Actually I havn't read it (or heard of it). Interesting reading... albiet a little overly optimistic. While markets can orginize in small degrees, they have been slow to act (how long has it been since this was writen?). In addition, it oversimplies the idea of an unrestricted dialogue between a company and its markets by ignoring the inherient vunerabilities such a dialogue would open in terms of liability and competitive advantages.
But thanks for the link. It's good to think every once in a while.
1. Return to a focus on music, as opposed to entertainment or product. Make a distinction once and for all that flash in the pan pop stars like Britney Spears or New Kids on the Block are not musicians, but entertainers. These groups are not so much recording artists as stage performers who also happen to have released an album. Considering relitivly short run longivity of these entertainers, keep promoting them the same way you've been doing for years: It works.
Now take the other side of the industry, the actual musicians; The folks who play their own instriments, the ones who formed a band together on their own and are creative and inovative forces are derived internally, not in a focus group. Employ A&R scouts and record executives with arts or music degrees, not business degrees. When deciding which bands to sign, make judgements based on individual merit instead of compliance to a winning formula.
In other words, promote and press music that is good, as opposed to an anaylist's predicted expectation for sales. In the end, this will provide quite a bit of profits as long as you:
2. Cut massive promotion costs. There is absolutly no reason why you should have to spend ~$5 million to promote an untested band. $1 million rock videos which are never viewed can be made just as effective as $50,000 videos in the hand of a novice filmaker who is allowed to innovate. Plastering the walls of every music store in America with posters will do nothing if nobody has heard of, or likes your band. Use low cost promotion methods, such as the Internet or word of mouth (hey, if the band is good, this does work). You can ultimatly generate low or no cost promotion with your best and most succesfull promotional outlet, radio, if you:
3. Stop orginized payola. Don't roll out a new untested band nationwide--they may fail! Allow individual radio stations and individual DJs the freedom to make programming decisions. If it's good, and the folks calling in keep asking for it, it will get played and eventually gain national attention. If it stinks, the DJs will soon drop it. When you allow programming decisions to fall into the hands of the folks who actually enjoy the music and talk on the phone every day and every hour with the people who will actually buy the music, you'll have a much better chance of knowing what music the people will actually buy then if you make those decisions in the board room.
Yes, this method is not as much a 'sure bet' as your current system, but then again, you will no longer blow millions on every new band which is essentially a crap shoot.
4. Finally, Value price recordings. ~$18 for a CD is simply too much money. Plain and simple. Consider a price point closer to the consumers willingness to pay. Make smaller recording runs for unknown or untested bands. As price per unit goes down, pass at least some of that savings to the consumer. Also, consider reviving the single. If you find yourself with a band that has a hit but an otherwise woefully uninspired album, charging $1.95 for a CD with just the one hit on it gives you more profit and allows the customer the ability to get the music he wants without making the often unprofitable (for you) decision to eschew the entire purchase.
As a personal note, you also might get me back as a customer if you stop calling me a theif or a terrorist because I've downloaded music off the Internet. Until recently I would purchase a few new CDs every month, but your public contempt for me has just frustrated me so much that I won't support your industry. You may think what I do is immoral, but you might want to consider this: If we make money in the long run, the custoemr is still always right.
Both are required for the succesful opperation of a car. Each require steel in their construction for structural reinforcement. In a pinch, and with a little engineering, theoretically one could be used to replace the other.
But most striking in their simularities: Both are round.
You're right. The economic system as we know it will end up changing signifigantly. If this thing blossems to fruition, humanity will only have two resources in scarce supply.
1. Land. Until we get off the planet on a regular basis, land will be king. Buy land. Now. It doesn't matter where it is. If you can pick up a few hundred acres in the middle of the desert, do it. In 30 years you'll have machines that can keep your house on that land safe, clean, and comfortable. Transit systems will take you anywhere you want to go in a short period of time, and ultimatly it won't matter where your land is, since the difference between living in downtown San Francisco and the polar ice caps will be negligable.
2. Intellectual property. Oddly, the more advanced we get, the stupider we become. Try as they might, the powers that be are slowly on the road to losing their centralized control over intellectual property. When it costs $500 to produce a movie and next to nothing to distribute it, when a studio quality album can be mixed and produced in a home office with open software, or when a book can be written then electronically edited and distrubuted, media companies can eventually be expected to become pointless. The thing is, we're already here... it just needs to take time to get John Q. Public to realize that triditional media is not only obsolite, but pretty much filled with rotten content.
In the future, Intellectual property will mean so much more. If your a talented writer, musician, painter etc, you will be in demand.
The reality is, unless you've got some land or are are good producing ideas, you're pretty much SOL 50 years from now. Think about it: Manufacturing jobs- replaced by machines. Technition jobs- replaced by an increasing demand for reliability in those machines (or potentially replaced by machines that can troubleshoot and fix machines). Health care professionals- replaced by diagnostic and surgical robots. Police or fireman? Cameras and robots. McDonald's fry cook? Robots again.
Name any job out there, and you can see it replaced by a better, faster and cheaper mechanical and electrical equilivent. Any job except producing ideas. These are not just artists, but programmers, industrial designers, or even techincal writers.
The bad news is, most of us will be out of a job. The good news is that we'll enjoy a pretty good quality of life while being unemployed. When the basic needs for survival--fuel, food, housing--are all available in a near infinate abundance at a negligable cost, then being poor doesn't seem that bad. (just expect your cable bill to be 10,000 times what your electric bill is).
The earliest memory I ever had, that I could truly call me own, was a 64k expansion card for the family's Apple ][e. I relished in how a simple 'pr#3' could make the screen jump from 40 to 80 colums, and would spend hours fiddling with HGR2. I was, now with a whopping 128k, truly eleet.
Ahh. . . recalling my earliest memory has brought me such warm feelings.
I always figured they had to use the wires and the substandard electrical system (you know, the one that always breaks down and shoots sparks everywhere anytime the ship gets hit) because even in the future, StarFleet has to construct everything with Teamster labor.
I mean, Data was built by hand, so he can get hit all he wants, his head can sit in a cave for thousands of years, and he still stays in good shape.
But the Enterprise was probably built by big contractors at the lowest bidder. Why do you think the Engineer (in every series) is always able to make the ship perform faster or better then it's supposed to? Most likely McDonald Douglass Tech 3000 published conservitive performance specs to limit their own liability.
Even in the future, that which is built by government contractors end up falling a little short of the grade.
How hard is it to take an address and say 'Oh, this isn't in our city. You should call the detective in the city it's in?'
Sure, as many people have pointed out, police detectives, espically in big cities have an awfully large case load. But this implies that nothing was even looked at, just some guy on the phone who took the report without caring and throwing it in a pile of papers.
The reality is, this wasn't something the Chicago PD should have handled. However, the fact that a very simple thing such as 'This actually isn't in our jouristiction' would take weeks to investigate is a little upsetting.
And in a perfect world, they would have people assigned to this sort of thing, and enough of them to do something about it in a timeful manner.
This story should be fowarded to everyone at the Chicago police. It should be an embarassment for them.
The ho hum attitude of law inforcement regarding things done on the Internet is sad, and scary. If the young man hadn't finally been able to contact an agency that actually wanted to do their job (stop crime), who knows where it would have gone.
Being a vigilante is never a good idea, but when the police don't do anything, it leaves the average person little choice.
I suspect we'll start seeing this more and more in the future, as long as law enforcement refuses to act on these things. Why should a person have to spend their own time and money in order to stop criminals? Are we going to reach a point where the only way someone can get an investigation is if they pay somebody to do it? I thought that's what our taxes which paid for police departments were supposed to do.
Just wait.. Withen a few years somebodys going to get killed because the police sat on their hands and a frustrated victim did their footwork and blows the person who scammed them away.
Because it's hard to be unbiased when you pit a pragmatic argument dealing with self defense and constitutional rights (in the US) against an emotional argument. Both sides have a difficult time seeing the bigger picture.
First, let me say that on their own, guns are bad. They are designed, espically handguns, to cause distruction. Theres no other way to put that. A gun is a weapon, plain and simple. And it todays day and age, I wouldn't mind at all if all guns just disappeared off the face of the planet.
However, since we live in reality, private ownership of guns become a neccesity for a variety of reasons when used properly. Since the pandora's box of instant death in the palm of your hand has been opened, it has been inpossible to turn back. No matter what legislation is passed, two dangerous or potentially dangerous groups of people will always have guns: Criminals and Governments.
There are reasons why we have a constitutionally protected right to bear arms, and it goes beyond the idea of protecting ourselves from the King of England. If we in America ever reach the stage where our government goes compleatly out of control and the democratic process breaks down, (some would argue that is already happining), what tool other then guns does the population have at their disposal to force positive change?
In addition, there seems to be signigant evidence that private gun ownership does help the innocent (allowing them to protect themselves from the criminal element) more then it hurts them (accidental shootings).
In addition, the numerous downsides to an armed population could be signifigantly reduced by simply changing our perspective about guns. We require that people have an understanding of the safety of guns, we teach them to respect guns for the power that they hold. We get it into peoples heads that when your drunk and angry, you leave the gun at home.
Personally, I don't own a gun, and I don't think I ever could. This stems more from my own individual feelings about the importance of life. I've gone shooting with freinds, and always have enjoyed it. It's been said that you shouldn't own or pull out your gun unless you absolutly intend to use it. My own personal reflections revealed that I wouldn't be able to do use deadly force regardless of the circumstances, and by having that option available and not being able to use it I could cause more problems then I could prevent.
Unfortunatly, when you start getting into the complex battle between morality and personal responsibility surrounding something as important as human life, the pundents on both side of the issue often conviently neglect objectivity.
And you've just demonstrated exactly what is wrong with the internal structure of most ISP support departments.
I spent a year tour working for a major ISP, and what bothered me was that when I started in the trenches, there was a feeling that 'yes, we want to help the customers. We want to make them happy. We want to do a good job.'
But after a short time it was discovered that customer satisfacation is not what makes the company happy, and it does not help you if you actually do want to move up.
The management structure is such that so many people sit in a position they are incompitant to handle. In a large company, managers are unable to handle dynamic concepts such as 'quality', 'customer satisfaction', or 'customer retention', so they fall back on easily measurable numbers such as call times as their only way to judge perforance.
And it is quickly learned that a manger who incourages his/her people to take the time to fix the problem right the first time and making sure that the customer is happy does not make the poor boob above him happy. Who cares if the customers are happy, don't cancel their service, or refers the service to others, or at the very least is able to resolve the problem with 1 30 minute call instead of 5 10 minute calls? The person above him/her can't seem to handle that leap of logic.
And what does the company do when suddenly the customers are unhappy and start cancling the service? They take some of their best techs and put them in a 'retention team', and offer all sorts of benifits to the customer--such as a few months free--if they change their mind.
To the customer, the impression the ISP sends is 'We will treat you like shit, unless you decide you want to get rid of us.'
That this is not the way to do business should be obivous to anyone. It happens more often then not, however, because the people calling the shots find it's a heck of a lot easier to look at the bottom line in small, quantifiable statistics then to take the trouble to look at the bigger picture.
In my case my guess is that it came down something like this: 'Our research indicates that the biggest customer complaint is long hold times. The top of the company has told me that I have to fix this. So I will do whatever I can to make my people keep call times low. I am succesful, and my bosses are happy. 6 months later the biggest customer complaint is poor customer service. I can just blame the techs on this and yell at them to be nicer to the customer. The top brass trusts me on this; after all, I am a good manager (I reduced call times!)'. But by this time, the company decides to promote me to a higher position.
I left that company, making a promise to myself to never work for a large corperation again. I havn't, and I couldn't be happier.
What happened to the days of the computer cowboys? When did everyone lose their enthusiasm, their drive for computers?
When we grew up and had to make our living off them. When we had to spend long periods of time at freinds homes or parties fixing terribly mangled setups.
Or, more specifically, when we started to get a life.
From this review (and others that have been floating around), IP rental just won't work in it's present state. My guess is there are those who will try it for its novelty value (such as the reviewer, and for that matter, my self), but they need to improve/change several things before it will ever take off.
1. Quality, quality, quality. DIVX is good, but by no means near DVD (or even a good quality VHS). From what I understand, this uses a lower quality compression then DIVX.
2. Co-branding with service providers. As it stands, the movies are delivered to from a remote IP address and the actual transfer of data runs over your pre-existing ISP. With more and more ISPs trying to cap large data transfers, this spells doom for both the consumers and the movie service. On the other hand, there is tremendous untapped bandwidth between the local office of the provider and the end user, espically for cable. Place a good server with a terribyte hdd filled with movies at a C.O., and you end up getting the information to the end user faster (or with better quality) without the added expense of having to run outside to the Internet.
3. Usability. They would have to either a: make it very, very easy to use whatever propritary viewing/authentication scheme, or b: allow the user more flexibility in choosing a media player and authentication system. Somewhere along the line they need to develop a system where you can download the movie and play it whenever the user wanted without having to jump through excessive hoops.
4. Value. At present $3 for a movie for 24 hours, even they could increase the playback quality signifigantly, can't compete with the added features of a DVD or the typical 3-5 day rental period.
5. Selection. If the average consumer were to turn to the Internet to rent movies, they would have to be able to compete by providing a selection of movies that would rival the catalog of a mail order rental service or even a well stocked Blockbuster. (15,000 - 30,000 titles would be a good start).
If somehow they could address all of these issues, I could certinatly see more interest in it, but as it stands now, I doubt we will see anyone getting rich renting movies online, or seeing your local video shop going out of business any time soon.
Is start up websites that do nothing but debunk all those UFO photos and make wild outlandish claims that it's a giant cover-up by the conspiracy therorists to mask the horrifying truth; That they have no lives.
After three years of always having me to call on to take care of anything IT related, I think they have just gotten used to it.
The first time after I left (I actually quit, was not laid off) that I got the call, I think I handled it the best way possible.
You tell them 'I'd love to help you out. You know I am consulting on my own now, right?'
Explain to them that you are your own business. Find a price that is fair... not unreasonably high, but something that is in a solid ballpark. I settled on twice of what I made hourly for the company. When you consider that a:) you are now going to have to pay additional social security as an independant consultant and are having to pay the costs of your own benifits (health care, etc.), and b:) You don't have a full time job, so a little extra is worth having.
Good luck to you. Remember, you don't work for them anymore. Of course you don't want to mean or vicious to them (to burn your bridges), just be freindly and professional. If you feel that you have some personal obligation to help them out, remember that when they let you go, it was 'just business' to them. Treat them the same way.
Good luck
Great... now how will I decide?
on
The Last Comdex?
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· Score: 3, Funny
It used to be so easy to purchase new equipment. Instead of going through the laborious process of researching the specs and reviews online, I simply went with the vendor with the coolest promo stuff.
Last year at Comdex netgear gave out t-shirts and a nifty little spoungy dog. Linksys wouldn't even talk to me. Guess what switches are sitting on my desk now!
So I'll be sad. Aparently actual business took place there, or was supposed to take place there, but for the most part, all I saw was people like me scrounging for free stuff.
Yes, like pathetic geeks. But then again, the pathetic geeks scrounging for free stuff usually are the ones making the IT decisions.
That's the first thing that came to mind when I read this.
The best thing I can come up with is that the client has to be very close when first authenticating, and as you move futher away the directional antenneas 'follow' you up to 4 miles.
Of course, this doesn't really make for a good solution. Is everyone going to have to walk into the server room with the antennea every morning to authenticate and make sure the laptop stays on all day (oh, you rebooted. You better drive back to the central antenna).
I'd be curious as to how they propose to handle this.
Investing large amounts of money into what at best can be a short term (5-8 year) money making opperation just seems unsound.
Computers are increasing in processing, storage, and display power at a geometric rate. Bandwidth is hitting a wall now in price and performance but an increased and more efficent infrastructure is expected to fullfill the needs. So called 'theoretical limits' are often debunked or simply worked around.
That's not to say this isn't a good idea to make money, it's simply something that could be done and put together for a signifigatly lower cost and ultimatly fullfills only a short term need.
I remember sometime back the lust I had in my heart for one of those new, fancy 17" monitors. There were occasionally rumors or adverts of something larger. But 17" was the holy grail of geekness above the 14-15" myself and everyone I knew had.
"Someday, it'll be afforadable" I thought to myself. That someday came in the late 90s. So I got one. Of course, I liked it.
Flat panels are the same way. Do I want one? Yes. Will I eventually buy one? Yes. Will I spend 700-1500 for a good quality one right now? Not on your life.
If these industry experts really belive that it will pass up CRTs this year, then they really have to change the pricing structure on them.
In the meantime, I'm very happy with my current 19" NEC, in black, which looks dang cool and cost me $250.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I havn't read it (or heard of it). Interesting reading... albiet a little overly optimistic. While markets can orginize in small degrees, they have been slow to act (how long has it been since this was writen?). In addition, it oversimplies the idea of an unrestricted dialogue between a company and its markets by ignoring the inherient vunerabilities such a dialogue would open in terms of liability and competitive advantages.
But thanks for the link. It's good to think every once in a while.
In just a few easy steps.
1. Return to a focus on music, as opposed to entertainment or product. Make a distinction once and for all that flash in the pan pop stars like Britney Spears or New Kids on the Block are not musicians, but entertainers. These groups are not so much recording artists as stage performers who also happen to have released an album. Considering relitivly short run longivity of these entertainers, keep promoting them the same way you've been doing for years: It works.
Now take the other side of the industry, the actual musicians; The folks who play their own instriments, the ones who formed a band together on their own and are creative and inovative forces are derived internally, not in a focus group. Employ A&R scouts and record executives with arts or music degrees, not business degrees. When deciding which bands to sign, make judgements based on individual merit instead of compliance to a winning formula.
In other words, promote and press music that is good, as opposed to an anaylist's predicted expectation for sales. In the end, this will provide quite a bit of profits as long as you:
2. Cut massive promotion costs. There is absolutly no reason why you should have to spend ~$5 million to promote an untested band. $1 million rock videos which are never viewed can be made just as effective as $50,000 videos in the hand of a novice filmaker who is allowed to innovate. Plastering the walls of every music store in America with posters will do nothing if nobody has heard of, or likes your band. Use low cost promotion methods, such as the Internet or word of mouth (hey, if the band is good, this does work). You can ultimatly generate low or no cost promotion with your best and most succesfull promotional outlet, radio, if you:
3. Stop orginized payola. Don't roll out a new untested band nationwide--they may fail! Allow individual radio stations and individual DJs the freedom to make programming decisions. If it's good, and the folks calling in keep asking for it, it will get played and eventually gain national attention. If it stinks, the DJs will soon drop it. When you allow programming decisions to fall into the hands of the folks who actually enjoy the music and talk on the phone every day and every hour with the people who will actually buy the music, you'll have a much better chance of knowing what music the people will actually buy then if you make those decisions in the board room.
Yes, this method is not as much a 'sure bet' as your current system, but then again, you will no longer blow millions on every new band which is essentially a crap shoot.
4. Finally, Value price recordings. ~$18 for a CD is simply too much money. Plain and simple. Consider a price point closer to the consumers willingness to pay. Make smaller recording runs for unknown or untested bands. As price per unit goes down, pass at least some of that savings to the consumer. Also, consider reviving the single. If you find yourself with a band that has a hit but an otherwise woefully uninspired album, charging $1.95 for a CD with just the one hit on it gives you more profit and allows the customer the ability to get the music he wants without making the often unprofitable (for you) decision to eschew the entire purchase.
As a personal note, you also might get me back as a customer if you stop calling me a theif or a terrorist because I've downloaded music off the Internet. Until recently I would purchase a few new CDs every month, but your public contempt for me has just frustrated me so much that I won't support your industry. You may think what I do is immoral, but you might want to consider this: If we make money in the long run, the custoemr is still always right.
As opposed to being able to build a computer out of a programming language or opperating system?
Steering wheels and tires are the same thing.
Both are required for the succesful opperation of a car. Each require steel in their construction for structural reinforcement. In a pinch, and with a little engineering, theoretically one could be used to replace the other.
But most striking in their simularities: Both are round.
You're right. The economic system as we know it will end up changing signifigantly. If this thing blossems to fruition, humanity will only have two resources in scarce supply.
1. Land. Until we get off the planet on a regular basis, land will be king. Buy land. Now. It doesn't matter where it is. If you can pick up a few hundred acres in the middle of the desert, do it. In 30 years you'll have machines that can keep your house on that land safe, clean, and comfortable. Transit systems will take you anywhere you want to go in a short period of time, and ultimatly it won't matter where your land is, since the difference between living in downtown San Francisco and the polar ice caps will be negligable.
2. Intellectual property. Oddly, the more advanced we get, the stupider we become. Try as they might, the powers that be are slowly on the road to losing their centralized control over intellectual property. When it costs $500 to produce a movie and next to nothing to distribute it, when a studio quality album can be mixed and produced in a home office with open software, or when a book can be written then electronically edited and distrubuted, media companies can eventually be expected to become pointless. The thing is, we're already here... it just needs to take time to get John Q. Public to realize that triditional media is not only obsolite, but pretty much filled with rotten content.
In the future, Intellectual property will mean so much more. If your a talented writer, musician, painter etc, you will be in demand.
The reality is, unless you've got some land or are are good producing ideas, you're pretty much SOL 50 years from now. Think about it: Manufacturing jobs- replaced by machines. Technition jobs- replaced by an increasing demand for reliability in those machines (or potentially replaced by machines that can troubleshoot and fix machines). Health care professionals- replaced by diagnostic and surgical robots. Police or fireman? Cameras and robots. McDonald's fry cook? Robots again.
Name any job out there, and you can see it replaced by a better, faster and cheaper mechanical and electrical equilivent. Any job except producing ideas. These are not just artists, but programmers, industrial designers, or even techincal writers.
The bad news is, most of us will be out of a job. The good news is that we'll enjoy a pretty good quality of life while being unemployed. When the basic needs for survival--fuel, food, housing--are all available in a near infinate abundance at a negligable cost, then being poor doesn't seem that bad. (just expect your cable bill to be 10,000 times what your electric bill is).
Me? I'm ready.
The earliest memory I ever had, that I could truly call me own, was a 64k expansion card for the family's Apple ][e. I relished in how a simple 'pr#3' could make the screen jump from 40 to 80 colums, and would spend hours fiddling with HGR2. I was, now with a whopping 128k, truly eleet.
Ahh. . . recalling my earliest memory has brought me such warm feelings.
The post was in the spirit of levity. I don't think any sort of substance was implied.
as far as gun ownership is concerned.... I own several. You own none. If a criminal reads this post, who is he more likely to mug?
Hard to say. I don't have a 12x CD Burner, (I don't have any). A smart criminal would probably go for the loot, despite the risks.
You're starting to sound suspiciously like some sort of gun rights advocate.
What's next, 'If access to unrestricted recording technology is outlawed, only outlaws will have access to unrestricted recording technology'?
Somehow that doesn't have the ring I was hoping for.
I always figured they had to use the wires and the substandard electrical system (you know, the one that always breaks down and shoots sparks everywhere anytime the ship gets hit) because even in the future, StarFleet has to construct everything with Teamster labor.
I mean, Data was built by hand, so he can get hit all he wants, his head can sit in a cave for thousands of years, and he still stays in good shape.
But the Enterprise was probably built by big contractors at the lowest bidder. Why do you think the Engineer (in every series) is always able to make the ship perform faster or better then it's supposed to? Most likely McDonald Douglass Tech 3000 published conservitive performance specs to limit their own liability.
Even in the future, that which is built by government contractors end up falling a little short of the grade.
I mean, whos going to start up the pool where we can bet how long between the source code is sent to India and it is all over the Internet?
Put me down for 34 hours.
How hard is it to take an address and say 'Oh, this isn't in our city. You should call the detective in the city it's in?'
Sure, as many people have pointed out, police detectives, espically in big cities have an awfully large case load. But this implies that nothing was even looked at, just some guy on the phone who took the report without caring and throwing it in a pile of papers.
The reality is, this wasn't something the Chicago PD should have handled. However, the fact that a very simple thing such as 'This actually isn't in our jouristiction' would take weeks to investigate is a little upsetting.
And in a perfect world, they would have people assigned to this sort of thing, and enough of them to do something about it in a timeful manner.
This story should be fowarded to everyone at the Chicago police. It should be an embarassment for them.
The ho hum attitude of law inforcement regarding things done on the Internet is sad, and scary. If the young man hadn't finally been able to contact an agency that actually wanted to do their job (stop crime), who knows where it would have gone.
Being a vigilante is never a good idea, but when the police don't do anything, it leaves the average person little choice.
I suspect we'll start seeing this more and more in the future, as long as law enforcement refuses to act on these things. Why should a person have to spend their own time and money in order to stop criminals? Are we going to reach a point where the only way someone can get an investigation is if they pay somebody to do it? I thought that's what our taxes which paid for police departments were supposed to do.
Just wait.. Withen a few years somebodys going to get killed because the police sat on their hands and a frustrated victim did their footwork and blows the person who scammed them away.
Because it's hard to be unbiased when you pit a pragmatic argument dealing with self defense and constitutional rights (in the US) against an emotional argument. Both sides have a difficult time seeing the bigger picture.
First, let me say that on their own, guns are bad. They are designed, espically handguns, to cause distruction. Theres no other way to put that. A gun is a weapon, plain and simple. And it todays day and age, I wouldn't mind at all if all guns just disappeared off the face of the planet.
However, since we live in reality, private ownership of guns become a neccesity for a variety of reasons when used properly. Since the pandora's box of instant death in the palm of your hand has been opened, it has been inpossible to turn back. No matter what legislation is passed, two dangerous or potentially dangerous groups of people will always have guns: Criminals and Governments.
There are reasons why we have a constitutionally protected right to bear arms, and it goes beyond the idea of protecting ourselves from the King of England. If we in America ever reach the stage where our government goes compleatly out of control and the democratic process breaks down, (some would argue that is already happining), what tool other then guns does the population have at their disposal to force positive change?
In addition, there seems to be signigant evidence that private gun ownership does help the innocent (allowing them to protect themselves from the criminal element) more then it hurts them (accidental shootings).
In addition, the numerous downsides to an armed population could be signifigantly reduced by simply changing our perspective about guns. We require that people have an understanding of the safety of guns, we teach them to respect guns for the power that they hold. We get it into peoples heads that when your drunk and angry, you leave the gun at home.
Personally, I don't own a gun, and I don't think I ever could. This stems more from my own individual feelings about the importance of life. I've gone shooting with freinds, and always have enjoyed it. It's been said that you shouldn't own or pull out your gun unless you absolutly intend to use it. My own personal reflections revealed that I wouldn't be able to do use deadly force regardless of the circumstances, and by having that option available and not being able to use it I could cause more problems then I could prevent.
Unfortunatly, when you start getting into the complex battle between morality and personal responsibility surrounding something as important as human life, the pundents on both side of the issue often conviently neglect objectivity.
And you've just demonstrated exactly what is wrong with the internal structure of most ISP support departments.
I spent a year tour working for a major ISP, and what bothered me was that when I started in the trenches, there was a feeling that 'yes, we want to help the customers. We want to make them happy. We want to do a good job.'
But after a short time it was discovered that customer satisfacation is not what makes the company happy, and it does not help you if you actually do want to move up.
The management structure is such that so many people sit in a position they are incompitant to handle. In a large company, managers are unable to handle dynamic concepts such as 'quality', 'customer satisfaction', or 'customer retention', so they fall back on easily measurable numbers such as call times as their only way to judge perforance.
And it is quickly learned that a manger who incourages his/her people to take the time to fix the problem right the first time and making sure that the customer is happy does not make the poor boob above him happy. Who cares if the customers are happy, don't cancel their service, or refers the service to others, or at the very least is able to resolve the problem with 1 30 minute call instead of 5 10 minute calls? The person above him/her can't seem to handle that leap of logic.
And what does the company do when suddenly the customers are unhappy and start cancling the service? They take some of their best techs and put them in a 'retention team', and offer all sorts of benifits to the customer--such as a few months free--if they change their mind.
To the customer, the impression the ISP sends is 'We will treat you like shit, unless you decide you want to get rid of us.'
That this is not the way to do business should be obivous to anyone. It happens more often then not, however, because the people calling the shots find it's a heck of a lot easier to look at the bottom line in small, quantifiable statistics then to take the trouble to look at the bigger picture.
In my case my guess is that it came down something like this: 'Our research indicates that the biggest customer complaint is long hold times. The top of the company has told me that I have to fix this. So I will do whatever I can to make my people keep call times low. I am succesful, and my bosses are happy. 6 months later the biggest customer complaint is poor customer service. I can just blame the techs on this and yell at them to be nicer to the customer. The top brass trusts me on this; after all, I am a good manager (I reduced call times!)'. But by this time, the company decides to promote me to a higher position.
I left that company, making a promise to myself to never work for a large corperation again. I havn't, and I couldn't be happier.
I am not a rocket scientist, but I always thought the whole point of the shuttle was that it is resuable, thus saving money in the long run.
Isn't NASA working on a next generation shuttle for human missions?
What happened to the days of the computer cowboys? When did everyone lose their enthusiasm, their drive for computers?
When we grew up and had to make our living off them. When we had to spend long periods of time at freinds homes or parties fixing terribly mangled setups.
Or, more specifically, when we started to get a life.
it would probably put my cat in the dishwasher.....probably put my cat in the dryer.
How exactly are these things 'problems'?
From this review (and others that have been floating around), IP rental just won't work in it's present state. My guess is there are those who will try it for its novelty value (such as the reviewer, and for that matter, my self), but they need to improve/change several things before it will ever take off.
1. Quality, quality, quality. DIVX is good, but by no means near DVD (or even a good quality VHS). From what I understand, this uses a lower quality compression then DIVX.
2. Co-branding with service providers. As it stands, the movies are delivered to from a remote IP address and the actual transfer of data runs over your pre-existing ISP. With more and more ISPs trying to cap large data transfers, this spells doom for both the consumers and the movie service. On the other hand, there is tremendous untapped bandwidth between the local office of the provider and the end user, espically for cable. Place a good server with a terribyte hdd filled with movies at a C.O., and you end up getting the information to the end user faster (or with better quality) without the added expense of having to run outside to the Internet.
3. Usability. They would have to either a: make it very, very easy to use whatever propritary viewing/authentication scheme, or b: allow the user more flexibility in choosing a media player and authentication system. Somewhere along the line they need to develop a system where you can download the movie and play it whenever the user wanted without having to jump through excessive hoops.
4. Value. At present $3 for a movie for 24 hours, even they could increase the playback quality signifigantly, can't compete with the added features of a DVD or the typical 3-5 day rental period.
5. Selection. If the average consumer were to turn to the Internet to rent movies, they would have to be able to compete by providing a selection of movies that would rival the catalog of a mail order rental service or even a well stocked Blockbuster. (15,000 - 30,000 titles would be a good start).
If somehow they could address all of these issues, I could certinatly see more interest in it, but as it stands now, I doubt we will see anyone getting rich renting movies online, or seeing your local video shop going out of business any time soon.
Is start up websites that do nothing but debunk all those UFO photos and make wild outlandish claims that it's a giant cover-up by the conspiracy therorists to mask the horrifying truth; That they have no lives.
Where do I sign up for the implants
What do you think that flu shot you recently had was?
I wanna be a drone to corporate marketing.
Yes, we all do. Be patient.
After three years of always having me to call on to take care of anything IT related, I think they have just gotten used to it.
The first time after I left (I actually quit, was not laid off) that I got the call, I think I handled it the best way possible.
You tell them 'I'd love to help you out. You know I am consulting on my own now, right?'
Explain to them that you are your own business. Find a price that is fair... not unreasonably high, but something that is in a solid ballpark. I settled on twice of what I made hourly for the company. When you consider that a:) you are now going to have to pay additional social security as an independant consultant and are having to pay the costs of your own benifits (health care, etc.), and b:) You don't have a full time job, so a little extra is worth having.
Good luck to you. Remember, you don't work for them anymore. Of course you don't want to mean or vicious to them (to burn your bridges), just be freindly and professional. If you feel that you have some personal obligation to help them out, remember that when they let you go, it was 'just business' to them. Treat them the same way.
Good luck
It used to be so easy to purchase new equipment. Instead of going through the laborious process of researching the specs and reviews online, I simply went with the vendor with the coolest promo stuff.
Last year at Comdex netgear gave out t-shirts and a nifty little spoungy dog. Linksys wouldn't even talk to me. Guess what switches are sitting on my desk now!
So I'll be sad. Aparently actual business took place there, or was supposed to take place there, but for the most part, all I saw was people like me scrounging for free stuff.
Yes, like pathetic geeks. But then again, the pathetic geeks scrounging for free stuff usually are the ones making the IT decisions.
*sigh*
That's the first thing that came to mind when I read this.
The best thing I can come up with is that the client has to be very close when first authenticating, and as you move futher away the directional antenneas 'follow' you up to 4 miles.
Of course, this doesn't really make for a good solution. Is everyone going to have to walk into the server room with the antennea every morning to authenticate and make sure the laptop stays on all day (oh, you rebooted. You better drive back to the central antenna).
I'd be curious as to how they propose to handle this.
Investing large amounts of money into what at best can be a short term (5-8 year) money making opperation just seems unsound.
Computers are increasing in processing, storage, and display power at a geometric rate. Bandwidth is hitting a wall now in price and performance but an increased and more efficent infrastructure is expected to fullfill the needs. So called 'theoretical limits' are often debunked or simply worked around.
That's not to say this isn't a good idea to make money, it's simply something that could be done and put together for a signifigatly lower cost and ultimatly fullfills only a short term need.
I remember sometime back the lust I had in my heart for one of those new, fancy 17" monitors. There were occasionally rumors or adverts of something larger. But 17" was the holy grail of geekness above the 14-15" myself and everyone I knew had.
"Someday, it'll be afforadable" I thought to myself. That someday came in the late 90s. So I got one. Of course, I liked it.
Flat panels are the same way. Do I want one? Yes. Will I eventually buy one? Yes. Will I spend 700-1500 for a good quality one right now? Not on your life.
If these industry experts really belive that it will pass up CRTs this year, then they really have to change the pricing structure on them.
In the meantime, I'm very happy with my current 19" NEC, in black, which looks dang cool and cost me $250.