This is by far the most idiotic post I've had the opportunity to read on Slashdot.
Yeah, I used to believe that too, then I realized that human beings don't actually vary in ability that much
Which completely explains why some people get a 4.0 in college and others fail after a semester or two due to excessive partying.
Correct- so the obvious answer is NO COMPENSATION.
Yes, because people just love to do things without getting compensated for it. I take it you don't know anyone who sits on his ass all day.
The primary motivation towards good performance is learning, not compensation.
Really? Just to let you know, most work out there isn't easy, sit-on-your-ass-and-get-paid-six-figures office work. It's more like busting your ass all day doing something hard and boring. You think a farmer does his job for the learning that it brings?
Well, if being lazy and greedy is natural as you insist
By nature, humans are lazy, selfish, greedy, and unwise. If it were another way around, we wouldn't need any economic system.
But if they are not, as I say, then it's rather easy to eliminate the cause- the free market and free trade.
Please explain how the free market system causes laziness.
The demand is there, and some people are willing to pay that much for a 360.
So what? Some people might be willing to pay $20,000 for one. What is your point?
A company's goal is never to create minimal demand, only to ensure that supply meets demand.
Given that currently they are producing few units, "meeting" demand would mean "reducing it to nearly-zero".
Also, a company's goal is to MAKE MONEY. It is not about meeting demand or setting prices. It's about making a profit. The market is not just a linear equation, it's a rather complicated system.
Things don't get a reputation for being overpriced. Price is an obvious quantity, which people can see at any store.
What the hell do you mean? People judge things in terms of price. You don't expect the same graphics from a $149 PS2 and a $400 Xbox 360. However, the $400 Xbox 360 does not offer enough value to be worth $700. If you sell it for that much, it will have a reputation as a poor value.
Also, you are assuming every consumer is an ideal rational consumer. This is not true. People buy items because they are hot/popular/well-marketed/from a well-known vendor, not because they offer a good value for the price. Just go to a drugstore sometime. You can buy Tylenol, or a store-brand cold medicine with exactly the same ingredients. The generic is usually 1/2 price or so, but people still buy more of the name-brand stuff. There is no quality difference, since both are manufactured to FDA standards. How do you explain this phenomenon?
But if it drops from $700 to $400, since they already quoted a $400 price tag I wouldn't hold anything against them.
Oh, and the people who couldn't afford it when it was $700 would just run out and buy it? They would probably wait some more, since they already waited long enough and Microsoft will probably drop the price anyway.
Please, stop rehashing what your Microeconomics professor said. It is complete and utter bunk if you stop and think about it. The whole supply-and-demand relation might work for commodity goods with a high elasticity (which almost never exist), but it is hardly applicable to anything in a real economy. Any example which shows a price increase directly driving down demand is usually extremely contrived.
Microsoft's goal here is not to eliminate shortages. It's to make money. They do this by selling as many consoles to as many people as possible while not losing a ton of money on each one. This means selling the consoles at- or below-cost.
The whole idea of marketing is to create demand for a product. Microsoft is spending millions on marketing. Why would they shoot themselves in the foot by increasing the price and driving down demand? Not to mention, the shortages are temporary. If the demand is still there when they finally get around to manufacturing the units, they will sell lots of them. If they kill the demand for a product by raising the price, lowering the price will have little effect.
You are completely wrong. Demand is a function of many factors, not just price. Hype is a much bigger factor. Shortages create hype, and hype creates demand. When Microsoft ramps up their production in a month or two, there will hopefully still be enough hype to generate large demand. The PS2 launch was one of the best examples of this technique.
If Microsoft just priced the consoles to generate minimal demand, the hype will die down and the console will get a reputation for being overpriced. Since demand will be equal to zero, there will be very few sales once the price goes down.
Furthermore, huge price drops are considered to indicate a dead product, and few people want to spend money on a dying product. Sega had to lower the prices for the Dreamcasts to $50 to get the damn things off the shelves.
Because supply vs. demand only works in freshman economics class. If Microsoft priced the things at $700, nobody would buy them if they knew the PS3 would be $300. Furthermore, there are certain expectations for console pricing. Every company that tried to make a $700 console (namely, 3DO) died a slow and painful death.
Besides, the idea behind selling consoles is not to make money. The real money is made on games. The console needs to go to the people who will buy the most games, which are also the people most eager to wait in line at Best Buy all night to grab a 360.
Well, Windows is really the only system that matters in the "Java acceptance" thing, and Java is pretty damn easy to install on Windows. On Linux, Java is about as difficult to install as anything else which doesn't come with your distribution. A lot of desktop apps (Azureus, for one) already use Java, and are rather good. Yeah, to make something truly cross-platform more effort has to be invested into UIs and such, but it's not that difficult to have different UIs for different OSs. Java is starting to support that fairly well, too.
Are you still in high school? That's about how I thought when I was in 10th grade, learning some PHP. Real applications are a lot more complicated than that. I'm sure you would love it if, say, Amazon charged your credit card, but failed to actually add your order to the database (which is exactly what would happen if you didn't have transactions and some error occurred). This is actually a fairly mild scenario.
Seriously, read a database book someday. MySQL is a toy database which is great for things you would normally do with a flat file (content management, web counters, and other single-user applications). The only similarity it shares with a real DB is the syntax. It starts to crap out with very small amounts of data (hundreds of megabytes or so), and it really does not scale all that well. Nobody would ever think of using MySQL for anything serious, with a large number of users and/or data.
Are those actual professional programmers, or are they hobbyists who are too lazy to learn Eclipse? That thing saves so much time and frustration that I can't imagine not using it. If he wants to make sure it runs well on old hardware, it's not that hard to keep an old box around. I'd rather make sure it runs on new hardware, though. By the time that software gets released, most of the 500MHz boxes will be in the dumpster.
Besides, I've used Eclipse on my (completely obsolete) 600MHz box. It's not the fastest program to run on that machine, but it's perfectly usable.
There is not much mercury vapor in a CCF tube. About a thousand times less than in a regular 4-ft fluorescent (like the ones used in offices). Those tubes routinely get broken during installation and removal. If it was really that harmful, everyone working indoors would be dead by now.
Actually, engineering can pay very well and has very good job stability -- if you are any good at it. Of course, most people are absolutely no good at it, even if they do slog it through their BS. Sure, you can complain all you want about engineers from India or whereever, but the main thing is that Americans are much worse at it than most people from India or China. Just look at who goes to get their MS (which is really the basic requirement for a true engineer).
True, you are not going to get 6-figure salaries with a BS. With a graduate degree, it's very much doable.
If you think everyone can be a lawyer or a doctor, think again. The only reason those professions are well-paid is because their trade organizations create an artificially limited supply.
Get the hell out of there as soon as you can. If they are cutting the program, the professors will be more worried about finding a new position than actually teaching. There aren't enough openings out there for a whole engineering department that is about to get cut.
Browsers should not be doing anything like this to protect against redirect loops, except having a redirection limit. What GoDaddy is doing is perfectly RFC compliant, except for the relative URL (which a lot of places violate, actually). This does seem to be a bug in Safari and Opera. Opera in particular does some pretty aggressive caching, which is probably the problem here.
If an idiot like you actually knew anything, you would realize that this flaw does not let you execute random code. In general, any bug which does not crash the program is very unlikely to be vulnerable to buffer overflows and such. In this case, the only thing that happens is that the browser starts slowly because it has to read a long file.
This is only true in some special cases. In general, simply accessing a random memory location will cause the OS to shut the program down due to an access violation. The only time you can exploit this is if you can _make_ the program access a _particular_ memory location.
There is nothing wrong with the input code. It works just like intended. The only problem is, it's possible to create a long title and slow down the browser startup (that is, until you clear the history file). Not to mention, who the hell uses the history feature, anyway? It's the first thing I turn off.
Re:I've run a naked drive for a week
on
Hard Drive Window
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· Score: 1
Actually, modern hard drives never have bad sectors. Unlike the 80s drives, modern ones have ECC. Either they will read perfectly, or they will get stuck trying to read a bad sector. If the sector really is bad, it might return a failed read, but I don't think you can detect bad sectors on them the same way you used to be able to (write one value, get another). If you are trying to write to the drive, it will just remap any bad sectors to a reserved one and pretend like nothing happened.
You don't need vaccuum. You just need to not have any dust. A vaccuum cleaner + filter combination would probably be ideal, assuming the box is airtight and doesn't shed particles.
Well, it wasn't the _first_ DAP, but it was the first DAP that held 20GB and didn't weigh as much as a calculus textbook. I think the closest competitor at the time was the creative Nomad. Ugly, bigger than a CD player, horrible interface, and only 6GB. Not much of a surprise the iPod has 90% market share.
Agreed. In theory, the yearly auto inspection is supposed to catch things like that. In practice, it's kind of blown off. I see cars with worn-out brakes all the time, for instance. You'd think people would notice the loud squeal and get the $20 pads replaced before the $200 brake disks get destroyed...
Uh, dude, if someone is selling gas for 10 cents a gallon, you KNOW the price is wrong. That's the issue here. So, if an ATM suddenly decides to spit out money, it's OK to just grab a bunch of it? Taking something that's not yours is theft -- period. Not much difference whether you counterfeit the UPC or the machine screws up. If you know the price is definitely wrong, you are basically stealing.
Hey, you anarchocapitalist moron, that's already how it works. The UPC is just a unique ID for the product in the store database. Obviously, the price is already stored in the database. Of course, nothing (except the cashier) keeps you from putting a barcode from a $4 item onto a $250 item.
Well, it would be kind of hard to walk out the store with an iPod under his jacket, wouldn't it now? Hence the forgery charge. If you just try to steal something, you'll probably get caught, so the punishment is not too severe. More sophisticated schemes merit more significant charges.
Slashdot Mirror
This is by far the most idiotic post I've had the opportunity to read on Slashdot.
Yeah, I used to believe that too, then I realized that human beings don't actually vary in ability that much
Which completely explains why some people get a 4.0 in college and others fail after a semester or two due to excessive partying.
Correct- so the obvious answer is NO COMPENSATION.
Yes, because people just love to do things without getting compensated for it. I take it you don't know anyone who sits on his ass all day.
The primary motivation towards good performance is learning, not compensation.
Really? Just to let you know, most work out there isn't easy, sit-on-your-ass-and-get-paid-six-figures office work. It's more like busting your ass all day doing something hard and boring. You think a farmer does his job for the learning that it brings?
Well, if being lazy and greedy is natural as you insist
By nature, humans are lazy, selfish, greedy, and unwise. If it were another way around, we wouldn't need any economic system.
But if they are not, as I say, then it's rather easy to eliminate the cause- the free market and free trade.
Please explain how the free market system causes laziness.
The demand is there, and some people are willing to pay that much for a 360.
So what? Some people might be willing to pay $20,000 for one. What is your point?
A company's goal is never to create minimal demand, only to ensure that supply meets demand.
Given that currently they are producing few units, "meeting" demand would mean "reducing it to nearly-zero".
Also, a company's goal is to MAKE MONEY. It is not about meeting demand or setting prices. It's about making a profit. The market is not just a linear equation, it's a rather complicated system.
Things don't get a reputation for being overpriced. Price is an obvious quantity, which people can see at any store.
What the hell do you mean? People judge things in terms of price. You don't expect the same graphics from a $149 PS2 and a $400 Xbox 360. However, the $400 Xbox 360 does not offer enough value to be worth $700. If you sell it for that much, it will have a reputation as a poor value.
Also, you are assuming every consumer is an ideal rational consumer. This is not true. People buy items because they are hot/popular/well-marketed/from a well-known vendor, not because they offer a good value for the price. Just go to a drugstore sometime. You can buy Tylenol, or a store-brand cold medicine with exactly the same ingredients. The generic is usually 1/2 price or so, but people still buy more of the name-brand stuff. There is no quality difference, since both are manufactured to FDA standards. How do you explain this phenomenon?
But if it drops from $700 to $400, since they already quoted a $400 price tag I wouldn't hold anything against them.
Oh, and the people who couldn't afford it when it was $700 would just run out and buy it? They would probably wait some more, since they already waited long enough and Microsoft will probably drop the price anyway.
Please, stop rehashing what your Microeconomics professor said. It is complete and utter bunk if you stop and think about it. The whole supply-and-demand relation might work for commodity goods with a high elasticity (which almost never exist), but it is hardly applicable to anything in a real economy. Any example which shows a price increase directly driving down demand is usually extremely contrived.
Microsoft's goal here is not to eliminate shortages. It's to make money. They do this by selling as many consoles to as many people as possible while not losing a ton of money on each one. This means selling the consoles at- or below-cost.
The whole idea of marketing is to create demand for a product. Microsoft is spending millions on marketing. Why would they shoot themselves in the foot by increasing the price and driving down demand? Not to mention, the shortages are temporary. If the demand is still there when they finally get around to manufacturing the units, they will sell lots of them. If they kill the demand for a product by raising the price, lowering the price will have little effect.
You are completely wrong. Demand is a function of many factors, not just price. Hype is a much bigger factor. Shortages create hype, and hype creates demand. When Microsoft ramps up their production in a month or two, there will hopefully still be enough hype to generate large demand. The PS2 launch was one of the best examples of this technique.
If Microsoft just priced the consoles to generate minimal demand, the hype will die down and the console will get a reputation for being overpriced. Since demand will be equal to zero, there will be very few sales once the price goes down.
Furthermore, huge price drops are considered to indicate a dead product, and few people want to spend money on a dying product. Sega had to lower the prices for the Dreamcasts to $50 to get the damn things off the shelves.
Because supply vs. demand only works in freshman economics class. If Microsoft priced the things at $700, nobody would buy them if they knew the PS3 would be $300. Furthermore, there are certain expectations for console pricing. Every company that tried to make a $700 console (namely, 3DO) died a slow and painful death.
Besides, the idea behind selling consoles is not to make money. The real money is made on games. The console needs to go to the people who will buy the most games, which are also the people most eager to wait in line at Best Buy all night to grab a 360.
Well, Windows is really the only system that matters in the "Java acceptance" thing, and Java is pretty damn easy to install on Windows. On Linux, Java is about as difficult to install as anything else which doesn't come with your distribution. A lot of desktop apps (Azureus, for one) already use Java, and are rather good. Yeah, to make something truly cross-platform more effort has to be invested into UIs and such, but it's not that difficult to have different UIs for different OSs. Java is starting to support that fairly well, too.
Are you still in high school? That's about how I thought when I was in 10th grade, learning some PHP. Real applications are a lot more complicated than that. I'm sure you would love it if, say, Amazon charged your credit card, but failed to actually add your order to the database (which is exactly what would happen if you didn't have transactions and some error occurred). This is actually a fairly mild scenario.
Seriously, read a database book someday. MySQL is a toy database which is great for things you would normally do with a flat file (content management, web counters, and other single-user applications). The only similarity it shares with a real DB is the syntax. It starts to crap out with very small amounts of data (hundreds of megabytes or so), and it really does not scale all that well. Nobody would ever think of using MySQL for anything serious, with a large number of users and/or data.
Are those actual professional programmers, or are they hobbyists who are too lazy to learn Eclipse? That thing saves so much time and frustration that I can't imagine not using it. If he wants to make sure it runs well on old hardware, it's not that hard to keep an old box around. I'd rather make sure it runs on new hardware, though. By the time that software gets released, most of the 500MHz boxes will be in the dumpster.
Besides, I've used Eclipse on my (completely obsolete) 600MHz box. It's not the fastest program to run on that machine, but it's perfectly usable.
There is not much mercury vapor in a CCF tube. About a thousand times less than in a regular 4-ft fluorescent (like the ones used in offices). Those tubes routinely get broken during installation and removal. If it was really that harmful, everyone working indoors would be dead by now.
Actually, engineering can pay very well and has very good job stability -- if you are any good at it. Of course, most people are absolutely no good at it, even if they do slog it through their BS. Sure, you can complain all you want about engineers from India or whereever, but the main thing is that Americans are much worse at it than most people from India or China. Just look at who goes to get their MS (which is really the basic requirement for a true engineer).
True, you are not going to get 6-figure salaries with a BS. With a graduate degree, it's very much doable.
If you think everyone can be a lawyer or a doctor, think again. The only reason those professions are well-paid is because their trade organizations create an artificially limited supply.
Go try to get a programming job with a degree in English and see how well you do.
Get the hell out of there as soon as you can. If they are cutting the program, the professors will be more worried about finding a new position than actually teaching. There aren't enough openings out there for a whole engineering department that is about to get cut.
Uh, dude, most universities weren't hit by Hurricane Katrina.
Browsers should not be doing anything like this to protect against redirect loops, except having a redirection limit. What GoDaddy is doing is perfectly RFC compliant, except for the relative URL (which a lot of places violate, actually). This does seem to be a bug in Safari and Opera. Opera in particular does some pretty aggressive caching, which is probably the problem here.
If an idiot like you actually knew anything, you would realize that this flaw does not let you execute random code. In general, any bug which does not crash the program is very unlikely to be vulnerable to buffer overflows and such. In this case, the only thing that happens is that the browser starts slowly because it has to read a long file.
This is only true in some special cases. In general, simply accessing a random memory location will cause the OS to shut the program down due to an access violation. The only time you can exploit this is if you can _make_ the program access a _particular_ memory location.
There is nothing wrong with the input code. It works just like intended. The only problem is, it's possible to create a long title and slow down the browser startup (that is, until you clear the history file). Not to mention, who the hell uses the history feature, anyway? It's the first thing I turn off.
Actually, modern hard drives never have bad sectors. Unlike the 80s drives, modern ones have ECC. Either they will read perfectly, or they will get stuck trying to read a bad sector. If the sector really is bad, it might return a failed read, but I don't think you can detect bad sectors on them the same way you used to be able to (write one value, get another). If you are trying to write to the drive, it will just remap any bad sectors to a reserved one and pretend like nothing happened.
You don't need vaccuum. You just need to not have any dust. A vaccuum cleaner + filter combination would probably be ideal, assuming the box is airtight and doesn't shed particles.
Well, it wasn't the _first_ DAP, but it was the first DAP that held 20GB and didn't weigh as much as a calculus textbook. I think the closest competitor at the time was the creative Nomad. Ugly, bigger than a CD player, horrible interface, and only 6GB. Not much of a surprise the iPod has 90% market share.
Agreed. In theory, the yearly auto inspection is supposed to catch things like that. In practice, it's kind of blown off. I see cars with worn-out brakes all the time, for instance. You'd think people would notice the loud squeal and get the $20 pads replaced before the $200 brake disks get destroyed...
Uh, dude, if someone is selling gas for 10 cents a gallon, you KNOW the price is wrong. That's the issue here. So, if an ATM suddenly decides to spit out money, it's OK to just grab a bunch of it? Taking something that's not yours is theft -- period. Not much difference whether you counterfeit the UPC or the machine screws up. If you know the price is definitely wrong, you are basically stealing.
There's also something called 'the copy machine'. Works great, and you don't need any stinkin' 15-day trial.
Hey, you anarchocapitalist moron, that's already how it works. The UPC is just a unique ID for the product in the store database. Obviously, the price is already stored in the database. Of course, nothing (except the cashier) keeps you from putting a barcode from a $4 item onto a $250 item.
Well, it would be kind of hard to walk out the store with an iPod under his jacket, wouldn't it now? Hence the forgery charge. If you just try to steal something, you'll probably get caught, so the punishment is not too severe. More sophisticated schemes merit more significant charges.