It's called a non-compete clause. It's there to protect companies from employees that use company resources to research and develop new ideas then quit, form their own company and then produce something with the information taken. You can do anything else that you want during that period but if you start a business that basically does what your former employer did, they can sue you. After that period is done for what ever you signed in your contract, then you can create a company that does exactly what your former employer did if you want.
Because on your cable you don't have a choice about what is available or not available and over your internet connection, Bell does not have a choice about what is available or not available.
1. Arguments have been made about multiple copies on a computer, such as RAID 1 or loading the data to memory but the arguments don't stand up because it is a function of the device. The is how computers work and you can't change that. Transferring a file requires multiple copies to created to facilitate the copying but the end result is a single copy.
2. The number of copies doesn't matter so much as usage. For example, my small high school had some research software (i can't remember exactly what it was) but only 10 license keys. The software was installed on every single computer as part of the image but only 10 copies could be used at once. If you wanted to load the software, the computer checked with the server for the total number of copies running. If it was less than 10 it would load, if not then it would not load. The software was as close as the nearest computer but at any time there were never more than 10 copies running at once.
It doesn't mater if the original copy existed for a few seconds or a month after the sale, as long as the original file was never played again and there was some sort of record kept to indicate the file is no longer legal which could be as simple as moving the file to a folder label "Sold Files"
Frankly you could keep the files forever and claim them as a back up, just don't play them or try to sell them again.
You can sell what ever the hell you want if you can find a buyer. The thing is ITunes doesn't need to delete a thing because it it a licensed distribute or manufacturer. They can create as many copies as they want to sell because for every sale a cut goes back to the recording studio or who ever controls the rights as per their agreement.
What this ruling confirms is that I can buy an mp3 file from you for any cost we agree on, (could be free or $0.01, $0.99, $10,000) and I get the copy from you AND you delete the original file. Nothing new, just transferred and my copy is 100% legal and so is the transaction.
You assume the money was spent on special effects. In reality more money was spend on advertising. TV ads are not free. Posters are not free. Billboard space is not free. Take out the advertising budget to get a better look at production costs.
Actually you really don't need to over analyze the model as it's self regulating. The bottom line is you need a good product. If it's crap, no one will buy it, it's it's good, many people will buy it. As the ratio of pirate to purchase goes up, the less profitable software will be. As businesses close and migrate away from software the demand for good software goes up as there is less supply. With less supply, more people will be willing to pay for good software reversing the pirate to purchase ratio.
Business make software to make money and always will as there is a core group of people that demand software that will pay for it. Worrying about how you could have made a little more money or being upset that someone got something for nothing or throwing money at a group of people that are not willing to pay you, takes away from the group that wants to pay you.
Look at the music industry, if they focused on the people that bought their music and made it easier for them to buy it and share it, they would have more friends and money but instead they decided to focus on the people that don't want to pay by suing people for ridiculous amounts of money, creating DRM software that takes away from the people that are supporting them and trying to pass new laws that would let them do more of the same.
That's not what I hear. If someone says "I wish I left more money behind for my family." I don't hear, I wish I worked more. I hear, I wish I managed my money better. Most people that live pay cheque to pay cheque are poor at money management because they just want things now. Looking back at a life you might realize that if you put off going on a bunch of cruises and made bigger payments on your mortgage, it would have been payed of years sooner and saved a huge amount of interest.
There are two sides to wealth. There is how much you make and how much you spend.
There are very few people that actually would continue to work if they won the lottery. There is a large group of people that say they won't quit their jobs but the fact that they are now rich really hasn't sunk in yet. Give them a few weeks, maybe a month or two, and in some cases, a year or so to understand how things are different.
First is that they don't NEED to work any more. When you spend a large percentage of your life needing to work to pay the bills, it's hard to think about not needing to work anymore when it happens so suddenly.
Second is how other people start treating them. People start being your friend that wouldn't talk to you before, then people asking for money, can I borrow a few bucks, how about the lotto winner get this round of beers, I have a great investment if I could borrow a few thousand, my mother is real sick but can't afford the treatments. It's about that time you realize that if you don't give people money they start treating you like a selfish dick or if you do give them money that it cost you more than you're making at this job, it's time to get out and enjoy your self.
Most people that would work after big winnings are people that will work for them selves. Start a small business doing what they love and answer to no one.
I can see that your working on several assumptions that are just not true. The first is that theft is the same as copyright infringement. Different laws, different actions, different consequences. If I steal a tv, I have taken the materials from you. In order for you to sell that tv you need to buy more materials to make that tv and pay someone to assemble that tv and maybe ship it to your location to replace that tv. All of those things can easily be measured in how it directly harmed you financially. This has nothing to do with how much you can have made selling that tv. Which bring us to copying media. If I copy a song, you haven't lost a thing. You have to expend zero effort to re cope losses because nothing was lost. All of these losses big business whines about are potential sales. Potentially someone could have bought this but now they defiantly won't because that have a copy.
Next you think that everyone is wrong because laws must be followed. Laws are just a set of rules that determine how people want to live decided by the people. If the vast majority act in contrary to the law, then it is the law that is wrong, not the people. Downloading and sharing is something that happens all the time, every day by common every day people. Your riot example is no where near the same as what happens online every day. A Riot is a single event usually occurring in a single night by a small group.
The final assumption is that an author should be paid or there won't be anymore books. Frankly, if they can't make money writing with sharing going on, then they shouldn't write. Maybe there will be a few less books but that will only increase demand for good books and if the writing is good, people will always pay for good work.
"He has a lot of connections, ones I want too." - Paul Christoforo referring to Mike Krahulik
Yup, still a big asshole. Paul still considers your worth by who you know. Thinks Mike helped make Pax by knowing a lot of high up people. Doesn't think your important unless you know someone else who is. Anyone who still has business relations with this guy really need to seriously evaluate what he's doing for you.
You loose $57.50 in value. No different than buying some toy or gadget for $120.00 just to find out two weeks later it's on sale for 50% off or buying something else for $60.00 and breaking it as soon as you get it out of the box. There is risk in owning assets regardless what form they are in, be it money, stocks, gold bars or just stuff.
Define slow? 1 year? 10 years? 100 years? Who's to say that were going to fast or to slow. As markets change, businesses will rise and business will fall. Who's to say that we need to drag our heels to keep certain entities around longer because its too fast or to rip the band-aid off quickly to get it over with so we can get on with the future.
A good example is the video rental market. To me anyway, when I was younger, my options on renting a video was to be lucky enough to find something that I might enjoy that wasn't already rented out from the corner store and to choose between 1 night rental or 2 night rental. Then out of nowhere a business called Blockbuster came out of nowhere that offered so much more. Week long rentals from the same price as a 2 night rental. Dozens of copies of the same popular movie that almost guarantees that a copy would be available all of the time. Basically it was much better than what used to be the only option.
Mom and Pop videos stores complained and shut down because they couldn't or wouldn't compete. The market had changed and Blockbuster took over a large portion of that market. But the market continued to change and what seems like a short while later, demand for video rental gave way to on demand streaming services and Blockbuster has shut down a majority of it's operations and we the consumers watched Blockbusters stores close with as little compassion as we did for the mom and pop stores.
Now was that too fast or to slow? No, it was perfect because it happened at the speed of the changing markets. Blockbuster could have changed but it didn't so it is dying. We don't need tax breaks or profit sharing to keep Blockbuster around for a little longer. We need to do nothing except as consumers, decide where to spend our money. If someone came along and embraced ebooks with a solid distribution system that made authors, customers and libraries happy as hell and put every single major publisher out of business tomorrow, then so be it. Either the market will support it or it will not. Swallow that bitter pill now and move forward instead of putting it off a few more years. The result is the same except the pain of change last so much longer.
Are you kidding? Do you know the amount of business and money went through the WTC? Banks, insurance and many world players had offices there that shut down on the day of the attacks. Only good off site backups and worst case scenario planing kept everything running afterwords. Where else could you do that kind of economic damage with a single target.
The Stature of liberty? Really? How would that hurt the US? You kill maybe 100 people on a busy day and just piss off America. The cost to rebuild or repair would be a small small fraction of what is just being spend to rebuild the WTC.
Wall Street? Sure if you hit the right area you might cause similar damage but where do you hit? You have 1 plane traveling at hundreds of miles per hour and your trying to pick out 1 grey building out of hundreds of grey buildings all from a view of the city you have never seen before. Odds are you would hit the fish market instead of anything truly important..
Targeting a symbol is stupid unless you have nothing to loose like when the Taliban blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001. That took little to no planning, little resources and certainly no suicide bombers. And what did that get them? Their side went "Yay", Those on the other side went "You bastards!" and the rest of us went, "that sucks, oh well." and we went on with out lives like nothing happened.
If the Taliban want to attack America, they want to hit the life lines. They want to hit the financial market, they want to hit the utilities like power and water. Anything that would give the most bang for their bucks because they only have so much money and you only get so many volunteers for suicide missions.
There are many gods. Mohamed, Zeus, Raiden, Ganesha just to name a few. How can you say there is only one God when there are clearly many. That's like saying there is only one fruit and bananas are that fruit.
What you should say is that you believe in only one God and the stories you enjoy mostly come from the King James Bible. Me, I like Star Wars books but they need to be cannon. Your wasting your time with anything that is not cannon.
But really, what does our reading preference have to do with any of this?
Face it, IT's job is to facilitate the rest of the company's performance of the real purposes of the company. IT doesn't make money for the company it enables the money making areas to make the money.
Okay, everybody tell me how wrong I am.
Gladly. It's not IT's job to facilitate and serve the rest of the company. IT doesn't bring in the money but IT manages the expenses that allow the company to make money. Why does everyone forget that it cost money to make money? A contractor needs to buy a hammer to do his job so he buys a hammer. He needs it to do his job. What he doesn't do is buy a hammer every week or every time a new type of hammer is released. Otherwise he would be buying more hammers than making money.
Lets also say this contractor is so big and busy he hires a hammer department to handle buying and distribution of hammers. Now workers look at the hammer department and an expense and bitch when they don't get a new hammer when ever they demand one, even though the hammer department will free up more time for the workers to make more money and keep expenses down by not facilitating every whim of the workers.
You're all part of the same team, you all need to work together to get what you need, not just what you want.
Your talking about machines, were talking about people. Metrics turn people against one another. Before you have a group of people working together to solve problems and get work done, after you have individual people working on getting their numbers to look good or at the very least, not to be the worst in the department. Helping someone else with a problem does not help me keep my numbers up. Helping other people actually hurts my numbers, sometimes so much that I get in trouble for not having good numbers despite the fact I'm the most knowledgeable, efficient and important member of the team so why help the department?
Look at some of the comments here already, make sure the numbers don't make you look bad, make the numbers point to someone else on the team. Already Slashdot wants to knife someone in the back just to save their own asses. Sadly the reality is that is what you need to do to keep your job sometimes.
It didn't say that our metrics are wrong but warns that not understanding them is very dangerous. You need to understand the value of what you're measuring and what your goals are.
Lets take the metric of issues resolved for an IT department.
Agent 1 - Issue 1 - Faulty keys on keyboard, Replaced keyboard - Resolved
Issue 2 - Faulty monitor, reconnected loose cable - Resolved
Issue 3 - User locked out of account, restored account - Resolved
Agent 2 - Inventory database inaccessible, troubleshoot servers, network connections, software, data corrupted, restored data from backup - Resolved
By using the metric of per issue you have granted equal value to any and all issues so even though agent 2 is working on something much more important and would take much longer to fix, by the metrics defined, agent 1 has done 3 times the work than agent 2. Now if you base your rewards on this faulty metric, agent 1 receives a bonus and agent 2 gets laid off despite the face that agent 1 couldn't do what agent 2 did.
You also need to understand what goal you are trying to accomplish. If your only goal is to increase issues resolved than you can make that number go up, but people will find the fastest and easiest way to do so. On the surface that sounds great but in reality everything else suffers because you have declared that not important. Costs go way up because parts are replaced instead of being fixed. Productivity goes down because problems get bandages and declared resolved when everyone knows the problem will reoccur again and again. Great for IT because they get a ton more easy resolved issues but sucks for everyone that is trying to use those resources.
It's still getting something for nothing, and maybe you spend the same amount in entertainment, but its distributed totally differently. If you spend $100 on some blockbuster concert and then pirate 10 albums from smaller bands, the only one winning is the big act. Rationalize it any way you want, but its stealing either way.
First of all, no. It's not stealing. Stealing is the incorrect term. Nothing is being taken, information is being copied. If you want want to use a term, the one your looking for is copyright infringement.
Second, it's not copyright infringement because you can only break the law when the law says something is wrong. The government has come out to say a particular activity is not against the law.
Third, finally a body recognizes that money is not infinite. If you only have $100.00 to spend and you plan on spending it, there is no more money to be spent. If you choose to spend it all on a concert then so be it. There is no money left to buy any of those albums if you wanted to or not. You valued that concert more than those albums so that's where your money went. If other people value the concert the same way then it will be successful and make tons of money. Not everyone will think the same way. Some will value those albums more than some stupid concert and will buy albums. If they are good they more people will buy them. If they are crap then no one will buy them. If they are great then maybe I'll go to one of their concerts.
Try working in helpdesk or a call center. The first think you learn is that people have no idea how to describe what is actually going on. "I'm having a problem with the Windows thing. The thing is not working. I click the thing and the thing does not do it's thing."
While helpdesk taking over without you expecting it is unacceptable, the two minuets it takes to connect and click on the three buttons, disconnect and carry on with life is always faster than the ten minuets it takes to read every window that is open and describe what your trying to do in the first place before the thing "broke"
I can agree with that. Just look at IE. The browser war was between Netscape and IE and new features came out to out shine the other. Then with the release of IE6 and Netscape died, Microsoft stopped all development of their browser. It worked, not great but it worked. Years later with no change, Firefox came out and started taking market share, and soon followed Chrome and then all of a sudden IE comes out with a new version that just basically just tries to catch up with the new browsers. Now that Microsoft has to compete with other browers, there are regular updates and actual development.
So basically, competition is good for development.
But when you're still providing us with Windows XP in 2011, you are doing it wrong.
Explain why we can't have what we want, instead of just brushing off our concerns with "policy" or "too expensive to support"
Actually you need to be doing a better job of thinking about and explaining why you DO need something you want. So your running XP. Yea it's old now but so what. Does it still work? Of course it does, software just doesn't stop working. Why exactly do you need to be running Windows 7? Your email doesn't get sent any faster. Maybe in your case you do need the latest OS but the only argument you have put on the table is XP is old and most office workers do not actually need the latest and greatest of everything as the latest version of Word really isn't going to change how you work.
What he produced was reviews. What he was paid for was to review products and write reviews about those products. He was not paid to produce Twitter followers. On his personal Twitter account he pointed to the work he produced and followers grew naturally.
It was no ones fault when Noah first created the account because no one knew that Twitter would become useful or what it is today. It is Phonedog's fault for deciding that there is value in the Twitter account and doing nothing about it until after Noah left the company.
What Phonedog should have done is created it's own official Twitter account for official tweets only and directed Noah to point his followers to also follow the official channel. Then they would have clearly defined what is company property and personal property. Noah could have been responsible for both accounts and still post work related stuff on his personal account, as long as the correct stuff was posted on the official account too. Basically Phonedog took advantage of the situation because the net result was that they benefited from Noah's personal account so they did nothing about it. Now that they are no longer benefiting, they are throwing a tantrum. Unless Noah signed some all encompassing agreement when he was hired, Phonedog should not get anything.
Slashdot Mirror
It's called a non-compete clause. It's there to protect companies from employees that use company resources to research and develop new ideas then quit, form their own company and then produce something with the information taken. You can do anything else that you want during that period but if you start a business that basically does what your former employer did, they can sue you. After that period is done for what ever you signed in your contract, then you can create a company that does exactly what your former employer did if you want.
Because on your cable you don't have a choice about what is available or not available and over your internet connection, Bell does not have a choice about what is available or not available.
Two (2) points.
1. Arguments have been made about multiple copies on a computer, such as RAID 1 or loading the data to memory but the arguments don't stand up because it is a function of the device. The is how computers work and you can't change that. Transferring a file requires multiple copies to created to facilitate the copying but the end result is a single copy.
2. The number of copies doesn't matter so much as usage. For example, my small high school had some research software (i can't remember exactly what it was) but only 10 license keys. The software was installed on every single computer as part of the image but only 10 copies could be used at once. If you wanted to load the software, the computer checked with the server for the total number of copies running. If it was less than 10 it would load, if not then it would not load. The software was as close as the nearest computer but at any time there were never more than 10 copies running at once.
It doesn't mater if the original copy existed for a few seconds or a month after the sale, as long as the original file was never played again and there was some sort of record kept to indicate the file is no longer legal which could be as simple as moving the file to a folder label "Sold Files"
Frankly you could keep the files forever and claim them as a back up, just don't play them or try to sell them again.
You can sell what ever the hell you want if you can find a buyer. The thing is ITunes doesn't need to delete a thing because it it a licensed distribute or manufacturer. They can create as many copies as they want to sell because for every sale a cut goes back to the recording studio or who ever controls the rights as per their agreement.
What this ruling confirms is that I can buy an mp3 file from you for any cost we agree on, (could be free or $0.01, $0.99, $10,000) and I get the copy from you AND you delete the original file. Nothing new, just transferred and my copy is 100% legal and so is the transaction.
You assume the money was spent on special effects. In reality more money was spend on advertising. TV ads are not free. Posters are not free. Billboard space is not free. Take out the advertising budget to get a better look at production costs.
Actually you really don't need to over analyze the model as it's self regulating. The bottom line is you need a good product. If it's crap, no one will buy it, it's it's good, many people will buy it. As the ratio of pirate to purchase goes up, the less profitable software will be. As businesses close and migrate away from software the demand for good software goes up as there is less supply. With less supply, more people will be willing to pay for good software reversing the pirate to purchase ratio.
Business make software to make money and always will as there is a core group of people that demand software that will pay for it. Worrying about how you could have made a little more money or being upset that someone got something for nothing or throwing money at a group of people that are not willing to pay you, takes away from the group that wants to pay you.
Look at the music industry, if they focused on the people that bought their music and made it easier for them to buy it and share it, they would have more friends and money but instead they decided to focus on the people that don't want to pay by suing people for ridiculous amounts of money, creating DRM software that takes away from the people that are supporting them and trying to pass new laws that would let them do more of the same.
That's not what I hear. If someone says "I wish I left more money behind for my family." I don't hear, I wish I worked more. I hear, I wish I managed my money better. Most people that live pay cheque to pay cheque are poor at money management because they just want things now. Looking back at a life you might realize that if you put off going on a bunch of cruises and made bigger payments on your mortgage, it would have been payed of years sooner and saved a huge amount of interest.
There are two sides to wealth. There is how much you make and how much you spend.
There are very few people that actually would continue to work if they won the lottery. There is a large group of people that say they won't quit their jobs but the fact that they are now rich really hasn't sunk in yet. Give them a few weeks, maybe a month or two, and in some cases, a year or so to understand how things are different.
First is that they don't NEED to work any more. When you spend a large percentage of your life needing to work to pay the bills, it's hard to think about not needing to work anymore when it happens so suddenly.
Second is how other people start treating them. People start being your friend that wouldn't talk to you before, then people asking for money, can I borrow a few bucks, how about the lotto winner get this round of beers, I have a great investment if I could borrow a few thousand, my mother is real sick but can't afford the treatments. It's about that time you realize that if you don't give people money they start treating you like a selfish dick or if you do give them money that it cost you more than you're making at this job, it's time to get out and enjoy your self.
Most people that would work after big winnings are people that will work for them selves. Start a small business doing what they love and answer to no one.
I can see that your working on several assumptions that are just not true. The first is that theft is the same as copyright infringement. Different laws, different actions, different consequences. If I steal a tv, I have taken the materials from you. In order for you to sell that tv you need to buy more materials to make that tv and pay someone to assemble that tv and maybe ship it to your location to replace that tv. All of those things can easily be measured in how it directly harmed you financially. This has nothing to do with how much you can have made selling that tv. Which bring us to copying media. If I copy a song, you haven't lost a thing. You have to expend zero effort to re cope losses because nothing was lost. All of these losses big business whines about are potential sales. Potentially someone could have bought this but now they defiantly won't because that have a copy.
Next you think that everyone is wrong because laws must be followed. Laws are just a set of rules that determine how people want to live decided by the people. If the vast majority act in contrary to the law, then it is the law that is wrong, not the people. Downloading and sharing is something that happens all the time, every day by common every day people. Your riot example is no where near the same as what happens online every day. A Riot is a single event usually occurring in a single night by a small group.
The final assumption is that an author should be paid or there won't be anymore books. Frankly, if they can't make money writing with sharing going on, then they shouldn't write. Maybe there will be a few less books but that will only increase demand for good books and if the writing is good, people will always pay for good work.
"He has a lot of connections, ones I want too." - Paul Christoforo referring to Mike Krahulik
Yup, still a big asshole. Paul still considers your worth by who you know. Thinks Mike helped make Pax by knowing a lot of high up people. Doesn't think your important unless you know someone else who is. Anyone who still has business relations with this guy really need to seriously evaluate what he's doing for you.
You watch too many movies. When was the last time the Yanks saved anybody? Americans can't even save them selves. New Orleans ring any bells?
You loose $57.50 in value. No different than buying some toy or gadget for $120.00 just to find out two weeks later it's on sale for 50% off or buying something else for $60.00 and breaking it as soon as you get it out of the box. There is risk in owning assets regardless what form they are in, be it money, stocks, gold bars or just stuff.
Define slow? 1 year? 10 years? 100 years? Who's to say that were going to fast or to slow. As markets change, businesses will rise and business will fall. Who's to say that we need to drag our heels to keep certain entities around longer because its too fast or to rip the band-aid off quickly to get it over with so we can get on with the future.
A good example is the video rental market. To me anyway, when I was younger, my options on renting a video was to be lucky enough to find something that I might enjoy that wasn't already rented out from the corner store and to choose between 1 night rental or 2 night rental. Then out of nowhere a business called Blockbuster came out of nowhere that offered so much more. Week long rentals from the same price as a 2 night rental. Dozens of copies of the same popular movie that almost guarantees that a copy would be available all of the time. Basically it was much better than what used to be the only option.
Mom and Pop videos stores complained and shut down because they couldn't or wouldn't compete. The market had changed and Blockbuster took over a large portion of that market. But the market continued to change and what seems like a short while later, demand for video rental gave way to on demand streaming services and Blockbuster has shut down a majority of it's operations and we the consumers watched Blockbusters stores close with as little compassion as we did for the mom and pop stores.
Now was that too fast or to slow? No, it was perfect because it happened at the speed of the changing markets. Blockbuster could have changed but it didn't so it is dying. We don't need tax breaks or profit sharing to keep Blockbuster around for a little longer. We need to do nothing except as consumers, decide where to spend our money. If someone came along and embraced ebooks with a solid distribution system that made authors, customers and libraries happy as hell and put every single major publisher out of business tomorrow, then so be it. Either the market will support it or it will not. Swallow that bitter pill now and move forward instead of putting it off a few more years. The result is the same except the pain of change last so much longer.
Are you kidding? Do you know the amount of business and money went through the WTC? Banks, insurance and many world players had offices there that shut down on the day of the attacks. Only good off site backups and worst case scenario planing kept everything running afterwords. Where else could you do that kind of economic damage with a single target.
The Stature of liberty? Really? How would that hurt the US? You kill maybe 100 people on a busy day and just piss off America. The cost to rebuild or repair would be a small small fraction of what is just being spend to rebuild the WTC.
Wall Street? Sure if you hit the right area you might cause similar damage but where do you hit? You have 1 plane traveling at hundreds of miles per hour and your trying to pick out 1 grey building out of hundreds of grey buildings all from a view of the city you have never seen before. Odds are you would hit the fish market instead of anything truly important..
Targeting a symbol is stupid unless you have nothing to loose like when the Taliban blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001. That took little to no planning, little resources and certainly no suicide bombers. And what did that get them? Their side went "Yay", Those on the other side went "You bastards!" and the rest of us went, "that sucks, oh well." and we went on with out lives like nothing happened.
If the Taliban want to attack America, they want to hit the life lines. They want to hit the financial market, they want to hit the utilities like power and water. Anything that would give the most bang for their bucks because they only have so much money and you only get so many volunteers for suicide missions.
There are many gods. Mohamed, Zeus, Raiden, Ganesha just to name a few. How can you say there is only one God when there are clearly many. That's like saying there is only one fruit and bananas are that fruit.
What you should say is that you believe in only one God and the stories you enjoy mostly come from the King James Bible. Me, I like Star Wars books but they need to be cannon. Your wasting your time with anything that is not cannon.
But really, what does our reading preference have to do with any of this?
Face it, IT's job is to facilitate the rest of the company's performance of the real purposes of the company. IT doesn't make money for the company it enables the money making areas to make the money. Okay, everybody tell me how wrong I am.
Gladly. It's not IT's job to facilitate and serve the rest of the company. IT doesn't bring in the money but IT manages the expenses that allow the company to make money. Why does everyone forget that it cost money to make money? A contractor needs to buy a hammer to do his job so he buys a hammer. He needs it to do his job. What he doesn't do is buy a hammer every week or every time a new type of hammer is released. Otherwise he would be buying more hammers than making money.
Lets also say this contractor is so big and busy he hires a hammer department to handle buying and distribution of hammers. Now workers look at the hammer department and an expense and bitch when they don't get a new hammer when ever they demand one, even though the hammer department will free up more time for the workers to make more money and keep expenses down by not facilitating every whim of the workers.
You're all part of the same team, you all need to work together to get what you need, not just what you want.
Your talking about machines, were talking about people. Metrics turn people against one another. Before you have a group of people working together to solve problems and get work done, after you have individual people working on getting their numbers to look good or at the very least, not to be the worst in the department. Helping someone else with a problem does not help me keep my numbers up. Helping other people actually hurts my numbers, sometimes so much that I get in trouble for not having good numbers despite the fact I'm the most knowledgeable, efficient and important member of the team so why help the department?
Look at some of the comments here already, make sure the numbers don't make you look bad, make the numbers point to someone else on the team. Already Slashdot wants to knife someone in the back just to save their own asses. Sadly the reality is that is what you need to do to keep your job sometimes.
It didn't say that our metrics are wrong but warns that not understanding them is very dangerous. You need to understand the value of what you're measuring and what your goals are.
Lets take the metric of issues resolved for an IT department.
Agent 1 - Issue 1 - Faulty keys on keyboard, Replaced keyboard - Resolved
Issue 2 - Faulty monitor, reconnected loose cable - Resolved
Issue 3 - User locked out of account, restored account - Resolved
Agent 2 - Inventory database inaccessible, troubleshoot servers, network connections, software, data corrupted, restored data from backup - Resolved
By using the metric of per issue you have granted equal value to any and all issues so even though agent 2 is working on something much more important and would take much longer to fix, by the metrics defined, agent 1 has done 3 times the work than agent 2. Now if you base your rewards on this faulty metric, agent 1 receives a bonus and agent 2 gets laid off despite the face that agent 1 couldn't do what agent 2 did.
You also need to understand what goal you are trying to accomplish. If your only goal is to increase issues resolved than you can make that number go up, but people will find the fastest and easiest way to do so. On the surface that sounds great but in reality everything else suffers because you have declared that not important. Costs go way up because parts are replaced instead of being fixed. Productivity goes down because problems get bandages and declared resolved when everyone knows the problem will reoccur again and again. Great for IT because they get a ton more easy resolved issues but sucks for everyone that is trying to use those resources.
It's still getting something for nothing, and maybe you spend the same amount in entertainment, but its distributed totally differently. If you spend $100 on some blockbuster concert and then pirate 10 albums from smaller bands, the only one winning is the big act. Rationalize it any way you want, but its stealing either way.
First of all, no. It's not stealing. Stealing is the incorrect term. Nothing is being taken, information is being copied. If you want want to use a term, the one your looking for is copyright infringement.
Second, it's not copyright infringement because you can only break the law when the law says something is wrong. The government has come out to say a particular activity is not against the law.
Third, finally a body recognizes that money is not infinite. If you only have $100.00 to spend and you plan on spending it, there is no more money to be spent. If you choose to spend it all on a concert then so be it. There is no money left to buy any of those albums if you wanted to or not. You valued that concert more than those albums so that's where your money went. If other people value the concert the same way then it will be successful and make tons of money. Not everyone will think the same way. Some will value those albums more than some stupid concert and will buy albums. If they are good they more people will buy them. If they are crap then no one will buy them. If they are great then maybe I'll go to one of their concerts.
Try working in helpdesk or a call center. The first think you learn is that people have no idea how to describe what is actually going on. "I'm having a problem with the Windows thing. The thing is not working. I click the thing and the thing does not do it's thing."
While helpdesk taking over without you expecting it is unacceptable, the two minuets it takes to connect and click on the three buttons, disconnect and carry on with life is always faster than the ten minuets it takes to read every window that is open and describe what your trying to do in the first place before the thing "broke"
I can agree with that. Just look at IE. The browser war was between Netscape and IE and new features came out to out shine the other. Then with the release of IE6 and Netscape died, Microsoft stopped all development of their browser. It worked, not great but it worked. Years later with no change, Firefox came out and started taking market share, and soon followed Chrome and then all of a sudden IE comes out with a new version that just basically just tries to catch up with the new browsers. Now that Microsoft has to compete with other browers, there are regular updates and actual development.
So basically, competition is good for development.
But when you're still providing us with Windows XP in 2011, you are doing it wrong.
Explain why we can't have what we want, instead of just brushing off our concerns with "policy" or "too expensive to support"
Actually you need to be doing a better job of thinking about and explaining why you DO need something you want. So your running XP. Yea it's old now but so what. Does it still work? Of course it does, software just doesn't stop working. Why exactly do you need to be running Windows 7? Your email doesn't get sent any faster.
Maybe in your case you do need the latest OS but the only argument you have put on the table is XP is old and most office workers do not actually need the latest and greatest of everything as the latest version of Word really isn't going to change how you work.
What he produced was reviews. What he was paid for was to review products and write reviews about those products. He was not paid to produce Twitter followers. On his personal Twitter account he pointed to the work he produced and followers grew naturally.
It was no ones fault when Noah first created the account because no one knew that Twitter would become useful or what it is today. It is Phonedog's fault for deciding that there is value in the Twitter account and doing nothing about it until after Noah left the company.
What Phonedog should have done is created it's own official Twitter account for official tweets only and directed Noah to point his followers to also follow the official channel. Then they would have clearly defined what is company property and personal property. Noah could have been responsible for both accounts and still post work related stuff on his personal account, as long as the correct stuff was posted on the official account too. Basically Phonedog took advantage of the situation because the net result was that they benefited from Noah's personal account so they did nothing about it. Now that they are no longer benefiting, they are throwing a tantrum. Unless Noah signed some all encompassing agreement when he was hired, Phonedog should not get anything.
How can you ask for something back that was never theirs to begin with?