I'll have to disagree with you. I think Google has demonstrated success which is exceptional to the norm. As an outsider, to me it definitely appears to be due to hiring every single genius willing to work for them.
Well, ok, then explain Apple's recent success. You seemed to have completely glossed over that point.
I mean, look, you're welcome to believe whatever you like. But there's a few factors which make me have a tendency to call this crap: 1) Google own constant propaganda about how smart/driven/creative their own employees are. I have to wonder how much of your opinion you got via Google's numerous stealth ad campaigns. 2) Google isn't any more successful than any other new company of its age and field of business. That is to say, they're not doing any better than Microsoft was at the same stage of development, or Sun, or NeXT, etc. (Well, maybe NeXT.)
The success of individual products, by the way, is irrelevant to their overall success.
How do you judge their "overall success" then? Having a single product that monopolizes the field while constantly flailing in all other markets?
By your standards, Microsoft is the most successful company in history-- they have TWO monopolized fields, and they flail around in a lot more markets than Google does!
That argument would be more convincing if Windows 98 hadn't been made that way for the purpose of making the argument in the first place.
But it wasn't. It was all part of the ActiveContent/ActiveDesktop idea that Microsoft was working with at the time. That was Microsoft's vision of Windows. It turned out not to be very successful, so they dropped it for future versions.
But to claim that they *only* worked on it so that, years in the future, they could have some critical piece of testimony to use in a trial that hadn't even started yet? That's Slashdot paranoia at its finest, right there. You deserve a medal.
Here's another shocking revelation: MICROSOFT DOES NOT HAVE A TIME MACHINE.
Your web app is "highly profitable." Means nothing, except that it can call a library to open up an SSL socket to a credit card gateway.
No, actually, it's B2B. We've never touched a credit card.
You're making a shitload of assumptions here.
It doesn't mean it required skill to code, that it provides a great end user experience, that it's robust or scalable.
Well, it doesn't provide any kind of end user experience, because it's not designed for end users. I guess you could consider the reports our analysts produce as an "end-user experience", and in that case, all of our clients are pretty happy with them as we get lots of repeat business.
that it's robust or scalable.
It's robust because it's been running for 4 years now, getting whatever minor bugs were left sorted-out for ages. It's scalable enough for our needs-- I mean, obviously the product wouldn't work if installed on (say) eBay.com with sampling set to 100%, but that would be a stupid configuration anyway.
Without more information, I'm left suspecting that you may be taking credit for your marketing department's efforts.
You have absolutely no fucking clue what the app is, and every assumption you've made about it is about as wrong as could be. You'll forgive me if I think you're just full of shit.
As for your ability to outperform a PhD, well, what does that prove? Some poor schmuck who specialized in computer vision systems, gets his ego mulched by the hard-assed bitch that is today's job market, winds up in some job where he's using none of his university training, but is expected to make the company website sit up and bark like a seal. After years of working on that in his spare time (while juggling at least five other hats within the company), the boss gives up and calls in a domain expert.
No, he *is* the domain expert. He's just utterly hopeless at turning ideas into products (as are most other PhD's I've met.)
The problem is that the company values his education even though he's demonstrably hopeless at creating profitable products-- the ONE thing the company actually needs. This is ridiculously retarded.
I'm not saying all PhDs are as hopeless as the ones at our company. I'm saying that your level of education has absolutely zero bearing on your potential value to a company. Zero.
In other words, the anecdote proves nothing about the relative merits of college vs. "the real world," but says a lot about the advantages of working inside your field of expertise.
How did you come up with this field of expertise shit? His PhD is exactly in the field we're working in. My "training" is a couple quarter of database classes, then playing around with JavaScript and C# on my own free time. If anything, *I'm* the one outside my field here.
Where did you come up with this ass-pulled assumption that he's working outside his field? Why do you keep harping on it as if it were a fact, instead of something you pulled from your ass? God, reading your post is infuriating.
These exchanges are generally stupid, because everyone has an ego to defend.
And it got significantly more stupid when you started typing that post.
I went to college, got a CS BS, and now feel obliged to defend the merits of that decision. You went straight into the job market,
No I didn't. Did you even read my post? I dropped-out of college, I didn't go straight into the job market.
Look, I'm not saying your BS is useless, or that you're a bad programmer. What I'm saying is that your (or mine, or a PhD's) level of education has no bearing on your value to the company. None whatsoever.
The sooner companies learn this, the better. They'll stop giving massive amounts of money to unqualified retards who happen to have the right stamp on a piece of paper, and talented workers who are currently being ignored will have an opportunity to prove their worth.
It was true when they said it, about Windows 98. Windows 98 couldn't (for all practical purposes) be run without IE-- even drawing the desktop depended on it. Moreover, there would have been no way for MS to remove the IE integration within the ridiculous time frame the court was asking about. (90 days, if I recall correctly.)
Here's a secret, one the article writer didn't tell you, that I'm about to reveal. You may want to sit down for this... ready? Ok, here goes:
THINGS CHANGE OVER TIME
Shocking, I know.
The reason IE isn't integrated into Windows anymore is because every version of Windows, from XP to 7, has been working to remove the integration that was previously present.
And you know what? IE aside, a HTML renderer of some sort *is* required by Windows-- just as it's required by OS X, most Linux distributions, and Chrome OS. So if you take IE to mean "iexplore.exe", then no it's no longer required. If you take it to mean "the Trident HTML rendering component", then yes it is required-- exactly as required as WebKit is in OS X.
One thing, though, is clear from Google's example: hiring a huge number of incredibly well-educated people does, apparently, also work.
Google has a few good products, and a lot of flops. Do you put Orkut or Google Buzz in your "works" category? Do you think Blogger is an innovative, quality piece of software?
Google's doing well, yes. But they're not doing *that* much better than other companies in their industry. And, figure this one out, one of the most successful of these companies (Apple in the last decade) is run mostly by marketing!!
I'm a college drop-out, and I just finished the new version of our highly profitable webapp. Not only am I one of the most respected and skilled programmers here (if I do say so myself-- had my employee review today, so forgive me if I sound like an ass!), but I have a much greater ability to interact with clients than the people who spent ages in college. I get emails from recruiters every week.
And to add icing on the cake, the first version of this webapp was "designed" by a PhD who, despite several years of working on it, never got the damned thing finished enough to be used on a client's site.
There's no relation between level-of-education and programming ability. As an added benefit, when you hire people who haven't spent as many years in school, they're more likely to be well-rounded. In my opinion, of course.
All I am saying, is that because of these huge capacity drives, I tend to go for at least raid 1.
RAID1 won't help you if you accidentally tell the computer to delete your whole collection. You're better off having two separate drives, and just writing a backup script to copy the contents of A to B every night at 3:00 AM or so.
(Use rsync, or robocopy on Windows, so you don't cause undue wear-and-tear on the drives. I actually do this using the new version of Mozy, which supports it, and also simultaneously uploads your data to their cloud-based storage. Highly recommended.)
I would never trade OSX's column browser view for the Classic Finder's spatial view. I find it to be MUCH more efficient.
Fine.
But the two are not mutually-exclusive. Other than you, who says you can only have one view implemented at a time? (Hell, Classic had several spatial views and one non-spatial view by OS 9, all working side-by-side.) You're arguing against a total strawman right now, one you pulled out of your ass.
In fact, there's really *no* way to use a spatial file browser at the moment-- GNOME's comes pretty close in the default configuration. So if anything, my need for a spatial interface (of which there are zero) overrides your desire of a column-based interface (of which there are tons.)
Also, usability research shows empirically that the column-based browsing mode is inferior to the spatial mode. It requires tons of rote memorization to accomplish tasks you could use spatial memory for in Mac Classic. You are welcome to like it better, but the majority of people will not. That's scientific fact.
The funny thing is that the geeks that make software for everybody else are the only people on Earth who like rote memorization, which is why the interfaces they produce (like the column browser, made by NeXT geeks with no access to Apple's usability labs) are almost universally hated among the populace. The sooner developers *realize* this, the better off we'll all be! The problem is, at the moment, we're actually going backwards.
(Actually, as another poster mentioned, Microsoft is doing a better job at usability right now than Apple is. The Office 2007 interface shows that they're willing to take risks to move the field forward-- which is huge! You may not like the ribbon interface, but like the spatial interface of old, it's measurably better than the other way.)
I used to play FarmVille, and it astonished me the way it could demolish my
I've never played Farmville, but most crappy Flash performance is Flash developers who poll for input (bad) instead of setting up callbacks (good).
I'd love to blame Adobe, but it's not really Flash's fault that people can write code like: "while(true){waitforinput();}" You can write that shitty code in almost every language.
but as a general desktop OS it's definitely one of the better
True.
and sure beats previous incarnations of Mac OS
False. OS X's Finder is significantly poorer than Mac Classic's Finder, and that's after a decade of development. (Imagine where the Classic version would be with another decade to perfect it...) The thing, the Classic UI wasn't just a product, it was a *philosophy* with the aforementioned HIG as its Bible... it wasn't just about Macs, it was about usability specifically, how to adapt a software product to a human being.
(A fundamental point: humans have evolved for millions of years to be the way we are. If humans are naturally better at something, say spatial memory over rote memory, you should make use of it. Meanwhile, nearly all computer UIs still rely on rote memorization to some extent.)
The real problem is that most people using Macs now never used Mac Classic, so they simply do not know what a truly great UI experience looks like. They're coming from Windows-- sure, OS X is (arguably) still better than Windows. But it's not *nearly* as better as it was in 1998. Not by a long shot.
(Just like if you say a spatial file browser is great, people say "no it sucked, it was in Windows 95." It sucked because Microsoft screwed up the implementation, not because it's a bad idea.)
And to clarify before the nitpickers come on: I'm just talking about the UI design. Yes, I know they multitasked poorly. Yes, I know they crashed due to no memory protection. But the UI was brilliant, and still has not been replicated in any other product since.
Likewise, I found out that the majority of postal routes are about 25 miles. This is the IDEAL situation for companies that want to offer electric cars. Create a CJ type vehicle that gets about 40-50 miles on a charge (radio, heater, ac).
First of all, the USPS already runs tons of alternate-fuel vehicles.
Secondly, the cost of gas is minuscule compared to the cost of labor. The budget problem is from labor costs, so unless those cars drive themselves and have long bendy robot arms that can reach mailboxes, your alternate fuel ideas are useless for solving the current problem.
It is really sad how little thought goes into solutions here.
You shouldn't type stuff like this. It's so hard to resist making the obvious cheap-shot...
Your post is pretty much entirely wrong. Not sure how you got modded up as "informative."
You do know the USPS is given a monopoly on first class mail deliver to ensure rural service is as good as urban service, correct?
Removing the monopoly doesn't remove the USPS, and doesn't change their mandate to deliver to rural addresses. The worst-case is that rural addresses get the same service they do now while urban addresses get cheaper, faster service. That's the *worst* case scenario.
Otherwise, you'd end up with what we have for broadband: Some options in urban/suburban areas, no options in rural areas due to the unprovability of servicing said areas.
In the vast majority of the US, broadband service is a local monopoly legislated by the local government. So... you're entirely wrong here, currently broadband works more like the USPS monopoly than the free market.
Did anyone else think that we really have to thank the Mozilla team for this? Without Firefox, none of this would have happened. Wed'd still use IE6.
Firefox tends do go a bit downwards in quality, lately. But I don't care. Thank you, Mozilla team! Every single one of you. Everyone who installed and promoted it. And the team who made the great logo and CI, that's so fashionable that non-geek women put in on their t-shirts.
And if Netscape hadn't screwed the pooch in the first place, IE wouldn't have obtained monopoly position, and Microsoft wouldn't have been able to stall on one version for 5 years without losing marketshare. Remember, Netscape is the one who said, "competing with Microsoft is *hard!* Let's just give up!"
And it's great that the Mozilla team was able to take the baton and run with it, but they also wasted years on an idiotic suite-type product when it was obvious to everybody that what people wanted was *just* a web browser. Imagine how much time was wasted by their adding in the kitchen sink before Firefox took over their development attention. So Mozilla screwed the pooch there.
And there's also the issue that the standards were such shit at the time IE and Firefox were being developed that IE's biggest crimes are basically: 1) wanting to implement a standard before it's implementation was clarified from the vagueness that is all W3C 1.0 drafts, and 2) wanting their browser to be backwards-compatible with pages made for the previous version of their browser. So there's the W3C screwing the pooch... (with a minor assist from Microsoft)
I don't know if you've noticed, but the standards are pretty shit. (Well, HTML5 is much better.) All browsers venture outside of the standards for various things, so it's more important to be cross-browser compatible (i.e. venture outside of the standards in the same direction the other guys are going) than it is to be strictly standards-compliant.
It's obvious to everybody that the system is broken, the only real debate is over how to fix it. I don't think you'll find a single person, not paid directly by the insurance industry, who supports leaving everything the way it is now.
I would also point out that saying they are the same because they have the same core, is like saying Win2K and Win7 are the same OS because they have the NT core. As the FLOSSies will tell you there can be a vastly different experience while keeping an OS core, for example with Linux you can have everything from an embedded minimal OS with nothing but a couple of CLI tools to a fully blown 3d desktop, all while having the same kernel "core" at the base.
Maybe eventually Slashdot geeks will realize that nobody in the real world gives a flying fuck what the kernel is, as long as it reasonably supports popular technologies. Other than that, the OS kernel is an implementation detail only, and entirely abstracted-away by the rest of the software.
Or, in other terms: the quality of the UI and applications are a thousand times more important to the success of a project than the quality of the underlying language or kernel.
(I make an exception for Java, since it's my educated opinion that it's impossible to make a quality GUI in Java.)
I suggest the problem is related to control over charges. Car mechanics have a job with similar complexity to what doctors face.
You lost me, buddy. If you had used Airline Mechanics, then I'd perhaps give you a pass because:
1) The machines they service are much more complex
2) The stakes are much lower-- if they screw up, even in a minor way, hundreds of people could die. (Whereas an auto mechanic could cause at most half-a-dozen deaths by screwing up, and that's not likely at all since cars that don't function properly just kind of sit there instead of impacting the ground.)
Software engineers often face a problem much more complex. (How many "surgeries" require several weeks to solve a single-line bug?)
Again: the stakes are lower for the vast, vast majority of software developers.
I think what you're doing is basically saying, "hey, I know a couple hard things-- I know how to fix cars, and I know how to engineer software" and you're translating that experience to doctors. I mean, hey, you're a smart guy, right? You could do that surgeon's job.
But it's not the same thing at all, and I'm not buying your arguments.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll have to disagree with you. I think Google has demonstrated success which is exceptional to the norm. As an outsider, to me it definitely appears to be due to hiring every single genius willing to work for them.
Well, ok, then explain Apple's recent success. You seemed to have completely glossed over that point.
I mean, look, you're welcome to believe whatever you like. But there's a few factors which make me have a tendency to call this crap:
1) Google own constant propaganda about how smart/driven/creative their own employees are. I have to wonder how much of your opinion you got via Google's numerous stealth ad campaigns.
2) Google isn't any more successful than any other new company of its age and field of business. That is to say, they're not doing any better than Microsoft was at the same stage of development, or Sun, or NeXT, etc. (Well, maybe NeXT.)
The success of individual products, by the way, is irrelevant to their overall success.
How do you judge their "overall success" then? Having a single product that monopolizes the field while constantly flailing in all other markets?
By your standards, Microsoft is the most successful company in history-- they have TWO monopolized fields, and they flail around in a lot more markets than Google does!
That argument would be more convincing if Windows 98 hadn't been made that way for the purpose of making the argument in the first place.
But it wasn't. It was all part of the ActiveContent/ActiveDesktop idea that Microsoft was working with at the time. That was Microsoft's vision of Windows. It turned out not to be very successful, so they dropped it for future versions.
But to claim that they *only* worked on it so that, years in the future, they could have some critical piece of testimony to use in a trial that hadn't even started yet? That's Slashdot paranoia at its finest, right there. You deserve a medal.
Here's another shocking revelation: MICROSOFT DOES NOT HAVE A TIME MACHINE.
Your web app is "highly profitable." Means nothing, except that it can call a library to open up an SSL socket to a credit card gateway.
No, actually, it's B2B. We've never touched a credit card.
You're making a shitload of assumptions here.
It doesn't mean it required skill to code, that it provides a great end user experience, that it's robust or scalable.
Well, it doesn't provide any kind of end user experience, because it's not designed for end users. I guess you could consider the reports our analysts produce as an "end-user experience", and in that case, all of our clients are pretty happy with them as we get lots of repeat business.
that it's robust or scalable.
It's robust because it's been running for 4 years now, getting whatever minor bugs were left sorted-out for ages. It's scalable enough for our needs-- I mean, obviously the product wouldn't work if installed on (say) eBay.com with sampling set to 100%, but that would be a stupid configuration anyway.
Without more information, I'm left suspecting that you may be taking credit for your marketing department's efforts.
You have absolutely no fucking clue what the app is, and every assumption you've made about it is about as wrong as could be. You'll forgive me if I think you're just full of shit.
As for your ability to outperform a PhD, well, what does that prove? Some poor schmuck who specialized in computer vision systems, gets his ego mulched by the hard-assed bitch that is today's job market, winds up in some job where he's using none of his university training, but is expected to make the company website sit up and bark like a seal. After years of working on that in his spare time (while juggling at least five other hats within the company), the boss gives up and calls in a domain expert.
No, he *is* the domain expert. He's just utterly hopeless at turning ideas into products (as are most other PhD's I've met.)
The problem is that the company values his education even though he's demonstrably hopeless at creating profitable products-- the ONE thing the company actually needs. This is ridiculously retarded.
I'm not saying all PhDs are as hopeless as the ones at our company. I'm saying that your level of education has absolutely zero bearing on your potential value to a company. Zero.
In other words, the anecdote proves nothing about the relative merits of college vs. "the real world," but says a lot about the advantages of working inside your field of expertise.
How did you come up with this field of expertise shit? His PhD is exactly in the field we're working in. My "training" is a couple quarter of database classes, then playing around with JavaScript and C# on my own free time. If anything, *I'm* the one outside my field here.
Where did you come up with this ass-pulled assumption that he's working outside his field? Why do you keep harping on it as if it were a fact, instead of something you pulled from your ass? God, reading your post is infuriating.
These exchanges are generally stupid, because everyone has an ego to defend.
And it got significantly more stupid when you started typing that post.
I went to college, got a CS BS, and now feel obliged to defend the merits of that decision. You went straight into the job market,
No I didn't. Did you even read my post? I dropped-out of college, I didn't go straight into the job market.
Look, I'm not saying your BS is useless, or that you're a bad programmer. What I'm saying is that your (or mine, or a PhD's) level of education has no bearing on your value to the company. None whatsoever.
The sooner companies learn this, the better. They'll stop giving massive amounts of money to unqualified retards who happen to have the right stamp on a piece of paper, and talented workers who are currently being ignored will have an opportunity to prove their worth.
It was true when they said it, about Windows 98. Windows 98 couldn't (for all practical purposes) be run without IE-- even drawing the desktop depended on it. Moreover, there would have been no way for MS to remove the IE integration within the ridiculous time frame the court was asking about. (90 days, if I recall correctly.)
Here's a secret, one the article writer didn't tell you, that I'm about to reveal. You may want to sit down for this... ready? Ok, here goes:
THINGS CHANGE OVER TIME
Shocking, I know.
The reason IE isn't integrated into Windows anymore is because every version of Windows, from XP to 7, has been working to remove the integration that was previously present.
And you know what? IE aside, a HTML renderer of some sort *is* required by Windows-- just as it's required by OS X, most Linux distributions, and Chrome OS. So if you take IE to mean "iexplore.exe", then no it's no longer required. If you take it to mean "the Trident HTML rendering component", then yes it is required-- exactly as required as WebKit is in OS X.
One thing, though, is clear from Google's example: hiring a huge number of incredibly well-educated people does, apparently, also work.
Google has a few good products, and a lot of flops. Do you put Orkut or Google Buzz in your "works" category? Do you think Blogger is an innovative, quality piece of software?
Google's doing well, yes. But they're not doing *that* much better than other companies in their industry. And, figure this one out, one of the most successful of these companies (Apple in the last decade) is run mostly by marketing!!
I'm a college drop-out, and I just finished the new version of our highly profitable webapp. Not only am I one of the most respected and skilled programmers here (if I do say so myself-- had my employee review today, so forgive me if I sound like an ass!), but I have a much greater ability to interact with clients than the people who spent ages in college. I get emails from recruiters every week.
And to add icing on the cake, the first version of this webapp was "designed" by a PhD who, despite several years of working on it, never got the damned thing finished enough to be used on a client's site.
There's no relation between level-of-education and programming ability. As an added benefit, when you hire people who haven't spent as many years in school, they're more likely to be well-rounded. In my opinion, of course.
Would Google's index (and infrastructure) be as good as it is if they relied on high schoolers?
Umm...no.
1) Prove it. You can't just assert things and expect people to believe it-- you have to at least tell us *why* you think the answer is no.
2) 99.9% of code needed is not Google's index.
and it probably requires a special driver to work through USB (at least on winslow systems).
Why do you say that? NTFS supports drives up to 256 terabytes.
All I am saying, is that because of these huge capacity drives, I tend to go for at least raid 1.
RAID1 won't help you if you accidentally tell the computer to delete your whole collection. You're better off having two separate drives, and just writing a backup script to copy the contents of A to B every night at 3:00 AM or so.
(Use rsync, or robocopy on Windows, so you don't cause undue wear-and-tear on the drives. I actually do this using the new version of Mozy, which supports it, and also simultaneously uploads your data to their cloud-based storage. Highly recommended.)
I would never trade OSX's column browser view for the Classic Finder's spatial view. I find it to be MUCH more efficient.
Fine.
But the two are not mutually-exclusive. Other than you, who says you can only have one view implemented at a time? (Hell, Classic had several spatial views and one non-spatial view by OS 9, all working side-by-side.) You're arguing against a total strawman right now, one you pulled out of your ass.
In fact, there's really *no* way to use a spatial file browser at the moment-- GNOME's comes pretty close in the default configuration. So if anything, my need for a spatial interface (of which there are zero) overrides your desire of a column-based interface (of which there are tons.)
Also, usability research shows empirically that the column-based browsing mode is inferior to the spatial mode. It requires tons of rote memorization to accomplish tasks you could use spatial memory for in Mac Classic. You are welcome to like it better, but the majority of people will not. That's scientific fact.
The funny thing is that the geeks that make software for everybody else are the only people on Earth who like rote memorization, which is why the interfaces they produce (like the column browser, made by NeXT geeks with no access to Apple's usability labs) are almost universally hated among the populace. The sooner developers *realize* this, the better off we'll all be! The problem is, at the moment, we're actually going backwards.
(Actually, as another poster mentioned, Microsoft is doing a better job at usability right now than Apple is. The Office 2007 interface shows that they're willing to take risks to move the field forward-- which is huge! You may not like the ribbon interface, but like the spatial interface of old, it's measurably better than the other way.)
Wow, good job with that less-than sign, Slashdot. Well, you get the gist of the reply.
I used to play FarmVille, and it astonished me the way it could demolish my
I've never played Farmville, but most crappy Flash performance is Flash developers who poll for input (bad) instead of setting up callbacks (good).
I'd love to blame Adobe, but it's not really Flash's fault that people can write code like: "while(true){waitforinput();}" You can write that shitty code in almost every language.
but as a general desktop OS it's definitely one of the better
True.
and sure beats previous incarnations of Mac OS
False. OS X's Finder is significantly poorer than Mac Classic's Finder, and that's after a decade of development. (Imagine where the Classic version would be with another decade to perfect it...) The thing, the Classic UI wasn't just a product, it was a *philosophy* with the aforementioned HIG as its Bible... it wasn't just about Macs, it was about usability specifically, how to adapt a software product to a human being.
(A fundamental point: humans have evolved for millions of years to be the way we are. If humans are naturally better at something, say spatial memory over rote memory, you should make use of it. Meanwhile, nearly all computer UIs still rely on rote memorization to some extent.)
The real problem is that most people using Macs now never used Mac Classic, so they simply do not know what a truly great UI experience looks like. They're coming from Windows-- sure, OS X is (arguably) still better than Windows. But it's not *nearly* as better as it was in 1998. Not by a long shot.
(Just like if you say a spatial file browser is great, people say "no it sucked, it was in Windows 95." It sucked because Microsoft screwed up the implementation, not because it's a bad idea.)
And to clarify before the nitpickers come on: I'm just talking about the UI design. Yes, I know they multitasked poorly. Yes, I know they crashed due to no memory protection. But the UI was brilliant, and still has not been replicated in any other product since.
Amen, brother. Now if only the drooling Apple fans would come to that realization...
Likewise, I found out that the majority of postal routes are about 25 miles. This is the IDEAL situation for companies that want to offer electric cars. Create a CJ type vehicle that gets about 40-50 miles on a charge (radio, heater, ac).
First of all, the USPS already runs tons of alternate-fuel vehicles.
Secondly, the cost of gas is minuscule compared to the cost of labor. The budget problem is from labor costs, so unless those cars drive themselves and have long bendy robot arms that can reach mailboxes, your alternate fuel ideas are useless for solving the current problem.
It is really sad how little thought goes into solutions here.
You shouldn't type stuff like this. It's so hard to resist making the obvious cheap-shot...
Your post is pretty much entirely wrong. Not sure how you got modded up as "informative."
You do know the USPS is given a monopoly on first class mail deliver to ensure rural service is as good as urban service, correct?
Removing the monopoly doesn't remove the USPS, and doesn't change their mandate to deliver to rural addresses. The worst-case is that rural addresses get the same service they do now while urban addresses get cheaper, faster service. That's the *worst* case scenario.
Otherwise, you'd end up with what we have for broadband: Some options in urban/suburban areas, no options in rural areas due to the unprovability of servicing said areas.
In the vast majority of the US, broadband service is a local monopoly legislated by the local government. So... you're entirely wrong here, currently broadband works more like the USPS monopoly than the free market.
So have your packages delivered to work. What's the big deal?
Did anyone else think that we really have to thank the Mozilla team for this? Without Firefox, none of this would have happened. Wed'd still use IE6.
Firefox tends do go a bit downwards in quality, lately. But I don't care. Thank you, Mozilla team! Every single one of you. Everyone who installed and promoted it. And the team who made the great logo and CI, that's so fashionable that non-geek women put in on their t-shirts.
And if Netscape hadn't screwed the pooch in the first place, IE wouldn't have obtained monopoly position, and Microsoft wouldn't have been able to stall on one version for 5 years without losing marketshare. Remember, Netscape is the one who said, "competing with Microsoft is *hard!* Let's just give up!"
And it's great that the Mozilla team was able to take the baton and run with it, but they also wasted years on an idiotic suite-type product when it was obvious to everybody that what people wanted was *just* a web browser. Imagine how much time was wasted by their adding in the kitchen sink before Firefox took over their development attention. So Mozilla screwed the pooch there.
And there's also the issue that the standards were such shit at the time IE and Firefox were being developed that IE's biggest crimes are basically: 1) wanting to implement a standard before it's implementation was clarified from the vagueness that is all W3C 1.0 drafts, and 2) wanting their browser to be backwards-compatible with pages made for the previous version of their browser. So there's the W3C screwing the pooch... (with a minor assist from Microsoft)
So, you know, there's all that.
I don't know if you've noticed, but the standards are pretty shit. (Well, HTML5 is much better.) All browsers venture outside of the standards for various things, so it's more important to be cross-browser compatible (i.e. venture outside of the standards in the same direction the other guys are going) than it is to be strictly standards-compliant.
On the one hand: female-dominated work environment.
On the other hand: heavy use of IBM and Siemens shit (including Lotus Notes)
You couldn't pay me enough to go back to supporting Lotus Notes.
I've seen that movie. Turns out it was Charlton Heston.
It's obvious to everybody that the system is broken, the only real debate is over how to fix it. I don't think you'll find a single person, not paid directly by the insurance industry, who supports leaving everything the way it is now.
I would also point out that saying they are the same because they have the same core, is like saying Win2K and Win7 are the same OS because they have the NT core. As the FLOSSies will tell you there can be a vastly different experience while keeping an OS core, for example with Linux you can have everything from an embedded minimal OS with nothing but a couple of CLI tools to a fully blown 3d desktop, all while having the same kernel "core" at the base.
Maybe eventually Slashdot geeks will realize that nobody in the real world gives a flying fuck what the kernel is, as long as it reasonably supports popular technologies. Other than that, the OS kernel is an implementation detail only, and entirely abstracted-away by the rest of the software.
Or, in other terms: the quality of the UI and applications are a thousand times more important to the success of a project than the quality of the underlying language or kernel.
(I make an exception for Java, since it's my educated opinion that it's impossible to make a quality GUI in Java.)
I suggest the problem is related to control over charges. Car mechanics have a job with similar complexity to what doctors face.
You lost me, buddy. If you had used Airline Mechanics, then I'd perhaps give you a pass because:
1) The machines they service are much more complex
2) The stakes are much lower-- if they screw up, even in a minor way, hundreds of people could die. (Whereas an auto mechanic could cause at most half-a-dozen deaths by screwing up, and that's not likely at all since cars that don't function properly just kind of sit there instead of impacting the ground.)
Software engineers often face a problem much more complex. (How many "surgeries" require several weeks to solve a single-line bug?)
Again: the stakes are lower for the vast, vast majority of software developers.
I think what you're doing is basically saying, "hey, I know a couple hard things-- I know how to fix cars, and I know how to engineer software" and you're translating that experience to doctors. I mean, hey, you're a smart guy, right? You could do that surgeon's job.
But it's not the same thing at all, and I'm not buying your arguments.
I see people with their $200 PalmPilots
You can see into the PAST!? You should join the X-Men!