Who should be responsible for tracking IT's cost/benefit ratio? The IT people, or the finance people (aka. "bean counters") and/or management? Mind you, that's tracking, not making the decisions. The decisions should be constrained but not dictated by costs, and IT should have a bigger say than accounting.
IT takes a lot of expertise. You don't want your very expensive DBA, system admin, network admin, or software engineer, doing any more accounting than absolutely necessary. If finance people cost more to employ, then it would make sense to require the IT people do their own accounting. On the other hand, if it's a small enough shop that the handful of IT people needed have a fair amount of downtime, then maybe they should do their own accounting.
What I find really scary about nuclear weapons is how little it takes to bring on nuclear winter and world wide famine. Russia could still destroy everyone by nuking themselves. Just 50 nukes could kick up enough dust that crops would not get enough sunshine for at least 7 years. Even Pakistan could have enough nukes to pull that off. Bit difficult to intercept that.
I thought the Pirate Party ought to have used a less controversial name, since 99% of the world used to think pirate=thief. Used to. The "Sharing Party" sounded more positive. But now, I think they were right. The intellectual property extremists have discredited copyright and patent law so thoroughly that "pirate" actually has a positive ring among a growing number of people.
"Hacker" is just fine. All B&N did was make themselves look bad. As if running a bricks and mortar bookstore alone isn't looking more and more backward by the day, they had to pull an idiotic and utterly futile attempt at censorship. If they're trying to show the world that they're dinosaurs who can't get a clue, about the only worse thing they could do is cancel their ebook program.
What media organizations do you think are creditable? Or do you think they're all garbage?
In that particular case, I don't need a news organization to tell me that medical care in the US is seriously twisted and perverted towards profit. I've seen it, many times. The fee for service system the US uses encourages medical providers to provide more service, whether or not it's needed, and worse, to cause more services to be needed. But I'll give you another source: Reader's Digest, February 1997. They tested a random sample of 50 dentists, and the results weren't good. The article itself seems to have been pulled, but there are still plenty of articles about that article. Here's one.
What about Big Oil's lies concerning not just AGW (did you know of Exxon's support up to the early 2000s for think tanks and research that denies global warming?), but disasters like Deepwater Horizon?
You're so outraged over Big Government. Yes, bash them hard over tax loopholes. But what about Little Government? For instance, many local governments have engaged in parking meter and red light camera programs of dubious merit that whatever else they are claimed to accomplish, extract quite a bit of money from the public. Many universities and colleges are even more notorious for strict parking enforcement. There's also a classic taxation without representation many have jumped on: special sales taxes for motel rooms, rental cars, and other things that hit travelers only. US sales taxes are under 10% for most items. But for rooms and rental cars, 15% or more is typical.
Speaking of government, what about attempts to rig elections, such as voter caging?
Then there is Big Finance. Madoff is the only perp who has been locked up. The rest of them got off with pathetically small fines. Some even got a free bailout. Why is Goldman Sachs still in business, still paying their executives obscene bonuses? Why is Mozilo not behind bars?
What about Big Media and piracy? Hollywood Accounting, and lobbying for laws like DMCA, SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998?
But you put your energies towards calling out this supposed great scientific conspiracy over AGW. It's beyond the pail to suppose there could be a deliberate effort with active and explicit collusion among thousands of independent scientists. However, there could indeed be a groupthink problem, motivated in part by the desire to secure more funding. (Do you really think funding is only available for those who will affirm AGW?) Medical research has just such a problem. How can we tell the difference? By reviewing the evidence and the work. And what we see is that it's the deniers who have engaged in bad science, and who have a clear motive and financial interest in doing so.
I'm inclined to the GP's point of view. Business Intelligence isn't that profound. As the joke goes, Military Intelligence is an oxymoron. Business Intelligence isn't even that respectable. Asking good questions would seem to be the hardest part. I'm sure there are guidelines for that. Shouldn't be hard to get a sense of the sort of questions to ask.
Despite the seeming ease, we see managers, who must be using BI, really screwing up. And often in stupid, heartless, ugly ways that end up misunderstanding facts to, for instance, make useful or even vital employees seem superfluous, and therefore candidates for termination in the next layoff. What formula does BI use to account for morale? If BI is being used like that, the users have already failed. A better use of BI is to employ it to avoid the necessity of layoffs.
Worse, I suspect BI is often abused to justify decisions. Feed it enough biased data, and it will reach the desired conclusions regardless of merit. Would be a rare manager who didn't slant the facts to make himself look important. "We make facts based upon decisions." Would explain a lot of why BI has a poor reputation.
After the questions, BI is just glorified data gathering and database searches. Could be argued either way, but BI is not even really Data Mining. Data Mining involves digging into data to discover correlations, facts, and answers to the unasked and unsuspected.
I'm sure there are students of BI who will vehemently disagree. Any BI experts care to tell me how wrong I am, and more importantly, why? Why should we take your subject seriously?
Make more friends? One of the best things the West could do is curb the excesses of its corporations. If you think they behave badly in the US, read about some of the things they do in other nations. US corporations have an unhealthy amount of influence and power. Everyone knows they have the implicit backing of the US military if worse comes to worst. When they commit an atrocity, they don't just make themselves look bad, they make the US look bad. The US compounds matters by letting them off lightly. What will happen to Walmart for this recent bribery scandal in Mexico? Probably nothing at all in the US. Will the US cooperate with Mexico by honoring requests for extradition? Probably not. Warren Anderson, CEO of Union Carbide during the Bhopal disaster, is still wanted for trial in India. So far, the US has refused to extradite him.
There are quite a few nations where you will put yourself in considerable danger if you wear a shirt with a logo of a US corporation. Do NOT wear a Union Carbide shirt in India. You'd be safer in an Uncle Sam costume than in a shirt like that.
Vote? Even if there were real, viable choices, have to do more than vote. The Democrats are only slightly better than the Republicans. Democrats are merely corrupt. Republicans are corrupt and crazy. Don't think voting is enough to excuse you from being reflected in that mirror. Politicians can't afford to be honest if we won't back honest players.
I see people still banking at Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citi. Still buying from Apple, Microsoft, MAFIAA members, GE, BP, AT&T, Comcast. Still gambling that health insurance won't deny and drop us the minute we need it. We could destroy these companies astonishingly fast if we'd all just quit doing business with them. They wouldn't be so stupid as to push it that far. In mere days, they'd crawl on their bellies begging us for forgiveness, and they would quickly do all those things that they claim are so difficult to do, such as paying taxes, resisting the temptation to buy legislation, reducing executive compensation, treating customers fairly, and making up for mistakes. They do appalling things, and people shrug it off, or bend over and take it.
I'm in a little battle with a local city. They're operating one of those red light cameras programs. Naturally, they have rigged things to cause lucrative violations, rather than reduce them. They carefully chose intersections for which the yellow was already too short so they could truthfully claim they didn't shorten any yellows. How can I make them wish they hadn't done it? I went to a hearing with evidence that their yellow lights were too short, but no joy. Judge told me I could take up the matter at a later date in municipal court, as if going to a hearing scheduled at their pleasure wasn't already enough of an imposition on me. I declined. Now I don't shop in that city anymore. How many people have joined me in this boycott? Zero of course. I've tried to persuade others, but all that does is get them thinking I'm crazy for making such a big deal out of a petty traffic violation. A few concede that I've got a point, but still won't do anything. I should pay up, shut up and stop annoying others with my whining, and get on with life. Then some turn around and mutter about their cell phone contracts, or the cost of cable TV. Even the ones who also have been burned by these red light cameras still won't fight. Some even rationalize it, convincing themselves the system is fair.
An effective approach to clean up bad neighborhoods is a zero tolerance enforcement and clean up operation. Litter, graffiti, broken windows, and burned out lights no matter how trivial are all cleaned up and repaired as fast as possible. Serves notice that petty crime is not going be overlooked. The same would work against these corporations and governments. Don't let a red light camera ticket go because it's only a little money, and too much trouble to fight. We blow off even the most insane EULAs because we feel pretty good that most of the nonsense in there can not be enforced. We should instead make software companies clean that crap up. No EULA at all. At least we fight back against DRM.
Fraud is a big problem, but not the worst problem. I've grown concerned that we're all engaged in mass delusion. We think the world works a particular way, but we may be wrong. We can produce what seems to be supporting evidence. I am referring to a much more fundamental idea of finance: the formulas for rates. They're neat and simple, and wrong. Implicit in compound interest is exponential growth. The universe doesn't support exponential growth.
Historically, depending on who you talk to, the stock market has averaged an annual rate of return of 7% or 10% or even more. But that record is only about 100 years long. Can the stock market keep up 7% growth for another 100 years? If it can, how about 1000 years?
Still? I saw EE contempt for CS 25 years ago. Engineers in general display contempt for, oh, the entire school of business, the law school, and all the art and half the science of Arts and Sciences, in particular, science such as History, and Library Science and other disciplines that sound like they attached "science" to the name to give it more legitimacy. EEs are the elite of the elite, sneering even at their fellow engineers, especially civil and agricultural. Possibly the contempt for CS stems from the thought it's just a jumped up Information Science program that ought to have stayed in the business school. Used to also hold geologists in disdain, until a few dams failed catastrophically.
I took a combo EE/CS class with students from both disciplines, taught by a EE professor with some serious attitude. He made no secret that he thought CS was a weak discipline, its problems were trivial, and its students inferior. He gave EE students a break on CS problems, and roasted CS students on EE problems. CS students averaged about a letter grade lower, thus "proving" his contentions. Have helped EE students with a CS problems that had them stumped, and after I showed them the answers, they blew it off as unimportant. Happened every time. Thought the answer was trivial, possibly because it didn't involve differential equations. A sure fire way to stump a EE is to hit them with something that requires dynamic programming. They still won't get it even after seeing how such a problem is solved. They just don't understand the concept of an algorithm, don't grasp that not all algorithms are trivial. Even a heavily mathematical algorithm such as FFT doesn't convince all of them otherwise, and those who are convinced tend to feel FFT ought to be part of EE and not CS!
Perhaps most law students and business majors aren't as smart, but thought EE would have learned more respect for at least CS by now.
Piracy is not as simple and black and white as you make out. How about: Hard drive with legit copy of Windows crashes. Pirate copy of Windows installed on replacement hard drive. Or the other way around: Hard drive with legit copy of Windows is moved to a new computer, where it refuses to work. Replaced by pirated copy. Old computer junked. Another one: Thanks to a bug in the DRM, a legit copy refuses to run. Customer service is unable to resolve the issue. Problem solved by replacing legit copy with pirated version. Or this: Is software licensed to a person or a seat? Can I install software on 2 computers (1 desktop and 1 notebook), both for my use only? Why should I have to pay for 2 copies for that? It didn't cost the vendor anything-- they didn't have to provide another set of installation CDs, manuals, etc. Many games work just fine that way. Do you see anything morally wrong with any of that? None of that was "get something for free", that was all hacking to get some use out of something that was paid for, and to get around restrictions that infringe on the customer's rights.
Vendors have made it very burdensome to maintain compliance. It's a real nightmare to track licensing for dozens of software packages on hundreds of computers. There's really no good reason why enterprise licensing should be so complicated, and should depend on details that are really none of the vendor's business. If I was in NSW's shoes, I'd dump that COPS software in favor of something open.
Now the law is caught in their own web. They're the ones who let software licensing become such a mess. Perhaps this will inspire them to change their attitudes a bit.
Companies used to operate that way. Immediate short term gain was not the only motive. They would consider the impact their policies had on their host cities because they were wise enough to understand that affected their own future. They even agreed to a 40 hour work week because both their own and independent research showed that got the most productivity out of people. Surely no one thought the 40 hour week was born out of some silly concern over the welfare of the workers! But now in many places, it's strip mining. Plunder and pillage until the accumulated capital is all played out, then move on to new territory. It's management by locusts.
You said shareholders? The money is being made for the workers-- some of the workers. They just all happen to be at the executive level.
Dysfunctional department is the best explanation I've read.
Texas Tech has had similar difficulties with its CS department. In the 80s, when they elevated CS from being a part of EE to an independent department in the College of Engineering, they needed more professors in a hurry. They raided related departments. These departments (EE, MIS, and Math) used this as an opportunity to dump their worst professors. Consequently, CS didn't have the usual 1 or 2 rotten apples, the whole department was rotten. Flunked students like crazy, didn't teach fundamental concepts such as big O, and spent inordinate time on rather trivial stuff. An entire semester of Data Structures for a superficial look at linked lists and binary trees? No analysis of insert, delete, and search times, which admittedly is more difficult if the students aren't been taught about big O. Didn't even cover B-trees. Just endless drills on writing code to copy pointers around. Any student who dared speak up about such things would end up flunking. There were so many unfair ways to get a failing grade. The teachers were bitter, angry people who hated each other, disrespected their new discipline, hated that they'd been rejected by their chosen discipline, and were far from above taking it out on the students. The College of Engineering had a graduation rate of 20% which I think is poor, but CS managed a new low of 5%, and it was only that high after massaging the numbers.
CS at Texas Tech has improved-- there was really nowhere for it to go but up. They didn't actually kill the department, but they thought about it and threatened to do so. Now I hear they're in trouble once again.
Oh yeah, there's music there too. Have I said enough to get Slashdot shut down for linking, and armed men in black uniforms sent to my house to terrorize me? No? Well, how about a few more links:
No, actually electric heat is often very inefficient. In places with mild winters, a heat pump is much better. Heat pumps are good down to about 0 degrees C.
For one person with at least a 1 month lead so you don't get burned by the crazy pricing system, flying is definitely the way to travel long distances. But for a group or shorter distances, it's not so obvious. Add in remote endpoints, and driving wins. 200 miles? Drive it. 300 miles? Still driving that, thanks. 500 miles? Now I'll think about flying, but am still probably going to drive. Getting flights between small regional airports is annoyingly roundabout and expensive. San Angelo, TX or Brownsville, TX (some of the largest US cities not served by an Interstate) to Fargo, ND is over $500 per person, double the price of a flight from DFW to Minneapolis. Push a little further north, to Winnipeg in Canada, and the already high price just about doubles again. Layovers might be so long and flights so infrequent that driving would not be much slower. There is little to no public transport at the small places, so you must rent a car or lean on family and friends to ferry you around.
You need decent range if you live in a place like San Angelo. Range anxiety is not restricted to electric cars there.
Dystopian pessimistic works of sci-fi? There are warnings, and then there's just plain unwarranted slasher sci-fi. The Cold War saw a lot of post nuclear apocalypse settings. While some of the ideas (fish and boulders still raining down from a turbulent sky years later on the pitiful remnants of humanity) didn't hold up if indeed they ever made any sense back then, on the whole, these warnings were of incalculable value if they in any way helped persuade politicians not to turn the Cold War hot. For the latter, there are things like the Jupiter Effect, devastatingly destructive comet dust, and, dare I suggest, Snow Crash. Independence Day had a feel good element to it, but was a turkey. I haven't read Cat's Cradle, but from what I know of Vonnegut, I'm supposing Ice 9 is satire about the very thing I'm complaining about. Clarke regretted using psychic phenomena in Childhood's End. The trouble with a Mathusian novel such as The Mote in God's Eye is that it makes a big deal out of a problem that nature solved billions of years ago. However, it may be that our unprecedented advances have reopened this problem. Many of the natural mechanisms that prevent such catastrophic collapses, such as isolation and predation, don't seem to apply to us. Today, the idea of falling off the edge of the world is quaint and not taken seriously because (excepting a few cretins) we know worlds are not flat. Malthusian ideas may fall into that category in the future as we discover more mechanisms that prevent that. Grey goo and Jurassic Park are more plausible, but they get dramatic and push the idea to extremes that are ludicrous. If a single T. Rex somehow got loose, it wouldn't last an hour. Soon as modern weapons can be brought to bear, it's dead.
There's also too-good-to-be-true sci-fi. The ramifications of the Star Trek transporter is one of those things that the story writers mostly refused to pursue because its powers would wreck havoc on the entire setting, to say nothing of the plots. Who needs a doctor when you can just beam from one pad to an adjacent pad, leaving behind any infectious agents and repairing any bodily damage, including aging?
I've noticed that one thing sci-fi is out of touch with is copyright, and it seems deliberate. I suspect traditional publishers take a real dim view of any futuristic novel that has free copying as part of the setting. Star Trek con man Mudd is chastised for ignoring patents and copyrights. In Hyperion, which won SF awards, one of the characters is an author who wrote a work that was a big hit with AI computers. In the story, the computers paid for just 1 copy and handled distribution themselves. His publisher comments that copyright doesn't mean shit when dealing with AI. I don't know of any serious work that attempts to paint a dystopian future caused by the breakdown of copyright. If there was such a work, it'd make a fine example of stupidly dark sci-fi.
Can you also design better humans to run these better reactors? Humans who won't start cutting corners to save a few pennies? Who won't understate risks, won't approve inadequate designs and then build even less than that, won't skimp on maintenance, and won't falsify test results and safety reports?
Do you not understand that Fukushima's design was inadequate for no good reason? They could have built a higher wall, but they didn't. They're gnashing their teeth and wailing that no one could have expected such a large tsunami. But that is a lie. They had good data on how big tsunamis could be, and they buried it. Building a wall capable of handling it was not unreasonably expensive either. At another plant, they did build a high enough wall thanks to one engineer's strenuous insistence and persistence in the face of near universal opposition. Just about everyone else didn't want to spend the money. The engineer was right. The wall needed the extra height to work, and it did and saved the plant. At Fukushima, they blew it.
Then what do the plant operators do? Acknowledge that they made a mistake? No, they try to make excuses, try to blame it on a disaster of "unprecedented" magnitude, try to claim they were adequately prepared for largest earthquake and tsunami known. They still claim they did their homework, even now when it's clear they didn't. That's not a recipe for inspiring confidence.
Yeah, I never saw a Zip disk for less than about $10. They had reliability issues too. Remember the "click of death"? CD-Rs absolutely killed them with greater reliability, 7 times the capacity and 1/10th the price per disk, and an even larger installed base of CD readers.
Iomega also had one of the worst web sites I'd ever seen. Their home page made you download several megabytes of highly annoying flashing animated images. Would take too long today, but they did that a time when most Internet users were on dialup. That they were too cheap to take their website seriously didn't inspire confidence in their engineering.
Best storage device is still the hard drive. Best OS installation device is now a network card or a flash drive. Only reason I still use CDs, DVDs or even floppies is for legacy hardware that can't boot any other way. Some kind of solid state device will displace hard drives eventually. I thought memristors might be it, but haven't heard anything about them lately.
Upper management is to blame. Why should flight attendants settle for peanuts when executives are raking in millions? No reason I can see. Crandall, former head of American Airlines, once persuaded everyone to take a pay cut for the sake of the airline. Then he turned around and accepted a huge bonus for negotiating the cuts. Needless to say, the employees were infuriated. After Crandall left, management did it again in 2003. Huge pay cuts for the rank and file, big bonuses for themselves.
Until executive pay returns to sane levels, let the unions go for it!
I'm not sure what to believe. Perhaps no one? I have noticed a pattern here: The most trenchant criticisms are all posted by Anonymous Cowards. GP, who are you? Why should anyone believe anything you say? Why should anyone care?
Could use some real journalism here, uncover the facts. Otherwise, all this is a waste of time.
In RIM vs. NTP, the court toyed with the idea of shutting down the BlackBerry network, cutting off thousands of BlackBerry users. Some of those users were government workers and Congresspersons. The court decided not to order a shutdown because it would be "unworkable" to exclude customers in the government from the shutdown. More like, the court realized in this case their power was unworkable, and inconveniencing Congress would be about the quickest way to lose that power. They didn't seem much concerned with the damage such an action would do to innocent 3rd parties.
In Verizon vs Vonage, the court actually went beyond making threats. The judge threatened to shut Vonage down, but didn't do it. However, Vonage was actually ordered not sign up new customers.
SCO took matters even further on their own. They used the threat of legal action to push innocent 3rd parties into paying a "license fee" to use Linux. They had the nerve to demand that all Linux users pay this fee. Never mind they hadn't won their case yet. Never mind that even in the event of a win, the losers should be paying, not the public. The courts' incredible powers were being used by a litigant to scare and blackmail the public.
The court did shut down Napster. Wantonly and irreparably destroyed a service millions of people had been using, describing Napster as a "monster", and ultimately for naught as other services quickly filled the void. They killed many of those services too, and in vain. None of those acts stopped piracy. The Pirate Bay may be the leading surviving service now. They misidentified the monster. It wasn't Napster, it wasn't even the Internet and technology itself, it was Nature.
It's astonishing that the courts can even think of doing such spiteful things. Keep on threatening to chop babies in half, as in the Judgment of Solomon, and it will someday backfire. The court will be forced to admit they were bluffing, or really cut the baby in half. It has happened. The courts are baby killers.
MS does not willingly improve. Their best game is monopoly and control, not improvement.
Vista was an excellent example of MS's philosophy, and we know it didn't do well. In Vista, they dared to impose unwanted, useless and even occasionally crippling DRM on their customers, and tried to befuddle everyone into believing the opposite, that somehow the DRM improved the user experience. With Windows 7, they had to step up their game on improvements. No surprise Windows 7 is doing better than Vista did. Though it's hard to be sure, the way they cooked the statistics. MS can't be trusted to tell that one straight.
Nor would I call IE an improvement. IE has always been the laggard with respect to security, performance, and standards. As for following standards, IE was very deliberately the worst, the better to leverage the rest of MS's software.
OOXML was not an improvement over OD (OpenDocument Format). OOXML, in addition to being a disaster from a technical viewpoint, was a blatant MS attempt to hang on to their file format lock for MS Office. MS was not at all scrupulous in their choice of methods to ram OOXML through the standards process. Asking for accelerated acceptance, bribing representatives to vote their way and vote against OD, trying to remove representatives who wouldn't cooperate, trying to gloss over technical problems.
MS is also a big reason Ogg Vorbis isn't used more in the US. They tried to destroy a format that they didn't control. All part of an effort to monopolize the market in multimedia. If you are in the US and want a portable music player that can handle Ogg Vorbis, there isn't much. You may have to install 3rd party software such as Rockbox, or buy a device sold throughout the world and overwrite its ROM with a European version, as the US version will not come with support for Ogg Vorbis.
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Who should be responsible for tracking IT's cost/benefit ratio? The IT people, or the finance people (aka. "bean counters") and/or management? Mind you, that's tracking, not making the decisions. The decisions should be constrained but not dictated by costs, and IT should have a bigger say than accounting.
IT takes a lot of expertise. You don't want your very expensive DBA, system admin, network admin, or software engineer, doing any more accounting than absolutely necessary. If finance people cost more to employ, then it would make sense to require the IT people do their own accounting. On the other hand, if it's a small enough shop that the handful of IT people needed have a fair amount of downtime, then maybe they should do their own accounting.
What I find really scary about nuclear weapons is how little it takes to bring on nuclear winter and world wide famine. Russia could still destroy everyone by nuking themselves. Just 50 nukes could kick up enough dust that crops would not get enough sunshine for at least 7 years. Even Pakistan could have enough nukes to pull that off. Bit difficult to intercept that.
I thought the Pirate Party ought to have used a less controversial name, since 99% of the world used to think pirate=thief. Used to. The "Sharing Party" sounded more positive. But now, I think they were right. The intellectual property extremists have discredited copyright and patent law so thoroughly that "pirate" actually has a positive ring among a growing number of people.
"Hacker" is just fine. All B&N did was make themselves look bad. As if running a bricks and mortar bookstore alone isn't looking more and more backward by the day, they had to pull an idiotic and utterly futile attempt at censorship. If they're trying to show the world that they're dinosaurs who can't get a clue, about the only worse thing they could do is cancel their ebook program.
What media organizations do you think are creditable? Or do you think they're all garbage?
In that particular case, I don't need a news organization to tell me that medical care in the US is seriously twisted and perverted towards profit. I've seen it, many times. The fee for service system the US uses encourages medical providers to provide more service, whether or not it's needed, and worse, to cause more services to be needed. But I'll give you another source: Reader's Digest, February 1997. They tested a random sample of 50 dentists, and the results weren't good. The article itself seems to have been pulled, but there are still plenty of articles about that article. Here's one.
You are very selective in the conspiracies you choose to decry.
Why aren't you up in arms about things like Big Pharma's focus on peddling more pills rather than finding genuine cures?
What about Big Oil's lies concerning not just AGW (did you know of Exxon's support up to the early 2000s for think tanks and research that denies global warming?), but disasters like Deepwater Horizon?
You're so outraged over Big Government. Yes, bash them hard over tax loopholes. But what about Little Government? For instance, many local governments have engaged in parking meter and red light camera programs of dubious merit that whatever else they are claimed to accomplish, extract quite a bit of money from the public. Many universities and colleges are even more notorious for strict parking enforcement. There's also a classic taxation without representation many have jumped on: special sales taxes for motel rooms, rental cars, and other things that hit travelers only. US sales taxes are under 10% for most items. But for rooms and rental cars, 15% or more is typical.
Speaking of government, what about attempts to rig elections, such as voter caging?
Then there is Big Finance. Madoff is the only perp who has been locked up. The rest of them got off with pathetically small fines. Some even got a free bailout. Why is Goldman Sachs still in business, still paying their executives obscene bonuses? Why is Mozilo not behind bars?
What about Big Media and piracy? Hollywood Accounting, and lobbying for laws like DMCA, SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998?
But you put your energies towards calling out this supposed great scientific conspiracy over AGW. It's beyond the pail to suppose there could be a deliberate effort with active and explicit collusion among thousands of independent scientists. However, there could indeed be a groupthink problem, motivated in part by the desire to secure more funding. (Do you really think funding is only available for those who will affirm AGW?) Medical research has just such a problem. How can we tell the difference? By reviewing the evidence and the work. And what we see is that it's the deniers who have engaged in bad science, and who have a clear motive and financial interest in doing so.
Follow the money. Follow ALL the money.
I'm inclined to the GP's point of view. Business Intelligence isn't that profound. As the joke goes, Military Intelligence is an oxymoron. Business Intelligence isn't even that respectable. Asking good questions would seem to be the hardest part. I'm sure there are guidelines for that. Shouldn't be hard to get a sense of the sort of questions to ask.
Despite the seeming ease, we see managers, who must be using BI, really screwing up. And often in stupid, heartless, ugly ways that end up misunderstanding facts to, for instance, make useful or even vital employees seem superfluous, and therefore candidates for termination in the next layoff. What formula does BI use to account for morale? If BI is being used like that, the users have already failed. A better use of BI is to employ it to avoid the necessity of layoffs.
Worse, I suspect BI is often abused to justify decisions. Feed it enough biased data, and it will reach the desired conclusions regardless of merit. Would be a rare manager who didn't slant the facts to make himself look important. "We make facts based upon decisions." Would explain a lot of why BI has a poor reputation.
After the questions, BI is just glorified data gathering and database searches. Could be argued either way, but BI is not even really Data Mining. Data Mining involves digging into data to discover correlations, facts, and answers to the unasked and unsuspected.
I'm sure there are students of BI who will vehemently disagree. Any BI experts care to tell me how wrong I am, and more importantly, why? Why should we take your subject seriously?
Make more friends? One of the best things the West could do is curb the excesses of its corporations. If you think they behave badly in the US, read about some of the things they do in other nations. US corporations have an unhealthy amount of influence and power. Everyone knows they have the implicit backing of the US military if worse comes to worst. When they commit an atrocity, they don't just make themselves look bad, they make the US look bad. The US compounds matters by letting them off lightly. What will happen to Walmart for this recent bribery scandal in Mexico? Probably nothing at all in the US. Will the US cooperate with Mexico by honoring requests for extradition? Probably not. Warren Anderson, CEO of Union Carbide during the Bhopal disaster, is still wanted for trial in India. So far, the US has refused to extradite him.
There are quite a few nations where you will put yourself in considerable danger if you wear a shirt with a logo of a US corporation. Do NOT wear a Union Carbide shirt in India. You'd be safer in an Uncle Sam costume than in a shirt like that.
Vote? Even if there were real, viable choices, have to do more than vote. The Democrats are only slightly better than the Republicans. Democrats are merely corrupt. Republicans are corrupt and crazy. Don't think voting is enough to excuse you from being reflected in that mirror. Politicians can't afford to be honest if we won't back honest players.
I see people still banking at Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citi. Still buying from Apple, Microsoft, MAFIAA members, GE, BP, AT&T, Comcast. Still gambling that health insurance won't deny and drop us the minute we need it. We could destroy these companies astonishingly fast if we'd all just quit doing business with them. They wouldn't be so stupid as to push it that far. In mere days, they'd crawl on their bellies begging us for forgiveness, and they would quickly do all those things that they claim are so difficult to do, such as paying taxes, resisting the temptation to buy legislation, reducing executive compensation, treating customers fairly, and making up for mistakes. They do appalling things, and people shrug it off, or bend over and take it.
I'm in a little battle with a local city. They're operating one of those red light cameras programs. Naturally, they have rigged things to cause lucrative violations, rather than reduce them. They carefully chose intersections for which the yellow was already too short so they could truthfully claim they didn't shorten any yellows. How can I make them wish they hadn't done it? I went to a hearing with evidence that their yellow lights were too short, but no joy. Judge told me I could take up the matter at a later date in municipal court, as if going to a hearing scheduled at their pleasure wasn't already enough of an imposition on me. I declined. Now I don't shop in that city anymore. How many people have joined me in this boycott? Zero of course. I've tried to persuade others, but all that does is get them thinking I'm crazy for making such a big deal out of a petty traffic violation. A few concede that I've got a point, but still won't do anything. I should pay up, shut up and stop annoying others with my whining, and get on with life. Then some turn around and mutter about their cell phone contracts, or the cost of cable TV. Even the ones who also have been burned by these red light cameras still won't fight. Some even rationalize it, convincing themselves the system is fair.
An effective approach to clean up bad neighborhoods is a zero tolerance enforcement and clean up operation. Litter, graffiti, broken windows, and burned out lights no matter how trivial are all cleaned up and repaired as fast as possible. Serves notice that petty crime is not going be overlooked. The same would work against these corporations and governments. Don't let a red light camera ticket go because it's only a little money, and too much trouble to fight. We blow off even the most insane EULAs because we feel pretty good that most of the nonsense in there can not be enforced. We should instead make software companies clean that crap up. No EULA at all. At least we fight back against DRM.
Fraud is a big problem, but not the worst problem. I've grown concerned that we're all engaged in mass delusion. We think the world works a particular way, but we may be wrong. We can produce what seems to be supporting evidence. I am referring to a much more fundamental idea of finance: the formulas for rates. They're neat and simple, and wrong. Implicit in compound interest is exponential growth. The universe doesn't support exponential growth.
Historically, depending on who you talk to, the stock market has averaged an annual rate of return of 7% or 10% or even more. But that record is only about 100 years long. Can the stock market keep up 7% growth for another 100 years? If it can, how about 1000 years?
They should make a movie about him. And send it overseas to the troops of course.
Still? I saw EE contempt for CS 25 years ago. Engineers in general display contempt for, oh, the entire school of business, the law school, and all the art and half the science of Arts and Sciences, in particular, science such as History, and Library Science and other disciplines that sound like they attached "science" to the name to give it more legitimacy. EEs are the elite of the elite, sneering even at their fellow engineers, especially civil and agricultural. Possibly the contempt for CS stems from the thought it's just a jumped up Information Science program that ought to have stayed in the business school. Used to also hold geologists in disdain, until a few dams failed catastrophically.
I took a combo EE/CS class with students from both disciplines, taught by a EE professor with some serious attitude. He made no secret that he thought CS was a weak discipline, its problems were trivial, and its students inferior. He gave EE students a break on CS problems, and roasted CS students on EE problems. CS students averaged about a letter grade lower, thus "proving" his contentions. Have helped EE students with a CS problems that had them stumped, and after I showed them the answers, they blew it off as unimportant. Happened every time. Thought the answer was trivial, possibly because it didn't involve differential equations. A sure fire way to stump a EE is to hit them with something that requires dynamic programming. They still won't get it even after seeing how such a problem is solved. They just don't understand the concept of an algorithm, don't grasp that not all algorithms are trivial. Even a heavily mathematical algorithm such as FFT doesn't convince all of them otherwise, and those who are convinced tend to feel FFT ought to be part of EE and not CS!
Perhaps most law students and business majors aren't as smart, but thought EE would have learned more respect for at least CS by now.
Piracy is not as simple and black and white as you make out. How about: Hard drive with legit copy of Windows crashes. Pirate copy of Windows installed on replacement hard drive. Or the other way around: Hard drive with legit copy of Windows is moved to a new computer, where it refuses to work. Replaced by pirated copy. Old computer junked. Another one: Thanks to a bug in the DRM, a legit copy refuses to run. Customer service is unable to resolve the issue. Problem solved by replacing legit copy with pirated version. Or this: Is software licensed to a person or a seat? Can I install software on 2 computers (1 desktop and 1 notebook), both for my use only? Why should I have to pay for 2 copies for that? It didn't cost the vendor anything-- they didn't have to provide another set of installation CDs, manuals, etc. Many games work just fine that way. Do you see anything morally wrong with any of that? None of that was "get something for free", that was all hacking to get some use out of something that was paid for, and to get around restrictions that infringe on the customer's rights.
Vendors have made it very burdensome to maintain compliance. It's a real nightmare to track licensing for dozens of software packages on hundreds of computers. There's really no good reason why enterprise licensing should be so complicated, and should depend on details that are really none of the vendor's business. If I was in NSW's shoes, I'd dump that COPS software in favor of something open.
Now the law is caught in their own web. They're the ones who let software licensing become such a mess. Perhaps this will inspire them to change their attitudes a bit.
Companies used to operate that way. Immediate short term gain was not the only motive. They would consider the impact their policies had on their host cities because they were wise enough to understand that affected their own future. They even agreed to a 40 hour work week because both their own and independent research showed that got the most productivity out of people. Surely no one thought the 40 hour week was born out of some silly concern over the welfare of the workers! But now in many places, it's strip mining. Plunder and pillage until the accumulated capital is all played out, then move on to new territory. It's management by locusts.
You said shareholders? The money is being made for the workers-- some of the workers. They just all happen to be at the executive level.
Dysfunctional department is the best explanation I've read.
Texas Tech has had similar difficulties with its CS department. In the 80s, when they elevated CS from being a part of EE to an independent department in the College of Engineering, they needed more professors in a hurry. They raided related departments. These departments (EE, MIS, and Math) used this as an opportunity to dump their worst professors. Consequently, CS didn't have the usual 1 or 2 rotten apples, the whole department was rotten. Flunked students like crazy, didn't teach fundamental concepts such as big O, and spent inordinate time on rather trivial stuff. An entire semester of Data Structures for a superficial look at linked lists and binary trees? No analysis of insert, delete, and search times, which admittedly is more difficult if the students aren't been taught about big O. Didn't even cover B-trees. Just endless drills on writing code to copy pointers around. Any student who dared speak up about such things would end up flunking. There were so many unfair ways to get a failing grade. The teachers were bitter, angry people who hated each other, disrespected their new discipline, hated that they'd been rejected by their chosen discipline, and were far from above taking it out on the students. The College of Engineering had a graduation rate of 20% which I think is poor, but CS managed a new low of 5%, and it was only that high after massaging the numbers.
CS at Texas Tech has improved-- there was really nowhere for it to go but up. They didn't actually kill the department, but they thought about it and threatened to do so. Now I hear they're in trouble once again.
Get 'em right here.
Oh yeah, there's music there too. Have I said enough to get Slashdot shut down for linking, and armed men in black uniforms sent to my house to terrorize me? No? Well, how about a few more links:
No, actually electric heat is often very inefficient. In places with mild winters, a heat pump is much better. Heat pumps are good down to about 0 degrees C.
For one person with at least a 1 month lead so you don't get burned by the crazy pricing system, flying is definitely the way to travel long distances. But for a group or shorter distances, it's not so obvious. Add in remote endpoints, and driving wins. 200 miles? Drive it. 300 miles? Still driving that, thanks. 500 miles? Now I'll think about flying, but am still probably going to drive. Getting flights between small regional airports is annoyingly roundabout and expensive. San Angelo, TX or Brownsville, TX (some of the largest US cities not served by an Interstate) to Fargo, ND is over $500 per person, double the price of a flight from DFW to Minneapolis. Push a little further north, to Winnipeg in Canada, and the already high price just about doubles again. Layovers might be so long and flights so infrequent that driving would not be much slower. There is little to no public transport at the small places, so you must rent a car or lean on family and friends to ferry you around.
You need decent range if you live in a place like San Angelo. Range anxiety is not restricted to electric cars there.
And longevity? How many recharge cycles? How long until it needs to be replaced, and how much to replace it?
Dystopian pessimistic works of sci-fi? There are warnings, and then there's just plain unwarranted slasher sci-fi. The Cold War saw a lot of post nuclear apocalypse settings. While some of the ideas (fish and boulders still raining down from a turbulent sky years later on the pitiful remnants of humanity) didn't hold up if indeed they ever made any sense back then, on the whole, these warnings were of incalculable value if they in any way helped persuade politicians not to turn the Cold War hot. For the latter, there are things like the Jupiter Effect, devastatingly destructive comet dust, and, dare I suggest, Snow Crash. Independence Day had a feel good element to it, but was a turkey. I haven't read Cat's Cradle, but from what I know of Vonnegut, I'm supposing Ice 9 is satire about the very thing I'm complaining about. Clarke regretted using psychic phenomena in Childhood's End. The trouble with a Mathusian novel such as The Mote in God's Eye is that it makes a big deal out of a problem that nature solved billions of years ago. However, it may be that our unprecedented advances have reopened this problem. Many of the natural mechanisms that prevent such catastrophic collapses, such as isolation and predation, don't seem to apply to us. Today, the idea of falling off the edge of the world is quaint and not taken seriously because (excepting a few cretins) we know worlds are not flat. Malthusian ideas may fall into that category in the future as we discover more mechanisms that prevent that. Grey goo and Jurassic Park are more plausible, but they get dramatic and push the idea to extremes that are ludicrous. If a single T. Rex somehow got loose, it wouldn't last an hour. Soon as modern weapons can be brought to bear, it's dead.
There's also too-good-to-be-true sci-fi. The ramifications of the Star Trek transporter is one of those things that the story writers mostly refused to pursue because its powers would wreck havoc on the entire setting, to say nothing of the plots. Who needs a doctor when you can just beam from one pad to an adjacent pad, leaving behind any infectious agents and repairing any bodily damage, including aging?
I've noticed that one thing sci-fi is out of touch with is copyright, and it seems deliberate. I suspect traditional publishers take a real dim view of any futuristic novel that has free copying as part of the setting. Star Trek con man Mudd is chastised for ignoring patents and copyrights. In Hyperion, which won SF awards, one of the characters is an author who wrote a work that was a big hit with AI computers. In the story, the computers paid for just 1 copy and handled distribution themselves. His publisher comments that copyright doesn't mean shit when dealing with AI. I don't know of any serious work that attempts to paint a dystopian future caused by the breakdown of copyright. If there was such a work, it'd make a fine example of stupidly dark sci-fi.
Can you also design better humans to run these better reactors? Humans who won't start cutting corners to save a few pennies? Who won't understate risks, won't approve inadequate designs and then build even less than that, won't skimp on maintenance, and won't falsify test results and safety reports?
Do you not understand that Fukushima's design was inadequate for no good reason? They could have built a higher wall, but they didn't. They're gnashing their teeth and wailing that no one could have expected such a large tsunami. But that is a lie. They had good data on how big tsunamis could be, and they buried it. Building a wall capable of handling it was not unreasonably expensive either. At another plant, they did build a high enough wall thanks to one engineer's strenuous insistence and persistence in the face of near universal opposition. Just about everyone else didn't want to spend the money. The engineer was right. The wall needed the extra height to work, and it did and saved the plant. At Fukushima, they blew it.
Then what do the plant operators do? Acknowledge that they made a mistake? No, they try to make excuses, try to blame it on a disaster of "unprecedented" magnitude, try to claim they were adequately prepared for largest earthquake and tsunami known. They still claim they did their homework, even now when it's clear they didn't. That's not a recipe for inspiring confidence.
Yeah, I never saw a Zip disk for less than about $10. They had reliability issues too. Remember the "click of death"? CD-Rs absolutely killed them with greater reliability, 7 times the capacity and 1/10th the price per disk, and an even larger installed base of CD readers.
Iomega also had one of the worst web sites I'd ever seen. Their home page made you download several megabytes of highly annoying flashing animated images. Would take too long today, but they did that a time when most Internet users were on dialup. That they were too cheap to take their website seriously didn't inspire confidence in their engineering.
Best storage device is still the hard drive. Best OS installation device is now a network card or a flash drive. Only reason I still use CDs, DVDs or even floppies is for legacy hardware that can't boot any other way. Some kind of solid state device will displace hard drives eventually. I thought memristors might be it, but haven't heard anything about them lately.
Upper management is to blame. Why should flight attendants settle for peanuts when executives are raking in millions? No reason I can see. Crandall, former head of American Airlines, once persuaded everyone to take a pay cut for the sake of the airline. Then he turned around and accepted a huge bonus for negotiating the cuts. Needless to say, the employees were infuriated. After Crandall left, management did it again in 2003. Huge pay cuts for the rank and file, big bonuses for themselves.
Until executive pay returns to sane levels, let the unions go for it!
I'm not sure what to believe. Perhaps no one? I have noticed a pattern here: The most trenchant criticisms are all posted by Anonymous Cowards. GP, who are you? Why should anyone believe anything you say? Why should anyone care?
Could use some real journalism here, uncover the facts. Otherwise, all this is a waste of time.
It has, even with more closely related assets.
In RIM vs. NTP, the court toyed with the idea of shutting down the BlackBerry network, cutting off thousands of BlackBerry users. Some of those users were government workers and Congresspersons. The court decided not to order a shutdown because it would be "unworkable" to exclude customers in the government from the shutdown. More like, the court realized in this case their power was unworkable, and inconveniencing Congress would be about the quickest way to lose that power. They didn't seem much concerned with the damage such an action would do to innocent 3rd parties.
In Verizon vs Vonage, the court actually went beyond making threats. The judge threatened to shut Vonage down, but didn't do it. However, Vonage was actually ordered not sign up new customers.
SCO took matters even further on their own. They used the threat of legal action to push innocent 3rd parties into paying a "license fee" to use Linux. They had the nerve to demand that all Linux users pay this fee. Never mind they hadn't won their case yet. Never mind that even in the event of a win, the losers should be paying, not the public. The courts' incredible powers were being used by a litigant to scare and blackmail the public.
The court did shut down Napster. Wantonly and irreparably destroyed a service millions of people had been using, describing Napster as a "monster", and ultimately for naught as other services quickly filled the void. They killed many of those services too, and in vain. None of those acts stopped piracy. The Pirate Bay may be the leading surviving service now. They misidentified the monster. It wasn't Napster, it wasn't even the Internet and technology itself, it was Nature.
It's astonishing that the courts can even think of doing such spiteful things. Keep on threatening to chop babies in half, as in the Judgment of Solomon, and it will someday backfire. The court will be forced to admit they were bluffing, or really cut the baby in half. It has happened. The courts are baby killers.
MS does not willingly improve. Their best game is monopoly and control, not improvement.
Vista was an excellent example of MS's philosophy, and we know it didn't do well. In Vista, they dared to impose unwanted, useless and even occasionally crippling DRM on their customers, and tried to befuddle everyone into believing the opposite, that somehow the DRM improved the user experience. With Windows 7, they had to step up their game on improvements. No surprise Windows 7 is doing better than Vista did. Though it's hard to be sure, the way they cooked the statistics. MS can't be trusted to tell that one straight.
Nor would I call IE an improvement. IE has always been the laggard with respect to security, performance, and standards. As for following standards, IE was very deliberately the worst, the better to leverage the rest of MS's software.
OOXML was not an improvement over OD (OpenDocument Format). OOXML, in addition to being a disaster from a technical viewpoint, was a blatant MS attempt to hang on to their file format lock for MS Office. MS was not at all scrupulous in their choice of methods to ram OOXML through the standards process. Asking for accelerated acceptance, bribing representatives to vote their way and vote against OD, trying to remove representatives who wouldn't cooperate, trying to gloss over technical problems.
MS is also a big reason Ogg Vorbis isn't used more in the US. They tried to destroy a format that they didn't control. All part of an effort to monopolize the market in multimedia. If you are in the US and want a portable music player that can handle Ogg Vorbis, there isn't much. You may have to install 3rd party software such as Rockbox, or buy a device sold throughout the world and overwrite its ROM with a European version, as the US version will not come with support for Ogg Vorbis.