the government can't tell public companies how to pay their employees and officers. but governments are huge share holders in public companies via their pension funds and are now using them to sue or force regulation that they can't via the legislature.
anyone can stand out in front of a police station and take pictures of people on a public street. when a government agency peddles these pictures it's the same as inciting a mob in the old days to lynch or beat up people before a conviction at trial.
it's different when the news does it because they are reporting on a government agency. in this case the government agency is showing off people accused of a crime simply to humiliate them before a trial. this is wrong
that was because wall street was telling everyone to become an internet portal and crap the homepage with crap to try to get people to stay longer than 10 seconds
i remember the early days of the internet. i remember the days before Internet Explorer when you had to buy a browser at retail and it was something called Internet in a Box.
I remember the days when Yahoo was king of search. it had a cool name, the results were pretty good and for whatever reason it gained mind share from the other 20 or so search engines around at the time. back then everything was on internet time and wall street analysts thought they knew everything and it was right after Yahoo's IPO. Wall Street decided that search was dead and the next thing was the Internet Portal where people would spend more time and see more ads. So Wall Street told Yahoo to expand or see it's stock punished. then of course wall street needed to peddle the worthless stocks of all the dot coms they sold and they needed suckers to buy companies like broadcast.com.
I bet the investment banks made a fortune on naive kids like Yang by first taking worthless dot coms public, charging huge investment banking consulting fees to find worthless companies to merge with, and then more money to arrange the sale of these worthless companies.
Yahoo made the classic mistake of buying a lot of properties or getting into a lot of different areas and not staying focused and letting the code fragment. or just being a middle man in reselling content.
Just like Microsoft. some VP starts a project like the Kin or the Zune and the rest of the company doesn't want to support it so it's a pariah project that doesn't work with other products the company is making. or it competes with other products.
Look at Apple, they sell two OS's. OS X and iOS and several minor variations of each depending on the device you buy. and iOS is essentially OS X Lite.
Google was just a search engine when wall street was telling everyone to be an internet portal. and they were making money on it. then they expanded into Gmail and other areas with the original business still being key. they took Apple's and Microsoft's strategy or releasing a beta product but with the features that a lot of people wanted to work better than the competition. and finish it later.
and the germans had secret experimental jet and stealth aircraft at the time that were never produced in volume due to the allies bombing the germans' industrial capabilities. Northrop had test versions of what is now the B2 back before world war 2 but it had problems back then which is why it took so long to finally make a flying wing design.
Re:Solution in need of a (perceived) problem
on
Why Wave Failed
·
· Score: 1
twitter and hashtags and lists
there is a hashtag for almost everything. as an example #sqlhelp is used by SQL Server admins to communicate together and help answer quick questions. easier and faster than google wave #srvadv or something like that is used by the NYC subway to communicate train delays
twitter unlike wave works very nicely on iphones and android phones
the idea behind wave was that kids would sit in front of a computer all day chatting. about the time it came out smart phones started to become popular and people use them more than PC's now.
then there were the usual Google mistakes
no trust. i'm not downloading and giving facebook passwords to some guy advertising a facebook plugin who's only a screen name no links to outside social sites. just like buzz only pulled info from twitter made it worthless hard to find people. i like google reader but it's a PITA to find people to follow. why can't google link it to facebook or twitter to scan for friends?
google makes some cool software but sometimes it seems like the combine apple's walled garden with the work of OCD kids. they code it to version.8 or barely 1.0. release it to the wild as open source and then forget about it and expect others to make it better. meanwhile the engineers who coded it have moved on to the next cool thing and don't want to work on it since it's old news. or lock it to only interact with google services where you can't find anyone else using it. and with google's management culture you will never get the engineers to revisit an old project unless it's a huge revenue opportunity.
article says they have owned the home since the 1950's. means they probably refinanced a few years ago to "liberate the equity" or "put the equity to work". i bet they will lose the home some day.
i've bought iphone charging cables on ebay for $2 each including shipping and they all seem to work. via the USB and in my car. sometimes i've pulled it out a bit by accident and i get the error. put the cable all the way back in and it works.
most locales the property taxes are a share of the budget. the more improvements on your property the larger your share. a lot of the valuations i've seen will divide it among land value and improvement value. the land value is the dirt and is low. anything you build goes into the improvement value and increases your share of taxes
if a permit had been applied for then an inspector would have come out to check it out. most of the building code is the same around the US and it's common sense rules to make sure things are built to last. i know people that did a lot of renovations using unlicensed people and there is always something wrong with the work. electricity doesn't work exactly right, leaks that no one can find for years, etc.
you must be a renter. you need a permit for any modification of your property. my father in law built a deck years ago. neighbor ratted him out and a city inspector showed up. made him hire an architect to verify the safety of the deck and they added it to the home listing in the public records for property taxes.
in the NYC burbs the way it works is the county makes up a budget for the upcoming fiscal year. then they look at the population and the property owned by everyone including all improvements. and there is a formula to determine what your share of the budget is based on the value of your property. the more improvements to your home the larger your share of taxes. in some NJ towns you have to let an inspector in every 2 years or else they just make you pay the max property taxes allowed. something like $14000 per year
yes the USA is the land of the free, but almost everyone has neighbors and this is the government's way to make sure that whatever you do to your home is not a safety or quality of life issue for your neighbors. you want freedom buy a house in montana away from everyone and do whatever you want
this is not something new. probably has been around for hundreds of years and i bet it goes back to england like a lot of US laws and traditions do
why spend money on R&D that may not pay off? what's the difference between that and spending the cash on a start up with an interesting product with an ROI? a lot of R&D has been transferred to the universities in the last 10 years where they license it out to the corporations.
there is no good reason why corporations should do R&D rather than universities. corporate R&D projects will be managed by the same MBA's who can't seem to find anything innovative, while a few guys in a garage are always the ones coming up with the cool new stuff.
look at MS and Apple. Microsoft has a lot corporate R&D projects that sometimes take years. and a lot of times the end result is convoluted and poorly implemented even if the idea is cool. Apple takes existing tech and packages it in a way that people want
the original patents may have expired but i bet the current product is slightly modified and has new patents to protect it. sure you can make it as Corning made it in 1962 but i bet it won't look as good or have the same properties as the current product
you forget that most chips people buy these days are the equivelant of "off the rack" clothing. they are manufacturing rejects that are sold as lower end cards. just like Xeon CPU's and the top of the line $600 graphics cards being the only ones that are a result of "perfect" manufacturing. everything else from i Core to your $150 graphics cards are manufacturing rejects with circuitry disabled. it's not like there is a production process for every single SKU of the 20 or so that ATI/Nvidia sell at any one time.
it all comes off one line, tested, binned and then circuitry is disabled depending on the results of the testing
for all it's short comings iOS is less than 1GB in size. i think 4 is around 500MB or so on my iPhone 3GS. Windows 7 is 20GB or so on my desktops and laptops but most of that is drivers. even if MS shrinks it to 4GB, that's still a huge footprint for a 32GB device. i bet a lot of people will be angry buying a Win7 tablet only to find out that 10% of their storage is taken up by the OS.
Apple knows the market for all their products. few years ago there was a story how Ballmer was pissed off that most of the Wall Street analysts at some investment conference he was speaking at had MacBook Pro's. these are the same people that spend 10 hours on a plane to China for investment research. this is why Apple is so fanatical about battery life.
MS had potential with WIndows CE and Pocket PC but they didn't concentrate on usability and let the platform stagnate and their partners cheapen the brand by releasing crappy hardware
i think MS can finally think a few years ahead again. smartphones carry a nice premium these days where the hardware makers can sell them at nice margins. but this is going the way of the dodo and soon software will be king again. the hardware smartphone makers will be the dell/hp commodity box builders where no one really cares about brand and lowest cost wins. only difference from the 1990's seems to be that instead of the OS and an office suite being the cash cows this time it seems to be providing the information services are thought to be the cash cows of the coming decade
most smart phones are already mostly identical whether it's the iphone or one of the others. they all have some version of an ARM CPU, the same flash memory, a screen from Samsung of one of 2-3 other companies that make them, etc. and for most people it doesn't really matter if you have an android or iphone. 80% or more of the functionality is the same with most apps being on both platforms.
the key is controlling the backend and the software that enables people to find information on their phones. Flash being multi-platform makes it easy to reach more people
time to go and buy up all kinds of expensive software to tell us something or other
it's almost like the DR consultants who say we need to spend a fortune on a DR site in case a nuclear bomb goes off and we need to run the business from 100 miles away. i'll be 2000 miles away living with mom again in the middle of no where and making sure my family is safe. not going to some DR site that is going to close because half of NYC is going to go bankrupt in the depression after a WMD attack
2 146GB drives from HP are less than $500 for the SAS drives. you can put the same storage on an EMC SAN and provision less for the system drive for a Windows server but by the time you pay their crack dealer prices for hard drives along with the drives for the BCV volumes and pay for the fiber switches and g-bics and HBA's and everything else it's cheaper to waste space on regular hard drives
personally i'd send it to China for "recycling" or just junk it or donate it. you'll get better performance buying a new iMac and virtualizing the G5. File servers are so last decade. just get an external hard drive and connect it to a TV all of which come with USB ports these days and play a long list of media files
Dell and HP started by supporting Linux, Android and Palm OS. Either Windows Server ends up running on ARM or Android/Palm server versions will. Wintel is starting to die
P.S. same story as Nokia. they sold dumb phones at cost and smart phones to drive profits. apple is killing that model.
Intel sells i Core CPU's for branding and the profits are in the Xeons. All CPU's are manufactured as XEON's and binned when they are tested. ARM is about to demolish that model since it's dirt cheap to design and manufacture their CPU's.
there is some company selling Atom CPU based servers and a lot of customers like them. Atom is just a Xeon with almost everything disabled due to manufacturing issues. Apple did a nice job with the A4 in terms of battery life and power consumption. MS will probably port Windows Server and other products to the architecture to keep VmWare and Linux at bay.
and with tech demos of Apache running on the iPhone any idiot will say that ARM will end up in servers soon with the big plus being you can customize it to your needs. just like Apple and Qualcomm did. with Intel you get a Xeon at $1500 each on average or a Xeon reject at $150. ARM CPU's cost a fraction of that even after R&D. and when you calculate the electricity savings it gets even better.
Slashdot Mirror
the government can't tell public companies how to pay their employees and officers. but governments are huge share holders in public companies via their pension funds and are now using them to sue or force regulation that they can't via the legislature.
anyone can stand out in front of a police station and take pictures of people on a public street. when a government agency peddles these pictures it's the same as inciting a mob in the old days to lynch or beat up people before a conviction at trial.
it's different when the news does it because they are reporting on a government agency. in this case the government agency is showing off people accused of a crime simply to humiliate them before a trial. this is wrong
that was because wall street was telling everyone to become an internet portal and crap the homepage with crap to try to get people to stay longer than 10 seconds
i remember the early days of the internet. i remember the days before Internet Explorer when you had to buy a browser at retail and it was something called Internet in a Box.
I remember the days when Yahoo was king of search. it had a cool name, the results were pretty good and for whatever reason it gained mind share from the other 20 or so search engines around at the time. back then everything was on internet time and wall street analysts thought they knew everything and it was right after Yahoo's IPO. Wall Street decided that search was dead and the next thing was the Internet Portal where people would spend more time and see more ads. So Wall Street told Yahoo to expand or see it's stock punished. then of course wall street needed to peddle the worthless stocks of all the dot coms they sold and they needed suckers to buy companies like broadcast.com.
I bet the investment banks made a fortune on naive kids like Yang by first taking worthless dot coms public, charging huge investment banking consulting fees to find worthless companies to merge with, and then more money to arrange the sale of these worthless companies.
Yahoo made the classic mistake of buying a lot of properties or getting into a lot of different areas and not staying focused and letting the code fragment. or just being a middle man in reselling content.
Just like Microsoft. some VP starts a project like the Kin or the Zune and the rest of the company doesn't want to support it so it's a pariah project that doesn't work with other products the company is making. or it competes with other products.
Look at Apple, they sell two OS's. OS X and iOS and several minor variations of each depending on the device you buy. and iOS is essentially OS X Lite.
Google was just a search engine when wall street was telling everyone to be an internet portal. and they were making money on it. then they expanded into Gmail and other areas with the original business still being key. they took Apple's and Microsoft's strategy or releasing a beta product but with the features that a lot of people wanted to work better than the competition. and finish it later.
and the germans had secret experimental jet and stealth aircraft at the time that were never produced in volume due to the allies bombing the germans' industrial capabilities. Northrop had test versions of what is now the B2 back before world war 2 but it had problems back then which is why it took so long to finally make a flying wing design.
twitter and hashtags and lists
there is a hashtag for almost everything. as an example #sqlhelp is used by SQL Server admins to communicate together and help answer quick questions. easier and faster than google wave
#srvadv or something like that is used by the NYC subway to communicate train delays
twitter unlike wave works very nicely on iphones and android phones
the idea behind wave was that kids would sit in front of a computer all day chatting. about the time it came out smart phones started to become popular and people use them more than PC's now.
then there were the usual Google mistakes
no trust. i'm not downloading and giving facebook passwords to some guy advertising a facebook plugin who's only a screen name
no links to outside social sites. just like buzz only pulled info from twitter made it worthless
hard to find people. i like google reader but it's a PITA to find people to follow. why can't google link it to facebook or twitter to scan for friends?
google makes some cool software but sometimes it seems like the combine apple's walled garden with the work of OCD kids. they code it to version .8 or barely 1.0. release it to the wild as open source and then forget about it and expect others to make it better. meanwhile the engineers who coded it have moved on to the next cool thing and don't want to work on it since it's old news. or lock it to only interact with google services where you can't find anyone else using it. and with google's management culture you will never get the engineers to revisit an old project unless it's a huge revenue opportunity.
article says they have owned the home since the 1950's. means they probably refinanced a few years ago to "liberate the equity" or "put the equity to work". i bet they will lose the home some day.
i've bought iphone charging cables on ebay for $2 each including shipping and they all seem to work. via the USB and in my car. sometimes i've pulled it out a bit by accident and i get the error. put the cable all the way back in and it works.
most locales the property taxes are a share of the budget. the more improvements on your property the larger your share. a lot of the valuations i've seen will divide it among land value and improvement value. the land value is the dirt and is low. anything you build goes into the improvement value and increases your share of taxes
if a permit had been applied for then an inspector would have come out to check it out. most of the building code is the same around the US and it's common sense rules to make sure things are built to last. i know people that did a lot of renovations using unlicensed people and there is always something wrong with the work. electricity doesn't work exactly right, leaks that no one can find for years, etc.
you must be a renter. you need a permit for any modification of your property. my father in law built a deck years ago. neighbor ratted him out and a city inspector showed up. made him hire an architect to verify the safety of the deck and they added it to the home listing in the public records for property taxes.
in the NYC burbs the way it works is the county makes up a budget for the upcoming fiscal year. then they look at the population and the property owned by everyone including all improvements. and there is a formula to determine what your share of the budget is based on the value of your property. the more improvements to your home the larger your share of taxes. in some NJ towns you have to let an inspector in every 2 years or else they just make you pay the max property taxes allowed. something like $14000 per year
yes the USA is the land of the free, but almost everyone has neighbors and this is the government's way to make sure that whatever you do to your home is not a safety or quality of life issue for your neighbors. you want freedom buy a house in montana away from everyone and do whatever you want
this is not something new. probably has been around for hundreds of years and i bet it goes back to england like a lot of US laws and traditions do
why spend money on R&D that may not pay off? what's the difference between that and spending the cash on a start up with an interesting product with an ROI? a lot of R&D has been transferred to the universities in the last 10 years where they license it out to the corporations.
there is no good reason why corporations should do R&D rather than universities. corporate R&D projects will be managed by the same MBA's who can't seem to find anything innovative, while a few guys in a garage are always the ones coming up with the cool new stuff.
look at MS and Apple. Microsoft has a lot corporate R&D projects that sometimes take years. and a lot of times the end result is convoluted and poorly implemented even if the idea is cool. Apple takes existing tech and packages it in a way that people want
the original patents may have expired but i bet the current product is slightly modified and has new patents to protect it. sure you can make it as Corning made it in 1962 but i bet it won't look as good or have the same properties as the current product
you forget that most chips people buy these days are the equivelant of "off the rack" clothing. they are manufacturing rejects that are sold as lower end cards. just like Xeon CPU's and the top of the line $600 graphics cards being the only ones that are a result of "perfect" manufacturing. everything else from i Core to your $150 graphics cards are manufacturing rejects with circuitry disabled. it's not like there is a production process for every single SKU of the 20 or so that ATI/Nvidia sell at any one time.
it all comes off one line, tested, binned and then circuitry is disabled depending on the results of the testing
for all it's short comings iOS is less than 1GB in size. i think 4 is around 500MB or so on my iPhone 3GS. Windows 7 is 20GB or so on my desktops and laptops but most of that is drivers. even if MS shrinks it to 4GB, that's still a huge footprint for a 32GB device. i bet a lot of people will be angry buying a Win7 tablet only to find out that 10% of their storage is taken up by the OS.
Apple knows the market for all their products. few years ago there was a story how Ballmer was pissed off that most of the Wall Street analysts at some investment conference he was speaking at had MacBook Pro's. these are the same people that spend 10 hours on a plane to China for investment research. this is why Apple is so fanatical about battery life.
MS had potential with WIndows CE and Pocket PC but they didn't concentrate on usability and let the platform stagnate and their partners cheapen the brand by releasing crappy hardware
i think MS can finally think a few years ahead again. smartphones carry a nice premium these days where the hardware makers can sell them at nice margins. but this is going the way of the dodo and soon software will be king again. the hardware smartphone makers will be the dell/hp commodity box builders where no one really cares about brand and lowest cost wins. only difference from the 1990's seems to be that instead of the OS and an office suite being the cash cows this time it seems to be providing the information services are thought to be the cash cows of the coming decade
most smart phones are already mostly identical whether it's the iphone or one of the others. they all have some version of an ARM CPU, the same flash memory, a screen from Samsung of one of 2-3 other companies that make them, etc. and for most people it doesn't really matter if you have an android or iphone. 80% or more of the functionality is the same with most apps being on both platforms.
the key is controlling the backend and the software that enables people to find information on their phones. Flash being multi-platform makes it easy to reach more people
time to go and buy up all kinds of expensive software to tell us something or other
it's almost like the DR consultants who say we need to spend a fortune on a DR site in case a nuclear bomb goes off and we need to run the business from 100 miles away. i'll be 2000 miles away living with mom again in the middle of no where and making sure my family is safe. not going to some DR site that is going to close because half of NYC is going to go bankrupt in the depression after a WMD attack
2 146GB drives from HP are less than $500 for the SAS drives. you can put the same storage on an EMC SAN and provision less for the system drive for a Windows server but by the time you pay their crack dealer prices for hard drives along with the drives for the BCV volumes and pay for the fiber switches and g-bics and HBA's and everything else it's cheaper to waste space on regular hard drives
personally i'd send it to China for "recycling" or just junk it or donate it. you'll get better performance buying a new iMac and virtualizing the G5. File servers are so last decade. just get an external hard drive and connect it to a TV all of which come with USB ports these days and play a long list of media files
Dell and HP started by supporting Linux, Android and Palm OS. Either Windows Server ends up running on ARM or Android/Palm server versions will. Wintel is starting to die
P.S. same story as Nokia. they sold dumb phones at cost and smart phones to drive profits. apple is killing that model.
Intel sells i Core CPU's for branding and the profits are in the Xeons. All CPU's are manufactured as XEON's and binned when they are tested. ARM is about to demolish that model since it's dirt cheap to design and manufacture their CPU's.
there is some company selling Atom CPU based servers and a lot of customers like them. Atom is just a Xeon with almost everything disabled due to manufacturing issues. Apple did a nice job with the A4 in terms of battery life and power consumption. MS will probably port Windows Server and other products to the architecture to keep VmWare and Linux at bay.
and with tech demos of Apache running on the iPhone any idiot will say that ARM will end up in servers soon with the big plus being you can customize it to your needs. just like Apple and Qualcomm did. with Intel you get a Xeon at $1500 each on average or a Xeon reject at $150. ARM CPU's cost a fraction of that even after R&D. and when you calculate the electricity savings it gets even better.
this is expensive medical equipment. the costs are in the approval process and sales commissions. not in the cost of the hardware