Almost all pre-loaded software on a major PC brand (excluding Apple) is crippleware. In many cases the computer vendor has been paid to pre-install the software. So my answer to people about the first thing to do is to uninstall all that junk. It's just taking up CPU cycles, drive space, and making the computer take longer to boot.
We already have the ability to make calls via VoIP, Facetime, etc. Anything internet based. The vast majority of mainline domestic planes have internet and do not restrict most voice protocols. The only saving grace has been internet became so popular on planes that services like GoGo quickly ran into bandwidth and latency issues (Most planes share a single 3G gateway). That will change as upgrades happen.
Best Buy got rid of the C level staff that were associated with the old CEO/founder. The new CEO made a number of hard choices and focused on the fundamentals. That has lead to a significant recovery. The stock price has more than tripled and they are one of the best performing companies on the S&P500 right now.
Major point, the online pick-up is now part of check out area and not customer service. For years I hated using online pick-up because without fail I would be stuck waiting behind someone making the financial transaction of the century. I used to use Circuit City pick-up all the time because it was always ready when I got their. I found it less frustrating to use Amazon and wait the extra day instead of waiting in line. So it's a great change.
They making some good changes to the loyalty program. It's one of the easier ways of getting money back on purchasing rarely discounted Apple Hardware.
They got out of some really badly done deals internationally. The Cellphone Warehouse deal for UK expansion gave Cellphone Warehouse a cut of BB's US cell sales.
Certainly there is risk for them. If all the changes don't turn into great numbers for the holidays it could spell disaster. We'll know in a couple months.
A buddy of mine spent a lot of money earlier this year to attend a Red Hat convention and take the (Paid) cloud training. What a waste. While the training was hands but very simple. The trainer didn't know much more than the attendees and it seemed clear to all parties involved it was not ready for prime time.
The core issue I see is he went at this like some sort of game. It's quite foreseeable that an organization that has a major police force, courts and prosecution would use those resources to get what they want. Give them the rope and you leave town on vacation. If they didn't have the due diligence to ask for something in the exit interview that's on them. It's reasonable to take a vacation and have time to think after a major life event (like getting fired). Once you're out of contact it's reasonable to assume that one cannot be uncooperative if they were unaware their cooperation was being requested. When you get back to town reefer them to your lawyer. There's no reason for one to have any interaction with a gov't official once it hits the fan. Using a lawyer keeps one from taking actions and making statements that would land one in jail.
Tesla does a tremendous amount of the work in-house. This includes things like the class A metal stamping, battery packs and a slew of custom parts and electronics. Most auto makers warehouse pre-stamped body panels and parts. Tesla warehouses raw rolled steel and aluminum. They make the parts as needed. They have one of the most automated factories in the world so it's unlikely that an outside supplier would be able to do it cheaper.
While they do have a lot of things they get from other vendors, it's a fairly small list in comparison to most transportation manufacturers. In addition they have a relatively small number of products they make (including parts for other auto makers). Because of this they simply don't need SAP. It's a size and scope that you could do in-house. GM or Ford could never scrap their logistics suite and have a replacement in 4 months.
A lot fighting game fanatics swear by the Plasmas for big screen displays. The input lag on a quality Panasonic is 16ms, whereas the lag on a quality LCD is 30-40ms (substantially worse on the cheap brands).
Best Buy is still a Market leader in electronics in general, but Wal-Mart and Target continue to make up a large part of this market. They have a preference for LCD. The sales staff isn't trained to talk about video quality. Plasma doesn't burn in any more, but it can have temporary retention issues. That's more than enough for retailers like Wal-Mart and Target to take the path of least resistance.
For all of it's failings as a store, including the ill-fated DIVX rental model, Circuit City was really the last national retailer that actually put effort into training the sales staff on some of the finer points of AV.
The ASL interpreters I know do a lot of on-call work for medical, mental health and educational purposes. One thing they mentioned is ASL has regional dialects.
You look at games and and they more or less have it figured out. While a company may have shills with good SEO skills they have a much harder time defeating review site like Metacritic that calculate a weighted group think. The problem is money. There's money in game reviews. There's money in large enterprise software analysis. It's pretty sparse when it comes to productivity and utility software.
At the same time the two are hitched economically. The long and short of it is millions of jobs in mainland China are at Taiwanese owned companies. An outright war between the two would devastate the Chinese economy. You're seeing more and more Taiwanese companies hedge their bets with new factories in other parts of Asia, India and Latin America.
In this particular poaching agreement you're looking at compression of 5-10% at most. So it's fairly modest. I suspect salaries were not the key reason for the agreement. This is more about disruption of timelines because of overheads like ramp up, training and recruiting. There's also a bit of ego about loosing a resource to a direct competitor. You get things like Balmer breaking stuff when he finds out it's Google poaching talent.
All that being said, the core reason these companies went with anti-poaching agreements was because non-compete agreements have very narrow and limited scope in California.
It's also worth noting that the DOJ hammered all of these companies years ago. It was settled and the practice stopped. In fact the only reason the class action suit could go forward was because of the discovery from the DOJ. For the most part employees would never have the means to get access to the smoking gun in civil court.
"Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other's employees, regardless of the individual's desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal. [...] Palm doesn't target other companies -- we look for the best people we can find. l'd hope the same could be said about Apple's practices. However, during the last year or so, as Apple geared up to compete with Palm in the phone space, Apple hired at least 2 percent of Palm's workforce. To put it in perspective, had Palm done the same, we'd have hired 300 folks from Apple. Instead, to my knowledge, we've hired just three."
Tech employees have no reason to sign onto those agreements unless there was a buy-out for early termination. Although that's typical in C level employment contracts I think you'd be hard pressed to get executives to offer them to rank and file folks. Even if they are stellar performers.
The French were caught red handed spying on US soil. They are on the list of known states that have been caught infiltrating the US Gov't. It's not a secret, but it's also not something the US goes out of the way to point out either.
Here in the US countries like France are heavily restricted from operating and managing US entities that have ties to US security and law enforcement operations. (Bio-metrics, AFIS, Facial Recognition, Crypto, Official Identity and Credential Solutions, etc.) Because they are foreign? No. Because they have been caught spying on the US.
The only different here is the US isn't flopping over and whining like a European Soccer player about a little spying.
I asked Jimmy directly about this in a pretty even handed way when he did the Slashdot interview questions back in August. He responded:
" Things have mostly stabilized. It's still not a crisis, but I still consider it to be important. One of the most exciting developments is the visual editor, which I hope will bring in a whole new class of editors who were turned off by the complexities of wikitext."
More or less he dismissed the premise that there was a problem in the first place, and any issues that are left could be handled with a better editor UI. Now, I do think the Wikimedia editor needs work, but Jimmy is kidding himself. Maybe he'll get a new rush of editors when they release the new UI, but I'm not convinced they'll stay.
I would recommend the new MFC-9340CDW. (or the slight cheaper 9330CDW if you don't care about Duplex scanning). Good print quality, strong network printing options. Wireless, Wired, PC, MAC, Android, iOS, Airprint, Google Print, etc. Also supports Scan to PC, Scan to Mail, Scan to Drive/FTP, etc.
I'm a firm believer in weight telling you a lot about printer quality. Some SOHO printers are as light as inkjets. They have poor paper handling and print quality because corners were cut. That is not the case with the Brother models I listed. It's well built, doesn't have a lot of flex in the case and I have yet to have a jam.
The 9340CDW has a street price of $399, which blows away comparable HP and Xerox printers with those feature classes.
"40% of computer support specialists and a third of computer systems administrators don't have a college degree at all!"
You couldn't pay for a 4 year degree as a support specialist. Maybe as a high end administrator, but what an employer would look for is specialized commercial training and certification. I personally think a 2 year community or technical college program is more than enough for these types of positions.
On the other hand, I don't have a degree and it hasn't stopped me from becoming a senior programmer and architect.
The US gov't buys plenty of things made in China. That's not the issue. Buying equipment from Huawei is buying products from Palantir (a CIA funded technology company). They are both companies with close ties to military and intelligence gathering.
Still, when the US Gov't does buy from China they do prefer to source it from companies like Foxconn, which are Taiwanese owned.
I think it's just a matter of unintended consequences. They will ultimately gain permission to use them for journalistic purposes. But the number of times you need to use a drone for a hard news story is pretty limited. On the other hand the number of ways you can you a drone as part of your paparazzi business is endless.
I think way too much emphasis is placed on having the absolute fastest CPU/GPU and the biggest battery. If you look at phones like the Moto X and the iPhone 5S they offload the mundane everyday tasks to ultra low power processors. The end results is they aren't firing up the big Ghz SoC as much as they can get significantly more battery life from smaller cells. We need to get away from the spec chasing.
What people don't realize is the private sector contractors in Gov't IT have little to do with regular private IT contracting. In order to gain these contracts you need to basically game the formula used to award the contracts. It's a bit more complicated than just having the lowest bid. A lot of it has to do with things like the number of Phd and Master degree workers you have to offer. This often leads to staffing composed of people who have unrelated degrees or people who are from diploma mills.
The Obamacare IT is no more or less messed up than any other gov't system of recent times.
Sadly, Obama can't just raid Silicon valley for some top tier talent to make a new system. That's illegal. Instead the contracts go to companies you've likely never heard of that specialize in sucking off the gov't teet. I'm sure 1/2 the budget was wasted making a 5000 page technical specification document complete with overdone pie in the sky UML diagrams no one understands.
That's the way things will continue so long as the contracting process doesn't take into account the previous success of the contractors work force.
Charles Nutter did a presentation on JRuby when it first came out. He runs the Fibonacci sequence over and over again. The JVM does it's optimization magic on the execution and pretty soon it's exceeds the native ruby execution speed.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost all pre-loaded software on a major PC brand (excluding Apple) is crippleware. In many cases the computer vendor has been paid to pre-install the software. So my answer to people about the first thing to do is to uninstall all that junk. It's just taking up CPU cycles, drive space, and making the computer take longer to boot.
We already have the ability to make calls via VoIP, Facetime, etc. Anything internet based. The vast majority of mainline domestic planes have internet and do not restrict most voice protocols. The only saving grace has been internet became so popular on planes that services like GoGo quickly ran into bandwidth and latency issues (Most planes share a single 3G gateway). That will change as upgrades happen.
Best Buy got rid of the C level staff that were associated with the old CEO/founder. The new CEO made a number of hard choices and focused on the fundamentals. That has lead to a significant recovery. The stock price has more than tripled and they are one of the best performing companies on the S&P500 right now.
Major point, the online pick-up is now part of check out area and not customer service. For years I hated using online pick-up because without fail I would be stuck waiting behind someone making the financial transaction of the century. I used to use Circuit City pick-up all the time because it was always ready when I got their. I found it less frustrating to use Amazon and wait the extra day instead of waiting in line. So it's a great change.
They making some good changes to the loyalty program. It's one of the easier ways of getting money back on purchasing rarely discounted Apple Hardware.
They got out of some really badly done deals internationally. The Cellphone Warehouse deal for UK expansion gave Cellphone Warehouse a cut of BB's US cell sales.
Certainly there is risk for them. If all the changes don't turn into great numbers for the holidays it could spell disaster. We'll know in a couple months.
A buddy of mine spent a lot of money earlier this year to attend a Red Hat convention and take the (Paid) cloud training. What a waste. While the training was hands but very simple. The trainer didn't know much more than the attendees and it seemed clear to all parties involved it was not ready for prime time.
The core issue I see is he went at this like some sort of game. It's quite foreseeable that an organization that has a major police force, courts and prosecution would use those resources to get what they want. Give them the rope and you leave town on vacation. If they didn't have the due diligence to ask for something in the exit interview that's on them. It's reasonable to take a vacation and have time to think after a major life event (like getting fired). Once you're out of contact it's reasonable to assume that one cannot be uncooperative if they were unaware their cooperation was being requested. When you get back to town reefer them to your lawyer. There's no reason for one to have any interaction with a gov't official once it hits the fan. Using a lawyer keeps one from taking actions and making statements that would land one in jail.
Tesla does a tremendous amount of the work in-house. This includes things like the class A metal stamping, battery packs and a slew of custom parts and electronics. Most auto makers warehouse pre-stamped body panels and parts. Tesla warehouses raw rolled steel and aluminum. They make the parts as needed. They have one of the most automated factories in the world so it's unlikely that an outside supplier would be able to do it cheaper.
While they do have a lot of things they get from other vendors, it's a fairly small list in comparison to most transportation manufacturers. In addition they have a relatively small number of products they make (including parts for other auto makers). Because of this they simply don't need SAP. It's a size and scope that you could do in-house. GM or Ford could never scrap their logistics suite and have a replacement in 4 months.
A lot fighting game fanatics swear by the Plasmas for big screen displays. The input lag on a quality Panasonic is 16ms, whereas the lag on a quality LCD is 30-40ms (substantially worse on the cheap brands).
Best Buy is still a Market leader in electronics in general, but Wal-Mart and Target continue to make up a large part of this market. They have a preference for LCD. The sales staff isn't trained to talk about video quality. Plasma doesn't burn in any more, but it can have temporary retention issues. That's more than enough for retailers like Wal-Mart and Target to take the path of least resistance.
For all of it's failings as a store, including the ill-fated DIVX rental model, Circuit City was really the last national retailer that actually put effort into training the sales staff on some of the finer points of AV.
The ASL interpreters I know do a lot of on-call work for medical, mental health and educational purposes. One thing they mentioned is ASL has regional dialects.
You look at games and and they more or less have it figured out. While a company may have shills with good SEO skills they have a much harder time defeating review site like Metacritic that calculate a weighted group think. The problem is money. There's money in game reviews. There's money in large enterprise software analysis. It's pretty sparse when it comes to productivity and utility software.
At the same time the two are hitched economically. The long and short of it is millions of jobs in mainland China are at Taiwanese owned companies. An outright war between the two would devastate the Chinese economy. You're seeing more and more Taiwanese companies hedge their bets with new factories in other parts of Asia, India and Latin America.
In this particular poaching agreement you're looking at compression of 5-10% at most. So it's fairly modest. I suspect salaries were not the key reason for the agreement. This is more about disruption of timelines because of overheads like ramp up, training and recruiting. There's also a bit of ego about loosing a resource to a direct competitor. You get things like Balmer breaking stuff when he finds out it's Google poaching talent.
All that being said, the core reason these companies went with anti-poaching agreements was because non-compete agreements have very narrow and limited scope in California.
It's also worth noting that the DOJ hammered all of these companies years ago. It was settled and the practice stopped. In fact the only reason the class action suit could go forward was because of the discovery from the DOJ. For the most part employees would never have the means to get access to the smoking gun in civil court.
From Ed response to Steve Jobs:
"Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other's employees, regardless of the individual's desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal. [...] Palm doesn't target other companies -- we look for the best people we can find. l'd hope the same could be said about Apple's practices. However, during the last year or so, as Apple geared up to compete with Palm in the phone space, Apple hired at least 2 percent of Palm's workforce. To put it in perspective, had Palm done the same, we'd have hired 300 folks from Apple. Instead, to my knowledge, we've hired just three."
Tech employees have no reason to sign onto those agreements unless there was a buy-out for early termination. Although that's typical in C level employment contracts I think you'd be hard pressed to get executives to offer them to rank and file folks. Even if they are stellar performers.
I would assume not for long unfortunately. It's also quite likely the feds will gin up some very expensive to defend gun charges against the husband.
The French were caught red handed spying on US soil. They are on the list of known states that have been caught infiltrating the US Gov't. It's not a secret, but it's also not something the US goes out of the way to point out either.
Here in the US countries like France are heavily restricted from operating and managing US entities that have ties to US security and law enforcement operations. (Bio-metrics, AFIS, Facial Recognition, Crypto, Official Identity and Credential Solutions, etc.) Because they are foreign? No. Because they have been caught spying on the US.
The only different here is the US isn't flopping over and whining like a European Soccer player about a little spying.
I asked Jimmy directly about this in a pretty even handed way when he did the Slashdot interview questions back in August. He responded:
" Things have mostly stabilized. It's still not a crisis, but I still consider it to be important. One of the most exciting developments is the visual editor, which I hope will bring in a whole new class of editors who were turned off by the complexities of wikitext."
More or less he dismissed the premise that there was a problem in the first place, and any issues that are left could be handled with a better editor UI. Now, I do think the Wikimedia editor needs work, but Jimmy is kidding himself. Maybe he'll get a new rush of editors when they release the new UI, but I'm not convinced they'll stay.
I would recommend the new MFC-9340CDW. (or the slight cheaper 9330CDW if you don't care about Duplex scanning). Good print quality, strong network printing options. Wireless, Wired, PC, MAC, Android, iOS, Airprint, Google Print, etc. Also supports Scan to PC, Scan to Mail, Scan to Drive/FTP, etc.
I'm a firm believer in weight telling you a lot about printer quality. Some SOHO printers are as light as inkjets. They have poor paper handling and print quality because corners were cut. That is not the case with the Brother models I listed. It's well built, doesn't have a lot of flex in the case and I have yet to have a jam.
The 9340CDW has a street price of $399, which blows away comparable HP and Xerox printers with those feature classes.
"40% of computer support specialists and a third of computer systems administrators don't have a college degree at all!"
You couldn't pay for a 4 year degree as a support specialist. Maybe as a high end administrator, but what an employer would look for is specialized commercial training and certification. I personally think a 2 year community or technical college program is more than enough for these types of positions.
On the other hand, I don't have a degree and it hasn't stopped me from becoming a senior programmer and architect.
The US gov't buys plenty of things made in China. That's not the issue. Buying equipment from Huawei is buying products from Palantir (a CIA funded technology company). They are both companies with close ties to military and intelligence gathering.
Still, when the US Gov't does buy from China they do prefer to source it from companies like Foxconn, which are Taiwanese owned.
I think it's just a matter of unintended consequences. They will ultimately gain permission to use them for journalistic purposes. But the number of times you need to use a drone for a hard news story is pretty limited. On the other hand the number of ways you can you a drone as part of your paparazzi business is endless.
I think way too much emphasis is placed on having the absolute fastest CPU/GPU and the biggest battery. If you look at phones like the Moto X and the iPhone 5S they offload the mundane everyday tasks to ultra low power processors. The end results is they aren't firing up the big Ghz SoC as much as they can get significantly more battery life from smaller cells. We need to get away from the spec chasing.
What people don't realize is the private sector contractors in Gov't IT have little to do with regular private IT contracting. In order to gain these contracts you need to basically game the formula used to award the contracts. It's a bit more complicated than just having the lowest bid. A lot of it has to do with things like the number of Phd and Master degree workers you have to offer. This often leads to staffing composed of people who have unrelated degrees or people who are from diploma mills.
The Obamacare IT is no more or less messed up than any other gov't system of recent times.
Sadly, Obama can't just raid Silicon valley for some top tier talent to make a new system. That's illegal. Instead the contracts go to companies you've likely never heard of that specialize in sucking off the gov't teet. I'm sure 1/2 the budget was wasted making a 5000 page technical specification document complete with overdone pie in the sky UML diagrams no one understands.
That's the way things will continue so long as the contracting process doesn't take into account the previous success of the contractors work force.
Charles Nutter did a presentation on JRuby when it first came out. He runs the Fibonacci sequence over and over again. The JVM does it's optimization magic on the execution and pretty soon it's exceeds the native ruby execution speed.