Arguing that you can just mash people together and get "synergies" is like arguing that you can put Van Gogh and Rembrant on a team to make a better painting, can put the Rolling Stones and Beatles into a single band and get a better album. They are just -different- things and the whole idea of synergies is really about simplification and eliminating those important local differences that serve to identify products. I'm not the one that looks for simplicity - it is the merger and mba types that just slam businesses together as if they can so easily be put together.
For some good examples of colossal mergers that failed, read up on the merger of PRR and NY Central. Railroads can't be different, there's synergies on the routes... all wrong. There's been plenty of disasters since then.
Let's try with a little IT analogy (shocking, I know). The "everyone do their own little thing" are the dreaded small VBA applications hacked up in Excel that have no architecture, no signoffs and just pop up all over the place
Has the thought ever occurred to you that all of those little applications actually solved problems for the business?
t's easy to be an armchair MBA and think you got all the answers because you don't see the actual implications.
There's only two kinds of people a company needs: people that make things and people that sell them. MBAs do neither. They don't sell, and they don't make. There's no value-add, so there is no point.
A truly clever developer will create code so easy to understand that a less than average developer could debug it.
Only if it does not impact time to market of the product. Average developers need to step up and get better.
'Method and an apparatus to deliver messages between applications,' claims a patent on routing messages using an XQuery match
Biztalk has routed messages using XQuery matching now for at least 5 years. The irony is, that, it seems like such a good idea to build a messaging system around XML, which Biztalk does, but in practice, it actually totally sucks.
There's a huge and erroneous misconception that centralization makes a corporation more efficient. I think centralization is a cancer. How often do mergers actually work? How often do governments actually execute well. The biggest failing of the free enterprise system as of late, is that, after hearing all of this about how government is inherently wasteful and inefficient and choked with slackers, that corporations set themselves to be operated just like governments. Just look at the result!
The fact of the matter is, that the thing that matters most in any corporation is time to market. It doesn't matter if you are centralized and more "efficient" if it takes you two years longer to ship a late product out the door, because while your smaller competitors were signing stuff and building things, your own design was going through committees and signoffs to make sure that you weren't doing what someone else already did.
Like, the stupidest thing GM ever did was to try and share so much data across so many divisions. What they should have done is just run each different division as a separate company, responsible for one thing - the bottom line. If they don't produce, then close them down. But instead, they have a huge corporate system that makes it very difficult for them to bring a new car design to market. And, by the time they get there, what started out as an award winning design is so late that they get slammed for making a mediocre product by the trade magazines first and the consumers second. All that's left of that company is Bob Lutz heroically pushing through car designs, but once he's gone (he's retiring), that company is screwed.
I think the larger story is, really, that management education in the United States is a colossal failure. There is no reason that a large and previously successful company needs to decline and fail when other civilizations created empires and institutions that lasted for hundreds and thousands of years. But as it is, in America, as soon as a founder leaves a company, the MBAs get in and these "professional managers" slowly sink the ship. It doesn't have to be this way, but it will be this way until we get some serious curriculum changes at our management schools.
That's right: HARVARD, WHARTON, YALE AND OTHER MBAS : YOU F---- SUCK!
I would joke that this could be a good thing, in that, we'll just game the review system to get raises.
The reality is, though, that the more corporations seek to control and monitor their employees, the more they will crush the entrepreneur in them. Corporations work best when they motivate people and you do that by creating a positive, team culture that gives its participants a sense of mission. Take that away, reduce people to cogs, and you are going to get cogs as a result, and you'll get an inevitable decline. What enterprising person would want to work as an anonymous cog, coming out of college with a degree and history that says they are anything but, when they could make a real difference at a startup.
Actions like this doom large corporations, and frankly, this sort of thinking was what alienated the big 3 for a lot of people, and now they want to do this to the computer industry?
Where've I heard such simpleton logic before? You're either WITH US or AGAINST US, you dirty traitor. Pretty cut and dry!
Yeah, it is, actually.
Any energy or environmental economist would be laughing their ass off at your sophomoric view of what "wealth" is
Actually, a lot of energy economists would agree with me. The more energy people have, and the less expensively they have it, the more their lives improve. It's cheaper for them to travel, to get to work, to power electronic devices and get new features in them. In so many ways, the more energy you have, the richer you are. It's just the way it is.
Even if you argued that increasing energy prices resulted in some efficiency, the fact of the matter, if you are investing a fixed set of dollars into a device to make it more energy efficient, you are losing out on other features as well.
For example, let's say cars didn't have to worry about fuel efficiency, for example, what would a designer not have to worry about? First off, weight could right out the wind. You could afford to make a car much heavier and use different materials. Indeed, the need to save weight might itself force the use of different, more expensive materials but with a compromise on other properties such as strength.
Similarly, what if power costs were not a consideration for data centers? Well, they could add other features, add more servers. Instead, they have to invest in efficiency, which doesn't really help their feature set too much. It's less brand differentiation and more commoditization, and makes them more likely to be outsourced.
Those are just two examples. There are countless others.
I think 65,000 feet is not nearly enough. The Mig 29 has a service ceiling of 59,000 feet, and that means it can go a lot higher. In fact, you can buy a ride on a Mig 29 up to almost 70,000 feet from here:
IT's funny how the summary says "safe from SAMs", when we already learned in the Eisenhower administration that Russian SAMS can fly just as high as our aircraft can.
Safe at 60,000 feet?
I doubt it. Some modern fighter aircraft can just about reach that altitude on their own. Wikipedia gives the service ceiling of a Mig 29 at 59,000 feet, and obviously an aircraft can burst up a bit higher than that.
Ten seconds is too long. Even if we set aside the dubious government driven proposition that cataloging and numbering everyone is beneficial, the fact is, an identification system that takes ten seconds is simply not beneficial. About a second, is all it should take.
Ten seconds, people won't be sure if the device is working or not, even if it says that it is. What do you do if a program stops running for ten seconds - you are start thinking about killing it. What do you do if you can't open your car door for ten seconds? You begin to doubt the key. Even typing in a password and waiting ten seconds for a response is cause for some doubt about your password.
Ten seconds is just way too long. If you are going to fund a technology like this, then hold them to a second.
You go on a rant like that and then purport to somehow be different from those you hate?
Yes, because I want people to more energy at their disposal. Energy is wealth. If you are in favor of more energy, you want humanity to get richer. If you are against it, you want humanity to get poorer. It's pretty cut and dry, actually.
When I come to power, I will have the government build 500 nuclear power plants, and just wave aside any environmental lawsuit with a stiff hand of nothing, and any protest with a hail of bullets.
At some point, you just have to treat environmentalists as the diseased enemies of mankind that they are. They are today's Nazis that are so hyped about purity they don't even bother to notice what they destroy to get it. Like the Nazis before, purity is not some real goal, it is emblematic of their utter hatred for people that live. Dirty jews, dirty subhumans, dirty humans... all have to be "dealt with". At the end of the day, the head of Greenpeace and Heinrich Himmler are cut from the same cloth, a bunch of freaks that look in the mirror and see humanity as a corpse infesting the earth. Death matters not to them.
Environmentalists are the enemy of all of humanity.
Have a look around at the current state of biodiesel in the USA, for example. Right now, despite a $1 a gallon subsidy, promising players such as Nova Biosource Fuels are shuttering their doors. The country has nearly 2 billion gallons of plant capacity for biodiesel, and a fraction of that is produced. The situation is the same for ethanol. And, just when things are gloomy for the USA, of course, along come our so-called European friends to jack up tariffs on American biodiesel and put the screws to even more American jobs.
Those high gas prices that Bush ushered in did more to boost alternative fuels and alternative energy than any stimulus package Obama will ever sign, and now that gas prices are lower again, alternative fuels in the USA is being destroyed, just as it was in the 1980s.
I'm bitter about this. In my lifetime I've seen two political parties make great use of spike in gasoline prices. Republicans did it in the late 1970s when attacking Jimmy Carter, and now, Democrats did it when attacking George Bush.
The worst is, Obama KNOWS that this was the wrong thing. He complains that the USA made the wrong choices in energy for 20 years, but had he actually been more positive about the increase in fuel prices during the campaign, instead of bitching about Bush's runup, we might actually have a credible renewable fuels industry in the USA. But, we don't.
Instead, we have a supposedly green President doing the same damn thing Reagan did - slinking off to the middle east to give more concessions to the Muslims in order to keep the oil pumps working, with the added stupidity of placing the USA back on the imported oil problem while at the same time pulling American troops off the top of the 250 billion barrels of Iraqi oil that they are sitting on.
When coupled with the recent killing off of nuclear energy, we are basically left with nothing. We have no biofuels left, ethanol is dead, nuclear power is being killed, and we're walking away from even getting access to the largely untapped sources of oil domestically and abroad.
WE HAVE NOTHING LEFT FOR ANY ENERGY, THANKS TO THIS JACKASS OF A PRESIDENT.
No, because other markets tend to have limited employment because of various barriers to entry for employees. There's technical skills, geographic considerations, and more that all drive up salaries in other professions. But in the drug world, there's no such skills required. Anyone can be a drug dealer, and they get paid as what they are - unskilled, uneducated labor.
Yeah, but you can't, as a practical matter, actually do that. You can't refuse a person from downloading your code on sourceforge. You can't issue a stop order out to whatever mirrors have your code. You have no way of knowing what each person is that is getting the various GPL software. There's no way for you to actually make that refusal!
Freakonomics had a really good article about the drug business and in a way, it is efficient. There is ample supply, despite law enforcement. And, there are more than enough interested workers, who actually wind up making, on average, slightly less than minimum wage.
Basically, drug culture is an -illusion- of wealth, because while a few do get rich, its ultimately just terrible work for the vast majority of people that participate in it. It tends to thrive in impoverished areas, because, for those people, there's just no work at all.
Is the thought that a lot of these companies that are using GPL code might actually be complicit in this plan. Poor Richard Stallman... he thought up the GPL after Emacs was swiped from him. Now, a bunch of companies are signing on with the likes of Microsoft not even over the matter of patents, but, over a more coordinated strategy to essentially just take the GPL code for their own products by turning the GPL into another kind of public domain.
Question : Don't you have to show that you've been harmed in order to bring a lawsuit? I'm not a lawyer, but I always thought that in order to sue somebody, you had to be damaged by them.
Now, let's say Tom Tom or any other company ponies up to Microsoft and distributes some piece of hardware bundled with Linux, and that's obviously a violation of the GPL. Clearly Tom Tom broke the license and they are not entitled to distribute it.
The question is, is the GPL owner harmed?
Well, one could make the argument that the answer is no, as everyone who actually had a Tom Tom device could in fact obtain the GPL code for themselves, and could update the code in the device. In fact, a person owning a Tom Tom might perhaps just state that a replacement in deed, because, if the Tom Tom GPL code is the same as the code it would be replaced with, which it has to be, then a physical act of copying the code over to make it legal is silly.
What this could be then, would be really Microsoft trolling for the ultimate legal showdown, which is thus: Microsoft makes a bunch of noise but ultimately gives Tom Tom a vfat license, rendering Tom Tom in default of the GPL. Somebody sues Tom Tom, at which point, Microsoft's pocketbooks open up and they support Tom Tom in the lawsuit, arguing that, well, because any person who is distributed the GPL by Tom Tom, can get it from somewhere else, Tom Tom's infringement is actually academic.
Thus, the attack would be, you can't be damaged by someone redistributing your GPL code against the terms of the license, because the person they are distributing it to can get it directly from you, and the GPL is actually worthless.
I see your point about the distributions needing to have the money to chip in, but do they really have it? FireFox is a tremendously expensive product, and even Novell is barely a billion dollar company. I would wonder if they could afford it.
The notion that it doesn't really matter what operating system people run Google on is a two way street. If everyone ran Windows, versus Linux, Google would still get the same advertising. To some extent, Firefox doesn't accomplish anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Arguing that you can just mash people together and get "synergies" is like arguing that you can put Van Gogh and Rembrant on a team to make a better painting, can put the Rolling Stones and Beatles into a single band and get a better album. They are just -different- things and the whole idea of synergies is really about simplification and eliminating those important local differences that serve to identify products. I'm not the one that looks for simplicity - it is the merger and mba types that just slam businesses together as if they can so easily be put together.
For some good examples of colossal mergers that failed, read up on the merger of PRR and NY Central. Railroads can't be different, there's synergies on the routes... all wrong. There's been plenty of disasters since then.
If you put your focus on local optimus you'll lose a lot on sinergies;
Dude, we've spent the last twenty years in the US economy merging, analyzing and looking for these synergies, and it's failed.
Let's try with a little IT analogy (shocking, I know). The "everyone do their own little thing" are the dreaded small VBA applications hacked up in Excel that have no architecture, no signoffs and just pop up all over the place
Has the thought ever occurred to you that all of those little applications actually solved problems for the business?
t's easy to be an armchair MBA and think you got all the answers because you don't see the actual implications.
There's only two kinds of people a company needs: people that make things and people that sell them. MBAs do neither. They don't sell, and they don't make. There's no value-add, so there is no point.
A truly clever developer will create code so easy to understand that a less than average developer could debug it.
Only if it does not impact time to market of the product. Average developers need to step up and get better.
'Method and an apparatus to deliver messages between applications,' claims a patent on routing messages using an XQuery match
Biztalk has routed messages using XQuery matching now for at least 5 years. The irony is, that, it seems like such a good idea to build a messaging system around XML, which Biztalk does, but in practice, it actually totally sucks.
There's a huge and erroneous misconception that centralization makes a corporation more efficient. I think centralization is a cancer. How often do mergers actually work? How often do governments actually execute well. The biggest failing of the free enterprise system as of late, is that, after hearing all of this about how government is inherently wasteful and inefficient and choked with slackers, that corporations set themselves to be operated just like governments. Just look at the result!
The fact of the matter is, that the thing that matters most in any corporation is time to market. It doesn't matter if you are centralized and more "efficient" if it takes you two years longer to ship a late product out the door, because while your smaller competitors were signing stuff and building things, your own design was going through committees and signoffs to make sure that you weren't doing what someone else already did.
Like, the stupidest thing GM ever did was to try and share so much data across so many divisions. What they should have done is just run each different division as a separate company, responsible for one thing - the bottom line. If they don't produce, then close them down. But instead, they have a huge corporate system that makes it very difficult for them to bring a new car design to market. And, by the time they get there, what started out as an award winning design is so late that they get slammed for making a mediocre product by the trade magazines first and the consumers second. All that's left of that company is Bob Lutz heroically pushing through car designs, but once he's gone (he's retiring), that company is screwed.
I think the larger story is, really, that management education in the United States is a colossal failure. There is no reason that a large and previously successful company needs to decline and fail when other civilizations created empires and institutions that lasted for hundreds and thousands of years. But as it is, in America, as soon as a founder leaves a company, the MBAs get in and these "professional managers" slowly sink the ship. It doesn't have to be this way, but it will be this way until we get some serious curriculum changes at our management schools.
That's right: HARVARD, WHARTON, YALE AND OTHER MBAS : YOU F---- SUCK!
I would joke that this could be a good thing, in that, we'll just game the review system to get raises.
The reality is, though, that the more corporations seek to control and monitor their employees, the more they will crush the entrepreneur in them. Corporations work best when they motivate people and you do that by creating a positive, team culture that gives its participants a sense of mission. Take that away, reduce people to cogs, and you are going to get cogs as a result, and you'll get an inevitable decline. What enterprising person would want to work as an anonymous cog, coming out of college with a degree and history that says they are anything but, when they could make a real difference at a startup.
Actions like this doom large corporations, and frankly, this sort of thinking was what alienated the big 3 for a lot of people, and now they want to do this to the computer industry?
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Quick, burn all his damn books!
It's anybody that acquires too much power that becomes the problem. Doesn't matter what angle they're working.
Ah, you are right, of course!
Where've I heard such simpleton logic before? You're either WITH US or AGAINST US, you dirty traitor. Pretty cut and dry!
Yeah, it is, actually.
Any energy or environmental economist would be laughing their ass off at your sophomoric view of what "wealth" is
Actually, a lot of energy economists would agree with me. The more energy people have, and the less expensively they have it, the more their lives improve. It's cheaper for them to travel, to get to work, to power electronic devices and get new features in them. In so many ways, the more energy you have, the richer you are. It's just the way it is.
Even if you argued that increasing energy prices resulted in some efficiency, the fact of the matter, if you are investing a fixed set of dollars into a device to make it more energy efficient, you are losing out on other features as well.
For example, let's say cars didn't have to worry about fuel efficiency, for example, what would a designer not have to worry about? First off, weight could right out the wind. You could afford to make a car much heavier and use different materials. Indeed, the need to save weight might itself force the use of different, more expensive materials but with a compromise on other properties such as strength.
Similarly, what if power costs were not a consideration for data centers? Well, they could add other features, add more servers. Instead, they have to invest in efficiency, which doesn't really help their feature set too much. It's less brand differentiation and more commoditization, and makes them more likely to be outsourced.
Those are just two examples. There are countless others.
I think 65,000 feet is not nearly enough. The Mig 29 has a service ceiling of 59,000 feet, and that means it can go a lot higher. In fact, you can buy a ride on a Mig 29 up to almost 70,000 feet from here:
http://rusadventures.com/tour27.shtml
That's plane is plenty capable of popping this balloon, and that's a design at least 30 years old.
No new technology is needed to shoot down dumbo blimp.
IT's funny how the summary says "safe from SAMs", when we already learned in the Eisenhower administration that Russian SAMS can fly just as high as our aircraft can.
Safe at 60,000 feet?
I doubt it. Some modern fighter aircraft can just about reach that altitude on their own. Wikipedia gives the service ceiling of a Mig 29 at 59,000 feet, and obviously an aircraft can burst up a bit higher than that.
These blimps would just be cannon fodder.
It's not like they ever work anyway.
Ten seconds is too long. Even if we set aside the dubious government driven proposition that cataloging and numbering everyone is beneficial, the fact is, an identification system that takes ten seconds is simply not beneficial. About a second, is all it should take.
Ten seconds, people won't be sure if the device is working or not, even if it says that it is. What do you do if a program stops running for ten seconds - you are start thinking about killing it. What do you do if you can't open your car door for ten seconds? You begin to doubt the key. Even typing in a password and waiting ten seconds for a response is cause for some doubt about your password.
Ten seconds is just way too long. If you are going to fund a technology like this, then hold them to a second.
You go on a rant like that and then purport to somehow be different from those you hate?
Yes, because I want people to more energy at their disposal. Energy is wealth. If you are in favor of more energy, you want humanity to get richer. If you are against it, you want humanity to get poorer. It's pretty cut and dry, actually.
When I come to power, I will have the government build 500 nuclear power plants, and just wave aside any environmental lawsuit with a stiff hand of nothing, and any protest with a hail of bullets.
At some point, you just have to treat environmentalists as the diseased enemies of mankind that they are. They are today's Nazis that are so hyped about purity they don't even bother to notice what they destroy to get it. Like the Nazis before, purity is not some real goal, it is emblematic of their utter hatred for people that live. Dirty jews, dirty subhumans, dirty humans... all have to be "dealt with". At the end of the day, the head of Greenpeace and Heinrich Himmler are cut from the same cloth, a bunch of freaks that look in the mirror and see humanity as a corpse infesting the earth. Death matters not to them.
Environmentalists are the enemy of all of humanity.
But the $85 mil will get you a few good lawyers, and if you work it right, a congressman or two.
That's why the guy that stole $85 million dollars gets to see the guy that stole 85 dollars thrown into jail.
Amiga - Remember when computing was fun?
I sure do. Back then, it was PERSONAL computing, not NETWORK computing.
Don't put him in prison for stealing the album. Shoot him for promoting it. 17 years and GNR gives us, what, a big pile of overrated crap.
Have a look around at the current state of biodiesel in the USA, for example. Right now, despite a $1 a gallon subsidy, promising players such as Nova Biosource Fuels are shuttering their doors. The country has nearly 2 billion gallons of plant capacity for biodiesel, and a fraction of that is produced. The situation is the same for ethanol. And, just when things are gloomy for the USA, of course, along come our so-called European friends to jack up tariffs on American biodiesel and put the screws to even more American jobs.
Those high gas prices that Bush ushered in did more to boost alternative fuels and alternative energy than any stimulus package Obama will ever sign, and now that gas prices are lower again, alternative fuels in the USA is being destroyed, just as it was in the 1980s.
I'm bitter about this. In my lifetime I've seen two political parties make great use of spike in gasoline prices. Republicans did it in the late 1970s when attacking Jimmy Carter, and now, Democrats did it when attacking George Bush.
The worst is, Obama KNOWS that this was the wrong thing. He complains that the USA made the wrong choices in energy for 20 years, but had he actually been more positive about the increase in fuel prices during the campaign, instead of bitching about Bush's runup, we might actually have a credible renewable fuels industry in the USA. But, we don't.
Instead, we have a supposedly green President doing the same damn thing Reagan did - slinking off to the middle east to give more concessions to the Muslims in order to keep the oil pumps working, with the added stupidity of placing the USA back on the imported oil problem while at the same time pulling American troops off the top of the 250 billion barrels of Iraqi oil that they are sitting on.
When coupled with the recent killing off of nuclear energy, we are basically left with nothing. We have no biofuels left, ethanol is dead, nuclear power is being killed, and we're walking away from even getting access to the largely untapped sources of oil domestically and abroad.
WE HAVE NOTHING LEFT FOR ANY ENERGY, THANKS TO THIS JACKASS OF A PRESIDENT.
So basically, it's like any other market?
No, because other markets tend to have limited employment because of various barriers to entry for employees. There's technical skills, geographic considerations, and more that all drive up salaries in other professions. But in the drug world, there's no such skills required. Anyone can be a drug dealer, and they get paid as what they are - unskilled, uneducated labor.
I could refuse to give them a copy.
Yeah, but you can't, as a practical matter, actually do that. You can't refuse a person from downloading your code on sourceforge. You can't issue a stop order out to whatever mirrors have your code. You have no way of knowing what each person is that is getting the various GPL software. There's no way for you to actually make that refusal!
Freakonomics had a really good article about the drug business and in a way, it is efficient. There is ample supply, despite law enforcement. And, there are more than enough interested workers, who actually wind up making, on average, slightly less than minimum wage.
Basically, drug culture is an -illusion- of wealth, because while a few do get rich, its ultimately just terrible work for the vast majority of people that participate in it. It tends to thrive in impoverished areas, because, for those people, there's just no work at all.
Is the thought that a lot of these companies that are using GPL code might actually be complicit in this plan. Poor Richard Stallman... he thought up the GPL after Emacs was swiped from him. Now, a bunch of companies are signing on with the likes of Microsoft not even over the matter of patents, but, over a more coordinated strategy to essentially just take the GPL code for their own products by turning the GPL into another kind of public domain.
Question : Don't you have to show that you've been harmed in order to bring a lawsuit? I'm not a lawyer, but I always thought that in order to sue somebody, you had to be damaged by them.
Now, let's say Tom Tom or any other company ponies up to Microsoft and distributes some piece of hardware bundled with Linux, and that's obviously a violation of the GPL. Clearly Tom Tom broke the license and they are not entitled to distribute it.
The question is, is the GPL owner harmed?
Well, one could make the argument that the answer is no, as everyone who actually had a Tom Tom device could in fact obtain the GPL code for themselves, and could update the code in the device. In fact, a person owning a Tom Tom might perhaps just state that a replacement in deed, because, if the Tom Tom GPL code is the same as the code it would be replaced with, which it has to be, then a physical act of copying the code over to make it legal is silly.
What this could be then, would be really Microsoft trolling for the ultimate legal showdown, which is thus: Microsoft makes a bunch of noise but ultimately gives Tom Tom a vfat license, rendering Tom Tom in default of the GPL. Somebody sues Tom Tom, at which point, Microsoft's pocketbooks open up and they support Tom Tom in the lawsuit, arguing that, well, because any person who is distributed the GPL by Tom Tom, can get it from somewhere else, Tom Tom's infringement is actually academic.
Thus, the attack would be, you can't be damaged by someone redistributing your GPL code against the terms of the license, because the person they are distributing it to can get it directly from you, and the GPL is actually worthless.
I see your point about the distributions needing to have the money to chip in, but do they really have it? FireFox is a tremendously expensive product, and even Novell is barely a billion dollar company. I would wonder if they could afford it.
The notion that it doesn't really matter what operating system people run Google on is a two way street. If everyone ran Windows, versus Linux, Google would still get the same advertising. To some extent, Firefox doesn't accomplish anything.