IBM is giving a classic demonstration in how NOT to handle a problem. It has been demonstrated time and time again that the tactic of denying everything does not work. It doesn't work for politicians, it doesn't work for accounting firms, and it doesn't work for electronics manufacturers.
IBM could have come right out, admitted to a defect and paid the price for that. By admitting to it, and making sure to replace all of those defects, they would have bought themselves a huge amount of credibility. We'd all buy IBM drives knowing full well that if there was ever a design problem we'd hear about it and get it fixed.
Now, IBM is risking the reputation of their entire drive line through these shenanigans. Before IBM stood as one of the best drive manufacturers, but repeated issues with the GXP line are quickly submarining that. In the ultra-competitive hard drive market, this sort of problem could put that unit completely out of business.
I personally owned an IBM 75GXP, and it is the only hard drive I've ever owned that had a problem. I've been using hard drives since a 20MB box attached to my Atari 1040ST, and not a single one of them ever made a fuss. My defective drive has since been replaced, but it's of course with another IBM drive and now I continue to be concerned that maybe this drive will be defective too.
I wonder how long before people learn the lesson that covering your tracks, especially in this era of rapid distribution of information, is a bad policy.
While nobody paid the government for the frequencies that 802.11, there is a huge amount of business going on it 802.11 equipment. The amount of business thriving off the sale of 802.11 equipment dwarfs what little Sirius has manged to do. Ultimately the FCC doesn't care about the money that comes in from a spectrum sale, it's not like they get to keep it. They care about politics, and what will decide this is who can apply the most political pressure. Can Sirius trump Cisco, Lucent, Intel, and all the other electronics companies making a killing in the 802.11 market? Doubtful.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the FCC's job is to server the public interest by regulating radio spectrum. So can somebody explain to me how a subscription digital radio service is more in the public interest than wireless data networks? With any luck all the hardware manufacturers will go write their lobbyists some checks and keep the FCC out of this.
I know it's a joke but...
on
Google Juice
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· Score: 1
Not an entirely horrible idea:)
Just think Slashdot Effect + Google Bombs. A Google Nuke?
My count of 20 packages is based on the warning redhat distributed. They recommend upgrading some 22 packages on a Redhat 7.2 system. This includes several packages for the kernel, zlib itself, and a number of other applications that are statically linked such as cvs, dump, etc.
The scary thing is, I may have installed other apps that have zlib statically compiled that I don't even know about because they aren't part of the default vendor distribution.
Sounds like that disaster you speak of did just happen. Well, maybe not quite a disaster, but anytime I have to upgrade 20+ packages for one bug, that's bad.
The patch is already out. The thing that really sucks is how many packages use a statically compiled version of zlib. I now have to upgrade 22 seperate packages on my Redhat 7.2 box. Fun fun fun...
Really it depends on how much you enjoy the job and how much you can afford to be without pay. If I really enjoyed my job, and could afford to do so, I could be convinced to stay a month or two if I thought the company was about to turn around.
Of course during that month or two some portion of my time at the office would probably be spent actively seeking another job. Somehow I don't think your boss can get to irritated if you take the afternoon off for an interview if you haven't been paid in a month:). If you enjoy the job enough, it's better than sitting at home.
The one thing that I'd be a bit concerned about is how durable the device is. The rotating screen seems like something that's begging to just snap off at the slightest collision. Granted, I haven't actually held one of these things and seen how durable they are, but it sounds flimsy.
So sounds like Amnesty International should pick up the tab for developing PGP. I mean, I grant you, I think that PGP is a wonderful product and I'd like for network associates to keep it, but they are a business and if it's not making money for them, there's no reason for them to keep it around.
Personally I use GPG and think it works wonderfully, and Network Associates has nothing to do with that. May not have some of the bells and whistles of the full commercial PGP but it still does what PGP has always done, encrypt e-mail. Organizations like AI should be able to function fine with just that.
This is the oldest trick in the lazy geek handbook. If you don't want to do something, instead of saying you don't want to do it, say that it's just really hard or impossible for unspecified technical reasons. Smart managers, and judges shouldn't buy that sort of logic.
It amazes me how long it's taken for these ideas to ferment. I mean I was talking with people about the distributed OS concept back in 96 or so. I have to wonder why the concept has sat mostly unexplored for this long. Perhaps more importantly, I wonder why it's suddenly hot again. Is there some actual practical use for the technology that's bringing it back into the light? Or are people just thinking this is the next logical step of P2P and thinking that it will be hot because P2P is?
1) Rip, Mix, Burn is a cool tagline and picking on it makes better press than attacking parts of an operating system many people still haven't heard of
2) It's Microsoft's job to take on the Linux folks not Disney's. There are clear divisions of labor in the Illuminati.
Kudos to Eisner! The more that the copyright orthodoxy makes ridiculous statements like this, the more it makes it look like their proposals need a good second look. Let them scream from the mountains how everything should be protected because everybody is pirating. When they get to the point of labelling all of society as criminals all of society (hopefully including congress) is going to start wondering what the RIAA and the MPAA are smoking.
Actually, if you go with the theory that Linux admins are more expensive than Microsoft admins, you could end up paying the same amount but more money going to the government than in the original arrangement. If payroll is taxed, then increasing your payroll would increase the taxes you pay. While this doesn't effect your bottom line, because of the offsetting cost savings, it does mean more money in the government coffers.
I wonder if there is ever a legitimate reason to not release the source code to a piece of software. I'm not saying you necessarily provide the software under a Free license. But I can think of no reason why any piece of software shouldn't include source code for the end user.
Certainly it is well within your right to keep your product closed but why do it? If I come along and pirate your source code you can certainly take me to court for violating copyright laws. I can see that some people wouldn't want their software to be under the GPL because there's limitied possibility for consulting or training business. But providing the source code just seems like the right thing to do and I can't think of a reason why this should be a problem.
No, the government dosen't get that money because the companies hide the money they save in shady offshore partnerships. On the other hand we all know that Microsoft is a trustworthy and upstanding corporate citizen who pays all the taxes they are supposed to. Kudos to Mundie for his valid point.
I agree with your sentiment that slashdot is one of the few places that actually has ads I'm interested in. Actually up until now, the ads on slashdot have been well done, unobtrusive and usually for things I have an interest in. At the same time, many sites, and it sounds like Slashdot soon, are making ads large enough to interfere with the site.
As for the bandwidth issue, I agree that if you are on a modem it's a bit daft to have such a system. If you've got the bandwidth to throw at it, banner ads really don't take up much space. If it helps keep your favorite site up a bit longer, why not?
I suspect if you did the same study today you'd find that advertising actually does more to bring up prices. Companies realized that competing on price was detrimental to them, so they switched to branding as the primary form of advertising.
To see this in it's most obvious form, look at Nike. Their ads don't even mention their shoes. Heck, they don't mention the name. It's just a sort of video art piece with a nike swoosh and maybe "just do it" at the end.
The thing is, people buy Nike, not because the quality is better but because of branding. Thus prices can be raised because people will pay more for what may in fact be an inferior product. That's on top of the fact that price is raised anyhow because they need to spend so much on building their brand through various advertising channels.
When was the last time you saw an ad banner adverising a product being cheaper than the competition? It's rather infrequent, non?
Slashdot Mirror
IBM is giving a classic demonstration in how NOT to handle a problem. It has been demonstrated time and time again that the tactic of denying everything does not work. It doesn't work for politicians, it doesn't work for accounting firms, and it doesn't work for electronics manufacturers.
IBM could have come right out, admitted to a defect and paid the price for that. By admitting to it, and making sure to replace all of those defects, they would have bought themselves a huge amount of credibility. We'd all buy IBM drives knowing full well that if there was ever a design problem we'd hear about it and get it fixed.
Now, IBM is risking the reputation of their entire drive line through these shenanigans. Before IBM stood as one of the best drive manufacturers, but repeated issues with the GXP line are quickly submarining that. In the ultra-competitive hard drive market, this sort of problem could put that unit completely out of business.
I personally owned an IBM 75GXP, and it is the only hard drive I've ever owned that had a problem. I've been using hard drives since a 20MB box attached to my Atari 1040ST, and not a single one of them ever made a fuss. My defective drive has since been replaced, but it's of course with another IBM drive and now I continue to be concerned that maybe this drive will be defective too.
I wonder how long before people learn the lesson that covering your tracks, especially in this era of rapid distribution of information, is a bad policy.
While nobody paid the government for the frequencies that 802.11, there is a huge amount of business going on it 802.11 equipment. The amount of business thriving off the sale of 802.11 equipment dwarfs what little Sirius has manged to do. Ultimately the FCC doesn't care about the money that comes in from a spectrum sale, it's not like they get to keep it. They care about politics, and what will decide this is who can apply the most political pressure. Can Sirius trump Cisco, Lucent, Intel, and all the other electronics companies making a killing in the 802.11 market? Doubtful.
Knowing about all those laws is a crime too now :)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the FCC's job is to server the public interest by regulating radio spectrum. So can somebody explain to me how a subscription digital radio service is more in the public interest than wireless data networks? With any luck all the hardware manufacturers will go write their lobbyists some checks and keep the FCC out of this.
Not an entirely horrible idea :)
... oh wait it already works :)
Just think Slashdot Effect + Google Bombs. A Google Nuke?
Other ideas:
Corporate Gluttons -> RIAA
Monopolist -> Microsoft
Did the word "copyright" appear once in that article? Because I swear it was talking about patent law but maybe I clicked the wrong link.
My count of 20 packages is based on the warning redhat distributed. They recommend upgrading some 22 packages on a Redhat 7.2 system. This includes several packages for the kernel, zlib itself, and a number of other applications that are statically linked such as cvs, dump, etc.
The scary thing is, I may have installed other apps that have zlib statically compiled that I don't even know about because they aren't part of the default vendor distribution.
Sounds like that disaster you speak of did just happen. Well, maybe not quite a disaster, but anytime I have to upgrade 20+ packages for one bug, that's bad.
The patch is already out. The thing that really sucks is how many packages use a statically compiled version of zlib. I now have to upgrade 22 seperate packages on my Redhat 7.2 box. Fun fun fun...
Really it depends on how much you enjoy the job and how much you can afford to be without pay. If I really enjoyed my job, and could afford to do so, I could be convinced to stay a month or two if I thought the company was about to turn around.
:). If you enjoy the job enough, it's better than sitting at home.
Of course during that month or two some portion of my time at the office would probably be spent actively seeking another job. Somehow I don't think your boss can get to irritated if you take the afternoon off for an interview if you haven't been paid in a month
The one thing that I'd be a bit concerned about is how durable the device is. The rotating screen seems like something that's begging to just snap off at the slightest collision. Granted, I haven't actually held one of these things and seen how durable they are, but it sounds flimsy.
Context is so overrated :)
So sounds like Amnesty International should pick up the tab for developing PGP. I mean, I grant you, I think that PGP is a wonderful product and I'd like for network associates to keep it, but they are a business and if it's not making money for them, there's no reason for them to keep it around.
Personally I use GPG and think it works wonderfully, and Network Associates has nothing to do with that. May not have some of the bells and whistles of the full commercial PGP but it still does what PGP has always done, encrypt e-mail. Organizations like AI should be able to function fine with just that.
Yeah I know, I talked about the idea with people, heard about Plan 9 and thought, "somebody's on it" and left it alone :).
This is the oldest trick in the lazy geek handbook. If you don't want to do something, instead of saying you don't want to do it, say that it's just really hard or impossible for unspecified technical reasons. Smart managers, and judges shouldn't buy that sort of logic.
It amazes me how long it's taken for these ideas to ferment. I mean I was talking with people about the distributed OS concept back in 96 or so. I have to wonder why the concept has sat mostly unexplored for this long. Perhaps more importantly, I wonder why it's suddenly hot again. Is there some actual practical use for the technology that's bringing it back into the light? Or are people just thinking this is the next logical step of P2P and thinking that it will be hot because P2P is?
I thought my sarcasm was somewhat more obvious than it was I guess :)
1) Rip, Mix, Burn is a cool tagline and picking on it makes better press than attacking parts of an operating system many people still haven't heard of
2) It's Microsoft's job to take on the Linux folks not Disney's. There are clear divisions of labor in the Illuminati.
Kudos to Eisner! The more that the copyright orthodoxy makes ridiculous statements like this, the more it makes it look like their proposals need a good second look. Let them scream from the mountains how everything should be protected because everybody is pirating. When they get to the point of labelling all of society as criminals all of society (hopefully including congress) is going to start wondering what the RIAA and the MPAA are smoking.
Actually, if you go with the theory that Linux admins are more expensive than Microsoft admins, you could end up paying the same amount but more money going to the government than in the original arrangement. If payroll is taxed, then increasing your payroll would increase the taxes you pay. While this doesn't effect your bottom line, because of the offsetting cost savings, it does mean more money in the government coffers.
I wonder if there is ever a legitimate reason to not release the source code to a piece of software. I'm not saying you necessarily provide the software under a Free license. But I can think of no reason why any piece of software shouldn't include source code for the end user.
Certainly it is well within your right to keep your product closed but why do it? If I come along and pirate your source code you can certainly take me to court for violating copyright laws. I can see that some people wouldn't want their software to be under the GPL because there's limitied possibility for consulting or training business. But providing the source code just seems like the right thing to do and I can't think of a reason why this should be a problem.
Sounds like Sun's excercising their freedom to innovate. How truely unamerican!
No, the government dosen't get that money because the companies hide the money they save in shady offshore partnerships. On the other hand we all know that Microsoft is a trustworthy and upstanding corporate citizen who pays all the taxes they are supposed to. Kudos to Mundie for his valid point.
I agree with your sentiment that slashdot is one of the few places that actually has ads I'm interested in. Actually up until now, the ads on slashdot have been well done, unobtrusive and usually for things I have an interest in. At the same time, many sites, and it sounds like Slashdot soon, are making ads large enough to interfere with the site.
As for the bandwidth issue, I agree that if you are on a modem it's a bit daft to have such a system. If you've got the bandwidth to throw at it, banner ads really don't take up much space. If it helps keep your favorite site up a bit longer, why not?
I suspect if you did the same study today you'd find that advertising actually does more to bring up prices. Companies realized that competing on price was detrimental to them, so they switched to branding as the primary form of advertising.
To see this in it's most obvious form, look at Nike. Their ads don't even mention their shoes. Heck, they don't mention the name. It's just a sort of video art piece with a nike swoosh and maybe "just do it" at the end.
The thing is, people buy Nike, not because the quality is better but because of branding. Thus prices can be raised because people will pay more for what may in fact be an inferior product. That's on top of the fact that price is raised anyhow because they need to spend so much on building their brand through various advertising channels.
When was the last time you saw an ad banner adverising a product being cheaper than the competition? It's rather infrequent, non?