Care to cite the links between the KKK and the Republican party. Apparently I'm uneducated since I failed to find any.
Don't try to pretend I said something I didn't. I said "the KKK crowd" rather than just "the KKK" quite deliberately; there aren't really any links between any political party and the KKK itself any more, because except for a few die-hards the KKK as an organization has been pretty much defunct for decades -- thanks in large part to the efforts of Democratic Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and Democratic Attorneys General Kennedy, Katzenbach, and Clark. By "the KKK crowd" I mean, of course, the sorts of people who would be Klansmen if it were still socially acceptable... including, again, almost all the ex-Dixiecrats except Byrd, who nearly alone among his contemporaries had the guts not only to admit that he was wrong, but also work to do something about it. Meanwhile, Thurmond's and Helms' spiritual heirs go Republican in overwhelming numbers.
Byrd's a Republican now? Shit, when did he switch parties?
When his party changed around him, Byrd saw the error of his ways, apologized, and set to work trying to undo the damage he had done. Most of his "Dixiecrat" contemporaries, like Thurmond and Helms, never did... so they went over to the Republicans, who welcomed them with open arms.
It's simultaneously amusing and sad how Republicans have to reach back decades to find slurs for Democrats, while the current Republican Party presents such a target-rich environment for those Democrats with the guts to take advantage of it.
...and guess what. All democrats. Learn your history. Stop being a drone.
Apparently you think history stopped in 1964. Maybe you should pay attention to what happened since then: pretty much all the Democrats who opposed integration and civil rights legislation had become Republicans by the end of the 1960s. One of the very few exceptions was, yes, Robert Byrd, who has over and over recanted his racist views, apologized for the evil he did, and worked hard for racial equality. For decades now, the KKK crowd has been the property of the Republican Party.
I suspect it's largely because of the World Wars that the US currently has such a bad odor in Europe. Europeans know very well what happens when a large, prosperous country with a strong military starts thinking it has a natural right to dominate the world.
outside of academia, nobody really cares where you went to school only what you can actually do.
If you really believe that, you are desperately naive.
Of course, expecting any real knowledge of the way the world works from someone who thinks it's clever to paraphrase a well-known Nazi quote in his.sig is probably a bit of a stretch.
If by "productive members of society" you mean "parasite MBAs," then please, by all means, they're welcome to get the hell out. Let them go wreck some other country's economy for a while.
disclaimer: i have inside connections with the bigwigs of major music labels. i despise their business model but they are good people.
No, they are not good people. I mean, sure, they may be good in their personal lives. They may be generous to their friends and kind to their children and rescue lost puppies in their spare time. Good for them. But what they do in their professional lives is pure fucking evil, and that means they are not good people, period. And if you willingly associate with them, then you need to take a good long look in the mirror and ask yourself what you're doing hanging around with such scumbags.
(2) Piss off Apple customers and turn them away from F/OSS.
(3) Absolutely no change in Apple policy.
I'm glad to use F/OSS on my Mac, including a great deal of software produced under the FSF umbrella, and I have released software, developed on the Mac, under the GPL. The success of OS X has created a huge new market for those who develop on Unix-type systems. Braindead stunts like this really don't help.
It looks like the purpose is to protect the commercial interests of private space companies. If all the sudden people are launching rockets and giving away the data for free, that hurts space commerce.... This policy probably had good intentions, but is now very out of date.
Saying "if other people make money doing X, we're going to pass a law preventing you from doing X for free" never has good intentions. It can only be a favor to existing commercial interests in return for their lining politicians' pockets.
So much so, in fact, that it looks like a couple of guys riding bikes around a neon-lit soundstage. Woo-hoo.
Maybe I'm just a bitter old fart, but one of my problems with a lot of modern video games is that the physics are kind of in the uncanny valley for me -- they're undeniably much more realistic than they were when I was a teenage gaming geek a quarter of a century ago (and we used real quarters back then, whippersnapper!) but they're still not quite realistic enough, so I find them constantly distracting. The light cycles in the original Tron moved like they could, in fact, exist only in a video game universe; the scenes with them were maybe the only part of the movie where you could really believe you were seeing a world completely different from that outside the machine. If Tr2n has the almost-but-not-quite-real look of most modern video games, which is what the trailer seems to indicate, then it will be quite a disappointment... maybe not to younger viewers, but to those of us who were teenagers when the original came out, and I think we're the target demographic here.
Unless you are a law firm with the business model of extorting cash for infringment, you lose by going to court.
Problem is, as numerous/. stories on patent trolling have shown, there are a fair number of companies with exactly that business model, and that model relies on overbroad patents like this one. No, it doesn't stop innovation from happening. What it does do is arbitrarily and capriciously penalize those who actually implement useful solutions to common problems, by taking money out of their pockets and giving it to predatory scum.
If we did adopt the principle that invalidating any claim in a patent invalidates the entire patent, that would go a long way toward reforming the patent system and making patent trolling less attractive, seems to me. There wouldn't be these absurd patents that start with claims that basically cover every technological advance since fire and the wheel, because companies would be much less likely to file patents that start with broad claims. And patent trolls would have fewer broad patents to buy up, sit on, and then unleash when some obvious solution to a problem ("It's a shopping list... ON THE INTERNET!") becomes widespread.
Don't teach him anything, its better if he sits down and learns it himself.
There are so many beginner pitfalls out there that online tutorials and such will fail to mention, he may well learn to program, but he won't learn to program well. I've worked with a fair number of self-taught programmers over the years, and while many of them produce good work in a number of ways, they always have huge gaps on their knowledge. Learning from a good teacher -- whether in a classroom or one-to-one -- helps avoid many of the pitfalls and teaches the student how to "know what they don't know," i.e. see the gaps in knowledge and fill them in. This kid has a great opportunity, and the "do it yourself, kid" approach would be a terrible waste.
That's about the reaction I had, which seems to be unusual -- most people I know thought it was fantastically amazingly wonderful, with a small minority who thought it sucked. Very much like Batman Begins: I may be the only person I know who thought it was... well, pretty good. Not bad, not great, a decent way to spend a couple of hours and munch some popcorn.
The editing was better than in BB, which pleased me; the abrupt jumps of that movie really irritated me. Bale is, as before, good but not great. Ledger's Joker performance deserves all the praise that's been heaped on it -- it's not just the glamor of a Star Tragically Dead Before His Time(tm). He's genuinely scary, and he pretty much owns every scene he's in. (As opposed to whatsisname who played the Scarecrow in BB, and makes a brief cameo appearance in TDK, who I thought was one of the least interesting and charismatic bat-antagonists of all time.) Everyone else is, again, pretty good.
[shrug] The 1989 version remains the definitive Batman film adaptation for me, but this will do for now. If they keep the franchise going, Bond-style, maybe they can bring Bale back in a generation or so to do TDK Returns. That would be cool.
Killing Grendel, then taking out the Joker... I don't think the words exist to convey exactly how badass a Beowulf cluster of Batmans (Batmen?) would be.
Re:It only works in the top slot
on
Inside Steve's Brain
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If you have to whip your employees into being outstanding workers, you're hiring the wrong people.
As for Rome... hah! As another reply to your post points out, Rome wasn't built by MBAs, or by their ancient equivalent. It was built by soldiers. Do you know anything about that world, "Brigadier?" (Probably not; business types love military imagery and "business is war" tough talk, but they prefer that Other Sorts Of Peple do the real thing.) I do, and I can assure you that self-important REMFs like you don't do very well at all when the bleeding starts.
I'd rather be hung by that one-button mouse than be forced to use it...
Sounds good. Let me know your address and I'll get one of my old Mac mice to you in the mail right away. Does your house have good strong ceiling beams?
Re:"If there is a problem with an Apple product.."
on
Inside Steve's Brain
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· Score: 3, Informative
[sigh] Macs do not cost anywhere near 50% more than comparable PCs. The "Apple premium" over PCs from other brand-name computer manufacturers such as Dell, HP, etc. is usually 10-20% at most; occasionally a Mac will actually be cheaper than a comparable PC, although that doesn't happen very often. If you want to say that Mac users generally pay more for their machines than those who buy comparable PCs, I won't argue with you, but "50% more than comparable tech elsewhere" is absurd and makes the rest of your argument easy to dismiss.
The question is, can what we learn from Jobs be generally applied? Was his success at Apple something which anyone could replicate, or was it a function of a particular time, place, and situation? It seems to me that a lot of these sorts of case studies try to generalize too much from specific circumstances -- and doing the right thing at the wrong time, so to speak, can be a disaster.
Re:It only works in the top slot
on
Inside Steve's Brain
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It's possible to be obsessive and perfectionist without being a despot, of course. The problem is, while that attitude doesn't get you fired, it also doesn't get you promoted. Once you get a reputation as "the go-to guy" for a particular job, in a big (or even medium-sized) organization you're stuck in that role forever. I suspect this is where a lot of the "just enough to not get fired" attitude comes from. Idealistic kids take their first job thinking, "I'm going to be just like Steve Jobs, only sane." After a while they realize that all this attitude gets them is the opportunity to take orders from people who have all the sanity of Jobs and all the obsessive perfectionism of Bill Gates. Burns out the idealism pretty fast.
The IBM and Amazon examples don't really work here: Amazon still sells books (whether they have their own warehouses or not is basically invisible to the customer) and the PC, no matter how huge its impact may have been, was never more than a small fraction of IBM's revenue stream. If Amazon stopped selling books entirely, or IBM abandoned their mainframe business, then their shareholders would be up in arms, and rightly so.
How was what I wrote a "political rant"? I'm talking about the effectiveness of business and political strategies, not about the merits of political positions. The Obama/FISA analogy naturally occurred to me because, as a Democrat, I pay attention to what my candidate is doing; I'm sure a Republican could have come up with a similar analogy involving McCain.
Apparently you missed the actual point of my post, so I'll say it again: businessmen, like politicians, very frequently do really dumb things, and they always have sycophants who will explain that they're doing those dumb things in pursuit of getting more of whatever they're interested in (money in business, votes in politics) while ignoring the fact that they actually end up with less of whatever it is they're after. So yes, it is just making excuses instead of actually looking at (to borrow a phrase from another hot topic) the facts on the ground.
You hear that kind of excuse a lot, just like when a politician does something particularly egregious (e.g. Obama's FISA vote) you hear people explaining, "Oh, that's just a compromise to get more votes. He can't do anything if he isn't elected."
The problem with the stock explanation is that it's very often just wrong. Ebay's current emphasis on big sellers at the expense of individuals is losing them money, just like Obama's FISA sellout is losing him votes. Piss off your core market to chase some other potential market, and odds are you won't do well with either. By all means, businesses should try to expand their customer base and politicians should try to appeal to more voters. But when you abandon the people who got you where you are in the first place, you're almost guaranteed to suffer overall.
Businesses that do well are those which build a steady, loyal customer base that keeps coming back for more. This is particularly true in the online world, where changing to a competitor is very, very easy; the few success stories to come out of the dot-com mania of a decade ago show how to do it right. Amazon, for all its evil, still does a damned good job of selling books. Google, no matter what else it does, remains far and away the best general-purpose search engine. Until a couple of years ago, I'd have counted Ebay among those success stories, but now it looks as though they were just as flaky as any HowFastCanWeBurnVentureCapital.com site; they just took longer to show it.
Suits and their sycophants love to talk tough about how they serve the bottom line... but in the real world, the suits are wrong more often than not, and here's a sterling example.
I know several people who used to do a lot of business on Ebay who are rapidly becoming disgusted with it because of its clear preference for giant sellers over individuals; I'm not at all surprised to hear that this is a general trend.
Why is it that so many executives feel the need to destroy a successful business model? Ebay started as an online auction house where individuals could find a worldwide audience for cool, quirky stuff, and it was wildly successful as such. If its executives want to start a site for selling commercial products with free-floating prices -- which is essentially what they're turning Ebay into -- then fine, but why are they abandoning the business that made them successful in the first place? Ebay was one of the few real success stories to come out of the dot-com boom. It's really sad to see them throwing that away now.
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Care to cite the links between the KKK and the Republican party. Apparently I'm uneducated since I failed to find any.
Don't try to pretend I said something I didn't. I said "the KKK crowd" rather than just "the KKK" quite deliberately; there aren't really any links between any political party and the KKK itself any more, because except for a few die-hards the KKK as an organization has been pretty much defunct for decades -- thanks in large part to the efforts of Democratic Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and Democratic Attorneys General Kennedy, Katzenbach, and Clark. By "the KKK crowd" I mean, of course, the sorts of people who would be Klansmen if it were still socially acceptable ... including, again, almost all the ex-Dixiecrats except Byrd, who nearly alone among his contemporaries had the guts not only to admit that he was wrong, but also work to do something about it. Meanwhile, Thurmond's and Helms' spiritual heirs go Republican in overwhelming numbers.
Byrd's a Republican now? Shit, when did he switch parties?
When his party changed around him, Byrd saw the error of his ways, apologized, and set to work trying to undo the damage he had done. Most of his "Dixiecrat" contemporaries, like Thurmond and Helms, never did ... so they went over to the Republicans, who welcomed them with open arms.
It's simultaneously amusing and sad how Republicans have to reach back decades to find slurs for Democrats, while the current Republican Party presents such a target-rich environment for those Democrats with the guts to take advantage of it.
...and guess what. All democrats. Learn your history. Stop being a drone.
Apparently you think history stopped in 1964. Maybe you should pay attention to what happened since then: pretty much all the Democrats who opposed integration and civil rights legislation had become Republicans by the end of the 1960s. One of the very few exceptions was, yes, Robert Byrd, who has over and over recanted his racist views, apologized for the evil he did, and worked hard for racial equality. For decades now, the KKK crowd has been the property of the Republican Party.
I suspect it's largely because of the World Wars that the US currently has such a bad odor in Europe. Europeans know very well what happens when a large, prosperous country with a strong military starts thinking it has a natural right to dominate the world.
outside of academia, nobody really cares where you went to school only what you can actually do.
If you really believe that, you are desperately naive.
Of course, expecting any real knowledge of the way the world works from someone who thinks it's clever to paraphrase a well-known Nazi quote in his .sig is probably a bit of a stretch.
If by "productive members of society" you mean "parasite MBAs," then please, by all means, they're welcome to get the hell out. Let them go wreck some other country's economy for a while.
The sad thing is, with the current state of the patent industry, such a patent might actually be granted.
disclaimer: i have inside connections with the bigwigs of major music labels. i despise their business model but they are good people.
No, they are not good people. I mean, sure, they may be good in their personal lives. They may be generous to their friends and kind to their children and rescue lost puppies in their spare time. Good for them. But what they do in their professional lives is pure fucking evil, and that means they are not good people, period. And if you willingly associate with them, then you need to take a good long look in the mirror and ask yourself what you're doing hanging around with such scumbags.
(1) Interfere with people who need tech support.
(2) Piss off Apple customers and turn them away from F/OSS.
(3) Absolutely no change in Apple policy.
I'm glad to use F/OSS on my Mac, including a great deal of software produced under the FSF umbrella, and I have released software, developed on the Mac, under the GPL. The success of OS X has created a huge new market for those who develop on Unix-type systems. Braindead stunts like this really don't help.
It looks like the purpose is to protect the commercial interests of private space companies. If all the sudden people are launching rockets and giving away the data for free, that hurts space commerce. ... This policy probably had good intentions, but is now very out of date.
Saying "if other people make money doing X, we're going to pass a law preventing you from doing X for free" never has good intentions. It can only be a favor to existing commercial interests in return for their lining politicians' pockets.
So much so, in fact, that it looks like a couple of guys riding bikes around a neon-lit soundstage. Woo-hoo.
Maybe I'm just a bitter old fart, but one of my problems with a lot of modern video games is that the physics are kind of in the uncanny valley for me -- they're undeniably much more realistic than they were when I was a teenage gaming geek a quarter of a century ago (and we used real quarters back then, whippersnapper!) but they're still not quite realistic enough, so I find them constantly distracting. The light cycles in the original Tron moved like they could, in fact, exist only in a video game universe; the scenes with them were maybe the only part of the movie where you could really believe you were seeing a world completely different from that outside the machine. If Tr2n has the almost-but-not-quite-real look of most modern video games, which is what the trailer seems to indicate, then it will be quite a disappointment ... maybe not to younger viewers, but to those of us who were teenagers when the original came out, and I think we're the target demographic here.
Ah, what the hell. Of course I'll go see it. ;)
Unless you are a law firm with the business model of extorting cash for infringment, you lose by going to court.
Problem is, as numerous /. stories on patent trolling have shown, there are a fair number of companies with exactly that business model, and that model relies on overbroad patents like this one. No, it doesn't stop innovation from happening. What it does do is arbitrarily and capriciously penalize those who actually implement useful solutions to common problems, by taking money out of their pockets and giving it to predatory scum.
If we did adopt the principle that invalidating any claim in a patent invalidates the entire patent, that would go a long way toward reforming the patent system and making patent trolling less attractive, seems to me. There wouldn't be these absurd patents that start with claims that basically cover every technological advance since fire and the wheel, because companies would be much less likely to file patents that start with broad claims. And patent trolls would have fewer broad patents to buy up, sit on, and then unleash when some obvious solution to a problem ("It's a shopping list ... ON THE INTERNET!") becomes widespread.
Don't teach him anything, its better if he sits down and learns it himself.
There are so many beginner pitfalls out there that online tutorials and such will fail to mention, he may well learn to program, but he won't learn to program well. I've worked with a fair number of self-taught programmers over the years, and while many of them produce good work in a number of ways, they always have huge gaps on their knowledge. Learning from a good teacher -- whether in a classroom or one-to-one -- helps avoid many of the pitfalls and teaches the student how to "know what they don't know," i.e. see the gaps in knowledge and fill them in. This kid has a great opportunity, and the "do it yourself, kid" approach would be a terrible waste.
That's about the reaction I had, which seems to be unusual -- most people I know thought it was fantastically amazingly wonderful, with a small minority who thought it sucked. Very much like Batman Begins: I may be the only person I know who thought it was ... well, pretty good. Not bad, not great, a decent way to spend a couple of hours and munch some popcorn.
The editing was better than in BB, which pleased me; the abrupt jumps of that movie really irritated me. Bale is, as before, good but not great. Ledger's Joker performance deserves all the praise that's been heaped on it -- it's not just the glamor of a Star Tragically Dead Before His Time(tm). He's genuinely scary, and he pretty much owns every scene he's in. (As opposed to whatsisname who played the Scarecrow in BB, and makes a brief cameo appearance in TDK, who I thought was one of the least interesting and charismatic bat-antagonists of all time.) Everyone else is, again, pretty good.
[shrug] The 1989 version remains the definitive Batman film adaptation for me, but this will do for now. If they keep the franchise going, Bond-style, maybe they can bring Bale back in a generation or so to do TDK Returns. That would be cool.
Killing Grendel, then taking out the Joker ... I don't think the words exist to convey exactly how badass a Beowulf cluster of Batmans (Batmen?) would be.
If you have to whip your employees into being outstanding workers, you're hiring the wrong people.
As for Rome ... hah! As another reply to your post points out, Rome wasn't built by MBAs, or by their ancient equivalent. It was built by soldiers. Do you know anything about that world, "Brigadier?" (Probably not; business types love military imagery and "business is war" tough talk, but they prefer that Other Sorts Of Peple do the real thing.) I do, and I can assure you that self-important REMFs like you don't do very well at all when the bleeding starts.
I'd rather be hung by that one-button mouse than be forced to use it...
Sounds good. Let me know your address and I'll get one of my old Mac mice to you in the mail right away. Does your house have good strong ceiling beams?
[sigh] Macs do not cost anywhere near 50% more than comparable PCs. The "Apple premium" over PCs from other brand-name computer manufacturers such as Dell, HP, etc. is usually 10-20% at most; occasionally a Mac will actually be cheaper than a comparable PC, although that doesn't happen very often. If you want to say that Mac users generally pay more for their machines than those who buy comparable PCs, I won't argue with you, but "50% more than comparable tech elsewhere" is absurd and makes the rest of your argument easy to dismiss.
The question is, can what we learn from Jobs be generally applied? Was his success at Apple something which anyone could replicate, or was it a function of a particular time, place, and situation? It seems to me that a lot of these sorts of case studies try to generalize too much from specific circumstances -- and doing the right thing at the wrong time, so to speak, can be a disaster.
It's possible to be obsessive and perfectionist without being a despot, of course. The problem is, while that attitude doesn't get you fired, it also doesn't get you promoted. Once you get a reputation as "the go-to guy" for a particular job, in a big (or even medium-sized) organization you're stuck in that role forever. I suspect this is where a lot of the "just enough to not get fired" attitude comes from. Idealistic kids take their first job thinking, "I'm going to be just like Steve Jobs, only sane." After a while they realize that all this attitude gets them is the opportunity to take orders from people who have all the sanity of Jobs and all the obsessive perfectionism of Bill Gates. Burns out the idealism pretty fast.
The IBM and Amazon examples don't really work here: Amazon still sells books (whether they have their own warehouses or not is basically invisible to the customer) and the PC, no matter how huge its impact may have been, was never more than a small fraction of IBM's revenue stream. If Amazon stopped selling books entirely, or IBM abandoned their mainframe business, then their shareholders would be up in arms, and rightly so.
How was what I wrote a "political rant"? I'm talking about the effectiveness of business and political strategies, not about the merits of political positions. The Obama/FISA analogy naturally occurred to me because, as a Democrat, I pay attention to what my candidate is doing; I'm sure a Republican could have come up with a similar analogy involving McCain.
Apparently you missed the actual point of my post, so I'll say it again: businessmen, like politicians, very frequently do really dumb things, and they always have sycophants who will explain that they're doing those dumb things in pursuit of getting more of whatever they're interested in (money in business, votes in politics) while ignoring the fact that they actually end up with less of whatever it is they're after. So yes, it is just making excuses instead of actually looking at (to borrow a phrase from another hot topic) the facts on the ground.
You hear that kind of excuse a lot, just like when a politician does something particularly egregious (e.g. Obama's FISA vote) you hear people explaining, "Oh, that's just a compromise to get more votes. He can't do anything if he isn't elected."
The problem with the stock explanation is that it's very often just wrong. Ebay's current emphasis on big sellers at the expense of individuals is losing them money, just like Obama's FISA sellout is losing him votes. Piss off your core market to chase some other potential market, and odds are you won't do well with either. By all means, businesses should try to expand their customer base and politicians should try to appeal to more voters. But when you abandon the people who got you where you are in the first place, you're almost guaranteed to suffer overall.
Businesses that do well are those which build a steady, loyal customer base that keeps coming back for more. This is particularly true in the online world, where changing to a competitor is very, very easy; the few success stories to come out of the dot-com mania of a decade ago show how to do it right. Amazon, for all its evil, still does a damned good job of selling books. Google, no matter what else it does, remains far and away the best general-purpose search engine. Until a couple of years ago, I'd have counted Ebay among those success stories, but now it looks as though they were just as flaky as any HowFastCanWeBurnVentureCapital.com site; they just took longer to show it.
Suits and their sycophants love to talk tough about how they serve the bottom line ... but in the real world, the suits are wrong more often than not, and here's a sterling example.
I know several people who used to do a lot of business on Ebay who are rapidly becoming disgusted with it because of its clear preference for giant sellers over individuals; I'm not at all surprised to hear that this is a general trend.
Why is it that so many executives feel the need to destroy a successful business model? Ebay started as an online auction house where individuals could find a worldwide audience for cool, quirky stuff, and it was wildly successful as such. If its executives want to start a site for selling commercial products with free-floating prices -- which is essentially what they're turning Ebay into -- then fine, but why are they abandoning the business that made them successful in the first place? Ebay was one of the few real success stories to come out of the dot-com boom. It's really sad to see them throwing that away now.