I think there is a disconnect between your arguments, and that is the use of "many" and "most."
I tend to agree with the initial poster that most CEO's are decent people. I also agree that there are egregious incidents of CEO exploitation of workers and shareholders. Both are probably true.
The egregious CEO's we hear about are usually Fortune 500/1000 companies where those absurd incentives are possible, where CEO compensation is set by a nod-and-wink executive compensation board, and where there is a serious glass ceiling for many of us to reach that level.
The problem is that there are only 500 (or 1000) such CEO's, and there are many, many more companies. I've worked directly with many CEO's of small companues, and I've met some really decent people, and some not so decent people. I also recognize there are enough companies out there that my sample set is way too small to make any generalizations.
I picked up the DVD while recently in London, mildly surprised that I had not even heard of the movie out in California. As I watched the DVD, I thought it was essentially a modern remake of Day of the Triffids...
I have had the same address for almost ten years, and as a result, I am averaging over 500 spams per day. Even if the filters catch 80%, that's 100 spams per day that reach my mailbox. And the average spam that gets through is usually on the order of 20K, so that's 2M of spam in my inbox, every day, and an estimated 10M of spam that has delivery attempted.
Unfortunately, the problem for me is that 9 years ago, the concept of spam was a joke, so on my much older web pages, my email address was published. Many people know me through that address. Perhaps it is stubborness on my part, but why should I be forced to change my email address on a regular basis because of SPAM, yet that does seem to be the only real alternative.
How long would people allow telemarketing if they were forced to change phone numbers regularly to avoid it?
If you've seen the microsoft commercial "we'll find the list of people who bought the record and send them e-mail" you know Microsoft is selling easier methods to spam.
The Red Herring was originally a trade magazine for people involved with the Silicon Valley venture capital community. Turning it into a mainstream publication with wide distribution was typical dot-com hubris.
In case you missed it, there is no "Silicon Valley venture capital community" anymore. Sure there are a few VC firms still functioning, trying to squeeze a few pennies back out of each dollar they invested, but the rate of new investment in this valley is well below the rate before the boom.
Something to consider: Montgomery Street didn't start laying off their analysts for high tech startups until late last year, as recently as last June they believed there would be a return to serious investment (and I worked with a pre-funded startup seeking funding.) Now? They don't expect any investment in technology for quite a while, and we entrepeneurs need to find a new model to get off the ground.
One thing I found interesting about Nemesis is how the politics of the Federation were inverted. Historically, the Federation would stand up in support of an oppressed people and fight against dictatorship. If we believe the plot, the Romulans had been oppressing the Remans for many years. The line, "You've got a friend on Romulus" after helping the Romulans re-establish their oppression and restoring the Remans to slave status says it all:
I've had to do this. I've maintained a site with some photographs, and found that someone was linking pictures of my sister on an ezboard BBS with rude and defamatory comments like "fat cow." A complaint to ezboard went unanswered, so I modified the conf file for apache to block all subsequent links to my site.
Since then, I've only added two more sites to that in 18 months.
Yes, "Real" techies are out of work. What makes the current recession interesting is that it isn't only the bottom rung of skilled workers who are left out to dry, with the effective elimination of investment in new ventures (VC investments in technology are at an all-time low; not the rates prior to the boom, but rates prior to the transistor.) the innovators are left out to dry.
Worse, Montgomery Street is seeing layoffs. These layoffs are of the analysts who understood the technology market. They weren't laid off last year... they're being laid off now. Why? Because a recovery is no longer expected to happen in the near future. VC firms are shutting down, too...
This is truly disturbing for the future of innovation in this country. It's one thing to have a down turn, and pull back investments a bit. Instead, we're seeing a meltdown of the infrastructure that made companies like Intel, Cisco, HP, etc... even possible.
Big companies tend to innovate slowly at best. The innovators tend to be poorly rewarded at best, and often go unrewarded. Right now, that's the only innovation path available in this country. What incentive is there for someone to work hard and come up with new ideas?
Re:excellent promotion for alternate browsers
on
Next-Gen Pop-up Ads
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Many moons ago, before browsers allowed you to block open() on events, there were pop-ups. I didn't like them then, so I just blocked javascript in full. I've found that blocking javascript in full may mean I miss some of the "cute" features of a web site, but rarely did it prevent me from reaching the content, and those sites where javascript was required often were the same ones that wanted to give me popups on every mouse click. I found alternates.
Browsing without javascript helped me to realize that the advertising community has hijacked javascript; it is time web developers realized that.
When AOL acquired Netscape, I was working at Netscape, and we were presented with all this AOL paperwork. After my lawyer reviewed it, there were many questions and clarifications desired. So, I red-lined a copy of the agreement and returned it, asking for one of the HR people to contact me. I left AOL about a year after the Netscape acquisition, and they still hadn't contacted me.
Thanks to the way the Victorian Era poisoned our culture, Westerners in general and Americans in particular have a morbid fear of sexuality.
This fear of sex dates back well before the Victorian Era. The Puritans who settled here had a similar approach to sex. Compared to them, the Victorians were highly librated.
For a while, Gene Spafford of the Clouds project at Georgia Tech was archiving netnews to 9 track tape. I think he stopped in the mid-80's, when he went to Purdue.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To know that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.
Before I click on a link, how do I know how large it is? How do I know in advance if the images on a page are small or large?
The only fair way to make metered access work is if you know what you are downloading, and how much you will be billed, in advance. Picture browsers being required to pop up a window when you hit a link that says "This request is XXXX bytes, and will cost you YYYY to download, do you want to download this file?" Alternatively, imaging if every link were required to have something like "Click here (XXXX bytes of data) for my fun site?"
The black hole could hold 2.6 million stars the mass of the sun inside a relatively tiny area -- less than the distance from the sun to Mars.
Let's see. For purposes of estimation, let's say the sun is 1,000,000 miles in diameter (it is smaller). Let's say the radius of Mars' orbit is 140,000,000 miles. The volume of a sphere is 4/3 r^3. So... In that sphere, 11,488,213 suns would fit at the same density... Even if we assume the article meant the diameter of the sphere was the same as the radius of Mars's orbit, we're still over 1,000,000 solar masses at current solar density. Not very much like a Black Hole at all...
One of my former employers went the out-source route. We were looking at building the next generation of an existing product, with a complete redesign and all new code. (The older version of the code had so many bugs and fundamental design flaws - as a result of a change in the system's platform - that it was effectively unusable.) We were given the task of coming up with a design, and estimates for time and cost.
At the time, we did not know we were doing this competitively with an outside firm. While I doubt it would have changed our estimates, it might have directly effected our thinking.
Anyway, this outside firm came in with a time estimate of 3 months less time to product for 60% of our cost. Obviously, management decided to go for the out-sourcing. They started negotiating the contract, and let us know that we would not be expected to build a new product. Since that meant we would be in maintenance mode, we lost many of our good engineers.
A year later, they still did not have a signed contract with the other firm. (Had we been given the go-ahead, our estimated time to product was a year.) Management came back to us to ask what we could do. Well... Not much, we'd lost most of the qualified developers.
I left shortly thereafter. (I had stuck around that long to reach a pension-vesting date.) Last I heard, they had still not signed a contract, 12 years later.
It is less an issue of what the original poster gained by using junkbuster. It is more of an issue of what Tesco loses by requiring only a certain (small?) number of recognized browsers, and by preventing access to their on-line store for people who use a proxy.
That's all junkbuster is, a proxy with certain filtering rules. (It is possible that Tesco's
may use a cookie not from the original domain, and junkbuster blocks it.) If you don't work as a web site with a proxy, you don't work as a web site.
Slashdot Mirror
A hotel in Hong Kong, just aftyer checking in from a flight that started in San Francisco. 3AM, September 12, 2001
Actually, vultures use their feces to cool their legs, so it doesn't go back into the soil as quickly as you might think.
(Condors do the same thing.)
How much money did AT&T invest in Olivetti and/or NCR in an effort to enter the computer market?
I tend to agree with the initial poster that most CEO's are decent people. I also agree that there are egregious incidents of CEO exploitation of workers and shareholders. Both are probably true.
The egregious CEO's we hear about are usually Fortune 500/1000 companies where those absurd incentives are possible, where CEO compensation is set by a nod-and-wink executive compensation board, and where there is a serious glass ceiling for many of us to reach that level.
The problem is that there are only 500 (or 1000) such CEO's, and there are many, many more companies. I've worked directly with many CEO's of small companues, and I've met some really decent people, and some not so decent people. I also recognize there are enough companies out there that my sample set is way too small to make any generalizations.
This morning, they disabled it. I guess someone like a Yahoo or AOL can challenge this, but it will be the little sites that end up suffering.
I picked up the DVD while recently in London, mildly surprised that I had not even heard of the movie out in California. As I watched the DVD, I thought it was essentially a modern remake of Day of the Triffids...
I have had the same address for almost ten years, and as a result, I am averaging over 500 spams per day. Even if the filters catch 80%, that's 100 spams per day that reach my mailbox. And the average spam that gets through is usually on the order of 20K, so that's 2M of spam in my inbox, every day, and an estimated 10M of spam that has delivery attempted.
Unfortunately, the problem for me is that 9 years ago, the concept of spam was a joke, so on my much older web pages, my email address was published. Many people know me through that address. Perhaps it is stubborness on my part, but why should I be forced to change my email address on a regular basis because of SPAM, yet that does seem to be the only real alternative.
How long would people allow telemarketing if they were forced to change phone numbers regularly to avoid it?
If you've seen the microsoft commercial "we'll find the list of people who bought the record and send them e-mail" you know Microsoft is selling easier methods to spam.
In case you missed it, there is no "Silicon Valley venture capital community" anymore. Sure there are a few VC firms still functioning, trying to squeeze a few pennies back out of each dollar they invested, but the rate of new investment in this valley is well below the rate before the boom.
Something to consider: Montgomery Street didn't start laying off their analysts for high tech startups until late last year, as recently as last June they believed there would be a return to serious investment (and I worked with a pre-funded startup seeking funding.) Now? They don't expect any investment in technology for quite a while, and we entrepeneurs need to find a new model to get off the ground.
One thing I found interesting about Nemesis is how the politics of the Federation were inverted. Historically, the Federation would stand up in support of an oppressed people and fight against dictatorship. If we believe the plot, the Romulans had been oppressing the Remans for many years. The line, "You've got a friend on Romulus" after helping the Romulans re-establish their oppression and restoring the Remans to slave status says it all:
The Federation now supports dictatorship.
I've had to do this. I've maintained a site with some photographs, and found that someone was linking pictures of my sister on an ezboard BBS with rude and defamatory comments like "fat cow." A complaint to ezboard went unanswered, so I modified the conf file for apache to block all subsequent links to my site.
Since then, I've only added two more sites to that in 18 months.
Yes, "Real" techies are out of work. What makes the current recession interesting is that it isn't only the bottom rung of skilled workers who are left out to dry, with the effective elimination of investment in new ventures (VC investments in technology are at an all-time low; not the rates prior to the boom, but rates prior to the transistor.) the innovators are left out to dry.
Worse, Montgomery Street is seeing layoffs. These layoffs are of the analysts who understood the technology market. They weren't laid off last year... they're being laid off now. Why? Because a recovery is no longer expected to happen in the near future. VC firms are shutting down, too...
This is truly disturbing for the future of innovation in this country. It's one thing to have a down turn, and pull back investments a bit. Instead, we're seeing a meltdown of the infrastructure that made companies like Intel, Cisco, HP, etc... even possible.
Big companies tend to innovate slowly at best. The innovators tend to be poorly rewarded at best, and often go unrewarded. Right now, that's the only innovation path available in this country. What incentive is there for someone to work hard and come up with new ideas?
Browsing without javascript helped me to realize that the advertising community has hijacked javascript; it is time web developers realized that.
When AOL acquired Netscape, I was working at Netscape, and we were presented with all this AOL paperwork. After my lawyer reviewed it, there were many questions and clarifications desired. So, I red-lined a copy of the agreement and returned it, asking for one of the HR people to contact me. I left AOL about a year after the Netscape acquisition, and they still hadn't contacted me.
This fear of sex dates back well before the Victorian Era. The Puritans who settled here had a similar approach to sex. Compared to them, the Victorians were highly librated.
Yes.
It is when a married person pays the same percentage as a single person.
It is OK to work single people 70 hours per week?
For a while, Gene Spafford of the Clouds project at Georgia Tech was archiving netnews to 9 track tape. I think he stopped in the mid-80's, when he went to Purdue.
The only fair way to make metered access work is if you know what you are downloading, and how much you will be billed, in advance. Picture browsers being required to pop up a window when you hit a link that says "This request is XXXX bytes, and will cost you YYYY to download, do you want to download this file?" Alternatively, imaging if every link were required to have something like "Click here (XXXX bytes of data) for my fun site?"
Could the government have made as strong a case (or any case at all?) if there were a 6 month statute of limitations on e-mail?
Let's see. For purposes of estimation, let's say the sun is 1,000,000 miles in diameter (it is smaller). Let's say the radius of Mars' orbit is 140,000,000 miles. The volume of a sphere is 4/3 r^3. So... In that sphere, 11,488,213 suns would fit at the same density... Even if we assume the article meant the diameter of the sphere was the same as the radius of Mars's orbit, we're still over 1,000,000 solar masses at current solar density. Not very much like a Black Hole at all...
At the time, we did not know we were doing this competitively with an outside firm. While I doubt it would have changed our estimates, it might have directly effected our thinking.
Anyway, this outside firm came in with a time estimate of 3 months less time to product for 60% of our cost. Obviously, management decided to go for the out-sourcing. They started negotiating the contract, and let us know that we would not be expected to build a new product. Since that meant we would be in maintenance mode, we lost many of our good engineers.
A year later, they still did not have a signed contract with the other firm. (Had we been given the go-ahead, our estimated time to product was a year.) Management came back to us to ask what we could do. Well... Not much, we'd lost most of the qualified developers.
I left shortly thereafter. (I had stuck around that long to reach a pension-vesting date.) Last I heard, they had still not signed a contract, 12 years later.
It is less an issue of what the original poster gained by using junkbuster. It is more of an issue of what Tesco loses by requiring only a certain (small?) number of recognized browsers, and by preventing access to their on-line store for people who use a proxy. That's all junkbuster is, a proxy with certain filtering rules. (It is possible that Tesco's may use a cookie not from the original domain, and junkbuster blocks it.) If you don't work as a web site with a proxy, you don't work as a web site.