There is mounting evidence that the cellular service companies are going to do whatever they can to kill Wi-Fi. After all, it is a huge long-term threat to them.
Of course. They killed Metricom - with the help of incompetent management - because of the threat of Metricom's 3G speeds, which were delivered in 2001, covering millions of people, but with little subscriber uptake.
Telecoms were implicated in the reluctance of municipalities to allow Metricom right of way, the endless FUD about 3G being delivered in 2001-2002 (it's just making it's way into widespread deployment today) and in the failure of Metricom to capitolize on WorldCom's promised "business sales force" - a promise which never materialized. Telecoms were also busy frightening potential investors in Metricom with the spectre of a "ghost network" of high-speed users forced to use two devices - one for voice, one for data - they were scared to death of Metricom's Ricochet because the network and devices were a perfect compliment for the then-nascent VOIP market.
I really enjoyed my 128kbps and higher speeds in 2000 using Ricochet. Had the company survived, we'd be seeing 1-2Mbps speeds today, if not higher - using public spectrum, Ricochet had ~1Mbps raw throughput eight years ago. Imagine the potential that better DSPs and spectrum reuse would have provided.
Little known fact - after declaring bankruptcy shortly before 9/11, a court injuction was obtained to allow Metricom's microcellular network to operate after the twin towers were destroyed - because of it's decentralized nature, Ricochet was the only data service that still worked in Lower Manhattan after the attack - wherever a radio had power, it was able to hop around and get to the wired internet. Latency was high, but Internet resources were on-site and usable at broadband speeds in the shadow of the broken towers because of Ricochet.
Whatever - telecoms have been playing this game for a while and won't be stopping anytime soon, but WiFi is a little too much of a behemoth at this point to stop.
Apple is worth $75bn > EMI's music arm ($1.4bn) + Warner Music ($2.9bn) + Sony's music arm ($2.1bn) + Vivendi ($5.5bn).
You are confusing market capitalization with worth. The catalogs owned by these companies are worth quite a few hundreds of millions at the very least, and that's not necessarily reflected in the stock price - and the rights to those catalogs are worth everything to Jobs and Co. - a very big stick to negotiate with.
Furthermore, the iPod does not have the best record known to man when it comes to being a reliable piece of hardware
Really? You have warranty return data for all the music players shipped since 2001?
The iPod has had some highly publiccized shortcomings - non-user serviceable battery for one - but for reliability, I'd wager they're above the rest.
I'd add that battery issues in many early iPods were caused by clueless users who left the devices in hot cars during the day or in freezing conditions overnight - both conditions are extremely detrimental to L-ion batteries.
Objectivly, Best buy, Compusa, Fry's, Microcenter, ect; they're all the same. They all do the same thing. It's wrong to think you can go to one or the other and not get fucked. Just remember:
Yes, but Fry's is by far the most entertaining. That's worth the trip, in my book.
Also, they seem to have better sales more often on storage.
I guess that's just Louisiana. We're keeping our Baton Rouge and Metairie locations, but we can't get a Fry's or an Apple Store to save our lives.
I guess that's a good demonstration of the mean intelligence level here. People would rather go into ChumpUSA and be abused by surly salespeople than order something online to save a few bucks.
They've got it completely wrong about competition. In this case, it's better that they have competition than not.
Exactly. I was there when we had to explain what the Newton was, what it did, and why you'd want one. Along with the whole "it doesn't quite work" phenomena, Newton was doomed from the start. Subsequent revisions fixed most of the flaws, but by the time Newton was killed in 1997, it had grown into a complex, feature-heavy solution looking for problems. The PDA market took off with the Palm IIIx about that time and it's simplicity meshed well with the immaturity of the PDA market...now we see smartphones that are what the Newton was (plus the phone) ten years ago.
The iPhone is a phone. And an iPod. And a tool for browsing web sites on the go. There's no explaining to be done. The market has reached a level of maturity where Apple can capitolize on their ability to design something people want. Phones are a commodity now, and people have always demonstrated that they're willing to pay for exclusivity when it comes to commodities.
And that was a stumbling block inserted by the fuel makers (Exxon and such) who, for whatever reason (perhaps to keep more inefficient gasoline cars on the road) fought every attempt to lower the sulfur limits in diesel.
Coincidentally, I'm doing a contract stint for that very company...and you know how much sulphur they pull out of crude every day at our plant?
Me neither. But, there's a 200-foot square pond (raised containment berm enclosure) six feet deep with sulphur at our refinery. And they melt and send away several tanker trucks full of that stuff every day. We process nearly a half-million bbls of crude a day (you should be able to tell where I am now) - sulphur is a by-product, and there's a lot of it in oil - even the sweetest crude.
While I can't say what XOM's motivations for stalling on low S2 Diesel fuel are, (Shell sponsored Audi's LeMans car and seems to be taking low sulphur leadership) I'd think it has more to do with the upkeep and plumbing of a 50-year-old, finely-tuned refinery rather than a lack of technology or sheer cost. If one process goes off kilter in a refinery like the one I work at, the price of gasoline goes up twenty cents nationwide. Note the recent problems in Texas at a refinery there. We've seen gas prices shoot up 20 cents over two weeks with no equivalent movement in crude prices or demand.
Possibly because of the massive labor and upkeep costs, big oil has taken centralization to an extreme, concentrating most resources among several key refineries. When you tinker with a process, you can perfect it in the lab. But when you try to take that process live, it has to be done on a working unit. There are no "practice" refineries. Production is impacted in a serious way when a reformulation is mandated, and that's part of the reason why reformulations are fought tooth and nail by oil companies.
Noted about the tailpipe. Interesting. Diesel city buses are the same way, and the last straigh-out Diesel exhaust I remember seeing was on a 1981 Audi 5000S Diesel.
My statement about particulates was relative; of course Diesel particulates will be higher; the combustion in a Diesel is not as complete for several reasons - chief among them being that the fuel is not as volatile. The higher viscosity of the fuel is another factor, and one that direct high pressure (25k PSI!) injection looks to ameliorate with a finer, more controlled mist of fuel that is more precisely timed.
They are supposed to look like that since their color temperature is typically 6500K which approximates the color temperature of the sun
Not to be pedantic, but I do need to crrect a misperception.
Actual daylight is anywhere from 4400-5600k. Daylight-balanced incandescents like SoLux bulbs are at 4700k and are similar to mid-morning light. Note that the color of "daylight" on a reflective white surface is highly subjective depending on atmospheric interference, latitude, and of course, time of day.
6500k is a normally-used tristimulus daylight benchmark - accurate for transmissive media like RGB computer monitors, but not for bulbs. A computer monitor calibrated to a D65 at 2.2 gamma will show the aforementioned white board photographed in the sun accurately, but it not, strictly speaking, daylight-balanced - merely tuned to reproduce daylight using three component colors. Hence, the higher color temperature than "real" daylight.
Likewise, I'd bet that these bulbs are deep in the blue, hardly the "warm light" (which is a cool color temperature) that people profess they like better about incandescents.
I don't mind the blueish tinge of newer CFLs, it's the sickeningly green color of most fluorescents that turn me off of them.
I prefer a cooler temperature incandescent to a warmer CFL.
have come a long way in the noise department...but still, when you have pistons the sizes of a small child's head, it's difficult to make a Diesel quiet:-)
I'd beg to differ. A Lexus RX330 we have stabled here has obnoxiously noisy gasoline injectors which are far louder at idle than a friend's Jetta TDI (Volkswagen Turbo Diesel). Not all Diesel engines are built by Caterpillar.
Primary stumbling blocks to Diesel adoption her in the states have been our strict particulate and NOx emissions rules, particularly in California and other states that have adopted California Air Resource Board rules. Urea injection will help to solve the NOx problem, and ultra-low sulfur and advanced fuel injection technologies will do the rest.
Audi's Diesel-powered direct injection race cars are loud - but they also won LeMans this year. Diesels look to be on the verge of a very big comeback, and a lot of money is being dumped into these efficient petrochemical engines.
Like the Diesel engine, the incandescent bulb is a product which can be made far more efficient and competitive while retaining it's inherent advantages - but only if the makers of these products are sufficiently goaded into investing in the R&D to make these advances happen. Australia and California, by proposing CFL-only laws to save energy are providing that incentive.
I've been a Cingular user for years, and am quite happy with them. In fact, my only complaint is that they apparently are going to become AT&T Wireless. I have a bad history with AT&T Wireless and laughed when they were absorbed by Cingular.
Ditto and ditto.
When my contract is up I will be shopping around. ATT Wireless was one of the worst cellular providers out there, bar none - and I was stuck with their terrible service "over the hill" in Santa Cruz until I complained loud and long enough that they let me out of my contract.
And now "they" are part of Cingular. Yay. This may be what chaps me most about the iPhone; I want one and can/will pay $500.00 for it, but Cingular's service rugularly drops out/doesn't work in both metro areas I work in - a new phenomena, I might add.
I have heard statements like "If only Mac has this and that software, I would switch in a second" or "If only Linux has more games, I would leave Windows forever".
Yeah, and where's all the bitching and moaning from industry pundits about how Vista is "missing" Photoshop?
The echoes are just starting to fade from the hue and cry made over the lack of an Intel Mac version of Photoshop, and how it was going to put a serious dent into Apple's Mac Pro sales.
Except it didn't. Or maybe it did, and the machines were so compelling they sold well anyway. It'll be an interesting litmus test for Vista to see who upgrades despite the lack of "officially supported" software.
Your ability to edit your photographs has improved.
Sorry, but no piece of software can improve a photograph. FWIW, I prefer Aperture and Photoshop's full-resolution transformations. You should be working at 100% to see subtle changes, and Photoshop's preview checkbox is more effective as a toggle of "change on/change-off".
Don't take it personally, but the advent of "one click" photo-fixer software and sharing sites like Flickr have allowed eager photographers to crapflood the world with terrible pictures that people claim to have "improved!" with one piece of software or another. Thery aren't any better because the tonal values or color changed. They're certainly no better when they're oversharpened to the point of having halos. They probably should have gone in the bit-bucket first off, but the promise of "Improved!" pictures led them to software, and software made it look better....so, it must be worth sharing, right?
The mindset that any software can "improve" a photograph is fundamentally mistaken; you can certainly push values round, but you can't get back burt out highlights or blocked up shadows. Nor can you make an inherently bad picture any good, except possibly by cropping - and as far as I know, there's no software that suggest crops as compelling as your garden variety photo-clubber.
To get back to my point about editing; Ansel made tens of thousands of pictures in his life, both for himself and for hire. There are about three dozen iconic images of his that are instantly recognizable as such to most non-photographers. That is the power of editing. Your digital camera and software allow the creation of literally gigabytes of crap at a time. To select the very few compelling items is one of the cornerstones of a truly skilled photographer.
Parents buying computers for their kids for college/hs are going to care about one thing: Price.
I don't think that parents prepared to pay 20-150k for a college education are going to quibble over a couple of hundred dollars' difference in the cost of a computer.
When you are dealing with novices, anything is possible.
I remember once at Apple, a co-worker put this compiled executable AppleScript into a user's startup items folder (this was back in the Mac OS 7.x days)
tell application finder shut down end tell
The user came in, started up his machine (it was his backup "solitaire" CPU) and it immediately shut down upon launching the Finder.
An hour later, he had the machine apart, and was ready to swap power supplies with a donor machine. We had a good laugh and told him what was going on, then we snapped his machine back together and went for coffee.
Can we just all agree that Google is about as evil as the average corporation now?
Sure! Since what they did is exactly what every other company looking to locate in a certain area does - play the municipality against the jobs and eventual tax receipts they'll receive if Google locates there.
But if we do that, can we also acknowledge that Kanellos is an admitted bomb-thrower and hyperbolic writer? He makes everything seem as if it were some hyeeeyoooge deal, and admits to writing inflammatory columns in order to rile up readers and to drive page views - just like Dvorak.
There's no real news here. In Louisiana, we want a big steelmaker to choose us over another location. We offer tax breaks and other information that's not public. I'm sure the steelmaker is hiding this information from it's competitors in order to maintain it's competitive advantage until the ink starts to dry on the contract. It's only Slashdot-worthy because we're talking about Google.
HR: But there's nothing to say we still have to give you the job. If you want to be pedantic we'll hire you for 5 minutes and then fire you. Now do you want the new deal or not? Employee: but I already quit my job and sold my house! HR: just sign on the dotted line.
They don't even have to hire, then fire you. Until you walk in on the first day, they can rescind the offer - for no reason whatsoever - and leave you hanging.
It happened to me. I'd been looking for a job here in Baton Rouge for five months, was hired ("we're really excited to rbing you on!") at a reasonable salary - and the days before I was to start, they sent a FedEx with a rescension letter enclosed.
No reason given, or owed. Perfectly legal. And to top it off, they did it the week before Christmas.
The company, by the way, was Innovative Emergency Management - heavily involved in helping all levels of government plan for emergencies - just like New Orleans, where they held a hurricane emergency drill only a few weeks before Katrina struck.
Slashdot Mirror
There is mounting evidence that the cellular service companies are going to do whatever they can to kill Wi-Fi. After all, it is a huge long-term threat to them.
Of course. They killed Metricom - with the help of incompetent management - because of the threat of Metricom's 3G speeds, which were delivered in 2001, covering millions of people, but with little subscriber uptake.
Telecoms were implicated in the reluctance of municipalities to allow Metricom right of way, the endless FUD about 3G being delivered in 2001-2002 (it's just making it's way into widespread deployment today) and in the failure of Metricom to capitolize on WorldCom's promised "business sales force" - a promise which never materialized. Telecoms were also busy frightening potential investors in Metricom with the spectre of a "ghost network" of high-speed users forced to use two devices - one for voice, one for data - they were scared to death of Metricom's Ricochet because the network and devices were a perfect compliment for the then-nascent VOIP market.
I really enjoyed my 128kbps and higher speeds in 2000 using Ricochet. Had the company survived, we'd be seeing 1-2Mbps speeds today, if not higher - using public spectrum, Ricochet had ~1Mbps raw throughput eight years ago. Imagine the potential that better DSPs and spectrum reuse would have provided.
Little known fact - after declaring bankruptcy shortly before 9/11, a court injuction was obtained to allow Metricom's microcellular network to operate after the twin towers were destroyed - because of it's decentralized nature, Ricochet was the only data service that still worked in Lower Manhattan after the attack - wherever a radio had power, it was able to hop around and get to the wired internet. Latency was high, but Internet resources were on-site and usable at broadband speeds in the shadow of the broken towers because of Ricochet.
Whatever - telecoms have been playing this game for a while and won't be stopping anytime soon, but WiFi is a little too much of a behemoth at this point to stop.
"My ex must have had a mirror made of this shit!"
Apple is worth $75bn > EMI's music arm ($1.4bn) + Warner Music ($2.9bn) + Sony's music arm ($2.1bn) + Vivendi ($5.5bn).
You are confusing market capitalization with worth. The catalogs owned by these companies are worth quite a few hundreds of millions at the very least, and that's not necessarily reflected in the stock price - and the rights to those catalogs are worth everything to Jobs and Co. - a very big stick to negotiate with.
Furthermore, the iPod does not have the best record known to man when it comes to being a reliable piece of hardware
Really? You have warranty return data for all the music players shipped since 2001?
The iPod has had some highly publiccized shortcomings - non-user serviceable battery for one - but for reliability, I'd wager they're above the rest.
I'd add that battery issues in many early iPods were caused by clueless users who left the devices in hot cars during the day or in freezing conditions overnight - both conditions are extremely detrimental to L-ion batteries.
Where did you get confirmation that these two were surviving?
Consumerist.com post.
Objectivly, Best buy, Compusa, Fry's, Microcenter, ect; they're all the same. They all do the same thing. It's wrong to think you can go to one or the other and not get fucked. Just remember:
Yes, but Fry's is by far the most entertaining. That's worth the trip, in my book.
Also, they seem to have better sales more often on storage.
I guess that's just Louisiana. We're keeping our Baton Rouge and Metairie locations, but we can't get a Fry's or an Apple Store to save our lives.
I guess that's a good demonstration of the mean intelligence level here. People would rather go into ChumpUSA and be abused by surly salespeople than order something online to save a few bucks.
They've got it completely wrong about competition. In this case, it's better that they have competition than not.
Exactly. I was there when we had to explain what the Newton was, what it did, and why you'd want one. Along with the whole "it doesn't quite work" phenomena, Newton was doomed from the start. Subsequent revisions fixed most of the flaws, but by the time Newton was killed in 1997, it had grown into a complex, feature-heavy solution looking for problems. The PDA market took off with the Palm IIIx about that time and it's simplicity meshed well with the immaturity of the PDA market...now we see smartphones that are what the Newton was (plus the phone) ten years ago.
The iPhone is a phone. And an iPod. And a tool for browsing web sites on the go. There's no explaining to be done. The market has reached a level of maturity where Apple can capitolize on their ability to design something people want. Phones are a commodity now, and people have always demonstrated that they're willing to pay for exclusivity when it comes to commodities.
TFA is ripe with FUD. The iPhone will do fine.
and that iTunes copy of "I like big butts" you bought will play on all mp3 players except the Zune.
The song is called "Baby Got Back", you insensitive clod!
And that was a stumbling block inserted by the fuel makers (Exxon and such) who, for whatever reason (perhaps to keep more inefficient gasoline cars on the road) fought every attempt to lower the sulfur limits in diesel.
Coincidentally, I'm doing a contract stint for that very company...and you know how much sulphur they pull out of crude every day at our plant?
Me neither. But, there's a 200-foot square pond (raised containment berm enclosure) six feet deep with sulphur at our refinery. And they melt and send away several tanker trucks full of that stuff every day. We process nearly a half-million bbls of crude a day (you should be able to tell where I am now) - sulphur is a by-product, and there's a lot of it in oil - even the sweetest crude.
While I can't say what XOM's motivations for stalling on low S2 Diesel fuel are, (Shell sponsored Audi's LeMans car and seems to be taking low sulphur leadership) I'd think it has more to do with the upkeep and plumbing of a 50-year-old, finely-tuned refinery rather than a lack of technology or sheer cost. If one process goes off kilter in a refinery like the one I work at, the price of gasoline goes up twenty cents nationwide. Note the recent problems in Texas at a refinery there. We've seen gas prices shoot up 20 cents over two weeks with no equivalent movement in crude prices or demand.
Possibly because of the massive labor and upkeep costs, big oil has taken centralization to an extreme, concentrating most resources among several key refineries. When you tinker with a process, you can perfect it in the lab. But when you try to take that process live, it has to be done on a working unit. There are no "practice" refineries. Production is impacted in a serious way when a reformulation is mandated, and that's part of the reason why reformulations are fought tooth and nail by oil companies.
Noted about the tailpipe. Interesting. Diesel city buses are the same way, and the last straigh-out Diesel exhaust I remember seeing was on a 1981 Audi 5000S Diesel.
My statement about particulates was relative; of course Diesel particulates will be higher; the combustion in a Diesel is not as complete for several reasons - chief among them being that the fuel is not as volatile. The higher viscosity of the fuel is another factor, and one that direct high pressure (25k PSI!) injection looks to ameliorate with a finer, more controlled mist of fuel that is more precisely timed.
They are supposed to look like that since their color temperature is typically 6500K which approximates the color temperature of the sun
Not to be pedantic, but I do need to crrect a misperception.
Actual daylight is anywhere from 4400-5600k. Daylight-balanced incandescents like SoLux bulbs are at 4700k and are similar to mid-morning light. Note that the color of "daylight" on a reflective white surface is highly subjective depending on atmospheric interference, latitude, and of course, time of day.
6500k is a normally-used tristimulus daylight benchmark - accurate for transmissive media like RGB computer monitors, but not for bulbs. A computer monitor calibrated to a D65 at 2.2 gamma will show the aforementioned white board photographed in the sun accurately, but it not, strictly speaking, daylight-balanced - merely tuned to reproduce daylight using three component colors. Hence, the higher color temperature than "real" daylight.
I prefer to measure in mireds!
Likewise, I'd bet that these bulbs are deep in the blue, hardly the "warm light" (which is a cool color temperature) that people profess they like better about incandescents.
I don't mind the blueish tinge of newer CFLs, it's the sickeningly green color of most fluorescents that turn me off of them.
I prefer a cooler temperature incandescent to a warmer CFL.
Yes, I'm sure it's the Fish Carburetor of lightbulbs!
True, Diesel's
Diesel's what? His engine?
have come a long way in the noise department...but still, when you have pistons the sizes of a small child's head, it's difficult to make a Diesel quiet:-)
I'd beg to differ. A Lexus RX330 we have stabled here has obnoxiously noisy gasoline injectors which are far louder at idle than a friend's Jetta TDI (Volkswagen Turbo Diesel). Not all Diesel engines are built by Caterpillar.
Primary stumbling blocks to Diesel adoption her in the states have been our strict particulate and NOx emissions rules, particularly in California and other states that have adopted California Air Resource Board rules. Urea injection will help to solve the NOx problem, and ultra-low sulfur and advanced fuel injection technologies will do the rest.
Audi's Diesel-powered direct injection race cars are loud - but they also won LeMans this year. Diesels look to be on the verge of a very big comeback, and a lot of money is being dumped into these efficient petrochemical engines.
Like the Diesel engine, the incandescent bulb is a product which can be made far more efficient and competitive while retaining it's inherent advantages - but only if the makers of these products are sufficiently goaded into investing in the R&D to make these advances happen. Australia and California, by proposing CFL-only laws to save energy are providing that incentive.
I've been a Cingular user for years, and am quite happy with them. In fact, my only complaint is that they apparently are going to become AT&T Wireless. I have a bad history with AT&T Wireless and laughed when they were absorbed by Cingular.
Ditto and ditto.
When my contract is up I will be shopping around. ATT Wireless was one of the worst cellular providers out there, bar none - and I was stuck with their terrible service "over the hill" in Santa Cruz until I complained loud and long enough that they let me out of my contract.
And now "they" are part of Cingular. Yay. This may be what chaps me most about the iPhone; I want one and can/will pay $500.00 for it, but Cingular's service rugularly drops out/doesn't work in both metro areas I work in - a new phenomena, I might add.
I have heard statements like "If only Mac has this and that software, I would switch in a second" or "If only Linux has more games, I would leave Windows forever".
Yeah, and where's all the bitching and moaning from industry pundits about how Vista is "missing" Photoshop?
The echoes are just starting to fade from the hue and cry made over the lack of an Intel Mac version of Photoshop, and how it was going to put a serious dent into Apple's Mac Pro sales.
Except it didn't. Or maybe it did, and the machines were so compelling they sold well anyway. It'll be an interesting litmus test for Vista to see who upgrades despite the lack of "officially supported" software.
my photos have improved significantly
Your photographs haven't improved.
Your ability to edit your photographs has improved.
Sorry, but no piece of software can improve a photograph. FWIW, I prefer Aperture and Photoshop's full-resolution transformations. You should be working at 100% to see subtle changes, and Photoshop's preview checkbox is more effective as a toggle of "change on/change-off".
Don't take it personally, but the advent of "one click" photo-fixer software and sharing sites like Flickr have allowed eager photographers to crapflood the world with terrible pictures that people claim to have "improved!" with one piece of software or another. Thery aren't any better because the tonal values or color changed. They're certainly no better when they're oversharpened to the point of having halos. They probably should have gone in the bit-bucket first off, but the promise of "Improved!" pictures led them to software, and software made it look better....so, it must be worth sharing, right?
The mindset that any software can "improve" a photograph is fundamentally mistaken; you can certainly push values round, but you can't get back burt out highlights or blocked up shadows. Nor can you make an inherently bad picture any good, except possibly by cropping - and as far as I know, there's no software that suggest crops as compelling as your garden variety photo-clubber.
To get back to my point about editing; Ansel made tens of thousands of pictures in his life, both for himself and for hire. There are about three dozen iconic images of his that are instantly recognizable as such to most non-photographers. That is the power of editing. Your digital camera and software allow the creation of literally gigabytes of crap at a time. To select the very few compelling items is one of the cornerstones of a truly skilled photographer.
"I'm doing it as hard as I can!"
Parents buying computers for their kids for college/hs are going to care about one thing: Price.
I don't think that parents prepared to pay 20-150k for a college education are going to quibble over a couple of hundred dollars' difference in the cost of a computer.
Well, yeah.. you can do that, and it works, but it's illegal. If you don't mind breaking the law
Uh...I'm pretty sure they can't put you in "computer jail" for breaking a license agreement.
It's a violation of the contract, and may carry penalties as such, but you're not breaking a law by doing this.
When you are dealing with novices, anything is possible.
I remember once at Apple, a co-worker put this compiled executable AppleScript into a user's startup items folder (this was back in the Mac OS 7.x days)
tell application finder
shut down
end tell
The user came in, started up his machine (it was his backup "solitaire" CPU) and it immediately shut down upon launching the Finder.
An hour later, he had the machine apart, and was ready to swap power supplies with a donor machine. We had a good laugh and told him what was going on, then we snapped his machine back together and went for coffee.
Can we just all agree that Google is about as evil as the average corporation now?
Sure! Since what they did is exactly what every other company looking to locate in a certain area does - play the municipality against the jobs and eventual tax receipts they'll receive if Google locates there.
But if we do that, can we also acknowledge that Kanellos is an admitted bomb-thrower and hyperbolic writer? He makes everything seem as if it were some hyeeeyoooge deal, and admits to writing inflammatory columns in order to rile up readers and to drive page views - just like Dvorak.
There's no real news here. In Louisiana, we want a big steelmaker to choose us over another location. We offer tax breaks and other information that's not public. I'm sure the steelmaker is hiding this information from it's competitors in order to maintain it's competitive advantage until the ink starts to dry on the contract. It's only Slashdot-worthy because we're talking about Google.
HR: But there's nothing to say we still have to give you the job. If you want to be pedantic we'll hire you for 5 minutes and then fire you. Now do you want the new deal or not?
Employee: but I already quit my job and sold my house!
HR: just sign on the dotted line.
They don't even have to hire, then fire you. Until you walk in on the first day, they can rescind the offer - for no reason whatsoever - and leave you hanging.
It happened to me. I'd been looking for a job here in Baton Rouge for five months, was hired ("we're really excited to rbing you on!") at a reasonable salary - and the days before I was to start, they sent a FedEx with a rescension letter enclosed.
No reason given, or owed. Perfectly legal. And to top it off, they did it the week before Christmas.
The company, by the way, was Innovative Emergency Management - heavily involved in helping all levels of government plan for emergencies - just like New Orleans, where they held a hurricane emergency drill only a few weeks before Katrina struck.
The former engineer in Apple's BSD Technology Group
Not sure I'd trust zero-day patches from a guy who couldn't hack it working for Avie.
Just sayin'.
Thankfully for those of us with several Macs, Apple doesn't require activation or serialization of the Mac OS X family pack.
Just sayin'.