Those people lucky enough to be be in demand have incentive to constantly shop around for a new job. Those people who aren't in demand have incentive to generally do the lowest quality and quantity of work necessary to stay employed. Perhaps this is more efficient in a way that will make some economists happy.
The system works, for two simple reasons. You can't constantly switch jobs, since you would not be doing any productive work, and would get rather worn-out. You also can't slack off, even if your skills are not in demand (since you can easily be replaced). This ensures the system is reasonably efficient. In addition, people with "hot" skills can find an appropriately challenging job, and there is a substantial incentive for improving your skillset.
In general, you don't know jack shit and are talking out of your ass. Almost all states have at-will employment, which means you can get fired for any reason whatsoever, with no recourse. As far as proving racial discrimination: you can't just claim that, you have to be a protected minority, you have to go to court, and you have to prove that you were terminated due to your race and not another factor. As far as age-based discrimination: it's VERY hard to prove in court, and rather expensive, unless you have specific evidence that you were discriminated against. In short, it's not that hard to get rid of someone.
How would they compete in the Opteron/x86 market? Unless you need specialized graphics capabilities, you can just buy everything from Dell, and SGI sure as hell isn't going to beat Dell. The reason the Indy was successful was because PCs totally sucked. I mean, the Indy was competing with Pentium 60s equipped with a piece of shit S3 or ATI videocard, priced at several thousand dollars. It was no contest.
ISO9001 is definitely overhyped, but you are underestimating its usefulness. It's always a good idea to have all your procedures written down and followed. Obviously, this is meaningless if nobody bothers to follow the procedures or if nobody updates them. On the other side, you can have perfectly good procedures and processes without getting certified. However, a properly run facility should have no problems getting ISO certified.
In any case, my point was that having the CEO micromanaging the assembly line is never a good idea.
Of course you can use fusion(if it worked really well), to power a hell of alot of cars. Just use electric cars and power 'em up off the fusion-powered grid...?
We already have an electric grid, and nuclear power will work fine in the meantime. Electic vehicles have much bigger problems than the energy supply -- mainly the batteries.
If Ford was able to get 30mpg out of the Explorer, they would be doing it. SUVs cost about the same to manufacture as a midsize car, and they sell for 2-3x as much. Toyota and Honda can afford to manufacture cars because they have lower labor costs and higher manufacturing efficiency. GM and Ford have been making large vehicles mainly because they are a lot more profitable than small ones, not because they are in bed with oil companies.
It's pretty obvious you don't have a clue about how electronics is manufactured. They don't just tell the contractor "build us a laptop". Apple would have a custom design done by their in-house engineers, and produce all the manufacturing data for the contractor. Steve Jobs tells engineers what to do, the manufacturers build exactly what they tell them to build. A company the size of Apple would have their own test engineers, production engineers, and QA teams on-site, supervising the process and ensuring appropriate quality levels. As far as shoddy workmanship: why would a large contract manufacturer have inferior quality to an in-house team? If anything, it would be the other way around. Defects like the grease issue are most likely the fault of an engineer specifying an incorrect application procedure, and QA personnel overlooking the problem.
In any case, production is highly automated and managed by an ERP system. It's not like Steve Jobs could just walk down to the manufacturing floor and tell them what to do. That will get your ISO9001 certification revoked in a hurry. If you want even a minor change, you have to issue an ECO and do all sorts of paperwork. Besides, there is nothing that can be changed on the assembly line. By that time, the boards have been manufactured, the parts and mechanical assemblies procured, and the tooling set up. The only benefit to doing manufacturing in-house is that you have more control over when things get built. Not an issue when you are ordering hundreds of thousands of units.
How does it matter where it's manufactured? It's hard to make a case for manufacturing in the USA. Component suppliers are all in Asia now. Asian contractors are just as good as American ones. It's not like you can tell a board made in China from a board made in the USA, assuming they were assembled to the same specification. The real issue here seems to be that Apple does not have adequate control over their manufacturing process and does not have proper quality assurance procedures.
Man, you need to lay off the crack. The energy industry does not run the country. It isn't the reason we don't have fusion plants. The oil companies don't really even care about fusion, since you can't exactly use fusion to run cars. Not to mention, there are no commercial companies that work on stuff like fusion. Companies don't generally work on such long-term, uncertain, and expensive projects. Oh, and I just love your conspiracy theory about the car companies being in bed with the oil companies. Who comes up with this shit? Have you not noticed that car manufacturers would kill to get a couple of extra MPG?
If you think the FCC actually tracks down violators, you have another thing coming. In reality, you can get away with a lot before the FCC is going to do anything. It's next to impossible to get a jammer off the ham bands (I've tried), and I REALLY doubt the FCC will bother investigating complaints about operation in the ISM bands. They don't give a shit.
I'm not refuting the claim, you fucktard. I'm pointing out the xenophobic spin. Read the statement:
In 2003, nearly 26 percent of foreign-born TB patients in the United States were from Mexico
First, is TB a significant problem in the US? It's not. Second, we are only looking at foreign-born patients -- given that the vast majority of immigrants in the US are from Mexico, 26 percent is a rather small number. So what's your point again, you racist shitbag?
The Washington Times is a right-wing tabloid, and this is exactly the type of BS they are known to spew. Are you going to start posting articles from the Weekly World News next?
The federal minimum wage is $5.15 per hour. This also happens to be the minimum wage in the vast majority of the US. A handful of states have higher minimum wage, but not many. Obviously, most call centers are located in states with low minimum wages, such as Nevada or Texas. $6 to $7 an hour is a very common wage for retail work, call centers, and other unskilled labor.
I don't think they will just let you run wire (or pipe/whatever) over large tracts of public and private land.
You don't need to be a utility to run wire over large tracts of land, as long as you get everyone's permission. Of course, that is rather difficult. Without the government, nobody could build a phone network.
So the point is that natural monopolies really don't tend to be a big deal even though they are pretty rare, the government-granted monopolies on the other hand are problimatic.
Well, the government is certainly not the problem here. What exactly would you rather do, and how would it improve the situation?
However, the barriers to entry into the OS market are practically NIL! ZERO!
Really? I didn't know software wrote itself. In fact, I seem to recall that Windows took years and billions of dollars to create. That's quite a substantial barrier right there.
Small government has no such power thus the government can't pander to big business.
I think you should put down the crack pipe. A government with no power is not a government, and a government with power is going to always pander to big business.
You must be crazy. Reading Microsoft documentation for any length of time makes me want to get up and kill someone. And VB.NET is a rather large and complicated beast. Not to mention, trying to explain OOP to a novice programmer is something that is best not done. It may seem like a trivial concept to you, but it's actually extremely non-intuitive and difficult to understand for someone who has never programmed before.
This, of course, is the main problem with programming these days. Even a simple program has to interface with the operating system and all of its byzantine APIs. Windows is especially unfriendly, since the command line is not meant to be used, and doing graphical stuff is a major pain in the ass. Linux is not much better. On top of that, the effort vs. satisfaction ratio is now extremely low. For a given need, you can generally find a much better program than you could write in a few weeks, for free, and with source code. The incentive to write your own software is simply not there anymore, just like the incentive to solder together your own radio.
It seems like you do not even understand what the phrase 'natural monopoly' means. You don't need governmental help to impose a barrier to entry to the local telephone market. Nobody is going to build a second, parallel phone network, even though government regulations do not prevent anyone from doing so.
Have you ever used one? It's tough to get the timing much above 100MHz. Even a 66 MHz PCI interface is extremely difficult to implement. No way those multipliers in a cyclone will work at 700MHz. Maybe in a $150 virtex 4 chip, but still unlikely. Besides, how the hell are you going to get that much data into the chip? There's a reason they don't put 150 parallel multipliers in a CPU, and it's not because they can't.
That's why you don't see generic DSPs being used in heavy DSP work (say, in telcos), but custom and semi-custom ASICs, and FPGAs in smaller environments.
Telcos need simple DSP, often on a large number of channels, and it needs to be done with precise timing. That's why FPGAs and ASICs are used. A dedicated DSP chip would not integrate well into the application, but it would certainly have enough power.
An FPGA does not make a very good DSP for the price. I suppose if it's one of the nicer ones from the Virtex series, you can get it to do DSP, but it won't be as good as the processor already in the PC. I'd say your best bet would be hacking a videocard to do the synth stuff -- it's optimized for the kind of parallel computation that DSP requires.
Not to mention, I've seen far more black LCD monitors than white ones. The one I have right now is black. In fact, it's probably the prettiest LCD monitor design I've seen. Just a simple black 1/2 inch frame around the screen. Not flashy, not intrusive, very minimalist.
Re:That's an okay idea, but...
on
Abandoned Games
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· Score: 1
Why would you want to have some 20-year-old chunk of handcoded x86 assembly which programs the registers in the CGA card directly? It would probably be far easier to just rewrite the game from scratch, like many people have done.
Intel is still a far larger and far stronger company than AMD. Intel can afford to screw up several times; AMD cannot. Dell, the #1 PC vendor, still doesn't sell a single system with an AMD chip in it. The lawsuit definitely has some merit. As far as the cost of lawyers: to a company the size of Intel or AMD, the 10 million or so they are likely to spend is not much money at all. Even SCO, who is practically bankrupt, has money for lawyers.
Apart from all the wasted paper and resources, I don't see much of a problem. Take the junk mail, deposit into recycle bin/shredder. I almost never even open it.
It's better to have racism out in the open so it can be recognized for what it is and justly condemed by society, not government.
Which part of the phrase "this did not work in the 50s and 60s" do you not understand?
Do you think EOE laws changed anyone's hearts?
Who cares if they changed anyone's hearts? They reduced employment discrimination, that's for damn sure.
Only by interacting and trying to understand one other can we fix this problem.
Yeah, let's all smoke some weed and be happy. That approach sure worked in the 60s.
By choosing not to associate with someone you have not actively done anything to them.
You seriously need to stop using weasel words. If you use the appropriate terminology, your logic doesn't make much sense. By not hiring a qualified individual simply because of their race, you have deprived them of a job.
There is no natural right that implies others have to like you, tolerate you or hire you.
You are intentionally confusing personal relationships and business relationships. Employment is not a personal relationship, it's a business transaction. Business transactions are (and should be) well-regulated and follow certain rules. You do not have the right to refuse employment to someone simply because of their race.
Sure you have disrespected them and it's morally unjustified, but not legally unjustified.
It's not merely disrespect, and it's not simply an issue of morality. Using a racial slur is not illegal. Making hiring decisions based on someone's race is illegal. You do not deprive anyone of anything if you use a racial slur. If you reject a job applicant, you are depriving them of a job. That's a huge difference.
I have. I know about the guilded age.
Really? You don't even know how to spell it correctly. Seriously, read some books. Preferably not the editorialized garbage you are reading.
It doesn't make you feel good, but at the end of the day you feel bad for the people perpetrating it because they are the ignorant ones.
Yeah, like getting beat up by some black kids is the same thing as being discriminated against. That's not even in the same ballpark, dude. Get back to me when you can't get a job because you're white. Oh, wait, that doesn't happen, does it?
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Those people lucky enough to be be in demand have incentive to constantly shop around for a new job. Those people who aren't in demand have incentive to generally do the lowest quality and quantity of work necessary to stay employed. Perhaps this is more efficient in a way that will make some economists happy.
The system works, for two simple reasons. You can't constantly switch jobs, since you would not be doing any productive work, and would get rather worn-out. You also can't slack off, even if your skills are not in demand (since you can easily be replaced). This ensures the system is reasonably efficient. In addition, people with "hot" skills can find an appropriately challenging job, and there is a substantial incentive for improving your skillset.
In general, you don't know jack shit and are talking out of your ass. Almost all states have at-will employment, which means you can get fired for any reason whatsoever, with no recourse. As far as proving racial discrimination: you can't just claim that, you have to be a protected minority, you have to go to court, and you have to prove that you were terminated due to your race and not another factor. As far as age-based discrimination: it's VERY hard to prove in court, and rather expensive, unless you have specific evidence that you were discriminated against. In short, it's not that hard to get rid of someone.
How would they compete in the Opteron/x86 market? Unless you need specialized graphics capabilities, you can just buy everything from Dell, and SGI sure as hell isn't going to beat Dell. The reason the Indy was successful was because PCs totally sucked. I mean, the Indy was competing with Pentium 60s equipped with a piece of shit S3 or ATI videocard, priced at several thousand dollars. It was no contest.
ISO9001 is definitely overhyped, but you are underestimating its usefulness. It's always a good idea to have all your procedures written down and followed. Obviously, this is meaningless if nobody bothers to follow the procedures or if nobody updates them. On the other side, you can have perfectly good procedures and processes without getting certified. However, a properly run facility should have no problems getting ISO certified.
In any case, my point was that having the CEO micromanaging the assembly line is never a good idea.
Of course you can use fusion(if it worked really well), to power a hell of alot of cars. Just use electric cars and power 'em up off the fusion-powered grid...?
We already have an electric grid, and nuclear power will work fine in the meantime. Electic vehicles have much bigger problems than the energy supply -- mainly the batteries.
If Ford was able to get 30mpg out of the Explorer, they would be doing it. SUVs cost about the same to manufacture as a midsize car, and they sell for 2-3x as much. Toyota and Honda can afford to manufacture cars because they have lower labor costs and higher manufacturing efficiency. GM and Ford have been making large vehicles mainly because they are a lot more profitable than small ones, not because they are in bed with oil companies.
It's pretty obvious you don't have a clue about how electronics is manufactured. They don't just tell the contractor "build us a laptop". Apple would have a custom design done by their in-house engineers, and produce all the manufacturing data for the contractor. Steve Jobs tells engineers what to do, the manufacturers build exactly what they tell them to build. A company the size of Apple would have their own test engineers, production engineers, and QA teams on-site, supervising the process and ensuring appropriate quality levels. As far as shoddy workmanship: why would a large contract manufacturer have inferior quality to an in-house team? If anything, it would be the other way around. Defects like the grease issue are most likely the fault of an engineer specifying an incorrect application procedure, and QA personnel overlooking the problem.
In any case, production is highly automated and managed by an ERP system. It's not like Steve Jobs could just walk down to the manufacturing floor and tell them what to do. That will get your ISO9001 certification revoked in a hurry. If you want even a minor change, you have to issue an ECO and do all sorts of paperwork. Besides, there is nothing that can be changed on the assembly line. By that time, the boards have been manufactured, the parts and mechanical assemblies procured, and the tooling set up. The only benefit to doing manufacturing in-house is that you have more control over when things get built. Not an issue when you are ordering hundreds of thousands of units.
How does it matter where it's manufactured? It's hard to make a case for manufacturing in the USA. Component suppliers are all in Asia now. Asian contractors are just as good as American ones. It's not like you can tell a board made in China from a board made in the USA, assuming they were assembled to the same specification. The real issue here seems to be that Apple does not have adequate control over their manufacturing process and does not have proper quality assurance procedures.
Here's a clue, fucktard: Americans don't get vaccinated against TB, either. In fact, there is no effective TB vaccine. What's your point again?
Man, you need to lay off the crack. The energy industry does not run the country. It isn't the reason we don't have fusion plants. The oil companies don't really even care about fusion, since you can't exactly use fusion to run cars. Not to mention, there are no commercial companies that work on stuff like fusion. Companies don't generally work on such long-term, uncertain, and expensive projects. Oh, and I just love your conspiracy theory about the car companies being in bed with the oil companies. Who comes up with this shit? Have you not noticed that car manufacturers would kill to get a couple of extra MPG?
If you think the FCC actually tracks down violators, you have another thing coming. In reality, you can get away with a lot before the FCC is going to do anything. It's next to impossible to get a jammer off the ham bands (I've tried), and I REALLY doubt the FCC will bother investigating complaints about operation in the ISM bands. They don't give a shit.
I'm not refuting the claim, you fucktard. I'm pointing out the xenophobic spin. Read the statement:
In 2003, nearly 26 percent of foreign-born TB patients in the United States were from Mexico
First, is TB a significant problem in the US? It's not. Second, we are only looking at foreign-born patients -- given that the vast majority of immigrants in the US are from Mexico, 26 percent is a rather small number. So what's your point again, you racist shitbag?
The Washington Times is a right-wing tabloid, and this is exactly the type of BS they are known to spew. Are you going to start posting articles from the Weekly World News next?
The federal minimum wage is $5.15 per hour. This also happens to be the minimum wage in the vast majority of the US. A handful of states have higher minimum wage, but not many. Obviously, most call centers are located in states with low minimum wages, such as Nevada or Texas. $6 to $7 an hour is a very common wage for retail work, call centers, and other unskilled labor.
I don't think they will just let you run wire (or pipe/whatever) over large tracts of public and private land.
You don't need to be a utility to run wire over large tracts of land, as long as you get everyone's permission. Of course, that is rather difficult. Without the government, nobody could build a phone network.
So the point is that natural monopolies really don't tend to be a big deal even though they are pretty rare, the government-granted monopolies on the other hand are problimatic.
Well, the government is certainly not the problem here. What exactly would you rather do, and how would it improve the situation?
However, the barriers to entry into the OS market are practically NIL! ZERO!
Really? I didn't know software wrote itself. In fact, I seem to recall that Windows took years and billions of dollars to create. That's quite a substantial barrier right there.
Small government has no such power thus the government can't pander to big business.
I think you should put down the crack pipe. A government with no power is not a government, and a government with power is going to always pander to big business.
For programming, I'd learn Visual Basic .NET.
You must be crazy. Reading Microsoft documentation for any length of time makes me want to get up and kill someone. And VB.NET is a rather large and complicated beast. Not to mention, trying to explain OOP to a novice programmer is something that is best not done. It may seem like a trivial concept to you, but it's actually extremely non-intuitive and difficult to understand for someone who has never programmed before.
This, of course, is the main problem with programming these days. Even a simple program has to interface with the operating system and all of its byzantine APIs. Windows is especially unfriendly, since the command line is not meant to be used, and doing graphical stuff is a major pain in the ass. Linux is not much better. On top of that, the effort vs. satisfaction ratio is now extremely low. For a given need, you can generally find a much better program than you could write in a few weeks, for free, and with source code. The incentive to write your own software is simply not there anymore, just like the incentive to solder together your own radio.
It seems like you do not even understand what the phrase 'natural monopoly' means. You don't need governmental help to impose a barrier to entry to the local telephone market. Nobody is going to build a second, parallel phone network, even though government regulations do not prevent anyone from doing so.
Take a look at RME audio and their soundcards. They have stuff up to 56 channels at reasonable prices.
Have you ever used one? It's tough to get the timing much above 100MHz. Even a 66 MHz PCI interface is extremely difficult to implement. No way those multipliers in a cyclone will work at 700MHz. Maybe in a $150 virtex 4 chip, but still unlikely. Besides, how the hell are you going to get that much data into the chip? There's a reason they don't put 150 parallel multipliers in a CPU, and it's not because they can't.
That's why you don't see generic DSPs being used in heavy DSP work (say, in telcos), but custom and semi-custom ASICs, and FPGAs in smaller environments.
Telcos need simple DSP, often on a large number of channels, and it needs to be done with precise timing. That's why FPGAs and ASICs are used. A dedicated DSP chip would not integrate well into the application, but it would certainly have enough power.
An FPGA does not make a very good DSP for the price. I suppose if it's one of the nicer ones from the Virtex series, you can get it to do DSP, but it won't be as good as the processor already in the PC. I'd say your best bet would be hacking a videocard to do the synth stuff -- it's optimized for the kind of parallel computation that DSP requires.
Not to mention, I've seen far more black LCD monitors than white ones. The one I have right now is black. In fact, it's probably the prettiest LCD monitor design I've seen. Just a simple black 1/2 inch frame around the screen. Not flashy, not intrusive, very minimalist.
Why would you want to have some 20-year-old chunk of handcoded x86 assembly which programs the registers in the CGA card directly? It would probably be far easier to just rewrite the game from scratch, like many people have done.
Intel is still a far larger and far stronger company than AMD. Intel can afford to screw up several times; AMD cannot. Dell, the #1 PC vendor, still doesn't sell a single system with an AMD chip in it. The lawsuit definitely has some merit. As far as the cost of lawyers: to a company the size of Intel or AMD, the 10 million or so they are likely to spend is not much money at all. Even SCO, who is practically bankrupt, has money for lawyers.
Apart from all the wasted paper and resources, I don't see much of a problem. Take the junk mail, deposit into recycle bin/shredder. I almost never even open it.
It's better to have racism out in the open so it can be recognized for what it is and justly condemed by society, not government.
Which part of the phrase "this did not work in the 50s and 60s" do you not understand?
Do you think EOE laws changed anyone's hearts?
Who cares if they changed anyone's hearts? They reduced employment discrimination, that's for damn sure.
Only by interacting and trying to understand one other can we fix this problem.
Yeah, let's all smoke some weed and be happy. That approach sure worked in the 60s.
By choosing not to associate with someone you have not actively done anything to them.
You seriously need to stop using weasel words. If you use the appropriate terminology, your logic doesn't make much sense. By not hiring a qualified individual simply because of their race, you have deprived them of a job.
There is no natural right that implies others have to like you, tolerate you or hire you.
You are intentionally confusing personal relationships and business relationships. Employment is not a personal relationship, it's a business transaction. Business transactions are (and should be) well-regulated and follow certain rules. You do not have the right to refuse employment to someone simply because of their race.
Sure you have disrespected them and it's morally unjustified, but not legally unjustified.
It's not merely disrespect, and it's not simply an issue of morality. Using a racial slur is not illegal. Making hiring decisions based on someone's race is illegal. You do not deprive anyone of anything if you use a racial slur. If you reject a job applicant, you are depriving them of a job. That's a huge difference.
I have. I know about the guilded age.
Really? You don't even know how to spell it correctly. Seriously, read some books. Preferably not the editorialized garbage you are reading.
It doesn't make you feel good, but at the end of the day you feel bad for the people perpetrating it because they are the ignorant ones.
Yeah, like getting beat up by some black kids is the same thing as being discriminated against. That's not even in the same ballpark, dude. Get back to me when you can't get a job because you're white. Oh, wait, that doesn't happen, does it?