I can tell you that even in the 1970s, Radio Shack trained its salespeople *exactly* the same way as today. Upsell, add-on, metrics on the average ticket and the average time spent with customers, metrics on collection of information for the direct mail marketing (on which 9% of store revenue is spent, same as ever).
>Do remember that this is a SCHOOL... It's purpose is to educate the kids, not to facilitate them playing games.
What kids? You have to be 18 to live in that dorm. And it's not strictly *School*, it's a residence. Do you think it would be acceptable to only provide electric light for those who are actually studying? Or to only allow people to leave to go to class or to the library but for no other reason?
>I think we eventually concluded that a fireproof safe doesn't really gain you much in the real world.
It's not as if the safe is a net liability. Your extreme examples don't make the safe a poor investment, or, say, no better than a paper shoe box. Is that what you concluded? Don't buy a safe because a paper box would be better?
>Add this to the list of things which should make Linux gain marketshare.
You speak of Linux as though it is a product. Linux is part of a social movement. It doesn't "gain marketshare" any more than something like "Civil Rights" or "Ecology" gains "marketshare". Certainly, markets can be made as a result of a social movement, or as a means for the movement to exploit, but the end is not "market share" especially not in the sense of commercial product marketing. You speak in terms of "consumers" and "markets" because your whole frame of reference seems to require you to put Linux into this frame; possibly because in order for Linux (the social movement) to benefit *you*, it must have some kind of market appeal and it must fit a growth model. But those are *your* problem, not Linux's problem.
""Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!""
Nothing about people who can pay $75000/year non-resident tuition???
>your children can still enjoy an american education - how does funding foreigners hurt them?
Are you *sure* that no American who is qualified does not have his spot taken by a foreigner?
I disagree with the notion that taxes are "funding foreigners"; Foreign grad students have to compete for the same pots of research money as everyone else. American students tend to go on loans and grants, and may represent a burden on universities where foreign students represent a profit center.
You know the reasons, but foremost among them is that military action against Burma is tantamount to a declaration of war against China. It also requires a land war in Asia. Burma today isn't a hell of a lot different from Vietnam in 1962. While we laugh off the capabilities of their military and the perceived intellectual capacity of their commanders, engaging them in a conflict does not likely end very well for anyone. You only *think* Iraq is "Vietnam part 2." Invade a Southeast Asian country again, and the problems represented by Iraq will fade to insignificance in comparison.
>sorry! not enough oil downthere... it belongs to China.
Burma has several things of interest to China: A large pool of unskilled labor, Forest resources and arable land, and abundant natural gas reserves.
Burma represents a significant stake in the energy sustainability of China and Thailand. China, Thailand, Russia, Korea, India all have oil business in Burma, despite the EU and US economic sanctions. Why haven't the EU and the US already cut off diplomatic relations with those countries over this alone?
>All I'm saying is if you want Linux to really be a Windows killer, if you want it in every home, then part of what you have to do is drop the DIY >attitude.
Who are you talking to? What makes you think many people want linux to "be a Windows killer" or "want it in every home?"
Linux is, from start to finish, *all* about DIY, or rather, about putting the ability to DIY (in terms of putting the tools to DIY in the hands of anyone who wants them, and also in terms of being allowed to DIY without risking lawsuits.)
Everyone in my school had to learn to use a slide rule.
The main thing I notice about slide rules versus calculators, is that in many computations, the user is required to be aware of certain techniques, often involving logarithmic properties. And in many calculations, you see a *range* around a solution, not just a number popping up like on a calculator.
Slide rule users tend to have a natural ability to estimate the magnitude of a solution, and do not find sigfigs and scientific notation (with a single digit mantissa) to be an unusual idea.
One nonobvious consequence of electronic calculators has been to push the understanding of log properties from early grade school arithmetic, into at least middle school territory, and I know for a fact that many College Algebra students today have difficulty with logarithms. In the slide rule era, there was *no way* a student would get out of grade school math without naturally being very comfortable with logarithms, and how to relate multiplcation to the sum of logs.
If people could become proficient at modifying object code, instead of being dependent on access to source, the distinction between open source and closed source would be *strictly* with regard to licensing.
>What's so hard about giving back to the community a tiny little something.
The demand curve doesn't justify it, and that makes it *very* hard to, say, go to the board of directors and convince them that your "giving back" idea is necessary or even beneficial.
What's so hard about getting into a position of authority where you get to make these decisions? You're smart and know what makes a successful business decision better than them, right? Make a business plan and get investors!
>What you end up with is audio drivers slowing down network performance
And you end up with a systems whose audio performance is unsuitable for professional recording or for use as a musical instrument.
There's a great deal of frustration and aborted "upgrades" in the audio world. People who were able to operate with, say, 5ms audio latency in XP are finding it impossible to even approach this performance with any amount of tweaking in Vista, since the audio driver has been moved into userspace in some ham-handed fashion.
Audio performance might be great for home theatre purposes, but it's totally unusable for production.
I think the purpose of this machine might be more to put a system in place where evidence *must* be collected and *must* be preserved, and the busy work of running a gel electrophoresis is just a means to that end. That's if someone really smart came up with this device.
>The same test would take at least a day to a week (if re-testing or conformation is required) in the lab.
It's got nothing to do with the lab equipment. It takes four hours to do PCR. It takes about half an hour to do an Electrophoresis gel. If you have to schedule this to be done by a lab tech, you add some overhead and some latency, of course. But the claim is that a chemical process that takes hours can be done in "as little as 25 minutes." If that were true, the invention would be on the Nobel Prize order of significance, and the portability would be irrelevant.
This isn't esoteric stuff anymore. It's undergrad lab stuff.
It's nothing but a gel electrophoresis kit in a carrying case with a built-in computer. Very gimmicky, and very scary that this might convict you of murder, and might do so even in the hands of someone who doesn't really understand the results they are interpreting. Hopefully it gets one thing right: It preserves the sample.
PCR takes 4 hours, Electrophoresis takes half an hour to an hour. The portable machine may do these things, but it doesn't do them in "25 minutes". That would be a much bigger deal than mere portability.
Anybody who has done the least bit of undergrad biology research knows this.
This is a wide-open target for a discrimination suit. You simply aren't allowed to say "no men as women" and still allow "women as men". It's not just a gender thing. You can't make a rule at your restaurant "No Goatees". You might get away with "No Beards".
First, the company needs to establish that it has the right to even demand to know the gender of its customer. (This in itself might be evidence of a discriminatory practice). Then the company needs to establish that it's unacceptable (actionable, legally) that the customer represented the opposite gender when made to disclose this.
They would be better off terminating accounts for "no reason at all" than to do it for something that's obviously discriminatory on a gender bias. I imagine their contract lets them terminate without breach. But once you give a reason -- and that reason is one of those hot potatoes like gender, ethnicity, or religion -- you run the risk of finding yourself in court, defending your decision against a very motivated plaintiff (even if their case seems completely ridiculous to you.)
Getting away from the legal considerations, there's another issue: It's a bad idea to piss off the gays. Ask Kathy Griffin; the gay crowd is a gold mine.
>So if they're not a stakeholder, what business do they have to lobby for this with congress?
Well, fortunately, nothing in the Constitution says that public access to elected officials is to be limited to those with any "stake" in any given thing.
>I'd hope congress would give them a firm 'Mind your own business'...but what are the chances of that?
Hopefully, none! The right of the people to petition the government for redress of grievances is an inalienable civil right. Whether or not you believe their grievances have merit does not mean you get to suppress them.
>Really, it's bad enough we have watchdog groups working on behalf of 'think of the children'...but watchdog groups looking out for the corporate greedy? > Pathetic.
When is the last time you corresponded with a lawmaker, either at the national or state level, either during a campaign or while he or she was in office? Do you, say, set aside a couple of hours every week to do this? Why do you believe that access to government is limited to "lobbyists" and "watchdog groups?" Don't you recognize that those groups are comprised of individuals with no more or less rights than you, the difference being that they are organized and actually work toward their causes?
What are you doing to counter their argument, besides shrugging them off and labeling them?
I no longer enjoy comparative language discussions with people who haven't at least taken, or preferably taught, university-level course in automata, grammars, compiler development, and who have programmed in a wide variety of language paradigms, e.g., you've got a really strong basis to compare Lisp to Haskell to XSLT, C to Java to Ruby, etc.
Otherwise it always seems like getting into an argument with users of a consumer product over which "brand" is better, and the reasoning in the argument is rarely compelling. The author had a project that failed. They think they know the reasons. That's all I can take from it.
>When you have a trademark, you can't make the decisions about who you enforce it against.
Of course you can. You're confusing doctrines related to defenses, with obligations. There's not a word in the law that supports your exaggerated view on trademark enforcement.
Slashdot Mirror
I can tell you that even in the 1970s, Radio Shack trained its salespeople *exactly* the same way as today. Upsell, add-on, metrics on the average ticket and the average time spent with customers, metrics on collection of information for the direct mail marketing (on which 9% of store revenue is spent, same as ever).
>What "home user" generates 100s of GB of data?
Photographers and musicians do this easily.
>Do remember that this is a SCHOOL... It's purpose is to educate the kids, not to facilitate them playing games.
What kids? You have to be 18 to live in that dorm.
And it's not strictly *School*, it's a residence. Do you think it would be acceptable to only provide electric light for those who are actually studying? Or to only allow people to leave to go to class or to the library but for no other reason?
>I think we eventually concluded that a fireproof safe doesn't really gain you much in the real world.
It's not as if the safe is a net liability. Your extreme examples don't make the safe a poor investment, or, say, no better than a paper shoe box.
Is that what you concluded? Don't buy a safe because a paper box would be better?
>Add this to the list of things which should make Linux gain marketshare.
You speak of Linux as though it is a product. Linux is part of a social movement. It doesn't "gain marketshare" any more than something like "Civil Rights" or "Ecology" gains "marketshare". Certainly, markets can be made as a result of a social movement, or as a means for the movement to exploit, but the end is not "market share" especially not in the sense of commercial product marketing. You speak in terms of "consumers" and "markets" because your whole frame of reference seems to require you to put Linux into this frame; possibly because in order for Linux (the social movement) to benefit *you*, it must have some kind of market appeal and it must fit a growth model. But those are *your* problem, not Linux's problem.
>i didnt see any hesitation from anybody on the face of the world on bush & co part when they decided to invade iraq.
More specifically, no nation with a military mustered any force to defend Iraq from invasion.
The same might not be true if you moved to invade Burma.
""Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!""
Nothing about people who can pay $75000/year non-resident tuition???
>your children can still enjoy an american education - how does funding foreigners hurt them?
Are you *sure* that no American who is qualified does not have his spot taken by a foreigner?
I disagree with the notion that taxes are "funding foreigners"; Foreign grad students have to compete for the same pots of research money as everyone else. American students tend to go on loans and grants, and may represent a burden on universities where foreign students represent a profit center.
>Myanmar doesn't have oil like Iraq?
Burma has more natural gas than Iraq has oil.
You might want to look into the countries that have natural gas business in Burma. Decide if it would be wise to declare war on those countries.
>why USA doesn't bring democracy also to Myanmar?
You know the reasons, but foremost among them is that military action against Burma is tantamount to a declaration of war against China. It also requires a land war in Asia. Burma today isn't a hell of a lot different from Vietnam in 1962. While we laugh off the capabilities of their military and the perceived intellectual capacity of their commanders, engaging them in a conflict does not likely end very well for anyone. You only *think* Iraq is "Vietnam part 2." Invade a Southeast Asian country again, and the problems represented by Iraq will fade to insignificance in comparison.
>sorry! not enough oil downthere... it belongs to China.
Burma has several things of interest to China: A large pool of unskilled labor, Forest resources and arable land, and abundant natural gas reserves.
Burma represents a significant stake in the energy sustainability of China and Thailand. China, Thailand, Russia, Korea, India all have oil business in Burma, despite the EU and US economic sanctions. Why haven't the EU and the US already cut off diplomatic relations with those countries over this alone?
>All I'm saying is if you want Linux to really be a Windows killer, if you want it in every home, then part of what you have to do is drop the DIY
>attitude.
Who are you talking to? What makes you think many people want linux to "be a Windows killer" or "want it in every home?"
Linux is, from start to finish, *all* about DIY, or rather, about putting the ability to DIY (in terms of putting the tools to DIY in the hands of anyone who wants them, and also in terms of being allowed to DIY without risking lawsuits.)
Everyone in my school had to learn to use a slide rule.
The main thing I notice about slide rules versus calculators, is that in many computations, the user is required to be aware of certain techniques, often involving logarithmic properties. And in many calculations, you see a *range* around a solution, not just a number popping up like on a calculator.
Slide rule users tend to have a natural ability to estimate the magnitude of a solution, and do not find sigfigs and scientific notation (with a single digit mantissa) to be an unusual idea.
One nonobvious consequence of electronic calculators has been to push the understanding of log properties from early grade school arithmetic, into at least middle school territory, and I know for a fact that many College Algebra students today have difficulty with logarithms. In the slide rule era, there was *no way* a student would get out of grade school math without naturally being very comfortable with logarithms, and how to relate multiplcation to the sum of logs.
If people could become proficient at modifying object code, instead of being dependent on access to source, the distinction between open source and closed source would be *strictly* with regard to licensing.
>I would say he has a problem.
He danced with the devil but now he doesn't want to pay the fiddler?
>What's so hard about giving back to the community a tiny little something.
The demand curve doesn't justify it, and that makes it *very* hard to, say, go to the board of directors and convince them that your "giving back" idea is necessary or even beneficial.
What's so hard about getting into a position of authority where you get to make these decisions? You're smart and know what makes a successful business decision better than them, right? Make a business plan and get investors!
>What you end up with is audio drivers slowing down network performance
And you end up with a systems whose audio performance is unsuitable for professional recording or for use as a musical instrument.
There's a great deal of frustration and aborted "upgrades" in the audio world. People who were able to operate with, say, 5ms audio latency in XP are finding it impossible to even approach this performance with any amount of tweaking in Vista, since the audio driver has been moved into userspace in some ham-handed fashion.
Audio performance might be great for home theatre purposes, but it's totally unusable for production.
I think the purpose of this machine might be more to put a system in place where evidence *must* be collected and *must* be preserved, and the busy work of running a gel electrophoresis is just a means to that end. That's if someone really smart came up with this device.
>The same test would take at least a day to a week (if re-testing or conformation is required) in the lab.
It's got nothing to do with the lab equipment. It takes four hours to do PCR. It takes about half an hour to do an Electrophoresis gel.
If you have to schedule this to be done by a lab tech, you add some overhead and some latency, of course. But the claim is that a chemical process that takes hours can be done in "as little as 25 minutes." If that were true, the invention would be on the Nobel Prize order of significance, and the portability would be irrelevant.
This isn't esoteric stuff anymore. It's undergrad lab stuff.
It's nothing but a gel electrophoresis kit in a carrying case with a built-in computer. Very gimmicky, and very scary that this might convict you of murder, and might do so even in the hands of someone who doesn't really understand the results they are interpreting. Hopefully it gets one thing right: It preserves the sample.
>But lobbying congress because a group believes a particular entity is breaking an existing law?
What part of the right to "petition the government for redress of grievances" don't you understand?
You don't get to decide for them what constitutes a legitimate grievance.
PCR takes 4 hours, Electrophoresis takes half an hour to an hour. The portable machine may
do these things, but it doesn't do them in "25 minutes". That would be a much bigger deal than
mere portability.
Anybody who has done the least bit of undergrad biology research knows this.
This is a wide-open target for a discrimination suit. You simply aren't allowed to say "no men as women" and still allow "women as men".
It's not just a gender thing. You can't make a rule at your restaurant "No Goatees". You might get away with "No Beards".
First, the company needs to establish that it has the right to even demand to know the gender of its customer. (This in itself might be evidence of a discriminatory practice). Then the company needs to establish that it's unacceptable (actionable, legally) that the customer represented the opposite gender when made to disclose this.
They would be better off terminating accounts for "no reason at all" than to do it for something that's obviously discriminatory on a gender bias. I imagine their contract lets them terminate without breach. But once you give a reason -- and that reason is one of those hot potatoes like gender, ethnicity, or religion -- you run the risk of finding yourself in court, defending your decision against a very motivated plaintiff (even if their case seems completely ridiculous to you.)
Getting away from the legal considerations, there's another issue: It's a bad idea to piss off the gays. Ask Kathy Griffin; the gay crowd is a gold mine.
>So if they're not a stakeholder, what business do they have to lobby for this with congress?
Well, fortunately, nothing in the Constitution says that public access to elected officials is to be limited to those with any "stake" in any given thing.
>I'd hope congress would give them a firm 'Mind your own business'...but what are the chances of that?
Hopefully, none! The right of the people to petition the government for redress of grievances is an inalienable civil right. Whether or not you believe their grievances have merit does not mean you get to suppress them.
>Really, it's bad enough we have watchdog groups working on behalf of 'think of the children'...but watchdog groups looking out for the corporate greedy?
> Pathetic.
When is the last time you corresponded with a lawmaker, either at the national or state level, either during a campaign or while he or she was in office?
Do you, say, set aside a couple of hours every week to do this? Why do you believe that access to government is limited to "lobbyists" and "watchdog groups?" Don't you recognize that those groups are comprised of individuals with no more or less rights than you, the difference being that they are organized and actually work toward their causes?
What are you doing to counter their argument, besides shrugging them off and labeling them?
I no longer enjoy comparative language discussions with people who haven't at least taken, or preferably taught, university-level course
in automata, grammars, compiler development, and who have programmed in a wide variety of language paradigms, e.g., you've got a really strong basis to compare Lisp to Haskell to XSLT, C to Java to Ruby, etc.
Otherwise it always seems like getting into an argument with users of a consumer product over which "brand" is better, and the reasoning in the argument is rarely compelling. The author had a project that failed. They think they know the reasons. That's all I can take from it.
>When you have a trademark, you can't make the decisions about who you enforce it against.
Of course you can. You're confusing doctrines related to defenses, with obligations.
There's not a word in the law that supports your exaggerated view on trademark enforcement.