Yeh, you know it's funny how these things work out - I don't like to job hop but didn't really like the position I held last year. I'd been there three years and was making plans to leave Q1 2006. I had been talking to a couple academics I became aware of through the University where I teach at part time. They'd started a high profile biz, were/are kicking ass in the market, but didn't want to pay a signing bonus and I wasn't gonna leave money (my 2005 bonus) on the table. So after much discussion we both agreed to wait until 2006. But then lo and behold, late 4Q 2005 I got caught up in a "restructuring". Shit happens, fair enough.
So net/net I ended up leaving that job about one month earlier than planned with far more money than I needed to pay off my mortgage. Current job doesn't thrill me too much either and while I wasn't really looking to leave some guys I used to work with at one of the big investment banks convinced me otherwise. And so it goes.
Mind you, I haven't negotiated hard for either of those jobs - more or less just accepted offers put on the table, so the value of Graduate degrees in the market is clear to me, at least based on my admittedly personal experience.
I haven't had to work for about ten years now so I'm really just looking for something fun / interesting to do. That was most of the reason I took an MBA and I'm more than a little surprised at how much additional money two Masters commands in the market.
Whenever governments try to block capital flows from consumers to producers, money finds a way. Albeit, with some friction, but it gets there in the end.
This reminds me of the invention of Swaps; a financial instrument originally devised by banks as a means to provide a service helping multinationals circumvent capital controls imposed by the British Government (warning: PDF).
I can see the formation of off shore entities that will sell a "service" to US consumers. Whatever the the facade (e.g., email, picture viewing, etc) of this service, the real purpose will be to enable US based consumers of online gambling to move offshore; by paying for the "service" the cash is then off governments radar.
Visit your favourite on-line gambling site and the funds you used to purchase the "service" are now magically available, minus some "friction", of course, to fund your gambling. Later another "service" would be used to repatriate funds back into the US.
There are loads of other mechanisms I can think of to get around this stupid law. Of course the government will find it necessary to establish policing actions to find / stop this avoidance, thus screwing the taxpayer a second time ("No, you CANT gamble online AND you have to pay me to make sure you DONT gamble online)".
Another reason I'm glad I don't live and pay taxes there anymore.
Undergraduate Math / Computer Science, Masters Quantitative Finance. Not an unheard of combination, but rare, with the attendant increase in compensation you'd expect.
Now I'm finishing an MBA, General Management with a focus in IT Outsourcing. So that's another perspective to add to the mix.
I chanaged jobs about six months ago for a 15% increase in pay, and now that I'm one class away from finishing my MBA I'm about to change jobs - again - this time for about a 23% increase in pay.
So Graduate School does indeed add value. I did both Masters while working and they were royal pains in the ass, no life at all. So if you can I'd reccomend taking a graduate degree full time. If not, that's another positive aspect that you can pitch to prospetive employers (solid time management skills, focus).
if were hiring him is how will the industry change in one year? They clearly lured him away for a specific job - will it be there in a year and even if it is, how similar will it be to the position they've envisioned for him - NOW?
Google must be paying him some kind of signing bonus, either immediate or defered, otherwise why would he even consider the job? So there are some direct costs involved, in addition to opportunity cost (i.e., why not hire someone who can start that job - NOW?)
The one year downtime would unsettle me if I were hiring him. Things change even in small amounts of time. In Internet time, one year is a long, long period.
Actually they are required to disclose risk as part of SEC regs; issues raised in their annual reports aren't really indicative of any focus on their part, rather it's a regulatory driven acknowledgement of underlying problems.
Seems to be lots of complaints lately about Google, and issue with service. I love the company and just hope they don't blow it in a rush to dominate all markets.
The problems seem to come and go...now loading fine as well. However lots of complaints (I just linked to two) being raised by folks about their core business.
And lest we forget, Adwords is under attack by click-fraud and everyday sees the emergence of increasingly viable competitors in search and other business activities that currently account for material amounts of Google's revenue.
Googles own Annual Report to shareholders details a wide area of risks it faces.
No, I think they are neglecting core business as they deploy resources to capture new markets, and in doing so increasinly open themselves up attack.
I've noticed Google page loads seem a hell of a lot slower lately than say one year ago. I'm not sure why, some folks blame Analytics, but it seems that sometime front page loading drags. I've turned off personalised search and it's about the same.
It's gotten so bad at times that I'm able to open a second tab, load then execute the same search on yahoo! before Google presents its front page.
I think Google should take a pause, and reinforce their core business before heading out to capture new markets. Their aggressive growth strategy threatens to turn them into the Microsoft of internet computing; get there first, capture the market and worry about quality later.
As a life long student of the markets, I've got a large number of spreadsheets that I use to track various indices, shares, bond prices, what have you. I'm currently using.Mac across several machines, and thought I'd give Google Spreadsheets a try.
I tried to upload daily NYSE closing prices from 1929 to date, about 21K rows and roughly twenty columns. It was a native XLS, and after maybe five minutes I got an error message, something along the lines of "Opps! We can't process your request at this time".
Oh well - it's beta so I'm not too fussed. This will really help though if I can keep all my trading spreadsheets up on Google and acccess them from pretty much any web enabled system..Mac is ok, but this would allow me to share and do other neat stuff.
"What incentive does Red Hat have to make an easy-to-use OS if they are deriving revenue from the very difficulty of the OS (i.e. making money on support)?"
Market forces. Folks can and often do migrate to other distributions for many reasons, such as support that you've mentioned above.
As Microsoft has an effective monopoly on the desktop, competitive market forces don't appply. Microsoft clearly is trying to monetise the entire Windows experience, security faults as well.
I run a medium sized mailing list off my server, you-suck.com
I've got several dozen subscribers in the AOL domain, and have consistently have had problems with bouncing / filtering out of AOL. And usually for bogus reasons.
About one year ago they were filtering ALL email that contained tinurl tags, as a "security" measure. Just to show you how totally bogus it was, even the text tinyurl, tiny (space) url , etc were filtered - that is, just the phrase or two words, NOT EVEN A URL!
Recently someone replied to a post with a string of profanity, including the word FUCK several times in a row. Now everyone on the list are good friends, have been for years, and we jerk each others chains a great deal. No problem. For us at least, as AOL didn't see it that way, and banned ALL email from you-suck.com due to what the headers of their bounces claimed were"profanity violations". I know for a fact that nobody on my list complained to AOL as most are family and the rest good friends.
Totally bogus.
I couldn't even email folks exaplaing what was going on from you-suck.com, and had to use Gmail to tell folks about the problem and ask them for their help in getting email from my domain unblocked (AOL won't do squat for non subscribers).
Bingo. I sent out Gmail invites to every one of my AOL subscribers and two weeks ago the last switched over. Problem solved.
But not really - from AOLs pov. Several of those impacted noted that lots of email was helpfully being screened by AOL, including loads of email from what should be whitelisted, top of the shelf domains - CitiBank, Fidelity, yahoo!, I'm not sure what else.
So of these two dozen former AOL subscribers from my list, at least six are now former AOL subscribers as well, and several others are making plans to bolt as well.
And telling all their friends about AOL, the Nanny ISP.
A couple frustrating years of my time dealing with AOL bogus bounces, and I managed to get a bunch of folks off AOL.
pick up another three hours (maybe more!) of battery life.
The thing is meant to be used away from the desk and indeed away from power points. Device runtime on a single charge is the most crucial factor here, not a high def colour screen that can play media.
I've squarely in the Pocket PC camp now (two 5450's), but still sometimes miss my Newton MP2K's. I used to charge them up Sunday night, top them off Wednesday or so and never would really run out of power.
Of course they were a lot simpler than these devices, but once again - battery life is key.
I purchased at 15" G4 PowerBook in April, 2004. It was replacing at Titanium G4 that I'd had for a couple of years.
About three months after I bought it one of the USB ports (located on the left side of the machine) died. I didn't get it fixed at the time due to work and University crap. And besides, the machine's got two so I was good to go.
June 2005 the strap on my carrying bag broke and the right corner of the PowerBook took the brunt of the force. The case was bent up and the cover wouldn't close. The machine ran fine, but would not sleep.
So I took it to the Apple Store in London, mentioning the problem with the USB port and telling them I didn't need that fixed (figuring I was paying).
They charged me 317 pounds for a new case, which was fair enought: I'd dropped the computer. They also said they'd need two weeks to get it fixed.
Three days later it was ready. I was amazed when I looked at the repair order: Apple not only replaced the case (as we'd agreed), but the screen, logic board and hard drive as well!!
In fact the only things left from the original machine was the keyboard and battery. Never figured out that logic but I wasn't going to complain.
So out of warranty, I got what for all intents and purposes is a new Mac, for about three hundred pounds.
Everyone at that company who can will immediately find another job, and they'll be left with the dregs, probably the very people they didn't want to keep in the first place.
I wouldn't go so far as to find another career. Just find a company that values you as an employee, and doesn't rub your face in the obvious (engineers are cheaper in India).
Gretchen Miller, director of world-wide marketing for mobile systems at Dell Inc., said she didn't think a $100 laptop would be powerful enough to meet students' needs. "We don't believe it's feasible at this point to manufacture a $100 notebook that meets our quality performance standards. Those things are all customer driven," she says.
Sure Gretchen. And how much does your cheapest laptop cost?
They have information on about 300 acredited degrees, ranging from Associates to Doctorates in lots of disciplines.
There is also a fairly active set of discussion forums, where you can post specific queries.
I'm not assoicated with them, but used the site pretty actively last spring when I was looking for an MBA program. In the end I started an Executive MBA from a traditional bricks and mortar University, but that was just my personal choise.
Some of the on-line MBAs were pretty solid; I took my research to the point of evaluating several schools and even talking with past students - no problems there at all.
I see a market for this, driven by the need of someone, somewhere, who wants to see an episode of some older TV show, or even a current TV show that doesn't have mass appeal. Appeal that's in the upper 20% of overall demand that is.
iTunes is a very effective distribution medium, and has helped the careers of many a smaller label / band, and even moved significant amount of back catalog.
Currently the networks are marketing to the top 20% in terms of demand, and ignoring the remaining 80% because they don't have the broadcast capacity.
Teaming up with iTunes they do. Another example of The Long Tail .
on biz, and I see a lot of pirated software in the banks where I'm working on client site.
I'm against pirating software in general, but with attitudes like this, well let's just say Africans are ok pirating MS software in my book.
Down in Africa those folks are just doing the best they can with what they got. This attitude that "if they can't pay they don't deserve" is mind boggling. MS could do a lot of good down there, but no.
On the plus side, I'm seeing lots more banks deploying Open Office on the desktop with Liunx and MySQL on the Enterprise side. This whole controversy will be rendered academic in perhaps ten years.
Who the hell would accept MS crapware when they've spent the formative years on their careers using Open Source?
I've got a couple of HP iPaq 5450's, the models with the finger print reader (to be used in lieu of a PIN).
I've disabled the drivers for the reader, as it chews up too much CPU. It would be one thing if the reader were only active when authentication were requested, but the way it works out of the box it is always active and renders the machine somewhat unresponsive at times.
It only supports the headset; any other Bluetooth functions are disabled. Hadn't tried the mouse one, but I know for sure file transfer doens't work.
Not really upset, just the product is mislabeled. It says it supports Bluetooth, and that implies an OBEX capability. At least that the way it works with my iPaq, PowerBooks, etc.
But for any type of commercial undertaking, specs are an essential part of the development process.
Without a spec you won't know what you're being asked to build, or will find it difficult to get customer agreement that what you're delivering meets their need.
Without a spec you can't estimate, and without accurate estimates you can't insure that you're properly getting paid.
I've read that it might take a barrel of oil some 60 to 90 days, from the time it's extracted, to end up in your fuel tank.
There's clearly a difference between historic cost (i.e., the cost of all the oil already being processed) and replacement (cost of a new barrel of oil).
I wouldn't expect retail prices to fluctuate so rapidly.
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Yeh, you know it's funny how these things work out - I don't like to job hop but didn't really like the position I held last year. I'd been there three years and was making plans to leave Q1 2006. I had been talking to a couple academics I became aware of through the University where I teach at part time. They'd started a high profile biz, were/are kicking ass in the market, but didn't want to pay a signing bonus and I wasn't gonna leave money (my 2005 bonus) on the table. So after much discussion we both agreed to wait until 2006. But then lo and behold, late 4Q 2005 I got caught up in a "restructuring". Shit happens, fair enough.
So net/net I ended up leaving that job about one month earlier than planned with far more money than I needed to pay off my mortgage. Current job doesn't thrill me too much either and while I wasn't really looking to leave some guys I used to work with at one of the big investment banks convinced me otherwise. And so it goes.
Mind you, I haven't negotiated hard for either of those jobs - more or less just accepted offers put on the table, so the value of Graduate degrees in the market is clear to me, at least based on my admittedly personal experience.
I haven't had to work for about ten years now so I'm really just looking for something fun / interesting to do. That was most of the reason I took an MBA and I'm more than a little surprised at how much additional money two Masters commands in the market.
Whenever governments try to block capital flows from consumers to producers, money finds a way. Albeit, with some friction, but it gets there in the end.
This reminds me of the invention of Swaps; a financial instrument originally devised by banks as a means to provide a service helping multinationals circumvent capital controls imposed by the British Government (warning: PDF).
I can see the formation of off shore entities that will sell a "service" to US consumers. Whatever the the facade (e.g., email, picture viewing, etc) of this service, the real purpose will be to enable US based consumers of online gambling to move offshore; by paying for the "service" the cash is then off governments radar.
Visit your favourite on-line gambling site and the funds you used to purchase the "service" are now magically available, minus some "friction", of course, to fund your gambling. Later another "service" would be used to repatriate funds back into the US.
There are loads of other mechanisms I can think of to get around this stupid law. Of course the government will find it necessary to establish policing actions to find / stop this avoidance, thus screwing the taxpayer a second time ("No, you CANT gamble online AND you have to pay me to make sure you DONT gamble online)".
Another reason I'm glad I don't live and pay taxes there anymore.
Undergraduate Math / Computer Science, Masters Quantitative Finance. Not an unheard of combination, but rare, with the attendant increase in compensation you'd expect.
Now I'm finishing an MBA, General Management with a focus in IT Outsourcing. So that's another perspective to add to the mix.
I chanaged jobs about six months ago for a 15% increase in pay, and now that I'm one class away from finishing my MBA I'm about to change jobs - again - this time for about a 23% increase in pay.
So Graduate School does indeed add value. I did both Masters while working and they were royal pains in the ass, no life at all. So if you can I'd reccomend taking a graduate degree full time. If not, that's another positive aspect that you can pitch to prospetive employers (solid time management skills, focus).
if were hiring him is how will the industry change in one year? They clearly lured him away for a specific job - will it be there in a year and even if it is, how similar will it be to the position they've envisioned for him - NOW?
Google must be paying him some kind of signing bonus, either immediate or defered, otherwise why would he even consider the job? So there are some direct costs involved, in addition to opportunity cost (i.e., why not hire someone who can start that job - NOW?)
The one year downtime would unsettle me if I were hiring him. Things change even in small amounts of time. In Internet time, one year is a long, long period.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Actually they are required to disclose risk as part of SEC regs; issues raised in their annual reports aren't really indicative of any focus on their part, rather it's a regulatory driven acknowledgement of underlying problems.
Seems to be lots of complaints lately about Google, and issue with service. I love the company and just hope they don't blow it in a rush to dominate all markets.
The problems seem to come and go...now loading fine as well. However lots of complaints (I just linked to two) being raised by folks about their core business.
And lest we forget, Adwords is under attack by click-fraud and everyday sees the emergence of increasingly viable competitors in search and other business activities that currently account for material amounts of Google's revenue.
Googles own Annual Report to shareholders details a wide area of risks it faces.
No, I think they are neglecting core business as they deploy resources to capture new markets, and in doing so increasinly open themselves up attack.
I've noticed Google page loads seem a hell of a lot slower lately than say one year ago. I'm not sure why, some folks blame Analytics, but it seems that sometime front page loading drags. I've turned off personalised search and it's about the same.
It's gotten so bad at times that I'm able to open a second tab, load then execute the same search on yahoo! before Google presents its front page.
In a recent IHT article, Schmidt first admitted problems, mentioning "Those machines are full. We have a huge machine crisis." .
The Register also raised several complaints from users about the (negative) impact of recent changes.
I think Google should take a pause, and reinforce their core business before heading out to capture new markets. Their aggressive growth strategy threatens to turn them into the Microsoft of internet computing; get there first, capture the market and worry about quality later.
As a life long student of the markets, I've got a large number of spreadsheets that I use to track various indices, shares, bond prices, what have you. I'm currently using .Mac across several machines, and thought I'd give Google Spreadsheets a try.
.Mac is ok, but this would allow me to share and do other neat stuff.
I tried to upload daily NYSE closing prices from 1929 to date, about 21K rows and roughly twenty columns. It was a native XLS, and after maybe five minutes I got an error message, something along the lines of "Opps! We can't process your request at this time".
Oh well - it's beta so I'm not too fussed. This will really help though if I can keep all my trading spreadsheets up on Google and acccess them from pretty much any web enabled system.
"What incentive does Red Hat have to make an easy-to-use OS if they are deriving revenue from the very difficulty of the OS (i.e. making money on support)?"
Market forces. Folks can and often do migrate to other distributions for many reasons, such as support that you've mentioned above.
As Microsoft has an effective monopoly on the desktop, competitive market forces don't appply. Microsoft clearly is trying to monetise the entire Windows experience, security faults as well.
What incentive does MS have to provide a secure OS if they are deriving revenue from the very faults they created?
I run a medium sized mailing list off my server, you-suck.com
I've got several dozen subscribers in the AOL domain, and have consistently have had problems with bouncing / filtering out of AOL. And usually for bogus reasons.
About one year ago they were filtering ALL email that contained tinurl tags, as a "security" measure. Just to show you how totally bogus it was, even the text tinyurl, tiny (space) url , etc were filtered - that is, just the phrase or two words, NOT EVEN A URL!
Recently someone replied to a post with a string of profanity, including the word FUCK several times in a row. Now everyone on the list are good friends, have been for years, and we jerk each others chains a great deal. No problem. For us at least, as AOL didn't see it that way, and banned ALL email from you-suck.com due to what the headers of their bounces claimed were"profanity violations". I know for a fact that nobody on my list complained to AOL as most are family and the rest good friends.
Totally bogus.
I couldn't even email folks exaplaing what was going on from you-suck.com, and had to use Gmail to tell folks about the problem and ask them for their help in getting email from my domain unblocked (AOL won't do squat for non subscribers).
Bingo. I sent out Gmail invites to every one of my AOL subscribers and two weeks ago the last switched over. Problem solved.
But not really - from AOLs pov. Several of those impacted noted that lots of email was helpfully being screened by AOL, including loads of email from what should be whitelisted, top of the shelf domains - CitiBank, Fidelity, yahoo!, I'm not sure what else.
So of these two dozen former AOL subscribers from my list, at least six are now former AOL subscribers as well, and several others are making plans to bolt as well.
And telling all their friends about AOL, the Nanny ISP.
A couple frustrating years of my time dealing with AOL bogus bounces, and I managed to get a bunch of folks off AOL.
Works for me.
pick up another three hours (maybe more!) of battery life.
The thing is meant to be used away from the desk and indeed away from power points. Device runtime on a single charge is the most crucial factor here, not a high def colour screen that can play media.
I've squarely in the Pocket PC camp now (two 5450's), but still sometimes miss my Newton MP2K's. I used to charge them up Sunday night, top them off Wednesday or so and never would really run out of power.
Of course they were a lot simpler than these devices, but once again - battery life is key.
and a hack writer like Dvorak believes it.
Must be true then.
a gold, GMT Master II, model 16713 specically.
And my USB drive (1GB thank you) is worn around my neck where it belongs.
I purchased at 15" G4 PowerBook in April, 2004. It was replacing at Titanium G4 that I'd had for a couple of years.
About three months after I bought it one of the USB ports (located on the left side of the machine) died. I didn't get it fixed at the time due to work and University crap. And besides, the machine's got two so I was good to go.
June 2005 the strap on my carrying bag broke and the right corner of the PowerBook took the brunt of the force. The case was bent up and the cover wouldn't close. The machine ran fine, but would not sleep.
So I took it to the Apple Store in London, mentioning the problem with the USB port and telling them I didn't need that fixed (figuring I was paying).
They charged me 317 pounds for a new case, which was fair enought: I'd dropped the computer. They also said they'd need two weeks to get it fixed.
Three days later it was ready. I was amazed when I looked at the repair order: Apple not only replaced the case (as we'd agreed), but the screen, logic board and hard drive as well!!
In fact the only things left from the original machine was the keyboard and battery. Never figured out that logic but I wasn't going to complain.
So out of warranty, I got what for all intents and purposes is a new Mac, for about three hundred pounds.
Damn!
That "director" sounds like a dork.
Everyone at that company who can will immediately find another job, and they'll be left with the dregs, probably the very people they didn't want to keep in the first place.
I wouldn't go so far as to find another career. Just find a company that values you as an employee, and doesn't rub your face in the obvious (engineers are cheaper in India).
What a clueless fuckwit that guy is.
Gretchen Miller, director of world-wide marketing for mobile systems at Dell Inc., said she didn't think a $100 laptop would be powerful enough to meet students' needs. "We don't believe it's feasible at this point to manufacture a $100 notebook that meets our quality performance standards. Those things are all customer driven," she says.
Sure Gretchen. And how much does your cheapest laptop cost?
About $499 it turns out, after rebate.
called 'DegreeInfo.com.
They have information on about 300 acredited degrees, ranging from Associates to Doctorates in lots of disciplines.
There is also a fairly active set of discussion forums, where you can post specific queries.
I'm not assoicated with them, but used the site pretty actively last spring when I was looking for an MBA program. In the end I started an Executive MBA from a traditional bricks and mortar University, but that was just my personal choise.
Some of the on-line MBAs were pretty solid; I took my research to the point of evaluating several schools and even talking with past students - no problems there at all.
I see a market for this, driven by the need of someone, somewhere, who wants to see an episode of some older TV show, or even a current TV show that doesn't have mass appeal. Appeal that's in the upper 20% of overall demand that is.
iTunes is a very effective distribution medium, and has helped the careers of many a smaller label / band, and even moved significant amount of back catalog.
Currently the networks are marketing to the top 20% in terms of demand, and ignoring the remaining 80% because they don't have the broadcast capacity.
Teaming up with iTunes they do. Another example of The Long Tail .
I see this working.
on biz, and I see a lot of pirated software in the banks where I'm working on client site.
I'm against pirating software in general, but with attitudes like this, well let's just say Africans are ok pirating MS software in my book.
Down in Africa those folks are just doing the best they can with what they got. This attitude that "if they can't pay they don't deserve" is mind boggling. MS could do a lot of good down there, but no.
On the plus side, I'm seeing lots more banks deploying Open Office on the desktop with Liunx and MySQL on the Enterprise side. This whole controversy will be rendered academic in perhaps ten years.
Who the hell would accept MS crapware when they've spent the formative years on their careers using Open Source?
I've got a couple of HP iPaq 5450's, the models with the finger print reader (to be used in lieu of a PIN).
I've disabled the drivers for the reader, as it chews up too much CPU. It would be one thing if the reader were only active when authentication were requested, but the way it works out of the box it is always active and renders the machine somewhat unresponsive at times.
Neat trick, but I just don't use the feature.
It only supports the headset; any other Bluetooth functions are disabled. Hadn't tried the mouse one, but I know for sure file transfer doens't work.
Not really upset, just the product is mislabeled. It says it supports Bluetooth, and that implies an OBEX capability. At least that the way it works with my iPaq, PowerBooks, etc.
I've got a Blackberry 7100t, and it supposedly has Bluetooth. But the OBEX implementation is crippled as well, and only supports headsets.
I've heard that RIM did this because of security implications; maybe so. But it said Bluetooth on the box, not partial Bluetooth.
But for any type of commercial undertaking, specs are an essential part of the development process.
Without a spec you won't know what you're being asked to build, or will find it difficult to get customer agreement that what you're delivering meets their need.
Without a spec you can't estimate, and without accurate estimates you can't insure that you're properly getting paid.
Why are pump prices so volatile?
I've read that it might take a barrel of oil some 60 to 90 days, from the time it's extracted, to end up in your fuel tank.
There's clearly a difference between historic cost (i.e., the cost of all the oil already being processed) and replacement (cost of a new barrel of oil).
I wouldn't expect retail prices to fluctuate so rapidly.