I don't know what became of that project [Cisco subsequently got in bed with Microsoft & Active Directory], but if Cisco were still supporting Novell, then maybe you could tie it all into Zenworks' inventory management system [which can publish to Crystal Reports].
This seems like something that ought to have been done by a commercial entity, but whether it has, I know not. And if it hasn't, then it would certainly be a nice opportunity for a startup.
This is not a step towards opening Java. The only relation this has to Java is the fact that it runs Java code and is written in Java. Just because sun open sourced it doesn't mean its thinking about open sourcing the Java lanugage.
Okay, that would explain a lot.
But when I first saw the thread, I thought it meant that Sun was opening the "source" to javac and java, and then I got to wondering: Okay, what language are those programs written in? C++? C? Bison?
Um, no. Marketing does not exist for people who have decided what they like before they've seen the show in question. It exists for people who are likely to be convinced to try something new, and you are not in that group.
Like installing buggy USB driver f*cking up DHCP client's ability to renew IP address. Or installing desktop skinning software causing Windows to start failing installation of virtual network adapters. Or that disabling (certain) personal firewall software actually not having a full effect on a traffic until the next reboot.
Or installing the old Oxford English Dictionary on CD-ROM, and having it nuke your networked Lexmark PostScript printer driver.
[By the way, the new Oxford English Dictionary employs C-Dilla, and is damned near unusable.]
Bullshit. An electrician here can easily make $100k-- you just need to be Union. Good electricians can always find work if they are willing to move around.
My point is that the guy making $100K isn't pulling any cable, or bolting any nuts. He's the guy reading the blueprints [or maybe even drafting the blueprints], and giving orders to a gang of cable monkeys, almost all of whom will be illegal immigrants.
Also, in regard to the original question posed by the original poster: You don't just walk into those $100K gigs as an amateur. To get there, you're gonna hafta do several years as a journeyman apprentice [before you're even allowed to sit for your state board exams], then study for and pass your state board exams, then put in 20-30 years in the union [paying off a bunch of thugs like Tony Soprano along the way] until you finally land one of those cushy "$100K" deals.
Frankly, I don't think that's what the original poster had in mind.
I'd like to take up woodworking and carpentry. You get to be creative, use your hands, and put an idea into existence and someone gets to use the end product. You can also start simple and work up to more advanced projects. It's very rewarding when you finish a project as well.
Don't get me wrong - I love carpentry, and stonemasonry, and electrical wiring, and landscaping - the whole gamut of physical labor. But our nation's inability to resolve the question of our southern border has caused unskilled and semi-skilled wages to tank. And it's ruined the careers of the old-timers [I know older guys who just can't find work anymore].
These days, if you're native-born, and even so much as semi-literate, then'll you start off as a foreman [supervising a gang of illegals], and move up from there - i.e. you're right back into deskwork.
Only an idiot would aim for a job with shrinking pay and demand, while outsourcing is increasing. I should know. We can smell our own.
Consider:
'Cheap Made-in-India Products' Strangle China
The world's largest chain store, Wal-Mart in America, is considering to switch from China to India its (main) supply base for textile and clothing, which is a major blow to Chinese business community.
Andrew Tsuei, a Vice President in charge of Global Purchasing at Wal-Mart, said in an interview with Indian media last month, "Subcontractors supplying clothing products to Wal-Mart prefer India as its purchasing base, where cost of raw materials is cheaper (than China), and Wal-Mart welcomes such a move."
To the pessimist, this can only mean: We're all doomed!
On the other hand, the optimist might observe that the West [USA, UK, Japan, Korea, Taiwan], in conjunction with China, and India, is laying the foundation for a 21st century of staggering, unprecedented economic growth, the likes of which the world has never seen.
The Folly of Our Age
The space shuttle.
June 16, 2005, 7:49 a.m.
Like the monster in some ghastly horror movie rising from the dead for the umpteenth time, the space shuttle is back on the launch pad. This grotesque, lethal white elephant -- 14 deaths in 113 flights -- is the grandest, grossest technological folly of our age. If the shuttle has any reason for existing, it is as an exceptionally clear symbol of our corrupt, sentimental, and dysfunctional political system. Its flights accomplish nothing and cost half a billion per. That, at least, is what a flight costs when the vehicle survives. If a shuttle blows up -- which, depending on whether or not you think that 35 human lives (five original launchworthy Shuttles at seven astronauts each) would be too high a price to pay for ridding the nation of an embarrassing and expensive monstrosity, is either too often or not often enough** -- then the cost, what with lost inventory, insurance payouts, and the endless subsequent investigations, is seven or eight times that...
Also the call center person has his/her hands tied when fixing the problem. Recently my cable internet service did not discontinue my service when I told them to. Even though it was obvious they needed to credit my account for the extra month they charged me for, the representative could not due to some rule. If he was trusted to just make the decision things would go much smoother.
Judging from some of the horror stories I've heard in re: cable/satellite/cell phone billing nightmares, I wouldn't be surprised if this were a deliberate attempt on their part to bleed just a little more money out of you.
An awful lot of these outfits exist on paper thin margins, and it could very well be that that extra month of "erroneous" billing is the entirety of the profit that they will earn on your account.
Plus, these cable/satellite/cell phone enterprises seem to attract some of the very worst elements of our society [in terms of borderline criminality in business practice], and it wouldn't surprise me if they did it just because they thought they could get away with it. Of course, it also wouldn't surprise me if they did it out of sheer incompetence, either.
PS: Did you know that in almost every state in the union, a life insurance agency is NOT required to inform the estate of a deceased person that that person did in fact have a life insurance policy with them? E.g. if Joe Shmoe life insurance agent is glancing through the obituaries of his local newspaper, and notices that one of his clients has just died, then in most states, he is NOT required to notify his client's widow of the existence of the life insurance policy.
So if, say, 5% of a life insurance agency's deceased clients have estates that forget about the existence of a policy [or never knew about the existence of the policy in the first place], then that 5% might very well represent the sum total of their profits over all accounts.
The subject of where a business's true profits come from is really fascinating - e.g. almost all the profit that General Motors made over the course of the last decade or two came from their financing subsidiary, i.e. they essentially gave away cars for free [or even at a loss] so as to be able to make a profit on the interest that they charge purchasers who finance through them.
I've had to explain to my mother how to drag and drop a file to copy it in Windows 30 times over the past 5 years and she keeps forgetting. Sure, it's probably a convenient excuse to get me to talk to her for more than 5 minutes, but I've got other shit to do.
C'mon dude, this is your Mom we're talking about.
Besides, it's not like she's charging you rent to live in her basement.
Frameworks like vecLib will probably require some more work to use SSE instead of Altivec though. Even the concerns about things like endianness are not really a problem so long as the code was written the right way in the first place.
The cheapest, fastest, easiest way to get hardware reverse-compatibility is to slap a PPC processor [or some stripped down Altivec silicon] into a PCIe X16 slot on the motherboard. At 4Gbytes/sec bandwidth, you could download the old machine code onto the PPC processor and upload the results in the blink of an eye.
And at volume pricing, it shouldn't add much more than $50 or $75 to the cost of the machine. Alternatively, Apple could increase the price a little and market it as an upgrade option.
The "problem" stems from the pool of available tickets beeing distributed among differently priced buckets.
Look, I know there are these things called "supply and demand", and I don't doubt that they have a rather profound influence on this thing called "price".
However, I honestly don't think that what's happening. I've seen it so often that I'm convinced there is a family of semi-smart software packages that are tracking your preset "cookie" [and/or your IP address], and/or keeping track of the total "hits" [or queries] for a particular product, and then playing games with the prices that are being served to the queriers [e.g. if the software senses an increase in queries about a product, then it's programmed to raise the price as a response to the increase in queries].
Now an ostensibly neutral observer to this conversation might proffer the thesis that I'm paranoid, but obviously I would demur.
Alternatively, one could try to associate "an increase in demand" with "an increase in queries", yet I would counter that "an increase in demand" is more or less identical with "an increase in SALES".
But I think both of these explanations are being too charitable to the people who designed the software - my belief is that thinking behind the algorithm goes something like "Hey, we've got some poor sucker out there who's showing some interest in our product - let's see how much we can jack up the price before he'll lunge for the bait."
Anyway, the moral of the story is that if you want the rock-bottom lowest price on a web purchase, then don't close a browser window that contains a price quote - and open a new browser window to check prices with the store's competitors.
I've experienced price changes within the span of five minutes, or less. I'll be surfing around to sites, comparing prices, and I'll return to a site I've just visited, and they'll increase the price on me [I've never seen a price decrease].
I think they program the software so that the more hits they get on a product page served to your [preset] "cookie", the more they edge the price up on you, figuring, I guess, that you're really interested in the product, and that maybe they can "scare" you into purchasing it [or maybe somehow bleed that extra $10 of profit out of you on account of your insatiable desire for the product]. And no, I don't think this is primarily a supply and demand thing - I think these price change engines are primarily driven by some [previously arcane] theory of marketing psychology. The airline/hotel reservation systems [Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz] are particularly guilty of this [and, again, I do NOT believe that it is primarily attributable to a finite supply of airline tickets or a finite supply hotel rooms].
And of course, you also have the phenomenon of e.g. different Yahoo stores [different URLs] that have identical ownership [i.e. identical "whois" lookups], and identical inventory [and, typically, identical SKUs], but which offer slightly different prices on the very same items. Or merchants whose "normal" price on an item differs from their "advertised" price at e.g. pricewatch.com.
Generally speaking, these kinds of gimmicks really tick me off, and tend to push me towards a site's competitor [assuming they aren't playing the same damned game] - and it sure doesn't make a damned bit of difference to me whether I purchase that ticket from Expedia, Travelocity, or Orbitz.
Have you ever allowed your email address to expire, and, if so, did someone else claim your email address and then go to websites asking them to send your passwords to that old email address?
Note that if you cannot remember your account password at jimsokolove.com, then the law offices of James Sokolove will be happy to send a password reminder to your registered email address.
Your modern-day University autocrat has about as much use for morality as a fish has for a bicycle.
This is all about the elites that govern these institutions - they were embarrassed* by the applicants, and now it's payback time.
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*Although, for the life of me, I don't see how this** sort of thing would embarrass a normal person, but that just goes to show you how introverted, self-obsessed, narcissistic, and arrogant these monomaniacal little twits really are.
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** i.e. typing a URL into a browser with the hope of finding out information ABOUT YOURSELF - information that, in theory, BELONGS TO YOU. Reminds me of hospital administrators who try to ban patients from reading THEIR OWN CHARTS, as if the medical records belonged to the hospital, rather than to THE PATIENTS THEMSELVES.
Just thinking about these kinds of people makes my skin crawl.
torpor: What is True Enterprise... if it isn't "Roll Your Own"? A company which purchases the infrastructure it requires to operate and expand, isn't an enterprise. It's, at best, half of the solution. If you have a business scenario which is driven by software processes, confronting the software creation, and being fully responsible for the continued evolution of that software, is the only way to guarantee continued survival as an enterprising solution to your customers. Buy something from someone else, and you put the majority of the True Value of your company in someone elses' hands.. Do it Yourself. This is the keystone for future business success. If its hard, all the more reason to do it in-house..
A lot of people are responding by saying things like, "What do you want me to do? Write my own Point Of Sale system from the ground up?"
If I can speak for "torpor" - and note that his/. GUID is in the low triple digits - I don't think he would argue that you should not purchase generic software [operating systems, database backends, POS systems] from vendors.
But those generic software packages are increasingly just commodities - as a businessman, it makes little difference whether your OS is Windows or OSX, whether your database is Oracle or DB2, and whether your POS system is IBM or NCR.
Indeed, companies such as Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Oracle, and the like, are increasingly coming to realize that there's no money to be made [or, at least, no major long-term growth in revenue] in selling generic software. Witness e.g. Oracle's furious, frenzied takeover of Peoplesoft*. Why did Oracle want PeopleSoft so desperately? Because Oracle has realized that there's little to distinguish their generic backend from other generic backends, such as DB2, SQLServer, or even PostgreSQL, and that, increasingly, the big profits are to be made in selling [or leasing] proprietary schema [and/or business logic] as customized to specific business endeavors.
I.e. the generic database backend market is completely mature, and is going nowhere as far as growth is concerned, so it's the sale [or lease] of the schema [and/or the business logic] where the new profits will come.
Now I think that torpor's point would be that if you purchase a tailor-made schema/business logic package from one of these "enterprise" vendors, and if you plan your entire business around their solution, then you have become little more than a franchisee of theirs, in almost exactly the same way that a small businessman becomes a franchisee of McDonald's, or Burger King, or Pizza Hut. Which is perfectly fine for most folks, especially if all they aspire to be are glorified middlemen, who spend the remainder of their lives in vicious rat races against armies of other glorified middlemen, each subsisting on paper-thin profit margins.
Again, though, I think torpor would argue that if you're doing anything even remotely sophisticated, and if you want to be the master of your own destiny [i.e. if the idea of being some corporation's bitch for the rest of your life doesn't appeal to you], and if you want to add any value whatsoever to the widget you're peddling [value that would somehow distinguish you in your widget's marketplace, and allow you to earn greater profits than your fellow widget peddlers] - then you want your underlying business logic and database schema to be your own property and of your own insight and creation.
*Oracle has taken a real gamble here, at least as far as their traditional revenue streams are concerned: By purchasing PeopleSoft, they're now in direct competition with their old channel [SAP, Siebel, BEA, etc], and it's entirely possible that their channel will reply with a collective, "Screw you, we'll just port to DB2."
Microsoft once took a very timid step in the direction of challenging its channel, with the purchase of Great Plains [and the attempted pur
CowboyNeal:The vote came after testimony from people including a Florida woman who had her infant die after being unable to call 911 from her internet phone.
hoggoth:People have died because of this. They don't really care why it's difficult to fix. Somehow I think the technical difficulties will be solved. Even if it means a database of IP address to geographic location mappings.
The moment "they" get a database of IP addresses to geographic locations, you can kiss your precious WWW anonymity the hell goodbye.
Someday you people are gonna rue the day you surrendered to "them" your right to anonymity.
PS: And, as Cowboy Neal points out, we are [predictably enough] gonna be doing this to "Save the Chilrun'!"
THE LAST STAR WARS It opens next week. I saw it, and here's the thing: It's unbelievably bad. O I'm telling you this because movie critics won't. So far all the early reviews -- all of them, from Variety to the Hollywood Reporter to Time magazine -- have been favorable. Why? Because while the movie critics of my long-ago youth were middlebrow snobs suspicious of populist entertainment, today's critics have turned into toadies. They are afraid of being on an audience's bad side, afraid that a movie they will pan might really strike a chord. Since it's a foregone conclusion that the final Star Wars is going to make a jillion dollars, the safe thing for critics to do is say nice things about it. The only nice thing I can think to say about it is that it's not quite as mindspinningly wretched as its predecessor, Attack of the Clones, but it's plenty awful anyway. Even Yoda gives a rotten performance. Go see it if you must when it opens next week, but at least you got one fair warning here. http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp ?ref=/thecorner/05_05_08_corner-archive.asp#062506
Star Wars VI THE FINAL Star Wars is, as writer-director George Lucas promised, a tragedy--but it's not the tragedy Lucas thinks it is. Ever since he began making his second set of Star Wars movies a decade ago, Lucas said that Episode III: Revenge of the Sith would be the unvarnished story of the young knight Anakin Skywalker's degeneration and conversion into the black-helmeted, black-outfitted Darth Vader, the villain of the first three films. The tale of woe it really tells is that of George Lucas himself, the final chapter in the sad degeneration of a vital, vivid, and highly amusing moviemaker into a dull, solipsistic, and humorless incompetent.
Lucas had more than a quarter of a century to figure out why Anakin Skywalker went bad. And here's what he came up with: [SPOILERS FOLLOW] http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/ 000/000/005/611ajqxt.asp
Jason Appuzo [Liberty Film Festival] objected to the needless insertion of politics:
[LOTS OF SPOILERS] This is in large part what irritates me about Lucas' recent remarks. He's actually created a good storyline here, and he's publicly clouding it with nonsense about Bush and the current war. Politics has nothing to do with Anakin's turn to the Dark Side. Revenge of the Sith takes a largely dismissive view of politics, and of movements (whether Jedi or Sith) that assert deep insight into human relations. This is why Vader's late utterances about "his Empire" - a clear dig at Bush - ring so phony, so out of place. Politics are not what have been motivating Anakin for the previous 2+ hours - then, out of nowhere, he starts speechifying like an adolescent Napoleon.
Slashdot Mirror
The previous comment [Mod parent up!] has got some funky HTML attributes [rel="nofollow"] and a weird local URL: Has someone discovered [and exploited] a bug in Slashcode?
samag has an article in sept 2004's issue called "System Inventory Using LDAP".
Many, many moons ago, Cisco supported Novell Directory Services:
I don't know what became of that project [Cisco subsequently got in bed with Microsoft & Active Directory], but if Cisco were still supporting Novell, then maybe you could tie it all into Zenworks' inventory management system [which can publish to Crystal Reports].This seems like something that ought to have been done by a commercial entity, but whether it has, I know not. And if it hasn't, then it would certainly be a nice opportunity for a startup.
This is not a step towards opening Java. The only relation this has to Java is the fact that it runs Java code and is written in Java. Just because sun open sourced it doesn't mean its thinking about open sourcing the Java lanugage.
Okay, that would explain a lot.
But when I first saw the thread, I thought it meant that Sun was opening the "source" to javac and java, and then I got to wondering: Okay, what language are those programs written in? C++? C? Bison?
Or is it largely "machine code"?
As one suggestion, though, cardboard (in 4x8ft sheets) proved a lot easier to work with than plastic sheets.
Have any of you guys ever heard of the concept of a "fire hazard"?
Believe me, you do not want to be within a city block of this thing when it decides to go up in smoke.
Um, no. Marketing does not exist for people who have decided what they like before they've seen the show in question. It exists for people who are likely to be convinced to try something new, and you are not in that group.
IANAM, but I have heard that the purpose of marketing is to reinforce brand loyalty.
Like installing buggy USB driver f*cking up DHCP client's ability to renew IP address. Or installing desktop skinning software causing Windows to start failing installation of virtual network adapters. Or that disabling (certain) personal firewall software actually not having a full effect on a traffic until the next reboot.
Or installing the old Oxford English Dictionary on CD-ROM, and having it nuke your networked Lexmark PostScript printer driver.
[By the way, the new Oxford English Dictionary employs C-Dilla, and is damned near unusable.]
This is the constitution as it was written: Today, five supreme court justices, who are sworn to uphold that constitution, changed it to read: It is very difficult to overemphasize quite how evil this ruling is.
Caused these fellas a world of hurt:
Back to you, Brent.
Bullshit. An electrician here can easily make $100k-- you just need to be Union. Good electricians can always find work if they are willing to move around.
My point is that the guy making $100K isn't pulling any cable, or bolting any nuts. He's the guy reading the blueprints [or maybe even drafting the blueprints], and giving orders to a gang of cable monkeys, almost all of whom will be illegal immigrants.
Also, in regard to the original question posed by the original poster: You don't just walk into those $100K gigs as an amateur. To get there, you're gonna hafta do several years as a journeyman apprentice [before you're even allowed to sit for your state board exams], then study for and pass your state board exams, then put in 20-30 years in the union [paying off a bunch of thugs like Tony Soprano along the way] until you finally land one of those cushy "$100K" deals.
Frankly, I don't think that's what the original poster had in mind.
I'd like to take up woodworking and carpentry. You get to be creative, use your hands, and put an idea into existence and someone gets to use the end product. You can also start simple and work up to more advanced projects. It's very rewarding when you finish a project as well.
Don't get me wrong - I love carpentry, and stonemasonry, and electrical wiring, and landscaping - the whole gamut of physical labor. But our nation's inability to resolve the question of our southern border has caused unskilled and semi-skilled wages to tank. And it's ruined the careers of the old-timers [I know older guys who just can't find work anymore].
These days, if you're native-born, and even so much as semi-literate, then'll you start off as a foreman [supervising a gang of illegals], and move up from there - i.e. you're right back into deskwork.
Only an idiot would aim for a job with shrinking pay and demand, while outsourcing is increasing. I should know. We can smell our own.
Consider:
To the pessimist, this can only mean: We're all doomed!On the other hand, the optimist might observe that the West [USA, UK, Japan, Korea, Taiwan], in conjunction with China, and India, is laying the foundation for a 21st century of staggering, unprecedented economic growth, the likes of which the world has never seen.
The Folly of Our Age
The space shuttle.
June 16, 2005, 7:49 a.m.
Like the monster in some ghastly horror movie rising from the dead for the umpteenth time, the space shuttle is back on the launch pad. This grotesque, lethal white elephant -- 14 deaths in 113 flights -- is the grandest, grossest technological folly of our age. If the shuttle has any reason for existing, it is as an exceptionally clear symbol of our corrupt, sentimental, and dysfunctional political system. Its flights accomplish nothing and cost half a billion per. That, at least, is what a flight costs when the vehicle survives. If a shuttle blows up -- which, depending on whether or not you think that 35 human lives (five original launchworthy Shuttles at seven astronauts each) would be too high a price to pay for ridding the nation of an embarrassing and expensive monstrosity, is either too often or not often enough** -- then the cost, what with lost inventory, insurance payouts, and the endless subsequent investigations, is seven or eight times that...
http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.p?r ef=/derbyshire/derbyshire200506160749.asp
Also the call center person has his/her hands tied when fixing the problem. Recently my cable internet service did not discontinue my service when I told them to. Even though it was obvious they needed to credit my account for the extra month they charged me for, the representative could not due to some rule. If he was trusted to just make the decision things would go much smoother.
Judging from some of the horror stories I've heard in re: cable/satellite/cell phone billing nightmares, I wouldn't be surprised if this were a deliberate attempt on their part to bleed just a little more money out of you.
An awful lot of these outfits exist on paper thin margins, and it could very well be that that extra month of "erroneous" billing is the entirety of the profit that they will earn on your account.
Plus, these cable/satellite/cell phone enterprises seem to attract some of the very worst elements of our society [in terms of borderline criminality in business practice], and it wouldn't surprise me if they did it just because they thought they could get away with it. Of course, it also wouldn't surprise me if they did it out of sheer incompetence, either.
PS: Did you know that in almost every state in the union, a life insurance agency is NOT required to inform the estate of a deceased person that that person did in fact have a life insurance policy with them? E.g. if Joe Shmoe life insurance agent is glancing through the obituaries of his local newspaper, and notices that one of his clients has just died, then in most states, he is NOT required to notify his client's widow of the existence of the life insurance policy.
So if, say, 5% of a life insurance agency's deceased clients have estates that forget about the existence of a policy [or never knew about the existence of the policy in the first place], then that 5% might very well represent the sum total of their profits over all accounts.
The subject of where a business's true profits come from is really fascinating - e.g. almost all the profit that General Motors made over the course of the last decade or two came from their financing subsidiary, i.e. they essentially gave away cars for free [or even at a loss] so as to be able to make a profit on the interest that they charge purchasers who finance through them.
I've had to explain to my mother how to drag and drop a file to copy it in Windows 30 times over the past 5 years and she keeps forgetting. Sure, it's probably a convenient excuse to get me to talk to her for more than 5 minutes, but I've got other shit to do.
C'mon dude, this is your Mom we're talking about.
Besides, it's not like she's charging you rent to live in her basement.
Frameworks like vecLib will probably require some more work to use SSE instead of Altivec though. Even the concerns about things like endianness are not really a problem so long as the code was written the right way in the first place.
The cheapest, fastest, easiest way to get hardware reverse-compatibility is to slap a PPC processor [or some stripped down Altivec silicon] into a PCIe X16 slot on the motherboard. At 4Gbytes/sec bandwidth, you could download the old machine code onto the PPC processor and upload the results in the blink of an eye.
And at volume pricing, it shouldn't add much more than $50 or $75 to the cost of the machine. Alternatively, Apple could increase the price a little and market it as an upgrade option.
The "problem" stems from the pool of available tickets beeing distributed among differently priced buckets.
Look, I know there are these things called "supply and demand", and I don't doubt that they have a rather profound influence on this thing called "price".
However, I honestly don't think that what's happening. I've seen it so often that I'm convinced there is a family of semi-smart software packages that are tracking your preset "cookie" [and/or your IP address], and/or keeping track of the total "hits" [or queries] for a particular product, and then playing games with the prices that are being served to the queriers [e.g. if the software senses an increase in queries about a product, then it's programmed to raise the price as a response to the increase in queries].
Now an ostensibly neutral observer to this conversation might proffer the thesis that I'm paranoid, but obviously I would demur.
Alternatively, one could try to associate "an increase in demand" with "an increase in queries", yet I would counter that "an increase in demand" is more or less identical with "an increase in SALES".
But I think both of these explanations are being too charitable to the people who designed the software - my belief is that thinking behind the algorithm goes something like "Hey, we've got some poor sucker out there who's showing some interest in our product - let's see how much we can jack up the price before he'll lunge for the bait."
Anyway, the moral of the story is that if you want the rock-bottom lowest price on a web purchase, then don't close a browser window that contains a price quote - and open a new browser window to check prices with the store's competitors.
How prevalent is this practice?
I've experienced price changes within the span of five minutes, or less. I'll be surfing around to sites, comparing prices, and I'll return to a site I've just visited, and they'll increase the price on me [I've never seen a price decrease].
I think they program the software so that the more hits they get on a product page served to your [preset] "cookie", the more they edge the price up on you, figuring, I guess, that you're really interested in the product, and that maybe they can "scare" you into purchasing it [or maybe somehow bleed that extra $10 of profit out of you on account of your insatiable desire for the product]. And no, I don't think this is primarily a supply and demand thing - I think these price change engines are primarily driven by some [previously arcane] theory of marketing psychology. The airline/hotel reservation systems [Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz] are particularly guilty of this [and, again, I do NOT believe that it is primarily attributable to a finite supply of airline tickets or a finite supply hotel rooms].
And of course, you also have the phenomenon of e.g. different Yahoo stores [different URLs] that have identical ownership [i.e. identical "whois" lookups], and identical inventory [and, typically, identical SKUs], but which offer slightly different prices on the very same items. Or merchants whose "normal" price on an item differs from their "advertised" price at e.g. pricewatch.com.
Generally speaking, these kinds of gimmicks really tick me off, and tend to push me towards a site's competitor [assuming they aren't playing the same damned game] - and it sure doesn't make a damned bit of difference to me whether I purchase that ticket from Expedia, Travelocity, or Orbitz.
Her name is Elaine Liner: More here:
the faggot format of your post
Yeah, but the more I thought about it, the angrier I got.
That's why it was kind long winded. With footnotes, no less.
PS: Since when do ACs get mod points?
Have you ever allowed your email address to expire, and, if so, did someone else claim your email address and then go to websites asking them to send your passwords to that old email address?
If so, the law offices of James Sokolove would like to help. Please contact us at http://www.jimsokolove.com/contact/.
Note that if you cannot remember your account password at jimsokolove.com, then the law offices of James Sokolove will be happy to send a password reminder to your registered email address.
Thank you, and have a good day.
Who is morally corrupt in this scenario i ask...
Your modern-day University autocrat has about as much use for morality as a fish has for a bicycle.
This is all about the elites that govern these institutions - they were embarrassed* by the applicants, and now it's payback time.
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*Although, for the life of me, I don't see how this** sort of thing would embarrass a normal person, but that just goes to show you how introverted, self-obsessed, narcissistic, and arrogant these monomaniacal little twits really are.
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** i.e. typing a URL into a browser with the hope of finding out information ABOUT YOURSELF - information that, in theory, BELONGS TO YOU. Reminds me of hospital administrators who try to ban patients from reading THEIR OWN CHARTS, as if the medical records belonged to the hospital, rather than to THE PATIENTS THEMSELVES.
Just thinking about these kinds of people makes my skin crawl.
torpor: What is True Enterprise... if it isn't "Roll Your Own"? A company which purchases the infrastructure it requires to operate and expand, isn't an enterprise. It's, at best, half of the solution. If you have a business scenario which is driven by software processes, confronting the software creation, and being fully responsible for the continued evolution of that software, is the only way to guarantee continued survival as an enterprising solution to your customers. Buy something from someone else, and you put the majority of the True Value of your company in someone elses' hands.. Do it Yourself. This is the keystone for future business success. If its hard, all the more reason to do it in-house
A lot of people are responding by saying things like, "What do you want me to do? Write my own Point Of Sale system from the ground up?"
If I can speak for "torpor" - and note that his /. GUID is in the low triple digits - I don't think he would argue that you should not purchase generic software [operating systems, database backends, POS systems] from vendors.
But those generic software packages are increasingly just commodities - as a businessman, it makes little difference whether your OS is Windows or OSX, whether your database is Oracle or DB2, and whether your POS system is IBM or NCR.
Indeed, companies such as Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Oracle, and the like, are increasingly coming to realize that there's no money to be made [or, at least, no major long-term growth in revenue] in selling generic software. Witness e.g. Oracle's furious, frenzied takeover of Peoplesoft*. Why did Oracle want PeopleSoft so desperately? Because Oracle has realized that there's little to distinguish their generic backend from other generic backends, such as DB2, SQLServer, or even PostgreSQL, and that, increasingly, the big profits are to be made in selling [or leasing] proprietary schema [and/or business logic] as customized to specific business endeavors.
I.e. the generic database backend market is completely mature, and is going nowhere as far as growth is concerned, so it's the sale [or lease] of the schema [and/or the business logic] where the new profits will come.
Now I think that torpor's point would be that if you purchase a tailor-made schema/business logic package from one of these "enterprise" vendors, and if you plan your entire business around their solution, then you have become little more than a franchisee of theirs, in almost exactly the same way that a small businessman becomes a franchisee of McDonald's, or Burger King, or Pizza Hut. Which is perfectly fine for most folks, especially if all they aspire to be are glorified middlemen, who spend the remainder of their lives in vicious rat races against armies of other glorified middlemen, each subsisting on paper-thin profit margins.
Again, though, I think torpor would argue that if you're doing anything even remotely sophisticated, and if you want to be the master of your own destiny [i.e. if the idea of being some corporation's bitch for the rest of your life doesn't appeal to you], and if you want to add any value whatsoever to the widget you're peddling [value that would somehow distinguish you in your widget's marketplace, and allow you to earn greater profits than your fellow widget peddlers] - then you want your underlying business logic and database schema to be your own property and of your own insight and creation.
*Oracle has taken a real gamble here, at least as far as their traditional revenue streams are concerned: By purchasing PeopleSoft, they're now in direct competition with their old channel [SAP, Siebel, BEA, etc], and it's entirely possible that their channel will reply with a collective, "Screw you, we'll just port to DB2."
Microsoft once took a very timid step in the direction of challenging its channel, with the purchase of Great Plains [and the attempted pur
CowboyNeal: The vote came after testimony from people including a Florida woman who had her infant die after being unable to call 911 from her internet phone.
hoggoth: People have died because of this. They don't really care why it's difficult to fix. Somehow I think the technical difficulties will be solved. Even if it means a database of IP address to geographic location mappings.
The moment "they" get a database of IP addresses to geographic locations, you can kiss your precious WWW anonymity the hell goodbye.
Someday you people are gonna rue the day you surrendered to "them" your right to anonymity.
PS: And, as Cowboy Neal points out, we are [predictably enough] gonna be doing this to "Save the Chilrun'!"
John Podhoretz [NY Post] hated it:
Jason Appuzo [Liberty Film Festival] objected to the needless insertion of politics: