Arguably, the cell phone, even if we didn't think anyone would want one...;-)
As they said, it's just another side effect (see outsourcing) of a culture where Increase Shareholder Value is your only corporate agenda. Long term gains are irrelevant. You can only be shortsighted.
Speaking of outsourcing, 'ever wonder who's gonna buy our widgets or pay taxes when none of us Blue Bloods have jobs?
The solution will occur when all management of all corporations gets outsourced. The truth is, Increasing Shareholder Value is the only objective, and having your corporation managed by a shrewd, talented CEO in Bangalor who gets paid $30,000 per year with no bonus or stock options is a smart thing to do.
There is no magic in this being an Internet Thang. He could have set up a Murder For Hire using Snail Mail and a handwritten check and we'd still be trying to extradite him and it would still be up the the courts in Oz.
One objection that kept my last place decidedly windoze was the accounting software. There are a limited number of accounting s/w packages that an anal CPA will be happy with, even in Bill Gates' Realm. In our case, the Controller said, essentially, "Anything you want, as long as it runs Solomon Accounting Software". (FWIW, Solomon was purchased by Great Plains, who was later acquired by Our Friends In Redmond.) In this case, a significant number of desktops had to have windoze along with at least one server (MS SQL Server).
But that's just an example. It could have been something else. It could be Illustrator. Or Photoshop (yes, I Love The GIMP, but I'd switch if Photoshop was free). The productivity of users in the long run is far more significant than even, say, a $15,000 accounting package.
My wife is currently taking the Becker/Conviser course in preparation for her CPA exam. Yup, we have to have Windoze for the practice software. Fortunately, OpenOffice runs very nicely on her XP box.;-)
I think that, as long as you're prepared to build and *support* heterogeneous systems with perhaps a blend of "Whatever The End User Needs", you are fine. You can suggest ways to save money, but keep your eye on productivity - it's arguable to me that OpenOffice is in some ways *better* than MS Office, for example. If you walk in *telling* users they should be happy with, say, Abiword, you're already on the wrong foot, IMHO.
I agree - and it's interesting that the agency ignores completely the concept of buying the box that runs the software you want. We ended up with a GC w/o doing any research at all into which was the faster h/w: it had Sonic and Mario, my kids like Sonic and Mario, that's all there was to it.
Of course, Sonic will now be available for others, but not Mario, Luigi, and Friends.
IMHO, GC is targeted towards younger kids while PS and XBox seem to go for the 12-24 yr old crowd. *This* should have been the basis for their findings, *not* cpu power. Moreover, they seem to have ignored the slowly happening convergence issues where the peecee and set top box could still really be contenders.
I suspect that there's either a little YMMV here, or watches (and other Lego-branded stuff) are handled differently since they probably don't manufacture them... For example, my wife paid $4.25 for a new copy of instructions for a Bionical which itself only cost $8.50 new. Moreover, they couldn't tell her the price of the instructions when she ordered them, only that it was "nominal" (yea, 1/2 the cost of the actual product). We were hoping for free, or a link on a web site to a pdf.
As the father of 7 and 8 year old boys, the elder of which has quite a collection of Bionicles, I've observed one little tidbit about Lego: if you lose or break a piece, it's gonna cost you an arm and a leg to replace it (No Bionicle Pun Intended;).
What does this have to do with their financial success? A lot, IMHO. It certainly has affected our brand loyalty. As Kewl as Bionicles are, we have tried to steer our boyz towards products made by more consumer friendly companies, such as K'nex.
I know there's more to running a company, but this to me says they still Just Don't Get It.
Be warned: the ccd thing (I can't remember what they call it on new Canon's) is smaller than a 35mm negative so your lenses are about 1.4x longer in effective f.l.
And my tongue was sorta stuck in my cheek there...
But it's still not up to Good Film (e.g.: Velvia). OTOH, I never liked anything bigger than 8x10 from my 35mm's anyway...;-)
Uh, dude. I can't afford a satellite. Or commercial stitching software.
Regular, off-the-shelf camera and lense (which itself is gonna have distortion). Free (as in beer at least) stitching software (i.e.: not a "product").
This is *not* "nothing", IMHO.
The camera he used is comparable to the $1000 Digital Rebel with a slight telephoto.
A look on the Bright Side (so to speak) of Blackouts: Had they actually implemented the powerline broadband thing, interference would have been nil during the blackout...
'Sorry I'm late, and sorry you won't see this, but we got one of our visually impaired employees a Panasonic 50" plasma display. We ran it at the native resolution and he was as happy as a pig in mud.
Mark
Re:What's that other Internet Explorer thing again
on
Mozilla 1.4 RC1
·
· Score: 1
This is so true and some guy just did it again: WTF is WASTE?
Re:We can have a PC not based on twenty year old t
on
Legacy-Free PCs
·
· Score: 1
And make SURE it isn't based on SEMICONDUCTORS! Talk about ANCIENT TECHNOLOGY!
Real life example: Solomon IV 2.6, peer-to-peer version. Win 3.1, runs successfully on all flavors.
Up to 6 simultaneous users (we did 6 very successfully). Works like a charm.
This is a "serious" full featured general purpose accounting package w/ gl, ap, payroll, etc. All the controls missing in Quickbooks, Peachtree, and their ilk, but priced competitively. No back end!
Starting w/ version 4.5, MS SQL Slammer is now required.
Some of us *have* sacrificed careers for something we were hoping would give us a reason to get up in the morning, only to find that it's still the same old same old.
There's a little bit of "no matter where you go, you always bring yourself with you" involved.
But I've found that many of us really don't know what we wanna do when we grow up. I include myself: I've been a programmer for 20 years. I don't love it. It puts bread on the table. It pays for my home. Heck, it pays for my home theater.
I just don't think that that many of us are going to get jobs where we "get paid to play". What *I* consider playing just won't pay me very well, if it paid at all.
So, I personally really do find the thought of reading about more people who have found what I don't think I'll ever find quite discouraging.
Is my life a drag? Far from it! But, work is work and life is life. They don't really intermingle that much for me.
Mark
"To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, `You must not eat of it,' 'Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.'
'Know what happens if you block cookies from ads.x10.com? They just keep opening windows on you. I've had 8 of 'em up before I closed some once (I normally use Pow)... Funnier - they have two ads, I had 4 of each.
Maybe we could have a contest to see who can have the most simultaneously open X10.com popup ads.
Oh, and the babes in the ads are almost sort of a type of soft pr0n...;-)
I suspect if you were to allow "real" charities that do such useless things as provide food, cloting, or shelter to those Less Fortunate, you'd find a LOT of people giving more to such Charities than we give to Micro$oft, Verizon, or AOHell.
Most folks, admitedly not all, would reduce their contribution to other charities were they to donate to EFF.
Potential Best of Both Worlds: donate time to a charity helping them set up and manage (yes, long term) an accounting system that does not require sending a lot of money to Bill Gates.
I agree. This whole business is so crazy: Timesharing with Service Bureaus that are now called Application Service Providers (ASP's). IBM needs to come up with a Truly Kewl Name for it if they want it to take off.
I guess there'll always be some tensions here that aren't really technology per se: In this case, it's in-house vs outsource.
Joe does an analysis that shows if he outsources all of IT, it will save $X,XXX,XXX, so they do it. Joe gets promoted. Three years pass. Sam does an analysis that shows if he brings all IT functions in-house, it will save $X,XXX,XXX, so they do it and he gets promoted...
IBM and Microsoft make money no matter what. Kinda like lawyers. Oh, I forgot they ARE lawyers.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that legal and accounting are already being outsourced. It's even possible that some of your tax returns this year are being prepared in India.
Mark
Others mentioned the transistor.
;-)
Arguably, the cell phone, even if we didn't think anyone would want one...
As they said, it's just another side effect (see outsourcing) of a culture where Increase Shareholder Value is your only corporate agenda. Long term gains are irrelevant. You can only be shortsighted.
Speaking of outsourcing, 'ever wonder who's gonna buy our widgets or pay taxes when none of us Blue Bloods have jobs?
Mark
The solution will occur when all management of all corporations gets outsourced. The truth is, Increasing Shareholder Value is the only objective, and having your corporation managed by a shrewd, talented CEO in Bangalor who gets paid $30,000 per year with no bonus or stock options is a smart thing to do.
'not even half joking...
Mark
It's obviously up the the Australian courts here.
There is no magic in this being an Internet Thang. He could have set up a Murder For Hire using Snail Mail and a handwritten check and we'd still be trying to extradite him and it would still be up the the courts in Oz.
Mark
One objection that kept my last place decidedly windoze was the accounting software. There are a limited number of accounting s/w packages that an anal CPA will be happy with, even in Bill Gates' Realm. In our case, the Controller said, essentially, "Anything you want, as long as it runs Solomon Accounting Software". (FWIW, Solomon was purchased by Great Plains, who was later acquired by Our Friends In Redmond.) In this case, a significant number of desktops had to have windoze along with at least one server (MS SQL Server).
;-)
But that's just an example. It could have been something else. It could be Illustrator. Or Photoshop (yes, I Love The GIMP, but I'd switch if Photoshop was free). The productivity of users in the long run is far more significant than even, say, a $15,000 accounting package.
My wife is currently taking the Becker/Conviser course in preparation for her CPA exam. Yup, we have to have Windoze for the practice software. Fortunately, OpenOffice runs very nicely on her XP box.
I think that, as long as you're prepared to build and *support* heterogeneous systems with perhaps a blend of "Whatever The End User Needs", you are fine. You can suggest ways to save money, but keep your eye on productivity - it's arguable to me that OpenOffice is in some ways *better* than MS Office, for example. If you walk in *telling* users they should be happy with, say, Abiword, you're already on the wrong foot, IMHO.
Mark
I agree - and it's interesting that the agency ignores completely the concept of buying the box that runs the software you want. We ended up with a GC w/o doing any research at all into which was the faster h/w: it had Sonic and Mario, my kids like Sonic and Mario, that's all there was to it.
Of course, Sonic will now be available for others, but not Mario, Luigi, and Friends.
IMHO, GC is targeted towards younger kids while PS and XBox seem to go for the 12-24 yr old crowd. *This* should have been the basis for their findings, *not* cpu power. Moreover, they seem to have ignored the slowly happening convergence issues where the peecee and set top box could still really be contenders.
Mark
FWIW, I've found "W3Schools" a decent source of Pretty Good Tutorials for most things 'web (xml, xsl, css, etc.).
http://www.w3schools.com/
Some stuff seems IE centric - i.e.: some examples only work with IE6 and alternatives aren't suggested.
Mark
While this article is dated today (2/22/04) in the guardian, it appeared at least a couple of other places a couple of weeks earlier:
The Impact Lab Some place called "sofa. rites de passage"And in the NY Times 2/8/04 ($ required):
The Virus UndergroundMark
Ya know, Darl's done as much as or perhaps even more than anyone else to propel Linux into the spotlight.
Thank you, SCO!
Mark
I suspect that there's either a little YMMV here, or watches (and other Lego-branded stuff) are handled differently since they probably don't manufacture them... For example, my wife paid $4.25 for a new copy of instructions for a Bionical which itself only cost $8.50 new. Moreover, they couldn't tell her the price of the instructions when she ordered them, only that it was "nominal" (yea, 1/2 the cost of the actual product). We were hoping for free, or a link on a web site to a pdf.
Mark
As the father of 7 and 8 year old boys, the elder of which has quite a collection of Bionicles, I've observed one little tidbit about Lego: if you lose or break a piece, it's gonna cost you an arm and a leg to replace it (No Bionicle Pun Intended ;).
What does this have to do with their financial success? A lot, IMHO. It certainly has affected our brand loyalty. As Kewl as Bionicles are, we have tried to steer our boyz towards products made by more consumer friendly companies, such as K'nex.
I know there's more to running a company, but this to me says they still Just Don't Get It.
Mark
It *is* a nice camera. I'm *very* happy with it.
;-)
Be warned: the ccd thing (I can't remember what they call it on new Canon's) is smaller than a 35mm negative so your lenses are about 1.4x longer in effective f.l.
And my tongue was sorta stuck in my cheek there...
But it's still not up to Good Film (e.g.: Velvia). OTOH, I never liked anything bigger than 8x10 from my 35mm's anyway...
Mark
Uh, dude. I can't afford a satellite. Or commercial stitching software.
Regular, off-the-shelf camera and lense (which itself is gonna have distortion). Free (as in beer at least) stitching software (i.e.: not a "product").
This is *not* "nothing", IMHO.
The camera he used is comparable to the $1000 Digital Rebel with a slight telephoto.
Mark
Frankly, as one who *just* joined the Dark Side by purchasing a Digital Rebel, I'm impressed.
For you naysayers, this particular gorgeous image is *begging* to be blown up to 30x50 inches or even more, IMHO.
When (not if) I figure out the stitching software (it's a little non-intuitive to me), my 4x5 is going on ebay!
I wish the learning curve for image manipulation wasn't so steep - I'd love to collaborate on a GIMP plugin to do stitching...
Mark
A look on the Bright Side (so to speak) of Blackouts: Had they actually implemented the powerline broadband thing, interference would have been nil during the blackout...
Mark
'Sorry I'm late, and sorry you won't see this, but we got one of our visually impaired employees a Panasonic 50" plasma display. We ran it at the native resolution and he was as happy as a pig in mud.
Mark
This is so true and some guy just did it again: WTF is WASTE?
And make SURE it isn't based on SEMICONDUCTORS! Talk about ANCIENT TECHNOLOGY!
Real life example: Solomon IV 2.6, peer-to-peer version. Win 3.1, runs successfully on all flavors.
Up to 6 simultaneous users (we did 6 very successfully). Works like a charm.
This is a "serious" full featured general purpose accounting package w/ gl, ap, payroll, etc. All the controls missing in Quickbooks, Peachtree, and their ilk, but priced competitively. No back end!
Starting w/ version 4.5, MS SQL Slammer is now required.
Mark
Geez, I hate being cynical, but:
Some of us *have* sacrificed careers for something we were hoping would give us a reason to get up in the morning, only to find that it's still the same old same old.
There's a little bit of "no matter where you go, you always bring yourself with you" involved.
But I've found that many of us really don't know what we wanna do when we grow up. I include myself: I've been a programmer for 20 years. I don't love it. It puts bread on the table. It pays for my home. Heck, it pays for my home theater.
I just don't think that that many of us are going to get jobs where we "get paid to play". What *I* consider playing just won't pay me very well, if it paid at all.
So, I personally really do find the thought of reading about more people who have found what I don't think I'll ever find quite discouraging.
Is my life a drag? Far from it! But, work is work and life is life. They don't really intermingle that much for me.
Mark
"To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, `You must not eat of it,'
'Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.'
OBTW - this was on NS7, not IE...
'Know what happens if you block cookies from ads.x10.com? They just keep opening windows on you. I've had 8 of 'em up before I closed some once (I normally use Pow)... Funnier - they have two ads, I had 4 of each.
;-)
Maybe we could have a contest to see who can have the most simultaneously open X10.com popup ads.
Oh, and the babes in the ads are almost sort of a type of soft pr0n...
Mark
'Lord knows, those folks need all the cloting they can get... ;-)
Mark
I suspect if you were to allow "real" charities that do such useless things as provide food, cloting, or shelter to those Less Fortunate, you'd find a LOT of people giving more to such Charities than we give to Micro$oft, Verizon, or AOHell.
Most folks, admitedly not all, would reduce their contribution to other charities were they to donate to EFF.
Potential Best of Both Worlds: donate time to a charity helping them set up and manage (yes, long term) an accounting system that does not require sending a lot of money to Bill Gates.
'Just a thought, a mere wrinkle.
Mark
I agree. This whole business is so crazy: Timesharing with Service Bureaus that are now called Application Service Providers (ASP's). IBM needs to come up with a Truly Kewl Name for it if they want it to take off.
;-(
I guess there'll always be some tensions here that aren't really technology per se: In this case, it's in-house vs outsource.
Joe does an analysis that shows if he outsources all of IT, it will save $X,XXX,XXX, so they do it. Joe gets promoted. Three years pass. Sam does an analysis that shows if he brings all IT functions in-house, it will save $X,XXX,XXX, so they do it and he gets promoted...
IBM and Microsoft make money no matter what. Kinda like lawyers. Oh, I forgot they ARE lawyers.
'Sorry for the cynicism.
Mark