Unless every other employee is busy, there really isn't any difference if the PITA customer is taking up someone's time.
Assuming that the PITA frequency does not substantially increase the chance that the employee will quit, or that the cost of employee replacement and retraining is negligible.
This is not always true, although lamentably frequent in the current economy.
1) The customers want sales. They demand sales. A significant percentage of customers will not buy from you unless the item is on sale. It's the US version of haggling.
2) Sales lure in new business
These really ought to be listed as three parts.
1) Sales imply to consumers that something is more worthwhile, and therefore consumers infer it is worthwhile. (Ah, the marching morons....)
1.5) Sales allow you to extract smaller (but still positive) marginal profits from the marginal customers who are willing buyers at a price somewhere between your regular price and your break-even price. The value-of-information, time-value of money, and joint time/infomation value analyses implied are left as an exercise for the student. =)
2) The part that most/.ers have been refering and easily understood: offer item A cheap to bring in the customer, hoping that people will buy regular priced item B as well, and/or get in the habit of coming to your store anyway. (Creatures of habit, these humans....)
A freind of a freind works at Dow Corning. He mentioned at one point that Dow uses a direct-to-microfilm printer for some of their most critical data. Expected media life is over 100 years given modest climate control. The pricetag, however, is doubtless out of this guy's range-- six figure, as I recall.
The contrast is more extreme if you feed "search engine" into one or the other. The results from AltaVista fall in between in quality, leaving aside the sponsored links.
The MPAA is screaming poverty, yet they are outfitting movie theaters with night-vision goggles? Something is very wrong with that picture.
Crappy IR illuminated monocular goggles run under $200 apiece... or, based on local prices, under 30 tickets worth, maybe 40 after the split with the theatre. Well worthwhile capital investment, even leaving aside the value of the press the arrests provide in deterrence. Now, if they use the $3200 high-end milspec ones, that's a little harder to justify, but not out of the limits of a clever accountant.
I hate the prepopped popcorn that is delivered and reheated. Tastes like styrofoam.
Actually, that's not quite what's done. Practices may have changed since I stopped dating a chain employee, but the local Carmike cinema was (by company policy) getting the kernels delivered unpopped in the 50# sacks, popping it one sack of about 50 batches at a time in advance, yellow-salting it to (toxic) spec, and storing the popped stuff in large plastic bags. This allowed Carmike to hire lots of people too stupid to operate a popcorn popper (you'll put yer eye out!), since only the managers were operating the popper-- the minions only needed to operate a popcorn warmer (glass box with bigass lightbulbs), and add body-temperature artificial-yellow-flavored-grease.
Of course, since the popping was usually done mostly on a Sunday evening, and it was done all without preservatives (salt aside), the result was generally inedible by humans Tuesday.
The competing cinema in town (Regal) was a little better; they popped on a daily basis, with experienced (but still evil) managers mixing small remaining part of a batch left over (and bagged as by Carmike) from the previous night in with the first batch made before the matinees. They repopped in the evening as needed depending on theatre traffic (IE, Blockbuster 2nd matinee = Fresh popcorn). This resulted in a mostly edible product, especially after the first matinee, but still no real butter. =(
Disclaimer: this information is five years old, and may no longer reflect the behavior of either chain. But I still smuggle in my own popcorn... with real butter, dammit.
And the phone number's bososity is both noted at the end of the complete write up linked to at the end of the article, and something which Google would tell you, if you thought to look.
Even if you're a complete idiot, they'd much rather you state your claim for the public record, demonstrating in your own words just how much of an idiot you are. It's a nice paper trail that helps them cover their own ass.
A few years back, I was working in the (hellish) restaurant business at a place so busy it was practically beating off the customers with a stick. Or, more exactly, managers were allowed to (occasionally) inform a customer that "the customer was always right" only until "the jackass is a jackass, not a customer".
One (black) manager told me about how a few years back, an obnoxious (white) law student didn't like the (fast but cranky) service he was getting, and sued the manager for discriminating against him because the student was white. Came case day, the manager's lawyer defended essentially by stating the manager was discriminating against him becuase the student had been an obnoxious jackass, not because he was white. The law student pro se'ed, and rambled on for about 15 minutes, citing this precedent setting case and that.
The (white) judge listened politely, and at the end of it, told the student: "You're going to be a good lawyer some day. And once you get your degree, I'll be happy to welcome you in my court again. But you were being a jackass, and apparently still are a jackass, and moreover you are wasting this court's time today. Case dismissed with prejudice."
Microsoft grew up during the 1980s and 1990s, when the growth in personal computers was so dramatic that every year there were more new computers sold than the entire installed base. That meant that if you made a product that only worked on new computers, within a year or two it could take over the world even if nobody switched to your product. [...] So in many ways Microsoft never needed to learn how to get an installed base to switch from product N to product N+1.
Or, in other words, Microsoft (or rather, the prevailing faction Joel called the MSDN camp) just really doesn't quite get the idea of "backward compatibility". So, if it's correct to infer that the current evidence implies that the market is saturating, then Microsoft is shooting itself in the foot badly.
Of course, some of the market for XBox2 will be for newcomers: while Mumsy and Dadzy may not be willing to by an X-unit for Junior at age 10, they may be more willing (or more tired of the whining) by age 15-- and Junior may have gotten a larger allowance. On the other hand, not all Xbox purchasers are in the teen demographic.
There may be some interesting conceptual connections to M$/RIAA/MPAA attitudes on intellectual property law-- no, you can't play PacMan/Shreck/Bethoven's Fifth for your unit N on your Unit N+1, you have to buy A WHOLE NEW COPY! And for EVERY OTHER THING you have a copy of! Wheee! This, however, is not likely to make consumers with stagnant disposable incomes enraptured of the platform. (Especially given the outsourcing impact of globablization on that disposable income.) Built in obsolescene is one thing; this, however, has the potential for going way too far way too fast.
While perhaps one can't remove information from the Net, if you don't learn how to do research effectively, and to distinguish the truth from the lies in what you find, you'll never find and believe the information. Not to mention you have to consider looking for it in the first place. "Critical thinking" is not high on Dubya's list of education priorities.
Yes, some of us in America do think, and some of us even actively oppose turning "One Nation, Under God" into "One Police State, Under the Religious Right"... but I'm far from convinced we'll win.
Even if the writer's conclusion is true, it is not so obvious as to justify stating it without argument.
All computer programs may be mapped to integers. ("It has been shown")
The integers are a denumerable set. (basic set theory 101)
The set of all computer programs that generate numbers, is itself a subset of the set of all computer programs. (Duh?)
The subset of any denumerable set is denumerable. (basic set theory 101)
All numbers, generated by computer programs that generate numbers, are memebers of a denumerable set. Trivially, QED.
Now, if you want proof of the premise-- that the set of all computer programs may be mapped to integers-- that's another story. (Hint: use a Turing machine and RTFB.) But the conclusion
seems blindingly obvious.
Well, that IS the other possibility allowed by Godel's theorem-- systems may be consistent and incomplete, OR complete and self-contradictory, but not both. If you feel that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, you can relax and prove most anything you want after assuming (P && !P) as an axiom. =)
There's virtually no mention about the remaining big player in this convergence game: the content providers. And overlooking this obstacle is foolhardy. Don't believe me? Lets see... convergence of CD player with computer with network gives Kazaa. Ooops, there goes the RIAA. Convergence with DVD player instead sends in the MPAA. Heck, I can't even hook my DVD player up to my TV through my VCR-- these folks have been holding up convergence since at least 1996, if not well before.
All content can be expressed as binary 1's and 0's. As all this converges, those bits all just slip slide around... and that has people antsy.
...are the techs behind it. Locally, DSL is pricier than the Cable modem service, especially for higher-speed service, and DSL is more area-restricted. So, some of my freinds use DSL, some use cable.
However, the local cable provider apparently has incompents working for them-- DNS server and TCP/IP network downtimes are common. For the TelCo DSL, downtimes are rare, usually under 15 minutes, and in the 3-5 AM "routine maintenance" time where normal humans (IE, not me) sleep.
My further evidence of the incompetence of the Cable techs is hearsay, via a freind who (a) worked for a local ISP doing DSL installs, and (b) who has had to switch from DSL to cable, due to moving outside range of the telco POP. He has anecdotally reported (based on various problems he's had) that the TelCo tier one helpdesk is average-to-good, knows their limits, and tier two is excellent-- he's NEVER had to go past them. In contrast, he's reported that the Cable boys until you get bumped to an actual network engineer (IE, someone who routinely LAYS HANDS on the main router while working with it, about tier five or so), you are dealing with idiots who have to use a terminal to check their network-enabled GPS-locator suppository before they can find their ass with both hands.
If possible, I vehemently recommend asking around amoung the local geek crowd for reports on quality-of-service, and basing your decision on that, rather than any zealous views on the technology. I'd actually prefer to use a cablemodem myself-- but not with the local idiots.
...are word processing (M$- or Open- Office), Web surfing, and E-mail... which are for 99% of the people using them more performance limited by the computer-to-network or keyboard-to-chair interfaces than the CPU. Pretty much all of those can be done quite nicely by a 333 Celeron or PPC750 233MHz chip, running your OS of choice. Games, Video Coding, and Photoshop are the primary CPU intensive operations... leaving aside constantly bloating OSes.
Which was sorta the original point of that idjit: computer gaming, video work, and photoshop are the most common reason for getting USE out of a high-end CPU. Of course, if you routinely use a java script to pop open all forty of your daily web comics, you can shock almost any CPU (and your DNS server) quite nicely. =)
Just because a standard is open does not mean that there are no patent issues.
Here, the articles on the topic (and others they link to) imply that at least SOME patents are held by M$. They're asking around for anyone else with relevant patents, to see whether the "reasonable and non-discriminatory" license fees need to get split between M$ and others, or whether M$ keeps the whole license pie.
Patent license issues will (probably, IANAL) make the license requirements inconsistent with the GPL's clause 4 (no sublicensing).
Furthermore, the study assumes that all intrusions are equally costly. Script kiddies, while massively prevalent and annoying, don't cost the biggest bucks. Black hats who are professional criminals, working in commercial or governmental espionage, or simply large scale petty theft, can be far more costly to affected parties. It's one thing if a script kiddie hacks your network, and sets all the machines on it to displaying "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US" messsages every 10 minutes; it's quite another when a black hat steals a million credit card numbers from one of your servers.
Given that the latter group has a deeper financial motive and resources to remunerate those with the needed talents, I would hypothesize that many of the exploits in "private exploitation" periods are used by the professionals rather than the kiddies-- which could inflate the costs associated with black hat disclosures substantially.
The cost of #2 is zero because it's people doing these things on their own time for their own amusement.
This is a non-zero cost, as these people might otherwise be spending their time and effort on other productive hobbies... like writing yet more open source software of high quality. The cost is less tangible than the others, in that it is to society at large rather than any particular person or company. I will grant, it still (probably) isn't a major cost.
Slashdot Mirror
Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.
Doesn't a Xerox copier fall withing this bill's purview? A scanner/printer all-in-one combo unit? A printing press?
Unless every other employee is busy, there really isn't any difference if the PITA customer is taking up someone's time.
Assuming that the PITA frequency does not substantially increase the chance that the employee will quit, or that the cost of employee replacement and retraining is negligible.
This is not always true, although lamentably frequent in the current economy.
I have NEVER found one thing in BestBuy that wasn't higher-priced than CompUSA, broken, incomplete or misleading.
DVD movies on sale at one but not the other. But that's about it.
1) The customers want sales. They demand sales. A significant percentage of customers will not buy from you unless the item is on sale. It's the US version of haggling.
/.ers have been refering and easily understood: offer item A cheap to bring in the customer, hoping that people will buy regular priced item B as well, and/or get in the habit of coming to your store anyway. (Creatures of habit, these humans....)
2) Sales lure in new business
These really ought to be listed as three parts.
1) Sales imply to consumers that something is more worthwhile, and therefore consumers infer it is worthwhile. (Ah, the marching morons....)
1.5) Sales allow you to extract smaller (but still positive) marginal profits from the marginal customers who are willing buyers at a price somewhere between your regular price and your break-even price. The value-of-information, time-value of money, and joint time/infomation value analyses implied are left as an exercise for the student. =)
2) The part that most
A freind of a freind works at Dow Corning. He mentioned at one point that Dow uses a direct-to-microfilm printer for some of their most critical data. Expected media life is over 100 years given modest climate control. The pricetag, however, is doubtless out of this guy's range-- six figure, as I recall.
The contrast is more extreme if you feed "search engine" into one or the other. The results from AltaVista fall in between in quality, leaving aside the sponsored links.
The MPAA is screaming poverty, yet they are outfitting movie theaters with night-vision goggles? Something is very wrong with that picture.
Crappy IR illuminated monocular goggles run under $200 apiece... or, based on local prices, under 30 tickets worth, maybe 40 after the split with the theatre. Well worthwhile capital investment, even leaving aside the value of the press the arrests provide in deterrence. Now, if they use the $3200 high-end milspec ones, that's a little harder to justify, but not out of the limits of a clever accountant.
I hate the prepopped popcorn that is delivered and reheated. Tastes like styrofoam.
Actually, that's not quite what's done. Practices may have changed since I stopped dating a chain employee, but the local Carmike cinema was (by company policy) getting the kernels delivered unpopped in the 50# sacks, popping it one sack of about 50 batches at a time in advance, yellow-salting it to (toxic) spec, and storing the popped stuff in large plastic bags. This allowed Carmike to hire lots of people too stupid to operate a popcorn popper (you'll put yer eye out!), since only the managers were operating the popper-- the minions only needed to operate a popcorn warmer (glass box with bigass lightbulbs), and add body-temperature artificial-yellow-flavored-grease.
Of course, since the popping was usually done mostly on a Sunday evening, and it was done all without preservatives (salt aside), the result was generally inedible by humans Tuesday.
The competing cinema in town (Regal) was a little better; they popped on a daily basis, with experienced (but still evil) managers mixing small remaining part of a batch left over (and bagged as by Carmike) from the previous night in with the first batch made before the matinees. They repopped in the evening as needed depending on theatre traffic (IE, Blockbuster 2nd matinee = Fresh popcorn). This resulted in a mostly edible product, especially after the first matinee, but still no real butter. =(
Disclaimer: this information is five years old, and may no longer reflect the behavior of either chain. But I still smuggle in my own popcorn... with real butter, dammit.
Nothing in the IT industry has taken me by suprise since I started reading it.
And the phone number's bososity is both noted at the end of the complete write up linked to at the end of the article, and something which Google would tell you, if you thought to look.
Even if you're a complete idiot, they'd much rather you state your claim for the public record, demonstrating in your own words just how much of an idiot you are. It's a nice paper trail that helps them cover their own ass.
A few years back, I was working in the (hellish) restaurant business at a place so busy it was practically beating off the customers with a stick. Or, more exactly, managers were allowed to (occasionally) inform a customer that "the customer was always right" only until "the jackass is a jackass, not a customer".
One (black) manager told me about how a few years back, an obnoxious (white) law student didn't like the (fast but cranky) service he was getting, and sued the manager for discriminating against him because the student was white. Came case day, the manager's lawyer defended essentially by stating the manager was discriminating against him becuase the student had been an obnoxious jackass, not because he was white. The law student pro se'ed, and rambled on for about 15 minutes, citing this precedent setting case and that.
The (white) judge listened politely, and at the end of it, told the student: "You're going to be a good lawyer some day. And once you get your degree, I'll be happy to welcome you in my court again. But you were being a jackass, and apparently still are a jackass, and moreover you are wasting this court's time today. Case dismissed with prejudice."
Look! The only reason that he's wasting his breath on this role is that, being dead, he has no other use for it.
(Sigh... he is sorely missed.)
since when has there been honest and decent programming on TV?
December 27th,1947
Or, in other words, Microsoft (or rather, the prevailing faction Joel called the MSDN camp) just really doesn't quite get the idea of "backward compatibility". So, if it's correct to infer that the current evidence implies that the market is saturating, then Microsoft is shooting itself in the foot badly.
Of course, some of the market for XBox2 will be for newcomers: while Mumsy and Dadzy may not be willing to by an X-unit for Junior at age 10, they may be more willing (or more tired of the whining) by age 15-- and Junior may have gotten a larger allowance. On the other hand, not all Xbox purchasers are in the teen demographic.
There may be some interesting conceptual connections to M$/RIAA/MPAA attitudes on intellectual property law-- no, you can't play PacMan/Shreck/Bethoven's Fifth for your unit N on your Unit N+1, you have to buy A WHOLE NEW COPY! And for EVERY OTHER THING you have a copy of! Wheee! This, however, is not likely to make consumers with stagnant disposable incomes enraptured of the platform. (Especially given the outsourcing impact of globablization on that disposable income.) Built in obsolescene is one thing; this, however, has the potential for going way too far way too fast.
While perhaps one can't remove information from the Net, if you don't learn how to do research effectively, and to distinguish the truth from the lies in what you find, you'll never find and believe the information. Not to mention you have to consider looking for it in the first place. "Critical thinking" is not high on Dubya's list of education priorities.
Yes, some of us in America do think, and some of us even actively oppose turning "One Nation, Under God" into "One Police State, Under the Religious Right"... but I'm far from convinced we'll win.
Even if the writer's conclusion is true, it is not so obvious as to justify stating it without argument.
All computer programs may be mapped to integers. ("It has been shown")
The integers are a denumerable set. (basic set theory 101)
The set of all computer programs that generate numbers, is itself a subset of the set of all computer programs. (Duh?)
The subset of any denumerable set is denumerable. (basic set theory 101)
All numbers, generated by computer programs that generate numbers, are memebers of a denumerable set. Trivially, QED.
Now, if you want proof of the premise-- that the set of all computer programs may be mapped to integers-- that's another story. (Hint: use a Turing machine and RTFB.) But the conclusion seems blindingly obvious.
Well, that IS the other possibility allowed by Godel's theorem-- systems may be consistent and incomplete, OR complete and self-contradictory, but not both. If you feel that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, you can relax and prove most anything you want after assuming (P && !P) as an axiom. =)
So, are you suggesting they should have applied for the CSS decryption license, and then sued when it was (presumably) refused?
How the HELL do you get past the snake???
Throw stick at it, it would seem.
There's virtually no mention about the remaining big player in this convergence game: the content providers. And overlooking this obstacle is foolhardy. Don't believe me? Lets see... convergence of CD player with computer with network gives Kazaa. Ooops, there goes the RIAA. Convergence with DVD player instead sends in the MPAA. Heck, I can't even hook my DVD player up to my TV through my VCR-- these folks have been holding up convergence since at least 1996, if not well before.
All content can be expressed as binary 1's and 0's. As all this converges, those bits all just slip slide around... and that has people antsy.
...are the techs behind it. Locally, DSL is pricier than the Cable modem service, especially for higher-speed service, and DSL is more area-restricted. So, some of my freinds use DSL, some use cable.
However, the local cable provider apparently has incompents working for them-- DNS server and TCP/IP network downtimes are common. For the TelCo DSL, downtimes are rare, usually under 15 minutes, and in the 3-5 AM "routine maintenance" time where normal humans (IE, not me) sleep.
My further evidence of the incompetence of the Cable techs is hearsay, via a freind who (a) worked for a local ISP doing DSL installs, and (b) who has had to switch from DSL to cable, due to moving outside range of the telco POP. He has anecdotally reported (based on various problems he's had) that the TelCo tier one helpdesk is average-to-good, knows their limits, and tier two is excellent-- he's NEVER had to go past them. In contrast, he's reported that the Cable boys until you get bumped to an actual network engineer (IE, someone who routinely LAYS HANDS on the main router while working with it, about tier five or so), you are dealing with idiots who have to use a terminal to check their network-enabled GPS-locator suppository before they can find their ass with both hands.
If possible, I vehemently recommend asking around amoung the local geek crowd for reports on quality-of-service, and basing your decision on that, rather than any zealous views on the technology. I'd actually prefer to use a cablemodem myself-- but not with the local idiots.
...are word processing (M$- or Open- Office), Web surfing, and E-mail... which are for 99% of the people using them more performance limited by the computer-to-network or keyboard-to-chair interfaces than the CPU. Pretty much all of those can be done quite nicely by a 333 Celeron or PPC750 233MHz chip, running your OS of choice. Games, Video Coding, and Photoshop are the primary CPU intensive operations... leaving aside constantly bloating OSes.
Which was sorta the original point of that idjit: computer gaming, video work, and photoshop are the most common reason for getting USE out of a high-end CPU. Of course, if you routinely use a java script to pop open all forty of your daily web comics, you can shock almost any CPU (and your DNS server) quite nicely. =)
Just because a standard is open does not mean that there are no patent issues.
Here, the articles on the topic (and others they link to) imply that at least SOME patents are held by M$. They're asking around for anyone else with relevant patents, to see whether the "reasonable and non-discriminatory" license fees need to get split between M$ and others, or whether M$ keeps the whole license pie.
Patent license issues will (probably, IANAL) make the license requirements inconsistent with the GPL's clause 4 (no sublicensing).
Furthermore, the study assumes that all intrusions are equally costly. Script kiddies, while massively prevalent and annoying, don't cost the biggest bucks. Black hats who are professional criminals, working in commercial or governmental espionage, or simply large scale petty theft, can be far more costly to affected parties. It's one thing if a script kiddie hacks your network, and sets all the machines on it to displaying "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US" messsages every 10 minutes; it's quite another when a black hat steals a million credit card numbers from one of your servers.
Given that the latter group has a deeper financial motive and resources to remunerate those with the needed talents, I would hypothesize that many of the exploits in "private exploitation" periods are used by the professionals rather than the kiddies-- which could inflate the costs associated with black hat disclosures substantially.
The cost of #2 is zero because it's people doing these things on their own time for their own amusement.
This is a non-zero cost, as these people might otherwise be spending their time and effort on other productive hobbies... like writing yet more open source software of high quality. The cost is less tangible than the others, in that it is to society at large rather than any particular person or company. I will grant, it still (probably) isn't a major cost.