I understand your analogy, so let's take this one step further. Microsoft's whole philosophy, and marketing campaign is targeted thusly; as if Harley Davidson used trucks for delivery of parts and motorcycles, but encouraged everyone else to use Harley Davidson motorcycles for those tasks. And Harley Davidson encouraged the local governments to abandon the use of squad cars entirely, and switch over to Harley Davidson Motorcycles (with a sidecar so you can transport captured felons to prison). And also encouraged the US governement to switch over to all Harley Davidson motorcycles, even at the Pentagon, and encouraged the US government to repaint all the road lanes so they were only wide enough for Harley Davidson motorcycles, so cars could not drive on them, so every person would basically be "forced" to buy only Harley Davidson motorcycles. And designed a new engine that only ran on a special blend of Harley Davidson gasoline, which no other vehicle could run on; then converted the nation's gasoline distribution to all Harley Davidson gasoline, so even if you were a rebel and drove an off-road vehicle (because the roads would only allow Harley Davidsons), you couldn't find gas to run it - you'd have to convert the engine to diesel, and brew your own biodiesel; which is essentially what the OpenSource people are doing!
Oh, so THAT'S why my Karma hasn't gone up despite some positive moderations! Jeez, go on one measley two-week vacation, and you miss everything! So, there's no LOWER limit?
Damn, now I can't save up 1000 Karma points and sell my account on ebay!
It seems to me, that if you get ONE end of a sub above water, and the other end is below the surface, but leaking, cutting a hole in the part exposed to air will cause the captured air in the submarine to escape, and the sub to cease floating, real quick. That is, as soon as you punch a hole the size of a pencil, and begin cutting the rest of the opening with your blowtorch, by the time you get the opening finished, you could very well have a flooded compartment by the time you're done.
I'm wondering; why couldn't they do a drop-launch of this weapon? that is, slowly shove it out the torpedo tube, let it sit and possibly self-home on the target, but not fire the main motor, move the mother ship away so as not to give away it's position, then fire the torpedoes engines at a safe distance?
Why not? well maybe their homing systems aren't that sophisticated. But ya'd think it would be safer than risking the sub.
Chevy did the same thing with the infamous swing-axle rear suspension on the Corvair. They decided not to change it. Instead, the negative PR got out of control, and they had to kill the car completely.
VW, facing a similar PR problem with the Beetle, switched over to the IRS rear axle, multi jointed, rather than the old swing-axle. The Beetle still sold well for a decade after that, and they're still making them in Mexico. (it was EPA emissions restrictions that killed it in the USA).
Playing the cost vs. safety issue is a game where you can overlook the negative PR issue, and it can quickly spin out of control. Unfortunately, to the public at large, this "safety" issue (data integrity, really) will be all but forgotten. Keeping ahead of AMD was more important, in the long run.
That chip bears as much resemblence to the one you could see inside your desktop case, as a NASCAR Ford Taurus bears to the model you see at the Ford Dealer.
- talk about being market driven - I just read a news thingie about Al Gore's campaign, and he's on a tirade about the high cost of perscription drugs.
Well, whatever that's about, but one of the points is, Shering-Plough, makers of Claritin, spent more on advertising last year than R&D. Anyone suprised? Anyone wanna bet when the computer industry catches up?
Yeah, that's nice that Apple got interesting after being worked-over in the mid 90's. Can anyone tell me why Motorola (manufacturers of Apple's CPU) continues to fail to be an interesting company?
Unless you define as "interesting", their wholesale internal abandonment of PCs based on their own CPU, and switching over to Intel-containing Dell machines running NT.
You think Intel's got problems. Intel has a papercut compared to Motorola, who was tending goal when an opposing player's skate slashed their neck. Okay, well if PPC isn't enough of a debacle, how 'bout Irridium? Shit. I just can't bash Motorola enough. Except to say that I LOVE my Palm Pilot and my Motorola Pager.
why does a damn chip have to have a trademarkable name?
Intel 586? Who else can sell a chip which is referred to as an "Intel 586", not only do you get to capitalize on the brand identity of your corporate name, you also get to save the $5million you would otherwise spend on some bullshit ad firm to come up with "Itanium"! Intel 586, not to be confused with the AMD 586. I don't see that as dilutive, but lawyers and marketroids have to lift their leg on every fire hydrant they see.
On another, trivia-oriented note; the Porsche 911 was originally supposed to be the 901. (901 was the internal project number - project number 901, sequentially assigned, it was the project after number 900.) But because POO-joe (Peugot) had copyrighted the number "901", they had to call the car the 911. Which became rather a humorous name, because that's the number you call when an idiot American driver can't handle a car with a rear-engine weight distribution, and spins out into a ravine. The problem eventually became so bad that Porsche built the front-engined 944 and 928. Thankfully those days are behind us, and American cars have such small front engines anymore, that the weight distribution isn't that different from a rear-engined car (snicker).
um, 8.5 years in the Tech Support industry tells me this: - in cases like this, "free consulting services" means, an engineer is flown in to try to figure out what the hell went wrong because they couldn't reliably reproduce it in-house.
That's like Firestone sending a guy to the ditch on the side of the road where your SUV lays, twisted and burning, to take a look at your tires, scratch his head and go: "gee, that's not right, is it?".
I wouldn't ask Sun to brag about the problem. I do, however, believe that waving a carrot on the end of a stick, and holding up an NDA is dishonest. I could see asking customers to keep mum, but requiring them to sign an NDA goes to a place that makes me nervous. It's because that's one of those things that should make that little voice inside your head that tells you you're doing something wrong, speak up and tell you you're doing something wrong.
in these connected days, there is a concept called intellectual property, and it's given a great deal of creedence by those in power (with money). With that comes all those nice DMCA thingies, and everyone wants assurances that these cool little boxes that let us communicate, function as more efficient tools to funnel money more quickly from our pockets into theirs (or for those of us with stock options, a leeeetle bit back into ours).
We look back to the days when nobody had enough money, and people were starving and the kids weren't getting educated, and nobody could afford to fix the streets or build enough atom bombs. It was scary back then. Now we know that if we kiss-up to the money-god enough, the money-god will bless us with enough cash to do GOOD things, like feed poor people. (or make them rich enough that they can feed themselves). That justifies a LOT. When you say to yourself as you slip on your pajamas: "It will make our company more profits, which means I will be able to order Muffy (my 16 year old daughter) the Lexus with the leather seats instead of cloth, and the company's stock price will go up, bolstering investor faith in the US market and tech industry, improve the economy, broaden the tax base, allow us to build a stronger military so we can intimidate these third-world dictators into keeping the oil prices down, so I can afford to put gas in Muffy's Lexus, which improves the image of America as a strong and prosperous nation, and helps poor people get off the welfare teat, get jobs, buy themselves Lexuses, give money to those charities that help poor people in third-world countries whose dictators have their tails between their legs because of all those cruise missiles I paid for in my IRS bill - yup, no matter WHAT I do, it's good." - it really makes it easier to sleep at night.
It's called "rationalization". Generally not the BEST replacement for a sense of ethics. But it passes.
A sure sign that your company is "marketing" driven instead of "engineering" driven, is when your CPU is named "Pentium" or "Thunderbird" instead of a nifty number like 80486. I have no current examples of a CPU manufacturer that still numbers it's chips, (except Compaq/Alpha), which means they've pretty much all gone over to the dark side.
I'm not a libertarian, and I'm not even a pseudo-libertarian, because I don't believe in "the market", the "invisible hand", or "trickle-down theory".
People are stupid. Period. Don't count on the magical "free market" to punish Microsoft, or decide that DVD region encoding is bad, etc. People are stupid. Madonna sells a LOT of records because people are stupid. I guess I don't need to elaborate on that point. It's pretty solid.
They may have originally BROUGHT cheap computing to the masses, but they don't intend to leave it there.
Like the drug dealer who gets the junkie hooked with a "free sample", Microsoft and Intel have been steadily raising the bar, with bloatware, proprietary locks to prevent competition, and planned obsolescence. They went there to get the marketshare, now that they got it, they can do whatever the fuck they want.
Hell, it's done every spring at every Osco across the Midwestern US; for the display of fans, (which sell alot in the spring), you can toss a beach-ball onto the grille, the fan keeps it levitated, but the slipstream *around* the ball keeps it positioned on top of the grille so it doesn't float away, it's pretty cool to watch, unless you've ever worked at an Osco, and had to watch those damn balls bouncing around up there for the whole part of an 8 hour shift.
Damn I'm glad I learned computers. That was a sucky job. Even raiding the liquor department after closing.
I think Intel can affort mucho setbacks. They are so far up the ailementary canal of the industry; I bet if you go out on the street and ask 100 people who makes the best chips in the world, you'll get 99 answers of "Intel", and if you ask them about AMD, Sun, Motorola, or IBM, they'll say "who?".
When companies lie, people are supposed to eventually find out about it ("ya can't fool all the people all the time, so now you see the light" - Bob Marley), and say "hey, that company sucks, I'm going to stop buying their products, because they lie."
Unfortunately, reality is a different picture.
Maybe somebody needs to make a vapor-tracking web-site, with a list of all companies, all their products, all of their press releases and release dates (and feature sets), and a running history of how many features disappear, and how the schedules slip, and whether the product even makes it to market at all.
Of course, what I meant was, that CSS is owned (in part) by Time Warner (or whatever that relationship is), and it's their trade secret that's being revealed/devalued/circumvented by posting DeCSS, but since they own (or whatever) CSS, it's theirs to reveal/devalue/circumvent.
The folks who should complain are the other partners who own CSS (the DVD consortium), who have been "exposed" and therefore double-crossed by one of their partners.
I don't think that the linking is the crime here, it's the linking without permission. Somehow, as ironic as this seems, I don't think that CNN would have problems obtaining permission from itself to post it's own trade secrets.
Duh.
(but then again, why did they delete the link later? Obviously a case of the right hand not knowing who the left hand was jacking off.)
Slashdot Mirror
-sigh-
it's viruses. it's been dicussed many times here on slashdot. should be in the faq if you ask me.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
a response to "buy what you sell, sell what you buy"
"never get high on your own supply" - Scarface
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
I understand your analogy, so let's take this one step further. Microsoft's whole philosophy, and marketing campaign is targeted thusly; as if Harley Davidson used trucks for delivery of parts and motorcycles, but encouraged everyone else to use Harley Davidson motorcycles for those tasks. And Harley Davidson encouraged the local governments to abandon the use of squad cars entirely, and switch over to Harley Davidson Motorcycles (with a sidecar so you can transport captured felons to prison). And also encouraged the US governement to switch over to all Harley Davidson motorcycles, even at the Pentagon, and encouraged the US government to repaint all the road lanes so they were only wide enough for Harley Davidson motorcycles, so cars could not drive on them, so every person would basically be "forced" to buy only Harley Davidson motorcycles. And designed a new engine that only ran on a special blend of Harley Davidson gasoline, which no other vehicle could run on; then converted the nation's gasoline distribution to all Harley Davidson gasoline, so even if you were a rebel and drove an off-road vehicle (because the roads would only allow Harley Davidsons), you couldn't find gas to run it - you'd have to convert the engine to diesel, and brew your own biodiesel; which is essentially what the OpenSource people are doing!
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Oh, so THAT'S why my Karma hasn't gone up despite some positive moderations! Jeez, go on one measley two-week vacation, and you miss everything! So, there's no LOWER limit?
Damn, now I can't save up 1000 Karma points and sell my account on ebay!
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
It seems to me, that if you get ONE end of a sub above water, and the other end is below the surface, but leaking, cutting a hole in the part exposed to air will cause the captured air in the submarine to escape, and the sub to cease floating, real quick. That is, as soon as you punch a hole the size of a pencil, and begin cutting the rest of the opening with your blowtorch, by the time you get the opening finished, you could very well have a flooded compartment by the time you're done.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
I'm wondering; why couldn't they do a drop-launch of this weapon? that is, slowly shove it out the torpedo tube, let it sit and possibly self-home on the target, but not fire the main motor, move the mother ship away so as not to give away it's position, then fire the torpedoes engines at a safe distance?
Why not? well maybe their homing systems aren't that sophisticated. But ya'd think it would be safer than risking the sub.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
And not enough Corvairs were sold because they were so well-slandered in the marketplace. Because of Nader.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Chevy did the same thing with the infamous swing-axle rear suspension on the Corvair. They decided not to change it. Instead, the negative PR got out of control, and they had to kill the car completely.
VW, facing a similar PR problem with the Beetle, switched over to the IRS rear axle, multi jointed, rather than the old swing-axle. The Beetle still sold well for a decade after that, and they're still making them in Mexico. (it was EPA emissions restrictions that killed it in the USA).
Playing the cost vs. safety issue is a game where you can overlook the negative PR issue, and it can quickly spin out of control. Unfortunately, to the public at large, this "safety" issue (data integrity, really) will be all but forgotten. Keeping ahead of AMD was more important, in the long run.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
That chip bears as much resemblence to the one you could see inside your desktop case, as a NASCAR Ford Taurus bears to the model you see at the Ford Dealer.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
- talk about being market driven - I just read a news thingie about Al Gore's campaign, and he's on a tirade about the high cost of perscription drugs.
Well, whatever that's about, but one of the points is, Shering-Plough, makers of Claritin, spent more on advertising last year than R&D. Anyone suprised? Anyone wanna bet when the computer industry catches up?
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Yeah, that's nice that Apple got interesting after being worked-over in the mid 90's. Can anyone tell me why Motorola (manufacturers of Apple's CPU) continues to fail to be an interesting company?
Unless you define as "interesting", their wholesale internal abandonment of PCs based on their own CPU, and switching over to Intel-containing Dell machines running NT.
You think Intel's got problems. Intel has a papercut compared to Motorola, who was tending goal when an opposing player's skate slashed their neck. Okay, well if PPC isn't enough of a debacle, how 'bout Irridium? Shit. I just can't bash Motorola enough. Except to say that I LOVE my Palm Pilot and my Motorola Pager.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
why does a damn chip have to have a trademarkable name?
Intel 586? Who else can sell a chip which is referred to as an "Intel 586", not only do you get to capitalize on the brand identity of your corporate name, you also get to save the $5million you would otherwise spend on some bullshit ad firm to come up with "Itanium"! Intel 586, not to be confused with the AMD 586. I don't see that as dilutive, but lawyers and marketroids have to lift their leg on every fire hydrant they see.
On another, trivia-oriented note; the Porsche 911 was originally supposed to be the 901. (901 was the internal project number - project number 901, sequentially assigned, it was the project after number 900.) But because POO-joe (Peugot) had copyrighted the number "901", they had to call the car the 911. Which became rather a humorous name, because that's the number you call when an idiot American driver can't handle a car with a rear-engine weight distribution, and spins out into a ravine. The problem eventually became so bad that Porsche built the front-engined 944 and 928. Thankfully those days are behind us, and American cars have such small front engines anymore, that the weight distribution isn't that different from a rear-engined car (snicker).
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
um, 8.5 years in the Tech Support industry tells me this: - in cases like this, "free consulting services" means, an engineer is flown in to try to figure out what the hell went wrong because they couldn't reliably reproduce it in-house.
That's like Firestone sending a guy to the ditch on the side of the road where your SUV lays, twisted and burning, to take a look at your tires, scratch his head and go: "gee, that's not right, is it?".
I wouldn't ask Sun to brag about the problem. I do, however, believe that waving a carrot on the end of a stick, and holding up an NDA is dishonest. I could see asking customers to keep mum, but requiring them to sign an NDA goes to a place that makes me nervous. It's because that's one of those things that should make that little voice inside your head that tells you you're doing something wrong, speak up and tell you you're doing something wrong.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
in these connected days, there is a concept called intellectual property, and it's given a great deal of creedence by those in power (with money). With that comes all those nice DMCA thingies, and everyone wants assurances that these cool little boxes that let us communicate, function as more efficient tools to funnel money more quickly from our pockets into theirs (or for those of us with stock options, a leeeetle bit back into ours).
We look back to the days when nobody had enough money, and people were starving and the kids weren't getting educated, and nobody could afford to fix the streets or build enough atom bombs. It was scary back then. Now we know that if we kiss-up to the money-god enough, the money-god will bless us with enough cash to do GOOD things, like feed poor people. (or make them rich enough that they can feed themselves). That justifies a LOT. When you say to yourself as you slip on your pajamas: "It will make our company more profits, which means I will be able to order Muffy (my 16 year old daughter) the Lexus with the leather seats instead of cloth, and the company's stock price will go up, bolstering investor faith in the US market and tech industry, improve the economy, broaden the tax base, allow us to build a stronger military so we can intimidate these third-world dictators into keeping the oil prices down, so I can afford to put gas in Muffy's Lexus, which improves the image of America as a strong and prosperous nation, and helps poor people get off the welfare teat, get jobs, buy themselves Lexuses, give money to those charities that help poor people in third-world countries whose dictators have their tails between their legs because of all those cruise missiles I paid for in my IRS bill - yup, no matter WHAT I do, it's good." - it really makes it easier to sleep at night.
It's called "rationalization". Generally not the BEST replacement for a sense of ethics. But it passes.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Not only does the emporer have no clothes, but I think he's got a "baby-dick" too. . .
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
A sure sign that your company is "marketing" driven instead of "engineering" driven, is when your CPU is named "Pentium" or "Thunderbird" instead of a nifty number like 80486. I have no current examples of a CPU manufacturer that still numbers it's chips, (except Compaq/Alpha), which means they've pretty much all gone over to the dark side.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
I'm not a libertarian, and I'm not even a pseudo-libertarian, because I don't believe in "the market", the "invisible hand", or "trickle-down theory".
People are stupid. Period. Don't count on the magical "free market" to punish Microsoft, or decide that DVD region encoding is bad, etc. People are stupid. Madonna sells a LOT of records because people are stupid. I guess I don't need to elaborate on that point. It's pretty solid.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Sounds like an invisible hand-job to me. . .
Or maybe Ron Reagan's "trickle-down" theory. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not be "trickled-down" on.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
yeah, great choice. Beelzebub or Mephistopholes. Sounds like a US presidential election.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
They may have originally BROUGHT cheap computing to the masses, but they don't intend to leave it there.
Like the drug dealer who gets the junkie hooked with a "free sample", Microsoft and Intel have been steadily raising the bar, with bloatware, proprietary locks to prevent competition, and planned obsolescence. They went there to get the marketshare, now that they got it, they can do whatever the fuck they want.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Hell, it's done every spring at every Osco across the Midwestern US; for the display of fans, (which sell alot in the spring), you can toss a beach-ball onto the grille, the fan keeps it levitated, but the slipstream *around* the ball keeps it positioned on top of the grille so it doesn't float away, it's pretty cool to watch, unless you've ever worked at an Osco, and had to watch those damn balls bouncing around up there for the whole part of an 8 hour shift.
Damn I'm glad I learned computers. That was a sucky job. Even raiding the liquor department after closing.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
I think Intel can affort mucho setbacks. They are so far up the ailementary canal of the industry; I bet if you go out on the street and ask 100 people who makes the best chips in the world, you'll get 99 answers of "Intel", and if you ask them about AMD, Sun, Motorola, or IBM, they'll say "who?".
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
When companies lie, people are supposed to eventually find out about it ("ya can't fool all the people all the time, so now you see the light" - Bob Marley), and say "hey, that company sucks, I'm going to stop buying their products, because they lie."
Unfortunately, reality is a different picture.
Maybe somebody needs to make a vapor-tracking web-site, with a list of all companies, all their products, all of their press releases and release dates (and feature sets), and a running history of how many features disappear, and how the schedules slip, and whether the product even makes it to market at all.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Of course, what I meant was, that CSS is owned (in part) by Time Warner (or whatever that relationship is), and it's their trade secret that's being revealed/devalued/circumvented by posting DeCSS, but since they own (or whatever) CSS, it's theirs to reveal/devalue/circumvent.
The folks who should complain are the other partners who own CSS (the DVD consortium), who have been "exposed" and therefore double-crossed by one of their partners.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
I don't think that the linking is the crime here, it's the linking without permission. Somehow, as ironic as this seems, I don't think that CNN would have problems obtaining permission from itself to post it's own trade secrets.
Duh.
(but then again, why did they delete the link later? Obviously a case of the right hand not knowing who the left hand was jacking off.)
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!