True. Even in the microcontroller world counting bytes is becoming more expensive than simply buying more. I kind of miss the days when you absolutely HAD to write tight, efficient code, but those days are coming to an end.
Putting an extra comparison would only cost a couple of bytes and a few clock cycles for certain date calculations. I can't see that being a big deal even in 1990.
I joked about the discussion being more work than doing it right because of the dizzying number of replies. It reminded me of what the meetings must have been like!
I would play Fortress Europa if setup alone didn't take a whole day. I doubt I've ever played an entire game, what with having a younger brother and a dog. After a week or so I'd find everything moved around. Oh well, start over again!
You're exactly right. And he will become an estate agent, just to break your heart.
The majority of uptight parents these days were raised in the permissive 60s and 70s, and are very uptight to rebel against their parents. I predict that the kids raised in the uptight predominant manner currently fashionable will rebel and have free-love drugfests and go on to raise another batch of republicans.
Of course you also have to allow for the fact that things are going to hell, which tends to make things worse year to year.
Oh, and what's an estate agent? A realtor or a estate-tax-dude or what?
Maybe it is expected to be a perk that would increase loyalty. They used to give out meals and so forth for the same reason.
Your comment made me sad. I liked it better when every little thing wasn't evaluated against the bottom line. Thinking like you leads to no dinner, offshored customer service, ads on tray tables, barf bags and overhead bins.
You seriously don't think we can do better than 30% efficiency?!?
There are lots of more efficient engines. We don't use them because they are untested and unreliable. The otto cycle engine has been refined for a hundred years and is proven. Starting over from scratch, we throw away the tested reliable near-perfect (within it's design) Otto engine. Now we start from nothing. Should we develop an engine tech that maxes out at 30% or keep looking? Obvious. I'd go with a fuel cell and electric. Top efficiency would be in the 90% range.
If we had to do it over right now, we would not even consider the Otto cycle engine. Just like we wouldn't even consider the x86 instruction set. To me it is obvious, and I'm not a car guy.
I really like the analogy because it is true in so many areas. We use many devices that are inefficient but proven, like top-loading washers, tank water heaters, lossy lawn sprinklers, etc. The cumulative refinements have made any of these near perfect for what their theoretical ideal is. It is lower than another designs theoretical limit, but it is higher than starting over with a better design.
It is blindingly obviously true. Otto cycle engines are in the 30%-40% efficiency range. I can name ten technologies that are more efficient. Everybody has heard of fuel cells, and a gasoline fuel cell would be in the nineties.
Not that I like car analogies. They're like a Ford Pinto, full of surprises.
If we declare trade war on the world, they will stop respecting our patents, copyrights, and trade laws. Our economy would utterly collapse. Only an idiot would advocate declaring war on the entire world.
I used winamp up until 2000 or so, when it started getting bloaty. The later versions really bug me. Why does it take so much memory and cpu and internet access to play a frickin mp3 file? Now I like vlc. The only media player with a traffic cone icon. Plays everything, very low resources. Works on my p-133 laptop.
It is cheaper in many cases to pay fewer people more money.
Imagine this scenario. You have a call center full of retards making $10/hour. Average wait time is 10 minutes, it takes 5 calls to get your problem fixed, and half of the customers going through this end up wanting to cancel their service. Compare to the same call center 2/3 full of good experienced people making $15/hour. Same price, no wait, happy customers, "same call" resolution.
I worked in a call center. I saw anyone with any skill leave for more money. Turnover was over 1,000%. It made no sense. They were paying more to train people than they were saving by having low pay.
I'm convinced that for customer service higher pay usually will equal lower cost. (assuming that higher pay means you keep better people and they stay longer)
Besides, the whole cost equation is strange. It's not as if Chase lowered their banking fees when they outsourced their call centers. Their customers weren't saying "I will go to megabank if you don't raise my fees and outsource my support" It just made some CEO rich.
Oh well. It's sad that people have so much trouble understanding that quality and quantity are different but interrelated. 10 bad employees are worse than 5 good employees, 5 good employees cost less than 10 bad employees. It's so simple.
You must not go downtown much. You'll see lots of people wearing $300 sneakers, $300 running suits with a $300 mp3 player and a $300 cellphone. Oh and people with lots of gold and diamonds in their mouth.
Another anomaly is poor people with pimped-out cars. I guess even at $8/hour you can save up or get a credit card. Or you could turn to crime. Urban inner city is a valid demographic.
I shop online. They pay 1 computer programmer $100/hour and I don't have to deal with anyone.
On the rare times I am reduced to shopping at an actual store, I wish they had competent employees. I can't tell you how many times they've messed up, been wrong about store policy, been unable to find what I want, etc. It's so maddening to see all the checkout lines stalled because nobody knows what they're doing.
My point was why not pay the same or less money for better service by paying fewer good people more? If 10 losers can make the store more or less run, 5 good employees that know what they're doing can make it run well.
My biggest complaint is the big box hardware stores. They have dozens of employees making $8/hour. None of them know anything. I wonder how the place gets stocked since nobody knows where anything is. They would save money by having 8 people making $15/hour, people would get in and out faster, everybody wins. Usually I go to the small hardware store where they pay more and people stay for many years. I die inside a little every time I have to go to Home Depot or some other hellhole because the small store doesn't have what I need. The most insulting thing is that the big stores don't really have better prices.
I've worked retail. I'd much rather have a small team of capable long-term employees with good rapport than double the crew with untrained incompetents. Actually that goes for any job. For coders would you rather have 10 newbies fresh from devry or 3 adept 10-year veterans who know what they're doing?
I've seen it so many times. What good are 5 checkout clerks who don't know how to do their jobs? They process 20 customers an hour. 2 skilled clerks can process 40 an hour.
The only time needing 20 people doesn't matter on their skill is for film extras, or placeholders in a line.
Your CEO point is completely wrong. We need to bring UP the wages of the lower rungs, not depress them. The unskilled people should build up their skills at a lower wage until they are worth $20/hour.
I've wracked my brain to figure it out. There is no valid reason for it except sadism. When I was in high school, working at Taco Shack, I could tell how the night would go by the people on the roster. If it was the 3 long-term kickass employees we would never have much of a line. If it was the 5 newbies lines out the door, angry yelling customers, and constant mistakes. I don't know why they didn't pay more to keep the good people. It would have saved them money and made the customers lives happier. Many low-wage jobs have several hundred percent turnover. Why not up your wages a bit and get it down to a nice 50% or less? The reason customer support sucks is most of the time you're speaking with someone fresh out of training paid the absolute minimum the company can get away with. A competent person making double the money could handle problems ten times as fast. Haven't you had that experience? Or do you not care who you get on the phone when your bank statement is fucked up?
Paying people more doesn't make them smart, but it can help keep them from leaving. A new employee is a shitty employee. I can't believe how many times it's taken my incompetent employee talking to his incompetent new boss, talking to the new incompetent manager to figure something stupid out. Seems cheaper to pay the people more and have them stay than have a cluster of useless but cheap drones.
Um, the CEOs and VPs and whatnot are not getting less. They're probably getting a nice bonus and raise for cutting costs. That's the way it generally happens. As usual, the highest-paid people far away from HQ get the shaft.
CEOs are making record multiples of peon wages, and the gap is growing. This move will further widen the gap.
In any case, I think CC would be better off staffing a store with 10 good people making $20/hour than 20 losers making $10. You'll get faster, more pleasant, and professional service.
I think what the OP meant was something like this: Computerized "sunglasses" that have multiple cameras & polarized filters for each eye. A display that shows the computed display. For each bright pixel, if it is highly polarized in one direction and not normal to that direction, display it less bright. So you'd get these results:
golf ball coming right at you: bright (balanced polarization) glare from hood of your car: dim (polarized horizontal) glare from shop window to your side: dim (polarized vertical)
I like the idea, but you can't do it with passive filters. You need goggles that don't let any natural light through and provide a computed display.
I've gotten a few first posts, but I've never mentioned it in the post. I've seen too many "Frist Post" that weren't and didn't want to make that mistake. I like the extra comments and moderation you get if you're first.
They just announced they'll spend $2.5 billion on a plant in China (their first Asian fab plant) as well as new US and Israeli plants. They've got lots of fab facilities all over the US, as well as some in Israel and Ireland.
I'm not aware of an internet shouting match that turned homicidal. There are 200 road rage homicides a year, and 27,000 aggressive driving fatalities
I remember every September Usenet would go to hell while the newbies learned how to behave. The main difference now is there is an unlimited supply of fresh 13-year olds getting online. Some of them never mature, so we have an endlessly swelling population of fucktards.
Well, obviously brick-and-mortar won't die back where there are people who don't have internet. Where I live anyone can get a library card and use those computers for free. The hundreds of computers are always in use, often by the down-and-out or minorities. There are charities that give poor people computers. I worked for one that intercepted dumpstered computers and set them up and gave basic training. Dial-up is cheap, under $5/month if you shop around. It really made me feel good to see some poor family get a computer. First it was the 12-year old learning how to IM his friends, then other kids would come in, and finally the adults, often not even speaking English. I've actually seen it make a difference in their job-hunting, price research, etc. It might be different in rural areas or the deep south, but those areas are underserved by the current system anyway.
I think the poor would be better helped by giving them garbage computers than propping up an inefficient retail model.
You're right that so far the bottom rung of our society has been largely left out. Fortunately, in our society there is plenty of waste that can be put to good use.
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True. Even in the microcontroller world counting bytes is becoming more expensive than simply buying more. I kind of miss the days when you absolutely HAD to write tight, efficient code, but those days are coming to an end.
Putting an extra comparison would only cost a couple of bytes and a few clock cycles for certain date calculations. I can't see that being a big deal even in 1990.
I joked about the discussion being more work than doing it right because of the dizzying number of replies. It reminded me of what the meetings must have been like!
Wouldn't it have been less work just to use the proper leap year calculation than do all this explaining and comment the code and design?
I'm all for shortcuts, but only when they save time and work.
I would play Fortress Europa if setup alone didn't take a whole day. I doubt I've ever played an entire game, what with having a younger brother and a dog. After a week or so I'd find everything moved around. Oh well, start over again!
You're exactly right. And he will become an estate agent, just to break your heart.
The majority of uptight parents these days were raised in the permissive 60s and 70s, and are very uptight to rebel against their parents. I predict that the kids raised in the uptight predominant manner currently fashionable will rebel and have free-love drugfests and go on to raise another batch of republicans.
Of course you also have to allow for the fact that things are going to hell, which tends to make things worse year to year.
Oh, and what's an estate agent? A realtor or a estate-tax-dude or what?
Maybe it is expected to be a perk that would increase loyalty. They used to give out meals and so forth for the same reason.
Your comment made me sad. I liked it better when every little thing wasn't evaluated against the bottom line. Thinking like you leads to no dinner, offshored customer service, ads on tray tables, barf bags and overhead bins.
You seriously don't think we can do better than 30% efficiency?!?
There are lots of more efficient engines. We don't use them because they are untested and unreliable. The otto cycle engine has been refined for a hundred years and is proven. Starting over from scratch, we throw away the tested reliable near-perfect (within it's design) Otto engine. Now we start from nothing. Should we develop an engine tech that maxes out at 30% or keep looking? Obvious. I'd go with a fuel cell and electric. Top efficiency would be in the 90% range.
If we had to do it over right now, we would not even consider the Otto cycle engine. Just like we wouldn't even consider the x86 instruction set. To me it is obvious, and I'm not a car guy.
I really like the analogy because it is true in so many areas. We use many devices that are inefficient but proven, like top-loading washers, tank water heaters, lossy lawn sprinklers, etc. The cumulative refinements have made any of these near perfect for what their theoretical ideal is. It is lower than another designs theoretical limit, but it is higher than starting over with a better design.
It is blindingly obviously true. Otto cycle engines are in the 30%-40% efficiency range. I can name ten technologies that are more efficient. Everybody has heard of fuel cells, and a gasoline fuel cell would be in the nineties.
Not that I like car analogies. They're like a Ford Pinto, full of surprises.
If we declare trade war on the world, they will stop respecting our patents, copyrights, and trade laws. Our economy would utterly collapse. Only an idiot would advocate declaring war on the entire world.
I used winamp up until 2000 or so, when it started getting bloaty. The later versions really bug me. Why does it take so much memory and cpu and internet access to play a frickin mp3 file? Now I like vlc. The only media player with a traffic cone icon. Plays everything, very low resources. Works on my p-133 laptop.
You've utterly missed my point.
It is cheaper in many cases to pay fewer people more money.
Imagine this scenario. You have a call center full of retards making $10/hour. Average wait time is 10 minutes, it takes 5 calls to get your problem fixed, and half of the customers going through this end up wanting to cancel their service. Compare to the same call center 2/3 full of good experienced people making $15/hour. Same price, no wait, happy customers, "same call" resolution.
I worked in a call center. I saw anyone with any skill leave for more money. Turnover was over 1,000%. It made no sense. They were paying more to train people than they were saving by having low pay.
I'm convinced that for customer service higher pay usually will equal lower cost. (assuming that higher pay means you keep better people and they stay longer)
Besides, the whole cost equation is strange. It's not as if Chase lowered their banking fees when they outsourced their call centers. Their customers weren't saying "I will go to megabank if you don't raise my fees and outsource my support" It just made some CEO rich.
Oh well. It's sad that people have so much trouble understanding that quality and quantity are different but interrelated. 10 bad employees are worse than 5 good employees, 5 good employees cost less than 10 bad employees. It's so simple.
You must not go downtown much. You'll see lots of people wearing $300 sneakers, $300 running suits with a $300 mp3 player and a $300 cellphone. Oh and people with lots of gold and diamonds in their mouth.
Another anomaly is poor people with pimped-out cars. I guess even at $8/hour you can save up or get a credit card. Or you could turn to crime. Urban inner city is a valid demographic.
"Can do" is an enthusiastic, confident approach. I can't believe I'm telling Mr. 137 what is can do. He's hardly a newbie.
I shop online. They pay 1 computer programmer $100/hour and I don't have to deal with anyone.
On the rare times I am reduced to shopping at an actual store, I wish they had competent employees. I can't tell you how many times they've messed up, been wrong about store policy, been unable to find what I want, etc. It's so maddening to see all the checkout lines stalled because nobody knows what they're doing.
My point was why not pay the same or less money for better service by paying fewer good people more? If 10 losers can make the store more or less run, 5 good employees that know what they're doing can make it run well.
My biggest complaint is the big box hardware stores. They have dozens of employees making $8/hour. None of them know anything. I wonder how the place gets stocked since nobody knows where anything is. They would save money by having 8 people making $15/hour, people would get in and out faster, everybody wins. Usually I go to the small hardware store where they pay more and people stay for many years. I die inside a little every time I have to go to Home Depot or some other hellhole because the small store doesn't have what I need. The most insulting thing is that the big stores don't really have better prices.
I've worked retail. I'd much rather have a small team of capable long-term employees with good rapport than double the crew with untrained incompetents. Actually that goes for any job. For coders would you rather have 10 newbies fresh from devry or 3 adept 10-year veterans who know what they're doing?
I've seen it so many times. What good are 5 checkout clerks who don't know how to do their jobs? They process 20 customers an hour. 2 skilled clerks can process 40 an hour.
The only time needing 20 people doesn't matter on their skill is for film extras, or placeholders in a line.
Your CEO point is completely wrong. We need to bring UP the wages of the lower rungs, not depress them. The unskilled people should build up their skills at a lower wage until they are worth $20/hour.
I've wracked my brain to figure it out. There is no valid reason for it except sadism. When I was in high school, working at Taco Shack, I could tell how the night would go by the people on the roster. If it was the 3 long-term kickass employees we would never have much of a line. If it was the 5 newbies lines out the door, angry yelling customers, and constant mistakes. I don't know why they didn't pay more to keep the good people. It would have saved them money and made the customers lives happier. Many low-wage jobs have several hundred percent turnover. Why not up your wages a bit and get it down to a nice 50% or less? The reason customer support sucks is most of the time you're speaking with someone fresh out of training paid the absolute minimum the company can get away with. A competent person making double the money could handle problems ten times as fast. Haven't you had that experience? Or do you not care who you get on the phone when your bank statement is fucked up?
Paying people more doesn't make them smart, but it can help keep them from leaving. A new employee is a shitty employee. I can't believe how many times it's taken my incompetent employee talking to his incompetent new boss, talking to the new incompetent manager to figure something stupid out. Seems cheaper to pay the people more and have them stay than have a cluster of useless but cheap drones.
Um, the CEOs and VPs and whatnot are not getting less. They're probably getting a nice bonus and raise for cutting costs. That's the way it generally happens. As usual, the highest-paid people far away from HQ get the shaft.
CEOs are making record multiples of peon wages, and the gap is growing. This move will further widen the gap.
In any case, I think CC would be better off staffing a store with 10 good people making $20/hour than 20 losers making $10. You'll get faster, more pleasant, and professional service.
I think what the OP meant was something like this: Computerized "sunglasses" that have multiple cameras & polarized filters for each eye. A display that shows the computed display. For each bright pixel, if it is highly polarized in one direction and not normal to that direction, display it less bright. So you'd get these results:
golf ball coming right at you: bright (balanced polarization)
glare from hood of your car: dim (polarized horizontal)
glare from shop window to your side: dim (polarized vertical)
I like the idea, but you can't do it with passive filters. You need goggles that don't let any natural light through and provide a computed display.
We need to develop a new, superstrong antibiotic called Placebocillin. If that doesn't work, we can always try intravenous Cephplacebo.
I've gotten a few first posts, but I've never mentioned it in the post. I've seen too many "Frist Post" that weren't and didn't want to make that mistake. I like the extra comments and moderation you get if you're first.
They just announced they'll spend $2.5 billion on a plant in China (their first Asian fab plant) as well as new US and Israeli plants. They've got lots of fab facilities all over the US, as well as some in Israel and Ireland.
Only missed it by 5 minutes.
You realize they stole the chimera name from greek mythology, right?
I'm not aware of an internet shouting match that turned homicidal. There are 200 road rage homicides a year, and 27,000 aggressive driving fatalities
I remember every September Usenet would go to hell while the newbies learned how to behave. The main difference now is there is an unlimited supply of fresh 13-year olds getting online. Some of them never mature, so we have an endlessly swelling population of fucktards.
Well, obviously brick-and-mortar won't die back where there are people who don't have internet. Where I live anyone can get a library card and use those computers for free. The hundreds of computers are always in use, often by the down-and-out or minorities. There are charities that give poor people computers. I worked for one that intercepted dumpstered computers and set them up and gave basic training. Dial-up is cheap, under $5/month if you shop around. It really made me feel good to see some poor family get a computer. First it was the 12-year old learning how to IM his friends, then other kids would come in, and finally the adults, often not even speaking English. I've actually seen it make a difference in their job-hunting, price research, etc. It might be different in rural areas or the deep south, but those areas are underserved by the current system anyway.
I think the poor would be better helped by giving them garbage computers than propping up an inefficient retail model.
You're right that so far the bottom rung of our society has been largely left out. Fortunately, in our society there is plenty of waste that can be put to good use.