Those who know what the problem is are troublemakers, organizations don't like them and tend
to re-org them into a place where they (a) will have little impact with their critiques OR (b) will fail and
thus can be swept out the door during the first round of layoffs.
There was a chart on the office wall about 25 years ago which went:
Project Life Cycle
1. Open acceptance
2. Wild enthusiasm
3. Implementation problems
4. Disillusionment
5. Total confusion
6. Search for the guilty
7. Punishment of the innocent
8. Promotion of non-participants
I used to think it was funny, but years of work in various shops have taught me this is the grim truth.
In effect the steps can be found within Microsoft, the first two where during the heady successes of the early
days of gobbling up easily taken markets. Step 3 are the growing pains of trying to forge headway into
existing markets against established competitors also the rapid pace of virii and worms stripping the veneer
of the solid image projected to businesses. Step 4 is where the management and employees don't see the problems
with the same eyes. Step 5 is the big JARBO reorg over Vista rollout problems.
Steps 6 and 7 are Microsoft hunting down their own unhappy employees and sacking them for the failures of management.
Step 8 is when complete outsiders from General Mills, Glaxo, Smith & Wesson and Toro come in and head up departments, over experienced insiders.
I don't work for Microsoft. BTW I don't work for Microsoft.. Uh, Steve, unhand my ch
Okay, I can understand if you still want to use your old video card. But all your other stuff should still work fine in a PCI Express machine. I'm curious, why upgrade your board/CPU if you're not willing to go with the latest video bus technology?
The current version of what I have in PCI Express terms would soak me about $600. I could just scrape together the $300 for the new board, as long as I could just move my 1.25 GB of DDR memory and my current video card over. I also have a backup video card, which I nearly gave away but plug in from time to time when I'm debugging hardware, since it's a fairly simple little thing with 64 MB of memory and good enough (Actually it's more than good enough for Scorched Earth 3D
Maybe when I get my pickup paid off I can think again about dropping a fat wad of cash on a whizzy video card, but not at the moment.
"Ah, part of the TCO equation! But, heck, you should be able to buy this system for $3000 a year from now. Funny how this pricing reminds me of what it cost to have 1 PC XT with MS-DOS on it back in the mid-eighties."
Computing for enthusiats has never been cheap;)
Who said anything about enthusiasts? I'm actually puzzled the moderations are leaning towards funny, because I really was trying to make a non-humourous point. It's perhaps funny-ironic, the ultimate system will hardly be the minimum for the next OS release from the vender most people get their work/entertainment environment from.
That mid-eighties box, which cost about $3,000 was about a mid to high end model, it had a faster clock, 20 MB HD and a Hercules video card. It was the bare minimum to do work, most of which was running a terminal emulator, but the rest was some work in Turbo C
You can buy a very capable system for $300 at Fry's right now. There's a large gulf between capable for today's OS releases and the one coming out in a year. The big question is, how many suckers are going to bite?
I just dodged that bullet myself, when ordering a new mobo with 64 bit Athlon, etc. I just wanted a new mobo and to keep using all the components I'd already spent about $1,000 on and was intent on still using. Cancelled the order quick and got one with the cruddy old AGP. Not ready to need SLI, yet.
SLI has some things to offer, but not to an old code jockey like me who considers Settlers of Catan a worthwhile game.
Is that a quality PSU? Because that sysytem's probably going to need it.
IIRC Enermax is another one of those generic Taiwanese PSU's which usually have a failure rate which just doesn't sit well (with me anyway) being hooked up the $,$$$ worth of gear.
I bought a PC Power & Cooling PSU for my energy hungry desktop money hole. Doing quite well a few years on.
[x] Memory: 2 GB [Check]
[x] Processors: AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (939) [Check]
[x] Hard Drives: 1 x 74 GB SATA, 2 x 250 GB SATAII
[x] Video Cards: 2 x NVIDIA Geforce 7800 GTX 256MB
This extreme gaming platform should meet the minimum requirements to play Solitare under Windows Vista.
For those planning on gaming on Vista, how much more muscle can you pack into this rig?
The price for the system that I had been testing was over $5000.
Ah, part of the TCO equation! But, heck, you should be able to buy this system for $3000 a year from now. Funny how this pricing reminds me of
what it cost to have 1 PC XT with MS-DOS on it back in the mid-eighties.
The Sears/KMart merger caused the resulting mass of "suck" to collapse into a gigantic black hole, composed of pure suckiness. The proposed Northwest/Delta airline merger will do a similar thing, providing a rare opportunity to observe a black hole of suckiness in the process of formation.
Assuming K-Mart isn't driven out but a critical mass of Walmarts. Soon to be followed by Starbucks clusters.
...that we are too far away to send a probe into this black hole.
The thing about space, is it's really really big, huge, you know? So the distances are in light years which means whatever we're seeing happend that many years ago. If we were to launch a probe to see it we'd probably find much of the excitment has moved on, especially by the time the signals make it back to us and all the probe finds is a few empty popcorn buckets and candy wrappers left by aliens who beat us to the show and got better seats besides.
$10K for 15 days work? I dunno, that seems rather good for one person, but one person couldn't pull it off. Water it down over a dev team and it certainly looks less attactive, but it would probably look pretty good on a resume.
You're overanalyzing.
Not merely preaching to the choir, but shouting at it.
the long-time use of the same general model
Exactly what I meant, but please do over extrapolate.
It's nice to think that anything can be accomplished if someone wants it enough and works hard enough
Yet we've made astounding advances using better understanding of physics, better materials and different approaches to challenges. Don't assume just because it all looks like a wall, LEO can't be accomplished by more means.
Are we to assume that you were joking? The entire sum of your prizes is 7.8 million dollars. It's questionable whether you could even pull together an X-prize style
Ah, a literalist. May I direct your attention to the conditions, located in the footnote.
Granted and granted and granted, etc. But the idea seems rather sound even if the prizes were higher. As Open Source development teaches us, many eyes make for better code, same applies for engineering. NASA has been without peer and yet the Russians with their old rockets have shown whizzy isn't necessary to get the job done. Who knows what some band of geeks in the desert can accomplish?
Random quotes:
"1,000 times current levels."
"The other half [of the energy] is gobbled up by a leakage current in transistors"
"designed to consume a tenth of the power"
"about a tenth the demand"
Re:1/1000th? Um, so, wait, making chips with extra low transistor leakage, where leakage is only half of the chips power consumption, can result in one tenth power consumption? And even, 1/1000th what some chips use? 1/1000th the power consumption of what, a penny in the circuit breaker?
Don't bother to emphasize your math skillz when applying for a job at Intel
$250,000 USD will be awarded to the team that can autonomously deliver the most lunar regolith to a collection device in 30 minutes.
I can see exactly where this is going*...
300,000 USD First craft to achieve orbit.
350,000 USD First craft to carry man in orbit.
400,000 USD First craft to reach Moon.
450,000 USD First craft to orbit Moon and return.
500,000 USD First craft to take man to Moon orbit and return.
550,000 USD First craft to land on Moon, take off and return.
600,000 USD First craft to land Man on Moon, take off and return.
650,000 USD First craft to land materiel on Moon, build structure.
700,000 USD First craft to land Man and materiel on Moon, build structure, inhabit for one day and return.
750,000 USD (optional) First craft to land Man on moon who spends 1 night in haunted Moon Mansion and return alive (Bonus: Gets eccentric uncle's inheritance)
800,000 USD First to build town on Moon
850,000 USD First to build domed city on Moon
900,000 USD First to build Monorail (Monorail, a monorail!) on Moon
NASA, if very, very cagey can do what they want on a pittance, letting people knock each other over trying to do for piddly prizes. Of course, Richard Branson will probably end up owning the Moon anyway...
*Prizes not necessarily in order. Actual prize amount may vary. NASA employees and their family members not eligible (especially if an abnormal amount
of materiel is missing from NASA) Offer subject to withdrawal at whim of sponsor or Congress.
It's never a good sign when big companies try to reorg in order to be more nible. Too hard to overcome their own momentum.
So do you suppose Steve Ballmer was later heard to say: "Now that that's done, where's the steering wheel on this train?"
I wonder how much faster the Microsoft insider's blogs are going to pick up. Reorg's usually start at the top and move down, ripping people from what they know and replacing them with people who don't. Dust usually takes a while to settle, which you can usually add onto the rollout time, which they mean to reduce. Odd that.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the iPod's doing. Crufty Apple Computer has taught Sony a thing or two with this toy.
the new Sony Walkman: "Please clean out your desk and walk, man."
Whew. I breathed half a sigh of relief when I read that.
Please pay $50 for your therapy. You didn't think this was free, did you?
extra fees may apply for moderation, counter-moderation and metamoderation
There was a chart on the office wall about 25 years ago which went:
Project Life Cycle
I used to think it was funny, but years of work in various shops have taught me this is the grim truth. In effect the steps can be found within Microsoft, the first two where during the heady successes of the early days of gobbling up easily taken markets. Step 3 are the growing pains of trying to forge headway into existing markets against established competitors also the rapid pace of virii and worms stripping the veneer of the solid image projected to businesses. Step 4 is where the management and employees don't see the problems with the same eyes. Step 5 is the big JARBO reorg over Vista rollout problems. Steps 6 and 7 are Microsoft hunting down their own unhappy employees and sacking them for the failures of management. Step 8 is when complete outsiders from General Mills, Glaxo, Smith & Wesson and Toro come in and head up departments, over experienced insiders.
I don't work for Microsoft. BTW I don't work for Microsoft.. Uh, Steve, unhand my ch
[NO CARRIER]
The current version of what I have in PCI Express terms would soak me about $600. I could just scrape together the $300 for the new board, as long as I could just move my 1.25 GB of DDR memory and my current video card over. I also have a backup video card, which I nearly gave away but plug in from time to time when I'm debugging hardware, since it's a fairly simple little thing with 64 MB of memory and good enough (Actually it's more than good enough for Scorched Earth 3D
Maybe when I get my pickup paid off I can think again about dropping a fat wad of cash on a whizzy video card, but not at the moment.
Who said anything about enthusiasts? I'm actually puzzled the moderations are leaning towards funny, because I really was trying to make a non-humourous point. It's perhaps funny-ironic, the ultimate system will hardly be the minimum for the next OS release from the vender most people get their work/entertainment environment from.
That mid-eighties box, which cost about $3,000 was about a mid to high end model, it had a faster clock, 20 MB HD and a Hercules video card. It was the bare minimum to do work, most of which was running a terminal emulator, but the rest was some work in Turbo C
You can buy a very capable system for $300 at Fry's right now. There's a large gulf between capable for today's OS releases and the one coming out in a year. The big question is, how many suckers are going to bite?
I just dodged that bullet myself, when ordering a new mobo with 64 bit Athlon, etc. I just wanted a new mobo and to keep using all the components I'd already spent about $1,000 on and was intent on still using. Cancelled the order quick and got one with the cruddy old AGP. Not ready to need SLI, yet.
SLI has some things to offer, but not to an old code jockey like me who considers Settlers of Catan a worthwhile game.
IIRC Enermax is another one of those generic Taiwanese PSU's which usually have a failure rate which just doesn't sit well (with me anyway) being hooked up the $,$$$ worth of gear.
I bought a PC Power & Cooling PSU for my energy hungry desktop money hole. Doing quite well a few years on.
[x] Memory: 2 GB [Check]
[x] Processors: AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (939) [Check]
[x] Hard Drives: 1 x 74 GB SATA, 2 x 250 GB SATAII
[x] Video Cards: 2 x NVIDIA Geforce 7800 GTX 256MB
This extreme gaming platform should meet the minimum requirements to play Solitare under Windows Vista. For those planning on gaming on Vista, how much more muscle can you pack into this rig?
The price for the system that I had been testing was over $5000.
Ah, part of the TCO equation! But, heck, you should be able to buy this system for $3000 a year from now. Funny how this pricing reminds me of what it cost to have 1 PC XT with MS-DOS on it back in the mid-eighties.
Just wait until you see the Emergency iPod, with a crank!
hear your favorite tunes under the most dire of circumstances
Assuming K-Mart isn't driven out but a critical mass of Walmarts. Soon to be followed by Starbucks clusters.
The thing about space, is it's really really big, huge, you know? So the distances are in light years which means whatever we're seeing happend that many years ago. If we were to launch a probe to see it we'd probably find much of the excitment has moved on, especially by the time the signals make it back to us and all the probe finds is a few empty popcorn buckets and candy wrappers left by aliens who beat us to the show and got better seats besides.
It's the resurgence of K-Mart!
I've used cygwin a few times. Works pretty good.
$10K for 15 days work? I dunno, that seems rather good for one person, but one person couldn't pull it off. Water it down over a dev team and it certainly looks less attactive, but it would probably look pretty good on a resume.
must be able to run David in it.
C'mon, you know the only way this stuff will standardize is when Microsoft Linux comes out ;-)
OK. How's this:
You're overanalyzing.
Not merely preaching to the choir, but shouting at it.
the long-time use of the same general model
Exactly what I meant, but please do over extrapolate.
It's nice to think that anything can be accomplished if someone wants it enough and works hard enough
Yet we've made astounding advances using better understanding of physics, better materials and different approaches to challenges. Don't assume just because it all looks like a wall, LEO can't be accomplished by more means.
Ah, a literalist. May I direct your attention to the conditions, located in the footnote.
Granted and granted and granted, etc. But the idea seems rather sound even if the prizes were higher. As Open Source development teaches us, many eyes make for better code, same applies for engineering. NASA has been without peer and yet the Russians with their old rockets have shown whizzy isn't necessary to get the job done. Who knows what some band of geeks in the desert can accomplish?
Um, so, wait, making chips with extra low transistor leakage, where leakage is only half of the chips power consumption, can result in one tenth power consumption? And even, 1/1000th what some chips use? 1/1000th the power consumption of what, a penny in the circuit breaker?
Don't bother to emphasize your math skillz when applying for a job at Intel
How about just buy a missile from DPRK, blow up the Moon and catch pieces with a butterfly net?
oh, you wanted to do something else with the Moon?
NASA, if very, very cagey can do what they want on a pittance, letting people knock each other over trying to do for piddly prizes. Of course, Richard Branson will probably end up owning the Moon anyway...
*Prizes not necessarily in order. Actual prize amount may vary. NASA employees and their family members not eligible (especially if an abnormal amount of materiel is missing from NASA) Offer subject to withdrawal at whim of sponsor or Congress.
Yeah, but maybe Jarbo is like a big transformer, you know, and can fend him off!
"Release that chair, scurilous villain!"
I think this should be called Microsoft: The Jarbo Era
What? And have McAfee and Symantec down on them for restraint of trade?
So do you suppose Steve Ballmer was later heard to say: "Now that that's done, where's the steering wheel on this train?"
I wonder how much faster the Microsoft insider's blogs are going to pick up. Reorg's usually start at the top and move down, ripping people from what they know and replacing them with people who don't. Dust usually takes a while to settle, which you can usually add onto the rollout time, which they mean to reduce. Odd that.