That touches on part of the game theory problem of car ownership. People perceive it as giving them a personal advantage in commuting, but the smaller number of people who use cars the faster everyone goes, so you end up in a situation where the best personal route is for other people to be 'playing for the team'.
Even in cities where it works, many people consider it a mark of shame to use public transportation and find that their peer group starts looking down on them. Given how admiration by your coworkers/community can play such a large role in career and community advancement, it can have a real impact on one's life.
Keep in mind, this whole 'when children grow up they move out, often far away, get their own home' thing is actually pretty modern and is far from universal. In fact because of various immigration shifts home builders have started carrying standard designs for multi-generational homes since they found there is profit to be made by not providing 'assimilate in all ways' options to people with money.
Meh, it is the old urban/suburban/rural divide. Each thinks they make up '99% of the country' and that their values/needs are the dominant one, thus people talking from the perspective of one of the other groups are ignoring the real world.
Actually, what is 'cool' is pretty damn important since, getting away from people who have a specific need, one of the reasons cars are so common and so heavily used in the US is because of their cultural connections. Cars have massive symbolic value to a great deal of the population, meaning far more people own and use them then actually need them and people actively fight effective alternatives both in terms of projects and associating stigma with them.
If society trends away from that 'cool' factor cars have into 'uncool', then you would probably see a decrease in the already artificially high usage.
If you are fighting your DBAs to get the job done, your problem is political not technological. A good DBA and a clear separation of domains can make a developer's life easier and let them focus on the parts they are building.
I suspect a bit of cooking the numbers, something like taking a multi year span where there was some kind of large up front cost for a fairly small community but more reasonable recurring costs, then just divided by the number of years they felt like tracking.
Not only that, but business in general wanted it. It was not just intended to 'help' people who Bell did not consider worth making customers, but it also drew them more into the general economy, so it impacted a lot of people who were neither Bell or getting the grants.
I know that is what they are saying in their summary, but given the groups goals I would not be surprised if they spun it or played loose with the facts. I suspect they did something like took the cost associated with a region over a few years and divided it by the number of landlines in the area, which while technically that would be $X/year, it would not represent long term costs.
Given how fun it can be to bait bots as it is, I could actually see that. I used to get IM bots trying to get me to go see various cam sites and they were quite amusing to screw with.
The problem with 'focused' reorgs like this is they tend to not actually stop the infighting, they simply declare a winner. So it is possible that Microsoft will now have even bigger problems with 'so how does your division help the one true division that matters?' meme
It depends on what they are including in that cost and how they are amortizing it. For instance setting up a local relay station for a small town including buying land, building the structure, outfitting it with equipment, etc, can represent a significant one time cost.
I am kinda curious if they can enforce it in a legal way. 'hack the fed' would be one thing, but it would be terribly amusing to see security escorting federal agents out of the building. It is a private convention and they are free to prohibit anyone they like.
And yet programmers in other languages with the same capabilities somehow manage. Javascript is plenty capable, you just have to give up some general purpose conviene when you are shifting from a server or desktop enviroment to an embedded one. It is a lesson people working in any language on an embedded system have to learn, but some communities seem more willing then others. People coming from web development seem particularly resistant.
Eh, what do you expect. The bulk of the people moving to mobile development are coming from the worlds of desktop or web applications. Barely any have significant embedded experience and just treat the system as a mini-desktop.
When it comes down to it, the government has a much better PR engine then some random consultant. From day one the government spun the story against him with resources he could not hope to match, and the public listened.
While people might rant about the philosophy behind it and feelings of control, the core motivation is that tax part. There has been a pretty strong anti-tax movement over the last few decades and this is just another front in that movement.
Ah, so all those FAA reports that indicated various engineering problems were at fault are just figments of our imaginations?
Yeah, sometimes the pilot gets blamed. Sometimes maintenance issues get blamed. Sometimes engineering issues get blamed. Sometimes the weather gets blamed. Often it is a mix. Based off so little information, the probability of the eventual report saying '100% pilot error' is pretty low.
While I could not see it happening, that would indeed be hilarious. If Putin were not already so well established in Russia, it would make a fantastic bit of domestic PR showing up the US in so many sensitive ways.
Yeah, Russia being willing to help is a big issue. The stuff Snowden put out was domestically embarrassing, but was well within what other nations probably knew the US was doing anyway, so from an intelligence perspective his stuff was pretty unimportant. Thus Russia has to decide, did he do them a favor by embarrassing the current US government, or can they score political points by being on the US's side in this. He is not valuable enough for nations to stick their necks out for him so any calculations they do are going to be purely 'do we want the US to look bad vs do we want to look good to the US'.
Our product used open source. We gave back a significant amount. Library work, bugfixes, drivers, management was supportive of contributing. But, our final device required a network of trust, people using them (and, more importantly, underwriters and regulators) needed to know that OTHER people were not running modified software and cheating other users.
So when GPLv3 came out, we had to stick to GPLv2, which ment participating less. Then we switched to Windows, which ment we did not participate at all anymore.
When an embedded device connects to other devices, sometimes the integrity of the network is more important then individual's desire to get a leg up or tinker.
It is consistant nonsense though. Any time you have a sexuality that breaks from the mainstream people deal with their discomfort by assuming that the people with that sexuality will not be able to help themselves from raping everything they see. Somehow, at a gut level, they feel that only normal men can resist the raping urge and men who are somehow abnormal must indulge their preference nonconcentually.
For some reason the reality... things like most gay men do not have 1000 partners and will rape strait men if they can, or that the vast majority of pedophiles never touch a minor, really screws with their heads.
Slashdot Mirror
That touches on part of the game theory problem of car ownership. People perceive it as giving them a personal advantage in commuting, but the smaller number of people who use cars the faster everyone goes, so you end up in a situation where the best personal route is for other people to be 'playing for the team'.
Even in cities where it works, many people consider it a mark of shame to use public transportation and find that their peer group starts looking down on them. Given how admiration by your coworkers/community can play such a large role in career and community advancement, it can have a real impact on one's life.
Not as much as you might think.
Keep in mind, this whole 'when children grow up they move out, often far away, get their own home' thing is actually pretty modern and is far from universal. In fact because of various immigration shifts home builders have started carrying standard designs for multi-generational homes since they found there is profit to be made by not providing 'assimilate in all ways' options to people with money.
Meh, it is the old urban/suburban/rural divide. Each thinks they make up '99% of the country' and that their values/needs are the dominant one, thus people talking from the perspective of one of the other groups are ignoring the real world.
Actually, what is 'cool' is pretty damn important since, getting away from people who have a specific need, one of the reasons cars are so common and so heavily used in the US is because of their cultural connections. Cars have massive symbolic value to a great deal of the population, meaning far more people own and use them then actually need them and people actively fight effective alternatives both in terms of projects and associating stigma with them.
If society trends away from that 'cool' factor cars have into 'uncool', then you would probably see a decrease in the already artificially high usage.
If you are fighting your DBAs to get the job done, your problem is political not technological. A good DBA and a clear separation of domains can make a developer's life easier and let them focus on the parts they are building.
I suspect a bit of cooking the numbers, something like taking a multi year span where there was some kind of large up front cost for a fairly small community but more reasonable recurring costs, then just divided by the number of years they felt like tracking.
Not only that, but business in general wanted it. It was not just intended to 'help' people who Bell did not consider worth making customers, but it also drew them more into the general economy, so it impacted a lot of people who were neither Bell or getting the grants.
I know that is what they are saying in their summary, but given the groups goals I would not be surprised if they spun it or played loose with the facts. I suspect they did something like took the cost associated with a region over a few years and divided it by the number of landlines in the area, which while technically that would be $X/year, it would not represent long term costs.
Given how fun it can be to bait bots as it is, I could actually see that. I used to get IM bots trying to get me to go see various cam sites and they were quite amusing to screw with.
The problem with 'focused' reorgs like this is they tend to not actually stop the infighting, they simply declare a winner. So it is possible that Microsoft will now have even bigger problems with 'so how does your division help the one true division that matters?' meme
It depends on what they are including in that cost and how they are amortizing it. For instance setting up a local relay station for a small town including buying land, building the structure, outfitting it with equipment, etc, can represent a significant one time cost.
Oh no! Not scientific research! How dare it not have immediate marketing applications!
I am kinda curious if they can enforce it in a legal way. 'hack the fed' would be one thing, but it would be terribly amusing to see security escorting federal agents out of the building. It is a private convention and they are free to prohibit anyone they like.
And yet programmers in other languages with the same capabilities somehow manage. Javascript is plenty capable, you just have to give up some general purpose conviene when you are shifting from a server or desktop enviroment to an embedded one. It is a lesson people working in any language on an embedded system have to learn, but some communities seem more willing then others. People coming from web development seem particularly resistant.
Eh, what do you expect. The bulk of the people moving to mobile development are coming from the worlds of desktop or web applications. Barely any have significant embedded experience and just treat the system as a mini-desktop.
That has to be the most disturbingly accurate analogy I have heard yet...
When it comes down to it, the government has a much better PR engine then some random consultant. From day one the government spun the story against him with resources he could not hope to match, and the public listened.
While people might rant about the philosophy behind it and feelings of control, the core motivation is that tax part. There has been a pretty strong anti-tax movement over the last few decades and this is just another front in that movement.
Ah, so all those FAA reports that indicated various engineering problems were at fault are just figments of our imaginations?
Yeah, sometimes the pilot gets blamed. Sometimes maintenance issues get blamed. Sometimes engineering issues get blamed. Sometimes the weather gets blamed. Often it is a mix. Based off so little information, the probability of the eventual report saying '100% pilot error' is pretty low.
You mean unlike every other programming language with its special characters?
While I could not see it happening, that would indeed be hilarious. If Putin were not already so well established in Russia, it would make a fantastic bit of domestic PR showing up the US in so many sensitive ways.
Yeah, Russia being willing to help is a big issue. The stuff Snowden put out was domestically embarrassing, but was well within what other nations probably knew the US was doing anyway, so from an intelligence perspective his stuff was pretty unimportant. Thus Russia has to decide, did he do them a favor by embarrassing the current US government, or can they score political points by being on the US's side in this. He is not valuable enough for nations to stick their necks out for him so any calculations they do are going to be purely 'do we want the US to look bad vs do we want to look good to the US'.
Our product used open source. We gave back a significant amount. Library work, bugfixes, drivers, management was supportive of contributing. But, our final device required a network of trust, people using them (and, more importantly, underwriters and regulators) needed to know that OTHER people were not running modified software and cheating other users.
So when GPLv3 came out, we had to stick to GPLv2, which ment participating less. Then we switched to Windows, which ment we did not participate at all anymore.
When an embedded device connects to other devices, sometimes the integrity of the network is more important then individual's desire to get a leg up or tinker.
It is consistant nonsense though. Any time you have a sexuality that breaks from the mainstream people deal with their discomfort by assuming that the people with that sexuality will not be able to help themselves from raping everything they see. Somehow, at a gut level, they feel that only normal men can resist the raping urge and men who are somehow abnormal must indulge their preference nonconcentually.
For some reason the reality... things like most gay men do not have 1000 partners and will rape strait men if they can, or that the vast majority of pedophiles never touch a minor, really screws with their heads.