What's you're point? That you can avoid incopetence by never outsourcing anything? The way you avoid incompetence is by not dealing with incompotent people.
All of the top ppl are buried deep into the Communist party
Yes, and everybody at Koch Brothers belongs to the Republican Party. That gives them influence over the party, not the other way around.
The majority remains under Chinese control.
I assume you meant "under Communist control." But your conflating "China" with "Communist" is kind of revealing. Yeah, the country is still controlled by a cadre of people whose official goal is world revolution, the end of capitalism, and the worker's paradise, yada, yada, yada. But look at the way they've run China for almost 30 years: like a business. To make that business work, they've given people economic autonomy (in their minds, much better than giving people the political autonomy the 1989 protesters demanded), they've collaborated with various capitalistic entities (including businesses in Taiwan, with whom they are technically at war!), and even showing some skill as capitalists themselves.
You may have noticed that American politicians profess to believe whatever they need to profess to believe in order to get power, and that it often has nothing to do with how they actually handle that power. What makes you think Chinese politicians are any different? Because they wave red flags? So do Republicans!
Maybe I got voted up because people can see for themselves that all this is happening. Maybe the people you know buy new computers every few years and maintain their own in-office networks — but that's not the trend, not by a long shot. There's resistance to moving away from these things, but the fact remains that they cost a shitload to maintain. And what do businesses worry about these days? Cost. Then they worry some more about cost. And then if they have some spare time they worry about cost.
When you say that the cloud is nothing new, you're assuming that "cloud" is just marketspeak for "servers". Wrong. It's about SaaS and other technologies that make access to applications a kind of commodity. Saying "this is nothing new" is like somebody in 1981 saying "PCs are nothing new, we've had computers for more than 30 years." What's new here is not the basic technology, but the economics and infrastructure that makes that technology more available.
Which is why HP (as mentioned in the article) is trying to save money by shifting to cloud-based CRM and HR instead of continuing to run their own servers. Ironic, really.
BTW, you mention the need to run an Exchange server? Every office I ever worked in that had its own Exchange server had major problems because the damn thing is hard to administer. If I had been there as an IT guy, I would have insisted that they go to an Exchange provider and let them worry about that shit. Cloud, cloud, cloud.
I read through the list feeling more and more cynical. Adaptation of best seller, staring on Screen Saint Thomas. Plotless CGI movie. High concept CGI movie. Comic horror movie. And so on... Some of these will have their fans, I guess, but I find it hard to care about them.
Then the last one on the list is a new movie from Alfonso Cuarón. Finally! If you've seen Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban or Children of Men you'll know this is the only big name director who understands all the little touches make an imaginary world plausible. Probably the only movie on the list I'll bother with.
I neglected to read TFA. If I had done so, I would have noticed something that made my point for me: Whitman is tossing internal applications and replacing them with cloud applications. Which certainloy run on white box systems. So why should I buy an HP brand server if HP itself doesn't use them?
Like the Sun sales guys, you're focusing on all the technical issues and ignoring economics. Commmodity systems are cheap. Economies of scale make them cheap to buy, and the fact that they run standard software on standard OS's makes them cheap to own. In a cloud environment, you just dion't care that they're less powerful — you just buy more of them.
Once got into an argument with a Sun sales guy over an x86 system I was using for an internal wiki. He called me lazy because I ran Linux on it instead of Solaris. I explained how the I needed certain standard Perl libraries that were widely used on Linux but which were utterly broken on Solaris. I offered to go back to Solaris if he'd help with the resources I would need to get those libraries working. Never heard back from him.
Pretty much everybody who needs a PC already has one, and will go as long as 10 years between replacements. Servers are still big business, but nowadays data centers want to buy cheap white boxes, since any reliability issues are handled by cloud software. So name brand computers are dead.
When I worked for Sun's hardware division, I believed that the company could turn itself around by firing all the sales idiots who thought x86 systems were a passing fad. (Which earned my emity because I worked on some fancy x86 systems that were easily the best on the market.) Now that I've been out working on cloud systems for 3 years, it's become obvious that the brand of computer an app is running on matters as little as the specific processor. Commodification of everything is the new normal.
No argument, though my ire is directed less at the leadership of big business than at a tax and financial system that favors the megacorp. If we're ever going to start re-importing manufacturing jobs, we need small and medium businesses to be able to finance their ops, something they can't do now.
And I think it's a little simplistic to think of Lenovo as an arm of the Chinese government. Their actual equity is only about 15%, and even that's indirect. Now, you might think the fact that they're an ideological dictatorship that doesn't tolerate serious dissent would still give them a lot of control. But in fact the Communists have devolved a lot of authority to local and private entities. (What private entities in an officially socialist state? Well, the fact that they have no say in "local affairs" in Taiwan has turned out to be an advantage.) You often hear of the central government being stymied by local corruption and politics.
The Red Flag is now little more than a symbol. They've gone from a Soviet-style centralized economy to a modern enterprise powerhouse in just a couple of decades. The only way to do that was for the central government to give up a lot economic control.
The "worst crowd"? I was unaware that Donald Trump was a commie.
U.S. companies don't check with their stockholders every time they add a hundred-empoloyee manufacturing line, so Lenovo doesn't do the same with the Chinese Government. Which, incidentally, doesn't have a direct or majority stake in Lenovo. What they do have is the semi-autonomous Chinese Academy of Sciences, which has a 1/3 stake in Legend Holdings, which has a 1/3 stake in Lenovo. The other 2/3 of Lenovo belongs to private entities, including non-Chinese investors.
I share your cynical view of U.S. business leadership, but Lenovo's attempt to PR this as a bold new U.S. manufacturing initiative is pure spin. They're simply expanding a small facility they bought from IBM years ago.
It's an abbreviation for "Slashdot editors are not detail-oriented".
The "makes sense" comment is lame. Proximity to your HQ is not a priority for factories. The right kind of labor pool and low operating costs are far more important. The SE U.S. is known for both, which is why IBM built up there. Both Lenovo facilities are probably part of the the real estate they acquired when they bought IBM's PC division.
(Yes, I am an expert, kinda. Three years on various Sun hardware product teams.)
This is boutique manufacturing. Not particularly newsworthy, since it doesn't represent any shift in Asia's dominance in manufacturing in general and computers in particular. What would be significant is more factories that can compete with Asian factories when it comes time to bid on manufacturing contracts. ("Manufacturers" no longer own factories, beyond a few legacy facilities.) Such factories do exist in the SE; Sun often contracted with them when I was there. But they're a tiny minority struggling to compete with much bigger operations in Asia and Latin America.
You're right, it isn't private security that's inept. It's outsourced security that's inept. Or at least it is when keeping cost down is the primary consideration — which is usually the reason for outsourcing.
Oh right, a woman whose sole claim to fame is that she said something really stupid has a one-time spike of hits, mostly by people who are thinking "Wow, what a stupid cow!" That's exactly equivalent to a guy who gets millions of viewers every week, most of whom are thinking "Tell it like it is, Glenn!"
Well, of course it's a tragic story. Goldfinger is obviously the hero. I mean he gets all the good lines ("No, Mr Bond, I want you to die!") while James Bond stands around making bad puns.
Gerrymandering is the creative drawing of district boundaries to ensure a desired outcome. It's not a good thing, but it's hardly fraud, since there's no disconnect between who got the votes and who got elected.
Intimidating voters is an evil thing — using extortion to influence an election. But once again, not fraud.
Not all evils are the same, which is why we have different laws to cover stealing from a bank with a forged check and stealing from a bank with a gun.
Lots of people don't play MMORPGs that suck up half their lives. What kind of cover story includes that much time spent on a collective fantasy? Not one that includes actual time spent gathering intelligence.
You mention that James Bond is fiction. That's very true. Real secret agents don't have elaborate schemes for doing ordinary things, like talking to people.
1. Of course he's nuts, but do you think it would be impossible for the CIA to use an online game like Eve to communicate in some circumstances?
Right, because there's nothing suspicious about an undercover operative who suddenly needs to contact headquarters firing up a video game. I guess that would be somebody infiltrating the Al Qada's notorious gold farming operation.
I have to go with Occam's Razor here. Or maybe Occam's Meat Axe, since the differences really, really small. But I find it slightly more plausible that Mitt things that his joke is funny than that he hasn't seen Goldfinger.
Slashdot Mirror
Alas the X4**** are no more. They all used AMD processors, and Oracle has decided to stick with Intel.
What's you're point? That you can avoid incopetence by never outsourcing anything? The way you avoid incompetence is by not dealing with incompotent people.
Dude, if you're going to argue with someone, argue with them. Don't just contradict.
All of the top ppl are buried deep into the Communist party
Yes, and everybody at Koch Brothers belongs to the Republican Party. That gives them influence over the party, not the other way around.
The majority remains under Chinese control.
I assume you meant "under Communist control." But your conflating "China" with "Communist" is kind of revealing. Yeah, the country is still controlled by a cadre of people whose official goal is world revolution, the end of capitalism, and the worker's paradise, yada, yada, yada. But look at the way they've run China for almost 30 years: like a business. To make that business work, they've given people economic autonomy (in their minds, much better than giving people the political autonomy the 1989 protesters demanded), they've collaborated with various capitalistic entities (including businesses in Taiwan, with whom they are technically at war!), and even showing some skill as capitalists themselves.
You may have noticed that American politicians profess to believe whatever they need to profess to believe in order to get power, and that it often has nothing to do with how they actually handle that power. What makes you think Chinese politicians are any different? Because they wave red flags? So do Republicans!
Maybe I got voted up because people can see for themselves that all this is happening. Maybe the people you know buy new computers every few years and maintain their own in-office networks — but that's not the trend, not by a long shot. There's resistance to moving away from these things, but the fact remains that they cost a shitload to maintain. And what do businesses worry about these days? Cost. Then they worry some more about cost. And then if they have some spare time they worry about cost.
When you say that the cloud is nothing new, you're assuming that "cloud" is just marketspeak for "servers". Wrong. It's about SaaS and other technologies that make access to applications a kind of commodity. Saying "this is nothing new" is like somebody in 1981 saying "PCs are nothing new, we've had computers for more than 30 years." What's new here is not the basic technology, but the economics and infrastructure that makes that technology more available.
Which is why HP (as mentioned in the article) is trying to save money by shifting to cloud-based CRM and HR instead of continuing to run their own servers. Ironic, really.
BTW, you mention the need to run an Exchange server? Every office I ever worked in that had its own Exchange server had major problems because the damn thing is hard to administer. If I had been there as an IT guy, I would have insisted that they go to an Exchange provider and let them worry about that shit. Cloud, cloud, cloud.
I read through the list feeling more and more cynical. Adaptation of best seller, staring on Screen Saint Thomas. Plotless CGI movie. High concept CGI movie. Comic horror movie. And so on... Some of these will have their fans, I guess, but I find it hard to care about them.
Then the last one on the list is a new movie from Alfonso Cuarón. Finally! If you've seen Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban or Children of Men you'll know this is the only big name director who understands all the little touches make an imaginary world plausible. Probably the only movie on the list I'll bother with.
I neglected to read TFA. If I had done so, I would have noticed something that made my point for me: Whitman is tossing internal applications and replacing them with cloud applications. Which certainloy run on white box systems. So why should I buy an HP brand server if HP itself doesn't use them?
Like the Sun sales guys, you're focusing on all the technical issues and ignoring economics. Commmodity systems are cheap. Economies of scale make them cheap to buy, and the fact that they run standard software on standard OS's makes them cheap to own. In a cloud environment, you just dion't care that they're less powerful — you just buy more of them.
Once got into an argument with a Sun sales guy over an x86 system I was using for an internal wiki. He called me lazy because I ran Linux on it instead of Solaris. I explained how the I needed certain standard Perl libraries that were widely used on Linux but which were utterly broken on Solaris. I offered to go back to Solaris if he'd help with the resources I would need to get those libraries working. Never heard back from him.
I'll say it again, commodification is everything.
Pretty much everybody who needs a PC already has one, and will go as long as 10 years between replacements. Servers are still big business, but nowadays data centers want to buy cheap white boxes, since any reliability issues are handled by cloud software. So name brand computers are dead.
When I worked for Sun's hardware division, I believed that the company could turn itself around by firing all the sales idiots who thought x86 systems were a passing fad. (Which earned my emity because I worked on some fancy x86 systems that were easily the best on the market.) Now that I've been out working on cloud systems for 3 years, it's become obvious that the brand of computer an app is running on matters as little as the specific processor. Commodification of everything is the new normal.
No argument, though my ire is directed less at the leadership of big business than at a tax and financial system that favors the megacorp. If we're ever going to start re-importing manufacturing jobs, we need small and medium businesses to be able to finance their ops, something they can't do now.
And I think it's a little simplistic to think of Lenovo as an arm of the Chinese government. Their actual equity is only about 15%, and even that's indirect. Now, you might think the fact that they're an ideological dictatorship that doesn't tolerate serious dissent would still give them a lot of control. But in fact the Communists have devolved a lot of authority to local and private entities. (What private entities in an officially socialist state? Well, the fact that they have no say in "local affairs" in Taiwan has turned out to be an advantage.) You often hear of the central government being stymied by local corruption and politics.
The Red Flag is now little more than a symbol. They've gone from a Soviet-style centralized economy to a modern enterprise powerhouse in just a couple of decades. The only way to do that was for the central government to give up a lot economic control.
The "worst crowd"? I was unaware that Donald Trump was a commie.
U.S. companies don't check with their stockholders every time they add a hundred-empoloyee manufacturing line, so Lenovo doesn't do the same with the Chinese Government. Which, incidentally, doesn't have a direct or majority stake in Lenovo. What they do have is the semi-autonomous Chinese Academy of Sciences, which has a 1/3 stake in Legend Holdings, which has a 1/3 stake in Lenovo. The other 2/3 of Lenovo belongs to private entities, including non-Chinese investors.
So no big conspiracy here, sorry.
I share your cynical view of U.S. business leadership, but Lenovo's attempt to PR this as a bold new U.S. manufacturing initiative is pure spin. They're simply expanding a small facility they bought from IBM years ago.
You're late toi the party. By 20 years or so.
It's an abbreviation for "Slashdot editors are not detail-oriented".
The "makes sense" comment is lame. Proximity to your HQ is not a priority for factories. The right kind of labor pool and low operating costs are far more important. The SE U.S. is known for both, which is why IBM built up there. Both Lenovo facilities are probably part of the the real estate they acquired when they bought IBM's PC division.
(Yes, I am an expert, kinda. Three years on various Sun hardware product teams.)
This is boutique manufacturing. Not particularly newsworthy, since it doesn't represent any shift in Asia's dominance in manufacturing in general and computers in particular. What would be significant is more factories that can compete with Asian factories when it comes time to bid on manufacturing contracts. ("Manufacturers" no longer own factories, beyond a few legacy facilities.) Such factories do exist in the SE; Sun often contracted with them when I was there. But they're a tiny minority struggling to compete with much bigger operations in Asia and Latin America.
You're right, it isn't private security that's inept. It's outsourced security that's inept. Or at least it is when keeping cost down is the primary consideration — which is usually the reason for outsourcing.
Darn, you beat me to it. OK, how about:
A Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim meet on the street.
"Silverstein!" says the Jew. "Long time no see! Who's your friend?"
"His name's Abdullah," says the Muslim. "But he's no friend of mine, not since he converted."
I could respond to that, but it would blow my cover....
Oh right, a woman whose sole claim to fame is that she said something really stupid has a one-time spike of hits, mostly by people who are thinking "Wow, what a stupid cow!" That's exactly equivalent to a guy who gets millions of viewers every week, most of whom are thinking "Tell it like it is, Glenn!"
Can't think why that never occurred to me.
Well, of course it's a tragic story. Goldfinger is obviously the hero. I mean he gets all the good lines ("No, Mr Bond, I want you to die!") while James Bond stands around making bad puns.
You act as if people on the liberal side dont say alot of stupid things.
Oh please. I'm not allowed to get snarky about Glen Beck without invoking the equal time rule?
Obama is gonna pay my rent, and we got the obama phone are 2 good counterpoints,
Let's see, Glenn Beck has 3 million viewers. Miss Obama Phone has how many?
Gerrymandering is the creative drawing of district boundaries to ensure a desired outcome. It's not a good thing, but it's hardly fraud, since there's no disconnect between who got the votes and who got elected.
Intimidating voters is an evil thing — using extortion to influence an election. But once again, not fraud.
Not all evils are the same, which is why we have different laws to cover stealing from a bank with a forged check and stealing from a bank with a gun.
*LOTS* of people play online games
Lots of people don't play MMORPGs that suck up half their lives. What kind of cover story includes that much time spent on a collective fantasy? Not one that includes actual time spent gathering intelligence.
You mention that James Bond is fiction. That's very true. Real secret agents don't have elaborate schemes for doing ordinary things, like talking to people.
I'm am saying this is all a global conspiracy to make people tear all their hair out!
1. Of course he's nuts, but do you think it would be impossible for the CIA to use an online game like Eve to communicate in some circumstances?
Right, because there's nothing suspicious about an undercover operative who suddenly needs to contact headquarters firing up a video game. I guess that would be somebody infiltrating the Al Qada's notorious gold farming operation.
I have to go with Occam's Razor here. Or maybe Occam's Meat Axe, since the differences really, really small. But I find it slightly more plausible that Mitt things that his joke is funny than that he hasn't seen Goldfinger.