is it really surprising that some of them are ahead of their US counterparts in some areas?
ideas take some time to be properly tested, accepted and spread - there is no surprise that some pioneering treatments will only be available is specific countries.
-get tired more quickly -charge more -'have a bad attitude'
There's no justification for you charging more because you are old. If you're better - that's another thing - but it sounds like you haven't been able to convince people that you are worth the premium you are asking. Perhaps you're not selling yourself properly. Perhaps your experience isn't worth what you think.
If you get tired and work less, that makes you less valuable. Do your better skills compensate for this?
Dealing with management idiots is a skill. It sounds like you have made a choice to just piss 'em off. All very laudable, standing up to the man and that - but you make your choice, you get to take the consequences.
1) the union used a robo-dialer to spam the office with phone calls (so they couldn't receive customer calls) 2) they encouraged their members to 'fight back' and send 'thousands of emails' 3) the company asked them to stop 4) the union refused to stop
This is not communication of the like of a letter writing campaign. It seems that it was clearly intended to disrupt and overwhelm the office.
Critically, the company asked the union to stop - but the union continued.
So actually, it looks like a deliberate, malicious denial of service attack which was made more effective by the fairly weak email system.
In that context it seems like a reasonable judgment, and application of an appropriate law.
take a bunch of experts turn what they say into rules guess the coefficients/interaction levels
multiply it all together
the result is no more than a bunch of wild guesses with enormous error margins.
It's hard to model systems even when the basic mechanisms are fairly well understood (e.g. weather, planetary warming). A giant social system where the mechanisms are not really understood at all isn't going to yield to IBM's supercomputer.
of course - utilisation might well vary according to plan. and cost is really only driven by utilization during peak periods. more importantly, this cost has to cover the cost of customer acquisition and infrastructure build.
here's the reality though;
Companies charge the fee which they think will maximize their profit.
They don't really know what that is, so they wave their hands a little (actually a lot). They try to charge fees which will cover their investment and generate a profit on each segment whilst building market share. So, people who use more bandwidth get charged an amount based on -a guess of what most/many of them are willing to pay -some comparison to what other companies are charging -how excited the some middle manager is about growing market share this quarter
Why would it be important to note that it took twice as long as statistically approval process takes, especially when there were major holidays during that timeframe?
Nothing to do with statistics - this is clearly a high profile app, so your first level drone isn't going to approve it herself. That means it has to be bumped up to the higher level panel which inevitably takes a bit longer.
Nothing to see here - just an artifact of the approval process.
--- In a modern capitalist world, the role of the state is making sure that minorities (not in the racial sense, but in the economical sense) have access to the same tools and benefits the "majority" has ---
Why is that?
Most people living in towns have access to dry cleaning facilities. If you choose to live out in the (cheaper, more spacious, more beautiful) countryside - you might not be able to get to a decent dry cleaner.
Where is the line between 'you make that choice' and 'the state should make sure that you have access to the same tools and benefits'.
I'd like to live in the countryside - but I want decent broadband and access to local cafe/shop/facilities.
== so they get essentially steer the priorities of the entire market.
yup, that was the general point I was making. JS, standards, html5 are just specific examples of the more general strategy.
== With Android, again the point is not the app sales, otherwise Amazon would be banned from Android market once they made their store.
You are right about the general point; Android is about making sure that other folks don't get to take over the mobile internet. However I think google realise that apps are important as the key differentiator of the platform. In order to get great apps, google need to make it so that developers can make money. Google have explicitly recognised this: http://www.techradar.com/news/software/applications/google-disappointed-with-android-app-sales-923912
This may be true for one developer - but that doesn't make it true for good developers generally.
I know a bunch of developers who sell their apps on both iOS and Android - generally, there is about a factor of 10 difference in the revenue. (Less on Android!).
This developer clearly did well, and grabbed the interest of the Android market. That's great - but it doesn't represent the experience of most developers.
You can also look at it a different way;
-A game which is clearly one of the very best available on Android makes about the same as it does on iOS where it is up against a lot of stiff competition.
-The game on android which is getting 9x the gameplay (3 times as many downloads, and about 3x the usage) generates revenue which looks like it is very similar after the first 6 weeks.
it would be great if it worked that way for everyone.
I'm consistently getting emails from users who don't understand why their app isn't downloading (answer - sometimes the market just takes hours to approve the purchase and allow the download)
Lots of users find their cards not working for unclear reasons
And the biggest point is getting that card on file. You jumped the hoops, it all works for you and now you buy stuff. A lot of people get put off by the hoops - or it just doesn't work for them.
The first two fronts are misunderstood by the author. I didn't bother reading further.
Front 1) Chrome He implies that Google is in the browser battle to control the browser and get everybody over to chrome. In fact - google is in the browser battle to raise the game. They're totally happy if ie maintains market share as long as ie does a better job at javascript and html5 so that users can use gmail, google docs, etc.
Google are clearly winning here - all the browsers have significantly improved their javascript performance and standards compliance since Chrome made them start competing again.
Front 2) Android He implies the reason Android doesn't have the developer support is due to fragmentation of devices. Completely wrong - the reason Android doesn't have developer support is that Google haven't trained everyone to buy apps, and so the financial rewards for developers are way lower.
Apple gets your payment method on day 1, and makes it easy for you to buy stuff with successful instant fulfilment. Google has a crappy dysfunctional checkout system and make no attempts to collect your payment details until you decide to bite the bullet and buy an app. At that point, they make the process painful and unsatisfying so that you are put off from ever trying again.
Pray you never have a child with a serious illness. Perhaps muscular dystrophy, autism, cancer, or downs syndrome.
You well know that your insurance wouldn't help you for long then - certainly not for the lifetime of your child.
While we're at it - pray that you don't have a serious illness yourself. Perhaps early onset Parkinson or Alzheimer. If you do, you'll find the $150/month days don't last long.
The US system seems to work very well for those that don't really need to use it, but I'm not sure that is the ideal measure of success.
Its the UK, a different culture. There they believe its the governments right to totally control how you live... death is just the endgame, and not surprisingly, the govt wants to stay in charge right till the end.
utter bollocks.
the arguments around assisted suicide are more subtle
1) the old religious argument (god says no to suicide) 2) arguments around how if assisted suicide was allowed, there would be a risk of people being pressured into suicide. 'Hey rich granny - isn't the pain intolerable??? Would you like us to set up an appointment with the nice suicide people?' 3) an argument around how people need to be protected from themselves when at a low point. E.g. you might feel that life is intolerable now - but actually, experience/research shows that people often feel better later and were glad that they weren't able to kill themselves easily.
there is more - but I think these are the main arguments deployed.
> 1: Amazon isn't using any state services such as street lighting, sewers, electricity, police protection, and the like that your state taxes pay for.
There's a flaw in your thinking here. Sales tax isn't a tax on Amazon, it's a tax on the consumer. The consumer is living in California, and that's why they get taxed.
To test this out, consider what will happen when a 10% sales tax is added to a $100 item.
A) the CA consumer still pays $100 and Amazon absorbs the cost somehow B) the CA consumer pays $110
the whole idea of general taxes being related to specific uses of service is almost always meaningless. The simple fact is that CA needs/wants to raise X billion in taxes. Tax revenue goes into a giant pot and is spend as the government sees fit.
You don't get a discount for not calling the police, living as a hermit and not using roads, or for not having any kids that need to be schooled. The reason for that is that the state doesn't care. They just pick some tax levels and charge you.
The tax code isn't about the result, it is about the story.
Politicians don't care that group 87 pays 32.4% Politicians do care that they have been _seen_ to support 'single mothers with jobs' or 'offshore oil workers' or special interest group Z.
you can create a set of rules with the same output, but if the effect is to just set income tax at X and remove the special provision inserted umpteen years ago by senator Ping and supported by campaign donators P, then it will never fly.
They recently donated servers to the 'jailbreak' community with no strings attached. They have invited the main coder of the community to speak at their events, and paid his airfare on at least one occasion.
The jailbreak (or homebrew) community have released apps that allow you to tether your device (without paying the carrier excess), to access the app store from countries where it is not supported, and a gazillion other things.
When I moved into my flat, it took a week or so to get broadband sorted out. In that time, I used the open wifi belonging to my neighbours (I never found out which neighbour).
Now I keep my wifi open so that my neighbours can use it if they need it.
When did becoming a good neighbour become a criminal activity?
On a different note, since when did you need assault weapons to arrest a man who may have been downloading illegal porn?
the problem here is that the contract that amazon offers is anti-competitive with respect to the developer.
Amazon say to me (the developer) that if I offer anyone else a lower price, then I have to permanently lower my price on the amazon store.
So newStoreTwo comes to me and offers to feature me on the front page in return for a 10% discount. That sounds like a store is competing to sell my product.
Amazon cries 'no fair' and stops this kind of competition.
The next step is when Amazon turn round and say that they only want to pay me 60% commission while newStoreThree is offering me 90% commission.
In a competitive world, I might say to amazon - thats fine, but if you are defining a commission rate, I'm increasing my list price at your store so that my return is similar for both. That would be healthy completion. If Amazon really can reach new different customers, then that's fine. Again - amazon cries 'no fair' and stops this kind of competition.
I have seen this play out in the Palm OS world. Over a couple of years the main stores (Palmgear/Motricity Handango) moved from offering 80% commission to about 30% commission. Meanwhile the plucky competitor (Mobihand) was offering up to 90% commission. I'd have loved to give Mobihand better list price terms, but the contracts from all the others required that the list price was the same across the board.
Meanwhile, while paying abysmal royalty rates, Palmgear/Motricity and Handango ran a deals every week or so discounting everything in their stores by 20% in a simple bid to grab market share (with no benefit to developers).
Eventually I de-listed from Palmgear/Motricity and Handango, but I wish we had never got to the such an uncompetitive state.
That's the problem when you let stores get big and agree to dangerous terms on the basis that they are currently trustworthy.
Slashdot Mirror
there are medical researchers outside the USA
is it really surprising that some of them are ahead of their US counterparts in some areas?
ideas take some time to be properly tested, accepted and spread - there is no surprise that some pioneering treatments will only be available is specific countries.
Apple impose some significant restrictions - but I'm not sure that's the same as treating devs like crap.
Old code keeps running, the sdk is pretty useable, it's easy to write apps that run on all the devices and that look good.
The main point is that they have created a system that writes big cheques to devs. Nobody else has managed that.
It's not because you are old.
It's because you:
-get tired more quickly
-charge more
-'have a bad attitude'
There's no justification for you charging more because you are old. If you're better - that's another thing - but it sounds like you haven't been able to convince people that you are worth the premium you are asking. Perhaps you're not selling yourself properly. Perhaps your experience isn't worth what you think.
If you get tired and work less, that makes you less valuable. Do your better skills compensate for this?
Dealing with management idiots is a skill. It sounds like you have made a choice to just piss 'em off. All very laudable, standing up to the man and that - but you make your choice, you get to take the consequences.
1) the union used a robo-dialer to spam the office with phone calls (so they couldn't receive customer calls)
2) they encouraged their members to 'fight back' and send 'thousands of emails'
3) the company asked them to stop
4) the union refused to stop
This is not communication of the like of a letter writing campaign. It seems that it was clearly intended to disrupt and overwhelm the office.
Critically, the company asked the union to stop - but the union continued.
So actually, it looks like a deliberate, malicious denial of service attack which was made more effective by the fairly weak email system.
In that context it seems like a reasonable judgment, and application of an appropriate law.
take a bunch of experts
turn what they say into rules
guess the coefficients/interaction levels
multiply it all together
the result is no more than a bunch of wild guesses with enormous error margins.
It's hard to model systems even when the basic mechanisms are fairly well understood (e.g. weather, planetary warming). A giant social system where the mechanisms are not really understood at all isn't going to yield to IBM's supercomputer.
of course - utilisation might well vary according to plan.
and cost is really only driven by utilization during peak periods.
more importantly, this cost has to cover the cost of customer acquisition and infrastructure build.
here's the reality though;
Companies charge the fee which they think will maximize their profit.
They don't really know what that is, so they wave their hands a little (actually a lot). They try to charge fees which will cover their investment and generate a profit on each segment whilst building market share. So, people who use more bandwidth get charged an amount based on
-a guess of what most/many of them are willing to pay
-some comparison to what other companies are charging
-how excited the some middle manager is about growing market share this quarter
Why would it be important to note that it took twice as long as statistically approval process takes, especially when there were major holidays during that timeframe?
Nothing to do with statistics - this is clearly a high profile app, so your first level drone isn't going to approve it herself. That means it has to be bumped up to the higher level panel which inevitably takes a bit longer.
Nothing to see here - just an artifact of the approval process.
---
In a modern capitalist world, the role of the state is making sure that minorities (not in the racial sense, but in the economical sense) have access to the same tools and benefits the "majority" has
---
Why is that?
Most people living in towns have access to dry cleaning facilities. If you choose to live out in the (cheaper, more spacious, more beautiful) countryside - you might not be able to get to a decent dry cleaner.
Where is the line between 'you make that choice' and 'the state should make sure that you have access to the same tools and benefits'.
I'd like to live in the countryside - but I want decent broadband and access to local cafe/shop/facilities.
Isn't that just a choice?
== so they get essentially steer the priorities of the entire market.
yup, that was the general point I was making. JS, standards, html5 are just specific examples of the more general strategy.
== With Android, again the point is not the app sales, otherwise Amazon would be banned from Android market once they made their store.
You are right about the general point; Android is about making sure that other folks don't get to take over the mobile internet. However I think google realise that apps are important as the key differentiator of the platform. In order to get great apps, google need to make it so that developers can make money. Google have explicitly recognised this:
http://www.techradar.com/news/software/applications/google-disappointed-with-android-app-sales-923912
This may be true for one developer - but that doesn't make it true for good developers generally.
I know a bunch of developers who sell their apps on both iOS and Android - generally, there is about a factor of 10 difference in the revenue. (Less on Android!).
This developer clearly did well, and grabbed the interest of the Android market. That's great - but it doesn't represent the experience of most developers.
You can also look at it a different way;
-A game which is clearly one of the very best available on Android makes about the same as it does on iOS where it is up against a lot of stiff competition.
-The game on android which is getting 9x the gameplay (3 times as many downloads, and about 3x the usage) generates revenue which looks like it is very similar after the first 6 weeks.
it would be great if it worked that way for everyone.
I'm consistently getting emails from users who don't understand why their app isn't downloading (answer - sometimes the market just takes hours to approve the purchase and allow the download)
Lots of users find their cards not working for unclear reasons
And the biggest point is getting that card on file. You jumped the hoops, it all works for you and now you buy stuff. A lot of people get put off by the hoops - or it just doesn't work for them.
The first two fronts are misunderstood by the author. I didn't bother reading further.
Front 1) Chrome
He implies that Google is in the browser battle to control the browser and get everybody over to chrome. In fact - google is in the browser battle to raise the game. They're totally happy if ie maintains market share as long as ie does a better job at javascript and html5 so that users can use gmail, google docs, etc.
Google are clearly winning here - all the browsers have significantly improved their javascript performance and standards compliance since Chrome made them start competing again.
Front 2) Android
He implies the reason Android doesn't have the developer support is due to fragmentation of devices. Completely wrong - the reason Android doesn't have developer support is that Google haven't trained everyone to buy apps, and so the financial rewards for developers are way lower.
Apple gets your payment method on day 1, and makes it easy for you to buy stuff with successful instant fulfilment. Google has a crappy dysfunctional checkout system and make no attempts to collect your payment details until you decide to bite the bullet and buy an app. At that point, they make the process painful and unsatisfying so that you are put off from ever trying again.
Pray you never have a child with a serious illness. Perhaps muscular dystrophy, autism, cancer, or downs syndrome.
You well know that your insurance wouldn't help you for long then - certainly not for the lifetime of your child.
While we're at it - pray that you don't have a serious illness yourself. Perhaps early onset Parkinson or Alzheimer. If you do, you'll find the $150/month days don't last long.
The US system seems to work very well for those that don't really need to use it, but I'm not sure that is the ideal measure of success.
Its the UK, a different culture. There they believe its the governments right to totally control how you live... death is just the endgame, and not surprisingly, the govt wants to stay in charge right till the end.
utter bollocks.
the arguments around assisted suicide are more subtle
1) the old religious argument (god says no to suicide)
2) arguments around how if assisted suicide was allowed, there would be a risk of people being pressured into suicide. 'Hey rich granny - isn't the pain intolerable??? Would you like us to set up an appointment with the nice suicide people?'
3) an argument around how people need to be protected from themselves when at a low point. E.g. you might feel that life is intolerable now - but actually, experience/research shows that people often feel better later and were glad that they weren't able to kill themselves easily.
there is more - but I think these are the main arguments deployed.
> 1: Amazon isn't using any state services such as street lighting, sewers, electricity, police protection, and the like that your state taxes pay for.
There's a flaw in your thinking here. Sales tax isn't a tax on Amazon, it's a tax on the consumer. The consumer is living in California, and that's why they get taxed.
To test this out, consider what will happen when a 10% sales tax is added to a $100 item.
A) the CA consumer still pays $100 and Amazon absorbs the cost somehow
B) the CA consumer pays $110
the whole idea of general taxes being related to specific uses of service is almost always meaningless. The simple fact is that CA needs/wants to raise X billion in taxes. Tax revenue goes into a giant pot and is spend as the government sees fit.
You don't get a discount for not calling the police, living as a hermit and not using roads, or for not having any kids that need to be schooled. The reason for that is that the state doesn't care. They just pick some tax levels and charge you.
the article misses the point.
The tax code isn't about the result, it is about the story.
Politicians don't care that group 87 pays 32.4%
Politicians do care that they have been _seen_ to support 'single mothers with jobs' or 'offshore oil workers' or special interest group Z.
you can create a set of rules with the same output, but if the effect is to just set income tax at X and remove the special provision inserted umpteen years ago by senator Ping and supported by campaign donators P, then it will never fly.
right - it pretty much defeats my purpose by making people pay to connect.
does dd-wrt do this with a simple user-friendly UI?
last time I looked, it was going to require fiddling with IP tables and stuff.
sure, I could probably learn all that - but it would be a pain, and I'd have the nagging doubt that I might have configured things incorrectly...
HP/Palm for one. (in the context of WebOS)
They recently donated servers to the 'jailbreak' community with no strings attached. They have invited the main coder of the community to speak at their events, and paid his airfare on at least one occasion.
The jailbreak (or homebrew) community have released apps that allow you to tether your device (without paying the carrier excess), to access the app store from countries where it is not supported, and a gazillion other things.
When I moved into my flat, it took a week or so to get broadband sorted out.
In that time, I used the open wifi belonging to my neighbours (I never found out which neighbour).
Now I keep my wifi open so that my neighbours can use it if they need it.
When did becoming a good neighbour become a criminal activity?
On a different note, since when did you need assault weapons to arrest a man who may have been downloading illegal porn?
the problem here is that the contract that amazon offers is anti-competitive with respect to the developer.
Amazon say to me (the developer) that if I offer anyone else a lower price, then I have to permanently lower my price on the amazon store.
So newStoreTwo comes to me and offers to feature me on the front page in return for a 10% discount. That sounds like a store is competing to sell my product.
Amazon cries 'no fair' and stops this kind of competition.
The next step is when Amazon turn round and say that they only want to pay me 60% commission while newStoreThree is offering me 90% commission.
In a competitive world, I might say to amazon - thats fine, but if you are defining a commission rate, I'm increasing my list price at your store so that my return is similar for both. That would be healthy completion. If Amazon really can reach new different customers, then that's fine. Again - amazon cries 'no fair' and stops this kind of competition.
I have seen this play out in the Palm OS world. Over a couple of years the main stores (Palmgear/Motricity Handango) moved from offering 80% commission to about 30% commission. Meanwhile the plucky competitor (Mobihand) was offering up to 90% commission. I'd have loved to give Mobihand better list price terms, but the contracts from all the others required that the list price was the same across the board.
Meanwhile, while paying abysmal royalty rates, Palmgear/Motricity and Handango ran a deals every week or so discounting everything in their stores by 20% in a simple bid to grab market share (with no benefit to developers).
Eventually I de-listed from Palmgear/Motricity and Handango, but I wish we had never got to the such an uncompetitive state.
That's the problem when you let stores get big and agree to dangerous terms on the basis that they are currently trustworthy.
The corporations don't want to filter the internet. It's just hassle and pain.
They may well bow to government pressure to do so if it looks like less pain than the threatened alternative - but this strengthens their hand.
so how do you connect?
do you just happen to own a modem that will connect to the cable?
not if you are downloading a torrent file.
try to download this torrent from piratebay
http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/6249208/Linux_Mint_10_KDE_%5B64-Bit%5D_%5BISO%5D_%5Bgeno7744%5D.6249208.TPB.torrent
on a virgin superhub, it will just fail.
it seems that they are not doing this for everyone.
possibly just the people who upgraded to their 50meg service and got the new 'superhub' with the non-editable DNS settings.
as to the crippled router; it is integrated with the modem, so you can't really get away from it.
I could plug another router in to the superhub and connect everything to that - but that's another device plugged in 24/7