In the early '90s, I worked in a retail computer store-- not a big box type place, but a smaller boutiqueish shop that employed people who might be actually able to answer a question.
We sold, at the time, Intel 386DX/33s and AMD 386DX/40s as our lowest end systems. Indeed, the AMD sold for about fifty bucks more than the Intel-- because the clock speed was higher, see. But we'd "cut the customer a deal" and upgrade them "for free!" (No, we weren't being generous or anything-- our cost on the AMD hardware was actually lower... as was our RMA rate), saving them fifty bucks on a $750 computer system. Not exactly peanuts.
Now, you and me, we see, "Wow, 125% the processing power for the same price? Sign me up!" You would think that, given that I'd sell you either for the same price, that I wouldn't have to keep an Intel 386/33 in stock at all. And Intel didn't make a 386 faster than that, the next step was to the much, MUCH more expensive 486, so it's not like one could upsell to Intel's 386DX/40, 'cause there didn't exist such a thing.
Joe Average, however, often asked, "But does it have the Intel inside?" (often using that exact phrasing-- "the Intel.")
In the 386 market, we sold on the order of one Intel for every three AMDs. Which doesn't sound like a lot until you note we shouldn't have sold a single Intel in the low-end market... Intel Inside worked.
For instance, it says that 21% of males visited adult websites
79% of men are liars!
While I am willing to believe that not every male on the Internet has intentionally visited an adult website (okay, not 79%...) I refuse to believe that there's anyone, male or female, on the Internet that has never had an adult website visit them, whether via spam, or popups, or popunders, or...
No, but back in the early '90s was when Seagate couldn't be trusted to follow the ATA/IDE spec and setting up their drives with a Maxtor, WD, or Samsung in a master-slave configuration was not guaranteed to work, and I'd say that's a good chunk toward making them a bad company, or at least a horribly impolite one.:)
The only hard disks I ever could get their drives to talk to reliably were made by Kalok. And, well, being Kalok, that was until I had to replace the Kalok drive for bad sectors, or loud screeching noises, or... [Note that Kalok's hard disks looked physically a surprising amount like the previous generation of Seagate. Corporate espionage, perhaps, and a nice bootleg Korean manufacturing facility? Hmmmmm]
I sold mostly WD and Maxtor during that time frame; funny that they lasted this long, as I suspect that most computer retailers of the time had the same issues I did-- if you sold a customer a Seagate, it often came back as it wouldn't play nicely as a slave drive, if you sold a customer a Kalok, it died a horrendous death inside of a few months, and nobody had customers who could afford Micropolis...
I submitted a feature request in our bug-tracking database to put a message near where what he was trying to do to explain why that option is grayed out.
Which will then go into the manual, along with all the other changes you requested.
In two years, you will get exactly this same call from a (hopefully different) developer. You'll ask why he didn't find this in the manual, and he will respond,
"That oversized boatanchor? There's so much trivia in that thing you can't ever find a useful piece of information!"
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. The problem isn't that the manual wasn't specific enough, the problem is it's easier to call you.
No one player should be able to drive a starship. MMOs already lend themselves to 'guilds', so why not build this into the game? One guild can be the crew of a given starship. A starship needs various crew, from weapons officers to helmsmen to a Captain to an engineer, and guild members can fill out these positions.
Hm. Actually, let's take that a step further: As I collect experience points, eventually I'm going to eclipse a certain total. Once that happens, the game will offer me command of a pretty ratty ship. I can either take the command, or continue on with the ship I'm currently on. I can put in for a transfer to another guild if I like-- it'll become pretty obvious which ships are the elite ships in the game, but the other guild has to accept me.
As my XP increases, Starfleet (or whoever's side I'm on) would offer me better ships. I get promoted, as opposed to "gaining levels". The way you get around the "Everyone wants to be Captain Kirk" problem is you _let 'em_. A few hours of play would net you enough XP to be offered a garbage scow or something like that. Rank n00bs, who need a ship to be crew on to gain XP, will happily join you. If you suck as a Captain, you wind up in command of this garbage scow for a good long while, where a good Captain will keep a good crew and pick up XPs and be offered command of better vessels.
But if you suck as a Captain, you're not stuck there, and you don't have to be one. Sign on with a "guild" (read: some other ship's crew) and you can collect XP and get bennies doing one of the other jobs available on a starship.
Why not? One of my most useful management guidelines came from Patton:
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
I think this is important particularly when managing geeks: They're smart enough to have good ideas, they're the ones in the trenches actually doing it. Point them in the right direction, and then stand back.
More useful wisdom in management from Patton:
"There's a great deal of talk about loyalty from the bottom to the top. Loyalty from the top down is even more necessary and is much less prevalent. One of the most frequently noted characteristics of great men who have remained great is loyalty to their subordinates."
"A good plan executed today is better than a perfect plan executed at some indefinite point in the future." (Note the "good" part of that phrase is VERY important...)
I think I would not have minded Patton as a manager.
Requiring "commercialization" of a patent doesn't solve the problem.
I come up with a wonderful idea. But I'm broke.
I decide to try to sell my patent to a company. Indeed, I have to in order to keep it with your model.
I talk to fifteen companies. Each one says they won't talk to me about patent licensing until I sign a document saying they're the only ones I get to talk to that patent about. (This is a pretty common practice with signing new music artists, ferinstance, so it's not as ridiculous as it sounds). They're going to require this because if they talk to me about the patent at all, and they're doing anything remotely related to it already, they open themselves up for lawsuits.
Now they've got me over a barrel. I have to sell the patent, and I basically have to rope myself into a deal with a company to sell it before I can negotiate terms-- and I am in zero position to negotiate; if I don't sell I lose the patent entirely. And since it's all in contracts, the free market doesn't get me anywhere; sure, I can talk to as many companies as I want, but none of them are going to be willing to give me details (like how much they'll buy it for or what kind of licensing terms I can get) until I've signed with them.
The whole point of patents is to keep the big companies from steamrolling the little guy who comes up with a great idea. I'd prefer we kept it that way.
But it wasn't the greatest movie ever, like some folks seem to think.
The camera work, for instance, left a lot on the table. I think Joss Whedon does a pretty good job directing TV, giving it a somewhat cinematic feel, but those same techniques applied to the big screen seem to leave it with a TV feel.
Plus, all the backstory required to cover 12 episodes of a TV show is very tough to do in a movie, and impossible if you want to leave any room at all to tell a story with the rest of the movie. The movie suffers some from this.
It's still easily the best movie I've seen this year, but if the next two happen ($10 million at the box office doesn't make that look likely...) I hope they grab a different director, and fortunately the backstory won't be an issue.
in the case of shooting the guy who's trying to break into my house, i'll give you a bit, but i'd rather call that "necessary, but still bad" rather than "good"
Naah. See, here's how it goes:
1) Person decides to break into your house. 2) Person weighs options: if he breaks into your house, he might get shot. [0] 3) Person decides to proceed to do so. 4) You shoot person, thus removing those stupid genes from the gene pool.
You've improved all mankind for future generations. I'd say that's Good. Not exactly the optimal solution for the perp, but what the hell, he made the decision...
-JDF
[0] Or he doesn't even think this far, and he's even dumber than I originally suggested.
No, I'm pretty sure Apple's first biggest product is buzz. Two examples:
1) They shrunk the ipod. The new ipod is so small they can't fit a worthwhile screen on it to see what you're doing. So what do they do? They release a marketing blitz: Life is random, and name the thing the "shuffle".
2) They release a mouse. This mouse has-- get this-- more than one button. Every review site (and some non-review sites) run reviews of it, hype it, praise it as the greatest thing since sliced bread...
Jobs claims Apple is a hardware company. This is not true. Apple is a spin company. And boy is spin profitable. The man is a genius.
Telemarketers should LOVE do-not-call registries. It's a list of phone numbers who won't under any circumstances buy the crap you have to offer because they hate the way you're selling it. You don't have to spend any of your telesales people's time dialing these numbers.
How the heck do they not get that it HELPS them to have DNC registries?
...to cool a room, as has been noted repeatedly, a few refinements that can be done easily and cheaply:
1) Get a second trash can. Drain to trash can number 2. This will allow you to save water, plus:
2) Put salt in the water. The ice and chilled water mixture gets colder with salt.
You probably don't want to drain salt water to the yard.:)
You can run from one trash can to the other, then when it's done draining, swap one can for the other and ice down the other can. If you've got some freezer space to dedicate to the project, the bottles of ice are probably an excellent idea-- have a set in the freezer and one in the heat pump.
...is that once you've got the title/reputation as "the guy who fixes things when they break", you wind up with the weird stuff.
When I was that guy for a small company, yeah, I got the usual, "Hey, is the network slow today for some reason?" or "Uh, my machine's doing weird stuff."
I also got, "Do you know anything about the IVR system?" I got, "Don't suppose you know how to fix microwaves?" And my favorite: "Someone's stuck in the elevator and the maintenance guys don't get here 'til 8AM..."
Sure, you can just say no, but heck, just answering those questions alone will soak 1% of your work week... Small-company sysadmins have a tendency to become the person you ask about ANYTHING electronic...
(It turns out the file "blade" on a standard leatherman is just the right size to trip the door 'lock' catch on an elevator (that's what the round hole in the door is) so you can get the outside doors open, once you can see the inside doors from the outside you can see the latch for those...)
I was in a similar situation a few years ago. 45ish people, we rolled our own network, mostly techie types...
We needed about 1.5 system administrators.
Fortunately, we had two. So about 1/4 of my average work week was spent as a testing droid for the developers and-- get this-- getting ahead of the game.
Whoever told you 1% of your work week is on crack. Stuff simply just doesn't work that well.:-/
I'm not sure that's exactly being fair to refer to them as "Microsoft's towel boys."
It's really pretty simple: You make hardware. You want to sell hardware. You pretty much gotta write drivers if you're gonna sell the hardware.
There's more Microsoft out there than Linux and Mac combined, and you can probably multiply the latter by six or eight and STILL not have as many machines as Microsoft. So you gotta write Microsoft drivers. It's just that simple.
I don't think they're writing Microsoft drivers out of some nefarious scheme to beat down the Linux people. They're writing Microsoft drivers because if they don't, they can't sell the hardware.
-JDF
It sounds to me like what he's really saying is
on
Linux Can't Kill Windows
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
He believes Linux isn't a "whole platform", and I can see where he gets that idea-- Linux isn't very unified (Do have KDE or Gnome? [0]) and anyone who hasn't dealt with a modern package manglement system has dealt with Dependency Hell.
So let's imagine some company, we'll call them Red Hat, to pull a bogus name out of thin air, and let's say they were to take this Linux thing, and make a nice standardized platform out of it. People ship you an application, you take your server, we'll call it a "Red Hat Enterprise Server" or something like that, and you can simply load the app on it and run it. They wouldn't say their app runs on Linux. They'd say their app runs on Red Hat.
To him, _that_ would be a platform, and that would have a chance at taking on Windows. It would be Linux behind the scenes, but it's more that just Linux.
Too bad nobody's ever going to do something like that.
-JDF
[0] Thankfully, even if you generally only see one of these, you can still have the other behind the scenes and run stuff intended for either...
We went to the teacher to explain what we did, and rather than the professor owning up to what was done, we the students got blamed
Well, _duh_. If the prof owns up to it, then you can publish and the prof's job/reputation is in jeopardy. If the prof threatens to crucify you instead, your college carreer is in jeopardy. You thought the moron'd just roll over and take it?
Slashdot Mirror
but I gotta figure it was marketing genius.
In the early '90s, I worked in a retail computer store-- not a big box type place, but a smaller boutiqueish shop that employed people who might be actually able to answer a question.
We sold, at the time, Intel 386DX/33s and AMD 386DX/40s as our lowest end systems. Indeed, the AMD sold for about fifty bucks more than the Intel-- because the clock speed was higher, see. But we'd "cut the customer a deal" and upgrade them "for free!" (No, we weren't being generous or anything-- our cost on the AMD hardware was actually lower... as was our RMA rate), saving them fifty bucks on a $750 computer system. Not exactly peanuts.
Now, you and me, we see, "Wow, 125% the processing power for the same price? Sign me up!" You would think that, given that I'd sell you either for the same price, that I wouldn't have to keep an Intel 386/33 in stock at all. And Intel didn't make a 386 faster than that, the next step was to the much, MUCH more expensive 486, so it's not like one could upsell to Intel's 386DX/40, 'cause there didn't exist such a thing.
Joe Average, however, often asked, "But does it have the Intel inside?" (often using that exact phrasing-- "the Intel.")
In the 386 market, we sold on the order of one Intel for every three AMDs. Which doesn't sound like a lot until you note we shouldn't have sold a single Intel in the low-end market... Intel Inside worked.
-JDF
For instance, it says that 21% of males visited adult websites
79% of men are liars!
While I am willing to believe that not every male on the Internet has intentionally visited an adult website (okay, not 79%...) I refuse to believe that there's anyone, male or female, on the Internet that has never had an adult website visit them, whether via spam, or popups, or popunders, or...
No, but back in the early '90s was when Seagate couldn't be trusted to follow the ATA/IDE spec and setting up their drives with a Maxtor, WD, or Samsung in a master-slave configuration was not guaranteed to work, and I'd say that's a good chunk toward making them a bad company, or at least a horribly impolite one. :)
The only hard disks I ever could get their drives to talk to reliably were made by Kalok. And, well, being Kalok, that was until I had to replace the Kalok drive for bad sectors, or loud screeching noises, or... [Note that Kalok's hard disks looked physically a surprising amount like the previous generation of Seagate. Corporate espionage, perhaps, and a nice bootleg Korean manufacturing facility? Hmmmmm]
I sold mostly WD and Maxtor during that time frame; funny that they lasted this long, as I suspect that most computer retailers of the time had the same issues I did-- if you sold a customer a Seagate, it often came back as it wouldn't play nicely as a slave drive, if you sold a customer a Kalok, it died a horrendous death inside of a few months, and nobody had customers who could afford Micropolis...
-JDF
I submitted a feature request in our bug-tracking database to put a message near where what he was trying to do to explain why that option is grayed out.
Which will then go into the manual, along with all the other changes you requested.
In two years, you will get exactly this same call from a (hopefully different) developer. You'll ask why he didn't find this in the manual, and he will respond,
"That oversized boatanchor? There's so much trivia in that thing you can't ever find a useful piece of information!"
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. The problem isn't that the manual wasn't specific enough, the problem is it's easier to call you.
-F
Is there something in coffee or tea that helps your liver?
Or is it simply that any liquid intake you have that's coffee or tea is liquid intake that's not beer?
-F
No one player should be able to drive a starship. MMOs already lend themselves to 'guilds', so why not build this into the game? One guild can be the crew of a given starship. A starship needs various crew, from weapons officers to helmsmen to a Captain to an engineer, and guild members can fill out these positions.
Hm. Actually, let's take that a step further: As I collect experience points, eventually I'm going to eclipse a certain total. Once that happens, the game will offer me command of a pretty ratty ship. I can either take the command, or continue on with the ship I'm currently on. I can put in for a transfer to another guild if I like-- it'll become pretty obvious which ships are the elite ships in the game, but the other guild has to accept me.
As my XP increases, Starfleet (or whoever's side I'm on) would offer me better ships. I get promoted, as opposed to "gaining levels". The way you get around the "Everyone wants to be Captain Kirk" problem is you _let 'em_. A few hours of play would net you enough XP to be offered a garbage scow or something like that. Rank n00bs, who need a ship to be crew on to gain XP, will happily join you. If you suck as a Captain, you wind up in command of this garbage scow for a good long while, where a good Captain will keep a good crew and pick up XPs and be offered command of better vessels.
But if you suck as a Captain, you're not stuck there, and you don't have to be one. Sign on with a "guild" (read: some other ship's crew) and you can collect XP and get bennies doing one of the other jobs available on a starship.
The War Room is still around-- though it's moved...
-F
That doesn't mean you have to become Patton.
Why not? One of my most useful management guidelines came from Patton:
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
I think this is important particularly when managing geeks: They're smart enough to have good ideas, they're the ones in the trenches actually doing it. Point them in the right direction, and then stand back.
More useful wisdom in management from Patton:
"There's a great deal of talk about loyalty from the bottom to the top. Loyalty from the top down is even more necessary and is much less prevalent. One of the most frequently noted characteristics of great men who have remained great is loyalty to their subordinates."
"A good plan executed today is better than a perfect plan executed at some indefinite point in the future." (Note the "good" part of that phrase is VERY important...)
I think I would not have minded Patton as a manager.
-F
Requiring "commercialization" of a patent doesn't solve the problem.
I come up with a wonderful idea. But I'm broke.
I decide to try to sell my patent to a company. Indeed, I have to in order to keep it with your model.
I talk to fifteen companies. Each one says they won't talk to me about patent licensing until I sign a document saying they're the only ones I get to talk to that patent about. (This is a pretty common practice with signing new music artists, ferinstance, so it's not as ridiculous as it sounds). They're going to require this because if they talk to me about the patent at all, and they're doing anything remotely related to it already, they open themselves up for lawsuits.
Now they've got me over a barrel. I have to sell the patent, and I basically have to rope myself into a deal with a company to sell it before I can negotiate terms-- and I am in zero position to negotiate; if I don't sell I lose the patent entirely. And since it's all in contracts, the free market doesn't get me anywhere; sure, I can talk to as many companies as I want, but none of them are going to be willing to give me details (like how much they'll buy it for or what kind of licensing terms I can get) until I've signed with them.
The whole point of patents is to keep the big companies from steamrolling the little guy who comes up with a great idea. I'd prefer we kept it that way.
-JDF
But it wasn't the greatest movie ever, like some folks seem to think.
The camera work, for instance, left a lot on the table. I think Joss Whedon does a pretty good job directing TV, giving it a somewhat cinematic feel, but those same techniques applied to the big screen seem to leave it with a TV feel.
Plus, all the backstory required to cover 12 episodes of a TV show is very tough to do in a movie, and impossible if you want to leave any room at all to tell a story with the rest of the movie. The movie suffers some from this.
It's still easily the best movie I've seen this year, but if the next two happen ($10 million at the box office doesn't make that look likely...) I hope they grab a different director, and fortunately the backstory won't be an issue.
-F
in the case of shooting the guy who's trying to break into my house, i'll give you a bit, but i'd rather call that "necessary, but still bad" rather than "good"
Naah. See, here's how it goes:
1) Person decides to break into your house.
2) Person weighs options: if he breaks into your house, he might get shot. [0]
3) Person decides to proceed to do so.
4) You shoot person, thus removing those stupid genes from the gene pool.
You've improved all mankind for future generations. I'd say that's Good. Not exactly the optimal solution for the perp, but what the hell, he made the decision...
-JDF
[0] Or he doesn't even think this far, and he's even dumber than I originally suggested.
Congress won't fund these guys well enough to put people in low earth orbit safely, and they want to go back to the Moon?
-JDF
If someone's got this thing mounted on his F16, a laser device that can shoot flying objects... I just can't see being his wingman.
-JDF [Whose karma just got -1 Pun'd to death...]
No, I'm pretty sure Apple's first biggest product is buzz. Two examples:
1) They shrunk the ipod. The new ipod is so small they can't fit a worthwhile screen on it to see what you're doing. So what do they do? They release a marketing blitz: Life is random, and name the thing the "shuffle".
2) They release a mouse. This mouse has-- get this-- more than one button. Every review site (and some non-review sites) run reviews of it, hype it, praise it as the greatest thing since sliced bread...
Jobs claims Apple is a hardware company. This is not true. Apple is a spin company. And boy is spin profitable. The man is a genius.
-JDF
Nokia does network gear, too. Mostly firewall appliances.
Telemarketers should LOVE do-not-call registries. It's a list of phone numbers who won't under any circumstances buy the crap you have to offer because they hate the way you're selling it. You don't have to spend any of your telesales people's time dialing these numbers.
How the heck do they not get that it HELPS them to have DNC registries?
...than most of you thought... Indeed, even longer than a few of y'all have been alive.
In 1982, Khan wore a pretty cool necklace. [0]
Definitely in the same vein as capacitors and IDE cables...
-F
[0] Geez, I need to get decent picture hosting...
If this G-d dude didn't want me to eat catfish, then why did H- make them so dang tasty?
-JDF
...to cool a room, as has been noted repeatedly, a few refinements that can be done easily and cheaply:
:)
1) Get a second trash can. Drain to trash can number 2. This will allow you to save water, plus:
2) Put salt in the water. The ice and chilled water mixture gets colder with salt.
You probably don't want to drain salt water to the yard.
You can run from one trash can to the other, then when it's done draining, swap one can for the other and ice down the other can. If you've got some freezer space to dedicate to the project, the bottles of ice are probably an excellent idea-- have a set in the freezer and one in the heat pump.
By smashing it to bits against the stage floor?
I think you mean Pete Townshend.
-JDF [Who? Exactly.]
...is that once you've got the title/reputation as "the guy who fixes things when they break", you wind up with the weird stuff.
When I was that guy for a small company, yeah, I got the usual, "Hey, is the network slow today for some reason?" or "Uh, my machine's doing weird stuff."
I also got, "Do you know anything about the IVR system?" I got, "Don't suppose you know how to fix microwaves?" And my favorite: "Someone's stuck in the elevator and the maintenance guys don't get here 'til 8AM..."
Sure, you can just say no, but heck, just answering those questions alone will soak 1% of your work week... Small-company sysadmins have a tendency to become the person you ask about ANYTHING electronic...
(It turns out the file "blade" on a standard leatherman is just the right size to trip the door 'lock' catch on an elevator (that's what the round hole in the door is) so you can get the outside doors open, once you can see the inside doors from the outside you can see the latch for those...)
-JDF
I was in a similar situation a few years ago. 45ish people, we rolled our own network, mostly techie types...
:-/
We needed about 1.5 system administrators.
Fortunately, we had two. So about 1/4 of my average work week was spent as a testing droid for the developers and-- get this-- getting ahead of the game.
Whoever told you 1% of your work week is on crack. Stuff simply just doesn't work that well.
-JDF
I'm not sure that's exactly being fair to refer to them as "Microsoft's towel boys."
It's really pretty simple: You make hardware. You want to sell hardware. You pretty much gotta write drivers if you're gonna sell the hardware.
There's more Microsoft out there than Linux and Mac combined, and you can probably multiply the latter by six or eight and STILL not have as many machines as Microsoft. So you gotta write Microsoft drivers. It's just that simple.
I don't think they're writing Microsoft drivers out of some nefarious scheme to beat down the Linux people. They're writing Microsoft drivers because if they don't, they can't sell the hardware.
-JDF
He believes Linux isn't a "whole platform", and I can see where he gets that idea-- Linux isn't very unified (Do have KDE or Gnome? [0]) and anyone who hasn't dealt with a modern package manglement system has dealt with Dependency Hell.
So let's imagine some company, we'll call them Red Hat, to pull a bogus name out of thin air, and let's say they were to take this Linux thing, and make a nice standardized platform out of it. People ship you an application, you take your server, we'll call it a "Red Hat Enterprise Server" or something like that, and you can simply load the app on it and run it. They wouldn't say their app runs on Linux. They'd say their app runs on Red Hat.
To him, _that_ would be a platform, and that would have a chance at taking on Windows. It would be Linux behind the scenes, but it's more that just Linux.
Too bad nobody's ever going to do something like that.
-JDF
[0] Thankfully, even if you generally only see one of these, you can still have the other behind the scenes and run stuff intended for either...
We went to the teacher to explain what we did, and rather than the professor owning up to what was done, we the students got blamed
Well, _duh_. If the prof owns up to it, then you can publish and the prof's job/reputation is in jeopardy. If the prof threatens to crucify you instead, your college carreer is in jeopardy. You thought the moron'd just roll over and take it?
-F