There came a time when the unions and companies came to understand that in the interest of mutual survival they each needed to make concessions. I think the manufacturers are getting the better of the deal, though, as most manufacturing is long gone from the host cities. Flint, Michigan is a prime example, which you can learn a bit about from Michael Moore's films, since he's from there. It was a thriving city with a booming economy in the 60's It's a derelict now. I don't think GM has anything left, where once AC, Delco, Truck and Bus and Buick employed thousands.
Re:Can't be bothered to RTFA.
on
Vive La Loafing!
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Can't be bothered to RTFA, I've got too much slashdotting to do here at work before lunch rolls around.
<Comic Book Guy>
"Sorry, I can't get to that project right now, I'm terribly busy, please call back later, thank yew!"
"Now where was I? Oh, yes, moderating on/. 'Worse post, ever!'"
</Comic Book Guy>
The Big Three in Detroit agreed to and signed off on every letter of those contracts, so wouldn't that make the management at least one half responsible for this supposed "audacious slacking"?
You have to remember, back in the 50's and 60's the automotive industry had a LOT of capital tied up in foundries, assembly lines, parts plants and logistics. I hail from the former heart of GM, Ford and Chrysler where cities grew with the fortunes of these companies and saw first hand the stranglehold the unionized workforce had on this investment. With nowhere else to go for labor (a strike would idle their lines and the competitors would reap those lost sales, and damn few would cross a picket line in a company town) and much of their investment located where the attitudes were complacent, GM, Ford, Chrysler and AMC were sitting ducks for the japanese automakers. The pendulum has swung very far to the other side, now as the companies have considerable strength in negotations (don't ratify the agreement, we'll move to Mexico or China)
who encourages workers to adopt her strategy of calculated loafing
In english: reading/posting on slashdot (e.g. I should be working on X but wonder if CowboyNeal is mentioned in the latest slashpoll)
in response to dimming prospects of success for rank-and-file employees.
Got news for you, there was a terrific article in the Detroit Free Press back in the 80's regarding the epic scale slacking which contributed to the ills of the
automotive industry. Overly strong unions and workers with an "I deserve stuff" attitude resulted in many of the anecdotes of redundant jobs and slacking where
the line was already overstaffed (workers taking turns going across the street for a few quarts of beer and sitting on the roof working on tans and such.) I went to school with
a lot of laid-off workers who recounted many tales which often even amazed them by the audacity of the perpetrators. Slacking is by no means unique or original to people in IT.
Could a translation find a Silicon Valley audience?
Dunno, when Silicon Valley finally hires a a worker I'll ask.
You should have seen one of the TV's I tried to service back when I was in highschool. It was a subsonic thing, with a small air bladder in the handheld part which, when compressed, emitted one or two subsonic notes, which were received by the TV and had an solenoid rachet system turn a pulley with a large bead chain. Cool in the ingenuity of the design!
Totally bogus profit grab. Definitely a bone to pick in the future, when contract renewal time comes up. ("remember when you fined us $1 million? Well we certainly do, so if you want in on the bidding process you might consider dropping your bid by, say, $1 million to be seriously considered as a candidate.")
no matter how obfuscated the key is, it has to be available and therefore breakable
Exactly. At some point they have to realize they can only do so much. Amazingly it's taken decades to bring out some of the stuff we've always wanted from the vaults -- old films, TV shows, and maybe maybe classic events in news or sports (they are playing some classic old football games, but imagine being able to choose the game you want to watch -- what did the end of the 'Heidi' game look like?) Produce and outstrip the pirates, undercut the prices of the pirates. It's amazing what people showed they were willing to spend to have a copy of a movie on Laser Disk or Video Tape -- too bad Hollywood still thinks it needs to charge high prices, which are the greatest contributor to piracy.
Sometimes the most mundane improvements can be the best. All the people who swear by HDTV will be SOL, because they'll have hi-res, but improperly colored, television/movies.
That's the problem with technology, it keeps moving forward and at some point you have to buy something and watch it rapidly become a POS. Exacerbated by how much you spend when you do buy. There's probably a lesson there, but I can't divine it - I'm still trying to figue out the benefits of RGBCMY in relation to the sh!t they call television programming these days. You want real quality viewing of movies? Build a home theatre with a BIG screen, like 64" or more. It's probably a blessing to have poor hearing and bad eyes... probably saves no end of money.
Coming soon, a computer for TV!
on
RGB to become RGBCMY
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Genoa partnered with Royal Philips Electronics NV, in Amsterdam, Netherlands, to implement the new color technology by modifying a family of rear-projection TV sets, which rely on liquid-crystal-on-silicon (LCOS) technology. In their current configuration, these sets produce images by shining red, green, and blue light from filtered white light onto a small microchip embedded with millions of tiny pixels made of liquid crystal that modulate and reflect the light to a lens system. This set of lenses amplifies the image and projects it on the screen, where red, green, and blue light overlap to form secondary colors.
Adding two extra colors to this kind of projection television has little impact on the price tag, says Simon Lewis, vice president of marketing at Genoa. He says the new Philips color-enhanced set, to be available next year, needs only a few additional filters and optical components to create the yellow and cyan light, with no changes to the more costly microprojection chip.
...
The promised result of this multi-primary color (MPC) technology is a television picture that, with its truer, more vibrant color and brighter image, looks more like cinema than video.
Right. Right when we've got all these plants around the world cranking out inexpensive TV's using LEDS and LCD, some whizzo comes along and says, "Hey, look, a great idea and all you have to do
is retool everything, develop some newer technology and keep selling it all at the same pricing you're currently at!"
Perhaps the main challenge in converting a video stream from a three- to a five-primary color system is doing it in real time, says Maureen C. Stone,...
Yay, now we really will need a computer in every TV! More components - more to go wrong, more power consumption, etc.
"How the algorithm does that, precisely, is a secret well kept by Genoa. "It's part of their intellectual property," Stone says.
Yay, more intellectual property. This should drive prices down.
<curmudgeon>
Why, back in my day we didn't have remote controls and we had a folded playing card stuck beside the tuner knob to keep the picture from doing
funny things, and we liked it!
</curmudgeon>
I'm sure it will look lovely, while watching older stuff from the bad old pre RGBCMY days.
CA has burned a lot of bridges in the past with customers. Is this an attempt to change CA's image, and/or repair some of that historical damage?
Could you be more specific, what kind of bridge burning?
To the best of my knowledge large contractors like CA conduct themselves thusly:
Making the Sale: Bring in their best people to impress the suits
Crash Team: Bring in a few hotshots to write up the plan, direct some headcount and do some user training
Ongoing: All the people who really know anything leave for the next sale/crash-team and a pile of green people are left to maintain the contract. The greenies are paid so poorly they leave as soon as they've got some experience to make a living wage at some small site a big contractor wouldn't consider (or err terribly and go someplace the big contract comes in and displaces them in a few years.) People at the customer sight may know more than the greenies and find it frustrating having to actually train them customer service calls will consist of insufferable time-wasting telephone menu systems or websites where you wait several hours for an answer, or never get an answer, while your operation sits and burning cash while everyone hangs around the water cooler waiting for things to get going again.
Has your computer even been 0wn3ed? What do you plan to protect Linux-based customers from the threat of cackers as the population of Linux based business systems grows and becomes more attractive to mischeif makers?
The problem is you're taking the short view. The long view is all the main players, owners of large libraries of film, music, etc. encode stuff, they want it secure perpetually. They're paranoid -- many of the entertainment industry moguls fortunes were made by shamelessly exploiting people and keeping rights to things in perpetuity, why else would they have pushed for the seemingly endless copyright protection?
The reality is, they'll have to settle on something and take their lumps and foot the bill where they can (or better yet, get more laws enforced and have the public fund it) and crackdown on piracy.
Hardly, AVP just started playing Friday, though it made a pile at the box office, which in that biz usually guarrantees a sequel. IMHO it was much better than Alien 3 and Predator 2. Only problem for me is I saw the other movies so very little comes as a surprise -- it's pretty much down to, who's going to survive and are they going to do some lame thing like plant a baby alien in someone at the end.
so did the predator win?
Just go see it, I'm not going to post spoilers. Tho if you're familiar with Aliens (II) you might recognize Weyland, which was kinda cool.
Sure they can't own the movie industry...but they can certainly give themselves a stranglehold over its distrobution resourcse[sic].
Indeed, if Microsoft introduces a video/audio player with it's one proprietary encryption, then just gives it away Hollywood* would likely embrace it. Once all the investment is made, to convert media to this format and a few iterations of releases Microsoft, there could be no backing out and Microsoft would be calling the tune. I expect Windows Media Player is exactly this.
So what are the alternatives? Real or anyone else proprietary? Same kind of problem, really. Open Source? Don't make me laugh at your naivity, Hollywood wants super secret encryption and content control, don't think they could possibly own that with something open source, which could be bypassed with a minor hack. Looks like they're in between a rock and a hard place. Maybe they should change their business model -- make money on the performance and increase product.
Microsoft refutes the accusations, saying that it's only interested in selling more copies of Windows and applications for its platform, and providing movie content would promote the platform.
If you believe this, I have some land for sale, just off the west coast, under about 3000 ft of water which is really Atlantis!
"all that is required is subversion, er, I mean submersion"
When is a case mod practical, aside from this one.
I remember finding a few of those old Philco's on the curb come trash day and they were nasty beasts. We dragged one home look through it and the shielding wasn't very good, if one of these things, and several were not very stable, fell over you could have a fire in short order. These things undoubtably predated consumer product saftety testing and who knows what kind of radiation they leaked. It didn't become much of an issue until the late 60's
For a case mod, I would only consider one of thse with a 17" or larger LCD display, but it would probably look fairly dorky and the beatuy of LCD displays is they're small enough that you can place them where you need, rather than being fixed to the computer, like laptops.
Casemodding isn't my cuppa, though some do end up looking kinda cool.
Personally, I've benefited a lot from Craigslist classifieds and I hope it doesn't lose its attitude."
This issue is clearly at the top of my list where businesses begin to fail their customers, they lose that rough edge they had when
they started out, that panache which got them noticed, their attention to fixing what was important and not wasting energy putting
doilies on things, and lastly being accessible -- too damn many online companies have buried their customer service behind FAQ's and forms to the
point you try to alert them to a problem and the square peg won't fit their round-hole request template and you never really know if anyone
did receive that urgent missive, but you do get a form letter which seems completely out of context with your concern. In short, they become
'Sirius Cybernetics', a mindless bunch of jerks who should be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
I'm fairly pissed off with eBay, for their constant fscking around with user interfaces and services that don't need half the crap they
put into it and it never really quite works as well as it used to, but it's full of cutesy sh!t pictures and things, oh, and the pages are really big now, lots of bloat in there.
I hope Craig's doesn't fall under the heel of the eBay design wizards, but expect some day for 'Craig' to be dropped, to look more corporate.
Cripes, I'm trying to get a tablet in here for evaluation. We do surveys with scan sheets and the stuff comes back half-assed half-filled out and I want to send out a tablet with an app (written by yours truly) to collect the data and tell them as they fill it out what's required and what the limits are. This would greatly reduce errors and make more money for us. Don't need lots of power, just enough to run a small app and keep some data.
Related to Apple -- if it comes with iTunes it'll sell and you'll immediately be impressed and jealous of people who use computers as they're meant to be used, rather than what adverts try to convince you you need what you should be doing with them to be a proper power user.
I have no idea whether the DAB standard we have here in the UK/EU is a world-wide standard or not, and whether these things would work in the US or not.
There's a bunch of info on it, buried in this very pretty website Near as I can tell the encoding is the same, but I couldn't tell you about what the frequency intervals are, etc.
Greg Kihn does the inane babble on KFOX. Yet another guy who spent years on hard drugs and alcohol and is now a republican... The music was ok, but geez, he and John Madden* (on KCBS) could just stuff it or allow you to FF past them.
*"Hey did you hear what John Madden said?"
No, and I really don't fscking care! (yelled at radio while trying to stab MUTE at 70 mph)
Slashdot Mirror
The internet* is a good thing because everyone can share and grow
Get millions on the internet*
The internet* is a bad thing
Try to detect those with nefarious intent and stop them
Blame lack of resources when intelligence fails and villains succeed
More people on the internet* can bring down barriers and expand learning.
Get more people on the internet*, without fixed infrastructure, e.g. wires
The internet* can be a worse thing
Need more technology to sniff communications and more people to sift it
etc.
* Formerly known as the Internet
There came a time when the unions and companies came to understand that in the interest of mutual survival they each needed to make concessions. I think the manufacturers are getting the better of the deal, though, as most manufacturing is long gone from the host cities. Flint, Michigan is a prime example, which you can learn a bit about from Michael Moore's films, since he's from there. It was a thriving city with a booming economy in the 60's It's a derelict now. I don't think GM has anything left, where once AC, Delco, Truck and Bus and Buick employed thousands.
<Comic Book Guy> /. 'Worse post, ever!'"
"Sorry, I can't get to that project right now, I'm terribly busy, please call back later, thank yew!"
"Now where was I? Oh, yes, moderating on
</Comic Book Guy>
You have to remember, back in the 50's and 60's the automotive industry had a LOT of capital tied up in foundries, assembly lines, parts plants and logistics. I hail from the former heart of GM, Ford and Chrysler where cities grew with the fortunes of these companies and saw first hand the stranglehold the unionized workforce had on this investment. With nowhere else to go for labor (a strike would idle their lines and the competitors would reap those lost sales, and damn few would cross a picket line in a company town) and much of their investment located where the attitudes were complacent, GM, Ford, Chrysler and AMC were sitting ducks for the japanese automakers. The pendulum has swung very far to the other side, now as the companies have considerable strength in negotations (don't ratify the agreement, we'll move to Mexico or China)
In english: reading/posting on slashdot (e.g. I should be working on X but wonder if CowboyNeal is mentioned in the latest slashpoll)
in response to dimming prospects of success for rank-and-file employees.
Got news for you, there was a terrific article in the Detroit Free Press back in the 80's regarding the epic scale slacking which contributed to the ills of the automotive industry. Overly strong unions and workers with an "I deserve stuff" attitude resulted in many of the anecdotes of redundant jobs and slacking where the line was already overstaffed (workers taking turns going across the street for a few quarts of beer and sitting on the roof working on tans and such.) I went to school with a lot of laid-off workers who recounted many tales which often even amazed them by the audacity of the perpetrators. Slacking is by no means unique or original to people in IT.
Could a translation find a Silicon Valley audience?
Dunno, when Silicon Valley finally hires a a worker I'll ask.
Work hard. Learn new skillz. Get sacked anyway
You should have seen one of the TV's I tried to service back when I was in highschool. It was a subsonic thing, with a small air bladder in the handheld part which, when compressed, emitted one or two subsonic notes, which were received by the TV and had an solenoid rachet system turn a pulley with a large bead chain. Cool in the ingenuity of the design!
Totally bogus profit grab. Definitely a bone to pick in the future, when contract renewal time comes up. ("remember when you fined us $1 million? Well we certainly do, so if you want in on the bidding process you might consider dropping your bid by, say, $1 million to be seriously considered as a candidate.")
Can we PLEASE drop the 'www' in everything?
"it's all ordinary now"
Exactly. At some point they have to realize they can only do so much. Amazingly it's taken decades to bring out some of the stuff we've always wanted from the vaults -- old films, TV shows, and maybe maybe classic events in news or sports (they are playing some classic old football games, but imagine being able to choose the game you want to watch -- what did the end of the 'Heidi' game look like?) Produce and outstrip the pirates, undercut the prices of the pirates. It's amazing what people showed they were willing to spend to have a copy of a movie on Laser Disk or Video Tape -- too bad Hollywood still thinks it needs to charge high prices, which are the greatest contributor to piracy.
That's the problem with technology, it keeps moving forward and at some point you have to buy something and watch it rapidly become a POS. Exacerbated by how much you spend when you do buy. There's probably a lesson there, but I can't divine it - I'm still trying to figue out the benefits of RGBCMY in relation to the sh!t they call television programming these days. You want real quality viewing of movies? Build a home theatre with a BIG screen, like 64" or more. It's probably a blessing to have poor hearing and bad eyes... probably saves no end of money.
Adding two extra colors to this kind of projection television has little impact on the price tag, says Simon Lewis, vice president of marketing at Genoa. He says the new Philips color-enhanced set, to be available next year, needs only a few additional filters and optical components to create the yellow and cyan light, with no changes to the more costly microprojection chip.
Right. Right when we've got all these plants around the world cranking out inexpensive TV's using LEDS and LCD, some whizzo comes along and says, "Hey, look, a great idea and all you have to do is retool everything, develop some newer technology and keep selling it all at the same pricing you're currently at!"
Perhaps the main challenge in converting a video stream from a three- to a five-primary color system is doing it in real time, says Maureen C. Stone, ...
Yay, now we really will need a computer in every TV! More components - more to go wrong, more power consumption, etc.
"How the algorithm does that, precisely, is a secret well kept by Genoa. "It's part of their intellectual property," Stone says.
Yay, more intellectual property. This should drive prices down.
<curmudgeon>
Why, back in my day we didn't have remote controls and we had a folded playing card stuck beside the tuner knob to keep the picture from doing funny things, and we liked it!
</curmudgeon>
I'm sure it will look lovely, while watching older stuff from the bad old pre RGBCMY days.
"Gilligan!"
I'm like, totally there, dude!
As if you had to ask...
Usually with a few more whenceforths, hithertos and fergoshsakes, though.
Could you be more specific, what kind of bridge burning?
To the best of my knowledge large contractors like CA conduct themselves thusly:
Making the Sale: Bring in their best people to impress the suits
Crash Team: Bring in a few hotshots to write up the plan, direct some headcount and do some user training
Ongoing: All the people who really know anything leave for the next sale/crash-team and a pile of green people are left to maintain the contract. The greenies are paid so poorly they leave as soon as they've got some experience to make a living wage at some small site a big contractor wouldn't consider (or err terribly and go someplace the big contract comes in and displaces them in a few years.) People at the customer sight may know more than the greenies and find it frustrating having to actually train them customer service calls will consist of insufferable time-wasting telephone menu systems or websites where you wait several hours for an answer, or never get an answer, while your operation sits and burning cash while everyone hangs around the water cooler waiting for things to get going again.
Has your computer even been 0wn3ed? What do you plan to protect Linux-based customers from the threat of cackers as the population of Linux based business systems grows and becomes more attractive to mischeif makers?
The problem is you're taking the short view. The long view is all the main players, owners of large libraries of film, music, etc. encode stuff, they want it secure perpetually. They're paranoid -- many of the entertainment industry moguls fortunes were made by shamelessly exploiting people and keeping rights to things in perpetuity, why else would they have pushed for the seemingly endless copyright protection?
The reality is, they'll have to settle on something and take their lumps and foot the bill where they can (or better yet, get more laws enforced and have the public fund it) and crackdown on piracy.
Hardly, AVP just started playing Friday, though it made a pile at the box office, which in that biz usually guarrantees a sequel. IMHO it was much better than Alien 3 and Predator 2. Only problem for me is I saw the other movies so very little comes as a surprise -- it's pretty much down to, who's going to survive and are they going to do some lame thing like plant a baby alien in someone at the end.
so did the predator win?
Just go see it, I'm not going to post spoilers. Tho if you're familiar with Aliens (II) you might recognize Weyland, which was kinda cool.
Indeed, if Microsoft introduces a video/audio player with it's one proprietary encryption, then just gives it away Hollywood* would likely embrace it. Once all the investment is made, to convert media to this format and a few iterations of releases Microsoft, there could be no backing out and Microsoft would be calling the tune. I expect Windows Media Player is exactly this.
So what are the alternatives? Real or anyone else proprietary? Same kind of problem, really. Open Source? Don't make me laugh at your naivity, Hollywood wants super secret encryption and content control, don't think they could possibly own that with something open source, which could be bypassed with a minor hack. Looks like they're in between a rock and a hard place. Maybe they should change their business model -- make money on the performance and increase product.
AVP II anybody?
*Actually all AV media in a general sense
If you believe this, I have some land for sale, just off the west coast, under about 3000 ft of water which is really Atlantis!
"all that is required is subversion, er, I mean submersion"
When is a case mod practical, aside from this one.
I remember finding a few of those old Philco's on the curb come trash day and they were nasty beasts. We dragged one home look through it and the shielding wasn't very good, if one of these things, and several were not very stable, fell over you could have a fire in short order. These things undoubtably predated consumer product saftety testing and who knows what kind of radiation they leaked. It didn't become much of an issue until the late 60's
For a case mod, I would only consider one of thse with a 17" or larger LCD display, but it would probably look fairly dorky and the beatuy of LCD displays is they're small enough that you can place them where you need, rather than being fixed to the computer, like laptops.
Casemodding isn't my cuppa, though some do end up looking kinda cool.
I swear, that and Commander Keen were the most damn fun.
This issue is clearly at the top of my list where businesses begin to fail their customers, they lose that rough edge they had when they started out, that panache which got them noticed, their attention to fixing what was important and not wasting energy putting doilies on things, and lastly being accessible -- too damn many online companies have buried their customer service behind FAQ's and forms to the point you try to alert them to a problem and the square peg won't fit their round-hole request template and you never really know if anyone did receive that urgent missive, but you do get a form letter which seems completely out of context with your concern. In short, they become 'Sirius Cybernetics', a mindless bunch of jerks who should be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
I'm fairly pissed off with eBay, for their constant fscking around with user interfaces and services that don't need half the crap they put into it and it never really quite works as well as it used to, but it's full of cutesy sh!t pictures and things, oh, and the pages are really big now, lots of bloat in there. I hope Craig's doesn't fall under the heel of the eBay design wizards, but expect some day for 'Craig' to be dropped, to look more corporate.
Related to Apple -- if it comes with iTunes it'll sell and you'll immediately be impressed and jealous of people who use computers as they're meant to be used, rather than what adverts try to convince you you need what you should be doing with them to be a proper power user.
There's a bunch of info on it, buried in this very pretty website Near as I can tell the encoding is the same, but I couldn't tell you about what the frequency intervals are, etc.
Greg Kihn does the inane babble on KFOX. Yet another guy who spent years on hard drugs and alcohol and is now a republican... The music was ok, but geez, he and John Madden* (on KCBS) could just stuff it or allow you to FF past them.
*"Hey did you hear what John Madden said?"
No, and I really don't fscking care! (yelled at radio while trying to stab MUTE at 70 mph)