"Organizational efficiency" certainly sounds like job cuts. But hopefully it means RIM might take a look at its manufacturing efficiency, as well.
At Apple, Steve Jobs always invested heavily in modern, automated assembly lines for its products, because he realized that the problem of too much inventory is particularly risky for computer makers. If you think about it, technology products have relatively short shelf lives. You can't sit on a pile of inventory and sell it for the next few years, like you could if you were making hammers or dinner plates. By next year, your inventory of shiny gadgets might effectively be junk. So the key is to develop a manufacturing process -- and equally important, supply partnerships -- that allow you to manufacture products at an incredibly fast rate, so that you can respond to market demand rapidly. If the market wants tons of units, ramp up production. When it cools off, stop making more. Then you don't have to sit on so much inventory.
If RIM is sitting on $1 billion in inventory, it certainly sounds like it grossly overestimated the demand for some of its products at launch. But it also suggests that it either isn't paying close enough attention to the market numbers, or is unable to react quickly enough to them. Working on either one might save it some money.
It also helps if you can outsource this manufacturing to a place where you can treat the workers in a way that would be illegal in your primary market. Bonuses for the execs if you can reduce their wages enough to keep them below the poverty line. You can bet that part wasn't a surprise to Jobs, either.
Yikes, your employees were using 5 year old phones? You may want to look more at the policies around cell phones and reconsider those rather than blaming a 5 year old device for any particular problem.
On the other hand, you could consider yourself fortunate that you bought 10 devices that all lasted for so long.
Leaving all the decisions up to popular vote makes for poor decision making because the general public (usually) are not as informed as the lawmakers. Like Henry Ford said, "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."
It's amazing the similarities in decision making skills between the general public and elected officials, isn't it?
How do you think such polling could be best accomplished?
Have a bunch of people walk around and ask other people questions, then have them log in via a portal and report the results.
Not everyone uses the internet, yet everyone should be represented. See the dilemma?
Not everyone votes in a traditional election, either. The percentage of the population with internet access far outweighs the percentage of the population who actually bother to go to the polls on election day. Further, anyone can go to a public library and access the internet for free.. at least they can do that in the state I live in.
Correctly does not show? Surely a good map shows you what's actually on the ground, and the 'gated off forest roads' are nevertheless roads which (If you have a key to the gate, or else a bicycle) you can actually use. It should show it as what it is - a track, without necessarily public access, but nevertheless there.
To each his own. If the road is inaccessible, I'd prefer my gps not to list it.
Uhhh...why exactly are you bothering? After he basically said "Yeah LOL go fuck yourself" over the pot petition all should know you'd get more results by writing it on a piece of paper and promptly burning it. For all his bullshit he is just as big if not a bigger sellout that Dubya was, personally I'd say he's worse as Dubya actually believed a lot of the shit he was saying whereas this one is just cashing the checks. But if you think he is gonna give a flying shit what the "people" think I have some swampland you may be interested in. If you manage to get the requisite number all you will get is a flowery "Ur not rich so fuck off' speech, so why bother?
As for TFA...is anybody surprised? With every move Forbes gets proved right on Ballmer being a shitty CEO, hell if the man had an original thought his head would asplode. And as for the rest of the list, Sony and Ericson are doing lousy and could probably use the cash, same with RIM, and Apple just plain old hates to have ANY competition other than MSFT. See Job's comments on how he would use his fortune to nuke Android for instance.
So how anybody could look at THAT list of names and no figure out they were gonna do something nasty I'll never know.
Stop shooting them down with little things like facts.
First post is AC or new account? Check. Anti-Google? Check. Barely related to article? Check.
Microsoft, you really should spend the cash for a competent astroturfing company. This one is really pathetic, and however much you are paying, it's way too much.
Microsoft? Why would they give a shit what happens in the tablet world?
Then USE the old rules. There are plenty of people that still do. Or better yet, write your own.. I don't think I've ever played with a group of people that used any set of book rules in its entirety.
And if you're not imaginative enough to write your modules, it's incredibly easy to buy a modern module and convert it to any rule set you'd like.
I would expect them to see that the description that comes up isn't what the product is. The price isn't stored in the bar code, you can't change the barcode to make the product lower priced, but you can print a bar code for a cheaper item and stick it on the expensive one. The till would bring up the product description and price of the cheap item, so they need to be selling a cheaper item with a sufficiently similar description that it would not get noticed by a sleepy drone
When I worked retail management at a supermarket 20 years ago this was NOT the case. Had a little situation with a guy slapping "gound beef" price stickers on beef tenderloin steaks (this is about an order of magnitude diff in price). Deli workers were known to do similar foolishness with price per pound of various products... If the deli girl liked you, you got the cold shrimp pesto salad ($10/lb) for the price of the generic bulk coleslaw ($2/lb).
In the modern era of self checkout grocery stores, especially if you're paying cash and have no loyalty card, every produce item is lettuce per pound. I donno how they stay in business like that.
In the long run I think the "dollar store" concept of $1 per package is going to eventually disappear and instead of RFIDs for each can of soup in the market, they'll simply weigh your cart and charge you a flat rate per pound. The "crab legs and beef tenderloin" problem is solved by making the packaging inconveniently hard to open and inserting bricks or corn or HFCS in the package to bring the cost per pound to a standard weight. Imagine a giant supermarket with only one cashier and checkout takes 15 seconds per cartload. Or packaging deals of cheap bulky stuff with expensive stuff, so buying expensive per pound stir fry meat is impossible alone; you have to buy it with a 10 pound rice sack. Or can't buy steaks or charcoal, must buy steaks and charcoal.
Since everything in walmart/target/whatever comes from China, and everything is made of plastic, I could see charging stuff from those stores based solely on weight. Here, you get 5 pounds of Chinese lead painted plastic. Is it a millenium falcon lego, or a dora the explorer vacuum cleaner, who cares, its 5 pounds of plastic and that'll be $X/pound.
The companies who put those little logos on the products won't have any of that. Say, Lucasarts who can add a starwars logo and increase the price people are willing to pay for 1lb of plastic 100 fold (that might be a bit conservative of a guess). The basic problem you are failing to see is that the "value" (even if it's only a value perceived by a customer and not a measurable one) is not simply derived by the value of something a product it is made from.
I'm sure retailers wouldn't have any of it, either - since they make more selling starwars legos, or Dora doll parts for $100/lb than they do selling regular legos for $10/lb.
I think the metered result from the wireless companys will look back as a failure. When the technology was new they could justify a metered way of doing things, the internet started in similar fashion, you remember 250 hours free from AOL? yes i know, nightmares of AOL, but you do remember that right? it was dropped eventually and the same thing is happening with wireless. Currently i pay 50.00 a month for unlimited text, data, and voice, i can even tether it to my laptop.
No, i dont think ISP will go to metered with much results, it was tried i believe and the backlash caused them to pull back..now with so much bandwidth required for free services like youtube, but also paid service like netflix, the company that will try this will lose to other company's who wont touch this; and if they all try this, then its time to start a ISP that wont..it will happen the same way the internet started and where wireless is going, eventually, a ISP will offer unlimited to compete with big money, then big money will need to follow suit to keep themselves in big money.
that being said, if they do this...ill cancel my internet and use a open wifi. (adding another level of problems for ISP)
I worked for sprint when they had their "Internet Passport" division which offered hourly service. I was part of a team that supported USAA customers (generally, elderly). I was tech support so most times I would have to just transfer them, but I would get calls at least once a day from some old dude who had accidentally forgot to log off when he was done and had received a bill for hundreds of dollars.
What needs to happen here, is the American people need to pressure their politicians to fire Julius Genachowski since he's not representing the best interest of the American people.
I use to block ads by host from the router, but my GF says it interferes with Hulu loading videos and takes longer if the ad does not load.
Yeah, hulu doesn't work if you block the ads. That's why I don't use hulu! It's not like there's a shortage of video services on the internet these days.
Third world economies desperately need to transition from subsitence farming to producing cash crops. I'm no fan of Monsanto, but their actions will ultimately be beneficial.
Because Monsanto has been so successful in India and South America, right? There's a few documentaries on the subject, and I'm pretty sure they're on netflix. Monsanto really is one of the greatest evils in the world today, threatening human life far more seriously than any Muslim terrorist.
I just want to know where he plans on spending his money...You can't build a computer of any kind without parts from Asia. Even all of those companies with the american flags in their ads are just assembling parts from Asia.
I'm pretty sure even American flags themselves are made in China.
Busy computers consume more electricity. And electricity costs real money. Now some this up over all the customer who unknowingly lost a couple of cents like this, and suddenly we are talking real money. One of the rare cases where the "theft" label is appropriate for a digital crime.
So basically, he spent other people's real money in order to steal virtual money. I have to agree, theft.
Problem is, except for possibly the "hangouts" which I don't know what they are (chatroom maybe?) it's all the same stuff everyone already has on facebook or even myspace or pick your social networking site. The price is the same (your personal information), so where's the benefit to using google+ over some other service?
Celebrities have lots of followers on facebook and spam the thing up there (ok, their PR departments actually do it for them). If you've liked a bunch of celebrities on any social network then the constant status spam is likely to drown out your actual friends' posts no regardless of the site.
I'm not saying g+ is bad, just that it's the same thing that's already been done. I fit nicely into that statistic in TFA where I registered, posted twice, and never went back.
WTF is someone who is intelligent enough to graduate from college (MIT no less) doing associating themselves with the Tea Party. It's got to be some kind of paid publicity stunt.
Or perhaps they have judged that people wouldn't pay what it would cost without the ads.
How would they have "judged" that without offering an ad-free service to see how well it's accepted?
Or perhaps they just don't give a shit what people want, because their customers are the ad advertisers, not the viewers. The people that watch Hulu are the consumables, not the consumers. Welcome to the "free market" - where you just don't get a choice. Funny how that works.
If they need to charge a large sum, say $1000/month to make an equivalent amount of money then it's a pretty safe bet it won't be accepted. It should be pretty simple for any business to compare what they make in ad revenue, then estimate if they think they can sell it at a reasonable price or not.
Of course once they get past that hurdle, a smaller company like Hulu has to worry about networks not allowing hulu to continue broadcasting if hulu is cutting out ads. DISH probably doesn't have to worry quite so much since the networks stand to loose a lot if they cut dish out of the pie, but smaller companies would be screwed in a hurry.
Slashdot Mirror
"Organizational efficiency" certainly sounds like job cuts. But hopefully it means RIM might take a look at its manufacturing efficiency, as well.
At Apple, Steve Jobs always invested heavily in modern, automated assembly lines for its products, because he realized that the problem of too much inventory is particularly risky for computer makers. If you think about it, technology products have relatively short shelf lives. You can't sit on a pile of inventory and sell it for the next few years, like you could if you were making hammers or dinner plates. By next year, your inventory of shiny gadgets might effectively be junk. So the key is to develop a manufacturing process -- and equally important, supply partnerships -- that allow you to manufacture products at an incredibly fast rate, so that you can respond to market demand rapidly. If the market wants tons of units, ramp up production. When it cools off, stop making more. Then you don't have to sit on so much inventory.
If RIM is sitting on $1 billion in inventory, it certainly sounds like it grossly overestimated the demand for some of its products at launch. But it also suggests that it either isn't paying close enough attention to the market numbers, or is unable to react quickly enough to them. Working on either one might save it some money.
It also helps if you can outsource this manufacturing to a place where you can treat the workers in a way that would be illegal in your primary market. Bonuses for the execs if you can reduce their wages enough to keep them below the poverty line. You can bet that part wasn't a surprise to Jobs, either.
Yikes, your employees were using 5 year old phones? You may want to look more at the policies around cell phones and reconsider those rather than blaming a 5 year old device for any particular problem.
On the other hand, you could consider yourself fortunate that you bought 10 devices that all lasted for so long.
Their inventory consists mostly of blackberries.
No. And Windows 8 can't survive in any world. Metro is going to sink Windows.
Aside from "a train" and "a cellphone company" what is this Metro which you think is going to sink windows?
Because we don't individually have time to research and analyze all the issues. So we hire people to do it as a full time job.
This guy is basically asking his constituents to do his job for him, while ignoring the fact that they're mostly guaranteed to screw it up.
An elected official's "Job" is to represent the will of the people who elected him.
Leaving all the decisions up to popular vote makes for poor decision making because the general public (usually) are not as informed as the lawmakers. Like Henry Ford said, "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."
It's amazing the similarities in decision making skills between the general public and elected officials, isn't it?
How do you think such polling could be best accomplished?
Have a bunch of people walk around and ask other people questions, then have them log in via a portal and report the results. Not everyone uses the internet, yet everyone should be represented. See the dilemma?
Not everyone votes in a traditional election, either. The percentage of the population with internet access far outweighs the percentage of the population who actually bother to go to the polls on election day. Further, anyone can go to a public library and access the internet for free.. at least they can do that in the state I live in.
Correctly does not show? Surely a good map shows you what's actually on the ground, and the 'gated off forest roads' are nevertheless roads which (If you have a key to the gate, or else a bicycle) you can actually use. It should show it as what it is - a track, without necessarily public access, but nevertheless there.
To each his own. If the road is inaccessible, I'd prefer my gps not to list it.
Nice job reposting it for him.
It should say "The shortage of hot women in IT".
It's definitely high time someone did something about it, too.
Uhhh...why exactly are you bothering? After he basically said "Yeah LOL go fuck yourself" over the pot petition all should know you'd get more results by writing it on a piece of paper and promptly burning it. For all his bullshit he is just as big if not a bigger sellout that Dubya was, personally I'd say he's worse as Dubya actually believed a lot of the shit he was saying whereas this one is just cashing the checks. But if you think he is gonna give a flying shit what the "people" think I have some swampland you may be interested in. If you manage to get the requisite number all you will get is a flowery "Ur not rich so fuck off' speech, so why bother?
As for TFA...is anybody surprised? With every move Forbes gets proved right on Ballmer being a shitty CEO, hell if the man had an original thought his head would asplode. And as for the rest of the list, Sony and Ericson are doing lousy and could probably use the cash, same with RIM, and Apple just plain old hates to have ANY competition other than MSFT. See Job's comments on how he would use his fortune to nuke Android for instance.
So how anybody could look at THAT list of names and no figure out they were gonna do something nasty I'll never know.
Stop shooting them down with little things like facts.
First post is AC or new account? Check. Anti-Google? Check. Barely related to article? Check.
Microsoft, you really should spend the cash for a competent astroturfing company. This one is really pathetic, and however much you are paying, it's way too much.
Microsoft? Why would they give a shit what happens in the tablet world?
Then USE the old rules. There are plenty of people that still do. Or better yet, write your own.. I don't think I've ever played with a group of people that used any set of book rules in its entirety. And if you're not imaginative enough to write your modules, it's incredibly easy to buy a modern module and convert it to any rule set you'd like.
2nd edition had by FAR the best rule set imo.
I would expect them to see that the description that comes up isn't what the product is. The price isn't stored in the bar code, you can't change the barcode to make the product lower priced, but you can print a bar code for a cheaper item and stick it on the expensive one. The till would bring up the product description and price of the cheap item, so they need to be selling a cheaper item with a sufficiently similar description that it would not get noticed by a sleepy drone
When I worked retail management at a supermarket 20 years ago this was NOT the case. Had a little situation with a guy slapping "gound beef" price stickers on beef tenderloin steaks (this is about an order of magnitude diff in price). Deli workers were known to do similar foolishness with price per pound of various products... If the deli girl liked you, you got the cold shrimp pesto salad ($10/lb) for the price of the generic bulk coleslaw ($2/lb).
In the modern era of self checkout grocery stores, especially if you're paying cash and have no loyalty card, every produce item is lettuce per pound. I donno how they stay in business like that.
In the long run I think the "dollar store" concept of $1 per package is going to eventually disappear and instead of RFIDs for each can of soup in the market, they'll simply weigh your cart and charge you a flat rate per pound. The "crab legs and beef tenderloin" problem is solved by making the packaging inconveniently hard to open and inserting bricks or corn or HFCS in the package to bring the cost per pound to a standard weight. Imagine a giant supermarket with only one cashier and checkout takes 15 seconds per cartload. Or packaging deals of cheap bulky stuff with expensive stuff, so buying expensive per pound stir fry meat is impossible alone; you have to buy it with a 10 pound rice sack. Or can't buy steaks or charcoal, must buy steaks and charcoal.
Since everything in walmart/target/whatever comes from China, and everything is made of plastic, I could see charging stuff from those stores based solely on weight. Here, you get 5 pounds of Chinese lead painted plastic. Is it a millenium falcon lego, or a dora the explorer vacuum cleaner, who cares, its 5 pounds of plastic and that'll be $X/pound.
The companies who put those little logos on the products won't have any of that. Say, Lucasarts who can add a starwars logo and increase the price people are willing to pay for 1lb of plastic 100 fold (that might be a bit conservative of a guess). The basic problem you are failing to see is that the "value" (even if it's only a value perceived by a customer and not a measurable one) is not simply derived by the value of something a product it is made from.
I'm sure retailers wouldn't have any of it, either - since they make more selling starwars legos, or Dora doll parts for $100/lb than they do selling regular legos for $10/lb.
I think the metered result from the wireless companys will look back as a failure. When the technology was new they could justify a metered way of doing things, the internet started in similar fashion, you remember 250 hours free from AOL? yes i know, nightmares of AOL, but you do remember that right? it was dropped eventually and the same thing is happening with wireless. Currently i pay 50.00 a month for unlimited text, data, and voice, i can even tether it to my laptop.
No, i dont think ISP will go to metered with much results, it was tried i believe and the backlash caused them to pull back..now with so much bandwidth required for free services like youtube, but also paid service like netflix, the company that will try this will lose to other company's who wont touch this; and if they all try this, then its time to start a ISP that wont..it will happen the same way the internet started and where wireless is going, eventually, a ISP will offer unlimited to compete with big money, then big money will need to follow suit to keep themselves in big money.
that being said, if they do this...ill cancel my internet and use a open wifi. (adding another level of problems for ISP)
I worked for sprint when they had their "Internet Passport" division which offered hourly service. I was part of a team that supported USAA customers (generally, elderly). I was tech support so most times I would have to just transfer them, but I would get calls at least once a day from some old dude who had accidentally forgot to log off when he was done and had received a bill for hundreds of dollars.
What needs to happen here, is the American people need to pressure their politicians to fire Julius Genachowski since he's not representing the best interest of the American people.
I use to block ads by host from the router, but my GF says it interferes with Hulu loading videos and takes longer if the ad does not load.
Yeah, hulu doesn't work if you block the ads. That's why I don't use hulu! It's not like there's a shortage of video services on the internet these days.
Third world economies desperately need to transition from subsitence farming to producing cash crops. I'm no fan of Monsanto, but their actions will ultimately be beneficial.
Because Monsanto has been so successful in India and South America, right? There's a few documentaries on the subject, and I'm pretty sure they're on netflix. Monsanto really is one of the greatest evils in the world today, threatening human life far more seriously than any Muslim terrorist.
I just want to know where he plans on spending his money...You can't build a computer of any kind without parts from Asia. Even all of those companies with the american flags in their ads are just assembling parts from Asia.
I'm pretty sure even American flags themselves are made in China.
Since Apple invest their money in China, I think I'll invest my hard earn money in someone else product beside Apple
Hard to believe this poorly worded comment is Score: 0.
Busy computers consume more electricity. And electricity costs real money. Now some this up over all the customer who unknowingly lost a couple of cents like this, and suddenly we are talking real money. One of the rare cases where the "theft" label is appropriate for a digital crime.
So basically, he spent other people's real money in order to steal virtual money. I have to agree, theft.
... trimming infrequently chunks of hardware.
And by trimming random words from sentences!
It inexact processing for language arts.
Problem is, except for possibly the "hangouts" which I don't know what they are (chatroom maybe?) it's all the same stuff everyone already has on facebook or even myspace or pick your social networking site. The price is the same (your personal information), so where's the benefit to using google+ over some other service? Celebrities have lots of followers on facebook and spam the thing up there (ok, their PR departments actually do it for them). If you've liked a bunch of celebrities on any social network then the constant status spam is likely to drown out your actual friends' posts no regardless of the site. I'm not saying g+ is bad, just that it's the same thing that's already been done. I fit nicely into that statistic in TFA where I registered, posted twice, and never went back.
WTF is someone who is intelligent enough to graduate from college (MIT no less) doing associating themselves with the Tea Party. It's got to be some kind of paid publicity stunt.
How would they have "judged" that without offering an ad-free service to see how well it's accepted?
Or perhaps they just don't give a shit what people want, because their customers are the ad advertisers, not the viewers. The people that watch Hulu are the consumables, not the consumers. Welcome to the "free market" - where you just don't get a choice. Funny how that works.
If they need to charge a large sum, say $1000/month to make an equivalent amount of money then it's a pretty safe bet it won't be accepted. It should be pretty simple for any business to compare what they make in ad revenue, then estimate if they think they can sell it at a reasonable price or not. Of course once they get past that hurdle, a smaller company like Hulu has to worry about networks not allowing hulu to continue broadcasting if hulu is cutting out ads. DISH probably doesn't have to worry quite so much since the networks stand to loose a lot if they cut dish out of the pie, but smaller companies would be screwed in a hurry.
It's good to be the judge.