The reason medical devices are so expensive has little to do with lawsuits when compared with the number one reason: the market for health care is distorted because the decision maker (doctor) is not the person paying for the decision (the patient or insurance). Medical device companies just market directly to doctors. Medical conferences are like industry paid vacations for doctors. Even if you tell your doctor that your Wii balance board does the same thing as the $18,000 device, he's still not going to prescribe it because he has no incentive to. He doesn't bear the cost of paying for it. You do or most likely your insurance do. You see the exact same thing in the textbook industry. The professors make the decision and the students pay for it. When the two entities are not the same, you have a market that's distorted and normal mechanisms of capitalism don't lead to lower costs and greater efficiency like they do in other areas. Of course FDA approval definitely plays into this by making it easier for doctors to have support for their decisions.
Newspapers are losing money. They're trying to figure out how to get "this Internet thing" to work for them. I know a lot of you have ideas and think that they're good but, to be honest, I doubt most of us here knows the intricacies of newspapers. It's their trade and their business. Let them try and figure it out how to make it work. That's what capitalism is all about after all. Good ideas live and bad ideas die off. Their current business model is apparently not working. Something has to change. If it works, then good for them. If you don't like it, don't pay for it. Not everything that has a price is bad. Until they go around suing people for inflated sums of money, I have no objections to what they're doing.
Making the workplace less pleasant is only going to backfire. If I was running a company I would make the place as nice as possible so my workers would want to stick around for as long as possible. The highest cost to almost any company is labor. Since IT workers are often paid on a salary basis, free coffee and even free dinner is a bargain for the extra work I can get out of them. Many tech companies do this. Cutting 401k, laying off some people, or hiring less people are one thing but making the work environment unpleasant simply has a bad return on "investment". You save peanuts on the actual cost and lose way more on productivity. Also, as another commenter pointed out, people will work as hard as they think is due. When you start nickel and dime-ing your workers, they'll do the same back. Don't expect "above and beyond" type of effort when you don't seem to be doing the same for them.
Have you read the part about Windows XP being so great right off bat that people aren't switching to Windows 7? They seem to have forgotten about the fiasco before SP2 for Windows XP and how Firefox got its start around that time because IE was such an easy target and pop-up friendly. I really think Microsoft is a big client of theirs.
To claim that Windows XP coming out of the gate set the bar so high that people won't upgrade to Windows 7 is such BS and complete sucking-up to Microsoft. Until SP2 came out, Windows XP was a nest of security problems that made using it nearly impossible. Wasn't that also the time when Firefox got started because IE was so horribly insecure and pop-up infested? It had so many services turned on by default. Anyone here remember the "net send" pop-ups? That was possible with the default install of Windows XP prior to SP2, IIRC. One thing XP established is the habit of waiting for at least SP1 to come out before switching. Even after SP2, I still switch the theme back to Windows 2000 Classic. I don't know where they got the idea of XP being such a spectacular winner out of the gate. Windows 2000 was revolutionary in the Windows world in terms of stability and user friendliness. Windows XP, until SP2, felt like a step back. For a long time, I avoided the "consumer" line of Windows (ME, XP, and Vista) and prefer to use their "server/enterprise/workstation" line (2k, 2k3) because of the lack of bloat and higher level of security.
"The Discovery Channel used to be educational... now it's "how can we use science to blow shit up?"
You know how bad it is now? It's so damn unwatchable and stupid that I change the channel to ESPN instead. Yes, I've decided watching football is more realistic and informative than watching the scripted drama on Discovery Channel. National Geographics and the History channel are both following the same trend from what I can tell. God, I hate that stupid dog whisperer show!
At least Discovery Channel has pushed me to discover the great game of football. Wish I had known about it earlier. It's actually a very fun game to watch on TV, unlike most other sports, which tend to be fun in person or as actual participants.
Agreed. I wasn't talking about technical merits but the ability to compete in the marketplace. Technical merits alone won't win in the marketplace. We've all seen many technically superior products lose in the marketplace. Unless AMD can win in the marketplace, there won't be pressure on Intel to compete more aggressively, thus lowering prices and creating better products.
I would say it's the expected cost of violating the law that matters. In other words, it is probability of getting caught x the cost of the fine. If you raise the fine so high that it will bankrupt you ($1 million) then people probably won't risk it. People still park illegally even though the chances of getting caught is pretty high relative to other violations but since in most places the cost/fine is so low, the expected cost makes it worth the violation.
There's a bit of irony here because a little man in Germany fifty years ago did something very similar in categorizing and identifying Jews. It was not benign.
"Schools are working to put real-world relevance into computer science education by integrating video game development into traditional CS courses."
Nowhere in the article do I find a statement that supports the claim that traditional CS courses are lacking real-world relevance. Can we please stop taking shots at the four years CS degree? If you don't like it, then don't get it. It's only been five years since I graduated my with my Bachelor's in CS and I can tell you that the course I took are highly relevant. I use it every day when I'm coding and thinking about my algorithms. I need to know what the run-time complexity of my methods and how I can use various data structures to make my code more efficient and what the trade offs are. In fact I do it so much that it's almost second nature. These are things they teach you in the core CS classes, at least where I studied that's what happened. My school was very prestigious but not well known for its CS department so I imagine that my education isn't that extraordinary.
Our CS program offered a set of courses that would have allowed students to create games. In fact, that's what the computer graphics course did. I worked with a couple of students who took that class. They reused those same skills again later during our AI project when we created a simulation where the AI played against itself. We weren't exactly creating the next WarCraft III or Civilization IV but some of the fundamentals are there. Likewise, those same skills could be put to use in other projects. The school doesn't have to have a course called "Game Programming for the Real World" for people to see that its course are relevant to the various sub fields in software engineering.
Also, software engineering is a more expansive field than just making games. Programming an O/S or network programming are both very relevant skills even today.
Wow. That's very respectable. The one time I contacted my representative with a long, detailed message about the financial crisis, she sent back a boiler plate response that's not even half as detailed as my message. I understand she has other people to serve but that was a real disappointment. I'm glad at least someone else has had better interaction with their representative. I hate the fact that I live in a secure Democratic town because they don't have any real competition to the seat.
I haven't been involved in internal hiring too much but I doubt we place too much value on formal education when hiring internally. In the case of internal hiring, we would have access to all the candidate's work so we can easily look at the changes he has made to the source code. Source code is one of the best tools for examining a candidate. If a candidate we're hiring externally has contributed significantly to an open source project and we can see his/her code, I'm pretty sure we will not even bother with looking at where the candidate went to school or if he/she went to college at all.
"There are many jobs where optimizing is important and knowing which algorithm has the best run time in O() notation can be important."
To add to that, it's not just optimizing. I've interview candidate (who came from a four year college but majored in EE and got his majors in CS) who didn't know what a NP-complete problem was nor could he calculate time complexity that well. So when I gave him a problem to solve, he kept trying these solutions that were overly complex and had exponential time. You have to be able to recognize a bad algorithm quickly so you don't keep trying to fix what's fundamentally broken.
Seriously, those aren't questions in the summary. It's a bunch of statements. When you frame your "questions" the way the summary did, there's not a whole lot for anyone to say. There's nothing else for me to say except to refute the basic premise of what the summary laid out.
I went to a four year college and got my degree in CS. My college is actually very prestigious but for its humanities, economics, and other non-CS related fields. I went there knowing that because I wasn't sure what I wanted to do when I started college. With that said, I did studied a lot of humanities and non-CS subjects because they interested me and my college encouraged me to explore. Nonetheless, I did study computer science rigorously, especially in the more theoretical areas such as graph algorithms and triangulation/localization algorithms. The way the summary is written, it made it sound like people like me don't know what a big-O notation means or what a pointer is. That's really unfair. If someone mistreats you because of your two year degree, the right approach isn't to denigrate people with four year degrees.
I've been in the industry for a while. The times when the degree matters is when the recruiter go searching for candidates. They search for skill sets but also for specific groups of schools when hiring interns or new college grads. Why? It's based on the perception that those who go to prestigious schools tend to be fairly intelligent because the schools themselves do a good job of weeding out bad students. It doesn't mean all students from those schools are good nor does it mean people who go to two year schools are bad. You have to think of it in terms of probability and inference. With that said, schools pay a role mostly when hiring for NCGs and interns. For experienced candidates, we usually don't even bother look at that. In fact, most candidates put that information last on their resume and we glance at it at most. The most important part is the ability to solve problems and write good code.
BTW, the article itself is pretty horrible. It doesn't even say anything of value. It's just a bunch of guys arguing and being judgmental. Grow up.
Yeah you know what's funny? When you look at the price tags for the bail out for banks, GM, etc., and the cost of the wars and then compared to the price tags for these possibly world changing scientific research, you start to wonder why we're not pouring even more money into research. The Large Hadron Collider is puny compared to the Supercollider we were building and then shut down because of cost. Seems pretty silly now because we ended up giving even more money so some execs can keep their yachts.
I'm a liberal but I think it's an insult to conservatives to call him that (seriously, there are intellectual, reasonable conservatives). He's just crazy. The best way to describe him is to call him a very successful television troll. I don't think he really has a position. He just want to get people riled up and attract as much attention to himself as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason medical devices are so expensive has little to do with lawsuits when compared with the number one reason: the market for health care is distorted because the decision maker (doctor) is not the person paying for the decision (the patient or insurance). Medical device companies just market directly to doctors. Medical conferences are like industry paid vacations for doctors. Even if you tell your doctor that your Wii balance board does the same thing as the $18,000 device, he's still not going to prescribe it because he has no incentive to. He doesn't bear the cost of paying for it. You do or most likely your insurance do. You see the exact same thing in the textbook industry. The professors make the decision and the students pay for it. When the two entities are not the same, you have a market that's distorted and normal mechanisms of capitalism don't lead to lower costs and greater efficiency like they do in other areas. Of course FDA approval definitely plays into this by making it easier for doctors to have support for their decisions.
Newspapers are losing money. They're trying to figure out how to get "this Internet thing" to work for them. I know a lot of you have ideas and think that they're good but, to be honest, I doubt most of us here knows the intricacies of newspapers. It's their trade and their business. Let them try and figure it out how to make it work. That's what capitalism is all about after all. Good ideas live and bad ideas die off. Their current business model is apparently not working. Something has to change. If it works, then good for them. If you don't like it, don't pay for it. Not everything that has a price is bad. Until they go around suing people for inflated sums of money, I have no objections to what they're doing.
Making the workplace less pleasant is only going to backfire. If I was running a company I would make the place as nice as possible so my workers would want to stick around for as long as possible. The highest cost to almost any company is labor. Since IT workers are often paid on a salary basis, free coffee and even free dinner is a bargain for the extra work I can get out of them. Many tech companies do this. Cutting 401k, laying off some people, or hiring less people are one thing but making the work environment unpleasant simply has a bad return on "investment". You save peanuts on the actual cost and lose way more on productivity. Also, as another commenter pointed out, people will work as hard as they think is due. When you start nickel and dime-ing your workers, they'll do the same back. Don't expect "above and beyond" type of effort when you don't seem to be doing the same for them.
VMware's solution for test and dev allows you to access the VMs over your browser: http://www.vmware.com/products/labmanager/
VMware even makes a product just for that use case: http://www.vmware.com/products/labmanager/
Have you read the part about Windows XP being so great right off bat that people aren't switching to Windows 7? They seem to have forgotten about the fiasco before SP2 for Windows XP and how Firefox got its start around that time because IE was such an easy target and pop-up friendly. I really think Microsoft is a big client of theirs.
To claim that Windows XP coming out of the gate set the bar so high that people won't upgrade to Windows 7 is such BS and complete sucking-up to Microsoft. Until SP2 came out, Windows XP was a nest of security problems that made using it nearly impossible. Wasn't that also the time when Firefox got started because IE was so horribly insecure and pop-up infested? It had so many services turned on by default. Anyone here remember the "net send" pop-ups? That was possible with the default install of Windows XP prior to SP2, IIRC. One thing XP established is the habit of waiting for at least SP1 to come out before switching. Even after SP2, I still switch the theme back to Windows 2000 Classic. I don't know where they got the idea of XP being such a spectacular winner out of the gate. Windows 2000 was revolutionary in the Windows world in terms of stability and user friendliness. Windows XP, until SP2, felt like a step back. For a long time, I avoided the "consumer" line of Windows (ME, XP, and Vista) and prefer to use their "server/enterprise/workstation" line (2k, 2k3) because of the lack of bloat and higher level of security.
"The Discovery Channel used to be educational... now it's "how can we use science to blow shit up?"
You know how bad it is now? It's so damn unwatchable and stupid that I change the channel to ESPN instead. Yes, I've decided watching football is more realistic and informative than watching the scripted drama on Discovery Channel. National Geographics and the History channel are both following the same trend from what I can tell. God, I hate that stupid dog whisperer show!
At least Discovery Channel has pushed me to discover the great game of football. Wish I had known about it earlier. It's actually a very fun game to watch on TV, unlike most other sports, which tend to be fun in person or as actual participants.
If there were more people like you, the world would be a better place. Seriously.
Did anyone else notice this line in the code:
". text: 00414436 call BadBoy "
I wonder if the complimentary call is named "SpankMe".
Agreed. I wasn't talking about technical merits but the ability to compete in the marketplace. Technical merits alone won't win in the marketplace. We've all seen many technically superior products lose in the marketplace. Unless AMD can win in the marketplace, there won't be pressure on Intel to compete more aggressively, thus lowering prices and creating better products.
Well, maybe a more viable competitor may be bad for AMD but good for the market. AMD has really stagnated in the last few years.
I would say it's the expected cost of violating the law that matters. In other words, it is probability of getting caught x the cost of the fine. If you raise the fine so high that it will bankrupt you ($1 million) then people probably won't risk it. People still park illegally even though the chances of getting caught is pretty high relative to other violations but since in most places the cost/fine is so low, the expected cost makes it worth the violation.
There's a bit of irony here because a little man in Germany fifty years ago did something very similar in categorizing and identifying Jews. It was not benign.
Brilliant!
"Schools are working to put real-world relevance into computer science education by integrating video game development into traditional CS courses."
Nowhere in the article do I find a statement that supports the claim that traditional CS courses are lacking real-world relevance. Can we please stop taking shots at the four years CS degree? If you don't like it, then don't get it. It's only been five years since I graduated my with my Bachelor's in CS and I can tell you that the course I took are highly relevant. I use it every day when I'm coding and thinking about my algorithms. I need to know what the run-time complexity of my methods and how I can use various data structures to make my code more efficient and what the trade offs are. In fact I do it so much that it's almost second nature. These are things they teach you in the core CS classes, at least where I studied that's what happened. My school was very prestigious but not well known for its CS department so I imagine that my education isn't that extraordinary.
Our CS program offered a set of courses that would have allowed students to create games. In fact, that's what the computer graphics course did. I worked with a couple of students who took that class. They reused those same skills again later during our AI project when we created a simulation where the AI played against itself. We weren't exactly creating the next WarCraft III or Civilization IV but some of the fundamentals are there. Likewise, those same skills could be put to use in other projects. The school doesn't have to have a course called "Game Programming for the Real World" for people to see that its course are relevant to the various sub fields in software engineering.
Also, software engineering is a more expansive field than just making games. Programming an O/S or network programming are both very relevant skills even today.
Wow. That's very respectable. The one time I contacted my representative with a long, detailed message about the financial crisis, she sent back a boiler plate response that's not even half as detailed as my message. I understand she has other people to serve but that was a real disappointment. I'm glad at least someone else has had better interaction with their representative. I hate the fact that I live in a secure Democratic town because they don't have any real competition to the seat.
So where the hell is our slingshot? David slay Goliath as I recall.
Compared to how we've helped them by deporting this supposed "Communist" rocket scientist, this is going to be peanuts.
I haven't been involved in internal hiring too much but I doubt we place too much value on formal education when hiring internally. In the case of internal hiring, we would have access to all the candidate's work so we can easily look at the changes he has made to the source code. Source code is one of the best tools for examining a candidate. If a candidate we're hiring externally has contributed significantly to an open source project and we can see his/her code, I'm pretty sure we will not even bother with looking at where the candidate went to school or if he/she went to college at all.
Really butchered my sentences.
"I've interview candidate (who came from a four year college but majored in EE and got his majors in CS) "
is meant to say
"I've interviewed a candidate (who came from a four year college but majored in EE and got his Masters in CS) ..."
"There are many jobs where optimizing is important and knowing which algorithm has the best run time in O() notation can be important."
To add to that, it's not just optimizing. I've interview candidate (who came from a four year college but majored in EE and got his majors in CS) who didn't know what a NP-complete problem was nor could he calculate time complexity that well. So when I gave him a problem to solve, he kept trying these solutions that were overly complex and had exponential time. You have to be able to recognize a bad algorithm quickly so you don't keep trying to fix what's fundamentally broken.
Seriously, those aren't questions in the summary. It's a bunch of statements. When you frame your "questions" the way the summary did, there's not a whole lot for anyone to say. There's nothing else for me to say except to refute the basic premise of what the summary laid out.
I went to a four year college and got my degree in CS. My college is actually very prestigious but for its humanities, economics, and other non-CS related fields. I went there knowing that because I wasn't sure what I wanted to do when I started college. With that said, I did studied a lot of humanities and non-CS subjects because they interested me and my college encouraged me to explore. Nonetheless, I did study computer science rigorously, especially in the more theoretical areas such as graph algorithms and triangulation/localization algorithms. The way the summary is written, it made it sound like people like me don't know what a big-O notation means or what a pointer is. That's really unfair. If someone mistreats you because of your two year degree, the right approach isn't to denigrate people with four year degrees.
I've been in the industry for a while. The times when the degree matters is when the recruiter go searching for candidates. They search for skill sets but also for specific groups of schools when hiring interns or new college grads. Why? It's based on the perception that those who go to prestigious schools tend to be fairly intelligent because the schools themselves do a good job of weeding out bad students. It doesn't mean all students from those schools are good nor does it mean people who go to two year schools are bad. You have to think of it in terms of probability and inference. With that said, schools pay a role mostly when hiring for NCGs and interns. For experienced candidates, we usually don't even bother look at that. In fact, most candidates put that information last on their resume and we glance at it at most. The most important part is the ability to solve problems and write good code.
BTW, the article itself is pretty horrible. It doesn't even say anything of value. It's just a bunch of guys arguing and being judgmental. Grow up.
Yeah you know what's funny? When you look at the price tags for the bail out for banks, GM, etc., and the cost of the wars and then compared to the price tags for these possibly world changing scientific research, you start to wonder why we're not pouring even more money into research. The Large Hadron Collider is puny compared to the Supercollider we were building and then shut down because of cost. Seems pretty silly now because we ended up giving even more money so some execs can keep their yachts.
"He is very conservative"
I'm a liberal but I think it's an insult to conservatives to call him that (seriously, there are intellectual, reasonable conservatives). He's just crazy. The best way to describe him is to call him a very successful television troll. I don't think he really has a position. He just want to get people riled up and attract as much attention to himself as possible.