And the primary beneficiaries of these laws are not "Authors and Inventors" but corporate publishers, movie studios, and record companies who reap the bounty of others' creativity.
Please be careful, a law change forbidding corporate copyright while preserving personal copyright would not necessarily help the public, although it would probably make lawyers richer.
Maybe... make copyright non-transferable under any condition other than heirs (and make adopting a corporation as a heir/child illegal)
A world of non-transferable personal copyright, patent, etc, would be interesting. Maybe not ideal, but interesting to think about. Imagine trying to get an entire orchestra to agree on a license for their work (just four drugged out rock band members would be challenging enough) I think we'd see a bit more solo record activity.... Good luck getting everyone involved to agree for a movie...
It seems to be a greedy boomers thing, it will be interesting to see when all the boomers are gone if their "stuff" will be free. Last time I suggested no one under 50 listens to the Beetles so it doesn't matter anyway, I got mercilessly flamed, so I'll refrain from that form of trolling. My guess is we'll have a new law for greedy-Xers such that everything post 1970 will remain in "perpetual" copyright but everything older will be free. An interesting area of discussion would be transitional era. I'm thinking Scooby Doo and Black Sabbath Paranoid are going to be soundly copyrighted as X-er fodder, but what about Led Zepplin, or the Bee Gees, I'm thinking those two would become free as boomer fodder. Then once the last of the X-ers die off, everything up to roughly Jason Beiber will probably become free, etc.
This inspired by a recent XKCD implying that christmas music has been "hostage" to boomer childhood sensibilities for some decades now, and a radio christmas music playlist transition in the near future appears inevitable, assuming broadcast radio survives as an industry long enough for the transition to happen.
You have a PS3, you're used to paying $60 for a new game or whatever the average actually is.
You have a PC, you're used to paying $60 for a new game, except when you plug in your ipod/iphone and play a new $0.99 game. Hmm why am I paying sixty times more for some games than others?
On/. we know why the iphone game costs a bit less due to technical knowledge of how they're made and what goes into them. That is of course completely irrelevant to the general public, who merely know that "a couple hours of fun with a new game" sometimes costs $60 and sometimes costs $1.
I just did a quick calculation, each new pv panel (~23kg) on a trip of 10,000 km costs $1.3, $1.9, and $12.6. for rail, ship, and truck, respectively.
I realize this is a very late post, but who in the world is giving you shipping quotes like that? I've bought small orders of electronic parts direct from mainland China and the best I've gotten is somewhere around 50 times your truck cost. Admittedly for mostly-air not truck. Ground literal slow boat from China was only about 1/3 price so thats even worse as we're now comparing something like my $30 or so estimate vs your $1.9 estimate. My packages were sub-one-Kg range so I'm sure there is a strong constant term where just shipping an empty box would cost a certain amount of handling fees, I'm sure a full sized shipping container would be cheaper, but...
Two candidates are proposed, both owned by the same corporations planning to support identical policies.
You apparently really hate the marketing message the R people used, but that doesn't mean they would have done anything different.
Oh sure, they would have attended twice as many prayer breakfasts, and half as many MLK parades, but I'm not thinking the end result would be any different.
Standard/. car analogy is its like getting all emotional about cars because the Saturn was a really nice car but the commercials suck so you bought a Toyota which is also a really nice car and thinking its important that the Toyota tv commercials don't suck as much.
He's 99% sane and logical, but that last 1% is crazy anti-gun nut, weird anti-free speech last century pre-internet era fan of the fairness doctrine, and even worse he's an anti-nuke nut. I suppose he's probably more sane, more often, than I am, on average, so as much as some of his beliefs really stink, I would certainly vote for him as a distant 3rd choice after RP and Feingold, if RP and/or Feingold were not on the ballot.
The sad part is if the other D's and R's were sane rational statesmen, he would not be worth considering, but, of course, they're not, which places him as one of the best choices, which is the sad part.
I do really like his outlook on foreign military misadventure, and as a prez he's probably got a heck of a lot more impact as CinC on that, than he does in trying to eliminate the 1st amendment on/. when discussing politics, or trying to shut down all the nukes which would basically perma-blackout the country.
I'll give you that both Kucinich and RP are nutty about things they would have little control over and could never implement from the executive office, but both are pretty reasonable about the stuff they actually could do.
I'll also cast opposing votes against any representatives who vote for it, regardless of party affiliation.
Since both of the big parties are owned by the same people, I assume that you will only vote 3rd party from now on?
Voting D or R is throwing your vote away. The only valid way to vote is to vote for a 3rd party candidate. Or an "extremist" D or R... The only R I would currently consider voting for is Ron Paul and the only D I would consider voting for, if he runs for anything, is Feingold.
But the developer gets to choose whether their app is free or costs money, not Apple.
In a free commodity market situation, the developer doesn't get to select the sale price, the buyer has plenty of input, because if the price is too high, no sale. Go ahead, price your house at $10M and see what the sales price turns out to be. It'll be 0 because there will be no sale.
The app store is not a free market so its pointless to compare it to commodity free markets like coffee shops where there is intense competition for standardized products.
If the coffee shops were like the itunes app store, you'd pay $1 and most times you'd get a typical coffee but sometimes you'd get only half filled cup, and sometimes it would have a dead mouse floating in it, and sometimes it would turn out to be orange soda instead, but you'd have no real recourse and all you can do is hope it turns out better tomorrow, next time you shop at the world's ONE coffee shop.
Note that the itunes MUSIC store is a commodity experience unlike the app store, you'll get exactly what you think you're buying 99.9999% of the time plus or minus human error. Ditto the itunes books and movies. Only the apps are a complete crapshoot.
Close, but the real problem is that Starbucks goes to extreme lengths to make sure each $4 coffee is as good as every other $4 coffee. I donno because I don't drink coffee or do the coffee shop scene from Friends. I assume there is no need to worry about your coffee? Even if conditions are unsanitary you'd think boiling water cures all evils, its not like eating at taco bell where I get food poisoning about 1/4 of the time. And the markup in price is so incredible compared to the material cost (what, like 1 cent of water, and 5 cents of ground coffee, equals $4 cup at cash register?)
However, as a guy who bought a lot of $1 apps, there is no standard, some are absolute stinkers that shouldn't even be free, and some I'd gladly pay $10 as a reward to the author for a job well done. There probably is no way to standardize apps to a universal $1 level of suckiness for all $1 apps.
The standard/. car analogy is I can buy a brand new, made in Japan, glow in the dark, toyota and simply sign and take possession and expect it'll be in perfect condition, and in the infinitely unlikely event it is not, I perhaps unrealistically think the stealership will make it right. Thats pretty much how its always turned out for me and all my friends, and probably the one guy in the whole USA who ever got screwed by T is going to have to post a response to this... On the other hand, if I spend 1/5 that amount on a used vehicle, I gotta crawl underneath it, and F around looking for leaks, and test all the moving and non-moving parts, and run a compression test on the cylinders (pretty easy and painless, unless you do something stupid like strip the threads or forget to disconnect the ignition). So I do NOT "agonize" over a $25K new Prius, but I do "agonize" over a $4K extremely heavily used neon, despite it being nearly a fifth the cost.
Perhaps it's because there is no recourse for me as a consumer if the app just doesn't work. At least with that $4 coffee I can send it back if it's bad, can't do that with an app.
On an iphone. In the android market you simply request a refund. Never had to try it, but supposedly it is possible.
there's no HIPPA violation if you voluntarily hand the information over yourself.
So... voluntary = do it or your fired, or do it or you get no medical insurance anymore, or do it or your health insurance premium bites an extra $400/month out of your check? Thats the part I'm a bit unclear on. I thought the IBM business process patent was something like "drop your docs" or we withdraw all your net income?
You could say its a design pattern. A sorta dysfunctional design pattern, but a popular one none the less.
Happens any time you mush a IT department traditionally underneath the beancounters in finance up against the engineers in the production dept. Like spontaneous crystallization.
Oh and another huge difference between IT mentality and engineering mentality:
IT network has like 100 users (windows) and 1 headless box (da server)
eng network has like 5 users (pc in tx building, pc on chief engineers office desk, engineering pc in the studio, maybe a couple other places) and 50 headless boxes (remote monitoring and control of an entire multi-station studio and multi-station transmitter building, extensive environmental monitoring of the transmitter building, remote access to the sound compandor/compressor thingy for audio processing loudness wars, full remote telemetry of the station transmitter, multiple redundant studio to transmitter links with full telemetry, all those modern new-fangled cat-5 to fiber media converters that are now SNMP controllable, SNMP monitoring of the backup generator and UPS, you get the idea)
The ratios are so wildly different that the skillsets just don't match up.
Likewise - I was in radio broadcasting as an assistant chief engineer for 8 years, and we and IT were always at each other's throats... They had the usual "we're the only ones allowed admin rights" attitude, which interfered with my ability to work on our digital audio workstations and automation systems. Eventually, it blew up, and we severed our networks. Anything that played audio became an "engineering" machine, and they were reduced to tending the email server and machines in the marketing department.
Ha I bet that was hilarious when the ad insertion machine started skipping and stuttering every 15 minutes when the anti-virus kicked in. Even funnier when the customers started asking their salespeople for credits. I've heard stories like that.
One telecom related anecdote was we rented a windows based box with some exotic software having a high 5 figure per year rental fee and a "you break it you buy it" clause in the contract. A drop in SEC mandated (sort of, anyway) network monitoring appliance. IT wanted to extend their tentacles into the machine "because its windows so we must control and monitor it" and that blew up all the way to CIO level and we won... Just because it's a piece of computer hardware does not mean joe random IT monkey is remotely qualified to mess with the overall system.
The fundamental problem is the IT mentality and the production engineer mentality are simply incompatible because of the difference in dollar loss during downtime and the difference in productivity requirements, to say nothing of expected response time. Also the engineers are systems experts responsible for the whole system, and the IT guys are trained not to care about systems, don't get involved in departmental workflow or business logic, just fix the tools and get out of the way. Finally the specialization is crazy... IT wants every box to be the same to lessen their workload, that just doesn't happen in the engineering world, you do what the service contract says not what the IT guy says. If the six figure annual service contact says turning on SNMPv2 on a production device carrying 7 figures per year of customer traffic will kill thruput and void the service contract, and IT says to turn on SNMPv2 because they have a policy that says only SNMPv2 is allowed now, then IT has to F-off and deal with their loss. IT can apply policies that kill productivity in a non-producing department with impunity, but in a production revenue generating department that attitude does not fly. CEO hears the true story of why they lost 1/4 mil of sales, that IT manager's head is on a platter, whereas its just funny if IT shuts down HR due to a little incident.
If it seems like the engineers of the station can handle it, what exactly are you looking to get out of a standalone IT department? They can be useful if the engineers are overworked, but really you should not try to shoehorn an IT department if it isn't needed.
I've worked in environments like the OP and you really don't want to piss off the production BGP guy by assigning him to explain to the receptionist for the fifth time exactly how to use F-ing headers and footers in MS Word. Also you don't want to dispatch your chief station engineer from the transmitter site to cubie-ville to replace someone's mouse.
Either you end up with very expensive high end people doing helpdesk work, which doesn't work for long, or you get help desk people trying to do extremely high end work (so, today's tickets for you are replace a mouse, remove virus from secretaries machine, pull some cat-5 into the new conference room, and swap out the fifty kilowatt transmitter tube #3 and neutralize the transmitter, what could possibly go wrong with that workload?)
Also you get prioritization BS like the CEO's computer needs to be rebooted for him, at the same time as you're having a nice transmitter outage.
If you are lucky enough that your IT costs are hidden in another department then go with it. Once you become a business cost you are done for!
That bad news is that in the broadcasting and general "telecom" world, engineering is already seen as a business cost, and per the OP, that's exactly where he is now.
Why if only we could be in this "technology" field without needing any expensive "technology" or those expensive "technology" people.
This is weird because being in the telecom biz for 20 years on and off, including working at a place that owned a lot more stations than the Poster owns, traditionally IT and engineering have always run separate networks and always been at each others throats. To the extreme of having two boxes on one desk, one on the eng network and one on the IT network and an air gap between the LANs.
Traditionally the way it seems to play out is the "IT" network is plain vanilla all microsoft centrally controlled and mainly focused on office drone productivity. Meaning the most specialized software IT supports is "Excel". The "IT" network swarms with viruses just often enough to terrify management at any suggestion of merging the IT and production networks (some "humorously" accuse the engineers of creating said crisis intentionally). The large IT network is famous for layer 2 routing loops (I can't believe they shut off spanning tree!) and whats best described as stupid OSPF tricks (like aggregating routes that are not "yours").
The engineering network seems to mostly be linux/unixy with not much central control (probably no lan wide file server, probably no wan wide DNS, believe it or not) although "whatever it takes to make a dollar" does fly so there is the occasional stand alone windows PC, which of course never gets updated because no one in engineering runs windows. Sometimes there is a firewall between the production network and the engineering network, or the eng network sometimes "dials into" the IT net via a VPN connection, but often there is an air gap. The secretary who clicks on every pop-up she sees in MSIE has no ability to access, say, the FM radio ad insertion box, although both are in the same building and have "something" plugged into their ethernet ports. Back in ye olden days I heard stories about salesguys hand carrying flashdrives with radio commercials audio files over to an engineer on the production network, I assume this still goes on.
This is also BAU common practice at ISPs and telcos and cablecos (kind of the same organization now, of course).
Some (some!) plants I've worked at are like this.. The CNC lathes and mills, or maybe the printing presses, and maybe the cad operators and/or preprint department live on one network, and the cubedrones in HR live on another network, and never the two shall meet nor are they maintained and controlled by the same people. Often, in the olden days, they used different technology, like if it was a "plant" the plant network was probably that 100-base-F fiber or whatever it was called and the cubedrones all lived on conventional cat-5 for obvious length limitations and also ground loop issues.
So that's your first job, decide how you'll interface the cubedrones with production/engineering, assuming they'll be interoperable at all, in any means what-so-ever. If you are not familiar with the telecom term/concept "demarc" well then you are in for a big education, thats all I can say.
I personally don't care. However, I'll tell all you/.ers that my son is horribly allergic to gluten protein in wheat, soy proteins, and casein proteins. Yes he had a Very rough time as a little kid but as a seemingly last ditch effort the gastroenterologist, or whatever the F he's called, ordered some blood tests and basically told us he'd never seen a kid with that high of allergen antibody levels, and more or less never feed him wheat, soy, or milk products again and he'll probably live. Actually after cutting that out of his diet, he thrived, not just "survived". This was a last ditch effort because the medical industrial complex makes money selling anti-steroidal drugs and exploratory surgery and endless consultations, not making money by just telling people "don't eat the stuff you're allergic to anymore, mmm kay?" To say I'm pissed off about the whole situation is an understatement. To misquote someone, I wish the medical industrial complex had but one neck, so I could throttle it.
Interestingly enough, when we cut out the bad stuff, the health of my wife and I improved measurably and dramatically, blood tests for cholesterol and our weight and other stuff. I later find out we're eating what is trendily called a "paleo-diet" or whatever, but aside from all the bookselling and Oprah interviews it just boils down to, if your ancestors ate it 10Kyrs ago, you should eat the closest equivalent. Lots of baked fish, meat and veggie stir frys (without soy sauce) lots of salads, which if you know what you're doing are extremely tasty, etc. The grill gets a good workout. Kabobs. BBQ chicken on a salad. That kind of food. Not so much bread and pasta and pretty much anything that comes out of a freezer box ready to be heated up.
Anyway the point is I really don't need some idiotic B-school dropout HR drone arguing with me, about how I should be paid less, because my son isn't eating enough whole wheat and tofu with a big glass of milk, and I'm not interested in sending endless medical records to HR, and endless permission slips, and just the whole bureaucratic nightmare. And if I buy food at a farmers market I'm somehow to be treated as an enemy of the state. Or I have to attend "food confession" where the "dietary priest" either hears my dining sins or grabs my fun parts, can't remember which.
You don't think you should be measuring energy in terms of energy, rather than power?
Nope. The units actually used in the electrical power business are around $1000/KW.
So a GW class plant probably costs about a gigadollar to build, from "thinkin' bout it" to putting it on the grid.
Yes I'm well aware that the capex of a coal plant is well under $1000/KW (or at least, it used to be?) however for solar, the fuel cost and endless maint cost is quite a bit lower, not to mention the ongoing labor cost which for a truly big solar plant basically rounds down to zero, although a coal plant employes a small, highly trained (=expensive) army. Then you get costs like site security, which is pretty much zilch for windmills vs quite a bit ongoing at a nuke plant.
I fully realize its sloppy accounting to only talk about capital cost per installed capacity, instead of factoring in capital costs, labor costs, financial costs, etc, but its a long term tradition in the power biz to only talk about capex and then fudge the numbers when making comparisons across different technologies.
I've been a utilities stockholder and investor for over a 1/4 century, I've read more annual reports than I can count, etc etc. I've pretty much been on autopilot for a couple years so I don't have current numbers to pull out of my hat, but the $1000/KW number "feels about right"
In fact the CEO would like it to cost as much as possible, so he has something to brag about on the golf course, I'm so wealthy I spent $50K on my installation that we on/. know is only worth $15K.
A better way to rephrase that, would be imagine what the consumer electronics market would look like if the market were small enough that a very large fraction of the market was audiophools, the $1000 HDMI cable type of people.
cost of a solar install of decent size is looking like $30K
Its the greenies and the middlemen. That's really a $15K system with a lot of people making a profit in the middle and at least some of the customers simply don't care what it costs so prices rise accordingly.
Look into doing it yourself instead of hiring a general or specialized solar contractor, trying to buy as far upstream as you can, etc. You can say that endless be-your-own contractor paperchasing BS is a lot of work compared to watching a star trek rerun, but then again lowering your costs by the cost of a cheap car is a lot of money per hour. That contractor was planning on supporting his family off of you... you gotta look after your own first, unless you're wealthy enough to raise both your kids and his kids. This doesn't necessarily mean doing your own wiring, it means hiring and paying your own electrician at a competitive rate and pocketing the profit the GC was going to skim off the top of the electrician's rate. Also a GC is always in a hurry to keep turning over and minimize travel expenses, but you can same money by taking a little longer since you have no turnover and you also have no travel expenses to reach the worksite, because you already live at home. A GC needs those panels delivered on a certain precise date or he loses profit; you don't care when they show up at home as long as its before the end of the building season; that alone might be over a 25% price difference in panels. You can buy from a cheap wholesaler who cannot promise when his backorders will arrive, but they're cheap when they get here! Same thing with the electrician, the GC needs a dude with wirestrippers like NOW and if he has to have you pay Sunday nighttime rates oh well, but you can make a deal where mr electrician shows up any ole time he's got some free hours for a substantial discount. Or you have an electrician friend/relative you can pay in beer and steaks. etc.
The demand by greenies for political/ideological/emotional reasons drives up price because they don't care. The CEO's trophy wife wants something to brag about at the gym on the roof of the house and she doesn't care how much it costs as long as its a very visible symbol to others that she cares about the environment, therefore the contractor raises his rates accordingly, and the rest of us suffer. In fact the CEO would like it to cost as much as possible, so he has something to brag about on the golf course, I'm so wealthy I spent $50K on my installation that we on/. know is only worth $15K. Contractor is more than willing enough to help with that goal.
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And the primary beneficiaries of these laws are not "Authors and Inventors" but corporate publishers, movie studios, and record companies who reap the bounty of others' creativity.
Please be careful, a law change forbidding corporate copyright while preserving personal copyright would not necessarily help the public, although it would probably make lawyers richer.
Maybe... make copyright non-transferable under any condition other than heirs (and make adopting a corporation as a heir/child illegal)
A world of non-transferable personal copyright, patent, etc, would be interesting. Maybe not ideal, but interesting to think about. Imagine trying to get an entire orchestra to agree on a license for their work (just four drugged out rock band members would be challenging enough) I think we'd see a bit more solo record activity.... Good luck getting everyone involved to agree for a movie...
It seems to be a greedy boomers thing, it will be interesting to see when all the boomers are gone if their "stuff" will be free. Last time I suggested no one under 50 listens to the Beetles so it doesn't matter anyway, I got mercilessly flamed, so I'll refrain from that form of trolling.
My guess is we'll have a new law for greedy-Xers such that everything post 1970 will remain in "perpetual" copyright but everything older will be free. An interesting area of discussion would be transitional era. I'm thinking Scooby Doo and Black Sabbath Paranoid are going to be soundly copyrighted as X-er fodder, but what about Led Zepplin, or the Bee Gees, I'm thinking those two would become free as boomer fodder.
Then once the last of the X-ers die off, everything up to roughly Jason Beiber will probably become free, etc.
This inspired by a recent XKCD implying that christmas music has been "hostage" to boomer childhood sensibilities for some decades now, and a radio christmas music playlist transition in the near future appears inevitable, assuming broadcast radio survives as an industry long enough for the transition to happen.
Is it a smokescreen for pricing changes?
Example:
You have a PS3, you're used to paying $60 for a new game or whatever the average actually is.
You have a PC, you're used to paying $60 for a new game, except when you plug in your ipod/iphone and play a new $0.99 game. Hmm why am I paying sixty times more for some games than others?
On /. we know why the iphone game costs a bit less due to technical knowledge of how they're made and what goes into them. That is of course completely irrelevant to the general public, who merely know that "a couple hours of fun with a new game" sometimes costs $60 and sometimes costs $1.
I just did a quick calculation, each new pv panel (~23kg) on a trip of 10,000 km costs $1.3, $1.9, and $12.6. for rail, ship, and truck, respectively.
I realize this is a very late post, but who in the world is giving you shipping quotes like that? I've bought small orders of electronic parts direct from mainland China and the best I've gotten is somewhere around 50 times your truck cost. Admittedly for mostly-air not truck. Ground literal slow boat from China was only about 1/3 price so thats even worse as we're now comparing something like my $30 or so estimate vs your $1.9 estimate. My packages were sub-one-Kg range so I'm sure there is a strong constant term where just shipping an empty box would cost a certain amount of handling fees, I'm sure a full sized shipping container would be cheaper, but...
I don't think you get how this works.
Two candidates are proposed, both owned by the same corporations planning to support identical policies.
You apparently really hate the marketing message the R people used, but that doesn't mean they would have done anything different.
Oh sure, they would have attended twice as many prayer breakfasts, and half as many MLK parades, but I'm not thinking the end result would be any different.
Standard /. car analogy is its like getting all emotional about cars because the Saturn was a really nice car but the commercials suck so you bought a Toyota which is also a really nice car and thinking its important that the Toyota tv commercials don't suck as much.
What is wrong with kucinich?
He's 99% sane and logical, but that last 1% is crazy anti-gun nut, weird anti-free speech last century pre-internet era fan of the fairness doctrine, and even worse he's an anti-nuke nut. I suppose he's probably more sane, more often, than I am, on average, so as much as some of his beliefs really stink, I would certainly vote for him as a distant 3rd choice after RP and Feingold, if RP and/or Feingold were not on the ballot.
The sad part is if the other D's and R's were sane rational statesmen, he would not be worth considering, but, of course, they're not, which places him as one of the best choices, which is the sad part.
I do really like his outlook on foreign military misadventure, and as a prez he's probably got a heck of a lot more impact as CinC on that, than he does in trying to eliminate the 1st amendment on /. when discussing politics, or trying to shut down all the nukes which would basically perma-blackout the country.
I'll give you that both Kucinich and RP are nutty about things they would have little control over and could never implement from the executive office, but both are pretty reasonable about the stuff they actually could do.
it says what is fashionable
Yet, as bad as you make it sound, its the closest that any non-corporate entity in the US will ever get to providing input to our leaders/owners.
If the only voice we have is not philosophically consistent, at least it IS a voice against an otherwise our otherwise non-representative government.
Democratic Party are owned by the big Hollywood studios. The Republican Party is owned by big business
Those are two sides of the same coin.
I'll also cast opposing votes against any representatives who vote for it, regardless of party affiliation.
Since both of the big parties are owned by the same people, I assume that you will only vote 3rd party from now on?
Voting D or R is throwing your vote away. The only valid way to vote is to vote for a 3rd party candidate. Or an "extremist" D or R... The only R I would currently consider voting for is Ron Paul and the only D I would consider voting for, if he runs for anything, is Feingold.
But the developer gets to choose whether their app is free or costs money, not Apple.
In a free commodity market situation, the developer doesn't get to select the sale price, the buyer has plenty of input, because if the price is too high, no sale. Go ahead, price your house at $10M and see what the sales price turns out to be. It'll be 0 because there will be no sale.
The app store is not a free market so its pointless to compare it to commodity free markets like coffee shops where there is intense competition for standardized products.
If the coffee shops were like the itunes app store, you'd pay $1 and most times you'd get a typical coffee but sometimes you'd get only half filled cup, and sometimes it would have a dead mouse floating in it, and sometimes it would turn out to be orange soda instead, but you'd have no real recourse and all you can do is hope it turns out better tomorrow, next time you shop at the world's ONE coffee shop.
Note that the itunes MUSIC store is a commodity experience unlike the app store, you'll get exactly what you think you're buying 99.9999% of the time plus or minus human error. Ditto the itunes books and movies. Only the apps are a complete crapshoot.
Close, but the real problem is that Starbucks goes to extreme lengths to make sure each $4 coffee is as good as every other $4 coffee. I donno because I don't drink coffee or do the coffee shop scene from Friends. I assume there is no need to worry about your coffee? Even if conditions are unsanitary you'd think boiling water cures all evils, its not like eating at taco bell where I get food poisoning about 1/4 of the time. And the markup in price is so incredible compared to the material cost (what, like 1 cent of water, and 5 cents of ground coffee, equals $4 cup at cash register?)
However, as a guy who bought a lot of $1 apps, there is no standard, some are absolute stinkers that shouldn't even be free, and some I'd gladly pay $10 as a reward to the author for a job well done. There probably is no way to standardize apps to a universal $1 level of suckiness for all $1 apps.
The standard /. car analogy is I can buy a brand new, made in Japan, glow in the dark, toyota and simply sign and take possession and expect it'll be in perfect condition, and in the infinitely unlikely event it is not, I perhaps unrealistically think the stealership will make it right. Thats pretty much how its always turned out for me and all my friends, and probably the one guy in the whole USA who ever got screwed by T is going to have to post a response to this... On the other hand, if I spend 1/5 that amount on a used vehicle, I gotta crawl underneath it, and F around looking for leaks, and test all the moving and non-moving parts, and run a compression test on the cylinders (pretty easy and painless, unless you do something stupid like strip the threads or forget to disconnect the ignition). So I do NOT "agonize" over a $25K new Prius, but I do "agonize" over a $4K extremely heavily used neon, despite it being nearly a fifth the cost.
Perhaps it's because there is no recourse for me as a consumer if the app just doesn't work. At least with that $4 coffee I can send it back if it's bad, can't do that with an app.
On an iphone. In the android market you simply request a refund. Never had to try it, but supposedly it is possible.
there's no HIPPA violation if you voluntarily hand the information over yourself.
So ... voluntary = do it or your fired, or do it or you get no medical insurance anymore, or do it or your health insurance premium bites an extra $400/month out of your check? Thats the part I'm a bit unclear on. I thought the IBM business process patent was something like "drop your docs" or we withdraw all your net income?
yeah yeah about that, do you have the URL for donation pages for RIAA and MPAA?
You could say its a design pattern. A sorta dysfunctional design pattern, but a popular one none the less.
Happens any time you mush a IT department traditionally underneath the beancounters in finance up against the engineers in the production dept. Like spontaneous crystallization.
The CS equivalent of the tower of Babel original universal language would probably be BAL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Basic_assembly_language
The 360 being the first major unified scientific and business processor, so I guess its most core language would be the first universal language.
There are terminology differences, in that HLASM is the assembler for BAL. So calling it "HLASM" is not entirely correct.
Although Knuth's MIX is more "universal" its not the first and its manufactured not organically grown from its ancestors like BAL.
I would give a pity vote to BASIC, but...
Oh and another huge difference between IT mentality and engineering mentality:
IT network has like 100 users (windows) and 1 headless box (da server)
eng network has like 5 users (pc in tx building, pc on chief engineers office desk, engineering pc in the studio, maybe a couple other places) and 50 headless boxes (remote monitoring and control of an entire multi-station studio and multi-station transmitter building, extensive environmental monitoring of the transmitter building, remote access to the sound compandor/compressor thingy for audio processing loudness wars, full remote telemetry of the station transmitter, multiple redundant studio to transmitter links with full telemetry, all those modern new-fangled cat-5 to fiber media converters that are now SNMP controllable, SNMP monitoring of the backup generator and UPS, you get the idea)
The ratios are so wildly different that the skillsets just don't match up.
Likewise - I was in radio broadcasting as an assistant chief engineer for 8 years, and we and IT were always at each other's throats... They had the usual "we're the only ones allowed admin rights" attitude, which interfered with my ability to work on our digital audio workstations and automation systems. Eventually, it blew up, and we severed our networks. Anything that played audio became an "engineering" machine, and they were reduced to tending the email server and machines in the marketing department.
Ha I bet that was hilarious when the ad insertion machine started skipping and stuttering every 15 minutes when the anti-virus kicked in. Even funnier when the customers started asking their salespeople for credits. I've heard stories like that.
One telecom related anecdote was we rented a windows based box with some exotic software having a high 5 figure per year rental fee and a "you break it you buy it" clause in the contract. A drop in SEC mandated (sort of, anyway) network monitoring appliance. IT wanted to extend their tentacles into the machine "because its windows so we must control and monitor it" and that blew up all the way to CIO level and we won... Just because it's a piece of computer hardware does not mean joe random IT monkey is remotely qualified to mess with the overall system.
The fundamental problem is the IT mentality and the production engineer mentality are simply incompatible because of the difference in dollar loss during downtime and the difference in productivity requirements, to say nothing of expected response time. Also the engineers are systems experts responsible for the whole system, and the IT guys are trained not to care about systems, don't get involved in departmental workflow or business logic, just fix the tools and get out of the way. Finally the specialization is crazy... IT wants every box to be the same to lessen their workload, that just doesn't happen in the engineering world, you do what the service contract says not what the IT guy says. If the six figure annual service contact says turning on SNMPv2 on a production device carrying 7 figures per year of customer traffic will kill thruput and void the service contract, and IT says to turn on SNMPv2 because they have a policy that says only SNMPv2 is allowed now, then IT has to F-off and deal with their loss. IT can apply policies that kill productivity in a non-producing department with impunity, but in a production revenue generating department that attitude does not fly. CEO hears the true story of why they lost 1/4 mil of sales, that IT manager's head is on a platter, whereas its just funny if IT shuts down HR due to a little incident.
If it seems like the engineers of the station can handle it, what exactly are you looking to get out of a standalone IT department? They can be useful if the engineers are overworked, but really you should not try to shoehorn an IT department if it isn't needed.
I've worked in environments like the OP and you really don't want to piss off the production BGP guy by assigning him to explain to the receptionist for the fifth time exactly how to use F-ing headers and footers in MS Word. Also you don't want to dispatch your chief station engineer from the transmitter site to cubie-ville to replace someone's mouse.
Either you end up with very expensive high end people doing helpdesk work, which doesn't work for long, or you get help desk people trying to do extremely high end work (so, today's tickets for you are replace a mouse, remove virus from secretaries machine, pull some cat-5 into the new conference room, and swap out the fifty kilowatt transmitter tube #3 and neutralize the transmitter, what could possibly go wrong with that workload?)
Also you get prioritization BS like the CEO's computer needs to be rebooted for him, at the same time as you're having a nice transmitter outage.
If you are lucky enough that your IT costs are hidden in another department then go with it. Once you become a business cost you are done for!
That bad news is that in the broadcasting and general "telecom" world, engineering is already seen as a business cost, and per the OP, that's exactly where he is now.
Why if only we could be in this "technology" field without needing any expensive "technology" or those expensive "technology" people.
This is weird because being in the telecom biz for 20 years on and off, including working at a place that owned a lot more stations than the Poster owns, traditionally IT and engineering have always run separate networks and always been at each others throats. To the extreme of having two boxes on one desk, one on the eng network and one on the IT network and an air gap between the LANs.
Traditionally the way it seems to play out is the "IT" network is plain vanilla all microsoft centrally controlled and mainly focused on office drone productivity. Meaning the most specialized software IT supports is "Excel". The "IT" network swarms with viruses just often enough to terrify management at any suggestion of merging the IT and production networks (some "humorously" accuse the engineers of creating said crisis intentionally). The large IT network is famous for layer 2 routing loops (I can't believe they shut off spanning tree!) and whats best described as stupid OSPF tricks (like aggregating routes that are not "yours").
The engineering network seems to mostly be linux/unixy with not much central control (probably no lan wide file server, probably no wan wide DNS, believe it or not) although "whatever it takes to make a dollar" does fly so there is the occasional stand alone windows PC, which of course never gets updated because no one in engineering runs windows. Sometimes there is a firewall between the production network and the engineering network, or the eng network sometimes "dials into" the IT net via a VPN connection, but often there is an air gap. The secretary who clicks on every pop-up she sees in MSIE has no ability to access, say, the FM radio ad insertion box, although both are in the same building and have "something" plugged into their ethernet ports. Back in ye olden days I heard stories about salesguys hand carrying flashdrives with radio commercials audio files over to an engineer on the production network, I assume this still goes on.
This is also BAU common practice at ISPs and telcos and cablecos (kind of the same organization now, of course).
Some (some!) plants I've worked at are like this.. The CNC lathes and mills, or maybe the printing presses, and maybe the cad operators and/or preprint department live on one network, and the cubedrones in HR live on another network, and never the two shall meet nor are they maintained and controlled by the same people. Often, in the olden days, they used different technology, like if it was a "plant" the plant network was probably that 100-base-F fiber or whatever it was called and the cubedrones all lived on conventional cat-5 for obvious length limitations and also ground loop issues.
So that's your first job, decide how you'll interface the cubedrones with production/engineering, assuming they'll be interoperable at all, in any means what-so-ever. If you are not familiar with the telecom term/concept "demarc" well then you are in for a big education, thats all I can say.
Isn't this a huge HIPPA violation?
I personally don't care. However, I'll tell all you /.ers that my son is horribly allergic to gluten protein in wheat, soy proteins, and casein proteins. Yes he had a Very rough time as a little kid but as a seemingly last ditch effort the gastroenterologist, or whatever the F he's called, ordered some blood tests and basically told us he'd never seen a kid with that high of allergen antibody levels, and more or less never feed him wheat, soy, or milk products again and he'll probably live. Actually after cutting that out of his diet, he thrived, not just "survived". This was a last ditch effort because the medical industrial complex makes money selling anti-steroidal drugs and exploratory surgery and endless consultations, not making money by just telling people "don't eat the stuff you're allergic to anymore, mmm kay?" To say I'm pissed off about the whole situation is an understatement. To misquote someone, I wish the medical industrial complex had but one neck, so I could throttle it.
Interestingly enough, when we cut out the bad stuff, the health of my wife and I improved measurably and dramatically, blood tests for cholesterol and our weight and other stuff. I later find out we're eating what is trendily called a "paleo-diet" or whatever, but aside from all the bookselling and Oprah interviews it just boils down to, if your ancestors ate it 10Kyrs ago, you should eat the closest equivalent. Lots of baked fish, meat and veggie stir frys (without soy sauce) lots of salads, which if you know what you're doing are extremely tasty, etc. The grill gets a good workout. Kabobs. BBQ chicken on a salad. That kind of food. Not so much bread and pasta and pretty much anything that comes out of a freezer box ready to be heated up.
Anyway the point is I really don't need some idiotic B-school dropout HR drone arguing with me, about how I should be paid less, because my son isn't eating enough whole wheat and tofu with a big glass of milk, and I'm not interested in sending endless medical records to HR, and endless permission slips, and just the whole bureaucratic nightmare. And if I buy food at a farmers market I'm somehow to be treated as an enemy of the state. Or I have to attend "food confession" where the "dietary priest" either hears my dining sins or grabs my fun parts, can't remember which.
You don't think you should be measuring energy in terms of energy, rather than power?
Nope. The units actually used in the electrical power business are around $1000/KW.
So a GW class plant probably costs about a gigadollar to build, from "thinkin' bout it" to putting it on the grid.
Yes I'm well aware that the capex of a coal plant is well under $1000/KW (or at least, it used to be?) however for solar, the fuel cost and endless maint cost is quite a bit lower, not to mention the ongoing labor cost which for a truly big solar plant basically rounds down to zero, although a coal plant employes a small, highly trained (=expensive) army. Then you get costs like site security, which is pretty much zilch for windmills vs quite a bit ongoing at a nuke plant.
I fully realize its sloppy accounting to only talk about capital cost per installed capacity, instead of factoring in capital costs, labor costs, financial costs, etc, but its a long term tradition in the power biz to only talk about capex and then fudge the numbers when making comparisons across different technologies.
I've been a utilities stockholder and investor for over a 1/4 century, I've read more annual reports than I can count, etc etc. I've pretty much been on autopilot for a couple years so I don't have current numbers to pull out of my hat, but the $1000/KW number "feels about right"
In fact the CEO would like it to cost as much as possible, so he has something to brag about on the golf course, I'm so wealthy I spent $50K on my installation that we on /. know is only worth $15K.
A better way to rephrase that, would be imagine what the consumer electronics market would look like if the market were small enough that a very large fraction of the market was audiophools, the $1000 HDMI cable type of people.
cost of a solar install of decent size is looking like $30K
Its the greenies and the middlemen. That's really a $15K system with a lot of people making a profit in the middle and at least some of the customers simply don't care what it costs so prices rise accordingly.
Look into doing it yourself instead of hiring a general or specialized solar contractor, trying to buy as far upstream as you can, etc. You can say that endless be-your-own contractor paperchasing BS is a lot of work compared to watching a star trek rerun, but then again lowering your costs by the cost of a cheap car is a lot of money per hour. That contractor was planning on supporting his family off of you... you gotta look after your own first, unless you're wealthy enough to raise both your kids and his kids. This doesn't necessarily mean doing your own wiring, it means hiring and paying your own electrician at a competitive rate and pocketing the profit the GC was going to skim off the top of the electrician's rate. Also a GC is always in a hurry to keep turning over and minimize travel expenses, but you can same money by taking a little longer since you have no turnover and you also have no travel expenses to reach the worksite, because you already live at home. A GC needs those panels delivered on a certain precise date or he loses profit; you don't care when they show up at home as long as its before the end of the building season; that alone might be over a 25% price difference in panels. You can buy from a cheap wholesaler who cannot promise when his backorders will arrive, but they're cheap when they get here! Same thing with the electrician, the GC needs a dude with wirestrippers like NOW and if he has to have you pay Sunday nighttime rates oh well, but you can make a deal where mr electrician shows up any ole time he's got some free hours for a substantial discount. Or you have an electrician friend/relative you can pay in beer and steaks. etc.
The demand by greenies for political/ideological/emotional reasons drives up price because they don't care. The CEO's trophy wife wants something to brag about at the gym on the roof of the house and she doesn't care how much it costs as long as its a very visible symbol to others that she cares about the environment, therefore the contractor raises his rates accordingly, and the rest of us suffer. In fact the CEO would like it to cost as much as possible, so he has something to brag about on the golf course, I'm so wealthy I spent $50K on my installation that we on /. know is only worth $15K. Contractor is more than willing enough to help with that goal.