The hardest thing would be getting a coder that's mature enough to do the job properly. It would take very little time to simply maintain the mature code and occasionally stomp a bug. Unfortunately if you give this job to a younger coder, regardless of what country he's from, you stand a very high chance of seeing him go crazy wanting to add new features and just screw it all up.
The way I read the OP's question was: "I really like program X, but I can't afford programmers to work on it. How can I convince programmers to work on program X for free or convince other people to pay them so that I can continue to enjoy it for free?"
If someone is offering a reasonable wage, they will attract talent. Weeding out the non-talented is actual work, but not impossible. If they don't have wages to offer, then the only option I see is to spend more of what they do have (time) to build a following of program X, convincing others that it's the cat's meow and must be experienced to be appreciated.
There are people out there working for free to maintain Commodore 64, Atari 2600, Apple ][, or PDP-11 emulators; all platforms which were obsolete 25 years ago. You don't find the same type of cult following for CP/M machines or building WordStar clones. Figure out why that is, and more importantly, which camp your favorite program X falls into: was it abandoned because it was no longer made, or because clearly better, evolved products of the same technology became available?
I don't understand what the issue is here. What the OP seems to be really asking is how to move the bandwidth requirement to overnight, when no one is using their connection for other business purposes.
If time-shifting the syncing to off-hours is acceptable, why do you not install a server with a beefy hard drive at the client location to do just that?
Have you explored the idea of compressing the data at the client side before sending it your way? Bitmaps often compress very well, especially if you can batch very similar ones together. A script to make a gzipped tar file every 5 minutes might do wonders for your data requirements.
If you're ready to shell out the money for a cloud provider, why not instead shell out the money for a second connection to dedicate to this client?
What does moving the data through a third party in "the cloud" offer over any of (or a combination of) these three approaches?
Shuttling a couple hard disks back and forth every day of the week using overnight shipping would be a fairly expensive option. You would have to have at minimum 2 sets of disks, sending them both ways every day, the shipping costs alone would be high if you do this on a daily basis. We are talking 2x the daily overnight shipping costs for a 2 pound package, multiplied by an average 21 working days/month. I don't know what the typical costs for overnight shipping in the US these days, but let's say $25 per shipment and $50/day. The monthly shipping costs work out to be $1050. And that does not include all the "manual" labor of copying data to/from the disks, packing, shipping paperwork, etc. The cost of the disks would be fairly trivial in comparison to the shipping costs.
Also, you would likely want a larger pool of disks to spread the failure rate, as all the bumps and shocks they receive every day being shipped back and forth is very likely to result in damage and short lifespan.
I totally agree on this method for one-time or infrequent large transfers, but I think you are creating more problems by trying to use this method for daily transfer of data.
You are correct about the logistics problems of this approach, but there are ways to make this more cost effective. As another poster mentioned, SD cards would be a good way to reduce the weight and fragility of the package. LTO tapes would be another option. If the OP can accept another day of latency, the Postal Service offers flat Priority Mail boxes that could ship 2-day instead of overnight for a little over $5. By investing in some more media to add a buffer to the system, the return trip could be via an even lower cost option every week or so.
But you are right about this being an expensive option: the let's-mail-stuff-back-and-forth option ignores that there has to be someone on both ends coordinating and performing the shipping, and reading media (and waiting) and writing media (and waiting). Those people cost money, even part-time high school students will cost more than the actual shipping.
In design, minimizing materials and manufacturing cost or keeping the product compact tends to far outweigh repairability concerns.
Which will not change, as long as we continue to pursue the Walmart model of cheaper-and-good-enough rather than expensive-better-repairable.
One of the other posters mentioned bike shops as an example of a repair shop model that continues to exist. Customers that frequent those shops are looking for a premium item; you won't find a $100 Huffy there, but the customer who invests $1000 in a bike will most likely continue to spend $50 for a tune up each year, long after the Huffy has hit the scrap heap. As long as people are willing to spend money for a quality bike, they will stick around, but they will always fill a niche market, not the high-volume, low-margin space that is most of our marketplace.
Back in the day a typewriter was a serious investment, just like all business machines that eventually trickled their way into consumer use. (Think telephones, faxes, copiers, adding machines, printers, etc.). When something costs $$$ and makes your business $$$$, there's a legitimate need and market for repair services that can keep a device going for $$. As soon as the object becomes obsolete or replaceable for $$, or with only a very few special use cases, it makes no financial sense to repair them. It's not that they become impossible to repair, but with a skilled technician doing the work the majority of the cost to do the repair (the human) hasn't fallen at the same rate as the cost of the device.
If all that was leaked was information about NSA-related snooping into our fellow citizens' lives, I would agree with you. There was more than that, information that could endanger people's lives.
If we find ourselves in a real war, where the stakes are freedom and our way of life, and the casualty count is ticking up into the millions then I'll be with you in the camp that says: the ends justify the means, and we must win at at all costs, because losing is not an option.
So, yeah, I'll stand behind any soldier that acts in accordance with his conscience in today's conflicts. We can well afford the luxury of prosecuting our so-called "wars" with a very light touch right now.
You're right, getting away with it doesn't excuse doing it, but if you're on the losing side who's going to do anything about it?
I didn't say I agree with "the ends justify the means". All I'm saying is that if our country were singing "God Save the Queen" before each game of the National Rugby League, we probably would have been taught in elementary school how George Washington and John Hancock were some of those insurgents that The Crown hung after that unpleasant row in the 1780s.
The GP said:
My understanding of it is that Security Clearances are about war. There is a chain of command, and ethics usually come in second to winning the war because being dead and ethical isn't as good as being alive and unethical in the context of a war.
The other problem is the fog of war, if everything is compartmentalized then how can you know what is or isn't ethical in a situation when the information you have is incomplete and "need to know".
When talking in this vein, the textbook example of "just following orders" is the guards of the Nazi prison camps who committed heinous acts because they were told to. The Jews that were starving to death before being experimented on could hardly be considered a serious threat to the German way of life. But it must be considered that this isn't an accurate reflection of the attitude of most Germans. These were not run of the mill, average German citizens, these were a carefully selected group who had shown their willingness or eagerness to go along and be SOBs. And even they had their Schindler.
Soldiers who do not blindly follow orders are a real pain to their commanders and damage morale, but the fact that they can do that in our country is the very essence of liberty. As soon as we squash the give and take, the ability to publicly question what our government is up to, we are lost. George Washington and the rest of those hooligans believed in their countrymen more than they believed in their government, and to lose that spirit by unilaterally vilifying anyone who would do the same would be a damn shame.
I think Snowden believed he was a true patriot, and went against his government thinking he had the moral high ground. I hope nothing he leaked costs anyone their life, and since it's out there I hope the information is put to good use to help keep our government honest.
But I also think he was wrong.
It wasn't up to him to make that decision on behalf of our country. Our intelligence has been damaged, and it has put people in harm's way. As you say, we aren't at war and these are not desperate times, so I do not believe he was justified in his desperate measures.
There is a chain of command, and ethics usually come in second to winning the war because being dead and ethical isn't as good as being alive and unethical in the context of a war.
"Just following orders" is long established as not a good enough reason to be complicit in war crimes.
The other problem is the fog of war, if everything is compartmentalized then how can you know what is or isn't ethical in a situation when the information you have is incomplete and "need to know".
If you are being asked to commit something that could be considered a war crime, then you probably "need to know"... either that it just is a war crime and you probably shouldn't do it.
Right or wrong, "War Crime" is always defined by the winning side.
it has nothing to do with looking good. he ALREADY looks good. otherwise they wouldnt have hired him as CEO, and given him a performance bonus years in a row. it has everything to do with being a good leade who acknowledges that his ultimate success/failure is influenced very much by the workers below him. they did well, the company did well, he got rewarded, and he is in turn acknolwedging and rewarding his workers. Thats what good leaders do.
damn cynics should be drug into the street and shot.
Amen to this. There are so many comments on this thread in the vein of "to a rich guy like this, $3.5MM is nothing", "it's all all a publicity stunt", "if he really cared about his workers, why not just pay them more".
This is all crap. There isn't a person alive who really thinks that $3.5 million dollars is chump change. No billionaire would just hand out $3.5 million, even if it's the equivalent of quarters found in the couch with respect to their overall wealth. People don't get rich by not understanding the value of a million bucks.
The guy's trying to reward his team, and downplaying his action of giving away real amounts of money with comments complaining about how much more he could give, or how spread across 10,000 employees it doesn't amount to much for each family really sounds like sour grapes.
When I was a kid, my dad's company used to take their employees and their spouses on a yearly vacation; two that I remember it was Costa Rica, another it was Hawaii. My dad tells me that the year they went to Hawaii (1980 or so) there was a lot of bitching and moaning; it wasn't enough that the company was paying their airfare, hotel, and giving them $200 spending money. Some people were complaining that they would have to find babysitters for their kids. Some complained that $200 wasn't enough to eat for an entire week and buy souvenirs. Some had working spouses who couldn't afford to take the time off. After the trip, the owner of the company told them he hoped they had enjoyed their trip, because it would be the last one he would be paying for.
Some people don't know enough to accept a gift, smile graciously, and STFU.
To put things in perspective : Lenovo 2012 profits : $472 millions Yang's share of that : $33 millions Lenovo's employees : 27 000 Lenovo profit per employee : $17,481 What Yang offers them : $300
I am not sure I want to reward that.
I'm not sure what your point is. If he really wanted to maximize profits, he should just fire everyone and keep the $472 million for himself, right? Are you saying it's wrong for a company to make a profit off of their employees' work?
When I stream video from Netflix, the server chooses an encoding and resolution specific to the device running their client software. I assume that other video streaming servers behave in the same manner: why stream HD to a 320x800 display?
In the case of the Chromecast which is presumably displaying to a 1920x10820 display, is there some sort of passthrough signalling that will let the streaming device use a more appropriate resolution? Or do I only get the same resolution as the intermediate device?
Yes, the Chromecast delivers at a higher resolution. Basically what happens is the intermediary device (phone, tablet, etc.) sends the video information to the Chromecast, and it logs into Netflix itself and behaves as a native player on a large screen. I was pleasantly surprised that I wasn't even prompted to log into Netflix on the larger display.
On a related note, can somebody tell me why this device is desirable? I'm still struggling with the use case here. What is the benefit of Chromecast over something like teeny little wdtv box? It's smaller and cheaper but does a lot less.
Well, two out of three ain't bad.:) The biggest downside for me is that you have to have an Android device kicking around to act as the remote control.
Either Michael Dell or one of the C-levels from Samsung. Microsoft fancies itself a "device and services" company now, they will think they need someone who can build "things" rather than ideas.
I assume by fired/terminated you mean because you have broken the terms of your contract (and normally been given suitable warnings, etc). Of COURSE there is then no payment period, you have broken your employment terms!
Exactly the same thing would apply in reverse, if your employer broke the terms of employment (for example didnt pay you, etc, etc) then you would have the right to leave immediately.
The 'question' is of course termed wrong, resigning your job is VERY different from being fired, it is equivalent to being laid off.
Get it? Simple enough?
In every job I've ever had, there were no "employment terms". I've always worked in an "at-will" arrangement, which means my employer has no obligation beyond paying me for the time I've actually worked. Usually there's some language stating that I agree and understand that I have no employment contract and that nothing anybody tells me, short of a written contract signed by a vice-president of the company can change that.
There is no value in positive comments. If you're considering to buy something, you want to know where it fails, not where it succeeds.
Moreover I personally would never leave a positive comment. If it works as advertised, life can go on as normal. If it doesn't, then I leave a comment.
Exactly. No one calls Customer Service to tell the company how pleased they are with a product.
I witnessed a moment that would be hard to replicate; a project had failed around 5 times over as many years. So the head of marketing temporarily took over the development department of around 20 programmers. He said, "You can form into teams of any size and you don't have to have anyone on your team you don't want. Also there is no seniority. So if the two newest guys want to form a team then fine. But whichever group makes me happy before September(5 months) will form the core of a new programming department and I will lavish a bonus on you that will make my top salesmen jealous. Also if I hear any complaining you can clear out your desk. And again, your goal is to impress me. Not anyone else in this company. If someone tells you that you are doing it wrong tell me and I will tell them to clear out their desks."
A team of 4 guys (all with Junior programmer titles) won in just over a week. My favorite complaints from the largest group of soon to be ex-employees (9 were fired) was that there wasn't any documentation, the wrong language was used, and that their coding wasn't to company standards.
That's a interesting story. Thanks for sharing.
I'm curious how that company looked a year after the "competition".
And low and behold, right now it looks as though I'm going to join the team. A team of fifteen, with aprox. 5-7 regular devs and no versioning in place and a lead who's nice but is so backwards I would let within 10 yards of any project... gee, am I glad that that is not my problem.
That's setting off warning bells in my head. No version control in place, you are reading the lead as "nice, but backwards" and wouldn't be comfortable with him on your project. If you are seeing that management is knowingly allowing problems to brew with no action to correct them, don't expect things to be different once you're hired...
Should I feel obligated to support "The American Dream" of the owners of the indie bookstore, even though they've decided to invest in a dying business?
In our city, there's a "downtown alliance" continually harping on about the importance of supporting local business against the big box stores. The examples that keep being brought up as the enemy are the Wal-Mart and Sam's Club.
I wager that Sam's Club provides a sustainable income to more families than the 4-employee mom-and-pop that is asking for our patronage. But, of course the owners of the mom and pop shops don't see it that way.
Democrats want to live up to the responsibility of pay for the government we have, and the services it provides. Republicans want to run up the debt by giving the wealthiest more money, at the expense of the poor, while putting all the cost onto future generations. The largest expansion of government since Medicare/Medicaid = Department of Homeland Security under Bush.... put on the federal credit card.
President Obama has been in office for well over a full term now, and is now safe from being voted out of office, so what's he waiting for? Until after he closes Guantanamo? After dealing with the NSA?
You give the president of the country way too much credit if you think it all rests on him. The actual difference, in numbers or policies, in either the house or the senate as been so narrow even since the Good Old Clinton Years you remember, that placing blame at the feet of either party is a sign only of how good a job the other party has done of pulling the wool over your eyes.
The ability to do this has been around a long, long time.
If you bought a TV guide back in the 1990's, there was a number in parenthesis next to the show title. So you would see something like "9:00 channel 13 Beverly Hills 90210 (938458764): description of the episode"
The number is a number embedded in the signal of the episode that notifies automated systems what the content is being shown then. You could program your equipment to record that number. It would cut out all commercials. You never had to set the time either. It would record whenever it saw that number. It is part of the video spec.
Not exactly; that number (called "VCR +" back in the day) wasn't embedded in the video signal, it was generated algorithmically from the channel, time of day, program length, etc. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_recorder_scheduling_code for more details.
Pacific Rim's trailer is fantastic. It's guaranteed I'll give no money to the film. It looks utter total complete absolute shit on a stick. Without the stick.
Amen to that! I got bored of it 30 seconds into the trailer. But then again, I'm slightly older than the apparent target 9-13 year old male demographic.
Meh. The plot in Primer was somewhat original, but I felt like there were 10 minutes missing in the middle of the movie. The dialog was too rambling and mumbled in too many scenes, and one of the two main actors felt like he was reciting lines.
If a single drunk driver is able to stop your production and that production is critical you are doing something wrong to begin with. While the cloud might (and probably will) offer better HA and DR it will not fix a bad design by itself.
The article also states: " I didn't want to create my own internal IT department". I' guessing Andrew Oliver is a PHB.
Translation:
Those IT geeks must have thought I was a gullible moron! The price they quoted me to protect my super important data was too high, but knew that it's all just mouse clicking and watching Youtube, so I got my nephew to set up some servers that first time.
After my catastrophic loss, I again chose to not waste money on redundant servers or hiring any of those overpaid minesweeper monkeys, but now my data lives in a far-away place that I don't know managed by people I've never met, so it must be a better solution than what I had before.
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The hardest thing would be getting a coder that's mature enough to do the job properly. It would take very little time to simply maintain the mature code and occasionally stomp a bug. Unfortunately if you give this job to a younger coder, regardless of what country he's from, you stand a very high chance of seeing him go crazy wanting to add new features and just screw it all up.
The way I read the OP's question was: "I really like program X, but I can't afford programmers to work on it. How can I convince programmers to work on program X for free or convince other people to pay them so that I can continue to enjoy it for free?"
If someone is offering a reasonable wage, they will attract talent. Weeding out the non-talented is actual work, but not impossible. If they don't have wages to offer, then the only option I see is to spend more of what they do have (time) to build a following of program X, convincing others that it's the cat's meow and must be experienced to be appreciated.
There are people out there working for free to maintain Commodore 64, Atari 2600, Apple ][, or PDP-11 emulators; all platforms which were obsolete 25 years ago. You don't find the same type of cult following for CP/M machines or building WordStar clones. Figure out why that is, and more importantly, which camp your
favorite program X falls into: was it abandoned because it was no longer made, or because clearly better, evolved products of the same technology became available?
I don't understand what the issue is here. What the OP seems to be really asking is how to move the bandwidth requirement to overnight, when no one is using their connection for other business purposes.
If time-shifting the syncing to off-hours is acceptable, why do you not install a server with a beefy hard drive at the client location to do just that?
Have you explored the idea of compressing the data at the client side before sending it your way? Bitmaps often compress very well, especially if you can batch very similar ones together. A script to make a gzipped tar file every 5 minutes might do wonders for your data requirements.
If you're ready to shell out the money for a cloud provider, why not instead shell out the money for a second connection to dedicate to this client?
What does moving the data through a third party in "the cloud" offer over any of (or a combination of) these three approaches?
Shuttling a couple hard disks back and forth every day of the week using overnight shipping would be a fairly expensive option. You would have to have at minimum 2 sets of disks, sending them both ways every day, the shipping costs alone would be high if you do this on a daily basis. We are talking 2x the daily overnight shipping costs for a 2 pound package, multiplied by an average 21 working days/month. I don't know what the typical costs for overnight shipping in the US these days, but let's say $25 per shipment and $50/day. The monthly shipping costs work out to be $1050. And that does not include all the "manual" labor of copying data to/from the disks, packing, shipping paperwork, etc. The cost of the disks would be fairly trivial in comparison to the shipping costs.
Also, you would likely want a larger pool of disks to spread the failure rate, as all the bumps and shocks they receive every day being shipped back and forth is very likely to result in damage and short lifespan.
I totally agree on this method for one-time or infrequent large transfers, but I think you are creating more problems by trying to use this method for daily transfer of data.
You are correct about the logistics problems of this approach, but there are ways to make this more cost effective. As another poster mentioned, SD cards would be a good way to reduce the weight and fragility of the package. LTO tapes would be another option. If the OP can accept another day of latency, the Postal Service offers flat Priority Mail boxes that could ship 2-day instead of overnight for a little over $5. By investing in some more media to add a buffer to the system, the return trip could be via an even lower cost option every week or so.
But you are right about this being an expensive option: the let's-mail-stuff-back-and-forth option ignores that there has to be someone on both ends coordinating and performing the shipping, and reading media (and waiting) and writing media (and waiting). Those people cost money, even part-time high school students will cost more than the actual shipping.
In design, minimizing materials and manufacturing cost or keeping the product compact tends to far outweigh repairability concerns.
Which will not change, as long as we continue to pursue the Walmart model of cheaper-and-good-enough rather than expensive-better-repairable.
One of the other posters mentioned bike shops as an example of a repair shop model that continues to exist. Customers that frequent those shops are looking for a premium item; you won't find a $100 Huffy there, but the customer who invests $1000 in a bike will most likely continue to spend $50 for a tune up each year, long after the Huffy has hit the scrap heap. As long as people are willing to spend money for a quality bike, they will stick around, but they will always fill a niche market, not the high-volume, low-margin space that is most of our marketplace.
Back in the day a typewriter was a serious investment, just like all business machines that eventually trickled their way into consumer use. (Think telephones, faxes, copiers, adding machines, printers, etc.).
When something costs $$$ and makes your business $$$$, there's a legitimate need and market for repair services that can keep a device going for $$. As soon as the object becomes obsolete or replaceable for $$, or with only a very few special use cases, it makes no financial sense to repair them.
It's not that they become impossible to repair, but with a skilled technician doing the work the majority of the cost to do the repair (the human) hasn't fallen at the same rate as the cost of the device.
If all that was leaked was information about NSA-related snooping into our fellow citizens' lives, I would agree with you. There was more than that, information that could endanger people's lives.
If we find ourselves in a real war, where the stakes are freedom and our way of life, and the casualty count is ticking up into the millions then I'll be with you in the camp that says: the ends justify the means, and we must win at at all costs, because losing is not an option.
So, yeah, I'll stand behind any soldier that acts in accordance with his conscience in today's conflicts. We can well afford the luxury of prosecuting our so-called "wars" with a very light touch right now.
You're right, getting away with it doesn't excuse doing it, but if you're on the losing side who's going to do anything about it?
I didn't say I agree with "the ends justify the means". All I'm saying is that if our country were singing "God Save the Queen" before each game of the National Rugby League, we probably would have been taught in elementary school how George Washington and John Hancock were some of those insurgents that The Crown hung after that unpleasant row in the 1780s.
The GP said:
My understanding of it is that Security Clearances are about war. There is a chain of command, and ethics usually come in second to winning the war because being dead and ethical isn't as good as being alive and unethical in the context of a war.
The other problem is the fog of war, if everything is compartmentalized then how can you know what is or isn't ethical in a situation when the information you have is incomplete and "need to know".
When talking in this vein, the textbook example of "just following orders" is the guards of the Nazi prison camps who committed heinous acts because they were told to. The Jews that were starving to death before being experimented on could hardly be considered a serious threat to the German way of life. But it must be considered that this isn't an accurate reflection of the attitude of most Germans. These were not run of the mill, average German citizens, these were a carefully selected group who had shown their willingness or eagerness to go along and be SOBs. And even they had their Schindler.
Soldiers who do not blindly follow orders are a real pain to their commanders and damage morale, but the fact that they can do that in our country is the very essence of liberty. As soon as we squash the give and take, the ability to publicly question what our government is up to, we are lost. George Washington and the rest of those hooligans believed in their countrymen more than they believed in their government, and to lose that spirit by unilaterally vilifying anyone who would do the same would be a damn shame.
I think Snowden believed he was a true patriot, and went against his government thinking he had the moral high ground. I hope nothing he leaked costs anyone their life, and since it's out there I hope the information is put to good use to help keep our government honest.
But I also think he was wrong.
It wasn't up to him to make that decision on behalf of our country. Our intelligence has been damaged, and it has put people in harm's way. As you say, we aren't at war and these are not desperate times, so I do not believe he was justified in his desperate measures.
There is a chain of command, and ethics usually come in second to winning the war because being dead and ethical isn't as good as being alive and unethical in the context of a war.
"Just following orders" is long established as not a good enough reason to be complicit in war crimes.
The other problem is the fog of war, if everything is compartmentalized then how can you know what is or isn't ethical in a situation when the information you have is incomplete and "need to know".
If you are being asked to commit something that could be considered a war crime, then you probably "need to know" ... either that it just is a war crime and you probably shouldn't do it.
Right or wrong, "War Crime" is always defined by the winning side.
it has nothing to do with looking good.
he ALREADY looks good. otherwise they wouldnt have hired him as CEO, and given him a performance bonus years in a row.
it has everything to do with being a good leade who acknowledges that his ultimate success/failure is influenced very much by the workers below him. they did well, the company did well, he got rewarded, and he is in turn acknolwedging and rewarding his workers. Thats what good leaders do.
damn cynics should be drug into the street and shot.
Amen to this. There are so many comments on this thread in the vein of "to a rich guy like this, $3.5MM is nothing", "it's all all a publicity stunt", "if he really cared about his workers, why not just pay them more".
This is all crap. There isn't a person alive who really thinks that $3.5 million dollars is chump change. No billionaire would just hand out $3.5 million, even if it's the equivalent of quarters found in the couch with respect to their overall wealth. People don't get rich by not understanding the value of a million bucks.
The guy's trying to reward his team, and downplaying his action of giving away real amounts of money with comments complaining about how much more he could give, or how spread across 10,000 employees it doesn't amount to much for each family really sounds like sour grapes.
When I was a kid, my dad's company used to take their employees and their spouses on a yearly vacation; two that I remember it was Costa Rica, another it was Hawaii. My dad tells me that the year they went to Hawaii (1980 or so) there was a lot of bitching and moaning; it wasn't enough that the company was paying their airfare, hotel, and giving them $200 spending money. Some people were complaining that they would have to find babysitters for their kids. Some complained that $200 wasn't enough to eat for an entire week and buy souvenirs. Some had working spouses who couldn't afford to take the time off.
After the trip, the owner of the company told them he hoped they had enjoyed their trip, because it would be the last one he would be paying for.
Some people don't know enough to accept a gift, smile graciously, and STFU.
To put things in perspective :
Lenovo 2012 profits : $472 millions
Yang's share of that : $33 millions
Lenovo's employees : 27 000
Lenovo profit per employee : $17,481
What Yang offers them : $300
I am not sure I want to reward that.
I'm not sure what your point is. If he really wanted to maximize profits, he should just fire everyone and keep the $472 million for himself, right? Are you saying it's wrong for a company to make a profit off of their employees' work?
[...] I quit when it became apparent that the guy making the powerpoint slides describing my work was making more than me.
This describes every employer I've ever had. Management or those one rung up on the corporate ladder always make more than you.
When I stream video from Netflix, the server chooses an encoding and resolution specific to the device running their client software. I assume that other video streaming servers behave in the same manner: why stream HD to a 320x800 display?
In the case of the Chromecast which is presumably displaying to a 1920x10820 display, is there some sort of passthrough signalling that will let the streaming device use a more appropriate resolution? Or do I only get the same resolution as the intermediate device?
Yes, the Chromecast delivers at a higher resolution. Basically what happens is the intermediary device (phone, tablet, etc.) sends the video information to the Chromecast, and it logs into Netflix itself and behaves as a native player on a large screen. I was pleasantly surprised that I wasn't even prompted to log into Netflix on the larger display.
On a related note, can somebody tell me why this device is desirable? I'm still struggling with the use case here. What is the benefit of Chromecast over something like teeny little wdtv box? It's smaller and cheaper but does a lot less.
Well, two out of three ain't bad. :) The biggest downside for me is that you have to have an Android device kicking around to act as the remote control.
No, hire Carly so she can buy Nokia. And Blackberry.
They both would probably be worth picking up for the patent portfolio, if nothing else...
Either Michael Dell or one of the C-levels from Samsung. Microsoft fancies itself a "device and services" company now, they will think they need someone who can build "things" rather than ideas.
I assume by fired/terminated you mean because you have broken the terms of your contract (and normally been given suitable warnings, etc).
Of COURSE there is then no payment period, you have broken your employment terms!
Exactly the same thing would apply in reverse, if your employer broke the terms of employment (for example didnt pay you, etc, etc) then you
would have the right to leave immediately.
The 'question' is of course termed wrong, resigning your job is VERY different from being fired, it is equivalent to being laid off.
Get it? Simple enough?
In every job I've ever had, there were no "employment terms". I've always worked in an "at-will" arrangement, which means my employer has no obligation beyond paying me for the time I've actually worked. Usually there's some language stating that I agree and understand that I have no employment contract and that nothing anybody tells me, short of a written contract signed by a vice-president of the company can change that.
There is no value in positive comments.
If you're considering to buy something, you want to know where it fails, not where it succeeds.
Moreover I personally would never leave a positive comment. If it works as advertised, life can go on as normal. If it doesn't, then I leave a comment.
Exactly. No one calls Customer Service to tell the company how pleased they are with a product.
We are actively looking for 90% of you to let go. Best keep your ducks in a row and play by the rules or you'll be on the short list, Sport.
I witnessed a moment that would be hard to replicate; a project had failed around 5 times over as many years. So the head of marketing temporarily took over the development department of around 20 programmers. He said, "You can form into teams of any size and you don't have to have anyone on your team you don't want. Also there is no seniority. So if the two newest guys want to form a team then fine. But whichever group makes me happy before September(5 months) will form the core of a new programming department and I will lavish a bonus on you that will make my top salesmen jealous. Also if I hear any complaining you can clear out your desk. And again, your goal is to impress me. Not anyone else in this company. If someone tells you that you are doing it wrong tell me and I will tell them to clear out their desks."
A team of 4 guys (all with Junior programmer titles) won in just over a week. My favorite complaints from the largest group of soon to be ex-employees (9 were fired) was that there wasn't any documentation, the wrong language was used, and that their coding wasn't to company standards.
That's a interesting story. Thanks for sharing.
I'm curious how that company looked a year after the "competition".
And low and behold, right now it looks as though I'm going to join the team. A team of fifteen, with aprox. 5-7 regular devs and no versioning in place and a lead who's nice but is so backwards I would let within 10 yards of any project ... gee, am I glad that that is not my problem.
That's setting off warning bells in my head. No version control in place, you are reading the lead as "nice, but backwards" and wouldn't be comfortable with him on your project. If you are seeing that management is knowingly allowing problems to brew with no action to correct them, don't expect things to be different once you're hired...
The American Dream.
Fuck you if you can't make it.
Should I feel obligated to support "The American Dream" of the owners of the indie bookstore, even though they've decided to invest in a dying business?
In our city, there's a "downtown alliance" continually harping on about the importance of supporting local business against the big box stores. The examples that keep being brought up as the enemy are the Wal-Mart and Sam's Club.
I wager that Sam's Club provides a sustainable income to more families than the 4-employee mom-and-pop that is asking for our patronage. But, of course the owners of the mom and pop shops don't see it that way.
Democrats want to live up to the responsibility of pay for the government we have, and the services it provides. Republicans want to run up the debt by giving the wealthiest more money, at the expense of the poor, while putting all the cost onto future generations. The largest expansion of government since Medicare/Medicaid = Department of Homeland Security under Bush.... put on the federal credit card.
President Obama has been in office for well over a full term now, and is now safe from being voted out of office, so what's he waiting for? Until after he closes Guantanamo? After dealing with the NSA?
You give the president of the country way too much credit if you think it all rests on him. The actual difference, in numbers or policies, in either the house or the senate as been so narrow even since the Good Old Clinton Years you remember, that placing blame at the feet of either party is a sign only of how good a job the other party has done of pulling the wool over your eyes.
The ability to do this has been around a long, long time.
If you bought a TV guide back in the 1990's, there was a number in parenthesis next to the show title. So you would see something like "9:00 channel 13 Beverly Hills 90210 (938458764): description of the episode"
The number is a number embedded in the signal of the episode that notifies automated systems what the content is being shown then. You could program your equipment to record that number. It would cut out all commercials. You never had to set the time either. It would record whenever it saw that number. It is part of the video spec.
Not exactly; that number (called "VCR +" back in the day) wasn't embedded in the video signal, it was generated algorithmically from the channel, time of day, program length, etc. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_recorder_scheduling_code for more details.
Pacific Rim's trailer is fantastic. It's guaranteed I'll give no money to the film. It looks utter total complete absolute shit on a stick. Without the stick.
Amen to that! I got bored of it 30 seconds into the trailer. But then again, I'm slightly older than the apparent target 9-13 year old male demographic.
Meh. The plot in Primer was somewhat original, but I felt like there were 10 minutes missing in the middle of the movie. The dialog was too rambling and mumbled in too many scenes, and one of the two main actors felt like he was reciting lines.
If a single drunk driver is able to stop your production and that production is critical you are doing something wrong to begin with. While the cloud might (and probably will) offer better HA and DR it will not fix a bad design by itself.
The article also states: " I didn't want to create my own internal IT department". I' guessing Andrew Oliver is a PHB.
Translation:
Those IT geeks must have thought I was a gullible moron! The price they quoted me to protect my super important data was too high, but knew that it's all just mouse clicking and watching Youtube, so I got my nephew to set up some servers that first time.
After my catastrophic loss, I again chose to not waste money on redundant servers or hiring any of those overpaid minesweeper monkeys, but now my data lives in a far-away place that I don't know managed by people I've never met, so it must be a better solution than what I had before.