Accurate numbers? Ha! Their whole game is to make it difficult to see how much you'll actually be spending. By the time the initial bill is all sorted and you're locked in for two years, you're stuck. The second bill arrives and you get sticker shock from all the fees and taxes that weren't very apparent when you signed up, but by then you have no remedy. Stay mad for 1.9 years, find new provider, repeat cycle.
What I came hear to say is a variation on this: ASK THE TESTERS! If your organization is large enough to have full-time system testers separate from the developers, they revel in finding obscure bugs and bringing them back to the dev team. They learn very quickly whose new code is bulletproof and whose is not. And they definitely know, once they've uncovered a bug, whose fixes stay fixed and whose just cause more bugs downstream. They don't a flying fig about lines of code, time spent on Slashdot, or anything else except 1) does the developer's code do what it's supposed to and 2) does the developer treat the testers with professional respect.
You are absolutely spot-on, in every point. This IS how it's all going to shake out, it's only a question of how much resistance people will put up along the way because driving is supposed to be fun. I for one look forward to a world of smoothly running, quiet roads, in which I summon my car (or maybe a clean auto-Uber) then simply zone out/read books/catch up on my Twitter feed via the chip in my head/nap until I arrive at my destination. We already have the expensive part of the infrastructure here (namely, roads reaching every conceivable non-wilderness destination in the USA), the rest is just engines, tires and software!
Amen. I'm with Republic and rarely pay more than $20/month. In a normal month I'm on wifi ~80% of the time, and it's flawless. Once, when I was traveling a lot during the month, I paid nearly $28.
I love my phone, use all my apps and services as much as I want, video is snappy, and the expense is barely a blip. Every month it gets harder to fathom why anyone in the USA is still left on the major carriers.
(Anti-disclaimer: I'm not associated with Republic or any other cell service company in any way, except as a current customer of Republic and former customer of Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, Cellular One, and others I've mercifully forgotten about).
Right! Alternative headline: "Poorly-Running, Generally Dysfunctional Companies Also Overpay For Executive Talent".
These smart CEOs (and most of them are intelligent, or at least cunning) just might be extracting more money from companies that are in chaos anyway, because they can.
As was the sudden, inexplicable regurgitation of an eyeball! (Which the actor deftly passed off as a sort of cough-gone-wrong spit-take).
As in "Da Da Da," by Trio?
Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh.
Absolutely the way. Only drawback is when your S.O. asks something like "what's our password for [some random low-value login like vacation hold for milk delivery]?" and then you have to endure the eye-rolls as you boot up another machine, log into KeepAss, and then start out... "OK, ummm... upper-case T, lower-case g, ampersand... no, that's the 'and' sign thingie on the 7 key, or it would be on the 7 if you didn't have a touch-screen, lower-case w, less-than sign, yeah the one pointing left, the number eight, the letter o, or actually that might be zero, let me paste it in somewhere else so I can tell the difference, OK it is an o, but upper-case o, um OK, where were we, OK then... backslash, no, that's forward slash, the other one... good... now, lower-case n, upper-case h, yeah I know, no worries, only 18 more characters to go..."
Very secure though!
Or a very thick coating of solidified smog particles if you drive it around Mexico City or Beijing. Maybe that's a win, if they remove more air pollution than they spew out!
"Humans' 'Droids Humanize Droids!" - Details after the jump...
Right, let's lift each other up, everyone's got enough troubles without enduring unprofessional insults at work! Coding at any larger scale is a team effort.
Though to stick with the theme here, it can turn ugly... "Wow, great job on the Client X code! We're promoting you to Project Manager!" NNOOooooo....
I hear wave after wave of immigrants keep arriving...
But this is a sunk cost.
Even so, on this whole investment, they must be... underwater.
The project is probably run by someone young, who is still... wet behind the ears.
Sorry. I'm just... fishing for karma. I'll say goodbye now... *waves*
Yeah, he was just panda-ing to the masses. (That's ursine to stop reading comments).
If you are safely hurtling along an Interstate at 70 mph, in a car whose systems required literally millions of hours of engineering, on a road surface that was also heavily engineered and painstakingly built by hundreds of workers using millions of dollars worth of large equipment... then congratulations, you've already ceded control of life-critical operations to numerous big, opaque corporations.
You're trusting your life to GM, Toyota, and the manufacturers of all the cars around you, that they won't spin out of control and kill you. You're trusting the road designers and government regulators that the surface won't suddenly buckle or turn. You're also trusting all your fellow bozos on the road not to be drunk, sleepy, texting or spilling coffee in their laps. Looking at the odds of what causes road deaths, I'm not that unhappy about extending further trust of my life to the relatively capable hands of auto company engineers.
"I will make no bargains with terrorist hardware." -- Peter da Silva
