it does not matter what model you use. Apparently they all created virtual worlds in big numbers (total value of derivatives and such is few times more than summed up gross domestic product of all countries on our planet) - this had to crash independently of the model - problem being that they used the same one. in other words: if all sheeple use the same model of reality then to make profit you need to use different one. Or to say it yet differently: if all sheeple do the same they create the bubble. nature of bubbles is that they burst when they reach physical limits of the stuff of which they are made. In our case it was human gullibility.
It(music industry) may not survive p2p sharing or it may fail because if one can simply generate music automagically - software will generate stuff that makes you feel good etc - then why need big corporations to produce the stuff in 'old fashion' way???
What is also interesting or at least what I find it interesting - all the stuff that according to TFA is created with help of computers I considered to noisy. I did not know why but now I do. OC they find out way to change and make it more sophisticated and yet another part of human performed jobs is gone. I suppose at the end we do not need superwise skynets and such - simple GPS makes your brain sleep all the time, the music is automagically created and maybe in the future a washing machine (google for "The Washing Machine Tragedy" to learn more) will satisfy your other needs too...
But of course you are right the business decision making our lives 'simpler' and 'easier' do not necessarily promote development of our culture (if such thing exists at all of course).
that is questionable actually - real progress exists but have been used up by additional energy sinks like: air condition, computers on board, electronic control systems, support for steering and breaking, the cars of today also carry much more of the (admittedly more modern) stuff than before - isolation etc. Not sure about 40years but if you take 10 or 20 years there may be a small decrease in fuel consumption but in general the cars use approx the same now and then. Or maybe I am just buying the wrong cars - actually I did posses an Opel which is GM - OK now I know what t he problem is....
This works like this then: 1. as soon as you get in sight of your pension health insurance company gets in touch with your pension paying entity 2. they make a deal and tell you that if you do not make a test your health insurance will be void. 3. OC this may work for majority but some will die because of side effects of this screening exactly as you pointed out. there will be saved lives too of course. 4. saved lives save money for health insurance company, early accidents save money for pension company -> profits
So yes - this method in combating child pornography is probably not very good but hey we can use it also to block access to certain information to the sheeple (or to majority of them) and in a process you may also get some means to black mail the disobedient (who would like to be associated with civil right activists that are also child pornography users?). This give them more control over their herd so not all is lost and affords of ISPs are not all wasted - rejoice!
In Germany many things are illegal ('verbotten') as long as citizens are concerned. This is immaterial as soon as some gov. agency breaks the law to get data on citizens for instance. I suppose that is what our constitution means by 'sozial'. It is interesting to observe how they are squeezing our rights with every occasion. I stopped buying CDs long time ago and did not move to illegal copying as I did not see anything useful to copy - it may be however that soon I will be paying tax to these bastards anyway. I wonder where does this stop? OC laws and actions that could help with spamming, cyber-criminality of any kind etc are left out as they are too difficult to handle and there is no lobby to pay the fee..... This all is very sad indeed.
I agree that we have all liars there - it is not different in Europe. I still think that it is is better to have a biased news with known bias than (local) biased organisation of unknown bias (possibly being sold at the daily rate to whoever pays more). Even better is to have few with different but known biases to chose.
There are also some other small little things like it is good to have somebody reporting to you in a language that you understand - something that people in china or Palestina may nit be inlclined or able to do.
besides that it is of course true - the quality of news deteriorates. I wonder only if one of the reasons is not the fact that with age we know better and realize how we sink in BS?
Measures to cut costs as you suggested, this being outsourcing of non-essential business or using third party solutions usually do not work unless they are done with brains and as that pretty much never happens they do not provide real savings. Spreadshit boys have their field day: once when they get bonuses for saving plan and another time when they have to fix what they messed up while doing it. As long as products still work all is well of course. Do not misunderstand me - I am not against such measures but I find it funny how it usually is done. besides I am cleaning the mess at the end so I do not complain that it is created in the first place of course. OC a day may come when they work out a new saving plan in which they ship the shit directly after it compiles and then bring me with other unfortunates to the big hall where the spreadshit boys give us a sack. Well I would not work for such company anyways so it is not a big deal.
When I think of saving plans, new great ideas and silver bullets, whatever the current hot word is, I always think about 3. paragraph of java's license agreement and why it applies to most of the software that has ever been written.
OC this being M$ we all welcome that they have trouble - maybe these analysts will get them if neither their competitors nor public prosecutors nor the the EU Comission could.
What I find interesting is that spreadshit boys even dare to claim anything again - after all these so called experts have not a f. clue how software is made and how difficult it is to make anything that works in a reliable way. I mean not M$ reliable - although they are much better now than they used to be - or web application reliable, I mean really reliable like the machines that control Airplanes etc. So here we are in one of the big recessions and so called analysts (this must come from ANUS not from ANALYSIS I am sure - there is no other explanation why there is so much shit coming out of people called that) see no point of spending on R&D - well software companies tend to be just that a marketing department and R&D not much else so when you cut down on R&D you may end up with marketing department and board of directors only - I guess that is what they would like to see.
I think also that it is another example of Dvorak's 'rage of the spreadsheet boys' - people that do not see anything that their spreadshit cannot explain. I wonder if these spreadsheet boys that have more power than public prosecutors, EU, competitors etc. It would not surprise me if they did. It just fits into the way things are in our perfect world.
This is true for many apps that are written for other OSs too. Majority of apps that I tried to install on linux locally on my account were OK but there were still some that wanted to do things to folders that my corporate security angels refused to make available for us mortals. I suppose it does not matter anymore anyway as CEO has something to say to all of us on friday....
I think you should not panic too much. This case has more to do with incompetence and stupidity of one country judiciary than with global trends. I find it interesting that it is impossible to prosecute the main country's chieftain and his cronies - maybe public prosecutor's frustration because of this is showing up in this random acts of silliness?
Well not everybody has the same obviously. I any case in Germany the market is saturated so there are so many different providers that I can imagine such contracts exist that do not have required capacities. That is not that relevant I think until the companies get to learn that if they charge too much for each single bit transferred trough their networks the usage will stay low. I made 'experiment' with my provider - Vodafone appeared friendly on the surface but the price for single MMS was so hefty that I vowed not to do it again. The same with internet access. Halo Vodafone do you listen? As long as you try to rip me off you will not get a dime from me!
I would not try to build a real nuclear bomb if I tried to do something terrible - a dirty one, placed in appropriate place would do to. I think we are extremely lucky that this has not happened yet.
I suppose there is no one single way of dealing with shortage of fossil fuels so we will need many methods if one of them deals with big part of our garbage that is only good. Plants that process manure are maybe not a common thing but their use is getting more and more popular. The advantage is there also that the processed thing can be used as fertilizer and it does not stink as terrible as the original thing. Why the method is not more popular I do not know. Seems to be no brainer.
I work for R&D organisation of a big corporation and ever since I learned unix and about open thingy I found it strange that our company sticks to the old guns, Last year I was stunned to find out that the replacement for my sun WS could be a Linux box - I directly ordered one in hope of having at last functioning machine that is smooth in working with the rest of our unix environment and do it safely as well as allowing me to boot windows box (virtualization) if I find it necessary. There were few colleagues that did the same. To my surprise the box came with: 1. massive restrictions on use other software, configurations etc. configuring power safe istelf is not possible without asking support which btw is not trained to do linux so it is a constant headache to use the box. Support people are afraid that becoming a root on my machine means I can spoof on everybody so they gave me no rights at all - comparable windows boxes have all free admin accounts for users. 2. installations usually require some rights that I do not have either because they are not thought trough or because they use resources that are protected - see to 1. for what that means 3. not all the software that is installed (ldap is one such example) works with our infrastructure - see 1. for what it means.
Needless to say some of my colleagues have already given up and use vista instead. For terminal which the box is supposed to be a simple Vista or XP installation is good enough. Linux does not fulfill the promise unfortunately not because it cannot but because neither my corporation nor our support company are ready for it. OTOH our products move slowly towards linux based platforms - not that it is visible on the surface but it is happening anyway. Our windows based software is slowly phased out. But in office environment even if it is R&D office linux has not made its waves yet.
I worked for few other big software companies before and it was the same.
Thee are locations where the price of electricity varies with day time and modern fridges (at least here in Europe) can keep cold without using electricity for hours because I suppose they are so well isolated. But you are right about the real goal of the technology i.e. decreasing but not overall consumption but the peaks - if that is done the overall capacity of network can be optimized. OC such over-optimization makes the whole thing vulnerable to any changes in consumption patterns i.e. either network can collapse or outages may occur in some parts of it. If there are more devices that can survive without constant supply of energy at least for a while then that may be acceptable.
I still have problems with my fridge talking with fridges of my neighbours.
I was charged with preparing technical test in a company that was growing fast enough as not to have real HR dep. so engineers had to do that. We always tested according to directives of our managers but the final result was always tweaked according to our gut feeling which could be helped by bringing some beers for instance or being recommended by one of us and bringing the boose:) The company was very successful in what it did. I left it to earn more money (which proved to be futile) the colleagues that stayed are now managers - the only one that went into reverse in his career there was the one that we rejected because we did not like him but our boss reversed our decision because his university degree was so good. So it worked in case of this company and it worked not based on some smart ass test done by agency that is 'professional' to the core but on our gut feeling and understanding that the candidate was one our peers. This worked perfectly. Now the tests that the HR dep. did later on was not even approximately so successful.
I had to do tests as an applicant too and every time I failed but I do not regret it because I see this as an indication of a job not being suitable for me not other way around. It usually is. Incidentally only one of these tests was personality test, the other two were technical and experience based. I failed them because they were looking for 100% match and I did not chose to prepare myself to such test - hey if they do not appreciate learning candidates then they do not need me. That back then - now I have family so I try harder and may yet to reconsider...
OC this all is a bullshit in times of crisis - usually people just discard you because your nose is not straight enough and that is the most frustrating experience there is. The only advice in such conditions is: try to get as much experience as possible during your university days and if job applications do not yield anything try to become self-employed - even if you are not very successful there future employers may pick you because of our will and drive shown in such way.
I think you do not understand. The way it works is this: Hardly anybody understands what software quality and software engineering really mean so they cut corners and send work to whoever says can do this in half the time and for half the price. To profit they have to halve the cost and the time to market again. Obviously all this is possible only the product does not work according to spec so what do then - try and rework, try and rework etc until it does. Last project I took part in that did such exercise was almost three times over budget and took a year longer to complete (original time frame was 12 months or so). And yes our organization has few geniuses that earn well and their task is to fix all - otherwise nothing would be ready. The point there is that some simple rules of engineering needs to be followed to make product working reliably - but nobody is interested in paying for it in advance so we pay for it afterward. I do not mind actually being at QA but I worry sometimes especially when my life depends on asshole who coded board computer of my car that told engine to shut down on the highway while I was overtaking a lorry with 120km/h. In the garage they said - the fault code was overwritten - how nice.
It is correct that you should be wary about placing all documents on-line on machines that you do not control and that may lie in jurisdiction other than the one under which your company operates. Few other worries would be - availability of service and capability - especially the capability of service is something which makes users that want a bit more complicated documents go elsewhere. This said I can imagine a lot of companies and private people using the service either because they do not know better or because convenience of having their documents 'always' on-line is something they prefer over other aspects of usage.
What always fascinated me is the ever present phenomenon of bad money replacing good money or in this particular context - worse suite becoming standard because people do not know better or do not care or both. besides this it is a great service - I use something similar too. Only not for work or sensitive private data. In fact my less informed wife forbid me to store our household expenses data on the web even if 'no' to us traceable information has been included.
If they cannot control their environment which they perceive harming then putting whatever makes them feel better is a good thing. If you compare it with habits and beliefs of general population or even/.ers you may find that those are not that much different in structure and effects and looking at hatred and lack of respect that is usually associated with any discussion involving religion/belifs (on/. and elsewhere) you may conclude that the conduct of hippies is rather sensible. At least they did not blow anybody up or shot with shotgun as it seems to be the habit of late.
Interestingly your story about how trichinosis has something to do with storage of pork is a good example of how 'well' informed general population is. For your information - the warms that live in pigs flesh and which cause the disease if humans consume such badly processed (cooking is killing the larva) flesh need living mammal to develop. So it is not meat going bad before consumption but meat being infected before the animal got sliced into your nice piece of ham. There could be other reasons why pork is not allowed in certain cultures - economic concerns for instance.
Come to think of that is probably the plan - that is why they do not do anything sensible and piss off the customers by suing them, by restricting the usage of the products they still purchase and by making the product expensive (have prices of music CDs gone down last 20 years?).
At the end there is no customer to serve so there is no need to do anything. But in any EU country there is a fee people have to pay when they buy goods that can potentially be used to record and replay music - there is no escape from it as the fees are included in prices and paid directly to organisations like RIAA in US and GEMA in Germany. So what we have is no costs except bank account and secretary and steady income as people by all the said goods.
It may be true that what you called 'monopoly of main stream outlets' is bad for quality of journalism, this quality is not improved however by multiplying the number of outlets. If anything the quality went down which has two reasons: people pay no attention to this many sources of information and the sources of information being rubbish as nobody is willing to pay for quality. Another thing which young people in the so called industrialized world may find difficult to believe is that there is non-digitized world out there, world that has no build in modern media.
I suppose this is a process where optimization of in this case news outlets went too far hopefully making place for new forms. What these new forms will be I do not know but I would be surprised if they were free. OC majority may conclude that the crap we are getting is good enough which pretty much makes any improvement unnecessary. Come to think of it why is having all these expensive journalism and its journalists together with needed infrastructure if we have/.
1. if money lies in your account it is working but not for you or possibly not as efficient as it could. Just to remind you - banks were originally invented to store money in a safe place. It relatively recent invention for the banks not to keep the money but to invest it exposing them to runs.
2a.have you ever considered how big a chunk of credit problem the defaults in subprime actually were?
2b. Why do you think that some other practices like CDS have nothing to do with the problem? They are few orders of magnitude bigger in value than anything what reasonable can be called subprime mortage.
I dislike TV but I watch occasionally especially when in-laws are at our place. What I observed is that most commercials are crap. Some of them however are very well made. Comparing this to the shows and movies that they interrupt I see a major difference in quality for adverts advantage. It seems that not only the creative people feel better making the advertisements but the way accountants devastate their works is different too - an add thanks to its short form is either completely destroyed or it works. Shows and movies on the other hand may become very annoying when one starts noticing marketing department at work. Common practice of product placing makes commercials strangely honest. Now considering all this you can imagine that I actually skip the shows and watch the commercials instead. You can save time on it too as the pauses become longer.
From this perspective the only aspect that is annoying here is that such devices have enormous potential for abuse by unscrupulous authorities and corporate sharks - or is there anything that can stop them using such systems to supervise us all Orwell style (as there were a need for it).
Slashdot Mirror
it does not matter what model you use. Apparently they all created virtual worlds in big numbers (total value of derivatives and such is few times more than summed up gross domestic product of all countries on our planet) - this had to crash independently of the model - problem being that they used the same one. in other words: if all sheeple use the same model of reality then to make profit you need to use different one. Or to say it yet differently: if all sheeple do the same they create the bubble. nature of bubbles is that they burst when they reach physical limits of the stuff of which they are made. In our case it was human gullibility.
It(music industry) may not survive p2p sharing or it may fail because if one can simply generate music automagically - software will generate stuff that makes you feel good etc - then why need big corporations to produce the stuff in 'old fashion' way???
What is also interesting or at least what I find it interesting - all the stuff that according to TFA is created with help of computers I considered to noisy. I did not know why but now I do.
OC they find out way to change and make it more sophisticated and yet another part of human performed jobs is gone. I suppose at the end we do not need superwise skynets and such - simple GPS makes your brain sleep all the time, the music is automagically created and maybe in the future a washing machine (google for "The Washing Machine Tragedy" to learn more) will satisfy your other needs too...
But of course you are right the business decision making our lives 'simpler' and 'easier' do not necessarily promote development of our culture (if such thing exists at all of course).
that is questionable actually - real progress exists but have been used up by additional energy sinks like: air condition, computers on board, electronic control systems, support for steering and breaking, the cars of today also carry much more of the (admittedly more modern) stuff than before - isolation etc. Not sure about 40years but if you take 10 or 20 years there may be a small decrease in fuel consumption but in general the cars use approx the same now and then.
Or maybe I am just buying the wrong cars - actually I did posses an Opel which is GM - OK now I know what t he problem is....
This works like this then:
1. as soon as you get in sight of your pension health insurance company gets in touch with your pension paying entity
2. they make a deal and tell you that if you do not make a test your health insurance will be void.
3. OC this may work for majority but some will die because of side effects of this screening exactly as you pointed out. there will be saved lives too of course.
4. saved lives save money for health insurance company, early accidents save money for pension company -> profits
So yes - this method in combating child pornography is probably not very good but hey we can use it also to block access to certain information to the sheeple (or to majority of them) and in a process you may also get some means to black mail the disobedient (who would like to be associated with civil right activists that are also child pornography users?).
This give them more control over their herd so not all is lost and affords of ISPs are not all wasted - rejoice!
In Germany many things are illegal ('verbotten') as long as citizens are concerned. This is immaterial as soon as some gov. agency breaks the law to get data on citizens for instance. I suppose that is what our constitution means by 'sozial'.
It is interesting to observe how they are squeezing our rights with every occasion. I stopped buying CDs long time ago and did not move to illegal copying as I did not see anything useful to copy - it may be however that soon I will be paying tax to these bastards anyway. I wonder where does this stop? OC laws and actions that could help with spamming, cyber-criminality of any kind etc are left out as they are too difficult to handle and there is no lobby to pay the fee.....
This all is very sad indeed.
I agree that we have all liars there - it is not different in Europe. I still think that it is is better to have a biased news with known bias than (local) biased organisation of unknown bias (possibly being sold at the daily rate to whoever pays more).
Even better is to have few with different but known biases to chose.
There are also some other small little things like it is good to have somebody reporting to you in a language that you understand - something that people in china or Palestina may nit be inlclined or able to do.
besides that it is of course true - the quality of news deteriorates. I wonder only if one of the reasons is not the fact that with age we know better and realize how we sink in BS?
Measures to cut costs as you suggested, this being outsourcing of non-essential business or using third party solutions usually do not work unless they are done with brains and as that pretty much never happens they do not provide real savings. Spreadshit boys have their field day: once when they get bonuses for saving plan and another time when they have to fix what they messed up while doing it. As long as products still work all is well of course.
Do not misunderstand me - I am not against such measures but I find it funny how it usually is done. besides I am cleaning the mess at the end so I do not complain that it is created in the first place of course. OC a day may come when they work out a new saving plan in which they ship the shit directly after it compiles and then bring me with other unfortunates to the big hall where the spreadshit boys give us a sack. Well I would not work for such company anyways so it is not a big deal.
When I think of saving plans, new great ideas and silver bullets, whatever the current hot word is, I always think about 3. paragraph of java's license agreement and why it applies to most of the software that has ever been written.
OC this being M$ we all welcome that they have trouble - maybe these analysts will get them if neither their competitors nor public prosecutors nor the the EU Comission could.
What I find interesting is that spreadshit boys even dare to claim anything again - after all these so called experts have not a f. clue how software is made and how difficult it is to make anything that works in a reliable way. I mean not M$ reliable - although they are much better now than they used to be - or web application reliable, I mean really reliable like the machines that control Airplanes etc. So here we are in one of the big recessions and so called analysts (this must come from ANUS not from ANALYSIS I am sure - there is no other explanation why there is so much shit coming out of people called that) see no point of spending on R&D - well software companies tend to be just that a marketing department and R&D not much else so when you cut down on R&D you may end up with marketing department and board of directors only - I guess that is what they would like to see.
I think also that it is another example of Dvorak's 'rage of the spreadsheet boys' - people that do not see anything that their spreadshit cannot explain.
I wonder if these spreadsheet boys that have more power than public prosecutors, EU, competitors etc. It would not surprise me if they did. It just fits into the way things are in our perfect world.
This is true for many apps that are written for other OSs too. Majority of apps that I tried to install on linux locally on my account were OK but there were still some that wanted to do things to folders that my corporate security angels refused to make available for us mortals.
I suppose it does not matter anymore anyway as CEO has something to say to all of us on friday....
I think you should not panic too much. This case has more to do with incompetence and stupidity of one country judiciary than with global trends. I find it interesting that it is impossible to prosecute the main country's chieftain and his cronies - maybe public prosecutor's frustration because of this is showing up in this random acts of silliness?
Well not everybody has the same obviously. I any case in Germany the market is saturated so there are so many different providers that I can imagine such contracts exist that do not have required capacities. That is not that relevant I think until the companies get to learn that if they charge too much for each single bit transferred trough their networks the usage will stay low.
I made 'experiment' with my provider - Vodafone appeared friendly on the surface but the price for single MMS was so hefty that I vowed not to do it again. The same with internet access.
Halo Vodafone do you listen? As long as you try to rip me off you will not get a dime from me!
I would not try to build a real nuclear bomb if I tried to do something terrible - a dirty one, placed in appropriate place would do to. I think we are extremely lucky that this has not happened yet.
I suppose there is no one single way of dealing with shortage of fossil fuels so we will need many methods if one of them deals with big part of our garbage that is only good.
Plants that process manure are maybe not a common thing but their use is getting more and more popular. The advantage is there also that the processed thing can be used as fertilizer and it does not stink as terrible as the original thing. Why the method is not more popular I do not know. Seems to be no brainer.
among other things.
I work for R&D organisation of a big corporation and ever since I learned unix and about open thingy I found it strange that our company sticks to the old guns, Last year I was stunned to find out that the replacement for my sun WS could be a Linux box - I directly ordered one in hope of having at last functioning machine that is smooth in working with the rest of our unix environment and do it safely as well as allowing me to boot windows box (virtualization) if I find it necessary. There were few colleagues that did the same. To my surprise the box came with:
1. massive restrictions on use other software, configurations etc. configuring power safe istelf is not possible without asking support which btw is not trained to do linux so it is a constant headache to use the box. Support people are afraid that becoming a root on my machine means I can spoof on everybody so they gave me no rights at all - comparable windows boxes have all free admin accounts for users.
2. installations usually require some rights that I do not have either because they are not thought trough or because they use resources that are protected - see to 1. for what that means
3. not all the software that is installed (ldap is one such example) works with our infrastructure - see 1. for what it means.
Needless to say some of my colleagues have already given up and use vista instead. For terminal which the box is supposed to be a simple Vista or XP installation is good enough. Linux does not fulfill the promise unfortunately not because it cannot but because neither my corporation nor our support company are ready for it.
OTOH our products move slowly towards linux based platforms - not that it is visible on the surface but it is happening anyway. Our windows based software is slowly phased out. But in office environment even if it is R&D office linux has not made its waves yet.
I worked for few other big software companies before and it was the same.
Thee are locations where the price of electricity varies with day time and modern fridges (at least here in Europe) can keep cold without using electricity for hours because I suppose they are so well isolated. But you are right about the real goal of the technology i.e. decreasing but not overall consumption but the peaks - if that is done the overall capacity of network can be optimized. OC such over-optimization makes the whole thing vulnerable to any changes in consumption patterns i.e. either network can collapse or outages may occur in some parts of it.
If there are more devices that can survive without constant supply of energy at least for a while then that may be acceptable.
I still have problems with my fridge talking with fridges of my neighbours.
I was charged with preparing technical test in a company that was growing fast enough as not to have real HR dep. so engineers had to do that. We always tested according to directives of our managers but the final result was always tweaked according to our gut feeling which could be helped by bringing some beers for instance or being recommended by one of us and bringing the boose:) The company was very successful in what it did. I left it to earn more money (which proved to be futile) the colleagues that stayed are now managers - the only one that went into reverse in his career there was the one that we rejected because we did not like him but our boss reversed our decision because his university degree was so good. So it worked in case of this company and it worked not based on some smart ass test done by agency that is 'professional' to the core but on our gut feeling and understanding that the candidate was one our peers. This worked perfectly. Now the tests that the HR dep. did later on was not even approximately so successful.
I had to do tests as an applicant too and every time I failed but I do not regret it because I see this as an indication of a job not being suitable for me not other way around. It usually is. Incidentally only one of these tests was personality test, the other two were technical and experience based. I failed them because they were looking for 100% match and I did not chose to prepare myself to such test - hey if they do not appreciate learning candidates then they do not need me. That back then - now I have family so I try harder and may yet to reconsider...
OC this all is a bullshit in times of crisis - usually people just discard you because your nose is not straight enough and that is the most frustrating experience there is.
The only advice in such conditions is: try to get as much experience as possible during your university days and if job applications do not yield anything try to become self-employed - even if you are not very successful there future employers may pick you because of our will and drive shown in such way.
I think you do not understand. The way it works is this:
Hardly anybody understands what software quality and software engineering really mean so they cut corners and send work to whoever says can do this in half the time and for half the price. To profit they have to halve the cost and the time to market again. Obviously all this is possible only the product does not work according to spec so what do then - try and rework, try and rework etc until it does. Last project I took part in that did such exercise was almost three times over budget and took a year longer to complete (original time frame was 12 months or so).
And yes our organization has few geniuses that earn well and their task is to fix all - otherwise nothing would be ready. The point there is that some simple rules of engineering needs to be followed to make product working reliably - but nobody is interested in paying for it in advance so we pay for it afterward.
I do not mind actually being at QA but I worry sometimes especially when my life depends on asshole who coded board computer of my car that told engine to shut down on the highway while I was overtaking a lorry with 120km/h. In the garage they said - the fault code was overwritten - how nice.
It is correct that you should be wary about placing all documents on-line on machines that you do not control and that may lie in jurisdiction other than the one under which your company operates.
Few other worries would be - availability of service and capability - especially the capability of service is something which makes users that want a bit more complicated documents go elsewhere. This said I can imagine a lot of companies and private people using the service either because they do not know better or because convenience of having their documents 'always' on-line is something they prefer over other aspects of usage.
What always fascinated me is the ever present phenomenon of bad money replacing good money or in this particular context - worse suite becoming standard because people do not know better or do not care or both. besides this it is a great service - I use something similar too. Only not for work or sensitive private data.
In fact my less informed wife forbid me to store our household expenses data on the web even if 'no' to us traceable information has been included.
If they cannot control their environment which they perceive harming then putting whatever makes them feel better is a good thing. /.ers you may find that those are not that much different in structure and effects and looking at hatred and lack of respect that is usually associated with any discussion involving religion/belifs (on /. and elsewhere) you may conclude that the conduct of hippies is rather sensible. At least they did not blow anybody up or shot with shotgun as it seems to be the habit of late.
If you compare it with habits and beliefs of general population or even
Interestingly your story about how trichinosis has something to do with storage of pork is a good example of how 'well' informed general population is. For your information - the warms that live in pigs flesh and which cause the disease if humans consume such badly processed (cooking is killing the larva) flesh need living mammal to develop. So it is not meat going bad before consumption but meat being infected before the animal got sliced into your nice piece of ham. There could be other reasons why pork is not allowed in certain cultures - economic concerns for instance.
Come to think of that is probably the plan - that is why they do not do anything sensible and piss off the customers by suing them, by restricting the usage of the products they still purchase and by making the product expensive (have prices of music CDs gone down last 20 years?).
At the end there is no customer to serve so there is no need to do anything. But in any EU country there is a fee people have to pay when they buy goods that can potentially be used to record and replay music - there is no escape from it as the fees are included in prices and paid directly to organisations like RIAA in US and GEMA in Germany. So what we have is no costs except bank account and secretary and steady income as people by all the said goods.
Now how does it feel to be a prophet?
It may be true that what you called 'monopoly of main stream outlets' is bad for quality of journalism, this quality is not improved however by multiplying the number of outlets. If anything the quality went down which has two reasons: people pay no attention to this many sources of information and the sources of information being rubbish as nobody is willing to pay for quality. Another thing which young people in the so called industrialized world may find difficult to believe is that there is non-digitized world out there, world that has no build in modern media.
I suppose this is a process where optimization of in this case news outlets went too far hopefully making place for new forms. What these new forms will be I do not know but I would be surprised if they were free. OC majority may conclude that the crap we are getting is good enough which pretty much makes any improvement unnecessary. Come to think of it why is having all these expensive journalism and its journalists together with needed infrastructure if we have /.
1. if money lies in your account it is working but not for you or possibly not as efficient as it could. Just to remind you - banks were originally invented to store money in a safe place. It relatively recent invention for the banks not to keep the money but to invest it exposing them to runs.
2a.have you ever considered how big a chunk of credit problem the defaults in subprime actually were?
2b. Why do you think that some other practices like CDS have nothing to do with the problem? They are few orders of magnitude bigger in value than anything what reasonable can be called subprime mortage.
I dislike TV but I watch occasionally especially when in-laws are at our place. What I observed is that most commercials are crap. Some of them however are very well made. Comparing this to the shows and movies that they interrupt I see a major difference in quality for adverts advantage.
It seems that not only the creative people feel better making the advertisements but the way accountants devastate their works is different too - an add thanks to its short form is either completely destroyed or it works. Shows and movies on the other hand may become very annoying when one starts noticing marketing department at work. Common practice of product placing makes commercials strangely honest. Now considering all this you can imagine that I actually skip the shows and watch the commercials instead. You can save time on it too as the pauses become longer.
From this perspective the only aspect that is annoying here is that such devices have enormous potential for abuse by unscrupulous authorities and corporate sharks - or is there anything that can stop them using such systems to supervise us all Orwell style (as there were a need for it).