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The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business
An anonymous reader writes "Business 2.0's fourth annual review of the most shameful, dishonest, and just plain stupid moments of the past year. Yes, SCO is represented..."
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That's the dumbest moment in advertising? I thought that commercial was hilarious!!
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
IBM contracting out DOS to Microsoft...and letting Microsoft keep ownership.
If IBM had played hardball and demanded ownership, more than likely Gates would have caved. The world would be much different today, that's for sure.
No butterflys. The Rolling Stones wouldn't have sold out...ok, maybe that would still have happened.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
And since when is it sexist to show women playing football? Sure, they were in lingere, but that just shows off the beauty of nature. What do people have against nature? Why are people so damn puritanical in this country?
Are we even allowed to have fun anymore?
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Articles like this are cute and give us a chance to snicker at idiotic behaviour, but the worst business decisions of (pick a year) should really be looking at and even emphasising the deeply amoral and criminal behaviour of some companies. Consider Coca-Cola, in India: They're draining ground water, bottling and reselling it, and dumping the purification byproducts onto the desert they've created where fertile farmland once stood. A few years ago, Nike (and then everyone else) ran into issues with sweatshop labour, but we don't hear about these things anymore, and they're still going on!
Bottom line, I'd like to see a magazine doing an article on the REAL abuses of businesses, and not just their silly little dumb decisions.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Who's up for a web site that catalogs this sort of behaviour, easy to search, for use during recruitment?
1) It's none of your business.
2) If the government were doing it, how would you feel?
3) The "second chance" is the key to our theories that people can be reformed.
4) Your proposed system would "convict" people outside of a court of law, possibly making their lives miserable with no justification other then hearsay.
5) Isn't this what references are supposed to be for?
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
Hate to pop in, but you guys dont seem to have used servers before. It DOES matter to put a server on carpet, for a few reasons.
1. Static electricity is a potential problem. You should have have carpet in a server room, or a workbench area. But this is a minor point.
2. Heat. This is a real problem. Many servers (including many of my older IBM servers) have planer boards in the bottom of the cases. For those of you in Rio Linda, the planer board is where the cpu and drm (voltage regulator) is mounted. This is the hottest portion of the server case by a long shot. These system exhaust the hot air at the bottom back and/or bottom of the base. This is why they have pedestals, to keep the bottom of the case raised slightly to aid airflow
Funny thing, if you HAVE to put this type of server flat on carpet, the smartest thing you can do is to put them upside down, so the tech that installed them was probably doing the best with what he had. No components inside the computer cares if it is upside down. Hard drives and fans work just fine upside down, and most fans work fine at 90 degrees as well. (old systems used to mount HDs this way, I don't personally recommend it for a 15k drive)
If you have any doubts as to what is stated herein, go take any old computer, lie it directly on the carpet with the normally hottest surface down (usually top or bottom, depending on airflow configuration) and let it lie there a few hours. Lift and feel. The carpet acts as an insulator, and WILL lead to premature failure. Remember, the average server has been running continuously for a couple years, not just a couple hours.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
The problem I have with this - as I expect most people do - is that it's a double standard. If my wife wants to contact me at work, that's verbotten. If there's an emergency at work after hours, the company expects to be able to count on my personal resources (phone, computer, time, etc.) because, well, because...
If the company has no loyalty to me, if they refuse to take my side, then I'll refuse to take theirs. On the other hand, if they have the common decency to allow reasonable use of company resources for personal reasons, then I'll be more than happy to allow them to make reasonable use of my personal resources for company reasons.
I'd say the key word here is reasonable. If the company is willing to be reasonable with me, I'm willing to be reasonable with them - and vice versa. The company often gets to define what's reasonable; in the above case, based on the company's attitude towards employee use of company resources, I think that a reasonable response to your boss calling you at home would be to slap them with a cease-and-desist order for harassment.
In any case, while I think the above was a good example of a pretty unreasonable policy (at least for a salaried employee), you're right - at least it was it writing.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9