me that I should have plugged OpenBSD's userland ppp program (not the kernel-based one). It's one-stop PPP and packet filtering which can be initiated by regular users. Although it is all command-line and configuration file based, its man page fully lives up to OpenBSD's reputation of coherent and complete man pages. Compared to the old linux ppp and chat horror, it is like manna from the gods.
.. the thing I found about Linux, is once you have it set up right, it is great for technophobes.
This is true about UNIX, in general. While Windows would behave as if it were born in a universe with no cause and effect, Linux, OpenBSD, Solaris, etc. just behave. With UNIX, most problems are either up-front configuration issues or external issues, such as an ISP going down for an evening.
UNIX is sort of like a hard mountain climb, which ends in a flat plateau of endless easy hiking with oasises along the way. Windows is just an endless climb where fatique makes hallucinations of plateaus appear and disapperar tauntingly.
Back in the day, attempting to decipher the poorly written, unorganized, and very cryptic ppp, slip, and chat documentation could take hours if not weekends.
An hour is clearly a milestone of progress, here.
Re:Management doesn't get overtime anyway...
on
Working Hard?
·
· Score: 1
Do I have the satisfaction of knowing that I helped get a major project up and running?
Does that project have a real purpose beyond making some PHB jolly? For your sake, I hope it does, because there are few things more depressing than slaving away at something that will never get used and eventually swept under a rug somewhere.
Re:No Overtime No Vacation
on
Working Hard?
·
· Score: 1
The rest simply exist, like tree moss, consuming resources and producing very little.
Please, tree moss deserves more credit as a crucial player in the oxygen cycle, and it certainly shouldn't be insulted in a comparison to human corporations! Shame on you.
You've got part of the problem figured out ('gimme') But that is only one sign of top to bottom problems with health care and health care delivery in the US.
Fair enough. Perhaps the main pervasive problem is one of financial conflicts of interest, where there is lots of money to be made in treating patients as much as possible and avoiding curing them when the disease isn't terminal. This would be the path to maximum revenue potential, but not necessarily the path to greatest general health for the patients.
Sounds like you need to find a better family doctor. Christ, what kind of quacks are you dealing with?
I don't think the grandparent post was referring to personal experience so much as the frequency of people diagnosed with depression, ADD, etc., when there are truly better reasons for the patient's search for some diagnosis--any diagnosis--that might dissolve their own insecurity about why they don't fully live up to whatever imagined idealism they have.
It takes practically no effort to get an anti-depressant prescription from a doctor. The same is also true of weight-loss drugs, high blood pressure drugs, sleeping pills, pain medication, you name it. I've seen generally healthy people who have a cabinet full of prescriptions, most of which are for kinda-sorta-my butt hurts prescribed remedies.
One reason is that the true cost of prescriptions is almost invisible to any patient with comprehensive health insurance. Even patients that don't have insurance can get hand-outs from the local health department or samples from doctors. Drugs are like candy to these people. All they need to do is hold out their hand and say "gimmie." Why should the doctor refuse? It's all part of the circle of money surrounding the pharmaceutical industry. And, most doctors simply place faith in the FDA process, thinking the odds are low that unnecessary prescriptions are going to be dangerous.
Slashdot Mirror
Articles (and topics) such as these, while nice trollbait and conversation fodder, nonetheless constitute a view that is basically a religious viewpoint...
Using Microsoft products is becoming more and more blatantly counterproductive to the free world as we know it.
We now see whole divisions of the U.S. military and government throwing billions of dollars at hopeless Windows standardization projects and putting them at the mercy of one corporation. We see whole foreign national governments trying to pry themselves loose of years of bad decisions that chained themselves to that same corporation. There are whole companies, who, out of short-sightedness, developed non-portable software tied by the guts to one platform and risk their entire livlihood against the success of that one corporation.
The software industry is more fragile now than it ever has been, and I dare say this isn't a matter of religion, any more. If, one day, my choices are play along with good-ol Microsoft or don't play at all, then it isn't religion but government. Microsoft has no right or priviledge to become that powerful. We can only hope that ESR's Libertarian statements about unstable monopolies are true, and that Microsoft's days are numbered.
Browsers are good for the users precisely because they hobble the developers.
Not enough, IMO. I long for the days when HTML was good and the web pages were usable. Now, we have layers upon layers of browser-side tools, like JavaScript, that have made the WWW much less robust. Just the other day, an otherwise innocent looking website was disallowing my form post--a simple form post--because of something in a JavaScript function. Now, I have to dig up Internet Explorer at work just to finish what should have been a one-minute transaction at home. Narrow-minded web developers suck. Microsoft sucks. And, I hate to say it, most of the WWW sucks, too.
...I dislike *nix simply because to get a desktop system running to my standards of happiness, I have to look all around the web to find the right apps to install.
Funny, I think the exact same thing about Windows. If I were ever forced to work full-time with Windows (thankfully I a free man at the moment), the first thing to get installed would be cygwin or MKS or similar. Windows simply comes with no useful tools. Emacs isn't there. Sed and grep aren't there. Also, I would rather become a sharecropper, literally, than develop software with Visual Studio (I would hope strongly the project is at least Java-based).
The biggest problem, even bigger than the lack of tools in Windows, is the fact that I now take having a choice for granted (for better and worse) making having to work with Windows a painful thought. Windows is inhibitive, Word is stifling, and the people that use them proudly and faithfully are brain-washed servants of Mr. Gates and his hench-people (HR people that accept only Word resumes, even for UNIX jobs, are among the worst).
...Sci-Fi got great ratings (i think) when they brought Star Trek to the network...
This must be the explanation behind the "New TNN". Granted, I don't mind at all being able to watch ST:TNG again, but having it come on right after WWE Smack Down is a bit disorienting.
Shell scripts aren't terribly portable. makefiles aren't either. /bin/sh (Bourne shell) and POSIX makefiles should be more portable than Perl. At worst, the portablility is the same, because the platform-dependent paths need variables to configure, for example.
Simple as that.
/bin/sh. That's it.
What do you do when XSL can't adequately map the files? What do you do when the transformation gets you only 90% of the way there requiring time-consuming debugging and finish work? Murphy's law applied to nifty ideas like XML means that there will absolutely be unanticipated shortcomings that aren't well understood due to the complexity and immaturity of the tools being used.
Bash? csh? sh? tcsh? bash 2.0? Which shell are you suggesting is usable across them all?
Ant is no more compicated than make.
Layering the J2SE runtime onto an application for the sake of compiling is "no more complicated"? This is only true for Java applications.
I didn't realize that Sun still had a use for the MAJC CPU, but I don't know much about it.
:(
It does number crunching on their XVR-1000 and XVR-4000 cards for the Sun Blade 2000 workstation and the Sun Fire V880z "workstation", respectively. Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to use either
Performance-wise, I'm not sure how competitive these cards are, but Sun cards do generage very good looking displays (antialiased Pro/ENGINEER on Sun is very nice). I wouldn't mind a demonstration of the V880z, though (four UltraSPARC III CPUs and eight MAJC CPUs on two XVR-4000s...)
Domain knowledge, I think it is called. That's what matters.
They are all right, except for the mathematician, of course (just kidding...well, mostly).
My own personal list of priorities would be (from high to non-existant):
1) Domain knowledge.
2) Solid data modeling ability.
3) Most everything else.
1,000,000) Buzzword compliance and/or magazine-cover conformance.
Unfortunately, most self-proclaimed prophets of the software world work in the exact opposite order, which is why nearly every project is a pain in the ass.
EDS do a lot of systems that don't work...they're not even cheap.
Please replace the string "EDS" above with a variable that can take on the value of most any contractor in the world. Even then, your statement remains true.
I think it is also worth saying that it appears these pork-barrel database projects get the sludge at the bottom of the contractor's talent barrel. Consider that there are a lot of really talented and brilliant engineers doing things like designing aircraft, radar systems, etc. and whose jobs cannot be filled by any "web enabled" wannabe.
How hard is it to write software like this that works?
.NET or J2EE, I pass it by doubly fast.
Harder than you imagine. If you remove the pork-barrel politics, directives of what technology to use coming from the clouds, and the recently potty-trained project team members, there isn't much left to give the project a chance at success. Most of the project's time is probably spent learning the difference between JDBC and EJB or at meetings discussing the differences between JDBC and EJB. The remaining time is spent accomplishing little by discussing the well-presented but vacuous system requirements for the project. Whenever I see a job posting for a database project for a government agency, I pass it and look for projects worth doing. If it mentions
I don't like this conclusion, but I've worked on, interviewed for, or heard about enough of these projects to realize they are pretty much all the same and for what seems to be all the wrong reasons.
There's also one benchmark I'de love to see. Power Mac G5 vs Sun UltraSPARC III.
While the UltraSPARC III is an excellent, reliable, and solid-performing CPU, most benchmarks would probably favor the G5. It's probably been a solid year-and-a-half since the UltraSPARC dominated SPEC, for example (before the latest POWER4s and Alphas came out).
Sun's equipment is perfect for business workloads and network infrastructure, but it is becoming harder and harder to argue in favor of Sun for HPC work, I think.
However, the new Sun V210 & V240 systems come with four built-in network adapters (even more can be added via PCI cards), so Sun might still have a go at clustering applications that push bandwidth more than the CPUs. Perhaps databases would like them.
You might as well argue that ASCII will go away.
ASCII is simply 127 or 255 characters or so. Writing software to translate it is trivial, and it can even be decoded by hand, if necessary.
XML adds a lot of complexity beyond this, which hampers a person's ability to read a file with practically no software tools.
Also, XML is not as ubiquitous as you think, and huge numbers of people don't know how to use the tools to work with it.
How about calling them by their true name:
Fucking piece of shit losers who have no respect for humanity nor the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America who waste their minimum-wage income on useless and physically disabilitating garbage sound systems. They are part of the decomposing culture of the United States of America, where, once again, their ape-like mating rituals are more important than civility. I hope they all go deaf, bald, and sterile from their assinine habits.
For anyone who rushes to their defense, realize that loud music is not protected speech, because it clearly disrupts anyone's ability to live their lives in their own fucking homes. Loud music is a physical and psychological assault on everyone nearby. Those people who don't care should be thrown into a canyon to die slowly in a mound of hungry ants.
Okay, I'm done.
"We'll just have to have someone do it for a class project."
I swear that Universities get by with the cheapest renewable labor force possible. Class projects, computer programmer summer jobs at $6.50/hour, etc....
Unfortunately, it just ends up creating a pile of square wheels collecting dust somewhere, and the resulting experience graduates and moves out of state.
Recently, for example, the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation advertised that its list of donors, including postal addresses, was for rent.
Charities are often the worst privacy whores. They also have no qualms about hiring mercenaries (i.e., telemarketing firms) to do their dirty work. I have recieve several calls, where some sappy loser tries to make me feel guilty for not supporting the goldfish at Wal-Mart or something, and they quickly blurt out that they are actually some sort of telemarketing company when I tell them to take me off their list and never call back.
I hate to say it, but charities often give charity a bad name.
All in all, we went from having to spend maybe an hour or two a month supporting mail services, to a full-time employee spending several hours a week feeding the damn thing.
Welcome to the world of Microsoft. Eat your gruel and like it, or else!
How about those Exchange clusters? Have you tried those? You might even need a full-time manual-intervention technition on top of that full-time administrator. Why are you frowning? Eat it! Eat it!
measure a product on it's ease of use, stability, security, cost, etc. whether or not it is OSS or not shouldn't be an issue.
It really should be an issue. Fundamental infrastructure applications, like groupware, should be completely open by now. These are commodity functions and should be provided by commodity software. We are getting there on other fronts with OpenOffice.org and Mozilla, for example, but solid groupware still seems to be on the horizon.
The main argument against trusting a closed source application from a commercial entity is that these commercial entities all suffer from a tendency to suck customers into their "platform" complete with non-portable extensions, binary proprietary file formats, and shifty salespeople. Outlook is pretty bad about this (binary file formats, non-standard stuff, etc.). Most of the other commercial groupware offerings are pretty bad, too.
The one thing that really gets me about Outlook is that its files are not greppable. Nor does Outlook have good filters for filing e-mail into folders (e.g., vm in emacs allows full-blown regexp filtering, which is very yummy). Simply put, Outlook really is not the best thing since sliced bread, but it seems to be the last frontier to be adequately replaced (historically there were better options that got shot down by the MS juggernaut, i.e., Lotus). The other threads in this discussion are both encouraging and discouraging, which means we really have a ways to go.
That's easy to fix: Install Firebird and set ther home page to your groupware server. Then rename the Firebird desktop icon to "Groupware XP Professional 2004."
Chances are the'll never catch on...
I know this post was modded funny, but what it says is perfectly valid. Accessing an application via an icon is already 80% of what the user expects (I know people who are completely helpless until there is an icon sitting on the desktop--yes, they are that helpless:(
Much of the time my problems aren't so much with web-based interfaces but the time required to go to a website, log in, futz around, log out, etc. Configuring a desktop icon with the proper URL just short of hard-coding the password would be pretty secure and very convenient.
I remember that until diald came along, you had to log in as root in order to bring up or terminate the dial-up ppp connection.
This reminds me that I should have plugged OpenBSD's userland ppp program (not the kernel-based one). It's one-stop PPP and packet filtering which can be initiated by regular users. Although it is all command-line and configuration file based, its man page fully lives up to OpenBSD's reputation of coherent and complete man pages. Compared to the old linux ppp and chat horror, it is like manna from the gods.
.. the thing I found about Linux, is once you have it set up right, it is great for technophobes.
This is true about UNIX, in general. While Windows would behave as if it were born in a universe with no cause and effect, Linux, OpenBSD, Solaris, etc. just behave. With UNIX, most problems are either up-front configuration issues or external issues, such as an ISP going down for an evening.
UNIX is sort of like a hard mountain climb, which ends in a flat plateau of endless easy hiking with oasises along the way. Windows is just an endless climb where fatique makes hallucinations of plateaus appear and disapperar tauntingly.
Sheer hell, it sounds like!
Back in the day, attempting to decipher the poorly written, unorganized, and very cryptic ppp, slip, and chat documentation could take hours if not weekends.
An hour is clearly a milestone of progress, here.
Do I have the satisfaction of knowing that I helped get a major project up and running?
Does that project have a real purpose beyond making some PHB jolly? For your sake, I hope it does, because there are few things more depressing than slaving away at something that will never get used and eventually swept under a rug somewhere.
The rest simply exist, like tree moss, consuming resources and producing very little.
Please, tree moss deserves more credit as a crucial player in the oxygen cycle, and it certainly shouldn't be insulted in a comparison to human corporations! Shame on you.
You've got part of the problem figured out ('gimme') But that is only one sign of top to bottom problems with health care and health care delivery in the US.
Fair enough. Perhaps the main pervasive problem is one of financial conflicts of interest, where there is lots of money to be made in treating patients as much as possible and avoiding curing them when the disease isn't terminal. This would be the path to maximum revenue potential, but not necessarily the path to greatest general health for the patients.
Sounds like you need to find a better family doctor. Christ, what kind of quacks are you dealing with?
I don't think the grandparent post was referring to personal experience so much as the frequency of people diagnosed with depression, ADD, etc., when there are truly better reasons for the patient's search for some diagnosis--any diagnosis--that might dissolve their own insecurity about why they don't fully live up to whatever imagined idealism they have.
It takes practically no effort to get an anti-depressant prescription from a doctor. The same is also true of weight-loss drugs, high blood pressure drugs, sleeping pills, pain medication, you name it. I've seen generally healthy people who have a cabinet full of prescriptions, most of which are for kinda-sorta-my butt hurts prescribed remedies.
One reason is that the true cost of prescriptions is almost invisible to any patient with comprehensive health insurance. Even patients that don't have insurance can get hand-outs from the local health department or samples from doctors. Drugs are like candy to these people. All they need to do is hold out their hand and say "gimmie." Why should the doctor refuse? It's all part of the circle of money surrounding the pharmaceutical industry. And, most doctors simply place faith in the FDA process, thinking the odds are low that unnecessary prescriptions are going to be dangerous.