First I love QT, Second I hate QT. If I am developing a desktop application tomorrow for anything I am using QT, full stop. The QT people seem to fully understand 50% of my C++ needs. But they fully ignore the other 50%. There are huge massive holes in QT for developers that if filled would have developers flooding to use QT. Two simple ones that would probably take a week to solve is that when I used eclipse on a mac QT was a huge pain to integrate and by huge I mean nearly impossible in that even if I got it working with all the debugging and whatnot functioning there was a risk that when I upgraded eclipse that poof it would all break. The same story for XCode. QT on xcode could be set up but to get full functionality was a pain and the same upgrade risk was omnipresent. You might argue that if developing a desktop application I should be using windows but my personal route is to go with Mac and then port to windows.
The next hole was this whole maemo crap. The only way I was developing for some oddball Nokia thing was as an afterthought to the bigger platforms. So here you have QTs strength that I can develop for the big 3 desktops which is a huge benefit for Linux in that people can develop for Windows and then Linux gets the easy port so why not keep that train of thought going and say we should make QT for iOS and android and get people doing easy porting to Nokia. But no I see more and more maemo and this stupid QML thing and a custom IDE just for QT which must have all been a massive effort for a zillion programmers which could have been, instead, spent porting QT to iOS and android.
So now we have maemo basically dead, I have put QT into my own personal terminal ward, and even Nokia is now in the ditch bleeding out. None of this need have happened.
If I had to guess they made QML because it made for awesome presentations for MBA types. But these same MBA types rejected making it easier to make iPhone apps as a business model. Then the MBA types had no idea the massive effort being wasted on an IDE and didn't understand what the hell QT really was.
I will give one other example of how QT didn't seem to get how off base they were. There are two things I read in QT related question forums over and over. One is "Is there a iOS QT Port?" and the other was "How do I use QT for the command line only?" Creeping in was "Can I use QT for android via the NDK?" I never once read "Wow the QT IDE is the best!" and I basically never saw questions about Maemo. I am not saying they don't exist but that out side of the work-a-day questions about programming details that was the trend. I'll even say that the QT creator wasn't too bad; but it just wasn't the effort that I think they should have prioritized.
Lastly there are other attempts at ports and some claims that QT might support iOS and android in the future. Very cool if they do. But in the context of the original posting of Maemo and generally the Nokia linux effort being a dud the above promises are probably too late. But if QT does pull an iOS and Android support out of their ear I will be first in line to try them out and bye bye Objective-C.
First a boatload of cores. 8 is a good start but I want 128 or 1024. One idea would be to have variable cores. That is a handful of crazy powerful cores and then another 1000 lightweight cores for all kinds of lightweight stuff.
But the difficult question is how compatible with existing things to make it. If you venture too far into the land of cool you might only end up with a tiny bunch of hardcore followers like Lisp and Erlang presently have. I am not saying that lisp or Erlang are good or bad but what strikes them from most people's toolsets is that they are too different from most people's norms. It is not too hard for a C++ person to wrap their head around Java or C# but ()))()()()())()()(Lisp)()())()))()()()() can be a bit hard to wrap a CPP::Brain(); around.
But at the same time if you stick with similar solution to ARM then why bother? I guess it all boils down to can Linux be ported to the new and cool or would a new and better ARM really be that much better?
I guess there is a third option. If a new CPU demanded a wholly new OS then maybe a whole new demand might be created. I have leafed through the Linux architecture and quite a bit of it seems legacy and often solving problems I don't have. Thus maybe the world is ready for a new OS/CPU. Strikes me as way too hard but for all I know this might be one of those "Wow it was so easy that we are puzzled someone didn't do this long ago" moments.
What exactly is the legal difference between this and demanding that all conversations be recorded and available for police perusal. I am not only talking about phone conversations but making it mandatory to have an app running on our smart phones recording everything and transmitting it to a police server. Is somehow text exempt from the 4th amendment.
The police seem to think that they have some magical right to eat away at our rights in order to do their jobs. Well what about an appliance salesman, shouldn't he have the right to examine your credit / banking information so that he can more efficiently sort out potential customers from posers; isn't he just doing his job?
You might think this is some hyperbole but years ago I did some work for a local phone company. In their technology sales department they regularly looked up customer phone records to see if potential customers were talking with other technology companies. Were these guys just using the tools at hand to do a good job? Seems victimless, until you consider the huge imbalance against the other technology companies. Would the solution have been to give the same records to the other technology companies? Or maybe there should be a constitutionally enshrined right to privacy.
Personally I would want to see the rights to privacy only be violable in the more significant of crimes; murder, kidnapping, etc. Not for drug offenses or anything as silly as a divorce. Plus the penalties for violating privacy should be huge. If the phone/credit card company sells my records to a "trusted third party" I want to see some executives do some jail time.
First I have to comment on the huge number of at least acceptable comments above that were modded down to 0. Very odd, but it seems that the pro MS down modders ran out of karma points after the first few dozen anti MS posts.
I have said it before: MS is doing nothing to bring me back. I like MySQL better than SQL, Apache better than IIS, CentOS command line better than Server, Mac OS X better than any windows. I haven't used Visual Studio in long enough that I can't compare it to XCode. On my Mac I can run all my critical commercial software plus it mostly reacts like Linux so another strike against MS. I use my xbox for gaming and it smells like Linux might become a force in gaming (to be seen). I think that I am a pretty typical geek in that I have an xbox as my only MS product. Now most corporate types are on Windows but that is often because they have WidgetManager 2000 running on all their XP systems. I have even seen corporations that have to play all kinds of games to buy new machines and get XP onto them legally so that their old crap keeps working. Few of these companies have managed to make the Linux desktop transition for the first reason of legacy software but for the second reason of MS Office. I don't personally use it but in a corporate environment OpenOffice just doesn't cut it. But the moment some group gets together and ports the OpenOffice code to C++ awesomeness will happen. My favorite word program for Mac is Bean. It is C++ and rocket fast. It doesn't do much but that is a feature.
So looking at Microsoft as a tech professional I would never in a zillion years recommend that a new corporate system be based in the MS world and I suspect that there is a horde of non MS people making the same consistent recommendations to various companies. Many of these companies don't change because of inertia but one of the things that slows down an object moving by inertia is friction and this price increase will add to the MS friction. I doubt that there will be a huge wave of people vomiting out MS from their company due to this smallish increase. What there will be is a slight increase in the trend of people using non MS products. In the corporate world it is usually the negative trends that get you. People didn't stop using film overnight but Kodak couldn't get ahead of the trend and Kodak basically invented the digital point and shoot.
I don't hate MS but it gives me zero reason to love it yet I remember the days when I did. Visual Basic (before.net) was a great way to make quick windows applications and for a while it got better and better. Then Visual Studio made Windows C++ programming way easier than that Borland C++ ever did (OWL was crap). These were products made to make my life better and they did. The impression I had of MS in the past was some hot shit programmers crowded around chalkboards, terminals, and doing the cool. Now my impression is that the programers are all third rate and completely beaten down by layer upon layer upon layer of useless middle and sort of upper middle managers. Now the only goal at MS seems to get a little revenue goose to impress their shareholders for 5 minutes. I doubt they will be as impressed in 5 years.
Hello this is the 19th century and it wants its app back. From what I can tell the whole news corp model is that each of its wings leverages the others. So you have music and movie people being relentlessly promoted by the news media wing and those entertainment people are generally available for the media while each of the media departments tries to work with greater levels of efficiency brought on by the huge size of the organization in things like centralized sales great cross promotion and the power to make the worthless acts worth far more than they should. What seems to suffer is quality. The various departments will now spend more time promoting each other than a normal media company normally would (which would be zero if it was independent) instead of a relentless pursuit of self improvement. And because an over promoted crap product can be far more profitable than the risk of finding and cultivating a good one they lose the later art. For a while through the 80s and 90s this model was great. But now people are able to continuously demand best of breed in every category the model is starting to become weak. People find new artists their own way and are being told less and less by a small group of baby boomers what to listen to and what to watch. We are finding shows on the likes of AMC (Who the hell knew AMC existed 5 years ago?) We download from iTunes we read blogs, and we watch YouTube (Hello PSY).
To give a simple example of the old way of thinking there is a TV rule on the big networks that Thursday around 8pm - 9pm is the best of the best. So what they would do is to put a show people wanted (Friends) on at 8 until 8:30 then they would put some shlock they wanted to promote on at 8:30 and then something people wanted again on at 9pm. Even if you really didn't wan to watch the 8:30 show they knew you might catch a few minutes after the first show and maybe a few more before the 9pm show and ideally you would simply leave the 8:30 show on and say what the hell. The internal politics for getting your show on at 8:30 were a bloodbath and it certainly had little to do with what people actually wanted. The first big change was of course cable with an ever greater selection of channels, then came DVR devices which made programming timing more and more irrelevant and now there is the slow but sure move to netflix type technologies. All of these are not only resisted on the grounds of piracy or business models but significantly on the basis that the network executives lose the power to foist total crap onto the population. They are having a harder and harder time making it rain on demand.
So when these geriatrics bought MySpace they thought they had another channel where they could start pushing their crap into kids faces. But what they didn't realize was that things move really fast on the internet and their audience slipped through their fingers as soon as they felt that Myspace was not working for them but against them. Not that facebook is some paragon of virtue but it is unlikely that your screen will fill with crap telling you how cool usher or rihanna is over and over.
That this app is being taken out behind the woodshed is not so much an indication that news on the iPad is not the future but that best of breed news as sort of found with Drudge shows that it can work just fine. So if you look at the fragmented modern media world you have the old giants playing every backroom game they can to keep their old models working while you also have a few shining lights of hope (Netflix, if not them then something like them) and interesting Gems hidden here and there and generally not within the old giants. Can anyone here see the people who came up with the Cosby Show greenlighting Breaking Bad?
I have met people with Asperger's and I have met people with Autism and I have met both treated and mostly untreated. People with these two diseases are wildly separate in functionality and the ability to function. I would no more say that Asperger's is in the spectrum of autism than I would say freckles are in the spectrum of melanoma. Technically it might be correct that they both have root similarities but a useless categorization. The treated people with Asperger's that I have witnessed have become shockingly functional human beings achieving at a level well in the top 1% while having few interpersonal issues. Whereas the best I have seen with autisim are people who marginally function in most areas of societal interaction and usually at best over develop one or two areas such as piano. So it seems to me that the strategy with people with autism is to help them cope with life whereas with Asperger's the goal should be to give them a few extra social skills so that they can thrive. Like melanoma and freckles with one your focus is to keep the person from becoming dead, with the other your goal is to find a good sun hat.
I am willing to bet that there are quite a few Asperger's programmers out there but very few autistic programmers; testers maybe.
In order to encourage people to get into STEM I think having some slice go to the actual inventors would be a good idea but a hard one to put into practice. For example how do you identify the guy who sticks his hand up in a meeting to cancel an 80 million dollar failure and says, "Hey did you bozos try adding salt?" which was the key to making the whole project work. Or how do you cut out the manager who divebombs the project 3 minutes before they file the patent and makes sure that the PR department only ever mentions him by name.
I can't count the number of professors that make some amazing discovery only to hear that it 100% depended on some off the scale brilliant graduate student.
If you want an interesting example of problems with credit it would be Hamilton Naki (look him up) when he first died many newspapers announced that he was a gardener with extraordinary surgical skills who helped with the first heart transplant but being black could not be credited. It later turns out that this story was false but that he was a quite medically skilled.
This all boils down to the fact that most people think that a few bigwigs make too much money while the bulk of employees are under paid. The simple solution is to raise taxes not only based upon your income but based upon the income ratio of your employees. So corporate taxes or income taxes on the highest paid should be based upon the average wage. So if your company has a bunch of minimum wage employees you pay high taxes. But if you raise their wages you lower your tax bill. These taxes should approach 100% for companies like Walmart with nearly 100% near minimum wage employees.
I am not against capitalism but I am against exploitation.
If I were a member of a union I would want a new union with a new pension plan. Many of these pensions made massive promises in the past and now a bunch of boomers are, at least in theory, looking at pretty good pensions. Yet now that the time has come to pay out these pensions the real costs are coming due and they are looking both to the taxpayer and to the existing members to pay these old pensions while negotiating far lesser pensions with the new members. The new members pension fees are typically far higher while their eventual payouts are far lower.
The next problem comes from the baby boom itself. There is a huge bulge of retirees requesting their pensions but they are requesting pensions at the same time that there is a huge bulge of taxpayers retiring as well. Again typically these were higher paying jobs while the new typical taxpayer is getting crap with no pensions. These are not anti union rants, these are cold hard facts. More cold hard facts are that these same boomers are requiring more medical care and on top of all that are more likely to vote and there are a lot of them. So you are seeing more voting along the lines of free this or low cost that for the elderly such as free buses, or even seemingly innocuous things like lower speed limits (which hinder commerce). What you don't see are things like property taxes going up to pay for these services.
This union demanding that they get what they were promised does not need some anti union statement to attack it. The union even having to demand what they were promised is a sure sign of a much larger issue. A boomer cadre are going to relentlessly retire in droves every year for the next 20 years. They are going to both need more in the form of medical and geriatric care and demand more simply because they can. Yet the numbers of workers that they are demanding this from are growing smaller and smaller and through crappy minimum wage laws, higher costs of living, the difficulty of getting a mortgage on a first home, etc these fewer people have even less to give. At some point this is going to crack. It is no problem for a government assembly to vote on something impossible but regardless of how hard they wish they cannot make it possible. What they can do is wreck themselves trying to make the impossible possible. It quickly becomes the story of the Dutch boy and the dyke and soon the dutch boy runs out of fingers.
Another symptom that will be interesting to watch will be those locations with more young people and few boomers having past promises will certainly thrive while those places with the highest liabilities will either stagnate or take the bull by the horns and do something drastic such as let pensions go bankrupt. In Canada this would be Alberta. I don't know the official number but looking around I would say the average age is 40 or less. Plus Alberta does not go for the nanny type laws. Lots of families with kids. Looking around Nova Scotia I would say the average age is 70, few kids but lots of Nanny type laws such as skiing now requires a helmet. One part of Nova Scotia known as Cape Breton is particularly union friendly, is particularly aged, and is particularly poor. Taxes are high in NS and low in Alberta and this is a trend I don't see changing. What I do see coming is a point when the older parts of Canada start making impossible demands on Alberta and one day it says "NO". That is going to be an interesting day in Canadian history.
I can think of all kinds of people with some silly opinion that want to call it educational but at some point it is propaganda. I could create a mathematically correct lesson on linear algebra that also disparages some group purely sticking to factual data.
At the same time there is factual data that some may want to hide because of embarrassment that has educational value. So the hard question is the motivation of the offense not the offended. People living in Quebec were offended when a magazine recently pointed out how corrupt their province is; yet the recent huge corruption scandal shows that it is really really corrupt relative to Canadian standards. So if I create an offensive math lesson it probably means that offensive propaganda was the goal and thus the lesson should be eliminated. If I create a lesson on topical Quebec politics which if done correctly will be embarrassing to Quebeckers it should stay.
So the intent of this union "Lesson" appears to be propaganda so regardless of any factual content it should be eliminated.
I am referring to the fact that there is an anti intellectual bent in society and that the few people who I meet who consider themselves intellectual are usually on the arts side. Things like slashdot are a rarity in the vast sea of Lindsay Lohan and Tom Cruise information. If a kid plays football they are cool, if they win a robot competition they are ignored. My daughter's school (under 200 students) had the opportunity this year to get free robotics gear and join in on a local robotics competition; they didn't even bother. Yet they field a basketball team, two volleyball teams, and a football team. Within a 10 minute walk are two universities with engineering departments so any assistance with robotics would have been readily available if the teachers couldn't figure it out, along with the fact that the parents in the area are generally well educated and thus a few engineers/scientists would be available. The science lab in their school was long converted into an art room because of the good sinks. This same school system blah blahs about STEM initiative that and STEM outcome that. But then spends most of its efforts on global studies, Canadian studies, multicultural studies, and anti-bullying.
So my original point stands, unless we have a society where a beer company not only gives great scientists rewards but cool rewards then kids will look up to a Juiced up sports star and say, "I am going to put in tens of thousands of hours of effort to be just like him."
I am not just writing exciting to say Good Job to Staples but this will be a huge step forward for more than all the tinkerers out there. This is a product that reaches out and touches my heart. I don't know too many people around me who could use this or could even use this. But if Staples stays the course they will develop their own market. I can see a situation where general public use first will be vanity items such as a personalized bobble head but then one day someone will need a replacement part and a company will say "Go to your local staples and pick it up, it should be ready in 45 minute."
A simple example of this would be my Dyson vacuum(I love it) had a dumb little part die and they replaced it without hesitation. I called on Saturday and it came today. But that required my house be dirty for a week and that Dyson warehouse the part, package the part, and ship the part. Wouldn't it have been better if they had just printed up the part locally on demand? Not to mention that as they learn that some part will regularly fail they can instantly "ship" a redesigned part without having to dispose of or guiltily ship the lesser version.
So I hope that someone installs a beer pipeline to the Staples executive who came up with this brilliant idea.
This is how you promote science. Rewarding scientists who kick ass and make rock stars out of them. I can't name 5 Canadian scientists of the last 20 years yet I am willing to be that there are some seriously good ones. Who do we put on our money? Politicians and some woman who inherited her title. I am willing to bet that the counter argument from governmenty types would be that so and so was on a stamp. Stamps who the hell uses those anymore?
Where are the genuine North American scientists like Einstein or Feynman? I am not talking about famous science journalists but famous scientists doing science in North America. I can tell you more about Tom Cruise's kid than I can about the state of Canadian science. I am looking forward to Jack Reacher but would trade in the entire movie industry for nuclear fusion or a huge leap in stem cell therapy.
I am willing to bet money that MS will let "trusted third parties" throw all the crap they want onto the machine as minimally the AV companies (the worst trial/bloatware out there) will demand out of the sandbox.
I use XP in a VM whenever I have to use the one in a thousand windows program so at my present rate of Windows usage I would have to upgrade every second time I use windows. What Microsoft is missing is that most people are using windows out of inertia. Places like Staples and Walmart still sell windows laptops so people buy them. If Apple changed its whole marketing approach tonight and reduced macbooks to $350 the sales of windows machines would plummet. I am not making the Mac vs Windows argument I am saying that people usually don't care; nor am I suggesting that apple drop their prices. Gamers use windows because that is where the games are, not because of some love of windows. If all the PC games moved to BeOS tomorrow then the day after tomorrow most of the gamers would move as well.
So what MS needs to do is to find out what people really want. A good example of them not doing this would be their new tablets. Most people want enough storage to watch lots of video and some for their apps. What people didn't want was all their space taken up with MS Office on the tablet; who the hell is going to do extensive office work on those tablets? As a programmer I want tools to make my life easier. What Microsoft tries to foist upon me are tools that guide me into their suite of products such as office and SQL server. What my mother wants is a machine that is simple (like an iPad) what MS gives her is a machine that is always asking hard questions. What my mother also wants is a machine that she can't easily screw up (like an iPad). What MS give her is a machine that comes pre screwed up by the manufacturer with trialware and allows for third party crap to install itself over and over until, in the case of her browser, she has 7 inches of toolbars and one inch of browsing space.
So until MS starts actually listening to their customers and not their internal marketing departments the only customers they are going to keep are the ones who don't bother leaving them.
I love the comparison of Amazon to Ebay's sales. The biggest complaint I regularly see about amazon is when they ship some tiny object in a giant box. (Which is can also be interpreted as Amazon trying really hard to make sure things aren't broken) whereas I read at least one complaint about ebay and or Paypal every day. Ebay has managed to anger the sellers by being totally one sided in disputes while at the same time they do little to clean up the listings to make ebay easy to use. If I want a part for an iPhone (say a new glass screen) I have to scroll through page after page of the same crap like cases and screen protectors. I want a raspberry pi yet it is just page after page of cases. They have no easy mechanism to clear out the crap. Basically all those cases are spam. I suspect that for any search that results in 1000 results that people are buying 4 or 5 of those results over and over and that they other 996 are just making people angry.
The only thing that ebay has improved as far as I am concerned was when they allowed you to sort by lowest price plus shipping. This then eliminated those people who were selling the $20 item for $1 plus $19 shipping.
Amazon has stumbled on a super secret business formula: treat the customer the way you would want to be treated. At least it seems to be secret as few other businesses appear to know about it especially ebay.
This guy could be graphed. The graph starts neutral at introduction which then quickly spikes up to "Coolest guy on earth" but it really depended on your situation after that many people would be some combination of thick skinned and lucky interactions and generally continue to think the guy was the man. But anyone who had something to lose such as a one time verbal contract then they were screwed so the graph would plunge deep into negative territory. But this is where your violin analogy comes in and now the factor was the person's self-esteem. He could reel people in like a fish maybe 4 times out of 5 bringing himself back to positive territory but many people knew that he had completely screwed them and often for so little personal gain that they were shocked. But now the graph will generally dip and rise over and over until most, but not all, people finally run away screaming. It was one of those fool me once shame on you, fool me 80 times holy crap how did you do that?.
A simple example was when I first met him he had seriously screwed me to the tune of $10,000 per year salary(first week) but I took it thinking it was great. But the secretary would tell me over and over again that she knew people who had gone to school with him as well as 3 former girlfriends. She even used the word psychopath many times. I didn't pay much attention and thought he was great and she was spiteful. Then I started to do the email thing which generally cooled him off but in the end I was about the 3rd to quit in a single month of spectacular screwings.
I was able to get a sort of dual circular revenge on him. The owners of the company knew what kind of person he was but since he was able to calm irate clients, get people working late and on weekends they loved him. So a few of us found out he was royally screwing the company. We discussed it over lunch and then thought since he was insane but the owners knew the evil going on we would let him keep going with the assumption that he would get caught anyway (didn't) as punishment of the owners. The other revenge was that someone was going to hire him for a huge job and they asked me what I thought about him. Not only did I explain him in detail I brought in former coworkers to back me up. Even with this I wasn't sure that I had prevented disaster as his charisma was at near superpower levels.
You comment about the BS of making more money but with this guy it is the freakish levels of unfairness. This is the sort of guy who would corner the market on insulin, destroy enough so that people are going to die, and then set up an awesome site for people to start bidding on the remaining stock. Not only would he be shocked at the level of negative feedback but would not lose a minute's sleep as they documented the carnage on TV. But keep in mind that he would then donate money to a diabetes charity if there was some kind of super tax deduction loophole created to reverse the short supply.
What I am trying so say is that you want your employees to be go getters and all that but that people like this are damaging because first they don't think the rules apply to them, and second few rules exist to contain people with zero empathy. People like this seem to find a niche where they know other people will play fair and the rewards for not playing fair will be theirs for the taking. So people like this guy are who I picture when I hear stories about bankers selling stuff so toxic that it would not only ruin the people they are selling it to but it will ruin their very own banks. So they can look at the company directory of two organizations (20,000 plus people) and say, "Every one of these people will be ruined because I want a bigger boat." and then push the "Sell" button again. Also they differ from the guy who comes to work with a gun and shoots Bob in marketing. That required emotion; nutty emotion but with these guys it is almost pure math and they are only looking in their own credit column. So I agree with the original article that these people must be ruthlessly purged from any organization. But with one extra recommendation. That just like sex offenders there should be a public registry and that they should not be able to hold public office.
RIM is so much fun to rip on because of the MBA/Scumbag lawyer types who have their BBs clipped onto their belts. But long ago BB was the first phone that caught my attention (around 2000). It had a sort of 486 processor in it and a fairly easy to use SDK. But I couldn't find a way to market the applications. So I ignored them for the last dozen years.
But here they are potentially using QT (and thus C++) which is my favorite development base. So there might be hope. I want to see how easy it is to use, deploy, and sell. Next I have doubts about the typical baby boomer being able to use this phone. In the demo there are swipes/side swipes/twisty swipes/and swipes with a half twist of lemon; so I fear that the boomer crowd might be a bit lost.
Lastly the keyboard might free up room for the screen but my daughter has the option of almost any phone she wants and she and her friends all have BB phones for their keyboards and BBMs. My other daughter doesn't text as much and only wants iPhones.
So what I hope that comes from this is that there is a push to get QT not only onto the BB but to expand it to the Android NDK as well as iOS. This might not sound like the best idea for RIM but they would then get developers like me primarily developing for iOS using QT but then porting to the others in short order. I look at my Objective-C code and dread porting all those square brackets to Java or C++. But just noodling the GUI and a bit of fiddling to port stuff would be great.
I worked with a genuine psychopath; no hyperbole; a true psychopath. This guy could charm the pants off anyone. If you met him you loved him; that simple. But after around 6 months you wanted him dead. After a while I learned some key skills to working with him. One was to nail everything down in an email and I mean everything. If you didn't have everything nailed down he would change the past. If you said you could have something done by the 30th and didn't put it in an email then around the 20th he would announce at a meeting that you were going to be late with your promise to have it done by the 25th like he told the client and put in the contract, a contract he would swear on a stack of bibles that you had looked over. The key here was that you probably did look over a contract that said the 30th and he had an email from you saying that it looked fine. So as I said, everything must go in an email so the trick was if he handed you some paper you scanned it and attached it to the email replying that you had read the contract.
Most people were unwilling to go to such lengths and thus would be screwed over and over until they quit. The key to understanding this guy was that he simply had zero empathy. Not little but zero. So if he hurt you for some tiny gain of his own so be it. But this is different from someone who is say mean as in a bully, for them being mean is the goal. For my psychopathic co-worker you had to understand that he had his own desires and that was it. He didn't weigh pro and cons in any normal fashion. If you quit then you could be replaced with a fool who might be easier to screw.
I long ago left working with him but in the years since I have encountered really nice person after person who clench their fists and say horrible things about this guy. They all say the exact same basic thing; wow charisma coming out his ass until he sets you on fire to warm his hands.
On a superficial basis a company might justify that having someone like this around is useful for the moment that you need to charm some upset client. This might work in theory but what you forget is that the moment it is advantageous for this type of person to screw you they will screw you. Your company might say, "they wouldn't do something so stupid as this industry is too small" but keep in mind that there are two incomprehensible factors at play. This is a person who does not give the tiniest of craps what anyone really thinks as long as they can't actually do anything. The other factor is that they will be able to charm themselves out of almost any situation. So if you say that they will never work in this industry again you are wrong. You will make a solid case to other people you know really well who also respect you and your opinion but the psychopath will meet them and turn their opinion 180 degrees and land on their feet.
This might seem a bit long winded but after dealing with a true psychopath it is hard to believably explain the functioning of someone who simply is incapable of sympathy and has 100% confidence that normal consequences don't apply to them. Take any situation where a normal person might say ooh this might blow up in my face, or I wouldn't do that to my worst enemy and remember that a psychopath will do it and would do it to their mother if there was even a tiny chance of them somehow benefiting.
So when I see the whole banking crisis and people are suggesting that these guys inadvertently destroyed trillions of dollars of the wealth in the US along with their own companies and I just remember my psychopath and think that if he was getting low on gas and could push a button that refilled his tank but destroyed a company all he would think is "cool Free gas" while the rest of us would frown about what kind of dick would even create such a button.
This is the exact attitude that causes the average employee to loath their IT department and why people outsource huge amounts of their IT in order to end-run the IT people. The top priority of IT is to provide and maintain the tools that employees need. Security should come under the guise of maintain; as in an infected computer is a poorly maintained computer. Where most IT departments have gone off the rails is that they think that they have a magical right to say no to top decision makers within a company. If the CFO says he wants to bring in his commodore 64 because he is more comfortable with some 30 year old spreadsheet program it is not the IT department's place to say no. It is their place to make it work and inform him of the costs of doing this along with better options. But not to say no. IT departments are like a utility for most companies. People don't run the company so they can use power; and the utility company can't come in and say hey, those bulbs aren't efficient enough so we are cutting you off, or we don't like those brands as we have a contract with a different supplier. They can slide a flyer in your bill suggesting their favorite bulbs and if you pay the bill that's it.
So if the company has employees wasting time crushing pigs then that is a job for their manager not the IT department.
And as for facebook and twitter; this is the 21st century; employees are expected to grow and try new things; not sit in their cubicles fuming at working at a crappy company.
I just watched a demo of the new BB OS and it looked pretty good. I have had two concerns about their new phone the first being the touch screen for typing; with this it looks like they have a pretty innovative way of quickly typing. The second was that IT departments can and regularly cripple the phone. You have people walking around with a pretty good smartphone that was turned into a lump of crap by the IT department. No twitter, facebook, and even sometimes web surfing. So in the new OS they have created two modes of use business and personal. The guy specified that you could then cripple the business mode and free up the personal mode.
These sound great and if the screen typing works as well as the demo it could be a game ruiner for touch screen phones without it; but I doubt it. If I were a company and I invented this technology I would sell it to one of the players with real cash. Second I suspect that this personal mode itself can be turned off. There is a reason that corporate types have been given free BB phones and then they go out and buy themselves a $700 iPhone with their own money and that is that IT can ruin iPhones. This also causes corporate types to rebel against IT and simply insist that the company switch to the iPhone. It is not a matter of which is better but which can't be crippled.
So I think that the BB should have eliminated the ability of IT departments to treat their users like infants (CEOs & CFOs included) and they should have kept their awesome keyboards. Basically they should have eliminated a weakness and played on a strength. Lastly many BB users are older and all the cool whiz bang that I saw in the demo will result in the whole old dog new tricks problem.
If customers want their data forgotten then maybe they didn't want it stored or shared in the first place. The rule should not so much be about data retention but data gathering. The rule should be quite simple. Any organization that gathers data can't share it at all with anyone not directly connected with the reason it was gathered. So my power company needs my address to know where the lights need to be turned on and enough info to bill me. But anyone beyond billing and switching should not have my data, not management, not marketing, and definitely not a "trusted" third party.
The same with my driver's license that is needed by two small groups of people, the people who issue the license, and the police if they need to know that I am allowed to drive. It should literally be illegal for anyone else to copy anything from my license if it doesn't involve my ability to drive so say a car rental place would be OK. Many bars have taken to scanning driver's licenses as you enter the bar. Then you start getting mail and crap from the bar and anyone else they sell the data to. I met a guy who rewrote the data on the magnetic strip to cause buffer overruns and crash their little hand held units. He regularly went to every bar downtown that had the scanners as the crash wasn't a simple reboot of the unit as some remote server lost its mind requiring someone to come in.
These organizations find this data valuable but somehow think they can take that valuable thing from us without negotiation. I say you want my data you can pay me $1,000,000 per byte plus royalties on resale.
Your comment perfectly sums up what I was saying. It is not so much that all MS products are crap it is just that in pretty well every category something else is better. If IE had features so cool I just had to have it then maybe I would convert back to windows. But minimally Firefox and Chrome are good enough if not way better. Going one step further one of the few things that I think prevents many people from going all in with Linux is iTunes. I suspect that many people are hanging on to Windows for iTunes and don't want(or can't afford) to go to Mac.
Yes that is exactly what Pandora's customers want; spam spam spam and more span from musicians.
This reminds me of the joke: How do you make a cellist's car go faster?........ remove the pizza delivery sign.
Any service that gave a person like this my data would instantly lose my business.
I hope that Pandora not only ignores her completely but that someone educates her about how much data privacy is worth to people. Some fools give private data away for free but if she wants most people data she should be willing to pay big bucks for it and expect to be turned down by the vast majority.
Slashdot Mirror
First I love QT, Second I hate QT. If I am developing a desktop application tomorrow for anything I am using QT, full stop. The QT people seem to fully understand 50% of my C++ needs. But they fully ignore the other 50%. There are huge massive holes in QT for developers that if filled would have developers flooding to use QT. Two simple ones that would probably take a week to solve is that when I used eclipse on a mac QT was a huge pain to integrate and by huge I mean nearly impossible in that even if I got it working with all the debugging and whatnot functioning there was a risk that when I upgraded eclipse that poof it would all break. The same story for XCode. QT on xcode could be set up but to get full functionality was a pain and the same upgrade risk was omnipresent. You might argue that if developing a desktop application I should be using windows but my personal route is to go with Mac and then port to windows.
The next hole was this whole maemo crap. The only way I was developing for some oddball Nokia thing was as an afterthought to the bigger platforms. So here you have QTs strength that I can develop for the big 3 desktops which is a huge benefit for Linux in that people can develop for Windows and then Linux gets the easy port so why not keep that train of thought going and say we should make QT for iOS and android and get people doing easy porting to Nokia. But no I see more and more maemo and this stupid QML thing and a custom IDE just for QT which must have all been a massive effort for a zillion programmers which could have been, instead, spent porting QT to iOS and android.
So now we have maemo basically dead, I have put QT into my own personal terminal ward, and even Nokia is now in the ditch bleeding out. None of this need have happened.
If I had to guess they made QML because it made for awesome presentations for MBA types. But these same MBA types rejected making it easier to make iPhone apps as a business model. Then the MBA types had no idea the massive effort being wasted on an IDE and didn't understand what the hell QT really was.
I will give one other example of how QT didn't seem to get how off base they were. There are two things I read in QT related question forums over and over. One is "Is there a iOS QT Port?" and the other was "How do I use QT for the command line only?" Creeping in was "Can I use QT for android via the NDK?" I never once read "Wow the QT IDE is the best!" and I basically never saw questions about Maemo. I am not saying they don't exist but that out side of the work-a-day questions about programming details that was the trend. I'll even say that the QT creator wasn't too bad; but it just wasn't the effort that I think they should have prioritized.
Lastly there are other attempts at ports and some claims that QT might support iOS and android in the future. Very cool if they do. But in the context of the original posting of Maemo and generally the Nokia linux effort being a dud the above promises are probably too late. But if QT does pull an iOS and Android support out of their ear I will be first in line to try them out and bye bye Objective-C.
First a boatload of cores. 8 is a good start but I want 128 or 1024. One idea would be to have variable cores. That is a handful of crazy powerful cores and then another 1000 lightweight cores for all kinds of lightweight stuff.
But the difficult question is how compatible with existing things to make it. If you venture too far into the land of cool you might only end up with a tiny bunch of hardcore followers like Lisp and Erlang presently have. I am not saying that lisp or Erlang are good or bad but what strikes them from most people's toolsets is that they are too different from most people's norms. It is not too hard for a C++ person to wrap their head around Java or C# but ()))()()()())()()(Lisp)()())()))()()()() can be a bit hard to wrap a CPP::Brain(); around.
But at the same time if you stick with similar solution to ARM then why bother? I guess it all boils down to can Linux be ported to the new and cool or would a new and better ARM really be that much better?
I guess there is a third option. If a new CPU demanded a wholly new OS then maybe a whole new demand might be created. I have leafed through the Linux architecture and quite a bit of it seems legacy and often solving problems I don't have. Thus maybe the world is ready for a new OS/CPU. Strikes me as way too hard but for all I know this might be one of those "Wow it was so easy that we are puzzled someone didn't do this long ago" moments.
What exactly is the legal difference between this and demanding that all conversations be recorded and available for police perusal. I am not only talking about phone conversations but making it mandatory to have an app running on our smart phones recording everything and transmitting it to a police server. Is somehow text exempt from the 4th amendment.
The police seem to think that they have some magical right to eat away at our rights in order to do their jobs. Well what about an appliance salesman, shouldn't he have the right to examine your credit / banking information so that he can more efficiently sort out potential customers from posers; isn't he just doing his job?
You might think this is some hyperbole but years ago I did some work for a local phone company. In their technology sales department they regularly looked up customer phone records to see if potential customers were talking with other technology companies. Were these guys just using the tools at hand to do a good job? Seems victimless, until you consider the huge imbalance against the other technology companies. Would the solution have been to give the same records to the other technology companies? Or maybe there should be a constitutionally enshrined right to privacy.
Personally I would want to see the rights to privacy only be violable in the more significant of crimes; murder, kidnapping, etc. Not for drug offenses or anything as silly as a divorce. Plus the penalties for violating privacy should be huge. If the phone/credit card company sells my records to a "trusted third party" I want to see some executives do some jail time.
First I have to comment on the huge number of at least acceptable comments above that were modded down to 0. Very odd, but it seems that the pro MS down modders ran out of karma points after the first few dozen anti MS posts.
.net) was a great way to make quick windows applications and for a while it got better and better. Then Visual Studio made Windows C++ programming way easier than that Borland C++ ever did (OWL was crap). These were products made to make my life better and they did. The impression I had of MS in the past was some hot shit programmers crowded around chalkboards, terminals, and doing the cool. Now my impression is that the programers are all third rate and completely beaten down by layer upon layer upon layer of useless middle and sort of upper middle managers. Now the only goal at MS seems to get a little revenue goose to impress their shareholders for 5 minutes. I doubt they will be as impressed in 5 years.
I have said it before: MS is doing nothing to bring me back. I like MySQL better than SQL, Apache better than IIS, CentOS command line better than Server, Mac OS X better than any windows. I haven't used Visual Studio in long enough that I can't compare it to XCode. On my Mac I can run all my critical commercial software plus it mostly reacts like Linux so another strike against MS. I use my xbox for gaming and it smells like Linux might become a force in gaming (to be seen). I think that I am a pretty typical geek in that I have an xbox as my only MS product. Now most corporate types are on Windows but that is often because they have WidgetManager 2000 running on all their XP systems. I have even seen corporations that have to play all kinds of games to buy new machines and get XP onto them legally so that their old crap keeps working. Few of these companies have managed to make the Linux desktop transition for the first reason of legacy software but for the second reason of MS Office. I don't personally use it but in a corporate environment OpenOffice just doesn't cut it. But the moment some group gets together and ports the OpenOffice code to C++ awesomeness will happen. My favorite word program for Mac is Bean. It is C++ and rocket fast. It doesn't do much but that is a feature.
So looking at Microsoft as a tech professional I would never in a zillion years recommend that a new corporate system be based in the MS world and I suspect that there is a horde of non MS people making the same consistent recommendations to various companies. Many of these companies don't change because of inertia but one of the things that slows down an object moving by inertia is friction and this price increase will add to the MS friction. I doubt that there will be a huge wave of people vomiting out MS from their company due to this smallish increase. What there will be is a slight increase in the trend of people using non MS products. In the corporate world it is usually the negative trends that get you. People didn't stop using film overnight but Kodak couldn't get ahead of the trend and Kodak basically invented the digital point and shoot.
I don't hate MS but it gives me zero reason to love it yet I remember the days when I did. Visual Basic (before
Hello this is the 19th century and it wants its app back. From what I can tell the whole news corp model is that each of its wings leverages the others. So you have music and movie people being relentlessly promoted by the news media wing and those entertainment people are generally available for the media while each of the media departments tries to work with greater levels of efficiency brought on by the huge size of the organization in things like centralized sales great cross promotion and the power to make the worthless acts worth far more than they should. What seems to suffer is quality. The various departments will now spend more time promoting each other than a normal media company normally would (which would be zero if it was independent) instead of a relentless pursuit of self improvement. And because an over promoted crap product can be far more profitable than the risk of finding and cultivating a good one they lose the later art. For a while through the 80s and 90s this model was great. But now people are able to continuously demand best of breed in every category the model is starting to become weak. People find new artists their own way and are being told less and less by a small group of baby boomers what to listen to and what to watch. We are finding shows on the likes of AMC (Who the hell knew AMC existed 5 years ago?) We download from iTunes we read blogs, and we watch YouTube (Hello PSY).
To give a simple example of the old way of thinking there is a TV rule on the big networks that Thursday around 8pm - 9pm is the best of the best. So what they would do is to put a show people wanted (Friends) on at 8 until 8:30 then they would put some shlock they wanted to promote on at 8:30 and then something people wanted again on at 9pm. Even if you really didn't wan to watch the 8:30 show they knew you might catch a few minutes after the first show and maybe a few more before the 9pm show and ideally you would simply leave the 8:30 show on and say what the hell. The internal politics for getting your show on at 8:30 were a bloodbath and it certainly had little to do with what people actually wanted. The first big change was of course cable with an ever greater selection of channels, then came DVR devices which made programming timing more and more irrelevant and now there is the slow but sure move to netflix type technologies. All of these are not only resisted on the grounds of piracy or business models but significantly on the basis that the network executives lose the power to foist total crap onto the population. They are having a harder and harder time making it rain on demand.
So when these geriatrics bought MySpace they thought they had another channel where they could start pushing their crap into kids faces. But what they didn't realize was that things move really fast on the internet and their audience slipped through their fingers as soon as they felt that Myspace was not working for them but against them. Not that facebook is some paragon of virtue but it is unlikely that your screen will fill with crap telling you how cool usher or rihanna is over and over.
That this app is being taken out behind the woodshed is not so much an indication that news on the iPad is not the future but that best of breed news as sort of found with Drudge shows that it can work just fine. So if you look at the fragmented modern media world you have the old giants playing every backroom game they can to keep their old models working while you also have a few shining lights of hope (Netflix, if not them then something like them) and interesting Gems hidden here and there and generally not within the old giants. Can anyone here see the people who came up with the Cosby Show greenlighting Breaking Bad?
I have met people with Asperger's and I have met people with Autism and I have met both treated and mostly untreated. People with these two diseases are wildly separate in functionality and the ability to function. I would no more say that Asperger's is in the spectrum of autism than I would say freckles are in the spectrum of melanoma. Technically it might be correct that they both have root similarities but a useless categorization. The treated people with Asperger's that I have witnessed have become shockingly functional human beings achieving at a level well in the top 1% while having few interpersonal issues. Whereas the best I have seen with autisim are people who marginally function in most areas of societal interaction and usually at best over develop one or two areas such as piano. So it seems to me that the strategy with people with autism is to help them cope with life whereas with Asperger's the goal should be to give them a few extra social skills so that they can thrive. Like melanoma and freckles with one your focus is to keep the person from becoming dead, with the other your goal is to find a good sun hat.
I am willing to bet that there are quite a few Asperger's programmers out there but very few autistic programmers; testers maybe.
Yup.
In order to encourage people to get into STEM I think having some slice go to the actual inventors would be a good idea but a hard one to put into practice. For example how do you identify the guy who sticks his hand up in a meeting to cancel an 80 million dollar failure and says, "Hey did you bozos try adding salt?" which was the key to making the whole project work. Or how do you cut out the manager who divebombs the project 3 minutes before they file the patent and makes sure that the PR department only ever mentions him by name.
I can't count the number of professors that make some amazing discovery only to hear that it 100% depended on some off the scale brilliant graduate student.
If you want an interesting example of problems with credit it would be Hamilton Naki (look him up) when he first died many newspapers announced that he was a gardener with extraordinary surgical skills who helped with the first heart transplant but being black could not be credited. It later turns out that this story was false but that he was a quite medically skilled.
This all boils down to the fact that most people think that a few bigwigs make too much money while the bulk of employees are under paid. The simple solution is to raise taxes not only based upon your income but based upon the income ratio of your employees. So corporate taxes or income taxes on the highest paid should be based upon the average wage. So if your company has a bunch of minimum wage employees you pay high taxes. But if you raise their wages you lower your tax bill. These taxes should approach 100% for companies like Walmart with nearly 100% near minimum wage employees.
I am not against capitalism but I am against exploitation.
If I were a member of a union I would want a new union with a new pension plan. Many of these pensions made massive promises in the past and now a bunch of boomers are, at least in theory, looking at pretty good pensions. Yet now that the time has come to pay out these pensions the real costs are coming due and they are looking both to the taxpayer and to the existing members to pay these old pensions while negotiating far lesser pensions with the new members. The new members pension fees are typically far higher while their eventual payouts are far lower.
The next problem comes from the baby boom itself. There is a huge bulge of retirees requesting their pensions but they are requesting pensions at the same time that there is a huge bulge of taxpayers retiring as well. Again typically these were higher paying jobs while the new typical taxpayer is getting crap with no pensions. These are not anti union rants, these are cold hard facts. More cold hard facts are that these same boomers are requiring more medical care and on top of all that are more likely to vote and there are a lot of them. So you are seeing more voting along the lines of free this or low cost that for the elderly such as free buses, or even seemingly innocuous things like lower speed limits (which hinder commerce). What you don't see are things like property taxes going up to pay for these services.
This union demanding that they get what they were promised does not need some anti union statement to attack it. The union even having to demand what they were promised is a sure sign of a much larger issue. A boomer cadre are going to relentlessly retire in droves every year for the next 20 years. They are going to both need more in the form of medical and geriatric care and demand more simply because they can. Yet the numbers of workers that they are demanding this from are growing smaller and smaller and through crappy minimum wage laws, higher costs of living, the difficulty of getting a mortgage on a first home, etc these fewer people have even less to give. At some point this is going to crack. It is no problem for a government assembly to vote on something impossible but regardless of how hard they wish they cannot make it possible. What they can do is wreck themselves trying to make the impossible possible. It quickly becomes the story of the Dutch boy and the dyke and soon the dutch boy runs out of fingers.
Another symptom that will be interesting to watch will be those locations with more young people and few boomers having past promises will certainly thrive while those places with the highest liabilities will either stagnate or take the bull by the horns and do something drastic such as let pensions go bankrupt. In Canada this would be Alberta. I don't know the official number but looking around I would say the average age is 40 or less. Plus Alberta does not go for the nanny type laws. Lots of families with kids. Looking around Nova Scotia I would say the average age is 70, few kids but lots of Nanny type laws such as skiing now requires a helmet. One part of Nova Scotia known as Cape Breton is particularly union friendly, is particularly aged, and is particularly poor. Taxes are high in NS and low in Alberta and this is a trend I don't see changing. What I do see coming is a point when the older parts of Canada start making impossible demands on Alberta and one day it says "NO". That is going to be an interesting day in Canadian history.
I can think of all kinds of people with some silly opinion that want to call it educational but at some point it is propaganda. I could create a mathematically correct lesson on linear algebra that also disparages some group purely sticking to factual data.
At the same time there is factual data that some may want to hide because of embarrassment that has educational value. So the hard question is the motivation of the offense not the offended. People living in Quebec were offended when a magazine recently pointed out how corrupt their province is; yet the recent huge corruption scandal shows that it is really really corrupt relative to Canadian standards. So if I create an offensive math lesson it probably means that offensive propaganda was the goal and thus the lesson should be eliminated. If I create a lesson on topical Quebec politics which if done correctly will be embarrassing to Quebeckers it should stay.
So the intent of this union "Lesson" appears to be propaganda so regardless of any factual content it should be eliminated.
I am referring to the fact that there is an anti intellectual bent in society and that the few people who I meet who consider themselves intellectual are usually on the arts side. Things like slashdot are a rarity in the vast sea of Lindsay Lohan and Tom Cruise information. If a kid plays football they are cool, if they win a robot competition they are ignored. My daughter's school (under 200 students) had the opportunity this year to get free robotics gear and join in on a local robotics competition; they didn't even bother. Yet they field a basketball team, two volleyball teams, and a football team. Within a 10 minute walk are two universities with engineering departments so any assistance with robotics would have been readily available if the teachers couldn't figure it out, along with the fact that the parents in the area are generally well educated and thus a few engineers/scientists would be available. The science lab in their school was long converted into an art room because of the good sinks. This same school system blah blahs about STEM initiative that and STEM outcome that. But then spends most of its efforts on global studies, Canadian studies, multicultural studies, and anti-bullying.
So my original point stands, unless we have a society where a beer company not only gives great scientists rewards but cool rewards then kids will look up to a Juiced up sports star and say, "I am going to put in tens of thousands of hours of effort to be just like him."
I am not just writing exciting to say Good Job to Staples but this will be a huge step forward for more than all the tinkerers out there. This is a product that reaches out and touches my heart. I don't know too many people around me who could use this or could even use this. But if Staples stays the course they will develop their own market. I can see a situation where general public use first will be vanity items such as a personalized bobble head but then one day someone will need a replacement part and a company will say "Go to your local staples and pick it up, it should be ready in 45 minute."
A simple example of this would be my Dyson vacuum(I love it) had a dumb little part die and they replaced it without hesitation. I called on Saturday and it came today. But that required my house be dirty for a week and that Dyson warehouse the part, package the part, and ship the part. Wouldn't it have been better if they had just printed up the part locally on demand? Not to mention that as they learn that some part will regularly fail they can instantly "ship" a redesigned part without having to dispose of or guiltily ship the lesser version.
So I hope that someone installs a beer pipeline to the Staples executive who came up with this brilliant idea.
This is how you promote science. Rewarding scientists who kick ass and make rock stars out of them. I can't name 5 Canadian scientists of the last 20 years yet I am willing to be that there are some seriously good ones. Who do we put on our money? Politicians and some woman who inherited her title. I am willing to bet that the counter argument from governmenty types would be that so and so was on a stamp. Stamps who the hell uses those anymore?
Where are the genuine North American scientists like Einstein or Feynman? I am not talking about famous science journalists but famous scientists doing science in North America. I can tell you more about Tom Cruise's kid than I can about the state of Canadian science. I am looking forward to Jack Reacher but would trade in the entire movie industry for nuclear fusion or a huge leap in stem cell therapy.
I am willing to bet money that MS will let "trusted third parties" throw all the crap they want onto the machine as minimally the AV companies (the worst trial/bloatware out there) will demand out of the sandbox.
I use XP in a VM whenever I have to use the one in a thousand windows program so at my present rate of Windows usage I would have to upgrade every second time I use windows. What Microsoft is missing is that most people are using windows out of inertia. Places like Staples and Walmart still sell windows laptops so people buy them. If Apple changed its whole marketing approach tonight and reduced macbooks to $350 the sales of windows machines would plummet. I am not making the Mac vs Windows argument I am saying that people usually don't care; nor am I suggesting that apple drop their prices. Gamers use windows because that is where the games are, not because of some love of windows. If all the PC games moved to BeOS tomorrow then the day after tomorrow most of the gamers would move as well.
So what MS needs to do is to find out what people really want. A good example of them not doing this would be their new tablets. Most people want enough storage to watch lots of video and some for their apps. What people didn't want was all their space taken up with MS Office on the tablet; who the hell is going to do extensive office work on those tablets? As a programmer I want tools to make my life easier. What Microsoft tries to foist upon me are tools that guide me into their suite of products such as office and SQL server. What my mother wants is a machine that is simple (like an iPad) what MS gives her is a machine that is always asking hard questions. What my mother also wants is a machine that she can't easily screw up (like an iPad). What MS give her is a machine that comes pre screwed up by the manufacturer with trialware and allows for third party crap to install itself over and over until, in the case of her browser, she has 7 inches of toolbars and one inch of browsing space.
So until MS starts actually listening to their customers and not their internal marketing departments the only customers they are going to keep are the ones who don't bother leaving them.
I love the comparison of Amazon to Ebay's sales. The biggest complaint I regularly see about amazon is when they ship some tiny object in a giant box. (Which is can also be interpreted as Amazon trying really hard to make sure things aren't broken) whereas I read at least one complaint about ebay and or Paypal every day. Ebay has managed to anger the sellers by being totally one sided in disputes while at the same time they do little to clean up the listings to make ebay easy to use. If I want a part for an iPhone (say a new glass screen) I have to scroll through page after page of the same crap like cases and screen protectors. I want a raspberry pi yet it is just page after page of cases. They have no easy mechanism to clear out the crap. Basically all those cases are spam. I suspect that for any search that results in 1000 results that people are buying 4 or 5 of those results over and over and that they other 996 are just making people angry.
The only thing that ebay has improved as far as I am concerned was when they allowed you to sort by lowest price plus shipping. This then eliminated those people who were selling the $20 item for $1 plus $19 shipping.
Amazon has stumbled on a super secret business formula: treat the customer the way you would want to be treated. At least it seems to be secret as few other businesses appear to know about it especially ebay.
This guy could be graphed. The graph starts neutral at introduction which then quickly spikes up to "Coolest guy on earth" but it really depended on your situation after that many people would be some combination of thick skinned and lucky interactions and generally continue to think the guy was the man. But anyone who had something to lose such as a one time verbal contract then they were screwed so the graph would plunge deep into negative territory. But this is where your violin analogy comes in and now the factor was the person's self-esteem. He could reel people in like a fish maybe 4 times out of 5 bringing himself back to positive territory but many people knew that he had completely screwed them and often for so little personal gain that they were shocked. But now the graph will generally dip and rise over and over until most, but not all, people finally run away screaming. It was one of those fool me once shame on you, fool me 80 times holy crap how did you do that?.
A simple example was when I first met him he had seriously screwed me to the tune of $10,000 per year salary(first week) but I took it thinking it was great. But the secretary would tell me over and over again that she knew people who had gone to school with him as well as 3 former girlfriends. She even used the word psychopath many times. I didn't pay much attention and thought he was great and she was spiteful. Then I started to do the email thing which generally cooled him off but in the end I was about the 3rd to quit in a single month of spectacular screwings.
I was able to get a sort of dual circular revenge on him. The owners of the company knew what kind of person he was but since he was able to calm irate clients, get people working late and on weekends they loved him. So a few of us found out he was royally screwing the company. We discussed it over lunch and then thought since he was insane but the owners knew the evil going on we would let him keep going with the assumption that he would get caught anyway (didn't) as punishment of the owners. The other revenge was that someone was going to hire him for a huge job and they asked me what I thought about him. Not only did I explain him in detail I brought in former coworkers to back me up. Even with this I wasn't sure that I had prevented disaster as his charisma was at near superpower levels.
You comment about the BS of making more money but with this guy it is the freakish levels of unfairness. This is the sort of guy who would corner the market on insulin, destroy enough so that people are going to die, and then set up an awesome site for people to start bidding on the remaining stock. Not only would he be shocked at the level of negative feedback but would not lose a minute's sleep as they documented the carnage on TV. But keep in mind that he would then donate money to a diabetes charity if there was some kind of super tax deduction loophole created to reverse the short supply.
What I am trying so say is that you want your employees to be go getters and all that but that people like this are damaging because first they don't think the rules apply to them, and second few rules exist to contain people with zero empathy. People like this seem to find a niche where they know other people will play fair and the rewards for not playing fair will be theirs for the taking. So people like this guy are who I picture when I hear stories about bankers selling stuff so toxic that it would not only ruin the people they are selling it to but it will ruin their very own banks. So they can look at the company directory of two organizations (20,000 plus people) and say, "Every one of these people will be ruined because I want a bigger boat." and then push the "Sell" button again. Also they differ from the guy who comes to work with a gun and shoots Bob in marketing. That required emotion; nutty emotion but with these guys it is almost pure math and they are only looking in their own credit column. So I agree with the original article that these people must be ruthlessly purged from any organization. But with one extra recommendation. That just like sex offenders there should be a public registry and that they should not be able to hold public office.
RIM is so much fun to rip on because of the MBA/Scumbag lawyer types who have their BBs clipped onto their belts. But long ago BB was the first phone that caught my attention (around 2000). It had a sort of 486 processor in it and a fairly easy to use SDK. But I couldn't find a way to market the applications. So I ignored them for the last dozen years.
But here they are potentially using QT (and thus C++) which is my favorite development base. So there might be hope. I want to see how easy it is to use, deploy, and sell. Next I have doubts about the typical baby boomer being able to use this phone. In the demo there are swipes/side swipes/twisty swipes/and swipes with a half twist of lemon; so I fear that the boomer crowd might be a bit lost.
Lastly the keyboard might free up room for the screen but my daughter has the option of almost any phone she wants and she and her friends all have BB phones for their keyboards and BBMs. My other daughter doesn't text as much and only wants iPhones.
So what I hope that comes from this is that there is a push to get QT not only onto the BB but to expand it to the Android NDK as well as iOS. This might not sound like the best idea for RIM but they would then get developers like me primarily developing for iOS using QT but then porting to the others in short order. I look at my Objective-C code and dread porting all those square brackets to Java or C++. But just noodling the GUI and a bit of fiddling to port stuff would be great.
I worked with a genuine psychopath; no hyperbole; a true psychopath. This guy could charm the pants off anyone. If you met him you loved him; that simple. But after around 6 months you wanted him dead. After a while I learned some key skills to working with him. One was to nail everything down in an email and I mean everything. If you didn't have everything nailed down he would change the past. If you said you could have something done by the 30th and didn't put it in an email then around the 20th he would announce at a meeting that you were going to be late with your promise to have it done by the 25th like he told the client and put in the contract, a contract he would swear on a stack of bibles that you had looked over. The key here was that you probably did look over a contract that said the 30th and he had an email from you saying that it looked fine. So as I said, everything must go in an email so the trick was if he handed you some paper you scanned it and attached it to the email replying that you had read the contract.
Most people were unwilling to go to such lengths and thus would be screwed over and over until they quit. The key to understanding this guy was that he simply had zero empathy. Not little but zero. So if he hurt you for some tiny gain of his own so be it. But this is different from someone who is say mean as in a bully, for them being mean is the goal. For my psychopathic co-worker you had to understand that he had his own desires and that was it. He didn't weigh pro and cons in any normal fashion. If you quit then you could be replaced with a fool who might be easier to screw.
I long ago left working with him but in the years since I have encountered really nice person after person who clench their fists and say horrible things about this guy. They all say the exact same basic thing; wow charisma coming out his ass until he sets you on fire to warm his hands.
On a superficial basis a company might justify that having someone like this around is useful for the moment that you need to charm some upset client. This might work in theory but what you forget is that the moment it is advantageous for this type of person to screw you they will screw you. Your company might say, "they wouldn't do something so stupid as this industry is too small" but keep in mind that there are two incomprehensible factors at play. This is a person who does not give the tiniest of craps what anyone really thinks as long as they can't actually do anything. The other factor is that they will be able to charm themselves out of almost any situation. So if you say that they will never work in this industry again you are wrong. You will make a solid case to other people you know really well who also respect you and your opinion but the psychopath will meet them and turn their opinion 180 degrees and land on their feet.
This might seem a bit long winded but after dealing with a true psychopath it is hard to believably explain the functioning of someone who simply is incapable of sympathy and has 100% confidence that normal consequences don't apply to them. Take any situation where a normal person might say ooh this might blow up in my face, or I wouldn't do that to my worst enemy and remember that a psychopath will do it and would do it to their mother if there was even a tiny chance of them somehow benefiting.
So when I see the whole banking crisis and people are suggesting that these guys inadvertently destroyed trillions of dollars of the wealth in the US along with their own companies and I just remember my psychopath and think that if he was getting low on gas and could push a button that refilled his tank but destroyed a company all he would think is "cool Free gas" while the rest of us would frown about what kind of dick would even create such a button.
This is the exact attitude that causes the average employee to loath their IT department and why people outsource huge amounts of their IT in order to end-run the IT people. The top priority of IT is to provide and maintain the tools that employees need. Security should come under the guise of maintain; as in an infected computer is a poorly maintained computer. Where most IT departments have gone off the rails is that they think that they have a magical right to say no to top decision makers within a company. If the CFO says he wants to bring in his commodore 64 because he is more comfortable with some 30 year old spreadsheet program it is not the IT department's place to say no. It is their place to make it work and inform him of the costs of doing this along with better options. But not to say no. IT departments are like a utility for most companies. People don't run the company so they can use power; and the utility company can't come in and say hey, those bulbs aren't efficient enough so we are cutting you off, or we don't like those brands as we have a contract with a different supplier. They can slide a flyer in your bill suggesting their favorite bulbs and if you pay the bill that's it.
So if the company has employees wasting time crushing pigs then that is a job for their manager not the IT department.
And as for facebook and twitter; this is the 21st century; employees are expected to grow and try new things; not sit in their cubicles fuming at working at a crappy company.
I the above I meant to say IT Can't ruin iPhones.
I just watched a demo of the new BB OS and it looked pretty good. I have had two concerns about their new phone the first being the touch screen for typing; with this it looks like they have a pretty innovative way of quickly typing. The second was that IT departments can and regularly cripple the phone. You have people walking around with a pretty good smartphone that was turned into a lump of crap by the IT department. No twitter, facebook, and even sometimes web surfing. So in the new OS they have created two modes of use business and personal. The guy specified that you could then cripple the business mode and free up the personal mode.
These sound great and if the screen typing works as well as the demo it could be a game ruiner for touch screen phones without it; but I doubt it. If I were a company and I invented this technology I would sell it to one of the players with real cash. Second I suspect that this personal mode itself can be turned off. There is a reason that corporate types have been given free BB phones and then they go out and buy themselves a $700 iPhone with their own money and that is that IT can ruin iPhones. This also causes corporate types to rebel against IT and simply insist that the company switch to the iPhone. It is not a matter of which is better but which can't be crippled.
So I think that the BB should have eliminated the ability of IT departments to treat their users like infants (CEOs & CFOs included) and they should have kept their awesome keyboards. Basically they should have eliminated a weakness and played on a strength. Lastly many BB users are older and all the cool whiz bang that I saw in the demo will result in the whole old dog new tricks problem.
If customers want their data forgotten then maybe they didn't want it stored or shared in the first place. The rule should not so much be about data retention but data gathering. The rule should be quite simple. Any organization that gathers data can't share it at all with anyone not directly connected with the reason it was gathered. So my power company needs my address to know where the lights need to be turned on and enough info to bill me. But anyone beyond billing and switching should not have my data, not management, not marketing, and definitely not a "trusted" third party.
The same with my driver's license that is needed by two small groups of people, the people who issue the license, and the police if they need to know that I am allowed to drive. It should literally be illegal for anyone else to copy anything from my license if it doesn't involve my ability to drive so say a car rental place would be OK. Many bars have taken to scanning driver's licenses as you enter the bar. Then you start getting mail and crap from the bar and anyone else they sell the data to. I met a guy who rewrote the data on the magnetic strip to cause buffer overruns and crash their little hand held units. He regularly went to every bar downtown that had the scanners as the crash wasn't a simple reboot of the unit as some remote server lost its mind requiring someone to come in.
These organizations find this data valuable but somehow think they can take that valuable thing from us without negotiation. I say you want my data you can pay me $1,000,000 per byte plus royalties on resale.
Your comment perfectly sums up what I was saying. It is not so much that all MS products are crap it is just that in pretty well every category something else is better. If IE had features so cool I just had to have it then maybe I would convert back to windows. But minimally Firefox and Chrome are good enough if not way better. Going one step further one of the few things that I think prevents many people from going all in with Linux is iTunes. I suspect that many people are hanging on to Windows for iTunes and don't want(or can't afford) to go to Mac.
Yes that is exactly what Pandora's customers want; spam spam spam and more span from musicians.
This reminds me of the joke: How do you make a cellist's car go faster?........ remove the pizza delivery sign.
Any service that gave a person like this my data would instantly lose my business.
I hope that Pandora not only ignores her completely but that someone educates her about how much data privacy is worth to people. Some fools give private data away for free but if she wants most people data she should be willing to pay big bucks for it and expect to be turned down by the vast majority.