There's fraud and then there is the usual behavior of MBAs. Microsoft is clearly a company run by MBAs and not the original engineering types. With engineering types deceitful behavior would not be expected and thus would be unexpectedly fraudulent. But with MBAs they will twist any statistic until it bleeds thinking that if they can spreadsheet it then it becomes reality.
This creates many amusing situations such as MBA types issuing Mortgage backed bonds based on mortgages issued to people with such bad credit that they usually missed their very first mortgage payment. It is the typical MBA's difficult relationship with the truth that resulted in GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Practices) limiting their truth distorting ways.
So any investor that invests in an MBA dominated company should know that they are dealing with a den of thieves who have degenerated into Bottom Line dominated monsters. So the only change that I would ask is that stock ticker symbols come with a super-script that tells you what percentage of the upper management has an MBA. (or used to be in real-estate / used car sales)
I wish they would give a detailed explanation of what they want to do; the reward for any person or group that actually does it; and the condition that their code is opensource.
Over and over you hear of these medical computer systems going into the billions (yes billions) and still not really working. Some parts of the system do involve some long drudge work such as entering the zillion codes for every ailment (mud in your eye) but I can't see the bulk of it being that terribly hard. As an open source project I could see groups of people just joining in for some altruistic fun.
But alas the large computer consultancies seem to have this locked up. They somehow convince the various governments to build systems that are so complicated that the documentation alone would fill tractor-trailers.
A great example of this would be the Canadian gun registry. It ran to around 2 billion dollars, never registered that many guns, and was an all around failure. My friends and I did some math and found that you could literally do the entire system in blocks of stone cheaper. That is you could carve all the records into blocks of stone and store them for access by people who would walk up and down the aisles with cell phones when someone called in a data request; and do this all much cheaper than 2 billion dollars.
But back to the opensource crowd sourced project. Why not give it a try? Worst case scenario it is a failure plus that failure wouldn't cost an arm and leg.
I have watched Australian Cop Shows and they just search cars, dig through pockets, and seize people's cars without the slightest regard to concepts such as probable cause, privacy rights, etc. Australia looks like an amazing country but legally it is a tin pot dictatorship. I think the only thing keeping it from being much worse is that the politicians weren't monsters. But if they were to elect some real monsters there is little protecting the people from them.
What the hell? I am saying simple as in the fundamental concepts are much simpler than the alternatives. If you go to Europe many of the trains have very complex systems for getting energy into the trains. The construction of the tracks is an engineering marvel. Then you have the high speed systems where the level of complexity and precision is much much higher. Few companies can do this without killing lots of people.
This system is wonderfully simple in COMPARISON. No doubt when you go to actually build it many interesting and challenging problems will need to be solved just that when all is said and done the bulk of the system will be tubes on pylons. If you watch modern high speed track being laid every tie has to be laid perfectly. Then you have to lay every rail perfectly. They you have to weld the rails together.... perfectly. That is a whole lot of perfection before you then move another 40 feet and do again... on freshly and perfectly prepared ground.
But with pylons you prepare a series of widely spaced solid bases and then put up pylons where you string the tubes along. A whole lot less work. And less to go wrong.
If anything my engineering knowledge is admiring the principle that separates the great engineers from the rabble. Simplicity.
I think it can work. I would love it to work. I just think that if it is as cheap as he says it could be then big money and politics won't want it to work.
I love it when simple obvious, and in this case old, technologies blow expensive and complicated technologies out of the water. Let's see, an old pneumatic message system with cars big enough for people. Cheap, easy to build, probably dirt cheap to run and maintain. Wow.
But there is huge problem with this system. Being so cheap and simple there is little room for massive companies to lobby/sell their complicated overpriced technologies. Tubes? How long is the list of companies that could build tubes? Pylons? How long is the list of companies that can build pylons? The train cars are a bit more limited but again not being maglev that list is still pretty long. Land purchases? I suspect that a bunch of insiders had land all lined up to sell.
Then you get other technocrats who don't like that their territory is being infringed. The rail people are probably scared that this might be independently run.
And lastly you get the aviation related interests that are far larger than most people might think. You have the oil refineries who will be unhappy to sell less fuel to both planes and cars, you have taxi drivers who run people to the airports, you of course have the airlines themselves, and you have the airports who will be unhappy to have fewer landings and takeoffs. Plus the no-doubt 50 unions who run the airports among others.
A tube system like this would be pure evil as far as those people are concerned dropping people off right down-town, how dare they.
I would buy one right now as long as it was fairly phone agnostic (at least all the phones for a given brand). I saw something like this years ago but the phone literally snapped into a very specifically shaped slot. My preference would either be bluetooth or at most a USB cable.
The labor costs of many farmers is exactly their problem. During harvest they can't get enough labor and in February they have tonnes to spare by virtue of being far from cities, factories, etc. This is why one has to be careful when comparing costs. It might be more expensive than oil if you calculate in hourly wages. But for some farmers the alternative hourly wage is zero.
The other thing is that in my experience farmers (and even better hillbillies) can be awesome innovators. One hillbilly that I met had converted his Volvo from Automatic to standard because A the automatic was shot, and B he preferred standard. Do you know how much work and innovation it takes to make that switch? The frame of the car is literally designed for one or the other. Plus the standard transmission was from some non volvo product. The thing ran very well and it lasted for years. So I would love to see technologies like this put into that guy's hands. I suspect that efficiency levels would climb or the cost of installation would be lower than expected.
What is hurting microsoft is not that many people need anything resembling a desktop computer. Most people are consumer's of content with the only content they create requiring little in the way of complicated interfacing (tweets, messages, pokes, likes, votes, and the occasional picture or even video). Thus a smart phone became many people's primary interface to the interwebs. What people are now seeing is that they want a better interface to the interwebs in their pocket so the larger screen sizes are becoming quite popular. But personally I think the happy size limit is at most an iPad mini or slightly smaller.
But instead MS goes and creates the surface which is basically a laptop with a keyboard that you will misplace. What? Who wants that? If I want a laptop, I want a trackpad, a keyboard, and a proper sized screen. If I want a tablet or larger smartphone that is what I want. Not some hybrid that isn't that great at being either when for the same or less money I can do better.
The reality is that there is a great product sitting right in this area. The product is a keyboard, trackpad, and monitor from a laptop that uses your phone as the computer. Not just one phone that is proprietary to the keyboard/monitor but something that will talk to your entire lineup of phones now and into the future. We know that smartphones are going to get smarter and smarter but a good keyboard and monitor could last through generations of smartphones. This way you can do all your phone stuff quite nicely with your choice of MS phone but then when you need to do some content creation (spreadsheet, video editing, resume polishing, etc) you have a proper keyboard monitor combo. This matches people's common usage pattern where they have a cool new smartphone but a 4 year old laptop (who's battery lasts 8 minutes) mostly gathering dust. But when they need the laptop they really need it.
This would also be nearly perfect for the road warrior. They effectively travel with one device. Also the keyboard/monitor thingy could be insanely thin with no HD, little circuitry, and potentially no cooling needs. Just one large thin battery, the keys, and the screen.
People blah blah about the economics of this vs that and then write off the more expensive techology. But what interests me are the actual costs. Often the economics can be very interesting on a local scale. For instance, if you were a small organic farmer could you plant some of this stuff in the scrubby back 20 and then with a little bio-fuel setup in the barn make your own fuel? Often people like farmers have cash flow problems and taking fuel out of the equation could be a big help. This might be a case where the farmer would work at this in the winter producing a summer's worth of fuel and it is grown on worthless land. For the farmer it takes his winter time and makes it valuable and takes worthless land and makes it valuable. It is doubtful that the farmer cares that crude oil is cheaper in that he doesn't have that under the back 40.
Then you go third world where access to cash is an even bigger problem so again removing fuel from the expenses would be a huge help.
A good variation of this would be that many Texas farmers have abandoned oil wells on their land. The farmer stakes a claim to the wells and then using wind or solar pumps a few barrels a day. These wells are dead as far as the big companies are concerned but for the farmers can add up to a pretty good living. So according to macro economics as viewed by the oil company accountants these wells are worthless; when the farmers show that they clearly aren't.
So I often read about technology X not being better than oil when you add up all the costs but often those costs don't apply.
In my experience there is never just one cockroach. This sort of short tempered thing is rarely done in the public eye. Even if the guy were an serial abuser he would still keep it hidden from the public. Thus I suspect that he fits a long pattern of CEOs who do this sort of public stress related nonsense only as they are cracking under unimaginable stress. Rarely this stress is caused by their own imminent firing as that is usually hidden from them until the trap door is sprung. This sort of stress is caused by really bad numbers. Numbers so bad there is just no spinning them. Numbers that not only say things are bad now, but numbers that say, there is no recovering from this. Normally these CEO types are able to delude themselves through screwing with the numbers but at a certain point the numbers are rotten no matter how much tempura you dip them in.
I saw this just before Air Canada did their bankruptcy, I saw this before Nortel went busto, even Sun before its long hard slide started having upper management go a bit off.
My favorite one was a tiny corner store when I was a kid. We went in and a friend of mine each had around $1.50 I paid for something but my friend asked how much a certain product was, The owner said, "$1.70" My friend said, "Oh that is 20 cents more than before" and put it back. The guy started screaming "Are you begrudging me 20 f*****g cents?" He then picked up a bat from behind the counter and chased my friend out of the store. The next day there was a big red notice on the door saying that the locks had been changed and that he could get back in his store when he paid the last 6 months rent.
So when I see CEOs acting insanely I see that stressed-to-the-max store owner from all those years ago. So if I were playing the stock market I know I would bet hard against AOL.
Or maybe the guy is a dick 24 hours a day and this just leaked out for the world to see. I'm betting.... both.
Many years ago I was dealing with a company that let's just say was huge and their computers guarded massive amounts of money. I was working for a contractor building a web page where customers would fill in an application and the application would be emailed securely to someone who would process it (not a great way but it fit their existing data flow) so after everything was working with our made up keys I asked the head (the entire company's head) of IT for the public key that we would need. He then sent me a collection of files that was all their keys, private and public. And by all I mean the keys to their entire kingdom.
I found the guy's home number and called him that night and explained to him how public and private keys work and that with the private keys people could own him.
So the question is not just how to ask for a public key but to make sure that they only send you the public key.
Personally I have had little success getting people to manage their keys. Few back them up, very few understand the difference between public and private. Often they are fearful of using public keys. Plus the end result is they often send unencrypted emails thinking that they are. "I sent this from my phone. Didn't we set up encryption?"
Long ago I worked at place that used Oracle. We basically never had a clue how much the licenses were going to be. We might do a project identical in every way to a recent project and get different numbers. Our other office would call the sales people with the identical specs and get different numbers again. It seemed the bigger the client the bigger the fee.
And these were all huge numbers often going into 6 digits.
Let me see, I'll call to see if MariaDB has a Cost calculator, It Does!!! Number of CPUs x $10,000 plus number of users x $500 plus number of different devices x $6,000 plus mobile user fee $8,000 plus Web usage fee $20,000 Then you add all that up and multiply by ZERO!!!
"not hire bad employees" I think most IT people dream about the day when they figure out how. My favorite failed coworker looked like he was going to really work out. Fit the team, a bit cooler than the rest of us, and knew his stuff. All the bits that make at least a good programmer. But then one day(about his third) he answered the phone and the in a low voice said, "How did you get this number?" It was an ex-GF and the break-up was mega drama. So for the next week it was around 10 calls per day all starting with "I told you to stop calling me here." Then after a week of this the two of them moved to Toronto.
As for the coffee pot I read about a different company where they created a setup where something would be spilled on the floor(nobody's fault) in the waiting room containing each group of potential hires. The company would only hire from the people who worked at cleaning up the mess; often less than 1 in 4.
My licensing costs. Let's see:
CentOS 6 - $0.00
Apache - $0.00
MariaDB - $0.00
PHP - $0.00
GNU C++ - $0.00
TOTAL -- $0.00
Plus number of hours spent auditing licensing: ZERO
Now let's look at my development tools:XCode, SSH, Firefox, Chrome, VIM, and the command line. For an additional zero dollars.
But the best bit is that even if MS said, "Dude you are so wonderful that we will now give you an unlimited license to every product we have completely for free for life." I wouldn't even crack the film wrap on the packaging. It is not out of some religious hatred of MS but that the products I use match my needs perfectly. So for me at least to switch back to MS would be to make my products and productivity worse.
Absolutely. I am not saying so much that mobile devices are as good. It is more of a resource issue. People have limited, money and time to dedicate to gaming. So when you mobile budget is competing with a new console and its associated games for many people the mobile will win. With the mobile they can also do some satisfying gaming; satisfying enough for many that is.
Many people blame piracy for killing record stores and then video stores. But an interesting factoid is that if you look at younger people's budgets in the 50's to the 90's it actually remained roughly the same with money going to clothing, movies, and music in nearly identical ratios. But in the later 90s it started to go into computers and consoles to the detriment of movies and music with the price of clothing dropping somewhat. Then into the 2000's you have another new budget item of mobile telephony. This money has to come from somewhere.
Looking at my kid's friends I not only see them with fairly high priced phones (iPhone 5s right now) and they seem to go through them fairly quickly. At $500 a pop plus $40+ per month (minimum) that is a whole lot of console budget being eaten up.
So in the 90s and early 2000s people would jump some pretty tough barriers to get their hands on cool consoles. But at this point people will be far less inclined to jump these barriers. I suspect that MS is seeing kids wandering around with these great phones and expensive plans and thinking. If they have money for that then they have money for us. The real question would be: are these kids willing to give up much of that budget(including monthly) for our console? I am pretty sure the answer is a resounding no.
It sounds like the spreadsheet wielding MBAs have completely taken over Microsoft. Spreadsheet thinking is an easy trap to fall into. You put up all your costs, and all your revenues and look at the bottom line. Then you start slipping in the occasional extra bit of revenue and suddenly the bottom line numbers start to grow like balloon. The key problem is that some numbers are hard factual numbers such as reducing the quality of the plastic will save you a fairly specific amount of money. But the problem is that a change of that nature may impact things like the reviews, return rates, breakage during shipping, etc. These numbers just come out of their ass and can end up being very optimistic. But you aren't looking at just one MBA with his spreadsheet but dozens all running their little fiefdoms and making their own adjustments.
I'm not saying they shouldn't make a profit but that they often don't match the weight of the pros and cons of each decision. For example. How hard do you have to push a faithful XBox 360 user to switch to the PS4 instead of buying the new XBox? Or like XP might many Xbox users stick with the 360 instead of going to XBox Vista? Then when they start trying to poison the 360 well the users might switch to the PS4. Even more complicated is that many people might be getting their gaming from their mobile devices. Would people abandon the console for a mobile device. These are all very hard questions to quantify and thus properly spreadsheet. So the MBAs argue that action X will annoy 1% of users while adding 10% to revenue. The 10% is probably close. The 1% is just a wacky guess.
As I said to another, I don't know how this ended as I only got a short time glimpse at the inner workings of this company. At least the deadwood was cleared out. But what they might have learned was that things could get done in a timely basis.
I once read about a theory called the Dead Sea theory. The idea is that the dead sea has many rivers running into it but none running out. So while those rivers are mostly fresh the water does contain some salts. But as the water goes into the dead sea the fresh water evaporates leaving the salt. This then happens to companies that don't get rid of the genuinely bad employees (the salt) while letting the good ones evaporate away. Basically the math is that you must at least fire the bad employees at the same rate you are losing good employees.
A while back this guy fired all the people he had identified as not refilling the coffee pot. At first he was pilloried as being a terrible boss but the remaining employees stood up for him and said he had fired all the selfish asswipes and troublemakers.
It is a cool idea but they are rotating the "3D" image about 1 degree. If they had even halfway good 3D data they could have rotated a whole lot more. My guess is that after 1 degree their "3D" turns into a spiky mess. Man I am getting sick of this popular science news, "Science has way to make flying cars a reality in 5 years."
I am not doubting that 3D information can be extracted from focal data, I am doubting that these guys can do it.
The best teams that I have ever seen were almost leaderless. Typically the "leader" was someone much higher up in management who would be given regular presentations and they would then be the sanity check to make sure the project wasn't going off course.
Often the key programmers were damn good and while not project managing would apply project management skills in discussions where features were prioritized etc.
Typically the worst teams had a very structured and detailed leadership org-chart. Junior programmers, Senior programmers, project lead, project manager etc.
Often the managers in these situations had become managers through 3 routes. One was seniority, where they had just put in a bunch of years and then one day they were managers. Were those good years or bad years, nobody seemed to care, did they have a knack for leadership, nobody seemed to care. The second route was they were horrible horrible programmers and just moved into management as a way to not get fired as terrible programmers. And the third were refugees from other departments. They would close the call center and suddenly the call center manager was in charge of development. These last managers were usually the worst. The skills that served them well were usually all political and cunning. Thus they saw all smart programmers as a threat. Some programmer might actually want to manage, would take a course from the PMI and were fired in 3 seconds.
As I said, the best managers were often barely managers at all. They knew exactly what they wanted and that was the bulk of their management style. They would repeatedly ask, "Are we making progress to what I want?" Then they would look at everything, cut through the technobabble and either be happy or not. But the key here is that they knew Exactly what they wanted. This is only a shade different from the aloof manager who sort of knew what they wanted. Those projects turned into a pile of sick in the first week. The goalposts would move daily with feature requests being a classic game of buzzword bingo.
I witnessed a moment that would be hard to replicate; a project had failed around 5 times over as many years. So the head of marketing temporarily took over the development department of around 20 programmers. He said, "You can form into teams of any size and you don't have to have anyone on your team you don't want. Also there is no seniority. So if the two newest guys want to form a team then fine. But whichever group makes me happy before September(5 months) will form the core of a new programming department and I will lavish a bonus on you that will make my top salesmen jealous. Also if I hear any complaining you can clear out your desk. And again, your goal is to impress me. Not anyone else in this company. If someone tells you that you are doing it wrong tell me and I will tell them to clear out their desks."
A team of 4 guys (all with Junior programmer titles) won in just over a week. My favorite complaints from the largest group of soon to be ex-employees (9 were fired) was that there wasn't any documentation, the wrong language was used, and that their coding wasn't to company standards.
So to answer the original question. Often the worst companies are looking for someone to pigeonhole into their complicated org-chart; while the best companies are looking for someone who will fit into their squad. Most companies are crap at development BTW and don't seem to care.
Actually they are scattered here and there. Usually in secondary markets and you don't hear about them much because they don't spend zillions on marketing. Oddly enough the traditional media companies don't talk about them much either. Lastly the FCC stuck a knife in their backs about 7 years ago. But this might give them a nice little boost.
The Russians must be loving Snowden as he must be target number one for Russia based US spies. So all they need to do is have him stand in an open field and see who "happens to randomly" stroll by with their 300mm camera. Then have him go rock climbing and see who "randomly" strolls by again.
My guess is that if there were rumors that the Russians had developed a new superweapon and another rumor that Snowden was going out for an ice cream. That they would dedicate more resources to Snowden.
Obama just went on Leno and said, "There is no domestic spying program" My biggest fear is that Obama is so misinformed that this is actually what he believes. Soon they will just be saying there is no Snowden. I have been waiting for the campaign of disinformation about him: that he is really a janitor and a Walter Mitty, that he likes child porn, that he does drugs, that he murdered his grandma, that he is UFO nut, that there is strong evidence that he made all this up, that he was a Russian plant all along, that he was a supporter of the Rebel Louis Riel.
Slashdot Mirror
There's fraud and then there is the usual behavior of MBAs. Microsoft is clearly a company run by MBAs and not the original engineering types. With engineering types deceitful behavior would not be expected and thus would be unexpectedly fraudulent. But with MBAs they will twist any statistic until it bleeds thinking that if they can spreadsheet it then it becomes reality.
This creates many amusing situations such as MBA types issuing Mortgage backed bonds based on mortgages issued to people with such bad credit that they usually missed their very first mortgage payment. It is the typical MBA's difficult relationship with the truth that resulted in GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Practices) limiting their truth distorting ways.
So any investor that invests in an MBA dominated company should know that they are dealing with a den of thieves who have degenerated into Bottom Line dominated monsters. So the only change that I would ask is that stock ticker symbols come with a super-script that tells you what percentage of the upper management has an MBA. (or used to be in real-estate / used car sales)
I wish they would give a detailed explanation of what they want to do; the reward for any person or group that actually does it; and the condition that their code is opensource.
Over and over you hear of these medical computer systems going into the billions (yes billions) and still not really working. Some parts of the system do involve some long drudge work such as entering the zillion codes for every ailment (mud in your eye) but I can't see the bulk of it being that terribly hard. As an open source project I could see groups of people just joining in for some altruistic fun.
But alas the large computer consultancies seem to have this locked up. They somehow convince the various governments to build systems that are so complicated that the documentation alone would fill tractor-trailers.
A great example of this would be the Canadian gun registry. It ran to around 2 billion dollars, never registered that many guns, and was an all around failure. My friends and I did some math and found that you could literally do the entire system in blocks of stone cheaper. That is you could carve all the records into blocks of stone and store them for access by people who would walk up and down the aisles with cell phones when someone called in a data request; and do this all much cheaper than 2 billion dollars.
But back to the opensource crowd sourced project. Why not give it a try? Worst case scenario it is a failure plus that failure wouldn't cost an arm and leg.
I have watched Australian Cop Shows and they just search cars, dig through pockets, and seize people's cars without the slightest regard to concepts such as probable cause, privacy rights, etc. Australia looks like an amazing country but legally it is a tin pot dictatorship. I think the only thing keeping it from being much worse is that the politicians weren't monsters. But if they were to elect some real monsters there is little protecting the people from them.
What the hell? I am saying simple as in the fundamental concepts are much simpler than the alternatives. If you go to Europe many of the trains have very complex systems for getting energy into the trains. The construction of the tracks is an engineering marvel. Then you have the high speed systems where the level of complexity and precision is much much higher. Few companies can do this without killing lots of people.
This system is wonderfully simple in COMPARISON. No doubt when you go to actually build it many interesting and challenging problems will need to be solved just that when all is said and done the bulk of the system will be tubes on pylons. If you watch modern high speed track being laid every tie has to be laid perfectly. Then you have to lay every rail perfectly. They you have to weld the rails together.... perfectly. That is a whole lot of perfection before you then move another 40 feet and do again... on freshly and perfectly prepared ground.
But with pylons you prepare a series of widely spaced solid bases and then put up pylons where you string the tubes along. A whole lot less work. And less to go wrong.
If anything my engineering knowledge is admiring the principle that separates the great engineers from the rabble. Simplicity.
I think it can work. I would love it to work. I just think that if it is as cheap as he says it could be then big money and politics won't want it to work.
I love it when simple obvious, and in this case old, technologies blow expensive and complicated technologies out of the water. Let's see, an old pneumatic message system with cars big enough for people. Cheap, easy to build, probably dirt cheap to run and maintain. Wow.
But there is huge problem with this system. Being so cheap and simple there is little room for massive companies to lobby/sell their complicated overpriced technologies. Tubes? How long is the list of companies that could build tubes? Pylons? How long is the list of companies that can build pylons? The train cars are a bit more limited but again not being maglev that list is still pretty long. Land purchases? I suspect that a bunch of insiders had land all lined up to sell.
Then you get other technocrats who don't like that their territory is being infringed. The rail people are probably scared that this might be independently run.
And lastly you get the aviation related interests that are far larger than most people might think. You have the oil refineries who will be unhappy to sell less fuel to both planes and cars, you have taxi drivers who run people to the airports, you of course have the airlines themselves, and you have the airports who will be unhappy to have fewer landings and takeoffs. Plus the no-doubt 50 unions who run the airports among others.
A tube system like this would be pure evil as far as those people are concerned dropping people off right down-town, how dare they.
I would buy one right now as long as it was fairly phone agnostic (at least all the phones for a given brand). I saw something like this years ago but the phone literally snapped into a very specifically shaped slot. My preference would either be bluetooth or at most a USB cable.
The labor costs of many farmers is exactly their problem. During harvest they can't get enough labor and in February they have tonnes to spare by virtue of being far from cities, factories, etc. This is why one has to be careful when comparing costs. It might be more expensive than oil if you calculate in hourly wages. But for some farmers the alternative hourly wage is zero.
The other thing is that in my experience farmers (and even better hillbillies) can be awesome innovators. One hillbilly that I met had converted his Volvo from Automatic to standard because A the automatic was shot, and B he preferred standard. Do you know how much work and innovation it takes to make that switch? The frame of the car is literally designed for one or the other. Plus the standard transmission was from some non volvo product. The thing ran very well and it lasted for years. So I would love to see technologies like this put into that guy's hands. I suspect that efficiency levels would climb or the cost of installation would be lower than expected.
What is hurting microsoft is not that many people need anything resembling a desktop computer. Most people are consumer's of content with the only content they create requiring little in the way of complicated interfacing (tweets, messages, pokes, likes, votes, and the occasional picture or even video). Thus a smart phone became many people's primary interface to the interwebs. What people are now seeing is that they want a better interface to the interwebs in their pocket so the larger screen sizes are becoming quite popular. But personally I think the happy size limit is at most an iPad mini or slightly smaller.
But instead MS goes and creates the surface which is basically a laptop with a keyboard that you will misplace. What? Who wants that? If I want a laptop, I want a trackpad, a keyboard, and a proper sized screen. If I want a tablet or larger smartphone that is what I want. Not some hybrid that isn't that great at being either when for the same or less money I can do better.
The reality is that there is a great product sitting right in this area. The product is a keyboard, trackpad, and monitor from a laptop that uses your phone as the computer. Not just one phone that is proprietary to the keyboard/monitor but something that will talk to your entire lineup of phones now and into the future. We know that smartphones are going to get smarter and smarter but a good keyboard and monitor could last through generations of smartphones. This way you can do all your phone stuff quite nicely with your choice of MS phone but then when you need to do some content creation (spreadsheet, video editing, resume polishing, etc) you have a proper keyboard monitor combo. This matches people's common usage pattern where they have a cool new smartphone but a 4 year old laptop (who's battery lasts 8 minutes) mostly gathering dust. But when they need the laptop they really need it.
This would also be nearly perfect for the road warrior. They effectively travel with one device. Also the keyboard/monitor thingy could be insanely thin with no HD, little circuitry, and potentially no cooling needs. Just one large thin battery, the keys, and the screen.
People blah blah about the economics of this vs that and then write off the more expensive techology. But what interests me are the actual costs. Often the economics can be very interesting on a local scale. For instance, if you were a small organic farmer could you plant some of this stuff in the scrubby back 20 and then with a little bio-fuel setup in the barn make your own fuel? Often people like farmers have cash flow problems and taking fuel out of the equation could be a big help. This might be a case where the farmer would work at this in the winter producing a summer's worth of fuel and it is grown on worthless land. For the farmer it takes his winter time and makes it valuable and takes worthless land and makes it valuable. It is doubtful that the farmer cares that crude oil is cheaper in that he doesn't have that under the back 40.
Then you go third world where access to cash is an even bigger problem so again removing fuel from the expenses would be a huge help.
A good variation of this would be that many Texas farmers have abandoned oil wells on their land. The farmer stakes a claim to the wells and then using wind or solar pumps a few barrels a day. These wells are dead as far as the big companies are concerned but for the farmers can add up to a pretty good living. So according to macro economics as viewed by the oil company accountants these wells are worthless; when the farmers show that they clearly aren't.
So I often read about technology X not being better than oil when you add up all the costs but often those costs don't apply.
In my experience there is never just one cockroach. This sort of short tempered thing is rarely done in the public eye. Even if the guy were an serial abuser he would still keep it hidden from the public. Thus I suspect that he fits a long pattern of CEOs who do this sort of public stress related nonsense only as they are cracking under unimaginable stress. Rarely this stress is caused by their own imminent firing as that is usually hidden from them until the trap door is sprung. This sort of stress is caused by really bad numbers. Numbers so bad there is just no spinning them. Numbers that not only say things are bad now, but numbers that say, there is no recovering from this. Normally these CEO types are able to delude themselves through screwing with the numbers but at a certain point the numbers are rotten no matter how much tempura you dip them in.
I saw this just before Air Canada did their bankruptcy, I saw this before Nortel went busto, even Sun before its long hard slide started having upper management go a bit off.
My favorite one was a tiny corner store when I was a kid. We went in and a friend of mine each had around $1.50 I paid for something but my friend asked how much a certain product was, The owner said, "$1.70" My friend said, "Oh that is 20 cents more than before" and put it back. The guy started screaming "Are you begrudging me 20 f*****g cents?" He then picked up a bat from behind the counter and chased my friend out of the store. The next day there was a big red notice on the door saying that the locks had been changed and that he could get back in his store when he paid the last 6 months rent.
So when I see CEOs acting insanely I see that stressed-to-the-max store owner from all those years ago. So if I were playing the stock market I know I would bet hard against AOL.
Or maybe the guy is a dick 24 hours a day and this just leaked out for the world to see. I'm betting.... both.
Many years ago I was dealing with a company that let's just say was huge and their computers guarded massive amounts of money. I was working for a contractor building a web page where customers would fill in an application and the application would be emailed securely to someone who would process it (not a great way but it fit their existing data flow) so after everything was working with our made up keys I asked the head (the entire company's head) of IT for the public key that we would need. He then sent me a collection of files that was all their keys, private and public. And by all I mean the keys to their entire kingdom.
I found the guy's home number and called him that night and explained to him how public and private keys work and that with the private keys people could own him.
So the question is not just how to ask for a public key but to make sure that they only send you the public key.
Personally I have had little success getting people to manage their keys. Few back them up, very few understand the difference between public and private. Often they are fearful of using public keys. Plus the end result is they often send unencrypted emails thinking that they are. "I sent this from my phone. Didn't we set up encryption?"
Long ago I worked at place that used Oracle. We basically never had a clue how much the licenses were going to be. We might do a project identical in every way to a recent project and get different numbers. Our other office would call the sales people with the identical specs and get different numbers again. It seemed the bigger the client the bigger the fee.
And these were all huge numbers often going into 6 digits.
Let me see, I'll call to see if MariaDB has a Cost calculator, It Does!!! Number of CPUs x $10,000 plus number of users x $500 plus number of different devices x $6,000 plus mobile user fee $8,000 plus Web usage fee $20,000 Then you add all that up and multiply by ZERO!!!
"not hire bad employees" I think most IT people dream about the day when they figure out how. My favorite failed coworker looked like he was going to really work out. Fit the team, a bit cooler than the rest of us, and knew his stuff. All the bits that make at least a good programmer. But then one day(about his third) he answered the phone and the in a low voice said, "How did you get this number?" It was an ex-GF and the break-up was mega drama. So for the next week it was around 10 calls per day all starting with "I told you to stop calling me here." Then after a week of this the two of them moved to Toronto.
As for the coffee pot I read about a different company where they created a setup where something would be spilled on the floor(nobody's fault) in the waiting room containing each group of potential hires. The company would only hire from the people who worked at cleaning up the mess; often less than 1 in 4.
My licensing costs. Let's see:
CentOS 6 - $0.00
Apache - $0.00
MariaDB - $0.00
PHP - $0.00
GNU C++ - $0.00
TOTAL -- $0.00
Plus number of hours spent auditing licensing: ZERO
Now let's look at my development tools:XCode, SSH, Firefox, Chrome, VIM, and the command line. For an additional zero dollars.
But the best bit is that even if MS said, "Dude you are so wonderful that we will now give you an unlimited license to every product we have completely for free for life." I wouldn't even crack the film wrap on the packaging. It is not out of some religious hatred of MS but that the products I use match my needs perfectly. So for me at least to switch back to MS would be to make my products and productivity worse.
Absolutely. I am not saying so much that mobile devices are as good. It is more of a resource issue. People have limited, money and time to dedicate to gaming. So when you mobile budget is competing with a new console and its associated games for many people the mobile will win. With the mobile they can also do some satisfying gaming; satisfying enough for many that is.
Many people blame piracy for killing record stores and then video stores. But an interesting factoid is that if you look at younger people's budgets in the 50's to the 90's it actually remained roughly the same with money going to clothing, movies, and music in nearly identical ratios. But in the later 90s it started to go into computers and consoles to the detriment of movies and music with the price of clothing dropping somewhat. Then into the 2000's you have another new budget item of mobile telephony. This money has to come from somewhere.
Looking at my kid's friends I not only see them with fairly high priced phones (iPhone 5s right now) and they seem to go through them fairly quickly. At $500 a pop plus $40+ per month (minimum) that is a whole lot of console budget being eaten up.
So in the 90s and early 2000s people would jump some pretty tough barriers to get their hands on cool consoles. But at this point people will be far less inclined to jump these barriers. I suspect that MS is seeing kids wandering around with these great phones and expensive plans and thinking. If they have money for that then they have money for us. The real question would be: are these kids willing to give up much of that budget(including monthly) for our console? I am pretty sure the answer is a resounding no.
It sounds like the spreadsheet wielding MBAs have completely taken over Microsoft. Spreadsheet thinking is an easy trap to fall into. You put up all your costs, and all your revenues and look at the bottom line. Then you start slipping in the occasional extra bit of revenue and suddenly the bottom line numbers start to grow like balloon. The key problem is that some numbers are hard factual numbers such as reducing the quality of the plastic will save you a fairly specific amount of money. But the problem is that a change of that nature may impact things like the reviews, return rates, breakage during shipping, etc. These numbers just come out of their ass and can end up being very optimistic. But you aren't looking at just one MBA with his spreadsheet but dozens all running their little fiefdoms and making their own adjustments.
I'm not saying they shouldn't make a profit but that they often don't match the weight of the pros and cons of each decision. For example. How hard do you have to push a faithful XBox 360 user to switch to the PS4 instead of buying the new XBox? Or like XP might many Xbox users stick with the 360 instead of going to XBox Vista? Then when they start trying to poison the 360 well the users might switch to the PS4. Even more complicated is that many people might be getting their gaming from their mobile devices. Would people abandon the console for a mobile device. These are all very hard questions to quantify and thus properly spreadsheet. So the MBAs argue that action X will annoy 1% of users while adding 10% to revenue. The 10% is probably close. The 1% is just a wacky guess.
As I said to another, I don't know how this ended as I only got a short time glimpse at the inner workings of this company. At least the deadwood was cleared out. But what they might have learned was that things could get done in a timely basis.
I once read about a theory called the Dead Sea theory. The idea is that the dead sea has many rivers running into it but none running out. So while those rivers are mostly fresh the water does contain some salts. But as the water goes into the dead sea the fresh water evaporates leaving the salt. This then happens to companies that don't get rid of the genuinely bad employees (the salt) while letting the good ones evaporate away. Basically the math is that you must at least fire the bad employees at the same rate you are losing good employees.
A while back this guy fired all the people he had identified as not refilling the coffee pot. At first he was pilloried as being a terrible boss but the remaining employees stood up for him and said he had fired all the selfish asswipes and troublemakers.
I only got a glimpse and the marketing guy only wanted the one product; they did clear out the deadwood though.
It is a cool idea but they are rotating the "3D" image about 1 degree. If they had even halfway good 3D data they could have rotated a whole lot more. My guess is that after 1 degree their "3D" turns into a spiky mess. Man I am getting sick of this popular science news, "Science has way to make flying cars a reality in 5 years."
I am not doubting that 3D information can be extracted from focal data, I am doubting that these guys can do it.
The best teams that I have ever seen were almost leaderless. Typically the "leader" was someone much higher up in management who would be given regular presentations and they would then be the sanity check to make sure the project wasn't going off course.
Often the key programmers were damn good and while not project managing would apply project management skills in discussions where features were prioritized etc.
Typically the worst teams had a very structured and detailed leadership org-chart. Junior programmers, Senior programmers, project lead, project manager etc.
Often the managers in these situations had become managers through 3 routes. One was seniority, where they had just put in a bunch of years and then one day they were managers. Were those good years or bad years, nobody seemed to care, did they have a knack for leadership, nobody seemed to care. The second route was they were horrible horrible programmers and just moved into management as a way to not get fired as terrible programmers. And the third were refugees from other departments. They would close the call center and suddenly the call center manager was in charge of development. These last managers were usually the worst. The skills that served them well were usually all political and cunning. Thus they saw all smart programmers as a threat. Some programmer might actually want to manage, would take a course from the PMI and were fired in 3 seconds.
As I said, the best managers were often barely managers at all. They knew exactly what they wanted and that was the bulk of their management style. They would repeatedly ask, "Are we making progress to what I want?" Then they would look at everything, cut through the technobabble and either be happy or not. But the key here is that they knew Exactly what they wanted. This is only a shade different from the aloof manager who sort of knew what they wanted. Those projects turned into a pile of sick in the first week. The goalposts would move daily with feature requests being a classic game of buzzword bingo.
I witnessed a moment that would be hard to replicate; a project had failed around 5 times over as many years. So the head of marketing temporarily took over the development department of around 20 programmers. He said, "You can form into teams of any size and you don't have to have anyone on your team you don't want. Also there is no seniority. So if the two newest guys want to form a team then fine. But whichever group makes me happy before September(5 months) will form the core of a new programming department and I will lavish a bonus on you that will make my top salesmen jealous. Also if I hear any complaining you can clear out your desk. And again, your goal is to impress me. Not anyone else in this company. If someone tells you that you are doing it wrong tell me and I will tell them to clear out their desks."
A team of 4 guys (all with Junior programmer titles) won in just over a week. My favorite complaints from the largest group of soon to be ex-employees (9 were fired) was that there wasn't any documentation, the wrong language was used, and that their coding wasn't to company standards.
So to answer the original question. Often the worst companies are looking for someone to pigeonhole into their complicated org-chart; while the best companies are looking for someone who will fit into their squad. Most companies are crap at development BTW and don't seem to care.
I just phoned every range in range. Not one has ever collected the lead. One said that someone came by once and said he was too small to be worth it.
Actually they are scattered here and there. Usually in secondary markets and you don't hear about them much because they don't spend zillions on marketing. Oddly enough the traditional media companies don't talk about them much either. Lastly the FCC stuck a knife in their backs about 7 years ago. But this might give them a nice little boost.
The Russians must be loving Snowden as he must be target number one for Russia based US spies. So all they need to do is have him stand in an open field and see who "happens to randomly" stroll by with their 300mm camera. Then have him go rock climbing and see who "randomly" strolls by again.
My guess is that if there were rumors that the Russians had developed a new superweapon and another rumor that Snowden was going out for an ice cream. That they would dedicate more resources to Snowden.
Obama just went on Leno and said, "There is no domestic spying program" My biggest fear is that Obama is so misinformed that this is actually what he believes. Soon they will just be saying there is no Snowden. I have been waiting for the campaign of disinformation about him: that he is really a janitor and a Walter Mitty, that he likes child porn, that he does drugs, that he murdered his grandma, that he is UFO nut, that there is strong evidence that he made all this up, that he was a Russian plant all along, that he was a supporter of the Rebel Louis Riel.
If the article said that it would run Linux, I would take it seriously. But when it says Ubuntu, I just read Shuttleworth self-aggrandizement.