There was a guy who made big deal (and even made the Economist) a few years ago about MS being a net money loser if it was forced to account for the massive stock options it gave to bolster its otherwise weak salaries as an expense. This has become a more popular topic (if not practice in some cases) in the post-WCOM era as it can distort profitability and valuation.
The counter argument, if I remember the Economist story, was that shareholders, employees and the corporation were able to get away with cranking up the stock printing press because in spite of the dilution of owership and value that printing stock normally would have, MS stock valuations continued to climb stratospherically, and that made everyone happy and ignore what might otherwise be fundamental problems with their management.
I'm not informed/smart enough to know if the Parrish site is right or not about Microsoft, but the financial shenanigans surrounding stock options as pay have certainly become public knowledge and a number of businesses have collapsed, if not due to this specifically, due to these kinds of accounting tricks masking their true value.
The question I have, though, is if you can keep making this trick work year in and year out for at least a decade, are you still a fraud or just talented? I don't know the answer to that and I suspect that as long as MS has a ton of cash, employees that feel well compensated, and shareholders that the answer doesn't matter. I also think that we'll never know the answer, either, since MS is too huge to just collapse quickly and its technology assets (slashdot critiques notwithstanding) would cause it to morph before it disintegrated.
Unfortunately you're describing a weak correlation at best ("contributing factors").
Furthermore, you're implying that these are people who have (had?) strong religious convictions. I'd argue that people with strong religious convinctions generally have an unhealthily unrealistic attitude towards sexuality -- only for procreation, recreational sex is "wrong" (even with spouses), etc.
It may actually be that the husband's viewing of pornography was more akin to the popping of a sexual safety valve -- the personal perspectives on sexuality were so warped by their religious training that something had to give, and the husband used pornography as an outlet otherwise unavailable.
I'd probably begrudgingly grant you that pornography as a substitute for a more typical intimate relationship will have a negative impact on someone's perspective on sexuality, I'd also argue that it's no more destructive and perhaps less so than many religious sects forms of sexual repression.
Usually the argument about polls and political campaigns revolves around the sanctity of political speech.
Calls like "We're calling from Sentor Grabbenbux campaign HQ urging you to vote Grabbenbux on election day" I can understand. Polls are a bit more of a stretch, although inquiring about political opinions may be as much about political speech.
But that's the excuse. I no more want to talk to the Democrats or the Republicans in my livingroom than I do on my phone. The legally sanctioned ability to prevent them from yakking at me in my livingroom isn't a problem, so why wouldn't telling them to not call me be a problem?
It sounds like just another loophole for politicos to me, cloaked in warm fuzzy 1st Ammendment clothing.
How is porn destructive? Presumably you aren't talking about 'destructive to those forced into performing', since most people would grant you that's destructive and more than rape.
The idea is to give your manager no reason to label you as a "no-hire", because if that happens, you are done. She should have kept her comments to herself until or unless her work improved, then (along with a good reputation) had her issues addressed.
What you've just defined is a coercive workplace where substandard conditions (abusiveness, sexism, pay, etc) are expected to be accepted in order to get to whatever the next level is (permanent job, raise, promotion).
I agree with the pragmatic angle of it (I've bit my tongue more than once), but I also have a real problem with the idea that we're supposed to just be quiet and accept it because there's a reward at the end.
Abusive behavior of any kind should never be tolerated by any employee or any business for any reason. Unfortunately I think that each place has its threshold of abuse, and people that complain below the commonly accepted threshold get marked as "whiners" when in fact they're doing the business a favor, since its the failure to speak out that keeps the attorneys busy.
Stopping the genocide in Rwanda Stopping the genocide in Cambodia Ending the Traffic in Human Slavery Solving the Isreali/Palestinian conflict Solving the division of Cyprus Ending the civil wars in equitorial Africa
And those are just the big successes where the prevented the loss of tens of millions of lives. It doesn't count the daily successes of ending international tyrany and misery everywhere else.
I'd rather see subscribers always post at +3 vs. posting in advance. They'd still be subject to moderation, which would mitigate the impact of the additional modpoint, but they wouldn't have the (more important) ability to 'lead' the discussion as early posters seem to do.
It may just be 6 of one, half-dozen of the other, though.
Heh, it doesn't matter what business I'm in. There's something borg-like about Wall-Mart that I'm not sure I like.
I admire them for their remarkable business acumen, but I've also heard lots of horror stories -- main street businesses shuttered virtually overnight, employment practices ranging from criminal (coercing off-clock work) to just icky (company-enforced cult-of-personality-religion surrounding Sam Walton).
Wall Street spins their business as being consumer-friendly (low pricing, broad selections), worker friendly (good 'diversity' hiring practices), and investor friendly (low wages, non-union, spartan work environments). On an individual factual basis, it's true.
However, when I go into their stores I see bottom-of-the-barrel single-vendor-only merchandise unattractively displayed and inattentive, ignorant employees. On a management level, the business practices seem ruthless, the employee relations are creepy-to-criminal (cheering sessions? Sam Walton photos? Where's the kool-aid?).
It's enough of a mixed bag and a juggernaut to just kind of scare me.
My gripe is that they give you a monitor that has the same horizontal resolution as your current display but short you on vertical resolution, call it a "widescreen cinema display" and charge you more.
The a 4:3 display gives you the same horizontal resolution, plus all those extra vertical pixels. At the end of the day you can display the same 16:9 image on the 4:3 display, plus you can display non-16:9 stuff larger on the 4:3 display, and usually for less money.
It's like paying more for the coupe than the sedan, when the sedan holds more and is easier to get into.
How can you even compare the transformation from an illiterate to a literate society with the ability to ramble in writing for strangers?
By trying to compare literacy with blogging, you're highlighting the gross over-significance that many place on blogging as some kind of culturally significant activity.
It's not. Sorry. Get over it. It's a poorly edited real-time autobiography in the hands of the best writers, and idiotic mental masturbation in the hands of most everyone else.
You'll notice that gambling initiatives never are proposed to fund highway development or the general fund.
Until now! Our own Dick Day (as in "Dick Day before he dicks you") is proposing just that.
Around here we have a lot of Indian casinos, and usually the new gambling proposals are either casinos sited a lot closer than Indian casinos or some kind of statewide thing that wouldn't entail a lot of travel. The Indians complain because they know the market for throwing away money is finite and it will drain customers.
This is right, and I laugh every time some state legislator argues we should set up some new casino or game to raise money for some project that can't get funding otherwise.
I'm not sure if they think people will gamble more or if those places print money behind the scenes. I'm guessing the latter.
I don't know what's funnier, the idea of blogging as some kind of culturally significant activity or the raging indignity of "legitimate" bloggers over people placing commercial content in their blogs.
That's about as disingenuous as the transit authority saying I "save" the cost of car payments, insurance and maintenance by riding the bus to work. True if I don't own a car, but if owning a car is otherwise a necessity, then riding the bus saves me parking fees and some maintenance costs and very little else, since insurance, most preventive maintenance and payments remain the same regardless of whether or not its driven to work.
The same is true of an internet connection. If you only ever used it for downloading music from that one site then you're right, it is costing you $50 per month. If you have it and use it for a variety of things, then you're only paying whatever fraction of that $50 was used for downloading music.
We just built a new data center. I wanted gas, but it was just too expensive, so we got the next best thing, a pre-action system.
We have sprinkler heads like everyone else, but the pipes feeding them are filled with compressed air. A special valve/air pump setup keeps the pipes pressurized and the water out until the alarm is set off by smoke. The pipes then fill with water but it takes a hundred mublemumble degrees to melt the sprinkler heads and dump water on everything.
The advantage is that you can have smoke OR heat (or a busted sprinkler head) and not douse the room with water. You need smoke AND heat to spray water -- any room that gets 150 degrees and is full of smoke has some pretty serious problems that sparing the water alone won't fix.
Maybe they could do a bulk discount for complete albums. $0.99 per track and get it down to $0.66 per song or something for a pre-existing album. That's about $7-8 per album, about what I used to pay back at the dawn of CDs for vinyl.
Unfortunately I think that the music companies are not looking at their industry as a mature one with limited growth opportunity, but instead are looking for ways to come up with double-digit increases in profits. This means that they'll never trade their sales channels' existing margins and profit levels for another sales channel at the same margins.
Generally speaking there's usually about 3-4 hours worth of HBO original series I record, plus I scan the guide over IFC/Sundance/HBO/Showtime/Encore and record 2-3 movies per week.
Then there's season passes to stuff like Rockford Files re-runs, Law and Order SVU, Monty Python, and so on.
Basically it adds up -- 15-20 hours per week of recording. I don't watch it all -- I delete some of it, some just expires without being watched. It's nice to have a couple of weeks retention on the movies, since I'm not always in the mood to watch what has most recently been recorded (or it sucks 10 minutes into it and I delete it).
But I'd hate to have one week retention and be stuck with only 1 or 2 movie or episode choices or be forced to be more discriminating about what I record. One of the virtues of a "full" Tivo is you can spend an evening watching what you want (with little commercial interruption) and not deal with real-time TV.
You'd be better off firing one of the many softpointed/hollowpointed/fragmentary pistol rounds. Designed to break apart or flatten on impact and expend all their energy in the target vs. overpenetrating.
Ironically, many self-defense books I've read have touted shotguns with light loads (#6 and smaller) for home defense based on their relatively short ranges and near-impossible chance for overpenetration to adjacent rooms or houses. Plus aiming isn't as critical as it is with solid projectiles.
It'd be illegal as hell, but your 8 ga loaded with birdshot and cut down short would be an amazing home defense weapon.
Not as bad as I make it out to be? Well, I don't have all the latest and greatest DVD-ROM drives, but I did burn DVD-ROM on all the media I had and tried it in:
a Dell GX150 with a DVD-ROM drive a Dell C600 laptop with a DVD-ROM drive an Apple G3 with a DVD-ROM drive a HP VL400 with a DVD-ROM drive
The only format readable in all the drives was the -R format. The +RW format was readable only on the Sony drive that made it. IIRC the Dell would read the -RW disc, but the Apple, the HP and the laptop wouldn't (the latter were slimline drives, perhaps with older technology). Our video engineer that uses a standalone Pioneer 'pro' DVD recorder deck says that he's had similar compatibility issues with -RW (it won't use + media, naturally) and DVD players.
I'd imagine that newer DVD-ROM drives would be able to handle all the formats pretty reliably, and newer DVD players will probably be tweaked to handle + and the various RW media as well.
But for outright compatibility, my tests indicate that -R has the best overall shot at runs-on-anything, especially if you have to target older DVD-ROM drives.
If Kodak owns all the patents and they don't have a vested interest in producing general purpose computer or video displays, does this explain why we keep hearing about OLED but we don't have many products? Or is the technology still not fully baked?
Tivo has decided they are a services company that sell TV listings and software updates to boxes that bear the Tivo name. Basically they want to hit you up for $14-20 per month every month for the priviledge of using their 'service'. Yes, I'm familiar with the lifetime contracts, I have one -- but very few of those will still be in use in 5 years as the hardware dies or is phased out through no more software updates.
Unfortunately they are not a hardware company and will not be doing any innovating in the hardware space any time soon. There's too much risk from the media companies -- even today you can't do batch "Save to VCR" from Now Playing.
I'd buy a Tivo with a HDD *and* a DVD recorder, but not one with just a DVD recorder, even a 23GB model. I have an 60GB Tivo2 and its barely big enough on basic quality with reasonable program retention; 23 GB would be wholly inadequate, although it might be interesting with some kind of multidisc jukebox feature, although I suspect that disc changes and fragmentation would rendering it unusable after a while.
I recently got a Sony DRU500AX at work and did some comparisons of +/- format compatibility of data discs.
1) +RW was readable only on the Sony drives. None of the other DVD ROM drives I tried would read it.
2) +R was readable on one brand of DVD-ROM drives.
3) -RW was about the same as +R
4) -R was readable on everything, so its the format I've standardized on. I've heard bad things about the CD-RW media longevity, so I probably won't bother with any of the RW formats. DVD-R media are pretty cheap ($3 from major merchants, less from other merchants), so it doesn't really matter.
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There was a guy who made big deal (and even made the Economist) a few years ago about MS being a net money loser if it was forced to account for the massive stock options it gave to bolster its otherwise weak salaries as an expense. This has become a more popular topic (if not practice in some cases) in the post-WCOM era as it can distort profitability and valuation.
The counter argument, if I remember the Economist story, was that shareholders, employees and the corporation were able to get away with cranking up the stock printing press because in spite of the dilution of owership and value that printing stock normally would have, MS stock valuations continued to climb stratospherically, and that made everyone happy and ignore what might otherwise be fundamental problems with their management.
I'm not informed/smart enough to know if the Parrish site is right or not about Microsoft, but the financial shenanigans surrounding stock options as pay have certainly become public knowledge and a number of businesses have collapsed, if not due to this specifically, due to these kinds of accounting tricks masking their true value.
The question I have, though, is if you can keep making this trick work year in and year out for at least a decade, are you still a fraud or just talented? I don't know the answer to that and I suspect that as long as MS has a ton of cash, employees that feel well compensated, and shareholders that the answer doesn't matter. I also think that we'll never know the answer, either, since MS is too huge to just collapse quickly and its technology assets (slashdot critiques notwithstanding) would cause it to morph before it disintegrated.
Unfortunately you're describing a weak correlation at best ("contributing factors").
Furthermore, you're implying that these are people who have (had?) strong religious convictions. I'd argue that people with strong religious convinctions generally have an unhealthily unrealistic attitude towards sexuality -- only for procreation, recreational sex is "wrong" (even with spouses), etc.
It may actually be that the husband's viewing of pornography was more akin to the popping of a sexual safety valve -- the personal perspectives on sexuality were so warped by their religious training that something had to give, and the husband used pornography as an outlet otherwise unavailable.
I'd probably begrudgingly grant you that pornography as a substitute for a more typical intimate relationship will have a negative impact on someone's perspective on sexuality, I'd also argue that it's no more destructive and perhaps less so than many religious sects forms of sexual repression.
Usually the argument about polls and political campaigns revolves around the sanctity of political speech.
Calls like "We're calling from Sentor Grabbenbux campaign HQ urging you to vote Grabbenbux on election day" I can understand. Polls are a bit more of a stretch, although inquiring about political opinions may be as much about political speech.
But that's the excuse. I no more want to talk to the Democrats or the Republicans in my livingroom than I do on my phone. The legally sanctioned ability to prevent them from yakking at me in my livingroom isn't a problem, so why wouldn't telling them to not call me be a problem?
It sounds like just another loophole for politicos to me, cloaked in warm fuzzy 1st Ammendment clothing.
How is porn destructive? Presumably you aren't talking about 'destructive to those forced into performing', since most people would grant you that's destructive and more than rape.
But viewing? How does it harm?
There are many environments where end-user gripes and politics mean more than real security..
The idea is to give your manager no reason to label you as a "no-hire", because if that happens, you are done. She should have kept her comments to herself until or unless her work improved, then (along with a good reputation) had her issues addressed.
What you've just defined is a coercive workplace where substandard conditions (abusiveness, sexism, pay, etc) are expected to be accepted in order to get to whatever the next level is (permanent job, raise, promotion).
I agree with the pragmatic angle of it (I've bit my tongue more than once), but I also have a real problem with the idea that we're supposed to just be quiet and accept it because there's a reward at the end.
Abusive behavior of any kind should never be tolerated by any employee or any business for any reason. Unfortunately I think that each place has its threshold of abuse, and people that complain below the commonly accepted threshold get marked as "whiners" when in fact they're doing the business a favor, since its the failure to speak out that keeps the attorneys busy.
But what if the 1.5 hour laptop allows you to do more work? Or better work?
I know its not true for sitting at a CLI, but there are large segments of the market for whom it may be worthwhile.
UN success stories:
Stopping the genocide in Rwanda
Stopping the genocide in Cambodia
Ending the Traffic in Human Slavery
Solving the Isreali/Palestinian conflict
Solving the division of Cyprus
Ending the civil wars in equitorial Africa
And those are just the big successes where the prevented the loss of tens of millions of lives. It doesn't count the daily successes of ending international tyrany and misery everywhere else.
Yes, The UN should be the ICANN model.
I'd rather see subscribers always post at +3 vs. posting in advance. They'd still be subject to moderation, which would mitigate the impact of the additional modpoint, but they wouldn't have the (more important) ability to 'lead' the discussion as early posters seem to do.
It may just be 6 of one, half-dozen of the other, though.
Heh, it doesn't matter what business I'm in. There's something borg-like about Wall-Mart that I'm not sure I like.
I admire them for their remarkable business acumen, but I've also heard lots of horror stories -- main street businesses shuttered virtually overnight, employment practices ranging from criminal (coercing off-clock work) to just icky (company-enforced cult-of-personality-religion surrounding Sam Walton).
Wall Street spins their business as being consumer-friendly (low pricing, broad selections), worker friendly (good 'diversity' hiring practices), and investor friendly (low wages, non-union, spartan work environments). On an individual factual basis, it's true.
However, when I go into their stores I see bottom-of-the-barrel single-vendor-only merchandise unattractively displayed and inattentive, ignorant employees. On a management level, the business practices seem ruthless, the employee relations are creepy-to-criminal (cheering sessions? Sam Walton photos? Where's the kool-aid?).
It's enough of a mixed bag and a juggernaut to just kind of scare me.
My gripe is that they give you a monitor that has the same horizontal resolution as your current display but short you on vertical resolution, call it a "widescreen cinema display" and charge you more.
The a 4:3 display gives you the same horizontal resolution, plus all those extra vertical pixels. At the end of the day you can display the same 16:9 image on the 4:3 display, plus you can display non-16:9 stuff larger on the 4:3 display, and usually for less money.
It's like paying more for the coupe than the sedan, when the sedan holds more and is easier to get into.
That scared the jesus out of me. Thanks.
How can you even compare the transformation from an illiterate to a literate society with the ability to ramble in writing for strangers?
By trying to compare literacy with blogging, you're highlighting the gross over-significance that many place on blogging as some kind of culturally significant activity.
It's not. Sorry. Get over it. It's a poorly edited real-time autobiography in the hands of the best writers, and idiotic mental masturbation in the hands of most everyone else.
You'll notice that gambling initiatives never are proposed to fund highway development or the general fund.
Until now! Our own Dick Day (as in "Dick Day before he dicks you") is proposing just that.
Around here we have a lot of Indian casinos, and usually the new gambling proposals are either casinos sited a lot closer than Indian casinos or some kind of statewide thing that wouldn't entail a lot of travel. The Indians complain because they know the market for throwing away money is finite and it will drain customers.
This is right, and I laugh every time some state legislator argues we should set up some new casino or game to raise money for some project that can't get funding otherwise.
I'm not sure if they think people will gamble more or if those places print money behind the scenes. I'm guessing the latter.
I don't know what's funnier, the idea of blogging as some kind of culturally significant activity or the raging indignity of "legitimate" bloggers over people placing commercial content in their blogs.
That's about as disingenuous as the transit authority saying I "save" the cost of car payments, insurance and maintenance by riding the bus to work. True if I don't own a car, but if owning a car is otherwise a necessity, then riding the bus saves me parking fees and some maintenance costs and very little else, since insurance, most preventive maintenance and payments remain the same regardless of whether or not its driven to work.
The same is true of an internet connection. If you only ever used it for downloading music from that one site then you're right, it is costing you $50 per month. If you have it and use it for a variety of things, then you're only paying whatever fraction of that $50 was used for downloading music.
We just built a new data center. I wanted gas, but it was just too expensive, so we got the next best thing, a pre-action system.
We have sprinkler heads like everyone else, but the pipes feeding them are filled with compressed air. A special valve/air pump setup keeps the pipes pressurized and the water out until the alarm is set off by smoke. The pipes then fill with water but it takes a hundred mublemumble degrees to melt the sprinkler heads and dump water on everything.
The advantage is that you can have smoke OR heat (or a busted sprinkler head) and not douse the room with water. You need smoke AND heat to spray water -- any room that gets 150 degrees and is full of smoke has some pretty serious problems that sparing the water alone won't fix.
Maybe they could do a bulk discount for complete albums. $0.99 per track and get it down to $0.66 per song or something for a pre-existing album. That's about $7-8 per album, about what I used to pay back at the dawn of CDs for vinyl.
Unfortunately I think that the music companies are not looking at their industry as a mature one with limited growth opportunity, but instead are looking for ways to come up with double-digit increases in profits. This means that they'll never trade their sales channels' existing margins and profit levels for another sales channel at the same margins.
Generally speaking there's usually about 3-4 hours worth of HBO original series I record, plus I scan the guide over IFC/Sundance/HBO/Showtime/Encore and record 2-3 movies per week.
Then there's season passes to stuff like Rockford Files re-runs, Law and Order SVU, Monty Python, and so on.
Basically it adds up -- 15-20 hours per week of recording. I don't watch it all -- I delete some of it, some just expires without being watched. It's nice to have a couple of weeks retention on the movies, since I'm not always in the mood to watch what has most recently been recorded (or it sucks 10 minutes into it and I delete it).
But I'd hate to have one week retention and be stuck with only 1 or 2 movie or episode choices or be forced to be more discriminating about what I record. One of the virtues of a "full" Tivo is you can spend an evening watching what you want (with little commercial interruption) and not deal with real-time TV.
You'd be better off firing one of the many softpointed/hollowpointed/fragmentary pistol rounds. Designed to break apart or flatten on impact and expend all their energy in the target vs. overpenetrating.
Ironically, many self-defense books I've read have touted shotguns with light loads (#6 and smaller) for home defense based on their relatively short ranges and near-impossible chance for overpenetration to adjacent rooms or houses. Plus aiming isn't as critical as it is with solid projectiles.
It'd be illegal as hell, but your 8 ga loaded with birdshot and cut down short would be an amazing home defense weapon.
Not as bad as I make it out to be? Well, I don't have all the latest and greatest DVD-ROM drives, but I did burn DVD-ROM on all the media I had and tried it in:
a Dell GX150 with a DVD-ROM drive
a Dell C600 laptop with a DVD-ROM drive
an Apple G3 with a DVD-ROM drive
a HP VL400 with a DVD-ROM drive
The only format readable in all the drives was the -R format. The +RW format was readable only on the Sony drive that made it. IIRC the Dell would read the -RW disc, but the Apple, the HP and the laptop wouldn't (the latter were slimline drives, perhaps with older technology). Our video engineer that uses a standalone Pioneer 'pro' DVD recorder deck says that he's had similar compatibility issues with -RW (it won't use + media, naturally) and DVD players.
I'd imagine that newer DVD-ROM drives would be able to handle all the formats pretty reliably, and newer DVD players will probably be tweaked to handle + and the various RW media as well.
But for outright compatibility, my tests indicate that -R has the best overall shot at runs-on-anything, especially if you have to target older DVD-ROM drives.
If Kodak owns all the patents and they don't have a vested interest in producing general purpose computer or video displays, does this explain why we keep hearing about OLED but we don't have many products? Or is the technology still not fully baked?
Tivo has decided they are a services company that sell TV listings and software updates to boxes that bear the Tivo name. Basically they want to hit you up for $14-20 per month every month for the priviledge of using their 'service'. Yes, I'm familiar with the lifetime contracts, I have one -- but very few of those will still be in use in 5 years as the hardware dies or is phased out through no more software updates.
Unfortunately they are not a hardware company and will not be doing any innovating in the hardware space any time soon. There's too much risk from the media companies -- even today you can't do batch "Save to VCR" from Now Playing.
I'd buy a Tivo with a HDD *and* a DVD recorder, but not one with just a DVD recorder, even a 23GB model. I have an 60GB Tivo2 and its barely big enough on basic quality with reasonable program retention; 23 GB would be wholly inadequate, although it might be interesting with some kind of multidisc jukebox feature, although I suspect that disc changes and fragmentation would rendering it unusable after a while.
I recently got a Sony DRU500AX at work and did some comparisons of +/- format compatibility of data discs.
1) +RW was readable only on the Sony drives. None of the other DVD ROM drives I tried would read it.
2) +R was readable on one brand of DVD-ROM drives.
3) -RW was about the same as +R
4) -R was readable on everything, so its the format I've standardized on. I've heard bad things about the CD-RW media longevity, so I probably won't bother with any of the RW formats. DVD-R media are pretty cheap ($3 from major merchants, less from other merchants), so it doesn't really matter.