Word Star had more users than the population of Bangladesh, Word Perfect was loved by the secretaries and Lotus 1-2-3 was worshiped by the accountants. Still Microsoft won them all, by hook or crook. Even if it is mostly by crook, it won. It needed employees with intense competitive focus to achieve that. All the people in the early days who had the fire in the belly to make their company succeed have all either burnt out, cashed out, shut out.
People who are left behind all came of age when Microsoft had almost mythical powers. It could squelch competition by FUD, All it took was an announcement of vaporware and the funding for start-ups who could compete would just evaporate. These guys simply are not capable of competing on a level playing field. And the playing field is tilted against Microsoft now. The earlier era minions of Gates have earned the enmity of vast sections of the computer professionals. And so many of their partners fear them and do not trust them.
Unless it is something radical like splitting the company into an OS division, a consumer products division, corporate server products division and all competing at full throttle it is not going to work.
So this flaw affects mostly app stores competing with Google marketplace. Not fixing this bug would give an edge to Google's marketplace. Though it is orders of magnitude different, this was similar to a situation early in the days of IE-vs-Netscape fights in the early days.( IIS and IE would work around each other's bugs making other web servers and browsers appear to be broken). How is Google handling it?
In some strange way Google is having the cake (open and competing app stores, instead of the total lock down on the Apple-iOS side of things) and is eating it too (its app store is less vulnerable than its competition due to its own bugs).
In the long run, having reliable and competent competition is what going to create lasting value to the customers, keep Google on its toes and keep it nimble. So if Google is really not evil and if it is interested in long term success, it should not take short cuts to maintain an edge over competing app stores. Hope it does.
Browsers have very large installed base. There are enough bug spotters even if a very small fraction of them actually hunt and report bugs. Even then, the bounty is for finding the bugs, not fixing the bugs that includes the cost of coming up with a fix, verifying it fixes the problem, testing to make sure it does not create new problems and rolling out the fix.
Back in the day when I was with the ministry of defense we lost a vehicle due to an error like this. They had changed the vendor for the gyros of the roll sensor. The new gyros had the voltages in the reverse sense. It is possible one vendor was European and the other was American. They wired it according to the sense of the old vendor. So the control input to the ailerons would add to the roll instead of counteracting it. The RPV crashed 1.5 seconds after launch.
In the postmortem the flight director started with, "... we sadly lost the vehicle after a flight of 1.5 seconds...". The mission director interrupted, "What flight? The damned thing had a 6000 Kg[sic][*] rocket booster. You can put it under a 3 ton rock and it will 'fly' for more than 2 seconds..."
[*]He should have said 6000 Kgf-sec, because that was the impulse delivered by the twin rocket boosters each 1500 Kgf thrust burning for 2 seconds.
Because it has a top speed of 99mph, it has to obey all the passenger car safety requirements. If they use some software to limit the speed to 25mph, they can sell it USA as a Lowspeed vehicle. But anyway they are only planning to make 250 vehicles for the European market.
I think in a decade or so, all the cars will get an electric motor as the zeroth gear.If the IC engine has work only above 5mph or 7mph they can tune it completely differently and improve fuel economy by 50% easily. Much of the fuel economy of the Prius comes from the engine that does not have to work below 10 mph. It would not be too expensive to store enough juice to pull the car up to 5 or 10mph a few times.
That is the concept behind Tata Nano. It is very cheap and you could barely call it a car. But its CEO (at that time, not sure who is running the show now) Ratan Tata said "It is not an unsafe car. It is a safe motor cycle with four wheels and a roof" (I am paraphrasing). In India it is common to see an entire family, dad+mom+two+kids all piled up in one motor cycle or a scooter dodging potholes and weaving in out of traffic. Yes, such cars exist. But it is very unlikely to pass any safety test in USA/Europe/Japan/Korea.
Salt was not cheap for Romans. It was so rare Roman soldiers were actually paid in salt. The Latin word for salt, salar is the root of the word salary. They certainly did not have it at enough quantities to poison the land or people. They probably sprinkled the conquered cities with salt in some kind of symbolic ritual. Talking about symbolic military ceremonies involving salt, nothing beats the induction ceremony of the Gorkha soldiers. These tribals pledge fealty to anyone who has given them salt. At the induction ceremony they line up, the commanding officer in full dress uniform marches along the ranks, with another colorfully dressed sergeant bearing a tray of salt. NCOs bellow commands for the inductees to open their mouth and the CO sprinkles salt into their mouth. For all that pomp and circumstance it looks ridiculously funny.
If your spreadsheet needs a gpu to speed up calculations, you are probably misusing spreadsheets. I know most accountants love the spreadsheet and they make insanely complicated things using spreadsheets pushing it far beyond what these are designed to do. But if you have a spreadsheet that needs this much of cpu time to recompute, you should probably be using a full fledged data base with multiple precomputed indexing.
Yup. Honda and Toyota were more innovative and less rigid than the Europeans who were coasting on past glory. Even them were going for small cars and fuel efficiency side and did not see the performance side of it till Tesla came along.
The nav system uses the same display as their rear view camera. I actually ordered their top-view camera system in addition too. Just for fun. They use two cameras on the wing mirrors and the rear view camera to display a composite image as though you are floating above the car and looking down. Quite cool to look at and my wife liked it. But the damn wing cameras do not turn and look backwards to provide some blind spot protection. Their idea of blind spot protection is radar mounted in the rear bumper.
BMW sees such customers all the time. In most other luxury brands such customers will pick a car from a different badge (Toyota instead of Lexus, Chevy instead of Cadillac). BMW has only one badge. So they call these cars "driver cars". Enthusiastic customers who can't afford all the fancy stuff. BMW caters to them. And ithat takes care of those off-beat guys who could afford fancy but still obstinately refuse to buy it.
You are right in claiming electric motors are inherently more reliable by an order of magnitude or more. In Washington PA there is a museum for trollies and street cars. There there is a picture of twin brothers from some Eastern European country. Their claim to fame? They wound an electric traction motor for a trolly car in 1918 and it never needed to be rewound till the car was scrapped in 1984. All these years that motor dragged the trolley car through mud and snow and heat all through the streets of Pittsburgh without ever needing to be rewound. (Winding the coils into to the armature of the motor is the equivalent of rebuilding an IC engine). The management would be averse to such technologies. They actually used the term "planned obsolescence" seriously in management presentations.
But there is an area where they were competing intensely, with no holds barred and no managers messing with them. That was the acceleration quarter-mile time and 0-60mph time got them the bragging rights. They took this pissing contest seriously. Here we are talking about virtually unlimited budgets, no interference from bean counters and sales critters. Adding an electric boost at below 5mph would have added to the over all complexity and service revenue would not be impacted. But still they did not have the imagination to do it.
Battery technology only limited the range of pure electric cars. The cars produce plenty of excess power, and they could easily store enough juice to accelerate the car from stand-still to 10mph. The electric motor would simply assist the first gear, or it could even be called zeroth gear and the IC engine engaging the wheels only beyond 7mph or 10 mph. How much juice you need to do it? Almost all the problems of IC engines occur because IC engines can not run at 0 rpm. Till someone something cranks it up to idle rpm, (900 or so) the engine would not run. They need to let the engine slip and engage the wheels through a clutch till the 1:16 reduction ratio allows the engine to engage the wheels without slip. Then it accelerates. Why the hell did they not soup up the starter motor, already in the power train to not just start the engine, but also to propel the car to 5mph? The batteries can easily store enough juice to do it 10 or 15 times, and the battery could be fully recharged in 1 minute of regular driving.
You could accuse me of Monday-morning-quarterbacking with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight. And you would be right. But I am not an auto engineer. There were auto engineers fighting the 0-60 mph time battle for all the car companies all the time. They should have thought about it and implemented it. Cost was not a limitation. I am talking about Porches and BMWs. Weight is not an issue. These monster cars are all engines-and-wheels with tiny cockpit for the driver to squeeze in. Complexity is not an issue. These engines are V12 and V8 engines with thousands of moving parts with twin turbo supercharging with intercooler. These beasts would malfunction if you looked at them wrong.
Look at their supercharging. Electric superchargers were well known and were actually used in airplane engines since 1930. Still these engineers are so averse to electricity or so afraid of it, they would rather use a turbine mounted in the exhaust manifold and use it to power a compressor to supercharge the cylinders. Look at the complexity. At this point they might as well dispense will all the cylinders and pistons and camshafts and try to become a pure gas turbine engine. That is what these are. Exhaust turning a turbine, which turns a compressor, heck you got a gas turbine engine right there. All these pistons and cylinders do is to slow the
damn thing down. If a simple combustion chamber is used and the turbines spin up to 30000 rpm, you got a jet engine. You can easily make a turbo-shaft engine. But these engineers were so wedded to the idea of cylinders and pistons, they did not make the jump. Of course, there is the turbo lag. I remember seeing Jay Leno riding a motor cycle made by strapping a couple of wheels to a discarded helicopter turning engine. He said, there is turbo lag on both ends. You turn the throttle off, and then the engine thinks about it for a minute before spinning down.
I just ordered a new BMW and the salesman could not understand why I would insist on ordering one without Navigation and the upgraded entertainment system and wait four weeks rather than pick one off the lot with all the fancy (fancy to the car guys) stuff. I told him BMW should stick to what it knows, IC engines and car bodies and keep its nose clear of things it has no idea of what fancy is.
Forget electronics, even in their bread and butter cars, engines, torque and power these companies fare very poorly. We have known for about 100 years, some basic facts:
1. Electric motors have maximum torque at zero rpm
2. IC engines have peak torque at some 3000 rpm
But till Tesla came out with a car using electric motors to beat the big "performance" car makers BMW, Porche, Jaguar and Benz, they kept messing with making the IC engines more and more powerful, with more and more complicated transmissions, in their acceleration pissing contest called 0 to 60 time. They have seen diesel - electric locomotives completely dispensing with transmissions, and using pure electric motors to produce oodles of torque needed to get a a mile long freight train moving. They should have added a small 10 or 20 HP electric motor to their high end cars, to go from 0mph to 5 or 7 mph in 0.5 sec and go fro 7 to 60 in 2 sec flat with their enormous 8 cyl, 12 cyl engines producing 300 to 500 HP. They could have done it 25 or 30 years ago. The technology needed to do it existed then. I am not talking about super efficient hybrid or regenerative braking or any such thing. I am talking about the pissing contest all these car companies took to heart and fought hard, and where there was big prize money awaiting the winner. Still not a single one of them thought of using a small electric motor to supplement their IC engines. But no, they were set in their ways till they were forced it eat the dust of Tesla with a liberal helping of crow.
When it comes to electronics, they think they will make big profits here by the "walled garden" approach. All companies pack their GPS in bundles and try to charge 500$ to 1900$ to get the GPS. Then they want 100 to 200$ to upgrade the maps. Hello! Google maps and spoken driving directions are free. They think
they are going to make money of these things?
It is not just the auto makers who lack imagination and innovation. The whole industry reeks of anti-competitive behavior and following the rut. The dealers are
lobbying to prevent Tesla from selling the cars directly to the customers.
This is precisely how most managers and buyers approach the problem. "All they are asking for is clear specs. Whats wrong with that? Anyway it is better to put it in writing, given that they may not have very high English skills. Give them enough time to understand the spec at their own pace and time". Then some totally useless unusable product gets delivered and the vendor goes through the spec with a fine-tooth-comb and selectively deploys Wren and Martin when it suits him and colloquial English when it does not, uses the spec in bad faith and games the system.
You give up in disgust, and fork over the money because, it is too late and the product is due and you blame yourself for picking this vendor.
They know the spec game inside out, right side left and top side down. They will implement a totally useless piece of software and when you complain they will insist they have implemented exactly what was in the original contract. That archaic grammar book by Wren and Martin is God's gift to them. They will endlessly argue what is meant by "shall" and "may" and "will". Most high school teachers in India still swear by this book as the ultimate authority in English grammar. So you will be forced to amend and correct the original specs. That will trigger all sorts of revised estimates and revised costs, and by the time you are done, you would have spent about 50% more than your highest bidder, taken twice as long, and gotten yourself software that does 50% of what you want, and probably 75% of what you wrote in the spec sheet but 100% of exactly what is in the spec sheet according to Messrs Wren and Martin as interpreted by Infosys.
Were they testing the "facial expression recognizing software" by training the camera on themselves as they were developing the software?
One of my friends did his masters thesis project in code quality metrics. As part of it he wrote some code that will find the average LOC per function, code/comment ratio etc etc and spit out a letter grade. His thesis guru was a fiend. He fed the source code of this analysis code into itself. Poor guy graded himself a C-minus or something.
So till all these companies gird up to make cash payments, the poor workers should suffer at the hands of the bloodsuckers? This is precisely what I mean by perfect being enemy of good.
It is like code release. Perfection is the goal. Better than last release is the shipping criterion.
The system of prepaid cards with fees is not the perfect solution for poor workers. But it is better than the old system of paying them with checks. Free checking is not available in most banks. Even when there is an allegedly "free" checking account it comes with a large minimum balance requirement. Fall below that and you trigger monthly fees. Further many people, mostly undocumented, don't have bank accounts and they use check cashing services that charge as much as 10% as the fees. So compared to those situations the prepaid card with fees is actually better.
The check cashing services are also closely allied with the pay day loan services that charge interests that work out to something like 240% on annualized basis. These check cashing services are one of the main opponents of Wall street reform, they are very well organized and media savvy. I would not be surprised if this sudden interest in prepaid card fees and the media blitz is actually organized by these loan sharks.
It costs money to process these transactions. It is not as much as the banks charge as fees and the fees can be unreasonably high. But still that is not as bad as what these check cashing services charge. I would rather work towards giving the regular banks some tax incentives to provide these prepaid cards without fees when they were given as wages for people below poverty line. Killing the whole idea of prepaid cards or demonizing the employers who provide them will prove to be very counterproductive.
Please educate yourself about the plight of the poor at the hands of check cashing services on one hand, checking account with fees on the other hand, people not having fixed addresses or visas who can not open bank accounts in the first place before jumping on the band wagon denouncing the wage card with fees or the employers who provide them.
Exactly. These MBA morons are like the proverbial Railway exec who calculated that all the rolling stock of the company occupies just 10 miles. He declared all the remaining miles of track to be excess inventory and sold them for scrap. But sadly, he would have collected his bonus and would wrecking some other company by the time this company realizes what has been done to it.
If it ever gets approved to civilian passenger use, the flight deck would be impregnable from the passenger cabin. All controls will be
locked and so even if a terrorist gains access he/she would not be able to direct the plane to high value target. At this point all you
they can do would be to crash the plane, which can be done without trying to get to the flight deck. But destroying a passenger
airliner in flight would get them big headlines and attention. That is basically what the terrorists want.
Destroying two towers and damaging one building is nothing for a country the size and might of USA. Compared to devastation of WW-II
Dresden, Berlin, Stalingrad, Tokyo, Nagasaki, Hiroshima etc, 9/11/2001 does not even qualify as a flea bite. But 9/11 made more headlines
and more news than all the impact made by WW-II news in its day in the prized demographics of the terrorists.
The reaction of the media, and hence the public, is like an auto-immune reaction or allergy reaction. Some harmless pollen grains are
detected in the bronchia and the body responds as though it is being invaded by the Ebola virus. So even after we deny the ability of
terrorists to fly fully fueled planes into buildings, the media reaction for an attempted terrorist attack, no matter how successful, no
matter how far fetched, would ensure the terrorists get their oxygen: publicity.
What we really need to prevent terrorist attacks is large doses of anti-histamine. Just ignore the terrorists, their attempts, their successes, their failures. Only when develop the collective ability to deny them publicity we will win the war on terrorism.
Music from 2 decades ago is mostly stuff that nobody listens anymore
That is not true. Most people continue to listen to the music they heard and loved during their teens, twenty something years. People trained in classical music listened to them before they turned 25. Very few people like the music they hear first time in their fifties and sixties. Looks like we start losing the ability to like fresh music starting from age 25-35 and by the time we reach 60s and 70s we totally lose it.
I wonder if the music executives pick the music that made superhits some 30 or 40 years ago, dress it up using modern arrangements, and disguise it well, but use the same foundation melody, scale and rhythm and try to create new hits.
Slashdot Mirror
People who are left behind all came of age when Microsoft had almost mythical powers. It could squelch competition by FUD, All it took was an announcement of vaporware and the funding for start-ups who could compete would just evaporate. These guys simply are not capable of competing on a level playing field. And the playing field is tilted against Microsoft now. The earlier era minions of Gates have earned the enmity of vast sections of the computer professionals. And so many of their partners fear them and do not trust them.
Unless it is something radical like splitting the company into an OS division, a consumer products division, corporate server products division and all competing at full throttle it is not going to work.
In some strange way Google is having the cake (open and competing app stores, instead of the total lock down on the Apple-iOS side of things) and is eating it too (its app store is less vulnerable than its competition due to its own bugs).
In the long run, having reliable and competent competition is what going to create lasting value to the customers, keep Google on its toes and keep it nimble. So if Google is really not evil and if it is interested in long term success, it should not take short cuts to maintain an edge over competing app stores. Hope it does.
Browsers have very large installed base. There are enough bug spotters even if a very small fraction of them actually hunt and report bugs. Even then, the bounty is for finding the bugs, not fixing the bugs that includes the cost of coming up with a fix, verifying it fixes the problem, testing to make sure it does not create new problems and rolling out the fix.
When the PHB announced a bug bounty program, Wally vowed to write himself a new car that afternoon.
In the postmortem the flight director started with, "... we sadly lost the vehicle after a flight of 1.5 seconds ...". The mission director interrupted, "What flight? The damned thing had a 6000 Kg[sic][*] rocket booster. You can put it under a 3 ton rock and it will 'fly' for more than 2 seconds..."
[*]He should have said 6000 Kgf-sec, because that was the impulse delivered by the twin rocket boosters each 1500 Kgf thrust burning for 2 seconds.
I think in a decade or so, all the cars will get an electric motor as the zeroth gear.If the IC engine has work only above 5mph or 7mph they can tune it completely differently and improve fuel economy by 50% easily. Much of the fuel economy of the Prius comes from the engine that does not have to work below 10 mph. It would not be too expensive to store enough juice to pull the car up to 5 or 10mph a few times.
That is the concept behind Tata Nano. It is very cheap and you could barely call it a car. But its CEO (at that time, not sure who is running the show now) Ratan Tata said "It is not an unsafe car. It is a safe motor cycle with four wheels and a roof" (I am paraphrasing). In India it is common to see an entire family, dad+mom+two+kids all piled up in one motor cycle or a scooter dodging potholes and weaving in out of traffic. Yes, such cars exist. But it is very unlikely to pass any safety test in USA/Europe/Japan/Korea.
It is far easier to melt the salt and store it in underground chambers and use it to produce steam later to drive the turbines.
Salt was not cheap for Romans. It was so rare Roman soldiers were actually paid in salt. The Latin word for salt, salar is the root of the word salary. They certainly did not have it at enough quantities to poison the land or people. They probably sprinkled the conquered cities with salt in some kind of symbolic ritual. Talking about symbolic military ceremonies involving salt, nothing beats the induction ceremony of the Gorkha soldiers. These tribals pledge fealty to anyone who has given them salt. At the induction ceremony they line up, the commanding officer in full dress uniform marches along the ranks, with another colorfully dressed sergeant bearing a tray of salt. NCOs bellow commands for the inductees to open their mouth and the CO sprinkles salt into their mouth. For all that pomp and circumstance it looks ridiculously funny.
If your spreadsheet needs a gpu to speed up calculations, you are probably misusing spreadsheets. I know most accountants love the spreadsheet and they make insanely complicated things using spreadsheets pushing it far beyond what these are designed to do. But if you have a spreadsheet that needs this much of cpu time to recompute, you should probably be using a full fledged data base with multiple precomputed indexing.
Yup. Honda and Toyota were more innovative and less rigid than the Europeans who were coasting on past glory. Even them were going for small cars and fuel efficiency side and did not see the performance side of it till Tesla came along.
The nav system uses the same display as their rear view camera. I actually ordered their top-view camera system in addition too. Just for fun. They use two cameras on the wing mirrors and the rear view camera to display a composite image as though you are floating above the car and looking down. Quite cool to look at and my wife liked it. But the damn wing cameras do not turn and look backwards to provide some blind spot protection. Their idea of blind spot protection is radar mounted in the rear bumper.
BMW sees such customers all the time. In most other luxury brands such customers will pick a car from a different badge (Toyota instead of Lexus, Chevy instead of Cadillac). BMW has only one badge. So they call these cars "driver cars". Enthusiastic customers who can't afford all the fancy stuff. BMW caters to them. And ithat takes care of those off-beat guys who could afford fancy but still obstinately refuse to buy it.
But there is an area where they were competing intensely, with no holds barred and no managers messing with them. That was the acceleration quarter-mile time and 0-60mph time got them the bragging rights. They took this pissing contest seriously. Here we are talking about virtually unlimited budgets, no interference from bean counters and sales critters. Adding an electric boost at below 5mph would have added to the over all complexity and service revenue would not be impacted. But still they did not have the imagination to do it.
You could accuse me of Monday-morning-quarterbacking with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight. And you would be right. But I am not an auto engineer. There were auto engineers fighting the 0-60 mph time battle for all the car companies all the time. They should have thought about it and implemented it. Cost was not a limitation. I am talking about Porches and BMWs. Weight is not an issue. These monster cars are all engines-and-wheels with tiny cockpit for the driver to squeeze in. Complexity is not an issue. These engines are V12 and V8 engines with thousands of moving parts with twin turbo supercharging with intercooler. These beasts would malfunction if you looked at them wrong.
Look at their supercharging. Electric superchargers were well known and were actually used in airplane engines since 1930. Still these engineers are so averse to electricity or so afraid of it, they would rather use a turbine mounted in the exhaust manifold and use it to power a compressor to supercharge the cylinders. Look at the complexity. At this point they might as well dispense will all the cylinders and pistons and camshafts and try to become a pure gas turbine engine. That is what these are. Exhaust turning a turbine, which turns a compressor, heck you got a gas turbine engine right there. All these pistons and cylinders do is to slow the damn thing down. If a simple combustion chamber is used and the turbines spin up to 30000 rpm, you got a jet engine. You can easily make a turbo-shaft engine. But these engineers were so wedded to the idea of cylinders and pistons, they did not make the jump. Of course, there is the turbo lag. I remember seeing Jay Leno riding a motor cycle made by strapping a couple of wheels to a discarded helicopter turning engine. He said, there is turbo lag on both ends. You turn the throttle off, and then the engine thinks about it for a minute before spinning down.
I just ordered a new BMW and the salesman could not understand why I would insist on ordering one without Navigation and the upgraded entertainment system and wait four weeks rather than pick one off the lot with all the fancy (fancy to the car guys) stuff. I told him BMW should stick to what it knows, IC engines and car bodies and keep its nose clear of things it has no idea of what fancy is.
1. Electric motors have maximum torque at zero rpm
2. IC engines have peak torque at some 3000 rpm
But till Tesla came out with a car using electric motors to beat the big "performance" car makers BMW, Porche, Jaguar and Benz, they kept messing with making the IC engines more and more powerful, with more and more complicated transmissions, in their acceleration pissing contest called 0 to 60 time. They have seen diesel - electric locomotives completely dispensing with transmissions, and using pure electric motors to produce oodles of torque needed to get a a mile long freight train moving. They should have added a small 10 or 20 HP electric motor to their high end cars, to go from 0mph to 5 or 7 mph in 0.5 sec and go fro 7 to 60 in 2 sec flat with their enormous 8 cyl, 12 cyl engines producing 300 to 500 HP. They could have done it 25 or 30 years ago. The technology needed to do it existed then. I am not talking about super efficient hybrid or regenerative braking or any such thing. I am talking about the pissing contest all these car companies took to heart and fought hard, and where there was big prize money awaiting the winner. Still not a single one of them thought of using a small electric motor to supplement their IC engines. But no, they were set in their ways till they were forced it eat the dust of Tesla with a liberal helping of crow.
When it comes to electronics, they think they will make big profits here by the "walled garden" approach. All companies pack their GPS in bundles and try to charge 500$ to 1900$ to get the GPS. Then they want 100 to 200$ to upgrade the maps. Hello! Google maps and spoken driving directions are free. They think they are going to make money of these things?
It is not just the auto makers who lack imagination and innovation. The whole industry reeks of anti-competitive behavior and following the rut. The dealers are lobbying to prevent Tesla from selling the cars directly to the customers.
You give up in disgust, and fork over the money because, it is too late and the product is due and you blame yourself for picking this vendor.
They know the spec game inside out, right side left and top side down. They will implement a totally useless piece of software and when you complain they will insist they have implemented exactly what was in the original contract. That archaic grammar book by Wren and Martin is God's gift to them. They will endlessly argue what is meant by "shall" and "may" and "will". Most high school teachers in India still swear by this book as the ultimate authority in English grammar. So you will be forced to amend and correct the original specs. That will trigger all sorts of revised estimates and revised costs, and by the time you are done, you would have spent about 50% more than your highest bidder, taken twice as long, and gotten yourself software that does 50% of what you want, and probably 75% of what you wrote in the spec sheet but 100% of exactly what is in the spec sheet according to Messrs Wren and Martin as interpreted by Infosys.
One of my friends did his masters thesis project in code quality metrics. As part of it he wrote some code that will find the average LOC per function, code/comment ratio etc etc and spit out a letter grade. His thesis guru was a fiend. He fed the source code of this analysis code into itself. Poor guy graded himself a C-minus or something.
It is like code release. Perfection is the goal. Better than last release is the shipping criterion.
The check cashing services are also closely allied with the pay day loan services that charge interests that work out to something like 240% on annualized basis. These check cashing services are one of the main opponents of Wall street reform, they are very well organized and media savvy. I would not be surprised if this sudden interest in prepaid card fees and the media blitz is actually organized by these loan sharks.
It costs money to process these transactions. It is not as much as the banks charge as fees and the fees can be unreasonably high. But still that is not as bad as what these check cashing services charge. I would rather work towards giving the regular banks some tax incentives to provide these prepaid cards without fees when they were given as wages for people below poverty line. Killing the whole idea of prepaid cards or demonizing the employers who provide them will prove to be very counterproductive.
Please educate yourself about the plight of the poor at the hands of check cashing services on one hand, checking account with fees on the other hand, people not having fixed addresses or visas who can not open bank accounts in the first place before jumping on the band wagon denouncing the wage card with fees or the employers who provide them.
Exactly. These MBA morons are like the proverbial Railway exec who calculated that all the rolling stock of the company occupies just 10 miles. He declared all the remaining miles of track to be excess inventory and sold them for scrap. But sadly, he would have collected his bonus and would wrecking some other company by the time this company realizes what has been done to it.
Destroying two towers and damaging one building is nothing for a country the size and might of USA. Compared to devastation of WW-II Dresden, Berlin, Stalingrad, Tokyo, Nagasaki, Hiroshima etc, 9/11/2001 does not even qualify as a flea bite. But 9/11 made more headlines and more news than all the impact made by WW-II news in its day in the prized demographics of the terrorists.
The reaction of the media, and hence the public, is like an auto-immune reaction or allergy reaction. Some harmless pollen grains are detected in the bronchia and the body responds as though it is being invaded by the Ebola virus. So even after we deny the ability of terrorists to fly fully fueled planes into buildings, the media reaction for an attempted terrorist attack, no matter how successful, no matter how far fetched, would ensure the terrorists get their oxygen: publicity.
What we really need to prevent terrorist attacks is large doses of anti-histamine. Just ignore the terrorists, their attempts, their successes, their failures. Only when develop the collective ability to deny them publicity we will win the war on terrorism.
Music from 2 decades ago is mostly stuff that nobody listens anymore
That is not true. Most people continue to listen to the music they heard and loved during their teens, twenty something years. People trained in classical music listened to them before they turned 25. Very few people like the music they hear first time in their fifties and sixties. Looks like we start losing the ability to like fresh music starting from age 25-35 and by the time we reach 60s and 70s we totally lose it.
I wonder if the music executives pick the music that made superhits some 30 or 40 years ago, dress it up using modern arrangements, and disguise it well, but use the same foundation melody, scale and rhythm and try to create new hits.