These companies seem to be stuck in the TV mindset, and view web sites sort-of like internet channels. Web site owners like ESPN want to be able to sell their "channels" to cable companies, and cable companies want to charge their users extra for "premium content." They're trying to pound a square peg into a round hole. My worry is that they'll manage to do it, via monopoly pressure or government legislation, and end up making my internet service about as convenient as my television service (that is, not at all).
I really wish companies would learn to adapt instead of trying to shoehorn everything into their existing business models. Why do we pay CEOs these ridiculous salaries again? It sure isn't because they're visionaries.
My fiance thought that you could get it from eating pork. I told her that you couldn't. She told me that the news had been saying that you could get it from pigs. This was in Japan. Its not necessarily stupidity on the part of regular people, but rather being improperly informed. I doubt that your average person is going to do do research into the disease beyond what they are told in the news.
Its probably because a student that goes through the effort of going to college in another country is probably more intelligent and motivated on average than his peers.
Are the teaching methods really that tightly-coupled with the books? I suppose if the teacher just reads from the book, but in my high-school days very few teachers did that. The text books were used for facts and reference, and the methods used to teach those depended on the teachers.
I wish I could find the study (a million copies of "The 25/100 worst-performing schools" are cluttering up Google results), but researchers found that poorly performing schools, on average, received more funding per student than well-performing schools. So, its not all that clear to me that funding is the problem in all cases.
I know more than one geek friend who are starting to feel that the whole Apple-bashing-Microsoft thing is kind-of off-putting. Even more-so once they started going from advertising-lying to flat-out-lying in their commercials.
And this is coming from a guy with a Macbook Pro, iPod, and iPhone.
Because school is where they have the most interaction with their peers. They spend eight hours of the day with their peers in school. At home, they may or may not be playing with other neighborhood children. These days, it leans more towards may-not, since parents are becoming increasingly paranoid about letting their children play outside.
Fundamentally, the federal government's efforts in "fixing" our schools is trying to make a complicated problem simple. The blunt truth is that there is no one problem that our schools share. In some areas its bad teachers, and in other areas its schools filled with lazy, unmotivated kids. In other areas, its because the parents do not have the time or inclination to be involved with their childrens' schooling (either because they are bad parents, or because they have to work double-shifts just to put food on the table).
This is why handling education at a federal level is a fundamentally bad idea. It assumes that there is some generic solution that can be applied to fix all schools at once. In reality, problems must be identified at a school-by-school basis, which leaves education best suited to local communities.
There's usually no one cause for success in anything, whether it be intelligence, business, or whatnot, nor is there one generic cause of failure. Success requires some degree of innate ability, motivation, access to resources, and some blind luck. This kid wouldn't gotten as far as he is if he was not innately intelligent, nor would he have progressed if he was not motivated to nurture that intelligence. If he didn't have a mother who was willing to put him in community college, or a community college nearby, then he wouldn't have gotten that degree. Then there's luck: if he was born in another situation, or had some sort of accident that mentally retarded him, he would not have succeeded.
Beware of people who like to generalize other peoples' failures into some simple reason. The world is complicated. Trying to get simple answers out of a complicated problem will leave you with a half-assed solution.
Uh? Its legal by default, until we make it illegal. If you want to make it illegal, you're going to show evidence that it needs to be. As sick as it is, there's no evidence that its hurting anyone.
Corporations don't price their goods based on their costs. They price their goods to maximize profits. Adding a tax on that isn't going to change the price point that optimized profit, unless it also changes the supply or demand.
I did look up the CRA. It doesn't force banks to give loans to people with bad credit. In fact, it explicitly says that they shouldn't. What it does say is that they can't deny a loan to a person with good credit based on where they live. Stop drinking the kool-aid and learn to think for yourself.
It has an "editor with a compiler" (and code/keyword completion), and integrated debugger (huge), refactoring tools, sdks (compiler, libraries, tools), integrated unit testing, and project management. Your definition of an IDE is pretty far off base.
Pretty much what happened to me. I was big on VC++6 and refused to use VC++.Net. Eventually I misplaced my copy of VC++6 and had to upgrade to.Net. After a little while of getting used to it, I realized that I was much more productive in the newer version. Using older versions in the computer labs at college made me realize how crufty VC++6 was.
If you think that writing software in Visual Studio consists of "point and click programming" then you haven't used it enough to have a valid opinion, or at all.
I don't disagree with anything you said, but part of the reason it became so ubiquitous was because of the "cool" factor. iPods tended to be more expensive and less functional than other players', but they had better aesthetics and a simpler (some would argue better, but I preferred the iRiver to the iPod) user interface.
And of course, I'm making this post from the perspective of an iPod/iPhone user. I use it for many of the same reasons you do (and because I happen to use iTunes for my music).
A lot of people will weigh the cool factor quite heavily when buying a $200 (not $600) device. For that matter, a lot of people weigh the cool factor extremely heavily when buying cars, which are significantly more pricey than $200. Its why Apple has managed to dominate the market with a functionally inferior (in terms of feature set) MP3 player (and many would argue the same about the phone).
Or they could lower the price of new copies to compete with a used copy. If I have a choice between a brand-new copy of a 3-year old game for $25 and a used copy of the same game for $20, I'm probably going to buy the new copy (pristine dvd case, no scratches, instruction manual in better condition, no stickers all over everything).
The problem is that a consumer usually gets to choose between a $20 used game and a $45 new game. The used game will probably function just as well as the new copy, so that's a pretty stark difference.
People buy used games because they're cheap. If publishers lower their prices, the incentive vanishes. They can compete, but they'd rather cry about all that imaginary profit that they're "losing."
Sony and Panasonic aren't complaining about used TV sales, Toyota isn't complaining about used car sales, and Dell isn't complaining about people reselling their computers. In what world is someone reselling the game considered taking away money from the publishers? Lets set aside the fact that some people will pay full price for a game because they know that they can resell it later and recoup some of the cost...
Its not like people are going out to buy used games. They want cheap games. If they kept publishing their old games, and dropped the prices as the games got older, I'm sure they could take a huge chunk out of used game sales. Its not like I'm falling all over myself to save $5 off of a new game at GameStop. Seriously, every time I buy a recently released game, they offer me a used copy for $5 less. Oh boy, sign me up!
It looks like that, instead of thinking about the problem and adjusting their business strategy, they've chosen to whine like petulant children about something that every other industry in the world (well, at least those based on real physical objects) doesn't have a problem with. Or maybe my brain just isn't sophisticated enough to understand their business genius. Either way, their little rant makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
Success of one MMORPG over another? No. But success in a general sense? Yes. Keeping an MMORPG going for a long time implies that it is profitable and therefore successful. It hasn't reached WoW levels of success, but its subscriber base is far from trivial.
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These companies seem to be stuck in the TV mindset, and view web sites sort-of like internet channels. Web site owners like ESPN want to be able to sell their "channels" to cable companies, and cable companies want to charge their users extra for "premium content." They're trying to pound a square peg into a round hole. My worry is that they'll manage to do it, via monopoly pressure or government legislation, and end up making my internet service about as convenient as my television service (that is, not at all).
I really wish companies would learn to adapt instead of trying to shoehorn everything into their existing business models. Why do we pay CEOs these ridiculous salaries again? It sure isn't because they're visionaries.
My fiance thought that you could get it from eating pork. I told her that you couldn't. She told me that the news had been saying that you could get it from pigs. This was in Japan. Its not necessarily stupidity on the part of regular people, but rather being improperly informed. I doubt that your average person is going to do do research into the disease beyond what they are told in the news.
PHD Comics had a great take on how science reporting works.
Its probably because a student that goes through the effort of going to college in another country is probably more intelligent and motivated on average than his peers.
Are the teaching methods really that tightly-coupled with the books? I suppose if the teacher just reads from the book, but in my high-school days very few teachers did that. The text books were used for facts and reference, and the methods used to teach those depended on the teachers.
Because it was nothing but an insult, had no useful information, and no bearing on the topic at hand. It was a troll post.
I wish I could find the study (a million copies of "The 25/100 worst-performing schools" are cluttering up Google results), but researchers found that poorly performing schools, on average, received more funding per student than well-performing schools. So, its not all that clear to me that funding is the problem in all cases.
I know more than one geek friend who are starting to feel that the whole Apple-bashing-Microsoft thing is kind-of off-putting. Even more-so once they started going from advertising-lying to flat-out-lying in their commercials.
And this is coming from a guy with a Macbook Pro, iPod, and iPhone.
Because school is where they have the most interaction with their peers. They spend eight hours of the day with their peers in school. At home, they may or may not be playing with other neighborhood children. These days, it leans more towards may-not, since parents are becoming increasingly paranoid about letting their children play outside.
Fundamentally, the federal government's efforts in "fixing" our schools is trying to make a complicated problem simple. The blunt truth is that there is no one problem that our schools share. In some areas its bad teachers, and in other areas its schools filled with lazy, unmotivated kids. In other areas, its because the parents do not have the time or inclination to be involved with their childrens' schooling (either because they are bad parents, or because they have to work double-shifts just to put food on the table).
This is why handling education at a federal level is a fundamentally bad idea. It assumes that there is some generic solution that can be applied to fix all schools at once. In reality, problems must be identified at a school-by-school basis, which leaves education best suited to local communities.
There's usually no one cause for success in anything, whether it be intelligence, business, or whatnot, nor is there one generic cause of failure. Success requires some degree of innate ability, motivation, access to resources, and some blind luck. This kid wouldn't gotten as far as he is if he was not innately intelligent, nor would he have progressed if he was not motivated to nurture that intelligence. If he didn't have a mother who was willing to put him in community college, or a community college nearby, then he wouldn't have gotten that degree. Then there's luck: if he was born in another situation, or had some sort of accident that mentally retarded him, he would not have succeeded.
Beware of people who like to generalize other peoples' failures into some simple reason. The world is complicated. Trying to get simple answers out of a complicated problem will leave you with a half-assed solution.
Uh? Its legal by default, until we make it illegal. If you want to make it illegal, you're going to show evidence that it needs to be. As sick as it is, there's no evidence that its hurting anyone.
Corporations don't price their goods based on their costs. They price their goods to maximize profits. Adding a tax on that isn't going to change the price point that optimized profit, unless it also changes the supply or demand.
A little of column A, a little of column B. For sure its not all rainbows and ponies right now, but its not as bad as the hyperbole suggests.
I did look up the CRA. It doesn't force banks to give loans to people with bad credit. In fact, it explicitly says that they shouldn't. What it does say is that they can't deny a loan to a person with good credit based on where they live. Stop drinking the kool-aid and learn to think for yourself.
It has an "editor with a compiler" (and code/keyword completion), and integrated debugger (huge), refactoring tools, sdks (compiler, libraries, tools), integrated unit testing, and project management. Your definition of an IDE is pretty far off base.
Pretty much what happened to me. I was big on VC++6 and refused to use VC++.Net. Eventually I misplaced my copy of VC++6 and had to upgrade to .Net. After a little while of getting used to it, I realized that I was much more productive in the newer version. Using older versions in the computer labs at college made me realize how crufty VC++6 was.
If you think that writing software in Visual Studio consists of "point and click programming" then you haven't used it enough to have a valid opinion, or at all.
I don't disagree with anything you said, but part of the reason it became so ubiquitous was because of the "cool" factor. iPods tended to be more expensive and less functional than other players', but they had better aesthetics and a simpler (some would argue better, but I preferred the iRiver to the iPod) user interface.
And of course, I'm making this post from the perspective of an iPod/iPhone user. I use it for many of the same reasons you do (and because I happen to use iTunes for my music).
A lot of people will weigh the cool factor quite heavily when buying a $200 (not $600) device. For that matter, a lot of people weigh the cool factor extremely heavily when buying cars, which are significantly more pricey than $200. Its why Apple has managed to dominate the market with a functionally inferior (in terms of feature set) MP3 player (and many would argue the same about the phone).
Or they could lower the price of new copies to compete with a used copy. If I have a choice between a brand-new copy of a 3-year old game for $25 and a used copy of the same game for $20, I'm probably going to buy the new copy (pristine dvd case, no scratches, instruction manual in better condition, no stickers all over everything).
The problem is that a consumer usually gets to choose between a $20 used game and a $45 new game. The used game will probably function just as well as the new copy, so that's a pretty stark difference.
People buy used games because they're cheap. If publishers lower their prices, the incentive vanishes. They can compete, but they'd rather cry about all that imaginary profit that they're "losing."
Sony and Panasonic aren't complaining about used TV sales, Toyota isn't complaining about used car sales, and Dell isn't complaining about people reselling their computers. In what world is someone reselling the game considered taking away money from the publishers? Lets set aside the fact that some people will pay full price for a game because they know that they can resell it later and recoup some of the cost...
Its not like people are going out to buy used games. They want cheap games. If they kept publishing their old games, and dropped the prices as the games got older, I'm sure they could take a huge chunk out of used game sales. Its not like I'm falling all over myself to save $5 off of a new game at GameStop. Seriously, every time I buy a recently released game, they offer me a used copy for $5 less. Oh boy, sign me up!
It looks like that, instead of thinking about the problem and adjusting their business strategy, they've chosen to whine like petulant children about something that every other industry in the world (well, at least those based on real physical objects) doesn't have a problem with. Or maybe my brain just isn't sophisticated enough to understand their business genius. Either way, their little rant makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
Great, just great. Now what am I supposed to do with all these torches and pitchforks!? Ass.
3) China - We don't want to open that can of worms
Success of one MMORPG over another? No. But success in a general sense? Yes. Keeping an MMORPG going for a long time implies that it is profitable and therefore successful. It hasn't reached WoW levels of success, but its subscriber base is far from trivial.