I thought "man, that should have clued you in right there that something bad was going to come from installing this. Acquire licenses automatically - add debit card number, and you're done.";-)
I think his point is that often, green lights are timed for speeding.
For example, in my home town (the biggest town for 30 miles around), the main road into the middle from outside is timed for 43 miles per hour during off-hours. The speed limit on that road is 35 MPH; that zone extends for about five miles. (This info came from one of the traffic planners in the county roads department.)
So if you are heading into work at 7:00 AM, and you want to hit all the green lights, you must speed. 7:00 AM is ideal, as the road is still quite empty at that time. The same guy explained that the police officers have been told the maximum number of green lights you can hit, if you keep your speed at 35 MPH.
The problem of course, is that this shows the predatory nature of (some) police enforcement. At the end of a fiscal quarter, it is pretty common to see officers on this street with their radar guns out at 7:00 AM. After pulling you over for speeding, the first question they ask is "How many green lights did you hit?" If you answer too high a number, bzzzt! you lose.
To answer your question: how do you expect them to time the lights? The answer is, yes someone does have that job, and their job is to study when and where the major traffic flow is, and try to optimize that.
In this case, additional city revenue from speeding tickets was a planned factor.
shark72 says I linked to the wrong report, and it looks like they have two reports re: newspapers and Craigslist.
My guess is that you had access to the real thing. Do you have your browser configured to report itself as a googlebot? Some web sites auto-allow google into their 'protected' content....
I found a different link on Ars Technica, which linked to the original study.
Although the article laments the loss of revenue, the study is for sale, and suggests it will teach its buyers how to cope.
What little I saw, had a rather pithy "adapt or die" admonition. It also listed four or five competitors to Craigslist, and suggested it saw holes in the Craigslist business, which offers opportunities....
Of course, the purpose of any press release is the sale of material, and here I am pitching it.:-(
Well, if you were in the newspaper business, it would probably be $250 not too badly spent.
To get back to my original point - the source material was "Yet another example of fundamental changes happening to some market segment," and how not to die like the dinosaurs. Of course, InformationWeek left off that last bit....
I used to complain that there wasn't a Novell logo for/. stories. Someone in/. management is chuckling.;-)
The comment about a lack of a bittorrent is kind of insightful - I expect that there are people who would just want to install it to see what it does - but they don't really want to sign up with Novell, for fear of getting deluged w/ Marketing calls and material. (My experience is that would not happen, but any time you have to fork over info in exchange for a copy of the code, you are going to create that worry.)
The flip side of course, is if Novell did provide anonymous access to the code, some of those people would start working on exploits.
Novell would lose, as their reputation for being pretty clean (security wise) would get sullied. But Novell would win, as they could clean up a bunch of bugs prior to calling it an official product.
... breaking into the entertainment industry is unbelieveably hard without having a solid DRM solution...
Which is why I think the 'TV will save the telcos' idea is bogus. These people are hyping the idea to each other, to help convince themselves it is a good idea, but its rather like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Internet usage is up, TV viewership is down, and the interactive nature of the internet makes that a trend in one direction only - doom for broadcasting.
A quote in the FA says: "There's one application knocking on the door and consumers are truly hungering for it: real-time TV and streaming TV,"
I strongly disagree. I own two Replay TV's and really quite dislike real-time TV. That the satellite and cable providers are doing a push to lease PVRs to us end-users is not lost on me.
I do see narrowcasting as a niche that will survive; but, with multiple delivery systems, the profit margin is going to be extremely thin. Add to that the expense of a DRM system (primarily in pissed off customers who cancel service because of it), and the whole thing seems a house of cards.
Bob Cringely points out that WiMax will probably eat the telco's lunch. I think he is right, and this is just a desperate clutching at straws in hopes they don't drown quickly.
You have a good point - although the devil is in the details....
I can see where it looks like a lateral translation, trading one form of asset for another.
As I understood it, buying back your stock is something you do when you cannot think of something better to do with your cash. Yes, the assumption is that you buy back the stock when it is undervalued - and in theory the stock will go back up.
On the other hand, I don't have faith that the company won't crash and burn like Enron or WorldCom. Two days following the stock buyback plan, the company announced, due to a lack of cash, austerity rules: no more free coffee, travel, training, raises, etc. Ummm... WTF? The other thing I didn't like about the company's financials, is that (in 2001) 48% of its assets were catagorized as "Good Will". This may be 100% legit, as the company is a services organization. The bulk of the company's growth is from mergers and acquisitions. But hundreds of millions of dollars in "Good Will" still makes me queasy. So for this particular company, the details make the value of the company have a somewhat ephemeral quality.
From this point of view, when you see cash outgo for stock buyback, it appears you are losing hard value, and gaining soft assets. Really soft assets.
I have to agree with you that it looks fine on paper.
Just don't expect me to buy stock in the company.
But I do concede your point - generically, a company does not lose value when buying back stock.
You are correct - primarily the shareholders get stuck.
I was thinking of something that I did not include in my post: the company has announced a plan to buy back stock. That is where the company will actually be out cash, and be worth less. Your point is right: the discount really only affects shareholders.
It doesn't help that I was confused about employee stock purchase plans versus employee stock option plans. See this post by ntropic.
When I'm mistaken, it is best that someone corrects me.
If I understand you correctly, then this ruling changes the reporting for "Wealth - Value of Remaining Options" in the ninth column on this page - but only after those options are exercised.
The place I used to work for gave its employees a 15% discount on buying stock (once per fiscal quarter). Every year during open enrollment for benefits, management pointed out that this program lets one buy $100 dollars of stock for the price of $85, and then turn around and dump it the next day for market price (or hold onto it, as might be your want) I'm told quite a few people did the immediate dump plan.
The people who lose in this scheme are the purchasers of stock at full price. The cash flow out of the company dilutes the value of the company, making each share of stock worth (a tiny bit) less. Some people pay full price, others (insiders) reap a benefit at a discount.
The requirement that these discounts are accounted as expenses, puts a dollar amount on them. Thus, someone (and outsider) looking at the company financial statements gets a clearer picture of where the money is going. They get to make a more informed choice.
Its a good thing.
Re:Slashdot Hive Mind: Emergence!
on
Emergence
·
· Score: 1
I assume you created your post with vi, 'cause otherwise you would have just invoked <meta> <alt> <ctrl> <shift>/. in emacs.
What? There's no script for that? Maybe vi really is better than emacs.
Had one user that went on FLMA, when she came back, her mailbox wouldn't open. Turns out she was the number one spam recipient in my system - upwards of 200 messages per day. I had to manually remove 20 K spam from her inbox - and then we renamed her account.
She did not understand why she was getting so much spam, because she always clicked on the unsubscribe link!
I had to explain the 'harvesting' concept to her, so that the new account wouldn't suffer the same fate as the old one. She was good after that.
They gave us a printout of the fourteen questions, a laptop (newly imaged) pre-configured to print to a network printer in the room.
Told us we needed to have our names on all materials we turned in. Then told us we had one hour to answer all as best we could (including time to print).
I assume they will grade each response much like teachers grade term papers: content accounts for the bulk of the grade, "form" a lesser part.
Next week is the formal interview. Wonder if we'll be thrown into a surprise public speaking engagement?;-) (I can only hope - I'm actually decent at that, and would clobber the competition. Heh).
I could not answer the question (at that time). I expect that of the other twenty people competing for the job, less than two have the answer as readily as you. My hope is that those that know that answer are not as familiar with CSU/DSUs, T-1 lines, Client/Server architecture, and network latency.
I did remember a little of my Intro to Psych class from high school - but that was twenty five years ago. I knew who Maslow was, and remembered that he defined a pyramid of needs, but could not have told you how many layers were in the pyramid....
I would be more scared of other people's bad English. Knowing the answer helps you motivate your subordinates. But if your boss orders H.R. to raze your pay - watch out!;-)
I'm looking for work, and a nice position is available at a local agency (almost $50K per year). My application was approved, so this morning I took a written test as the first part of selection process.
It was an essay test - big time.
It was timed: one hour, maximum. Fourteen questions, ranging from describing network security measures, to "How does Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs apply to employee motivation?"
I would have done better, were I faster on the keyboard. However, my spelling and grammar are not all that bad. I think I still have a shot at getting the job.
The ultimate point I want to make is that at least one employer is going back to essay tests for hiring.
Kids, learn that spelling and grammar. Introduction to Psychology might not hurt either.
Thank you for that. I *have* had one interview where my Novell experience was a benefit. For skills expansion, I'm trying to learn LAMP and VOIP. VOIP because it looks like a growth path, and relatively easy to understand (substantially, its just an app on top of switching). LAMP, because I used to be a programmer, and loved it, and can implement it at home. SuSE of course.;-)
I wouldn't count GroupWise out quite yet - but your advice about keeping job skills up is 100% on the mark.
This year, more companies are migrating to GroupWise from Exchange, than the other way around (which is a first). Correspondingly, the NGWList server is picking up newbies. Also, Novell has a Linux strategy, so if companies do start switching their mail servers away from Windows, the companies get use the Evolution client, and choose from GroupWise or OpenExchange as the backend. I'm biased, but I know that the fundamental architecture of GroupWise is good. So I think does have a decent chance.
Novell re-wrote the SMTP Gateway from the ground up for version 6.0. It is much better than before. Probably the weakest piece now is the reliance on the OutsideIn viewers. If the incomming HTML isn't just so, the messages don't render well on the client.
You are absolutely correct: the future is in honing skillsets outside email administration.
I did insert myself into other roles - for a while, I did more router and switch administration than anyone else at the site. I set up the first syslog server, I wrote scripting solutions launched via login script, I was the BorderManager guy, I launched the NAL roll-out. All of those skills made me valuable - I got pretty decent raises.
When it came time to cut costs, I was no longer valuable, I was pricey.
Whoops.
It can tough, trying to keep skills up to date.
If you work for a good company, then it is much easier. Good companies want to implement the best solutions - which means spending money to keep up with change. I didn't work for a good company - we essentially sat still for three years, hunkering down and "saving money". I would have been our Single-Sign-On implementor, but the PHB's in my department didn't want to see a successful Novell solution. Ditto NDPS, NDS 8, ZENWorks.
So if work doesn't provide an upgrade path, you have to do it at home - which has its own host of problems. Sigh.
I do agree that directory services (LDAP and the back-end for same) and network security are growth paths. I kind of worry that network security (packet level, like IDS) will be automated pretty quick, though. Enterasys has a way of tying a user's Active Directory account into the switch fabric, so that switches only allow traffic out their ports based on the permissions on the A.D. account. When Cisco gets around to adopting the same, I can see that networks will become smart enough to 'deny all, except for explicit permissions'. Probably within five years.
At that point, the security focus will be securing the directory services, rather than worrying about rogue packets.
Being able to audit your directory service (and understand the results) will require skill. I don't think that would be easily automated.
I was laid off about a month ago. My primary duty was running a 1,800 user GroupWise system. GroupWise has gone through enough evolution that (providing your admin's know what they are doing) it essentially runs itself.
Which is why they didn't need me any more....
Previously, we were able to successfully fend off PHB led migration plans to MS Exchange, because it took two full-time administrators for Exchange, and only 1/2 FTE for GroupWise. I even heard that, had the migration to Exchange been viable, I'd have been indespensible (at least for a while).
Interestingly, with Exchange 2003, Microsoft has re-architected the product to be an almost exact copy of the GroupWise architecture. The back-end (servers) work exactly the same now. Which, if you are Microsoft, makes sense: "Hey, we cannot get our product into some of these GroupWise sites, because they are getting the same job done better; perhaps we should copy Novell's success?"
So, it does make sense to me that in a few more product cycles, MS Exchange will require far less maintenance than it does now.
Which means that legacy Exchange admins will be the first to get their pink slip, if the company wants to downsize.
Slashdot Mirror
Try Tools|Options|Piracy.
I thought "man, that should have clued you in right there that something bad was going to come from installing this. Acquire licenses automatically - add debit card number, and you're done." ;-)
For example, in my home town (the biggest town for 30 miles around), the main road into the middle from outside is timed for 43 miles per hour during off-hours. The speed limit on that road is 35 MPH; that zone extends for about five miles. (This info came from one of the traffic planners in the county roads department.)
So if you are heading into work at 7:00 AM, and you want to hit all the green lights, you must speed. 7:00 AM is ideal, as the road is still quite empty at that time. The same guy explained that the police officers have been told the maximum number of green lights you can hit, if you keep your speed at 35 MPH.
The problem of course, is that this shows the predatory nature of (some) police enforcement. At the end of a fiscal quarter, it is pretty common to see officers on this street with their radar guns out at 7:00 AM. After pulling you over for speeding, the first question they ask is "How many green lights did you hit?" If you answer too high a number, bzzzt! you lose.
To answer your question: how do you expect them to time the lights? The answer is, yes someone does have that job, and their job is to study when and where the major traffic flow is, and try to optimize that.
In this case, additional city revenue from speeding tickets was a planned factor.
Thank you for pointing that out.
shark72 says I linked to the wrong report, and it looks like they have two reports re: newspapers and Craigslist.
My guess is that you had access to the real thing. Do you have your browser configured to report itself as a googlebot? Some web sites auto-allow google into their 'protected' content....
InternetWeek, not InformationWeek.
Although the article laments the loss of revenue, the study is for sale, and suggests it will teach its buyers how to cope.
What little I saw, had a rather pithy "adapt or die" admonition. It also listed four or five competitors to Craigslist, and suggested it saw holes in the Craigslist business, which offers opportunities....
Of course, the purpose of any press release is the sale of material, and here I am pitching it. :-(
Well, if you were in the newspaper business, it would probably be $250 not too badly spent.
To get back to my original point - the source material was "Yet another example of fundamental changes happening to some market segment," and how not to die like the dinosaurs. Of course, InformationWeek left off that last bit....
Which has a link to a preview of the report (pdf); the price to buy the report is $250 - both of which can be found here.
The comment about a lack of a bittorrent is kind of insightful - I expect that there are people who would just want to install it to see what it does - but they don't really want to sign up with Novell, for fear of getting deluged w/ Marketing calls and material. (My experience is that would not happen, but any time you have to fork over info in exchange for a copy of the code, you are going to create that worry.)
The flip side of course, is if Novell did provide anonymous access to the code, some of those people would start working on exploits.
Novell would lose, as their reputation for being pretty clean (security wise) would get sullied. But Novell would win, as they could clean up a bunch of bugs prior to calling it an official product.
Thanks!
Which is why I think the 'TV will save the telcos' idea is bogus. These people are hyping the idea to each other, to help convince themselves it is a good idea, but its rather like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Internet usage is up, TV viewership is down, and the interactive nature of the internet makes that a trend in one direction only - doom for broadcasting.
A quote in the FA says: "There's one application knocking on the door and consumers are truly hungering for it: real-time TV and streaming TV,"
I strongly disagree. I own two Replay TV's and really quite dislike real-time TV. That the satellite and cable providers are doing a push to lease PVRs to us end-users is not lost on me.
I do see narrowcasting as a niche that will survive; but, with multiple delivery systems, the profit margin is going to be extremely thin. Add to that the expense of a DRM system (primarily in pissed off customers who cancel service because of it), and the whole thing seems a house of cards.
Bob Cringely points out that WiMax will probably eat the telco's lunch. I think he is right, and this is just a desperate clutching at straws in hopes they don't drown quickly.
I can see where it looks like a lateral translation, trading one form of asset for another.
As I understood it, buying back your stock is something you do when you cannot think of something better to do with your cash. Yes, the assumption is that you buy back the stock when it is undervalued - and in theory the stock will go back up.
On the other hand, I don't have faith that the company won't crash and burn like Enron or WorldCom. Two days following the stock buyback plan, the company announced, due to a lack of cash, austerity rules: no more free coffee, travel, training, raises, etc. Ummm... WTF? The other thing I didn't like about the company's financials, is that (in 2001) 48% of its assets were catagorized as "Good Will". This may be 100% legit, as the company is a services organization. The bulk of the company's growth is from mergers and acquisitions. But hundreds of millions of dollars in "Good Will" still makes me queasy. So for this particular company, the details make the value of the company have a somewhat ephemeral quality.
From this point of view, when you see cash outgo for stock buyback, it appears you are losing hard value, and gaining soft assets. Really soft assets.
I have to agree with you that it looks fine on paper.
Just don't expect me to buy stock in the company.
But I do concede your point - generically, a company does not lose value when buying back stock.
I was thinking of something that I did not include in my post: the company has announced a plan to buy back stock. That is where the company will actually be out cash, and be worth less. Your point is right: the discount really only affects shareholders.
It doesn't help that I was confused about employee stock purchase plans versus employee stock option plans. See this post by ntropic.
I'll never claim that I'm not confused - just less confused. ;-)
If I understand you correctly, then this ruling changes the reporting for "Wealth - Value of Remaining Options" in the ninth column on this page - but only after those options are exercised.
Do I get it now?
The people who lose in this scheme are the purchasers of stock at full price. The cash flow out of the company dilutes the value of the company, making each share of stock worth (a tiny bit) less. Some people pay full price, others (insiders) reap a benefit at a discount.
The requirement that these discounts are accounted as expenses, puts a dollar amount on them. Thus, someone (and outsider) looking at the company financial statements gets a clearer picture of where the money is going. They get to make a more informed choice.
Its a good thing.
What? There's no script for that? Maybe vi really is better than emacs.
She did not understand why she was getting so much spam, because she always clicked on the unsubscribe link!
I had to explain the 'harvesting' concept to her, so that the new account wouldn't suffer the same fate as the old one. She was good after that.
Told us we needed to have our names on all materials we turned in. Then told us we had one hour to answer all as best we could (including time to print).
I assume they will grade each response much like teachers grade term papers: content accounts for the bulk of the grade, "form" a lesser part.
Next week is the formal interview. Wonder if we'll be thrown into a surprise public speaking engagement? ;-) (I can only hope - I'm actually decent at that, and would clobber the competition. Heh).
I did remember a little of my Intro to Psych class from high school - but that was twenty five years ago. I knew who Maslow was, and remembered that he defined a pyramid of needs, but could not have told you how many layers were in the pyramid....
I would be more scared of other people's bad English. Knowing the answer helps you motivate your subordinates. But if your boss orders H.R. to raze your pay - watch out! ;-)
It was an essay test - big time.
It was timed: one hour, maximum. Fourteen questions, ranging from describing network security measures, to "How does Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs apply to employee motivation?"
I would have done better, were I faster on the keyboard. However, my spelling and grammar are not all that bad. I think I still have a shot at getting the job.
The ultimate point I want to make is that at least one employer is going back to essay tests for hiring.
Kids, learn that spelling and grammar. Introduction to Psychology might not hurt either.
I wouldn't count GroupWise out quite yet - but your advice about keeping job skills up is 100% on the mark.
This year, more companies are migrating to GroupWise from Exchange, than the other way around (which is a first). Correspondingly, the NGWList server is picking up newbies. Also, Novell has a Linux strategy, so if companies do start switching their mail servers away from Windows, the companies get use the Evolution client, and choose from GroupWise or OpenExchange as the backend. I'm biased, but I know that the fundamental architecture of GroupWise is good. So I think does have a decent chance.
Novell re-wrote the SMTP Gateway from the ground up for version 6.0. It is much better than before. Probably the weakest piece now is the reliance on the OutsideIn viewers. If the incomming HTML isn't just so, the messages don't render well on the client.
You are absolutely correct: the future is in honing skillsets outside email administration.
I did insert myself into other roles - for a while, I did more router and switch administration than anyone else at the site. I set up the first syslog server, I wrote scripting solutions launched via login script, I was the BorderManager guy, I launched the NAL roll-out. All of those skills made me valuable - I got pretty decent raises.
When it came time to cut costs, I was no longer valuable, I was pricey.
Whoops.
It can tough, trying to keep skills up to date.
If you work for a good company, then it is much easier. Good companies want to implement the best solutions - which means spending money to keep up with change. I didn't work for a good company - we essentially sat still for three years, hunkering down and "saving money". I would have been our Single-Sign-On implementor, but the PHB's in my department didn't want to see a successful Novell solution. Ditto NDPS, NDS 8, ZENWorks.
So if work doesn't provide an upgrade path, you have to do it at home - which has its own host of problems. Sigh.
I do agree that directory services (LDAP and the back-end for same) and network security are growth paths. I kind of worry that network security (packet level, like IDS) will be automated pretty quick, though. Enterasys has a way of tying a user's Active Directory account into the switch fabric, so that switches only allow traffic out their ports based on the permissions on the A.D. account. When Cisco gets around to adopting the same, I can see that networks will become smart enough to 'deny all, except for explicit permissions'. Probably within five years.
At that point, the security focus will be securing the directory services, rather than worrying about rogue packets.
Being able to audit your directory service (and understand the results) will require skill. I don't think that would be easily automated.
Which is why they didn't need me any more....
Previously, we were able to successfully fend off PHB led migration plans to MS Exchange, because it took two full-time administrators for Exchange, and only 1/2 FTE for GroupWise. I even heard that, had the migration to Exchange been viable, I'd have been indespensible (at least for a while).
Interestingly, with Exchange 2003, Microsoft has re-architected the product to be an almost exact copy of the GroupWise architecture. The back-end (servers) work exactly the same now. Which, if you are Microsoft, makes sense: "Hey, we cannot get our product into some of these GroupWise sites, because they are getting the same job done better; perhaps we should copy Novell's success?"
So, it does make sense to me that in a few more product cycles, MS Exchange will require far less maintenance than it does now.
Which means that legacy Exchange admins will be the first to get their pink slip, if the company wants to downsize.