I worked with a client this summer that was dumping an install of about 20 X-Serves for a Windows based server environment. They have a substantial Mac user base and it seemed like the right idea at the time, but the experience was pretty awful.
They said the directory server never worked right and there were a bunch of other glitches, some of them I think hardware-based. It was a big deployment and they even had Apple involvement but it never worked right.
Credit reporters have lenders as clients and have a financial incentive to accept whatever information lenders report, regardless of accuracy, and to make removal of inaccurate negative information as difficult as possible.
Lenders have an incentive to have as much negative information as possible on clients as it allows them to charge higher interest rates.
The major parties hate third parties and have every incentive to make third parties look bad. From draining votes from their candidates to possibly undermining their control of the legislative process, they are a threat to Democratic or Republican control & influence.
The media likes to portray them as part of the lunatic fringe because controversy pumps up ratings and sales. The media also has a vested interest in the two party system, in terms of influence, contacts and its defacto role as arbitrator/kingmaker.
Take Christine O'Donnell for example. I don't personally think she's a great candidate, but the criticism of her is severe considering that the head of the House banking committee, Barney Frank, had a young lover running a male prostitution ring out of Frank's apartment and claimed he didn't know. OK, Christine's a doof, but that's worse than Frank? Or worse than any of the other sex/bribery scandals R or Ds have been in?
What I think is missed in both the smug, "Daily Show"-type dismissal of the Tea Party & third party movement this cycle and the attacks from both parties is that *despite* the negative publicity and outright hostility shown to these candidates (and their own foot-in-mouth syndrome), people are so annoyed at the traditional parties they are willing to vote for them anyway.
The media is too busy either joining the denouncements or smugly dismissing them to see this.
I think there's some difference of opinion on that. Some corporations, driven by bean counters, want to hire ready-to-work employees, exploit them, and then toss them to the curb when they become too expensive or can be replaced by a lower-paid model with a more up to date education.
The downside being that such organizations usually require micromanagement and can't have very complex systems as there is a disdain for training, whether its skills for the job or skills about the job (process, etc).
Some corporations prefer training, as it allows a more sophisticated process model and requires less management as its assumed employees are both educated in internal process and skills for doing the job the way management wants it done.
I had lunch the other day with a guy who used to work in a pork slaughterhouse.
I tell you what, sticking a gloved finger up strange people's assholes for the rest of my life sounds vastly superior to a day in the slaughterhouse.
He said you got paid in cash the first couple of days as so many people quit the first day (or part of the day) that issue checks for these people was too much headache.
Is this just a troll summary to generate page views, an ad for Sprint, or are the submitter & editor really that brain damaged?
Other than the outrageous upcharge, iPad 3G models have the same Wifi abilities of the non-3G iPads and are just as able to use cellular data portable hotspots as Wifi-only models.
I'm sure "Why would you?" is the obvious retort, and while *I* wouldn't, I can imagine that some people end up with 3G iPads because they didn't pay for them, they bought them used or they want to use them in an area with no/poor AT&T 3G coverage.
That may be true, but there are a number of potentially mitigating factors.
For one, lower population growth has to be a function of generations; it very likely wouldn't happen in a single generation. At least initially there would be a growth in population as parents would continue to have large families. There's also the question of culture and religion -- in many cases family size is driven by religious faith or other cultural norms, not necessarily life expectancy.
Secondly, checking malaria would improve life expectancy but have a nominal impact on standard of living -- decreased medical care vs. more mouths to feed in the short run. The standard of living impact only seems to apply once the population growth has slowed.
As much as I appreciate the diminishment of death and suffering when a disease like malaria can be neutralized, I wonder if anyone has taken into account the population growth question that results and what the impact on poor regions like Africa that suffer most of the deaths?
It's "only" 800,000 some deaths per year, but given that they are mostly among children this has the potential to equal millions more people if even a relatively small portion (25%?) go on to produce a family with 4-6 offspring.
The Chinese are heavily invested in Treasuries, but they need to in order to maintain their currency peg. Without the ability to hold their currency peg their export-based economy has serious, future-of-the-Party problems.
But their "control" of these Treasuries is essentially meaningless as a "weapon". For one, the the US could simply void them and unilaterally declare the debt non-payable. This would be an extreme circumstance, but at the end of the day the consequences of this are largely political and public relations related. The US could also choose (with some pain) to inflate their way out of debt.
For better or for worse, the Chinese and the Americans have quickly and probably without any real thought, completely coupled themselves in ways that are pretty destructive to break out of.
I'm sure this is all about PR and has nothing to do with trade secrets. "Government" Sachs isn't terribly popular right now and they really would like to maintain a low profile.
And I'm sure part of the defendant's strategy is to shine particularly bright lights on directives from Goldman management about HFT and how they wanted to control/manipulate markets.
This kind of testimony in open court would be a PR disaster for Goldman and they know it. The last thing they want these days is another "Evil" tag.
I sometimes wonder if MS senior management isn't full of guys making good money, looking at how much time they have until retirement is a real option and thinking "If we can just string this Windows/PC model along for a couple more years, I'll be set. Retire in my late 50s. Second home (or boat or....) paid for. Enough savings to live off until 401k money kicks in."
I can see where it could almost become a cultural mindset, coupled with a financial analysis that says the "real money" comes from Windows, Office, Exchange & SQL. Everything else (phone, tables, hardware, software, etc) is a half-assed feint to keep Wall St. quiet, keep key industry experts locked into long employment contracts and out of the hands of competitors, and occasionally hit the lottery when something sticks to the wall.
Or is it the actual management model? Keep the Windows/Office core profit engine running, fuck around on the margin and assume you can manipulate the market enough to keep your dominance forever?
Seems like it would make sense -- have 2 or 4 video inputs on the display and treat the single monitor as if it were four smaller devices.
I'm sure there might be some alignment issues (solvable in software), but perhaps there might be timing issues that would be annoying with video or animation, especially when overlap occurs.
The only problem with such an analysis is that if you rely on sub-assemblies coming from China, how is the East Coast of the US supposed to be an advantage?
At a minimum, it's a trip through the Panama Canal or trans-shipment via rail from the West Coast. I suppose going around the Cape in Africa would be an option, too, but that seems even further.
I'd wager that for most people, there's no reliable way to "check your source" for most apps offering "something for nothing" (ie, cracks, rooting, jailbreaking, etc). Many are written by anonymous entities and distributed diffusely to avoid the wrath of whoever produces the device they're trying to circumvent. In some instances there's a reliable distributor, but in many cases not.
But I also wonder if going after a jailbeak app as a target they might be going after the right audience -- people willing to take a risk to get more than they paid for (running "unapproved" apps) or to get something for nothing (iPhone without AT&T contract).
You'll probably never read this, but I hear you -- I run into clients like this from time to time (fortunately not as often as we used to).
Too ignorant to see the stupidity in what they were doing and why it didn't make sense to keep doing it that way.
They're also the same people with a 5 year old P4 system with 512MB of RAM that's "too slow" and who won't replace it because it's too expensive, despite being willing to throw $300 worth of labor and $100 worth of RAM at it.
What makes me crazy about these people is how unwilling they are to invest in their IT (despite business basically stopping if it doesn't work), when for many small business and extra $10k a year on IT would make a world of difference, transforming them into leaders from followers.
Ha, I worked with a sister company that had *two* routable/16s -- they used one externally and one internally.
We had to host one of our workers in their facility and wanted an unfiltered external IP to connect our employee's computer equipment to and we got a whole bunch of static about how they didn't have enough IPs, ironically.
and in many cases, it's people you never even met in person who you allowed on your friends list in the neverending quest to have more "friends" than your buddies do.
I think this is the big mistake people make, coupled with Facebook's "friend of a friend" permission that allows people you really don't know (aka strangers) to troll your profile, friends list and photos.
Outside of people I knew in high school or college, I make a point to turn down friend requests from business/work acquaintances and people I don't know personally.
If you keep your profile relatively clean (ie, no pictures of you freebasing heroin) and limit your friend exposure, it's actually a reasonable way to keep up with people you like but can't stay in contact with in more traditional ways due to geography, family, etc.
I just ran through my profile and there's little of use to anyone, friend or foe. I don't even put my own picture up there.
There are several glaring cases of US malfeasance overseas -- Allende & Chile, propping up the Shah. I'm only a casual student of history, not an expert, but my general reading is that most of the time these were cases of the US government trying to block Soviet expansion which I think historically was a good thing.
Does this justify any and all American actions? No, I don't think so, but the cold war wasn't a game for sissies, either. You didn't go up against the Soviets with a pacifist ethos.
The ACLU isn't required to support the 2nd Amendment, but they look like partisan advocates (read: liberal, pro-gun control) when they don't, as the U.S. Supreme Court has definitively supported the 2nd Amendment as an individual right, and the ACLU claims to be in the business of supporting the exercise of individual rights protected by the constitution.
If you make that claim about supporting individual rights, how do you not support the individual right in the 2nd Amendment so endorsed by a majority of the Supreme Court? My six year old would say "Because I don't want to" but the ACLU needs to do better than that.
Slashdot Mirror
I worked with a client this summer that was dumping an install of about 20 X-Serves for a Windows based server environment. They have a substantial Mac user base and it seemed like the right idea at the time, but the experience was pretty awful.
They said the directory server never worked right and there were a bunch of other glitches, some of them I think hardware-based. It was a big deployment and they even had Apple involvement but it never worked right.
(there should be a ? at the end; why are Slashdot subjects so short?)
Maybe the Burmese junta had some deal with the Chinese military and/or Chinese organized crime and stiffed them?
Is it opium extract season?
Where this really sucks is credit reporting.
Credit reporters have lenders as clients and have a financial incentive to accept whatever information lenders report, regardless of accuracy, and to make removal of inaccurate negative information as difficult as possible.
Lenders have an incentive to have as much negative information as possible on clients as it allows them to charge higher interest rates.
The major parties hate third parties and have every incentive to make third parties look bad. From draining votes from their candidates to possibly undermining their control of the legislative process, they are a threat to Democratic or Republican control & influence.
The media likes to portray them as part of the lunatic fringe because controversy pumps up ratings and sales. The media also has a vested interest in the two party system, in terms of influence, contacts and its defacto role as arbitrator/kingmaker.
Take Christine O'Donnell for example. I don't personally think she's a great candidate, but the criticism of her is severe considering that the head of the House banking committee, Barney Frank, had a young lover running a male prostitution ring out of Frank's apartment and claimed he didn't know. OK, Christine's a doof, but that's worse than Frank? Or worse than any of the other sex/bribery scandals R or Ds have been in?
What I think is missed in both the smug, "Daily Show"-type dismissal of the Tea Party & third party movement this cycle and the attacks from both parties is that *despite* the negative publicity and outright hostility shown to these candidates (and their own foot-in-mouth syndrome), people are so annoyed at the traditional parties they are willing to vote for them anyway.
The media is too busy either joining the denouncements or smugly dismissing them to see this.
I think there's some difference of opinion on that. Some corporations, driven by bean counters, want to hire ready-to-work employees, exploit them, and then toss them to the curb when they become too expensive or can be replaced by a lower-paid model with a more up to date education.
The downside being that such organizations usually require micromanagement and can't have very complex systems as there is a disdain for training, whether its skills for the job or skills about the job (process, etc).
Some corporations prefer training, as it allows a more sophisticated process model and requires less management as its assumed employees are both educated in internal process and skills for doing the job the way management wants it done.
I had lunch the other day with a guy who used to work in a pork slaughterhouse.
I tell you what, sticking a gloved finger up strange people's assholes for the rest of my life sounds vastly superior to a day in the slaughterhouse.
He said you got paid in cash the first couple of days as so many people quit the first day (or part of the day) that issue checks for these people was too much headache.
Interesting. The challenge, of course, being large swaths of Africa where political control and religious control go hand in hand.
Is this just a troll summary to generate page views, an ad for Sprint, or are the submitter & editor really that brain damaged?
Other than the outrageous upcharge, iPad 3G models have the same Wifi abilities of the non-3G iPads and are just as able to use cellular data portable hotspots as Wifi-only models.
I'm sure "Why would you?" is the obvious retort, and while *I* wouldn't, I can imagine that some people end up with 3G iPads because they didn't pay for them, they bought them used or they want to use them in an area with no/poor AT&T 3G coverage.
That may be true, but there are a number of potentially mitigating factors.
For one, lower population growth has to be a function of generations; it very likely wouldn't happen in a single generation. At least initially there would be a growth in population as parents would continue to have large families. There's also the question of culture and religion -- in many cases family size is driven by religious faith or other cultural norms, not necessarily life expectancy.
Secondly, checking malaria would improve life expectancy but have a nominal impact on standard of living -- decreased medical care vs. more mouths to feed in the short run. The standard of living impact only seems to apply once the population growth has slowed.
As much as I appreciate the diminishment of death and suffering when a disease like malaria can be neutralized, I wonder if anyone has taken into account the population growth question that results and what the impact on poor regions like Africa that suffer most of the deaths?
It's "only" 800,000 some deaths per year, but given that they are mostly among children this has the potential to equal millions more people if even a relatively small portion (25%?) go on to produce a family with 4-6 offspring.
This is one reason why we should insist on the source code to all firmware - or reverse engineer write new firmware ourselves.
That makes management deadlines easier to meet and pleases vendors and other third party support. Sweet.
Bluff? Translation error? Bravado?
The Chinese are heavily invested in Treasuries, but they need to in order to maintain their currency peg. Without the ability to hold their currency peg their export-based economy has serious, future-of-the-Party problems.
But their "control" of these Treasuries is essentially meaningless as a "weapon". For one, the the US could simply void them and unilaterally declare the debt non-payable. This would be an extreme circumstance, but at the end of the day the consequences of this are largely political and public relations related. The US could also choose (with some pain) to inflate their way out of debt.
For better or for worse, the Chinese and the Americans have quickly and probably without any real thought, completely coupled themselves in ways that are pretty destructive to break out of.
I'm sure this is all about PR and has nothing to do with trade secrets. "Government" Sachs isn't terribly popular right now and they really would like to maintain a low profile.
And I'm sure part of the defendant's strategy is to shine particularly bright lights on directives from Goldman management about HFT and how they wanted to control/manipulate markets.
This kind of testimony in open court would be a PR disaster for Goldman and they know it. The last thing they want these days is another "Evil" tag.
Man-made sapphire, like watch crystals?
Or all of the above?
I sometimes wonder if MS senior management isn't full of guys making good money, looking at how much time they have until retirement is a real option and thinking "If we can just string this Windows/PC model along for a couple more years, I'll be set. Retire in my late 50s. Second home (or boat or ....) paid for. Enough savings to live off until 401k money kicks in."
I can see where it could almost become a cultural mindset, coupled with a financial analysis that says the "real money" comes from Windows, Office, Exchange & SQL. Everything else (phone, tables, hardware, software, etc) is a half-assed feint to keep Wall St. quiet, keep key industry experts locked into long employment contracts and out of the hands of competitors, and occasionally hit the lottery when something sticks to the wall.
Or is it the actual management model? Keep the Windows/Office core profit engine running, fuck around on the margin and assume you can manipulate the market enough to keep your dominance forever?
After all the battles over health care, I think I prefer the single-payer fear model.
Seems like it would make sense -- have 2 or 4 video inputs on the display and treat the single monitor as if it were four smaller devices.
I'm sure there might be some alignment issues (solvable in software), but perhaps there might be timing issues that would be annoying with video or animation, especially when overlap occurs.
The only problem with such an analysis is that if you rely on sub-assemblies coming from China, how is the East Coast of the US supposed to be an advantage?
At a minimum, it's a trip through the Panama Canal or trans-shipment via rail from the West Coast. I suppose going around the Cape in Africa would be an option, too, but that seems even further.
I'd wager that for most people, there's no reliable way to "check your source" for most apps offering "something for nothing" (ie, cracks, rooting, jailbreaking, etc). Many are written by anonymous entities and distributed diffusely to avoid the wrath of whoever produces the device they're trying to circumvent. In some instances there's a reliable distributor, but in many cases not.
But I also wonder if going after a jailbeak app as a target they might be going after the right audience -- people willing to take a risk to get more than they paid for (running "unapproved" apps) or to get something for nothing (iPhone without AT&T contract).
You'll probably never read this, but I hear you -- I run into clients like this from time to time (fortunately not as often as we used to).
Too ignorant to see the stupidity in what they were doing and why it didn't make sense to keep doing it that way.
They're also the same people with a 5 year old P4 system with 512MB of RAM that's "too slow" and who won't replace it because it's too expensive, despite being willing to throw $300 worth of labor and $100 worth of RAM at it.
What makes me crazy about these people is how unwilling they are to invest in their IT (despite business basically stopping if it doesn't work), when for many small business and extra $10k a year on IT would make a world of difference, transforming them into leaders from followers.
Ha, I worked with a sister company that had *two* routable /16s -- they used one externally and one internally.
We had to host one of our workers in their facility and wanted an unfiltered external IP to connect our employee's computer equipment to and we got a whole bunch of static about how they didn't have enough IPs, ironically.
and in many cases, it's people you never even met in person who you allowed on your friends list in the neverending quest to have more "friends" than your buddies do.
I think this is the big mistake people make, coupled with Facebook's "friend of a friend" permission that allows people you really don't know (aka strangers) to troll your profile, friends list and photos.
Outside of people I knew in high school or college, I make a point to turn down friend requests from business/work acquaintances and people I don't know personally.
If you keep your profile relatively clean (ie, no pictures of you freebasing heroin) and limit your friend exposure, it's actually a reasonable way to keep up with people you like but can't stay in contact with in more traditional ways due to geography, family, etc.
I just ran through my profile and there's little of use to anyone, friend or foe. I don't even put my own picture up there.
There are several glaring cases of US malfeasance overseas -- Allende & Chile, propping up the Shah. I'm only a casual student of history, not an expert, but my general reading is that most of the time these were cases of the US government trying to block Soviet expansion which I think historically was a good thing.
Does this justify any and all American actions? No, I don't think so, but the cold war wasn't a game for sissies, either. You didn't go up against the Soviets with a pacifist ethos.
The ACLU isn't required to support the 2nd Amendment, but they look like partisan advocates (read: liberal, pro-gun control) when they don't, as the U.S. Supreme Court has definitively supported the 2nd Amendment as an individual right, and the ACLU claims to be in the business of supporting the exercise of individual rights protected by the constitution.
If you make that claim about supporting individual rights, how do you not support the individual right in the 2nd Amendment so endorsed by a majority of the Supreme Court? My six year old would say "Because I don't want to" but the ACLU needs to do better than that.
I'm sure the architect thought about it but then said "WTF, she's a rich cunt and by the time it's a problem, I'll be dead or retired."