>Bit sad, really. I think a product will sell >itself, if it's a good product.
Ahh, if only this were true. Time and time again, though, it's simply not the case; having a good product is important, but it's neither critical nor is it the MOST important aspect of surviving in the marketplace.
Some quick examples we should all know about:
95 vs (OS/2|Be|etc)
x86 vs (Alpha|Sparc|Mips|etc)
NT vs (Unix|Linux|VMS|etc)
And these are areas in which paid IT professionals are often doing the purchasing! It's those areas wherein people without experience, much less expertise, do the purchasing that marketing REALLY reigns supreme. Consumer electronics is just ripe for the picking of marketers.
A friend taking a business class at a university once told me about a survey which asked for an agree/disagree on this:
The first obligation of a company is to the stockholders. Any action which increases profits is always ethical and justified.
Well over half the class agreed wholeheartedly.
This culture of greed, more than anything else, is what bothers me about our future.
At first glance this looks very cool. One of those "Hey, why didn't I think of putting up a website like this" kind of things.
The policies look very generous (100MB web space, more if it seems justified, cgi-bin/, anon ftp) I just hope they don't get abused by those annoying folks that insist on putting warez and illegal mp3s on any free service they can.
Seems to me, there are 2 broad categorizations that can be drawn employers in need of techies.
Shops that hire everyone they can find
Shops that hire everyone that can do the job
If you're going into a job interview and you either get shuffled through a bunch of H.R. people or don't get challenged technically, you're most likely going to end up frustrated, bored, or both.
Those are the jobs taken by people who either can't do what they claim or are just in it for the money.
Personally, I'm not happy unless I'm working in a place where I have respect for my company and coworkers.
Laptop drives are built to really take some serious shocks. From IBM's specs for the Travelstar 4GN (approx same size)
Shock tolerance:
Operating: 150 G/2 ms
Non-Operating: 700 G/1 ms
That's pretty impressive to me. I wouldn't go around hitting it with a bat, but I'll bet there are components in the player which are more fragile than the hard drive.
I have a friend who built a prototype of a similar unit for a large company that shall remain nameless. He said the hard drive only had a duty cycle of 1-2% unless the user was actively shuffling songs, which is clearly a worst case scenario. Given a playlist of 5-6 songs deep and 32 MB of memory, I could see the duty cycle of the drive dropping to 0.1-0.5% in the best case...
I have a friend who is doing the same thing. I think it's a great idea. It's similar to posting source code to a algorithm. People can stop by and look at it, give their opinion, be inspired, write a new algorithm to do the job better or differently, comment on how crappy the routine is but not do anything about it, etc.
I think it's a great idea as well. It's amazing to me, though, how everything on slashdot gets credited in some way to open source, even when wildly inappropriate. Open source is a wonderful thing, but it is a descendent of this process, not an ancestor.
But the first step is reading it...by discounting wildly this man's writings as complete garbage, you are performing the role of a bad critic: Trying to drive away the audience because the writings do not meet all of your criterion for being "good" versus weighing the good with the bad.
I certainly don't want to give someone the impression that I can (or would even want to) be an absolute judge or filter to what they read. Nor do I want to suggest that the author be shunned in all future work. However, the critic's job is not always to evoke discussion, sometimes it is to warn others that something may be a waste of their time. I certainly don't think the author should be silenced...by no means! But at least in the U.S. it is right of speech which is guaranteed, not the right to be listened to.
Seems to me, there are 2 major reasons to write something and publish it to a wide audience
Communicating an idea which is new to your audience
Providing a better discussion/presentation of an old idea than previously existed.
IMHO, these writings are neither novel nor particularly well presented. The author seems to be caught up in the concept of his own genius that he comes across as a virtual Polonius: arrogant to the point of idiocy, speaking in flowery language, accomplishing nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
>itself, if it's a good product.
Ahh, if only this were true. Time and time again, though, it's simply not the case; having a good product is important, but it's neither critical nor is it the MOST important aspect of surviving in the marketplace.
Some quick examples we should all know about:
- 95 vs (OS/2|Be|etc)
- x86 vs (Alpha|Sparc|Mips|etc)
- NT vs (Unix|Linux|VMS|etc)
And these are areas in which paid IT professionals are often doing the purchasing! It's those areas wherein people without experience, much less expertise, do the purchasing that marketing REALLY reigns supreme. Consumer electronics is just ripe for the picking of marketers.A friend taking a business class at a university once told me about a survey which asked for an agree/disagree on this:
The first obligation of a company is to the stockholders. Any action which increases profits is always ethical and justified.
Well over half the class agreed wholeheartedly.
This culture of greed, more than anything else, is what bothers me about our future.
The policies look very generous (100MB web space, more if it seems justified, cgi-bin/, anon ftp) I just hope they don't get abused by those annoying folks that insist on putting warez and illegal mp3s on any free service they can.
- Shops that hire everyone they can find
- Shops that hire everyone that can do the job
If you're going into a job interview and you either get shuffled through a bunch of H.R. people or don't get challenged technically, you're most likely going to end up frustrated, bored, or both.Those are the jobs taken by people who either can't do what they claim or are just in it for the money.
Personally, I'm not happy unless I'm working in a place where I have respect for my company and coworkers.
Nor will there be...ever. Until the K7, AMD has never included multiprocessor support in their x86 designs.
Don't blame this one on the MB manufacturers!
- Shock tolerance:
- Operating: 150 G/2 ms
That's pretty impressive to me. I wouldn't go around hitting it with a bat, but I'll bet there are components in the player which are more fragile than the hard drive.Non-Operating: 700 G/1 ms
I have a friend who built a prototype of a similar unit for a large company that shall remain nameless. He said the hard drive only had a duty cycle of 1-2% unless the user was actively shuffling songs, which is clearly a worst case scenario. Given a playlist of 5-6 songs deep and 32 MB of memory, I could see the duty cycle of the drive dropping to 0.1-0.5% in the best case...
Doesn't take much battery to drive that.
I think it's a great idea as well. It's amazing to me, though, how everything on slashdot gets credited in some way to open source, even when wildly inappropriate. Open source is a wonderful thing, but it is a descendent of this process, not an ancestor.
But the first step is reading it...by discounting wildly this man's writings as complete garbage, you are performing the role of a bad critic: Trying to drive away the audience because the writings do not meet all of your criterion for being "good" versus weighing the good with the bad.
I certainly don't want to give someone the impression that I can (or would even want to) be an absolute judge or filter to what they read. Nor do I want to suggest that the author be shunned in all future work. However, the critic's job is not always to evoke discussion, sometimes it is to warn others that something may be a waste of their time. I certainly don't think the author should be silenced...by no means! But at least in the U.S. it is right of speech which is guaranteed, not the right to be listened to.
- Communicating an idea which is new to your audience
- Providing a better discussion/presentation of an old idea than previously existed.
IMHO, these writings are neither novel nor particularly well presented. The author seems to be caught up in the concept of his own genius that he comes across as a virtual Polonius: arrogant to the point of idiocy, speaking in flowery language, accomplishing nothing.