The lock-ins in the US are not that bad if you take advantage of the system a little. I got my t-mobile phone from amazon.com for -$175 after rebates (yes they actually gave me money) and sold it on ebay unlocked for $100 after 1 year (T-mobile unlocks your phone after about 3 months). So I made $275 and paid ~$400/yr for the plan.
At the end it cost me about $100 for one year of cell phone service with more minutes than I used each month (it helps that most of my friends are on t-mobile and I had free t-mobile calls anytime).
After this I actually got a new t-mobile phone (again with large rebates from amazon) and had to change my number, but I could have just switched to AT&T or another GSM provider (Cingular?) and keep my number.
I don't mean to defend MS, but I don't think the differentiators are the frequency of the releases, or the additional features.
If a product is well designed and build you don't need frequent releases. In regards to features, most people don't want to do many things with a browser except view web pages, and it a browser does that good and creates a pleasant experience users don't care about features they wouldn't use anyway.
Take the example of the iPod: there are plenty of players out there with a ton more features and available for a lower price. But none of them come even close in market share. Features don't win the hearts of consumers.
All the recent accounting scandals basically start with artificially incresing the revenues in the books, but from the beginning it is clear that at some point all of it will go down.
In this case, sure they can ship like mad to the distributors, but at some point the distributors are going to stop accepting and sending back the excess supplies. This could only work if demand for their product will dramatically increase in the future, but I doubt they were betting on that.
Given all this I can't understand how the executives of these companies hope they can get away with it. I guess that given all the pressure and stress that they face, their judgement is clouded and they hope for a miracle in the future. I am especially surprised by these methods b/c they generally only work for a very short time. If they worked for 40-50 yrs I could understand why the executives use them.
New medication has to get tested on humans and companies pay for that. Any rich person can sign up but usually the poor do b/c they need the money. That's how life is. The rich get better health care, better food, etc. In some cases the rich to want to be the lab rats; for some cancer drug candidates there have been scandals that rich people paid to get into the trials.
I actually think that India's poor is better for them, because otherwise those people would not have access to any medication at all. Better an experimental drug that has undergone extensive testing on animals than nothing. Plus test subjects get medical monitoring and test they would otherwise not afford.
I agree that more women should go into programming, but not because the current situation is unfair towards them. I think that personal preference and ability contribute more to the current situation than stereotypes or discrimination.
However, I think design of software packages may suffer from the lack of input from women. I think that men and women interact differently with a computer. Currently since most of the coding is done by men, interfaces and features are probably written for a male user and women's productivity suffers when using those programs.
A woman's touch to interface design could do a lot in making the program better usable by other women.
Hopefully, at sometime time, the morons will realize that making charitable donations doesn't increase your money [...] The only diff to this scenario is when giving the donation puts you in a lower tax bracket.
The tax bracket scenario is also false. If you move into a higher tax bracket by a certain amount, you are taxed at a higher rate only on that amount. For example if you are right on the border between the 15% and 20% tax brackets, and you earn $1000 more, then you are taxed $200 on the $1000 (20%), but 15% on the rest of your income.
The only benefit donation deductions give you is that you look like you are giving more than you actually are. For example if Bill donates $100M it only costs him $50M, because he would have paid $50M in tax, had he not donated the $100M
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, quality shots from a hole thats .8mm wide? Now I've heard everything.
Of course your pupil is only 1.5 mm and cameras can already outperform the human eye in many respects.
The lock-ins in the US are not that bad if you take advantage of the system a little. I got my t-mobile phone from amazon.com for -$175 after rebates (yes they actually gave me money) and sold it on ebay unlocked for $100 after 1 year (T-mobile unlocks your phone after about 3 months). So I made $275 and paid ~$400/yr for the plan.
At the end it cost me about $100 for one year of cell phone service with more minutes than I used each month (it helps that most of my friends are on t-mobile and I had free t-mobile calls anytime).
After this I actually got a new t-mobile phone (again with large rebates from amazon) and had to change my number, but I could have just switched to AT&T or another GSM provider (Cingular?) and keep my number.
We already have malicious code that can replicate and spread itself. The only thing we're missing in terms of real Darwinian evolution is mutation
Actually there is code that does just that, but as far as I am aware genetic programming hasn't been used to make viruses.
I don't mean to defend MS, but I don't think the differentiators are the frequency of the releases, or the additional features.
If a product is well designed and build you don't need frequent releases. In regards to features, most people don't want to do many things with a browser except view web pages, and it a browser does that good and creates a pleasant experience users don't care about features they wouldn't use anyway.
Take the example of the iPod: there are plenty of players out there with a ton more features and available for a lower price. But none of them come even close in market share. Features don't win the hearts of consumers.
All the recent accounting scandals basically start with artificially incresing the revenues in the books, but from the beginning it is clear that at some point all of it will go down.
In this case, sure they can ship like mad to the distributors, but at some point the distributors are going to stop accepting and sending back the excess supplies. This could only work if demand for their product will dramatically increase in the future, but I doubt they were betting on that.
Given all this I can't understand how the executives of these companies hope they can get away with it. I guess that given all the pressure and stress that they face, their judgement is clouded and they hope for a miracle in the future. I am especially surprised by these methods b/c they generally only work for a very short time. If they worked for 40-50 yrs I could understand why the executives use them.
New medication has to get tested on humans and companies pay for that. Any rich person can sign up but usually the poor do b/c they need the money. That's how life is. The rich get better health care, better food, etc. In some cases the rich to want to be the lab rats; for some cancer drug candidates there have been scandals that rich people paid to get into the trials.
I actually think that India's poor is better for them, because otherwise those people would not have access to any medication at all. Better an experimental drug that has undergone extensive testing on animals than nothing. Plus test subjects get medical monitoring and test they would otherwise not afford.
I agree that more women should go into programming, but not because the current situation is unfair towards them. I think that personal preference and ability contribute more to the current situation than stereotypes or discrimination. However, I think design of software packages may suffer from the lack of input from women. I think that men and women interact differently with a computer. Currently since most of the coding is done by men, interfaces and features are probably written for a male user and women's productivity suffers when using those programs. A woman's touch to interface design could do a lot in making the program better usable by other women.
Hopefully, at sometime time, the morons will realize that making charitable donations doesn't increase your money [...] The only diff to this scenario is when giving the donation puts you in a lower tax bracket.
The tax bracket scenario is also false. If you move into a higher tax bracket by a certain amount, you are taxed at a higher rate only on that amount. For example if you are right on the border between the 15% and 20% tax brackets, and you earn $1000 more, then you are taxed $200 on the $1000 (20%), but 15% on the rest of your income.
The only benefit donation deductions give you is that you look like you are giving more than you actually are. For example if Bill donates $100M it only costs him $50M, because he would have paid $50M in tax, had he not donated the $100M